Thu, 19 May 2005

every day you get a little whiter
Like most post offices, my post office has insane people handing out their xeroxed newsletters about the masons and the zionists and the aliens, and by and large these people confirm what Duane once told me, that insanity is unendurably boring and tedious, but then every once in a while turns up a gem. “Ma’am,” he says (and I must here admit to having a weird affinity for being called ma’am, which at least hints at the possibility of a civil conversation), he says “Ma’am, do you want to live forever?” “No!” I said, genuinely unhappy with the idea of eternal live. “Good! You’re one of the smart ones! It pays on you to be alive forever, but no one looks at that end of it!” “Pays like vampires?” “That’s what those people think, but they’re wrong! It makes you like retarded, only more so, you can’t take care of yourself, you stop being like a real person, and every day you get a little whiter. It’s hell! We did that to my brother and it’s horrible, they told me it would take him a few days to get used to being alive again but he never did! He just sits in the basement and drools on himself and watches the television!” “Isn’t that what most people do?” “Yes, I think that’s part of it, but maybe not, that part I don’t know about, but here, take my newsletter and just, I mean, just be careful, okay? Be careful when people ask you about being alive forever.” He then walked off nervously, across the street, where he started talking to a couple at the bus station. I read some of the newsletter while waiting in line to mail off mix cds, and it’s obvious the guy I talked to didn’t do much of the writing, but the basic message was the same: don’t agree to eternal life, it’s a scam. I may do some research later; will update as needed.
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

what about joan?
My email gets pretty seriously filtered before it hits my inbox. Most obvious spam gets deleted via Bayesian and content filters, but there’s a gray area of stuff that’s probably spam but maybe not, and that gets sent to my WHOZITZ directory, which gets deleted every Wednesday morning. When I’m bored, I poke around in that directory to see if there’s anything of interest, and today I found obvious spam entitled JOAN LOST HER CLOTHES!. Now I should have known better, but my sympathy had been triggered — it’s a bad hang, losing your clothes, but the upside is it’s an ideal opportunity to show off ingenuity and dignity, and so now I was curious. How did Joan deal with this crazy situation? Did she make surrogate clothes from newspaper and plastic bags? Did she bushwack some nutrient-deprived supernodel and steal her clothes? Did she bypass the situation entirely and confidently walk around without clothes, leading passerby to assume some sort of reality-prank tv show is in progress? I followed the horribly ugly URL and came to the expected peeping thomas-style website, filled with (blocked) popups, but no news on Joan. Damn you peddlers of quasi-pornography, what about Joan? Is there an address where I can send her some of my clothes? In a snit, I called Cecelia, and she agreed that Joan deserved a proper outfit no matter how she solved her nudtastic conundrum, and admittedly was a little bit aroused by this Joan character wandering around without a stitch on. “We could give Joan clothing and make her be our friend!” Cecelia giddily stated. “Yes! Joan will teach us MacGyveresque methods of dealing with the loss of clothing, and we will be well-prepared for the next time we accidentally go to All-Nude Roller Disco and misplace our locker key,” I said, calmer but still pretty jazzed. “Yes! But how will we get past these shady internet characters?” “We will use the internet to fight the internet!” And so we would like to put the word out: If you have seen a naked or recently naked individual responding to the name Joan, and if she looks pretty crafty and clever, please tell her that Ana and Cecelia have clothing and alcohol for her just as soon as she can manage to drop us a line. Thank you.
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

wasp
There’s a decommissioned telephone switch box almost hidden by bushes in the field between where I live and the nearest convenience store. It is almost entirely overrun with a giant wasp’s nest, but across the top is a pile of wedding rings, amulets and loose change left by those who pray to Saint Friard for retribution and mercy, in equal measure. I went to leave my cellphone atop the box, but the hum of the wasps was so loud that I wussed out and instead threw it into the pond.
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

ballroom dancing with the vermin-eater
As of this afternoon it has finally started snowing here in the republic of Iowa, the ghosts of head-on fatalities attempting to read the calligraphy of tiretracks across the asphalt before the snow swallows them completely. I went out with my new secondhanded camera to try to catch pictures of them, the confusion in their spirit-eyes as they lose the lattice of the body, now little more than a tissue-map spread acros their dashboards, and become less-than, minus the habits of the organs, so that their forms become increasingly nonhumaniod, until all you can see is shifting patterns in the snow, the brain making connections where no connections exist. I never made it out to the highway, however, as I was spotted by the vermin-eater, out on the deck in her stained prom dress, attempting to catch snowflakes on the tips of syringe needles. The vermin-eater believes that the form of snowflakes are a communications technology, so that each snowflake makes use of a limited alphabet of patterns in order to form an unlimited set of information-packages, and since none of the failures at the university will put proper funding behind the snowflake translation project, she gets absolutely frenzied when it snows, as the information is lost forever as soon as the sun returns. Like many of us out here in the park, the vermin-eater stopped paying her lot fees and utilities years ago, after the managers were vanished, but unlike myself (who still earns a marginal living by which I can support my experiments and addictions) the vermin-eater lives off what her gang of dogs drags out of the fields, and since her dogs have shrunken skulls, the prey they hunt are moles, skunks, and crows. The vermin-eater told me to stay away from the accident scene; the dogs and a cult of organ theives were having it out and neither side would have much ptience for my phototaking. I nodded, shrugged, and walked to the office to get a coke.
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

vanish
I live about four miles from an elementary school whose students have been flickering in and out of existence. This makes it hard to arrange lectures and activities, as some students are missing for up to three minutes at a time, a gap far too large to simply skip over. Even worse, the children are apparently being given some nature of ‘involution education’ while away, a series of partial lessons which, when accumulated, provoke states of distance awareness, alternate time, and the activation of the puberty device. A pair of these children live here in the park; I’ve seen them drawing interwoven mandalas in day-glo chalk on the basketball court. I tried to talk to them, as I’ve always had an interest in subjective time, but their mothers, mascara slurred around their eyes, screamed at me and poked at my undercarriage with broken broomhandles until I left them alone. The children refuse to leave the park, claiming their hair has taken on a secondary function, pulling nutrients from the air, leaving them free to perfect their work. Yesterday the manager put up cyclone wire around the basketball court covered in blue tarps, so as to diminish media attention, which I think is pointless, as the earth is filled with miracles, but the manager is a pragmatist in these matters.
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

tv as eyes
At a swap meet I bought a tivo which was also a time machine, and would record any television show in history if I programmed it right. I was all anxious to tivo every episode of WKRP, but I couldn’t remember when it was on, but then I remembered that my grandad stored all his old TV Guides in the attic, so I drove to Duluth and filled a spiral with all the shows I wanted to record, but by the time I got back the retro-futuro tivo was on the blink, and Merle and Ed Satan came over and claimed it was probably a loose wire, and before I could get between them and the device it was cracked open like a turtle on the interstate. I’m gonna see if any of the celestial mechanics can fix it, and if so, I’ll let you know if I get hold of anything particularly noteworthy.

(ljcomments)
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

trace elements remaining in the bloodstream
Every once in a while people try to engage me in arguments. I’m not sure why this is. Example: on the plane this morning this man in one of those weird panelling-looking suits where you can just peel off a dirty layer like a fruit roll-up tried to bait me that superthin east coast pizza is the way it should be. here in the midwest (rekanize, fool) people often champion the deep-dish pizza. I’m the Switzerland of pizza, and could not care less, so I thought about doing what I ususally do when I’m flying somewhere over Lake Superior and no longer want to listen to people dribble out of their mouth-holes and scream “THERE’S A MAN ON THE WING OF THE PLANE!”, but people are much less understanding of such stunts lately. Instead, I took this as an opportunity to work on my diplomacy skills. “The key to good pizza ain’t the crust,” I tell him. “It’s the meat. You have to make your own meat. And not muscle-meat, no. The skin. Use the skin. The skin is where an animal keeps its soul, and the souls of dead animals is where flavor comes from.” This used to be enough to bother people so that they’d be quiet, but he just shrugged it off and said “That’s what I like about you people out here, you’re so quaint”, so I had to stab him in the thigh repeatedly with my fingernail clippers (legal again!) until he shut his fat fucking mouth. Tomorrow, I promise, I’m going to work on my diplomacy some more.
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

to-do (one)

  1. For my thirtieth birthday a friend of mine gave me eight pounds of uncut heroin, which I guess was a thoughtful gift, but that’s way more heroin than I’m ever gonna need, so I got to selling it, but the only people I know are poor post-students or just plain poor people, so everybody’s wanting to buy heroin at like five dollar increments, and it’s going to take me decades to sell it all that way, and also my lifestyle doesn’t mesh with all these people coming over all the time and falling asleep under the deck so that I have to hit them with the hose and they start yelling about how they’re not going to buy any more of my heroin, which I mean so much for keeping a low profile. Thus I’m going to plant the remaining 7.8 pounds of heroin on my nemesis, and laugh as the police beat him into a stupor. Which brings me to
  2. Must aquire nemesis. Not as easy as it sounds. I’m very charming and friendly, and people naturally taking a liking to me unless I get all in a snit and chase them around town while whipping them with my belt and cursing them in the literal sense. Also I don’t much want some high-maintenence nemesis who will constantly be conspiring on my front lawn and calling me late at night with digitally manipulated recordings of conversations I have had with loved ones which make me sound like a tool. No! I want a nemesis entirely on my own terms, who maybe has a day job and some entertaining hobbies so that the months when I have no pressing need for nemesising until one day and then POW! he finds a big bag of heroin in his pants as the sirens grow louder and just as he realizes that he is now fundamentally doomed he picks up the phone to call his lawyer only there is no dial tone, there is only my voice, telling him that I am the winner! I am the winner!

(ljcomments)
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

the uncontrolled vocabulary
“What is it — this thing which now forces itself upon my notice? What is it made up of? How long was it designed to last? And what qualities do I need to bring to bear on it — tranquility, courage, honesty, trustworthiness, straightforwardness, independence, or what?” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Three, Hays trans.)

