invocation: &'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'& &` '& &` the undiscovered '& &` country '& &` '& &` 29MAR93 vl: . '& &` is: .... '& &'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'& (c) copyright 1993 sdi, inc s.r. prozak & l.b. noire ! spo nsored& created&wri *==+==+==* tten&edited&pro *sdi,inc.* motedexhaustivelyby *==+==+==* spinozarayprozak&labete noire,foundatcblanc@pomona. claremont.edu&rm09216@nyssa.swt .edu&groupsontheusenet&dedicatedtot thestudyofliteraturelife&humanunkind.. :-----/------/-----/-----/-----/-----/-----/-----/-----/----/----: :the undiscovered contents: : : : :. brief villification of theory & functionality : :.. musings in solitude after a primal clash of wills : :... random poetic ramblings section : :.... stoner adventures, vol. v : :..... virulent interlude of emotional attrition : :...... the lust of the flesh, the shine of the skin : :....... interpolation & contributor biographornication : :-----/-----/-----/-----/-----/-----/----/-----/-----/-----/-----: vitiation: for the christian, it is all in having an erection or having no erection at all, being the deprived victim of a lack of stimulus or of conditioned stimulus withdrawl so that some cannot be mustered. the systematic approach to our reduction constitutes perhaps the greatest threat to jargon ever engendered, and perhaps therefore vindicates our initial villification of all that is unsensed. consider the tribal music of the african tribes migrating through the american south to become the blues; despite its complete technical eclipse in the face of the conventionally accepted forms of music (which as we know eclipse all popular music) it has a quality its adherents classify as 'soul,' which we of greater experience can experience as 'authenticity.' consider the artwork of lesser artists, who without the ability to skillfully craft every brushstroke produce prodigious works of splattered paint and concrete pantyhose, which they insist has artistic merit. we, of course, know differently. grammatical errors undermine the lowly texts of those who do not possess the assiduous persistence necessary for subversion of the graphical complexity... thus here in academia all is safe. the walls are thick and constructed of multi-dimensional bricks, upon which we have heaped the categorizations, upon which mount the administrations, upon which pile the routes of publication, visualization and popularization. remember: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. -- the hon. robert chezvick solidification: Plan: she tore my heart from my chest and held it in her bloody hand before my face. however, the shock did not appear on my face. you see, she forgot the human heart continues to beat outside of its host. however, the shock did not appear on her face. you see, she forgot the careless sadism and realized what it was. a tear fell from her eye. i died, yet my heart lived. continuing to throb in her hands. phoenix - --- One word does the work. She'll not even think about what's she's doing while she's doing it. I see it to this day. More pain inflicted. I bare it and turn away thinking the pain is worth the few and far between moments of pleasure. I turn away and head downstairs in disgust seeking a different, or rather, more stable source of comfort... EOT - --- the radio screams to me, "is there anyone out there?" i turn it off. if only it was that easy. three days pass. "what happened? try to kill yourself again?" no, just thinking about you. same thing, i suppose. i was only concerned and the punishment for the crime of caring is patronization. you don't think you deserve to be treated that way? what about the trust i gave you. perhaps we shouldn't make promises we can't keep? then don't tell me you love me. i take back what i said, go ahead and push me away. it's going to make the final task that much easier since i know it's inevitable. there is no plan, can't you see that? - --- i know the story, but it all worked out. trust. trust me. trust you. trust everything. i'll sit by your side and guide you through hell. i've been there many times before. hold my hand and i'll lead you home. then i'll let you go. - --- words are a deceit. as we stand with our arms intertwined, our bodies becoming one, i'll admit my fear. you'll ask of what i'm afraid. i'll tell you i'm afraid of my dreams becoming reality again. - --- she arose from the ashes of a long-dead dream scoffed by all. with the warmth of the surrounding summer night, she repeated everything. then she took it away as easily as she gave it. now she is sitting across from me. the name is true this time and the story is true. now the little flame disappears in the night. to be seen again? who knows? who cares? who knows who cares? -- la bete noire fragmentation: solis sun-burnt impressions of the sun's love on soft skin. glowing eyes, fire from within... burning with the cool of an icy storm cold yet hot enough to keep me warm. (fern) Raincloud The power of the storm The magic of the rivers Part of a swarm Winds fly through the timbers Growing in power Then shrinking so small Herald the shower That brings life to us all Welcome the freedom Blow out the sun This is your kingdom Never be done Playing the rainstorm Singing the sky Go on perform You never shall die (w. francis) "a question" how do you make love to someone who does not matter in your eyes a world built around this shell to carry someone and deliver it coming to realize the grasp of reality at the end of this nightmare shared phoenix you live again from dying embers to dance again laugh and a tear seems it rather ? this is not all that exists to be equal for I am alone in my nightmare and you are still there (lbn) virtual rain across a nipple like a nose beneath the faucet under skies emotive eyes the ceiling blue or maybe brown which is more honest so they say in the dry days rain down the arms with upturned hands stretching outward upward gone to tug the sky & heart & mind wonders of a world unkind. (srp) stoner adventures, vol. v reduction: The world split like a windburnt lip opening beyond the crack of my door. It was safe to go outside, so I did; the sunlight exceptionally bright momentarily teared my eyes and staggered me back for the safety of the doorway, but I had lost that haven in my blind wandering, and so like someone seeking shelter from the downpour I ran into the bright Saturday. Fourteen Christians who were picketing my apartment building screamed at me that I was a user of evil weed, a servant to Satan, and that I would go to hell if I didn't accept my father. My father who? I thought, and then wondered if these people knew they were already acting like my parents. I met Spike at the bus station and together we went to Spike's buddy Miles' apartment, at which we arrived after much climbing over air-conditioning units, steam pipes and forgotten rusted ladders over the collected roofs of several drearily similar apartment buildings. When I asked Spike why we were doing this, he said that it was the result of Miles' landlord being upset at his nonpayment for some days, and if we went in the front, we were going to get a lecture (Miles' landlord is actually a middle-aged woman who would scream at the minions of Satan for a buck they owed). Climbing down the ultimate fire escape, I wondered why I always thought of Miles as Spike's Buddy Miles. Maybe it was because when I was introduced to him, Spike threw his arm over Miles' shoulders and said something like, "This is my good buddy Miles." It wasn't until a few years later that I realized how often that phrase means absolutely nothing, and how Spike with his traditional clairvoyant bravado had ridiculed the traditional superficial usage and known that Miles would someday be a good friend, all in one cartoon-character sentence. Sometimes I forget how sharp Spike is, and sometimes unforgivably I forget how kind Miles is, how much of a great friend he is to me. Miles has never had much money, but I suspect that comes from his outrageously profligate habits. All of his money flowed like blood into his dope buying or bong- making, and so much more brushed off onto his friends like gold dust at a carnival, scattering in the snow outside his door when they left. His apartment had two rooms, both a sallow shade of milky chalkboard green, with wide white windows clumsily stuck in their frames in various stages of aperture. Next to his one-mattress worn bed was a large old-fashioned gas pump, with six goldfish swinging complacently in aqueous breezes over some form of purple light, which gave the entire setup the appearance of having emerged from beyond the upper limit of our planet's atmosphere. Something was vaguely strange about the actual hose and nozzle, but the rest looked legit, although I knew Miles too well to suspect that this was anything but what it was. "Okay," I said, when Miles came into the room, "Where does the dope go?" Miles smiled broadly, the resounding nature of his personality echoing through the halfshut-eyed haze that announced his state of being a high-ass, or someone who has smoked well enough to be visible, which for stoners like us can be quite an effort to attain. "I'm obvious, aren't I?" he intoned in his gentle voice, much like his gentle fingers working overtime on the gaspump bong to make sure each seal was tight, each fixture working. By the looks of it, he had worked doubly hard on restoring it, bringing it even to the level where it could be converted, resurrected from its decrepit state. "I wanted something big, with flair," he said, issuing his two customary statements for announcing the creation of his latest oddity. "And I wanted something glass --it's easier to clean, and shows you a prettier hit -- something (if glass) big and stationary, so that it wouldn't be broken immediately. Also, it had to have some means for quick inhalation, and this caught me, from the junkyard south of here," he said, opening the top where to my amazement, flowed a slender glass tube into the glass cavern beneath. Crowned at the top with a large wooden bowl (a veritable dope altar) mounted on a metal proboscis