If it looks like a duck, swims like a ceiling tile, and quacks like a reptilian carport, it’s probably salvia

I’m a day removed from a super threshold experience. I have no clue how to sum it up. I wish I’d done some writing soon after, or recorded myself during the trip. I have to go on memory. I’ll try a chronological report.

My first attempt, which I’ve reported here, was more powerful than expected and suggested amazing potential. I tried a higher dose a week later, indoors, but I didn’t feel significantly greater effects. I did a series of extra hits about a minute or two apart. Each time I would bump up to a short peak like a little nitrous spike with a wave of anesthesia. There would be a loosening of all assumptions and solidity – increase in possibility. Colors would brighten, space would elongate, edges would sharpen, the floral pattern on the couch would grow, warp, suck me in. I would feel on the verge of opening a window or a doorway, but then I would return to a mildly psychedelic plateau before it got really interesting. It seemed the gravity of my personality and personal reality was still stronger than the salvia, and would pull me back. I could never boost myself past the threshold. I realized that I was just wasting the drug. Climbing gradually over the threshold was not an option. I had to concentrate the required amount of salvinorin in my bloodstream over the course of a minute. That was the ticket.

So that is what I had in mind when I began my third journey. I decided to trip indoors, in the afternoon, with the windowshade open a crack, on the same couch as last time. I had a friend with me who was acting as a sober sitter. He brought his bubbler. I packed its tiny bowl to the brim with 5x, then loaded a slightly smaller hit in my glass pipe that I planned to smoke immediately after pooching the bubbler’s bowl.

Bubblers kick ass, especially for salvia. The hit was very large, but the smoke was cool. I took it in easily and held it for what I thought was thirty seconds. I torched the bowl again and lit up what was left. Got some more salvia in and held it for less, then exhaled and went for the pipe. At this point I was feeling the fringes of the warp creep up on me, but nothing too strange. I flamed the pipe with gusto and hit it hard. Held the smoke in, noticing that I was starting to feel really weird. The gravity sensations were beginning. I had just dosed myself with an estimated 60 mg of 5x (870 mics of salvinorin).

The transition occurred halfway through the second toke and it was so rapid I didn’t even notice. I don’t remember what was happening during this period but I do remember whispering to my sitter that no, I don’t need a third toke. I was clearly past the threshold. I whispered a few more things, like: “holy shit”. Then my memory is gone. This black period might have been the peak but I can recall nothing from it.

My memory returns in the middle of some raging sea of mutating consciousness. It did not feel expansive, it felt constricted, like I’d been forced to occupy the headspace of something not meant to contain my new form. I felt like I was taking in too much information, and the unprocessable excess was spilling over into a physical energy I didn’t know what to do with. There was no question of doing anything though, the energy was doing me, changing me. I was the energy.

The change felt violent and intense. I can’t imagine anyone having a tranquil trip on this substance. As I was assimilating/being assimilated into the new paradigm, the oddest associations flung out of my collapsing core – an unrecognized memory of the backyard of my grandma’s house and a plastic tricycle subsumed into a duck-lizard on a spinning checkerboard landscape. Checkerboards, tiles like cells in a hyperorganic circuit, flowing, conveying, attached to something, whipping back and forth in a 3d figure eight. I was part of this manic motion. The tiles might have been scales on some vast liquid amorphous reptile, but the reptilian motif was part of the species warp which tied into a pre-verbal child-like nonsense thread that made perfect sense in the moment. I can't isolate any part of it, it was all a fuzzy bubbling gestalt with myself knotted through. On this plateau I was in no position to be able to freak out because I was beyond freaking out - far beyond myself. It was beyond psychological, it was a brutal dismemberment of identity and assumptions that attach me to my species, let alone personality. It was becoming a new life form, with consciousness forced to wrap around the novel angular contours of a non-Euclidean object.

My perception of the outside world was completely gone but I had a vague sense that I was tripping on something and someone was watching me. I felt impelled to communicate with this person because what was happening to my mind was unbelievable. It was impossible. It was inhuman, it broke all the rules. I couldn’t connect the state I was in with my past experience at all – it was ludicrous. I tried to speak, but the act was so foreign to me I couldn’t finish a syllable without drawing it out in a spastic moan. Then it would wrangle into glossolalia of its own accord. I was fascinated with trying to speak and hearing what I was saying. After twisting into jabberwocky and recognizing it as that, the jabberwocky itself twisted into some new language that seemed to explain everything. I’m told I laughed hysterically around this point. I do remember a feeling of enormous hilarity, like I was comprehending a cosmic joke. The feeling was epic, my self and life were only tiny fragments of it, and I was compelled to express it. Even though it was impossible, the attempt to express it felt ecstatic and revelatory and part of the joke.

It wasn’t the kind of clear white light above-it-all transcendence I’m used to from 5MeO-DMT and DXM. It was like being yanked into a parallel continuum that is connected to our world in subtle, intricate, and vital ways. Time was very distorted around this point. Not stretched, but meaningless. I could conceive of no beginning or end to what was happening. It was a place out of time. I felt less inside a room and more spread through a nonlocal field of mind. Physical space was a distant, trivial notion. I was totally disoriented – I had no name, no conception of what tripping was or what had happened to cause this. I did have a sense of body, but not a human body. My “body” seemed to be twisting into fluid shapes and words and concepts.

What I’m saying doesn’t come close to conveying the strangeness of it. I wouldn’t call it alien, though “extra dimensional” seems apt. Whatever it was I was falling into, or becoming, or being snatched up in, it had some vague connection with humanity, but it was like humanity was one small node in its superstructure. I later had the idea of humans as surface stubs way out on the fringes of a vast organic order, a pattern within a pattern, and consciousness need not be confined to the personal stubs we inhabit and mistake for separate inviolate entities. But the salvia experience was less like contacting the Gaian mind and more like having portions of my personal pattern of awareness scrambled arbitrarily throughout the larger organic order.

It was not like any other psychedelic experience I’ve had. It was far too bizarre to relate to any past trip. And yes, it DID have much of the character that other voyagers ascribe to salvia, mainly because of its idiosyncrasy. But it was nothing like what I’d imagined or could have imagined.

The room was blotted out by a sensation that consisted of all my senses put into higher context. Anything I saw with my eyes was interpreted in ways that bore no resemblance at all to its traditional identity. I thought that I was lying down with my eyes shut the whole time, but I later found out that a lot of the time I was actually sitting up and staring at things, the window, the room, the cat which jumped off the couch as objects took on lingual associations once again.

My thoughts began to condense to more rational, lucid, human-style questions like “what the fuck is happening to me?” I finally got out an actual word “BULLSHIT!” as the salvia’s hold relaxed. It seemed the only thing to say. Now it felt that my regular world was doing the pulling, pulling me back, hard. Like the transition into the salvia trip, the transition back was hard to pinpoint.

I blurted out a bunch of astonished “what the fucks?” before realizing I was coming back to something. The shift from visual perception making no sense at all to seeing people and tables and pipes again was rapid and jarring, and probably the cause of my unease and paranoia. It was not a smooth transition back. The mindfuck was still intense, and the confusion. I felt a heavy body load, extreme dizziness. I was back in my regular world, but it made no sense in juxtaposition with that five minute jaunt which seemed to demand answers. The joke was fading, I couldn’t remember why I’d laughed or what I’d figured out.

Now I felt a fear that is common to my trips which is that I’d perversely modified my perception and it would never properly re-assemble. I was stuck comprehending my world and the human game from a point of view that would never allow me to participate in or even deal with such patterns. The mental alteration was almost gone but the resonance was strong, and the physical heaviness and strain were not abating. I felt extreme difficulty in reconnecting with my organic niche, once taken for granted, now seeming ridiculous. I was not enjoying being halfway in/halfway out of the salvia state. I proclaimed that I wasn’t likely to do the drug again.

My sitter said something about “plant consciousness” and I thought “if that’s what plant consciousness is, it must take a LOT of getting used to.” But somewhere in the back of my mind, I was convinced that whatever I’d gone through, it had about as much to do with plant consciousness as a duck has to do with a floor tile. Which might be a lot, who’s to say?

Over the next few minutes I did come back all the way and my tension eased. I felt relief. Everything was alright. Except for the fact that I COULDN’T FUCKING REMEMBER what was so damn important. What was hilarious. What I’d been trying so hard to express. Five minutes later and it was all gone except for a vague sensation of… something. I asked, “What can I possibly learn from this? What good is it?”

In retrospect it felt like a delirium – but it also felt real, like it was something important and substantial, cotangent with ordinary awareness and waiting for me to join it. But it’s not something that fits easily into human standards and assumptions and modes of perception.

I can say how the peak made me feel, but I still can't say what the peak was. There was a visual component to it, but visuals were not the primary information conveyed. The experience was more about the mindfuck. But it was not psychoanalytical in the way that most other psychedelics are to me, and I like that about the mint. It didn’t seem to be very concerned with my issues, anxieties, superstitions, paranoias, hopes, and dreams, except in that difficult period of re-integration.

Bullshit is still the key. "Bullshit" is the only artifact that I can confidently say is part of the heart of the trip, that crazy core that is beyond my understanding or recall. I think what I was calling bullshit was not the trip itself, but everything ELSE - what was happening to me seemed so out of the bounds of everything I knew as a human being and a personality that my universe was rendered utterly unbelievable in the sense that I didn't buy it. It was like I couldn't believe in the human game anymore. Salvia was the sacrilege sacrament for the monkey ego trip.

