Unstern

Keep on. Keep on your neglect. Your ignorance.

Keep me away from the drink. And I'll keep my dignity.

I can keep on like this. I can keep my dendrites cold. So cold, there's no need for revenge.

There's always dreams, extremes of ego distortion. Was hanging with Omar and Cedric today. The summer haze of the dream dayshift. Cedric broke my monitor, tried to fix it. I have dignity in dreams. I'm not a fanboy. I offered them drinks, but I told them I was too tired to party that night. Told them I wouldn't know where to go anyway.

There's silver linings. Like my resolve to leave only strengthens.

When the paradigm shifts, it's best not to cling to the old ways, the old, unsustainable ways. I could learn to love the unlucky star, the fallen angel. The rogue star. There's a new homeworld for me. Outside this galaxy of social entropy.

The nipples of mother hope have run dry

I’ve become clearer on my position regarding economic politics. I no longer have to squirm with guilt over uncertainties about “where I really stand”, or what I would fight for. I’m a leftist, but I’m not an absolutist. I’m not “ideologically pure”. Neither am I the eternally compromising middle. I have ideals. Hopefully without too much of the ology. And though I hope for utopia, I don’t expect it.

I think that although capitalism, particularly with regards to the market mechanism, is odious and cruel in its design, given enough checks and balances, it could theoretically be reasonably okay for people to live under. Not that it has a very good track record. But I’ll concede that for long stretches of the 20th century, in certain parts of the capitalist world, majorities of the people have lived unprecedented qualities of life. Nevermind whose suffering that might be based on. It does “work” in the sense of allowing the conditions for an insanely wealthy upper crust that is a small fraction of the people, an exploited middle class which also gets to do a little bit of exploiting itself, and an entirely exploited lower class. It’s enough for people who get through the day with prozac, bud light, and american idol to fall for Margaret Thatcher’s con that There Is No Alternative.

One thing I do know, though, is that there’s a lot of shit I don’t know. Maybe markets are the only way to go. So I don’t reject capitalism outright, I don’t blacklist capitalist “sympathizers”, and I could stomach voting for capitalist politicians.

But I also think that socialism, even if it has its own naïve or over-regulating approach to human nature, can also be reasonably okay for people to live under. Especially if it’s employed in the absence of totalitarian bullshit. It has a horrible track record with totalitarian governments, but pretty good results with democracies. So I can call myself a socialist, support lefties that are considered extreme by the “sensible liberals”, and sure, I’d vote for socialist candidates if I thought it could do some good.

For the foreseeable future we’ve got to run the world, or at least our nation, on an imperfect, ad hoc set of conventions clumsily fitted to antiquated load bearing structures. Whatever the system, there are serious social problems in the world that need serious consideration, and absolutism gets in the way of that. I don’t demand that capitalism is antithetical to a starving man in Tanzania being able to afford the fish he catches for European supermarkets. If some mechanism could be found within the existing clusterfuck, great. But when the clusterfuck of war, famine, and exploitation is allowed to continue for as long as it has, running down generations of people who end up knowing nothing but poverty, too downtrodden to fight back, with no ideal to fight FOR… then I think it’s time to look BEYOND the fucking system. It’s certainly time to look beyond fevered ego pop stars and their benefit concerts.

I don’t feel as radical living in Canada as I would in the states. The changes I’m in favor of are more incremental than they would be in America, because my country is marginally closer to my ideals. But in the plutocrat-worshipping conservative climate of a lot of America, I’d be some kind of radical for my opinions and prescriptions. Or perhaps I would only be “radical” in the template that defines the somnambulistic media discourse. A lot of people have noticed that on almost every issue, from social spending to foreign policy, the American public’s actual polling lies considerably to the left of what’s on the menu offered by the politicians of either major party.

So I’m for just about any change that will move the society I live in to what I view as a more socially just arrangement, given it doesn’t have too many negative side effects. I also value pragmatism and sustainability. The solution has to be workable, ecological, and it shouldn’t loot the future. And the more world events sink in for me, and the more I see the ramifications of imperial powers playing around with armies, proxies, and populations, the more I’m coming to embrace isolationism. I’m not banking on rosy futures anymore – I don’t see the trajectories I used to when my consciousness was contracted. Yes, this is the information age. But for those who try to control global demographic trends… information overflow can lead to paralysis.

Yes, isolationism. Leave it the fuck alone. Cut the fear-mongering militaristic bullshit. And stop comparing foreign leaders to Hitler until they start actually acting like Hitler. Like invading countries for petroleum. Oh wait.

the beginning of the night

Slathers of drool

vast spaces, open for business
empathy expanding, feeling growing
brings fear, confusion, instability, tension
but it does have a bizarre carnival upside
raw energy, strangeness, surreality, dynamism, changing vantage.

splinter seed
crypticly sealed
yes indeed

a burned almond
of eternal incomprehension

chugga chigga wugga

is it all a theme, or pure confusion? getting filthilly incomprehensible? willful delirium?

Am I gonna make use of this transcription? Psychosomatic ramblings. Shaky footing over stepping stones. Beauties inside. Sacred cylinders of doznut guzert berglers. Esoteric exotic certainty in subways of sediment - dream resonance. A feeling. A reality. Binary code. Blinking. Remembering strange old feelings, certainties, transient? Question. Certainty. Meaning. Fugue wrung perfectly, designed to confuddle the masses on the frothy beachfringe, for what could be puddles of plueperfectful planglets of paradisiccle plandwires. That actually was in many ways, true to the feeling. Remains so. If I had more trust in the transcription. But my life is a paradigm slur. Values are always in a state of flux - probability clouds. Slanted metaphors.

Strange. I feel slanted, skewed, like DXM. Yes, it's happening. Weird. Body sensation, perfective shift, something going wonky in my brain. Words seem slanted to the left. Body mind seems bent to the left, upper left direction. Kinda salvia like feeling too, I guess, but more DXMy. Those were COOL, weren't they? I've got those feelings many times, forgotten, half remembered, when my left hand feels like my right, standing and sitting at the same time, alien gravity sensations, REALLY remembered, wrote about, gave an artistic treatment, in the grande jabberwock style. But sucrets, god. They're quite a flavor. Associated with - drilling holds in the body mind connection and seeing what happens. I forget the fascinating weird things. But I forget the cracks in those. The chasms of fear and pain. Well what do you expect, what are you, a fucking shaman? A lab rat? I should get paid for being a test subject for new synthetic tryptamines by the CIA. Sure, control my mind, I'm not doing anything with it. Just pay me a fair wage and sign me up.
















Riding around in a van. A roller coaster. Mental. External. Squirmed internally, twitchy, in a van, outside a 7/11, friday night. Waiting. For fuel. For fuel. For fuel.

Riding around, feeling the splinter, the slow centuries. Twitchy, pandora's box, depths, yes, this is what i meant when i thought about writing THAT thing down, why don't i write about THAT, communicate THAT?! Because THAT is pretty much impossible, a fool's errand? Because the result would be... this?

Circus ranches beckon - beautiful people everywhere - the way they show their hair - makes me want to say

Cirrus smears gallop into each other's garments, swearing dead ends on blasmphed post conviction tradeoffs to faraway fringes of crusted dustcaptains.

Commodius Vicuus to a mututally understood reference to newly created significance, entered into the economy of shared monetry hallucination, a collective value, impossible to contemplate any alternative...

creature of habit caught in a hypervolution skew

i feel my limitations

still slinging around that sutra

at the end of the day

i could play doom, duke nukem, jedi knight, unreal, half-life
and forget about it

There are no pyramids to be rendered here.
It is an activity of no use.

It's a miracle I can even write anything right now, so cut me some slack. If you want. Whatever. No, it isn't a miracle. It's the fish and loaves company on the grocerking shelves. It's on sale today.