They were born twins, and assumed they would remain as such, but the years wore on them in different ways, brought up different attributes, which only increased as one walked north and one walked south, and they took up new homes, new wives, until you wouldn’t even know they were twins, wouldn’t even know they were brothers. One I knew well, years ago, and the other I only met once, and I realized something, watching them uncomfortably joke with each other. The god hates equivalence. No one thing can ever be substiuted for another. I was thinking of that this morning, making breakfast, watching the global warmed December rain out the window, watching the factories across the fields grinding away, and I thought of myself as a distinctive form, as a thing which is seperate from what is around me, though perhaps invisible, as things which share a form and color and texture hide each other, and perhaps to understand what is distinct in me, I need to leave here forever.
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

the safety kings
I hadn’t been to sleep in a while, and thus tried to keep as low a profile as possible in the course of my day, but I couldn’t have been too low profile as an old man with a santa claus beard and a crown made from reinforced tin foil walked up and introduced himself as Nate Tetlow, Safety King. He told me I looked like just the right kind of person to fill in for him as temporary Safety King while he drove his sister to the hospital so she could get her foot looked at. I asked him what was involved in being a Safety King, and he said it’s simple, you just jump in if there’s a particularly unsafe situation and correct, and also advise those who would seek council as to safety-related issues. Safety Kings also get asked to sign on as witnesses for various things, such as marriages and loan applications, as they have the solid community-minded demeanor that inspires trust, but that probably won’t come up, he told me, as I’m only going to be gone for a couple hours. I should have realized that my sleep deprivation made me a poor choice for Safety King, but on the other hand I didn’t have anything else to do (except sleep, and I was trying to stay up until at least dusk, so I said sure, and he gave me the crown and ran to his Jetta and tore ass toward North Cedar in an absolutely unsafe manner. I spent the day watching the neighborhood, my crown riding low and my demeanor kinda zen-gunfighter as I warned kids about kites and powerlines and explaining to a guy in a pea-green track suit how it was I was a Safety King and not, as would be grammatically correct, a Safety Queen (my logic on this is that there is no proper Safety Monarchy, and I am not wed to a Safety King, so overthinking the parallels is just silly; if you wear the crown you’re a Safety King and that’s that). I waited for Nate for about six hours, and he never did show up, so until such time as he contacts me I am considering myself a full-time Safety King, and offer my services in this regard to loyal readers and interested third parties.
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

the new devil, hands in his pants
I took a job last week as a door-watcher. There’s a blank white room in an office building just down from the elementary school, with a desk and a chair and a office supply cabinet and a buzzer and two doors. One door is the one I walk in and out of, and the other is the grey door, and should the grey door open while I’m on shift I’m supposed to press the button. The grey door has yet to open, so mostly I entertain myself by putting thumbtacks I stole from the supply cabinet onto the bottoms of my new leather boots and tap-dancing around the room. Tap dancing, I’ve decided, does not need to be as lame as it is generally presented, if you work some bump and grind into it. But then I guess that’s mostly the case with anything. When I’m not sure of how to proceed through the days, I used to try paranoiac-critical dereve, where I wandered around the city, letting the pulse guide me, and pulling predictions out of things I would see which bore some slight resemblance to things I was thinking about. I was doing a lot of speed then. Now I pick a poet, flip through a collection, and pick a single phrase at random, which I sift for insight. Wallace Stevens is particularly good for this, and my Stevens koan for the day, from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: “I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds.”
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

the last day of my old life
Dollar store voodoo had caught me, the brain bound by chemicals in the scent of the car that caused me to forget to stop at red lights. I didn’t even see that other car coming. It was two am, and I had time to bury the bodies and dump the other car, but it was clear that my life had taken a turn into bad places, the sort of mistakes I might not soon be able to talk away from, so I called my lawyer and worked out one of those group-divorce settlements. I left all three of my husbands and almost everything I owned and had my name legally changed to Manifeste Destiny. The only things I took from the house was a change of clothes and a bag of my own blood I had “in case of emergency”, but I saw a deer that had been shot by the edge of the highway on my way out of town and poured the blood into its mouth, blowing salt with my mouth on its mouth, and I brought it back to life, watching it scamper into the underbrush and praying my days of bad karma were behind me, but no, no.

Three miles outside of town I was picked up by a man who claimed to have an engine of destruction in his back seat, underneath a brown tarp, and as he started to explain the details over the din of a well-worn Corrosion of Conformity tape I realized he knew what he was talking about, his prototype destruction engine might actually work, and so I stabbed him repeatedly in the neck until the visible Jesus descended from a low-flying cloud and took him to Heaven, which seemed odd to me, so I reached up and tugged on the cloak of Christ, pulling him back to the earth. “This is a man who built an engine of destruction! He is a foul and crawling thing, and must be sent to the hell which bears his name, for his name is Sheol, as printed on the inside of his skin!” I said. “No, he is a servant of divine providence, as are you, and all such agents will go to heaven, where they will be rewarded for their acts,” said Christ. “Even those unaware of their role?” “Particularly those unaware of their role! These are soldiers who require not the crutch of reason, of logic, who simply do what they know to do! The lessons of the heart are legion, and point one like a compass toward the celestial city!” “So you are to say that I am to ascend as well?” “Your tasks are not yet completed. Time will tell.” And in a moment, the visible Christ left this earth, carrying the shriveled soul of the engine-maker over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. I long considered what I had seen, and slept in the back seat of the car, the warmth of the engine of destruction like the warmth of a lover who was not yet planning my death.

It may be the case that in Heaven all one needs is quickly placed beneath the hand, so as to seem constantly available, but here on the earth everything is constantly missing or broken, and my abuse of crack cocaine had done nothing to remedy that fact, having shrunk my field of vision considerably, this being one of the reasons I had left my husbands, as I am convinced they were stealing crack cocaine out of my pants while I slept, and also they were devils. I cleaned the blood out of the driver’s seat and drove down the highway to Gulnac, where homeless people built metal detectors from stolen batteries and Pringles cans to scan graveyards for rings and fillings. At the side of the road just before the city limits there was a small luminous boy in the garb of a preacher. He told me a parable of revenge and loss. He told me a parable of ache and love and how all these hungers will be satisfied. He told me a parable of DNA sequences, of the star-maps along the zodiac, of the misguiding direction of gravity. “Do you believe there is a secret road?” the luminous boy asked. “The road is not secret; I can hear it even when I am asleep.” The luminous boy smiled. “I grant you safe passage into Gulnac, as an envoy of the King. You will need to find a second passage out.” I nodded, and faded, and threw up in the passenger seat, reading the half-digested chunks as an oracle, an oracle that told me to steer clear of the gun shop and the whorehouse. I found two twenties tucked beneath the driver’s seat, and went looking for a street fighting match, which Gulnac used to be famous for, but a wave of malnutrition had washed over the city and now nobody was physically able to sustain the endless feats of cunning and physical endurance that street fighting matches called for. So much for expanding my newfound fortune. I parked the car beside a grain silo and fell asleep, rolling into the vomit-puddle without so much as a wince.

When I awoke, my automobile had been replaced with an invisible hearse, by which I was to transport VIP guests to hell. A man stood by the side of the road with his skull in his hands screaming that he needed instructions and perhaps a ride, and I yelled back there was no way I would let on the secrets I had been gifted with, secrets only just then rising up to the surface of consciousness, and that if he did not walk off into the field and bury himself in a hole that I would see to it that God would seek him out and force upon him endless punishments, at which point he ran into the field, out toward the train tracks. I walked in the other direction, past the grain silo and into a small pumpkin patch, where I washed myself in a creek and stole a suit off a scarecrow. Freshly cleaned and attired, I returned to find the invisible hearse, which I discovered I could see if I squinted just right, climbed inside and set off on Rural Route 120 toward Devlin.

If you can kill it, you can take and wear its skin, and that will be enough to fool the ignorant and inattentive, and as they rule this place it will be enough to pass unseen. A swampish heat came up from the fresh-cut grass, piled thick across the lawns, a vegetative ache in the nostrils, blowing north in waves, like a field of filled dumpsters baking in the noonday sun. Above that, however, you can smell other features, becoming more prominent as summer marches into fall; someone is cooking steaks, somewhere a few blocks over, and perhaps also asparagus. More distant still is the scent of burning leaves, and diesel fumes from the interstate, and the smell no one notices, the smell of the people, shuffling through their lives, not the sharp tang of fresh sweat nor the thicker unwashed grime nor the myriad scents they use to disguise themselves, but a baser smell, more fundamental and permanent, the scent which keeps the deer in the fields and the wolves in the hills, the scent which gives up the whole of each person’s life to anyone willing and able to sift the information from the air, sniffing at genetic packets like a map of the nerves and secrets of every person on this earth. Monday I suckled three wolf cubs at my breast and they became part of my nervous system; through minor cranial surgery I could overclock their parietal lobes and thus pinpoint very distant objects by triangulating the target, which allowed me to catch and kill devils. At night they would run alongside the invisible hearse and scare away deer, until the wolves no longer remembered our bond, and broke left, like a fighter squadron, into the cattails and milkweed lining the road.

At night, the children walked to the top of the hill, where the school looks over the town, and they stack wooden pallets against a drainpipe to climb atop the alcove and leap from there to the main building, and scale to the highest point, where a small metal shed holds cable and antennas. The children checked the orientation of the antennas and made corrections as necessary, guided by starlight, and when they were satisfied they took two and a half foot pipes and began pounding at the walls of the shed, slowly, as though they were mimicking a pulse, as though they were trying to call down something to the city of Devlin. I watched them from the invisible hearse, parked in a graveyard to the south, and fiddled with the scanner, trying to see if I could pick up a return signal, but all I heard was static. The graves there were partially wound with multicolored string, where visitors would tie a loop around the obelisk-like headstones upon each visit, with some so covered it was as if they wore sweaters. I noticed every headstone had at least one loop bound to it, all in the same color string, and I imagined some old man walking the rows every so often, checking for bare headstones. The fields outside the graveyard were not so much a hiding-place as a locus of surrogate light, containing fragmented images from all directions, the breath frozen as luminous things hunted out my time-pulse. Gratitude sprang up and forth once the lights stopped. I had planted my journals out in the fields, not staying long enough to see what sprouted up, struggling for sunlight, new words meshed from the old. Airbourne harvesters sifted the grain, the pages, the clouds, utilizing these components as one of the engineers would, pulling the materials apart for pieces to what the harvester-cult considered a portal to end-of-time, something called the Abaddon Device, diagrams hidden in the steganographic source-text of their holy books. The automated pilots waved, and I waved back. The earth was filled with portals.

Distance between cities is marked by rural touchstones, by the distance of silos and groves of trees, so that those who came here to hide often build mockeries of such standard scenery, farms whose size fools the eye, modified road signs tricking the unwary into following endless emptied creekbeds in search of gas and lodging, the husks of cars with Illinois plates rusting in the later summer sun. Unschooled children with .22s hide in the trees and shoot out tires at unimaginable range, sending half-wolf dogs out to pick through the wreckage like a turtle’s tasty innards. I paid two of them to watch over me as I entered the edge of town, where a partial immortal hid in a jar from the agents of the afterdeath, little more than a head and pieces of chest left of him, speaking advice to the Mayor of Devlin from some future eigenstate. Dampeners in the tiles of the ceiling along the hallways of the Devlin city council building absorbed faith and radiated blistered fear. I was protected, but knew to pay attention to such foul omens. Children smiled at me, unsettlingly, and I whistled short themes they would remember and whistle themselves, in quiet times, for the rest of their lives. Orange voices. At a certain length, tone-sequences began to fold on themselves, algorithms coded in the first few sequences in order to map the unfolding of the entire piece, frequency limiters and repetition hues, cerulean in the light, a milk-white hum as the interoffice spiral tightened and I closed in on this place’s heart, tucked away, stored in a jar of bleach and gooseberries to repel stray dreams. “You, you are a key,” I mumbled, and tucked the jar beneath my coat, and so was caught by weekend vigilantes in homemade police uniforms.

It was then I was marched before a series of judges. Each sat at a long table made of whitewashed pine, nailed together in a slapdash fashion, which suggested trials here were of a very ad hoc nature. The judges were constantly being served various scorched meats on fine china, which they would swallow whole and spit the skins between the table and myself as I waited for questioning to begin. Eventually the judges grew full, and tired, and slow, and asked that I explain the nature of my crime in detail. I had spent the week before watching the trials from atop a silo where I was storing the bodies, and thus knew that the nature of release from custody depended on the quality of my storytelling abilities more so than any set idea of law, so I had made a pair of pornographic puppets out of my undergarments while in my cell, and constantly interjected my tale with reenactments of illicit affairs between the Hum Goddess and myself, which were exaggerated in the extreme, but this was theater, and such is to be expected. Likewise, I offered tales which painted my victims as direct conduits to the dark veins of Hell, which (as I have often mentioned) is everywhere, as it seeps from these carriers of the disease of impropriety and stains the whole of the earth, and as such I was simply keeping the children of this fair city safe from the endless schemes of The Devil. This elicited applause from the cheap seats, only some of which I paid for with whisky and hypnosis recall therapy beforehand, so that soon enough I could feel the swell of public support gather around me and shield me from all misdeeds, and as a politician hates nothing more than to go against public opinion, I was released and given three thousand dollars as a reward for my public service. Having beaten the legal system of this town to a quivering mass, I put on my scarecrow jacket and headed over to the schoolhouseto drink the black syrup, catch a quick nap and return my collection of the Very Important Damned to the nearest enterance to Hell.