It seems that when I finally broke through I might have gone too far to take much back with me. I might want to try for a middle ground. But I can see that maybe what I experienced was too much for my brain to process - whereas some people CAN remember, understand, encompass, feel, see, and explain more. It may be that my mental design specs can't handle an alteration that severe. My personal version of perception may not support a salvia peak, like trying to view a 32 bit color image on a 256 color monitor. Maybe further experimentation will help me figure this out.

The Sour Lining of Nirvana

Scorched goody flesh on a goody torch. Dark princess lights farts. Anesthesia lifts and the opiate taste returns: it’s the sour lining of nirvana and it’s goody goody good – too good for me. When I come to the sour lining of nirvana after spiking redbulls, it’s hard to see transcendence through, to the enlightenment that’s so close I can smell it.

Upper, downer, allrounder. Woozy from zen stink, pubic hairs crisscross the bed and I retch again, sugar-loaded sperm-stained love-monkey safe in a Motel 6, feeling round for the dust in the corners, dust that must bring my saccharine trip back to grainy relatables, tables and constants, things I know what to do with. But all I know is I feel sublimely sick and the maidwashed walls hide nothing. Well, let’s get waffles.

What do you do with hyper inspiration / poetic perspiration in a crowded Kansas diner in the morning? Nine-to-fivers sizzle in the killer sun and I’m not used to having words at my disposal. I see no disposal anywhere, they must course most coarsely through an aching orifice, stretching specs past design with lining constricting the mind. I play the squeezebox game for cryptic kinetics, movement number four, presto digitation, manual labour of love-dread.

I haven’t been a poet in months and my wrist is getting sore from writing this down. Forearm tendons throb the echoes of omnipresent koans at hand wringing ethereal clenches, choking the life out of life itself. Dao grates with a slick lubricant penetrating cheap bliss, breakingthru – rich sleaze.

I’m afraid any moment mania will consume me. I’m too sane, uncomfortable with madness. I’m too aware of awareness, revelation makes my shaky head explode, knocks the cardhouse flat. It’s all or nothing for me. Mickey doesn't have the answer. Let’s go back to the room and hypothesize that if our supreme understanding was flowing out of the rocks and the trees and the TV screen, and the motel walls with their Mr. Clean sheen, everything would be set right. The Dao would prop up mania with rock solid foundation, Gaia’s synthetic verification, but so focused am I on the imperfection of imperfection, I fail to see that the truth of perfection is in what I’m writing right now!

I create my own sour lining, I ache because I’m alive. It’s folly to be fulfilled. I’ve lived a rich life as a pretty lazy petty paisley artist and the culmination of the subgenius is this laughing exegesis.

Politics wait while I piss out the logos. Political animals are on the way, carnivores coming for me in my moment of calm, a urination moment where everything is everything. Time no longer ticks. It flows, like what the philosopher peasants called the Dao, the Dao, oh here we go, flow, with the grand old Dao, just like Lao. I’ll be sweet and wipe the seat after admiring the splatter-pattern.

I’ve missed the finger that points at the moon, I’ve actually been living. When I wake up I appreciate the dream. Sacred flakes off to real profanity and how does Lao-tse survive? Somehow history gowned him in the Emperor’s Garments but I see them draped across the ages.

Cup of life overflows for an epic slur and I’m still hung up on the coatrack of enlightenment, Mickey Mouse coding through my synapses, codeine flowing through the bad-boy bloodstream of bliss, might as well be heroin in synthetic life drama, chemical messages, electric signal, biological information… is this what consciousness is? I need to see deep to realize how shallow it all is. When I see life as a game, why do I feel so serious? I puke the Dao out of me, regurgitate ancient philosophy, Shiva in my pocket, ripping at the lining, alcohol gone, codeine leaving, lining tasting sweet at last in stark relief.

Political animals have taken over the zoo. We make shoddy myths when we watch CNN but one day they'll become magic mantras and mythological manna. They'll set armies marching, more of them, a link in a chain of genocide. The dry-drunk president of the free-world will resonate fractally in future events as a sociodynamic something or other, we can’t extrapolate from this crazy vantage, mired in bloody mercantile history, unable to agree on the sustainability of SUVs, chasing the value of fluctuating currency, punchline spread through slices of time.

And I'm on a poetic ego trip, felating my own enlightenment and cackling at its absurdity, dopamine to the last drop, drowned in divine mania. Words are madness, grotesque intoxicating madness, a deck of cards arranged like a house, a simulacrum of thought, a mockup of feeling, crumb of reeling rocking rolling rhyming ridiculosity. I'll lose myself in words, the proper venue for mania, disappearing in the menu of blanket gravy. I’ll be sure to enunciate 'til every syllable sparkles in crisp, high-definition redundancy, polished pixels of syntactic intent, read to a roomful of perked-up poets who will appreciate – oh egogodme!

I'm on fucking fire, filling this notebook to the brim. And there's my partner in crime, sleeping through my mania. I feel so scarily loaded, I yearn for what I imagine is her misty hippocampal retreat. I wonder where the plumbers’ yearnings went. Woke up this morning after a Walmart cocktail and found the external brilliance of genetic imprint slapping me in the face, roping me into a sadomasochistic fuckfest, impaled on the maypole in a forty minute solo, wanking off with the world, giving Joyce a run for his literary lexicon.

Ring ring riff reverb burbs burbling along the deja-thread, you’ve heard this before. Isn’t this a cycle? There are finite possibilities but existence could be plural. Life is a loop but we can sever the string, shrug off the quest for the Dark Tower, chill a little longer in the Motel 6 after the notebook has been filled and find the interdimensional portal in the shower during the exploration of a new tantric sexual position: Oh Me! Oh You! Oh Doorway! Was this here the whole holy time? How’d we miss it? Wait! Is the phone ringing? Riffing? Reverberating? Better answer.

I guess I am maniacal but that is just a word. I’m addicted to writing. I assume I can put the pen down any time I want but will is an illusion. Still on the ego trip and feeling philanthropic. Everyone can bask in this ego, bathe in my light, there’s enough to go around. Good people, savor my good-hearted sarcasm, imbibe my sophisticated yin rapscality!

Do you mind if I open the windowshade or is it just a shade of hallucination? Is my actual circumstance wobbling on the street in front of a Denver comedy club loaded on tryptamines babbling incoherently to a smirking cameraman interviewing me for a David Cross DVD? Probably not but it’s fun to imagine such gateways through reality’s plurality. I’m going to milk the mania for all it’s worth, exploit the natural high which stems strangely from an artificial hangover low. Perhaps Red Bull really did give me wings and will ultimately drop me on the Manhattan streets when it’s exhausted its amusement at my arbitrary mania – and I will pick myself up off the ground looking for a crack dealer to keep me flying, higher than Christ in a Scorsese flick.

The cat manifesto

Don’t make light of my bond with my cat or I’ll kick your ass, you heartless bastard. Cats are for everyone. Liberal and conservative, Christian, Atheist, Satanist. They bring us together. They’re a natural resource. They reflect our comfy delusions, our pwecious pwettypwetty projections like mammalian holograph plates.

When I retire from this bullshit life and collect my social security, I’m going to become a crazy cat lady. I’m a guy, but I’m not one for convention. It’ll be a good way to go out. Chilling with my twenty cats. Gradually severing my connections with the human race. Babyhatah, hatin’ the game for good measure. I will learn to be at peace with my position as a scratching post and provider of food. Catfood – it’s not just for seniors anymore, it’s for cats too! I’ll cat my life away, the spice of life hospiced with morphine drip and feline dreams, forgetting what I was in death and the jungle in the sky.

Lemon Slice

Back in the Cave with a citrus wedge, a sour edge.

Why am I here? Not to write, certainly. To exist, I guess, at baseline, spasmic typing, spelling unchecked. To shuffle again. To write another list. Not a to-do list, but a doing list. Some verbs. I don't like the black of this blog. I think it should whiten.

I could try and go for truth. Political truth? No, I'm not a political blogger. I am often political, instinctually, before the sense of duty that is a density of ethics purity, and we all know how dirty pure is.

I wonder what it would be like if this was OFF RECORD? Funny, some of my greatest writing has been off record, but UNKNOWINGLY - the future held some record shredding in store, and I wrote on, blissfully unaware that I was feeding a void.

Listening to Liszt - Mephisto Waltz number 1. Led astry again by the devil's fiddle. But there are unignorable shifts. I've lost the insatiable appetite I used to have for classical piano. I binged, burned out. So aesthetic embers glow in kaleidoscope layers. So adday adday adday. No exclamation.

Still haven't learned the rules of the game, syntax of life, code of mind.

Still waiting for the miracle. I have drugs, I have miracles at my disposal. But the miracle drug route. Well, just thinking about it sent a shiver through me. Thinking that I could conjure miracles from a minty smoke if I so desired. That's what will is. Leading to obliteration of control, possibly. All in good time. For the self-subverting extra-orbital affair. I'm prepared. As I ever will be. Which is not at all.

Salvia-blogging

It's maybe half an hour after I smoked a "test dose" of an extract.

I still don't feel quite like myself.

I wonder when I'll return to normal? If I never do, I think I could live with that.

Absorption

I guess I'm gonna have to commit to blogger now - like a reluctant husband. Because this is what people are reading now. But I liked message boards better. I'm not sure I really like this little cave all that much. Maybe I should adorn its stalactites in frilly paisley drapes, if the matrix will allow me the privilege. Blogger's not a pleasure to navigate.

My writing impulse has been on a severe wane for months now - my words are slowing to a trickle - no great thundercrashes of prose, no epic poems, barely even any modest ones. Is it because with all the music projects I have no time for verbal inspiration? I don't know, I kind of miss the writing. But the idea that I used to aspire to a technical perfection in writing weirds me out - musical technique is hard enough. Getting all your syntax straight, getting characters fleshed out, getting the plot untangled, getting to the fucking stripped down point and remaining original besides - fuck - maybe if I had another lifetime ahead of me.

Maybe when I reincarnate as - well, you know, there's no writer that I could comfortably become in my current incarnation. The only writer I would want to be is the version of myself that is repressed inside the cage of laziness I've allowed to grow around me, atrophied talent, letting the best ideas to rot. I would have to be my personal potential if I'm going to be anything. But does this voice really have anything to say? My revolutionary stance has remained basically upright from the days when I first developed a social conscience, but back then they were my own conclusions arrived at through original observation of life and people. They've since been reinforced by the angry lefty complaints, more informed and articulate, I've come across since, but I think they've also been corrupted by a propagandistic slant - I can't tell where my voice begins and the shrill chorus ends now.

I've been absorbed somehow. Not sure if this is a personal weakness, or just the natural process of the hermit cracking the shell. Because although I've gained a lot coming out here, it also feels a bit like a sell-out. Can't be the great zen tree falling in the forest anymore, but now that I'm heard and sometimes even actively listened to, I realize I'm too entangled to say a damn thing without being compromised and hypocritical, and failing to wrest words from a daisy chain of influence and confluence that stretches past the event horizon. That's why the future is in riffage probably. Intellectual property will disappear. The artistic greedheads will find their meme-hoarding an increasingly ridiculous and socially-unacceptable endeavor.

Okay, there's some words. Jaunty-neutrality. I'd say I've still got some brain cells left to rub together after all the DXM peaks (no sine-waves in the dextroverse) even though I'm drawing upon the well of cliches to state this.

Nah

I should have said no.

I should have said no.

I should have said no.

I should have said no.

I should have said no.

I should have said no.

I should have said no.

I should have said no.

I should have said no.

I should have said no.

I should have said no.

I should have said no.

I should have said no.

I should have said no.

I should have said no.

I should have said no.

Iraq

Whatever happens in Iraq, the Bush cartel will easily spin it in their favor. If somehow Iraq actually acheives something that resembles democracy, it will be said to be a total vindication of the imperialist landgrab as halliburton cleans up on reconstruction and america's "enduring bases" continue to rise up all over the desert. If it turns into the taliban does babylon, which seems the only sensible projection, then the Iraq people will have fucked it up themselves. "Our brave soldiers sacrificed to bring them freedom (at the low low price of 100,000 dead and a totally shattered infrastructure) but they're just not ready, poor ragheads. They won't accept the gift."

Faithful and Dangerous

Some people don't like the idea that religion is dangerous. They'll say, religion doesn't kill people, people kill people. You can't blame the spanish inquisition on religion, it's bad people who did that. But what about those PEOPLE who tortured "sinners" in the name of God.? They knew for a fact that people who disobeyed the dour man in the sky would suffer beyond comprehension in hell when they died. So what could they do but torture the sinner in the hopes that this extreme duress would compell the soul to confess? Or something. A moral obligation for a humanitarian of integrity. Not a very well thought out idea, but also not a suprising conclusion for a "man of faith" to reach in that situation. Christians created the ideas that would allow normal people to behave like deranged psychopaths. The logical conclusion of hardline christian premises end in the thumbscrew and the rack.

Maybe religion is dangerous. Christianity anyway. Or maybe it's just organized religion that is problematic. Organized religion - organized crime. Is there a difference? Of course, there's always a few people every year who go on a killing rampage because their private spirit/devil told them to. You don't have to be organized to be lethally deluded. But you do have to be organized to pull off the spanish inquistion. Or convince a townful of folks to burn a witch. Or topple the government of a middle eatern country. You'd have to be very crafty to get that done.

But people who say religion should be banned are way out to lunch. Next they'll be telling us we need to ban drugs too. Imagine!

Mold

Thanks for shopping at Fuck Your Town. Nice to see you back, brainscraped on aisle 43 with no synonyms left for the intangible tumour that swells in your system, suffocates you slowly. Scanners indicate you’ve still got thirty canadian dollars in your pocket. Pick up Snark the DVD on your way out, it'll leave you with some laughs and malnutrition, Southparkian substance, flabby anarchy.

Really, who wants ideology? It's uncool, punchline of politique's self-parody, passé. Reality's what you can get away with, so let the adbuster platitudes play out, smearing into meaningless streaks as the mindshield wipers work hydraulic magic, sufficiently advanced technology.

Your petals of prose that bloomed like a rose now droop over with cancer death, cobalt sixty side-effect, decayed gray progeny of the human distillation, dissolved in the tincture of civilization. Urban weed in gutterbird ecology, organic solvent resolved, pet ether with a pet purpose for a pet shop, interior carbon-dioxide cow. Feed the machine, snap-to-grid like ivy climbing the concrete cube. Laugh at the hazy glow of inner-light lunatics if you can find those soap-crate crazies anymore. They’re not in the DVD extras.

Streetcorner Bill, Bill of the Will still bumbles around in the mud, stumbling bodhisattva bum, blubbering pompous Dionysian poetry, unafraid to be cliché and wearing trite splendor like an old hat as you stare into the sun of a Strauss crescendo, vintage Clarke transcendence. They served Hofmann's Elixir strong in 1968 and visions never topped 2001 in human mythology, Nietzsche benighted and benign for cinema, also sprach the VALIS fool. People who fiddle with their heads too long eventually come to believe they can get gnosis from a pink laser beam but there's no science behind it. Just the point they arrive at eventually, portal to the padded cell, full circle, white-walled nursery to white-walled comatorium, still an alien abduction.

Put down the nostalgia needle and keep your eyes on the road. 2001's in the rear view mirror and Apollo’s old hat. Not only has third millennial man walked on the moon, he's circumvented the man's record-industry monopoly to download digital music for free. A bold future chimp, are you sure you can handle it? The epic responsibility, making hedonic history? Today, Napster, tomorrow, Alpha Centauri? You're not going to pay for Metallica tunes and nobody's going to pay for your education, not that you want to invest in your own brain anyway, what could you ever train that lazy traitor to do? Thinking is about all the silly sod can manage, in feedback loops returning to the ideological end of the cycle, ideological music and art, directing your arabesques of inspiration into profane political kabuki choreography, self perpetuating like a wormy parasite for pragmatic concerns, like slimy survival mechanisms, like you've gotten with the winning team even if you won't attend the pep rallies. So take cover under the missile shield even if it's full of holes and thanks for shopping at Fuck Your Town.

Nice to see you back again. Footsteps fail to reverb recycled air, it’s thick with supplement, over-correction, you can’t hear yourself, can’t see yourself in anything but trick mirrors that accentuate new threads, Nike brands over the void because you've exhausted your metaphors for sloth and gluttony. The zen of shopping is the finger pointing at the bargain bin. Buddy, you're in the bin now. Beyond Zen with a capital Z, sizzling over the bacon fat horizon, outside the audible range of roasting cattle. Meat still has purpose, nevermind the metaphorical junkyard.

But you cannot petition the market with prayer. See the contours of an elegant system swirl into spirals of no alternatives, progress from feudal kingdoms to industrial revolution. Live in layers of cages for sanitary transactions, sanity, civility, except when it conflicts with your fix. Your fix is wanted, needed, good for business, trade, commerce, fits into the mold, another potato chip split in fifty sub-flavors, explore the possibilities as they explode into fractal subsets of MSG-frosted snack-bliss.

Personable pattern emerges from the natural paisley landscape, a hand reaches out from a sleeve. It's Mr. Pattern, Your Royal Representative, R. KS, Republican. He wants to shake your hand and you want to take it, feel the power pulse through the skin. You never thought you’d swoon for this cheap rush but then, you never thought you'd put on a KRPM radio shirt for the jumbotron when they whisked you out of the crowd and told you they'd upgrade your seat for a brief endorsement. They didn't call it whore class, Mr. High Class Whore, they called it the bling ring bleachers with high per-capita celebrities. And when you got there the smell of money was dizzying, the rush rich like a conqueror’s spoils. So you told the crowd you listened to the station. You never looked back.

You can hedge your bets by voting for the electable candidate as you indulge in your activist tantrums but you know the politician is paisley. They're all paisley, cut from the same cloth, the ornate pattern we putter around in ourselves at the fringes with our petty power trips, base pyramid games, selling life insurance. The paisley is political, just like you. You can't stay mad at paisley. R. Kansas will fight for you, get you a better deal at the bargaining table for you are of his constituency. He deals with the pirates so you don’t have to, he’ll lower your bracket’s tax two points, maybe three. What will this cost you? Only a double digit cut for the top tiers in tandem, a reasonable ratio for the 10x elite. Mutual prosperity, see? Spend your new money, Snark 2 is out on DVD. Luxuriate in the frills.