Purpose in level designing. What an obscure little niche. What a quaint aspiration. What a delightful little delusion. An aesthetic unto itself.

Okay, now I'm having major waves of disgust dig into me. Ah so what. I don't think I'm untouchable. Anyone can be gotten to. Just don't make letters out of the blood from my headwounds. It's disrespectful. Allah wills it. Because joy.

captain's log

it rolls down stairs
in pairs, over your neighbor's dog
it's a rolling stone with moss, imposing
unstoppable, snowballed, from the cradle to the grave

magnum PI is on, the only thing that will sooth

mario themes on the keys, a warp zone, an old episode
an escape, through the warp zone, timewarp, plumbing the depths of ancient fantasy, atlantean vantages on taken for granted cosmic dramas, a hundred coins and a one up, the elusive green mushroom

how do i work that in? a foolish question
might as well ask the guru if he's really the head of the quickie mart? really? him? and waste my three alloted questions

subtle sarcasm slathered improv
a roarshach weave of aesthetic units synesthetically sinewed to feelings, emotions, petty psychodramas, fears, obsessions

the tension is abating though, finally, exhaustion takes its place - sloughed off all the nerve cells - ew, that's a grisly metaphor, makes me cringe against an imagined cleaving off a layer of my cerebral cortex, nevermind

the painful pleasure of anaesthesia, hyperconsciousness, simulating schizophrenia

i'm doing exactly what i said i'd do, transcribe - for some reason - utilitarian, artistic, of the moment, purposeless, blessed, like the cheesemakers, lillying the guild, the lollipop league welcoming you to munchkin land

dense hyperlinked paragraph that, like something out of The Wake except lacking lingual economy, not smelted, merely melting, smelling of elderberries - the next level of literature is too complicated for the average dolt like me to understand or appreciate. Alien Jazz, Jamie, young Jamie, nine years old as Jamie, but thirty-nine years old as decrepit dirty old man Chris, playing alien jazz, attuning to alien Jazz, a state boundary, epic, for the ages, like the moment of maximum appreciate of dark side of the moon, hallelujah, the messiah, the lost chord...

It doesn't all have to fall into the old patterns
It doesn't always have to fall into the old patterns
Sometimes bees will chase you for miles
for the scent of red bull, what a weird way to start my trip
but i avoided insectile alien abduction, even if i leaked psychofluid, in cretaceous iteration, in algebraic algae, not worried about liberation, in protozoan pools, also sprach the VALIS fool, as I remembered from a distant runon delirium.

June. Sounds like June. The soundtrack and the scents of June. The sense of June. It's here. Which means it's amanita month for Mr. X. He's sensed it for some time. The approaching shift. The geopolitical situation was getting too complicated to follow. He's been taking Hoffman's Illuminati Life-Extension Elixir for nearly two centuries now, but it seemed the more the modern political paradigm unfolded, the more complicated the whole thing got, the more elusive any kind of substantial feeling of comprehension became.

World War III seems perpetually immanent. A lot of people are getting killed every day. The wire services are basically nothing but a body count. It's still happening over there. Mr. X has lived at home long enough to resume thinking of it as "over there". He's another rocky mountain recluse, but he has no one to letterbomb. Killing individuals won't change anything. It's out of control. He's getting shockingly zen, or at least he thinks he might be sometime, but he's outlived eight or nine gurus. He's sloughed off his arrogance. Certain feelings seem like fossils.

Mr. X spent the sixties in the CIA. MK Ultra was nothing compared to the million monkeys project. I'm not sure where that concept is leading. Well something to do with a model of collective consciousness that is a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters for a million years, but even broader in scope. Not just the complete works of william shakespeare. But your own fairies. Your most unique personal expression, your soul incarnate in wacky characters, your alien artifacts, you hybrid creature.

I was curious what it would be like to eat one and a half cookies. Well, it's quite similar to the last time – the same, basically, except 1.5 times as strong, feeling of deep comprehension, something that can only be articulated or conveyed in absurdly indirect ways, exotic metaphors, loss of state bounded luster, expiry on feeling of revelation – listening to sorabji – fascinating stuff. This is far from anti-musical, this is intoxicating impressionism.

Yes, that feeling of the splinter. Pleasure being pain, the compulsion to feel some extreme, being torn, stretched over an abyss. Heh, Neitzchean trip? Tension returns every once in a while, like a jagged spoke in a cycle that is generally jittery. Also sharp frets about toxicity, burn out, depression, unwanted psychic debris. Compulsion to cover that up, not talk about it, create a more pleasant reality. Insecurity. Childish superstition that if I talk about something, that will make it real. But is it already real anyway? Physically, I’m starting to feel very relaxed, although I still doubt very much I can sleep. Feeling like maybe binding back to a more familiar self/state though. Or maybe just an ebb in the massive tidal alienness. Boy, this is a strong stone. I think maybe I’m finally emerging from the peak. The depth. Yeah, that was intense. Less inclined to wander off my normal idioms.

Values warp, invert. Seems just a simple thing to say. But it has such huge implications it seems. In my increasingly hard to come to grips with mental universe. I seem to feel less in control daily. Adrift in a sea of chaos. Nihilism. Values, but personal, solipsistic confrontation with a vast intellegent, but coldly apathetic system. Life feels like software. Scripts, subroutines. Maybe this feeling is more than just a “feeling”. Maybe I am in an emulation. Really. All reality is virtual. Behind everything lies code. And behind the code lies some macro processing hardware. But that’s taking the metaphor to a literal absurdity. But there’s DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid that regresses to superstrings, alpha and omega of binary being. Let’s say.

Still got a torus cave in my head, feelings I can’t deny, but which I should nevertheless ride like transient waves. Emotions. Must have taken a lot of work to make all this real. Drugs continually crop up in everything I write. I can’t get off the subject, the splinter. Consciousness. Reality. It’s still meta-crack, though I never use the M word anymore. Looking at the moon. Monkey mirror. Fairies in mirror are larger than they appear.

Because stimuli implodes in my head, folds in upon itself metabolizes to cryptic chemical interchange, quantum ballistics on raison d’etres. Oil painting with psuedoscience. Some crazy shit has happened since the conjuring. Moving image of eternity. Rode a feeling for a while, can’t find the dial, that’s okay, shouldn’t be desperate to change anything, except when the roof flies off, wicked witches are just green screen projections, forward doesn’t seem to be an escape, just reflection, the house isn’t that fun, can’t seem to create fun from nothing.

Cycles, just cycles. Endless snowflake cycles. Flakey cycles of snow. Snowstorm. Hurricane in my head. Hollow one second, flooded with meaning the next. Then drained again. An absurd cycle of thought. A dichotomy silly, serious, shit, sanctified. Holy shit. Kaleidoscope of delirius color, dreamlike, but all of a sudden too real again. Flailing, unable to feel the way I should feel based on a fondly remembered net of emotion/thought entanglement. Cross section of kinetic consciousness.

At least I’m not getting those shooting, stabbing pains. Cat and mouse game, chasing myself. That elusive self, who flanged through several barely remembered dialects tonight, almost extrasoular vibrations, whatever vibrations can be made to mean, made into prime numbers, messages from Vega. I’m really on a rambling roll tonight. I’m not entirely comfortable with this level of mind-manifestation/madness. But I thought I’d document what that stuff does to my head. In the gamble that some information could slip through the state filters. Collapse state vectors. Frankly, this feels weird.

-

There is a laboratory, deep under the Pacific Northwest Rainforest, perhaps not coincidentally close to the radioactive waste of Hanford, where a million monkeys are typing on a million typewriters, or something to that effect. A computer simulation might be closer to the situation. Experiments are being done, one of which, ironically, involves a monkey. Or, well, a chimpanzee.

Some people, and some monkeys are being fed OPIUM. Most of the participants are quite willing. OPIUM has got a good reputation. It's spoken of in creative, ever-evolving slang, in hip circles. But rarely encountered, for real. It's very elite stuff.

OPIUM stands for Optimized Personal Imagination Upgrade Medicine - does the acronym sound contrived? Well it should, because it's the ultimate in synthetic thought. A conscious gestalt? It's in the vein of telepathic appliances. Your desires are worked out in advanced. Obviously it's a strain of advanced consciousness (is that like advanced melanoma?) It might be rogue growth like an oncologist's white whale, megatumour, akira on crack. Maybe that's a magic trick. Anyway, OPIUM is getting trendy. Nobody is quite sure what the consequences to society will be, but the pill/therapy is in a club-drug stage - it could be taken orally, or it could be taken mentally, through stimuli. People are probing deep into biology these days.

Some people say it makes them see fairies. Dragon chasing fairy freaks. Some day it's a drug for fruits.

But the woodsprites weren't as unique as a fingersnapper thought, they had been typed by a monkey, they were in the archives, the information age, the burst buckle, the point at which knowledge becomes a negative value.

"What's all that jazz?" Candie asks, and improvises a tune on her reedy little tube that impressionistically embodies the melodic query. A gnomish flurry of notes. A bent smile, beckoning in spirals. Tommy doesn't know what to answer. It was a tangent. He gets on them a lot. He comes back to the woods. Feels like he's in some kind of lost chapter. Chronoblivion. It happens a lot in this forest paradigm. The ego frays at the edges. He feels like some strange underdeveloped character named Mr. X. Hah. Him in the CIA. Preposterous. But good for a laugh. The trees reflect that diffracted gnosis in mandlebrot arrangements of novel foliage. Metaphors continue to crawl like bark up the old ones. You can almost smell the karma. Smells soily, like the sum of a million rotting carcasses. Good doggy. Bad boy. Dead duck. Crazy as a loon. Piggish. Slinky bitch, craved dick once long ago. The distant memory of power and conquest. The wonder of having forgotten. Everything. The ability of rebirth. Regeneration. The immortality of eternal iteration. Hmm, this got more metaphysical than I intended. Oh well.

Oh yeah, wood sprites. Candie specifically. Once again in present tense. In the present tense. Fairly fractal. Barcarola blender. She knew a little something about fungi. She was a wry observer, the day the bear ate the amanita. When Mr. X decided to follow in a fictional bear's hallucinogenic footsteps, she was there as well. Did Mr. X notice? Did she interface the delirium? The waves of cross-visual compounds, alien like sets of faces twisted in ways you could never imagine - in some laboratory it was the will of an author slinging around sutra sets of aesthetics - in another, it was Candie's forest - it was documented on film, on the page, typed by a monkey. Grizzly man. Doctor Heidel told her she was in a matrix. She had to spend twenty minutes in the penalty box. Twenty years under the soil. Sixty years waiting tables in a cornerstore. That was a movie unto itself, filled with fairy metaphors.

At the end of the day, I could play Doom and forget about it

Just convince yourself it's "interesting". I say. As I strain in pain. The pain isn't real. You're fooling yourself. Psychosomatic fool. Take the reins. Don't suffer the joke of purposeless alien pain regimes.

But there were good times. There are nostalgias. Yearns for fresh mind to replicate my childhood, genetically. Nothing so presumptuous as paternity. Not vanity. Some cock-eyed contemplation of vitality. A thread, a stitch of timelessness.

I wandered through the grass
wondering which fix was worse
locked in the dread of sickly maturity?
or locked in a room with three dozen sadistic delinquents
and having to justify my existence?
how could I rosy tint high school
and sell out my old defiant sneering self?

That excessively negative regime

was still aloft somehow
because at the end of the day, I could play Doom and forget about it.

Now, I can still play Doom
and try to forget the terrors of contemporaneous times

the feel of apocalypse, death, chronic crumpled corruption
but I just end up impaled on those subscript splinters.

There is the new
interface with the void, the alien, the disconcertingly familiar
what am I going to do with it?

Oh, it was real persecution
not like I was a jew in nazi germany
or a palestinian in jewistan
but I was a Weirdo in High School
I didn’t fit in.

“My people” – my people aren’t easily labeled
they come from a distant homeworld, extragalactic
orbiting a rogue star mega-parsecs away.

We aren’t geeks

but maybe freaks

but who isn’t?
isn’t it still cool to be weird?

No, that old delusion remains, if diluted
the one I raised to maturity
when I found my attraction to my aesthetic, my clashy alien color scheme
(and I don’t even like the clash, never was a punk, or so punk I didn’t know it)
the delusion that it was ever cool to be weird
too cool for school and its phlemy redbull aftermath
in the bars, the clubs, occasionally running into those old paradigm fools
now their fully grown mature selves, the ones who tower over me

some awesomely rotund, most successfully
projecting that they have it together, to be social, participate in a jolly fiction
maybe reality, I dunno, don’t ask me what reality is.

Or maybe I’m just pessimistic, neophobic, twice bitten, four times shy

oblivious to the possibilities, born yesterday, still quivering

in the glow of the rogue star in my head.

Once I could take comfort in the fact that Star Trek VIII was coming out in november
november would make everything alright if I could just make it to november
I could endure the parade of indignity that was my morning walk down the hall
to my locker to try and forget the new batch of designer insults the carnivores
had come up with, to impress each other with, to bring me down.

Actually I have to strain to remember the pain.
I didn’t want to dwell in a universe colored by that
so I made a new one for myself, colonized a homeworld in vast open psychedelic space, manifesting the mind with aplomb, it was an art I thought I could master, like my idols, new age guru types, Terence and RAW.

Ah, chaos, the final eternal frontier
making what I wanted to, harnessing the raw power of the quasar
people can be good, I’ll find my own people
I did find people, real people, a lovely girl, good friends.

But you can’t dwell in your reality
forever, you’ll run up against what those
stubborn other people call objectivity
what they save money for
what they crave money for
why they pay their dues
why they shake hands with record executives

while they eulogize Syd Barrett’s brain
while profiting from Crazy Diamond apparel that becomes cultural clothing
catch phrase trafficking, but hey, I’d take a Pink Floyd memorial on my tombstone.

But gravity isn’t always groovy, isn’t always gravy
and some good friends came to dead ends
and some rabbitholes were scary, I didn’t want to go down
bunnybloodslick tryptamine tunnels, why does meaning feel so slippery and sanguine
why is my blood an emetic, why can’t I drink my own lifeforce, why
can’t I look at my own mind, why does the mirror make me sick, what is this splinter
this toxin in my system, my spirit, my reality, why do I continue to use the word
“reality” in poetry even after I promised myself I’d stop, why is reality like my nicotine fix? Why were there acid freakouts and self-imposed limitations on consciousness
openness, openness opened up dark possibilities, nihilistic philosophies.

But time does heal some wounds, and some wounds healed up, I got out of the paranoid trip of needing to think everyone’s against me, gained massive freedom that way, luxuries there for the taking, accepting. Yes, some wounds healed up, but some new wounds opened up, wound me up in feedback loops, bleedblack bloops, trying to fix them, got on self-replicating patterns, repeating fractally, iterating at exponentially higher scales, a progression at 1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.8, 2.4, finally overloading, overclocking this information-taxed turing machine, sproinging loose springs, bolts flying, neurotransmitting fluid leaking, fractally mimicking society as a whole, an oil-addicted clusterfuck unable to diagnose itself, except by geniuses like me, haha, yeah right, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, I’ll attribute it all to the buddha, it would be blasphemous to say this silliness is my own.

Another Sopranos Funeral

Don't tell me death is profound
I've barely squeezed out a fifth of this gut laugh
I'm going to taste this rigatoni
and watch another Sopranos Funeral
it’ll be my anti-drug.