The hidden christ appeared at the foot of my bed as a crippled girl with clouds of blood in her eyes. Tendriled flowers in her left hand she brought to her face as if to breathe from. The hidden christ began to sing from a shake of the bones in her chest. She bounced up and down to rub her ribs, a low drone eminating from her, stuck in the bedsheets. She tapped a second cadence with the tips of her fingers on the bedposts. The hidden christ spat teeth and clumps of clotted blood onto my covered legs and feet. “Manifest strictly on-earth, place where all ideals played out, and as one cannot appear twice in same form all is difference and shall continue on and on until all forms have been seen, which is nearly eternal.” She had spun wind in her mouth and blown into the faces of all the flowers, which trembled and twisted. “You would care for tea?” “I would not care for tea. Keep from my bed, hidden christ, in any of your forms.” The hidden christ lifted the lacework of her underskirts and showed me her lower mouth. “Your kingdom is toppled and its bricks make for charnel-houses.” “Thrones and dominions are as nothing to me, all that which is, the thread and threat of your very meat.” The hidden christ spattered the oak of the floor with the small rain and made as if to bless the shivering flowers. She gnawed on her tongue as if it was beyond her control, as if it rushed to escape her throat. “Spread the veils of mary, of salome. The plans you have for this world, for your history, your identity, all come from a hole between your legs.” “God has spoken all and final in the form and function of all things; nothing remains but silence. You and I are the voice of God, not in our meaning or grammar but in our very existence. Your shrunken psychologies mean nothing to me.” Her body hummed like a struck bell. I will never return to sleep. Pools of the thicker blood puddled in the valleys of the bedsheets, between my thighs. “Do you believe in evil? Should evil be destroyed? Are you a culpable and complicant witness to evil? Where were you then, when the matter was made, when the first blow fell?” Now I was awake, at least enough to walk, and the hidden christ walked at my side to a curve in the road where a hole had been dug. “When yours is to kill, you should always dig a grave. By the time the hole is finished you will know the length of your resolve. Those who kill without intention live lives shallow as the base of a bowl, their lives wound down to the end of a rope.” I was so tired I could not raise my arms. The drizzle soaked into my skin and weighed me down. The hidden christ begged I should bed with her at the bottom of the hole. Her arms had been broken in multiple places and she could not lower herself down without my help. Her body followed the curve of mine like the black fluid I had swallowed the night before. The skin around her mouth had been gnawed away by infection and left her a leer she could not put down. The cicadas shivered and filled the air around us with a rattle which brought up spasms in her, pearls trapped in her throat, the wet skin where she had the rings cut from her fingers trembling in the moonlight. Further we went, to a tree whose branches dug into the ground. Eggs grew along the trunk and branches of this tree, some as large as a child’s fist, each containing something which scratched and cried. The hidden christ began filling her lower mouth with mud, so as to feed the child therein. Overhead geese hid in the clouds and tried not to see us. The air was all rotted pumpkins, burning leaves and the shriveling of plants which live atop still waters. Here there were frogs and salamanders who breathe the water and reeds with their hindlegs and tails. There was a mossy growth in her mouth which i could feel as i stuck my fingers inside, a tidal ripple with each swallow, tears on the back of my wrist. There was something stuck to the back of her throat, like a pinecone caught in amber, but I could not reach far enough to keep hold. The mist had bloated my skin, it hurt to curl my fingers or bend my knees. A smell of eaten things. There were statues of young women in veils holding machine guns made of opal, further into the trees. The statues were headless. There were inscriptions on their bases overrun by some sort of white fungus. The hidden christ asked for my second name and all the eggs on all the trees began tapping and clawing in unison. Gel-weapons came out of her pores. The hidden christ had armies gathering on the horizon. We were at the bottom of a well, capturing daylight in a mirror whose binding was woven around her throat. “Doll-twins, you and I. I will birth you innumerable children who can only be seen one at a time, holding the other siblings in its stomach until a hole for hiding and form-transfer can be found. Your uterine prayers are trapped in my body. All heaven dips low to grace your crown.” “You’ve buried belladonna in my blood. There is no hidden christ. Moab descending. Perverse reversions; I am falling into chronal harmonies with my dead siblings, places outside. Please let me sleep.” The hidden christ placed her mouths over my eyes and whispered blessings directly into my brain, and sometime later, much later, I awoke, filled with righteous terror and bathed in the marker-blood of the sow. (ljcomments)
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

the god poked me in the hindbrain i store in my womb
One of my more loathsome habits is stealing pens. I’ve been doing it since I was six, when I found a child-sized victory in leaving the principal’s office with his old-style Conklin in the front pouch of my Garanimals overalls. Since then I’ve picked up pens from the NSA, from the Curl Up And Dye Beauty Shop (which I visited, years later, and even got a picture of), a Mr. Spock floaty-pen, and a weird cheap Bic pen with a sculpy figure at the far end, voodoo needles in its genitals and eyes. That’s the one I use to pay bills with, on the rare occasion that I pay bills. In order to karmically make up for this, I printed up a gross of pens, each with their own little message, which I’ve been leaving in places where they seem likely to be swiped. Being me, however, I felt a need to put questionable messages on the pens, such as “This pen was used to sign a Texas death sentence” and “All secrets written with this pen will be publically displayed in an unflattering light” and “This is the pen your nemesis will stab you in the throat with” and “This pen contains invisible ink, so don’t sign any checks with it, or maybe it doesn’t”.
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

the days are near, and the fufilment of every vision
Sometimes at night, wandering around the neighborhood, I’ll hear them before I see them, the plastic clack of the stroller wheels across the broken concrete, and there beneath a streetlight they’ll be banded together, the mothers, sharing cigarettes and secrets in a hushed tone, and I’ll nod at them, so as not to wake the babies, and they’ll nod back, and keep walking. I don’t think the mothers ever sleep. In a couple hours they’ll be waking the children while their husbands head off to the factory, leaving a little early to keep the quiet of the morning over the hustle and noise of th ekids getting showered, getting dressed, getting fed, getting on the bus, at which point it’s about eight thirty, and with everyone gone but the littlest of the babies, two of the mothers, Michelle and Regan, bundle up the kids and head over to Cassandra’s house, where they put the babies in a crib in the far bedroom, turn on the monitor, and head out to the living room, where the mothers watch The Today Show and freebase heroin. I’ve hung out with the mothers three mornings since I moved here, which has been just shy of five years, each time on mornings when the thunderstorms knocked out the power in the neighborhood. I’m not sure how it happened the first time. I think I had to ask for batteries, and the nearest person who I knew would be home was Cassandra, who I shared a class with the year before, some blurry communications class that everyone took as a requirement. I was suprised to hear the television, and went in to see a small portable propped on top of the bigger Sony, some fill-in weatherman standing in front of a gaggle of screaming east-coast frat brothers talking about the midwest storm front. I sat next to Regan on the couch, all the furniture a sort-of pastel arts and crafts style, the carpet and couch deeply padded. Nobody said much of anything, which was fine with me, as I’m not very chatty in the morning, and while Cassie got the batteries I watched Regan pick up a piece of tin foil and a glass tube from a lace-doilied end table with ceramic small teddy bear figurines gathered at the center. It should have seemed weird, and it did seem weird later, but at the time I was just trying not to act weird and conspicuous. She ran a lighter under the tin foil, sucked in the smoke, and sat very still for a minute, after which she passed the tin foil, glass pipe and lighter to me. And that was the first time I freebased heroin. The only time I do it now is on mornings when the storm knocks out the power, when I head to Cassandra’s place and sit with the mothers. They tell me they only do this once a day, in the morning, and while I have no reason to believe them, I do. They’re all a few years younger than me, taking a class or two each semester out at the community college, all they can afford of time or money, aware that they’ll probably never get an actual BA, never go on to the state college an hour and a half down the highway, but taking classes is a promise of change, and I understand that as well as anyone. These girls, scrunchies in their hair and Target sweatpants, they may speak to me but it is clear that I am not one of them, not a mother, not privy to what they know, and there is a sense of being a definite outsider when they speak to each other, the words rolling off their bitten lips both languid and sharp. They listen to the sort of pop music I like to laugh at a little; boy bands, synthetic mall divas, bling-bling hip-hop. They are earnest where I am ironically selfconscious, but cold a little inside, distant behind the eyes, aware of how little room for change their lives afford. I think I am a little jealous of them, in a way I can’t quite define, as they are part of a consistent undercurrent of cool which runs beneath this world in the places where the camera can’t reach, something which I can see but not touch.
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

spread increasingly thin
My little brother Merle, back when he was little-little, made me a magic wand, and gave me explicit instructions as to its use. He bought the core off a kid for a snak-pak and a quarter during one of the Hatch Elementary Swap Meets, and read books on magic wand construction at the public library, in the private arcanum in the sub-basement you can only get to by pressing all the elevator buttons but one. The magic wand is wrapped in duct-tape with pen scribbles up the sides; sometimes you have to bang it on the palm end (NOT the business end) to get it to work, and it never works when your hands are sweaty, or clammy, or cold. Also, you cannot be thinking of two things when you use it, which is why he gave it to me, as he hadn’t gone on the medication yet and couldn’t not think of two (or more) things at the same time, but he said I could use it, because he said if I really wanted to I could do anything. I still have it, wrapped in dark green velvet I ripped out of a motel couch, and if I can get a large enough mirror I might actually use it again.
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

so they trusted him, but he seized sixty of them and killed them in one day
Please allow me to reintroduce myself. My name is Ana Skyfish and I got no time for pleasantries, and like my associate Crow T. Robot once said, I don’t come with a comfort strip. I got suckered into some shitty employment a while back and haven’t kept up with the chitchat for far too long, but my prior employer is now picking glass shards out of his face and I’ve got some catching up to do. First I moved out of the old neighborhood into an empty storage barn halfway between Washburn and La Porte City and nobody minds my taxidermy experiments or shotgun practice, or at least if they do mind they have enough civic pride not to call the fucking cops. Technically I’m the only one living here, but Cecelia is here quite a bit, which is fine by me so long as she doesn’t start inviting her kook friends over. William leaves his bus here when he’s not working and sometimes he comes inside and brings us necessary mission equipment, which is an ideal situation. That’s about it for regulars. We’ve got legit net access and very unlegit satellite access and a stereo system that can literally wake the dead. We’ve been building furniture from abandoned flood-damaged lumber we took off some Amish Separtists for a stray Bloemhof Fighting Lemur we found in the attic. I’m making my stand here at the barn: I’m never going to work another day as long as I live.