And the hand that reaches for your own seeks out the mark of the mark, branded, bought-and-sold, beckoning you to an Italian Dinner. Are you pumped up? You've been bumped up to manage the middle, the middle management, where pasta’s spiced with pesto and the cars are roomier. No need to connote negatively and badmouth the Utilitarian Mafia. The Waste Management Mob’s running the country like a business, taking out the trash.

Paisley, paisley, life is such beauty dear gods in the pattern but why the spikes? Why red in tooth and claw, is the negativity necessary and natural? Why the comparisons to piracy, why the feeling of being taken and inability to reconcile clinging half-heartedly to moving middle class goalposts? You loved the Jetsons but now it's time to jettison utopian dreams you gobbled up like candy - should have stuck to wholesome cereal kiddie. But oatmeal can’t compete with fruit roll-ups.

Emergency sell-out kit behind door number two’s guarded by a three-card-monte submarine shark. Trident missiles are for high stakes empire games, asymmetrical warfare. They'll let you eat cake and drink coke, your one concession to the sweet taste of material, brain tonic. Crack is for hard cores, a druggie's drug, omega, and you're too alpha male to think of the end. So thank you for shopping at Made in China, your reactionary patriotism is adorable, civic pride so last millennium, retro culture kitsch.

The DEA's got your town jittery, poor paranoid peons watching the sky for chem trails, mind-altering shit from the CIA, man, triggering acid flashbacks left and right, the hippie’s achilles’ heel. You are peaceful and you have no weapons but they’ll still plant the rebel base on you.

Some poets would like to think the rebel base is in their coffee cups, paradoxically thermophilicly thriving in the sweltering vitriol of poetic presumption, that inspiring righteous fire fuzzed so well by the shifting enemy and banality of evil. Fractal artistic defiance makes all confining conventions blasphemy, the outer light is for lamers, if you haven't got the internal torch aflame get with the program, Kootenay über Alles.

To be fair, fair trade is a fair start. But my boycott's bigger than your boycott - oh the vanity. Let them drink coke but hype the organic alternative. The hippie mafia is novel at least, support your co-op middlemen, it beats taking orders from Sicily. Small fish tycoons could argue they make Kootenaystan the paradise it is, and if you aren't in paradise you haven't smoked your entire ration of nirvana manna yet, the herbal staple. You won't blend in with the weed and fungi economy but it's okay. You're just a goblin in Hobbiton, a troll in an enchanted valley, and if you want to practice black magic go right ahead, just so long as it doesn’t hurt any of my friends. But your money wires down veins and criminally-cloaked arteries to armored hearts in florida, the bahamas, the big apple, and we sense indirect effects on our more driven brothers with their never-ending questing for the bling.

The Fuck Nelson parking lot gets warm earlier, they've got a spring-generating machine on the rooftop, you can see it from Gyro, they turn it on in February, it irradiates employees but that's only a surface cancer, easily treatable with a skin lotion that just came on the market.

So pick a card, any card. Choose your poison, apply for the position. Craquepipe Banquerupture, debtor’s prison behind door number three, double or nothing, get out of jail lottery. Doesn’t matter. The new apocalypse is as old as the nuclear option. Nature red in tooth and claw. This time we die for our own sins. Human sacrifice times six billion under the sizzling diagonal rhombus demon. Jesus H. Koresh, what are we doing this for again?

Synthetic virus out-humans humanity with hostile efficiency, phase out the precursor body, an ungrateful host. Rolling up Faust’s well-oiled conveyor belt with an alien buzz and terminator gene, conjured into the pool by guilty technocrats following vague dream biddings from nature’s impish avatar many ludicrously label Satan, collective punishment prophecy seeping into mythology, gestating into reality, armageddon’s money shot spurting three months of mayhem.

Windchimes sing a stuttering song over the dark porch of an abandoned suburban castle during a flaming summer totentanz. Fungal infection of the Aristotelian tower – business as usual. Visigoth graffiti over ivory – textbook history. Plato’s penthouse seething with snakes – business as usual. Golden ratio twisted out of shape – hyperorder. Tree of knowledge rotted to the ground, gnosis spread - mold on god’s bread. 

bringer

i want to sleep

i want to rhyme

i'm not a winner
i don't play the lottery

i'm not trained
to hunt gazelles

omnivorous simian chews silicon
omnivorous simian chest silicone

you're out there
surviving, staying
where the money is
the heat-vent of thermodynamic civilization
stay stay stay where the money is, let’s see you
on the cover, cover girl, cover the cover, the top forty

let's listen to what they call a sellout,
let's dance to the sell-out song, let's synthesize the rest

no rest for the wicked though, no
not that damnation ever attained
a cinema verite credibility

after a gangland shooting in a catholic church
and a warped run to the japanese river wharves
in the post-apocalyptic future, like it's all preview premonition
like i dunno, pick a bible, any bible, point your finger
assign your sanctity, your sanctity
yeah your fucking sanctity, profanize, before my eyes, my prize

endearing mafia mandibles moving in rhythm to a terrorist's totentanz tarantelle, nuclear suitcase booming, blooming into a city's mushroom cloud, maybe mine - assuming i must die for the reverence of the real, as if nuclear war is real, a real possibility, isn't it really trite by now, abandoned bunkers and superterranean real estate 

thank god (a prayer)

thank god there are smarter people than me

taking care of things

thank god there are experts in the control rooms

thank god our leaders know what they're doing

thank god our god is compassionate

thank god, thank god, thank god

thank god my news is pre-digested

and my bacteria can't digest the synthetic information mainline

cause then what kind of freak would i be?

god, but what of daoist salvation?

do i want to become one with the pain chaos?

do i want to become one with the chaos pain?

do i want one to become with the pain chaos?

but what of daoistic stuttering

but what of thank god for daoistic stuttering

thank god for static fractal noise sputter stutter stallacticle syntax and dyslexic metaphors for dialectic superwhores, and stardom of rainbow color crayon trim raining down on the paisleys of daiseytown from the sarcastic snot-dripped fractal of r'aison d'etre, like sarcasm hanging from a jawdrop, loving the lovely lard-slathered letters run over your tongue like the thing that should not be, like lovecraftian exchange rates for the cthulhu unit of love and void and the reason you played, spirit, concoction of everyone i've ever mainlined met and loved in politically incorrect ways, like loving my enemies, and taking my friends for granted, but not to the desperate dead dread end, not that that's anything but a gleam in HAL's eye, like i'd sweettalk that cold robot into opening the pod bay door for me, penetrate his synthetic walls like the most devoid vacuum yinfucker... you know those yang space ghosts coast to coast - we're a race of chimps or at least we were - now we're getting too weird to know what to call ourselves. That's what my novel, Original Sin should be about. And the reader can decide for themselves what original sin could mean, it could mean a billion things of course, so knock yourselves out, it's a fill in the blank meaning underline, a plaything, the ending of a paragraph.

Geograph.

atomic armstrong

testing testing testing testing testing... testing the power of the tiki gods, tuning in to their frequency - hello? are you there? what will you give me, for my undying allegiance in your schemes to... uh... what are they again? what do you do anyway, you florid power, after washing in with the foaming surf? are you the deity committee we sacrificed all those virgins for, tossed them into the caldera, vapourizing their never-to-be-popped cherries to show how much we love you, how we're on your side oh sky demons, and we send you our freshest just out of the gate? what do you desire? the story of a man who sold out for a higher price than mortals can imagine?

atomic armstrong wants to lounge around in life for a while, put the grail's grace on his pale face, glitter with christian schlock, hack away at the gray day, bleeding the cup of christ for steel-girdered paradise

when sci-fi painted our retirement years radioactive, nuclear winters of mad max mutation, reagan still rasping on TV he's gonna beat the commies like clinton eastwood staring down the baddies, atomic armstrong stepped off the set of the moon landing, staggered out of studio 54 with the standard shaft still sticking broken off out his ass, stumbled back through the seventies and straight into the merry pranksters' movie ~ here he was hippie craque, a nip of nitrous reverie and a gritty hit off the pipe that frames life in stark duality, the dirtiest route to the purest euphoria, and only the rock, synthetic monstrosity of pharmaceutical humanity can get him to the hyperbliss he knows he can see - neat nirvana in a nutshell, clean and next to god, still rotting in the room of a speed freak commune. His comrades are building a bomb to kill the warpigs, but they'll blow themselves up before they get it out the door, so he'd better get out of history and back into the 21st century. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

that's one small step for a man, one giant leap for ratkind, and a book deal in 2005 cause the public will pay to know how he stayed alive, what moment he decided to fink out his red-blooded american terrorist cell, but he won't tell because his trophy for transcending history is spilling over with holy water like the fountain of youth and he's busy sipping, slurping, gripping the grail and chugging it down by the gallon, never asking where it comes from

Atomic Armstrong wants to lounge about in life for a while, wants to go off the deep end but he knows there's no end to the deep end when you're really into the dive, never more alive, plunging for new depths of death and death of depths, off the board, that's one small step for a man, one giant dive for ratkind, admission of full control to the reptilian brain

atomic armstrong wants to lounge about in life for a while, cause the good doctor told him there was no god, and betrand's bitter pills are working their way into his nervous system, so what can he get out of this reality? make lemons out of lemonade, gold out of ground, money from oil - step out of the hippie rags and into a well-cut suit, and realize why diamonds are a girl's best friend, and comprehend the status symbols, their gleaming raison d'etre, the truth of glittering gold and the thousand dollar dinner he discovers he won't turn down when offered, embracing the pragmatic route to success with its conventional luxuries of aged liquor and mafia buddies, associates, soprano swan song slur for the next eighty years of upper crust retirement in jersey's gated community, become like THEM, become the greatest THEM of them all, the quintessential THEM, lord of THEM, play for THEM while you play THEM like Tupu the Tiki Demon's cursed woodwind

lounge action, slackadaisical laxative action, loosen the belt and kurtz out the natives, provincial, terrestrial natives eating their cancer meal for breakfast in the five essential flavors and vitamins morning, seven secret herbs and spices, brought to you by Pfizer with fixed pharmaceutical prices - shaking frilly-hipped hula mirth at the last luau on earth before molten cauterization scorches this pre-pompeii cataclysm straight off the island to pave the obsidian way for business as usual - dirge of the turgid tiki turnover, let them eat mango

cause this is our lounge you see, and when we play a wrong note it ricochets off the fronds of the palm tree and transmutes to sublime harmony, pre-cognizant counterpoint cause i say so, k?

Lounge Act

Julia’s in the club, underage. There are hotter girls, lots of them, but she embodies a deadly gestalt of parts sinewed together like a stealth cobbler’s patent leather, tailored for Christopher and no other, meaning nothing in the grand scheme except a pathetic unrequited stimulation, heart palpitations, ache in the loins. And she’s getting away with it, the dance club, but he’s coming at her from such an obtuse angle, it would be a terrible tangle and mangle any propriety he might still be able to hang on to. But she's a knockout, such a charm that the only thing he would violate, in his mind, is propriety. In all other respects and disrespects, it would be magical, a watery reverie of labial delirium, to jump on this mostly unspoiled girl, in whatever sly and slimy way might be required – any creepy means necessary, for he would be the winner of the game that only the greatest of connoisseurs had scoped out this early – this winter stage. A mad scientist who forgot his calculus could one day find himself back in time, an appropriate body brought along for himself, some hairless hunk of teenaged flesh bought from the body shop. But even with this prosthetic, the verbal interface would be the main challenge. Chris doesn’t do pick-ups and he doesn’t do lines.

Julia's with a fuzzy-haired bundle of fun who’s all red-eyed high. She’s a bit less fem and probably still in the single digits for total career THC trips, a lovely counterpart to the main attraction, letting herself go, arms outstretched, thinking she can feel the flecks of light from the disco ball.

But Julia is the one, the handsome girl with golden brown hair, too cool to be blond. She is so past that. But there are blue highlights left over from some – some – oh Christ, Chris has no business naming those pure sleaze-daubed episodes in her theoretical life. Oh, it’s pre-pubescent dye of some kind, but this is post pubescent lounge night and in this light, there’s some inside information gained from slippery electric affairs that now arms her with an eye-rolling ability to deal with intruders, not with aplomb but a bombed-out whimsy, a smoke-obscured battleground with clusterfuck fronts.

She’s wrapped her upper half in a deep-necked tank top and her shoulders are sparkling – literally. Sparkles, you can buy them at walmart. Her style is sparkly. Those freaks who freak at walmart, she doesn’t know what’s up with them. It’s just a store, like any other. Better than most, prices-wise, selection-wise. For peripherals, not garments, oh no. Walmart garments are a wasteland, heaped stacks of crate clothes under smoke-filled Rio skies. Not her style. She needs something a little open-necked. Open. Not for pleasure, really, except hers, at being halfway – maybe even, coyly, a third. No expectations no blame, and twist yourself up stranger, it’s entertaining, revealing, a window she’ll see, a mirror you’ll see. She’ll see, when she’s open. Not for business, business women don’t wear sparkles, not there anyway, the clever crescent under the collar bone. She’ll go far in the lounge because no one’s seen a pattern like that before, though it’s so obvious, why didn’t you think of it?

It draws eyes, some more bold than Chris. Julia Exudia, energy short of ecstasy, measured dose of reality in a wrinkled shirt fold, arms, complete and smooth, sliding out. Chris can’t get close to her thoughts. When he catches a fragment, he extracts and extrapolates to a delusional tremendum. He imagines touching her hair, feeling the frail weight of her whole taut head with his hand. He’d be a bit bigger but respectful. Has anyone ever touched that hair in that way? Grazed the contours of that round face? The asymmetry is balanced like an artful paisley that slid off the grid, rustbloom.

He thinks she meets his eyes for a second, under the wooden rafters of the low-ceiling room, the room that Jessica said was a bit of a joke now, wise black-haired Jessica, lamenting old age, a small, thin, bony woman with black bursting out of her eyes, her head, a vital, fungal noir. Fine forty something, and Julia at the opposite end of the spectrum. Just a little under the line. Provoking him over the line. Because she’s got it going on. In a certain sense. A certain mammalian sense we’ve all sensed as that budding foliage clogs the language center of the brain, the divine vine of lust strangles reason, substituting sensation. Even when set against the intellect, it can expand thought, make it for all the cards.

Christopher’s cards aren’t on the table. They’re close to his vest, comfort since he isn’t here with friends. His finger shines with the bind of his ring. Years ago, he allowed himself to be pulled into romance. It was barely a choice, but it was enough of a choice that he still congratulates himself on his decision. He opened his arms and felt his face spaghettify. It was going to be the ultimate trip. There was a force attached to a female, not THE feminine but A feminine fighter, a feisty flight from a crusting life to find some dubious online avatar, but she had a good nose for reality, and though she got spiked with the poison prickles of overgrown and overdrugged life’s brutality, she found him out. She came across in tact, off the medication. Beautiful, bountiful, fragile, skin showing through scabs of duress, demands of having to pry manipulators’ steel hooks out of her open wounds – she had to perform the operation herself. It wasn’t pretty. It was gorgeously horrific. She was willing, for the time being, to abandon the bullshit for what she thought, through academic soul-probing, would be a good guy, a good lay, and a survey of what could lie ahead, in truth, in lie. The bullshit was the dark and savage kind, the kind that may take a decade to turn into song, the kind you can’t just rap about. (Sometimes there is nothing for Chris to offer but to listen and fill in the blanks as only a soul-mate can.)

It was reality and it was another, the other – gravity welled, his heart swelled, apocalypse vertigo, he fell, into the white hole of true love, a font and fountain, a refiner’s fire. He would be a hero some day. But on this day he was to be saved – saved by his soul-mate, a brown-topped girl, darker in hair and spirit, of sharp wit she would turn on herself again and again. She spared no attacks for the worst ones, the ones who thrived on conflict and spreading of misery, the ones who really needed to be taken down. She was in fellowship with Chris – a Sisyphean martyr caught up in the hamster wheel, drinking and smoking and talking of art. But in between these impolite and erudite discussions they would plan pitifully modest careers outside the artistic realm – rent, tolerable rooms. With pets they might even be home, who knows?

It was a time for absorbing cartoons and slurring paradigms, oil depletion with some Aqua Teen to take the edge off, and botched experiments, and never quite consummated tolerance. A little infidelity to keep the edge on. There was no effort expended that could not be attributed to the inevitability of endorphins, intellect, and diabolically perfect providence.

But Julia is underage, at the club, the lounge, novelty. Christopher is neither a man of action, nor a man. But the beat is strong, and he’s been practicing in his head to be a lounge act – lounging about in life, grabbing, non-abashed at the newly conglomerating orbs of confidence drifting by in state-bounded implausibility, white lies, light lies, lies that are life, lives that could be lived, playing the virtuoso in limbo, under the hokey, low-key low bar. Merely feigning confidence can get him back in the game, nodding his head to the beat: he’s gotta have a beat, gotta groove with the world, and this dank pocket of world is sweaty with meat-market mania. It’s a techno beat, but he imagines a Nomeansno solo over it, Andy Kerr freaking out on guitar.

Julia is in the lounge, in the lounge – and he, as an ostensible, fun-loving, adult-man, is encountering her there, little Julia from that other world, that just-so-slightly sexual world. Christopher’s eyes have been darting away from the stimuli all night. He hasn’t allowed himself to get hard at the sight of any skin or alert searching eyes. He won’t allow himself to get as far as alertness because that would imply agenda, and agenda would imply failure at having accomplished any aspect of it. No, ostensibly, he’s just grooving on the atmosphere, the vibey density of all these people, dancing, or trying to dance, or thinking they ought to dance, or being too high to dance, and bouncing around, and baring primo sweaty skin Chris will allow himself no more than point five seconds glance at, just enough for that little thrill, that chemical spike.

But Julia is something else and the juxtaposition is explosive. Chris is stiff as a board in seconds. She is something. Some kind of girl, real girl, a toy without instruction manual, too complicated for even the grown ups, she’s grown out of her mold. What thoughts flower underneath that hair, what feelings flourish, supply those pale hazel eyes with their palette? Julia brown, Julia flesh-tone. Julia in A flat major, the key Chris could never play, that major third spaced a little too far away. The mystery is chasmic and orgasmic. He formulates a ridiculous implausible and unsustainable fantasy with an overflowing spilling slosh of neurotransmitting fun:

[Christopher is walking with Julia along the forest path he loves so much. But where is her reality? Where is her mind? Where are her words?]

She has no words. She turns to Chris and smiles. The smile fades in a way that suggests robust mind-idle. No, no need to label it. Look at the pine needles. Chris looks. And sees the pine needles. Where did Julia go? Chris mustn’t be alone.

She is still there with hair, red highlights, the R of the R G B nearly glowing in the chilly air, a brisk March morning, March 4^th, march forth, things haven’t played themselves out yet. What did you do Chris, to deserve this?

“Surely you respect my axe, Julia? It’s a benign axe, it cuts soundwaves to ribbons, but it could never cut your skin.”

“Yeah, soundwaves,” she says, unimpressed. Which is cool. There is so much more. So much other. Respect lies in some dimension that slipped over the death barrier.

“The axe isn’t here right now”, she says with a thin film of etiquette, smile overhanging, flanging. Chris can’t tell where the smile leads, that’s the problem. It’s so fragmentary.]

The fantasy can’t sustain itself, an ‘80s chart-topper newaves out of a speaker column, conjured by the tune tweakers on the subterranean stage and a lot of the older gen are moving – really getting into it. It’s a cultural touchstone Chris can’t reach. He’s been drunk with older friends, the bonafide punks or whatever became of them, enough times to know that this is probably something by either the Soft Cell, or the Cure, he always gets those two confused.

That’s okay, the next wacky mix goes back further, to a temporal enclave Chris can relate to – the Doors, in their autumnal blues. And Julia is moving to this too, she’s got a natural jazz shuffle in her body. She throws her head back, fine follicle clumps flailing, showing off their lingering tints of psychedelic coloring, and she bobs and weaves to Morrison’s blues. “Cars hiss by my windows”. And the dumbest lines shine in relief, sweet relief at having this young dancer offer them an arabesque treatment, a sight Morrison never dared dream, a semantic twist into no long-past locked-up experience but the here and now, in this room. Surely the karmic connection necessitates him pursuing her in a ridiculous romantic comedy that will stop being funny very quickly.

And then one of those hip songs comes on, and Chris can tell it’s hip by how it sounds, how the whole tonality has been shifted down a few cents so you can’t whip out your pennywhistle and jam with it, and how the melodic lines are not any single instrument but pastiches of tweaked out samples, car horns, advertising jingles, and interviews with interesting high-on-life backstagers that made it through the Gatling Grunge Noise Gate, but then the spirited-unchiseled-lambwaver of Oberst’s voice rips through the quirky sound soup, and Chris thinks: Hell, they’re remixing Bright Eyes – I’ve dug this dude for nearly a year now! Forget the fools that tried to turn me on to him with their taste-plague contrivance.

And the meat market is fresh today, you wouldn’t believe how many would have sex with you if only you had the right ____. Chris and Julia are both dying, slaves to the forward cant of drunken Chronos, slice dice, soil, oil, everything must GO! But graph the curves of their high-frequency waveforms and watch them mingle like mountain ranges, offset, odd. Julia’s up, Chris is down. But Julia’s got a downer in her future. They’ve intersected on this turn of the century set, but rarely on the same stage. Their parts have been recorded separately, separate takes, on separate days, separate grooves. We’ve got a polyrhythm and it takes a pretty tweaked-out mind to feel it, really feel it, hear it as signal and not noise. That’s lounge action, slackadaisical laxative action, moving, moving somewhere, not sure where, ending up transcribing things that could have been, another plague of poetry.

That’s why our new band is “The Noise Gate”. The Gatling Grunge Noise Gate.

Here’s our ASCII logo:

|....................../

|...................../

|..................../

|...................|

|===========\=......|

|============|=.....|

|===========/=......|

|...................|

game over – insert quarter to continue

I don't mind so much being a loser except for the loser stigma. It's a shame projected by society, a society that interprets Darwin’s theories to mean that the survival of the fittest members is a moral victory. I can't seem to escape that platform.

It's something that's probably psychologically inseparable from even a sophisticated primate, 99% of our DNA screaming to us through every nerve with every inhalation and heartbeat of our place in the hierarchy, and are we winning or losing the game? It’s an instinct both Jamie Lewis and Mung the Chimp can relate to.

It's a vital organ of the phantom beast they call "dignity", sometimes becoming the ego in a vile rampage. The fifty year old boys from secret fraternities are indeed controlling what we see and do from ivory towers, giving us guidelines, issuing edicts, propagating what is "acceptable" and what is "sensible" and what constitutes success.

Because, don't the parallels to nature's losers stare you in the face every day, in the pathetic faces of obese, cancerous european races? The evolutionary cul-de-sac approaches with greater and greater speed as the technocrats put the pedal to the metal and hope the rocket thruster they installed under the car lifts us above the suburban homes and off into space before impact.

"Loserdom" is a state of mind but also a shard of reality within the framework of contests and gauntlets that are shared utilities and institutions and corrals for vast sections of my species. More than that, they are gut feelings, awareness of how the sociopathic elite provoke your ire while striking such fear into your heart as well, so that you keep your distance and hardly dare comprehend their intricate systems of dominance in day to day affairs, as well as long ongoing games.

I didn’t know I was supposed to feel indignity at having achieved my current level of income and nothing else professionally. Being a loser in this society adds insult to the injury of being poor, and it's worse than the poverty: it’s a demoralizing life-spoiler, a deadening. Perhaps the answer is not to wave my finger at what I call “society” but rather inhabit a new, easily available reality, partially fashioned by me. Find the alternatives in or out of the system, alternative ethos, independent underground. I know I’ve already found a good portion of it.

Tsunami’s Surplus Sutra

We’re rebuilding after the flood like we always do

but people aren’t special anymore

We are masses

and most of us are surplus

unique, like everybody else

statistics, not tragedies

notes, not melodies

in demographic symphonies

someone’s got us pegged

They work us in their factories

work us in their offices

sell us things to keep us working

broadcast in our homes

herd us through the mall corrals

put us out to pasture

buried under short-cut cemetery lawn

Talking monkeys

Earth’s greatest magic act turned into a housing tract

Crammed into holes

for lack of opportunities

be sure to buy some ointment for your

poor sore pegs of jagged genetic defection

Mammalian epidemic

food for the next thirty generations of germs

aptitude test said: worm’s meat for the skull orchard

influenza, smallpox, one step ahead, two steps, four steps, eight

malevolent mitosis, cancer, the revenge of synthetic matter

We think we’re hot shit with technology

nothing can stop us, we’ll disappear into silicon

as soon as we get the infrastructure up, as soon as we pay off the national debt

as soon as we get our guys in office, as soon as we get our shit together

it’s a new year’s resolution, resolve to make one next year

Cheap Life

the product of the 20th century

Cheap Bullets for Cheap Life

Industrial Munitions, Zyklon B

cheap food, cheap gas, cheap labour

Live out low cost life in economy class

slave to the flux of the marketplace

in a closet apartment, dying out the paradigm

dying out with the old college drop-out try

dying in debt, trying and dying while the water dries up

Abort the struggle with anesthetic death

reach for the pills or the pistol

cause those poor folks on the coast had no warning

but you do, and who needs the chills of the heat death?

America voted to do another line

keep the binge going, a second term is fine!

Make an amazon donation to the starving hordes

and eat popcorn to disaster porn

Me unique, you unique, like everybody else

like ashflakes of nuclear winter, dental records fossilized

and I think that death is in the tide

but one day the culling will be done

and the herd back in balance

or spaced out in space colonies, no thanks to me

fat grub, eating facts of life for breakfast

shitting them out as rich cream filling

recycling my waste for efficient malnutrition

and unwilling to be the first of gaia’s raid victims

let the brown drown, the hordes who couldn’t find higher ground

the hut-people on the other side of the planet, damnit

let them bear the brunt of the purge like they always do

they’re used to catastrophe, they can take it

thick-skinned holy mass of messiahs, god bless 'em!

No, don’t look at me! I’m weak, I admit it, happily

I don’t make a good martyr, I’m a product

of the new line of genes, the next model, haven’t you seen?

They’re CK genes and they’re all the rage now

my genetic specs support vast sensation at the cost of

delicate nerves, they’re destined for the

microchip mothership we’ll escape this planet with some millennium.

But that’s several steps in evolution away, sucks for me

my cloned ancestors of better breeding get to reap the benefits

and nuance continues to squirm, divide, split hairs deep inside

the wrinkles of my folded-upon-itself cerebral cortex

nuance to prop up hypocrisy

 to justify racism

 to cultivate cynicism

 metaphysical egotism

 to disconnect –

me from reality, declare myself a solipsistic being of an abstract plurality

Viruses mutating

natural intelligence

casually bandied-about apocalypse

like a sci-fi premise
   a rusty eschatology

      shallow sutra

         string-bean poetry

all washed up on wreck beach, tsunami-surplus

BEHOLD THE COLD DECISION

Everyone has a room to cower in. A room where you control the thermostat. An eternal room of comfy claustrophobia, a room infinite in time, but finite in space. A dimly-lit room with a hardwood floor and a Persian rug, and a window to the wintry world outside where you can watch snow fall and animals freeze and die, and enjoy the view. It’s amazing what you notice when you allow yourself to look. A room of complete temporal dilation and fruition of cross-section NOW consciousness, a room of bright colors for large pupils.

I'm gonna shake hands with God, and incorporate myself into its climate-controlled gestalt, a cool blue shimmering heavy jelly, off the scale of the Geiger counter, beckoning at me to join the roiling tumorous mass.

Or, I’m gonna get my ass kicked – bitch-slapped – bubble-burst – innocence shattered – citizenship of TINA utopia (there is no alternative) revoked, and all the rest. The best-of-all-possible-worlds will become just another electron in the cloud of probability, a Schrodinger’s cat, haunting the flimsy certainty of reality. And we will be seen for the trivializers we are, and subsequently submit to the shrill and stoic cry that LIFE IS SERIOUS, and turn flat faces up to the rain, and purify ourselves of pretensions, and choose an ideology to live by because we have to make a choice, just because we can’t be like the ass, standing in front of the haystacks, starving because we don’t know which to choose – and this is somehow purpose, because we say so, just because – cause A is A, and everything follows from that, okay? Dig?

The Canadian Land of the Dead

I turned my back on the great canadian tv movie. Its patriotism was poison to me, I couldn't consume.

This land ain't my land. This land ain't your land. At least the haida and the mohawk and the huron and the ojibway and the newfoundland redskin origins had some sense of its sanctity. Ours is second hand, a sunset on a postage stamp, an embalmed inuit. And the 49th parallel is arbitrary - signed on the dotted line, serrated continent. We should drink Pepsico, keel over, and let the indians repopulate. Maybe they can take their names back too.

Old Europe is our distant trim cousin. We gorged ourselves on petroleum ether and timber. Brewed beer for the fatherland. A succession of rich guys rule from Sussex drive. The gloss of a series of renaissance resonance flakes off parliament like paint. Mob hitmen slink out of suburbia and slum in the ghettos, sink into the quicksand of poverty, clip extra-mafia dealers at discount rates. The eye on the pyramid cap was sewn shut, the castle of silling rave flickers on from dawn til dusk outside public view or popular imagination. The conspiracies are safely enclosed in the X-files DVD collection. Shopping carts haul them out of superstores and into houses. Psychiatrists reanimate their spiked-water plans from the '60s for the duration of a conversation, then prescribe us pharmaceutical grade placebos, calm us just enough with new age lullabies, soften us up for the nuclear strike.

I sit on a beanbag, locked away in my fallout shelter, still on the electrical grid, belly full of cheesecake. I just got back from shoveling snow, a socialized task fitting into the ministry like a square peg in a round hole, ice chip surplus down the money hole. I was appointed, not carved out of the market like a good go-getting entrepreneur. I'm fellating pink platitudes and hitting lenin again, taking a big hit off the blog bong, injecting myself with friendly opinions, micing the echo chamber, amplifying it, putting it into html, java, C++, Pascal, Arabic, Hebrew, Swahili, morse, horse, Houyhnhnm, and most humourously of all, human.

America is the human's human, the humanity of humanity, the synthetic of ecology, for better or worse, we'll see. He who gets the first weapon in space wins!

Naomi smiles slyly at our country in a wireless feed to CBC, tells us condescendingly the pussy’s in the mail. We are frigid and our thoughts are frozen. But the globe is warming and the ice is cracking. Glacial statues will become mercury and it's nothing but a scene out of terminator two, tragedy, farce, and the preposition marx forgot, the dialectic hegel never dreamed, the stillborn democracies in deserts with population centers

Negative Nancy gets a kitchy carebear valentine for christian christmas and discovers the true meaning of existentialism. Luc DuMont chews on just enough blotters to hit the acid sweetspot and laughs himself into a merry void of pretension. Young Jonathan spins in a circle until he tumbles onto the couch. He’s a dancer. Cobain goes off the nod, picks up a guitar and plays a grim cover of an Eby song, then stuffs a stick of dynamite down his throat. His biggest fan pushes the plunger.

Gramps sleeps. Stew chews on Stendal's faux-cynical christmas story over molson ale. The pixies play on a new tape deck imported from twenty tears in the past on the chronoblivion black market, but its presence is not thought incongruous. The pixies are enjoyed by a wider demographic than has ever previously enjoyed them before. Even gramps stirs from his slumber and listens. Mumbles to us about his punk days.

Where is the light? There are little lights all over the christmas tree. Maybe they'll suffice until St. Nick puffs out of the crackpipe. Throw another rock on the fire. Stoke your lump of coal. Stroke your neighborhood calico. Close the borders. This land is our land now. Let's monopolize christmas this year. Keep Santa in house, under house arrest in the tundra, surrounded by a herd of genetically-manipulated killer caribou cavalry and mounties with m-16s. Keep him drugged on a drip, protecting our airspace with a missile sleigh for this grand secular holiday, bombing the Baldwins for New Years’ night. It's what Brain Orser would do and we know he's the winner after all. The Gold Metallurgist, our demon king, one nation under figure-skating Satan. After all, all empires fall. Egyptians, Romans, Limeys, Americans, and even God’s country. And this is the Canadian land of the dead. We've got our respawn points lined up. See you in Buddy Cole's bar, comrade canuck.

The Industry needs qualified people

Hungover

on no hour's sleep
I'm here in class
to learn a trade.

I have caffeinated water to keep the

creeping chaotic unprofessionalism at bay

it wants to come out but

I will suppress it

and relax in

tense manic calm

a mighty plastic edifice

a can-do attitude.

In front of me

the instructor demonstrates

his awesome grasp of traffic control trivia

happy as a pig in shit.

Above me
is a skylight
a window to the heavens and their cast of
cheerful cottonball unsui

the ghosts of professionals who succeeded

in phasing out.

Light cumulous lumps

call ~

I answer.

Original Sin (i)

The tincture of Manhattan stands, dusty, under a tired evening. Jamie enters, center stage. She’s a little cradle-cage of solipsism, take it from your invisible narrator, your eye on this scene. The blank is fucking with Jamie as she marches her way into this scene. The blank is what tells her she has no identity, needs no introduction, like the anonymous virus that gives you that goddamn cold. She must be an archetype or something, to enjoy a role, a raison d’etre, to survive in this prima scene, this unholy entry wound into the story of what happens in the Manhattan tincture, that extract of an island.

How much of her unborn brain will she be able to keep, she wonders. The fucking blank bastard fucks with her. I pretend to be trapped in Jamie’s mind, for now. For the purposes of this story, her world is objective reality. And you’re a prisoner of this really, insofar as these words bind you.

The fucking blank bastard is kicking her ass. It’s kicking her ass through the streets, because she knows she has to find the licorice, if not that street she’s looking for. If not the street, the licorice. Something has got a hold on her, some beast, some monkey has climbed onto her back, she doesn’t know where the FUCK it came from. It wants to be fed. . . Licorice. No ordinary licorice. Chadwick’s licorice. The blackest of all licorice. Licorice so black, light cannot escape from it. Where the fuck does this licorice come from, she wonders. I could tell her it’s forged from the furnaces of hell. She won’t believe me though. She will believe me by the end of the story. I know how the story ends, but for you, second person, the present tense reigns.

How can she be addicted to licorice, she wonders. It’s not even just a psychological addiction. Oh, it is that, no question, the imperative creeps into her dreams like a sly, sophisticated, soft spoken cigarette demon. It slips in through her brain’s backdoor. But damned if it isn’t physical too. The taste looms large in her imagination, so tragically beautiful but not real, not enough. She needs the real thing. Soon enough, she is motivated to get it. If nothing else. The crave spills over the misty mind barrier into solid bodily functions. It’s an itch in the face and an ache in the ears and a soreness in the joints. It’s a concrete slagheap of lethargy. It’s a dash of jaundice, a smidgeon of scurvy. And it all is blotted out, verboten, by Chadwick’s sticks. For a few minutes. A cheap fix. She needs. . . Licorice. Chadwick’s licorice. It tastes so good. A dark sweet, not bitter, but a void of anything but sweet. Sweet is the light. And the blank bastard is kicking her ass, because she asks the blank bastard why she craves, and the blank bastard doesn’t answer. The blank bastard just wants one thing. Sweet. Dark. Licorice. Sweet Dark Licorice. Deja fucking vu. She’s felt this crave before. She tries not to take this ridiculous crisis too seriously, but it is a little serious, since the habit is starting to cut into her welfare cheques. So she stews on it. It remains, stomach achingly profound.

And she needs those cheques to live. She can barely afford her rent.

She lucked into her sorta-stable situation by finding the welfare fountain. She found a hacker who would whore her into the government bureaucrazy, the virtual network sitting inside some computers in some 55th floor office someplace where money falls from the ceiling like rain, the hallowed offices, the water in the circle of low-rent life, the giving river, the trough for scoundrels, for cockroaches to consume, in survival, sans self-respect. Someone wormed their way into the oh-so-unprotected machinations, computers with no failsafe or auxiliary, responsible for distributing that ultimate mafia’s money with now-severed tentacles of P2 conspiracy still clinging, in a ghostly layer, to every transaction. Someone hacked into it for Jamie. A fairy hacker, her roommate at the time. A good deed, if you ignore that theft of a few binary digits in a system that represented a nano-percentile of the virtual pie. At the time, there were still more virtual dollars in the gross global product of the republic of planet earth than there were people. Inflation was expanding the virtual universe to the edges of its infinite cage. Then the electricity ran out. Bye bye virtual cage, infinite fininteness, big crunch, collapsed universe in a lone server, plug pulled, 0. The final yin. But that’s another ghost story.

The harsh reality is that Jamie is going to be broke if she doesn’t keep buying that weirdly expensive licorice from Chadwick’s, and if she’s broke she’ll be evicted, and then where will she go? Back to the fairies? They won’t have her. The bridge has burned. Not by her, she thinks, but god knows who did it or why. When the bridge burned, she was fucked up, and didn’t notice. That night choked on its own vomit. It’s dead. At least it won’t come back to haunt her in memory. Hopefully.

There is fear every day, primal fear. Shelter seems to be shrinking away. It slinks away from her bed in nightmares, leaves her cold, in the streets of New York, blowing like trash, cementing to a foundation somewhere, being absorbed into the city, thoroughly. They’re always tearing shit down around here, the old buildings are being slaughtered with wrecking balls and dynamite. They’ll tear her down too, eventually, after she is absorbed. Her numb cunt won’t mind, her powdered organic frame will fall rhythm to construction and destruction. They’ll turn her into a new office tower. People will discuss the price of oil and politicians will shake hands with business leaders in her offices. She will watch the consequences unfold on foreign shores, in passive comprehension, as she dreams herself spectator to the drama. In this reverie, she will no longer play a role. She will see it all and be it all, as totality. She will be apathetic. Stone. Buddha. She will no longer care about her future, her fate, the fate of society, the fate of humanity, the fate of planet earth, no longer a republic, even the fate of the universe. It will blink on and then off, and then on again, or not. Maybe God is done flicking the switch. She won’t care. Either way’s cool. She’ll dig the universe. Ultimate empathy in the void of ego. Something like that. It could work. It would work better than this stupid society that calls itself “pragmatic”. That thinks it’s got it all figured out. That the checks and balances are in place, and we got our economy afloat, and if you can’t get ahead, it’s your fucking fault you whiner. It don’t get no better than this, fool. Get a thick skin. Grow up. Welcome to reality. This gives her the message that her night death reverie is a downer. An unrealistic fantasy. Maybe even a wishful thought or a sugar coat. Saccharine. Psychedelic. Fluff. Fairy and airy.

The question hammers at her in the glare of the day, keeps her up at night: If you die tomorrow, what have you done? What have you seen? She knows the answer, but won’t allow herself to think it.

She lives in the pragmatic society. It hides ridiculous luxuries, esoteric technologies, secret societies, even a carefully rationed amount of magic. The horrors are right out in front of everybody. They’re on the news every day. They’re on film and in print, they’re in the screech of Schnitke’s strings. They’re in the bomb craters of Bahgdad. Some churches still flay their followers with the idea of eternal damnation, but there are citizens of the republic of planet earth who are well versed in hell - much moreso than the priests who perpetuate that hellish dogma. And the ones who suffer this gnosis, gorged on the fruit of knowledge – they don’t fear its degrees. Anyone who has been on the other side of the grainy Times newspaper photo, who has bled the blood pixels you see in the morning, has understood absolute pain.

The world has got a tinge of utopia and a firey underbelly dystopia, in which our Licorice-hunting lady Jamie has found a niche – a niche on which to hang her tired metabolism, so she can take a spirit nap, because sleep is so good when you’ve got a warm bed in a warm apartment, and the heat bills are paid, and this crazy chaostrophy they call a city is enclosing you, washing over you like an alien wave, and you just turn off the light and let it wash over you. If you can get enough licorice, you’ll be alright.

But the body aches in the daytime, it aches when you think about it aching, it opens up a pandora’s box of aches, it aches in infinite fractal regression, progression, aches upon aches. It’s an achy bastard. If everybody’s body is as achy as Jamie, she wonders, how can they go about their daily business so stoically? Jamie’s not a stoic, she complains when she aches, but she has managed to eliminate most factors that trigger or exascerbate aches, so she lives as ache free as she can.

One thing that causes Jamie to ache a lot is work. She has had a handful of jobs in this absurd city, and all of them caused aches eventually. The job that proved ache-free for the longest amount of time was the one where she had to stand on a street corner and count the number of taxis that went by. That was outside, but there was a roof nearby, so the rain and snow didn’t take an intolerable toll on Jamie’s sensitive nerves. She kept a tally. It was a nine to five job. She worked seven days a week, so she earned a lot of money.

No one actually hired her for that job. The activity was done of her own initiative. Some cynics might have said it wasn’t really a job at all. But the fairies were putting her up for rent at the time, so it was all good. That winter she got too cold, and quit that sweet gig. The other jobs were realer, and all induced aches earlier, usually after a week. The McDonalds job was the worst of the lot, closely followed by Walmart and The Computer Chip Factory (She can’t remember was the fuck it was called, and neither can I). She was drunk every day for that one. Relevant memories are hard to dig up.

But it was a good year, even though she was unemployed for most of it. Jamie had been taken in by the fairies. The fairies were a short-lived band of gay philanthropists. Not much was known about them. They took in homeless or soon-to-be-homeless people. They rented a vast number of condos in the Jackson Tower, and the facilities were legendary.

Of course, there were many appeals made to the fairies. In order to make an appeal, one was advised to visit the fairycafe, or as it was known by people not in the know, Robin’s Donuts, on Madison and 72nd. The fairy network would be informed of the request, and a fairy agent would meet you in the far booth at an agreed upon time. Fairies wait for no one, so the supplicant was advised to be early for the appointment. In would walk a large, rather muscular stud in a red cape, with bejeweled fairy wings, draped in paisley shawls. The shawls were designed by the local paisley artisan and kaleidoscope maker, Jon Kaleidoscopsmith. The fairy would sit down and discuss the worthiness of the request with the submitter. But the criteria for being allowed residence at the fairy condominiums was unknown to anyone. A carefully guarded secret. One poor fairy never even talked under torture, it was said by one of the Robin’s Donut crew one gray evening. The thought of a fairy being tortured by those mafia scumbags sickened us all to the core, those fuckers. Although strangely, it did turn me on a bit, and that disturbed me. It was said that to be accepted by the fairies, you had to be a virgo, and you had to have the manna. Nobody understood what the manna was. It was something like funk, and it helped to be on a particular drug, a little known synthetic tryptamine called 4HO-DIPT, which totally disappeared on the street around nineteen ninety-whatever.

What turned the fairies on was groveling. That’s all they wanted. No sex. At least, hardly ever, there were a few cases where the supplicant was asked to give up more than his dignity. But generally, they just wanted you to get down on your knees and beg to stay with them, and maybe even cry a little. They were good at making people cry. It was rarely hard to nudge their clientelle over the edge. They would make everyone supplicate themselves, but they would only select one in ten.

Jamie won the lottery, as did fifty others that year. Jamie cried, and was granted herself free room and board. She got a room. She got bored. But she was comfortable, for a while.

* * *

Jamie needs to stop thinking about licorice.

“Fucking fuck!” she seethes at the empty street. She rarely has the energy to curse aloud these days, but tonight she’s on fire. Tonight, she’s got a pulse and a purpose. She’s got a show to see. She’s got some blood in her cheeks. She’s not a frigid bitch. She could even go for a dick inside her, maybe. It’s been a while since she had that crave. The licorice blotted out every other desire, it seems - implanted a self perpetuating viral meme. But mostly she’d like to kill someone because she can’t find the street she’s looking for. But mostly she’d like some – no.

Jamie needs to stop thinking about licorice. She needs to find that street.

She already bought her fix, a big bulge of a fix, a goddamn bag of a fix, and she ate it all. It’s gone. She should be satiated. But it’s gone. None in reserve, and it’s comforting to have a licorice surplus. She spent her last fifty bucks, are you happy Chadwick? She has just enough for the ticket now and she’s going to that show, damnit. She has nothing else to live for. She’ll really kill herself this time, if she doesn’t see that show. But then, if she sees the show, she can die, so she’ll probably kill herself anyway. Eventually. But first she must see that show. Because life can’t be allowed to take its course, life’s a bitch, and she’ll have to be a bigger one by killing herself off. She’ll have to kill herself off before whatever disease mother nature has planned to finish her off with does its work. Then she’ll be the winner. For once in her fucking life. And that fucking fairy lottery doesn’t count. She had to cry for that one. She was really the loser after all. Because her condo contract ran out, so now she has no free room, but she still feels the stinging humiliation of the forced weep that quickly turned into a real one. It wasn’t fair, in the end. Too high a price to pay. The year of free room and board is gone, except as grains of nostalgia she still shakes out of her shoes every once in a while.

So she needs to forget the posh and freaky fairy facilities and find that street. 61st. She doesn’t know how she got to this isolated canyon. She hasn’t been this far from her sedentary hole in years, and she’s never been to this part of Manhattan. She didn’t know there were places like this. Empty places. Unless you count the crackhead under the fire exit. But he’s empty, in his own way. And full of crack. He’s in that rare part of the crack cycle – the section of satiation. He’s high. Jamie thinks maybe she can get directions from him. He knows where up is, at least. Obviously. Right now, anyway, he knows that preposition.

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Jamie calls. She doesn’t bother with formalities, politeness, politics, niceties. She’s a rude rat, and she’s down with that. The head stares at his pipe for ten seconds, strokes his beard, and finally answers her:

“Practice, man.”