belladonna

sex hasn’t been the same since they put those vitamins in our water supply. there was a slippery inversion, now we lust after the aged, the ones who dare show up at the bar. maybe this is what they meant when they said we’d live in our imaginations. we just didn’t realize the shift until we were mired in it, lusting after their imaginations, our re-sexualized crone neighbors, whose minds are filled with books we haven’t read, the implications of the failed lancaster missions, what adult children inheritors of the cultural shitheap can’t begin to piece together.

so the mental universe is unwinding, something’s moving backwards, and some say it’s perverse, but there’s no denying, the oldsters got a hold of their power. or was it the children who found it? is it us who symbiotically discovered, empowered the fermented and demented minds of the fifty, sixty, seventy somethings, dived for fecund thoughts, the intellectual fuck like the progressive rock masterpiece notated in hexadecimal grids with color-coded counterpoint? did we re-supply fort knox? the economy is in the rotted fruitcore, james’ giant peach.

“well, we kind of got back together, me and her,” i tell him, my mid-life crisis friend. “but hey, don’t let me harsh your buzz, carry out those carnal desires.” i like how that rolls off my tongue, over-enunciated, sarcastic-sounding but sincere.

“hey is this chair taken?” a young one says.

“no, have a seat,” i say, keeping the brittle tone, cutting joviality. i will be a gentlemen and refrain from offering cocain. instead i will buy her a shot.

“how are you tonight?” she asks, sitting beside me. barely sounds inquisitive, i can tell from my peripherals her eyes are darting, she’s looking for someone else, better company. i will strive to suffice. i can’t look yet, the ritual hasn’t progressed to that stage. the ritual? what ritual am i performing? i’m making it up as i go along. in peripheral, she appears slim, small, blond, one of those rag dolls i used to love, the climax would be quick and meaningless.

“this is mallory, we’re going to jam tonight,” i say. yes, get mid-life crisis connected. this isn’t for me, i’m on vitamins now. “can i buy you a drink?”

“yeah, okay,” she says, a little taken aback, sensing the trap, the ritual i haven’t finished inventing yet.

“a shot of humidor for the lady!” i call to the servant girl. i’m allowed to call her that, albeit to myself, because i gave her a ten dollar tip last night, although i’m not sure she remembers.

“what’s that?” our new table-mate asks, dry, almost as brittle as my boisterous and distancing tone. “sounds operatic.” still, it’s a good question, she can play, riff.

“yeah, i think it was carmen’s suicide elixir,” i say. i can tell mallory is straining for a monty python reference, since that is what he’s best at. now it’s my duty to give him some sort of set-up.

“one last shot and salut,” she says.

ah. i love it when i don’t have to hold the universe together at the corner of the smoking-room table.

“she’s joined the bleedin’ choir invisible,” mallory says with a grin. i allow a look and she is smiling. “what’s your name?” mallory asks.

“molly,” she says. “what are you guys doing on stage tonight?”

“we’ll just see what happens i guess,” mallory says. “hopefully get some kinda groove goin’.”

“he plays bass. did you see that huge-ass keyboard propped up against the amps?”

“mmm… i don’t think so.”

“yeah, well that’s mine.”

“keyboard player.”

“when i have to be, yeah. we’re just gonna improvise, hopefully it will be cool, maybe it will be crap. hopefully we won’t bore you.”

“yeah, well, i just came here to smoke anyway, unless you need a drummer.”

“you play drums, eh?” mallory says. “well for sure, come jam with us. looks like you need a smoke too.”

molly reaches into her purse for some change, but mallory has a canadian classic filter in her face before she gets far.

“thanks.”

the humidor arrives on a tray, it’s so easy easy when everybody’s trying to please me, sharing the wealth, your typical tequila puddle and loose change cup runneth over. she picks up the shot and slams it down, workmanlike. emerges, nearly choking but hiding the nausea admirably.

“forgot lime,” she croaks.

“yeah, that’s sipping tequila, you shouldn’t shoot it. but hey… does it help you play drums better?”

“no.” more darting eyes. it comforts me, i was getting weirded out thinking she had latched onto us, pathetic me and mallory, having to live up to being some sort of menschen. being transitory company is more comfortable. she is latching onto mallory’s cig though, like it’s her own.

“so…” somebody says, or was that in my head?

“you guys are musicians, huh?”

“well i call myself a musician when i can,” mallory says. “wanking is pretty much the highlight of my day.”

“and mine,” i chime in.

“are you guys talking still about music?”

“well let me put it this way, molly,” i say. “if my ratio of sex to masturbation was expressed as a percentage, there would be at least four decimal places.”

“one in a thousand?” molly says. “my god.”

“you know, that doesn’t sound all that bad to me,” mallory says. “or at least it didn’t while i was married.”

“oh, i have lots of sex. it’s just that i jerk off like a fiend. no pussy can keep pace!”

mallory cracks up, then gives me an odd look. he’s wondering what’s with me tonight. it’s freaking everyone out. i guess it’s the vitamins. i look over at molly and she is smiling, but it’s sort of a grimace. but sort of a smile. she’s hanging around, because we have managed to be entertaining, even though i’ve barely looked at her. mallory has looked, a lot. go mallory. close the generation gap!

“what do you do for fun, drummer girl?” he says.

“i hit things.”

there should be more. the humidor is revealing this to me, even though i didn’t drink it myself. this is crossing a line, but i lean over to her, finally looking her in the eye for the first time.

“you know you’re not real right? you’re just a topical manifestation of my short term memory, the neurons that still fire up the limbic system a little, a contrived, ad-hoc array of jumbled emotional stimuli – psychologists could glean much data from it, but as literature, it’s junk.”

“so you’re giving up on me?” molly asks me, looking back with eyes that change color every few seconds. “like i don’t have a character anywhere? you cared enough to give me some lines.”

“and you cared enough to come by. it doesn’t quite add up. things rarely do, here. maybe i’ll figure out who you are later. i haven’t really figured out who i am yet, even. all i know is, i’m on vitamins. let’s play some music.”

i continue that thought on the keys after i’m set up, saying: “this is what i’m thinking right now”, thinking it can flow, should flow, why not? kicking it off. then mallory interlopes with something that i’m not sure is a riff, and i scramble to play around it, losing confidence, and fucking everything up. is this my line, or his?

i realize i am continuing my thought, expressing my feeling, with utmost integrity, in sonic nausea. yes, a triumph of vertigo. might as well play it up. i play some arbitrary arpeggios while looking at the bar crowd. no one looks back.

i realize molly is playing, hitting the cymbals, an array of cymbals, a pattern that uses nearly every part of the kit, sounds like to me. so i lose awareness of what mallory is playing on his bass and try to match that beat, something that feels comfortable between those symbols, but the arpeggios take me away again, astray with augmented chords, so i justify it all by saying syn-copay-shin!

i return to my keys, reflecting odd-angled house lights. it’s always so different playing here. and i shouldn’t have to look up, i should be able to direct this trio with my ears, but who is the leader now, am i comping or leading? take charge! better to take charge than be uncertain, half-assed… but shouldn’t i let the rhythm section… is this chord allowed? oh, is he playing a whole tone scale? no, that’s me being desperately analytical when there’s no time to feel.

martial snare rolls in the midst of this, and sure, i’ll march with you, i’ll follow you into hell, i’ll try, anyway, i’ll do it for you, molly. let’s call this: death march, i’ll quote the dies irae, like anyone will notice, certainly not when i fuck up the melody, but you can’t really fuck up that melody cause it’s already fucked up, stuttering measures of notated meandering, so really, i’m just channeling.

of course there is no end but i pound a fermata chord between the wisps of dying drum and bass anyway, it’s not my fault, sounded good in a warped sort of context, hopefully the audience is all stoned or not listening, either would be nice, it’s over, so without missing a beat, i grab my keyboard, forgetting the patch cord which hooks on a mic stand, nearly sends me sprawling, the sound guy moves to catch me but i’m alright, another beer and i would have tumbled, but i’m alright, just keep your distance people, i’m getting my shit out of here as quick as i can.