And how have you been? (ljcomments)
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

something i learned today
When you’re on an airplane, and you hit some turbulence, and you can see lightning off in the distance, apparently it’s no longer funny to scream “THERE’S A MAN ON THE WING OF THE PLANE!”. It’s not funny for the passengers, and it wasn’t funny for my mom, who had to drive to Wichita and pick me up after I was forcibly removed from the plane halfway home for Thanksgiving, but fuck those squares anyway, because deep down, they know it’s funny.
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

my skull falls out
This afternoon I’m applying for a position at the local revitalization clinick, and after staying up all night watching Dark Shadows (sidenote: I have an affinity for Dark Shadows primarily because the interiors all remind me of all you can eat buffet places my family used to go to when we were little kids, so I think of it as dinner theatre, and just out of screenshot bulky midwestern families are knocking back fish and shrimp dinners beneath fake candlelight), I’ve decided to wear my cape and be all skulky during the interview, just to see what they do. I mean, it’s a revitalization clinick, for fuck’s sake. How can they not appreciate this?
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

a shallow roadside grave for the king of lies
Recent development in summerland religio-kookery: trunk shrines, generally built atop subwoofers and built of springs so that when the <60hz bassline thumps small figures of The Hidden Christ and Jennifer, Patron of Popular Girls bob up and down as suits the character. Most of them have elaborate murals painted across the inside, like a diorama of the critical moment of their favorite figures from the Stephenson Bible or its even more questionable apocrypha, fake-gilded dollar store change baskets weighed down to prevent spilling. I saw a slew of the weird hipster faithful in the parking lot of Eat tonight, handing out handwritten pamphlets with elaborate meth illuminations while discussing amp packages and ignoring their sullen looking girlfriends.
(12:14.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

some entirely seperate way
there’s a giant transmitter just down the street. some of the kids go out when the stormclouds come in and stand inside it, on the concrete, hoping in the way kids do that lightning will hit it and they will have confirmed their long-promised legacy of immortality. i don’t think i’ve ever seen lightning hit that tower, however, and i’ve been out here for nearly a decade. there is a chunk of overturned abandoned farm-mecha stuck out in the field, its transformable talons broken on the outcropping of rocks, and i have seen the lightning hit that, seen it close enough to smell it, the cable-tendons pulling taut like a suspension bridge just before it collapses.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

scope
This afternoon I had to go to the mall to get strings and candles and vodka, and while lunching in the food court I watched people walking past and tried to imagine the scope of their potential modification, how skinny or fat they could possibly be, how strong or weak, if they had the ability to change beyond recognition, so that a year away from their loved ones would afford time to vanish in plain sight, walking past husbands and children who do not even think to take a second glance. (ljcomments)
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

the revolution of the ugly
No sleep no sleep no sleep because there’s a film crew here in town shooting a feature about stoic farmers tragically being foreclosed on and their daughters seeking some man to love and save and so we’ve been pelting them with rocks and feces until they go back to the rancid west coast womb where these well-coiffed fetus creatures thrive. The air here stinks of yeast and sulfur ever since the first catering truck pulled up, though the stink has diminished now that they’ve barricaded themselves in their trailers. There is no hiding place from the american cultural holocaust; it must be attacked and destroyed completely everywhere it incubates.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

review: maker of all/the reverents, amphouse, 10.21.04
The Reverents were literally a band of brothers, with Josh and Jason Armstrong on guitars and Jacob Armstrong on bass and piano, with the occasional live addition of Michelle Davis and Owen Pending on percussion. A slower, fuzzier variant of Chatham/Band of Susans intricate guitarwork, Josh and Jason provided the primary rhythmic element around which Jacob’s bass was more a distorted accompaniment, inverting the general structure of contemporary rock music. Too slow for amped-up punkrock kids, too loud for aging hipsters, and not heavy enough for the narco-Sabbath set, The Reverents never really found an audience around here, content to open for other bands and occasionally play scores for silent movies out at the drive-in.

In 1998, Josh and Jason Armstrong were killed in a car accident on Highway 63, driving back from a show at the Barbary Coast Opera House. Jacob, who was also in the car, broke three ribs and cracked his skull, spending the next two days in surgery at the U of I hospital. Jacob unsuprisingly fell off the radar for the next four years, taking a job at a bakery and marrying his long-time girlfriend Michelle. It was certainly a shock to hear the first Maker of All ep last December, with Jacob and Michelle developing electronically processed clouds of sound, basslines granually pulled apart and recontextualized as a sort of live instrument microsound. Although there have been two other eps released in 2004, the performance last Saturday was the first, and while I was pretty excited to see how Jacob would make this process work in a live environment (particularly one as noisy as the Amphouse), the idea of a Reverents reunion didn’t sit well with me at all.

The Maker of All show was quite a bit different than on the eps — much louder, first of all, and more distorted, with Jacob having swapped the bass for a hot-rodded Fender Jaguar. Michelle Davis-Armstrong sat behind a table filled with small electronic devices and the ubiquitous laptop, though any notion that she might just be checking email was quickly demolished as she lurked over the table, striking knobs and buttons like a cobra, racing back and forth in a mad dash to keep up with Jacob’s much speedier performance. The duo was joined by Manuel Sela on a second guitar, and his sharp jangled clusters of notes swarmed around Jacob’s relentless patterns, broken and refracted by Michelle’s effects into something both mathematically rigorous and alien in form. The crowd was much more animated than at any Reverents show, and the lack of breaks or stage patter only seemed to help (for once) maintain the jittery, vaguely menacing mood.

After the set, the stage cleared and the lights came up and two large televisions were wheeled to either side of the stage, and a small piano was moved up to stage center by Jacob, who then sat at the piano, facing away from the audience, and began to quietly play. Nobody could tell if this was a level check, and everyone kept chatting at the lights slowly came down, Jacob continuing to play quiet minor chords, until the two televisions came on. On the left, Josh Armstrong, looking all of about seventeen, sat in the family basement in front of a small practice amp and a slew of effects pedals, the sound wanting to be loud but coming out like a broadcast from far away. On the right, a tiny Jason Armstrong, perhaps ten, stood atop the living room couch with a starter acoustic guitar strapped over his shoulder, a little too big for him to play comfortably, so he takes his time getting to the fingerings, looking down at his left hand until he sees he’s in place, then staring back up at the camera, his face squinched-up in a mock frontman scowl as he hits the chord. While the footage of Jason plays at regular speed, the footage of Josh seems a bit slower, or perhaps he’s just stoned, certanly possible in his Misfits skull t-shirt and jeans with holes in the knees, staring at the amp like a scrying mirror. Josh’s fuzzed-out riffing falls into time with Jason’s cautious rendition of some impossible to identify cover, and Jacob plays between them both in space and in frequency, the notes hanging between Jason’s overwound acoustics and Josh’s trippy sludge-crawl. Occasionally one falls out for a second, Jason taking a little too slow up the neck, Josh bending over to turn up a distortion knob, but just as soon the three brothers are back in time, and suddenly it makes sense, that weird Reverents tempo, a metabolic hum like a churchbell they could always find a way back to, some eternal tone they had known since they first picked up their instruments, or perhaps even earlier, a pre-uterine echo they sought to embellish. All three brothers stop at the same time, with Josh looking up at the camera with a self-conscious smirk, mumbling “You call that rock and roll?”, while Jason takes off the guitar, placing it gently off the end of the couch, then bowing dramatically while a handful of other kids clap and cheer, ending with a pratfall somersault off the couch at the bottom of his last bow, and then the screens go to black as the cameras are turned off, and Jacob stands and walks off stage, and nobody said anything until the lights came back on.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

rekanize, fools
For those of you who don’t know, this journal is mirrored at JSD pretty much instantly, which means that if you’re on the RSS tip, you can hit the rss 0.91 feed and aggregate the instant sugarsweet edification that is this site however you see fit. You can do that for all the other subdirectories there as well; check JSD for details. This also means those of you down with movable type can hit trackbacks instead of the LJ comments, which I don’t know who is into that, but the option’s there if you want it.

Also, it sounds like AvFest is postponed, but don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll get up to some shit this weekend.

[Note: if you’ve only read this journal at JSD, and are thusly confused, note that there is a livejournal mirror, with comments and LJ-type hoo-hah.]
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

work songs for reconstituted animals
will be the title of the collection of interviews and articles I’m writing with living legend Duane Berryberry, which will probably be released at the end of summer. Expect chunks to go up on JSD; I’ll drop a line here as they go through. Duane Berryberry, for non-locals and kooks, was the guitarist-songwriter for late 60s band Tracer-Echo, who disappeared for twentytwo years after a show in 1971 where, depending on who you ask, Duane had a complete nervous breakdown, Duane was possessed by evil spirits, initiates of the Colony ashram attempted to kill the members of the band over drug debts, a fan shot Duane and guitarist Maria Hollowlight in order to assure their ascent to heaven before the world’s end, or any number of more obscure scenarios. I first met Duane through a friend of mine who is now missing, who took me out to the farm where Duane has been working on what he calls The Great Work since he vanished from the public stage. Over the years we’ve become drinking buddies, and after he told me how much he liked some of my old Grand Theft Audio and Alchemical Warfare articles he agreed to a series of very informal interviews, which we’ll be banging out over the next few months. In the meantime I’ve been developing a few articles, including a list of references in the two official Tracer-Echo albums, so this may very well be a serious project. I don’t want to jinx it, tho. Seth, if you’re reading this, please give me a call, or at least call Carolyn, if only just to say hi and let her know you’re okay.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

random sections
The cameraman is drunk; the image pans sharply as he staggers into the crowd, as one of the trombonists hits him in the head with a well-placed valve shot, as he zooms in on a cheerleader’s ass, as he drops the camera and picks it up again by the cord so that it spins madly which grow as he begins to spin the whole camera over his head like a mace and then flying out of his hand as the first cop reaches him, the battery weighing down the back end so that the last shot any of us watching the live footage of the Summerland Pride Parade saw was like that footage you get when you mount a tiny camera on a model rocket, only run in reverse, as the camera fell to earth.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

positive dental attitude
For years now, I have been afraid of my teeth. Overlooking general dentistial mouth accidents, of which I have had more than my share, I have taken issue with the lack of mutability of my teeth. Barring braces or stains, neither of which are my bag, teeth are essentially the same from the time you get your adult ones grown in. Your skin may change, your soul may change, but your teeth drag your past behind you like a veil. Or so I thought, until I saw the vermin-eater a few hours ago, still out counting snowflakes, of which we now have a stateful. For the longest time I didn’t get along with the vermin-eater, due to my inability to let past offenses flow from me, particularly those so trivial I don’t want to admit to them. In this case, I held a long-standing distain for her after she told me her favorite country band was the Eagles. Earlier this afternoon I finally got over that block, as the vermin-eater taught me how the human can exchange teeth with the canine. I now have 42 teeth instead of my prior 28 (completely free of wisdom teeth, me) and have delighted myself by smiling at children in the office, who now call me the dog-witch as they run away screaming. I wish I had the accompanying jaw and musculature, as it’d be wicked to be able to chew through cable and rope, but the vermin-eater told me that was a bit beyond her abilities. I’m pretty neighborly, so as payback, I showed her the two identical snowflakes I found on my car windshield yesterday night, which she examined carefully, then licked into water while walking back into her trailer, closing all nine of her locks as poor Muhilden whimpered from beneath the porch, sucking on his new sugar-rotted molars.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

poisine
You wear the milk-blood, you carry the bowl beneath your mouth, you rap your rings against the bottom of the bowl and a poisoned sine wave seeps out into our ears. They bring them in to take off their clothes. The guests wear suits of deep velvet which absorbs sound, so as to be silent during movement. Once they were bomber pilots, action at a distance, an oil-smell to them like they were packed away in crates in some cellar after the war and reassembled for the dinner. This would explain the gaps in their consciousness, the short moments of glassy-eyed stillness between sentences, a reduction of all unnecessary motion, so that when they were no longer directly spoken to they would shut down, slump into the chairs. The light must be upon me at all times. Without the light I am prone to attack by shadows. I am paying you to keep that light on me without even a moment’s rest. Oh but i’d tongue-taste it, on the skin, on the very walls where moisture sought escape, carriend inside and your breath has left you your breath has left you you stink of the new death push at the wall and the wall will give way, the thinnest of sheetrock crumbling beneath the hands, behind which identical rooms hide, the contents mirroring those of your room, wax bodies taking your places with the eyes carved away. Heaven Christ, open your skin to me.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