resting inside of the glass tube, the gas pump bong was conceivably the greatest invention for mental destruction I'd ever seen. Another tube, much wider, ran from the open-air part of the glass bowl to the main part of the pump, presumably to the opening of the hose, and still another tube ran into the water from below, which Miles informed us aerated the tank and scrubbed the water, so that the six fish -- Huey, Louie, Dewey, Sleepy, Skewey and Screwey ("I'm Dopey," Miles explained, when asked, smiling under red eyes) -- wouldn't choke on water clogged with vitiating dope sludge. As this explanation wound down with Miles left staring absently out a window, I heard Spike rustle behind me and reached out my left hand for the best bag of our bestest homegrown I knew he would be handing me. "Miles, we brought you a present," said Spike, wiggling a corpulent bud inches from Miles' protrusive nasal organ. "This baby's gotta go, or we're over the legal limit carrying this bag around." Miles snapped back to us, eye to eye. One of the most ferocious stoners I know, Miles is an exceedingly gentle man who has no luck with life, but needs no gods except his own two feet and his unfathomable good will. Another volume will be written when I see Miles turn down a bong hit, especially off of one of his new creations. Stuffing the green bud into the large bowl, Miles told us he was glad that we had come along. "I'm bored, and there is a need for movement," he said. "This body wants to journey to the end of the boredom, wants to move. It has a thirst for energy expenditure, just to make the universe spin around and around, before death comes sagaciously to spittle us," he said slowly. Not having smoked since the day before, I was essentially sober, and also sort of bored, so I agreed. "Where do we wanna go?" I asked into the stilled air as Miles took his first hit. This was an amazing spectacle in itself, with Miles sucking until his face became red on one side of my vision and the chamber filling with opaque smoked dyed purple swelling out the other side, with Spike's face leering over the glowing bowl somewhere in the middle. Miles leaned back, sucking in a huge flow of smoke as Spike yanked out the dimming bowl, with its shining stem trailing out after it like a sword pulled from a scabbard. Spike motioned me to go next, poking the faintly smoking contents of the bowl with a blackened finger. Spike lit it for me as well, and I drew in an expanding breath to fill the chamber, watching it grow milky and then fill with solid violet smoke. I signaled Spike to withdraw the bowl as I performed the inverse of a howl, drawing in as much smoke as my lungs could hold, seemingly not enough but yet almost and now enough, then the hotness swelling like sweat in me, the magma I had swallowed into my lungs, but I able to hold it, keeping the painful constriction feeling good as the velvet creeping fingers of dope overwhelmed my brain. I leaned over to look at Miles. His face cherubic in its serenity, he was about a tenth of a bong hit from passing out. "Miles?" I said, and he blew cheerful smoke into my face, making a circle with his thumb and forefinger to say he was disturbed by no unruly gods. Miles lived a life like that; he gave a shit about what mattered to him, like friends and making things and doing nice things for random people, it seemed. He wasn't one of those cheesy smiley people who go around pretending everything is great and good and fine and well, who always smile at babies and hold open doors, but a person who would do solid things, sometimes insignificant in anything but the emotional significance, and would do them so wholeheartedly that you never doubted that he was doing them only because you and not he absolutely needed them done. Once when I was suffering a long day in the quiet of the rain in my apartment, sort of distressed after a girlfriend had left me (after which I had vowed to become an asexual, one who sleekly avoids entrapment with either sex, but you see what became of that) whom I had sort of cared for, not really but kind of yeah I think so now that it hurts-ishly. My door took two knocks and swung open to my yeah, and there was Miles, his traveling grin on (his traveling grin being his drawn-out absent face which barely has a smile on it, giving him the impression of being a careless traveler, but in fact means he is observing everything, ever watchful, even if it happens to be the good chance that he's royally high) and a brown bag in his hand. The framed High Times centerfold I was hanging fell immediately, and I yelped an obscenity, this falling-short being been the last small failure on a giant stack of them towering over my head. Miles started talking, doing what the Californians call "talking shit" when they're in a good mood, that is, randomly speaking about various trivial topics of amusement, assigning pretended value to often the most mundane and inconsequential things in trade for a laugh. I was so fascinated by this bizarre entity whom I barely knew at the time (Spike must've told him about my difficulties) that his oddball talk about things most would never have heard in their heads in a few millennia that I forgot to notice that he was aligning my picture with a pencil produced from somewhere in his workshirt, and carefully nailing it in. He punctuated his last sentence, something about the amazonian javelina, with the final hammersmash to put the nail into the aging plaster. "And so..." he trailed off. "Thanks," I said. "Want a beer?" I asked. Miles shook his head no thanks, in a way that said I would if possible but I must abstain. At the time for me, that made a lot of sense, having experienced a few alcoholic difficulties on my own, in the same staggeringly dangerous way children find lightsockets and crease their brains with electric fingers, in the way that is almost as dangerous as some people with their gods. I opened a cheap local beer and turned around to see Miles sitting at the table with his nonchalant noncommittal look and a children's walkie-talkie in front of me, complete with some form of decoration declaring it to be from alien worlds. "What's that?" I asked, sort of foolish-looking (mainly because the beer I had thrown out had to be number thirteen or more for the day). "Partner to this," he said, drawing out another one from under the table. I almost laughed, then wondered am I taking the world way too seriously? and so thanked him, and brought out my bong. Miles and I smoked a large bowl, and he left me the walkie-talkie. "S'got this neat jobbo," he said, "that turns it on when the other one is calling. So if you're bored, gimme a ring." He left it with a fatty, a jay wrapped from whole paper and lusciously ripe green bud. From then on, Spike and I used the little walkie- talkie to summon Miles. I've never seen another one like it, or even anything close. I'm not sure that the cartoon character that endorses it even exists. I had been lost in thought, but returned as Miles got up. Something like that happens with dope: you'll be walking into the bathroom and thinking how pretty the tiles are and how neat the toilet dispenser is and how rad the mirror is and then suddenly, like a lightning bolt out of nowhere, it will hit you that you have absolutely no idea what you're doing in the bathroom. If you don't panic, you might remember the pressure in your bladder and figure out why you were there in the first place. Spike Miles and I went into the other room, which was a bathroom, kitchen, and sofa-room all in one, mainly because the sofa fit between the toilet and the stove. Somewhere in a corner were some crates, upon which rested some random tools (although Miles was able to borrow most of his, even in areas where he knew noone) and some random tinned food. Miles had never been much of a cook, and I doubted the presence of much cooking paraphernalia in the room. However, we all fit on the sofa, except Miles who pulled in a battered chair stolen from a hotel lawn some years ago. We talked for a while, saying dreamy things and enjoying our freedom to do nothing, and then smoked some more, and talked, and played endless games of Centipede on the video machine Miles had found, bought for scrap for $15 and repaired, setting it up next to his toilet. "Capacitor in the screen," Miles said, firing it up and yanking once on the screwdriver taped into the coin slot. Spike was up first, and played a good game, and then I was up, and then we played against each other, and soon it was very dark outside, and we were smoking once again, all of us very so sweetly high, drifting in a cloudless sky like puffy lambswool mistballs. Miles was saying something to Spike about a place owned by a good friend of his no cover drinks cheap, a band occasionally pretty good and not too far off, and so when my game was finished Spike tapped my shoulder and we went, out into the chilling night but only for a few blocks, with a door blown open by the smell of whisky cigarettes and sweat being the portal into this new quickly-moving and blurry place. I took a seat at the bar, and immediately noticed a large green and muscular snake sliding between six glasses placed like a spread-out Olympic symbol, but I turned on my elbow to ignore it and looked over the dance floor, where thousands of sleek women shimmied up and down, glistening in green sequined dresses, next to men in shining silk suits softly seguing to the music, and all of this beneath a blazing green and red interchanging lights display, all of it almost blinding but intensely occupying for my eyes. Miles and Spike took a booth, and I was long in joining them, for they sort of laughed at me and said the word "highass" and I said something sort of like "fuck yeah baby" and they laughed even more. We got drinks, and listened to the band, which was a weird carnivorous eclectic blues, drawing us in like smoke to the face of a stoner, tugging on our souls like the knife of a surgeon under anaesthesia, sort of a resonating heart-mumbling type of thing. Spike spotted a slight blonde and went to talk to her, bringing her back for drinks, and