thankfully, no one meets my eye, until

there is someone to greet me, white-haired woman without the glaze of the younger ones, but a laser-like gaze burning into me, beaming gargoyle from the bar, and when she leans into me and looks into me, i can tell she’s one of those parched and pursed gateways to incredible exponential edible mentality, eventual sexual ecstasy via the arabesque weave, the glass bead gang-bang. i’ve seen her around, on the arms of the potent, advertising her unattainability to the plebs, legendary for her mind and its flexibility in states far beyond intimacy, leaving the yoga hall where the rip-off artists conned mystic hippies, and the health club where the failing bodies would compete for the best meat. the legendary mind is looking well, carrying a sixty-five year old avatar with dignity, and if you think that for every fold in the skin are a thousand in the cortex, and the vortex that leads to is telepathic consummation of a non-local free-range rogue-star binary system in energy times the speed of light squared being an equitable metaphor for the implications of hyper-evolved dendritic entanglement and catalytic fulfillment of desire, even if you’re still stuck on the cock-gobbling chemical level, and especially if your cells are still controlling you, it can lead you pretty far. on.

she says: “it sounded like you were deconstructing keith emerson in a jazz context but a proper presentation of entropy requires coherency.”

nodding, i say: “i hadn’t thought the premise through nearly enough.” i hope this is an adequate response. maybe she’ll buy me a drink.

i think about what she looks like in her mind. her attentive eyes allow me this connection, she is splayed open and lubricated. it’s a trick i’ve acquired since my vitamins kicked in. layers peel away. colors change, it’s a seasonal kaleidoscope. her lineage does, of course, go back all the way to aphrodite, that much i can see, and she sees that i see, but no further, and let’s leave gaia out of this, wouldn’t want to get incestuous, i’m not that far into this reversal. i’ll keep it greco-roman, maybe establish a nomadic euroromp in our shared hallucination, that jet-black witch bitch, starved through anorexic aesthetics, fleshy when necessary, voluptuous at the summit of let-them-eat-cake, does she like that dress? because i do, in spite of myself, i’d put my head in the guillotine for her.

“what do you know about belladonna?” i ask, falling into the vortex, streaming through.

“i know it was useful at the opera house,” she says. “they thought our eyes were beautiful dilated, though the rogues had no need for that, they had less natural, more human methods of dilation, i could pretend you are one of them…”

Alt D

White space capsules, in their small plastic sheath, concealed, but always at hand. They're like my suicide pills, except pro-active, in the way of sedation, negation of the importance of the serious players in the drama. Maybe not self-destruct, but self-dissolve. Alt D is the self dissolve combo. I press it heavily. I am already a flake, and the flake flakes into crumbs, powders off into the night.

Damp Sailor's Sarcastic Template

"just... as you need it," he says, after crushing up the green pill under the credit card, instructing me not to rail up the whole second hit right away. he taught me this, like he taught me other things, a secret handshake, making sure i can do it right, so i don't get my ass beat. as i need it. no, he's right. the buzz is still strong. no need just yet. the problem is, what feels so righteous to play and say, and sounds so synesthetically perfect in the moment that creates it, dies quickly, leaving the purest wrong in its wake, like a paint-by-numbers sarcastic template. but that's for the aftermath, an abstraction so far over the horizon, i can't imagine. cause time is dilated when there are no worries, and you're flowing with more happy juice than any brain ever experienced at once until the advent of mescaline-derived synthetic phenethylamines. gulliver traveled with me, up the snow, not used to hills, yukon-boy, a year younger than me, already having written two novels more than me.

federico moulista is hunting for zombies. he has just taken up smoking. it makes sense, tonight. he has found himself some comrades. myself among them. all we need is some girls. yes, here in this absurd room. that would be perfect. the union. a quixotic quest in hypothetical lobes of heiroglyphical dens. just as i need it. but this thing doesn't fix everything. it's not got the force of something that needs to be said, that driving idiom thing. hopefully, the word "ego" isn't important anymore, ergo, whatever. it's not that those lofty juvenile pursuits were worthless, naive and stupid, it's just that they were more than i could be arsed to deal with, come to grips with, and actually trying to do that would look so uncynical and out of step with the function of society, so cartoonish, i'd end up in some primary colored ward of the loony bin and decent men would never so much as speak my name, because i haven't got much of a grip on anything, nor a grasp, and would rather i saved my strength to ornate the fineries. yeah, whatever pool-scraping that implies. it's a savory purple night-day on the cracked aqua concrete of the empty pool, balmysoul starshine through the sunfield, a kingly jungle of cosmic rays. it's been leagues, aeons since hallucinations, i welcome them with open arms:

after a cascade of fractals in the foam of rivers

i'm greeted by the vivid visage of a face, he's the guy

who sketched me a man in a chair

signed it

while i reeled from his weed

while i tried to eat his wife's indian food

prawns, never before, when in the

transcaucasian orchestra, he heard the pocket

as keith jarrett played. fell with me into the groove, i was so happy to have a fellow there with me, the fellowship of the groove, and it was his hydroponic edmonstone grass i'd smoked just minutes earlier, this new and improved laboratory study of a day, man alive, there are men alive in here, nobody knows how or why we keep going, maybe it's because he's hitting the piano at those intervals primed to make me feel like a dolphin being fucked by a unicorn.

federico snaps me out of my self-regarding trance. he wants to watch amadeus. i tell him no, fuck that, it's a great movie, but let's stay here and hunt zombies. it's better i tell you. and i don't even need reserves yet, anyone can plainly see, i’m flying above any sort of care anyone could ever imagine. wastoids, wasting time.

he heard the pocket. nevermind what it means. nevermind what it was. let's feel what it ought to be. the valley. stretching from one horizon to another. the ground feels high, like we're closer to heaven. it's so hot in the day. so cold at night. one girl honestly said she's on cloud nine. i believed her. i also believed the other one, who could be her counterpart, literally, or figuratively, when the dew is demonic, damp is the devil, a tremor in every extremity, a shiver in every fiber, no corner to hide to, it's all out in the open, the peripheral sounds, a drip drip of dementia and disease, all for the worse, the same person, in the dregs of morning, when other staggers are coming up, getting up, finding their own pleasure centers, when she said this is the time... the time when she feels gross. i was horribly in tune with that statement, disgustingly empathetic, striding in particular to parallel... and now, beholding this soft-spoken scream-slur in extreme third person, being months and months later, i see the erosion of values and things and scenes as being sublimely fucked up.

upgrade my gray matter. it won't be better than yours, don't worry. it can't be. i just want to whiten it with baking soda. i want high definition perception, if possible, just plug it in. headaches chase me through porter filters. bully for those stout bastards, i'm going to stave them off with naproxen, just to be specific.

it was one of those dreams that keep me coming back to sleep. the ghost in the next room got up from his professional slumber, morphed his torso upwards to my nomadic bunk, decades in the making, fifty feet high, in a little plywood corner, with my mates sleeping and wandering around and getting them selves into trouble, and ladled me some nectar, enriched with pure heroin, it was more than enough. i said i'd be a crack whore for the number 23, i'd run his numerology racket, i'd be a minion, a peon in the pyramid - just fill that empty gel cap again, drop it into my mouth, i'll do the rest. so it felt really good, and being drugged in a dream makes me lucid, because it's dealing with consciousness, so everything's meta. so i realized i was dreaming, and the dream paralysis became analog to a placid sedation, which ran through the currency exchange and allowed endorphin surplus, pro pelling me into one of those skiing dreams i love so much, where i'm whipping down diamond drill, an epic trick, a black diamond curving out beyond the blast, weaving musically through moguls, slamming stubborn slumps of snow, commanding contours, who's your daddy, comman-fucking-deering, allocating my weight precisely, allowing a twist the other way for a payday paydirt - yes, i'd call it a reverie.

reality

though

is fueled by toxins

take that as whatever jig you want

take it to the gaping lotus experience

decapitate it in a gapper

that would work, i'm sure

might even heal over certain freedom wounds i've won, by failing every test, every game

obeying every law, unwittingly.

parallel rabbit holes on a street corner

if a tree falls in the woods, is the sound transcribed

for blogger's stenographic record?

