The Journal of Speculative Disease

Sat, 12 Apr 2008

interim
So it’s been a while since this has been updated, and the dates on most of these entries are wrong, and one of these days I’ll get all this stuff straightened out but probably not soon.
(01:48.04.12.2008) [/else] #

Thu, 19 May 2005

a hymn in sixtyeight chapters
[I wrote a shorter version of this for scrytch and Scotto asked if he could publish in in Trip #6 (Fall 2001), so I added some more material and there you have it. This piece has a hidden meaning, and if you do a little hunting you’re sure to figure it out. There’s also a parallel version of this, called “a curse in sixtyeight chapters”, which is currently in limbo.]

a training which takes place in dreams
attacks taking place in zero time
hiding places which do not actually exist
the shimmering defense
a trap of marvels and prayers
finger-snares in the hair of the bystanders
use of the false truth appendix
the trial of impossibly heavy weights
the endless litany of chores each day brings
the discourse of infidel mathematicians who prove the impossibility of resolvable conflict (may they rot in hell)
my secret heresy of anti-closure (an inversion)
a lock of your hair i keep in my dresser
the advantages of darkness and famine
the abuse of certain black solvents
the impossibility of sentience in the mirror-world
nihilum, its use in banned strategems
a room made of large flat sheets of muslin
the lioness, up amid the trees
the inability of x to equal y
binding spells caught in liquids, applied to the lips and tongue
the extention of lightning in o-time
tree-forms worshipped by barncats and raccoons
my obvious attempts to sit next to your heart
a view of the fading world
memory-zones as mapped across the apartment
a reconstruction of attack patterns in multiple-headed beasts
(not an allowed statement)
a curst legend of divers insect-calls
use of chemical spills and low-level tension
revised claims of ownership
insomnia as tool, weapon, and excuse
lines repeated by dead people
the disturbing pattern of encroaching light
the company of strange women who do not respect personal space
coincidentia oppositorum as a mixing of contrary fluids
the use of social circles as spies and carriers of bad thoughts
how to disguise yourself as yourself
on the treatment of prisoners, lovers, and doctors
a coding-wheel for rings on fingers (size, shape, symbolism)
everyone who loves you will one day have to leave
steam-tunnel hotels; how to capture your enemy therein
relics of prior generals taped to specific parts of the body
places you can no longer go (hermetical sealing)
the diabolical encyclopedia of burnings and reductions
distance attacks by clusters of misled warlords
time weapons: delay, tedium, memory
eight letters i never sent you which i am destroying right now
tremor-calligraphy and its use in battle-maps
infinite routes of escape from any enclosure
methods of fooling weather
debilitating foods (rot, certain discharges, waste, promises)
charmed and cursed doorways
a weak winter light stuck at the window
red torn nerves lining the old rural highway
a store where emotions can be exchanged or incinerated
a certain safety in being completely alone
on the blinding of witnesses
the wolves at the door
i believe you are a superhero, i believe in you
on the book of errors, wherein dwells the most high god
the transformation of moisture-touching into corrupt forms
the sea flattened and brought up
birds which have forgotten how to fly
the fat of the mouth-worms, and the narcotics they can produce
moon-vapours which may contain pods or seeds
an erasure of myself from your memory
a list of presets for the instant apology generator
a longing, like a spinning, like a falling thing disguised in sunlight

(12:16.05.19.2005) [/else/trip] #

the richter goldberg psychiatric institute: an introduction
[This was my second Process Engine article, which was basically a bit of turd-polishing as to my Richter-Goldberg project and the rules behind it. I’m not sure if this one even made it online.]

“Cursed be the one who makes a carved or molten image, the work of the hands of an artisan, and sets it up in secret.” -Rabbi Shim’on, Zohar 3:127b-128a

I’ve been putting this off, mostly because I’ve been lazy and haven’t really gotten the project in shape, haven’t slogged through the backend work and pulled together money and moved to Iowa City and set up the server and all the things standing between today and that long-distant point where (I tell myself, now) the project will have taken form, an empty box (kara-bakos) which will be ready to fill. I started this website at the very end of 1994, at which point it was basically a place to put up stories I had written. Unfortunately, I’m of a mindset where I constantly add little miniature pieces to a general locus rather than develop a standard narrative-arc novel, which means I’m basically fucked as far as publishing goes. As time went on, it became clear to me there was a soft taxonomy by which I could arrange the pieces I was writing. One was a semi-realistic storyline about a group of characters in a midsize Midwestern town dealing with memory and forgetfulness and one’s inability to change. There’s a few primary stories which snake through here, including the story of the rerisen, which I tried to shoehorn into a book. This stuff varies from hijinx stuff to rural depressionism pieces, and is usually the stuff people like, if they like any at all. The other stuff I call the Biomorphic Abstraction stuff. This is the stuff I have the most fun writing, and which I feel is technically my best work, even though it’s hard to get into. It’s the work where all my interests find a place: puppetry, automatons, cryptography, game-structures, butoh, false histories, symbolic alphabets, experimental technologies, and more than anything what Ballard called the externalization of the human nervous system. I sat out to build Richter-Goldberg as a means of organizing and facilitating this material. My first experience with mnemonics as a discipline (and not just the Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge kind) came from Borges, and like everything I learned from Borges, the idea stuck in my skull and crystallized, taking on an unearthly glow. In 1993 (I think, it was around then) I read Douglas Cooper’s excellent first novel Amnesia, in which he credits Frances Yates’s book The Art of Memory. I tracked down a copy a couple years later and was hooked. This, I realized, was the skeleton for my Biomorphic Abstraction device, as I began thinking of it. I did research on museums, on wunderkammern, on architecture, all the while collecting notes on this building where this group of people desperately connected research in order to avert some distant event, some hidden current seeping unseen through history.

The building is three stories high. Each story has 25 rooms. Each level has a hidden room which is not accessible by standard entrances, forming a hidden spine. If we read the rooms as letters of the English alphabet, that means each level is a lipogram. This makes for a total of 78 rooms. At least one symbolic reading should be immediately apparent (and yes, there are cards to match). The Kabbalah is based on the Hebrew alphabet, which consists of 22 letters, all of which double as numbers allowing for gematria; attempts to translate this material into English fail at their source as they lack the specific structure necessary to make such conjectures relevant. The influence of Kabbalistic practice is readily apparent all over RG, but I’ve deliberately strayed away from any literal readings, instead finding translations of the actual constraints in English and perverting them to my own ends, the idea of a core text being in essence a starting point for extrapolations outward into strange secret places. I’ve made attempts to learn Hebrew, just as I’ve tried to learn everything else, but so far I have fallen so short as to make any gain a pittance. Certain characters see divinity as a nemesis to humanity in RG, and from that I can understand why certain readers have felt offended by my treatment of certain concepts. Anyway. In the Kabbalah, there are ten Sefirot, which are numbers as living entities, emanations which, when combined with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, form the elements of all creation, (In this sense, English can be seen as a corrupt language, which is certainly how some of the characters feel about it.) RG is designed according to a base 5 system, as each of the three floors are 5x5 panmagic associative squares (the sums of each playing a pivotal role deep in the text), so that here there are five Sefirot, only that’s bad terminology, as they are here absences, voids, collectively known as The Cult of the Yellow Sign, practicioners of the Fivefold Erasure System. That the appearance of the five absences on each floor, when joined directly, form the five points of a star, and that the hidden spine of the building is located in the center of the inner pentagrams of these stars, is worth some, but not too much, consideration. That the absences mirror the vowels in the alphabet of rooms is far more suggestive.

The plans for the RG backend have developed as my abilities have grown; initially it was little more than a collection of pages-as-rooms loaded with goofy javascript. For reasons I no longer understand, I ended up separating the script/noise into its own thing as the Infernal Salt Codex, which is a retranslation of the core materials by an AI named Aqaraza (which is an old Scrytch reference). Later this became some CGI/database stuff which mangled emails, so that I could add to it from public terminals while I was computerless. Now it’s xml/xslt stuff that I still haven’t finished. A number of people are actually developing interesting online narrative structures which actually work, so lately I’ve been taking notes and mostly just been collecting all the material, which is taking a suprisingly long time. The structure basically forms a scaffolding for nested narratives, it is what John Barth would call the Arabesque. It has a particularly strong tie with Raymond Roussel’s work Locus Solus, both in structure and subject, and if I do it right, it will feel endless withouth actually being endless.
(12:16.05.19.2005) [/else/processengine] #

Paul Ford interview
[I wrote this for a site called Process Engine, which has been down for a while and I haven’t really been in touch with Deb lately so I don’t know what’s going on with her at all. Paul writes Ftrain, among other things. This interview came out of discussion about narrative technologies, and possibly starting some sort of focused web resource on that topic, but like everything else I basically flaked on that. I think this was early-mid 2003, but that might not be right.]

Bhlyr: are pieces generated with the character-as-narrator in mind, or are the pieces later fitted to whoever would be most appropriate? which is to say, do you know who’s speaking when you’re writing?

PF: I definitely WANT to know who’s who; those pieces where the authorial voice is uncertain are problematic, and need fixed and edited. In general, Scott is much more direct; Paul will gaze at his navel endlessly. Scott is actually quite violent - emotionally, morally, physically, and is constantly trying to goad Paul into action. At least that’s how it works in my head. It hasn’t always played out that way in the prose.

But I’m working on that. The next phase of the site is definitely going to be character-centric, and the lines will be more clear. I’m going to step out as much as my fragile ego will allow and let the characters interact. Sort of like when your parents leave for the weekend and leave you in charge for the first time.

Bhlyr: did the narrators begin as characters in other stories?

PF: I’ve had the idea of faking characters-as-writers since I first learned about the Web. And I did a few Web hoaxes in 1994 or so. It seemed to be one of the most promising things about the medium. It generates anger and confusions sometimes.

As for where Scott began, honestly, I don’t know. The boundary between work, life, text, play, and Web site is pretty thin for me. I think Scott Rahin (Ray-hin, not rah-heen) began as a kind of joke, or a parody of one of my friends. I don’t know if I ever put up the first pieces that included him. He just popped up some day when I needed him and hasn’t gone away since. I have his back story pretty well in place, and if I ever was to get off my ass and write a novel it would probably be about him.

I am always surprised how many people believe he’s real; as I forward with the work and audience continues to grow I’ll have to find other ways to let people in on it, but I also like the ambiguity at the beginning of the reader’s experience; it raises some interesting questions as they try to draw their own lines between the author and the characters/writers.

Bhlyr: is there any basis for the narrator-characters in actual people, or perhaps aspects of different people? are they physically defined, in that you could see them in your mind’s eye, or are they strictly textual?

PF: I’ve attached a picture of Rebecca Dravos which I drew a bit ago. I still don’t know exactly what Scott looks like, which makes me crazy; I’d like to know. He’s fairly strong and not bad-looking, but I think he runs to the stocky, and has a slight limp. I can do his voice - it’s nasal and slightly higher than mine, and his tone is very arch.

Overall the characters are collaged from my social environs: Scott is made of bits of about 5 of my male friends, and of course more of myself. Rebecca, who will hopefully have much more to say soon, is sort of a female foil to Scott, very disappointed, smarter, quieter and more focused. The other characters are in development. I’m still learning, as a writer, how all that works. Hopefully I’ll be a little farther along in a few years.

Bhlyr: do you see pieces written by “paul ford” to fit a style distinct from, say, pieces written by “scott rahin”? could anyone, thus, write as “paul ford”? or is it not that distinct?

PF: No, I think we all have distinct styles. MY style changes but it’s essentially a fingerprint; I tried to submit an anonymous parody to another Web site which was asking to be parodied, and it was immediately identified as my work, even though I clearly marked myself as a “concerned reader from Chicago.” Entering that contest was a moment of terrible late-night weakness, but I guess it proves that the “Paul Ford” stamp is fairly indelible in its way.

So to write as Scott I sort of have to become Scott, and of course it’s still me. Scott is a little more willing to take risks and he speaks from a less repressed place than Paul.

See how “Paul Ford” is also a character in this? I mean, I sort of cast myself as a bit of a neurotic-but-brilliant, kindly, lonely, mopey, literary-minded fellow. It’s a fun persona to explore, but it doesn’t acknowledge what a shithead I can be often enough.

And you COULD say that’s me if you met me, but I don’t think that’s who my friends know. Mostly people see me as someone who works fairly hard, likes to read, and is fairly profane. The Web site is part of my life, that persona is part of me, but it’s a surprisingly minor part if I’m out on the town. One more thing…I’ve received a number of emails from people writing to Scott, asking him to write more and to get me away from the monitor - agreeing with his critical assessment of myself. Those are the best emails.
(12:16.05.19.2005) [/else/processengine] #

else: an intro
Else is where I put things I’ve published over the years in print or on websites that have since bit the dust, which is to say most of them. It’s also where I put the remains of unfinished projects and odds and ends of a similar nature.
(12:16.05.19.2005) [/else] #

the day the muzak died
[written for Fringeware Review 12. I wrote this in a rush as a backup piece to apoc rant, so it’s basically a goof. I’ve done some editing to it to fix spelling and grammar hooey. Apologies for the lame title.]

“Ana! Are you up? Get up!”

“Mrbpht. Ah. Huh?”

“Get up and turn on your television to channel 90! The most fucked-up thing in the world is on! Me and the Daves and Seth are here and it’s agreed that this is the most fucked-up thing in the world!”

“Yeah. That’s very, that’s just great, but I have no TV. My bro’s got it so he can watch ‘Carnival of Souls’ again. So I’m going to sleep.”

“NO! Get dressed and come over and we’ll make popcorn and oh Jesus, this thing is, okay get dressed and i’ll tell you what’s going on, okay, so it’s kinda like y’know that history of rock claptrap that was on PBS? Well it’s like a cross between that and WAX and some kinda crazy digital editing thing, so we start out in 1978 and Jerry Lee Lewis is out in front of Graceland fresh off setting another of his wives on fire and he’s drinking some kinda thick green likker he says the aliens gave him and shooting out windows and yelling about how he’s the real king of rock and roll and then instantly we’re back in 1968 and looking at the corpse of Paul McCartney and in the back you hear ‘turn me on dead man’ and there are all these quick flashes to two surgeons doing a Bangs and eating the half-digested pills in Elvis’s corpse only there’s three bullet wounds in his upper body and we follow the blood sluicing down the floor drain back to McCartney who we can’t tell if he’s really dead or if he’s gonna hide out in Africa like Jim Morrison but i’m getting ahead of myself-”

“Josef? I’m gonna put you on speaker-phone, okay?”

“-but then, oh yeah, that’s fine, and so the three remaining Beatles go off to consult the Dalai Lama but Paul’s NOT REALLY DEAD, he opens his eyes and it’s very, kinda like the end of salem’s lot? And then so quick Johnny Ace is playing russian roulette and talking about the kings of the past, when they got to be so old they were sacrificed, jump cut to the end of the Wicker Man, as being symbolic of the health of the kingdom and how confusing it was if the king died before that because (and Johnny’s gun goes click) the fight for the crown would be filled with imitators (and Johnny’s gun goes click) but for any king it was better to burn out than to fade awa-(and Johnny’s gun goes-”

“Josef, I’m gonna make some coffee first, it’ll only take a sec…”

“BOOM and we’re back with Jerry Lee screaming about how it’s a trade-off, he’d do it again, and a light comes on at Graceland but we’re back in ‘68 where Syd Barrett is beginning his eclipse and fall from Pink Floyd but here comes John Lennon asking if he’d be innarested in writin’ a couple tunes, and so the combination of Yoko’s uptown art influence and Syd’s psychedelia-as-regression-to-childhood, the White Album becomes a meditation on John’s mother’s death while meanwhile out in the desert Charles Manson decides to go back into songwriting, lacking the proper catalysts for mass-murder, and flash back to ‘67 and Dennis Wilson (the only Beach Boy who knew how to surf) brings up the idea of covering Manson’s ‘home is where you’re happy,’ which they do and don’t change any of the lyrics, and back to ‘78 where Manson’s deep ecology and childlike lyrical ability bring him in closer circles with a young Bruce Springsteen, still showing his Dylan roots and playing a no-nukes show attended by none other than…oh fuck! Oh, they just shot Lennon, only it wasn’t whatshisname, there’s implications that an alien intelligence watching Earth believes its governing bodies to be pop stars and have been interfering in things here in order to debilitate-”

“There’s no such word, Josef-”

“Yeah well that’s irrelevant because here’s Paul, dressed in a walrus suit, the letters HEY JUDAS tatooed on his knuckles, fleeing the scene of the shooting and there was a quick flash of Kurt Cobain in a bed in an italian hospital with somebody, I can’t tell who, whispering in his - IT’S DEAD LENNON! DEAD LENNON IS TALKING TO KURT COBAIN! And now there’s a clip of Daniel Johnston talking about the Beatles coming back after the apocalypse but nobody believes him and we’re back at Graceland, and somebody comes up behind Jerry Lee and whispers ‘I’ll make you famous again’ and Jerry turns around and there’s Robert Johnson and there’s a hidden implication he sold his soul to the aliens back in the day and they open fire on each other and jump cut to dead Elvis getting up off the toilet and jump cut to Brian Wilson, barricaded in his room just like his daddy used to do, a fat chunk of hash on the table and a shotgun across his lap, mumbling about how Jesus will keep him safe from intruders and trespassers and there’s a knock on the door and jump cut to Janis Joplin hitting Jim Morrison, only it doesn’t exactly LOOK like Morrison, but hitting him with a southern comfort bottle and calling him a fucking clone mutant and jump cut to the final Beatles concert, 1971, where Syd collapses in a saucerful of sickness and a massive riot ensues and jump cut to Cobain singing ‘gonna leave this region, they’ll take me with them…’ and then it gets real quiet, hey Ana i think it’s over so if you wanna go back to, no, it’s a long shot of Graceland, the light in the house goes off, and we can hear a voice inside saying ‘c’mon sweetie, let momma in the bathroom, I know you’re in there,’ and the stars move in strange ways, and fade to black. Well that certainly was different.”

“Well fuck, then, how about you guys just meet me at Eat for some pancakes or something?”

“Yeah, I’m down and Seth’s down and the daves are asleep. We’ll see you in ten. And I hope you have some happy news.”

And Ana smiled and turned away.
(12:16.05.19.2005) [/else/fringeware] #

apoc rant (final)
[Originally written for Fringeware #12, rejected due to space constraints, included on the Fringeware website with the issue’s other articles until the site went down. This is the revised version, written a few years later. There’s currently talk that it will be reprinted as part of a collection of manifestoes; if that happens I’ll be certain to update. Essentially a collection of ideas gathered from people I talked to between 1995 and 1997, and deliberately ranty, so don’t think too much about it.]

Introduction

What does it mean, to look back on all the promise of end times, the immediacy of divine assignment now scrubbed from me, every day a trial of tying shoelaces and paying bills and pretending to care about the day to day detritus we are sold? What does it mean to look back on my prior life, when I strode with purpose, attempting to understand what waited just around the corner, the great transformation which would pull apart all things and recombine their disparate elements into whole shimmering cloth? What does it mean? It means nothing. I wanted to believe I was alive at an important time, that my actions extended beyond my sight, that there was an answer, all bottlehollow lies good only for the tiny warmth nostalgia finds in past failures. If there was to be a great transformation, I emerged from the coccoon a corpse.

This, then, is the record of my aspirations, and what became of them. I can promise you nothing, not truth nor clarity. Written in the spring of 1997, it is fundamentally absurd, as is any attempt to view the future through a headful of chemically eroded half-truths. I spoke to strangers about the end of all life as though this were a reasonable topic, no more upsetting than a cloudy day, and after these discussions I would run back to the basement of the farmhouse where I was hiding and bang out these observations on my typewriter. To me, this material is an anchor-memory, a path back to another life, an arrow pointing in a direction I did not follow. What it is to you is beyond my ability to guess.

“People need to make mysteries and legends” — Don Delillo, White Noise

“It is the tide of madness, its secret invasion, that shows that the world is near its final catastrophe; it is man’s insanity that invokes and makes necessary the world’s end.” — Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization

a. apoc via ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’:

How I blew my cover while working as an undercover subway cop’s assistant (a quasi-legal profession if ever there was one), spotting perps for Rob the Cop who’d pay me off for my good deeds by letting me and my friends slip by Iowa’s purchase law is a weird story. Me and Jimmy Cheerios and Jimmy’s cousin Ray were all set to work a whole day-shift in order to clear the fuzz off Ray’s block for our upcoming (Not Getting Back Our) Deposit Party, riding the Silver Lake West route while loaded to the eyeballs on some strange AL-LAD derivative in order to keep us attentive when Jimmy eyeballed a very suspicious looking gentleman who was unscrewing the seats from the floor. Rob the Cop apparently got left back on Locust, which meant one of us was gonna have to face the certain doom of going up to this clown and, y’know, have to DEAL with another human being, which we woulda skipped but we were obligated to fufil our agreement. Only we weren’t sure he actually had a screwdriver; Jimmy was tempted to start crawling around on the floor like a snake, so his judgement was fairly shaky, and we couldn’t see any harm being done by the alleged chair-screwer, but then again our judgement was shaky as well, so finally we just decide to ask him flat-out if he’s up to no good.

To make a short story shorter, that’s how I got this scar on my left shoulder, and that’s why the Deposit Party is cancelled for another month, though the rent means we can’t exactly get you the keg money back just yet.

b. apoc via ‘will to nothing’:

The end of the world is a form of linguistic shorthand which cannot be shortened without removing the integral semantic meaning. One may say, no. one may not say. There is no means by which we may speak intelligently of such occurrences, after which not only will there remain no we to speculate or witness, there will be no more subject, no more history, no more anything. The end of the earth presents the project of humanity as not only failure, but a nonexistence not only of our flesh-and-bone bodies, but of all systems by which we understand. The potential of speech, of history, of thought; it’s some lovecraftian beast gnawing at our sanity, an utter futility against which one can stage no attack, a fact becoming increasingly apparent in our solipsistic, subjective time. The shift from discovery to invention, and the light it casts ex post facto on all aspects of our lives, brings on the realization that once there is no more we, there is no more anything. Take a quick inventory of what will be missing if we allow no escape from this final end, not just the flesh and the bone but the idea and the notion, from which there can be no retrieval of our wasted words and our fraying memories. What could you save? How could you transmit this information meaningfully through time and space? Where could such material be kept safe until rediscovered and examined? Or is this just a feeding of the vanity to think there is some audience at the end of the universe waiting for the fossal record of our failed civilization-nest? The question is not so much could this information be saved, nor could some other race discover and decipher the information, but why would they care? Exterminated genetic backwaters are a dime a dozen, and all of ours aren’t any more valid. No one wants to remember someone else’s dreams.

Should we not be providing such psychological means of understanding alternate escape trajectories but technological means of living the future we would want to live in (whatever that means) but what do these things mean outside communication technologies? Is this, increased bandwidth, the solution to our earthly problems, problems already existing just currently unexpressable? Coding of global economies and gov-functions into massive accessibility via viral forms so as to make available this “folk wisdom”? would i to argue tat to claim pro-apoc is simply that in the end times “all will be revealed”, as my man robert plant put it, and thus all our retro-futurism, all this “archaic revival”, all this appeal to past cultures, this classicism, it’s a Universal Remembering Project, a rediscovering of lost and hidden knowledge so as to make the human project as currently understood summable and codable and reproducable and transportable. Indeed our desires to create bigger better means of data collection and processing find root in this, the vessel we have filled, and as such when the standard tropes of resistance/revolution are nothing more than the tools to a solid resume, the struggle shows itself as the trap for creativ e energies and distractions it always was and the means of keeping tabs and crosshairs on already dead revolt. One could argue it stands as a prerequisite for answering such questions not the actual content of the response but the application pre-question of guiding principle and stratagem and power system, in which case i remain mute as near-future tactical analysis, these are questions asked not in order to be answered, but to silence.

Throughout history it has always been the case that catastrophic global change has been seen via apoc, as the end, when in fact it had been a phase shift, after which the culture radically reorients itself in a comparitively short period of time. Perha ps the gospel is a reusable set of instructions for dealing with such change, maintaining a foundation in times of flux, the notion tat god’s work is to be done until the very end as no disaster should keep us from it. Any book which prepares us in a practical way for drastic change, then, is a gospel, literally ‘good news’.

c. apoc via ‘deep ecology’:

To what extent is violent action justified as a means of gathering attention? At what point do you become just another church-burner who sees all change at the end of a gun? If you were looking to make a global statement on the death of nature as ‘force’, i.e. ours being the last generation to think of forests and jungle as Conradian ‘dark places’ instead of areas of commerce and state-sponsored parks (the last generation, so to speak, alive to witness ecosystems), and if you were faced with limited time, would you resort to media war and star-killing? This is a deeper and far more terrifying form of martyrdom than we were once accustomed to. The hyperbolic extent to which we regard ‘individual freedom’ and ‘personal choice’ allows us a detached and demeaned respect for self-immolating Buddhist monks but bring out shill cries and hand-wringing when ‘innocent people’ suffer similar fates. Is this apologia a means of, for example, casting blame onto Sharon Tate and off Manson, whose deluded attempts to cease the “progress at all costs” policy of governments and businesses has shown little concession to the global damage it has wrought? No, certainly not. Tate (and her unborn child) as well as all others killed that night were innocent victims, as are all victims of terrorist strikes. However, to call such things senseless tragedies is untrue, a false means of alleviating guilt. There are statements being made, and it is our bovine ignorance which continues this cycle, a compliance through fear and self-destructive stupidity, but we are always left wondering if the cure is worse than the disease. If we are so afraid to listen to ‘terrorists’, is it because we become squeamish when we witness the logical end-results of our negligent actions and legislations, or is it because opposites are essentially the same, and the hypocrisy of moralists speaking through bloodshed is nothing more than a serving of the forces they half-heartedly seek to topple? Is this kind of protest the opposide side of a single entity, whose ultimate ends are served by either limp token protest or by smearing violent actions across otherwise effective revolt? When we imagine the whole of the world should be fascinated by our pet causes, when we consider them ignorant when they do not fall into step with our beliefs, how can we dare to consider the policies of others thuggery which deserves wrathful retribution? Who pays? Who gets paid?

d. apoc via signal-death:

Statements have a short life by nature; they soon become a shorthand for themselves, referent to nothing, an excuse to Heidegger’s dread ‘gossip.’ We interconnect signs like legos, paying no quarter to any referent, fully believing the connection of half-understood cliché and headline makes for an argument. Given this as the field on which we play, is it little wonder anyone aspiring to make political change transfers themselves to the mirrored dichotomy of art and terror? When one understands government and diplomacy as a massive demonstration of the politics of the schoolyard brawl, this will be the means by which discussion takes place. There is a logic that states to utilize the terminology is not only to weaken it, but to empower yourself in the process, but are there weapons one can pick up and never put down — when do the things you use start using you? Does the fact that the interconnected highway system we’ve come to rely on has its origin in nazi state-planners cause us to use the backroads? Do we abandon the banking system kept afloat by drug money? Do we ignore pleas in the night in order to keep ourselves and our families safe? At what point do all our small concessions to evil become corrosive, an eating-away at everything that sustains us?

e. apoc via ‘the stooge theory’:

The end of the world will never die as concept for the simple reason that, as the years go on, the stakes rise: there is more to lose, and there is no notion of collection not undercut by the potential of that collective being lost. Besides, the eschatological environment obviously changes and provides new takes on just what ends when this apocalypse takes place. There will always be a desire to see the backdrop of our lives gain the utter (and temporary) significance the big end provides. It is also indicative of how much we want to have something happen to us, instead of from us; see the overwhelming preference of the Jesus descends, judgment day, reign of Christ school of millenarianism, as opposed to the unification of all on earth in belief/Jesus descends’ option, the one preferred by the church during the early centuries of its existence. There is always an outside force at work whether Satan, aliens, technology-gone-mad Y2Kism, capitalism, asteroids, communism, disease, terrorism, ad nauseum. We are, and always have been, victims and petitioners, asking for what we always ask for when we have done wrong, forgiveness. We take it the only way the victim knows how to be forgiven. We’ve been waiting to be punished, or praised, or somehow made to feel that it is us that has been selected to witness this cusp of history. The finding a chronal structure to life is appealing to anyone; it’s a big part of why people get really into going to work. We’ll always find new ways of tricking ourselves into eating cold oatmeal.

f. apoc via per ardua ad astra:

If we do believe in a global consciousness, the question arises: is it bound to this planet? Can this so-called gaiamind exist elsewhere? Can we take the earth to the stars? This changes the way we think of ourselves; no longer bees for the machines, we become a means of transportation/reproduction of Nature, the DNA of our bones and tissue inadvertently left in the wake of our explorations which will find activation at some future point and begin this world anew. This apotheosis of the human plague, the benign sickness of god, in which the biological imperative of humanity preservation and proliferation is more than just survival mechanism. It is the self-serving means by which Nature finds a means to leave this earth and, thus, survive as well. The elements of this planet have been told they are in Gods image, and as such are the means by which God is able to act in this dimension, perhaps suffering the inevitable signal-decay which takes place anytime a form of communication (particularly sentient forms of communication who believe themselves to be autonomous) is used, nevertheless underlying the concept that only through the ultimate negative stimulus, the king of terrors, can the God continue to exist. If we (the collective of living things) are the means by which God interacts with the universe, a post-apocalyptic god is faced with the daunting prospect of being without senses, completely without any tangible connection to this world. The division between God and the collective of living things is as foolish and ill-conceived as the mind-body duality; there is no one without the other. Of course, the beaurocratic strata of the afterworld allows for the sorting and filing of all souls risen after death, but can this system continue foreverafter once the earth has been empties of all its tombs, all earths all tombs? How wide does this net stretch, exactly?

g. apoc via hero-worship:

There’s a cult in Kentucky whose basic tenet is, depending on your orthodoxy, a) that Kennedy was the fabled second coming of Christ, or b) that Kennedy believed himself to be the second coming. Both believe he ordered his own death. Came to save us and we hit him with the fourth nail right through the skull. Three shots, just like Christ, Brady getting one in the wrist a kind of in-joke. Thirty-seven years from his death to the millennium; three the trinity, seven the seals. Three alternate hells in the bible: sheol, the dark passage of the dead; the untitled underworld for the impure while the righteous go to the elysian fields; gehenna, the cesspools of Jerusalem. hell come back as the earth, the final bardo, thirty-seven years in the making. Kennedy himself said, quoting Luke, for those of whom much is given, much is required. All deaths prior to the earth-hell a means of ascending to the holy. Removal from hell. Vietnam was a holy war. Kennedy knew, had himself martyred, a leader by nature leads. Oswald as false Pilate, whom Ruby smote despite pleas to put the sword down, not his ear but his soul was severed, sealed his fate. Jacqueline holding portions of the brain and body; it is accomplished.

Does information post-acquisition acquire a new context in all cases or can it spread its old meme through the new host-body? Once you pick such a thing up, can you ever really put it down again?

h. apoc via endgame:

Your voice. Your voice. This is no heaven. When the initial schism between the God and the Satan took place the world was filled with novelty, expanded quantitatively when Adam and Eve left Eden, for now souls were up for barter and collection, which meant one could keep score. The value of these initial souls was tremendous, due not only to their rarity but the age of said souls, lasting in cases up to seven centuries. What of the souls lost in the flood? What final resting place did these souls have — was this a massive concession to the infernal warehouses of Hell, or was this a wiping of the board, the echoes of checkmate and beginagain? naynever, for here the beginnings of hell proper begin. There was a craftsmanship and attention to fine detail, to irony and subtle nuance, each soul an individual end. Take Abidjan, who was made to work eternal at a loom of his childrens hair, bearing the screams as each strand was ripped from their skulls over and always, the cloth a thick textured brown. The Satan took great delight in such devices, in custom-fitting and releasing his clockwork abominations to run until the end of the end. It was while creating the hell of sennacherib the blasphemer a chessboard he played against himself, knowing each pawn taken connected with the deaths of ten thousand men across the earth in ten thousand pointless wars that the Satan realized he had failed. The Satan had always believed fear was the punishment, the final of all sufferings, but as he watched Sennacherib slaughter his own men rather than postpone the game any longer, he saw that man would commit and witness any atrocity to avoid inaction, that the only thing humans feared more than fear itself was boredom, particularly within the confines of eternity.

It was during the middle ages, when man was busy delighting in telling stories of the punishments of the wicked, that the modus operandi of hell shifted. The earth had always been the true birth of hell; the Satan took every existing punishment from a corresponding event committed by some human somewhere; it was an oft-forgotten declaration from the God that the Satan could not commit an act until man had committed it. The novelty of hell began to fade from the Satan, the delight was gone, the drive to create grew smaller and smaller within the Satan until it could not be found. For a time the infernal devices remained, but the surroundings grew into the antiseptic white of sickness and death. Once the Satan became so desperate for souls that he took them from animals, clouds, toys. Now there was more than one could ever count (which became a punishment in itself), all excited in a way they could never admit to themselves to see the greatest show beneath the earth. Terror became replaced with disappointment, fear sunk down into confusion. By the twentieth century, hell consisted of endless games of pong, endless pushing change into cola machines which gave up nothing, endless calls to numbers which would never answer. But the bottom, the lowest of the lowest sufferings consisted of memories, memories of wonderful days, of happiness and love and bliss, over and over and over until the colors faded and the sick set in and the souls begged for anything anything anything else than their lives one more time. But this hell is not one inflicted from an outside source. This is the hell which is called absence. And it is the only hell there ever was, and the only hell there ever will be, and the end which awaits us, not stalking us as though we were worthy prey, but waiting, patiently, because there is no way we can escape. Hell and heaven are both static, they do not change. And anything which does not change is, by definition, hell. There was nothing and no hope, and no waiting to best the God because it became obvious, in the end times, that the God and the Satan were the same, warring across two sides of the same board, and once the end ended it would all start over, the separation, the creation, the banishment, the war, the rupture and the rapture, and it would then begin again, and again, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

i. apoc via d.i.y.:

In this assignment, your goal is to convince the panel that the takeover of a building will convince an entire nation to deal with you on your terms. Dependence on political amnesty or promises made by government officials are never binding (an examination of such contracts made in the past prove them to be area or time specific, i.e. you will be offered complete amnesty from 4:51:00 a.m. to 4:51:01 a.m.) and not to be trusted, thus take over and secure the entire area, bringing in your own aerial assistance as soon as possible. Destroy all potential liabilities without hesitation. Line remaining hostages along windows or other open areas. Bring along battery-fed televisions and lighting with which to plan attacks on hostile forces during prime time hours. Keep any media interaction short and shoutable. Destroying media reporters/cameramen is a certain way to assure media saturation. If reconnaissance from air becomes impossible, destroy everything, selves included, preferably with a series of detonations engineered to collapse the building; there is no point in leaving any trace. One such event says nothing. A few such events say much. A regularity of such events says nothing. Terror is predicated on novelty.

j. apoc via neural atrophy:

If we live in a self-contained solipsistic universe, our end (in a self-centered, solipsistic way) is the end of the earth. Not only is this evident through death, but through the alternate means of dementia, senility and brain damage; the signal which makes up the world becoming incoherent, just so much noise. In such a universe of one, where is the ever-loved split between the Self and the Other to be made? Are we all Self? Are we all Other? Regardless, it is the death of history, of memory, of organized coherency. Or, in a Foucaultian sense, the subjective death of the societys regime of truth. Any claim that an institutionalized person is outside the societal network of power is facetious at best; however, once one is incapable or unwilling to participate in collective normalization processes, one is then cut off from the contextual process of culture, its gratification systems and dream machinery and, regardless of its physical placement, begins to create an individual means of understanding relationships and data. We see our new hell as an irreversible Babel-scenario where there seem to be too many realities. The end of the world, then, is the death of context and the subsequent death of communication. These institutions are formed adn supported on the notion of isolation, however; is there any way for such tactics to work while diminishing the schism between the isolated institute and the world-at-large? Can the creation of alternate interpretation-schema find a place within and thus enlarge our collective reality, or is this necessarily impossible, as one devours the other, reality eating at irreality eating at reality? The totality of existence contains all things, including the removal of the totality of existence entirely. Does talk of the apocalypse help us to digest and come to terms with the idea, stripping it of its memetic strength? Or are we willing something into existence by focusing on a seemingly imminent end?

k. apoc via game-theory:

Postmodern theory is hooked on the idea of philosophy as game. Lyotards games played in peace, Foucaults claiming his arguments as opening moves. What is this game? Can any number play? And is this not ultimately a dodge avoiding any sort of qualified validity, any nature of argument? When cleverness is rewarded over balance, one runs the risk of incomprehensibility equaling brilliance. I won, you’ll just have to take my word on it. Once the deconstruction of existing foundations and aspirations, setting itself up as interpreter and insisting on cooperative games (which, remember, are winner/loserless and, thus, endless), philosophy attempts to offset the end of the world by means of a Scheherezadesque perpetuation of the game. Is the usurpation of the omega point of humanism a fear-based attempt to throw us into overtime, or just a sad attempt to prolong its own waning usefulness?

Had a light which seemed to eminate from some point just behind him at which point i noticed he as set up his own autoprogrammed lighting system scraping rations and wire-relay instructions for more chemicals. Trusting in ghosts offering warm food and the tactile nostalgia of touch leading into the white noise of our deaths. Gift-given and gone jittery with permissions and varials protocols deep sub-cellar crackbeat vietcore the thanatofash of perfumes simulating the apple blossom scent of vx nerve gas still tasting the chunks of vomit in my mouth the failures of genetic human replication leading to the tanks holding lifeless replicas of the famous dead, here a marilyn whose skirt lifts by a stream of bubbles through the s ealant fluid every hour on the hour. Deep catholicism chic, heavy wooden crosses in a pile by the door, fresh lashes scross my face touched up with rouge perfectly highlights my rector’s uniform, needle tracks in my eyelids and my leeching scars - the new high in blood loss and the new aesthetic being parasitism - lost in the dark but the touch across my fingertips gets me back in character.

l. apoc via the joy of sloppy thinking:

If, since the time of Plato, philosophy’s dread rival has been rhetoric, and only circa Derrida has it been willing to admit these subjects not only come from the same sources, they are the same, it is little wonder the disdain high thought has shown the conceptual end of the world, firmly camped at the farthest screaming edge of rhetoric. Having been thus forsaken, it has become the proving grounds of cult literature, fringe science, pop fiction and pseudo-documentary. One needs only look at the current proliferation of asteroid influence on major television shows, an interesting spin on the alien meme (which seems, like country music, to pop up every ten to twelve years). Being such an integral piece of popular consciousness, it allows us to play rather fast and loose with ideas we may not really understand. Classic philosophers dismiss such pondering the way hard science fiction writers dismiss new-wave/cyberpunk/pro-apoc fiction; it hasnt done (and painstakingly explained) its research, thus its of no value. Gregory Benford typifies this stance when he claims the role of science fiction is techno-sociological planning for the future; a cadre of Cassandras able to steer us through the perils of life post-millennium. The avarice and ignorance of such a statement astounds. As Bernard Wolfe said, “anybody who paints a picture of the future is kidding himself; he’s only fancying up something in the present or past, not blueprinting the future.” The same can be said for the folk-tales of the end of the world: this is not a future statement. This is a statement of where we are right now.

m. apoc via kool-aid:

The apoc reading Jim Jones held was the end of the world was

inevitable, given the current escalation in weapons technology and the increasing threat of global pollution,
going to be a prolonged event instead of the flash we currently associate with it,
thus provided the surest means of gnosis currently available.

Apoc, the unmistakable knowledge of ones own mortality (and the mortality of all we know to exist) would be the bridge to reach Jones version of the Christ-figure. It is through the crucifixion that Christ was able to accept his nature and destiny and thus ascend to heaven. This was the rationale behind the Jonestown massacre, that mass suicide would allow the Jonestown inhabitants (fearing for their lives from the Guyanese army) to transcend this world. Echoes of this rationale can be found in David Koreshs seven seals document and in statements made by Supreme Truth leaders in the wake of the sarin gas attack, to pick out two large-press examples. These things happen everyday, and may well grow exponentially. The question remains; is the facing of one’s end educational in a qualitative sense? Are our lives improved by coming into close quarters with our corpses? It’s a standard platitude that we grow as people by dealing with the deaths of people close to us, that suffering strengthens character, but at what point does the overexposure of such misery and loss break the heart and mind? Or are these death-cult notions actually true and honest means of appraoching mortality? Is stepping out of this life a skill developed through meditation and practice, or are we suckers to believe we can make sense of essentially meaningless events? Should we leave the dead to bury the dead, or can our attention elevate us by coming to terms with these things?

n. apoc via displacement

There are certain times in which the normal culture and means of daily activity are suspended. Take WWI, when people planted victory gardens, Rosie the Riveter encouraged women to work, and Asians were held in containment facilities. Such times also allow for alternate allocations of government funds. Wars provide money to weapons manufacturers who advance weapons technology which allow for more wars to be fought, and more importantly, look good on-camera. Calling the Gulf War a month of US weaponry research and development becomes particularly ironic when most destruction took place not with our fancy-pants Patriot missiles but with good ol carpet-bombing. Advanced weapon tech is outside the realm of supply-demand economics, bought and sold as luxury items. The threat of the end of the world circa cold war made this possible. The continuation of the apoc meme is necessary in order for defense contractors (and everybodys got their fingers in that particular pie) to stay fiscally solvent; the complete obliteration of our way of life must be a constant threat in order for certain departments of the government to continue operation. As always, the simplest means of understanding how it is that certain things come to pass is to look for who stands to gain. Follow the money. War allows governments to act in ways entirely beneficial to their own ends. Of course, the rising up off the earth evident in nuclear blasts may not be an accident, either.

o. apoc via the necessity of fear:

“FEAR is the machine by which we ALL OF US become willing to perpetuate the LIE to sell the hours of our lives in order to stay aliveandfedandwarmand ALL OF US willing to buy into the placebo effect of the war machine the means by which we feed each other all cut-up shot-up children and chunks of babies into the DEATH FACTORY we get our checks from pull the elderly from their beds by chain and wire and electrode and drag them kicking and screaming trailing blood and shit down to be cut-up and put in the DEATH FACTORY we do we are ALL OF US calling us better and holding up high heads like rats feeding off each other force-fed the stickyred cables of meat pigs ears and disgust on the tv where we learn not to care needle in the eyes and the mantra of the LIE and we learn how to FEAR and what to FEAR and hoarding our scraps for FEAR we lose what we got ALL OF US go under and will not come up again broken and had our memory destroyed and their hands in your body and all one can hope to do is make more FEAR to speed the LIE until the waves cover us and the blood washes us away and none will be spared until this hell black vomit DEATH FACTORY sewerworld is gone and done and not until the tide of destruction of the FEAR and the LIE have not will ebb until and end and all is destroyed in the DEATH FACTORY gone and covered in skin and bile and all ALL OF US is ended and it is over.”

p. apoc via reference:

Christ’s gospel of austerity and faith held its base in an upcoming apocalypes, which all christians wee taught to prepare for. The nearness of this end was pass down through the years; Augustine believed it, citing Rome as the kingdom of the Antichrist (and, with it’s fall, instigating the rhetorical notion of the victim being responsible for the crime; The City Of God being an apologia for the sack of Rome in 410), so did Martin Luther, but Luther also blamed Jewish biological weapons placed in wells for the Black Death, so we’ll have to take him with a bag of salt). If one takes the bible to be the word of God, then its prophecy, from Daniel to Revelations, is absolutely true, and we are (always) living in the end t imes. No true Christian cannot believe in an upcoming apocalypse, and America is, by definition if not in practice, a Christian country (despite the best of intentions). If the doomsday cults in Korea (1992), Japan (1995), and Switzerland (1997) had prepa red cells for doomsday, then the US, a country without history, is a petri dish for endings, particularly given tat this is, one must admit, a violent age. An age when we pray for miracles to right our wrongs.

q. apoc via ‘posthumanism’:

End of the end of the world. Overstatement, hyperviolence, information war, the central dynamic being new ideas, new tensions. The multinationals have abandoned Japanese monster flicks for abortive faulty brain-computer interfaces: vicarious sex, postindustrial love story, ontological roses, noise as form. Zero-sum null-set zeitgeist of global power struggles, death and negation, still no substitute for strange destinies of being-as-other, distorting loops of Fuck Me Up The Ass. Years before we realized sleaze we appropriated unpayable debts, life lessons, synaptic junk food — alas, no post-hippie gen XXX, no realized Xanadu in the link and pulse of bodies. You not convinced fractal levels of complexity belie human emotion? The buzz of the new has lost you, all your strategies obsolete, all your profit endlessly chasing the dragon of tech just over the horizon, your body your office, connected by telecom demons to teh hole where all your hours go. What of all the promises of a workless future, of the extention of free time? All the efficiency goes back into the work-week, extended to any hour on any day, your life sold to people who won’t even pay for your grave. The fault is yours. The blame is yours. Your acceptance of the status quo, the unspoken standards of what you keep telling yourself is uncharted terrain, has left all the revolution you bought at the mall like the taste of death in your mouth. This end will be ein mude tod, artificial politics and everyday life and the need for alternate genitalia a dead channel. Undeal with reality.

r. apoc via ‘our man in the field’:

Their bodies had dammed and effectively contaminated the river spilling out into the road, and their eyes had closed up and turned to black mush, and the bugs had picked away at their faces so they didnt look like us anymore, which was quite a relief to all of us who had to dig the pits. VX nerve gas provokes a chemical reaction in the human nervous system causing the lungs to fill with mucous at a rate which bursts blood vessels, effectively drowning the victim in their own fluids. UN officials stated in Mondays report that although human rights regulations had been breached, it would be “inadvisable at this time to enact trade sanctions due to the fragile economic condition of the area.” Cranial swelling hemorrhaging and full immune system collapse within three hours. DO NOT RUB EYES OR EAT OR DRINK EXPOSED SUBSTANCES. Thank you for your assistance! Yes, its gone black and swelled, I know, I know. Keep its mouth empty, okay, and morphine, uh, fuck, needle in arm? NEEDLE IN ARM yeah, yeah. And keep it out of sight, for fucks sake. “Who maintains that the current influx of small arms and narcotics in no way assures airdropped medicine will reach those in need.” All correspondents have been claimed missing or dead. Media blackout. Reports of biochemical saturation as of yet unverified. The fourth Red Cross airlift in as many days considered lost. “Its simply too late for any form of military intervention to have any viable effect other than caving in to senseless guilt.” Over to you.

s. apoc via ghost story:

There is a certain delight we take in scaring children. As we grow older, we feel ourselves stretching into new skins, coming to resemble the closetdwelling bogeymen we once so feared. As we feel our forms of power-in-the-world slip away, learning that responsibility is another word for subordination, we find ourselves grappling at whatever means of superiority we can claim. The relationship is a flawed model of this system of needs, in which we take pleasure in the small tortures love affords, but only at childbirth do we fully savor the heady taste of inspiring fear. The other, in a relationship, exists outside the battleground of the home, but the child is trapped, a captive audience to schadenfreude and spookery. Have you ever scared a child? Is it a kind of karmic retribution for the power others have held over you or good clean fun? We like to be scared; perhaps, when we are allowed our payoff, the catharsis which uncasts the spell. a child has no access to such devices. If I die before I wake, pray the lord my soul to take. There is no dispelling the end of the world, particularly the small worlds children inhabit, a terror which will hobble them until they gather the hopeless fatalism to look into the closet and see nothing there, at which point they gather the first of adulthoods weapons, the knowledge of a power no less mighty for its emptiness. When you look into the closet, remember, the closet looks into you.

t. apoc via inverted metaphor:

Maybe it would be better to forget. There are languages where the only words are variants on good-bye, a meditation in action on transitoriness. The road turns. Around the corner and across the field there’s an old-tyme ragtime band made up of human-sized wind-up animals. Monkeys, squirrels, a lizard that stands on its hind legs and plays the drums. Music is important when it’s the only way outside of Time. Alas, they wind down and slow and stop, someday I’ll show you the score, where this is taken into account and written in the margins. The things you take into consideration when you begin thinking in another language are frightening, sometimes. The people who used to live here before the sickness got ‘em tried to teach these little shaved monkey-things to keep the band wound but the monkey-things were too dumb, they thought. Not true. “Hell is filled with people who tried to stretch time, and when heaven is as easy to find as a juicy nest of bugs you don’t fuck with the Cosmic Mysteries, mon amour,” says the Monkey King, who speaks for all monkeys, even the fallen domesticated ones, in a voice as steady as a frost that will never thaw. My goddess once held council with the Monkey King, who taught her things I will never understand, and in exchange turned her body into a flute, pores opening, the hollows through her bones clearing, the wind run through her like soft rods. You have heard this sound. The Monkey King has the highest respect and the greatest fear of instruments. My goddess and I once placed strings through the passages in her body when the holes were open. The pitch shifted and the clouds grew solid and fell from the sky. We learned not to mess, and we haven’t since.

How do you know when you’ve been had?

The loyal order of failed prophets, of which I am one, hidden winds lost beneath underground rivers, the fossilized flotsam of what-once-were artifacts to transmit the cyclic nature of time, we pondered over such and realized the plants were going to sell us out to the aliens. “The god damn government has been controlling the weather for years!” the insectoid hive nature of alien culture, blow-ups of mandibles, layered wings, multiple eyes gone glistening the streets crosses on doorways painted in herbicide the scent sticks to your clothes your face and churchbells distanced timestretched the weeds, the vines, man, they’re getting to be fucking arrogant, alien truces with the vegetable kingdom organic technology pollenspread “stars and beyond,” the promises, the subvocal alliances, “all any living thing wants to do is claim and conquer, planets cold trade, it’s our fucking turn” exoskeletal placement accumulation to new gravities, new destinies, the sky a distraction. guttural -60 Hz cries a swan song. We prophets needed guidance. The fortuneteller, a dark matted brown its body all up to the dolls head, a lightbulb where the brain would be. It took up nearly the whole closet, but it wouldn’t come on unless the door was closed. So I squeezed between wood and glass and dust and closed the door. Moth balls, old pine, grandmotherly the smell. The light in the bear’s head came on, and unsettled. I placed my hands in the hole where the fortunes came out and formed my mudra, index finger beneath thumb, ringfinger up to the sky. Head and arms moved along axes. Consideration, consternation, this certainly wasn’t a good sign. (silly mystyk, majyk’s for kydz.) The hazy blue neon of the light confused me, fingers misplaced. No matter, I have the answer. “Never the never, forever and ever, those who give it will take it in the end.” SO SAYETH MY CRYPTIC RUBRIC. 50 cents, please.

“but ultimately can’t be helped that there’s this skipping noise because Enochian see is not designed for the human larnyx and thus surgical alteration or digital re-manipulation is necessary for tone-accuracy and thus barring available subjects the latter was regrettibly put into action circular speaker formation triangulated to stand for three parties and upon stepping into the circle one could feel the sub-molecular collecting of Dread Spirits.” — phone message, 1997

u. apoc via ‘will-to-invisibility’:

“these stories deliberately confuse and obscure, they cover over what should be made clear in an attempt to convince us the author knows more than the author says. the inverse is obviously the case. what other conclusion can we come to concerning ‘the end of the world,’ an impossible subject; what does the end of the world look like? what happens? how long does it take? only by a rigid reliance on the abstract can the concept hope to exist. it is an excuse to the lowest form of ignorance at a time in which we are in desperate need of solutions, not this adolescent playing-at-armageddon. what becomes of us when we model ourselves, when we find the locus of our fears and desires, in death? this faux-cynicism and cheap nihilism serves no purpose but to make us numb to the symptoms of this universal death of affect. is this what we deserve? does anybody care?”

v. apoc via ‘i-love-you’:

That Shakespeare saw fit to compare the fury of the scorned and the fury of hell says much. It is a maxim throughout time, immortalized in song: “My world is empty without you.” From a purely psychological standpoint, what can we say about this infatuation with apoc and its connections to failed interpersonal relationships? The end of the world found solid ferment in the early church, which was never known for healthy relationships. The self versus the other becomes typified to a nearly absurd level in the self-help mantra ‘men are from mars, women are from venus, i’m from uranus’: Burroughs’ split-species theory becoming mode and model for sexual warfare. Fear that which is not you, and want not to fear; destroy what is not you. The vision and the void.

The biological imperative which underlines and guides our “free will”. The notion of the orphan has been quite the commodity in pomo crit these past few decades, the idea (as, of course, you know) the free agent, the radical (in a biological sense), that which begins self-contained, twice removed from the vast poisoned culture, I guess. We all want to claim total distance from the object we study, but we cannot, for we are what we study, we are the culture we theorize upon , and our work is in essence the final stage of an encroaching narcicism, media reporting on media reporting on media.

w. apoc via ‘ceremony-decay’:

We find passage through the day-to-day by relying on a) the routine and habit of our lives and b) on the pomp and circumstance of figures outside our immediate lives: political-entertainment people. The desire to alter ‘rut’ in our lives, to make abrupt and permanent change at any point in which we are not content (and who’s ever content?), both in the be-there-firstness of pop culture and the revisionist nostalgia for the mythic ‘better time’ (the ’60s, the ’50s, previous centuries, or even our own childhood) as coupled with the unreality of American government: ceremony the public no longer has interest or faith in, and we find ourselves floating without referent, easy prey for those who know our hopes and desires, as easy to decode as the clothes we wear and the foods we eat. In a world where we literally wear our psyches on our sleeves, are we not leaving ourselves dangerously open to demagogues fed on proper vocal intonation and semantic weaponry? And if this is so, why not throw your future into the capable hands of the ultimate heat-death, reducer of all things, the great equalizer, an angel of mercy to a sick and dying planet? When we understand heaven as a structured society of infinite bliss, our longing for death increases as our order and control of our daily lives decreases. Why wait? In a world in which the only constant is change, the ultimate transition becomes a smaller and smaller leap to make. Besides, it is always better to dive than to fall, always better to dive than to sink. What do we have, at the end of the day, except the small and compromised control over our own lives, our own bodies, and how much of this can we truly call our own? Live free and die, they say, ready to hand the yoke over to the nearest enemy. Suckers.

x. apoc via ‘manufacture of disgust’:

Much has been made of the impulse toward sabotage in factory jobs, the dark desire to see machines malfunction, collapse. From the manga dreams of attack mecha to the small victory of beating our technology into ordered submission (admit it, you have hit a tv, kicked a car, who hasn’t?), we seem to feel a small amount of power in exerting force, both in the real and vicariously, on the instruments which make up our modern landscape. Are these impulses limited to tech and beyond nature? Any kid who’s ever kicked a cat, tortured ants, exploded frogs can answer that question, just as anyone who’s thrilled at a tornado ripping through a cornfield or a nuclear blast flattening trees knows the answer. We may find such impulses vile, inhuman, loathsome, but they are a part of us, and to varied degrees inform our actions. From the miniaturized warfare of gardening and lawn maintenance to the asphalting of swampland, from weekend hunting to the eco-death of irradiated land, we all harbor a will-to-destroy, and as with any desire, the extreme case fascinates us. Listen to the care and detail with which both pro- and anti-apoc speakers craft their vision of the end; the endless loss statistics, the explanations of how such an event would affect the human body, the ugly joy of terminology like ‘spasm war,’ ‘nuclear winter,’ ‘vaporized clouds of blood and bone.’ Can we hide ourselves from these impulses, come to terms with our wants, before we involuntarily give ourselves over to release?

y. apoc via ‘media sickness’:

I remember when I first told her about the album. How the vocal recordings were taken from some third-world country undergoing civil war in the early 90s (this is indicative of just how American I really am, how little I know about the world outside my two-mile radius). how the songs were lamentations for the dead, sung by the remaining family of three children killed in a shelling attack the previous week. How there was a picture of the funeral published in the liner notes of the album. How the tapes and photographs were smuggled out of the country. How copies of the released album made it back to the country. How all those in the picture were rounded up, had their hands bound by plastic ties, and executed. I dont know why I told her this. We went out later that night, and at some nameless bar during a lull in the conversation she started screaming STOP IT! STOP IT!, unwilling or unable to stop. I had to drag her back to the apartment. It was the beginning of our end, that night, the beginning of a lot of endings. But there was still time, then.

The disasters inflicted by G*d are incomprehensible due to their taking place outside of human-time. They happen, literally, instantaneously. There is no delay-gap from will to act, from intent to accomplishment. It is not the physical destruction of the punishment which leads one to terror, to a primal fear, but the unraveling of cause-and-effect, so essential to our understanding of the process of events. The idea that something can halt time’s arrow, accomplish massive destruction, and restart time as it sees fit destroys the rational process and leaves bystanders mute. This is not an accidental side-effect, but the primary intention of all of G*d’s actions on Earth: G*d can only manifest here, in this realm where we live out our lives, as (due to the a-real nature of G*d) anything beyond this realm is, by definition, incomprehensible. The means of understanding space-time necessary to being human are eradicated in such a “place”, so that if souls can be said to exist post-death, they cannot be said to possess even the most basic animal consciousness. The post-dead must learn everything all over again.

z. apoc via a galactic shutting the door:

There are theories, and suppositions, and myths, but if you really want to know what I think about the end of the world, then let me explain what is to come.

In Greek myth, the creation begins with Chaos, followed by Earth and Love and Erebus and Night, but things didn’t really kick off until the creation of Uranus (the sky god) and Gaea (the earth god), whose union leads to the birth of the Titans, the Cyclopes, and the Hecatonchires. Uranus feared the hundred-handed Hecatonchires and tried to off them, but Gaea called on her children to defend them, and only Cronus came to her call, wounding Uranus and becoming king of heaven and earth. Now Cronus took Rhea as his wife and sired a whole mess of children, but was told that one of his children would dethrone him, and thus he (get this) ate all his offspring, except for Jupiter (better known later as Zeus), who grew up on Crete, eventually returning to force Cronus to vomit up his siblings. Then came the war of Cronus versus Jupiter/Zeus, wherein all of the Titans were destroyed. Gaea, who had sided with Jupiter/Zeus earlier (it’s her doing that Cronus didn’t eat him), was outraged and created the Giants, who were anthropomorphic (unlike all the gods, these creatures were born on Earth) but not up to battling the forces of heaven as commanded by Jupiter/Zeus, and were buried underground. Thus the gods ruled supreme and all was hunky-dory until Jupiter/Zeus got fed up with the state of the earth in the Iron Age and drowned (nearly) everybody in the Deluge, our first encounter with a massive global flood.

It is possible that these giants which Jupiter/Zeus battled against are those referred to in the Old Testament as the Nephilim, the giants who walked the earth before man. There are allusions that these giants may have necromantic abilities according to the temples of Marduk, which lined Etemenanki, or the tower of Babel, in Babylon. Less than fifty miles to the northeast the temples of Ba’al and Astarte at Ba’albek were built at the order of King Nimrod by a “tribe of giants” who were able to move the massive blocks of hewn stone (weighing up to a thousand tons) with their immense strength and knowledge of sorcery (which may be another way of saying “knowledge of engineering”). The creation of these temples is alleged to have taken place shortly after the Flood, which were later built over by the Romans to form temples to Jupiter (or Zeus) and Venus. If this is true, it means that the Nephilim, or a race of Nephilim-human hybrids (reports of such occurrences take place in Genesis), survived the flood. The Greek god Cronus most likely has his roots in the Sumerian god Anu, the sky-god, who (as the Sumerians entered a period of monolithic worship) was set aside, as was the earth-god Enlil (comparable to the Greek Gaea), for the god Marduk, who was originally the god of Babylon, but grew to become a universal god as the city’s power spread across Mesopotamia. Marduk, comparable to Jupiter/Zeus, allegedly had this ‘tribe of giants’ destroyed. Beneath Ba’albek there is a vast collection of underground tunnels. This is not the last time we shall see a connection with catacombs and a tribe of giants.

Across the Atlantic ocean, in what is now Bolivia, the city of Tiauanaco is alleged to be built by a similar race of giants. The Indian legends state that in approximately 200 BCE a flood which lasted sixty nights and destroyed all in its path was brought to an end by the arrival of Viracocha, a creator-god who arrived at Tiahuanaco. According to Indian legend recorded by Spaniard conquistadors, “Tiahuanaco was built in a single night, after the flood, by unknown giants. But they disregarded a prophecy of the coming of the sun and were annihilated by its rays, and their palaces reduced to ashes.” A Jesuit priest records a tale that “the great stones one sees at Tiahuanaco were carried through the air to the sound of a trumpet”, implying that these giants had at least the abilities for at least limited low-altitude flight, compared here to the angel Gabriel. Less than ten miles north lies the tremendous Lake Titicaca, at the bottom of which divers recently discovered not only temple-like walls but thirty large stone blocks used, according to legend, as a wharf for ships taking the dead to the now-submerged catacombs. This would imply Lake Titicaca as the world’s largest burial pond, intended for the magicians and sorcery-wielding giants who were able to move solid blocks on par with those moved at Ba’albek.

Two hundred miles to the west, the Nazca lines spread gigantic images of totemic animals. The design of these forms is thought to be designed by the Nazca through use of either extensively well- developed geometry and/or low-level observation of the land. A hint as to whether or not the Nazca were assisted can be found a hundred miles further, on the coast of the Pacific, in a burial tomb outside Paracas called the Necropolis, where the bodies of over four hundred noblemen are designed with giant masked anthropomorphic creatures who take to the air with the help of worn ribbons. Further still, across the Pacific, we find the tale of a race of giants with a severe case of architectural genius at work in the Khmer capitol of Angkor, where talk of a race of giants led by Pra-Eun, the king of the angels (yet another flight reference), built the magnificent temples atop Cambodia’s Kulen Plateau, whose inhabitants disappeared in the 15th century, leaving no trace. Perhaps the most impressive of the temples at Angkor is that of Angkor Wat, an anomaly in Cambodian architecture in that its sculpture seems to reflect an advanced understanding of astronomy as it relates to the calendar. Alas, all information of the inhabitants of Angkor was lost, as between the first Siamese raid of the city in 1431 and the second raid a year later, the entire population disappeared. A pattern forms: floods, giants, massive construction, time/geometry, disappearance.

The ongoing myth of the language of the birds, an ur-language comprehensible to people of varied root-languages, has been bound with teh Nephilim since at least the Sumerians. Legend of this xenoglossia continues in the garden of eden, and later seen with King Solomon giving this give to the Queen of Sheeba. Why do we pull back to this notion of universal language, shared not only by all of humanity but (in Welsh and Native American folktales, for instance) also with certain animals, losing their speech (or, like Descartes’ monkey, refusing to speak)? Think of the alchemist Artephius, who live a thousand years due to trade with strange beings. Think of the characteristica universalis, rekindled via real-time global communication, cross-pollenated xenoglossia, bringing out the Apochatastasis, the universale reintegration promised at the end of time, Boheme’s “sensual speech” eminating from the angels, the “natursprache” known at the cellular level, an ideal survival mechanism.

It is my hypothesis that a race of large anthropodial creatures with highly developed engineering and geometrical capabilities, all fascinated with astronomy, who possessed the ability for mechanically assisted flight and possibly the capability for resurrection, all of whom disappeared from the face of the earth without a trace and legend of destruction by a sun god, were none other than the Nephilim of legend, who fled from the face of the earth into catacombs to hide their culture. It is also my hypothesis that rumor in various culture of contact with sky-bourne creatures, masked as totemic animals, were not visitations by aliens but surveyors of the Nephilim race, seeking knowledge which they traded for their massive sculptural abilities, whose legacy can be seen across the globe. It is with the Nephilim, thus, that we find the alpha-point of the Universal Memory Project, the attempt to compress all thought into an indescructable “world-seed”. We would also argue that aspects of this process hint at immortality, as seen most apparently in the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Consider also various intelligence-creating technologies, such as is written by Rabbi Eliezar Rokeach (Eleazar of Worms) in his book The Depths of the King, wherein one finds specific instructions for the creation of a Golem, or else the Ghayat al-Hakim (The Goal of the Sage), wherein one can find directions as to the creation of severed heads which can speak of events to come. Intelligences can manifest in basest clay and dead flesh, if one knows the process of revitalization technology.

What we know of the Nephilim is slight. They appear before mankind on this earth, where they took up with human wives, thus spawning the Gibborim. So how was it the Nephilim survived the great flood? The Talmud speaks of the arc of Noah, atop which were two great beasts: the unicorn [re’em] and Og, the King of Bashan, who [along with his brother Sihon] was descended from Ahijah, son of Shemhazi [Samhazi] and Azael, the two angels come down from heaven in the time of Enoch. Both were of enormous size; in the Tractae Nidda, Abba Saul is quoted as saying he walked along the thighbone of Og’s skeleton for three parsangs [a Persian measurement approximately 3 1/2 miles] and still the bone had not ended. Whie this is certainly exaggeration, as the length of the ark was only three hundred cubits [Genesis 6:15] or 450 feet, there is no question Og and Sihon were of great height, noted repeatedly by no less than Moses, who killed Og. Beyond this, all we have is conjecture.

I would finally argue that is it no accident that the majority, if not all, of these areas previously mentioned have been the centers of massive warfare in the past fifty years. This is the tactical aspect of the fourfold erasure system through which apocalypse will manifest attempting to erase the remaining traces of these cultures from behind the guise of warfare, and possibly attempting to exterminate any remaining trace of the Nephilim, implicating a pervasive trans-global governmental influence toward this system. The final curtain of this horrific play will, by definition, be the end of the world.

At least that’s how I’m betting.
(12:16.05.19.2005) [/else/fringeware] #

sixtyfour
[My friend DMF was working on a zine called Desire, in which he was soliciting stories and poems and whatnot around that topic. He asked me if I’d want to contribute, and it took me a little while to figure out what I’d write, as desire isn’t really a theme I write about all that often. I was doing a series of stories which did not contain the word I, and I wrote this as part of that series, but it seemed to fit well with the desire theme, so I emailed it to DMF and there you have it.]

A mental tally of whose possessions dominated a room, or even a surface, such as the kitchen table, helped the couple to keep a score as to how the marriage was progressing. He was losing points in the bathroom, but he expected that, a fair trade for the leverage he gained in the refrigerator. They joked about this trial they shared, a sort of apartment-scale game of Risk, but the seriousness with which this game was played made the results unquestionable and permanent. The closets were the equivalent of the Soviet Union, vast tracts of land only important when taken as a whole. The end-table in front of the couch was of endless importance, as it became the centerpiece by which most guests were framed (irregular guests, it should be noted; he brought Tom and Carl into the basement where they hung out in the storage room while her close friends tended to gather around the kitchen table). The living room was essentially a place to stage family and emloyment relations, the magazines and candleholders shifting back and forth between the two depending on who had to impress the guest most, a small example of how gameplayers are ultimately interested, at least in the beginning, in continuing the game rather than going for a decisive win. The painting over the couch, however, was a battle in which no cease was in sight, a point of contention in which the organic sweetnesses of marriage had no place.

He had a landscape painted by an ex-girlfriend who had gone on to some regional acclaim, a flurry of local gallery displays, and a couple write-ups in artforum. This, he would argue, was no throwback to the days of sheet-stained sewn oats, but a genuine piece of art whose understated use of color and line added a grace to the room. She was having none of it. There are people who see a sublimated eroticism in all painting, from the obvious throb of Gaugin’s prostitutes to the lead-poisoned horrowshows of the late Goya. Needless to say, she saw in each stroke the story of her husband’s retroactive infidelities. Besides which, she reasoned, it clashed with the couch, and there was no way the couch was going. She told him she’d let him hang it in the storage room, which she had basically given him as a good-will treaty, but he was unwilling to let it “go to waste” down there. The couple argued, fought, and occasionally moved the painting, all to no avail.

The cold of winter came out of the skies for them, frosting the windows and sending the heater into a sleep-splitting series of pops and hisses. The crazy candymaker who lived next door had returned to his homeland, hanging a quiet over the apartment, cracked only by the chime of the churchbells two blocks south. The couple spent more time inside, unwilling to dig themselves out of January, and the land-claim game reached a new plateau. No longer spending the gray maudlin Sundays thrift-store scavenging, they had come to a seasonal moratorium of new stuff ever since Christmas, and thus it became a matter of placement and logistics rather than an influx and cycle of material, a drawn-out slugfest replacing suprise. The last one asleep each night either hung or unhung teh painting, while minor skirmishes flowed over the medicine cabinet, the top of the television, the shelves of books they only touched to place them in the line of sight of the couch. The collection of prints she brought back from her exchange student year in Kyoto shuffled behind a catalogue from a Klee exhibit he’d seen at Stevens Ballroom. The refrigerator magnets shifted like empty plague ships in the horse latitudes. The seemingly, tellingly accidental loss of a drawing her brother made for her years ago led to thrown objects and bilateral screaming. She untuned his piano, he drained her medication down the toilet. He lost her keys, she lost his watch. And all the while, the focused fury of the painting placement kept a vigil over the whole of the apartment, an inevitable showdown which taunted them in their sleep, a conclusion that they both knew would be the end of them, a decision more of who would move out and away than a telling of who held the high ground in the relationship. The high ground had been abandoned. All the action was down in the trenches now.

One night the painting fell off the wall. All the shift and pull of their mutual indecision had loosened the screws, whcih puled out of the studs somewhere around three. It was an omen, they readily agreed, but could not come to a conclusion as to what it meant. He took it as a sign they should set this aside, put the pettiness of the struggle behind them, more in seeing his likelihood of winning this theatre slip away than any sort of reasonability. She took it as the inevitability of their dissolution, practically empty of the energy necessary to continue this struggle. Hours they spent, sitting on the couch, uncompleted reachings for the other left hanging in the new dawn air, their breath visible against the frost-softened light through the front window.

They are together, still, having given the possessions they could not conclude as mutual and equal to friends and family and charity. Each of them have to themselves their clothes, their medications, their tax information, and a frayed look in the eye you sometimes see in people who haven’t seen natural light in months. They work and sleep and cross each others bodies with their hands, just like any other couple…keeping a strict mental tally on who’s touched who the most, and last, and longest.
(12:16.05.19.2005) [/else/desire] #

angel of mercy: an introduction
Angel of Mercy began in late 1990, right around the time I first started staying up late on school nights to pound out stories. The vast majority of these early stories found their way into the hands of a friend, who encouraged me to keep writing, thus leading to these questionable first attempts at low-rent zine production. The first two episodes were never actually sent anywhere; I made up copies and messed around and was just too much of a wuss to let them out into the world. After I got to Iowa City, however, there were so many people doing the same basic thing I was doing that I felt nicely anonymous. Primarily these consisted of short stories mixed with photocopied images and hand-written scrawls, averaging about eight pages each. I’d make five bucks worth of photocopies at kinko’s and leave some in my dorm lobby (Quadrangle, then Burge, then Currier), at the ped mall, wherever. I didn’t put my name on them, but left my po box, and got a few interesting replies. Later, I got more into swapping copies with other people, which brought me into distant circles with a few genuinely cool people; no less an authority than Kerry Thornley (who traded me for copies of his “Out of Order” sheets) said Angel of Mercy was “not horrible”. Alas, in 1993 I was forced to leave Iowa City, at which point Angel of Mercy (and all writing of any sort) stopped for a good long time.

This archive here contains bits and pieces from that time. A lot of it simply isn’t that good; zipping around on questionable chemicals and youthful folly, much of the text material is the sort of self-satisfied cleverness that doesn’t really hold up on close examination. Once in a while, however, I did okay for myself. Many of the stories are the roots of the characters and places I still use in stories, so it’s a miniature history lesson for people interested in who I was and what sorts of things I was doing, then.

As to why it’s called Angel of Mercy, it’s a personal thing and not worth a story.

Special thanks to Jenna, who dealt with the bulk of this material first-hand; all the roomates I kept up until all hours of the night; the upper floor of Great Mid, where I did most of my layout work; and my friends of that time, wherever they may be today.
(12:16.05.19.2005) [/else/angelofmercy] #

mister victor inc.
[I kinda got off track during the spring semester, and only published two issues. This was the issue where I started writing additional stories in marker over the photocopied pages. The three or so people who actually read AOM were not at all down with that.]

My father used to work for Victor Incorporated, a company who specialized in complete horizontal and vertical hold on the television antenna market. The market took serious slides in the eighties, with the influx of cable and satellite dishes, and as such in ‘88 Victor Incorporated’s owner (whose name, I assume, as either Something Victor or Victor Something but I’m not sure) took a policy of microdownsizing, applying the concept before it had become a Forbes buzzword.

“People of Victor Incorporated, it is my job to bring sad tidings; there will be layoffs, there will be firings, there will be pressure put on certain individuals to leave, until we’re down to our optimum manpower level, our fighting weight, so to speak. From now on our Pacific Rim consultancy division will be Randy. The Acquisitions department will be Shawn. The Payroll and Expenditures department will be either Martin or William, I’ll let you know later this week…yes?”

“I’m the entire Acquisitions department? Which now employs 437 people?”

“You can always quit, you know.”

“No, no sir, just curious. Carry on.”

Victor Incorporated continued on with their bare-bones staff for two weeks, at which point the owner jumped to his death from the clock tower in town, down on campus. Immediately after the funeral my father decided it would be a good time to retire, and has been happily unemployed ever since. Once he told me that at the owner’s funeral, while he and the Inventory department (James) and the South American Distribution department (Sheila) sat on the front porch of the funeral home and snuck shots of Glenfiddich, a friend of the owner told us he had heard a story that the owner had walked to that tower every noon for one hundred and thirty-seven days, each of which he found the stairway to the top of the clock tower closed. Then, one day, it was open. My father tells me not to overthink this whole Girl With Beautiful Hair thing.

“Later on, you’ll get older, and it’s weird how now I actually spend time being with women, perfectly attractive women, and I don’t even feel this immediate pull to schlepp them, I mean, I’m still attracted and all, it’s not a, you know, it’s not like there’s any problems, but that immediacy, that necessity, that’s all gone now. I mean, I’m actually friends with women now, and it’s really interesting.”

“Well, Dad, I mean, I’m friends with women now. A lot, actually.”

And he gives me that look like “And you’re my son, right?”

…

She was talking, but I was thinking about my father, and so she said “Blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah OB-GYN.”

“I hate that. I mean, I really hate that. Obstetrician-Gynecologist. You don’t abbreviate any other doctor’s names. You don’t call an endocrinologist an EC. you don’t call a cardiologist a CO. You don’t call an Ear, Nose And Throat Specialist an ENTS. You can say the words, already, I mean-“

“Just stop it already. Just let it go.”

And that was the end of that.

…

Back in my stupider days I had thought that the best way to keep in The Girl With Beautiful Hair’s good graces was o become the apple of her parent’s eyes, which shows how just plain wrong I generally was. With her father this was simple; he called me up one night and asked me to help him bust one of his employees, one Raymond Oates III, out of prison. Raymond, whom I knew from his position at E1 Duce Burrito, apparently also did some construction work out at The New Mall on the far side of town, and apparently got in this big hassle with a couple OSHA people who were asking “leading, loaded questions” to the illegals, and so Raymond up and knocked ‘em the hell out. So her dad and I and a few people from work climbed in his pickup and headed over to the new prison, conveniently located downtown next to the pawn shops and the furniture stores. I’ve always half-believed there’s a hidden system of justice guided by laws mere mortals cannot understand, a secret court accessible by those who know certain code-words, certain ciphers. The truth of this was demonstrated to me that night, with the police chief meeting us in the parking lot in order to discuss siege agreements.

“Chief Knutson, it’s like this. You let my man out or we’ll tear up all the road around the prison, we’ll build a playground from your parking lot, we’ll put some hideous art sculpture on the helipad.”

“Yeah, well, you do THAT and we’ll get all loaded and shoot up your precious new mall, we’ll get all your licenses revoked, we’ll impound all this equipment.”

“You know there’s only one way we’re gonna solve this.”

“DUEL!”

and then half an hour later we were out in some field, getting ready to do it up gladiator-style, bulldozer vs. cop car in a fight to the finish. The only person on the construction side still sober enough to get up in the cab was me, and I was going up against one of the cop’s rookie guys, which made me think for a minute this entire thing was an elaborately-staged hazing ritual, but before I could get anywhere with that the shots were fired, the flares lit the sky, and we were off. The key to aggressive bulldozer driving is not to chase the guy, to wait him out, until he can’t take it and tries to ram from the back, at which point you just back over him. For the life of me I’m not sure what exactly the cops had in mind, tactically, when they chose the car as their chariot of choice, maybe figuring I’d give up before it actually came to blows. Who knows. Anyway, even though I now get pulled over every time my tail lights go out, I definitely had an in with The Girl With Curious Hair’s father. My own father, after hearing of my exploits, was quite impressed as well. I made a mental note to run over more cop cars in the future and realized I had probably blown my chances with her mother; destruction of state property generally sent her into fits. I haven’t seen either of them in a while. Who knows.
(12:15.05.19.2005) [/else/angelofmercy/04killers] #

julietta
[Here’s a chunk from issue 3, December 1991, which I finished and distributed just before going home for winter break from my first year of college. I was still basically writing about high school stuff and overly tweaked out on cleverness, but it was a fun time.]

I awoke to find Mr. Peptide swatting me across my head with his pointer in an effort to awaken me with maximum embarrassment as to make me an example and as my head rose from the table a small corner of the book I had just bought, I Was A Telekinetic Affectionato Of Semiautomatic Weapons With The Ability For Full Automatic With Minor Adjustments And Stock Laser Scopes For The Now-Corrupted American Junta Of Nineteen Seventy-three, which he found to be, if I may be so bold as to quote, “completely and utterly offensive and not at all in keeping with the iron fisted neo-fascist doctrine on which my Civil Obedience and Citizen’s Responsibility class is now and forever will be based, you fucking infidel,” and quickly grabbed the book, swatting me over the head with it instead of the pointer which resulted in minor neurochemical imbalances which I was able to use after class as a bribe chip to gain me complete access to Teacher’s Lounge A, including hot tub and sauna access as well as free full-body massage and privately trained and imported concubines and first-run movies in the brand new bowling alley-rifle range, the experiences there gained would come to massive amounts of benefit in the upcoming future. A few days later, today, I left the web of comfortable euphoria which I had erected in Josef’s basement and once again found myself asleep in Mr. Peptide’s class but awoke far before he was able to discover my narcoleptic tendencies and once again swat me with whatever vorhandensein was on today’s agenda, an agenda I tried to second-guess as Mr. Peptide stood over me with blood in his eyes screaming “YOU TOOK MY LOUNGE RIGHTS FROM ME YOU SON OF A BITCH YOU WILL PAY IN INCOMPREHENSIBLE SUFFERING,” (or perhaps I was projecting my own fears into the eyes forever in the shadow of Hess and Goebbels and pseudo-Freudian dominance needs) causing me to look down and notice something about him I had never picked up on before-this man creased his pants so tightly that you could literally lose a few finger putting them on in the morning. Call me unbelievably ballsy but my scientifically-directed head, which some think holds the brain of Albert Einstein, stolen from the Smithsonian and put into the skull of some backwoods fuck-up like, oh, I guess it’s too absurd to finish, but I could not resist experimentally throwing my textbook directly at that gleaming crease which whispered songs of dismemberment and watched in amazement and horror as the nine-hundred and fifty-two page book was cleaved into perfect halves without the least bit of effort. Other kids in the class picked up on this and threw objects of their own at the magic pants-bricks, dirt, chairs, rulers, a large diamond discovered and hidden by slaves who worked in mines in the Amazon who transported it to the States via a hired enemy of the country who was to buy the slaves’ freedom (what the fuck kinda paradox is that?) but instead went on the run and sold the diamond for a bag~f jelly beans and a Desert Storm T-Shirt after repeated cranial bludgeonings, the buyer giving the diamond to his daughter for her ninth birthday~ seven years ago. All objects were perfectly halved. Shit! This motherfuckin’ mark’s up for a bad case of Mutiny Of The PS 982 Civil Obedience and Consumer Responsibility class we all agree as we stripped him down (yeesh! the things revolution calls for!) and flung him through the stained-glass picture of Piaget over his desk, listening to him squeal out the extasis of being dominated by children, the same children who assisted me, the proverbial Magellan of the magic pants, prepare for The Big Showdown at the sacrifice of about seven fingers and an unknown amount of blood. Raiding Teacher’s Lounge A, I equipped my teen gang with a veritable arsenal of high-tech weaponry, using my new-bought book as a guide to maximum round capacity and trajectory accuracy, running through a target area filled with yearbook photos taped onto targets no larger than we. All who dared attack us got a taste of the magic pants and a few rounds in assorted areas, and we hijacked a bus, taking it on a two-month blitzkrieg of violence and mayhem Mr. Peptide would have shivered at the thought of, I invariably manifested my destiny, becoming both the Son Of Heaven and the Godfather of Washburn, Iowa.

“Uh, yes, that’s wonderful Matt. But I still think even though you’ve become an Enemy Of The School you should still go. The last thing you need is more heat. Besides, I’ll meet up with you at lunch and we’ll go out for delicacies, okay?”

I know Ophelia’s right, but I feel weird about going back. I don’t really want to. Dreamed about white, the color of light, the fate of every creature exists both in the intelligence and in reality. I’m just beginning. The faint voice said centuries and centuries have found the wrong image, as if from the center of a storm - no. I have to stay awake. Otherwise it’ll be bad. Get in trouble. Crucified until dead. Hung from the ceiling. Small opaque bundles of assorted breakfast cereals turn with the winding wind, the secret closed, saying the rhyme you taught me when I was just a child in your arms, I was always a child in your arms, you haven’t forgotten. Circumvent the revolutions of the sky with these daydreams, these dark days of dead majyk and waiting for communion, snow-blind eyes blooming from information and newfound senses, fingers intertwined, proving grounds, delirium. Portraits hang over the hole in the floor where the beads fell, I’ll have to save those someday. We glumly miserably count out the five minutes it takes to make rice. What a beatific way to spend an evening. Carpathian. Heralded. Titanium frames and my months in diatribe with the frozen Christ. When a false god betrayed us and we all fell to black. These are birthing pains. The vision liquefies. A bleak fragility made of scattered shards of what glistened like lies across the white of the sheets in the summerwintering sun. These promises are not made in ignorance. I understood before I entered. A simple proximity making me better than I am. And her hair catches and cradles the light of the moon gently within the silken revolution my fingers dare not enter, gathering strength, breathing through. Brown pictures turn to dust in memory. Silhouettes in the window say blessings for our little passions. I’m so tired. I am so tired. I know my loss this way. The word scared my memories, part of my spirit fell asleep. Passionately dedicated to what sounds like light. If you fool yourself anymore I will kill you. they scatter by a new wind, dying down, picking up, across the over and always. Everything human now except for humanity. Benediction via history, a judgment of extinction and sublimated fear. The piece of truth gets lost among the others, it’s a dream you’re having trouble holding down, praying for an end, oblivious to truth you cannot digest. It’s you.

But whatever became of Julietta?
(12:15.05.19.2005) [/else/angelofmercy/03aphasia] #

monitors
[First issue. November 1990. Seventeen years old. Burroughs and Kerouac, The Pixies and The Cure and Slayer and serious caffeine abuse. Printed up copies on the school photocopier while my friends did shit for the newspaper. Left copies around West High, up on the hill, at the library slipped into books. That spring I took a couple trips to Iowa City and left copies all over campus. Nothing but text (even the cover) which made it kinda a hard sell. Title a tribute to Chrome, which I thought I was super-cool to be into Chrome at the time. What a rube, what a maroon.]

So now it’s gone, followed every planned path, left without whimper or murmur or sigh, off to places never identified or explored where everything’s had its novelty rubbed away, a reinvented memory set for nostalgia taking the place of surrogate originals. We are left with shapes in the dust and guesses at their names. But we are professionals, and this is all we need. The Davis Ranch had become famous, over the years, for a sort of experimental rodeo; being within shouting distance from the disposal mines, the animals were born with hundreds of distinct genetic abnormalities. Most of these were fatal, but the occasional animal stayed alive long enough to allow odd variants on rodeo classics, two cowboys chase a two headed calf, bulls whose horns sprouted from the skull and shoulders like tendrils. The birthing problems seen in the livestock were soon apparent in the human population, and flush with stillbirths and crib deaths, the population around the ranch became increasingly promiscuous, so that adult life was a series of pregnancies and funerals, until the riders who lived long enough to be strapped to the saddle mirroed the oddities of the beasts they rode, the grandstands lined with children on homemade respirators and hairless parents sucking down thumbsized pills with cheap beer.

It gets easier to believe once you’ve put a few years behind you. Sold used prom dresses in high school parking lots to pigment-deficient freshmen. Downright lewd. Drew chalk outlines around me every time I tried to sleep. No faith, no persistence, these people. That hyperfocus you get on each potential smell when there’s a new girl around. All I remember her saying was “I can’t handle this”, all she ever said. The blood that stains her teeth. Someone to take it out on. She thought it was forever. “A different kind of friends”, she said. If she saw me now, she’d stare at her feet and weep. She made me feel invincible, back when I was invincible, when the only thing that could touch me was her. Building cameras nailed into the walls to catch the traces, the remains. It’s all nostalgia with me. Hold to the ground and tell yourself secrets. Everybody always loved you. Washed right out of her mind as soon as I left her sight. I want my fucking shit back.

I planted magnets in your mouth so the angels could never find your grave.

Diving for spare change the sailors toss off the bridge, ducking between cars, callouses on the fingertips to master the grasp. It’s been nearly ten years since someone else cut your hair. There’s a mason jar with string wrapped around the mouth in which you keep all the things you can’t identify but you know you’ll one day need. You find your way home at night by following the church bells. Your palsied hands tremble and all your change falls from the St. Marks Bridge. Someday you’ll keep what’s yours.

There’s a ballroom on the moon where all the drinks are cheap and all the dancers make excellent use of the diminished gravity. There’s someone there, sitting at the bar, who’s been having dreams with you as the star, all action and hints at romantic intrigues, and this person wakevs every morning waiting to sleep, chewing up diphenhydramine and walking to the bar to wait out the waking hours. Tonight you’ll bump backs in the midst of a waltz, and swap partners, and then all the truth will come out of his chest.

She paid her third grade class in sugarsticky candy to call you and tell you to come home, knowing you were always a sucker for the grand gesture.
(12:15.05.19.2005) [/else/angelofmercy/01monitors] #