phone call from beyond the grave!
Lo the telephone is the most finely sharpened of all the Devil’s tools, for it allows even the most sanctified home to be contaminated by any force able to access Phonespace, of which there are many who now are tormented in Hell. It is long the morbid humor of the dead to inform the living via telephone of falsehoods as to the afterlife and what it shall eventually deliver to all peoples, a dispicable trait shared both on high and in the low, and so it was that on a morning when I was sorely incapacitated with gin poisoning I was foolhardy enough to cease the incessant mindless ringing of the telephone and so entered into conversation with something holding the bold claim of Daviditude, which is to say a voice bearing a formidable likeness to David who is no longer with us, which is to say the living. I herein recite what I was told not in the belief that it is true, but that in its falsehood it provides a series of clues as to the trickery involved so as to assist you, should such a call ever enter into your home, lord would it never be so! I was told that the afterlife smells like homemade scented candles and carpet freshener, and there are many magazines to read but not like upon the earth, and that it seems like maybe there’s a lamp with a pink lightbulb somewhere as everything has a certain fleshy haze but you can never figure out where it comes from. In the afterlife you are supposed to be assigned chores but no one does them and no one seems to mind. There is no need for to eat or drink, but occasionally you get a little thirsty, and then it goes away, and perhaps this is more to do with remembered habit than the actual demands of the body post body. It is possible to partake in intercourse, but it is approximately as pleasurable as finding a quarter on the floor. It is always a little too warm in the afterlife, and you never really have any privacy. You get to keep your car keys, but your car stays behind. Indeed, the afterlife is just like your living life, only more of a hassle. Be forwarned! All persons who call via the telephone to tell you of the world to come are not to be trusted! They are simply attempting to kill all the free time that not having to work or sleep or worry about appearances and the secret lives of celebrities has given them, a gift without use, and so they turn their misshapen mouths across the universe toward you! Pay them no mind! Hang up upon them and return to your drinking and carrying on! And don’t forget your ears! (ljcomments)
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

i can hear you walking over my grave
When I first moved out here I spent a lot of time watching funerals at the tiny graveyard beneath the I-380 overpass. Packs of mourners were wandering the graveyard, dousing for voices with their cellphones, trying to pick up some signal, some last message by which they would find their way once again, so long content to keep her as their magnetic north around which all forces coalesced and all hearts were oriented. Freelance reporters, watching from the gates at the front enterance, bounced sunlight off mirrors and scraps of tin foil in an attempt to get the attention of any of the immediate family, but their sunglasses were set to phase out light at those levels, so that only the priest noticed them at all, and believing them cultists attempting to pull solar demons into the bodies of his parishoners, sent his sons after them with shovels and pickaxes. I watched them from an oak tree long split by lightning, the branches gnarled and intertwined, and I wanted to stay there, to watch what became of the funeral party, to feel the sunlight dappled between the leaves and falling on my face, to not have to go back to my life, but the devils of habit and tedium pulled me back into debt and terror and loss, tugging back and forth, until I felt tired deep in my chest and started walking back toward the trailer, listening to traffic hum above my head. On the way back I saw a drizzly looking dishwater blonde, wearing a half-dozen sweaters atop each other, like she spent her whole live in the mouth of a rainy day. She looked lost, so I walked up to say hi and ask her if I could help her, and she started screaming at me about fucking nasty Iowa cunts like me, so I punched her in the mouth and she fell like a sack of potatoes. Fucking nasty Iowa cunts like me don’t take shit off tourists.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

1/2
The last time I saw my grandfather he was setting fire to his journals. He had been keeping a journal in overstuffed Mead spiral notebooks since he was a child, which also substituted for a photo album, a calendar, a clipbook. Burning the lot would be at least a weekend project at the rate he was going, examining each page before tearing it from the spiral metal and dropping it into the flames. I came out and stared at him, and he shot me a look like I was trying to teach grass how to walk. “I’m not burning ‘em all, you dolt. I’m just thinning it out some. You have to make a little mystery.” I told him I didn’t understand, didn’t see why posterity shouldn’t be rewarded with as complete a record as possible. He told me the events in a life are trivial, inflated with the breath of context and sympathy only as it suits our vanity, our mirror-vain flattery. It is the gap, and the silence, and the breath between words where the greatness lies, for that is where we can stretch as far as we allow ourselves, set adrift to wonder, wander, build atop what was once just the smallest of irrelevant details. “This is what you leave them, when you leave. Questions which have no answer, or no answer that will satisfy, so they will turn the memory over in their hands like a cold river stone, the lightest of suggestive sketches as to a truth greater than the truth of our small lives lived like rodents, money-hungry, fuck-hungry, noise-hungry. Give them stillness, silence and darkness and they will remember you forever, which is critical, as you only stay in the second world as long as you are remembered in the first, and if all you leave them is the meager facts, your life in the second world will be a shrill re-enactment of the days they may remember. Open the space to mystery, and the second world is to be aflot on a lattice of your loved one’s dreams.” I continued staring at him, and told him he should come in out of the cold. “Someday,” he said to me, but not to me, to some other me that I would become, “someday you’ll see I’m right.”
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

no one forced you to be a moron
Cecelia stopped by tonight and showed me the most horrible product I think I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It’s gumball gum, and it tastes bad, like vap-o-rub tastes, only that’s not the horrible thing. The horrible thing is, for about twelve hours, it stains the inside of your mouth silver, like shiny silver. “It’s like your mouth is a mirrorball!” Cecelia said, obviously delighted with this abomination of science run amok, but I was positively mortified, and have since given up any desire whatsoever to kiss Cecelia, or to eat paint.

I got up to nothing this weekend, other than working on the book (which I now wish I had banged out for that write a book in a month thing that Bauler was telling me everybody’s doing this month, as public shame would really up my productivity) and abusing the gift of sleep while I can. I suspect this will be a hectic week.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

no more will i see you
i’ve been very sick, and very down, so i took the large yard-sign that i’ve been using as a nondigital weblog and wrote “SICK DEPRESSED LEAVE ME ALONE” in black paint, and let me tell you, that’s the wrong thing to write if you want to be left alone, as every fucking clown in the state decided to stop by for some tea, until finally i had to take to hitting people really hard in the shins with my walking cane until they limped off in fear. i’ve since been experimenting with various signs which would successfully keep the kooks away, and so far the most successful one read WANT TO HAVE LONG CONVERSATION ABOUT MY CRUSH ON JESUS, for which my only company was Cecelia, who had much to say on the topic and had the courtesy to bring her own booze.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

i’m out to make her with my midnight creep
Tonight I went out with Nella to record ghost voices. Nella’s a weirdo; some of my people like her a lot but man, I dunno. I think if you’re used to her she’s probably pretty sweet, but she does this thing where in the middle of a statement she’ll just stop talking and walk off, particularly when she’s up to something, like say recording ghost voices, which I’m not even sure what it was we did except B&E an empty tenement over on the south side with chalk drawings on the walls where she set up her DAT deck and shortwave radio and whip antenna and then walked around the room, whispering to the walls and adjusting the equipment until she got these weird rapidly descending tones and partial voices. I think this is one of those things that if I did it on a regular basis it would make me go crazy, but it’s certainly worth trying.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

review: mr magnifico’s afternoon distraction
Mr. Magnifico’s Afternoon Distraction, a kind of variety show for children and unwed mothers, is well-hosted by Mr. Magnifico, who walks out from behind a Lynchain red velvet curtain dressed in the sort of suit you see Seventh Day Adventists wearing, a pair of knockoff Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses and a dark red fez. He’s holding a martini glass and obviously a bit loose already, slightly slurring his sibilance-stripped s’es, and as he introduces the day’s performers (a new bit by the Eight Dollar Puppet Theater, a “narrative clairvoyant” who professes to have psychically discovered and transcribed Bruno Schulz’s missing novel The Messiah, and an Edification Playhouse story about the dignity of employment) he shows a handful of shiny nickels to the kids in the audience and then throws the handful offstage, and as the kids bolt up and scramble for change Mr. Magnifico sets himself down among the moms and starts in about how he used to be a sailor. Magnifico whistles out the side of his mouth and his assistant Fabulous Jiminez takes the kids into the other room, where they make paper-mache masks which are later sold to west coast upscale boutiques as Guatemalan conquistador masks while Magnifico mixes more martinis, cues the house band and plays vaguely pornographic cartoons from the ’50s until the kids come back to the main room. At this point the actual proper show begins, now that the audience is primed for the sort of sophisticated fare Magnifico favors: he refuses to descend into the sort of scatological material (“working brown”, he calls it) so popular among his competitors on The Heinous Anus Happy Hour and Purple Poopitudinous Presents. Mr. Magnifico bypasses all this with the gentleman’s art of prestidigitation: all of his tricks somehow end up with Magnifico and two special helpers from the audience chained inside a trunk and buried alive for about thirty minutes while the day’s performers do their thing. On this day, tragedy strikes as the Eight Dollar Puppet Theater bursts into flames as part of some elaborate retribution from one of the other notorious puppetry gangs working this side of the Mississippi and three kids, already horrified after seeing their mothers seemingly buried alive fifteen minutes prior, go into shock and have to be taken to the studio cafeteria for pudding. Finally, Magnifico and moms appear from behind the red curtain to a smattering of applause turning to gasps as Magnifico realizes he has somehow made his pants disappear. Fabulous Jiminez covers his boss’s indiscretion with his cape of gold, refracting the stage lights and blinding one of the cameramen. A spurned husband, disguised as a portly eight year old, rushes the stage screaming “Sic semper adulteris!” and firing three round before being crippled to death by security, at which point various moms flocked to Magnifico’s side, only to find that he had seemingly caught all three bullets between his teeth. At that point I had to get up to go to the bathroom, and by the time I got back the show was replaced by an old episode of Captain Steele. Two thumbs up.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

don’t i look cool with my mouth filled with blood
So it appears I didn’t get the cape job, in that the second question of the interview was “Would you mind taking off your cape?” and I replied “No problem! While I’m at it, I’ll take off my pants!”, which ended up causing a whole big spectacle and also completely ruined my whole Barnabus Collins vibe. More a Bootsy Collins vibe. Luckily, my application for the head writer position at Subhuman Pit Wrestling Federation seems far more promising. All week I keep seeing three-legged dogs, everywhere I go.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

morphia (notes)
The room filled with silent dogs, absolutely still, staring at me as i sit in the chair. I kept the door open as some sort of offering or opening to the outside world, an invitation, bring me your wisdom and set it before me like so much opal and offal and pearl, but all that has arrived are the unclaimed dogs of the neighborhood, collected mounds of trash beside the boarded tenements so as to climb inside air ducts and feast on discarded chunks of meat, dead squirrels, couch stuffing. Now they stare here, the expanse of potential dominion, and all I can do is stare as I have abused opium this afternoon and now want nothing but to stare, to fall into the chair in microscopic steps. I know I need to get the dogs out, as the compound is rife with delicate technology: decaying synths held together with homemade patch cords and aleaoric possession, the basement beowulf cluster grinding away, the fungal samples stored in the michael-jars covering the walls of the closets back by the alley exit. I attempt high-frequency ventriloquism, sending the dogs into the street, where they pounce upon a carriage, and I find the cordless phone somewhere in the folds of the chair, and i order a sandwich and beer and a dvd of Performance from the delivery service, and this delivery boy seems to appear instantly, and i warn him to shut the door, tell him to poison the dogs, i will pay him in mutt pelts, and he stares at me until i attempt to throw my now-cold tea in his face to shake him from his lethargy but succeed only in spilling it on my bare feet. (lj comments)
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

memory: summer 1992
We had enough components to assemble three scientists, packed there in the white travel paste, hidden underquilts and golf clubs for fear we would be pulled over by secret police in dark green minivans and disappear forever beneath the earth, driving on unmaintained access road H68, electromagnets mounted in the doors attracting and repelling us from any other traffic, of which we have seen none since fleeing the interstate. We each took faith measurements with faithometers built from gold wire we pulled out of the gated plague community center, PP3 batteries and syringes inserted into veins beneath the tongue, and once we were all confirmed, we painted a giant white cross on the top of the car and drove into the antiscience neighborhood, where the assembler was hiding (who, he asked us on the phone eight days before, would seek out an assembler in a post-christian backwater?) in the basement of a storage unit by the Demum Sophia trailer park. We were using IR goggles and sound dampeners, and there was no moon, and there was a 10pm curfew since the riots started, so no one could see or hear us until we hit a deer patrol, the sirens and lights mounted to its shoulders blinding us until we could rip off the goggles and kill the dampeners and floor it all the way to the park, where we had to abandon the car in a culvert across the road and drag the scientist-components to the assembler’s trailer, their vocal components begging us to piece them together again, only all the trailers had been moved and covered in light-absorbing paint, so that we had to field-assemble one of the scientists, the spine bent and the legs nonfunctional, and follow him as he crawled along the sidewalk and neurotically-trimmed lawns, sniffing out the assembler, knowing that finding him was the scientist’s only chance at proper form. After what seemed like hours, we found the trailer, and went inside, but the trapdoor was broken off its hinges, and as we stared down into the hole, we saw the bodies of the assembler and his family, face down, nails piercing their skulls.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

mechanical reproduction
Nawadir left, and probably isn’t coming back. They never do.