Miles (being not great looking but a very amiable guy with a knack for excellent smalltalk) returning with a woman from Ohio with brunette hair and an intriguing wide mouth, and I staring out into the mass of bodies and not wishing to be a drag excused myself readily to go suck on a drink and spent a few more minutes warming the bar, dragging on a Dos Equis, a beer made by miserable expatriate Germans in the heartland of Mexico. Maybe that is what it takes to find something, isolation and misery, alienation and perseverance. Life sort of drifts by you when you're stoned, and the "sort of" is as necessary to the meaning of that phrase as the "drifts." I can never exactly peg the feeling of being stoned when I'm not, and when I am, I never think to really define it, just to record it. I am not the serious type when I am stoned, as much as Spike or Miles would be. By "serious" I mean that they believe in leading functional lives while stoned, doing the mundane and the extraordinary while baked halfway to oblivion, and although sometimes I enjoy that, with the gritting life I lead as a film student, always under that "am I not good?" and "will I make it?" conundrum balanced against my own feelings of pure genius (ego-induced sustenance) and self-doubt and life-angst-weariness, my main purpose when stoned it to be stoned, to be driftlessly aimless, to observe and contemplate, to feel and resonate, but not to try to do anything but be stoned, but be useless. This is my highest and best use when stoned anyway, because I'm not as hardcore as Spike and Miles and am usually pretty detectable. It was somewhat wearing off. I didn't notice when the woman sat down next to me, nor when she ordered a drink, but sometime after her first sip I turned to catch a look at her (luckily as she looked away burrowing purse money for bar tab). My eyes fortunately drifted away before she looked back, and I heard her speak, a mellifluous pleasant yet strong voice, like the chin of an ancient warrior teaching his children, and so my eyes drifted back to her. Dark, dark brown hair, almost black, and brown eyes soft and bright without overly reflective lustre, giving her the look of someone attractive yet less suited to this antipensive plastic place than even I. Physically, she was admirable, although not a goddess, with a face that was beautiful in many lights, I supposed, but was uncertainly so now. It felt like rain. I was attracted, and there was tugging in my chest, which put into my mind the idea to inform Spike and Miles that I was leaving, to grab the bag and go, when I turned to spot them and caught her eyes immediately. Sudden shock, and all my mouth could form was "hi" and some kind of introductory apology, and even more sudden shock when I noticed her purse slung to her hip and her drink pushed ahead on the bar, as mine was. She responded with her pleasant voice, and her purse relaxed, sliding resignedly down her back. She picked up her drink, and quietly asked a few question, if I came here often, and I managed to acceptably interact with her, answering her questions, introducing myself more fully than name and mixed drink preference. I was not out of shock for the night: she mentioned she'd seen me leave the table over there, and suggested shyly we adjourn there, as maybe we could hear ourselves think? Laughter, glasses up into the air, and we over the waxed sliding floor back to the table. On the way over I think I caught the eye of the guitarist, who must have winked, but I am not sure I saw it. Now the booth was closing in, etc, but I wasn't too afraid, but really curious and immensely out of reality, barely able to mix introductions. Laughter flew like swallows above the heads of the band, who had increased their tremendous speed-blues attack to resound entirely through the hall, widening it and sending it shooting afar like thousands of electric sparks showering around the amazed human, catching him, spinning him, flinging him into the deep and probeless depths of space, sending him rising in those, or maybe falling, as with no direction given there can be no ascension or descent. Their guitarists played with their fingers singing along the cable, moving like fighting birds or maybe mating birds, sending out waves and sheets of flowing tones, covering out heads in still-glowing sparks, warm and cold, life in all. Behind the drummer even crouched their vocalist, the feral life of dawn alive in his halfshut eyes, his mouth murmuring so many phrases like candy: our child we cradle ending our nights alone singing our blues so softly rising waking eyes, to-day morning unbroken bringing us the dew why not why not why not flowers spotted with our blood so much ocean for today here is this our love it dares the gods in their slumber not to kiss the eye of the sun vengeful spitting death retiring coral sea running to the sun on those dovewings we sail away watching as the day grows long our love is chancing, rising, limitless unquenchable and deep, and immortal like the depth of sinking night It was a lovesong that didn't make sense, gibberish to the wearied and fearful, and soon I returned to the table, hoping that I wasn't appearing to be too much the dreamy stoner. I seemed to have held her interest, and the entire group talked for some time, until Miles had left with the attractive blonde whose blue-painted eyerims made her look much like a dove, but whose soft voice spoke a sad loneliness. The women at the table thought they were going to an apartment somewhere to have sex, but Spike and I knew that Miles saw in her eyes pain, and would grow to be someone maybe days from now maybe years or months she would cry to, would be aided by, and would probably never have sex with except in her mind. I could tell he wanted to end the reflection of a scar inside of his chest in her eyes, wanted to help. Miles knows too much of this world to be of it. The woman with Spike who called herself Simone excused herself somewhat after that, leaving Spike a phone number on a napkin, and a promise. Spike grinned behind her back with the smile of the doubtful, but he tucked it into his wallet nonetheless, giving under his eyelids the querying look of possible departure to me, the unsaid male equivalent of should I leave you two in this carnival land? carnival, or carnal, I wasn't sure which. The woman with me caught the look and nailed Spike with a counter-request to stay, not in an unfriendly way but hurriedly, as if fearful of abandonment, or maybe of interest. I didn't wish him to leave, and wasn't sure about the sex thing, or even the stay thing, and so my look was blank but amiable, which she checked before asking him to stay. Somehow in her voice there was approval which told me she now feared me less, but in a way so much more. I couldn't fathom it, so we spoke of trivial things, Spike talking to her about basketball, her sitting between me and him, I carrying on occasionally about making salsa, one of my favorite culinary adventures. The band wailed on, increasing in tempo, as the darkest part of the night arrived. I looked at my watch and realized we had talked until the hour before dawn, the hour of death, or the hour of life. A single blast announced a drumstick slamming into rim: I heard blues merge into some form of deathly noise, and saw the band members grappling with demons on the stage, the steely green bodies of the demons grasping instruments with their claws and running the metallic nails down each string, sending out the harshest howls and screams heard ever by man. A guitarist grasped his instrument back, clutching it like a precious child, and the demon extruded his protrusive face and spat a tempered tongue through the man's body, letting him slide off it howling blood out his throat in his agony. An amplifier exploded, letting the stale sunlight of fire and insanity peak the stage. Smoke poured over demons' shoulders as they ripped the arms from the other guitarist, slashing him with claws until one finally fired a tongue through his skull, dropping him limply into the flames. This is the void of your insanity growled a demon harshly delivering a potent backhand to the drummer's face, crushing a potentially handsome set of features and sending him through a wall. Spike and the woman next to me wheeling, in the background of my eye, helpless in indecision, knocked out of their matrices of being able to deal with this by the shock, me slow-motion, focused on the scene erupting. A serpentine woman in her green glowing dress at the front stared helplessly into the eyes of the first demon, who tore at her dress, slashing her skin, and leaving her blood on the burning stage, she screaming and him howling, the entire scene blurry as I heaved a cheap chair through the window behind us, leading first Spike and then my new acquaintance through the jagged hole. Behind us, the club erupted into flames. In a small cafe, one of the few left in our city, we discussed the club's incineration abstractly. The end result figuring left the police at as much of a loss as ourselves, but no desire to go back. "I don't want to see that again, to see what's left," my companion said, shivering outwardly as I was inwardly. Dawn rose above us, over her shoulders coming beautifully, and we talked a bit more before Spike introduced the concept of sleep, and suddenly I was tired and Spike was gone, and I didn't really know what to do, and we talked a bit more, I paid, and we left splitting to go to our locales. I spent the trip home thinking of a word, and came up with nothing for her but delightful, or maybe fine, perhaps even exquisite, for the evening, feeling foolish for using formal and dated words, but so incapable of expressing it with something similarly vague. She left an impression, that of being as in a hazy blue springsky day way, carelessly beautiful, and I was attracted to her, which frightened me as I fell asleep in a softborn morning, with thoughts of words spoken out of the mouths of the past. Rising at noon the next day, I went down to the newsstand and bought a paper with no news in it. Nothing had happened in the city but a tax