The Zen of Doing Stuff

I’m trying to write my novel. The chapter is called “Natura’s Incarnation”. Let’s see what YOU do with that if you’re so damn smart. No, let’s not see, you’d probably hamfistedly do something better, and it would shame me to the rodent-littered intestines of my soul.

It’s hard to take it seriously. Although it is serious. It’s nature. But what is the nature of nature? Is it in its nature to question? Is that natural?

Nature spilled out of its notes, the notation on itself, scientific. It’s conceptual, in a digital signal procession of fireworks. I wonder if I’ll edit that out as being meaningless enough when I take it upon myself to trim the fat? Fat is natural, but little Jack Sprat wouldn’t eat it.

I’m not inside the story today.

~

Where does dreading stimulation come from? It comes from writing without an audience. It would be different if I was on blogger. Where does that come from? Why is this impossibly alien? Avant-garde went away, like a lot of things. Innocence in ruins, lying under the conqueror, Cliché III.

So I will post, I will write FOR someone, bolt my hilarious pseudo-ego to that cryptic bandwagon. Writing feels so strange, like some lost childhood hobby, a fumbled art, an alien language I knew when awake and dreaming were the same, the place the Daoists point to. Meaning in words? What’s this? Perhaps I haven’t recovered from the aftershocks of the persistence of gravity well in feelings – such a clumsy unpoetic attempt at expressing that thing I so frequently profess is a self-created cancer. Okay, indulge me one little bit of self-censorship.

We got a brandy leak.

Another little chocolate nip
and I’m back, typing, feeling there’s some vague purpose behind it
although I’m so incredibly aware of how I’m caught up in the ridiculous pattern
of being a human being, sad and petty routines – I really need more sunlight, fuckdamnit.

Another little chocolate nip
and I feel like an aristocrat – now I got grand schemes in this grungy scheme of things – now merlin is a boy with a point to make in infancy – now I FEEL the infamy of forced rhyme and hastily latched onto incidental rhyme – now genius is pain whether attained or not –

When it’s your writing
it’s so easy to soothe into it, settle in, bask in the glow of ego
love the sound of your own voice, the one you know
but when it’s someone else’s
you’re looking for the formula, the easy pattern, you want to assimilate fast
and if it’s unforgiving, too on-its-own-terms, you crumple it into
the dustbin of your consciousness and move on
and is second person really necessary here?

Another little chocolate nip
okay, that’s too much brandy
oh, but I’ve had a hard night at work, fuck it
I’m a working artist man, and that’s such a bullshit title
I come back to writing and everything resembles bullshit
but what is bullshit? do I dare even answer that question?

If I wanted my horrific writing amplified to the status of “sickening”
I’d use the word “ramble” right now.

And in this ramble, I’ll start another stanza on another tangent:
where is the apple, waiting to fall on my head
did it rot on the zopiglonger ground, a metaphor I’m unwilling to explain
and will probably not even really get later?

I did write a song about transformers today
well not “about” transformers, but featuring a fractal shard of their existence
in the fragment of universe I happen to share
with the transformers (more than meets the eye)

And sometimes the only way I can express an idea
is by taking a tone that I hate, using language that makes me gag
because of my literary shortcomings

Pause pause, cadence, cadence
isolated coincidence
sacrilegious to flow
like subverting sacred geometry to
the proximity of assonant possibility
and remember jabberwocky? jesus fucking christ
did something die in me?

Maybe one day I’ll get out my graph paper, solve for X, and
FIGURE IT OUT

Maybe my poor moldy modulated mind
can’t get a handle on paradigm shift
cause I hit the ALT key instead, altered too much
and not enough probably, not in novelty’s negative nancy nunnery
heh, actually that last line makes a ton of sense:
the most musical meaning MEANS MOST!

Ah yes, where did that flow come from, I liked it
even in meta tags it had a nice reverbed ring to it
but writing is still alien, especially in meta tags
and even on blogger, in which I mine meaning every
political day, maybe some coffee could be good for me.

K, coffee’s in the mix now.

I wrote a chorus that’s been met with something of a lack of enthusiasm. I’d been feeling fantastic about it, but then I interfaced with the world and the doubts set it. I listened again today and thought, damn that’s cool shit - sounds just like I wanted it to, better than I thought it’d turn out actually - but some part of me needs external confirmation that it’s cool - ah this unsightly ego drags me to the brothel of validation to haggle over the price of the whores.

Now I have all these ideas darting around for a great new project: approaching song recording (yes not just writing but performing and recording, the whole shebang, I want in) with the intent to flesh out the musical/lyrical/conceptual ideas using three or four tracks, scaling it down, like recording performance versions, as demos, or maybe even as the finished product, to force myself into a more minimalist mode. It might save my sanity.

You know, I just realized this is sort of like the kind of letter I get from netinous, except I’m not writing this to him, I’m posting it in blogger. Heh, maybe I oughta reciprocate instead – well I do sometimes. I just remembered that I never write the kind of letters I used to write. They used to be soaked in artistic fervor, like a bomber laced with embalming fluid. I guess they still can be, but I can barely stand the word “art” anymore. And I’m EARNING my fervor nowadays, as I trade drugs for sunshine – keening on Sol. I’m starting not to care what kind of person I become. Even if I end up stinking of sobriety – so be it.

I got a song idea while improvising on the piano – images of gold mines came to my mind’s eyes. I called it: “Trying to mine the staked claims (and failing to undermine)”. I was thinking on many layers at the time, and the meaning resonated across several medias. The nexus point where the musical idea converts from the sublime to the secular concerns the territory that’s been strip mined by prospectors of olde, several generations and a century of recording techniques, an exploding population – decades back, the land was rich and good, but a century, a glut of novelty, and what’s left for us thinking newbies? Ah, that last sentence was so slick, so laden with privately-coded keywords, and so pretentiously unfriendly to outsiders. But the idea is ironically vital: it’s a tired time to be alive.

The goldmines and the staked claims. Reminds me of the Yukon kid who told me a story of how he proved himself the genuine goldpanner of the bunch while hanging with some locals at the Royal. Maybe he should be a character. Unfortunately my memory of him is tainted, scarred into my sad-sack circuits since we were on mdma when we met (I don’t type that chemical in caps anymore). Character hell, he should be the song. Remember when purging the pain through art was an intuited activity? Well, writing about something doesn’t preclude my doing it.

I should find melodies, a chorus and a verse (won’t be hard), keep it from ballooning into a sinfully gluttonous twenty minute epic, “orchestrate” it entirely with solo piano (use “colors” like prokofiev, exercise my atrophied impressionism), and be satisfied, call it DONE and move on to the next song on the album. Actually my wordwytch’s album takes precedence – and I won’t be satisfied with anything less than gorgeously produced piano-progrock-psychedelia (my latest hyphening of what I do in the “studio”) for her album. She deserves an ambitious collaborator. Hey, I think this coffee’s pepping me up a bit – took a while to kick in but hello!

Throughout the last two paragraphs I’ve been seeing the level E1M5 from the game Doom. The Phobos Labs. Interesting.

Had a very interesting dream that I could go into as well. Damn, my writing always comes in floods. My entries are always perverse pastiches of thoughts because they come in a torrent. I can’t write a little here and a little there and make nice neat packages – except when I drink enough cough syrup, but that’s another story.

I can’t post this right now though, our phones are fucked up and I’m confined to the offline.

See, that’s coffee beans for you: every stupid little thought seems REALLY NEAT and YEAH, let’s POST THIS, everyone will want to know! See I was happy and hyper and then I recognized the happy-hyperness, made the connection to chemicals, and now I feel the sickness shrouding that lovely little oasis of the ontology I used to take for granted. And now I further strengthen the shroud by writing about it as if it’s a reality – the prophecy fulfills itself. Nah fuck that. That’s that little drama queen wanking on coffee beans. Or something.

Well yes, it’s a chemical high, but it sure beats the savage beast they call ecstasy. I can see why so many people board this train and never get off – it’s a nice substitute. That’s one of the main reasons the drug war is so idiotic – I might be willing to listen to the drug warriors if they appeared to be sane. If they said that cocaine is deadly and destructive and then conceded that maybe it would be better if people chewed a little coca leaf and relaxed in the evening with a puff of ganja, well then I’d be much more inclined to listen to them. But the extremists are running things – Bush and Bin Laden fighting their cola wars. Maybe if we can learn anything from history, we can learn to moderate and hope the idea doesn’t become corrupted in the Orwellian manner, turned into another thought crime.

Now I’m plunging headlong into headstrong politics. Wonder if this will be of any use later? Ah, who cares? Wow, I’m feeling that weird gravity distortion again – my axis of horizon is tilting, my spatial dimensions are skewing. I thought this only happened on DXM, not this lite pharmacocktail I’m currency bouncing around on. Maybe all the neurocircuits are linked now, maybe my brain caved into a quivering sea of confused goop.

I still wouldn’t go back in time and tell myself to just say no. Although give me a few years and I might have him running down the tanned-textured corridors of the Phobos Labs with a chaingun as a lifetime distraction. Maybe I should have become the level designer I aspired to be, back when life was my crack, and the kootenays was an easily gamed-away distraction.

But as the Moody Blues tritely sang, to jaunty psychedelia: “we’re all looking for something”. The stupidest clichés seem the most profound, they hammer into me with their nails of truthiness.

I’ll end this entry on a happy note, because there’s one to be had in this minor key symphony. I re-discovered sunshine. I’ve always taken a ridiculous sort of pride in thinking myself immune to the emotional effects of seasonal change. I’ve always loved the supposedly drab aesthetics of overcast days and winter landscapes. I still retain that love. But I also have to admit that my night shift, in conjunction with this being tilted away from the sun thing, has probably contributed to my sense of sickness. I can’t blame it all on drugs and self-created headtrips.

When I went out grudgingly, at my mom’s request, to shovel snow, I caught a glint of sunlight peaking out of the concretized atmosphere. Real unfiltered sunlight hitting me directly for the first time in what felt like years – I remembered it, vaguely. It was looking into me, like the void, but substantially – quite unlike the subtracting eyes of Mephistopheles. It wasn’t the night to deal with the devil and trade decency for a quick torching of all that was left to do. It was the star of infinite possibility and eternal radiance. It was a deja-thread day, a day that did not need to be seized but merely lived through. It was the kind of thing I would rave about in the rhapsody of tryptamine ecstasy but it was not the product of an artificially-administered chemical passing through the blood-brain barrier.

It was pure, simple sunlight.

It reminded me that if I never got to realize my most desired dreams, there was still a bountiful future ahead. It was the relief of seeing the void in relief, brilliant contrast, the beauty of black against white. It was shirking my existential duty and being allowed to love the Dao once again – the coincidentia oppositorum was no longer grating but harmonious. It was a light of reason. Only my headtrips, those negative reality-creation routines, would make these unfilled desires “horrors”. I would still go on to write original music and quirky (if unpublishable) stories that would give me a warm tingly feeling when re-reading them in the right frame of mind. I would learn to enjoy strange foods, I would discover the genius of a school of film I’d previously thought to be bullshit, I would discover a school of thought that would reshape my view of the world, I would watch empires fall, and maybe, if the universe allowed such madness, even see a third party take power in the US. I would go to the dentist to get my wisdom teeth out. I would get pain, and self-pity, and codeine. I would wonder whether to use any and risk re-connecting to the garishly reductivist neurocircuits of up and down that any kind of euphoria, fake or real, activates.

These thoughts would bubble up, but the sunrays shouted over the hissing self-conflicting headtrip with a unified message: I’M HERE! I’M WARM! I’M BRIGHT! I AM THE SOURCE OF LIFE! Then it told me: LOOK HOW I COLOR THE VALLEY! And I looked, and it was good. It brightened up the valley and it brightened up my thought process – I could finally see enough to rebalance my fears. I strung them all up on an abacus and made logical deductions: not ALL my worst anxieties could be real, and if the void was real, that made what novelty was left to consume all the sweeter. It wasn’t like the last line of blow after all. It was like Sisyphus found out this trip to the top of the mountain was going to be his last. Then he found a stick on which to prop his rock. Then he laid down in the dandelions for a while and looked up at the clouds.

I looked up at the clouds and I saw the light. The light saw the bleakeries, the angst, the emptiness, and reflected it all back at me, but I felt the light anyway. I FELT it, warm on my face and bright in my eyes. I nearly heard it since it was a high level gestalt, subtly synesthetic. It was like the good half of the universe. The screaming voids I’d come to FEEL as universal truth were RIVALLED at last. They would not go away but there was finally something to challenge them.

It was just sunlight doing this to me and in some sense I’m not doing it justice, and in another sense this is a gross excess – but I basked in that light for what felt like five minutes (probably thirty seconds). Then I walked up to mountain station, and across the forest path, and down to Gyro park, and back to my house. The light faded but I’d been recharged – a little. I felt a kind of vitality I hadn’t in a while.

Okay, I may have reached a state of rapture remotely like that for a second or two. But in another sense, I can’t touch that former state of mind now that I’m firmly lodged in another, except through the opiate haze of nostalgia. So what can you do with state boundaries? But rip through them in your off-road vehicle and muddy their jagged borders with trackmarks.

I need to get more sun I think. My organic gestalt craves cosmic vitamins. It might not all be drugs and self-created headtrips, but it might all be chemical. The chemical level is an interesting one for sure. It’s between biology and physics. It’s where the enzymes meet the protons and the carbon chains of deoxyribonucleic acid intimate Bohr’s quantum mechanics, non-local organics, the possibilities of a sea of realities and information sum reveries. It’s got enough action to warrant a God’s eye view, and it might in fact be the avatar of God we humans, with our electron microscopes, can best appreciate.

And I still think I’ve thought too much.

Glasswear - the meaning of the pile

Well look - it's me getting back to my roots. Whatever those are. Another entourage I'm hiding from. Too many people. Yes, I'd rather write.

Well that didn't work. Heh. I tried to swallow a pill with a swig of wine. Lol. Stupid gag reflex!

The lion doesn't lie. Don't think there's any conviction in that line. If there was, it was muonic. Gone in a flash. And the plateau is in the past.

Arpreggios aren't that hard, I tell Tony, just play them one hundred times and you're set. I don't want to show people my tapes anymore. I was ecstatically interested in that activity not long ago.

Some of it's genuine, I guess. Who burned the Reichstag in Camazotz?

Now we're drawing happy noodle boy.

Up, Down. I shouldn't worry about writing about it. Everything's all fucked up - a worldview. A self-dubbed Shaman. Vic's corrosive/expansive itinerary. Novelty Maintenance. Cancer, biological programming - the appetite of a cell. Dealt with by Shamans on the Chaos Farm. Taking things seriously.

I want to break a bottle over my head. A flitting desire. Twenty second halflife, fireworks, values. Misfit on my own shitlist.

Give me cherries Jubilee and that's it.

Downloading Nirvana from Ken is the za-zen of hacking. Za zen is walking zen. When hungry eat, when tired sleep.

I'm going to take a cyclo and shut my mind off. But not yet.

Cleaning up... cleaning up... A somewhat enjoyable activity. I need an occupation but it's got to be self-chosen and yet partly imposed by fate. Cleaning up...

Rico stares at a massive pile of empty booze bottles. What do you think of that Rico? Don't go messing yourself up on drugs now, cat, you're nice and unsullied. Stay that way.

You'll never comprehend the meaning of the pile - the grand purpose - or maybe you will, who am I to preclude your cognitive options? You seem to be the smartest cat I've ever known.

The dishwasher is babbling - a lost Atlantean language - lost luggage. Up down, the rapid riverrun halfway house hedonist. No airy fairies, not quite neutral. Chinese newspapers, thousand print delivery. Point taken.

A part of me wants to see how far I can go - as a self, an artist, an ego - but another large hunk of me is intolerably sickened when the Faustian bit progresses beyond a certain point - the ego trip is poisonous. Perhaps the ego itself is poisonous. Useful, fun, intoxicating, bright, brilliant... but... I don't know.

Gravity wells, left and right. I could shop around, find a well that's good for me.

I can't seem to find a natural way to function - nothing seems right - buried under these layers of spurious self analysis. It's good that I know people who are not so entangled - gravity wells left and right but so does hope when you know where to look, or when you're caught by a glint in your pained paranoid peripherals.

Assonance still rolls off the tongue. And it's either ether or the other.

So what do you give the man who's given himself everything in bit-sized form - a synapse crossing with much fanfare... the common man?

Perhaps I should live to start a community in a space colony. A new pile of meaning in an interstellar seedpod, hard-case, glass and solar power. Let this stubbornly-rooted nomad brand himself narrowed and provisional - nevermind a noun or a verb.

Glasswear's in style.

The Ground of Being

This is actually Eureka Springs, the Nelson of Arkansas, where we stayed for a couple of days. And that is my stunning girlfriend who helps keep me sane, while maintaining just the right dose of madness.

Cubic Rubric

I'm staring at the screen again. And what's so wrong with that?
Why can't I learn to enjoy the void?

I used to have no problem with television. Now when I do allow myself near the box, it's an uneasy alliance. I watched more Larry Sanders tonight. It filled me, but this worries me because I don't usually need filling. To resort to my DVDs raises alarms or at least it would if I could muster up enough serotonin to flood a certain alarmist brainlobe. No, there's some starving regions up in me cortex, maddam. Speculate on the cause if you want, strip me to my synapses and put me on a poster. I'm pathetically apathetic tonight.

Got no time for civilization tonight.
And civilization's got no time for me.

"It's my party and I'll die if I want to" said the skeleton on the poster - guidance councilors in junior high. I never got high in junior high.

Now I don't care, about wrong or right, stoned or sober. And yet my nervous system isn't dullened and I feel the weight of living. But excessive analysis robs me of my allotted apathy, I wasted currency in self-imposed profundity.

I can't be bothered, to write my novel, to write my songs. I can almost be bothered to clean up. I will be bothered to go to work in three hours. I will.

The snow is so paltry this greenhouse winter, and yet it keeps me from taking my spirit walk, what would have been a writing walk back when... back when I was far stupider than now, and happier. Also more intellectually potent because I could focus – stupidity can be a problem solving aid – when you’re a hammer every problem looks like a nail. I was more useful then - I could have been reined in, trained in mathematics, my energy could have served something, I could have 3d rendered, I could have wrested power away from the plutocrat conspirators and designed the space colonies. I could have realized McKenna's dream of allowing humanity to live in our imagination - for whatever that's worth. I can't really dream anymore, except when I dream. My dreams have become nocturnal, the day is nightmare. Now I have self analysis and the extrapolation of this to... uh, whatever that thing is. You know, the thing. Do you know it?

Damn, this entry sucks. I've written suckier ones, but I haven't indulged in much self-flagellation for a while, so I thought I'd try it out.

I can't be bothered to read, and there's nothing I want to google. Ah yes, let everything I've ever cared about slip away, unclutter the neurological lattice - perhaps that is tranquility, an electro-chemical nirvana. Oh God, could I please shut up about chemicals already? But I can't, they seem so important, and I know jack shit about genes and sub-atomic particles.

Dez said I should be grounded, I'm guessing that's a great idea, but I'm also staring up at the winking blinking lattice and its black depatterning like it's the mobile above my deathcrib - I'm not exactly fascinated but it's something to look at. Not quite the void, not quite the void, not quite the void.

Whoops, this entry was supposed to be about staring at the screen. Well, maybe I'll lie down and stare at the inside of my eyelids instead. Catch you later, boys and girls.

Jonas Doll

Amid. Medi. T. Ation? Ration? Mountain. Named. Sensation.

Back. I'm back. Trying to bring back that vague image, a mountain scene. British Columbian forest slopes. I don't know the names of many flowers or trees. I can experience nature with the best of them, but when I write it's metaphors or just plain meta.

This is a lull. A kind of meditation, a distasteful kind to my current mind.

The image was a forest scene near Kokanee Glacier, one of mother nature's greatest gifts, frosted peaks to crown this valley. Staring up at the peaks from an already lofty altitude, a different breed of vegetation up here, short clingy trees with integrity - life, still below the tree line. The image was vague as it always is in my mind's eye, spotty with cataracts, but the feeling was so fucking strong. If I could synesthetically translate my thoughts to vision - well maybe that would violate some cosmic law. Perhaps it would be incompatible with this being the best of all possible worlds. And you know that in the best of all possible worlds, the best thing to do is to strive for perfection, or something perfectly imperfect. Ah, slipping through the mists of meta, trying to see the mountain peak in what I feel OUGHT to be the vision.

Let that fucker flood in photons, I want to SEE. I want to BE part of it. But for that, I must DO. I must do it, find the action. My value-primed impulses tell me life demands action. I've had dreams, I've been a connoisseur of sleep, but I can't sleep now, too angsty, too lacking something. What could I do, I don't build landscapes in Bryce or Vistapro anymore, I'm not going to let silicon simulate my imaginational riches. I could try to square the actual glacier with my daydreams but I'm not driven to do that. Life is about action, but what about drive?

Amid body atrophy. I don't feel the entropy, I'm distracted with nothing, a big neon nothing. Actually I'm writing because it's better than nothing. And nothing else will satisfy, not that this satisfies. Novelty is old news but perhaps it will make a retro comeback.

I'm coming to be obsessed with the problem of novelty. It seems that the flagship of this fleet of malaise is the running out of things to do artistically. The funny thing is, this is particularly heinous when extrapolated to all of society, but why should I care? "All of society" is a personal projection. I'm not obliged to feel the imagined pain of the universal chorus. And mind is a renewable resource, we keep churning it out. Why should any fresh mind care how many iterations I've been through? We've got the tips of the fractal pouring out of loins all over this globe.

It can be a real drag seeing everything in terms of civilization. What are we to do, grit our teeth in forced smiles and journey onward in a desperate and dirty search for new ways to laugh? Is this the new QUEST FOR FIRE? Ba dum ching! Thank you thank you, I'll be here all week.

Children are our future. Not me man, I'm not going back to school. I won't be responsible for the new blood. I won't be sending the next gen into the prehab clinics. Let Zoe enjoy her Jonas doll. I'm honored, quite sincerely, it'll be my immortality.

Most of us feel a horror of seriousness. Because we, yes I'm making broad statements about humans again, we invented seriousness, and we turned it into an artform, and then we developed comedy as a reaction to that serious stomach-churning canon. Now I wonder what the Greeks talked about when they drank their ergotized beer. A bear ate amanitas and Mr. X. loaded himself with blanks. As far as I know, "Barkivist" is an original word I came up with, at least according to google. But the trees own that word, really. Hey this is just a branch off the genetic tree. This scummy colony of humanity is using me as an agent for the metabolism of humour. It's a bodily function. Eat, shit, binge and purge. Shoot up, cut up, reference Burroughs. Where's a blade runner when you need him?

Did I really change my brain that much, or was this shift due anyway? Is this just the expiry date on childhood, or was it a bad chemical combo?

I needn't be this serious - I watched Larry Sanders episodes today, ones I'd seen before, and laughed a lot. It sucked me into that hilariously wretched world. Part of losing my identities has been me opening up to the idea of becoming, say, a Hollywood asshole. I've gone as far as thinking I'm due to play the devil. Not PAY the devil, PLAY the devil. For God's sake. But shouldn't I be a saint first? Or perhaps I've got another millennium to go through playing the middleman.

There were times when I would expend the energy to reorganize a ramble like this so it would make a pretty coherent package, perhaps even a poem. There may be more such times. Maybe. Linear. Linearality is a bitch goddess. One time I blew my mind and thought I was perceiving forward and backward in time at once. It's been a while since I've lived a good paradox and been aware of it.

Hmmm. I know there is more to be explored in meditation. This isn't meditation, this is rambling, interspliced with an occasional thought, and an even less occasional sensation.

Oh hell, I'm going to sleep now, and wait for a 1200 micrograms techno track to wake up me (it's my computer alarm).

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What I'm looking forward to: Being burned out on being burned out.

Drearily Sane Sutra

"If you hate the taste of wine, why do you drink it till you're blind?" - Bright Eyes

My girl is working off her hangover
while I write off my headache
and the strive to betterment
feels natural and nasty

the shakes can be reduced
to the ballistics on the spasm
of this bundle of nerves

chemical reduction falls short
and electrons laugh as they
bind my four-dimensional thoughts
bundle humming the sonic sum waveform
chiseled into my system, THE system
laying out life's path as the paisley peaks
play out a nervous ringtone for the
four billionth untapped variation on the
music of the spheres, ringing the undone
unsung song because i can, because i must
because what else is there to do when you're
trapped in sartre's trip through mescalito's bowels,
trapped in the tract of aesthetic digestion
for the sake of, for the sake of, for the sake of
sake, and japanese spirits, and anime porn, and
the orifice woman who let, who let, who let her
hormones flow, discovered sexual secrets i'll never know, O,
at an age where i was still obsessed with psychedelics
and it's dizzying to think that gentlemen younger than me
in their gentlemen's clubs got their rocks off with sexual enslavement
but i don't care enough to play the devil.

Horribly fascinating to think though
that if this sutra kept going, crossed over into life
I would be cast as the devil cause
you can't be God forever but
you can play the game of holding out, standoff
in the cosmic crossfire flanging fever dreams.
I've still got my poker face on, i'm holding on
to something, i don't know what, what looks to me
like a royal flush, but reality says
the suit doesn't match.

Zastrozzi makes more sense to me every day and I identify with him because I'm sick.
I must commit evil to be well, pain is medicine, tragedy is health
where is victor, I will cut him into thirty-two pieces of equal size.

And all these years i've been making
a massive metaphysical mistake
thinking of infinity
as ALL
not the infinite
which makes all the difference in the world.

Mon deiu, the figure eight is just a figure of speech.

Hari krishna, hari hari
drop out, be in ~

I'm not an astrologer but I know the Age of Aquarius is over. The dawn is dead. This is the five thousandth mighty iteration of the fall of Rome. Wizards and Wise Women positioning themselves, rooks and kings castling, players planning mad moves as the bubbles drift by, the housing bubble, the boy in the bubble, the boy king.

It still feels like the last line. I should contrive a junkpile of lexical intent and claim it's a detelescoped summation of human history and myth. I should obfuscate to avoid direct drug metaphors. If I was a writer of Joyce's stature, I would imbed a mini-story in this paragraph that would say everything worth saying about the implications of chemical intoxicants without mentioning any substances but rather embodying their contours in context and subtext, characterized, anthropomorphized, stylistically tailored to perfection and fractally resonating through the rest of this writing. But I'm not, so I'll just lop off the line at LINE, since a reference to coke would make me puke.

John Lennon said, with great conviction it would seem, that GENIUS is PAIN. But he wasn't talking about the pain ostensible mediocrities deal with on a daily basis, since when you're a member of a supergroup with a legion of admirers, there are a wealth of options for blocking out conventional pain. No, I know what he was talking about, even though I am, ostensibly I tell you, ostensibly, one of the ostensible mediocrities, even as the stink of psychedelic shit caking the walls of mescalito's bowels has me gagging more than loling. Lennon was talking about the pain of the creator, the goddamned god, having to go on, the web that god gets into, and on the seventh day, He let the lilliputians devour Him slowly.

Even the geniuses are laughably, pitifully limited. Rock stars play their role like everyone else. I jumped into the middle of a Cobain bio today (the chapter was called: "wasted") and felt right at home. It's nice to have someone play the role of rock martyr for you - so you don't have to do it yourself. Kurt was right in his intuition, it was funner to watch him than to be him.

There are many ways to hollow out. There is genius and there is asceticism. They aren't mutually exclusive, but the archetypes I associate with them are.

Now I fiend for innocence, the novelty of novelty. That and tranquility. Innocent novelty, the desire for retrograde, is my upper - peace is my downer. Linearality feels so stomach-churningly profound and terrible. I want to go back. I know how pompous I sound as I say this. There's so much I haven't done, so much I don't know. But I don't know how to write my novel now, because I've sloughed off so many paradigms like snake skins. I might have to treat it as fantasy and not the reality it once was for me. Its dendrites have vapourized in the blast furnace of my brain. But get away from me with that drill, just because I boosted my production of serotonin with dodgy frankenstein molecules and set my neurons firing in maddening chain reactions doesn't mean I'm into trepanation. Not yet anyway. The devil has never been obvious to me, and I never trusted those cross-wearing ghostbusters.

Bright Eyes is singing about a "yellow bird" now, and I think he's sounding like an idiot, but intellect is strong enough to insist that despite my emotional flinch, one day I will fully appreciate the symbolism.

Ah my flawed goddess - she is a check on my mental illness - she herself is ill but we reflect each other, we compliment in sickness and health. Maybe one day we will be shamanic healers, accreditation from the spirits and not the alcoholic ones.

*

Some of my new drawings

Vishnu's Dream (Leopold Bloom)

Cloudfall














Celestammal's Organ Equalizer Window




















Scans by stranded

Strongbad Financial Times

Since it went by so quickly

So many possibilities

Should I write the greatest novel since Finnegan's Wake? Should I take a walk down to the pizza shop? Should I sleep? Should I ramble with a stunted lexicon in an ezboard box?

Theoretically, there is novelty.

And somehow my mind turned on a dime, after I filled it with too many euphoriant chemicals - it had me questioning aloud - is the universe fundamentally a dull pointless place?

And I know there is the koan that will dissolve my riddles, but I'm riddled with the cancer of my Own Koan that cares not for dissolution - this Koan thinks it has the solution, thinks it IS the solution, sees itself, unity as deadly superimposition, nullspace crunch, gibbed out of the matrix.

And I know there is the moon, always the moon.

And there is still pizza - pizza is good and filling and I'm still alive and I can eat pizza. That is something that can be accomplished with only a little effort. I could have been a Cro-Magnon having to kill for my food, but in this glorious age, the fruition of novelty, I merely have to hand over three credits to the local merchant of my choice.

I could work on Original Sin, but my passion is somewhere else - intersecting that aforementioned novel in nodes - oh, my moldy metaphors, whatever shall I do? Would it be right to contrive a larger vocab or would the forcing of that upon myself sully the product - some corrupted manifestation of following bliss

and

I'm surprised I still have the ability to ramble on. There is some dubious energy in me. I'm still mentally ill, I wonder if there's any going back - who knows if it has anything to do with chemicals - maybe it isn't even the brain - maybe it's the timewave, because it's definitely ducttaped together with time, a mortal temporal piñata (hey, there's a nice word, too bad the context is so shabby). It. Yes, I'm rambling, but there is a solid block of IT here, and there is snow outside and there is pizza on a rack and I'm hungry and I have ill-gotten money.

I have very little structure, that's why I call this rambling.

I just had a revelation - I can either do elaborate virtuosic structure, or I can do finely-textured from-the-heart, quintuple-adjective detail. But rarely at the same time, they don't interlock like they should, like they would in a Joyce novel, like my beautiful theories led me to expect in literary synesthesia.

Maybe I have to start fresh. If the universe just collapsed, perhaps it's time for a new novel. How about a 500 page novel using only 500 individual words? Maybe then people would get the point.

Or maybe I should learn biology. Maybe I should learn how chemical bonds work. Maybe I should learn how to program in C. Maybe I should learn some Irish drinking songs – besides the Ballad of Tim Finnegan. Maybe I should learn how to solder so I can get a job at Pacific Insight and make money 12 hours a day and sleep 9 and watch TV for 2 and masturbate for 1. Maybe I should remember how to ski. Maybe I should remember what the capital of Slovenia is. Maybe I should move to Slovenia, learn the language, join a side in a civil war, die for my adopted country. Maybe I should study economics, sociology, history, political science, actual science, ecology, geology, geography, psychology, systems theory, chaos theory, game theory, mathematics, and quantum physics, and finally prove to the skeptics why communism is kewl.

But I know deep in my heart of heart of heart of hearts, I'm going to get some pizza. The question is, will I walk down and re-connect with nature, even if it's cold snowy nature, or will I operate the gas-guzzling autokinoton to accelerate the end of this greasy civilization?

I expect my happiness quotient will increase in aggregate by walking, even taking the chill into account, but still I'm tempted to reach for my technological addiction, something we still have no word for. Kurt Vonnegut wrote an essay called “Cold Turkey” which seemed diffuse at first. Then I noticed the brilliant connections he was making with his cigarette habit and his car fetish. I'm a little different. I'm no car fetisher. They symbolize the alpha male bullshit I scorn, being karmically cast off the primal dungheap’s pinnacle. No trains, no planes, no motorcars, I’m the karmic caste-away. Not king of the hill. I can't even sell propane accessories, a skill that symbolizes success in certain Texan subdivisions: the power of persuassion for the purpose of propone purchase. A lot of oil money funds energy cowboys, rootin’ tootin’ salesmen, lawn-lovin’ Dukes of Cul-de-Sac, securing domestic perimeters, a pretty housing bubble, watch it float through the warm winter air.

Hey, now I got a flow going on. Too bad there's no structure. Perhaps there's promise in my ideas, my marginally novel take on things, my neologisms, but the discipline is so sorely lacking and I'm pitifully intolerant of the criticism that could theoretically bootstrap me to heights of genuine literary value perhaps even lip-smacking market value, mmm, print media, mmm, New York Times Bestseller List, mmmschmack, do your balls need licking Mr. James R. Bantam, is your house really so random?

I've never felt a need to be Joyce. But I haven't accepted being Jonathan. It feels fundamentally wrong - to accept. Or maybe I'm saving acceptance. Saving it for a rainy day. Saving it for an opium reverie, pinning it on the dragon’s tail. Or did I spend it on synthetic ecstasy? I don't know, I never made a great accepter and I'm not proud of that.

Nobody knows what their place is. Some people believe in karma but karma doesn't solve anything really. Karma is cryptic and complex in this society. Jennifer said the world was fucked up which pleased me with its simple truth. A cliché that hasn't gotten old - we're fucking ourselves up and I don't know about you, but I can't quite muster archaic nostalgia - no, non serviam, I will not serve nature, I will not serve God, I will not serve man a big mac but I'll pack your bread, man, for 9 bucks an hour. I'll write a novel and some of you will read it, and that's cool. I won't read your stuff unless it catches my eye, which is rare. Sometimes I'll look, even with sore, sleepy peepers, since I think I ought to. Hey, it's contrived but I should get over that hang up - it enriches anyway, lets me glimpse lives in American panhandles, long-winded academic exegeses of Carolina lawyers, motivation is motivation. Artificial is natural. All that jazz.

Someone once told me theft was theft, to shame me for "stealing" MP3s. I told him I wasn't going to argue with someone who could only flay me with tautologies.

Wow, I'm still writing. I guess I CAN write, if I can be bothered. But it's just a ramble. So many possibilities (see, I'm keeping that theme alive - there's a kind of backbone to this ramble but its splintered). Possibilities, like taking certain splinters that resonate, ideas that rhyme (thank you Ashberry for that line) and gluing them together to form some consonant literary craftwork.

See,
I still see novelty and yet the flooding fulfillment of categories sickens me. Does that come across? I thought I could express it best poetically, but I'll try a straight forward form since I'm in the mood for insulting your intelligence (whoever you are - does anyone check in here? I'm spread thin on this line and that's fine):

Possibilities...
I can see so many possibilities - novels that haven't been written. I know there are things I could do musically that haven't been done yet - I could squeeze out some novelty, cram in a genre

but,
seeing this saddens me. It feels empty to fill these spaces. It feels like the last line of blow.

Will there be space colonies in the future? I'd like to see space colonies. Yes, maybe one day we'll live in glorious space colonies. So many possibilities.

But so what?

Oh, but the tortured optimist in me says, you wouldn't be so-whatting if you lived in a SPACE COLONY! Silly boy.

But I'm not won over, optimist. Space colonies, they look great in the mind's eye. But they also look vague there. They look suspiciously like the dragon’s tail, like the unending end of an opium reverie. Mushrooms never showed me space colonies, and if they did, I have the feeling they'd be tied to tryptamine tension and I'd be clutching my soul for fear of being unworthy – unworthy of the mighty space colony, the last orbital vestige of human vitality, the terrible profundity of hyper-humanity strung out on technology.

So many possibilities.

Is it that God is everything and nothing but a self-clutching horror, Oedipus tearing out his eyes for eternity?

Now I see, with a demonic cackle, why atheists can be as subject to wishful thinking as the religioids.

What a strange loop.



But there's still pizza, waiting for me. Damn, that almost makes me forget the horror of the horrible God. Food therapy. Quit your drugs and your philosophy, become a fat buddha feasting on the slaughterfruits of overdriven society. Oh my, what a fucked up world, but we make the best pizza, the best pizza in history. I will travel back to the Italy of 1764 to sample an obscure enclave where they supposedly embodied the wabisabi surety of the pie's purity, but I'll tell you in 2046 when we're standing before the tsunami and chatting amicably in the brotherhood and sisterhood of victimhood: the best pizza is right here, right now, and that is a mystical truth I can walk downtown for and end this entry with, a wikipedia stub, and a stunted novel hub, begging for misspoken spokes and a wolf on a leaf.

And it's cool that some lovely little Nelsonites will be trying to heal the world through thought and bond and energy, channeling the manna of this enchanted valley, creating a reality? And if so, is it indecent to say so? Lakeside is the play, yo, the play's the thing to catch the consciousness of the King of the PostCorpal WebRing those HiGhEr DiMeNsIoNaL bEiNgS gnosed into my hosed mind with a hyperdopaminal laser-scalpel, 21st century schizoid man, fulfilling Tippler's omega-point prophecy, describing it all in math I could finally understand, cubing the square of novelty, unlocking the lingual prison with a wordkey and beckoning me to a passing boxcar of possibility, another trainride for the head-hollowed hobos, a pillow car with black-tar hookah and moldfruits for breakfast, loops of industrial cereal health to blame on our tombstones when we rot next to the masons and the mayor.

And Bush will rot under Arlington Cemetery next to Laura in clawed upright position, eye-sockets filled with molten gold. And I'll be in a dream state in a Columbine Killers' limbo video game where aborted mass-murderers hobnob with the winners of level 17, in the year of our Churchillian Devil 1999, and I'll be forced to admit, in juxtaposition with a blood-crusted April, that a couple of Littleton maniacs got the jump on me, but neither lived it up as well as born-again Crawford Boy who never dreamed of being president when he was content to snort coke off the urinal of a Boston Bar's bathroom, sexual snacks and a celeb sample-pack smacking themselves back in the sadomasoch sockets of the Republic of Planet Earth's VIP chamber, in the pockets of Prince Machiavelli’s Mafiosi, important enough for Arlington, important enough for a gilded karmic notch, and a pyramid two feet taller than King Reagan's, and me, uncapsed, the archetype of the mediocrity, the dead mediocrity with my adjective garments clinging to my skeleton, a stitch out of time saves none, and who will I haunt? So many possibilities...

And God has no mirror, yep yep, sure
and brooksy photographs the implications of abandoned headwear
and the wordwytch abandoned her blog

and hey,
that was an okay ramble, it filled some time, some headspace.

29

Build your own meat - it brings meaning to LIFE!

Still raining, still dreaming

Weird feelings. Which is why I've made the decision to clean myself out. If I can't stop fucking with my head for a month, I really am an addict. So I'm going to take control.

But I haven't recovered from my head fucking yet so I'm still feeling weird. Still hollow. I know it's not reality, it's the chemicals, making everything I value seem silly and trivial. Robbing life of meaning. It might take a while for me to get my equilibrium back, if that's even possible. I remember an innocent time, a pristine baseline. I don't think I need to be guilty. I don't renounce my experiments, I've learned a lot, maybe more than I should have. But it's good to know when to fold. Know when to follow classic country songs.

My weird feelings flowered in an hour long improv. I actually managed to purge some of the negativity. I played the blues and then I played with the blues. I failed to record it. I never record the best improvs.

I can create, but I don't have the drive I ought to. I'm still stuck staring into the cesspool of Narcissus. I'm hoping I can break these feedback loops I've exacerbated with endless overlapping cycles of serotonin manipulation, dopamine spikes, 5HT receptor games. We can't resist playing with our heads, they're the most powerful of power tools. But even the brightest among us don't really know what we're doing. If anyone ought to have been licensed to operate their brains it would be people like Wilson, Leary, McKenna, Huxley, Crowley - those folks - they lit up their lives with a Mephistophelean glow.

In contrast, I'm a young, confused, weak, scared little fool. I deserve no such license.

What motivated me to write this entry again? I can't remember. Maybe I just wanted to write. See what comes out. This all still feels hollow. It's so hard to articulate what's been building in my head for the last year or more. Some foreign way of thinking. I really don't want to call it "wisdom" or "maturity" because that would mean that I'm comprehending the hideously pointless nature of reality.

Not that the lack of a point is necessarily horrible, but I haven't found a way to love existentialism, at least not on a regular basis. I've known for ages, long before the angst, that we create our own meaning. Sometimes that bothers me, but often I find daoistic peace in the idea. Carl Sagan wrote a book I never read called "The Demon Haunted World - Science as a candle in the dark". He banished God from his world, but he also expelled the demons.

My problem is that despite all the new age self-help optimism I've absorbed from my favourite quantum philosophers, I don't seem to be a particularly potent creator of my own reality. I suppose I could hold out hope of getting there, though, if I keep my mind sharp. Timothy Leary didn't come into his own until middle age.

Tony's got a great new mantra: "God has no mirror". He told me that as we were walking through the snow. I imbibed the snow frosting my favourite forest path in the purple tint of the virgin dawn and saw what he was saying. Brooksy should have been there to snap a pic with his digicam. It was a beautiful morning and T was having a glowing acid trip. I was very glad, it soothed me. That someone in my circle can trip well on acid. I know the drugs aren't evil but there are demons in my brain.

I've actually been thinking about moving to Kansas. I love Nelson but it may be that I'm overdosing on the place. Kansas would be a good place to dry out. I also feel like I need a change of environment. Not just yet, but somewhere down the road. I'd never leave this place for too long though. Whatever crazy shit happens here, whatever drugs flood the marketplace, the land will remain, and the land will be the last thing to lose its meaning.

The land is what I was thinking of when Tony smashed God's mirror.

Original Sin 1.83 - insert for Jamie's early life

Jamie is alone on her morning recess stroll after acing her “special” geography exam. She’s thinking, as she usually does during academic breaks, of the many ways she will put her developing talents to use. Jeff, the downcast kid with the perma-scowl and the dorky-looking dress, a sixth grader, catches her eye as he does often on these school grounds. He’s a loner like her, but not by choice. He’s not content like Jamie. Often he mutters threats, mutilating enemies in his mind. It’s eerie seeing this behavior from the outside. She doesn’t want to think how much it reminds her of her last incarnation.

“No,” she says. “This is the time for clear thinking. I can handle it, even if Tommy couldn’t.” A group of second-graders look at her oddly and start whispering amongst themselves. This happens a lot. Jamie smiles and turns back to Jeff. Jeff allows himself the rare indulgence of level gaze and their eyes meet. He seems to want to approach but can’t commit himself. Jamie commits for him. She’s very decisive these days.

“Hi,” she says. “Your name’s Jeff right?”

“What do you want?” he says with a deepening scowl. “I don’t consort with scum.”

He wanted to talk to me so he could denounce my perceived malevolence, Jamie thinks. A moment of pity. Tommy would have related. But Jamie has written herself out of that loser-script. She refuses to relate, it’s not what God wants and it’s not what she wants. She shouldn’t relate to people like this, they’ll drag her down into their futile sever-lives.

“What did I do to you?” Jamie asks. “I thought you were smart. I’ve seen you around and you seem to be on a higher level than most of the dimwits here. But you know, we’re not all that different – except I’ve learned how to get what I want and not bitterly scorn the joys I’ll never possess. You’re living in your own world and you’ll die there. I know people like you – you’re hopeless. You don’t have the imagination to get out of your prison.”

Jeff gawks at her. Was this a prank or a prepared speech? He’s heard that Jamie’s an odd child and expected a strange response but he didn’t expect an articulate harangue like that from a second-grade girl, subverting his righteous denunciation. This isn’t fair. Anger flares in his eyes.

“Who the hell do you think you are? You don’t understand what it’s like for me. They cast me out. They decided I’m not worthy to live. You’re just like them. Fuck off and leave me alone.”

“Them them them…You blame everyone but yourself. You can integrate intelligently or you can show them what a bad-ass you can be. Or you can feel sorry for yourself and look like a douchebag. It’s your choice.”

“Get out of my face or I’ll kick your ass you little shit.”

“Ah, pick on someone your own size, that might toughen you up boy,” Jamie says and walks away, power-euphoria coursing through her brain. She’s never given such a lecture. It feels great. Maybe one day she’ll be a drill sergeant.

The pity returns but the euphoria breaks it down into isolated thoughts of little consequence. He won’t amount to anything, she thinks. Poor bastard’s saddled with a grade Z imagination. He’s a bit ahead of the curve, but he disappointed me with his inane retorts. His loser-mentality will bury him. I got a second chance because I have something to offer. The divine ideals God told me about. Yeah.

She guesses the universe needs Grade A imagination like hers… for engineering euphoria? Hyper euphoria? She remembers something her dad had said to her last month. He was reading one of his science magazines. There was an article about the “hedonic engineering” research going on in labs all over the country. They were actually announcing the creation of a training program for bright children. Somewhere, a group of scientists are going to mold young minds to eventually take over these ambitious experiments. Derrick had suggested she look into the program. Something to think about, definitely. But she really wants to be that concert pianist she meant to be since the days of Tommy.

Original Sin 1.8 - Jamie's Incarnation

On a sunny afternoon, at the foot of a small hill, in a sprawling yard of green ocean-front property, a young girl paces angrily, fifty feet forward and fifty feet back. Her parents eye her nervously from the patio. Joan Lewis takes apathetic sips from a glass of ice-tea every ten seconds. Her husband, Derrick, nurses a glass of white wine.

"Why does she want us to call her Jamie?" Joan asks.

"How should I know?" Derrick says, exasperated, as Joan lets out a sigh. "I just can’t believe she’s up and walking around."

"It’s weird," Joan says, "She didn’t sound like our girl when we were driving home. She sounded like somebody else."

"Well hell, she had a grand mal seizure. Give her some time to recover."

"Of course I will!"

Both parents turn back to the yard where their child is stomping around, clearly lost in some intense inner-world.

"What in the hell is she so angry about?" Derrick murmurs to himself.

"The doctor said her brain was fried," Joan says in a shaky voice.

"He didn’t say that!"

"Well that’s all I could figure from the frigging medical jargon. I barely understood a word. And I don’t think you understood either. You’re a dentist, not a doctor."

Derrick lets out a peeved exhalation, turning away from his wife. "He wasn’t saying her brain was fried, I can tell you that. Her motor control is obviously functioning fine. And she was talking a lot in the car. In fact, she was talking in rather complex sentences if I recall."

"That’s what weirds me out," Joan says.

"Tiffany suffered a major shock to the system. Her brain is probably reorganizing itself. She may never be quite the same as she was. But she will recover." He subverts his surety by swallowing hard.

"Didn’t the CIA use electric shock machines to brainwash people in those experiments in the sixties?" Joan asks.

"No, none of that happened, it’s urban myth. You read too much of that conspiracy junk."

"So she’s going to be okay?"

"We lucked out honey. We’ll have our girl back. And we’re going to buy a lightning rod tomorrow, I promise."

Joan breathes out, then takes a long drink, finally seeming to enjoy it. Tiffany reaches the end of the yard again and stops to drop kick a tree trunk, letting out a high pitched grunt. She connects with the trunk but then stumbles on her other leg and falls, yelling in rage.

"Oh, baby!" Joan says, getting up from her chair in preparation for a run, but Derrick stops her with an arm.

"Leave her alone for now," he says. "Remember what happened last time we tried to talk to her."

Joan scowls but gets back in her chair to apathetically sip ice-tea.

Tiffany is pacing toward the ivy-covered shed through a well-trimmed lawn. She is deep in thought.

So God made me a girl. A FUCKING GIRL! The trickster bastard! Should have read the fine print.

She is a little girl. The hugeness of everything is awe-inspiring. She is apparently old enough to walk. And talk, although she clammed up fully after realizing how much she was creeping out her parents with her thirty-six year old speech patterns. Now they think she’s gone catatonic. How ingenious of God – a lightning bolt to enter this life. The trickster bastard. She storms across the grass, skirting the hill. She’d been kicking a soccer ball up that same hill when the lightning had struck. She’d discerned that from her parents but she has none of this person’s original memories.

God bless you Tiffany for disobeying your daddy and playing out in the storm, she thinks with a smile, not sure if she’s sarcastic or not. You gave me your life.

She doesn’t want to think about what happened to the original mind of this body but she can’t help wondering. Is the original Tiffany dead? Overwritten like a digital document? Ascendant to heaven on angel wings?

No, not heaven. You know the truth about heaven now.

There’s a quiet voice in her head. When she asks questions from an authority-seeking position, the instinctual response sounds a bit like God, but she can’t be sure she isn’t just talking to herself. There’s no gnosis anymore, no certainty, an odd, vacuous feeling – but here she is!

Don’t ask where Tiffany is.

But it’s bugging me.

Well then, know that I am willing to sacrifice one of my innocent children for one guilty Faustian.

Oh Christ. "God" was right, she shouldn’t have asked.

But a new emotion takes the baton from the gritty guilt: reverence of the force that is willing to move mountains for her, move minds out of the way for her, cosmic trickery, all for her. She’s chosen. She is protected and loved.

Well I don’t know about those last two.

She stops pacing as the anger ebbs away. She turns to face her new home, a very tasteful, white-trimmed one-story suburban estate, well landscaped. Her parents look back quizzically. She can hear seagulls on the shore beyond the hill and the engine of a car pulling out of the cul-de-sac behind the house. It’s all perfectly vivid. In fact it’s more real than anything she can remember. The reality of the situation hits her for the first time. She falls back against the hill, cackling on the grass with a jaw-breaking grin. It’s real! A new life! A fresh start! She hollers in joy, easily reaching a lofty pitch and startling her puzzled parents. She doesn’t care how worried they are in this moment of exaltation.

She gets back up, feeling out her new body for the first time. The pelvic smoothness is a strange sensation but she thinks she can get used to the lack of a dick. The biggest shock is the thousand little things she can’t name, the subtleties of another body adding up to a profoundly alien gestalt. Alien but human – a real live OTHER human, what luck to be able to experience the true shattering of the solipsist’s wall! This human seems somehow speedier than Tommy, possessing a quick metabolism which also quickens thought. There is an intriguing difference in the nervous system too: rich tactile sensations within narrower extremes. It seems this body handles pain better than Tommy, sorting it into more manageable categories.

I love you Tiffany!

The most noticeable novelties are those of childhood physique: the almost laughable smallness of the limbs, the low vantage, the oversized head. She runs a hand through her long brown hair admiring the texture. Then a flash of euphoria as she discovers Tiffany’s greatest gift: the total lack of little aches and pains and lethargy and atrophied muscles he’d taken for granted as Tommy. Those things had crept in gradually as he’d aged in the last life forcing him to acclimatize to decline, never consciously noticing the entropy but sinking into dull melancholy because of it – the intangible loss of youth. Now the pure baseline is back all at once. Boy, girl, what does it matter? It’s so fresh and so good!

Her angry pace has become a dizzying sprint. She runs around the yard, whooping, clapping her hands together and jumping for joy. One of her leaps puts her off kilter and she lands on the side of her foot, sending her sprawling. This time both her parents get out of their chairs and jog toward her. As she tumbles, she laughs at the stupidity of Tiffany’s limbs. They lack thirty years of muscle memory but she’ll get it back.

Her parents are catching up to her. They look very concerned. Tiffany rolls to her feet and runs right at them.

"I love you!" she says and slams into her mother, clasping her arms around the woman. Joan gasps, then hugs her back hard.

"Oh baby, I love you too," she says, sniffling. Both parents are smiling. Derrick breaks into relieved laughter, pries her off her mother and hugs her tight.

"How are you darling?" he says. "You were sounding strange in the car yesterday."

"Oh mom," Tiffany says. "Dad. Daddy… I, um… don’t feel like myself. I think something happened to my head after the lightning. I don’t remember too much."

"That’s okay Tiffany, you’re going to be fine," Joan says.

Tiffany smiles back sweetly and says: "I’m Jamie mommy. That’s my name now."

***

She’s looking in her bedroom mirror. There is enough space between Smurf stickers to make out her reflection. She strokes a clump of girly hair. Yep, I’m a Tiffany alright, she thinks. Sweet-faced little cutesy-pie with the outfits to match. But now is the time for her true self to take charge – not Tommy, but the emerging self, the one that is going to kick the ass of this incarnation. "Jamie", a gender-neutral title. It’ll do. Tommy always wanted to be James anyway. Jamie will be a suitable compromise. Jamie Lewis. Sounds nice. Funny that she’s got the same surname as before. She supposes she’ll keep it. Her parents have finally accepted her name change though it still weirds them out. They’re going to have to get used to a little weirdness now and then.

It’s been three weeks since the lightning and two weeks since her rapid recovery. She is settling in. Her parents have been helpful in filling her in on the details her "fried brain" is missing. She is the only child of a dentist and a receptionist in a fairly swanky Long Island home. It’s actually much nicer than his last parents’ leaky, bug-infested house, but it’s on the edge of unending suburban sprawl. There is nothing here like the woods Tommy had access to. But there is the ocean. And that ecstatic fresh feeling is still with her.

It’s a good thing the transition hadn’t gone the other way, Jamie thinks. That would be appalling, gaining Tommy’s whole collection of ailments at once! But the opposite is heavenly – a true fountain of youth!

But God hadn’t given her this as a gratuitous grace. The point was to make use of it.

I will, Jamie thinks, looking at her fresh face, expression hardening. I damn sure will. The responsibility to use the gift right. It’s an honor she won’t waste. And she feels capable this time. This body is an organic expression of capability. Can-do muscles, competent cartilage. She will not let God throw her for a loop, she’ll roll with being a woman. She’ll be a superwoman. A vessel is a vessel. Tommy had never been all that manly anyway.

And forget sex for now, that’s not for a while – sex is just an abstraction given the lack of hormones in this raw, five year old corpus. It’s surprising how powerful an abstraction it remains though, despite being severed from libido. Bringing Tommy’s mind here has also brought with it every intellectual scar and his paranoid conception of gonadal politics.

Jamie is sure the scars will heal quickly with Tiffany’s hyper-metabolism. This is the time for her to develop skills and strategize for the future. Can’t go wrong when you’re thinking three moves ahead. She thinks God must have allowed Tommy’s complex consciousness to inhabit Tiffany’s cranial tissue despite its smaller size, filling it out more fully. People only use ten percent of their brain normally, right? Tiffany’s head seems to be a fine fit. Her thinking is not in any way hindered – if anything it’s been clarified. She might be able to credit the body for that, at least partially. She can feel the purity of the bloodstream with every heartbeat. There’s something about this body that makes everything easy. Except athletic feats, her limbs still seem rather dumb.

"Dinner time!"

Her mom is calling her from the kitchen. Another microwaved meal with mom and dad. She wonders if they’ll be weirded out if she asks for mint tea to wash it down. What was it about the lightning bolt that made you crave mint tea? Derrick, what a question! She snickers and vows to ask anyway. She wants to see the look on their faces.

***

1987 is a strange year for the Lewis family of Long Island. What seems at first to be a senseless tragedy becomes the flowering of a precocious personality. It turns out that Jamie Lewis is indeed a prodigy, wise beyond her years, with an eerily prescient understanding of the world.

After a few days in kindergarten she is whisked away to the special wing of her private school and placed with the "special" kids. Upon attaining this rank, she decides to stop being obviously ahead of the curve and play along with their academic games. She wants to be smart but she doesn’t want to be a freak, and some of the math is actually challenging at this level.

She thinks God kept Tiffany’s brain as it was but reorganized the neurological connections to replicate Tommy’s consciousness. That was the trick and it was the same thing He’d done using His voice in the orchard, except this time it’s to a radical extent, a total transformation. Jamie deduces that the original Tiffany is either dead, or has morphed into the new personality. This smooth method of mental invasion has an added bonus: it allows Jamie to take advantage of the rapid learning Tiffany’s pre-adolescent brain is capable of. She is delighted to discover that the French language is assimilated with ease. She moves on to German in a month.

The novelty of the fresh feeling has worn off and she’s not distracted by it anymore. It simply makes daily life a hundred times more valuable and daily tasks a hundred times easier. She takes the vitality for granted now. She is learning all she can, and staying healthy. She pressures her mother to buy health food. She’s even brushing her teeth three times a day (of course Dr. Lewis will not hear of improper oral hygiene). She tends to avoid her school mates which worries her parents, but they are delighted at the rapport she’s developed with the adults around her. Jamie sometimes injects the expected cuteness into the surreal conversations since she knows they don’t really want to be on equal terms. It’s alright, she can wait. The game of skirting the line between her expected role as child and her potential role as oberfrau is endlessly entertaining.

Jamie has never known such optimism. Even Tommy’s childhood doesn’t compare. All light here is outer but it warms the inner void. God was my friend after all, she thinks. Benevolent and loving. Tough but fair. He steered me toward the good. He’s a voidful bastard but he’s goaded me into living while I can. Because I’m special. Thank God. As she settles into her new life, she thinks less and less about the deal.

***

"I’ve already told you, I’m not going to be studied like some animal in a zoo. Who knows why I changed? Who cares?"

"Alright, alright. I thought since you loved learning so much, you might be willing to contribute to the study of the mind. But if you don’t want to that’s your choice."

"Yes, I know."

This is the third time she’s had to make it explicit to her father that she’s not intent on submitting herself to scientific investigation. Her mother usually takes her side in this matter, but it seems Derrick’s been bringing her around to his idea of the importance of Jamie’s electricity-induced transformation. Jamie is nine years old and is barely trying to act like a child anymore.

"So, are you going to get to your piano practice after dinner?" Joan asks, salting her tofurky.

"Ah, I don’t need to practice today, I played a bunch yesterday. I want to take a walk, maybe pick up some licorice."

"What happened to eating healthy?" Joan asks. "You used to be obsessed with it."

"Hey, I’m into health, I just like licorice once in a while okay? Gimme a break."

"You know, we bought you that piano for Christmas because we expected you to use it," Derrick says.

"I am using it," Jamie says. Derrick’s definition of "using" it apparently doesn’t include improvisation, the philistine. But she’s sick of scales and arpeggios. She wants to do her own thing. Her teacher is technique-obsessed and drives her hard because she’s supposed to be a "prodigy". Mrs. Kaliszewski believes it’s time for her to get to the "next level", whatever that is. Jamie is more interested in art. She didn’t come back here to be a mindless technician. She is going to create masterpieces. Technique will come. But inspiration is right here, right now!

"Okay forget the licorice, I’ll play," she says, getting up from the table.

"Wait, you’re not even finished –"

"I’m inspired," Jamie says, and makes a beeline for the Clavinova in the living room. She’s had a slow, asocial month, the first thing resembling depression in her life as Jamie, but suddenly the optimism is back, along with inspiration’s flame. The shape of the masterpiece is emerging from the amniotic ocean. She hears the melody, brilliantly asymmetrical, in C sharp minor. How about that, the first masterpiece at age nine? Her hands hit the piano, falling on the right keys immediately. She loops the theme, both hands in unison, then both hands in thirds. Then it goes canonic and follows with steadily complexifying counterpoint. It is the sound of optimism, the potential in the prodigy’s path.

The theme intensifies. Jamie’s parents watch as she launches into an ecstasy of stumbling virtuosity, laughing at the wrong notes, the near-successful attempt at audacious sonic density, perhaps not perfect but who’d ever even try such a stunt? She continues upping the ante long after her parents have lapsed into slack-jawed confusion, even after she herself knows what she’s doing. It passes the point of coherency and enters what Jamie thinks of as alien jazz, the channeling of hyper-coherency, a stylistic revolution for future reference. Humanity will need to evolve to appreciate it.

She winds her way back to the theme she started with – Tiffany’s brain supports robust memory. The improvisation comes to a close with a simple restatement of the inspiration theme in C sharp minor and a serene hymnal cadence ending on a major chord. Jamie lets her hands drop, staring at the keys, stunned, almost frightened at what had come out of her. Amazing what a little inspiration and optimism will do for you.

"Hey was I recording?" she asks.

"How should I know?" Derrick answers.

She checks the Clavinova’s display screen.

"Shit! Why didn’t I record?"

"Language!" Joan scolds.

I just failed to record a masterpiece and you’re worried about my LANGUAGE? Well they didn’t get Stravinsky in 1906. Tommy didn’t get Gombe right away. And only the elite will understand hyper-coherency – if she can ever transcribe it. Well she’ll just have to remember it. Write it down! Right now, before it fades!

She’s been struggling with music theory (why the prodigy hasn’t absorbed it all in half a year is a mystery to Mrs. Kaliszewski) but she’s made incredible strides from where Tommy was in the understanding of notation. Her can-do spirit is strong. She rushes towards her room where the staff paper is.

"Wait, it’s your turn to do the dishes," her mother says as Jamie jogs past, feet pounding the hardwood floor. Her bedroom door slams shut seconds later.

***

Vera Kaliszewksi has cleaned up the notation errors in Jamie’s sloppy manuscript – there were many. But the piece is now presentable. Vera has several revisions to suggest but Jamie won’t hear of them. This time an argument is avoided. Vera has learned that it’s better not to butt heads with Jamie’s arrogance, especially since her parents have proven to be overprotective neurotics, easily manipulated by Jamie into telling her to back off. "We’re paying you to teach piano, not composition."

"I hope you’ll listen to me one day my dear," she tells Jamie as she stuffs the seventeen page manuscript into an envelope. "As talented as you are, you could be even better if you had a firmer grip on tradition. You must learn the rules before you break them. Still I must say, this is a fantastic debut. I’ve never heard anything like it from any of my students."

"Opus one," Jamie says with a smile.

The envelope is addressed to Continental Magazine, a glossy, educational, youth-oriented periodical. Jamie’s composition, Inspiration in C sharp minor is being sent to the music division of their annual "Young Achiever’s Contest". The winning entry will be performed at Carnegie Hall by the current critical darling of the classical piano world, Dmitri Scherbakov.

***

"The hell? I don’t believe this!"

Jamie is looking at the faces of the first, second, and third placers in the latest issue of Continental for Kids.

"That little gook won over me?!"

"Jamie! Where did you learn a word like that?" says Derrick.

"Sorry, I meant to say that little fuck!"

"Jamie Lewis, that is enough!" Joan says. "Go to your room!"

"How could I not even place? Goddamn judges. They’re probably all Yakuza."

She storms off to her bedroom and slams the door. She doesn’t know where the racial anger is coming from. She’s surprised and disgusted at its presence but it flows out of her. No, it’s not racial anger exactly. Just the stereotype of the smiling over-achieving Japanese boy. So bland and predictable. But her composition was supposed to subvert the predictable. It should have steamrolled over the mediocre crap that usually rises to the top of these stupid competitions.

She did get an honorable mention (as Tiffany Lewis) and an invitation for an interview in the magazine’s next issue. But no, she won’t appear in their shitty rag to answer condescending questions. That’s beneath her. She must maintain her dignity, that’s been part of the plan since the beginning. So what if it sours this minor celebrity? Honorable mention? That’s not honorable enough for her masterpiece. Let Scherbakov play Michael Wong’s Mozartian rip-off. She climbs out of her bedroom window and heads down the cul-de-sac. In these endless suburbs she must walk four miles to get to the nearest convenience store. But she could really go for some licorice right now.

***

"I was told you wrote a nasty letter to Continental," Vera says.

"Yeah well, they angered me," Jamie says. "I had to let them know. I don’t take any crap any more. I have an image to maintain."

"Ironic that your image has been permanently tarnished as a result of your trying to do whatever it took to keep it clean."

"Permanently tarnished? Think what you like. I don’t need your lessons anymore. I’ll be fine on my own. I quit."

It starts with the one deviation deemed justifiable. Then it snowballs. Things are going awry but it’s okay. Jamie is remembering the comforts of laziness and video games. There is no Nintendo in this universe, nor Sega, nor Sony, but Acusoft has got a nice game box on the market with cutting edge technology roughly equivalent to the Super Nintendo of Tommy’s adolescence, perhaps slightly better. She’s still developing academic skills but she needn’t be a workaholic. What good are skills with no leisure time? She can strike a balance.

And she’s discovered Chadwick’s licorice, a gourmet product, $9.99 for a bag of six curled sticks. She has to cross the burbs to get it and it’s costing all her allowance money but it’s so tasty. It was a strange taste at first, strange and compelling. Every bite since has been a deeper probe into the licorice world. It’s like all licorice before Chadwick’s was the planetary crust. Chadwick’s takes her to the core, radiant with the energy of buried alien artifacts. Sometimes she suspects the licorice itself is a subtle expression of dormant alien intelligence – hyper-coherency in licorice form. Nothing tastes remotely like it. And it’s inspiring – in the licorice reverie she can imagine the things she will become, manifestations of alien jazz. She will get to them. Later. She will strike a balance. There is room for licorice. What would life be without licorice?

***

"Hey licorice-head… what’s with all the candy? Are you hiding drugs in there?"

The taunter’s voice rings in her head all the way home from high school. She would distract herself with the beautiful black bite of Chadwick’s sticks but she’s all out and the nearest den is on the other side of town. When did school get so shitty, she wonders. Ah yes, it was the moment she decided it was time to be social and interact with her biological contemporaries. Bad idea. What a crappy day. And now she has to tell her parents she’s failing math and science. Whoopee.

"Hey, are you addicted to that shit? Is it your substitute for sex? Maybe your skin would look better if you didn’t eat so much of it, haha."

It’s guys like this that keep Jamie’s budding heterosexual instincts safely contained. She declares herself to be a lesbian but her "friends" think she’s creepy, even the surprisingly common dykes and bisexuals. Her features have hardened and her face has grown pallid. She shaved off Tiffany’s beautiful hair years ago and maintains the buzz cut. Tiffany’s dead as a doornail and life doesn’t seem to be working out so well in Jamie’s body anymore.

She thought it’d be easier being a member of the opposite sex. She thought she’d get a free ride but she’s hitting a wall. More and more her gender seems a joke that God played on her, a living mockery.

She walks through suburban wasteland eventually reaching the cul-de-sac that marks her home. This scene is starting to bore her. She hasn’t seen woods since… well since Tommy. Is there any forest in this part of the world or has it all been paved over? She enters the house through the back door hoping to avoid the parents but Derrick is in the kitchen on the phone. He puts it down and says: "I was just talking to the school. Seems you’re falling behind in your studies."

"Leave me alone dad, I’ve had a hard day."

"Tell me what’s happening in school," Derrick says in German. Jamie stares blankly.

"You’re getting rusty. You used to understand me most of the time. Are you forgetting your languages?"

"So what if I am?" Jamie says, "I’ve got better things to learn."

"You’re playing video games all day. What’s happened to you? You used to get perfect grades – in the special program! It’s like you’re not even trying anymore. I know you have the brains but you have to put in the work. How are you going to get into a good school if you don’t put in the work?"

"Maybe I don’t want an academic career did you ever think of that?"

"You think you’re going to get anywhere in life without college?"

"I’m a musician."

"It’s very nice that you play a little piano now and again, but really, we’re talking about a career here. You think I’m going to pay your bills for you when you’re an unemployed dropout?"

Jamie pauses. "No, I guess not," she says and leaves for her bedroom. Her old parents would have. She misses them. They were better than these wispy waspy people. They didn’t push their religion or their scholastic standards on her. Too bad Tommy had to flip out at school and leave them behind.

***

God doesn’t feel like a friend anymore. Jamie remembers the forest and the wood sprite, vaguely. The time before the forest is even vaguer. She can recall Candie’s laugh better than she remembers Tommy’s home where he once packed sod beside the garden. Lord how she misses Candie. What she wouldn’t give to hear her play one tune on her pipe. Sometimes she plays the Princess theme on the Clavinova but it’s not the same. She dreams about the orchard and the mansion. The Help Wanted sign. Maybe she could have helped someone there. She’s bloody useless here. She’s got a bit of respect but no one really likes her music and nobody thinks she’s good enough. She was a prodigy but now what? Now she’s a failure.

She’s taken to snapping her fingers again when she imagines fanciful ways of bringing

her lost world into the new one, but it’s a sad ritual. She knows she’s betrayed whatever spirit arose from the fingersnapping regime. She thinks maybe if she’d kept the faith those fingersnapping wishes might have come true one day, but the deals she’s made with the sprites and the Clowngod… She’s sold her spirit and drained her magic. She’s running on empty. Maybe she should have stayed at home with Scuffy, toughed out school, then gone on to a humble life of fingersnapping. At least she’d be anticipating heaven.

She’d set Scuffy aflame, sometimes that hurts more than anything. She wishes she could see Poetic Injustice again. It seems perfect for these times. If no one cares about her art she could at least get back to its fuck-off righteous roots. She tried to reproduce the manifesto once but failed. She spun off track like the Princess after being nailed with a turtle shell on Chocolate Island 2.

***

Jamie thinks it must be hard to break the parental love bond but she’s managed to do it. She’s worn them down. In the end, she was too Tommy for them.

No, it wasn’t Tommy that wore them down, Jamie thinks. It was that "new personality" God tried to cultivate. The optimist. She coasted for a while but when the going got rough she got to be a bit of a bitch.

Jamie leaves home in a drab outfit utterly lacking fashion sense. She carries her only possessions: three bags of Chadwick’s licorice, five hundred dollars, and a decent Timex watch, the last birthday present she’d gotten from her parents. She can’t bring herself to throw it away. She’ll keep it as a memento, tribute to the twelve years Joan and Derrick had raised her.

Sorry I stole your real daughter, she thinks, but this specific incarnation wasn’t my idea. Take it up with God, that trickster bastard.

Jamie takes a good look at the Long Island shore on a sunny summer evening. It’s a pleasant little place but it’s worn out its welcome. She probably won’t be back. She’s waiting for a bus to New York City. She’ll try again there. If she can make it there… well, who even cares? The only thing she’s basing her hopes on is Candie’s prophecy. The words seeped into her head last night, finally motivating her leave the house in which she was no longer wanted:

"The fairies will help you. If you seek it you will find it. I know because you have the manna."

Jamie has no idea what this means but it’s her only hope of survival in the urban jungle she’s about to enter. God’s gone. He’s left her to her own devices with a guaranteed void at the end of it all. But she’ll see what can still be squeezed out of this farcical second chance. Might as well pin her hopes on a fairy even if it seems she’s burned up all her magic.

Scuffy had been a good bargaining chip. She thinks she has another one: a baggie half full of orange powder she’d bought shortly before dropping out of school. She would never take drugs but she knows there are people for whom certain powders are worth plenty of money, maybe even licorice. She was told it was a "synthetic tryptamine", whatever that means.

***

"Thank you so much for the 4HO dahling, we haven’t been able to find any in months."

"No problem," Jamie tells her philanthropic benefactor, navigating carefully through the party-ravaged halls of the Jackson Tower’s forty-fifth floor ("the gayest number in New York" as it was known to the 72nd street crowd).

"Hey stick around, we’s just gettin’ warmed up," says a large husky black fairy. "We gonna rail this bag." His wings brush against Jamie’s back.

"Ah, leave me alone," she says. "I’m tired, I’ve got to sleep. I’m just glad I don’t have to work anymore."

"Work? You was workin’? Looked to me like you was standin’ round the lobby countin’ taxis. What kinda work that be?"

"Important secret government work I’m not at liberty to disclose."

The husky fairy laughs and says: "You a trip. Man, I betchoo’d be trippin balls if you took somma that 4HO."

"Nah, I’ve got a cold, I don’t feel so good. And I don’t take drugs. Except for this cold-remedy I’m on."

"Maybe you sick cause you eat nothin’ but that licorice. I knew a dude that was into that chatwick’s shit – he was messed up."

"Licorice has nothing to do with it."

"Ah Jamie," lisps a tall blond fairy, "so sorry to tell you but if you want to stay here you must party with us, at least occasionally. You’re becoming a bit of a drip."

"I don’t drink. I’ve never drank."

"Oh well, I guess it’s back out on the street with you. Bum’s rush." Several fairies turn their heads.

"Jesus, fine. Give me a drink."

What kind of life is this? Jamie asks herself. Well… an interesting one, whatever else it might be.

***

Jamie’s hand is bleeding but she doesn’t feel anything. She is yelling something though.

"I’M GOD, YOU FUCKING FAGGOTS! THIS IS MY TOWER! YOU ARE MY GUESTS! SO SHOW ME SOME…" She pauses to belch loudly, then finishes: "RESPECT!"

The blood seems to be connected to shards of glass from a shattered drink that now drips from the wall. There is a nondescript moment of human contact, a dull thump she barely feels and then she is tumbling down some stairs or something – luckily not too many and she’s back on her feet, barely.

"I AM THE SHERIFF OF MANHATTAN!" she screams. "I AM THE BUFFER AGAINST THE BLANK! YOU’RE ALL DEAD DON’T YOU KNOW THAT?" She’s not sure if the words are coming out right but she’s trying valiantly to make them understand. It seems important.

"YOU ARE MY CHILDREN AND YOU MUST LIVE YOUR LIVES FULLY FROM HERE ON OUT! I COMMAND YOU! IT’S ALL YOU’VE GOT!" She’s crying but she’s not sure why.

"We are living our lives fully you sad little shit!" someone yells from down the hall. Someone else mutters: "The bitch is creeping me out." Then there are hands on her. She’s being carried away to the elevator. She has nothing left to struggle with. She has nothing left to think with. So ends the short experiment in being the Sheriff of Manhattan.

***

A cold wet morning. A virgin hangover and no licorice. Jamie is lying in the gutter, three blocks from the Jackson Tower, head cradled in a pool of vomit. She gags and sits up. God! Surely not her vomit, she doesn’t puke!

What happened last night? She doesn’t know but she’s out of the fairy facilities. Somehow she knows she’s out for good. She remembers taking a drink and choking it down. She remembers taking a second. After that… no clue.

She makes a wobbly ascent with a groan and begins a meditation on whether there’s anything left to live for. Well, she was prudent enough to make a backup plan before taking up residence in the fairy condos. The plan involves using the doubled identkey her fairy hacker roommate had given her before she’d gotten kicked out. She can use it to draw from the Washington welfare spring. She can’t take much or it’ll trip alarms. But she’ll have enough to get by. But how will she pay for licorice?

Oh well, she’ll deal with that later. Right now she needs a place to lie down that isn’t the street. Would a room be asking too much? She sets off in search of a hotel, wiping as much of the crusting puke off her hair as she can manage in one motion. It needs cutting again, it’s starting to look like a perverse tangled version of Tiffany’s pretty mane.

The streets are filling up as rush hour approaches. Too many people. Urbanity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The woods worked as long as there were sprites. She fantasizes about going way back into the past. Not twenty years but two hundred. Maybe four hundred. New York four centuries ago, unspoiled land. The blank bastard, opining as it does more often these days, especially in the absence of licorice, tells her: The first trip didn’t work out, why should the next? Don’t get your hopes up.

Chadwick’s will shut you up, she tells it. Yes, a bit of licorice and she can dream of a pastoral New York, all for her. Sheriff Jamie of Pastoral New York, in the year of our lord, 1592. In C sharp minor. She laughs. God never told her to dream. That is her rebellion. She went back to her pathetic slacker ways. She hadn’t become the winner she’d resolved to be. But she’s become a new person, she thinks. Older, wiser, maybe even cynical. World-weary for sure. Has she fought her way this far to attain apathy-cool? It’s the best she can hope for. Fuck Tommy, fuck Tiffany, and fuck God. She’ll live on her own terms, not God’s fraudulent contract.

She remembers that before she can get a room she’ll have to find a ‘net café in which to use the hacker’s identkey and score some funds. No shortage of those places in Manhattan. There’s one right across the street. But just before she crosses, a poster on a postbox catches her eye:

Mung Williams
Carnegie Hall Debut
April 14, 2005, 8:30 pm

Chopin
Scriabin
Gombe
Williams

and featuring selections from
Continental’s "Young Achiever" Composer’s Contest ™ :

Jeremy Wynn
Nicole Vance
Sarah Grandberry
Tiffany Lewis

Jamie does a double take. Is her name really on there? Yes it is. But how? Then she feels the déjà-thread of the chronofluid tugging on her in strange ways. Not that damned liquid time again! Not when she’s somehow got her name on a poster for Carnegie Hall! Ah but where is this liquid time taking her? It’s taking her back to a place where she’s lined up outside…

***

"Oh Jesus am I back now?" Jamie gasps. "Please let me be back now."

"Uh, what?" says the muscular, ballcap-wearing dude.

Yes, she is back among the full-throated carnivores, waiting in line to see Mung Williams at Carnegie Hall with her old masterpiece inexplicably on the program. She’s finally caught up to the present, a jolt after so long in the ether of awkward memory.

Christ, I was only trying to take my mind off the blank! she thinks. I wasn’t trying to re-live my whole damn life! Once through that shit was enough. Twice was overdoing it. I’m sure as fuck not flashing back again!

Jamie checks her Timex. It says 8:53, but she remembers it’s running late. The line is barely moving. It’s going to be a packed house. She prays it won’t be sold out before she gets in. She doesn’t see any scalpers around.

"Isn’t it Mung X now?" someone says. Jamie catches fragments of conversation further up the line.

"Yeah that’s what I heard. He read brother Malcolm’s autobiography. It’s one of the few modern books that really resonates with him."

"Brother Malcolm?" An utterance of disgust. "Ya whigger. If you said that in their presence they’d bust a cap in yo ass, foo’."

"Like you know anything about black culture."

"Never said I did, fuckstick."

Jamie wishes for the end of their inane chatter but it continues with someone else piping in: "Hmmm… Mung X. Doesn’t really roll off the tongue so good, does it? Not a good ring to it."

"No it’s awkward, I agree."

"And unoriginal. Couldn’t he have come up with a less hackneyed political statement than changing his last name to X?"

"Give him a break, he's just learning our customs. I think it's pretty damn amazing that he at least understands the concept of a political statement."

God, shut up you morons, Jamie seethes. I just want to hear him play my piece and then… then I guess it’s time to meet the void God promised me.

Predictably the blank tells her that her suicide is a fantasy just like everything else she’s failed to accomplish. The blank will keep her life above it as a block. And without that block, there’d be nothing to mock, the blank’s favourite pass-time.

Shut up blank. I’m going to see Mung Williams play my masterpiece. That was no fantasy. It’s on paper. It’s the unholy fusion of optimism and loser philosophy that disgusted God. But I did it anyway, so fuck everyone. It’s good enough for Mung Williams. Carnegie will ring with my righteousness.

Jamie discovers that while she was lost in thought, the line had moved considerably. She now stands two heads from the box office. The propped-open glass door of the lobby is visible. Taped to it is a larger, fancier version of the poster that had drawn her here. This poster is not advertising the event as "Continental’s Young Achiever Composer’s Contest", but rather: The Scherbakov Young Composer’s Competition. Scherbakov, the great Russian pianist who had ended up playing Michael Wong’s piece of crap back when she was a striving prodigy. This new and improved poster advertises the Young Composer’s portion of the program as being the cream of 2005’s crop – so what the hell is her rejected fourteen-year-old piece doing on the list? Oh well, better late than never.

"Just one?" asks the woman in the ticket booth. Jamie has arrived! There may be a God and He may be a bastard but she is getting into Carnegie Hall tonight!

"Yes indeed," she says and lays all her licorice money onto the counter. She snaps up a ticket for a balcony seat. The woman in the box office then leans her head out of the window and yells: "Sorry folks, that was the last seat. We’re sold out!"

A collective moan rises to a crescendo among the considerable crowd that has entered the line behind Jamie. Angry voices punctuate the moan, some uttering threats. Nervously, the ticket lady slams the window shut. Some of the crowd is now turning their anger on Jamie. She curls her ticket into her fist and squeezes it tight.

"Hey, don’t hate me just cause I’m lucky!" she shouts to the frothing end of the line. Jamie sets off for the entrance as the more unhinged members begin to gibber with rage. Jamie turns around to flip them off, then makes a run for the lobby.

Inside is calm and civility. There is an air of excitement, but it’s tempered with aristocratic restraint. Light jazz wafts out of the ceiling sound system. Jamie shows her ticket to an usher and is directed to the staircase that allows access to the upper level. A perma-grin takes hold on her face. For the first time in years, licorice is a million miles from her mind. There is only sweet sweet anticipation.

***

9:00 on the digital face of the out-of-sync Timex and the curtains open. Jamie has settled into her balcony seat and is leaning over the rail, heart pounding. She has tuned out the assinine chatter of the adjacent concert-goers and is waiting for her savior. She is waiting for the one who will recapture her long-lost moment of optimism, a hammer-pattern of glory for piano strings, her fleeting triumph before washing up fully, a second failure in an expensive second life, before she turned to licorice to keep her dreams afloat. Those twelve years with the dentist and the receptionist, lavished with upper-middle class care and private education… maybe the waste will have been worth it for those ten minutes of inspiration… in C sharp minor. If her savior can do it justice – and why not – it is a night for miracles. Ungodly miracles. She feels it.

Mung Williams, unmistakable, the short figure with the strange gait emerges from the curtains. He is greeted with a chorus of murmers, gasps, even low tittering which slices into Jamie’s brain like nails on a chalkboard. A wave of excitement breaks through the hall and the cheers begin. Jamie is breathless.

Ah you’ve come, she thinks. Just like the poster said you would. He will start with Chopin according to the program. Kick some Chopin ass, an entrée, give me a taste of how you will deal with my masterpiece – are you up to the challenge Mung? Somehow I think you are.

Mung shuffles over to the nine-foot Steinway grand in the center of the stage. He is dressed in a black tuxedo, trying to maintain his dignity. Some would say he is struggling, being a chimpanzee.

***

They announced me as Mung Williams, he thinks as he approaches the piano bench. I told them several times, it’s Mung X now. Morons. Are they so incompetent they can’t get the program changed three weeks in advance, or do they enjoy upsetting me? No, focus, this is your Carnegie debut. These New Yorkers put a lot of stock in that. They’re waiting to see how you’ll deal with Chopin, they put a lot of stock in him too.

Mung pulls out the bench. Luckily, it’s been properly adjusted and when he sits down, his feet reach those silly three pedals. He should have been an organist, his dexterous feet get bored with nothing much to do but sustain and clear. Yes, he’ll sustain and clear like a good little Chopin recitalist. Give the people what they want. But when he gets to the new repertoire, the obscuranta he chose to round out the program – that "Inspiration" piece. Yes, he’ll give them what they didn’t know they wanted. It will be a test. He’ll see who passes. He’ll cultivate his own clique from those worthy. Tiffany Lewis… he’d like to meet the composer. She’d be all grown up now though and who knows where she is?

He lays his leathery fingers over the keys.