A couple weeks ago, he told me I talk in my sleep, and I called him a liar, but the past couple nights I’ve been using one of those voice-activated tape recorders, and it turns out I do talk in my sleep, only it appears that I am not myself in my dreams. My voice is still my own, only I speak in an odd cadence to someone named William, who lives in Vancouver as a baker. I don’t know any William, or anybody in Vancouver. After a week of this, I got a second tape recorder and recorded myself asking this sleep-me questions, and set it on a timer for three am, and placed it next to my bed, on the other side of the voice-activated tape recorder, but when I heard my own voice from inside the sleep I was absolutely terrified, and literally jumped out of bed, kicking the tape player off. Will update as necessary.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

livid, feral
She is standing there beneath the giant lights which hang over the interstate, standing in the stream which runs beneath the bridge, the concrete cracked and broken and fading to the mud she stands in, smearing it across her dress, her face, a vibratory calm and overdeveloped focus to her every movement, until she is covered, only visible in the whites of her eyes, stalking the space between the interstate and the access road. She was once a student, someone I noddingly knew from an 8am Prophecy in Ancient Israel class, someone I think I saw once singing in a choir performance on the front steps of the Union. I watch this woman becoe a troll-thing, watch her make a home of a drainage site, luring motorists with a broken piece of mirror in one hand and a large flat rock in the other.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

a basketful of little people’s questions
every year around the beginning of spring the local elementary school blows about twelve bucks on helium balloons which the little people (except the disappearing ones, who are in camera-guarded detention) attach by string to outdated card catalogue cards, the blank sides printed with the school’s address and simple instructions for reply: who are you? where did this balloon land? and a blank space where each kid can write in his/her own question. Just before school lets out, they go to the playground and release the whole bunch into the gray skies, staring up until they can’t see them anymore, or until the bell rings. I live about three miles from the school so I wasn’t too suprised to see clumps of balloons float by, but then I saw a bunch with their strings knotted together, stuck in a tree. I went to spring them but a number of the balloons had popped, so I thought about it for a minute and then cut the cards free, headed back to the house and made a list of everyone I knew, or half-knew, who lived in other countries. After I found thirty addresses (I used to be a lot more social, when I was an up-and-coming academic whippersnapper instead of a down-and-out public embarassment) I wrote short letters to each, explaining my plan, including the cards, and headed off to the post office (where I am loved, as mine is the Post Office of Unearthly Delights, but I’ll get into that later). I realize this is cheating, a bit, but who wants a letter from a Jessup farmkid when you can get a letter from a proper Balinese chanteuse?
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

like a switch
I was seven, and taught myself to sleep in public. It was important to me, for reasons no longer clear, that I should be able to sleep anywhere, and after a week of sitting with the idea, of mulling it over, I went to the park on a Saturday afternoon, sat down beside a thicket of bushes, and went to sleep. It was a warm spring day, and the grass was thick, and so it was easy. Soon I undertook more difficult areas, such as the mall, or on bus benches, or in the back yards of people I did not know. Soon I could sleep anywhere, at any time, and tested myself by sleeping soundly between two train tracks. I had mastered a skill that I did not yet have a use for, but I was proud, and knew that my life would route itself to make the most of my skills. [ljcomments]
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

levitation tricks
Owen just stopped by, at this god-awful late hour, and had a box worth of packages sent to me at the old place, most of which look to be music of some sort, or else explosives. Either way, expect reviews during the week, depending on how much free time I get. Also still awake are my little towheaded neighborkindern, whose parents have them huff turpentine from soiled underwear in order to keep them from screaming now that they had to pawn the television to cover the electric bill. They steal flourescent chalk from the slightly wealthier children at the bus stop and draw demonic-looking sigils outside my door. I am currently at work on a non-lethal trap which I hope will solve this problem, as while I don’t much believe in underage sorcery this year has proven to be so rife with malevolent spirits that it’s not in my best interest to take any chances. If need be, I’m willing to sell them to the hospital, where the miracle of modern science will allow the children to be sacrificed to various gods and brought back from the dead at least three or four times before their tiny deformed bodies finally give up the ghost. Of course, I hope it doesn’t come to that.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

songs in the lesser key of solomon
On laundry days I like to pretend I’m a drummer in a super-obscure jazz trio who only play at seances. Constantly on the nod, I keep a sharp eye out for the fuzz and for uppity ex-boyfriends and landlords looking for back rent, but while they may see me they cannot reach me, for they are tricked in the eyes by minor spirits. I shuffle into the laundromat reeeeeeeeeal cool, no fucking around with sorting whites ‘cause I ain’t got no whites, dig, I got no time for crazy laundry taxonomies. I got enough change that when I walk I jingle, and I plug my three loads and then sit down in the back and scat-mumble to myself, hassen lassen assassin, and in comes my man Electronic Miguel looking for some nature of hiding place and I tell him we got a gig tonight in the sewers, where Madame Dolores, keeping it cool since she got kicked out of the Magic Castle (those cheap pimps), will be pulling a levitation gag she lifted off Harry Kellar, only Miguel starts acting a fool, yelling about the sewer ghosts, making my little laundromat scene conspicuous like a pile of cadmium in the snow, so I jab him one in the ribs with my taser and he runs off so fast he barely keeps in his Keds. By this time it’s a go for the dryers, so I take my shirts and pants and unmentionables and load up the dryers just across from where I’m sitting and just kick back watching the colors swirl into each other, until I realize the dryers must have stopped hours ago because it’s nighttime now and I got to get up on teh good foot if I’m gonna make it in time to play the seance.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

krankenhaus
Owen, in a classic bit of passive-agressive prankery, has convinced the neighborkids that I have Hitler’s brain in a jar stashed somewhere in my kitchen. One of them is out there right now, a boy with one of those horrible disposable yuppiekinder names that I can never remember, screaming about how he told his teacher he’d do an oral report on the thousand-year reich and how he’ll be certain to fail if he can’t bring der Fuhrergehirn in as a visual aid. I’m giving him another five minutes to come to his senses and then I’m turning the hose on him.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

join the car crash set
With the collapse of the robot fighting boom, hundreds of guys who thought adding a buzzsaw to an RC car was a good idea are now left with nowhere to go, and that’s why the Immaculate Conception over in Gilbertville started offering Robotic Ballroom dances, where Crushinator and Ki111zzz0r can compete for a ten dollar grand prize through an intricate series of passes and spins across the hardwood gym floor. I used to go sit up in the lightbox and get high, just like high school, watching the unsocialized fumble through first mistakes and obvious fumblings, only now it’s all mechanized, which probably is for the best, as nobody’s getting pregnant at Robotic Ballroom Night. Today, however, Cecelia and I and Rissa entered our own robot, which is an actual proper robot without any sort of remote control hoo-hah, and oh man, if you ever need a cheap and ultimately meaningless boost in your morale, go spend an evening with a gaggle of pubescent pre-engineers, but in the end it was all for naught, as out robot (the Gynosphere) accidentally drilled its way through the floor and into the cafeteria. I’m sure peanut gallery Freudians will have plenty to say on that, but not nearly as much as Sister Mary Catherine, who barred us for life from the RoboDances. Which, again, as I said, is probably for the best. (ljcomments)
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

i predict!
I predict that in the year to come, Video Hits One (VH1) will officially change their name to Hooray For Crap (HFC)! (ljcomments)
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

i keep making mistakes.
At night, the diesel rigs pull off the interstate and park on the side of the access road, the engines idling through the night to power televisions, heaters, small electric ovens. Now that time has slowed for me, I begin to notice the trucks, able to spot those who run the same route, and I note that they often park together, small clusters, the drivers walking out into the field. At first I thought this was to exchange sexual favors, or to buy and sell drugs, but last night I walked out to the spot in the field where they meet and saw a small shrine made of flat slate, crosses made of pallet slats and copper wire, small cups of port wine set into the ground, now covered in a skin of dead mosquitoes. I suspect there is a voodoo for truckers as there is a voodoo for moonshiners, but that’s just one more question I’ll never know the answer to.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

how i taught the sun to suffocate
Once upon a time there were two sisters who were in love with each other. The first sister had small pieces of coal in place of teeth so that when she placed her face against the wall she could write the words she was afraid to speak with the tip of sooted tongue, and because no one writes stories about women who are not beautiful, she was beautiful. The second sister had two small wings which were actually arms which grew from her back and would braid her hair as she slept, and she was beautiful as well, but she was beautiful in an entirely different sense, which the modern storyteller would say is a myth, there is only one beauty as told in the synapses but it is my story and i will kill ten million children and hide their skulls so they can never be reborn if anyone tries to tell me how to tell my story. The two sisters as mentioned earlier were in love with each other and had no need for any other company, so they moved to the country and fooled squirrels into giving up their lives so as to be born again as stew.

The sisters were born from a hole in the ground covered in opals and sapphires, which is bad news for me, as I only know how to seduce women who were molested by their fathers, and as the sisters were born orphans they were not asked to attend classes, but often read the newspaper and the secret papers you can only get at certain places and times, and were thus familiar with the concept that anything is a poison when taken in an excessive dose, and so it was that the sisters devised a scheme to kill trust-fund princes who kept stopping by with intent to marry through an overabundence of sunlight. With sugar and water they made lenses which greatly intensified the light until the lens at the bottom of a well stacked with sugarglass lenses was supersaturated with sunlight and so was pulled from the bottom of the well at the sound of horse’s hooves along the asphalt and the princes would then eat of the sugarglass and soon they would be in the well which was then filled with stones and later lead after the sheriff stopped by looking for donations for the Criminal Labor Auction. Before they filled the well with lead the sisters married all the corpses, as it seemed that perhaps a dozen dead husbands were not bad to have, as husbands go, and from now on any blow-dry prince could learn the sisters were severe bigamists and should peddle their apples on some other street.