increase, and it was all editorials, a few for it, a few more against it, but most indecisive, as was the style of journalistic decisiveness during that time. I sat in another small cafe, drinking coffee as last night, pondering my next option, when something in sunglasses sat down next to me and there she was and I looking like hell. A flowing deepsea blue wispy skirt and an aqua t-shirt of the hue of the Indian jewelry they sold near my house when I was a child. "Good morning," I said, and she returned the thought, and said very politely that I looked like hell, and I said yes and how did she look so very un-hellish? I think that received a blush and she may have almost left, but instead she answered that she had just risen, and was walking by when she noticed someone looking a lot like me looking like hell and stopped in for a chat. She ordered coffee, and I expressed my gratitude to unspecified powers that she had, as I hadn't remembered to get her number last night oh er sorry this morning, and she laughed and said I had her name, did I need a number? to which I blushed and concurred, shaking my head with a touch of the incredible feeling of similarity to a sunbaked brick after smoking mounds of dope the night before. We talked for a while, and then she said she had to run on to work soon, but I caught the word soon and asked where she worked and she said well oh she worked as a writer of scripts for television and I asked more, and so she sort of relaxed and admitted she had no office schedule but was behind, and then asked what I did, and I said film student, which was true I explained although I was enrolled nowhere as film school was too far from reality to even think of art and I expected a bad feedback but her nod didn't look like a yeahsure nod, but something too far entrenched in her belief in the same not to expect it from me. She said something about me not looking like a film student and a beret, which we both laughed, and then she mentioned a question that I liked beer (she'd noticed that I had picked a Dos Equis the night before, asking the bartender especially if any was handy) and invited me up for one. Delightedly I accepted. Work was a typewriter crouched like a faithful dog on the dining table next to her kitchen, amidst piles of paper, and she suggested we move out of her dark and sharply square apartment to the balcony, which caught so much sun, and although bright on my eyes was so much nicer, with all of our skin and eyes shining in the light. I asked why she didn't bring her typewriter out to work, and she said she couldn't when working on real work, but I noticed on the small glass table the marks left by the rubber feet on the bottom of it, and almost said something but realized the importance of not stabbing into the guarded portions of someone's life. We had beers, beautiful Simpatico pouring like cold molten gold into long thin glasses, and talked some more, making some jokes about coming home, and trying to find some excuse for ourselves for being out so fashionably late, acting like college kids. Many jokes in that, and we were drinking quite a bit of her beer, and I asked if she was really going to work and she denied it, said no, so I suggested we find a place for lunch and she laughed saying dinner is more like it, and so I said hold and I'll be back and went out noticing I had a good buzz not just from alcohol in the hall, and went back home to get money, a shower, and some new clothes, and then hit some small markets for good beer and the careful preparations for a chicken barbecue, having noticed the paucity of edibles in her refrigerator, which reminded me of mine when I actually worked, which made me feel somewhat shallow. I also remembered three lost cheap plastic beads, huddling around the edge of her glass table, which reminded me of something in the mouths of the past. She was still on the porch when I returned, a good forty minutes gone by, and seemed almost surprised to see me, but only surprised at that moment, as if knowing she would see me again. I carefully mixed mustards and sauces and produced chicken in a pan of hers (unused, part of a set lost or broken) and we had more beers, she admiring my taste (I had guessed a stretch and chosen Warsteiner) and I admiring her movements which seemed to stretch out of her as a center of energy into the world around her, adding energy to it and thus creating more, defying all of conventional science. We ate with the setting sun, and made jokes about nocturnalism. The night slipped over the daytime earth's orb quickly, finding us casually engaging in light romantic gestures on the couch until we awakened to head out, and she said something about that Spike guy, and so I sort of called him, not really wanting to but feeling the pressure of her eyes on me to screw up, wondering if he was competition or protection. We all showed up at a pub hidden behind a large laundry, one of our favorite habitats for us impecunians, and found a table made from the hood of an Edsel, suspended in glass and bolted to a base made from the engine block. Spike and the Marquis had showed up, each with a female companion, Spike's being a somewhat traditional dreamy film student type, and the Marquis bringing a woman with wild red hair like a lash, who spoke fervently about the difference between greens in nature, and the power and beauty of each with its moods. I was on the end, my companion next to me, and Spike beyond that, which worried me as he would lean over to her and speak in half-whispers, often them both laughing and then sort of smiling at me, which then led me to get up from the table presumably to visit the head but she intercepted me some time later as I was standing by the phone and asked me what's wrong? i said nothing, literally, and she apologized but more explained, just joking, but then said it would not happen more and gave me a sweet and deep kiss which I returned, and then she vanished, and Spike was over in a little while, and said look man i know what's up, would i do that? no (both of us), a smile understanding, just goofing around. Spike called a friend of ours named Ernest, who was an old stoner, who possessed a bong (water-pipe) made from a Ming Vase an employer had left to him, him wishing wondering what it was, bored, tired of life, made it into a bong. When told of its value (about six grand i am told) Ernest swore, and said that he had thought love was greater than money when he made it, but now wished for money. I spoke to him after Spike and Ernest howled out in much the same voice, "I'm not sure anymore now. I don't know what love is worth, and I'm pretty sure money is convenience, or at least dope, translated. I do know I value my friends -- my men friends -- as they are the only thing I can hold onto like a saddlehorn, and ride out the times when they sling me up and down." I sorrowfully excused myself from the night's festivities at Ernest's, and asked Spike to give him some of the Malachi's homegrown. The Malachi is an astronomer, who, when his observatory ran out of cash, chased everyone out and used the giant telescope (modified) to focus starlight on his plants, producing some beautiful ("cosmic" was the joke) green bud that you could smoke for hours and not pass out, but be so high that your highness translated everything with precision into beauty, and truth, and the lack of the search thereof. Our table being somewhat far off from the main, and in a darkened corner, someone produced a rolling paper and someone else some fluffy green bud, and soon we had a monster three-paper jay floating around the table, smoke rising like a wedding dress from the gleaming block. She smoked with us, cautiously but obviously enjoying it, sort of drifting among us, laying her head on my shoulder. "Red rain..." drifted by on the stereo, past the swerving laughter of our companions. Beers went around many times, and some food arrived, and we all spoke and laughed and had some trouble coughing up the cash for the bill before we left, dispersing like a shattered bottle upon hitting the curb. She and I ended up together, which we sort of knew would happen, and wondered where to wander next, it being relatively early versus our last night, only three a.m. I was desperately looking for an excuse not to go by my domicile, as it was in its customary condition -- my fridge hung open, shot nights before by the retired federal agent down the hall who had run into my room screaming "THE RAILROADS ARE RUN BY OPIUM SMUGGLERS" and fired seven wild .45 rounds into the kitchen before collapsing under the collective weight of two bottles of tequila, after which I let him spend the night, and there being a broken window and most of a Ford Pinto on the floor, me being "holding" the parts for a friend until all suspicion was clear, and mainly, there being massive fingers of watermark stain dripping down from the ceiling, leaving the walls looking like slices from a cave, and the broken lights and dense moisture leaving little doubt that one was in a cave, and sofa literally burned in half by Amon and I some months ago when stoned so much we passed out leaving the burning cherry to neatly gut it until the smoke became so thick we awoke to put it out with our stale beer, only later realizing that it made the apartment unlivable -- but she intercepted that with the suggestion that we return to her apartment. I accepted. Incredibly dark within her apartment, me reaching for the switch but my hand stopped simultaneously with my lips opening, us intertwined and then falling for the couch. Both begging for what must happen and the softness yet ferocity of it surprising both. It started with a kiss exceeding the cool depths of ocean, moving us backward with the gentle touch of a wave, then the unfrantic hurried removal of clothing, somewhat graceful like falling in the moonlight. I took a nipple into my mouth and massaged it with my tongue, then running the warm wet tip up to her soft parted lips, black in the darkness, but red with warmth and energy, grasping mine like the hands of an old friend, and tongues tackling and tangling as we joined in