NODE$AZABUA ESC: INV CONNECTED ENTER AUTHORIZATION CODE: vx1w3~bda ENTER AUTHORIZATION PASS: _________ WELCOME TO THE VIRTUAL NOISE EXCHANGE. YOUR MANTRA IS ESC. SYSTEM _COWSENGINE__________________ USE EXISTING? N USER _GUESSED_____________________ VERIFY? N MANTRA NONE VOL VI SYS$TERM: VT314 SYS$EXT: 159 CONTINUE (Y/N) ? Y =============== the undisc. ct. =============== editors: sven ("cblanc@pomona.claremont.edu") prozak && l.b. ("rm09216@academia.swt.edu") noire %ls -bfd total 33 drwx--x--x 4 abraxas 512 May 29 19:21 ./ drwxr-xr-x 7 other 512 Mar 15 14:39 ../ -rw-r--r-- 1 abraxas 0 Aug 16 19:09 .link -rw-r--r-- 1 abraxas 512 Jun 6 00:31 .cshrc lrw-r--r-- 1 lbnoire 111 Jan 28 19:21 push lrw-r--r-- 1 chaos 113 Feb 4 11:02 poets lrw-r--r-x 1 mstutz 131 Apr 11 05:31 fav_comics drwx------ 11 pazuzu 512 Jun 6 04:11 death_metal lrw-r--r-- 1 bambrose 121 Mar 5 04:12 mantra lrwx-----x 1 srprozak 132 Jun 6 04:06 stoner_adventures % push [l.b. noire] The burning in my quadriceps tells me that my legs are nearing exhaustion but I have to keep pumping the pedals to reach the crest of the hill. I've always prided myself on using that bit of long-suppressed rage to carry me through situations that require extending yourself beyond your capabilities. This time, I'm not sure if I can summon the anger to surpass my physical limits. The anger is no longer there. I feel as if my best friend since I was ten has now betrayed me and left me at the time I need him most. My limit is reached and my leg muscles withdraw in terror from the imminent pain. My mountain bike slows to a crawl during the climb and I shift to the lowest gear. This does nothing to help the situation because I am now just spinning the pedals while inching forward at an intolerable rate. I jump from my saddle without even bothering to use the brakes. Gravity is enough to bring the bike to a stop. As usual, I didn't think about the consequences of my actions so my now-useless legs give out when I put my full weight on them. I fall first to my backside. This undignified position is made worse when my bike, lacking a kickstand, cannot stand on its own and sprawls across me sending me to the ground on my back. I lie there for a few seconds wondering if my heart, now pumping at 180 beats per minute, is going to rupture. I usually take my heart for granted and barely give it a second thought. However, right now I can feel it as another aching muscle in my body simply wanting more oxygen and a brief rest. I look down at my bike before I push it off my chest and to the side. Then I put my hands behind my head and decide to rest here for a few minutes. I look at the sky and observe the dissipating clouds dancing through the setting sunlight which gives them colors ranging from a light hue of purple on their western sides to a bright shade of orange on their eastern sides. I can feel the sunlight on my face which makes me look over to the setting sun on my right. I suddenly realize I had reached the crest of the hill and start laughing out loud. For once, I had actually accomplished something without having to rely on a spirit I dread to summon. Adolescent energy has dissolved into the past taking with it naivete, innocence, ignorance, and haste. Emerging in its place is a maturity bringing with it wisdom, experience, awareness, and patience. After resting, I move my bike to the side and stand up, brushing the grass and dirt off my shorts. I look around to assess my situation: The sun is beginning to set; I am almost fifteen miles from town on a ranch road in the middle of the hill country; the temperature is starting to fall from sixty-five degrees to Dog-only-knows what in the thirties with a slight southwestern wind adding to the drop; and, it doesn't matter that I am nowhere near a phone because I have no money. I decide to continue to my destination instead of turning home because I am so close. Although it would be easier at this point to turn back, I need to finish this ride. I lift my bike and straddle the seat. One more look around reinforces the fact that I'm in the middle of somewhere: Trees, hills, rocks, shrubs and cacti stretch to the horizon in every direction. The only synthetic interruption to this blanket of green and brown is the solitary ranch road waving over the hills until it disappears in a valley between two large hills which actually resemble small mountains. I shiver at the temperature and the thought of having to cross this distance to get to my destination, but it is something that simply has to be done if I want to get there. The thought of using the full potential of my mountain bike crosses my mind. I had recently become more skilled at off-road riding when a friend had to teach me the vast difference between road cycling and off-road cycling. It took me several weeks (and numerous cuts and bruises from falls) before I learned the basics of crossing rough terrain. However, since it is getting dark I decide not to do this right now. I'm not too familiar with the countryside of the Devil's Backbone to attempt its crossing in the dark. There are a few of ravines and cliffs that could put a quick end to my ride if I didn't see them in time. Also, the idea of hitting a rock and being thrown onto a cactus isn't very thrilling. This trip will have to be finished along the road. I push off with my right foot and begin coasting down the hill. Acceleration. Within seconds I have reached the bottom of the hill and must begin another climb on another hill. However, the climb is made much easier by using the momentum from the previous hill. The funny thing I discovered about myself and cycling is circles. The word "cycling" alone holds much meaning. If I were to look at the long distance of a ride I was about to make, I wouldn't even start. However, I simply start without worrying about the distance. It's not an ignorance of the distance for I have to know my own limits. Instead, it's a way of not becoming overwhelmed with the trip ahead. I simply look down at the ground and concentrate on where I am with an awareness of my destination. Concentration. Concentration on little circles. I look at my feet and concentrate on the little circles I'm making with the peddles. They seem to be moving in a continuous cycle never moving anywhere and never accomplishing anything. A large dualie pick-up truck passes inches from my left side at a speed which is surely much higher than the posted speed limit. The suction of the passing truck nearly rips me from the bike and onto the road. I momentarily consider shouting some form of obscenities at the shrinking truck, but restrain myself because it won't accomplish much more than emptying my lungs of much needed oxygen. Besides, I'm not adequately armed to fend off an attack from Joe Bob and Bubba who are probably carrying an ax handle and a shotgun. Cycles. My feet continue to circle endlessly like gerbils on exercise wheels. They seem to never move more than the few inches back and forth, but it is this motion that drives me forward. The motion of the cycle that gets me to my destination. It's at this destination that I look up and realize that I have passed between twin hills and into a large valley. The sun has completely set by now and I'm following the road partially through feel and partially through the faint moonlight illuminating the center line. I cross the bridge over the river. I can't see the river since it is too dark, but I can hear the water flowing over the rocks below. I coast for another two hundred yards before stopping at the only light along the main street of this small town of a few hundred people. I pull up to the small gas station and get off my bike. I lean it against the wall near the door and bend over with my hands on my knees to catch my breath. After a minute, I stand up straight and walk inside. An elderly couple are running the place tonight. The man is sitting at an old wooden desk going through receipts. The woman had been reading a magazine but came over to the counter when I walked in. I ask her if there is a phone I could use. She tells me of the payphone right outside the door. I thank her and walk out feeling foolish because I now realize I had leaned my bike against the wall right under the payphone. I pick up the handset, punch in a carrier access code, a telephone number, and my calling card number (which I had memorized after repeated uses). Ring once. Ring twice. "Hello?" my fiance answers with a sleepy voice. "Hey, I'm sorry to bother you. Were you asleep?" "No," she lies, "I had just laid down." "I'm sorry. I was wondering if you could do me a favor." "Yeah." "I'm kind of stranded twenty-five miles from my apartment. I was wondering if you could pick me up." "Where are you?" "I'm at the first gas station in Wimberly. I rode here on my bicycle, but I'm too tired to ride back and it's getting cold and . . ." I trail off. She giggles. "Okay. Let me get dressed and I can be there in about thirty minutes." "Thanks. I can't tell you how much I appreciate this." "It's okay." "All right. I'll see you in a little bit." I'm getting ready to hang up the handset. "Hey!" I managed to hear her yell before I hung up. "What?" "I love you." I laugh a little at my forgetfulness and say, "I love you, too." "I'll see you soon." "Bye." I hang up the phone with a smile on my face. I look up at the moon. It has risen to its zenith and is throwing its full light on the ground. I smile again and walk inside to the warmth to wait. % bolgia of poetry "I do not know myself and God forbid that I should." J.W. von Goethe. I am I am what I am a man(iac) Am I evil? yes I am because I am man What am I? A(n) Philosopher Mathematician Artist Poet Lover Monster None of the above I am what? I my eyes, my eyes the burning in my inseyedes pebble on a shorelessea rocked to and fro for all to see I CrI ng the tears from my eyes _. . ._ lost the motherland waif forever despeyesed dI ng i AM soldier of fortune student of wisdom vampire in the night cloaked from vision shade shadow am I [-thumper: kkim@pomona.claremont.edu] "what a foolish mailer" then they lie it's the truth in the skin paradise it's the lie in the skin subvert the soul denied forty shrikes and leeches clawed out the soul of the misbegotten man blasted by the sand of the dunes and the sun of the lie, finally screamed fuck it and shot sixty grams of pure street smack into his aorta. somewhere in chicago, an E string broke on a secondhand guitar. label the guilty forgive the label thymotic sense denied decision which deride in turn confusion at the thought a choice is isolation [-sven: cblanc@pomona.claremont.edu] "clay figurines" While clawing my way through this maze I find myself in a daze The man without a heart Clay figurines blown apart The twilight mercenaries grind on Eliciting an undulating cry by dawn The dream ends the night gone Yet the cry persists to echo on Oh-how I live a secluded life Striving to break free of all this strife Let the masquerade end The masks torn off, the smiling faces descend Spiraling downward into the madness, never to mend [-thumper: kkim@pomona.claremont.edu] "line tension" ahhhh damnit gotta go atm. just had 40 eating out too much where're my keys? desk no dresser no pocket light lock it lts go. sunglasses! forget it ahh no ticket sweeeet twenty thousand! god getting old new oil shit that's 20. maybe 60 new sonic youth newyork dark shades black old vans jeans t go! please go! the trees! spring grass orange poppies more ya roses? na daisies thats 12 ahh hell gotta get a job [-altars of madness:dsaltarelli@alphie.claremont.edu] "ground", A.Y.8 I put my face to the ground and scream there is no sound echoed back but what originates with me the ground is silent I climb on a rock and scream at the ground the sound flies free for a moment before the ground swallows the vibe the ground is silent I climb to the top of the tree and scream there is nothing to see, but the absence of vibrations is startling the ground is silent I climb a hill and lay on my back the sky observes my rest and reflects my nature; it carries it downward the ground is silent I remove myself from the earth there was no one to talk to, no one to converse the ground was silent. [-lbnoire:rm09216@academia.swt.edu] "unknown" What am I? I am the fuel I am the fire I am the burning desire I am the nightmare of your life I am the fear that keeps you up all night I am the shadow that you cannot see I am all there is, you are me. What am I?. . . a dream I Dream into reality I Become the basis for morality Actions become words Mimes make sense Acting out the silent pain of death [-thumper:kkim@pomona.claremont.edu] "suffer" Pyrogenesis Cleansed by your clarion call I breathe and I scream [-bambrose@pomona.claremont.edu] "nocturne" beet poetry at its best poq whoq whaq slaq smaq wow--way-0, man, that's sofuckingheavyyonder... scary like a bogeyman's abandoned gauntlet in a small car by a side rd. scareful like children- unleashed from adultish thinking. scary again like all them out there a million eyes waiting, watching, whispering, & scorning us of distant- minded absentness.orare we all them moons? left skyward, eyesome, alone monolithicrantingpraise "signal noise" (wave) sort of like in the morn of it all my hand is wrinkled beneath salt water waves pass smoothly over skin eyes pass slowly down the beachline horizon moving like a slow nun. and then the breeze soft slapping wind water stops to brush the shore people turn to stare and stare water curses those who live youthful in the stunning sun in the ocean of my latent birth my hand once more passes through a wave catching single golden hairs passing through the growing wrinkles the aging of the sun defies the day begin again insurgent thing cleft leave me dawning shimmering riplets like wrinkles scar the sky. [-sven:cblanc@pomona.claremont.edu] % favorite comics I hear somebody. I guess that there's someone else on the line; Mitch had said that the lines were open, and so I called, and I didn't expect anybody because I'd never really done this before, but somebody was talking. I did this a couple times, calling this shit late at night, and it was real cool -- this night, there's a voice, a guy, talking to someone else, a whisper. The whisper kept saying, "Yeah," and "Okay," and not much else, like it was trying to avoid waking someone. So I said, "Hello?" And the voice talked. He said, "Hello?" So I said, "What's up?" And the voice said, "Not much. Listening to Mitch's show." Mitch had put some music on, and I didn't like it all that much -- I thought that the talk show was better, so I turned down the volume a little. Then the voice said, "So what are you doing?" "Me?" "Yeah." "Listening to the show." "Yeah. I don't really like this shit." "This music?" "Yeah." "Me neither." So we both listened to the silence on the telephone for a while. The whisper was even quiet. "My neighbors are asleep," the voice said. "Shouldn't they be?" I asked. "It's three a.m." "Yeah, but they're kind of weird." "Why? Where do you live?" "Euclid. Where are _you_ calling from?" "North Royalton. I've never been to Euclid." "I've never been to Royalton. I don't even know where that _is_." I couldn't imagine anyone who lived in Cleveland and who hadn't been to North Royalton. I mean, sure, there's East siders and West siders, but North Royalton? I mean, come _on_! "Yeah, but I have weird neighbors." "How so?" "This guy next to me worked for the post office. He sold cocaine and he got busted, now all he does is sit around and play loud music -- loud soul music. "He likes it that he's suspended -- he likes to sit around and play music. When the weather's cold he invites everyone over that he knows and has a barbeque -- with like sixty people." I turn down the music on the radio a little more; I can't hear him all that well. But he's still talking: "Then you know it's time to leave -- you hear the thumping." I hear a busy signal in the background, behind his voice. He says, "Do you hear a busy signal?" "Yeah," I say. Then, I say, "Hey -- is there someone else on here, someone who was whispering?" "Yeah," says the whisper. "Oh." The voice says, "I have to take off my socks -- hold on." I hold on. I have nothing better to do. Sockless, he says, "I want to go ice skating. I only went once, but I want to go." I say, "I went once. It didn't work out very well. I fell all over. I was in Boy Scouts." The voice is quiet to that. I listen to the music; it's still pretty lousy. "My neighbor asked me if I believe in God, and I said, 'No.'" This is what the voice says, out of nowhere. I wait a second, and then I say, "Oh." I say, "So, tell me about your crazy neighbors." He starts to talk. "There's two old people, the post office guy and this old lady across the street. They're the only old people in the neighborhood. Everyone else is young suburbanites: 'Hi, I work at Tower City during the day and watch rented movies at night.' The old people are the interesting ones. They're the ones on the medication. "The old Alzheimer's woman is crazy." "Why?" "She's this old lady across the street and down a couple houses. My window's on the side of the house and when she turns her porch light on it hits my wall and it keeps me up -- you know how a little light at night keeps you up? Well, she does this all the time . . . I wish I knew her phone number because I'd call her up and say, 'What are you doing?'" He sounds like he doesn't believe that she's got her light on, like he sees it but he just doesn't believe it. He's quiet for a second, like he's reviewing what he just said, like he's talking to himself. He says, "She'd probably say, 'Is it 1930 again?' "She's crazy . . . she'll turn it off and on all night, at weird times. I really wonder what she's doing." "It's the disease," I say. He is quiet to that. Once, I wondered about that disease. I wondered what it would be like, to not remember the things that you want to remember. To have to have everything, all your good memories and all the noise, the stuff you filter out, all go together. I think it would drive me nuts. He is talking again. "I saw these pictures -- it's for a little kid's coloring contest . . . most of these things were supposed to be red and green, you know?" "Christmas stuff?" "Yeah. Well, most of them were okay, except this kid's, who was color blind -- Santa was green, his nose was green -- it was pretty funny. "I like the coloring contests. I always like to turn them in and falsify my age . . . then they come and verify it." We both laugh, and we hear the whisper laughing a little. The voice says, "Family Circus has never been funny. I saw this thing in the bookstore, they had all the Family Circuses ever, these thick books. If you add up all the space he's been in newspapers, for the past sixty years, it would probably fill up the space of the earth. _Marmaduke_'s funnier than that. "And Ziggy -- for a week, the guy that does it just does those vending machines, and you wouldn't see Ziggy for a week." The voice sounds really irritated, so I keep quiet, and listen. "And B.C. -- _that_'s not funny. "Calvin & Hobbes is strange: Calvin sends his pet _mail_ -- it shows how schizophrenic he is. "Born Loser -- I think there's a _computer_ that makes it. He draws so bad, I don't think _anyone_ could draw so bad." I laugh, but the voice sounds really pissed, and the whisper is quiet. "Not many people put work into their things," the voice says. "I don't know about Shoe. I think the guy's got _arthritis_ from the way he draws. Herrman's okay sometimes. Kinda that sadistic humor. And Bizarro is okay once in a while. "Cathy: you have to be a forty-year-old person to like it. And I guess the real person is just like this -- she depicts her life in it. "Beetle Baily is bad too -- I think the same computer draws that that draws Born Loser. One box: 'Hey Sarge, what's going on?' and on the next one: 'ZZZZ'" "Yeah," I say, and I'm laughing. "He's dead," says the whisper, and it suprises me. "What?" asks the voice. "He's dead -- the guy who does that comic." "Oh, so then it _must_ be a computer that does it. Far Side is good but it's too hard to find. They put it like in the Arts section or something, away from the other comics. You have to look for it. "Every publicized comic -- there's like two hundred of them in this paper -- it would be okay to see, but most of them would are like Family Circus -- the computer drew it, and they just put in different words. "I cut out these stupid things, bad comics, just to remember these stupid things. I thought they used to be funny, but they're not anymore -- they're not! After fifty years, it's not funny! I think the Family Circus guy just turns in the same things." I never read comics anymore, but I know exactly what he is talking about. I mean, I read all that stuff before. He says, "I'm thinking of writing to this newspaper and complaining." "Do it," I say. He probably won't. "They should have a comic that makes fun of other comics." We're both quiet for a while, and then I ask him about his neighborhood, if the crazy lady turned her light on again. "No," he says, "but there's this other crazy lady about five houses down that has an alarm on her house, but it's not a normal alarm -- it's like a buzzer from twenty years ago. And she's got one that when you touch the house or anything it goes off . . . she sets it off by mistake all the time -- but she hasn't done it lately. "Once she locked herself out of the house and she called the fire department to let her in. They were pissed when they got there and there was no fire. "She's crazy." "Old people are crazy," I say. I once had this old man who lived next door to me when I was a kid. He used to steal candy bars from the store and give them to me. Then he would steal tools from our garage. His fingers got cut off from his lawnmower once. "I wonder if this lady sleeps during the day so she can turn the light on all night." The whisper says, "Send her a letter in the mail." "Yeah -- maybe I will." I put down the phone for a minute and go to the bathroom. In the hallway, I'm extra quiet, so that I don't wake up my parents. I use the downstairs bathroom for good measure. "Okay, I'm back," I say, when I get back. The voice says, "I got a Skippy jar full of urine, and another time I got four pairs of women's underwear, menstruated -- all in the mail." "_What_," I say. "I got it in the mail. I sent about five thousand catalogs to my friend's P.O. box at his dorm. They couldn't even fit it all in his box, so he sent that shit to me." "Why did you send him all those catalogs?" "I was bored, and my mom has all these catalogs, and from the back of mags like Cosmo I sent away for shit for him -- a free contact lens cleaning kit (he just got arrested for trying to steal it) and a pair Depend underwear." "He got arrested?" "He got arrested because he needed it and he didn't have any money. And the place he got it from only prosecutes if you steal over $4, and it turned out to be $4.06. He got pissed . . . he got so pissed that he sent me underwear in the mail that his roomate found in the garbage." "Oh." "His mom hates me -- she thinks I degraded her son . . . she just _hates_ me . . . he goes to Kent -- what other college would people have no work, and they get so bored that they send shit in the mail?" "I don't know. Do you go to college?" "No," he says. "I did -- once. Whenever I go back, I'll probably major in Art. There's all sorts of things I could do but probably never get a job in, unless I come up with a bad cartoon and put it in the paper -- but there's no room for anyone who does anything interesting." "Yeah." It's hard to find work in the field you want. There just doesn't seem to be as many opportunities as there once was, like on television, on old t.v. shows where everyone has cool jobs. "My neighbor just got home. There's this guy, his name's Nuna, he sells cars for a living -- but at night, he'll leave at 3 a.m. and come back around 4 -- I think he joyrides the cars. I've never seen him during the day; I think he sleeps or works or something." "Bye," says the whisper. He hung up; went to bed, probably. I'm tired of all this -- the music is the same crap, so I shut the radio off. Until next week; same time, same station. "I'm tired, too," I say. "I think I'm gonna go." "Yeah," the voice says, with no inflection. He just says the word, and then says this one: "Bye." "I'll talk to you later," I say, no knowing what else to. "Yeah," he says, this time with a smirk. "Bye," I say, and hang up. It's still dark out, but it won't last for long. I get ready for bed: shut off the lights, pile in with my shirt and pants still on, and let whatever's left of the dark hang over me. [-michael stutz:mstutz@rs6000.baldwinw.edu] % interment in measured tones [death metal reviews] In the name of the father, of the son...from the parallelograms of heat muted to light I modulated into the darkened room smelling of stale bread and eroded grease odors. Above the thick skin of checkerboarded red and white tablecloth the face of my friend Ed caught the fractured triangle of reflection, closing his eye to a squint. "Barf christ," he scowled. "Hasn't been a great day." These were the days when we could view days individually, before they began to integrate into patterns, progressions, marriages, jobs, or various cycles of decay that we learned to dread our way through. Right then it was finding a place, staying, finding a job, moving on. "So what's new on your mind?" The flies clustered like broken petrified logs in a corner, odd angulars into a society. "Not that much. Some crisis at the radio station, transmitter melted or something under the force of our air conditioner, they finally fixed it. With the condition of most of that stuff I'm just glad nothing blew up on us. Almost got a ticket, but - I saw this in the cop's eye - he saw a black Mercedes pull an illegal U, and damn, I was off free and he was turning, a bulking steel shark, off down the street after him." "Lucky." My experiences had been less pleasantly resolved in recent memories of that area. Through the suffocating static smother of the store speakers a hard bluesrock tune came on under the enthusiastic voice of the female DJ, who had trouble pronouncing the phrase "coming in concert" over the sound. Ed looked up annoyedly at the speakers. The front of a woman ducked in front of us to put a couple glasses of ice tea on the table, and then, folding back the battered paper of her pad, asked us to give her orders to write down on green and white thick bond. Ed looked at me a bit quizzically. "Chile relleno," I said starkly. More silence for Ed to read the bareprinted words above his finger. "Two enchilada, dos equis," he said, folding the menus into her hands. In her absence of sudden: "So what's new on your end?" I separated the four-ply napkin by twisting a corner with some sweat from my thumb. "Um, not much. Sending in some reviews of the past three months or so in death metal." Took in some ice tea, remembering someone telling me that's it's good for the throat when you do the hoarse distorted shout most of the death vocalists prefer. Ed drank from his as well. "It hasn't been a bad few months, actually. The problem with death metal is the same thing that initially protected it: the extremity of it. When you listen to something where the guy is vomiting on the mike and the music is all extreme, disconnected, nihilistic, everywhere, you're initially pulling back somewhat. That's what most of the world did. But at the same time that began as a mark of death metal's exclusivity, that also became its primary point of recognition, leading to a generation of fans who went for anything that followed some rhythmic and vocal elements, namely percussive and low, respectively." Ed nodded. I didn't sense that he cared any more that day than normal about death metal, but he gets into it sometimes, and besides, I was rolling steady. Also, he had just taken a large mouthful of enchilada and couldn't protest. I love a captive audience. "For a while there, as a result, it was all the same goo, guys meeting those qualifications and adding some gimmick, whether name or appearance. It got pretty gross, and I was about to throw in the towel, but couldn't give up my show, couldn't give up Morbid Angel." Ed knows how much I like Morbid Angel myself and seems to enjoy it thoroughly when I play it in his presence, and has also been a supporter of my show from the beginning. "But two things happened: the fan base got huge, but also spread out the available resources, leaving the smaller labels that signed crap bands heading for financial consumption, and labels began getting choosier. The smarter edge of the fan base got much more careful about what they bought. For a while it looked good again, but soon more of the commercial element came in, with bands like Sepultura and Entombed selling out, and big bands like Cannibal Corpse making it big in the mainstream United States. The only thing that saves us from these people is that their music remains fairly insipid and unsatisfying. Too many fans are buying tons of music, really digging the aesthetic but unable to deal with the simplicity and uninventiveness of the music. A whole lot of them bailed the scene. But at the same time the older bands began to get acquainted with their instruments and starting putting out better metal. And the newer crew looks pretty good. Originally, death was concept music, of brutality and a heaviness nothing else could touch. The philosophy's expanded, and a lot of stuff has come in, but not much from the dangerous side of things, the so-called 'alternative' scene. When bands want to sell out they tell us how they're putting in some 'alternative' influences." I gulped ice tea with an expulsion of air. "But most of the stuff has just gotten more serious on the musical end, which is fine by me. For a while there, it was getting as bad as the punk bands: we play with more 'feel,' etc. I think there's feel in music, but I think that feel comes from the odd collusion of intellect and emotion in a discipline, like making music. It's rock, sure, but it's art too if it's serious. Varathron was the band that first impressed me. It's pure black metal, but the older kind, which is more musical and more like older heavy metal. It's harmonic in nature; they play chords and don't just stream notes at high speed. It still has the death vocals, and uses some modern metal elements, but at heart it's tonal rock, pretty basic but not simple at all. There's a lot of variation in riff structure and in song layout, as well as some interesting experimentation with harmonics, and an ability to harmonize riffs without them sounding cheesy (a lot of this black metal stuff makes me think of giant lumps of Swiss cheese descending on a block of fresh asphalt in a New York summer). This is one of the first black metal releases I've been really enthusiastic about. It's not Scandinavian at all, from Greece actually, but it's well-played, not messy, and comes across as having real thought and intent behind it. They don't try to be scary, but the cheesiness comes in the names: Necroabyssious, Wolfen, Mutilator, and Necroslaughter. Whatever. At least they kept it out of the music." I lifted my glass and got a brief wisp of sip of ice tea, and then felt ice cubes against my upper lip. I put the glass down. "Next thing that I thought was hot shit was Mortuary, from Mexico. Really unique stuff, really powerful and fast, an earlier style of speed metal. I don't think this is new, but I don't know. Got it from J.L. America as they folded into decay. There's an obvious Slayer influence in this stuff, but it doesn't sound like Slayer. Just sometimes a similar way of thinking about things, although the approach ends up different in the end. Playing is pretty competent for underground metal, and the album overall is great. Moves quickly, songs vary, quite a bit of musical experimentation. This is far from the norm and the second release from Mexico to impress me, the first being Cenotaph. Another band that blew me away was Doomstone. I played you Deceased, right? The drummer for that band, King Fowley, started up a side project called Doomstone that recorded this album about a year ago. It's called "Those Whom Satan Hath Joined" or something along those lines. Pretty pro-Satan overall, but I don't think it's serious, that is, it's mainly to have some fun with the lyrics. There's some serious bagging on the black metal people in the liner notes. Fowley's always been a nut, though. Deceased is great stuff that makes its way by being tight and musical, technically challenging while not forgetting the idea of the listener, of making cool music. Half of the problem with death metal comes in that label, technical. For one thing, it doesn't mean jack, since 'technical' means music lessons to most of these people, and since underground metal isn't known for musicality anyway. For another thing, the bands that are spend most of their time trying to prove that they are because they're so used to people considering them inferior players and because, un-amazing as they are, they're better than most of the crowd. A few stand out ahead, starting with Morbid Angel and Atheist, but stuff like Deceased really belongs in the same category, that is, being reasonably competent or better musicality without being braindead. Playing songs to make great songs and to make them artistically challenging, but not just to try to prove that in a pond full of nobodies you're the best- trained nobody. Almost as bad as glam metal in the late eighties, when the guitar solos started getting long. But Doomstone is 'technical,' if we have to use that term, getting most of its influences from older metal while bringing a new style of noise- and atonality-influenced music into the mezcla. The end result is great. You can't really sing along, but the songs move, each is distinctive, and the whole album doesn't have a bad track. There's a Grim Reaper cover on here, but I never knew that band anyway. A lot of goofy references to cheesy movies about the occult, including one tune called "Rosemary's Baby." I have no idea who the other band members are, but they all have stupid names like "Urinator of the Holy Graveyards." I like this one a lot but most people have no clue it exists. Some of the stuff from the Midwest just blows me away. I heard about their scene a year or two ago when stuff like Accidental Suicide, Morgue, and Afterlife was coming out, all of it pretty musically interesting and technically evolved. The new stuff takes this further, with more technical detail (nothing amazing, but impressive for underground) and power coming in, and more advanced song structures. Lyrics have gotten away from the once-dominant American ideal of proving something, whether anger or sickness, in the lyrics. They're demented in their own right, but with a self-aware humor that's refreshing. The main act leading this scene is Oppressor, whose demo I really liked when I received it about a year ago, for my show. The power of this music isn't whatever technical standards it hails to, but the ability to integrate disparate elements into a working and interesting format. There's heaviness in here to compare with the most extreme American acts, but there's also cool musical workings and internal structures that support themselves well, producing an aesthetic of complexity with a percussive speed grind that smears you against a wall if you catch it at volume. Gutted impress me as much but in an entirely different vector. The obvious technicality of Oppressor isn't here; this is a straight-up rock format with stuff well-encoded into it. This isn't even death metal, but speed metal with a death voice. The songs aren't as catchy as the more mainstream stuff, but they have a grasping appeal that's not so much easily understandable as reflective of coherent assembly. Some stuff makes your ear listen, but this stuff gets you involved and then takes you with it. There's heaviness to spare here, and some goofiness in the lyrics, with songs such as "Kickin' the Corpse" leaving me to laugh. But it's self-aware, and not stupid, so I have no complaints. This is one of my favorites of the year. Not from the midwest but from Florida come two of my other finds. Neither are that new, or new at all, in the case of Ripping Corpse, who are one of the few metal bands who could legitimately wear the label progressive - interesting musical ideas expanded interestingly, not necessarily as intricate in their song structure as most bands but exceptionally coherent, in that songs are completed works and not streams of riffs. Lead guitar is not often this well done; for pure musicality this is one of my favorite works. Resurrection have a similar approach, taking Florida metal and making it technically-challenging, rather than just adding technicalities. The songs work and are enjoyable on several levels, leaving the technical work to be assumed and not be the focus of the entire album. The only band even close to this is Monstrosity. Both of these albums, Ripping Corpse's "In the Forest of the Dreaming Dead" and Resurrection's "Embalmed Existence," are first-class death metal. The former is probably out of print, Kraze records being defunct in a serious manner. From Britain come Malediction, one of the few death metal bands to legitimately remind me of Morbid Angel, and not through aping, as their sound is far from the atonal masterpieces of Azagthoth. Malediction play intense, not necessarily super- technically powered, but well-assembled and intriguing death metal. The album I have is a live EP, "Chronicles of Dissension," which is exceptionally well-produced for a live album, with the only clues to it being live being the pauses before each song where a drunken British voice talks. The music is fast, but slows when strategically necessary; it has a voice that encompasses the song, and doesn't restrict itself to occasional exposure during a riff or a solo. There is a full-length album that I don't have, but if it's of the same caliber of this material, it should be incredible. This is the only British band that's really brought my respect since Carcass or Repulsion (not forgetting the classic gods Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, but gods of a previous era, although timeless in their musical vision). Sweden has for the last few generations of death metal bands lead with innovative and potent metal. Seance and Fleshcrawl have released the best albums in recent memory from that area, with the notable exception of Therion, who, although technically brilliant and musically exceptional are nowhere in the same league of heaviness: both of these bands deliver impact power and suffusing brutality. Seance produced a guttural, mechanical and distorted masterpiece in "Saltrubbed Eyes," in which they learned to drop the many dissonant riffs approach of their first album in favor of a cohesive approach to song structures which emphasizes bringing out what is put into the song, instead of stringing it in linearly. On their first release they reminded me of a Swedish Malevolent Creation, but here the sound is much more Seance's own. The final track, an instrumental, gets special mention. The primary work here is the guitar tracks, which are experimental for death metal, especially eurometal. There's a lot of work with shorter but more definite riffs, and some experimentation in the noise of the lead guitars, which seem competent although they often choose to be content with half-noise solos. Smearing notes and all of that work. The distortion on this album is grating to a maximum, a new height of abrasiveness in guitar. This is one of my current favorites from Sweden. Fleshcrawl have always impressed me, but "Impurity" outdoes itself. Where their first was slow this has achieved a balance, realizing an aptitude for tempos in different components of the songs. Song structures are spread out and varied, although they don't seek to emphasize these varieties but an overall impression. There is a track from Finnish gods Demigod (Slumber of Sullen Eyes, their one album, is one of my favorites from Scandinavia: heavy but harmonic stuff, a unique sound that builds itself from out of the songs, instead of carping songs to follow an aesthetic) covered on this album, but more innarestin' in the track which isn't a cover, Inevitable End, which seems to be right out of the book of Bolt Thrower, albeit speeded up. The remaining songs are heavy and satisfying, excepting an instrumental by Dan Swano of Edge of Sanity. You can't sing along but who needs to? this is the descending blade of heavy metal that's not afraid to be technically competent, compositionally intriguing, or image deficient - it's the hardline straight up with no gimmick, and consequently both of these albums seem to be overlooked in the United States. (Possibly in favor of Entombed's terrible "Wolverine Blues," which would be a travesty of the first order.)" Ed put down his empty glass, and flipped two fingers toward his palm to gesture for more. With it came our food. I dug in, heavily, starving and aggressive. Ed ate more carefully but with equal rapidity. Surprisingly, he wasn't intimidated by my spew about a genre he could care less about, but was sort of interested. Through the corner of a mouth: "So things are looking up except for the sellouts? I remember you ranting about that some time ago, that and Christian metal" (Christian metal being my favorite oxymoron to pick on, as metal is beyond Christianity and really should have nothing to do with it - not saying, however, as every Christian misinterprets this argument, that it needs to go running to Papa Satan - it just was founded and designed outside of Christianity and doesn't work with it) " - are there more of those?" I poked more chile relleno into my mouth. "Well," chewing, "I think more are coming, as it gets easier to throw a little Alice in Chains into your music. And that's the band they'll all ape, that or Helmet, maybe. Alice is easy because it's one of the heavier bands in the so-called 'alternative' range, and because with the complexity of that sound, a band can work a lot in without being seen as what they'd otherwise be: a metal band suddenly going heavy bluesrock on us. Plus, they share a lot of roots, Alice in Chains and death metal; those people heard Black Sabbath and Motorhead, too. Entombed tried the Alice in Chains thing with Wolverine, and it sucked, but it wasn't a bad shot for a first, from the eyes of the mainstream, who seem to buy suck music any chance they can get. It's a safe sound to assume. I haven't seen too much of that lately. But I've been staying far away. It's amazing how sometimes the most obscure stuff is the best. You'd think more people would catch on, but it doesn't seem so - take Obliveon as a case in point. If you can get past the dumb name, this is spectacular progressive death metal from Canada. For once the bass is used as a lead instrument in metal without becoming cheesy - it makes its presence felt, but without being either a leading pop element or an attachment for the sake of additional hooks. Integrated structurally, the bass-guitar interaction of this band is incredible, nailed to a precision drum track to make this a tight setup, with incredibly players lending to the tightness with the right-on instrumentation that any fan of speed metal would love. But this is death metal, albeit a very unique interpretation of the genre musically. It's not particularly heavy in the original sense, but cool - in the way that a jazz or progressive band would be. But it's heavy, and it's amazing, and not effete like "progressive metal" acts like Dream Theatre. It stays true to the core of metal. More obscurity in the form of Alastis, one of the few "doom metal" bands worthy of the title. There is real musicality to this, good tempo variation, impressive drumming and cool riffs to package a slowing majesty of falling darkness. Vocals are a subdued version of the death/black metal voice, and fit well into this music, which has elements of both the modern and the older styles of metal. Impressive at the least. With an entirely different sound but a musically impressive output is Demilich, who are Finns playing harmonically-intricate death metal; it reminds me of the sounds of a funk band without the annoying elements in the way Demilich slide and cycle through the castles of tones they build on "Nespithe." It's not musicianship showing off, either, but a unique look at metal with a real experimental eye to it. This is one of my favorite releases of this year. But the core of metal remains the heaviness, and the emphasis that places through its rhythm and timbre. Loudblast fulfill this with the musicality quotient that any lover of the above will enjoy. Heavy, with real death and speed metal elements demonstrating the band's superb songwriting. Not superb judgement: this album has a fourth track of some of the most annoying female vocals ever to hit vinyl. But the music is outstanding. Another harder to find but brilliant band is Goreaphobia, who despite the stupid name create impressive death metal, with intense variation and a preservation of well-conceptualized mood and vision pervading throughout all three tracks on this album, "Omen of Masochism" (one of the nicely cheap Relapse underground releases). The cover illustration is a bit annoying (half-clothed woman consorting with devil) but the music is phenomenal, and heavy, having a lot of the better elements of death and grindcore musically while remaining so. A good sense of energy to this as well. Stupidity has always been a part of metal, and the silliness continues. Demented Ted caught my ear despite misgivings about the stupid name; this is good stuff, solidly heavy and technically intricate, although not as progressive and experimental as it could be musically. That would be the greatest failing of this album, but it survives it as good speed/death metal. The greatest area of foolishness, while we're on the topic, would have to be black metal, and one of my current favorites, Sacramentum, is a proud member of that arena. Yet it's phenomenal music, with a good melodic sense (this is modern black metal in its stream of notes incarnation) and a more conventional than usual adherence to sound, although without being cliche or uninventive. Highly recommended to black metal fans. Actually," I said, wiping my upper lip on disposable napkin, "all of this stuff is, and I'd have trouble deciding what to leave behind, but that's just because this is what I've found after listening to tons and tons of this stuff. We're not out of the deep water yet. There's a lot of crappy metal out there, as there always will be. But I think a lot of the stuff I see coming up is great, especially as bands learn that learning instrumentalism doesn't mean they've sold out, or that they suck. The greatest underground today is in the growing category of progressive or near-progressive metal, as it's too out there for most of the mainstream death metal fans and too musically subversive to ignore." Ed wiped his mouth on a similar napkin. The sun had set and the air hung almost liquid in through the cold glass. The stillness of daysend and the fullness of our stomachs slowed our thoughts, but soon we paid, and left to wander between pedestrian and building alike, stretching our thoughts through the networks of modern life without particularly attaching to anything. [-sven:cblanc@pomona.claremont.edu] % mantra Past the small hamlet of Gnihton, across the orderly layers of gently nodding fields, there lay, well, yet another field. This particular field was quite like its surrounding brethren in most aspects, complete with dirt, weeds, corn, and of course loud, noisy, wheezing monster-thingie (apparently cornfields tend to attract to an alarming degree the likes of such). However unlike the other fields around it, each too having its own wretchedly belching blob-creature, this field was singular for its location. Admittedly the other fields had locations too, but they unfortunately were not located in the correct place. To put it simply, the field lay next to a path. Like the field that squatted next to it, this path was rather unremarkable in most aspects in comparison to those of its kind, and although it did not have its own personal monstrosity, it did have large tangles of briars and an absurd-looking strain of mutant cauliflower that it could call its own. Reportedly, the cauliflower in the aforementioned region has been known to bluster and babble quite indignantly when called absurd, but the fact remained, and even the cauliflower knew this deep inside, that it was pretty funny looking. The exact origins of the plant have indeed never been pinpointed by historians or biologists, but the current theory en vogue proposes that the thing was the result of an asteroid strike. Nothing that ridiculous could ever have developed on earth, or so ran the argument as originally published in Modern Botany. The species apparently spent the next thousand or so years entrenching itself in an area measuring fifteen feet across and eighty or so miles long. The natives, being a practical lot, had simply marked off their fields around the ground in which sprouted the cauliflower, and so the path was born. When scientists first discovered the strange phenomenon, they found to their utter astonishment that no one in the memory of the natives had ever attempted to taste or even pick the vegetable. "No chap in their right mind would ever think of mussing with one of the bloody things. Anything that silly lookin can't be good for anything now can it?" said Henry Blankenship, a ninety year resident of Gnihton's successor, Cornwall, when questioned by dumfounded Men and Women of Science. Even more surprising were the results of the scientific community's endeavors to excavate the now beleaguered plant. Despite its wobbly, lopsided and shockingly pink appearance, the Cornwallian Cauliflower (as it soon became known worldwide) was resistant to all attempts to uproot it from its favorite locale, even the heavy and persistent use of a bulldozer was to no avail. Neither could anyone discover any sort of seeds, so in the end one exasperated biologist brandished a pocket knife and proceeded to saw off and consume a small portion of the Cornwallian Cauliflower. To no one's astonishment he dropped dead on the spot, but not before uttering the now immortal phrase, "Mother of God, but that's a foul taste." Needless to say, from then on the plant was left alone, which was a bit of tragedy considering that though the plant did contain a deadly poison, it also cured cancer, AIDS, herpes, and tasted quite yummy when served steaming hot with a light cheese sauce (all in all an interesting tradeoff). The foul taste that the doomed biologist found so repugnant was not a property of the cauliflower itself; it most likely had to do with the fat, aging wampus that had used that particular cauliflower as a urinal just several hours earlier. Through all of this the poor plant endure in a most noble manner, hoping that somehow evolution would translate its phentoype in future generations to one with a smidgen of dignity here and there. Nature had a bit of a sadistic streak in it though, and so the Cornwallian Cauliflower would go on being brazenly pink, lopsided, and bloated until it was the last thing left alive on the earth, waiting patiently for evolution even as the superheated gases of a sun that had gone nova engulfed the planet Earth, leaving behind only a thin and decidedly pink plasma. As a result, even more sobering than the passing of the earth, the Seattle Mariners would never win a pennant, let alone a World Series. Celestial historians reply to this by saying that despite the lack of a pennant, on the plus side the team would finish over .500 three times during its four billion year life span. We digress, however. What is most important about this path that was refuge to a strange strain of cauliflower was not the hubbub surrounding its flora, but rather a single event that took place there around one thousand years before the Great Cauliflower Catastrophe (as the incident became known). When considering this event, one must think hard to discern the proper scope of what is being discussed. Forget the Big Bang; forget the emergence of Homo Sapiens; forget Hitler; and realize deep down inside that what happened on a small dusty track outside of the peasant village of Gnihton that day in 998 AD was the single most important event in the History Of The Universe. Admittedly, the incident itself eventually panned out in a semi-swell manner, but simply the enormously terrifying, mind- boggling, spine-chilling, skin-shivering, vomit-releasing possibilities that it offered were so tremendous, so namelessly deep and primal, that even God was so startled that he let out a rather loud belch while napping near the Deneb system. The electromagnetic radiation from God's Belch would later be received by Earthbound dishes and interpreted by puzzled scientists as "Greetings Earthlings. Have you any cheeseburgers?" Nothing much could be made of this enigmatic statement and so astronomers dismissed it as chance, though to the public's chagrin, the interpretation of God's Belch spawned a whole new series of "Where's the Beef?" commercials. Back to the path, though. The path was dusty. It had no qualms about this, and would go so far as to get right in a travelers face and jaw with him or her in a rather ornery and persistent manner if the traveler expressed verbally any beliefs to the contrary. Combine this fact with that of the cauliflower, and one might argue that it would be altogether easier simply to walk through the corn fields. It could quite easily have been much better going through the towering rows of corn, but corn on the whole is an intimidating lot, and besides, the lands on which the corn grew were owned privately by His Majesty Ferdinand III (often called Ferd III behind his back), and trespassing except by those peasants assigned to work the fields was a criminal offense. The punishment for trespassing on the King's lands never became common knowledge. Ferd III's people were naturally stoic and accepting, the luckless recipients of the monthly royal beheading accepted their lot without a fuss or protest, but no one ever observed a trespasser heading to their fate and not screaming and fighting for all he or she was worth. Rumors of the name of the exact instrument of torture floated around hither and thither, but they must have been some sort of secret code word, for the words "Richard Simmons Videos" are rather cryptic, and so they must have instead stood for some terrifying device of pain and suffering no less. In the end, rather than risking such a nasty penalty or such a tedious and dusty journey, most people stayed away from Gnihton; it was a lousy excuse for human habitation anyway. On the path rested a rock. While there indeed were other rocks on the path, six to be exact, seven if you count the small pile of petrified dog excrement, those rocks tended to be sedimentaries for the most part, all in all a very boring lot. Happily for the pile of dog excrement, called Herbert by others of its kind, its life purpose was fulfilled when Baron Horace Von Stepovich accidentally trod on it. Despite the pile's formidable carapace, it's soft internal consistency nonetheless forced the legendarily snobbish man to spend several hours cleaning his very leather, very black, very new boots. Of course all of this depended on the fact that the standard definition required a rock to be at least walnut sized and no less. The rock's name was Bob. Why it was called Bob and not some other equally impressive name such as Binky, Ferguson, or Bartholomew, is a mystery. As for appearances, Bob was rather plain, a dusty gray countenance that only in the best of lights could be called dull silver and numerous scars and pits from past struggles with others of his kind as the only distinguishing features. Bob stood out instead with his intelligence and cunning. Bob disdained the stupid, boisterous ignites that spent all their time bragging among themselves about their recent exploits, what volcano they'd been spit out of, how hot it was, how many other rocks they'd beaten up, how much they could bench press, and so on. Bob similarly despised the plodding and ever-stupid sedimentites too. It was always the sedimentite who didn't get the joke, it was always the sedimentite who told the most amazingly boring and lengthy stories (some might argue that the author of this is a sedimentite), it was always the sedimentite who drank too much spiked punch at a party and ended up getting pounded into the ground by the ignite whose girlfriend the tipsy sedimentite had made a slurred comment to. On the whole, the sedimentites were a rather sorry bunch, but luckily they were too dull to realize this, and went right on with their plodding, victimized ways. Bob was a metamorphic, and for the most part metamorphics did their best to distance themselves from their "lesser" brethren. Most metamorphics secretly believed that their race was destined to rule the world someday, but they usually kept this conviction to themselves, fearing being beaten up by an ignite or blubbered at by a tortoise-like sedimentite. Bob's specialty was physics. More precisely, Bob prided himself in his ability to gauge the gait, stride, and distance away of an approaching human and use his extraordinary mental powers to position himself in such a way as to send the offending two-legger sprawling on its face when the toe of its boot collided with Bob. Nothing pleased Bob more than a good trip job, and his love for the sport had made him into one of the world's best. What this all boiled down to for Bob's situation at the time was unhappiness, plain and simple. The disheveled path to Gnihton was not frequently traveled, leaving Bob with few people to trip, and even worse, when someone did come along, the cursed cauliflower had a tendency to make Bob burst out laughing and thus lose track of his complicated calculations, botching the job entirely. "I was much better off back on the King's Highway where traffic could get so heavy that I sometimes had to be calculating the results of 47 differential equations simultaneously just to keep up," Bob reflected bitterly at one time. Without a doubt, the highlight so far of Bob's rather young life, a few measly million years, was when through a stroke of pure brilliance he managed to trip the notoriously watchful Baron of Ebert, one Horace Von Stepovich by name. By great fortune, the snooty baron's retainers, toadies, and personal guard had all been following him at a very small distance, and thus when he fell to the ground, his dimwitted servants stumbled over him in turn, resulting in many curses, numerous minor scrapes, four beheadings, and a broken pancreas. It would go down as one of the greatest coups in rock history; to humanity it would simply be known as International Toe Jam Day. The meaning of this day has unfortunately been a bit perverted with the passage of time. Unfortunately for Bob, despite his smashing success, he soon found himself hurtling over the corn fields as propelled by the strength of the irate baron's left arm. Bob landed not far from one of the large and bulbous creatures, huffing and wheezing in a most noxious manner while squatting amongst its cornfield. Only later was it discovered that the creature was a distant ancestor of Ted Kennedy. Now Bob might have simply lain in that cornfield until the end of time if it hadn't been for a small, grimy, little peasant boy who had the ill luck to be named Olaf by his unconsciously sadistic parents. Olaf's parents worked on the field where Bob had the misfortune of being tossed into, and Olaf, who was rather lazy, spent most of his time looking the source of the mysterious burbling noises he often heard emanate from the field just before he drifted off to sleep. Poor Olaf never did find the source of those strangely compelling noises, but one day in his searches he quite literally stumbled over Bob. Not content with just chasing after some unseen noisemaker, Olaf had recently taken up rock collecting. With the addition of Bob, Olaf's collection reached three, but unfortunately, due to lagging attention span and lack of deep-set interest, Olaf's collection would grow no bigger. When Bob found himself picked up and stuffed into the dark and fetid pocket of a dirty sweatshirt he was naturally overcome with panic. In vain he tried to free himself from his newfound confinement, but only succeeded in entangling himself with the loathsome corpse of a hairless rat, a tenant for nearly two months now, and most probably the cause for much of the pungent aroma that permeated the air. At this point there was a small thonking noise, and thus Bob realized that he was not alone in his imprisonment. The rock's name was Gerald, and the other one's name, for there were two others total, was Ophelia. Bob soon discovered that though Gerald was an ignite, he possessed the worst qualities of both the ignite and the sedimentite. Not only did Gerald want to discuss whose volcano was bigger, whose volcano was hotter, and apparently whose volcano's eruptions had killed the most humans, he also did it in an annoying, boring, and toneless manner that even the most diehard sedimentite would envy. Of course the fact that Bob had not originated from a volcano never even occurred to Gerald. The end result of this nasal, droning soliloquy was a loud bonking noise as Bob rapped Gerald quite the nasty blow to the temple in frustration. Gerald lapsed into a wounded, very short, and very self-righteous silence, sure that all others of rock-kind would see it his way and unanimously condemn this rash and violent metamorphic's actions. However this thought quickly left his mind, and trying a new approach, he changed the subject to one even more riveting with excitement if such was possible: that of the aches, pains, and life- threatening injuries that he had suffered and still continued to suffer from. Bob's response to this discourse was of course rather predictable, and so Gerald and his aching noggin gave up, and sulked off to the side. Through all this the quiet Ophelia had sat rather wide-eyed, and altogether unsure of what she had gotten herself into. Now Gerald did indeed have quite a few aches and pains, 476 to be exact, and though normally very slow to anger, Bob's second blow to his forehead had pushed Gerald over the proverbial edge, though this didn't immediately show. In fact it only showed when Ophelia wacked into Gerald from behind, quite by accident, the collision actually being the fault of the clumsy little boy who had very unskillfully tripped over a cunningly camouflaged log that sprawled shamelessly across the entire breadth of the road the boy had been running along. It was all very unfortunate, all very tragic, a simple case of accidental bonking, but it happened to happen to the wrong cranium at the wrong time, for good or for evil the damage had been done and there was no turning back. For a small moment Gerald lay stunned, as did the boy, both of their rocky skulls having been addled by the terrific blows they had received respectively. They were both of sturdy stock and back to speed quite quickly, but what this implied was very different for the two beings. For Olaf it simply meant picking his scrawny body back up, wiping away a few tears, and resuming his unwieldy gait. For Gerald, though it was completely different. With a long and acidic string of expletives, Gerald soared into the air to crash against the cowering Ophelia with a resounding and extremely solid ker-thwack. Ophelia loosed a yelp of pain, and quite unlike her normal serene and laid-back self said a very naughty word and pounced in return upon Gerald. This went on for quite some time, and Bob watched on with the smug and self-satisfied air of one who has started a big ruckus yet has somehow avoided the consequences of such. This couldn't last forever though, in fact Bob's smirk only lasted until one of Gerald's wild and uncoordinated leaps went amuck, and resulted in the bonking of all three combatants. Few things can make one more angry than when one is just sitting and enjoying a good spat between others only to be pulled into it. So it was with Bob, and though he didn't have any feathers to speak of, if he did they would certainly have been quite ruffled. Now it was Bob's turn to screech in pain, and in time, jump with an insane and incomprehensible battle cry that struck fear in the hearts of all those involved in the fray, unfortunately including Bob himself. But Bob was already in midair, so all he could really do was roll his eyes rather nervously in a surprisingly cowlike gesture. Regardless of eye-rolling or not, the blow turned out to be the last of the day, for the shoddy and cheap fabric that Olaf's sweatshirt had been constructed of gave way, and all three combatants plus the dead rat tumbled towards the hole and the eventually on out as if devoured by some sort of burlap vortex. All four former tenants of the sweatshirt landed with a minimum of trouble upon the dirt road that young Olaf had been racing along. Meanwhile, the boy Olaf continued his rapid journey over dirt, gravel, and pink cauliflower. He was quite excited by now, and so he ran exuberantly, arms flailing at seemingly anatomical impossible angles, legs firing in comical disarray, and greasy, matted hair twitching uncomfortably in the wind, all the while oblivious to the fact that not only had his precious rock collection deserted him, but also so had Bucky the Rat. And while Olaf would not take the loss of the rocks too hard, a few sniffles here, new hobbies involving mummified reptilia there, the loss of Bucky would be one that would haunt him for the rest of his life, causing him to lose his job, ruin promising relationships, and eventually drive him to hurl himself off a cliff and into a roiling pool of toxic goop left by the environmentally irresponsible aliens from the Sirius system. But young Olaf could not know the tragic life that lay in store for him, so for now he ran on. Back at the point of breakthrough, three dazed rocks, and one very dead, very ripe rat lay strewn about what the reader has already recognized as the path that led amongst the cornfields to the village of Gnihton. Though Bob wasn't sure, he could swear he had heard the rat emit a very squishy "Oomph" as it had hit the road. When he finally could bring himself to take a look at his surroundings, he discovered that Ophelia had already fled, while Gerald had taken refuge under an exceedingly ugly cauliflower plant. The rat meanwhile, seemed quite content where it was, and had not moved one bit. The sun loomed directly overhead, and Bob found the heat so oppressive that he scurried under the nearest cauliflower, which unfortunately happened to be the same one that Gerald was under. Feeling the heat of the day, the humidity in the air, and the whining of Gerald's nasal voice, Bob slowly found himself overcome by the oddest sensation. He found himself closing his eyes and letting it wash over him, wrapping him up, dragging him down with its hypnotic undertow. His only complaint was the periodic bonking noise that occasionally cropped up in the background. When he came to from the most pleasant dreams, he found himself stooped over a small hole in the ground from which emanated the occasional yelp. Bob wasn't sure how Gerald had managed to fall down and become thoroughly wedged in a hole that hadn't been there just a few hours ago, but not wanting to here the explanation, Bob used his sharper side to scrape dirt into the hole, quickly filling it up. So that in a nutshell was how Bob found himself languishing along the lonely, nameless road to Gnihton. Bob was determined to make the best of the situation though, and so nary a traveler passed the area without tripping and falling face first into a cauliflower at least once, sometimes more if Bob was especially on top of his game. After a couple centuries of this, Bob was surprised to find himself growing quite happy, despite his initial discontent. Maybe he was just getting old, but nonetheless he no longer felt the compulsion to trip human beings at all hours of the day, in fact, two or three a month was all that he seemed to need anymore The only trouble Bob ever suffered was derived from the cauliflowers. Several of the foppish things had actually tried to ingest him for nutrients, of all things, and only quick thinking and a well timed kick had saved him from a nasty death at the hands of a particularly lithe and quick plant. Bob's father had been killed that way, and his mother had lost a chip, all due to a large rosebush that had sprung up on the side of Bob's childhood mountain home for no apparent reason. At the time of his father's death Bob had vowed his revenge upon all of rose-kind. Bob had also vowed never to be broken up and ingested by a plant, and he certainly wasn't about to have this done to him by a cauliflower, especially a floppy pink one. The year 1187 began like any other, cold to be exact. In fact 1187 was so cold, that even the corn-monsters were silent for the most part, emitting only the occasional snort for warmth. Traffic was especially light during the winter months, it was only in the spring and summer, when men and women would venture out to visit their distant relatives, that the fun really began. However, before this could happen in the year 1187, Bob had a visitor that would change him forever. It was early February, and Bob's first glimpse of the traveler was not a particularly good one. Between the cauliflower and the light mist, all he caught was an exceedingly long and well- groomed beard. As the unsuspecting fellow drew closer Bob made out in addition to the beard, heavy velvet robes, a large conical hat, bushy eyebrows, and a penetrating stare. There was a staff somewhere too, but Bob would remember this later only if he was explicitly reminded of it. The chap's name was Merlin and he was a wizard by trade. Why Merlin would ever want to go to Gnihton of all places is a mystery, perhaps he had had a bit too much to drink. The fact that he was singing a rather brazen song concerning a saucy barmaid named Josephine and a handsome satyr name Geoff supported the theory that he had a few too many mugs of the King's Finest. Regardless of the reason just why the wizard Merlin was staggering his way in the general direction of Gnihton, the fact remained that in his path was a rock named Bob, and Bob wasn't about to let Merlin off, wizard or not. Somehow, though, Bob calculated wrong. Instead of a slight bump, a yell, and a great thumping noise as was the normal procedure, he found himself suddenly tumbling along the path away from the advancing wizard. Now nothing annoyed Bob more than being kicked. He didn't mind being stepped on, didn't care if he was thrown, polished, or fetched or perhaps swallowed by a slobbering dog, but when it came to being kicked he drew the line. Snarling in anger he performed some near-miraculous calculations, dug himself deep into the earth, and waited. The results were rather predictable. Merlin may have been the world's most powerful wizard, but the fact remained that he was outrageously drunk, and upon contact with the glowering Bob, he pitched forward, caught himself on his staff, lost his footing again, and fell backwards quite squarely on his behind. The curses that followed were by remarkable coincidence the exact incantation for a rather nasty fire spell that unfortunately incinerated one of the slobbering, hooting corn-monsters that happened to be sleeping nearby. Now a remarkable thing happened when Merlin's boot connected with the braced form of Bob. Normally, Merlin's boots were endowed with a protective spell to guard against what had just occurred, apparently he had a few run-ins with other rocks too. However, the spell had degenerated in recent days, and being in the state he was, Merlin could not readily be counted on to go about renewing and restoring such things. So instead of repulsing Bob away with a magical force field, somehow Bob ended up tripping Merlin and absorbing the magical power of the failing protection spell. Later, Merlin would remember none of this. He would in fact, even conveniently forget the fact that he had later woken up with a terrific headache, stark naked, in the middle of a cornfield, with a large and particularly foul-breathed wampus cautiously sniffing him, apparently pondering his integrity as a urinal. Luckily for Merlin, the wampus finally decided that indeed he would work quite well as a urinal at precisely the same moment that Merlin magicked himself far away. As for Bob, he fell into a deep and unassailable coma for several years, even the passing of the Baron of Ebert didn't rouse him from his unnatural slumber. When he awoke he was a changed rock. The magic from Merlin's boot had woken something very deep, vast, and powerful within his mind. With the slightest effort of will he found himself hovering several inches above the roadway, and cautious experimentation soon had him zipping about as a bumblebee might do. One might wonder how the meager magic from a failed protection spell might bestow the power to fly, among other things. This is result of a minor corollary of the Law of Conservation of Magic-mass which states that quite simply, smaller masses needed smaller amounts of magical energy. Effectively, a spell that couldn't even protect a boot made Bob a wizard-king of his kind. Bob's time had not been idle while in the coma, for he had been visited by dreams of the most wondrous kind. In these dreams he would sit at a great table filled with the most wondrous kinds of food one could imagine, pebbles from the far off beaches of Mexico, quartz from only the purest of deposits, and of course bowl after bowl filled with the diced root of the wild rose. As he helped himself to these exotic delicacies, he would be revered and cooed at by ravishing young rock-girls. Later he might sometimes retire to his throne room where vast legions of the barbaric, uncivilized humans would bow down, grovel, and worship him as their new god. Those were Bob's dreams as he lay so inert upon the dusty road to Gnihton. Later, as he sped away into the crisp, chill night air on the wings of a magical breeze, those thoughts replayed themselves again and again inside his head. He had a vision, a dream, and none could stand in his way. He would have and stop nothing short of one thing, and one thing only: world domination. (to be continued) [-bambrose:bambrose@pomona.claremont.edu] % stoner adventures: "ston" I Suspension in or of sounds running through my fingers and hair, past closed eyes, through slow-breathing mouth and nose, the energy of life with its superfluous sonic insignia of existence asserting itself against the cold of the conscious night, the serpentine erraticity of signals tearing through the night air. The sounds of water almost: the birthdream of the wide and explainable beach, the place to lie lulled on the warm sand, sleep like ocean foam filling first ears and then mind. The blue sky the depth of an honest eye for miles above, around. The horizon pushed back by the potential, the expanse of it all. Sleep flooding. Green skeins of light from the terminal wash over the waves of sheets, through the greyed sectors of the apartment. Anaesthetic morphing. Day beyond the walls of sleep, the inverse of the function, through gentle rollings of a green light, or fluid, a medium to move through. Sleep takes the eyelids, the walls assemble. On my back in the feverish suspension of restless sleep. This house owns its dead and those of many other houses. I hear the bug-killer. Its resilient fluorescent halo throws rainbow concentrics into the warm damp night. The frequent frying of its deterrent noise reveals the fallacy. Somewhere exploded carapaces land smoking on concrete. From here they are electronic impacts, a grating signal shearing of life. A car clatters by, a scrabbling insect of falling pegs and levers, cogs abrading gristle steel, integrated motion of percussive perturbation. An abstraction of the man selling newspapers in the debris corner of Westheimer and Montrose: "You didn't have to create your own consciousness: this one already comes with a sense of an encompassing substance called air that moves into empty spaces from all directions, a conception of liquid solid and gas, a gravity, a visual interpretation, and a sense of death in language." A six-second pause; then rainfall like an exhalation of finality, resigned. The dream starts in the stainless steel numbness of cold contact, a birthing onto polished concrete. The sensation of being suddenly a point in a vast space overwhelms me, but then it fades out to the brittle throating of an engine, and the cold numbness turns to the concentration whiteness of knuckles over knuckle-molds on a steering wheel. The freeway fires straight ahead, laid down evenly, permanently, upon the spinning earth; from there the perspective spans at lightspeed, covering ground in every direction, stretching reaching stretching the eyes in each way toward the horizon. Black road, tan earth, with shades of brown rising from it in waves of dry desert plant. Dust floats serpentine over the frayed edge of road. The rest is slick, black, uniform - racing toward the horizon. My eyes ache from hours of road. Indetermination reflects every angle. But forward it goes. At the wheel my mind sees through shifting waves of time myself, sixteen, faster along some road, lonelier. But not as empty. There is none of the lonely determination; press on to the resolution. The road is empty. Coalescent fading, a sensation of a gathering consciousness, a brief vertiginous halt, and fall. Carcass bus borne and worn by the sunlight of long hours travel departs gate three real soon now. Rushing, groaning tearing symphony of collision within the headcage witnesses its departure. Sweat and a wet sheet drawn close in my fist: resting hard white knuckles on my cheekbone. Thick-drawn paste invades my consciousness of mouth, moved by a languid tongue alerting itself from a clench. Absolute desire to return to sleep which is only marginally less intrusive than reality. Can't fall asleep here and rise to sweep sweat and grime from me in sheets of spit-warm water. It is the fourth day of investigation, and things have become hirsute. The legal implications of computing follow the political implications of religion: those that understand grab as much power as they can, even taking it from those that fully understand. I leave the shower doorway to stand shivering in an apartment where fading floodstains reach from the pipeburst decay in the ceiling to the erased linoleum floor, living under a benediction of legal complications and consequences I didn't catch the first time around, a series of jobs that would insult any halfconscious primate, two relationships which now in time feel like the rise of phlegm and vomit in a monday morning cough. Supine. Between tiny isolated tiles water coagulates as I use the battered payphone in the closet strewn with aging longleg spiders: a wiring jury-rig takes pleasant advantage of the chaos of this ancient building to defeat the taps that can't not be there. Spike stoner buddy and friend of years comes on the line, stilted in a distorted answering machine message, projected in a sense of unreality as if mimicking the abstract echo of the tape: I recede from the phone, almost, before realizing that Spike's intoxicated warning of possible troubles had realized. Left a message for rendezvous. In the alley across the street the pureness of blue sky above his head made wino (567-68-0515) turn left and see a diagonal fill of darkness blueness at end alley, where a no parking sign seemed suddenly very white and shock red. I take my rig, a folding slimline laptop, and duck through the the barely-believable boarded door of an abandoned motel, concertina wire rising above me and around me, as if mimicking the barricaded signs of the freeway. These signs always become diluted, however, with the graffitti, and no amount of wire or light can save their reflective messages. Inside there are no signs: even the bank informational tabs have been ripped from the cash machine in what was once the lobby. I prop a plywood slab against the machine, and activate power with a few jump-transfers in another part of the building. I had scouted this before, readied it somewhat, and now used it. The cash machine has a full netlink, and could be exploited: soon I am connected, with borrowed numbers and code, and shortly afterward begin plumbing my sites. The crisis of being hackerminded is your inability to relinquish the attack. You find something, you explore. If you can't you become irritated, angry, frustrated. The impotence of suburban life falls upon you, and you rage in your box. Curiosity is the drive; it is built so highly like a muscle that it must be resolved, or taken to its inverse: fear, where you let the various curiosities of the universe operate on their own if they let you operate in the illusion of your own. The knowledge must be had, but the process is almost more important than the knowledge. The striving. And the net is an open land: there are few rules and many sites. So into it you go, hacking it as you go along, and in the end you have built a network into it of yourself: places you've been, code you've written, hacks you've accomplished, ideas you've set forth, all terminating in the variety of entities you're allowed to live, to create, with the skill of forging identities or borrowing them or even straight away faking the work of an identity, implying a human in the negative space. None of it verifiable. Into the abyss, a mess of nodes and data and security bulletins, and something can be pulled from it. Away from the abyss and you wonder the depths: you wander a representation of the virtual in your mind. Soon you are almost there. The idea takes you in, as the abyss of life promises less, sometimes, or as it promises more. In the representation there are answers; it is another world, but a mockup of this one. I enter this world hypodermically (immediate appearance of a fishing net let fall upon itself) and link through a few nonfavorite sites, requiring some work. Sweat has penetrated the lobby with its wet smell. Some hours have passed. Another link acquired: a security pattern which carefully traps all incoming protocols (divided into their packets: small blasts of information encoded) and rejects the nonlegit ones, but fails to check within the legit ones, to see if there's another protocol running under them. An older emailer graphic compatibility succumbs easily to this manipulation, and soon I have legitimized a link to the indexer machine within their pattern, an older workhorse which serves information to the more current machines (which are guarded as hell). The emulsion of air from a car door impact. Time: should go soon. Incomings, and on parole, there is no room for error. Breeze through the main file area, like a large square room, layout is sloppily absolute order and predictability. Hmm. People on the machine: sublimate this account to a running process, mask the human nature of its operator. There - wait, new directory. An oddity of systems are the more slight-of-hand security jury rigs, which use unused bits to place concealment restrictions. What kind of daemon am I running? So far just thought this was a timeserver protocol - another car door. Time to get out - anything left? this file, that file - one there, the resource. Append it to the active objective file, download. Linked, closing. Out of this personality, into the physical world to the sound of a window seal breaking with a pocket knife. Cash machine off, and through another but now physical array of linked rooms, dashing through the remnants of the motel. Overturned trash cans, furniture piled into obstacle courses. Through a newlywed suite: out the window. Up onto the hot punched metal of the air conditioner, and a brief moment of insurgent fear in midair, then the gritting foot- adherence of concrete. Away in a flurry of pebbles, over the fence, inverted to the phalanx of some form of law enforcement outside. & invoking one new crypticity. I find Spike on the way out of his apartment, carrying a box hurriedly from what had become a boxlike gap in the block of small wooden boxes stuffed however predictably with cheap televisions, plastic flamingos, dead Presley paraphrenalia and thin skein-cotton checkerprint curtains, all of which are flickering out a window in the wind (in a vision tempting of flame). In some rooms the muddled chalky bark of a news program could be heard. On walking into the park we ruminate over the conditions of Spike's arrest, as we had ruminated many times before over trivial items in the now: deals, days, loves, decay. "So what happened?" I mumble to the crunching of Spike's feet pushing gravel into itself on the path. White-grey gravel, petrified clay. The trash of centuries paves the futures of today. The trash of today paves the centuries of future. The future of today paves over the trash of centuries. "I bought from Sherman" (a complete stoner, a last resort when jonesing hard, in a stupor from days' abuse of potent Calgary Cross, a golden variety of dope from the middle east, shove with some force a floppy disk into an older Macintosh computer sideways, destroying the disk drive) "who's been selling to a fed for some days, and is too hosed to notice the difference, who then smokes me out with this guy" (sacred stoner ceremony: the transfer of trust in a paranoid world, the sealing not so much of doors but of complicity, good honest complicity and trust) "and I figure, well, he's okay. A little geeky though - I think I should have been more sober, or just thought more. I was either too stoned to think or too stoned not to realize I wasn't. Anyway, fed's in the bag, finds a sample, and Sherman and I are taken downtown, papered, wiped off, shelved, and given streetwalk with some costly bail. I used my fund at the antiocean" (Perpetual Life of Antioch County: fund he'd had some years) "because I don't care what the cost, I'm not going back in. Out here I can move, even if I'm living in shit. In there, I'm trapped in the fields of Hades, and I suffocate." A pigeon gawks past us in jerking mock gesture of surveillance, white-walled eyes flapping up and down past us, a thrusting of rhythmic terror. Spike shrugs a tired abstraction of apathy from his face. Birds wander across wide wet grass amidst crushed cups stenching of soft foamy lager, rich in taste as the dingy water from the city, paper plates smeared with browning lasagna, crumpled beer cans, and three sheet clumps stained uneven grey by time and water. Empty anger of being gut-punched and flat out fucked with what the child's world prescribes as an ultimate evil, the utterly "unfair," if that term ever had any meaning before obliterated as useless in itself by adulthood. A resort in the passive expedient of present. The trash can a shocked city mouth with its cutting rim against a morning felt, wetted newspaper, soft drink cups, a broken umbrella, a marriage notice, a divorce letter, a full roll of toilet paper, an empty pack of cigarettes or candy wrapper, a standard desk pencil sharpener, one blunt corner dented with blood, against a rotting B.L.T. Television screens light a row of suburban homes where children kick a liver down a street. Overhead the sky burns red at midday. "Smog," Spike sidesquints back at me, turning from above. The federal courthouse awaits us; also the court recordkeeper who can tell us what we need. At the window: "Hello. I'd like to check up on charges pending for a friend," then names given, which always makes me nervous, even though I live under many different names. Something about naming an object makes it known; looking into eyes naming you suddenly ties you back to everything. The animal jolt of being ID'd by a fed: "Good evening, Burr," and suddenly a shock of sweat up the spine. Instead smile: "Good evening, officer" and then show shoes how to shuffle. Through the window the swirling of the angry godseye around the sun. "Ok, I've found two records, one for each, and both are scheduled to be tried in Meekin County" (where the hell? it's a courthouse, we'll find a way to get there) "but the dates have run past, so there's a global warrant. I'd warn your friends." "Thanks. Why Meekin County? Isn't this federal jurisdiction?" Her glasses lower to reflect the form in triplicate. "I don't know," drawn cold voice, but not cold toward me, just lost. Glasses now reflect themselves. "Let me find someone." And so we are let into a back room, a small conference room turned office, in the federal building, where a small man with round glasses peers at us from under a sweaty brow. "God it's hot," he greeted us. "We're just here to check up on some friends." The obligatory of-course-you-are follows; if he asked for ID he could verify, but there is a sense of compartmentalization to this office, of ineffective efficiency. "Only 5 Too Many Days Till The Weekend," reads a wall sign, with interchangeable numbers. Today's Wednesday. His keyboard banging retrives me to the present. Papers stack in leaning collages of chaos toward each other; from three stacks he pulls cliplets of text from varying levels, collating in his roughened hands with short pugilistic fingers. "These are the files...wonder what they were thinking...well, you've been relegated to Meekin County, which is" (and a pause, in which we aid him in drawing flat a state map over the marker- textured table, battered with coffee rims from years of frustration past, stained with chocolate from morning donuts and any other enticements to bring one into a dark square barely within three dimensions at the end of the line in the courthouse building) "...not here...well, we are federal, so" (a return to the keyboard to look it up) "judas priest - they put you in kentucky." Kentucky? "I don't know," he giggles, a placed mask of flexiplastic over his mouse and nose (airline drill). "I don't know why they did it, but the only person who can change that is a judge. And" (reaching down to a cannister beneath him, twisting the knob with a tight blast of hiss) giggling, "I don't think you want to see a judge. I don't think you want to see him at all. Your friends might be in trouble, then. Wouldn't want to see them in trouble, would you? So what I'd do is go to Meekin County, and see what you can do with federales there. I'm just a small federale here, and I can do no more - even if I wanted your friends convicted, all I can do is inform you and perhaps take a confession - do you want to confess? I doubted not that you wouldn't. I doubt with a bold chin, because it's my job to doubt." Nitrous, christ I hadn't done that for a while. "Can I bum a hit?" Spike shanks a steel corner of elbow to my rib, but all he gets is a funny noise, and laughter from the little man. "Sure, sure," he says, handing it over. I inhale a bit, but not too much; littleman takes a hit. "You don't have to worry," he says, handing over a sheet with our pictures on it. "The clerk out front identified you." "So are we arrested?" Spike's voice straight up from behind me. "No, we can't do that, until you identify yourselves, which I doubt not you will not do. We really couldn't do much there except point you to another office, which is six feet past the exit from this building. No, we file you, if we wish, but we really don't expect much. Computer crimes, hmm? Problem is you won't be able to quit it. You'll be back in six months." "Well, we're not even convicted yet," Spike says. "So we have to go to Kentucky if we wish to be convicted?" "Your friends would, yes," eyes straightening to blue, recently tinged with laughing wetness. Ours with redness. Sky confining, hot, like the walls and foamtiled ceiling of this place. Artificial cave for dog. And another inhale. "But they might just want to go there and make an appearance." "Why?" this time I'm curious, moreso than Spike, who's already planning to blow it off. "We're allowed to dispense information and so I will. There was a recent addition to the lastest gangbuster bill, the one about custody? that says that if you can find local authorities to arrest you and sentence you, then the feds can't do so - so you get a lesser sentence. Local authorities are much more lax about computing crime. This was designed for gangs, so it'll have to be a two of you - you have to agree to dissolve the gang is the only catch." Dissolve the gang - that's not that hard, rotating in mind. "Problem is if they catch you working together again, there is a small matter of felony." This time we all - Spike, I, littleman - take a hit. "So we could cop a plea, lesser, inform on each other, dissolve the gang, and walk out with - what?" "Oh..." the littleman's smile gets larger, a big grin, with the moisture of his oilysweat and his eyes mixing along his cheeks over the moving orifice. "Well, our lawmakers are trying to patch this one, but they haven't yet. If you get there in time." "What happens?" Spike is unusually alert. "It was a little element we didn't think of. It was put in to appease to prison overcrowding people, and requires the attachment to the gangbuster bill for the ahem more stringent elements. If you were to inform on each other, and then dissolve, the legal system would give you one year's probation, by mail." "By mail?" Spike and I looking awry. "Yes, that being the one federal agency that always comes through. And they don't but it makes more sense to say they do. So you would have to mail back a statement of existence including proof of gainful employment back to Meekin County once every six months, total twice, for a year." Quizzical incision of perspective: "I don't suspect that will be difficult for you, seeing as how documents can created by those with access to the necessaries." Into my hands came the paper, flecking skin from my inside thumb and leaving blood on the edge of the page (no crime in that). Two previous arrests, one a community service dodge (non-malicious hacking: a faked bill in email to our state senate which declared a repeal of all sodomy laws in case of nuclear attack, caught by an alert local CO who found my line making too many calls "for human fingers to dial" at the court; I was dialing by hand, but i can dial like a banshee, still didn't know what I was doing) and one an offhook with the help of a good lawyer my father hired (when I was still tight with the folks - I wonder what they're doing now, after divorce and children gone - probably still alive, even, oddly I hope so, afterall), but then the ugly part: three pending cases, the most recent two days old, with noshows in various courts. I hadn't known what to do about these. Two of them were legit; the second one was not, an attempt to pin a local computer crime on me because I was known to associate with two of the personalities, but the truth was that I bought drugs from them. One of them went down with Sherman, too, and that probably blew the whole mess. Poor Spike. His cases were further complex: an ancient warrant for arrest for a decade-old drug-dealing case, and then the recent charge, which was growing in credence the further time receded the former case. Fuck. He's hosed. And a federal file already opened to resume investigation of the first, which means that we can't just delete files - there's human contact that must be made. A heavy chestheaving to reduce the stress, the impact coming on with the pressure of the air conditioning, like hands suddenly grasping the temples of the skull. "Thanks," I say to the little man, shaking his hand. You didn't have to tell us that. He smiles up with a brightness I hadn't seen. Spike shakes too. Over the cheesy office speakers plays another moaning womn pop song, an r&b washout with occasional highlights in the solo. I imagined some rented-warehouse studio somespace where a studio musicians, full of dreams both live and buried, gathered to help put out this cheeseball dreamer music, perhaps edging in where they could a personal touch, something done well in a flood of mediocrity, not as much to tell us they exist but to prove to themselves that they had. At least in potentiality. We walk through the gaping office doorspace while behind us inhalation sucks wind. The plaque reads "Joseph Smallish" in bold artdeco, and beneath it "Assistant Executor of Documentarian Confluence" in an uninfluential roman font. We walk into a thick brush area: bending live oak shelter with a floor of smooth cracked nuts, a shifting surface. Spike removes a scarab from his pocket, a bright fakery of imitation. He pushes the head aside to give access to a simple bowl in the aluminum. "THE CURSE OF KING TUT" is engraved in the metal. A small bag of thick green emerges into his hand. "Some Berkeley purple-assed kind," Spike says, explaining the origins of this plant in the mountains of Northern California, where graduate students had planted some dope within walking range of an observatory, and gradually mutated their strain to create naturally hideous marijuana plants: thick, ratty, weedy, close to the earth, but extremely potent, with heavy fat clouds of bluegrey smoke announcing its consumption. Last time I smoked this expresses Spike with his hands, quickly fastly surely loading the bowl, I was a void in myself, an oblivion of temporary incapacity. Our smoke fills the leaves and branches of the oak, netted with the tight- stretched canopies of the caterpillars. Persistence of a species made stubborn by its irascible will to live (a truck parked sometimes up the street from our house which had a glove inserted on the stalk of a running light, a spear tipped with a warning glow, with the end of the extension running up the middle finger, giving the characteristic expression of human will and resistance, a life-giving irreverence). Night lurked in the bruised air above the trees. Spike gave me a glance: we were not out of the city, had not yet removed our stuff: the heaping belongings roughly linked to provide a structural life, had not found any cash of note: a vehicle needed, dope needed, some time to lie low, needed, had not found a destination: some resignation, fatigue in it. We were to stay in this city, this swelling humid despair, where the rain and mold left dark streaks down the buildings and cars rushed back and forth from air conditioned monoliths to preserve their occupants from the incessant sun, for the night. This city. Aging of occupants current by occurrences, past events involving despair and expedient thoughtlessness by others disciplining the intellect to diminution and the fear to acerbicism, ages of solitude spent examining the affect of a place so much imbued with the spirit of decay. In the moisture of the air anything rotted, and the instant decomposition allowed anything fixed to soften in the center, a swelling contusion of sweetness and failure. Stark acidic the air swelling around the cab. Hot a fetid breath of some creature, the residue of exhaust in moisture adding a burning sensation to the air's touch. Spike a series of yellowed reflection lines against the burnt fading of the sun. Red malevolent, impotent orb, drowning in a melting slide into the dense horizon of the city. Nightfall: to stand hard against the lapse of daylight's safety, of the ability to have eyes. The dusk moments before the rules change. Must find a line to the unexplored cities of the net. In time. I cup a hand to slide into my pocket, pulling out a roll of bag and dope. Grand Rapids kind clears out the brain and sinuses. Called rapid for its onset and the day-following deterioration of the digestive system, grown in thick leafy bunches hanging on the sides of the mountains framing the rapids into the genitalia of a sleeping god. Noone would think to look there, tired hands holding the thick sticky bud. Squeeze not crush into a bowl. Tired energy. Our bowl the small virgin mary plastic figurine Spike had bought on a whim from a machine next to St. Vinyl's Cathedral which molded the figure while we watched. Before it cooled, Spike and Swiss army knife added some modifications, doubled and sealed when we returned: a thin steel tube bent and widened at one end, inserted from expanded mouth of virgin, a thick smile as if painted stubbornly with layered makeup, cracking like drying mud beside a road painted with the afterimages of whipping-past cars. In the interstice of her legs lies buried a bowl; on her lips mine go, sucking in the hot but sweet smoke, a curling warmth in the lungs like a hot shower in midwinter as a child. Before winter wasn't a season: before the air heaved through me with great cold emotion, in darkened silhouettes of apartments, watching the endless city race away from me in its expanse. Under a similarly large but infinitesimal expanse which reached from me to before my birth, a darkening blue stretching past the microcosmic planet, into the cycling of the stars and seasons, the flaring and dying of figures too large for me to even perceive them. Dwarfing our earth. Blocked-out patches of glowing purple recede and the smoke mutters from my lips, handing the virgin to Spike. "Kiss her," I say, laughing, the bitter rind of sunset growing on the edge of my mouth. He shrugs, and lowers the feather flame. The light moves down the spine of the statue, a bronze warrior bent to task in the center fountain. From our bench under olive trees we watch the shine fade, lapsing into the water, the closing peaceful darkness. We smoke more than our fair share of inscrutable crushing marijuana: our eyes blear, our fingers numbly tread, our giggles muted by our mumblevoices. Our hunger is another blank echo as we move down the greylined streets, talking above the fading hum of grime: about Less Than Zero, Spike's recent read. I abstract: "E. Ellis writes in the current to express the utter disconnection of his characters; they don't relate to what is happening, it goes by as if onscreen; they don't relate to what they are doing: they are either putting drugs or bodily fluids into themselves, but each is an experience entirely in the present, with no connection to the events of their actions or present or future; they have no use for memory, and never will; they have lapsed into a dissonant abstraction whereby they don't need to reach, to touch, other than as objects: reminds me of Catcher in the Rye, where he ends collapsing as he tries to reach however pathetically his sister with love, something he doesn't know from family where he is a liability or school where he can't interact between his actions and his self, barely aware of either, only of what is occurring, effects which he can't predict and connections to himself he doesn't understand. In the end his reaching takes him beyond the catcher; he falls; fall from grace. In the end of Less Than Zero nothing happens, the present continues, and the action doesn't matter, as it is a monotone going past anyway, the self disconnected." He refines: "That book sucks. They babble, because they have nothing to say. They have money and they exist. Fuck 'em. What do we need for that shit? Holden Caulfield tries his hardest, but fuck him too: who wants to erase all of the fuck you signs in the world? He tries, but he's just young. Soon he'll find a way to cut it off, to get back into life." I abstract: "He ends in catatonia." A bus passes with schoolchildren faces pressed to windows, mouths open in suction to mock us, but no laughter. A hallucination. Passing a bookstore window: a bible flips two pages open, and hangs listless in the window, the drool of boredom leaking from its binding. "Fuck them too," Spike drolls, and we pass laughing into the night, aware of the bus passing us in time, the aging of lives we would never encounter again in a city of numbers uncountable by human fingers. Stopped at a convenience store somewhere north of the turn we need to take. Freeways course by, sidestreets break for entrances to greater flows, which in turn flood larger roads. Much empty street under the noise of cars tearing the night in random patterns, but discernibly pulsing, with pauses between groups infecting the air with their abrasion. Over the rim of the freeway streetlights spread their punctual halos into the night, pulsing in turn with the crushing impact on the light of passing cars. The convenience store standardized: fluorescent spill through the gated burglar bars, windows stuffed with as much promotional poster and warning sign as can obstruct the outside world without suffocating the inside in cramped darkness. The inside light is also processed: neat curtains of fluorescence shade the aisles in quantified representations of each shade of light, giving a darkish hue to some of the packaging, a feeling like day-old eyeopen on speed, a false freshness of suspension. Smooth fat sharkskin of cop cars lowslung cruising past, smooth motions between lanes, quiet turns into parking lots. Behind the windshield sunglasses and relentless eyes. Almost as if hoping their randomness would create a new system. Spike and I get a sixpack of Miller Genuine Draft, with its updated apparel of quality appeal masking only the musky murmurs of decrepit flavor. We approach the boarded chain store across a wide lot, and watch shadow figures spread stalky legs from windows and run soundlessly across broad asphalt plane, overseen by the polytheism of halide lamps stretching firmly into the sky before the larger mass of stores. Our empty bottles, back into the sixpack, point to a decision: where next? We leave the bottles boxed and bagged against a sentinel halide eyestalk, to be discovered whenever society returns to that fragmentary praire of pavement. Feet often know when the mind is confused. We walk boldy, the way each can knowing not much will happen of consequence to the world, knowing that image defers the realization of the tight box one must turn in. Loud conversation. As if they have anything to take from us, or us from them: we're moving through. I could think of anchors, and ways to stay, but there's no real point. Dawn comes to the city eyes open or closed on the human. So move now, reach out, feel the freedom of having a life one can toss so easily onto the pyres rising as if from 55-gallon trash drums in the corners of the city that constitute its consumptive lurch at warmth. Open house on sixth street: a grey wood enclosure with each board sucked dry inward on itself, drawing back from those that surround it. The impression left is more fence-dwelling than house. Spike and I enter, paying folded bills to a mime with bowler hat in the door. He smiles at Spike, grimaces like a monkey, cheeks drawn back strictly, at me. Inside punchbowl and walking dim rooms of people. Punchbowl: I park at it, draw a saucer-cup of guava-tainted alcohol, incognito. Very much the sucking dry corners of mouths the alcohol, beverage. The starch abstraction of fruit hovers in the aftertaste, the foreground taste devised like most to conceal alcohol not accentuate a flavor, being several smokescreens of citrus simultaneously. The most important thing to remember about the universe is that it is infinite enough for all things to end in paradox. Even the repetition is excessively recombinant, misapplied in parallel. I once called upon a friend from a previous shade of life, another time when we'd been closer in proximity and mindset, our divergent paths having us diverted, and then left, sad, lonely in alone motel cubicles. He leaned back against the grain of the wood stained, its fibrous structure rising upward toward the fading kitchen light above him. His eyes were closed. The door had not been locked, and I had turned the handle to go in. Clicking of the bolt whisked from lock. (We have sublimated nihilism into being the structure, instead of dictating the structure above nihilism: refusal of relativism). The mind pulled clean from its fabric. "Ray?" "Abstract yourself. Quiet. Close the door. Close your eyes. Close your ears. Think of the focus." "Ray?" "There's nothing in here. A big open space with nothing happening. Nothing to clutter, nothing to order. No permanent dispensation to disrupt. Listen to the silence - or the lack of even that, the absence of silent sound. The absence. There is nothing. It is beautiful." "Ray, you're a burner." "Keep an open mind. In my space this is what I want. And this is the life! There's nothing goin here, kid, and I couldn't be happier." I made Ray a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and put it on his knee. Washing the knife off, I sighed: that week there had been many casualties of consciousness, such as Ray. On the back side of the door, which I closed as I left, was nailed a fluttering pink paper petal, crinkled, and a collection of coupons. What nailed them there was a knife. I went into the hall, and left Ray to his silence. I thought about Ray on the way back, through the graffitti-splashed bus, through the aisles of lighted signs, through the rows of parked cars, through the crowds suffocating in unison in their massings. Good luck peace Ray. At summer camp I'd felt like that: shut off the world, shut it shut it let me stay here. In the shade on my bunk: nothing much is happening here, if I be quiet, I can hold this, maybe. Then nostalgia for all else going by, for friends growing up, for lives moving onward. Of course my reticence was popular: one less incompetent kid to be a liability on the baseball team. Count off, go. I stand in the shadow of the treads of their feet racing forward: a dream of some fear later, that of the world tracking ahead suddenly, leaving one the only anomaly in a flat, empty landscape. A hard summer. The solace I had was riflery: we didn't shoot real guns, they weren't loud, and they'd let you practice on free time. Cheap Red Rider BB guns with rust filigree. BBs aged, copper turned dark. Blasting away at cans: Old Milwaukee, Pearl Light, Lone Star, occasional Budweiser. At first I had no grasp of the difficult short too-light rifle; I propped it with my head and then tried to eye through the sights. "Look, that's not it," from one of the counselors. I look up eyes rolling back to see him, unsquinting. He smelled often of cigarettes, was tall, with a flattened body and tightly rolled limbs sprawling out from it. "You're moving your head so you see the target. No matter what you want to see through the sights, they still line up at something, and that's what the gun's pointing at." I tried again, compliant, silent, moving in a fog of ideas, wondering if that's what I had done, and wondering often where I looked. "That's still not it," and then a firm but not mad hand on my scalp, moving my head still. "Move the gun. Whatever you want to see, you have to make it see." Kindness in his stumbling speech, hidden behind a few decades of conduct guidelines for teen males. Wonder where he went to; hopefully out of that place. Assholes running it: "Maybe that's not how Jim saw it, Burr. You think that he meant to provoke you, but maybe that's just his way - and then you hit him. If it were you saying that, I'd believe you, but it's just him." - from a camp leader, about Jim, the guy who would come up and take your shit from your footlocker, and then lie about it. If I were Jim, asshole would make sense. Camp didn't make sense: even the sports which had tons of rules had those rules modulated into the wishing intent of the players while I was there. I disliked games where you couldn't take the ball off of the field (past the out of bounds lines and into the forest, maybe) and had so many rules that didn't make sense, that held back - but I thought there were moments of brilliance, like the one time I hit a soccerball, and it was a good pass, a good solid one, once. For anyone else there a daily occurrence; for me a triumph. But the game goes on, and I saw that. My triumph led to someone else's score, someone who was of no mind to speak to me anyway. I got in a lot of fights at camp. Headshaken. Eyes fully onfocused on that, feeling of the muscles pulling back to focus. A door closing. Entry to a movie. This party is an echo of others in the splayed light on the wall, different colors deemed festive. Calorous. Wandering the drinktray. Going back to the punchbowl; Spike is armsaround cutely talking to a quick whiteblond-haired artist from the district over, a reach of grey houses with neon signatures lining angular windows. Racing after processions of characteristicisms with the same ambivalence I follow these drinks, cheap brittle-shell plastic cups with fluid that glows resonatingly to the dissonant lights: our conception of modern, our modern parties. How cultured adult we have become. Sodden. Fuck. Spike takes her off into the night, doors swinging shut like a shattering of saloon. Alone. The cringing damn of banging tables with shut fists and impotent anger. Drinktray. Like most other urban attachments this party holds to the icon of halfbuilt houses decorated sparsely, as if the lack of completion holds excuse for the lack of overdecorating. As if we can't throw out our own excesses, excuses. Wallboard shreds away to reveal the fish spines of structural housing, wood aged without fading grey, hidden by the staid bulk of the house. Posted against the skyline, posited against the night. Through these rooms half made servers tuxedoed and shortskirted women (torpedoed: Spike) wander in predetermined paths, implying a destiny over the past in their topheavy desertion, carrying drinks. I take another, cheap plastic drink a stem imitation of flower in its simple cupping, easy crunching as the empty pop-shatters under my heel. I've left a trail. I see them slick with the residue of beverage, spit, sugar, distinctively pungent (sharp smell like fresh cheese mold) alcohol: a hall trashcan with slack sides of reflective black plastic, the pilings of detritus inside, all lit with the neon surgings like one's cheeks inflate with light in the final moments of a decisive suicide. Into the void. Spike gone and I am left standing in antiposition to the wall, the slouch I should carry with my age gone, the dramatic uptightness in my stomach abstracted by the flood of artificial blood. Addiction begins when the reaction to the substance as foreign ends. Slurping something icy, cold with the seething warmth that spreads from impact points in the tongue outward to the mouth, the spine, afterwards. Aftereffect the impact of the image, afterwards. Time becomes disconnected like the body: the arms move as the legs should follow in a normally coordinated movement, the top half of time sliding forward on a meltingness not unlike the slurring of my vision. Wander into the next room, the arches of the doorway passing over me like a reflection of my cold, bent and wanton spine. Tables here, beetles clustered up close against the walls, disposed away from the doors. The stiffening smiles of quick glances of verification; my UPC code is read. The laser flashing across my body like the light in their eyes. Quick blonde faces, heart-shaped like I'm told they should be. You go for the objective, accomplish, and then get out. You go in, talk their talk, and then they let you in. You gotta play it rough, straight up just don't work. Cheap novels, detective. Dicktalk rough and tongue. Move into a chair shatterable plastic like the cups, two people on the other side. Antithesis of comfortability until eyes of Sean and Corporal catch me (Corporal is AWOL from position in some branch of the military, has been for some not sure time now, but he's kept the name, as it's the biggest joke in the world around here, probably except for him (quick sharp black eyes, dark roughcut close hair, bluntish nose and soft short fingers in handshake) who works daily as a computer tech of good repute although I've never seen him, nightly creates wild animated art, interactive figures that crawl in invisible boundaries of imaginary worlds superimposed upon fragments of this one, a buck fifty museum tour the best thrust of his heart-shaped hands; Sean is a stoner, came from some college, fairly wealthy I suppose although nowhere heading rapidly now) and then open their faces, those spreading like the backward overexpanding and whitening, breaking cup-top I will step on in the glowing pool of iridescent black water outside, sheltered from darkness with the licking lights of immensely breakable decorations from inside. I greet, salute and start talking, pausing briefly to be introduced to Nitcha and Heresia, two bright-faced too unabashedly pretty blondes. Neither real, but in this place -- talking about some structure of political imagination found in movies and architecture, enjoying the ability to make deconstructionist spaghetti and easily ripple off latinate obfuscatory language, complex intricacies, as a thumbsuck against the fact that for whatever brilliance I have, there is nothing that will thrust me past that wall of genius, now. Or keep hope and move on toward it, life is a learning process. So is talking with Sean; Corporal having moved in on one blonde, other is something of drawn back from Sean, but probably not aware yet that he's gay. If this were a cliche modern youth novel I'd have Sean take me out back and fuck me in a trashcan, us both young dissonant bisexuals, but Sean wouldn't ever give a damn about me except as a stoner. He's cute though. Sipping drinks, I of course pour more on, only then to run into the good virgin in my pocket -- not that, please. Too sacreligious; anyone have a rolling paper? Second woman takes out Bible and hands it to me, a small Gideon's, and motions tearing. I smile at her and she explains, a clear voice like white liquor, vodka. Vodka? Apparently it works very well, make sure lick it gently, laughing at my quizzical-doubtful expression, and then -- but it rolls well, a thick conical wad of my best Oregon Dark Recollections bud, a thickly purple swelling of coiled THC that wanders from the oblique corners of the darkness of the room to collide heartily with your brain. All hail at the altar of sacrifice. I pass it lit to her first, where it moves to the one next to her, Dutch name I think, maybe German. She tokes politely but also gets a stuffer hit; giggles at number two: wanted to stay sober to seduce Corporal, who should if he can. Back to that youth novel. Corporal must have been thinking vaguely in the receding corners of his mouth about the same thing, but with a shyish opening toothgrits the fatty and inhales thickly, his practiced lungs opening like the distant light of an overpass, from the depths inside. Depths inside: I am next, and shrugging smoke again, taking a large hit with a blink, causing laughter in blondes, and a grin from Sean. Corporal vaguely blows smoke in a dissipating trail over a group of young potentialities moving recombinant to the dance music. Next to Sean. My hand extends, and the depth of consciousness reaches out from beyond him to the walls, the filling of the room with an awareness of the sounds, the movement, the hot backs of dresses warm under spread fingers. Awareness before perception? Perception before conception? Erection. The second blonde (whitish blonde again) takes it in red nails, again stoking the end, pointing fire at me. I laugh. First blonde is afraid, but after the Corporal takes a hit, and laughs over retreating blue smoke that he's going to be nonfunctional immaculate, as he says (did you leave a word out? no, I am the king lizard, of cold blood and lust for heat), and then hands back to her the flaming end, she takes it and charges her pulse with its thick smoke. I pass the thick joint to Sean with an explanation that he didn't get a large enough hit, but the truth is I did, vague recession of. He tokes, smokes a drawn-out, and then takes more air into his lungs, socketing the curled smoke in the base of his lungs, filling his eyes with its redness in a slideshow of progression: I'm forgetting time, letting it pass my fingers past as I zone, staring out into moving legs, orphaned smoke and the soundless slosh of clear liquid in cups left on tables. Sensation of utter lack of movement, and absolute movement of everything not in motion. Luckily this way I can tell what's moving by the negative space, by what's not, that is, the stuff in motion not appearing to be. I've confused myself: my friends and I, not in motion, but sailing over the city and its alleys and streets gutters lined with tricolor rags of president's departure or notable noteworthy's demise; televisions color the streets with their bluish glow, sending flashing beams of it from quartered windows in time to the attackado bravado of machine gun fire glittering on other screens. Confusing consumption. Conspicuous lack of my presence on the laughter of the two blondes, stoned shoulder to shoulder backreeling. Possibly paranoia: accepted as a pattern of life by stoners, accepted more so in the houses they've left: aversion of the head, a quick turn to the world, invert the cheek. Accepted without question whenever said; options change, heads turn, motive to new sensations of stability. Usually on the basic level, as stability is only temporal when worlds flow past and are thrown away on a daily basis. Sounds very newspaper. Flourishing of the hand of one blonde as she throws it back, cocking it on her wrist to gesture something, eyes brightly red, the other almost sullen in her quieter, acquiescent stoniness. The bible joint long since burnt, memories introduce themselves of smoking the rest of it with Corporal, the others nonstoners with no ability to withstand the serpentine blast of that potent dope. Table circular spins in abstraction, sliding each face into focus when their turn to speak is taken: not in the life giving turns, but in the taking back of the turns from a sky that would otherwise allow them to dissipate. The passing of years. Life is many days, he said. Another drink lands in a lap. The party is breaking up: people are fragmented, drunken, stoned, and falling in and out of focus, their own predominance. The party is flourishing: more people dock in the doorway, move into the house, confront anonymous serving personnel, address nearest acquaintance and slide into rooms as if into mailslots. Thin, beautiful people: the classing is heating up. I am allowed in as an example of what I do, or maybe just for amusement. Paranoia: people are fragmented, drunken, stoned, unconscious. Network. Stretching miles of wire, stringing filaments of fiberopticism like fingers of nerves, reaching into and inserting, infiltrating, moving throughout the brief flesh of the society on the land. No conception of real location, brief reminders if wanted -- not at all. Yearning for the detachment: too much of people hung like smoke on clothes, hung on us, hung on tables, hung on ideas or connections, eyes bulging in glee as chemicals shatter the brain. Insertion of nerves, needles, wires. Wired. Still talking to the blondes and Corporal. Sean strikes a scenario profile against the darkened glass, a skein of mist laid over a corner of it. Stoned, stoned. Corporal is red-eyed and charming: bastard, wish I could be, inequitable ascension. Blondes in alliance, a similarity consolidation. Collusion of aesthete. Stoned, immaculate. We ramble through progressions of ideas that slant along lazy tapers of thought, dropping to a point into which a new idea can be launched into the conversation, although these ideas, too, are recycled. We are within a tight form, allowing little of the free-ranging improvisation of a stoner's inner thoughts, but affording easily the constricted and socially-driven illusion of communication that paranoia presents to the outside, emulsifying the stoner's passage through society with adherence to each of its conversational traditions of iconism. Speaking of Aims of Our Generation or perhaps Modern Art: An Incongruous Detour I am unaware that in three seconds this thought will slam into my backskull, slowing me for a minute before I search my library of unfolding tape loops and spew out an anecdote, canned in preparation at the back of the brain for a dead-air moment. When I come back, we are ready to leave. I sense this just about as we head out the door, about: we are all pretty well lit at this point, Corporal and I leading the bunch, Sean complacently stoned, everyone else tipsy, silly, or just stoned and drunk. Repetition breeds familiarity. Sean takes off in a subway car; Corporal and blonde one are making signs of itchings to leave, so blonde second and I take off for the tertiary location, a coffeehouse in midcity built from a beached freighter, towed inland in decrepit rusting condition, now bearing the nameplate "RED'S." Rough large cups of coffee, crushable croissant made big, heavy. Chocolate filled my option. My treat. We are there, I finishing my beer and her eyes red to match tablecloth. I am not incompetent, but things are going well; I shall not be surprised if I end up with her tonight, but will it matter? Tomorrow we leave, fugitives, and anything tonight then will be icing, but just icing? We talk about newspapers, how print comes off on your hands. She is engaging. Society magazine words I'd hate as a child, later in an advertising class deconstruction, later realizing iconism beyond the best urges of that endeavor. And now, having numbed & forgotten, reducing to common tokens of vocabulary, things to write in bathroom stalls or bad hard rock songs bawled out in oedipal angst. Composite of personality in some ways: some responses fit too much into the edge of expectation. Friendly, lonely. A kiss: light on her lips, a tongue around the inside edge of her lip -- how does this feel to you? is this what you want? -- and a deeper kiss in response to her hand pulling my shoulder. Further kissing, some hand motion along my sides, my hands massaging her shoulder and a section of lower back -- the game continues, having moved to one of the core moments of human interaction. A further kiss and we are off for the night, directionless as we leave without words, almost a clinging but more a grasping, like fingers locked to each other until they whiten, unbending. From Spike's memoirs: "He came into the livingroom of our cheap apartment and described a dream. He faded into the consciousness of the dream having sex, with the pleasure of that running through his body first subduedly and then intensely, alternating reality, and then losing it in a rush of feeling. For some reason he was under the impression of fear of ejaculation; he was sure as you only are in dreams that that occurrence would define the purity of bad. At the peak of his pleasure -- the last moment -- with some inscrutable woman writhing under him, he pulls out. Looking down he screams: his penis is a large writhing maggot, a twisted pupae with a seeming life of its own and a twitching consciousness. Then he woke up." "We decided to hit the road the next night, but we woke up far too late to do anything about it, and just prepared out money, stowed our gear. In Burr's empty apartment we ate burritos and I called to say goodbye to Nitcha." A continued narrative of despair: [continued in part the dos] /-------------------------------------------------------------------------\ | Ralph Christ's Law of Addiction: When a substance ceases to become | | foreign to the host body, the initiation of addiction has occurred. | \-------------------------------------------------------------------------/ [end of part the uno of the undiscovered country] CONTINUE (Y/N) ?Y ======================== the undiscovered country part 2 ======================== % [stoner adventures: cont'd...] One last night on the city: we stow our bag and Spike eats the roach of the joint we've just smoked. I get another drink from the remaining bottle we have, a liter of Night Train. Against the cold we are wearing only jeans and our thicker jackets. Spike's is a bit faded light tan soft leather with collar and cuffs of slick brown hide, cured smooth. Mine is German military, with modifications for bag stowing. Tonight the bud I've got is California long grain, known so because it resembles extended Thai -- longer, thinner buds, a bit dry and brown when drying, but incredibly potent. This one comes from Curracao, California, where a friend of mine owns a mushroom farm, and has lights in a shielded corner of the dungheap -- they grow mushrooms on cow shit -- and grows this amazing stuff, incredibly well-nourished. We split an ounce, and, after sales, I have a tidy bag left, free. Friends are a wonderful thing: they intervene in times of no or little dope, and they bail you out when you're in hell. There are people all over this country I haven't seen in years perhaps but could probably easily smoke out with. Not just the bullshit bumming of smoke: but smoke out, and perhaps pass out, even, and not feel as if an interlocking puzzle of ice had dropped a unique piece into the between of me and they. I like smoking dope with friends, but there's friends and there's friends. Some friends are good - Spike I don't doubt would pull me out of anything - and some are pretty good, stoner friends to have a good time with, but not the people who save you from the world, yourself. Reminds me of the gunfighters Earp and Holliday: both psychopaths, killers, but they knew how to love each other as friends and psychopaths, and never let each other down. Good stoners like that. Paranoia is accepted status quo in the stoner community. Beyond the obvious fear of law enforcement ("The biggest problem in this country today" - Skunk Jr. stoned altitudinal) there is always fear of isolation enhanced by the displacement of being stoned. It doesn't place you in a new world, just a different one. It's not a good nor an evil world: anything is possible; it's not just some silly happy flowerhair trip. Paranoia is accepted, not questioned. Dealt with. Stoners very tight in the end of the fear twisted tight like the end of a joint. Everything stained with the resin of paranoia; you can smell it. Brownish like pissstains on the wall of a small bathroom in a toilet of an apartment. I had known Monk for six weeks before I ever smoked with him. Some people are quiet but Monk is quieter. Not cold quiet, just quiet. As if entirely abstracted from the situation, but he is just spotting it from a distance. Something he told me later about the days of youth as we tried to shout through the hey's and whines of the bickering wheedling crowd stuffing the room. We left back door of bar, went to the umbrage of burglar bars on glass that sold us a halfrack of watery, aluminum-spittle beer, and then ended up in his flat, as he reffed it. We broke out beers and were talking about how much of a fuckin' mess the bar was, and were just bullshitting in general, when all of a sudden he asks I wanna smoke. There are about four seconds you can take for a reply - maybe less - but that time took the thoughts of time: I had known him for some time, liked him a lot for all of his reticence (I talk a lot, endlessly, non-linearly) and had heard a lot from him, and so said, yeah, after the perceptible delay but without hesitation. We smoked and talked, and learned a lot about each other. Monk got burned in a few bad deals, got tired of being looked at and expected, got tired of the grooves in which to be known, and then got tired of the fighting against that, when all it was was fighting, to him. Monk wanted life; he quit the stoner thing and hitched with the Navy. I didn't think that would work, and it didn't, but we lost track of him after discharge. Back to narrative. I get on the bus first, walking point in the city. We're going to a far district, a semi-sequestered subcity where most of the usual laws aren't enforced for reasons of inadequate and overworked law enforcement and liberal local government. I like places like that: non-intrusive. We don't cause many problems, at least fewer than the residents of the place. First towards The Pie House, a twenty-four hour outlet serving pies in a floundering ripoff of the House of Pies, a similar establishment. The Pie House is shaped like a large box with a traditional slanting house-roof. It is up in that roof that we go. We get off the bus and go inside. Past the bathroom is a door marked 'Employees Only.' Employees and stoners are often synonymous. We go. There's already two people at the table, Tomas and I don't recall, perhaps Aditya -- Adi from back when I would stay up all night every night smoking pot, lots of pot, and seeing what fun I could have learning about distant computers the old- fashioned way. Tomas is a Swedish friend who can compose odd modern music symphonies on piano and does so routinely, stoned on ferocious imported pot. He does not use a synthesizer. He finds them abominable from key feel to sound, and insists on a real piano. Of course he doesn't hide his dope in it: too expected. He stashes it in the metronome, a wooden pyramid, holding guard on the top of the piano. Nevermind that he probably needs a metronome as much as an old subway car. This room is here for stoners. The management here are stoners, and aren't too busy about hiding it, especially as it gets them business for the high school crowd. This room is also strictly up periscope: one hears the dope here, so to speak. Within ten minutes Tomas and Adi are stoned to brain rupture, and take turns on the phone summoning others. Eleven minutes means eight people. More dope passes around, Spike and I already loaded to the gills and afternoon is barely killed yet; but it is a rule in the stoner code never to fear how intoxicated you are or where you will go, to save the energy for focusing on how to do what you must. The truth unfurls like a sluggish, drunken tongue: no police action on us, some Hypnosian skunk and Crucifixion kind bud (grown in empty cannon shell casings in Jerusalem: affords cash to live during wartime, which there appears to be as common as rush hour) infiltrating the south of the city. One of the Stark brothers has some kind of money rig set up with the DA and knows when things are bad for any of us -- as if cop questions don't clue stoners in either. Over joints in corners of cities, landings of fire escapes, freight elevators, vans, crawlspaces, water towers, condemned buildings, square apartment rooms with rinsed white walls, bellfries, stained-whitewall bathrooms, parking lots, dumpsters, limousines, shadows of doorways, the word is passed. The light of the joint flickers with the words, which pass from stoner to stoner, whatever side of society they lee upon. Something of our structure seems to be known, but they can never connect up the clues: we're seen as a group of low-end criminals, when our society stretches up within the greater society. Out there in the mass of people, it seems like just a clump, a random hunk of humanity thrown into some space for temporary storage. But if you looked through the crowd you could see the stoners, and figure that's the crowd. It's connect the dots; through all the faces there are more orders than just stoners, more recognitions in the blurring rush of faces. Stanley has brought some Polka Dot Thai. Polka Dot gets its name from the contrast of the very white seeds against the burnt brown color of the rich bud itself. Goes down rough but is worth the pain. It's an incredible, lasting high, suspending you out over the crisscrossing electric lines of the night. Jonas reaches behind him and grabs a floor vacuum, upright with a snakelike hose and attachment, short, for cleaning stairs and shelves. Luckily the mouth is about the necessary size for that labor, and the attachment fits neatly over most mouths. A quick flick of the switch pumps a substantial amount of smoke through the water in the gut of it, filling the lungs more than sufficiently with succulent smoke. It's the longest-lasting electric bong I know. &interlude: hypothesis of incarnation of desensitivization, of dissonant expectation of obliteration, filtration and isolation, abstraction of perceptions. devastation impelling emigration, after exigencies of evasion from febrile discontiguous orientation, hallucination. regression to primary vocalization: egress of reification, ejection. indecision. The two stoners walked into the street stiffly, young men arrayed in brown and tan. They walked shoulder to shoulder casually, a short distance apart, without speaking but comfortable with this absence of noise, realizing a communication which did not require sound thrown at the maw of expectation. Turning down a side street, one produced a small stick of marijuana wrapped in paper printed with a notice of nonpayment. The other accepted, and they shared the joint, a distant orange star migrating between them down the alley. Down the darker avenue to a bus stop. The bus departed from the City of Despair to the Gates of Delirium. ("I don't know what will happen," he recalled saying, after years of being unable to remember, "since we've been waffling around in this place long enough for them to put out notice on us if they catch us on the nearby roads." Burr just looked at him, as he said, and said something like, "We can give them time to forget about us. We seem to be doing alright now," and resumed his locked stare past colliding molecules of air into the darkness submerging the passing terrain.). &&Transmigration. Leaving the flatly constructed hotel room took no grief. The walls were cardboard painted pimply with textured paint, the floors hard-packed carpet, worn into pavement with the passage of wet feet, endless feet, leaving in it a vague stench of bacterial decay, but strongly muted under suffocating purulence of antiseptic cleaner. Designed to stench like various spring flowers: their cleaners crawled the walls, mopped the floor, sterilized the toilet seat worn through to pressboard wood, falling with a hollow beat against the cheap porcelain, stained by corrosion in rings like a cut tree trunk. Our duffel bags sunk limply against a wall; we took them. My laptop rig had rested on the cheap pressed-wood desk; I moved it to safekeeping in our vehicle: we purchased it as we had thought we would from a lesser used lot on the southern perimeter of the city, a potential ripoff except for our stoner tactic of obliterating the salesman with some hydroponic Canadian green. We walked him until we found a car worth taking; we took it, paid a few hundred less, and wandered onto the road. Its soft sneakered tires nuzzled curb and muttered their way along hot pavement, a subdued exit. It is an anonymous Ford, made with Japanese help some time ago, more than a functional box only in its advertisers' minds. Projection screen televisions everywhere play the commercials, and we use them to time our returns to the bar, oblongs of light under dark wooden obstacles in the shadow of the place, a cave-ish concealment, retreat from the outside paradox of enlightened overload. Finding another hookup isn't hard here either: most businesses have several links, and sometimes one can be patched to, as the case of the air conditioning repair shop I crouched behind, in the protective walling and stench of a dumpster, free to type even as police cars cruised within feet of my hiding place. Stars rotated minutely in the window of the absent dumpster top. A/C repair personnel treat netlinks like power cords and put the hookup on the side of the building; some thin network wiring, a converter and I were now prowling the ranges of the net. First to set up a convenient, secure jumping point - there to another site, from there another - now looking backward, scanning, to verify that I'm not noticed. Now to that other site - and the surprise of the night when it's not there. Not not answering, but not extant. "Judas priest," I whisper. "What?" - Spike, in the far corner of the dumpster, a lighted end glowing with his breath of speech. "That site vanished," I say, manipulating deeper into the network, losing the surrounding world in my absorption. I had stowed the file in several places, several sites I could use with impunity, but only one had it. Retrieve to local machine - a large file - and bail. "Going going gone now," I spit at Spike as I'm over the top of the dumpster. He follows; we are gone into the adjacent field when police cars hit pavement at high speed, leaving sparks over speedbumps, searing to a stop where we were. "Out - to the car - fast," and we are into the night, another pattern of lights smearing into a massive intricacy of them, all in motion, their tracing paths overlaying each other. Parking our box we go into the cafe, and it is here that I realize how stoned Spike and I are. When he looks back at me, body half-turned from the register, I see the fringes of wet redness in his eyes, a sweltering glow rising in them. I ask for a coffee and skip the danish: more cardboard, baked with sugar to conceal. Idolize the iconization: beer ads in more cardboard, cardboard breasts pressed against the window. Spike gets a danish. We watch traffic, as if in a seventies movie. Traffic gets lost in the diffracted orange-brown refraction of twilight as the city caves in for the night. To where? Spike nibbles, then devours, folding the danish into his mouth. We are unfound, now, but their searching takes them through the lights and links and lines of the city, scanning for the hint of our voices in the refraction of the multitude. All we have are our voices. Pass calm. Lapsing noise of cars passing, soft fading. Along the aisle of shops lights fade, metal gratings clatter to rough cement floors, inches past the smoothed threshold of the same substance. Night never fades; it crashes silently into the periphery of vision and then intensifies in darkness. One can tell as the contrast of the lights rises, and then everything takes on the slick obscured perspective of night darkness. Not really a photonegative of day, but given enough time to get used to it, an inversion of the day: release, disconnection. "...Harvey, don't call me that," intones the waitress, and slams the phone down. The drum solo has ended. We are the only two left, our plastic cups suddenly brittle in the outside light shining through their rims, the old man with heavy thick slab fingers poked through his cup mumbling to himself the other there. Her black phone encoffined, she turns with a contrast smile: we tip and leave. We're into the night. It isn't unlike making love to enter the night: it takes a push out the door, the initial shock, confusion, blindness, and then absorption. It reaches fingers into you from outside and draws you outward in extension, then allows you to resolve yourself back into a mixture of night and self. All are one in the night: the faces coming don't have stories until the cigarette is lit or the awning selected for rendezvous. We are one, Spike and I, a moving phalanx of two dodging telephone poles as we hunt out safe lodgings until we've had our final fill of information and celebration. As if we were celebrating. Life is a fishhook that turns in space, however, and the celebrations of past days are often funerals, so a grim bracing party might be a dawning, or even just nothing, a continuation. With no deterioration there is amelioration, as this city is a slide of shale into a fetid pond, a steadily collapsing conception of decay. Into the back door of the Cranberry Cafe, a slightly upscale place of new red brick against the crumbling steady exteriors beside it. I balk at first: this is a cop territory, the smell of their urine thick around the poles and doorways. Into a back poker room, the attendant thinguy young cop takes a pause ducker into the door. Bit of cigarette smoke follows the answer, an enticement. We return offer (personally, I am not liking this: cops and dealing with cops is suspect as ordinary deals gone wrong are a walkaway, whereas with cops there is always the twist of adder possibility: arrest) and receive our bid, a Malibu in the parking lot. Buttocks to bumper we wait, Spike with a halfburnt cigarette waved in the air, lit end away from the building writing gesticulations in the sheer expanse of night past our eyes. Minutes later we have our cop, an older guy with smoothed brown hair around the crown of his head, a small belly building. He hands us a bag, but its fresh scent is uncoiling light and sinuous in the air toward us. We pay. Goodnight, gentlemen, in that soft southern accent that says college, politeness and beware: a turning of soft white mouth inside lights up his eyes, his canines stretch toward us. Spike smiles, and we back away. More bright eyes in the night. You can never see them. Arenas open with each alley, stretching past us in a line of conflicting images, shadows colliding before fading degrees of light, the red eyes of cops slanted cynical from the slow slowing cars that roll past. No slow rolling: after something, their wheels pour ahead on a drumbeat, and they are sliding past, cutting the night. Nightsticks for the dawn. Shadows which were soot on the walls fall into limber motion again. We ride. "Ride on, ride on," sings Spike. "Looking for a truck..." he murmurs fumbly. I agree: there ain't much more to do sometimes. So you go on, you move on, you go into the cold night and you sing and drink and smoke against it about it and then keep going, because if in the back of your mind, there is something at the end: if it is art or it is love or it is freedom: if that, then there is life in your moving forward, and not just drudging reaction and frozen-fingered refusal to die on principle. Principle, hell: a line of ideas; life is many days, but are they good days? I just look for something I want to be in a few months, and keep it in mind - something a headmaster once frowned upon, literally, his mouth downturning into a bitter lemon smile when I said I didn't like rules, but I knew what I wanted, and what I wanted not to do. He said I'd learn to like them. I never got sense of it; Spike, who has been to jail, says that sometimes those words have a truth to them which makes you feel like cold concrete sweating in the basement noone goes into, except every six months to throw down strychnine to kill the rats in twitching potency. Carnival House: a massively failed carnival ground left for exploration into which opened a bar, and then a series of underground businesses. Almost anything available there, however absent ascendant antagonism celebrated. The penalties of financial failure the burdens of those who pass, and those who squat and stay in the space created by the ruins become possessors of the night. The area wasn't safe enough for a carnival; now we have a festival. Lights string angular through the place, weird Christmas gig setup. Spike thumbs up at a few. I guess I'm hazy from the blunt some streets back, a quick clutched smoking of the honeydew bud we'd gotten from the pig. Erik has joined us; I turn to see him behind me, grinning a bit at me (realizing I had no idea he was there? realizing I'm too stoned?). Into the carnival. Good cover until we can hit the road, but more good cover for our stressed brains. Spike is way fucked, legally speaked. I'm not so bad off and I trust in luck: perhaps out of all the papers there, they'll lose mine. The carnival: People are passing out drinks of odd sorts, and I infiltrate the bar for a beer or three, bringing back two more unconsciously for Erik and Spike. Reflexive. Arc lights whiten the sky above, in which the dogfights of insects leave trails like northern lights through my vision. Everything is reflex, once you do it enough. Eating, defecation, micturation, conversation, intonation, appreciation, evaluation, fucking. The carnival is a massive reflexive swirl of humans, which wash through buildings and lots and fill the night with their noise and light. Welcome now, in a solitary age of seconds strung together as telephone poles are connected across vast fields and valleys. I brush hair from my face: I like Spike a lot as a friend, a better stoner than a stoner friend. Erik's a stoner friend, the scrawny Viking, and a good guy, but is not Spike. He smokes a mean binger however. Ramble on. Spike has saved me from my share of dangerous days and starchy, disconsolate nights. There are disposable buildings, ugly plated steel fabrications, to clutter the horizon, and reflect the neon and traffic light, and rust archly against the bluing sky of a Saturday evening, but the superstructure of Carnival House stays below ground: an intestinal complication of tunnels and ballrooms, storage areas, bars, garage parking, and video arcades, bathrooms: converted now a milling of gamble-holes and dark corners. The cops don't have to notice, and often don't, until there's a bill missing in a monthly pay. I suppose moles die for that. Amazing the level of humans searching through the grit on the floor for pinprick drops of salted gold. Grit rides our feet down the serrated metal stairs. Clattering of heels, even mine the ever-sneakered. Into a larger room, a gymnasium of conversion: filled with people: unceasing blur of melding colors pulled inside out to bring up faces, and then to vanish again into the gleeful boiling mass, hands and drinks and feet awry in scattered directions of randomness, Spike and I drawing up chests to wander through, Erik having lapsed into the rugged churning morass of people. And it moves on: not blind, but not having an eye, just motion: when on one side there's a fight, or on the other someone vomits, the mass swerves back the exact opposite just as forcefully. Not even noticed, as conversation, seduction, peregrination, prevarication, and perpetuation flogged the motion of the crowd, seduced with their bulging eyes and crotches, their saliva lurching for liquor or flesh, their peristaltic shock waves spreading through their wanting faces, their dope-hungry gleaming gaze probing the night, the crowd. Spike pauses. I recollect turning to speak to him, and then the blunt and beer and heat of the motion seized my head. His face blurred away in a smear toward the lagging corner of my vision, and there was a soaring noise like the roof sucked off in a twister, and then I was reeling in the motion, lost under the glee with dark bile creeping behind my eyes. Another spin, a drink spilling, thrusting out a splash that soaks instantly into stained red carpet. Her face half-skeletal attacks mine; swings into view from below, leering happily, takes me by the mouth. It's the girl with the H name from nights before -- when? mind rolls into bile unconsciousness -- or is it her? Is she aware me? can't even tell, conversation a blur from me, drunken straightforward from her: stagger back to grin realistically, end up with her in concrete- stepped handrail-supported stance in back stairway, my tongue and hers heavy silvery smooth-muscled beasts holding each other in their strength. Hands sliding and shifting; a drill older than my teens, something only refined in adulthood. A massive blur this is. It would be a shame, she is cute, but I am not of the presence to. Leaving tomorrow, no need to leave wreckage of a perhaps in a clutter of destroyed potentials. In the hang of lust, our hands drift apart to come together on the car. Cold metal, buckling under our movements. Her car, tucked in the lee of a corner of cyclone fencing nice a condom with its artificial skein, her warmth grasping me sliding downward a touch stopped, resumed, and I'm on top of her, moving forward with the rhythmic slowness of the night. All of this time has taken; where are we lost? Entering this world of heat, a stretching sash of warm flesh, her body pivoting on it, turning curving against mine. Her mouth opens, hot also. The sigh that runs down my spine and through this weird stinger I have sprouted, into her flesh, the wound widening. Tears in my eyes, a delirious descent of twenty or thirty narrow reflections of the carnival in my sight, shimmering with hallucination. She begins to suck in air faster louder, ...she takes breath with my thrust, she hold it drawn strict into her lungs, fingers rushing down my back. A sigh taken too quickly, a choking intake, her pulling back, pushing carseat in fear. I swing my head down pleasure taking into something new an element of useless fear. Abstraction of vision in a sharp shot of moment as I see squirming in my crotch a footlong maggot, squirming agonizedly, burrowing into her, maybe mewling I can't tell her scream. Not even her: she is gone, but the maggot is there. The rotting heap of the city writhes with its minions. The eyes of living inside, cocaine off the mirror and then the reflection twisting, the carnivorous maggot chewing through all that lives. The piles of trash twitch alive, and curl around the nearby humans like adders striking at the wrist. The corpses of the dead burst; the coffin lids split; maggots roll upon the earth, crawling from the wound- graves of the deceived, killed, buried, and lied after. She is gone; it is over. Am I hallucinating? All I see is maggots, the crawling of decay, the appetite of putrefaction. Choking in my throat: fear or vomit, and then, beneath my skin, I feel them spawning, moving, too near me, chewing me into trash like the rest of the city. A violent cough vivisects. Scream, dash, chaos of angular falling outward of door, gravel roll and recovery, back inside: must find Spike. Must have collapsed in sleep. Across her backseat. She has gone, some hours later. Somewhat sober, still in dangerous hallucinatory sliding swimmingness of reality. She is gone. This was more an impact than a touch, this was more lost than gained. Hide any evidence on self, don't want to hear it from those around me, who might chalk up a mark on the wall somewhere for this exploit. Not really an evidence excepting doubts of reality. Spike? Reality. Must move. Wonder where she went, a stretching of an emotional want into the night, a car door open as if she'd run. But peaceful here. The beast must've been a dream, or a hallucination. Or was this a dream? Whose car is this? Transient, like the haze of memories rising like smoke off the forehead in morning, the break of fever, the loss of recall. Into sanctorum: sudden yearning for Spike, my friend and stoner buddy, beyond the stilted starch uselessness of drunken babylon. Slamming door into the night, where the yearning draws, but instead I find a hollowness and longing. On the freeway above lights rush by, destinations found, links made, connections accomplished. Here I stand with life rushing around me, dust of gravel soaring around my feet. There goes. The emptiness and loneliness rushes in with the force of innumerable such yearnings, rushing from the vacuum of night to me, sucked from void to void, the painful begging of my soul succumbing to the terror crouching compressed in my throat like chancreous resurging alcohol. Charge into the night, scared like the man shouting into the dark and empty room to dispell demons, to build his own fear so that whatever demons await him won't disturb his peace of mind with their ravenous teeth, empty gnarling bellies, and yearning claws -- the gods of emptiness hover above, into the castle, into the carnival, to find Spike. Through scuffing gravel, desperate eyes: Spike, Spike, Spike. Hanging pause for breath, backward feeling for rail like drunkard. Wait for silence, continuous roar. Oh fading throughout me like this up straight to wait. Fixed wristlock on the railing. Darkness can't be seen here, foreseen. I am wasted am I so? in the breath of darkness on the skirts of this place. Falling faces inside. Step, fall: face in papercup, stench of stale tobacco and wet paper, latex. Pull back, up, shake hair and move slowly into center of this mess. Too many people stagger upfront sweaty hair in my face, head against my forehead. God, a drunken apology. Eyes blink signal move. Did that just happen? A vomiting of narrative. A loss of. Whorls of sunlight splintered are antlike in my eyes. Stinging stare away from light, move onward while camera eclipses and swells like some cheap artschool film. Lurch, stomach. Falling slops of spew into a flowing industrial trashcan, grey beauty of stolidity against my onslaught. Tirade of like words. On top of beer cans crushed and torn ties, broken cummerbunds, condoms split like gunfired balloons. Food rotting in there too, now there's some digestive juice. Fucking threw everything out. Back to the vortex: Spike locator. Interlocutor. Can't see a thing, moving onward. Would be in deep shit if it weren't for people falling against me falling against them. Jerkstop coordination, thoughts. Fad argyle against my cheek, brush past the jacket with my hand down, could have gotten his wallet. Laughter. Phones hang from the ceiling in this odd room, swinging over my head, pendulae or pendulums? Hate latin, people dance in clothing with reflective tin cloth as part of it, big shiny bands around their guts. Full guts. Laughter. Stumble down hall past tables of gambling, through back room full of some goods in crates, over couples fucking, one fading whinnying moaning scream muffled by pressure. Don't fall down that way man. Walking straight across slabs of stamped metal. Steam from somewhere, fading of the night into the dark abstraction of morning. Head still damage. Back into the main area, must find Spike. Loaded like a freight train. Sweetened breath of vomited wine. In an alley of hamburger wrappers, cigarette packets, plastic lapel flowers, swinging Christmas tree air fresheners, toilet paper, gold teeth and a plastic raincoat torn on the ground. Insurgent fear demanding flight. So much for the cavalry. The lot edged with cars spinning around, searing the night with the noise of their burning tires, swinging into each other with ferocious jarring collisions. Thumping of tires over barriers, maybe bodies. Who knows? Gunfire also from above, but scattered with quick giggly noises as if above taken-in breath from the white face of fear. Woman pushing past my face, eyes silver glass above grey smears of dust on her face. Breath is wet heavy rot of the streets soaked in gin, cheap oily vomiting waves. Must awaken, away. A side of the inside building collapsing in dustflow of cheap plasterboard. Dance music pressing my skull together, insistent beat entirely linear. Our silence is so often from fear; we learn from the confessions of others. Giddy woman's laughter. Bodies shrinking against each other into the tainted darkness (edged rancid with colored glow). Exhaustion hold. Cough. On through the beating pulse, mechanical thrust knocking over heartbeats all-ahead on expediency. Into the bar, down in a corner table under red neon seamstitch of black and white room. A police car. Withdraw cigarette, limp crumpled. Smoke hesitantly, use time. Soberify. Must have been drinking more, smell like six types of liquor. Cough. "S'nomore 'bout th'life? S'getting it goo n mhhnth." "Mack'n gone? Ssshea beh." "Guvmint fall'n. Gunna d' hod. Killa th' bnhh mmn, duth inna thnth. Hunth." "Mos' bood gunthnth. Mockva munthuth." "Gunna ahe's'snathmmnh." "Gunna." "D'th' mn th rhtht e nnthnth uh hh a'm'bl." "Munna guth." So the police are looking for a dark haired drunk man. Several thousand here: there he goes. Wonder where Spike went, stomach turning over uneasy again. Vertiginous outbreak, man. More intoxicants not a good idea, but jonesing hard. The drunk worn off anyway. The drunk run off anyway. From the face of reality: ...and the difference is? No difference engines here; a large disposable blur. And I? In this crowd, I - a syllable or an organ, perhaps the latter selling in Vegas. Fake fruit display on bar. Fruit flies: real. Mango'll do, will fit. I eat carefully in the dark. A woman at the next table laughs, perhaps pointing. Ignore. Dark silence waits in the corners of the room. The ends of the hall. A thousand paper napkins pass, carefully wadded and tossed an empty booth over. The pit shines in the redshaded light. Pocketknife a beautiful object: carving the pit, carefully, using the thick shell for my work. Done: the pipe. Feeling more clearheaded, still lost. Sobriety isn't the cure. Neither is this, but sustenance. Loading half a bud of American Sigma I kept on me: dry, potent pot, sweet-tasting and green. Taste was just that, sweet. Light hit at first, rising in waves through the chest and head until suddenly the earth is a very faraway place. Also stores well, hence the backup bag. Loading a bud is breaking it in half, putting half carefully in dish of pit pipe. Smokes a little rough, but good traveling device. I take hard fast hits, sucking tightly into my lungs. Clears my head. Location of Spike has suddenly become important. Speaking curt sentences sans articles like a cheap paper detective. Better start carrying or I might get rubbed out. Haha. Searching the arcade, searching the other drink area, a more practical establishment consisting of a vending machine loaded with Night Train, Thunderbird, King Kobra, and a few I'd thought were banned. Probably not: just banished. Thrown away. We throw it all away if we can't hold it, if we can't hold on to it. Baboons shrieking shit-throwing at the great cat, its eyes glowing somnolent, malevolent in their darkness. Context of infinity. Some tables scattered around, bracelets of their iron legs caught in the careless dance of trampled dead. Leering face drawn over original manufacturer's logo; now beyond loyalty of that sort. Looking for a drunken darkhaired man? Cops? Or were they looking for sunken dark stairs to bunk? Halfasleep to the left; rouse, shake, grin, sort of leer. Mug thickly at this concept. Spike moves in faster than slow motion and follows me from the place, thinning in the morning light as we walk down the broad red carpet, our feet flicking flattened paper cups and torn lottery tickets. There is enough blue in the morning to light as way as we go. Spike pulls out into the bluebacked vein of a street, and tires peel down flat hot lane. &null. (change of balance muffle rotate lost dark tea-smelling colliding of dark angulars, dark blue and dark dark going through some light area female talking drifting haze of winter shadows an open window the breeze beyond it picks cloth and tall grass, whipping intricate rhythms drift never rotate sudden-falling inspection). &&resume. Footsore in the back seat, rising with the stiffened consciousness of ending sleep. Spike: where are we going? "Been on the road since midnight," is all he says. All he'll say. Ah, right to the town of justice. A burnt blunt rests a severed finger in the ashtray. How we stay up all night. I once talked to a trucker who told me about been told with condolences of factory delays, made to wait, and been told that his cargo still had a pressing destination, time schedule notwithstanding. At a truckstop they have solutions, and he moved on with the liquid thrust of methamphetamine, to return to his home site and have to inject his bladder full of clean urine to pass the next day's drug test. He used a turkey baster; the nonuncommon resort of the desperate. In the absence of a presence, the grasping forces of evolution take charge: whatever means needed. Whatever needs mediated. Something of that form. Never understood government, or logic: far too many terms with hard angles to them, uncompromising pre-contradictions. Desperation follows us on this road. It rolls behind us, dodging the broken yellow lines. The desperation of a city collapsing like an overburdened landfill, shifting weights of flattened paper, rotting food (mostly food processed uniform, taking the texture of taste to an icon), broken toys, smashed cameras, urine-soaked newspapers (colors colliding in a staining melange), golf videos, promotional pamphlets for politics and luxury cars, the oracular works of Gideon, shattered punk records and umbrellas flippantly pulled into inversion, their spiny vanes sticking incongruous over torn cloth. If trash doesn't collapse over the streets, flooding them: the last garbage collector's strike left mounds of bagged trash rotting in its enclosures reaching to second story windows. The same day a Papal Bull came out blaming the use of condoms for the excessive trash; the strike was settled two days later with the use of force, the government opening fire on the trash and igniting blazes of flatulent decay which covered the city in its choking wrath of smoke, driving the garbagemen and everyone else back to work where at least the airconditioners filtered the worst of it. This is a city with assiduous dedication to nonpermanence: everything is used and deployed strategically half-over the rim of a public trashcan, as if condom, with the grease-smeared "Keep Our City Beautiful" placard half-removed by bored teenagers with can openers. Condemned signs fill the windows. We had hit open road: miles of grey-black strolling road under the kneading grey clouds of future horizons. A glass company truck with its infracted rack of mirrors passes us, making us pass it by in reflection, its driver oblivious. With Morgue: Morgue the demented skier, a collector of fine objects normally called trash, gaudy lights, cheap mirrors, Jesus figurines and Elvis statuettes. His apartment was visible for miles because of the unique setup he had of Christmas lights, mirrors, and pinwheels and fans. Lights flickered and pinwheels spun, throwing images through the mirrors around the room and out the window. The array was so confusing and disorienting that people would come to stare, sitting bug-eyed on the pavement looking up at his window. Most of these were normals, not even stoners. Inside we smoked with impunity as the room was set up in such chaos only to reveal movement and not the specifics of said movement. The flinging of my arm changed from a trajectory upward to a shower of greens spiralling out of the left corner of the pane, ricochetting from the ceiling mirrors, and finally dissipating in a burst of fractured color in the center of the window. And still they watched. One night his room caught aflame and vanished in a swirling conflagration that defied the cheap silver beauty of his trash collage: a puff of black smoke squirted from the rear of the building, with a final grunt as the generator bolted on to power the phones to call 911. Morgue lived in near- poverty, spending his money on dope, and often found himself renting from landlords glad for the extra income over the tax shelter they'd built out of previously-condemned buildings. Like pre-owned toilets: no matter how you euphemize, trash is trash. We found him later somewhere on route 66, living amidst the glory of classic American dreams. His place was a mobile home with fake red brick side sitting alone in a field of tall bleached grass and scattered rusting ribs of equipment. His mattress took up a corner, leaving stark fake-wood floor stretching to the centerpiece, a steam engine mockup of sorts, a small-scale version of one of the permanent pumps that carcass the Texas countryside: a raven dipping its beak into the black well of oil. Character- istic rust and lichen had been removed, leaving a faded but identifiable red, flat and broad in its tone and years. "This was once an operational pump, on a small scale," Morgue (Morgan is his real name, but after one of his hypotheses led him to grow indica using seven fluorescent lights and a microwave dish he produced pot he named after himself, called Morgue, which gave one the feeling of utter detachment that being dead on a pull-out slab must provide) said, but broke his lips into a smile and explained his conversion. The pull of the pump pendulum drew air past a combustion chamber, dragging thick pot smoke through a chamber of heated water (heat provided by an adapted coffee maker) and then through a stack filter of iced water, chilled by the innards of a dorm-room fridge of his from past years wrapped around the pressure cooker casing that was this final stage. Carefully taped and sealed to this end of the machine was a vacuum attachment with added foam rubber, to fit around the mouth and nose. Nose? "That's the beauty of this one," Morgue exclaimed gleefully, his red eyes opening brightly under his thick watershed of hair. "It takes the smoke you exhale back through this alternate pipe here -- " (pointing) " -- separated by weight, as relative temperature allows, and runs it through a condenser, which inserts it again here, distilling whatever THC remains into fortifying smoke." Try it. Insurgent lust. Spike played point and took the first hit, a seeping weight of warmth that filled his lungs and sat him down hard. Morgue grinned at him, warningly. "Shoulda told you: it burns as fast as you drag, and the smoke's so purified that you don't even fill the hit much. You just burnt this whole bowl," he grinned over the rim at Spike, holding up a thimble full of ash leeched white by the potent fire of the draw. "That was some of my Alaskan, as well." Spike grimaced defiantly in return, and blew out the pressure of smoke he had been holding tight-casked in his lungs. "I's one stoned motherfucker," he said, and then remained silent for the rest of the evening, lost in the rotations of his own mind around that blast of cannabinoid. My hit brought me into an opened world, where I could see reflected around me my skull and the fissures that lined my brain. Impressionable instantaneous bonding. Morgue reloaded his bong while I attempted to compliment it: "Very much a significant presence; strong affect and assertion; overall, a command performance." Cementing impact of fast falling intoxication, spurious reality ascended, sudden rush of full stimulus: the scary combination of a healthy abstraction (distance enough to consider the subject) and an unfolding of layers of reality. The red means the eyes are open; or am I just falling into ludicrous pot-worship, when in fact it is only an excuse to see without taking the onus on oneself to prove the necessity of doing so? "A fine year," I concluded. That was Morgue's narrow warm home, a strip of wood and aluminum reminding of a wafer cookie somehow lost on a flat pounded grass plain. Coming away from it it seemed as if that strip and not I were moving away turning into the desert. I reflect as I read the massive file now on my personal rig; in terseness, a system not human although grammatically precise (although not correct: its method of using prepositions as conduit sometimes falls into grammatical, sometimes does not - but always almost makes sense). Within this a protocol is described, a parasitic nature which assembles itself within other protocols. Similar to my technique, an offhand and difficult method but an effective one along unsuspecting networks. What made theirs better: the paper described a system of network rather than a method of intrusion, a way of connecting machines invisibly to the world, and, had it not been for hacker error, to me. Penicillin blues. I have to put the reading down after some time to assimilate the technical details gleaned, but more importantly, the impact: how had I thought I had run so smoothly through the net, when with this there were others, or the potential for others, to be invisible, omniscient, watchful? Damn. On the road similarly, towns and land twining behind us as we kept speed at subdued scream down the isolated pavement, a part of thousands of miles laid by lonely hands through country and mountain and desolate territory. Desolate is of course always a contrast, and we had just left the large city of plastic. There are always cities of plastic, some erected every day. We evade most, Spike and I, because our lust for plastic converts into need for dope. It's non-addicting, but anything is addicting if it stops the hole in the floodwall: the bloodwarm water ceases to pour out into the cold abyss, the hunger more precisely which is always there to weaken you, to break your will, to make you bow to it and the fear it holds rank over your head. Pink Knight used to have mounted on his computer monitor the motto of forward motion: Fear is the mindkiller. He was taken on a raid, turned in by a young sycophant facing a small jail stiffness for his part in some escapade, and who having the goods on PK found very little reason not to turn state's evidence. And so an incredibly common story iterates again: hackers are a closed community for a reason, blocking out the efforts of such types. In an age of so many causes, so many are overturned by expedients. Hackers have a uniting ethic which locks them to a common cause, an ideal of how to use machines. I can't blame them for being a somewhat closed society. More road and I'm driving now. As night washes away into dawn and daylight, the road goes from slick black to sprawling worn grey, slick in parts where the smooth whizzing tires tread it down daily. Copside road with a car pulled over, belly of cop moving at the window where some other life awaits a gutpunch. The whole crowd has slowed; cars now trot in slow motion in comparison to our former speed. What gives: living in fear, an accrued sense of learned helplessness. It comes when you're sitting with your back straight in the air, hands over your head, while men in blue with slick black boots circle you and talk of trivialities, holding the power higher than the nightstick. Spike still has a jaw scar from a cop incident, I believe a class ring caught in the impact. Miles are like fingers counted over again in a jail cell, the five fingers being the five cuts of light dropped by the bars of small window to the floor, five feet square on a side, five years in a felony. Five states in the crossing, lucky for a vehicle that sort of runs. We get oil into it not in the nick of but definitely on the hot side of time in Las Vegas, and move on. Roadwearing down the eyes, blunted by reflection and time, iteration again of the same patterns. Stop briefly to hack and find our records are the same, the networks seem the same. Someday this will have to grow; too much being said, or perhaps too little - only a fraction of the net seems to be motion, the rest is a swelling before motion, a swirling of data and ideas. Suddenly the signal is traced among them, and then there is a language, a network - perhaps through one of these networks or languages lies expansion. Road expansive, curving through the heat to the horizon. However far you go there is still road. Above the striated earth and broiling redness of sand is a sky which reaches interminable to form the second half of the world, the greatest free space imaginable crouched over our narrow and flattened perspective. Who are _we_: All of us. There's none of that anymore, says a man worn like rainblotted newspaper, shaking a knotted finger in my head, there's no all of us. There's us, and them. The Russians aren't coming, Doctor: but it's still us and them. Who's them? Anyone not us right now -- anything more is too big a thought. Our car a capsule. Swallowed by darkness over road. Heavy surging in my brows signals the ending of my shift driving. Spike and I have a friendly arrangement: I drive until I'm tired, and then he takes over, and the cycle continues. We don't question because we trust the other to be honest: we're both going to the same place, we have been friends for years. Once Spike, Me, Amorphine and Gonzaga took to the road, heading to a nearby town for Gonzaga (an imported citizen; I have no idea what his real name is, but he communicates a few words with exceptional pronunciation and clarity, leading me to value his communication over that of most other acquaintances, even though a detailed one hour conversation might take only a dozen words and twice as many gestures from him) to lie low for a night so that his ex-girlfriend could spend her furlough time without having to "ram his nose through his ass so he has a clitoris" as she had threatened drunkenly in a sports bar called The Punched Ticket (Jeanine is really nice, overall, but occasionally becomes sauced on Cisco clones and uses her skills as a aikido trainer to unleash her angst. She once was about to do the above to my nose but I was able to deter her with a procrastinatory explanation of the derivation of the word assassin, from the Arabic, for Hashish) the night before. Amorphine lounges in chairs, slouches on sofas, collapses on car seats, and hunches in bars. I've known him for ten years, and I've never seen him the same. Amorphine and I made acquaintance in a small restaurant in Mississippi called The Checkered Dog. Most restaurants useful for meeting people are a definite article, an adjective, and a noun in name. Someday I'll have a bar named The Definite Article. The future, prepositionally speaking. All of which is a split infinity with the present moment, something I can't focus upon quite yet, not unlike the concept of death. Me dying: Amorphine and I met on a cold day, not unlike a vacant drooling sky to die underneath. When I was young I thought I'd die by battle; Amorphine thought the same. He would eventually die being shot to death by federal agents confiscating computer equipment, chestholding a Braun toaster he had saved two weeks' wages to buy, which contained a microchip, excusing his death in the line of duty in itself. Condemned in newspapers. For the next two years, he would periodically appear at local sales, cafe openings, used-car lots, hangings, elections and debutante balls. Once I saw him in the background for a late-night advertisement for the Nixon box set, featuring sixteen CD's with remastered and annotated recordings of the Watergate tapes, for $129.95, the original price of the dictaphone machine most of the phone calls debated during the trial were recorded on. Amorphine gave a sad wave, and faded behind his thick sunglasses as the voice overwhelmed even the physical space in the picture with its incessant advertising pledge. At The Checkered Dog, Amorphine and I consumed two hamburgers and six beers, and I learned from four words of his that his name had come from a time six years ago when he had rejected all claims of physical existence and had starved himself for nine days, passing out at the end and having to be revived with morphine leftover from a GI shipment to his country during the second world war. In the end, he would die at age 27, similarly injected with morphine that failed to revive him. The third time: once as a child of six, he had been injured falling from a tree, and morphine had enabled his broken body to repair itself in isolation from pain or pleasure, only the numb delight of absence. As we drove, I thought often of The Checkered Dog and Amorphine, who seemed to be limp and porous tissue, unconnected disconnected but still grasping the wheel firmly as if it mattered. Shrug. We took six hours shifts each, and those became failures as half the time we fell asleep on our shifts, and the rest of the time we were just getting into interesting thoughts as drivers when we had to retire to the back of the van. The method Spike and I use works much better. Spike lies eyes turned down in the back seat, indestructible auto industry fake cloth feeling synthetic beneath him. On occasion he snores. I snore alongside him, grateful for the company of sound on this desolate drive. Empathy to the subsuming joy of sleep. Going the long, awkward, circuitous route instead of out the front door; back door manners may get a bad rap, but the endurance of continuity beats some honor points anyday. The road here is grey, older semi- asphalt, with mid-sized pine trees venturing occasional stabs at the sky. As if thrusting thumbs at an unkempt god: Spike jars this out of me stirring in his sleep to mumble. "Burr...?" "Uh huh. What up old man." "Thinking about itches. When it itches, you scratch." "Because otherwise it drives you mad: too much stimulus." "No, I figure it evolved in us. It was part dream. Because itching brought blood to the skin, it was useful against most causes of itch. An evolutionary mistake." "Like intelligence." "I haven't gotten there yet." Rolls over, falls back asleep. Warmth of sleeping people. I feel most like an animal when I walk into a room full of people asleep, and feel my breathing slow to their rate as I sense -- not as much smell or feel -- the bodies in the dark, turning in their disconnected dreams of life. More road. When I was young I visualized the car grille as eating the road, consuming enticing stripes of divider alongside pure asphalt, consuming it all as we rushed along, the fragmented patching of the roadsurface rushing up at us in smearing collisions of light. Now we eat our way through fast food and tearing cheap roadmaps, batteries for our flashlights, cigarettes, and gasoline. Behind us the road settles its detritus of paper shreds, beer bottles, broken rust-fragments of cars, condom wrappers and burnt flares. Now we eat our way through countryside left unnamed by the map, a neurotic compulsion in itself to name everything: even the index is labeled as such at the top and bottom of each column. Our red vein rides through the ridges of several states, passes the blocked dots of great cities, detours down the fragile outlines of sideroute freeways, and pours us into the sheaf of valley where Loquate, TN, makes its resting warm the hills. Where once nothing but Appalachian subsistence indolents wandered, now a city springs from a mall and a gas station left by passing tourists. The sign reads POP: 24,022 but we know there are several thousand more, because Loquate lives two lives: a legitimate economy and the leftover overflow from the attempt some decades ago to make it an Atlantic City for valley America, legalizing gambling, prostitution, and leaving an easy regulation on drug use. The experiment was so successful that within a year the city was wealthier than the third world, the local government had capitulated, and the Mafia was buying up local libraries as tax shelters. The city revolted, but the new economy threw it back: and, illegal, continued to prosper. This makes Loquate ideal for hiding out on one's way farther into the countryside, but both Spike and I wanted time to rest, to recover for our journey, but as importantly to recover from the despair which crouched like the hallucinatory cloud of a black widow spider on the past horizon. Loquate is not ideal for habituation, however, because of the virulent local economy and the environment it creates. Coming into the city, we bound over a soft swelling hill populated at top with a gas station selling "Gas line" and a small store with a sign labeled with a blue squid, marked "Pes ados." Neither are open, both secure places in the universe with their dingy neon. Crackling probably under the drawing brows of a storm. Spike pulls off of the broad road down a gravel path to a 7-11 which must exist without business, far from any path or combination of roads I can read except for the narrow grey dusty stretch we have just pulled in through. The sign flickers its bright broad colors over us as we extend each of our nervous and tense limbs in an approximation of stretching. An itching in the calf muscles, a thick condensation in the gut. We go to the door, but the inside is dark, but Spike pushes the door regardless, drawing from some internal sureness I can't reach. The windows are darkened with grime and provide cover, but it is still obscure inside, lit only by a few shaky fluorescent tubes. Waist-high rows divide the small space of linoleum. Behind the desk two feet keep watch, supported by a head averted to a television, its abstract black and white showing a domestic argument, a tortured rehash of poignantly fake lines. Soap operas are like hearing one side of a drunken phone conversation. "I must leave town, I must: He's dead!" shrieks a bodied voice, a full womanhood blonde in drawn-faced desperation. His eyes catch ours without any sense of loss in his inattention to the movement; the noise fills the air, keeps the store from domination by the crepitant hum of the fluorescents. He is young and stark-faced, and hands us ZigZags for a buck fifty, a weathered bill (under fingers of ages, ours and his, his and ours, yours) and points to the bathroom in the rear. We go through the glassbead curtain and a throat-voice punches through the haze of our travel: "And look who is joining us:" Long, thick beard and glasses, also thick. Jerry? Above a cigar his thick reddened eyes track us, beadily without greed or malice. A belly of some proportion, but well-carried (fat doesn't bother me until it shows signs of desperation, the eating in order to generate stable ground to walk upon, to be too big to be displaced) and tucked into a thick-cut chest. "How are you?" he speaks at us, allowing his cigar to roll to the edge of his mouth and lock there. A vagary of memory: Buffalo Bill, our cohort from the wild mountains of Southern California where he for years maintained a mushroom farm that must have been the envy of every psychoactive weapons division in the world. Strains of psychoactive mushrooms pushed the floor of his house upward, growing steadily in their thousand and one Mason jars in the darkness. Bill loved to barbecue brain cells, and we had joined him for several exploits, including the one in which he was named. Our love of jargon, names. To control the world: to rename it without a care for the original, an abrupt imposition of self. May my last name stand for some kind of potent weed. A folding card table supports three chairs and two other individuals, an exact clone of the man behind the desk out front, and a scrawnier, younger version of either of them with his hand on his hip, as if he were a gunfighter. "Howdy," Spike says, striding ahead of me to shake Bill's hand, and introduce himself to the two, named Alex and Stanford. They nod me in as well, and I pull up a milkcrate to sit to the lee side of the refrigerator. Spike takes a seat across from me and I meet his eyes. We break out the bag of the chronic. Luscious, steamy bud from East of Eden -- somewhere to the east of us, a massive underground facility housed in the basement of an IRS tax records facility, where an enterprising and bored employee had started growing dope twelve years ago, where now a steady flow of volunteers kept his salary augmented for a brief cut of the torrent of cash. Expensive, but through a contact near to the source and proud of it: a seventeen-year-old playwright, left bored in his parents' house between days of numbing school to write brutally nihilistic plays about characters in high schools named after colors or letters, who, in the many volumes (contiguous) of his plays played out every permutation of petty crisis of worthlessness that could be imagined, coming near the realization of pointlessness in its purity frequently, but always continuing their quest for a plot in near tears of frustration. Each night of meditation or writing in his black room lined with reflectors and strobe lights, he would smoke fat bowls of this thick, treacle-knotted bud and launch his brain far into the void, where it would hover and produce the apt descriptions of hopelessness he felt on life. Even his players smoked thick, rich, vicious bud. A grim character, he added a comment as we took the bag away: "You all remind me of my dead uncle" (pointing to Spike) "and the character (Y12) I turned him into" (pointing to me) "who (AB-) eventually took an overdose of oven cleaner in desperation, and died vomiting blood at a school play" (pointing at ground) "not unlike my real uncle (2), who killed himself drinking." Smiled. We smiled smoking blunt nuggets stuffed into our portable bong, a small homemade created from a Magic Mushroom air freshener, an odd idea of clean breathing that injected scent into the air around it, a small plastic mushroom with incongruous, frivolous polka dots to hold against the stench of the world, feeding its sweetness not even honest enough for decay. A faint smell like the sweet bitterness of infection hanging in the tainted air when removed, a plastic carcass to illuminate the trash. The hanging basket of the bowl mars the purple surface of the shroom. Our pull carb comes from the plastic action of a cheap cap gun. It smokes well but fast. Alex or his brother becomes silent, withdrawn, quickly as the smoke hit him from what was not intended to be the monster hit it was. Some people get silent: for some pot is a cutoff from the world, the line dropping dead for a few hours. With the sudden displacement of reality, almost anything can happen. You can see terror and snap out of it clutching your feet up from the floor, locked in some toilet somewhere, terrified of the world and the intricate scenarios that crawl through the cracks of the bathroom tiles to illuminate the skeletal fear of the overwhelmed organism. Sometimes it's the bubbling exuberance of nothingness, but that echoes hollow, popping like champagne bubbles against plastic glass (her name lost in the concavity exploding). For some dope is a mediator. There is no relative - it hits you all the same, but what you're doing at the time forces it through its twists and turns. For me pot is relaxation with a motive. Numbness from hours of travel clutches me like a stomach spasm during drinking sickness. I don't want a large hit, slow inhaling this one...fade to negative space, a jarring withdrawal into the abstracted. Are we all artifacts? Exhale. Spike again. Fast hits, two, and then passing the smoking chalice to Stanford. Across the table, Buffalo Bill passes me a bag of Cheetos. "Thank you," I say, "Is this your establishment?" Interruption for Stanford to pass the bong to Buffalo Bill. I pass the bag to Alex. Buffalo Bill takes a large hit. I take the bong, and Alex passes the bag to Spike. Spike eats complacently. I inhale quickly, tasting ash, and dust out the bowl, filling it with an oversize bud. I prod it one more time into the base of the bowl, and pass it to Alex. Stanford has the bag; "We all are partners in this, Dad and Alex and Van and I." His red eyes smile at me. Alex's hit drifts past my face, dispersing on its way elsewhere. He passes the bong to Spike. He looks at me. The bag of Cheetos is with me, passed by Buffalo Bill. "Is anyone up for another hit?" Spike asks, but we are all zoned, no-one replying. Again, Spike. One of the things I dislike about the modern novel is the detached amusement. Things are funny, self-conscious, but gone is the dedication to character I've found in some older, better novels: the negative space outlines a vague human, wary of emotional being, scratchy as if carved from the static on a detuned television. But his name (Q. Public John) and life are carnival cutouts, painted from oxymoron, contradiction and pun, and give us some sense as readers of the work of a self-recombining intricacy, existing as lace did hundreds of years ago, craftsmanship for appreciation, decoration. Cyclic redundancy test from birth to decay to chaos in aftermath. Each one of these countries is an egg dropping from an ovary, blooming in luteal glory and then falling free, leaving the swollen launch site to vanish back into the fruit-shaped organ. Each has its empire, which flourishes, explodes, and dies, leaving a nation of scar tissue. Dislikes are likes in the end; in the end, all is paradox. Arf - I'm zoned. Where? So is everyone else. No relative effect with marijuana, the great equalizer. Spike is staring at his cards, probably hallucinating. Would like to be in his mind, sometimes. Awe to respect to friendship. Time to go rig. I picked up a cellular unit some time ago, and now invoke this through a local gateway, the only way to guarantee no tracing - the packetized nature of this protocol and the intricacy of gateway hardware neutralizes the threat of trace in under about fifteen minutes. That's all I want online, anyway: the car trip having allowed me the construction of a program to speak this language, the immersion of protocol within protocol. Hacking stoned enables me to subvert the outside world and leave it there: I'm more efficient, as I get closer to the actual machines and ideas I'm working with by subtracting all else. Putting the navigation into reflex, getting my thoughts closer to the computer. Although it's there. My friends used to always kid me about NWI, but we'd always be netting under the influence. Searching for something, wading through epochs of digital signal, aeons of digital noise. Others alongside but not with us - the hunt for something, the feeling that in all of the worlds of network there, something has been missed - that it is a matter of screwing up the digital eyeball and coming closer, and one will find within the morass a human nervous system of resonant meaning to a living organism. But our fields of data are our graveyards; it is all there for anyone to look, much as I search my memories of childhood for clues to what I am now, to who I've become. Or was destined to become - not that, but that beyond our control could as well be destined, or that in the past -the event is the value. And now I search in repetition, probing among the interlocking minions of network subroutes, searching for what in all of that traffic is disguised, has more to tell than its subordinate function. Starting at the point of entry (discovery), I find linked systems and explore, but that is decoy - I soon learn that thinking physically or topographically fails, as this layout is based upon some structure defined by the structure of the protocol building it - not crammed into any predefinition, it instead defines itself among those things defined. The protocol makes more sense to me after fifteen minutes: based upon a protocol for maintaining accurate chronological data on machines, it enables a routine connection to be made for this transfer - into which it is fairly easy to envelop another voice, the voice of the protocol I'd just finished teaching my rig to talk. Testing effective, successful. Onward into the void: and after several probes, I find a connection, finally. A moment of pause, as if I didn't believe it - and then packing up, returning to the group. More time to digest this inhuman thing. Back to the table. How long have I been zoned? No way to tell but this means I'm rather high. Well, the orgies should start any minute now: I saw reefer madness. Doubtless the beast is behind it all. Buffalo Bill Spike Alex have broken out cards; Stanford and I are outside the circle, obviously too stoned to operate. Almost paranoia, and then an uncaring, knowing that Buffalo Bill the older stoner would not care, would be safe to be around. Amazing the trust that echoes even in these ultraviolet sessions of unreality. Odd place for a stoner shack. The shadows are inside the door before I've even seen them. There is a crack sharp hard and Bill's terrified face flashes blank before me, hitting the table which collapses. Shadows flash across the light, into the darkness, Spike looking vulnerable paranoid scared with his hands raised as brackets above his shoulder. Passing shots in the night. Vanishing shadows with the tearing of the wind of an engine starting, a car peeling away. Buffalo Bill's wideyed face launches into my eyes; I close them and rub them in sublimated understanding mocking me as impotent fear, Alex and Stanford staring numbly. Blood has gathered under Buffalo Bill, too fast to be anything good. No grief as of yet, but chest withdrawing as if approaching. His hand, extended, must have brushed my lap: two aces (black), a pair of eights, and a red-eyed joker stare at me from my left thigh. The balcony is blanched with the weak light of dawn. Alex Stanford are inside making police statements; Spike and I have assumed the role of friends and are outside of a roomful of state cops jawing questions at Bill's survivors. Below his body may lie outlined or perhaps tenting a sheet taken away. Goodnight friend. As a final precaution we had reached into the pocket of Bill's overalls and snagged his bag preciously, hiding it in basement tube joints of pipes and conduits leading to nowhere, forming their own interlocking maze for rats to race and stoners to stash. Moments of silence and counted breathing. Unneeded we march down stairs and out the door. Alex joins us. Numbness like the way the chill of the night hits you: a stiffening uselessness from the waist upwards. Stoically Spike removes the battered faucet he had snagged from the junk out back from his jacket as I slide a patch of screen ripped from spare screen in the same area from beneath my shirt. I then hand him my cup of water, which he pours into the U-bend of the pipe, then sealing the connection end of the faucet with screen. This comes from the kitchen sink of a rather nice kitchen and has a wide bent to it like a socket wrench. I hand a chip of American Thai (smooth, muscular) bud which he slides into the depression of screen. Alex bends to it, and a smell like some odd, beautifully burned earth rises into the night. Spike and I take hits next, our bong behaving beautifully. I can't tell if the stars are flashing, or if they're just there. Sometime later we reappear inside. I can't remember how much time. The cops are gone: wide open room. What do you wanna bet that was a waste? Stanford's eyes cast at us. Alex stoic grimly proposing sleep. Not a bad idea; Spike and I explain our situation briefly to a few flat whistles, and leave with our best wishes burnt on our tongues. Bill's eyes flutter behind my lids. His cold hand rests on my lap. Christ. No matter how many bits or bytes flow past my eyes, they can never equal feeling Bill's there. I resolve never to mistake a human for machine again, no matter how easy the inverse is. I used to think everything ended in paradox. I now know to know things as inverses, as those are their ends. The rattling of the unwanted sip of coke in the aluminum echo chamber of the can, a ticking like some wearingdown machine. Emptiness and abandon await the hollow. I feel the hollow. We dodge a rotting cow carcass, and pass through two intersections of unmarked dirt roads, and then turn back into the city. Lights line a path of approach, their flashing multitude of color spreading like a wound into the breadth of the city. Like angels, like holy. A breath taken in fast. The lights blink like a pond stilled with bacteria: a sheet of silence. Sagging yellow lights pass overhead. We rush in on skeins of air, the comforting cruising sound flashing in my ears. Into the void of the valley filled with night, and then over a hill, cresting it with morning, the refracted burnglow stinging our eyes as it is caught in the dirt attached careless to our windshield. Past a hill, two cacti, some scattered farmhouses under a skyscraper, complementary dead-end turns, a grove of pine trees, cold acres of wheat, a tanker casting its shadow alone in a spread of sand, banana trees shading an artichoke farm, six maguey plants near an aluminum trailer, and mesquite interspersed throughout the rocky flatland. Along more road: absolutely flat, laid on wet on the flat soft and deep-packed sand, occasional basket of a compact tumbleweed. A field of poppies. And then the shoulder turns to gravel, and we are cruising on the bed of a dense loam of crushed rock. Through one more canted bend through rock: spines on the rockface from the intruding needles of the engineers, their injections placing the shock-resounding blasts deep in the pink softness of rock. Rusted cage of a lowbuilt car. And then angular geometries of rising electroneurotic signs, twitching out their messages in the unhurried instancy of electric current. More allies between loave-boxes of stores, their fragile hollowness exploited by the contrast of light filling their guts. Cars matte in the dark, occasional vein of fire in a passing reflection along a door, or maybe a blotting blur of it as the door opens, a man talking across his tympanic roof. A billboard swings into view, with an anonymous black font printed fixedly on the white background, an icon of vertical jail bars in the lower right corner. Spike catches me with his crosscut glance in the aerial box of the car as we swoon into the valley. This is Meekin. The air holds thickly together, a thin mat of solidification and purulence hanging its drenched mantle over the refractive brightness of the signs and the stolid somnolence of the grey-stark buildings. There is a drawn-out sweet smoke industrial smell, the wheedling sinister whisper of the fumes encoded in air surfeited with smudge. Down a hill of parked cars, the roofs gaining fragments of a moon as we ascend. Beyond the rim of hills that defines this valley the close-glowing palette of clouds is sucked into the fecund earth. What we find in the valley is singularly beautiful: a local netlink, with low usage, oddly so for a town the size of the one ahead. However, no complaints, especially when the padlock is the only security method discovered locally. A quick rig links me with full bandwidth, and after sharing a quickie smoke of some Mexican Coronita green (rolled in paper with "It's a Boy" in blue letters on it) with Spike, I invoke whatever demons await on the net. Contact is almost immediate, as if they knew a frequency we would meet on by hand of Fate the defunct. The site looks local, from the speed, but that is highly doubtful (I remember that time requests are prioritized networking, from some class some days ago, my last contact with the outside world) and the setup looks too extravagantly competent to be from this area of hingelocked back doors and decaying superstructures. Into the abyss: a divergent twisting series of connections, a penetration into a self-forming structure that from every angle resembles itself, but then expands to twist inside, and portray itself in the inverse perspective. Making hacking it difficult: necessary to think like it. Its primary structure seemed to be an infinite series of machines until I realized that the structure was built of objects, which could be on one or several machines, near or far: the advantage of a hidden protocol was greater expansion without fear, an ability to know data in its own context and group it by characteristics of the data and not by machine or financial structure; this realization enables me to plough into machine code and documentation in one object, one that soon learned some of my request patterns, and began to preassemble queries and subcontextual searches for me. To every grouping of data it recognized a surface pattern; underneath that patternit recognized the subtextual relevance of my requests, and assembled a structure of response from them. This system is amazing, I thought, frighteningly efficient. The only problem I see with it is its unfriendliness to humans. None of the commands are designed around a human mind, but that of a database, a series of internals, and the responses fire data into another engine, as if piping through a conduit. The only reason it sees me: it has no idea I'm human. Or am I? I think, reacting in turn to another response. So much of the past has been a running, a response, that I feel more like a vending machine. S'okay. Spike pats my shoulder - we're at about the four hour mark, and he has waited - and then I feel in my mouth the end of a fat jay, and into my nostrils comes first the fresh minty scent of good green pot, and then the dry abstract smell of flame. The first inhalation is huge, and when my eyes roll back Spike takes the joint from my mouth and smokes. We take turns, wordless, and then I thank him with my eyes and return to my rig. Some hours of penetration await me; that was good pot, the world swims wide, potentiality; the system awaits me. In my early days of hacking I'd been at first a brute force blaster, finding wide pathways and blasting them in, but had found that unstimulating after a while. No point to the repetition of ease, of brute sensation. More sense to go for finesse, and to have some rules about what you did, leaving all else up to freedom. Like being able to play an instrument well, in hacking you don't need to slam things around anymore or rely on gimmicks to get effects when you're good. Several years and many machines took that point, and then I realized I'd departed a basic field, and could only then see how much effort it would take to get good. Practice outside of school - never took computer classes in school, partially from paranoia but partially because most were too directed, not enough freedom of serendipic tunneling - and some more years got me to the stage of comfort, of being able to speak the language of the net and of computers. Now I had entered a new stage: my discipline, although hidden behind junk food and dope, had taken me this far, taught me a language and an art, and now I had ascended a new level, and found a new network. Thinking: it can't be that hard to find this, just a matter of time when you're good. And then - who's running this thing? Not much time to ponder. I grab some documentation on the languages of the protocols, which appears to be variations on the basic protocol, and by the language spoken specifies a lot of the object manipulation, leaving the rest up to intricate, compact coding. All of which appears to be designed to look random, to be invisible to the security eye, or any eye but the one acquainted with the language already. I couldn't have done better myself. The only aspect of this net that staggers me: who's running this thing, if it takes adjustment time to understand requests phrased by humans? Was this a mutation from the endless dead cycles of AIs, databases, servers, protocols, daemons, and bored outpost workstations? Selfawareness? I can't find that, but the eerie way the network reshapes itself in response to queries, rerepresenting data and objects as if the viewfinder had twisted in a fall, and the way it builds extensible data structures as if anticipating the range of question, have alerted me to an underlying structure more powerful than most of what I had witnessed to that date. More data expands into view. I think it operates by finding inverses and working from there, creating a span of possibility, playing with the calibration of infinity, and then rebuilding itself based upon the data. Part of what held back my thinking was the extremist nature of it; when I got a dead end, I'd back up and pull out, react in the opposite rather than the inverse. Computing inverses it was ahead of me. A terrifying machine to meet in conflict; a terrifying network to penetrate. Security buzzes around us (the machine - net - and I) but I realize I am covered by the machine, that its masking of my activities has lead them to be assimilated as routine processes of the net. With all that shifting, it must be easy - or am I incorporated into this thing? Tiles of the floor. Onward. The structure seems a mess to my infant mind for it, placing it compartmentally. But there is intricacy here, like the interlocking lace of a vacant lot flower, that I can barely see, much less decode. I invoke a few demons on my rig to help me, having them process incoming information and filter, translating from the original. So much in language. Vaguely aware of smoking, and of lighting a religious artifact. Just more data in the brain. The world stretches before me, a series of helical extensions mutating in response to its turning, represented as chronology but more accurately delineated by requests, which I can see mutate the structure from within. So much complexity. I query the machine for data on myself, a prime hacker mistake, but I must know: how does it think human? And of what? A pause. Drywall mouth. Movement in the periphery, taking in Spike in a corner, waking up at my movement. Ash taste. And here comes: a brief synopsis of past, police record included, some assessment of abilities from an official test, parking violations, a couple of bulletins cross-referencing me from various computer security agencies (and two private firms), and an employment history complete with current address. Some of this stuff I hadn't known, and had never expected to see in one place. Queries for financial and educational data are available, and I run them, sending them scurrying for information in the background. And then more data comes: labeled current intrusion report. I must have gasped; Spike is watching. I open the file, and there is a listing of connections, a report of activities, and finally, a listing of the contents of my machine. The protocol works both ways. The inverse is accomplished. And suddenly empty I was, feeling the gut echo of realization, the ashen fatigue descending over my shoulders to blank me out. I break connection. "Let's go." Not blankly, but surprisingly normal sounding. Spike helps me, and we hit the road. He watches me in the mirror. Concern. For now I don't care: I understand, and from this structure - well, I am a part of the structure. And there is no inverse to be found. We descend the valley. We fold into the parking lot of a motel, the ground eroding under us with the roll of gravel. Into the office and the clerk is worn narrow drab by the job, I am guessing: hair curved downward with the listlessness of summer heatbaked leaves, lifeless in their collapse. Under that a defensive nose. Still more to the narrow face, mainly smooth lines worn uninspired by aging. Clothing matches colors conservatively: a purple shirt organized around the boxes of the pockets, and grey-black slacks with frosting on the creases, running past the dryclean wearing. Eyes submerged in the tiredness flowing upward in the red of his lower lids. Spike and I need hours to rest. A transaction of cash, no cards, a room key with a thank you attached and we're into the moist unused smell of a motel room, a component box in a forest of them stretching defiant against the direction of the freeway, which leads away to the east. #unconscious: low, medium #unconscious: deeper stretch of sleep, density descending (soaking into sand, heavy wetness) #unconscious: apocalyptic intensity (the motel floor collapses downward into feathers, the tatters of the room itself reassembling elsewhere. they evade through the oily water of reality and appear out of the blackness elsewhere. everything's an elsewhere. these words I -- your slumbering brain, unslumbering but unlimbered -- speak to you have nothing to do with reality, and follow a linear contiguity only in the base meanings of the words, what whatever is left of your interpretive process will grab in immediate weariness. the actual aspect of this conversation is in the multiplicity of these speech units, the harmonics on the chords, which are strung together with a real theory and not the weary expedient non-entity of structure most speak. the door is a pink-grey in the loss of light; the sink runs blatant, the silver faucet turning above it, the chin of water it drops steaming into the hole. the hole sucks it down with the washing of a thirstiness. in the closet there is a ton of luggage, piled upon itself in its slickness of imitation leather, aluminum, plaid and textured surface resembling the goosebumps prickle of a forearm. mother garner the edge of my eye. i'm going places for the paste, taste. is there a doctor in the house? doctor f., so good to see you arriving, and so good to see you haven't noticed anyone here. good to see your soul. sold american. the cars punch by on the crunching of the road collapsing a spine smashed impact rocked back into itself to take the blast, instead crumbling in an instant like the gritty popping of a nose under fist. remember that time you fought cathers? catheters. something you'd bypass now. draining of the waste. waist: the exercise clinic, blue and silver buffet against the freeway feeder, cars mosing out with their blunt and faded probisci. probar: to experience. need for experiential data? no thanks i've already lost a leg. to try out. all is tried, mother, i've got to pass this grade. wearing my eyes spread out like the letters on this cheap newsprint schoolpaper, must go on. tired yellow round the ridges burning with fatigue like this overburnt kitchen light, a yellowing of the corners of the windows in their starchy mountings. doctor f. departs with his papers, discussing acceptable loss. cars rush by on the white road. wearing into it their grey smear of exhaust. tired. right, more road. it is all roads. life is many days. mother? must go on. did you know you're a scorpio? and i an aries? oh, well, that was supposed to go on. but one owns our own dreams. arms fatigued at the root, reaching out. must push, stretch onward to pull over darkness, pulling it down beneath the gut and out of sigh, bottoms of feet itching tickling as if prepared for a needle so many times in the doctors office, flesh puckered for the slinking stab of the needle. in quick, the pole of steel. into you. but don't let it touch you. up fast, up fast, must over the wall -- ) #unconsciousness: resurrect, retire. (pulling, tugging of anaesthesia) #unconsciousness: restrict. retire retirement. Spike's eyes in my face. Stodgy retirement of darkness and comfort. "Good morning pal we've got road to take," Spike moving onward toward the bathroom, I can't see his steps. Okay. Waking. Bring me home. A shower helps: soap under the arms, soap the chest (enough chest hair there to stand in rows like cattails above dunes. Wet they trail in adhesion in the water-slickness of my chest. Thickness, resilient flesh with the hollowness of my lungs coughing in the steamy air behind it). Curt sharpness of the motel soap, foamy thick orange squeezed into my palm, dying my hair shades of a guava smell. The muffled voice of Spike is a broad murmur-tune punctuated with the blast syllables of his accentuation. Time to leave the shower; time to hit the road; time would be of the essence were it not indeterminate, time would be nice. Sunlight always shocks, the eyes receding tender under the buffet of its approach. Stark fingers shocked straight forward into the sockets. Spike leads and I stagger, wet-haired, a vague doggy smell on the wetness. Am I raw animal? Crush the skull. Eyes must be a little tired, hanging dark and low in the shade of the hair over my forehead, dark, wet. Spike leads and we turn down the corner of a dry but palatable drag, a main line of this town. Quiet, suspended, with a newspaper paper punched out by the wind hanging like a dead jellyfish in the stagnant grey waters above the streets. Somnolent visions of Atlantis, KY, the seat of Meekin County. Some eyes glance us as we cross the facade of a local store. Muffled gazes with chins fastly bound into themselves. Jawlines defined in the sterile isolation of stillness. I ask one local, checkered blue shirt and broad lined hands, where I can find a road map, and he answers factually, quickly: "At the corner there is a gas station which will sell maps. They cost about three dollars." Thank you, I say, unnerved somewhat, and move out of his stare to pursue the gas station. Awareness of what disturbs me, squirming in my shirt, about that dialogue would be forthcoming, the realizing that no eyes followed me, no extraneous conversation followed the directions. I had the straight dope laid on me like a crowbar. Right along the line of my nose. Onward to the gas station, pushing our legs down into dusty cement to feel the impact, a jolting reassurance. Maps -- $2.95. Guy knows his gas station. Gastronomical: brittle candy bars, thick toffees, gummy globules of sugar fruit, resilient capsules of hot cinnamon candy, brown sugar, apple pies, jawbreakers, chewing gum, jellybeans bagged by the pound. Where the hell are chips, or anything? Pay the guy $3.11 total for a map; he's stark factual, asking three-elev-en please, no smile when we entered or left, a blinking cursor on his terminal. Back out to the street and we see the first one: the churning muscle (fistsized like a heart) hanging over the erect vein, the fine finger of a skinny needle slicing a slide into the flesh. Blood mixes the substance in a flourishing hand of red; the plunger fills the arm under the momentary thrust of firmness of the thumb, uniting the body in action where it had previously been loose, abstracted on a park bench. Not the same guy, but they might have been brothers from the stare, he wrote in his diary, back in the hotel room, somewhere in the future. Meantime: Needle slicks out, droplet of blood licked away, the untied innertube peeling from the arm. Unselfconscious entirely. He readjusts his shirt, rolling it slowly, twitchingly down his arm, and at the end has an immensely direct sense of calm. Erect he walks across the street slowly, his feet bonded to the shadows he leaves for a hanging instant on the pavement. Spike and I inhale an accustomed tolerance of drug use and the twisting, insinuating, strange ways it pervades a life, makes the user an upright citizen with no fear from either the needle or the eyes tracking its silver-scarlet plunge. Longshadows stand out down the lane from either eye; there are no cars, our realization. Spike I and the habitual nervousness of such contextual disparity stand aback into the shade of the gas station overhang. The cursor waits inside. I creep an eye over the figures on benches, still, their forelegs angular to the ground, their backs and heads straight and eyes ahead. Almost military: a dedication to inaction. I don't like this town, Spike is thinking or maybe saying, and I agreeing with a sudden urgency to pull back to the road and go when a car rolls to a silent pause in front of us, chrome glistening over white breadth and black confines. There is no mistake these cops are here for us; it is only one, and he motions us inside the car. We get in back. An admission of guilt or maybe shock. Each word means a different thing, none of which are its dictionary meaning. It all has to do with where it's said; "jail" on the street, in an apartment with a known number on the door on a street with familiar landmarks, is an entirely different entity from "jail" in a police car that knows unfamiliar land equally well. The cop is bulky, compressed into a stout bullet with reflective sunglasses, on which slide the corners and buildings. Spike is upright, stiff, and I am aware of the sweat on my thighs infiltrating the fake leather of the copcar seat. Nothing here is connected; this cop is unaware of anything but routine, the people on the streets are unaware of anything but the stare, the gas station man waits for a terminal input. Terminal, disconnected. The line is dead, sir; would you care to hold? This place is far on hold. Should've edited those felony convictions to parking violations. Into the air conditioning which squeezes the water from air, instantly chilling the drying flesh. Dessicate in these cells. Wait here: a stiff voice like four straight fingers held up at the chest. The cop turns a corner out of sight; from the desk the two eyes of an attendant follow us in our stillness. Spike leans over to ask, and is reminded of his distancing requirement of four feet, and as he steps back is addressed by number, told his ordinance number violated, and told to wait. Stiff fingers. Another cop comes back, and we see first cop moving into a back room near a coffee machine, pulling back a chair of aluminum frame and padded platforms, taking from his back pocket a length of rubber tubing. Spike turns and my eyes meet his straight on, a sudden thrust of dangerous awareness. We are not even cuffed. Taken down the hall, now moving into a holding cell. Shock muffles our mewls. A three-part collision of steel cage on door, lock on lock, and then catch on lock-rim, a chin of steel worn shiny by use. Eyes are opened in the darkness. The same starkness of expression. We learn our visuals from context: by knowing wall, we distinguish human. We can smell the drug, on them, in them. In the dark. Here the context equals the eyes, which bore at us with the patience and awareness of a wall. The only living thing in this room is Spike, and the twitching of the muscles under his shoulderblades, something that only happens when he's really nervous. I put my palms on the muscles and grind them in, feeling the spasms release like a trampoline with each push. Let them think we're gay. No eyes even find this. We are more wall. Do they even have words for wall and face here? Or is it morewall came downwall to us all, wall, and from there we walled ourselves in, went out with a wall? At an interval from our entry, as if a clock's hour hand clicked into place, one of the group facing the bars emptily palms a needle, and draws tubing across his bicep with the help of the silent man next to him, who carefully verifies the tube is on and then resumes the twilight stare. A spoon cooks in the background, and is passed over. The hunger of the sliding in, and the head moves back briefly as the drug rushes through the valleys and canyons of his brain. Spike sits two down from him: "Mind if I ask what that is?" Working, steadily attentive, assiduous at cleaning the works: "Stoicaine." #interlude: connect (past tense deep in the folds of brain) login: FIELD pass: Welcome, FIELD REPAIR. To access FCLAD, type 'FCLAD' at the prompt. It is 09:38:17 GMT (-0600). FCLAD: FCLAD Welcome to FCLAD! Please enter L S C E Q: &| C Enter the drug to cite by brand name, chemical name, or common name: STOIC? 1 records found. Stoicaine. Methylaldehide Disodium Lethium Chlorosomatomate (.4 g). see also Shock[7], Soma[1], Strych-9. Stoicaine is the latest in the family of chemical subversives reported from the streets of major cities. Acting apparently upon the forebrain neurons, it acts as a blocker as well as a transmitter of vital neurochlorides, resulting in a reductive effect upon forebrain activity as well as the pleasant release of endorphins that similar opiates possess. Not much is known about this drug as most subjects have died in police captivity, but according to users interviewed in the field it 'makes everything a shade of light blue' and reduces the brain's creative and connective impulses, allowing it to record data without effect on memory, but leaving it virtually non-interactive with the outside world. Users have been known to sit motionless for hours in perfect contentment. FCLAD: disconnect #interlude: return The memories that impinge upon the memory for their very fear value. Doubt for that drug -- yes -- no more -- on the way toward real believership. Stares of rough faces into the shadows of jail bars without a concern for motion. Normally prison cells activate not as much to find a victim in the newcomer but to assess the threat of the latest entrant; not even that occurred. Utter contentment of imposed solitude. Solitude now perceptual upon our tired lids; confusion exhausts, the roomful of nonhumans of our species tiring us doubly. Spike and I lapse to vast sleep. Awakening: the needle stinging into my arm. #interlude: terror (...) #disconnect The hands draw back from my arm. Redness suffuses the whiteness in splotches on the skin. The air is thick. There are seven in the room; the light is not dim enough to be unable to see them. Spike who I came with is to my right by three feet. Blue suffuses the air in a light wash. Coming down hard from above. Something like falling backward, sinking into the ground. The ground around with the idea of mushroom to it. ...Door opening, three crashes. About a second between each. Trays all around; there is food here. It has been four hours since the last food. Eat. The trays leave with scraping on the beige floor with scratches of steel. ...A need. Vague. Very vague: twitching. Must find. Some thoughts of need. Day blends to night: in the darkness, a pinprick, and then sleep. So still. There is nothing here without a word or number. There are four walls. There are two doors. There are one toilet and one sink, one drain. There are seven. There is one. Or is there one? Counted already. There are seven. Each day is twenty- four hours. This is a net stretched over everything, an enwrapped structure. Everything fits into it. You even die at a time. Over two from me is Spike. Quiet stares into room. The door opens somewhere behind; a hand squeezing my arm, walking down the hall. One more takes Spike. The door crashes three times. In front of the desk: dismissed with a ticket for Loitering, fine $85. Spike pulls out $43.12, in one twenty ($20), three fives ($5), four ones ($1), seven quarters ($0.25), thirteen dimes ($0.10), twenty- one nickels ($0.05) and two pennies, $0.01 each. I have $21.77: one twenty ($20), one dollar bill ($1), three quarters ($0.25) and two pennies, each also $0.01. There is an order to these amounts: add them, it is $64.89, which is the price of a fifty-pound green metal wheelbarrow in the store on the way around the third turn on the way to the police station. ...There is given to me a pen, blue with a clicker that needs to be thumb-punched so that the pen-tip is out, and a clipboard, somewhere where the signature needs to be made. Made. Spike takes pen, does same. In front of the glass-eyed woman clerk is the same stack of papers littleman had; she strikes through them, and tells us to report to the following address, by mail if necessary, twice in the next twelve months. Seamless, her eyes flawlessly alert. We are allowed now to walk through the tinted door (they let us go knowing we go nowhere) and take ten steps down the street, where we pause, and sit on the slatted bench. Beneath the slats the sun runs in strips: 12 of them. ...Sweat creeps from the back of the sides of my head to my eyesockets, rimming them in wetness and continuing down my face. Sweat chills and then emerges on my skin, getting colder. Stoicaine is cold, but this is much colder. Stoicaine cold freezes all of the air and objects in the air, making them move slowly, and talk slowly if they do. Everything is a light blue, it is a calm. Like water, but water doesn't feel like anything but air. Runs faster though over wrists. There is no need really for sleep, but the order fits lying down for eight hours during the darkness. Now more sweat. There is need. Last time there was need ... , .., there was an occurrence. The drug: more. Give us each day our daily bread... ...Goddamn, it is cold. Frozen to what would be thirty degrees. The drugstore clock says not, says eighty. Twitching intense, odd free jazz slitting my veins. The bench vibrates with another twitching. Spike is one away from me. Goddamn, cold. Goddamn. Cold. And suddenly the parchment of sidewalk in front of me: I vomit cold yellow splattering acidic, running into the grass in slow fingers. Across the street an eye or three are on me. ...Impact jar of perspective as Spike yanks the left arm out of socket, and by it we go down the road, to our car. Starting, and leaving. And the road begins to pass as we both vomit, twitch, and sweat, the cold sweat of a morgue slab or icy winter water falling into sand on a beach with no one else there but vague memories of their presence, once upon a time. #final (interlude) (crescent casting shattered halos of streelight passing by my car the whisking noise of wind like lives souls torn out of life and thrown into the endless spiralling orbit of descent, the heat of the city's decay rising like mist from the streets, their asphalt pores breathing pure oily ancient down my neck, the pressing weight of time insurmountable flowing through my veins, aging crack and die, like streets bleached black to grey, continual fade of days, the isolation of driving alone through streets marked nameless on vague maps of mind, more cruise control for the thoughts in isolation, something big or small vile or beautiful, the impact rests you here, in the contemplation of life from a chunk of steel muttering random through constructs of eroded concrete; this is the life of the loner and the joiner, to drive while city sleeps and watch its lights, almost a vigil for the empathy that you can't help feel, the same empathy that puts you in the lonely mode, the withdrawal, feeling the weight of life knowing that more suffering is here, present, only kept away by time, that the now is a vaguely warm damp car, the smell of it too present in the nostrils, relaxing, the feeling that life moves past the car even in sleep, past your eyes somnolent with machine to keep going; this isn't an isolation but a resurrection, a rediscovery of one's narration one tells oneself to sleep at night, a realistic readjustment, the stolid swallowing of the truths to big to tell, the determination of motion, the fledgling might of empathy, and the wondering where your friends are, where do you end up? and realization that things move, the time burns buffing into the windshield, the days draw long like calloused old fingers drawing a cigarette from the pack, nothing more to do but kill one more and watch the road, the night encompassing, the fear of darkness, the love of light, the love of the freedom of darkness, the flight through cavernous clearings disclosed, the wrath and love and loneliness pulling through the taught tendons of your fingers tied to the wheel, a determination to drive until morning is a sensible entity, a calling to pull the soul into its own, to pull life forth before the dawn, watching grey concrete pass its own shadows, the buildings rising into the daylight, the trash clattering down gutters to hide, a mass of people receeding, comfortable in namelessness but not realizing that is never true, that in the cacophony of our machined empires the resonant human truths are what we can't ignore, pipe-bound on rooftops, sharing a jay near the surf, burning a bowl in a parking lot or just killing beers on a porch, into the void of intoxication beyond the void of our enforcement, a determination to see things in their layout, when that is all known, has been known, and the passing of the bowl over the glow of friends' eyes is the noblest truth i'll ever know) #consumption (irridescence) #continue The car wheels a squeak out in the turn, and we peel off like an airplane coming home. The files are cleared we are safe and I can't feel it, the hollow resonance of security or delusion. II Four days later we will be in downtown Houston, under the grey shadows of smog between glass pillars reaching toward the babbling clouds of the sky. Small injections of morphine will help this. Spike has found us a home, a way from that place. His spine was chilled like mine but not as badly. He pulled me out. Thank you Spike. If once I was afraid of the word love for a man, from expectation and insult: I love you Spike. People do shit all of the time because they feel they should, or they think it'll get them something, but Spike brought me out of that hell, the land of cold flesh walking with gutless dissonant eyes. Spike also worded me on the computer: gotta speak its language. But this was over a fat joint of Columbian green (stuff the locals don't smoke; to their practiced taste, it's too much like Jamaicano, but Spike and I know this stuff crushes like a trash compactor on overdrive and have no intention of giving it up) when we found some stoner buddies on our way north. We bounced between Cleveland and Iowa a few times, then began a slow perusal of northern states. All clear records came from the south. I decided to verify the state of our records with my new friend of unease, the network I couldn't imagine naming, and cautiously extended a local construction of some machines that I had commandeered for that purpose (belonging to a paper company a continent away). The local architecture defeated it; too much noise. From other machines I built a contextual network across three continents, and then scaled down, as this network doesn't care about size, only data. It links them in concepts, contexts. So I built an emulation of myself, a machine which existed to thrust its hidden signal into the ever-flowing cacaphony of mainstream noise, encoding within that signal another protocol, an insurgent noise which overwhelmed and then entered the matrix of the hidden network. Based it upon a little used feature of data relativity within the network - from an inverse, I constructed a self- referential argument; this spread confusion and susceptibility to bogus responses to more-data requests. I am amazed how easily it worked - but more. I queried it on me and Spike, and found Spike had no record, and I had a traffic ticket (a cashier's check hit the US mail service that afternoon, in an envelope addressed to the DPS in an envelope addressed to a local friend who'd mail it) but no serious record. The welt had closed, the scar tissue receded. Tissue lost in the mass of it, pouring past, some of it alive, with some ideas, but most dead, grey, unaware. I asked it several times, but it reported no more intrusion requests. Sometime around Athens, TX, I lost all ability to connect with it. The protocol eclipsed along a chromatic and vanished into the noise, pulling away into a void too large to grasp. I at first panicked and locked myself in a toilet for six hours, afraid of another arrest, the jail time. Must have been the Cyclopic Thai that Spike and I had murdered an eighth of earlier that day. I tried more connects, feeling braver when the next sun rose and I was free, clear, alive. Too much noise, but I found the assumption of the noise calming: it is in here somewhere, and I will find it. Others fear the noise, but that's a brute-force thrust, not the finesse of hacking. A beauty, a martial art like all of them are. It awaits me, or a new narration of me, an identity to borrow for a jaunt with this system. No mocking, it just moves: it processes like all else, with no thought for its death, but with movement toward life. Someday it may live. Hopefully at that point in time I'll have a network to watch it (of my own, or rather - borrowed, to become my own). A cool night breeze washes in over the desert, disturbing small whorls of dust to coagulate in the dark inscrutable air. So much noise in the silent desert, but so much of it - so much freedom. I have learned its value. Four days more and we will be free again to move, with hopefully the small worm I unleashed across the network metamorphosizing into uselessness, having eaten all of our files. With those gone we have relative freedom to build our identities and begin a relatively clean life again, although any disturbances may resurrect our files. No problems - from the perspective of freedom, I'm less afraid of screwing up. Caution is the byword, as Spike used to smirk. We are however going to cautiously murder tons of really good green pot, or maybe vary and go for some of the dry brown stuff that makes you peel your eyelashes off the ceiling. Houston's not a bad city, but another location. More than location, but it has its advantages: Below us by thirty miles lies Galveston, with an honest and beautiful blue sky. The inverted silhouette of the expanse of the ocean, the insignia of freedom. [-sven:cblanc@pomona.claremont.edu] /--------------------------------------------------------------------------\ | In our continuing search for meaningful survival among the labyrinthine | | complexities of modern decay, resonant human truths are what we cannot | | afford to ignore. | \--------------------------------------------------------------------------/ [EOF] ____________________________________ | Hello, I am: | s.r. prozak cblanc@pomona. | -------------------------------- | philosopher of claremont.edu | | DISTURBED | | disorder, chaos, | -------------------------------- | depravity, and lust. Fri18:00/88.7FM |__________________________________|