The sun learned it had become a witness to evil and refused to rise for a month. (ljcomments)
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

i hold your hidden name in the hollows of my body
Some of the neighbors have Vietnamese singing kites, from which they attach hooks and razor-wire, so to duel above the neighborhood, standing on the roofs of the houses and listening to the shrieking descent of wounded kites falling back to the earth, scraps of rice paper and ribbons like spilled fuselage as the little kids down at the park try to shoot the victor out of the sky with pump-action bb guns. unfortunately, not all pedestrians in the neighborhood are aware of what takes place above their heads (mostly post-Chicago kids who dropped out of the university and don’t think to look up), and when a broken mass of metal edges falls out of the sky with a horrible muscle-locking squeal, sometimes that can confuse a person, and not everybody gets out of the way in time. Me, I have a glorious violet umbrella with a Robert Fludd designed cosmogram in ultramarine, dark enough that you have to get close to see it, at which distance you might notice the mesh armor sewn into the bottom. Should anyone ever decide to shoot arrows at me, I’m ready.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

Subject: force the word to collapse into its silences
Trace the path of all you have spoken, not the lines laid atop your sight which you saw as arrows and instructions for the things that spilled from your mouth, but the actual traces through the air and dust, the places where they connected and nested among the people around you, the bounce and reformation within their chests so as to echo you in unacknowledged ways years later, the sour notes left in their ears as the sentences came apart and connected to hurt and hidden things within them that you could never see as you were looking in some other direction, at crawling insects glimmering in the sun, which you suspected held a purpose, an influence, the small actions forming patterns in things so far away, and once you have traced the blood-trails of each of your words you will be given a gift of great consequence, and will pull back the words, wipe away the memory, take away all the things you have said, the mistakes you have made, the potentials lost. There will be a day when all of this has vanished.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

five things you may not know about me
(passing the mic from my friend gmoryx)

  1. In the summer of 1995, while high, I helped my friend Cowboy James sell twelve handguns and two shotguns in a parking lot after an AA meeting in Iowa City. James had me hold onto his guns after he got his felony, which sat in my closet for a month, until he needed to get money together to skip bail and go to Missouri to marry his girlfriend. I made fifty dollars, which I spent on drugs from a friend in Quadrangle dormitory, and that was the last time I saw Cowboy James.
  2. Most people know that I have performed two weddings and one exorcism, but not everybody knows I participated in an Order of the Eastern Star induction rite.
  3. I once went without speaking for three months.
  4. I spent most of my high school years skateboarding and was actually not bad (which is surprising if you’ve seen me lately) until I sprained my knee and got out of it and never picked it back up after I went off to college.
  5. “Ana Skyfish” is not a real person, but an imagined character, utilized here in order to avoid talking about myself (my life is very boring). There are reasons. There are always reasons. Something comes up and I say it’s out of my control. A process already in motion has made it impossible for me to accomplish my desired goal. What can I do but shrug my shoulders and add amusing details so that this latest bit of failure can polish up into self-deprecating amusement. Of course, I set responsibilities at cross purposes as a way of avoiding responsibility, and in doing so I avoid any sort of long-term relationship (of any nature), as ongoing witnesses hamper my ability to lie effectively. Any challenge to my minor intellect, little more than a box of titles and authors chained together in a miserable mockery of actual comprehension, will send me into fits of indignation, running home to scribble imagined threats cast by my stable of regular characters. Accomplishments seem nothing more than obligations, and apologies are simpler, as I have spent the whole sleepless night designing them, perfecting them. I take pride in my faults, considering such logical ideas as health and agreement and basic human kindness as herd mentality claptrap, petulantly pleased to be sick and fat and afraid. I am obvious when I think I am hid, and cower in plain sight behind my next big project.

(ljcomments)
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

feign suprise
At what age did I realize I was never going to become a mover/shaker in the online world? The same age as I realized I was never going to become a mover/shaker of any stripe, I suppose, which would be 24, not too long out of school, vaguely aware of usenet and email and irc via dormant vax accounts, living out of a van while playing shitty Ohio clubs that are now long gone. I was in Akron, high on mushrooms, when I heard a voice tell me that I would never be a rock star. I knew this, of course, and would never publically confess to any desire for any stardom whatsoever; we were post-punk noise merchants, after all, no more important than the crowd and all that crap, and certainly I never wanted to be famous in the proper sense. What I wanted was for the right people to know of me, to be able to connect my name to something I had done: “Oh yeah, her, she put out that ep, I remember her”. I wanted to be well-known enough to be able to walk up to people and have them know me just enough that I wasn’t a complete stranger, that they knew of me, in a vague sense, just enough to hold up the initial fragile structure of a conversation. I wanted to be well known enough that if I ended up putting out a new album, years later, some kid in Akron would hear about it, and be all jazzed, like when you see someone you thought was dead or insane of addicted step out of a crowd, settled and stable and glowing. The voice told me that would never happen, and I walked around Akron for hours, in the middle of the night, watching the snow and mumbling “I’m never going to be a rock star”, over and over. The next day we played our final Buddy Holly’s Drummer show and drove home, and I didn’t pick up the guitar again for three years.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

eyestained
Nawadir was in town for a few days, and so I wanted to show him around the old neighborhood, only parts of the old neighborhood (like the internet) had vanished into the aether, shattering the illusion of permanence and leaving me uncertain that all the places I remember were ever real. For instance, the butcher shop where we used to get ice cream from those large Czech women is still there, still owned by the same two families and still selling ice cream which becomes just a little intermingled in the head with the slight salty smell, which I’ve always loved but Nawadir couldn’t quite get his head around. Also still there was the cafe consisting of at least a dozen small rooms connected with curtains, which always helped me to feel vanished and untraceable. The mural was still up on the wall, a kid-folk scroll depicting the return of biblical saints in the garb of superheroes not at end-of-time but around 1940, where they assisted in the spread of television and medicine. In fact, I saw a panel I had never seen before in which Ezra and Uriel (dressed in dapper suits) walk alongside the ocean with Rita Hayworth and pick up fish which had been washed upon the shore. Now missing, however, was the newstand where I was first read now-vanished zines like Alchemical Warfare (a sort of academic journal based out of the now-abandoned Richter-Goldberg psychiatric hospital out by the old highway), Neviditeln? Divadlo (a repair and modification newsletter from a local automated puppetry troupe), and Grand Theft Audio (crankrock zine I later wrote for until Dave and Michelle had a baby and flaked on us), and a couple of the old bars had now swapped owners and target audiences (all the old meatpacking bars had shifted over to more upscale sports bars and now thankfully reverted to meatpacking bars again), but most depressing was the loss of the Salter Apartments shrine, a sunken playground not visible from the street, where all the playground equipment had been pulled due to bullshit safety concerns and then replaced over time by local kooks (including me) with corkscrew antenna slides and huge scrap-iron gongs which were both oddly quiet and immensely satisfying to bang on. The playground was paved over for another parking lot, and I was tempted to break off car antennas, but Nawadir (to his detriment) doesn’t get displaced acts of vandalism, so I refrained.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

every different dog
I occasionally have the unfortunate tendency to pretend that people I don’t know, usually friends of friends, are actually my friends, and are perfectly comfortable with my calling them out of the blue to chat. I was at my worst with this during my first year of college, mostly as I was homesick a lot and also because I now had access to second-circle friends who lived in the same city. I’d call around one am and rail on about how lame contemporary cereals are or my plan for fueling the energy needs of high schools by harnessing the nervous energy of horny teenagers before they could ask who I was and how they got their number. Occasionally I’d show up at their apartments or dorm rooms and ask if they wanted to go to the Hamburg and help me with my ball lightning experiment or install sculpey genitals on thriftstore Barbies. Mostly this led to trouble and stern talking-tos by the intermediary friends, some of whom decided from such actions that I was a “kook” and stopped hanging out with me, but once in a while I managed to bypass the middlefriend and meet someone with a high tolerance for rambling and sugar abuse. That’s how I met Owen, for instance, and while that didn’t exactly end on the best of terms the premise still stands.

I’ve recently taken to doing the same thing with websites, jumping off the friends list of my friends and leaving barely coherent replies to entirely unrelated posts. I sneaky-pete their home addresses and send them Ana Skyfish Heroin Drive ‘04 t-shirts and borderline-creepy letters about how every different dog has a different language but you can learn a language called Perfect Dog which will allow you to communicate to every dog if you’re willing to use the powers of your Middle Brain.

If I don’t know you, and I’ve bugged you in such a way in the past couple months, I apologise. Take it as a compliment. (ljcomments)
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

dopesick
Years ago, when I was on drugs and convinced that I had overwritten the neural space where I once stored my basic motor skills with information downloaded to my brain by God about the true nature of time, these six hairless children dug themselves up from the earth and started poking through the skin of my back into my spine with bent pieces of rusted coathangers. That’s how I feel right now. When your nervous system starts screaming about revolution, fifth column, how it’s going to autocannibalize itself rather than take any more shit from the parasite-consciousness. The consciousness is ultimately nothing more than the appendages of my memory-system, and this is where they collision takes place: the memory-system needs time whereas the biologics have no understanding or use of anything beyond the immediate. At least that’s what I tell myself. Went to the market an hour ago and the pre-fetus checkout girl shot me a nasty look when all I bought was vodka and ice cream. I told her my purchases were coded symbols which were subconsciously being assembled in the far back of her underripe brain which, when completed, would blot out her life with an epiphany which will answer every question she had ever asked. She stared blankly at me, and I realized she had never asked any questions. She then made the “this is bogus, man” face and I could see her extention fangs as she said “What-everrrrrrrrr.” Kiss my ass, Dracula.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

domains
Yesterday, inspired by a dream I had, I began work on a children’s book entitled YOU ARE UGLY AND NO ONE WILL EVER FUCK YOU. It’s the story about a young boy who is painfully shy and not good with people and kinda gangly, but good-hearted, and while the other children might pick on him (in a very mild and average way, the way all children pick on each other, but still, you know, he’s spurned by everyday society I guess) he knows that someday something great will come of him which will force the girl he likes in his homeroom class take notice and fall in love with him, and then he discovers a secret hole in the backyard, which he descends via a very clever rope-and -pulley contraption he builds himself, and at the bottom of the hole there is a giant squirrel whose legs are broken and is starving and half-mad, and the boy talks to the dying squirrel as to how he is sure to be destined for great things until finally the squirrel dies and then the boy steals the skull of the dead squirrel and wears it on his head like a helmet and the next day at school he runs around with the squirrel-skull on his head whooping and screaming as to how he is the greatest boy in the world and hits a third-grader who once laughed a little at the boy’s mismatched shoes in the head with the skull until the third-grader does that terrifying silent cry where they can’t get enough air and then the boy runs into homeroom and jumps on the desk and tells the girl that now she must love him because he is the greatest boy in the world and the girl says YOU ARE UGLY AND NO ONE WILL EVER FUCK YOU.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

cut away the form until the essence remains
unless you are an absence, in which case you can only be seen in the frame which defines you, the walls cradling the empty space where you sit and stare like a camera that doesn’t record, doesn’t send out a signal, only pans slowly back and forth, a silent witness without memory or judgment, before which my selfishness and loneliness looks entirely unremarkable, similar in its every attribute to the thousands of other people who pass by this same spot every single day, so that I almost think to myself that by sharing these similarities that I am in fact not alone, that I am a part of a thing beyond the end of my skin and breath and sight, that there is a silver thread run through a small hole in my forehead which stretches and knots among all the people around me, but a web of loneliness cannot by definition nourish or warm, just confirm what is obvious, and as I scurry away and try to think about trivia from movies I saw as a child, or the lyrics to some half-dreamt pop song, or some fuzzy future when I am with the person I’m secretly (not so secretly) sweet on, or someone resembling her, or anyone at all, as I panic-rush for a distraction I know I will not find soon enough, as tonight in my bed just before I sleep all the things I saw in that absence will be there, staring at me, waiting.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

cradled forever in my arms
The first proper snowfall came, and I went out to collect samples to send to friends isolated in places tormented by my enemy the sun. I do this for both the obvious reason, and for the unspoken but untimately threadbare reason that I am poor, and making a gift of snow is one of the things within my means when the holiday season arrives. Many of my old friends, the ones I cut away like so much chaff when I outgrew the idea of being friends with everyone, dismiss the holidays, dismiss the religious underpinings as something they have grown past, setting themselves as beacons for the masses to follow into the great golden age, free of the crippling crutches of supersition and ignorance. All my problems could be solved, they would whisper to me, if only I took on additional lovers, or swallowed some new jumble of letters and numbers, or bound myself to pseudophilosophical sophistries that catered to their every weakness, their every hatred. I have often fallen for faulty logic, but never from them, as the proof of their lives plays out in the endless drama and bickering they desperately nurse, the failed relationships, the endless focus on the fault of “the normals” for every imagined wrong thrust upon them. I hate them as I hate death, and happily build gifts for the people I love, even if those gifts amount only to snow.