collected childhood drawings

enjoy the soft screetch of perception

of being known, of passing through a mind with a vessel

pissing in the wind, whistling past the grave yard, possibly

to be in the fossil record of the digital future

"the digital future", such a linear notion

the foot-on-the-gas mentality, non-harmony

carving a path through planetary destiny

how unfair, those roman plebs long past

never had their life stories preserved in online archives

were only represented as lucius and pullo in a tv series

the only grunts mentioned by name, by julius caesar

a haunted house with a nauseating smell

is somehow touching, a shack remains

one of a few, god forbid we run out of mystery

like we're running out of history

*

i can't stop eating these salsa flavoured chips

as long as i don't think about what i'm doing

and shut off the stomach cam, i don’t want to see

what the eyes can't digest

i'm clinging to light and a lukewarm tea cup

cause they shut off our gas

but not electricity

so we have light but not heat

and earl grey is my new favourite drink

calorie restriction

and consciousness

it’s examination

of gak

of euphoria

what is natural, should i care? what is healthy, is health natural?

what is society, is society natural, is society healthy? should i care?

calorie restriction

and consciousness

it’s awareness

of binge

of food

of brain chemicals

parallel rabbit holes, nevermind the carnivorous associations

so is this a binge, is this what a binge is?

i never noticed before

now health is an issue and

the physical can't be ignored, and the physical is mental

and the mental is physical

because it's all a series of

cycles and if you can determine the frequency, you can see

where you fit even if you don't know what is

natural, and healthy, and society, and should you care?

a wild night with half-caffeinated coffee
analyzing electro-chemical thought to the point of hallucination

a naturopathic purge

no binge this week

no booze this week, just a lot of thc

and now reeses' candy, brain candy after

that meta-fiction movie, a grim laugh at society

is it healthy to laugh at society, if a laugh is natural

does that naturalize absurdity?

alice naturalized to wonderland eventually

throw infinity at the psyche and watch it adapt

like i'm starting to like this earl grey, sans cream, naturally

helium and hydrogen

white knuckle test pilot ejected from energy
doesn’t know what to do
his delusions ballooned to infinity just like strassman said they would
but not in the way he could anticipate or deal with

heaven is in the hole
no color there
don’t think you know
don’t give me that look
don’t think you know
no color there
heaven is in the hole

No Means No Nelson

Goddamnit. Nomeansno is playing in my hometown, in my favourite bar, tonight. And I'm going to fucking miss the show. Because I'm in Kansas. I think I'm going to cry.

No, don't get me wrong. It's great to be down here, with my girl, and my american friends. I'm learning about painting, forgetting about masturbation. A fan brush seems synesthetically useful when stoned. But great fucking timing.

I'm listening to their new album, "All Roads Lead to Ausfhart". It's fucking GOOD. They've still got it. They're my second favourite band, after The Mars Volta, and that's not just the patriotism talking, although that does make enjoying their music and existence extra sweet. By all accounts, they're still devastating live. Fuck.

If anyone in town is reading this, and going to the show, throw me a bone, and tell me how it was. Maybe KCR will stream it, at least.

let's go to guam and fuck a baby
i saw a tour on the internet
they say hell wakes all sinners
but they haven't got us yet
something's wrong in the heartland
there's an evil that creeps upon this land
but they say god accepts all sinners
so why should we give a damn?
i was born of love eternal
but now i do the devil's work
if there's a god up there in heaven
he must be one big fucking jerk

- Rob Wright, Mondo Nihilissimo 2000

your character must change

Whether you "mature" towards the realization that there are things worth fighting for, and possible better futures you ignored because of laziness, cowardice, myopia...

whether you "mature" towards cynical realism, to the point that the prattling on of idealists makes you want to punch them in the nose...

you end up thinking whatever change you've made (first thing they teach you about characters in writing class: they must change), whatever the kinetics of your life's evolution, that is what constitutes truth, higher consciousness, reality. Because you've evolved beyond your naive, childish opinions, whatever they were. One shift is enough, fulfills the quota. Now you're sophisticated. Maybe not quite wise, but wis-er. In a better position to judge.

So you form your final answer. Your posture. Old age isn't wisdom, just stagnation. At least that's how it seems to me now. I'm sure I'll revise that opinion when I'm older.

Primo hypnogogia

elaborations on an ochre haze of closed eyelids, phosphene flowers. hypnogogic visions on a codeine plateau. blotto assembly line. i couldn't get her up to my place with a banana and a crysanthemum. it would take more. maybe a dali-cheque. his subconscious is worth more than most.

providential pits of clotted fate. glottal be-in. il merchant. so i'm reminded about the loss of values. maybe i should eschew the world, find the icy pleasuredome.

three crew-cut sports dicks bouncing in their chairs. one gorgeous blond with a gaudy ring. i have a walmart ring. cirrus logic shakes your riff to its soul. shakes on a plane. i envision turbulence in murder sense is an everyday chevrolet. chrome-letting the birthing stock, a chromlette running through the dyke hole. she's got a candy cunt, comes in handy, merlot flows from her nipples. why am i always tortured with beautiful people in my peripherals?

plains refrain, a gorgeous day in a gleemonex way. it's michael's shore, with a sheep and a fox. all the law we know. the gurgling chud language is faint now, indistinguishable from white noise. non-insistent itches felt from here and there. the brazen nihilism of the opiate is fading, but what is in its place, i'm not sure. maybe a purple-veined dick joke. maybe cheney's got a gun.

the codeine-induced hypnogogic images were surprisingly vivid, exotic, and quirky, and no thc was involved. just reverie, the raw material of the mind, intersecting muddy folds of the cortex.

unprecedented levels of habit - the ironic novelty of it! what do we do? there are no historical analogs for this depth of modern exhaustion!

dayum ~!

Scuzzy but lovable spot

i'm sitting on the scuzzy but lovable spot, fretting over the "wrongness" of writing in this notebook at this time and place. what if it's not wrong, but the rightest thing there could be? what if it's right and true? what then?

i didn't know it was the scuzzy but lovable spot when i wandered over and decided it was an adequate place to sit down, to stop the random walk and freeze my thoughts in cubes. i needed to clear my head. the house had become a concrescence for inebriation-exacerbated emotion-driven delusion. stoned, drunk paranoid, arrogant, everything i do is wrong, everything i do is right.

so i'm writing what is wrong, right here, right now, on this scuzzy but lovable curve, grass-clotted bank, gravel-strewn curb, rounded sidewalk edge.

what is wrong at 4 am?

what justifies paranoia at 4 am?

navel grants the right of gazing. gazeright. the rite of gaze. tremulant paranoid associations pile up on this curb, nexus of two of town's siren-haunted highways, ambulance, fire, and police routes.

and i notice, in the dark night, in the cool breeze, in the basic warmth the atmosphere has trapped at this exotic latitude, on the plains, in a small american town, near the house i'm renting with my girlfriend, that i'm in the sweet spot of the circadian cycle, on this scuzzy curb, at 4 am. the rite of spring is cool like the breeze, and cool like jazz, and cool like the vast intergalactic intelligence which happens to catch this moment in nano-intersection during an icy ocular sweep. the temperature is perfect and i feel more comfort than i've dreamed possible since resigning myself to living, barely, in a chronically flawed and deteriorating body, in a necessarily savage society, being nice in a way that is, at its core, selfish tweaking of the endorphins that fire in response to acts i perceive as altruistic, aren't i nice? yes, nice, in the way nature selected, in the behavior algorithm proved to enhance survivability by genes of eons past, not necessarily in conjunction with this hyper-morphing tech-fueled clusterfuck, but in the grander evolutionary sense, the game of trial and error and error and error and error, the madness of the monkey's interval, his time in the sun, her time in the sun, when women aren't human but something better, if the dominance hierarchy disgusts you.

but this scuzzy curb somehow makes everything right for the moment, like a rite for the moment, a sacred write, and it's okay right now, but how long will now last?

cartoons squeeze through the mesh of a suddenly shut lucidity trap. filter.

lights change, magic fades. there is perception of hallucination. i'm seeing the sawteeth of death-dealing dynamics, kinetics of the moment, in bondage to the state.

remembering it's never too late for a change. classical raggae.

but the stubborn facts of gravity from the ages, circa copernicus, creep out of the woodwork. i find them engraved on the concrete tiles of city sidewalks, how did i miss them before? am i allowed to sit on the scuzzy spot and write this in a notebook? surely the city planners didn't intend that, surely that doesn't fit into the plan, surely not now, or ever. surely it's wrong, and surely i'm not the one to be that necessary paisley comma now, or ever. surely. surely the scuzzy but lovable spot is someone else's territory, at 4 am, illicit circadian territory, a state boundary that could kill you dead, for real, for ever and ever and ever, amen.

looking for leprechauns is a tiring pursuit. it wears at you. you wear your soul on your sleeve, and it wears the sleeve out. so you say fuck it and try to find werewolves. it's eternally justified, a rainbowpin to a honkey. thumps of heavy automotive machinery, a rickety u-haul attachment. walking back, i deem my head clear enough, enough to head back into the concrescence of familiar insanity. back to the house. mutual intoxication was proving more than i could deal with, malevolence and benevolence perceived in different ways, in different places, in conflicting superposition, a yin-yang engineered for symbiotic discord.

sometimes problems can be solved by sobriety. sometimes problems can be solved by getting fucked up. states change. that's what that recess acid trip taught me. the gravel turned to liquid. melting is a cliche when it's a word, but when it's the phasing of every photon into a state of mind-controlled malleability, it's authentic "outside the field" originality, the possibility of penicillin and paradigm shift, even if the reins are out of the child's hands, never giving a thought to the rocket-ride, the elasticity of unlearned, unschooled juvenihilism, the sacred damnation of extreme innocence, momentum of the unconscious, archetypes fragmented into falling tetris blocks, shards i drop with energy warrior efficiency into perfect stalactite placement on the commodore. they're calling it retro, but it post-dates jung by decades.

Last Fit of Ecstasy (new song)

My best work yet, I think, in terms of both recording and composition. Written for performance, tweaked for computer generated audio. I had help on the lyrics from meth and raz.
Last Fit of Ecstasy

dead kitten, dead friend, dead poet, dead end
empty bottle, empty flask, empty house, shattered glass
blank stares, empty pool, scavengers from high school
broken necklace, broken bones, broken body in the snow

i haven't felt right since my last fit of ecstasy
i haven't felt right since he put his hands on me
i haven't felt right since the coke binge mentality
violated virgin brain chemistry

i haven't felt right since a lot of things
i haven't felt right since a lot of things
i haven't felt right since a lot of things
i haven't felt right since a lot of things
i haven't felt right since a lot of things
i haven't felt right since a lot of things
i haven't felt right since i lost mckenna's light

novelty novelty, where the fuck is novelty?
novelty novelty, where the hell is DMT?

is this my new paradigm?
is this a solid state of mind?
life's apotheosis - dread grimace
could my face be frozen like this?

can’t say how much i spent last night
since i came back, i haven’t felt right
life's apotheosis - dread grimace
could my face be frozen like this?

so the tension prickles up the spine of your lazyboy lounge chair
so the tension prickles up the spine of your lazyboy lounge chair
so you see through the sun in its gamma ray glare
so you feel that awareness is too much to bear
so you've decided to google "panic"
decided to google "panic"
decided to google "panic", panic

if you could only
appreciate this opportunity
if you could only be lucid
in the nightmare of history
the advantage is there
if you just have the strength
but you’ve decided to google "panic"
decided to google "panic"
decided to google "panic", panic

i should recognize this feeling as
psychosomatic transience
ride the long synaptic gap to the next meaning, feeling
once desired utopias spoiled like movies, cause

i haven't felt right since they told me the end
i haven't felt right since they graphed the trend
i haven't felt right since they told me the end
i haven't felt right since they graphed the trend

no matter how long it takes, i’m gonna take the scenic gurney
i haven’t felt right since i hit the shaman’s height

at least i have my health
a strange sort of health, i'll grant
if i had to say the alphabet backwards, i could

i know i’ve burned through a lot of things
i know i’ve burned through a lot of things
by now i’ve burned through a lot of things
but there’s still incineration to come

it's barely hallucinogenic, a glorified retinal grain
what you see after boggling for days on some dirty methamfretamine
fret fret fret

maybe this is how cancer starts
maybe it's how william burroughs starts
one thing i know, i need to keep dreaming

i haven’t felt right since a lot of things
i haven’t felt right since a lot of things
no no
no, no, no

Why did they care who was at the back of the bus?

We're all poor losers anyway.
What does it matter what our skin color is?
Is it really necessary to segregate the lower class?
Sounds redundant to me.
Then again, maybe it's vital.
Keeps up appearances.
His theoretical waspy solidarity with your cracker bus-riding ass:
Sure, I wouldn't piss on your head if your hair was on fire...
but I'm of your race, we're racial buddies, doesn't that make you feel special?
You get to sit at the front of the shitmobile
with the other fecal princes of turdtown
revel in your pigmented superiority!

Rank Blank

it turns a pacifist into a warrior, that is, a bully in the pecking order. to be ranked is to want to push around someone lower, or something, if you don’t have that bloodlust. maybe you can claim superiority in an evolutionary cul-de-sac. the kind of thing the void would appreciate, son of celesta. stay frosty, stay crystalline, keep your predictable hexagonal sheen.

slimy context fills in, sad canisters, phallic cylinders. hey. you think those hand spasms are funny? cause they’re not. not from here. not inside this capsule. indigestible.

i don’t see anything when i close my eyes, it’s infuriating, it’s like i’m blind inside. lost the rhombus in caesarian sediment and mahler symphonies i don’t listen to anymore.

dinner invitation, divination celebration of this first person divinity, right here, you’re all invited to partake in my sacredity, how lovely, don’t you agree? the cachet of the negative rank, except he’s still playing, isn’t he, so how could he attain that without the game genie? it seems like i only really live when i’m asleep.

can’t write the great prose. this day is a write off. got a few laughs though. action hotdog go! a lot of aches. no reason my back should hurt. i was supposed to exercise but i didn’t. a long sickly rut. still nauseas. still lulling. arrogant guilt with a little self-disgust. and disgust with everything. even though there are good things. dez is good. and my mom’s almond cookies. and the skootching supercomputer. but it all feels so fucked up. a lazy way to label it. labeling is lazy anyway. but less lazy than doing nothing i guess. except in my case, doing nothing as opposed to continuing to type would take effort. a ramble worthy of jandek. dark career of the soul. i can see his appeal. can sort of hear it, distant strains over the hills, not that strainy, sort of lazy. i should track my own guitar. write around an instrument i can barely play. piano is weighing me down. there are other options. there’s the tar pet trap.

i think my headphone cord is trying to hump my arm. it feels like a fondle. it feels good actually. sensuous.

i’m so sick of this window. addicted to the internet, addicted to my computer, usually unexamined. i want to shut this window, but then i’d be even lonelier than i am. for a while, but maybe soon after i’d discover some inner light. i want to take stone shelter on the rain drenched plains, and write songs the easy way, sing and play. or maybe i just want to want. there’s a chorus. when i wear my wet funboots, i want to want. leads to this arch and aching magnetic re-arrangement. don’t speak of words. spirituality ate itself. yeah well, it’s harder to find the sacred things now. but they do still turn up. one day they may turn up in my guts as intestinal parasites.

i think i need a glass of wine. i’m tempted to take a xanie. quite tempted. but i should save those for easing my interactions with people in situations where my hangups would prohibit me from getting work, even though that seems next to impossible anyway, unless nepotism comes to the rescue, like it did the only time i ever got steady employment.

anyway, i’m going to connect back to my ancient roman roots, and drink wine. let the id out a little. you’ll barely notice it. this white wine is tastier than i expected. it’s too bad it flips the switch so blatantly. closes off pre-intoxicated methods of appreciating life – from the first taste. i wish i got the exaggerated sense of verbal facility some claim. no, cannabis is the drug that makes me think i’m brilliant. and tryptamines are what make me think i’m sacred. and when i’m sober, i think i’m a snowflake.

i want to be softer now, short of liquid. the phase variance. four tet is good music. at this point. it’s finding combinations of sounds that haven’t traditionally pleased the auditory receptor systems. i don’t know what the method is. i can see my future loutish self flanged on a squeaky hinge. doesn’t look so good, but it never did. i’ll put on some shades, smudge the plastic glass with snot, obscure, cloud, blink, strobe, simulate epilepsy. maybe this is a nyquil night. maybe even a flexeril week.

