The Denver Sutra

We hung around the tour buses after the Chilis’ stadium rock encores, sobering up before the long drive back to La Quinta. No, not really sobering up, just losing more of the buzz than we wanted to. We sang our depraved songs A cappella to pass the time. We think it was Desiree’s melody and my harmonization that lured Juan Alderete, the bass player for The Mars Volta, over to our place by the fence for a half hour chat on music, literature, and chaos.

*

Insufficient bitterness

to continue.

*

I never used to ask

What is he on?

What did she take?

Personal flair was accepted as

- behavior -

@ character @

Now it has to have a reason

and Occam’s Razor quickly leads me

to chemical analysis.

I’m just writing in another notebook

although Dez bought it for me

– post breakup –

she went out and picked up this

quietly stylish black/tan book

while I slept in the hotel bed

cause I asked her to… a very

girlfriend thing to do, so the pages

feel special.

*

Could the origin of this nausea be the inability to write, in the face of planet-sized feelings? Trite inarticulate honesty is better than nothing, I guess. Eases like a metabolic function, like I fed a critical mass of sick cells an illicit bit of photosynthesis for a circadian tick. But it’s all in the game.

Dez left. I’m back to the girlfriendless Nelson paradigm, in which I can’t and won’t hide my yearning to fulfill my long dormant sexual agenda. Razberrychaos still shines through, engineering monuments through fractals of drunk flailings – and even though Desiree dyed my hair red, I’ve rarely felt so dissatisfied with my look. Because I’m no longer the male half of the artist couple, the sexually-sanctioned freak compensating for failings in masculinity with cryptic lifestyle kinetics. Now I’m a free agent with a piss-poor portfolio, because although I have art on the shelf, I see how important the immediate physical connection is, the primary colors, the deficiency I feel as a sucking chest wound, what makes me invisible, not even a joke.

I could transcend with a glowing green scythe. It will be my costume for the next Shambhala. I’ll have saved my brain for a splurge of serotonin that I will use to boost my behavior algorithms in artificial confidence, ecstasy, mimicking those evolutionarily pro-adaptive progenitors, harvesting cash crops of impossible conversation with chemical currency cum quickie casuals in strange camps. Because I don’t want to get the girls with my writing, drawing, music, or even my mind. Because you can only live so long in your fuckless head before you feel your entire stalk of being wither in the burning sun of energy that doesn’t MATTER - - -

Anyway…

I’m trying to stave off the sense of nihilism I instinctively recoil from by telling myself that feelings aren’t real. That sounds counter intuitive, but nihilism is an emotion for me – the presence of negative energy.

*

Waiting at Gate C Thirty Sick

with a backpack full of expired poetry

cramps and fresh memories

pungent, reminding me

to burn a CD with a

Chili Peppers song, mediocre music

played by a world-class band

to mark the occasion.

Bad breakfast cramps, energy

settled poorly in my stomach like a disgruntled Muslim in Gaza, forcible function of racism’s rationalization in gastro-intestinal crucible, gastronomic gusto in a coffee-ground cubicle, stressing down to my bowels. If I hear about everybody’s asshole one more time I’m gonna KILL someone, I swear!

No, can’t give in to psychosis, I’ve got to catch a plane

to a 21^st century croquet game, a gentleman’s game, a proper use for a mallet, the kind of opportunity one takes with a velveteen touch and a crescent eye, ocular aversion to the cramped chunk of con swish reduction add absurdum.

*

Today, Denver is the nexus of the Stuccoverse.

I don’t know what that means but I know it’s virtual.

The psychosis creeps in like a twitching variation on an old man’s spinal disease, a novel chemical composition, a few hundred molecules to the right in a spectrometrical anomaly. The old man lived long enough to find comfort in breathing, post-matador poetic transcription, what you’re supposed to show, not say with clenched teeth, tall eyes, and known bugs in perception.

I kind of like the crazy but I hate it, I hate it, I HATE IT! I want it to stop. It seems this psychosis speaks for all energy, energy itself and its trembling handshake with matter, its bittersweetheart deal, a corrupt alliance, what matters more than any thought I could think in intersecting planes. I only really like it when I can’t have it, and I can’t take a lesson from this because I’m stuck to the hi-chair at the kiddie table. I can’t digest the grown-up food.

*

I’m stately

and stand-up

a state actor

sincerely sarcastic

sickly bombastic.

I’m jonesying for genuine friendship

incapable, unfulfilled.

I want to wish you happy discord with Hari Krishna, see how you react, but I won’t because I fear your reaction. I sense olfactory incompatibility, sublingually, subliminally.

But I think my twitchings are not obvious, and my penmanship is adequate, and I can… just barely listen to this hypermelodic R&B gargling without flipping out, which would equate to me letting my little blips of twitches build to a seizure-like spasm that would mildly alarm the woman sitting next to me.

She just sighed in a soft, friendly-sounding way and her peripherals are making me nervously excited. This is energy I can roll with but I don’t know where to enroll.

The demilitarized zone is interlocking eye-verse, eyes getting away with stealth understanding of words and thighs, and I just allowed a sigh that riffed on the girl’s, and I just allowed a smile that knows nothing of Krishna, and I’m regarding a well-tailored, probably self-tailored black back of a blouse.

Damn these dry gums, or is it an obsessive psychosomatic mirage? I’m remembering how extraordinarily run of the mill I am, filed down verbal favourites and the novelty of red hair, thinking I’ve got a little hint of Matt’s schizo floodgate, how adorable, found art, Canadian psych-kitsch from the Bronze Age of Information, before nanotech took off.

Smile again, look as pretty as you can and maybe good things will happen despite the twitches (nothing can save you from them), act like Krishna has nothing to say to you. Don’t ask if you’re a creep, don’t be redundant, hum a Thom Yorke melody if you feel like being crazy. This is a non-Sforzando flight. Soften. Mezzo piano. The bar is always open, but you can’t stay here. Heraclitus is my co-pilot. All is fire. Your skin makes me cry. But you can’t know.

OOPPivivivivivivivivivivivEENN

OOPPBUplSIeaNEsureSSEENN
OOPPivivivivivivivivivivivEENN

INNOCENT yet ILLICIT interest –

would you like a hot apple pie with that?

I still don’t really know what she looks like. Our father who art in heaven. Krishna forsakes me every day, and that’s okay, comma, comma, comma,

Malibu Stacey, I want to ride with you. Take me for a ride in your hot pink convertible, pop your afternoon birth control and come, we’re on our way to north Cali’s stately mambo stepclass, cha cha cha, the state of grace, our instructor is from Esalen, he’s the hottest ugmo I’ve ever seen, a FILF, gutless in a good way, he has an aura, steel grey, carpeted with lichen.

We’re driving back across the timewarp coast, and plastic’s come alive but our bodies stopped biodegrading, nowhere to die but up, winged tortoise studios, midpoint jetburn aftertouch intermezzo.

Do you like what you see?

Don’t answer –

too many sharks in the Spanish Galleon, not enough aliens in the abyss. Denver’s toxicity is mingling with this crybaby airspace but Krishna embraces contradictions, recommends contra-indications, wraps Contra. One day I will remember poetry, forget sacred geometry.

~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~

Sad steward slam, an unrequited sociophilic hemlock award for handing a poor man in a wheelchair beside the highway a thin wad of cash while finishing off a butterfinger ice-pop. One five and five ones, looked more impressive than it was. He asked me if I was sure I could afford it. Me and Raz, we thought we might have cheered him up a little, cheaper than a pack of cigarettes and I don’t think he smoked. He had a sign on his lap but I don’t remember what it said. His face said enough, it made a mockery of fakery.

There’s no such thing as charity, finding it is like trying to get the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and Krishna shits in my mouth and tells me I’m failing the nutty symbol test, the quotient of intelligence, the college flunkie’s malprops, the isms crowd, the ripple reflections of the bone of my own.

~

How much did magic thighs see, I wonder? Because unlike the poor man whose presence was present enough for my thick ness to respond to, I need a sign. My face can’t be sufficiently read, except by psychics with thick thighs and highly developed observational skills, of coy minds and eyes I can’t see, people who pull on the entrails of my spirit, who demonstrate the existence of said spirit through artful zen reduction, who cue like Toscanini, who read souls like braille. I feel like a virgin with their fingers on my mind, exalted in violation.

The pen is mightier than the penis if you are a limp dick. The notebook is a shield and a prison, and a curtain of imported beads, garishly symmetrical with itself, quaintly resonant with low frequency open-stage guitar strings, drunkenly off-kilter with contemporary fashion, synthetic cornmeal with Kootenay Cabbage and Krishna, your face was – is – more than I could – can – deal with. I’d say you’ll never know but I can’t decide. Hari Krishna. Mother of God.

Dry dry dry mouth, hung out to try but left when the moment didn’t show. Substituted a blond head of hair, the best blond yet, closest to the contemporary ideal and its nuclear fusion with my illusion, just another clipoff glade of shade grazing my glandular profusion of twitchy mistaken misanthropy, spinning a line like a ragged and jagged Rapunzel tied to a loom of doom.

Time to expose my loathed arms, stymie the flow with a charmelized comma, a candycane slashed through a window’s pain, punitive rhymes for our times, check check it.

It makes me feel better to see the Beatles so distant in the rearview mirror. Not too far now to reinvention of the wheel. 300 miles to Salt Lake City.

The hotter the fire

the deeper the sleep.

-

.

The painfully pretty woman next to me, whom I didn’t even really see, craned her neck, along with a few other yokels, to see what the commotion at the back of the plane was all about. A kid with asthma, turned out to be of little consequence. Apathy had been appropriate. So she lost several cool points with me, but I guess, in accordance with the calculus of character, she gained an endearing sloppiness of personality, shook off some of the suffocating charms, soloed more like Omar than Frusciante

*

Atavistic dolce ~

~ Devil’s trill

You may not realize

but your work ethic paid off.

I know. It’s hard not to notice the grapes dangled above my midget body, just above my stretched head. The fruits of Aphrodite were grown to be known.

Satan spawn

hasn’t started his rock band yet.

He’s smart enough to avoid guitars.

His weapon of choice will be the turntable

because there is no future

of music

only the techno-gulag

of 2020,

a clear-eared dystopia.

Lessons from Shambhala

Shambhala is a 5 day party in the forests of a Salmo river ranch. It draws a crowd of ten thousand or more. What do I make of the debauchery I just went through? I figure I can make something of it if I draw lessons from my trip through that sticky web of interlocking lifestyles. If I take a microscope to what happened, I might emerge with some insights, and not of the wishful spiritual flavor I used to pursue anywhere drugs were involved.

Lesson #1: I smoked some dope, swigged some tequila, and popped some mild pharms, till I got to a haze in which I couldn’t differentiate what was doing what to my head. I wandered back to the pavilion, draped in arabian fabrics, but I couldn’t get in because I didn’t realize one of the fabrics was not separated, but draped from one pole to the other, with three inviting-looking cloths in front saying: “come on in… it’s easy!”

Eventually I figured out what was up, and went around the other side. Jesse said something about it being an I.Q. test. So I sat down and slurred, “goddamn Mensa bullshit”. This seemed to strike a nerve or a chord or I don’t know what. Anyway, it got more reaction from Marco and Jesse than anything I’d said previously. Turned out Jesse had gotten into Mensa, and Marco possibly, I wasn’t sure. Anyway, I started thinking I’d offended them. Then Marco said something that I interpreted as being a joke for him and Jesse to share, at my expense, that I wasn’t expected to get. And I didn’t. It’s possible I was thinking in this paranoid way because of my conception of Mensa as being a society of intelligent jerks who like to lord their smarts over the dumb hordes, whom I identified with, since I feel I lack a common-sense, problem-solving sort of intelligence, and flourish more in less technical, more artistic niches. So this feeling of being made fun of mixed with my nervousness over causing offense as the conversation flowed on. I told them I’d rather not know what my I.Q. is. I’d rather cultivate delusions. Water them daily, give them light, have conversations with them.

Lesson #2: The ego trip is uncomfortable for me on E. I tried reading bits of my novel to the group I was rolling with, but I was so flighty and manic I couldn’t read or focus or be into any of it. Extrovision works better. When I’m rolling, I need to leave the art behind and be open to others, be art in my interaction with them. Material brings me down. “My” material even moreso.

Lesson #3: Glowsticks are cool.

Lesson #4: E is like alcohol times 1000. Affirmation mode without the sick swoon. Realization of possibility. Opening the window. Hug-love-drug-bullshit. Makes me very uncool. “And you say you can’t express”, I said as the Russian girl sang. So heartfelt, but so fucking trite, so not me. And so fake, because did she even say she couldn’t express? I can’t remember.

Lesson #5: You can be on E, with googley eyes and a hyperactive jaw, but still, if you smile at people, even girls who looked like they walked straight out of your wettest dream will likely smile back.

Lesson #5.5: I should bring chewing gum to my next roll, otherwise I’ll be sticking my tongue out every few seconds like a lizard, and not be aware of it until someone points it out to me.

Lesson #6: After the E wore off, it was pretty much downhill. So now I deem myself “jaded”. I’m so concerned with living in the “real world”, and the rules of the real world, and the obligations of accepting and exploiting and living by those rules. But Robert Anton Wilson’s axiom still rings true, reality is what you can get away with. So why not make my own real world, to the extent that I can? Which is more than I usually think. Not talking to the hot girl because I’m an uncool undeserving creep isn’t the “harsh reality”, it’s me making a harsh reality for myself.

Reality certainly gives me negative material to work with. I’ve certainly done creepy uncool things in the past (see Lesson #5.5). But they needn’t have any bearing on this moment, with this stranger. I can make them have bearing, but that’s not a universal truth or an objective reality, it’s my subjective imposition.

Lesson #7: I had many moments of feeling like people had windows into my head they shouldn’t have. Like they knew way more about me than they had any right to, like how the FUCK can this person read me this well? I had some freaky moments like that last year at Shambhala. This time it happened on E, and off. I was grooving on a Keith Jarrett album, the Koln Concert, loving the music more than I’d loved any music that weekend, but also paranoid that the people around me were annoyed at the music and it was imposing on their conversation, and should I turn it down, or should I turn it off, or would that be awkward because I would be unable to hide being upset and thus acknowledge the tension, etc. And then Marco started going on about how long winded this Keith Jarrett guy was, and then Finch joked that “the good part starts after the intermezzo”, and others joined in along these lines, and I felt like these people were doing an unbelievably perfect job of parodying me, and the way I talk, and the kinds of things I say, and it was hard to take. So I turned off the CD and went for a walk.

Earlier, a guy wandered into our camp saying he knew Finch. Finch didn’t remember him, but he hung out with us and jabbered enthusiastically. Everything he said sounded exactly like I remembered myself to sound when I’d been rolling. In an embarrassing way. I could see he had his window open wide. Maybe we were closed. Closed for business. Marco was trying to remember where we’d put our bag of weed, so he asked for his “marijuana cigarette”, whereupon the stranger stood up and shouted to the tents beyond: “Does anyone have a marijuana cigarette?!” repeating the inquiry several times, loudly, eager to help out. “Oh god,” I thought, “You probably think that’s the coolest line in the world, you poor man. But wait three hours.” And I cringed, for him, and for myself.

Actually now, two days later, it’s pretty funny to me. Why can’t I laugh at myself? I’m so pitifully ego bound. Ugh. Narcissus hurled.





Lesson #8: Possible pretext for strange socialization: “Can I hang with you guys for a while? My friends all ditched me.” Whereupon I make up an interesting story about my “friends”, perhaps with kernels of truth in it. If I can filter out audible desperation, it might be useful.

Lesson #9: I have a certain degree of homophobia, not because I worry about being gay, but because I worry about being weak, which has become synonymous in my head. That’s not due to any personal logic construct, but because of the irrational imprints I’ve gotten from society. I’ve become so twisted up, however, that at times I’ve come to believe it really is about being gay, despite my lack of sexual interest in men. Because I could always be suppressing something right? Then I remember – oh yeah, in my head, gay is shorthand for weak – that’s the real issue. Gender psychology creates a lot of anxiety for me. It’s true, I yearn for aspects of masculinity I feel I lack. But I would never want to go anywhere close to an extreme with that. It’s not where my soul lies. I guess my soul flinches in a conflicting recoil from both the yin and the yang. I’m a discordant S curve. Designed for insecurity. Evolutionarily maladaptive. Genetically defective.

Lesson #10: I understood perfectly what Shulgin meant when he dubbed MDMA Window. It did feel like a window. A massive opening in the mind, so that I was free of my past and future, able to speak to anybody about anything. If I could have those extra chemicals sloshing through my brain blood all the time, yeah, I would live in that clear bright universe of possibility, with all the neurotic roadblocks thrown down – I could romp through life unimpeded, get what I want in a benign way, with love as my hyperdrive. But I’d wreck my brain, and end up an idiot. And say I did decide to keep my finger on the switch, a permanent ecstasy drip – who’s to say I would be able to sustain the mental appreciation of the magic window even WITH those extra chemicals? What if the window stays open, but it loses its magic? Wouldn’t I eventually realize I’m acting like a lizard? The reason “ecstasy” works is because of its kinetics. That means a rocket ride up and a crash landing.

Lesson #11: A lot of people tried very hard to make me dissatisfied with my life, what I’ve achieved, and where I’m at. I guess they succeeded. But they failed at spurring me on, which I assume was their intent.

When people try and press on me the potential that I have, and by implication, the wasting away I’m doing in not giving 100%, I don’t feel incited to greatness. I feel depressed and frustrated that I’ll never get to these enticing heights because despite the fact that I do lust after money and fame, I don’t lust after it enough to want to practice four hours a day. I sold out to some extent, but not enough. And I won’t sell out to make other sell outs feel better about themselves. I don’t want to be a session player, and make three grand recording a leslie organ part for your Alice in Chains-inspired band, exactly the way you want it. I’m still an artist, as pretentious as that sounds. Well, it comes with the job. Not a good substitute for money, but there are a few perks, like being allowed to be pretentious.

Lesson #12: Despite the previous lesson, it is time I got serious about music – and that means pain, discomfort, and frustration, but it also means I may prevail and reap the rewards. I should lock myself away, quit the drugs, and be a secluded scowling zen pianist (I’ve lacked the moxie to call myself a “pianist” since I quit trying for virtuosity five years ago). I should work on my technique, theory, and sight reading – it would be a good, boring, non-artistic thing to focus on, since, even though I’m an artist, I’m utterly fucking bored of art, particularly music.

That’s the thing with false positives, even those that come in a single small pill – they leave you unenthused. At least I have the good fortune to also be unenthused with more false positive. Although like the last time I did E, I did get close to the addiction cycle. I did think: well, if I’m this down, and it looks like this is a harsh lesson in the nature of perception, I might as well do that E again, I did feel good no matter how false it was and I know I can get there again.

Lesson #13: I’m craving the novelty of strangers, especially those of the female persuasion, because I can’t be complacent anymore. I don’t want to take them home – I have no home of my own to take them to. I just want to get a little deeper than the sparse and subtle surface grazing I’ve done thus far. I don’t know how to begin doing that and I don’t think it should be contrived. I used to sit around and people would come up to me, eventually. That seems to be happening less, maybe because I have less of a fuck-off attitude, and am therefore less cool, less intriguing. I guess I’m going to have to do something to get attention, like be a better musician.

Lesson #14: Finch is really taken with the idea of me going off somewhere, to a good school in a big city and making connections. I appreciate her driving me on, I appreciate it more than the opinions of the annoying cokehead who thinks he’s a producer genius, and I know this is the kind of advice I should be taking. Except I don’t know if school’s what I really need at the moment. I think what I really need is to practice what I already know I need to do – on my own. If I can pull that off, I can think about refining my skills in academia. Finch said, well, you could stay here and be in Aaron’s salsa band – scornfully. But actually, that’s the kind of thing that DOES motivate me to practice. Not going to some fucking school in Vancouver. But taking a smaller step toward perfecting something that I see as achievable in the near term. And I’d like to keep working at the bakery for a while longer, because I value stability. Whether that chips away at the rebel cool I’m supposed to have, or not.

Lesson #15: I had a strange feeling after last year’s Shambhala that lasted a couple of weeks. Everything looked different, although I couldn’t say why. It was like all the emotional connotations of things had been stripped away, and reality was a kind of blank slate. It was an empty feelings, but it was also like I could re-imprint ideas and feelings on to familiar stimuli. It was like someone had hit the restart button on my limbic system. I’d thought it was the acid that caused it. But I got the same feeling this year, upon returning from Shambhala, and no acid was in the mix. So it’s definitely the E that causes that. MDMA scares me because it causes changes in my brain that seem to last a long time, and are very wide-ranging and profound, and usually not for the better, although I must say, very educational.

Lesson #16: I was warm and finally about to sleep Saturday night when Finch came in to the tent. She needed her comfy bed (probably the best in a 50 tent radius) for herself. So I got out to relocate to my tent. But we sat and talked for a while, in the cold and dregs. I was thinking about doing more E, but the last roll was scary, and I knew I’d feel even worse coming off a second dose, and who knew how long the aftermath might fuck with me? So I thought I was done for the night and ready to sleep, but Finch (or “Jenn” as I kept calling her that weekend) seemed agitated, and craving a cup of Moroccan Mint tea, so I walked back into town and got one for her. And felt really good going in, and coming back. Philanthropy – it isn’t E, but it’s good for the soul.

Lesson #17: Monikers are fun, they help shift identity. Anyone who wants can call me “Johnny” now. J’than is old paradigm, and Hector never meant much, except to old soul mates.

Bored of Euphoria

Shambhala was fun until I ran out of happy juice. On E, I was king of the world. I could have had almost anyone I wanted, or at least that's how I felt, and that's half the battle. And there were piles of gorgeous girls, responsive to my inquiries. But sex was redundant.

I could have poured in more fuel. Kept it going, after that 1 hit. In fact, I vowed to do exactly that, while rolling. Don't worry about the downer, just do another hit when it wears off! But... When the saccharine high fades away - it just doesn't seem a sane solution to keep pushing my system, to artificially inflate my enjoyment of life to an undifferentiated frill of warm fuzzies.

But sanity doesn't allow me to be happy about being down. It does allow me some enjoyment of reconnecting to my cynical and jaded self. For a while. It's nice being able to be cool again, getting past the E-tard paradigm, using my insecurities as security blankets by refusing to be open to new feelings and thoughts. But the negative cool doesn't last, after sobriety magnifies my insecurities a hundred fold. I feel utterly worthless and insignificant.

So I bounced back from the crash, but now I'm on a more long term downer. These emotional currents look to me like progressively larger ripples of longer wavelengths. But then, I didn't outright feel like crying immediately after. Now I do. Familiar stimuli is poison to me. But shambhala is over and I've got to go back to work. Novelty isn't readily available.

But then, I'm almost looking forward to working. My niche at the bakery, what I'm supposed to be ashamed of, and usually am. But fuck it. Fuck art. I'm utterly bored of music, my own, and other people's. I don't need to listen to people who presume to tell me how I should live my life. I've got to be less open to other people's opinions. A little bit of arrogance would do me good.

The only music I can stand right now is Aphex Twin. The ambient works. I can't feel "enthusiastic" about anything, but I can enjoy this music, and the tint it makes in my mood. It's the sound of mechanized melancholy, which is what my mind is right now. It's the perfect music for when you've crashed hard on a lot of hard drugs.

I miss Dez. I was right in my intuition, Shambhala did suck without her. In a way. Because it's good to be with someone. Even if the person is as neurotic as yourself. Maybe next year I should carry out the agenda of my subconscious.

I'm left feeling utterly anti-social, but not in a positive "fuck everyone I'm fine on my own" way. Because I'm not fine on my own. It's just that I know other people won't give me any enjoyment at all.

Oh well, there's plenty of E in the sea - I mean fish - I mean... uh, I dunno. Nevermind. This is Hippie Craque, signing off.

Suite for Guitar and Strings in E minor

I've been chipping away at this bastard on and off for a year or three - hard to remember now. Finally finished last night. Recorded and MP3 encoded. It's a piece for acoustic guitar and string orchestra, structured a bit like a concerto with three movements. The movements are meant to flow seamlessly from one to the next, but I've split number 3 for convenience.

Movement 1 and 2: Andante - Presto (10:37, 12.1mb)

Movement 3: Moderato (10:50, 12.4mb)

There's no spiritual solution to a chemical problem

I declined to talk to the sullen-looking ex-junkie on the park bench, recently divorced from his drug. There's nothing I could say that would help.

Assemblyman Zellman

Assemblyman Zellman loosened his belt before his midlife crisis, but admirably close to belly lint. I was lucky enough to be subject to his good cop routine. He didn't send me to the butcher of Baghdad.

He sent me here. Clapped a rhythm
and told me to DANCE!

So I...

thought

thought is attempting to sneak ahead of emotion
under the glare, the nails on a chalkboard light-year stare.
I forget attachment, remember detachment, what I
try to remember to carry around for convenience
at all times.

There are no axioms supported here.

This is not a masterstroke or a masterbation
but expressionism.

The lines blur between
addction, disease, life, happiness, reality, simulation, desire, mechanics
the seamless web has some chafing lining, if it's seamless
why does it itch so much?

The wrong is a subset of right which is a subset
of a neutral throng I can't net in words
which is pointless to say.

Somehow I'm allowed neophilia in a stroke of fucked luck
painting fleeting joy with phlegm
or fled joy in the gouge of a canvas
oil like fossilized feeling.

Gounging thoughts through layers of emotions, neuron circuitry
science has given me the gift of reductionism, the chains of reductionism
carbon chains, remembering the forum of the lycaeum, brainstorms of a bent bent
occasional benders would bend through there.

Impressionistically dissolved in addiction, finger, olfactory, Pavlovian
so purely free of chemical interchanges, etherally informing from the groundwater:
you're not fully clean unless you're ZENfully clean.

Bridge under the water.

The finger brings what rings in moldy memory, the drool of a dog, anticipatory with the tired eyes of limp gouged knowledge, gnostic swamp hag codicial, nag hamadi is fucking killing me here. The year is 2006 and I'm another dog, half-sleeping between two holocausts, here and there, everywhere.

I'm urged to binge and purge simultaneously - something's gotta go, but I need need need
that special something I can't name, can't attain through any immediate urge.

I won't reach the lusted for O of oblivion that way.

I passed by the rosebush covered tombstone attraction.
The gateway to the American Land of the Dead was roadside kitsch
Albuquerque collector's spoon, I can laminate the sentiment on a placemat
spill minestroni broth in it, crust on the mat Albuquerque, how's that for a symbol?
I can lament the sentimental sediment on the mat, placed like a plastic placebo between me
and the rollicking good times of potential reality
like a clown on ecstasy
if junctured to a sutured bit of neural circuitry.

Zellman tailored a suit for me to slink into one day
one day, may day, outdoor fucking, I'll say hey, a new way to say hooray
it's a tux, armani, not in a lossy format, but luxurious lox for a damned detox
damnation, every day is revelation if you want, if you need, if you sniff five more times
if your candyman wish is backed up by the think tank funds, how much is reality worth
is it the card, mastercard, for all the cards? Or is it just a ratty little double in the deck?

Zellman don't know - you won't get nothing out of him.

The Food Bank is Closed

No charity. None for you. None for you either. Or you. Or you and you and you. And you, how’s life, enjoying being a libertine? Skimming this post to look for your name. Sorry, it’s not here. Even the reflection is hallucination.

Oblivion as a Doom level. Those were the days. The days I didn’t care. When I loved the void. Don’t know if I can go back there.

Unfortunately, this is the kinesis time, when one can still feel the nausea of loss, the sickening draining of happy healthy brain chemicals that are stimulated and regulated by familiar faces and voices. This is the dynamic, the middle of the diminuendo, when one still clings to hopes of salvation, dashed a splinter at a time. One hasn't yet given in to the void, and constructed an aesthetically-appealing melancholia for oneself, with bluesy integrity. One hasn't made that cold comfort available yet.

Sometimes I condition my air. I don’t condition my hair. I’ve done too much conditioning of the mind, it backfired on me, conditioned me to react badly. I should watch the libertines, then I’d know the secrets of the universe.

Burste

What's the terror based on? That vaguely nightmarish flavour? The one that sometimes triggers panic attacks, but usually only brings on hours of intolerably tense paralysis... I guess it's just another symptom of being another person in a strange frankenstein strain of humanity - the synthetic alien technology unleashed on Gaia, that we are some perverse splinter off of... polymath polyalloys, brilliant, beautiful, disgusting, lost and deluded... it seems amazing to me there are people who exist that don't feel fundamentally fucked up and wrong... but the only reason i even know a state of mind exists without those flaws is because i had it once... ancient paradigms... i was a blissbabe once. So hallucinations i mistake for alien these days could be, in part, old ways of thinking, reflected by retrograde neurons, so strange to me as to be unrecognizable, unfamiliar. A self can splinter off into factions you don't recognize as yourself anymore. Psychological thinking like this is just a projection, of course, I know, a bubbly model.

Mind altering chemicals are natural and yet unnatural - in a sense we were "meant" to take them, in another sense not at all. They certainly jive strangely with this world that is all my personal projection anyway - suddenly a solipsistic feeling engulfing.

He has his truths and lies, I have mine. He is a pathetically paranoid soul, but he's earned it - he's survived trauma I can't quite imagine. I'm generally unafraid to walk around my neighborhood at night, even while cannabinated and prone to suggestibility of the personally paranoid kind - but I’m generally cool, the setting is benign. He doesn't have that luxury. He's seen sadists reign. So have I, but not up close and personal, to his extent anyway. Sure, I still see sadists reign, from afar, I read about it online, but they're not clusterbombing my house under sorties of apaches, the deathchoppers named after the near-dead Indians.

We each have our own kernel of truth in our caricatures of reality, and we each have our delusions that trail off the edges of perception like fractal hallucinations growing progressively grotesquely cartoonish. When I'm walking around my neighborhood, in the absence of other factors, my delusions are generally of a benign or neutral or not too terribly menacing flavour. But...

Harvesting magic continues. I felt I reconnected to the message for a muonic moment. Pop psych bubble burste.

The crack in biological telos

Handsome like a typographic error in a transcription of prestidigitation. Still too much information. And I grab at myself and rub at some ever-elusive spot and still find no AC converter for a bioport, no outlet.

All I need, I think, is a kaleidoscope niche, so I can be the smith in the color shard. The demons dimmed the lights. They're interdimensional interlopers, they have a vantage I can't imagine, and they knew what I needed before I did myself. So they dimmed the lights. So my color shard isn't really that colorful anymore. It's become a shade. The demon dimness flattened out lightwaves that would entrap me in their undertow.

I'm just another lopsided creature. Poorly designed in the best of all possible worlds.

They carved up my sacred path with a backhoe. I went back there but not too far because the angels gave me stern looks from every corner. This is not a time or place for revolution, retribution. Every angle, the angels. Only the demons are my friends. They don't want to save me from myself. They want to hang with me, in myself. They’ll let me hang myself on myself, enough rope, rope resources stretch like hope, hope on a rope.

Angels, fucking angels. And every corner, their synthetic soil for growing guilt trees, and pesticides that irritate my lungs. I'm one of the people being phased out. They don't know they're doing it but they are. It's one of those hypervolution things. Unconscious, and when I get an inkling of it, I only write of it in obscure metaphors that make me wonder, upon reflection, what the fuck was I going on about, and then stop wondering entirely and chalk it up to the mundanity of rambling.

A phase-out is a subtle thing even in hypervolution, but we can feel the splinter, a little shard of apocalypse, a little crack in biological telos, in the acceleration of modern life. A phase-out in modern life is another hilariously fucked-up mutation, a freak show in a kootenay valley town, a little overgrown larval freak who missed the boat, got sucked into the wave, looped into the hangman's naïf. A phase-out in my life is how my lungs went bad, not from smoking much, but just because. Maybe genetic, which is an even funnier joke. Sinus infected esoterica. Dad had a niche I'm proud to inherit, except I make it into a worse mess than any node in the lineage before me, because of my maladaptive nature. Yes, mother nature intended my malignant melody in her dissonant symphony, I'm the vermin they need to loathe.

I couldn't even enjoy drugs for very long, didn't get to the elf-tyke heights before it all went rancid, the prize was the consummation of my eyes, partially devoured corneas. Yeah, I guess the demons did draw me to a sort of personal esoterica that staggers along in 2006 with crumbs of kitsch on its lips, the smile of drunken affirmation finally frozen in sardonic awareness of the decade of morning, sobriety like a rainbow, never quite reached, but the drive is over. Time for a new guitar tone, something message board morons would mistake for a $300 Ibanez. Time for another drink – the cycle may be repeating faster but I won't catch up to intoxication, the monkey will starve anyway, too perplexed with possibility to scream at me.

They strapped the straight jacket on me, in the night, in my delirium, I didn't notice. But I notice when I try to move those limbs I used to know I had, like in that heartbeat gnosis, sensation of salvation. So I can't even kill those angels. Some are primed for careers in cynicism. Professional cynics. Funny how I once thought that would be a niche for me. But my demons were kind enough to turn down the lights for me. Shade my shard, my little kaleidopiece. I can hold on to this shard in my stomach, it hurts less inside than outside. It will only come out over my cold dead body.

Crack this telos wide open, and fate needn't mean anything to me. The best of all possible worlds? Thy unconscious will be done. It's a microscopic subset of hypervolution. It's a jenga tower on the rug. The zen point of intersection in a bar, back when waves were gravy, I liked the shine of the glades, shards were on the outside, glittering, to be played with, passed around with kid gloves.

I've barely begun the jaunt. This is the post kaleidoscope act, act 3 of a thousand light-year stare. Cornea scraps for catfood. This won't be on my next album. Would be fitting to be in the sea of the market economy though. Necessity. One day me and Jesus, we'll storm the temples. Kill the angels. You fucking guardians. We don't want you.

We've fallen. Why has Celesta forsaken us? This is the real ending of the New Testament. The resurrection was tacked on. We've seen ourselves through the knothole, outside the highway, in Ive's gospel. I'm a miscreant through how many generations of social diseases, how much crippling propriety? The final expression of the inability to purge, bloodline exponentially toxic, the hidden handsome reality of a cookie-stoned monster. It's enough to want to go retrograde, live vicariously through my antecedents. They were beautiful, in a strained sort of way – they passed the blighted potato through the underground, dove clear, cut roasts, cleaned knives of decency. Maybe I'll live out the rest of my life as a homemaker. I'm pretty good at vacuuming floors. It's a skill I have.

But when you're this far under the star... you find it so hard to be humble. And yet, every night somehow they manage to string me up to their guilt trees, at odd angles, those fucking angels. I thought they were supposed to be sacred. Their geometry makes my head ache. Their telemetry gives me chest pains. Their faces inflict genital agony. Those sharp stabbing pains. But it's just another little stab in a little day. Blood-dripping shards of routines. I can go on. The jaunt continues. It's just a dream, the demons whisper. I find it hard to hear their raspy whispers under the radio and the blog chatter, but they're there, telling me it will be a dream, it will be a dream if only I believe in them, dream's will be done.

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.