ecstatic motion. After her pleasure peak and sighfallen exhaustion, she joined me once again in the agony of excessive sensual joy as I came, holding me and caressing my ears and soul with whispers and moans, not of the pornographic cartoon type but the true satisfied yearning, like our ferocious deep kisses. An hour's light sleep left us up, in the mood of frankness such a thing does to two interested human beings. We talk more, and I tell her I have no parents, that my first father was gone and I was a bastard, and that the grandparents and uncles and public institutions that raised me didn't care until I did what they all expected (I fucked up: busted, Jan 22, 19-something, carrying an ounce of best Zoroastrian bud, but she didn't mind, said something about stupidity of drug laws quietly so not to stop me) and then they released me and I could go to film school and drop out and make odd abstract movies, although right now I was between films. Jokes about art films around. I got up to go to the bathroom, bent back down to give her a kiss, and then went into the white and clean can. As I was pissing I looked down at my penis, quietly hiding softly in my hand, and realized that although the sex had been really very nice I hadn't wanted it so much as to need it, and that we both didn't need it at all. I saw some of that in her eyes when I returned, but not the entirety, which sort of scared me. I got the impression that she had been very still while I had been gone because her left hand had only moved slightly, to pull up the sheet and tuck her hair back behind a small soft ear. She pulled the sheets aside for me, and I pulled myself in and kissed her once, softly, and she was sad seemingly and so I pulled her over and asked and she said something about parents, and I said I'm sorry if I hit a nerveness and she said, no, but that she had had a father once, and he had been a drunken bastard, and that he had thrown her and her mother out, and that she knew her father, and was sorry she did. I said I was sorry and she said it wasn't my fault, and that it didn't matter much, myself interrupting with a query about the nature of her crying and she saying no no that's not it, it's just me being emotional trying to laugh it off. It was like joking about art films. I smoothed down her hair, trailing it down her smooth back and running my hands around her shoulders like a sculptor, willing her and moving her into gentle sleep, which she lapsed into after maybe a half hour and slept with her hand and wrist in mine until she stirred into a small ball an hour almost later. I slid blankets down my legs and went out onto the balcony, pulling a towel over me, smoking the joint I'd left in my wallet for this purpose. It's always a good idea to have one when you want to think. I stared out at the night, a swimmingly shimmering night, all stars flying high over shifting clouds, reminding me of the way someone's eyes suddenly snap open to find you looking at them. Miles had once said how reflective the night is, but I couldn't find it. There was no resolution to that night, except that the depth of it must be beyond measure. I could almost feel the heaviness of the clouds, and fearing their birthright would soon come. Back inside I found her still asleep, so I left a note and went home. A note tacked on the door reminded that I hadn't seen Spike in some time, and mentioned something about some fine Thracian bud he'd inherited from a friend going to jail for a smuggling offense. A friend of mine had once compared jail to marriage, saying that both reduced all of your outward options, leaving you only the ability to lash out or to take within, making you either an angry young man or a bitter old one. I never understood either -- it was like having a child, being married. No matter what, eventually you'd fight. No matter how long, eventually the child or lover or whatever would age and die, and you'd have to watch, unless you were dead first. Or unless the relationship died on its feet and you didn't mind watching the other die. And even as the head emerged in birth, how could you tell it would love you, and even more frightening, that you would love it? In high school, my best friend Tony and I double- dated two sisters, who if they weren't twins were very close to it. We split up after dinner, and Linda and I ended up at a secluded outdoor location talking, necking, and almost making out. Halfway through it I realized that Linda and I were probably equally inexperienced, and neither really interested in each other but in the incident, and when I asked her if this was true, she replied with the look of the glumly bored that it was, and so I walked her back to my house, where she borrowed some clothes and we played an exhilarating game of one- on-one, mainly because she was an all-star teen athlete, with a future and desires for children and office jobs, and I was a stoner with hopes for making odd films and at best dying alone as the first light of public scrutiny hit my work. When we returned for her sister and Tony, he was gone and she was in copious tears, having made out with him, assumed there was some real interest and not just inexperience, and then hit the root nerve of desperation when she learned somehow that he had done the same, neither knowing or sure, but both hoping too much to make sense. There was much screaming, and the sister wanted to see neither of us again, so I took them both home and left Linda with a "please call me" but never heard from her again. I then went back and spent twenty minutes calling Tony's name to bushes, before I found that he had vanished into a nearby phone both to observe, and there had fallen into a troubled sleep. From then on in high school I had given up pretty much on the romantic process, sticking to sex as a commodity when I could get it, and dope or beers when I could not. There was one exception, but that is history too vital to relate here. Falling asleep, I thought I dreamed of her, silhouetted and then swimming with me through the night. It was a dream where nothing was real, at least in the sense that nothing stayed the same for more than a few seconds. A doorknob twisted as a pretty silver-pink little snake around my hand, and then bit savagely into the pinker flesh. She cried out, beautiful in the moonlight, and I saw it was not my hand, but then it was my hand that had been bitten, but she was feeling the pain. And then she was bandaging it, and telling me it was just because she had never felt pain before, and was curious to see what it was like. But I saw in her eyes that that was not true. I awoke to the feeling that I had never slept, and made a large cup of coffee to get me moving. I felt motion, the kind of motion that breeds on motion and motivates, a continual going, something unknown to me for weeks. I called a few people whom I knew I needed to recruit for my next film, something I was planning about the nature of power, and how it is so much like sculpting from gold (props were going to be a problem), and then called her up, and the phone rang on for a while but noone answered and no answering machine snatched the line from the grasp of faltering hope, so I hung up. I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, but a four-foot green mamba snake encircled my last beer, leaving me to slam the door and head back to the other room to pick up the phone. I grabbed it: six pauses before a drumbeat and her voice floated onto the line, like vibrating water as the ripples drift out from a penny thrown in, for luck, for remembrance, for hope. "I thought you'd called," she said, sounding younger but more isolated than I'd ever heard her before. "I did," I said hesitantly, which I think she heard in my voice because she quickly embarked on an explanation, talking about showers and doors and everything else, but I saw in my mind a silverpink snake wrapping around a phone handset, frustrated at being unable to get inside. Halfway through, she cut off with an inhalation like one about to cry, and then asked straightforward with the force of an army if I wanted to do dinner. I was in accord, she named the place, and the phone went down without either of us listening to say if the other said goodbye, except that I may have lingered softly singing out my customary "take care," an epitaph to many an illstarred conversation. I had some hours to kill until eight in the evening, so I showered and wrote out a basic outline of a script, the kind that is all full of notations like "that character meets that other character (the one with the mohawk) and goes to the special bar mentioned before, where they fall in love" and really means nothing other than a desperation to get to work but a lack of materials or thoughtpath, the direction shooting uncontrollably into the air. This left me with about two hours left, so I showered again, and thought of her as I had been doing all day, leaving my unable to work, and called again, but got nothing but more ringing. This time I couldn't feel if she was there, listening, hoping, fearing. It was as if the silverpink snake had let me go, allowing me to drift in the listless night. Six flags sagged limp against giant swordlike poles daring the sky to revenge as I left the front door, starting out into the relentless heat. The night was beginning, so full of potential, and I was retreating for some sense of backup. I crossed the forehead-like sidewalk with a quick gait, but stopped for some reason, driven back by the heat, or maybe a dream, and turned back toward my door. The sight of a tiny glassine lizard, red eyes like jewels under water, twitching his brazenly sharp tail three times before quickly disappearing into a bush by the door. I could feel his tiny red needle-eyes on my back as I retreated toward my objective. Insecurity shook my shoulders and weakened my ankles. Reassurance came willingly with a stoner shaman like Spike at hand; we loaded his custom-made bong crafted from eighteen inches of marble, and smoked out a bonghit to level the gods. The gods of night, and the gods of day, all in retirement, with the sky smudged as it often is in the indecisive period before the skin of the sky slits and the water falls, the troubled instant silence before a death or a tempest. The door opened with an afterthought knock, and Ernest stood before us. Something was wrong, Ernest's eyes told us, but he wouldn't tell us and so us all stoned and unknowing and helpful gave him a bonghit, which must have been the last thing he needed. Ernest collapsed onto his knees, and the breath of alcohol soaked in smoke covered our faces like raindance masks. Vomit spurted from his mouth, filtered by teeth, and Spike and I dragged him through vomit like his own blood to the bathroom, where we learned in some sadness that his youngest Amelia had fallen to the mischance of a bus, misguided in confusion at the end of a Friday, its front bumper killing her instantly on her sixteen-dollar secondhand trike. Ernest had done what we all do; crying is like an accumulation, a certain number of things that on every level of your life build up until nothing can resolve them, and then the sky explodes throughout your eyes and sadness takes over until you are made ill with it, and then it recedes, and you retreat back into the world, a little unsure but hopefully somewhat purged, as nature sculpted you, to go on, with all of the functional choices of a paramecium or earthworm, surviving for the sake of itself. This was the last great tragedy Ernest could take for a while, but he would not cry, and so he left his weeping wife and drank a bottle or two of red whisky and halfway through his last drink looked down and saw it was all blood, and ran to the only place ("good friends they will keep you") he knew was safety, and we were the only gods there. Spike and I sat Ernest down, gave him water and more smoke (this stops the puking, it keeps it all down, which at this point was okay because the toilet was red as blood, within it small demons swimming, their cackling calling of laughter annoying and frustrating in anger and pain, and so I flushed them down deep to the sewers, but here they resided, as their echoing calls came up through the pipework and into our souls) and let him cry, and when he cried himself to sleep and looked safe I pulled an old blanket from camp (back when home was home and things were simpler but much more oppressive, when camp in its myriad fears was so much a release) over him and hurried to her apartment. Noone answered to my ring, so I went to a side window from the hall, where I could see her on the balcony, a single fragile wineglass held by the stem. I called her name and she set it down, unshaking when I expected a collapse, her stern strength forcing me into retreat in the hall, but I called again, and she turned away, gesturing with a finality words couldn't say. Finally, she went inside and closed the door, and I knew as I battered the door that the lights were going out, the sobs receding, and that I would probably not see her again, as a silvery snake was guarding her lonely phone. A manager of the building came up and told me that I couldn't carry on like that no more, sorry buddy can't let you disturb the clients, and I walked past eighty doors with old ladies in white hair each head retreating as my footsteps came near but each set of eyes still catching my hurt and delighting in mercy that I was not them. I walked down in the warm night, the cicadas and the traffic building a wall around me without me, feeling the immense potential even beyond the immediate weighting sadness which pulled me down. I wandered into a playground and sat down, on the nearest object which I could find, a child's merry-go-round, the kind I would ride when younger, with noone else to push it having to run and run and run holding the handholds and then jump on at the last minute and spin, spin, singing in the wind until dizziness knocked me into the center, and I would look up into the vibrant sky away from the sun and the entire world around me flashing, converging, but unthreatening. I sat there afraid to cry and in the summer darkness some children came by, and I was aware of them by their laughter and then by their work; they pushed me around until it was too fast, and as the world spun upon me I crushed my eyes in tears, and woke up running quickly out of the rain of their laughter. Spike's place with dried eyes, Ernest in the next room, Miles, Amon, Michel, Susan, and Mel clustered around a large bong, a huge head of plastic over the bowl. In it glowed homegrown, Spike and my best, and congratulations flowed from the rest. I asked Spike where's Ernest he pointed away; I found him all peaceful, asleep and safe. Ernest is a warrior. I talked for a few minutes to his sleeping face, then left that disturbed pleasant countenance to go with my friends. At this point most couldn't speak, this being killer kind bud that Spike and I had perfected from the beginnings of our smoking, cross-breeding to achieve the heaviest impact of any kind bud ever created. We didn't know the THC levels, and joked that they couldn't be measured. This was our choicest stuff, like the sacrifice for some prodigal son come home, smoked in Spike's newest instrument of obliteration. People chanting for me to take a big hit I inhaled, and sucked down a world or two of lifetimes, and fell back immediately hearing the background voices that's so big a hit oh he will be so stoned so stoned, and then I felt empty and hollow the way a cheap car drives, and lightheaded and sat down, and I was so stoned I couldn't think, but beyond even thinking there was knowing, and I wondered why I'd taken the bong hit, since I was still here, so stoned I couldn't remember that I was stoned, and sort of knew that I hadn't stepped out and gotten stoned at all, but was just here living as if uninterrupted. I took another, got a beer, sat down and stared out the window, which I'm sure produced giggles but soon those subsided as the killer bud took over and everyone found themselves too stoned to realize or to relate but too stoned to be anywhere but here in this world, watching it flow like the world beyond a merry-go- round, watching it much as a goldfish must perceive the outside of the bowl. I left after a while, and went back to her apartment, but I couldn't knock, almost feeling her breathing, but not feeling her mind. Then I started; I couldn't even feel the breathing, and she was probably out at a club. Borrowing some paper from the desk I left a note, the night clerk not being the same ejector who had removed me before. I called from a payphone on a desperate whim, but an answering machine came on with a voice that wasn't hers, saying hell-o leave a message and i will be seeing you, and i left in my best choked voice an explanation, but halfway through realized what i'd seen in her eyes and just hung up, with an oh shit from the desperation of lips abandoned hanging on the tape before the crash. She probably knew it was an excusable thing, and she probably wanted it to continue, but it was the same inexcusable fear that I had felt in the bar, in her apartment, on my own; what made me leave a note and not spend the night, what made me forget her number and have to look again at the wrinkled paper in my wallet with her slender script streaming across it. Whatever the case, I could almost feel her pulling out of me like a knife out of a wound, although she had been the balm, and the wound was only now created. I went back to Spike's and the party was winding down, people abandoning cups and beers and going to sofas and talking and smoke pouring out windows and given a chance I took another hit and Spike smiled and patted me on the back going by like a movie screen image, not something to smile at but just to observe. Out on the porch I stared into the sky, an unusually bright night, and unusually cold. Breezes of the coming winter mutedly flickered through leaves, and below me the horns of the cars and the traffic noise were tugged into the faraway. All I could see was the clarity of stars, observers of millennia I couldn't even count aloud in my lifetime, and I realized this was abandonment, being left to the realization that the night is your soul, and that out there in the soul sometimes it is so lonely and cold and yet so beautiful that you figure the misery is part of the beauty, and maybe thus is art, and the last sad joke of the evening "maybe I should make a film about this" hangs in the air. I sat. Staring into the unfathomable night once again, I realized she was out there somewhere under it, running, never to get the explanation, demons from the past following her with the horrible ringback echo of their clicking nails on concrete (throwing up sparks) singing her ears in terror. And somewhere tomorrow she would be all run out, and would return back into a life under a dawn with shadows rising in the brutal raw pinkness of soulsides exposed. Left on the balcony I realized the perfection of it all, and unleashed my mouth into a tourniquet burst, sending the scream of the denied echoing up to the dispassionate moon. In the silence only one thought fell: "How beautiful this night like any other night is, and how it wells up with freedom. How beautiful this night is, and how free..." She of course left the apartment shortly before midnight to spend the night with a girlfriend, who told her all about men and the horrors of them, and the next day she rented a cheap motel at the beach and wrote a brief outline for a screenplay, made a few calls and talked of the flu, promised more detail and began jotting down notes before the phone was cold. There was no movement, so she rented a car and drove even farther away, rented a cheaper hotel, and wrote more on her typewriter, that astounding beast. Halfway through her last day there she found it completed, and to celebrate her ecstatic state of accomplishment bought a chilled bottle of champagne, and without thinking once she was in the door put in the refrigerator and forgot about it. Two days later she was apartment shopping. Being intelligent and sensible, she wrote many good screenplays, and soon had an LA house, and children and many contracts. Somewhere