i wish i could do my dreams justice in writing, but if i could do that, i’d know what those agents of the nightmare thrills were for. and that would be ridiculous, this side of the gnostic divide. i’ll just be happy with the stocking stuffers mckenna left me before he went up the chimney. a deck of cards, a fairyland sutra assortment. there aren’t many gaps in my set. i enjoyed bootlegs and trading days, it was my grateful dead tour.

fence-sleeper wants to have it both ways, life and death. semi-consciousness. a fetish of the pale, albino lust. go to the mountain where those people are. the mountain that does not exist. bring your ikea staff. the ball’s in your court. jacks, marbles, crypticity. it’s a soup you drink at the homeless shelter. it’s a romance. a hoodie, it was made in china in 2005, but it’s timeless. boxie could break it down for you. frederick abberline would recognize the taste.

am i going to get drunk, sleep, or watch a movie? i’m not in a fugue state, otherwise i’d do all three at once. a complimentary combination, it’s not unheard of. the window is flickering magic like a near-dead neon sign. maze walls narrowing, the day’s cheese long gone, new brain lobes cut away every day without notice, click click click, nothing new. run the circuit again, report at this juncture, a hallucination worth transcribing. was that a rubber duckie? not exactly.

i tried to play with a doll i drew, today, but i didn’t get very far. she looked like she knew all kinds of crazy games, but i didn’t know the rules. couldn’t make any. it was during the time i felt like smashing things, but instead i tried to command contours. it went better than i expected, but of course, short of redemption. still, i thought of draping her in paisley. it would be pornographic, but artistic. who said it had to be sacred?

jehovah’s witness temple stubbornly stands, near the graveyard. that’s too much spookiness for one neighborhood, it’s gotta violate some zoning law. nobody understands how the faith healer stays minted. or how she writes nursery rhymes for adults. it seems easy. but the only one you ever met who could do it… burned in and out of town, fucking everything that moved. barely seems real anymore, even though there are recordings. you haven’t listened to them in years. but you do sing your recollections of them when you’re really hammered.

remember the hand-drawn laminated map of annexia? best let the gibberish hang from a meat-hook, swaying provocatively, there is a vast intelligence at work, you just can’t see, but maybe you can feel, that little quirk in your personality, that crick in your neck, i will suggest, is tangentially related.

Willy Nilly

consumer fraud is getting as sophisticated as purveyor fraud? that's why i won't start a business. no patron gods for me. they killed each other on mt. olympus.

overzealous gag reflex won't retire, remaining obstinate in extra innings, bringing every cough to the point of retch. a toxic mix of coffee, goldenseal, and greasy fries. the incidents of hanging out. i'll do a cost benefit analysis later. or never. shred the files, or lose them in a mound of paper, or plain information.

the day jerks on. i see sparks of life in people, like perversely animate electronic humanoid toys. sorry to lay my diseased trip on you, it's just that this is what happens when your cachet runs out and you didn't realize it was prescription, a finite script, and no refills, and the search for life becomes a gutter dive, maybe that show tonight could contrive some situation i've been craving, something to fill the void.

biting my finger fills the void, it feels good, just a comfy bite, a friendly bite, separating myself into parts to be bitten. let's say this is spare decadence, presided over by a queasy reflex system warning me if i go too far with the self-regarding sickness, i will get a taste of the real wretched thing. pointless blunt first person fabrege interior smells like pharmasave, reasonable grace, how sweet the sound, how ambling the ambiance, rods and cones still detecting some movement. island in the aisles, i'm tempted to fake a seizure, i think it would trigger a real one, get some attention, i'd wake up in a hospital bed on a drip, and there would begin a bedridden adventure.

trapped house boy, lineage of gaulish wastrels completed by middling limey scholars, i'd like to mix it up with a guilt-drunk heartland pseudo-slut, sociology slur, looking around the room, stinking with ocular residue, puddles of ionized photons, a syrupy churn obscuring millions of options, listening to speakers at new age events talk about personal transformation, what a great idea. we must be purpose-less-ness-less.

yeah, i came back to waste away, it is okay to say? made sufficient overtures and efforts to arrive back, slack, let the spine curve, slump in discouraged non serviam because they don't want me, they'd rather have honest crooks stock the shelves, no one can see or define but i'm carrying around the curse i magnify in dawning awareness, it sinks in, the apollo-singed skin, while schizo plays playboy unknowingly, i scowl at the bearing of a better life than me, it's so obvious how everyone's above me in every category, envy corrodes possibility.

mashing up the air with my teeth, clenching, was paranoid enough to get a hair cut, foolish sellout fucker, now no job and no hair, funny, i guess i've got some sort of roman look now, i should find a brave centurion to squire, put me on the right humble path.

it's been more than a month since you've seen me, this patchwork of love and apathy, i've said shameful disloyal things but i usually feel little, even though i put my ring back on, like a talisman, apathy as retaliation, maybe a lull in co-dependency, funny, a lopside shifts the relationship, ballast and bombast pumps needy in me, still sloshing around, can't bail it out, don't want to bail out.

she learned a thousand new words for melancholy, apparently that is the swell in my malaisey vocabulary, but it feels good to ride on rhymes, a jaunty flaunt of virtuosity, too bad my hands will always be too clumsy, manual dexterity a skill i could apply if you would give me a crack at your pussy, they said it's not for me, but i demand to differ, sometimes i love to please at the other end of the charcoal filter, i'm a slave 4 u, slave with a six figure salary, indentured victor of the new economy, a spoiled spoil of the class war, discovered by a talent agency, appropriately appropriated to the southern front, with a catheter on my dingle dangle, willy nilly, vital signs stable, would be uncouth to freak out, i know, i know, it's like a guiding principle, a foundation of the new republic, i would never betray the marble ethos of deus excrementus, even if it meant keeping the war going, it's just another adorable epileptic fit after twenty stab wounds, in minute seven of the three hour death scene, most of which was redundant and unregarded.

jesus, this is getting gross and weird. well sorry, i'm just bored, oh good lord am i bored, and energetic, channeling petty devils, penned up in a picket fence perimeter for the entertainment of the earl of cul-de-sac. maybe this foolishness has shamed me into praying to the body temple, that's purpose, getting on the exercise bike, trying to defy the gravity of atrophy, just remember the dynamics of the pain/gain ratio, another tailspin, duck tales, chicken-fried goat scrotum for the young master, chest cavity filled with elf-paste, enchanted shoes, nutty bunnies, cloven-hoofed outlaw polish, wanted on seven star systems, i'll be careful. okay. sufficient. really. i can go now. now. slipstream 5000, a cgi slider.

Doxylamine

doxylamine, personified potentate of succinate, tells me the only way i can write is if i stop caring. okay buddy, whatever you say. there's sufficient holes in these third hand pants to welcome apathy with an open crotch. they're nice pants, just full of holes. like the theory of attraction. i hate that theory. it's not attractive to me. there's something fundamentally ridiculous about everybody thinking they can be elite. that's why i listen to the succinate. he makes sense to me.

whispers, vespers, it's thrice synthetic, a strategy octavian could not make sense of. i've got the karma of a clobbered peasant, the genes of an aristocrat scribe, and the providence of an industry lieutenant who burned his cachet to light a cigar. it tasted good, rich tobacco flavour. now i'm coating my sores with menthol. diurnal combustion. am i sufficiently succinated to write this? never got to the ivy extract, let alone stodal, but i'm jonseying for seconal and thinking about barbital, somehow one hundred and fifty capsules, a real splurge, a real falloff a tree, maybe it could dilate past the predicted lids, into an urn, meeting adjourned, adjunct to the function of spurned converse affected schizo rosetta moss.

looks like i've not even made it to act ii of the morality play, haven't been presented with the metal edges to grate off feelings, still learning slow lessons, osmosis blockhead bruisers. the succinate tells me in this situation i go to cottonwood, like it's a quest, absorb some waterfall spray, close my eyes like they do in the first person profundis, forget the latin antecedents, slave to the web of associations, the malfunctioning fan rattles on the runon, yes, the intended effect affects all schizophrenic observers, a screaming head cut off the ephedra remains pilloried in a stock rut, trading day long done, in fact it's a shift that drags all seasons with it, a succinate slur, it's a doxymoron, supports all hypocrisy, enables all we've felt, parlez-vous?

must... finish... prayer... not that jupiter cares. oh snap, particulate shiver, translation with the scratch of a yellow pushpin, muscle memory converts flat surface to a series of scribblings en francais, it's modern magic, the aggregate of which is a bored and melancholic mind, consumed, possessed with petty ness, sick ness, ugly ness, a new shamanic gestalt of cold medication and fevered contemplation, a cool burst sensation as advertised.

it still isn't good enough, getting exponentially inadequate, errant syntax swimming in the grout of god's grimace, forming the edifice of a smile, what succinate likes to see in sicklight, not dead yet, cloned pheromones used to maneuver a picture-perfect painter into joining the "war to end all wars"... so divorced from any historical reality, twisted, looking at my sockets, caged-write, unable to define. let's call it tribute to apollo. if cachet is ashed. couldn't hurt.

y men

what do you do with a piano? i guess you lead a band of mutants with your wolverine claws, unholy levels of keyboard amp, unheard of mix becomes the force-fed aesthetic of the future. legionnaire holds back guitar to an edged crunch to flank the enemies of progress. if i must do something new, i’ll accept artistic martyrdom, stay unschooled in the rules that must be broken for novelty’s sake, for the style of statements and soundtracks decades ahead, in times that are unimaginable but will end up being clever re-configurations of the near-capacity trans-cultural database accelerated with quantum computation.

stymied flow, forced into a low-scoring scrabble play because the invisible clock is ticking. libidinal landslide crushes local village.

x men are pre-millennium. y men are the future. so can they be expected to take care of their own? throw me a bone?

x men are in league with traditionalists, the lineage. the slots are opening up, enough to spread the word through the well-networked middle class, there are places, finally, in the order. so they’re starting to see the functions of the old gods. starting to reconcile with lobbyists for israel. ah i see, the homeland, yes. and what can you do about those muslims? that situation is synergistic with arms manufacturers, a self-perpetuating suicide harvest, life-affirming death. of course, being as sophisticated as this age will allow, i’m terribly ashamed for appearing condescending to any culture.

y men and women enjoy the irony of the futant ideal and reality, ideality, a charmed alphabet soup. we brought back charm. we let the institutions and buildings crumble, lent a few tribes for the sacking of new york and the overrunning of los angeles. we built the new charms with occasional reference to the old charms. an economy of luck, an age of superstition. reason is sisyphean, fuck that. pantera-riff party on second censomensus beach: “we are the new breed” in dicacphlegm grunt, strummed with the pick of destiny.

sarcastic throng worships the empty casket of timothy leary. if it doesn’t make me laugh, it’s worthless, which is why we cluster together, the humour is shared, we’ll bore it into the skull if we have to, silence brings seriousness, we put the serious heads in the stocks. even the boardwalks rot, we camped in swamps underneath, stole fire from the x men cancer survivors, indistinguishable from magic, fashioned cobalt 60 rayguns with sound effects, flash physics funkmeisters with double-edged swords, the priests of wargames, stun guns, evolved tazers, got the occasional scalp of an other but usually chain-whipped a neighbor, she likes it really, she’ll agree with a jagged-toothed smile, emotionally ambiguous, served slightly chilled with a vintage cartoon reference.

stymied flow for slow centuries, something breaks, stomach wall bursts, he patches it up with synthetic intestine, nanoplastic parasites invade the digestive tract, spread to the brain. eventually, through tendon-snapping acrobatics of self-analysis, he creates a schism in the brain, separates himself from the parasites, learns to communicate with them, makes an alliance. what can you accomplish with the aid of tiny plastic parasites?

“it’s something. it’s an accomplishment,” she says. he made it to the grocery store. made it to the second floor.

in a stock contest, medium-sized mr. nichols would be crushed by the plentiful entrants, atavistic bulkheads, load bearing spinal columns. but he is the type to dwarf the drones at nelson safeway. transferred, he’s got a mercenary tie, striped to signal he is a company man. benefits. presiding over this slice of my future. i don’t realize but i didn’t fulfill my quota of eye contact. plus something signaled i was doped up. orange alert. eyes shifted the message. not enough neurons for the task. benzos are my achiles’ heal.

i skipped my high school aptitude test. it would have said that at this point in my life, i should be smashing equipment into amps while dodging flying liquor bottles. i missed the boat on that. acid did find me, but i found it too slick a bunnyhole, too quick to insanity, or whatever passes for that in this pastiche. so i went and saw mr. nichols.

managed to freak him out with my plastic parasites. didn’t even know i’d done it. stealth. it’s an aquarian conspiracy!

enter audiobook osmosis man. his superpower is deriving deep wisdom from recorded lectures and audiobooks, avoiding the need to actually read anything. he is also the greatest tetris player in the world. he has the second through seventh sight. he has discovered the elusive fourth preview block. he plays tetris while listening to howard zinn, joseph campbell, and rupert sheldrake. he is a connoisseur of sleep and sooth. he lives between ideas and sleep. the seesaw between them is his passion, practice forever on the horizon, something to consider.

pipe cults are the best hope for the kappa opioid receptor protagonist. a developing story. they think they can abolish economy, replace it with chlorophyll. i’m listening. every cult has got an anti-depressant. i ran out of anti-drugs.

found a sound. castanet-core. i was used to a grind, a coffee grind. the castanet carried me a few blocks anyway. to the dregs of the parade, incidentally, a bus station. i followed the signs home.

There’s guys on the line who would eat you alive

Got no one to talk to, so I’m venting online.

So, I really tried to hustle this week. Applied to five places. Even with the xanax it was hard, but I did it. So far, not one place has called back, except the kalesnikoff lumber yard. So, battling the nastiest flu I've had in years, popping reactin and drixoral after a sleepless night, I drove forty minutes to the lumber mill. I was excited... they were desperate for workers, surely I could get hired there. It was a physical job, but I was gung-ho about that, I wouldn't mind the exercise. I was willing to work hard, even through the illness. Manual labour is what I wanted. Something mindless. But it turns out I’m not a human resource. Or even scrap material.

Upon arrival I was subjected to a degrading and demoralizing interview that quickly assured me coming there was a complete waste of time. The HR guy didn’t outright say he wouldn’t hire me, but he was discouraging and skeptical from beginning to end. The vibe was perpetually: "what the fuck are you doing here?" He kept talking about “our world”. He said he thought I probably wouldn't last a day, there'd be no point putting me to work if the foreman was gonna take me off the line after an hour (so now it's an hour I won't last?), that I'd get "eaten alive". I asked him what he meant by that, and he responded indirectly with statements about how many pounds of timber were loaded off the trucks daily, like I was supposed to do the arithmetic on the spot with divisors I hadn’t access to.

At that point, I was ready to give up, but I tried to make a case for myself, said I was willing to work hard, obviously I wasn’t a burly guy but I’d like to try, maybe I could at least do the part-time light-weight jobs they’d advertised. Still I got the same vibe, and accusations of being lethargic. I told him I was on no sleep (but declined to mention my flu, god forbid he’d think I wasn’t in perfect health). Didn’t seem to help much. I guess I should have shot up with methamphetamine before driving to the mill. Finally I told him that I guess I’d wasted my time. He agreed, and I left. I probably wouldn’t last a day in a nazi concentration camp either.

This is me in the "good" economy. I'm the most unemployable person on the planet. Clean record and proven responsibility count for shit, I'll always be a dodgy dirtbag. Even when I get through the gate, when someone actually considers me, they’ll take one look at me and their prejudice churns to the surface.

Maybe I'll get some of that EI money. I don't feel so bad taking money from the government anymore. And music. That's the only thing I can see myself doing professionally anymore, however ephemeral the rock-star ideal is. If I can practice to my satisfaction every day (something I've never been able to drive myself to do), then I can feel good about myself and fuck everyone else who has an idea what I ought to be doing.

Why do work issues cause me so much anxiety? Because my perception is always focused on the big picture – my place in society - the feeling that I ought to be doing something of value, society’s narrow definition of “value”, and the conflict between my abilities and anyone’s needs. I can’t be an arrogant artist type either, though I tried in my last paragraph. I have this crazy idea that I would find purpose in helping solve the peak oil crises, by working in research on alternative fuels, but then I’ll have to go to school and get an engineering degree or something, and I suck at math.

I know, I’m being whiny. But it’s fucking discouraging, when you overcome your fears and negativity and try for something and it comes to nothing. And it feels good to write about this stuff, it relieves pressure. Maybe I’m trying to reverse jinx this whole situation by talking about it, so I end up looking like an asshole when I actually DO get a job shortly after typing this self-pitying screed, according to the rules of life’s irony. But since I talked about THAT I have to jinx THAT. Gotta triple jinx, or quadruple jinx? I can’t remember. Ah, fuck it.

overheard:

“the economy is okay!”

the bus driver, happily supplying that bit of conventional wisdom, as a punchline, to the other happy selkirk girl, paying her bus fare

i think: “haha… you think so, you chipper asshole?”

though i guess it is – that’s the conventional wisdom anyway, and okay, maybe it is, how the fuck should i know? i just know i’m out of work, and i’m really really bad at finding work. really really bad. really fucking bad… i just haven’t a clue – well i do have a clue, but that’s the torture of the situation. that’s why i’m hoping valium will save me – or whatever the crazies are doing these days, to quell

saw glenduh on open stage – he can play a guitar – and sing
he’s all high on nelson – being back in nelson – the nelson euphoria
i couldn’t really feel the nelson euphoria myself, because it was winter
and i was supposed to be gone
and i still wish i was gone, back in kansas
where i actually sort of had a life
and desiree

talked to him after – the whole exchange was pretty predictable
i’m actually somewhat amazed he remembered me – he remembered one or two things anyway
gave me the same rap – i nodded with a sarcastic smile he didn’t notice
sure sure, i’ll play keyboard for you, whatever, yeah, i’ll be dedicated
but now i’m more jaded i guess, in the grand schizo style
that was a reference to the planet x asshole, if you didn’t get it

maybe planet x will require an explanation at a later date
but if so, i don’t care, i’ll let it be a mystery
if i ever get to that level of alzheimers
i’ll be proud
at the lack of memory

i’m drunk and anaesthetized – this is the good part of being drunk
although emotionally, right now, i still have serious fucking issues
i can’t be happy by myself tonight – i think i should be with someone
too drunk, too flaccid, not that that would really fill the void anyway

things changed
or maybe i changed
or both, i dunno

i don’t have as much fun anymore – it seems to me, other people are the problem
i want to have fun, but the fun people aren’t there for me anymore, to aid me in my fun having schemes – i can’t go to the bar by myself and somehow engineer some fun-having situation from scratch like fucking macguiver – if i have people with me, it’s totally different – but i’m solo these days... i can’t blame my sick and tired friend i guess, she's sick and tired according to her… and i guess i can sort of understand that

but i can blame planet x, even if he’s a nutcase

at least i think maybe i can blame him – and i do, anyway – because i’m so fucking angry at what he did… okay, so he’s a nutcase, he lives a hellish schizo life, i guess the medication doesn’t work… even though it seems to work pretty well for meth, but he’s a different person – or maybe it is personal – although that’s pretty crazy, but crazy things are true, according to neils bohr

i don’t really feel like censoring myself – what the fuck, it’s just expression, it might violate the delicate terms of my state boundaries but fuck those things… is it uncouth? fuck it – this is my blog – i’m changing its name to uncouth – this is why i don’t give my parents the link – because they’re not the kind of people i can get blotto with and unload all my anxieties on, in the grand schizo tradition

i never imagined i’d have access to this kind of technology, when i was a kid, looking at astronomy books, pondering the plasma cores of stars – mckenna said it was like descartes’ angel – all the information you want – i guess what the modern psychology has revealed is that any potential heaven is easily and naturally subverted by the mind and its fickle structure… minds are just minds – not amazing cosmic eternally enduring transcendent things… but rather, whiny reptilian highly-nuanced cores of chemicals – neurons are amazing things, and their networks, all the more amazing, but still… still… the human mind is the closest thing to the universe… next to the universe – but godhood is a wearing, wearying pastime.

Is that a state-bounded thought? I could change my mood instantly if i had certain chemicals. If I had MDMA, I could rocket up to a four hour euphoria, where everything’s really okay and wonderful, why don’t I realize that all the time? It’s the magic window. And then I’d come down, and do double triple quadruple penance for my state-bounded naiveté, the emotional dregs of self-flagellation in abysmal serotonin deficit. If I had cocaine, I’d realize it’s rocket fuel for jackass post-Freudians, but still, it has a glamour, to me at least, because it’s still rather new, and rather Columbian, i don’t know where it comes from – but it’s a short hourglass – but it doesn’t lie as egregiously as ecstasy.

At issue is the popularly implied analogy between the computer's ability to store data and the human memory and logical procedures and human reasoning, an analogy that influences cult members to conclude that a computer's ability corresponds to human thinking.

I do have very powerful psychedelics still, in my drawer, but no real desire to do them. Tryptamine ecstasy sounds nice in theory – but it takes a certain commitment, and insanity, to want to go there, and I guess I sort of satisfied my curiosity, even though I know I could always go so much farther, if I had the will…

The human mind, for Roszak, is as much a miracle as any religious tenet and the pursuit of philosophy. Given the glory of the human mind, Roszak is not about to reduce or subject it to a reductionism implied by semiconductors in metal boxes. In the final analysis, the computer should be seen for what it is -- "a valuable public servant"

So now what? What do I write about now? Oh, I’m sure something will come to me.

Selkirk Sutra

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~ the great galactic information stream ~

as a reward:

the spongy spine of sainthood ($3,172 cash value)

*

remember those innocent times when you’d drink just to stay alive? drink in theory, not necessarily reality, millions of pressure-cooked words on hypothetical intoxication… now the intoxication is in my coat pocket. it’s real and more powerful than words, a bottle of jagermeisster, i think i’ll need it to get through this job fare. fair?

i’m back at the college, holed up in the library without the guilt-blanketing quilt of drudgery, because this is a one-time thing. so i’d better do something, but i thought i should rest, and eat, and take a drink first, in my own horribly nostalgic library hole, where years ago i would sleep with my head on the cubicle desk, and wake up and write, and rub at acne sores, anything to avoid study.

a lot has happened since, and i have little use for the words i wrote then. but i guess they’re not totally worthless, they did a good job of documenting my delusions, and being back here makes me realize how close to the surface the paranoia always is, and how i could latch onto those old things in a heartbeat, with the right triggers.

i grabbed a norman mailer book off the shelf so it would look like i was involved in a book and not this lunacy. “the naked and the dead”.

*

too many people at this damned job fair. throngs, balloons. and the whole venue perversely reminds me of the quantum experiment, where i went on a rampage with materializing handguns, for no good reason, jesus. i’m scared to go back there. maybe i should drink some jager first. i’m sure it can be arranged.

*

back here amid college kids, college grown-ups, all seeming so committed, putting my glorious slack into clenched contrast. i remember how i could escape into discordian philosophy and the church of bob when a simple statement of “spoon!” could be the funniest thing i’ve ever read, lack of context being the root of hilarity. it was the duress that could wring from me hysterical laughter, the most brash hack-and-slash route to escaping the vines of confining society. the driver complex. for a fantasy video card. still never rendered my pyramids, except for a month-long love affair with vistapro 3.0. it’s not what the pros use. but i should have got into that line, 3d rendering, i had a passion for it once. it almost seemed purposeful, to advance the cause of virtual reality technology, in my own small way. i should be rendering buildings for grand theft auto games, with auto-collapsible wire frame skeletons, in polygons. and i could do my own texture mapping, cause i have aesthetic sensibilities to go with the technical ones. yeah, but i don’t think they have that booth at the job fair.

ran into chera in the library. i heard “hey john”, turned around and she was standing up from her study table with that beatific smile of hers and saying hi. is she one of those naturally serotonin rich people? oh jesus, why must i ruin everything with chemical analysis? it was nice, she is so warm. introduced herself to me, as is her habit, since i always seem so lost and confused when she greets me. i got a hug before i left, she told me to call sometime. then i drew rainbows, squiggles, overlapping perpendicular waveforms, noodles in a cup, and a bomb blasting celestial profusion in a symmetrical arc.

*

emotions will be the death of me. i’m wondering if i should send that letter. i’m not on anything, so it’s not a state bounded issue. it’s fairly normal, just slightly friendly, but i’m wondering whether i’ll regret it later, like that phone call. i got another complex to add to the catalog: something about unrequited social initiative. i know how insane it all is.

*

mother’s little helper.

tobias’ little fantasy

overcompensation

so the crowds thinned enough for me to poke my head down to the job fair. all the scary high school kids, glazed with malevolent innocence, left on their busses. it’s a little more cozy. i walk up to the pacific insight booth. three young healthy happy looking people – two girls and a guy. beautiful people, but i feel weird approaching. they don’t exactly look like they’re waiting for anybody, nah, they’re too cool for that, they’re pacific insight, they’ve got benefits, the benefit of the doubt, that i’m worthy.

still, i break the silence and one of the beautiful people looks up from her laptop.

“so, i’m just wondering, how do i get hired at pacific insight?” i say the company name, rather than “here”, or “with you guys”, because i’d rather sound like a clunky android than be presumptuous. they take my droid statement literally, and talk to me about resumes and online applications. i say no, i mean what skills are you looking for?

ah, at last, cracking the shell of that cryptic corporate distance – they say experience in manufacturing, and team work. okay, solid information, finally. solid enough to know i have no shot unless i get experience working at the factory that won’t hire me unless i have experience, the great tautological circle of the unemployable.

so i decide i’ve done enough, head outside for another drink of jager, thinking about getting a degree in electrical engineering or some crazy thing like that, so i can join the elite club, those beautiful spokespeople behind laptops, a job, what every good serf wants.

outside, freezing, i find a filthy alcove under concrete stairs, dead leaves, bleached trash, overflowing butt can, structurally unsound chairs that are classroom outcasts. i wonder if i can drink here, the parking lot is close by… oh hell, it’s february, i could smoke crack under here and no one would notice.

okay, that’s enough herb liquor. the bottle barely fits back in my coat pocket.

*

back to the library, waiting for 4:00. i pick up a michael parenti book from the ‘60s – he notes that while america is going nuts worrying about how communism is going to take over the world, anti-communism already has. then he goes on to describe this unrecognized ideology. i’m finding reading easier than usual, after a few drinks. it allows me to be swept up in the words and not get hung up on semantics. it keeps me from feeling the need to question the precise intent of the author all the time, and what everything ought to mean. but of course, my critical facilities are blunted as a result of this. still, with less hang ups, i take in more information.

*

val’s back on the bus. i ran into her at the stop on my way here. our eyes met, then i said hi, which seemed to relieve her, seemed she wanted to talk. a rare case where my initiative paid off, we had a good chat. seems she’s studying to teach english in china. one of those. she’s the same, enjoyable.

back to nelson we go. i’ve filled a few pores in my brain with herb liquor. it does take the edge off a bit. maybe if i get that valium script i’m hoping to score from the good doc, i can take a pill and a shot and function in society. in these strained, unstructured times, my maladaptive neuroses regain control. it’s ridiculous, i should just get on with my life. but it’s february, and things seem really bleak, so can i just chalk it up to lack of sunlight and wait for the miracle? shift the burden to my future self? i had to leave my jager with the bus driver. better remember to get it back. it’s a charmed beverage, one of those things you leave in the woods as an offering to yetis.

*

stare down the sniper’s gun

maybe this time, hope a flower barrels out of the maw

the Chris Driver complex

They call it the Chris Driver complex. It returns to you in post-apocalyptic psychology, after your religion and ideals have been ground to dust good and proper, to pave the way for the propriety of a blank buzzing confusion. The confusion was blooming in William James’ day, when the dentist was enlightening, but now the blooms are wilted, expired hallucinations when you did acid and tetris and things made a good deal more sense, like you were practically the protagonist in a Faust adaptation, player one, charmed, the magnetism of the brash and stupid child, wearing trite splendor like an old hat, cocked like clockwork. That punk never needed the Chris Driver complex, but you do, when your charm wears off with the weight of ecstasy’s chemical windowsill above you, and you lose your job, and theoretically (and it’s as solid as evolution) there’s still enough wealth to go around in 2007 to justify scrambling for the luxury item called dignity with its bling accessory pride, because didn’t your guardian angel, that wizened hustler, give you her coupons for the liquidation sale of a closing Canadian superstore?

So you visit the store one shady day in submission to the angelbitch holding the whip, she thrashes you with a smile, tone of voice, self-assured flip of hair, cryptic sensuous and blond. You’re in a massive steel hangar of shelves for super-sized consumer goods, eerie and quiet and you hide your coupons and look around, ostensibly for nothing but maybe socks and underwear, but for some reason you can’t bare to buy any of them, every action is embarrassing, and you would buy something but none of the checkouts seem occupied, and you don’t want to take too close a look and look like an idiot, some weirdo, is this place even open, what are these people doing, should you be here? Buying is out of the question, let alone applying. No applied physics here, it’s creepy, forget it, go to Wal-Mart, it’s the devil you know, just lay low and buy some socks and forget looking for work.

Times like these, you know your hang-ups are going to leave you twitching under the noose before long, leaving only neurotic kneejerks of denial and escape, the most satisfying being your cartoon version of the world, which grows from kernels of truth to hard drive crashes and corrupted operating systems. Post apocalypse offers a lot of space to go bonkers in, if you were a plug-in preset, you’d be “ruined city reverb”. That’s why you turn to the Chris Driver complex, like your cat turns its head to the can opener. It goes with those well-fitting shades, plaid-tinted, blocking the more punishing frequencies of sunlight, the clarity that hurts too much. Bespectacled, the stubborn facts that divert agnostic froth no longer appear. “The way the world really works” is laughable, unknowable. The way it seems to work is a tragic but noble defeat, a framed oil-painting of slow suicide in muted blue and red.

The charm of the Chris Driver complex is its ability to build gorgeous and riotous delusions that would make great movies with the right cinematographer. Paranoid, yes, yourself as the center of every societal ill, systemic fuck-up, twisted vendetta, animal instinct run amok with modern amphetamines. But with the evils must come angels, not the unattainable whip-wielding ones whose skin make you cry, but platonic fags with soothing voices who regale you with tales of narcotized tranquility, personal paisley visions, narcissistic and masturbatory, what you’re best at, loving the one you’re with, alone with only yourself to respect yourself in a desperate swoon for cock-eyed cock-rocking tranquility, dreams under duress, the best kind of reveries, because the harsher the reality, the more brilliant the fantasy.

So Chris Driver regains control, on the ironic occasion of a trip to the Grocery store. He’s the character who was you, who imagined himself employed in a worse-case scenario Sisyphean hamster-wheel stock job, where they were out to get him with their nasty looks and comments, saying everything he worried they thought because why hold back now that his supports are gone and he doesn’t have a fucking friend in Jesus, time for him to know who he really is, the dirtball loser pussyboy, because that is the truth and the truth is good and beautiful, so beautiful how ugly he is and he can either accept that or drown in delusion. So now you’re applying for that hypothetical job, except for real this time, because you fell through a hole in the market economy, even though the economy is supposed to be good.

Well, it’s good for somebody but not you. You lost cachet, along with your wallet, on the floor of some bar, maybe one of those blackout nights at the Royal, and then you lost your job. And what didn’t kill you left you weaker, with more reasons to be afraid, all drama queen bollocks, skin irritation of experience, the new crop of fears, more nuanced, sophisticated, and plausible than the superstitious bullshit you left behind, but still mockingly contradictory. You never thought the dregs had undone so many, and now you’re networked with the creeps and the ruined. You were reaching for the angels but they pulled away like the promise of the last term politician and the offer from MasterCard and the flirting eyes of the Jessica Alba-resembling hippie girl back when you might have had a shot. Now you’re parasitical on the economy, unemployed, needy, and using drugs to fill the void. Better than TV, I guess. Now you’ll reach for yourself instead, why not? Player one is game over, let Luigi take over the pixilated level-one palace, extra code conjuring game genii, meta-programming the human bio-computer to grant it the respectability of a sense-deprived scientist.

You’ll need to forget the angelbitch sadist you’re supposed to buy with your Zastrozzi credits and learn to love the good fags in your head, intoxicated and good and sick, but your chosen perversity, maybe healthy, maybe Lao could justify it, it’s gotta balance out something, right? And second person might as well be first, in solipsism.