I've got an ice-cream sandwich in my future
two chocolate slabs of death
with a rich creamy filling
the poor man's klondike bar
fifty cents a pop.

Don’t ask me who I was in the void
I like the way my voice is squeaking
I don’t know who I am anymore, I never giggled before
I’m someone who can be someone else, someone who would
climb the corporate ladder for a klondike bar, storm the olive garden
just to punk the don, I’d die laughing.

Spicy Meataball

Tarantellation-tailored Crawstruck was found dumb, lit up like a christmas tree with quiet dignity. He was a useful idiot for a while, but you know what happens when neurons collide with contraband carbon chains. They're illegal for a reason. The Adagio swelled to its baroquesticle sforzando, gravelly strings playing the grave for Don Giovanni's last gravy snuff, a flat out boat-floating burn past the Bardo and Berdoo to the Hollywood Freeway and all-access pass to the American Land of the Dead. Glam rock blocked his cock. Rush stole his viagra. Crawstruck tumbled drunkenly out of the commedia's curtains and onto the Waxen Citadel's stage, buzzing like a violin clonopinned to a coma. "Shakespearean pseudo-cleverness", said noted critic B. Johnson, summing up the historical episode. The nightmare lagged on, the jet long gone, traced back through fossil records to an Altarian port on the dark side of an obscure quasar like a gaudy jewel in a donut, a porthole in a torus cave, impossible according to relativity, but permitted by quantum field theory.

Tarantellation went back to square one on the twister floor as a cello scraped through marinated manicotti.

Tarantellation bootstomped Hindlick's groove before the saucy kraut could make his move. Spicy meataballs to the wallsa. Don't make me put my foot upa your ass.

Tarantellegration ingratiated himself to the making of the draconian documentary. All trains were on time because he got in good with the Maltese yakuza.

Tarantellegranite walls to the balls of beef barons played by vowelese on the governess grands circa 1861 shone like the ruby’s schizoaffective schtick.

The grease on the seat was slickchow, cee eh aye oh, oiling the way for Saint Nicholas. He was able to squeeze through the ducts with the Holy Ghost tucked under his cap and escape the xenomorphs, crazy like a fox because he read about Lao's dao. There followed numerous shake-and-bake colony gigs during which prime directives were violated with jolly aplomb. Eventually he washed up on Crete with an elfin underling, too high on coke to count to thirteen.

So they prosthetized for a kevlar mainframe, he got his endoskeleton pimped out, perfect, circuits for crunching numbers, macrochips dipped in ragu, up the wazoo, out the kazoo, pasta fazul, shut upayouface!

Balsamic burbling up from the kitchen sinks his ambition to reign as Caesar’s slaughtering subset but a compromise could be found in the neutralization of the linoleum-stucco interchange that makes a vital tidal wave inconvenient for the Newark Kapardis.

Benvenuto Ferruccio knew he was the real deal after being burned on the seventh seal, mama mia, she told him not to touch the stove but he couldn't resisti, scarred hand grandeur in the operatic style.

There were too many crying clowns in the car, too many capos in Capone's crew, too many sluts in Hagbard's submarine, and Lovecraft's surplus monsters had them all wrapped in tendrils of past tense, twining history and mystery and getting jiggy with it, and stumbling over pockets of groovinatude, and stubbing toes on funky outcroppings, and hip hopping a dope ass way through the grungified phatness of pizzazz chords beginning in F sharp major and ending on a B flat augmented cadence. As Nostradamus predicted in Dante's Faust. Too much moxy for the proxy war to be sanitized on TV.

But Ferruccio never goes anywhere without his wetwipes. He finds they can get him out of all sorts of sticky situations.

The allegro movement was a release, he unleashed a steaming load into the bowl, his dinner on a cyclic journey, down the tubes, the whole countrie going down the tubes, you don’t want to know how the sausage is made, but thank the blessed mother for the lax attitude of certain corruptibles looking the other way.

Banking on Death

I’ve got two grams of heroin in a vault

comfortable margin for overdose

button-pushing bunkerboys

have the skeleton key to my

non-recreational stash.

It’s the end-times checkout junket

the only power I’ve got

I’m not interested in wars

for water, oil, or atmosphere.

I could deaden my empathy and strive to survive

it’s neat to eat wheat, it’s gnarly to eat barley

but I’d rather kill my body than my soul

or my circumstantial enemy, after me and my family

for what he doesn’t have, what I was born surrounded by

mountains, water, infrastructure, province of empire

can’t bear nobility’s pretense inheritance, sacred geography

must be free of egomaniacle sophistry.

Let my friends fight for the fatherland

when push comes to shove, they’re assets

and artists are useless in war

can’t fortify the beaches with words

or mine the mountains with music.

In the instant of survival or death

I’d fire back but

I’m hoping not to be caught off guard

and suckered into long-term investment

what is the return, survival?

A currency seeming so stable in luxury.

Pronouns

I don't go for cheap associations in the dynamics of theatrics.

Deadening and Dullening isn't conscious even if capitalized.

Sometimes sarcastic echoes can only express the beholdable binary bit of data you're flailing to grab hold of.

You never step in the same river twice.

Telescope - de-telescope.

Don't believe anything I say, there's no point.

the rattle of loose screws

On the shore, slammed to the sand with the nature of the valley
at Lake’s eye view i felt the reality of what they metaphysically mutter "sacred"
in times of fingerpointing dissociation from the feeling of
ground-down granite under their shoes, wind ripping at their shirts
grass talk conferring colour in the floodwade of tributary
glacial weight and veins of rain evaporating like innervessels on vitalgressions
through the heartbeat cycle of human hertz, wave form white caps
on the frothy edge of the over-arching-organism, quiet
undeliberate breath decaying in flowers of filth
with every exhale, what magic really is, alone in the
coliseum of undeniable sensation

but the chainsaws reminded me of the realities
that i also can't deny when i seek comfort
in the circus wonderbread electric msg
and my divorce from society in the routine i can get away with
in this slice of life i've scavenged for myself like a scaredy little rodent
backed into the corner of a plastic-patched condominium
with these distracted tenants who haven't paid their rent
who are consuming like there's no tomorrow
cause there's probably no tomorrow, since oil is order
and chaos is death for the majority
so we stuff ourselves with the snacks they sell down the road
still reasonably priced

and i still won't kill for my food

someone owns a piece of everything
it's business, you know what would happen if they threw the guns away?
capitalism is more civilized
except when it's not


*


He was a drug buddy for a while
that's how we got together, mutual interest in mind-manifesting
or just plain old-fashioned getting high
drinking, drugs, art, philosophy
whisky mystics and men

then
i learned the natural progression of paranoid paradigm

he sprung a leak
he's leaking springs
his brain's a broken toy

he can't be my friend anymore because i’m trying to convince him
his perception is bogus, he's taking on a solution of toxified sludgewater
infected with some synthetic parasite the conspiracy dumped in our lake
dwindling thimble full of ecology brought to us by Larame Cigarettes
as Groham's billboard reminds us

nancy drew figured me out
i'll apologize to him about working for
The International Campaign to Defame the Only Human that Exists
of which I'm a high ranking member
having worked undercover two years
slowly gaining his confidence, buying him tickets to raves
tempting him with my hot horny girlfriend, collaborating musically
only to use the information i've slowly acquired about him
to mess with his mind by saying things that sound like innocent conversation
but are diabolically tailored to trigger his deep-seated anxieties
because the world is fundamentally a malevolent place
and rich powerful men want him to suffer for their amusement
he's the chosen victim of the universe's glistening steel mindgrinder
and i'm the sharp edge of one of its teeth

i'll apologize about that
right after he apologizes to me for being part of an illuminati plot
to get me to burn my brain out on ecstasy
don't think i don't know, agent Orr
that you were the mastermind behind
somehow tricking me into buying those pills
all those times, the author of my ills, i blame you
even though this exact same pattern has repeated itself
with five or six different people in three different cities
it’s the world that’s wrong, not myself! ha!

now i'm part of his "campaign"
i won't call it a campaign, i'll call it a "conspiracy"
to sever his terminology, the word that give it the fingerprint veracity
to make it go down easy, sanction his psychosis

suddenly
i'm the dark matter in his nightmare universe
was i paid off by another member of the conspiracy
or have i been in on it all along
planning my chess moves from a Vancouver penthouse
with my laptop, using my network of operatives
to swoop down on him in Nelson, placing agents
on every streetcorner for strategically-timed comments
that can't really be heard at that range
but could theoretically be about him, and therefore must
malevolently be, must be the "kootenay phase"
of Operation Enduring Defamation and
when we're done, his character
will be flatter than fallujah! chortle chortle chortle!

he's flattered we've wasted so many resources on him
he loves his solipsistic self-righteous sob story

too much coke?
too much acid?
too many beatings?

his trauma is real
his delusions are not
he told me the fact that i was making rational arguments was evidence
of my involvement in the conspiracy
it betrays my intent to manipulate him
i wonder what i can say that won't be evidence
should i make irrational arguments?
then i'd be playing on his eccentric thought patterns for real

he’s waiting for a letter to explain it all
he’s sure one day he’ll see the twisted tell-all faces
in his father’s fractals
it gives a structure to the universe
something that explains his pain
he’s not gonna give it up
over the trivial matter of
our two years of friendship
and my insistence that i’m innocent

quite a bind
makes me want to go back to the lake
tune out the chainsaws
and forget about people
and how they cut themselves
and how they cut themselves off from me

i thought i was weird, fucked up, paranoid, neurotic
and then i actually got to know other people
like my fucking friends
now i think i’m alright.

Hands Off

Red Ferrari Marty, living in L.A.

bumps another line to get through the day

- MC Lars

I’m sitting on a picnic table at Lakeside. Hot day, cool breeze. Shade. Beautiful. Feeling sick. Hungover. Hands shaking. Wondering if writing makes it worse. If writing makes me feel the sickness, or deal with it through feeling.

I’m walking past the beach people, dragging behind me iron chains of debauchee burnout, dead weight of zombified neurons just alive enough to give me lumbering chase through the torus cave in my head, bloody warren memory burrows. I’m recalling everything I gregariously said to people last night on my pubcrawl in the most negative light devisable. I decide that the most healing thing to do is to withdraw. My dendrites have stopped yearning for an expressive human face that looks back at me. My nervous system no longer craves the touch of another.

I got on the drink and hyper happiness. Now I’ve had my fill. No dignity made it past the state boundaries. I’m remembering the joys of being anti-social – and yet out in society. Being there, but gone. Unavailable to the crowds. Standoffish. Taking in the rhythms of the beach people like a stealth bird, humming melodies to myself. The beach people, the park people. My anti-social impulse still competes with my dick that makes me a shifty eyed creep, stealing a peripheral glance at achingly beautiful others walking past me, the gorgeous girl I’m ostensibly cut off from at every level.

Sometimes it’s better to fantasize than etch a ridiculous agenda into reality and watch erosion wear it down. There’s the rub.

Eriatarka (my Mars Volta Cover)

This is my favourite song by my favourite band. It's the song that inspired me to sing. I had to cover it.

Listen

The original is guitar based. My version is for piano, bass, and drums. Voice is me. The piano transcription is my own. Drums and bass were transcribed mostly by myself, with some help from midis I found online. All instruments are synthetic. Sequencing and recording were done with Cakewalk and Soundforge.

I interpret this song as being about an artist in a drug-induced coma and his loved ones on the outside contemplating the morals of drawing comfort from machine-assisted existence. What is life and death about, really? Maybe the answer's in the House of Eriatarka.




Lyrics:

and there are those who
haven't found the speaking so wrong
is it wrong
of pavlov lore
they ran rampant through the floors
is this wrong
feels so wrong
happened on a respirator
in the basements
are they gone are they gone
stung the slang of a gallows bird
rationed a dead letter pure

trackmarked amoeba lands craft
cartwheel of scratches
dress the tapeworm as pet
tentacles smirk please
flinched the cacooned meat
infra-recon forgets

and there are those who find
comfort in the breathing
wrong
is it wrong
it houses the watchful eyes
they're panting in a pattern in droves
is it gone
happened on a respirator
in the basement
is this wrong
can’t be wrong
stung the slang of a gallows bird
sanctioned this dead letter pure

trackmarked amoeba lands craft
cartwheel of scratches
dress the tape worm as pets
tentacles smirk please
flinch the cacooned meat
infra-recon forgets

evaporated the fur
because it covers them
if you only knew the plans they had for us

they used to have pulses in them
but impulses made them strong

trackmarked amoeba lands craft
cartwheel of scratches
dress the tapeworm as pets
tentacles smirk please
flinch the cacooned meat
infra-reco forgets
gotta be a way
of getting out
are you just growing old
trackmarked amoeba lands craft
cartwheel of scratches
dress the tapeworm as pets

keeping the peace

good show tonight

they're playing the coma theme

he sings of his overdosed friends

malt liquor forms of tasty riffs

spacey sounds, overproduced and unreal
springing sonically from the base
of a vomit-stained windpipe

dilated death on an artist’s

enameled-tin studio floor

concrete cadaver omega over 'n done with
artist fuck, faggoting off under that

bastard butcher's knife, splaying

blissful entrails, flailing

for void knows what

drug addiction is war
for the bourgeois boy with a chip on his shoulder

the drama, the death, but better
than war
not self-sacrifice
but self-immolating profligate vice, full on, full bore

non serviam

chromatic melodies

army of one

chemical weapons

lost in lyrics

evil drug metaphor
for mephistopheles

worked for burroughs
worked for thompson
worked for

blank

boy/girl

negative nutrients

fossilized psychosis
they didn't make
it so they lie

between the masons

and the mayor

crack house / packed house

rock 'n roll detour on the short
road to death

so you're a cock-rocking man

and you served your time in hell
paid your dues

good for you

hi-five
now
let's keep the peace
why don't we?

and pass me the syringe,
I want me a hit
of that ritalin/oxycontin cocktail
you've got going there

war is so worn

age of gods, age of heroes, and age of humans

Viconian Thunder Number Three:

Now be aisy, good Mr Finnimore, sir. And take your laysure like a god on pension. A universal theme. I'm not on pension yet. Paying CPP. And if I'm being universal here, I feel as old as the universe. And yet, I feel as if I was born yesterday. My homeworld. It's this world. Alien and alluring as hell. Heavenly. Eternally.

Mick and Nick. Forgot about them. One day I'll have to write THE novel. Really work on it.

I have my own private primary duality which i relate to everything. As sedation takes its toll.

"We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat." - McKenna

The Gravy Railcart

Let Walmart destroy my home like a Vogon constructor fleet. Here there be dragons. Here there be drugs. Here there be apathy, in excess of Health Canada’s limits. I could almost go anti-hippie. No, I couldn’t. But there’s not much attaching me to my town anymore. It’s never good to become dependant on one or two people for your social life, people that inevitably disappoint. I need new friends. New taverns. But I also need new associations. A new life. Maybe I’ll start by cutting my hair.

I’d quit my job right now and move to Kansas to live with Desiree, but I’m clinging to the stability of my paycheck. Finding employment, for Hippie Craque, was like finding Atlantis. Still is. Which is why it seems a miraculous fluke that I found the modest market niche I currently tolerate. I’m horrified at the notion of throwing that away and having to look again. Another Atlantis? Two in one lifetime?

No, better to go with the bird in the hand. Better to stay on the gravy train. Well, the gravy railcart. The gruelcart. Not as grueling as those poor saps who work full days. I wouldn’t become one of them if I could help it. I’d pick fruit in Midwest American orchards with my fellow illegal immigrants, mostly Mexicans, but I’d only do it five hours a day. Because I value free time over money.

No, I’m not a workaholic and I’m proud of that. You can call it my Canadian values, or maybe, deep down, genetically, my flaccid eurocommie ethos. I should have been a Greek philosopher fag. I kicked work before I was born, I’m off the stuff. I’d rather walk. My name is Hippie Craque, and I’m a walkaholic. Sure, come after me, drag me back to your concentration camps so you can put me to work mining Antarctica where my only pleasure will be getting loaded from the recycled piss of Argentinian shamans drunk on fermented Penguin stew. But you’ll have to catch me first. I should warn you, I’m a racewalking champion. I can do 50k standing on my custom-designed head. I got a trophy from Videlectix!

By the way, I stubbed my toe at the Bakery yesterday, so naturally my life is in shambles. A shambles? Or shambles? Regardless, I’m continuing, valiantly, to inform you of my travails. So I’m taking this opportunity to request donations. I just – sniff – don’t think I can keep writing the commentary you so enjoy here without immediate financial reward. Cash, credit, gold bullion, silver pinecones, Reichmarks, Nolan Ryan rookie cards, and sexual favors are all accepted. Which is why you’ll find a Paypal button up my pretentious fucking ass. Let’s see if we can raise $50 000 by the end of July. All donors will receive a signed copy of a rare lost chapter from “Original Sin” where Jamie snaps out of her Long Island hallucination to realize she’s Christ dying on the cross, and an exclusive Hippie Craque tote bag.

Goddamn those donation-seeking blogwhores annoy me. Stop threatening me with the sharp end of your faux-charity freelance and get a column in a New York culture rag already. Everyone else has.

Re-acquaintance with the World on the Rocky Grohman Lakeside

I would be tired, but a mug of caffeinated sludge keeps me up. I'm roaring down the highway in my sport utility whatever, ten clicks over the speed limit. The road is curved like the contours of the Mona Lisa.

My genes are not meek. They inherited this system of roads. Genes and roads are structured enough for their purpose. The Ministry of Transportation maintains the highway, drawing from sales tax I contributed from this afternoon's trip to the convenience store, to impulsively purchase a simosa and a wonderbar. I don't know how many Chinamen died to pave this road, or how many Iraqis died to fuel my car this far. I'm not an activist so I'm not about to calculate the number. I got with the winning team. I can drive my car, not really mine, ill-gotten with the reigning culture of a hegemonic species, to the parking lot of the park.

I park. There are a few other cars here, a bit of a drag but what did I expect? Three or four people stretched across this narrow park makes for a lot of room, it's first class. How many people have such easy access to something like this? Still, it makes me a bit prickly. I must be, at least partially, in "social mode", I must be partially proper. But I also must do what I came here to do, which is smoke an outlawed plant.

I take three bong hits inside the car. Vapours swirl into the air.

The crumbs you clumsy stoner, you dropped pot crumbs all over the seat, what about the next time you cross the border, they've got everything on you, license plate in closed-circuit camera checkpoint will bring up your red-flagged file, cross-referenced with the report of the rent-a-cops who busted you with energy drinks and a head full of paddywhack in Lakeside Park after closing, they’ll know you’re not really “Mr. Smith” and that isn’t your “maiden name” (the stupidest lie you’ve ever told), they'll pull up your passport, go over your elementary school records, browse a breakdown of your last border crossing complete with drug dog, detainment, search... Oh Jesus, stop being paranoid and just vacuum the fucking thing later, don't waste your stone on paranoia, get out and get back to nature or something like you figured might happen if you got high enough.

I get out. Detail detail right away, the colors colors colors, so pure bright intoxicating, I'm colordrunk. I enter the westbound path, nervously sedate, the usual paradox of cannabination. I notice all the spiderwebs I'm tearing through. Sorry spiders. So arrogant. But it's not my fault. It's my nature. How could I do anything but?

Freaky woods. Hegemonic species my ass, we don't run shit. We’re a symptom of this planet, this woods. We’re food for viruses while alive, food for worms when dead, food for the earth, life feeds on life. We thought we got a Faustian deal to squirm out of that niche, we thought we would loot the future, that was something we could do. Reality is what we can get away with, we say, so why not, why waste time worrying, guilt-tripping?

That's why "liberal" has become a dirty word. Departing from traditional semantics, the liberal is now the priss who's staying sober at the party so he can drive us home safe. We'll chug beers and snort rails and poke fun – the kid hasn't learned the Dionysian mysteries and won't be initiated, the neotenic loser. We'll taunt him until he gets pissed and becomes an anarchist. He'll say, "Fuck you assholes and your society, you can save yourselves,” and then he'll smoke a joint with the spacey hippie chick outside, and then he'll pop a tab of acid and a hit of E and lose total innocence about the mind and the universe, he’ll enter paradise and come down in the slums of the People’s Republic of Planet Earth, the dregs of burned-out conscious civilization, the ass-end of the novelty trip, in the gutter staring up at the smog-blurred stars. But he’ll still enjoy television mob dramas like The Sopranos, and he’ll still enjoy his wonderbars, and gas prices will stay low enough for him to drive his parents’ car for another decade, and he’ll follow the political cockfight, the left and right pecking each other bloody, with interest, until the game becomes lethal and the issues become life and death, and the oil runs out, and the reality is unignorable, on a mass scale, bringing real anarchy – which will be the end of the line for the self-styled anarchist, time for the last act of will, the last perverse turn of phase, the last coping mechanism, the last binge, the poppy, renewable resource, he’ll alter his value system completely, chemically, disregarding consequence – it won’t matter anyway. And then he’ll… who? Who was “he” again, eh?

Woah, weird tangents... Woah, weird woods! So alive, demented facial fractals, hyper-real, gorgeous and frightening, reminds me of The Brothers Grimm and their dichotomy, divinity-canopy, horror-chasm. What a beautiful Kootenay glow, filtered through flapjack flavor-layers of foliage, May sunlight, edgy, angled, boreal. Natural intelligence as a force beyond human understanding isn’t superstitious, just receptive. There’s a power here that my values slip off. It’s better that way, makes worrying about apocalypse seem silly. I could piss anywhere I wanted if I wasn’t so neurotic.

There is an annoyance, an ache. I've got to drain my bladder but I'm fretting in foreign territory, paranoias, tickets, fines, worlds of damnation and toxicity, regulation, inferno, concentric circle, what did I do to earn this natural bounty when so many people live in such horror? My existential right to be here is in doubt. My presence is pretension, every footstep ill-gotten.

But finally, the path ends and I forget about the ache. I emerge from the density of the woods and my first physical sense is chill. But the feeling interlocks benign to the scene, open: Open to the valley’s paranormal panorama, lake bending into mountain twists at each jagged horizon. Fuzzy thickets of grass here and there, giggling sprouts of rock-hugging shrubs, an algae-brown eco-pool, and large slabs of grand rounded gray, candid, skinny-dip into the water. I want to embrace them. Can this all be for me? Really?

Total isolation from my sick social network. Total solo confrontation with the world, like there was never anyone else but me and it, this, what Adam must have felt.

I am reacquainted. Simple joy, for being alive at the rocky Grohman lakeside. It beats the hell out of synthetic rewards we contrive to offer ourselves for achieving certain objectives in our video games, like winning the battle of the bands, or scoring the next bag of scag. No, this valley is a planetary reservoir, renewable. I feel spirits here, ancestors, welcoming me. Not necessarily people. The garden is not severed but Secular, because there is no other.

Good energy here. I go to the edge of the craggy shoreline. Chillier, windier here, warm early summer sun muted by the force of the current, the water, the air, kinetic, sweeping, changing, Heraclitian, swirling bubbling face of the lake drifts by with its hydrogenic payload blue,green,gray gnarled patterns of liquid light, waterbark reflecting trees behind us, we must use the Royal We here, because We're surrounded by so much living energy.

The wind sweeps off the lake. I stand on the rock, insanely anthropomorphic. Colors scream to me from every direction. Faces in the waves, bodies in the waves, minds in the wavelengths, vibrations, everything strangely alive, weirdly benign, miraculous, vast luxury, microcosmic clouds, stratosphere bleeding out into space, pine needle patterns, lichen worlds.

BILLBOARD

on the highway, facing the bench.

This scene brought to me by Hillbilly Jambouree!

No illusions I'm not in a little penned up facsimile of nature but the outhouse sure was convenient. I’m sinking into the virtual human world again, that uniquely crystallized psychedrama: Drugs, has it become prepositional, dumb as a sack of hammers, bluntly up and down, plainly about chemicals? Is there no free lunch? Will I pay for this feeling of wonder with a grotesque stretch of malaise equal in time or intensity? Oh why get into that trip? Look around, reacquaint!

It's so trippy! I haven’t been to this park since childhood and these paths are barely remembered, but bound to the associative fabric of lost Atlantean vantages on taken-for-granted cosmic dramas, the zen surety of infancy, the dumb man in the beautiful dream. It’s journeying into my subconscious and having it manifest as woods. Paths beckon, every path a paisley pretzel, gleefully prefigured, not "random" at all but fine and graceful as a Mandelbrot, leaves and branches heaving, breathing soil, the "tone" of the scene an audible vibration, holy shit, synesthesia! Adventure beckons, total transformation available to ingest (just a question of motivation) and those crannies mimic the shape of every crack I ever found in the bedrock and forgot. It's all back, salvia trails, tryptamine rivers on the tips of my tongues and tentacles.

The highway above, surreal. Cars streak, sonic trailers hum, chrome flash reminding me of the billboard I refused to read, wonder if it was the one Clay chopped down once in legend. Too many reminders of the gritty human fractal to let my ego dissolve, but this is all nature. Can't I appreciate the human fractal as it interlox with everything else? Why must I hate my nature? Does a virus suffer self-loathing? Do viruses have viruses, or is that biologically impossible? Should I trust every damn thing to the scientific method? Extrapolation? Are metaphors more important than statistics?

Boardwalk, was there always a boardwalk here? How unobtrusive. How Dao in design, a shade of pale wood, goes with the grain of the marshland, and what is that on the end of the log in the pond? Oh my God, is it a turtle? No, can't be. Hey, it's a bird. But it’s not moving. A duck, gotta be a duck. But no, that's too perfect, almost ironic, like the Parks Department winking at me. A goose, like something out of T’s five methoxy euphoria? No, it's gotta be a duck. But it's still not moving. Gotta be fake. A fake duck? But that's so... so blatantly synthetic. Why go to that trouble? That's downright sarcastic. With the BILLBOARD sitting across the highway, laughing.

Oh but remember the lake, in the other direction. The rocky shore, so long, so unmovable. They dammed it upstream several times, but here is nature without human blight. There's that self-loathing again. I'm projecting into nature, limiting my awareness. Understanding is impossible when it's all just projection by this penned up value system. Nature is truly alien, inscrutable, what the Severed Garden’s all about.

"Dirt isn't dirty", brooksy once said. Shambhala was wonderfully filthy. Even the crudely synthetic MDMA felt at home. All forms of filth, spiritual filth, biker weed lit from the morning sun, a parade of record spinners and laptop DJs. We spent a lot of money there.

Get out while the getting’s good. Don’t linger and let the wave break, change the venue, switch the paradigm. I drive home, still stoned, jittery at the wheel, appropriately neurotic regarding traffic.

Home, straight to the piano, feeling like virtuoso king of the universe because the feeling is flowing through me in so many snowflake iterations glazing the moment, even if I'm objectively aware of the flaws in my technique. The well-manicured progression, the demonic dissonance, the dolce melody, the full-fledged fat groove gravy comes from shutting off the mind and letting the fingers do their work, but I can appreciate intellectually too, impressionistically, any way I choose, any palette of perception. If I could play this on a grand… No worries about state boundaries, that phrase was so last month, and maybe I finally am getting burned out on being burnt out. Or maybe I'm just stoned. Happy, to use Cobain's euphemism.

But I'm spottily happy and life is still strained and psychestained, and I'm still a whiner. But I'm enjoying life right now, playing music that I love, even if this is a wanky ego trip. If I die tomorrow - oh what do I need to think about that for?

The Lull Continues

I'm writing again, because it's that time in the cycle. Barely plugging the hole in the brain's chem bucket. I'll revel in recently exhausted tritisms, flash in the pan neologisms, soon to appear in the bargain bin of Fuck Your Town.

I can't remember how the cycle goes exactly. But I remember, there've often been lulls of this length. Environmental factors can get me out of them, changes in circumstance, but so far nothing powerful enough has come to pass.

And still that damn unspoken addiction, plaguing me even when I'm sick. Unfiltered drones.

I could go to that park beside the highway - that would be novel. I thought about getting rid of all my hair. Don't know if I'm ready for that level of novelty. Maybe I should save that as a reaction to severe trauma.

Still that damn unspoken addiction.

Times like these, drugs become appealing again, because if everything's fake and meaningless anyway, might as well go for guaranteed stimulation - even if it brings guaranteed depression fairly quickly. Times like these, chemical happiness seems realer than whatever paltry feeling I can get by twisting against the circumstances of my ridiculous life. Chemicals are real.

That damn unspoken addiction, what the fuck is it? Of course, it's not the root of any real problems. Or maybe it is, undetectable except through the harmonies of alien jazz. Like Jamie's licorice. From Chadwick's. A malevolent cosmic ray. The mistakes I made that allow me to love my own work and yet be eternally frustrated. No, not eternally. Transiently. In this little slice of life. Not all possibilities were realized. Not all opportunities were taken.

Things will be different in June. One way or another. Mr. Dilato might make a re-appearance. The Conjuring. The Clowning. Dilato in the X-ing with Medicine. I might get kinetic synesthetic calisthenics again. I might not. The thousand year epoch might continue. How that will jive with June I can't say.

I've got to stop going for that olfactory flavor. It's so easy. Doesn't seem to be ostensibly damaging, but I wonder. It disturbs me. I don't have anywhere near the energy required to de-condition myself. And it doesn't put me through the trite rock'n'roll life'n'death drama, so I won't be shocked out of it.

Chess, backgammon. There was a time when I would have latched onto those incidental associations - woven them into a glossolalic arabesque. Maybe if they were accompanied by the above mentioned calisthenics. Kinetic, natch. Chess on acid. Peter Griffin freaking out on Claymation. It's too real! We all had a good laugh at that. It was a happy time, why does it seem so sad in retrospect? Damn retroscope. And the fondest memories come from some of the crappiest times. I can harbor nostalgia when I know how it ends. When a rosy tint will support a linear bias. When I'm out of the shackles of the moment, the moment of paranoia and sickness.

Sick-itch, incidental to the unspoken addiction, or dendritically attached in sketchy cause-and-effect shuffle? I couldn't help acquiring cosmic consciousness - it's often a stone to drag around. Ironic, it came on strong in good stones, in the form of good stones, then in bad stones, sickness and health. But time seems linear, and sickness seems to win. Wavefront bearing frothing foam onto the dead beachhead, Beachedwhale-Upon-Anzio. I could bring Jonah into this, but I won't. I'll showcase lowercase artistic discipline, I'll be the pretentious prosecutor of pretense.

Funny how I had to force myself to write, and ended up not wanting to stop. Even though it's all bullshit. Well it makes the flowers grow, so the discordians say. I'll sing the discordian accord in the psychic warzone - the munitions manifest as landscape scarring explosions. Just another European dispute - they could have gone longer, that war weary collection of countries. They could have gone for the record. Would it have mattered? I hope my will to live doesn't extend to the point of the ridiculous.

Apathetic to Information

No energy to articulate. No desire to seek. It's one of those ebbs again.

I'm sick of people, sick of drugs, sick of art. I want to go off them all. I'd go off work too, if I wasn't addicted to my paltry paycheck. But I'm not going to be a slave to self-imposed social, chemical, or artistic obligations. And I'm not going to do stuff that doesn't inspire me. For now, I'd like to read, walk, and think. That's about it.

In case you didn't know

My girlfriend has been back on blogger... for a while.

If you're going to wobble, wobble well

I wrote some fucked up email, consumed with petty ridiculosities, making everything worse by twisting it into some lingual construct of grandiose emotional projection.

I took a walk outside, it was gray and gorgeous, a storm was brewing. Fit my mood like a glove. I was anointed in raindrops, swept clean by the wind.

I thought about going back and writing apologetic second guessing messages to blunt the impact of the original mess, but then I thought of that great old zenism: If you're gonna wobble, wobble well. Stagger like a fucking pro. So often, situations can benefit from the application of confidence, where conventional wisdom would dictate that it's inappropriate. It's okay to go off every now and then. So if I'm gonna do that, I'm not gonna second guess myself.

I was thinking, as I walked through the woodsy slope, toward a tasteful housing development cut into the forest like a bladerunner's incision: Let this storm turn into a full fledged hurricane, destroy these houses, flood the streets, rip trees out of the ground, send cars flying, smash, destroy! Maybe it will be good in the grand scheme, bring people together to rebuild, create a purpose that doesn't involve pettiness and politics.

But I did second guess that, because I get superstitious sometimes, and it occurred to me that I shouldn't whistle for the wind unless I want it to blow. No, I'm not wishing property damage on you, yuppies, I don't have the heart to fuck with the rich and powerful more than I already have done in my rebellious commie youth.

But I tell her, I can't not be rocky when I'm listening to Blue Oyster Cult!















I'm not consumed with bitterness anymore. I allowed myself to indulge in that for a few hours, but there are better things to do and think about. Like how much Blue Oyster Cult rocks - I'd only listened to the big hit, the one that everybody knows, don't fear the reaper (both cowbell and non-cowbell version), but holy fuck, the rest of their stuff kicks ass too. Got Tyranny and Mutation rocking the house tonight. Flaming Telepaths. Amazing how many musicians who came after ripped them off. Okay, not ripped off, paid homage. Cause if I get to pay homage to Prokofiev, Rzewski, Keith Jarrett, ELP, and the Mars Volta, all in one song - folks can pay homage to BOC.

I was wrapped up in some dramas. Felt like the vast majority of my attempts to reach out to humanity have gotten me nothing in return but a bad case of blueballs. Figuratively. It will be good for my mental health not to do that for a while.

I did a faggy thing once which almost had me babbling, like I was caught up in some congressional nightmare: I am not, nor have I ever been a member of the homosexual agenda. But instead, I decided to play it cool and not worry. It was a fun night, and I refused to allow people’s misconceptions to enflame potential neuroses. But Lord help me if I dressed well - there'd be enough misconceptions to fuel sitcom plots for a whole season, plus the DVD extras. And I still love my hair, it's almost as erudite as my prose. Hehe.
















Tasty hair topping a lucious face. My girl is the queen of the amazon delta. And sometimes queen of herself. She's great to write out the storm with. We got preserves in the basement.

She was gonna do a pagan ritual last night, but she thought her Frida Kahlo bling was blocking energies. No, she didn't say it like that. But yes, she is a flake, the finest flake I've ever known.

Sometimes we clash in catastrophic ways, but we’re more alike than any two people I know as far as being on the same wavelength, understanding certain human truths, being subject to similar frailties. Interstellar Mistress of Mystery.

dronefile

Yeah, it's the dronelife sutra. The apologia.
















Yeah, it's the apologia. File it under drone filtertips.

The tax-writeoff for dental work. It all combines to a beholdable jenga tower. Which is the drone drone dronal monotonal key we're jigging around in, the first recasting of the word in a 434 part series.

"Nothing is sacred when no one is saved"

I beg to differ, Nevermore.

But that's me. I recall your song the last time i was dilated, on the bed, a two-headed flowering split next to me. Those were the days.

A blondehead flowing statue of the rosemont benedictionary. Those were the days. Plumbing suger-glazed surfaces, slick with cotton-candy fog, solidified, tasting good to my sweet tooth, surely i still have sweetness receptors on my tongue, surely that taste is still possible.

And still, Gyro is a piece of park I feel as enlightenment - as I read to a gaggle of delightful drunks at the Royal one night. As we pride ourselves on telling it like it is, up here, in this blip on the radar - oh yes, blip me out of existence, or close enough to feel like a whimper wisping over the edge of the abyss.

And still, I hate how life stabs its hooks of censorship into me. We can't be watching Lawrence Welk all the time, things have got to go outside the margins. Even if a few TVs must smash through the upper floor suites of Mrs. Gualtieri's Retirement condominium.













"Stuff music", Lenny Bruce and his nuances, still kissing God's hand, protruding piece of his chemically reduced junk, molecules pixelating to atomic nuclei with their electron veil, to those stringy thingies in their essence, to scrap iron, emptied onto an east coast american yard, some mafiosi's asset, under the table, under the radar, that lower case filler that could feed a family of nine in Tanzania.

Yeah, it's the dronelife sutra. Darwin's hidden variable, the fish he never factored into his Victorian Lake.

"How cute", she says. Yeah, she's been hanging around Big Rock Candy Mountain, and I don't know how long I can dance on these rock faces - a metaphor worthy of Dali's back catalogue - yeah, sorry, I should have devoted myself to music, this literary detour is, well, living up to its sour seeds, and misdeeds, grabbing for cryptic descriptions of stimuli left 'n right - but then, improv is like that, we need a realtime literary equivalent of open stage - chat is that, but so vacant so often.

So many possibilities - still...

Why do I write these nauseating pastiches of stream of consciousness? I guess because when I'm in the right mindstate, the aggregate seems writable, worthy, meaningful in some Rorschach way. Like some stand up comic who's trolling for some less comedic but similarly hoodwinked crick in the collective conscious veteran of the psychic wars. Blue Oyster Cult opened for the space stand-off set, the star-speckled bag of celestial cronies.

"Finished with my woman cause she wouldn't help me with my mind" - Ozzy, "Paranoid"

"What I want most in the whole wide world, is a girl, just a girl, one who'll keep me from losing my mind - and she'll be the best girl, in the whole wide world" - Nomeansno, "Revenge"

Funny how often that theme crops up in rock 'n roll - sorry boys, there ain't no state of grace even with full assimilation of the feminine arts, and believe me, I've suffered for my art, not of my own volition by any means, I should have been a ski bum, by all rights, I should be travailing under the chairlift every day, heat-seaking altitude by the negative reading on my frigidometer, but i ain't hangin brightly, I dunno what she's done to you, whataya think that means? Break on through.




















Got called some names tonight. Too many. I know it was meant to push my buttons. I think I responded in a way that merged the best of machine mythos with that psychedelic mind-manifesting manna. Yeah, I've still got these cheezy reverences for certain clockfaces within the mind.

Anyway, I slipped a little too far off the dao tonight, this black rite of psyche-shredding thickets, tickets to palaces of neuroses - i'm close enough to equilibrium to munch my ice-cream sandwich with poise and premium posture (just kidding).