in the eastern part of a forgotten city, a merry-go-round swung with its handholds removed, part of a demolition crew's best efforts before the new week's construction. I took a cigarette on the porch of Spike's sagging apartment during the second night of my residence, staring out into the inscrutable darkness and watching the lights smear by, and then drop from my eyes, only to reappear. The city with all of its multitude of cars and machines and people hung silent but not stagnant, as if just paused, and then the sky broke, and a tremendous heaving downpour blasted across the ground, above it lightning crossing in dread warnings. I felt my heart heave, and reached out a hand past the wrought-iron barrier of Spike's balcony to catch some rain. When it returned, there was ruby blood in the cupped fingers. emotionutrition: collection of disparate lights Hard is the music loud is the light. I recall with awe that terrifying day. The mountain weak beneath my feat. That day, it was too easy, too simple, rising up on human chairs of steel, it wasn't right. I would pay. No mountain tolerates such perversity, in any form. And so, muscles tense, bones near breaking, I bombed that mountain, its slopes unusually gentle, as if to spurn a feeble sense of security not in mind but in body where thoughts, in their absense, left pain and discomfort. Returning home with such feeling, body spoke to mind: drugs, it said. Release this pain. Do not let such a beast, the mountain YOU have conquered, abuse me this way. Mind saw no abuse...only thoughtlessness. Yet cowardice prevailed, and in came the drugs. Seated in that chair, that vile easy chair, body grinned favorably upon mind, as drugs replaced thoughts and suffering diminished. Walls spun, tunes throbbed, other bodies jerked about. Mind knew, mind knew mind knew. As it raised body and drug to peripheral superficial heights mind in an instant saw as body mind and drug plummetted that mountain that weak feeble mountain loomed in a flash. And then kerplunk without exaggeration. We all hit together and all mind could see was that mountain. It occupied thought and space and sound. Waves of thoughtlessness streamed through body, painlessly, because of the drug. All rose and withstood severity; body, in its increased state of discomfort screamed more, while that fucking mountain that horrid distant mountain pummelled over and over and over until mind lost thought and gasped drug in despair. Mind body thought mergedand produced stomach as all lay to rest, weak beneath its feat. (adam r) regurgitation: the undiscovered brutality Desultory "Into Eternity" - From Sweden comes one more release of dynamic and muscular death metal. Long an underground favorite, Desultory take the classic, die-hard Swedish sound and add some progressive touches as well as lyrics surpassing those of some of the leading Swedish bands. They lack the distinctive cheese-grater distortion made famous by bands such as Dismember or Unleashed, but Desultory maintain the complex and fast-forward riffing style that gives the Swedes their original battering-ram style of attack. Guitar solos dominate their given portion of the music with quite a bit of effort put into solos, achieving a complex and soulful additional dimension missing from many bands using the school-of- scales approach, improving on contemporary death metal standard. Beneath the potent lead guitar rushes a frenzied procession of advanced riffs which support the incredible balance of emotion like pillars of snakes. Imagine the standard riff style of Unleashed crossed with the complexity and depth of Immolation's riffing mixed into a progressive yet straightforward matrix of death metal prowess. Vocals seethe disembodied across the fortress of sound Desultory produce, creating the impression of being fully integrated with the music yet detached enough to comprehensibly express thought rather than emotion. Above average lyrics back the vocals, focusing purely on the darker sides of life with grim relish. This is one of the better Swedish releases I've heard. Fleshcrawl "Descending Into the Absurd" - Straight from the depths of Teutonic society, Fleshcrawl bring a unique interpretation of heaviness to the death metal sound. Like others, Fleshcrawl have begun with the supposition that weightier music can be achieved through the variation of fast and slow tempos, and alternating speedy fleshripping power riffs and sludgy, slab-of-chords doom riffs. They never leave you stuck in the same riff for too long, which is a change from too many doom bands who don't know when repetition has ceased to have any more effect than drumming the listener back into his chair. Heavy distortion and convoluted stream of chord riffing dominate the faster parts of Fleshcrawl's music while contorted downward chord-slinging creates the doom effect. Guitar leads are fairly infrequent and not all that distinctive, but often pack some unique musical effects into a sprawling song. The greatest gap in this music could be the spread out nature of the music, which seems to lose its compact detonation feel when it breaks tempo into slower parts or bridges, leaving us with long songs that tend to ramble, and often trail off without direction. Vocals are heavy, low-hung growls like clouds of smog over an industrial graveyard. There is quite a bit of value in this album, but sometimes it requires infusions of patience to get to it. Amorphis "The Karelian Isthmus" - Fantasy metal returns with a historical edge, this time coming from modern Finland, where Amorphis craft their progressive and intriguing brand of death. I would hesitate to call this a death metal album, even though musically it's very clearly death, because the emphasis seems to be on the fantastic and the unbelievable from the past, enhanced by an overactive imagination. Lyrics are well-crafted and interesting; the music varies from experimental musical passages to straight-on death metal layered with a bit of complexity. Bass and drumming fall into the Swedish standard of power excellence, but are less brash than many conemporary bands. Serpentine growling fits neatly on top of the music, communicating without unnecessarily detracting from the guitar power that is the core of this album. Parts of this album seem to lag but are necessary for the spirit of this music, which is not that far from death but not all that close, either. Afflicted "Prodigal Sun" - Progressive and odd death metal from Sweden, from the opening sitar to the often-ecclectic lyrics. Bass and drums show the influence of the newer generations of technical death metal bands, and guitar reflects both Swedish heritage and adherance to more recent standards of technicality. However, Afflicted avoid becoming musical knowledge hangups and still demonstrate devotion to the art of crafting soulful metal. Vocals are flat, dry and serrated testaments to the darker emotions, singing lyrics of unusual depth and breadth. Harmonic aspects pepper the music of Afflicted, which crowns itself with carefully constructed and contorted solos. Still, there is no fear of the full-ahead-go spirit of Swedish death metal; some dead serious high- speed-grind tracks fill out this album. Afflicted have found a solid middle ground between technical and spirited, between genres and styles. Autopsy "Acts of the Unspeakable" - California gore metal band Autopsy returns with a lengthy but predictable album. Guitar is a mix of loose grindcore and death metal, and remains at a subtle level in the mix, leaving the main inflection to be in the vocals, which are of the extremely guttural bass-tone mangled vocal chord growl. Autopsy play at varying tempos, some ranging from the extremely slow and heavy end all the way up to the normal speed for wired death metal bands. Autopsy's attempts at gore and brutality are the main deficiencies of this album - -- guitar, bass and drums are better than average for the genre, and guitar leads maintain some sense of cohesiveness -- because the lyrics suffer from too much television brutality. It's all images of senseless violence and death and gore and all of the things we consider brutal, but stacked up and juxtaposed in a style now so hackneyed as to be thoroughly boring, and the actual writing of the lyrics is done on a fifth-grade level, complete with forced rhymes. It bores after a while, yet Autopsy haul forth some impressive passages. Mental Funeral was better. Order From Chaos "Stillbirth Machine" - A churning, sloppy and ponderous introduction opens this album, which essentially bores the listener with industrial pink noise for the first two minutes, but then Order From Chaos tear into their music with growls detached from all human range of sound. The sound of vocal chords ripping like bloodstained silk lends to this music a savage authenticity, something that might otherwise be missing given the incredibly inarticulate guitar leads and something droning riffs. A threesome, Order From Chaos rely on a minimalistic death/punk sound which drifts toward the slammingly simple at times, to which they add filler bass and standard drumming, capping the whole thing with the occasional howling "making noise with my fingers" solo. The music isn't bad -- in fact, for the operating limitations, pretty good -- but there are areas where less should have been attemped and areas that are audibly deficient, leaving the hope that this album was more practice session than complete effort, and that the next will utilize the best from this release alongside some technical and compositional improvements. Of special notice are the later tracks such as the title track, which features said demonic screaming and some extensively repulsive guitar thrashings. Impetigo "Horror of the Zombies" - Cheeseball horror flicks mixing with death metal might sound like a goofy musical nightmare, and that seems to be what Impetigo are aiming to capture. Each song is preceded by a sampled intro with the sound and intellect of a B-grade horror flick, which ends up detracting from the listening of this album, as each sample ends up being too long to listen to without being bored the first time, which bodes ill for future listenings. Once the initial noise collage is past, however, Impetigo rage into their horror prowess with songs that vary from midspeed sludge metal to fast death to blood-chugging heaviness. Guitar solos don't make an appearance, and there isn't a whole lot of variation within these mini horror epics. but the rhythmic core of riff and vocal proves worthy of notice. There are some tracks, such as Cannibale Ballet, which end up being boredom encapsulated, and some stupidities in addition to the massive error of putting an expanded sample introduction on each song, but overall Impetigo play a promising new style of gore metal that promising only to get more disgusting as time goes on. Affliction "The Damnation of Humanization" - A speed/death metal mixture with some unexpected harmonic punches, Affliction presents choppy speed riffs intermingled with death metal arterial-spurt-of-chords tirades, all of which lives under the benevolent reign of innovative lead guitar and bass with bravado. Speed metal must be considered the primary influence for the music, both in terms of the instrumental work and the vocals. Riffs and bridges generally follow speed metal riff patterns, without fully launching into the death style, and lyrics are shouted with sparse melody in the tradition of eighties speed metal. Drumming doesn't detour into the double bass overload common to death metal, and bass borrows from some of the better players in this genre, not just following the riff but actually building off of it, plus interacting expeditiously with the rhythm section during breaks from the musical spearhead attack. Sometimes riffs fall too much into the midrange speed metal pattern of sounding somewhat similar and being far too repetitive, but other than that Affliction stand as ballsy players in an all- but-dead style who've added their own touches to great effect. Bolt Thrower "The IVth Crusade" - Bolt Thrower return with their heaviest album to date; in fact, it appears that "The IVth Crusade" was written as a study in heaviness,attempting to create the weightiest music possible. Deathy vocals pervade these songs, strung over exceptionally heavy grindcore rhythm guitar and thundering death metal double-bass hell drums. Volcanic chords tunnel under the roaring vocals, bracketed with a powerful rhythm section of precision drums and inventive bass. Song lyrics expand beyond the colorful fantasy approach Bolt Thrower became famous for and become even more cerebral and philosophical in many aspects. Their heaviest album to date, and quite possibly the best, this latest release from Bolt Thrower modernizes their sound and brings them to the forefront of their genre once more. Man Is The Bastard "The Sum of The Men" - A local LA-area band, Man Is The Bastard (now Charred Remains) play a quirky and virulent brand of grindcore. Varying from the full speed charge and adding into the slowness a brand of musical weirdness unseen anywhere else, Charred Remains create an uncomfortable and troubling musical vision, taking the best aspects of death metal emotion into the uncertain terror of the modern world. secretion: I love your tongue, probing searching. And your thighs when your crotch leaves a damp spot on my leg. And your warm wet lips planted around me, soothing, exciting, wet. Your hands all over me leaving electric trails of sense, and my hardness. Oh how hard it is, but how smooth the entry is...it feels like crawling into a warm, plush, incredibly soft bed with silk sheets...tossing, turning, folding, sliding, the friction, the motion, the steam, the heat, the rythmn, the rythmn, the rythmn, the rythmn, the rythmn of the heat..... constant, primal, gripping, deeper, deeper, faster, harder, very deep, so deep its coming from as far back as you can remember, coming forward, coming out, coming up, coming here, coming now, coming, coming...........in a pool, a pool of water, the temperature the same as the air, the same as your body, our bodies, the motion, the touching, the contact barely noticable, sensory deprivation, but you can feel it, feel it, sense it, enjoy it, enjoying it, becoming of it, becoming in it, coming in it, the waves pass over you like a beach, the sand, the friction, the grind, the push, the pushing, pushing you, pushing, pushing, higher, higher, there, there, there, spreading, spreading through you, spreading around you, spreading out of you, spreading down your legs, spreading out your legs, lifting, lifting you off the floor, the mat, the bed, the sheets, letting more in, letting me in more, the resistance, the friction, the feeling, the feeling of it, the feeling of it coming, coming, coming, coming, coming here, coming now, coming, coming yes, coming yes, coming oh, coming oh, coming oh so hard, so deep, the storm wells, the storm rages, you rage, you ravage, the storm pulses, pulses, like a sun, the pulsing, the burning, the heat, of it, of all of it, it is all here, it is all now, coming towards you, coming nearer, nearer, here, now, coming, coming, coming, come...... the storm passes, and there is silence, the sun, the breeze, the breeze of collective breath, the gathering of the water, the gathering of the dusk, the sun, the flecks of clouds, the angle, the angle of the sun, the angle of your love, our love, it is evening and the welcome storm is gone and has come, and it is time to rebuild us and gather the evening and see what it is we have brought. This is what is, this is what should be, and we are here, we are in it, we are of it. It is of us, and the evening falls into the night like lovers unto the storm that wells within and so it is again. (honseki ki) excretion: a streetcleaneresque dedication to the dead & the holy skin ha, ha, ha harsh breath over a cigarette coffee rimming dawn, singing we walk hand in hand behind the dust grimy and singly the streets open narrow like veins in the arm of a soft suicide. look, this book about the space like an empty coffin filling slowly nebulous face of mine pouring into it i am the streetcleaner when i am brave in there the rubbish littering coffins lizards crawling on the opened lids iguanas sunning themselves sadly in sunlight boring in boredom, too sad to move much accepting the patience of the eldest shaman geckos bright as the eyes of a corpse demons claws all over the back, leaving bloodscars spitting life's essence into giant heaps of trash the detritus of our busy lives searching for more junk to bury or burn or pile or stow away impregnate the idea of mountains in our veins their feet are like needles, like demon penis punching flesh, the thousand fires crawling down your skin too slowly for the dawn to overtake no return/ no removal (to a safer way) j'know nemesis in the dark, under the mound of trash the blackened demon, fire-hardened and battle-hungry tearing flesh poking iwth claws of geckos so colorful, so alive, fading fast the blood pours from my eyes the geckos crawl free, all over the trash heap burns brightly, more is piled on monday's valuables collapse onto tuesday's pyres there goes the future, there goes too much past the tears slide in, hissing steam in the demon's face his laughter punctuating the night like the needle sliding in, forever mournful, forever angry, fire and demons dance over the raging heap my eyes beneath it all to melt and see so many more lizards crawling amidst our abundant flesh. i am a streetcleaner ("don't hold me back back this is is me my own hell" ) maybe you can jump through it the burning hoop of blackness into colors and pain then jump more, the final thrust lungs bursting like drowning ascending into something new j'know ? or it just could be dark and light and red breathing earthily endurance. "it's very small it doesn't matter it was just wanted " (nemesis in darkness crawls like the lizard, moutning your leg, mounting your soul, thrusting, thrusting, inward like a spear, needles converging, brning, all is scattered, millions of cigarette butts cast to the streets) "i didn't mean to upset you" (...) "i'm sorry, just don't call" (srp) biographic evisceration: fern (phurn) - a pomona college student, wanderer, goofball. about five feet or so. wfrancis (dubba yew phrancis) - a student of life. no location known. generally supposed to be aware. honseki ki (whonsekkie key) - You know me. You know many of me. I have been here a long time, I will be here a long time. I am Honseki Ki, and I will be your host, yet you will host me. What you want, I can not give you, but you may take whatever you need. Just please leave the rest, and enjoy it all. the editors: s.r. prozak - percussion, synthesis, vitreous decomposition l.b. noire - dryskull vocal emesis, horns, slice.of.life sampling icantation: thus endeth issue four. visit our ftp sites at - - redspread.css.itd.umich.edu /u/ftp/zines/Undiscovered.Country - - pomona.claremont.edu po_1995:[cblanc.tuc] any submissions to: cblanc@pomona.claremont.edu. we thank you for your readership, and implore you to distribute this incorrigible netzine as far and wide as possible. enjoy! - -s.r.p. l.b.n. trailer: From: IN%"lisap@NeoSoft.Com" 7-JAN-1993 12:37:22.35 To: IN%"cblanc@POMONA.CLAREMONT.EDU" CC: Subj: boy howdy Return-path: Received: from uu.psi.com by POMONA.CLAREMONT.EDU (PMDF #2438 ) id <01GT8K7THVFK8WVZ4R@POMONA.CLAREMONT.EDU>; Thu, 7 Jan 1993 12:37:08 PST Received: from sugar.UUCP by uu.psi.com (5.65b/4.1.031792-PSI/PSINet) id AA21557; Thu, 7 Jan 93 14:04:41 -0500 Received: by NeoSoft.Com (smail2.5) id AA06753; 7 Jan 93 13:27:24 CST (Thu) Date: 07 Jan 1993 13:27:24 -0600 (Thu) From: lisap@NeoSoft.Com (Lisa Pittman) Subject: boy howdy To: cblanc@POMONA.CLAREMONT.EDU Message-id: <9301071327.AA06753@NeoSoft.Com> X-Envelope-to: cblanc Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT sure is a lot of fun, bereft, history, empty sharkfull of lies bless you new york and your skyscrapers like needles touching skin bullets touching brain flooding out the mantras of our bravest best refrain two must live as one only cast in stone cuz here in there perimeter the needle touches one. 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