I am not only giving snow this season, however; I have started work on a series of board games which both edify and distract. The first is built from a chess board, a series of magnets (placed beneath the board), and a series of pawns (whose heads are made from compases). The game is called Courting, and consists of two players attempting to move their pieces into the same square, so that they may smooch, only the magnets are laid out in such a manner as actual smoochery is imposible to achieve, and the winner is the first to realize the futility of the act. Potential gift-takers will be heartened to know that, as in all good games, there are a series of variations on the basic rule-set.

I am also learning to play Distance Piano, which consists of a prepared piano and a collection of lawn darts, but I am not certain performance recordings will be of high enough quality to make stocking-stuffers this year.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

crack baby upset
My bathtub is cracked, and there’s a leak in one of the pipes, so I had to pull back a wall to get at it, and what did I find but a second bathtub stacked beneath the first, its porcelain painted with a bucolic nature scene. I got out the big heavy flashlight I stole off a cop and peered down into a space between the second tub and the wall, and I could just barely see a third tub, a painting of what looked like stormclouds on the small patch I could see. I suspect that were I to gather proper equipment I could unearth an endless series of bathtubs, one stacked atop the other forever through the earth, each a scene in a series by which I could glean endless insight into each and every event throughout history in both (in all) directions, but I had fixed the leak and was ready to take a bath, so I remounted the faucet, hung some drywall, nailed up the new wall and took a bath, looking for shapes in the porcelain.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

bury me in a coffin made of the bones of my enemies, deux
In my spare time, I have been working off my community service (long story, I’ll come back to it) by working with the elderly down at Methusela’s Empire Nursing Home. Rather than have them do bullshit demeaning activities, we discussed it for a while and decided the best option would be to develop a butoh troupe. Aside from being the most important dance movement of the 20th century, butoh is ideal for the elderly, as it depends less on the kind of muscular rigor favored by American performers and instead works with the minimal essence of the performer’s body and the intelligence it carries. So we studied Tatsumi Hijikata and Min Tanaka and did a lot of movement work ebfore working on ways of bringing the daily lives of the performers into the work: the last thing we wanted to do was ape old-school butoh performances. All of which is to say that tonight’s performance, our first, scared the living piss out of the nurses and orderlies, particularly when Greta slipped in a line from Marat/Sade. Heheheh.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

i know i’m not supposed to be talking about the tv but
Okay. So i’m watching this Christina Aguilera [sp] video, and she’s with Lil’ Kim, and she’s all dressed up like I guess b-girl style, and she’s all rubbed down with bronzer which I guess is supposed to make her look like a negro. Certainly it’s dubious. So I call up Cecelia and I says “Cecelia, I’m watching this Christina Aguilera [sp] video” and before I can finish Cecelia says “The one where she’s like in blackface?” and I says “Yes! The very one! How come nobody is all up in arms about this?” and Cecelia says “Well see that’s because we as a society expect so little from Christina Aguilera [sp] and that’s what makes her a superstar” and I says “Sure, but we didn’t expect much from Ted Danson and everybody got on his case for wearing blackface and that was at some private deal but this is on three times an hour! And like Vanilla Ice and Eminem before her she’s surrounded by black people which just makes her look ten times more obvious and offensive!” and Cecelia says “The one good thing about all that nonsense is it makes it really easy who’s gotta go on the great day of the blood-tide” and I says “That’s the drag bit about the great day of the blood-tide, tho, it’s always just around the corner, it just can’t get here quick enough.”
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

christ destroying the cross
Once in a blue moon I play with a band called Drone Sickness, which is mostly Hophead, Marduk, Beene and Bhlyr and a rotating band of other people. Last night Nella was also there, which is cool as I never see her; she’s one of those people I love for about an hour and then I’d be fine with not seeing them again for a couple months. Apparently they’ve decided to completely remake their first album, so last night was mostly collecting interesting sounds. Beene has been filling cds with Very Low Frequency broadcasts, Marduk has been working on terrain mapping in csound, and Nella had a few more DATs worth of ghost recordings. I asked her if I could go with her in a couple weeks when she goes back to the site, and she agreed. What’s interesting is I was the only person there who could play a traditional instrument (I had my trusty modified bass guitar and mountain of pedals), and as anybody who plays bass in a rockandroll band can attest, it’s an interesting experience being the focus of musical attention. Bhlyr ran some of my stuff through Bidule, which I snagged a copy of and have been messing with all morning; Audiomulch fans looking for more MIDI options might wanna give it a lookover.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

the body will constantly lose
The first I saw of him was a strobe-illusion, and I was young then, smoking ditchweed out of a dented and perforated Coors can, and I couldn’t help but think the whole party was designed to sift off my better nature, to reduce me to impulses and second guesses, because I was paranoid then, and tired of constantly suspecting this would be the last I would ever know, each moment graded as an ending, as speaking to the whole of my life before some celestial jury, so that the lights and the noise became like a tide, something to float upon, so as to fear nothign on this earth, for it was the whole of the experience which kept me afloat. I don’t understand this logic now, but I find myself reaching for it, from time to time, convinced there is a truth dormant beneath the paint across the walls, the blood behind the face, that which supports the pattern.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

blood blood blood
In the basement of the park office, every other Thursday night, Cecelia hosts ASKK (Adult Survivors of KinderKultus) meetings, where most of the thirty-eight children found in the Xavier barn swap stories as to finding work and sustaining relationships as a living monument to absolute atrocity.Seven of the members are now blind, having been old enough for the Entering Ritual (“the ghosts will enter through holes in the eyes”, as written in the KinderKultus Management Manual) before the Great Disappearance, wherein the nine adult members (called “child management supervisors” in the manual) vanished without a trace. These are closed meetings, so I’ve been unable to attend, but Cecelia and I have been sharing a potato patch for making vodka, and every once in a while she’ll talk about it, in an offhand way. One thing’s certain; none of the children have any doubt that the “teachers” will never return to this earth.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

the blind boxing the blind
Summerland has a few pirate radio stations, but the only one you can get out here is Strawberry Shortwave, which functions as a musical oracle, by which near-future tactical analysis can be gleaned by concentrating on the subject one needs guidance on and turning the radio on, where the first lyric one hears will hold the answer. This is an old game, which we used to play as schoolchildren during endless phone conversations which required some sort of third-party help, but that’s only so helpful when most songs are variants on you love me/you don’t love me/nobody likes me and I feel weird, so Strawberry Shortwave specifically bases its playlist on suggestive and specific lyrical content (at least during the day, which is the only time it comes in here; I know at night there’s an entirely different schedule), and while sometimes it’s too cryptic to be of much use, more often than not it’s dead on. there’ll be a time when i won’t remember what i was afraid of
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

atonal
Initially after getting the new drive I whipped up an elaborate taxonomy for organizing my mp3s, which had previously lingered haphazzard on three hundredish cds at the back of my closet. No more endless hunting along the spool for me! I would begin anew, everything in its right place. Within a week most of this organization had broken down due to the same sorts of problems every taxonomy faces, but one folder remains, aptly titled DRUNK. For a time I thought of dividing it into PUBLIC DRUNK, which would consist of songs I was perfectly okay with people knowing I was into, and PRIVATE DRUNK, which would contain the more embarassing material, but I realized that this would only serve to confuse me when I was actually drunk. This is for the best, as I’m no longer certain of what music I should be embarassed to like. Likewise, some albums I’d be proud to own in certain company would lead to endless headshaking and handwringing in others. Besides, nobody ever comes over here to listen to music, and it’s unlikely anyone but me will ever even hear any of this (except Cecelia, who doesn’t really like anything that isn’t punkrock), so I gave up on that idea entirely. If I were serious, I might have someone else make that kind of decision for me, someone with a serious critical streak, but asking someone else to organize my music feels too much like taking a dump in the middle of the street. (ljcomments)
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

artificial memory: june 1988
“No, he would…right! That’s what I’m saying! It’s like he, like he doesn’t know, and I mean *I* don’t know but that doesn’t mean I’m just gonna sit in my room and wait, I mean, nobody fucking knows, so why don’t we just go out and get it on?” [deleted] “Yeah, but that’s, that’s fucking ridiculous. I mean, I look back at the destruction I’ve left in my wake, and that’s no small amount of destruction, and but how could I have moved anywhere and not made some sort of impact. And yeah, people get hurt, but for fuck’s sake, why should safety be our guiding concern? What do we learn from being safe? How do we ever change if we are constantly safe? And how is that even logical as, as a place to go from, go out from in a relationship?” [reply deleted] “But that’s the thing, I’m responsible, I’m completely responsible, and I have to work out from that, I’m not denying anything, I’m not, y’know, anyone else’s fault, I’m just saying if I have to choose between fucking up and then fixing what I fucked up or else never doing anything at all, I’m gonna fuck up every single time, because” [remainder of conversation taped over with the album Darklands by The Jesus and Mary Chain]
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

don’t jazz me around, angel of poverty
The logic was that I would befriend my creditors, take the coin of their rehearsed friendliness, to invite Carl and Jean from First Federal Separtist Bank, Christine from United Moneychangers, and John from the University of Summerland Community Credit Union to my house for dinner and drinks, perhaps some friendly matchmaking among the single set, filling their hands with homebaked pies and quilts, showing up at their birthday parties with elaborate yet tasteful gifts, so that when I tell them that I am never going to work again, will never again for the remainder of my life trade the hours of my life for money which I would then give to those I owe, that I am a fiscal dead end, then they would understand, or at least be pained, perhaps having to go to the far bathroom from their offices where no one would suspect them and cry over the thought of having to bring the weapons of debt against their best and truest friend. Some days it’s like you’re walking around with your ribcage open, with your organs spilling out on the ground, only everyone’s too embarassed to tell you and you’re so tired you don’t even notice.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #

afforded a single glimpse
The baby had the clawed hands of a devil, turned inward like those of tendon-damaged suicidal teenagers, nails thick as horns. Its mother looked at me, expecting me to coo, to coddle; apparently the reactions of all the people who had this clump of misshapen birth set before them had broken down into paroxysms of joy at the embodiment of innocence and light, but not me, I promised myself I was done lying to parents. “Your child is an abomination”, I said to the mother, refusing to hold the child in my hands, tempted to get all Gregory Peck and stab the stupid beast to death so as to spare the earth the great and unholy potential this child held. “You mean his hands? The doctor told me that was just a temporary thing.” Certainly he did; he would have said anything, as such a child refutes the very idea of science, the notion of verifiable results nothing more than a sad trick played by a malicious demiurge, human understanding simply a bauble to distract from the blood-driven machinery that truly beat the pulse of the world, the same infernal whine I heard that night behind the rendering plant. I stared at the baby, buried in blankets, and the last thing I remember is the look on its pinched and bitter face as I vomited into the stroller. (lj comments)
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #