Delirious Couture

Do try not to be any trouble, won’t you. The night dresses at Juicy Couture advise that good girls like to sleep, and so they shall, swaddled in their sweat shop fashioned cotton couture lying atop a mountain of soft fluffy pink sheep (also fabricated for a nickel a piece in some god awful plant in the People’s Republic of China). Across the street from the Juicy Couture you can shop for silverware in a place called Christ Awful, well actually I believe it is spelled Christophel, however the pronunciation is almost the same, and anyway, if you weren’t born with a silver spoon sticking out of your mouth you can do what a good citizen should do and take the train downtown, or walk or ride a Vespa and use a MasterCard to buy your own Christ Awful silver spoon so that you can mimic the monarchy like a good little ape.
Please note that I have not compared you to a monkey, as monkeys have long curly tales and you most probably do not have a long curly tale and are therefore an ape rather than a cute squirrelly little monkey with a pointy toothed grin and an overwhelming desire to bedevil all less agile creatures which cross your path. No, you are an ape, which is content if the keeper puts a diaper on you so that you wont crap on the concrete, and provides you with a shiny red trike to ride around on, and maybe once in a while dresses you up in a tutu, bonnet, and make up and has you wait in the window of a burning prop building so that a clown can rush up a ladder to rescue you while a man with hairy elbows, done up like a woman in grease paint, a wig, and a sequined gown, points to you and shrieks: "My baby! Help! Somebody save my baby!" and if you are cooperative you get all the bananas you should like later, and maybe a mug of cheap yellow ale while the clowns all sit around in their stained undershirts playing poker and smoking smelly cigars.
That most definitely describes you. So be a good pet and dress up like a grown up human and toddle off to an office building and fake your way through the day so that you get paid, and then go and purchase things which are way beyond your means so that you look even more grown up and sophisticated and successful. If you can’t manage an office because you lack a degree which signifies the degree of humiliation you are willing to suffer in order to get to a truffle or a wedge of cheese, then you can always work at the Seven Eleven or a fast food restaurant, or do some hard labor and you can at least shop at one of the low level department stores which offers things which are similar to those things which can be bought over by Union Square, only there are certain differences which have been purposefully made apparent so that the good truffle sniffers and ass kissers can show of their meritous conformity via fashion, as if their shoes, handbags and jackets were brownie buttons commemorating their ideal citizenship.
If you are a complete fuck up in the areas of ass kissing and truffle sniffing there are several options available to you. You could become addicted to drugs, sex, or alcohol or any combination of the three. As far as the system is concerned, it might be better if you choose drugs which will inhibit your ability to perform sexually considering you are not likely to produce any offspring which will be no more socially adapted than yourself and will therefore also fail to join the workforce and become perfected consumers, I mean, citizens of our fair nation.
Another option is to become a skilled criminal, which means that you break the law continually as a way of life. Addicts often succumb to criminal activities out of need, so that they can get more booze, coke or whatever floats their boat, and of course we must not forget that most of the best substances to abuse are illegal to obtain or keep in ones possession, so it is assumed that those that take option A are also already criminals, hence the word "skilled" is employed to give distinction to those who choose option B. That word, "skilled", has been selected to imply that criminality is a craft which may be honed, and if you are already ill equipped to thrive as a model citizen, this may be a good life choice for you, because in its own way it does help the system. Police officers need bank robbers, counterfeiters, con artists, petty thieves and gangsters to chase after. (Politicians, embezzlers, and preachers fill a more specific niche within this category, but really such a career should only be selected as a last option if you find that you are nearly completely inept and suffer from serious mental and emotional aberrations.)
Option C is, of course, suicide, though it really is a pity that option C comes after option B because the world would probably be better off without Politicians and Preachers. C is the most respectable of all options and if there is any way that you can find it in your heart to boldly and completely self-destruct before you breath up one more ounce of the scarce supply of oxygen being sputtered out into the atmosphere by the few trees to have escaped the fate of being converted into housing projects or papers to push around on polycarbon desks, then I hope that you will go through with it.
The very last option, option D, is open only to those who are beneath even death and who are completely certifiably insane but who have managed out of a sense of self preservation and desperation to escape the notice of professionals in the field of mental health. If you have by some great cosmic error discovered that death offers no respite and are either so misfit and maladjusted to the popular culture, or so disdainful of it that to eat one more banana will cause you to drive a plane into the tallest circus tent that you can find at the heart of the great empire of apes, then for you there is a fourth way, an option D. The D may stand for Doom, Destiny, Deconstruction, or Delirium or all of the above. This option is for bad girls who will not sleep on mountains of pink sheep, and worse boys who will be outfitted in the dehydrated couture of the reversed current, who sit together in darkness and play life back-words, reciting the tenant of Hassan the Assasin, "Nothing is true, all is permissible."

Puppets Made of Flesh

So it goes that I sympathize with the most unhappy and with those who harbor a bleak outlook on the situations born of civilization, of the great con of man, of life as we know life to be, and I don’t just mean human lifestyles, but the condition of organic life with its maddeningly pointless design. For a moment or two, knowing that somewhere out there in the big black jungle made of frowning faces and the legs of dark gray pantsuits that reach up sky high where they give way to a canopy of industrial smoke, there are a few others who can see what I see, or at least something akin to it. Eventually however, I find that hearing of their own oppressive loneliness makes my empathetic heart tremble.
Sure, we are brave ones, we who see what we see and then go further to say what we can say, paint pictures, sculpt sculptures, make collages, write plays, anything that we can do to transform shit into exotic blooms, as part of one last desperate attempt to make something of our ridiculous woes, but it makes me sad anyhow.
Usually I can turn all this hysteria into a joyful performance. I will laugh, joke, sing, and dance. I will do what I can to make the other smile. Then nature catches up with me, (because I don’t always manage to outrun it) and then tears are just tears and not jokes or crystal ants or anything at all. Just salt water squeezed from little ducts set in the innermost corners of my eyes because the world is loveless and dead and it is infecting me while I am failing to infect it. Affection passes itself off as love around here, and you will be rewarded with affection only when you are not taking something that somebody else wants or when you are giving somebody something that they want, but if you should fail to appease, then the affection stops and you don’t even have the emptied out representation of love.
Here and there maybe, you might find a mad hatter through whom love flows no matter what. Usually not though, because when those crackpots come to the attention of the general public it is generally agreed upon that the best thing to do is have that nut case nailed up to a cross so that the buzzards can pick out his (or her) eyes. As you can imagine, anyone like that is either dead or making themselves as inconspicuous as possible. Meanwhile some other clown is passing himself off as a fountain of loving salvation from which comforting answers spring forth like popcorn from an air popper so that you may paste them over your hollowed out heart like little hello kitty band aids over a 35 caliber gunshot wound, and that in exchange for a little bit of the green, if you know what I mean, or sometimes they’ll swap for sex or just attention, power, and glory, or all of the above.
Anywhere you go on this bumpy globe there is someone waiting with a pair of shears in hand, ready to fleece you, pat you on the head and send you back out into the cold Siberian winter so that icicles will crystallize on your eyelashes and your breath will freeze in your mouth so that you choke to death on a maw sized ice cube when you attempt to bleat for help. There are plenty of perky folks running in circles after their tails, glad to be doing so if the other option is to look over their shoulders and notice the master, and then the master’s master, and so on until they realize that it’s Emperor Palpatine holding the end of a long string of leashes, and seeing how low you are in the pecking order, it can mean only one of two things: you are either a clone, or worse (and most likely) an android. Of course the key to keeping androids happy is to never point out that they are androids and to additionally conceal the fact that they are working for the Empire.
The saddest part is that androids, like you and me, as eager as Pinocchio to be real boys and girls, are happy to swallow the lie. We live out our mechanical lives insisting that we are the real deal, that we are in control of ourselves, never really wanting to find out that all of our likes and dislikes were programmed into us by Geppetto back on the Death Star and that, even now, he’s streaming new programs into our highly sophisticated systems through television and radio transmissions. He probably works for some low level General who also likes to forget about the Emperor and fancies himself to be the real deal, the ultimate power. Once you’ve pulled back the green curtain and caught a glimpse of the icky sticky lonesome chaotic truth, it’s hard to push that image out of your mind, and even if you do manage it with lots of bon bons and day time tv, or prescription drugs and booze, or even illegal drugs and underage sex, you find that the uneasy sensation that something is very wrong will not be to far off.
And if you do look it in the face then even your own moments of happiness will seem sickeningly superficial. Your own mechanical arm bringing a cherry ice cream cone closer to your own mechanical mouth and the fleeting sensation of gratification and pleasure that follows will become a horror to you. Then I am told, that you will need to either go back to uneasy sleep or finish waking up so that the horror of it becomes a delight and you yourself are one of those secret mad hatters, cruising the world without worrying about the crosses they are manufacturing down at the saw mill, doing your best to infect the Empire with the strange radiation leaking from your bursting heart, laughing at the crystal ants marching down your cheeks.

Retriever

It is with heavy droopy limbs that I plod away at my keyboard attempting to bring you a message from beyond. With this tired and decaying biological miracle I struggle to open up a fissure into a hidden realm, a place where creatures shimmer in 7 or 12 dimensions at least, so that what you or I could see, even with the use of some subtle sense outside of biological eye sight, would seem to be ever moving and crawling, as if its flesh were composed of millions of pyramid shaped cells, always falling off and being replenished, just as our own skin cells flake off, leaving us continuously in a brand new skin. What if I were aware of the newness of this drowsy contraption in every moment? Really it is the drowsiness which hinders such a perception. Just as when you wake in the morning at the tolling of the digital alarm blinking with its red eyes formed of squared off Arabic numerals and feel that you can’t possible move, but force yourself up, and just by taking yourself through the motions of a person who is awake, the sleep begins to slip off of you, in the same manner as the aforementioned skin cells, just as you wake yourself up in the morning by showering and dressing, even if you feel like an animated corpse, so do I go through the motions of being the awakened messenger, even though inspiration is lost somewhere in the fog.
Just by lifting my satchel up and heaving the strap over my sagging shoulder, and strapping on my little winged sandals and using bobby pins to affix my little golden winged helmet securely upon my head, I heighten the chances of delivering a message today. Don’t think that I’m having illusions of grandeur; that I believe I am retrieving from the beyond some golden truth which I will deliver to you. Certainly not. I am like a good Labrador running out into the tall, seemingly impenetrable reeds to fetch a dead bird and bring it back to my master’s hand. Then I, the master, will turn the feathered thing over in my hand and look at it wonderingly.
‘Is this what I shot from the sky? Is this my own true nature?’
And I, the servant, will wag my black tail and loll my pink tongue and cock my head to the side imploring the master to give me some more work to do before I resign myself to lying around on the rug licking my own genitals or waiting at the front window to bark at the mailman, whilst the master reclines, atrophying in a lounge chair, watching images flash on a 20 inch square cathode tube monitor adorned by insect like antennae, perhaps even watching images of duck hunters. So I whine a little and wag my tail, and the master nods and raises the rifle and waits for something to move across the blue screen of our mind. BLAM! We don’t know what it is until we’ve caught it and killed it. Then we examine a corpse and ask ourselves,
"Is this a bird?"
If we were to assume that everything we could observe about dead birds was the truth about live birds, that would be an error. Could we really hope to learn about the nature of flying birds by shooting them down? We could at least be in a relationship with them, which is what we long for, the unification of our holy trinity, the master, the retriever, and the illusive quest. The bird is a dream, and the master is a stalker, and the retriever is a warrior, a fine infantry man doing the rough work. Meanwhile the general keeps an eye on the whole picture and plans and urges the infantry on towards the flag which dances intoxicatingly in the wind. When at last we tear it down and hold it in our sweaty grimy palms, what is it that we will have attained? We will not know, even then, while clutching it, all that we will have is its discarded outward manifestation, so that we will have to ask ourselves:
‘What could a flag be?’
A flag is a dream. A general is a stalker. An infantry man is a warrior.
Then we will turn our nose to the new horizon and begin the quest afresh. The relationship will manifest through a new set of outward forms.
This is the glimpse of the hidden which I will deliver; an artifact which marks the place where the mysterious passed in a lightning moment of awakening. It was present and alive for a moment in a fleeting relationship between you, and I, and its own unknowable nature. The byproduct of that union, of the heat that was generated when we closed the circuit for a moment and nearly shattered the illusion of separation, is the thing which we can hold in our hand when the circle is broken again , a dead bird, a photograph, a blog entry, a key to remind us that once we breached the gate of no gates, and if we strive for it, we will do it again.

We Make Ourselves Every Day

We make ourselves everyday, we make ourselves in our own image. Some of us do it with care, artfully constructing a vehicle for the nameless, some do it sloppily, drowsily, with no attention to that which they are making, like a pimple faced, snot nosed teen in the kitchen of a drive through fast death chain assembling a Whacker burger from the ingredients available in a row of unwholesome white bins.
We make ourselves everyday. Some of us do it with flare. We make ourselves not just once in a day but as many times as we possibly can, in as many mediums as possible. We do it in service to my Lord, a silent black strange thing which cannot be defined as a thing itself. Only our relationship to it might be described, and I describe that relationship to you now with that pair of words, "My Lord", which implies that it is the governing noble force and I the capable hands which act out the will of the creeping chaos, the untamable shadow of the moon, the eternal resident of the underground labyrinth.
We make ourselves every day, in every moment. Some use only their default settings. They make themselves without love, they make themselves without care, they make themselves without attention. These docile little lambs go about chewing their cud and bleating their complaints to one another while the shepherdess, cloaked in black, wielding her curved cane, a cane made in the shape of a hook for snaring an unwitting fish, guides them gently towards the ashen abyss, to the well of lost souls, where they will spin like thin white sheets in the spin cycle as viewed through a little glass portal, twisted and tangled, churning in the dark, their whiteness revealing their great sin; the sin of having made no effort. They will have been, as we say, caught white handed, bleached out by the destroyer, the bone masher, smiling under her hood, edging them on with her boot tip, fastening gleaming brass bells about their necks. Why, I wonder, does she want them so white? So purged of color and variance? So depleted of any nutritious value that you will have to WONDER, is it still bread at all? See how she leads them to pastures which keep their fleeces soft and lovely?
We make ourselves every day, and if we do not do so with vigilance, there will always be another willing to make us for herself. She will prepare us to her taste, tender and undernourished, like calves shut away from sun and slaughtered before they can mature in order to yield a choice piece of veal.
Some have noticed the way that we make ourselves. Some have painted themselves black to escape the butchers block, to flee from Mary’s gently prodding toe, for everywhere that Mary bends the lamb is sure to go… Once painted black we are denied the safety of being bound to the flock. If you are not to her liking…away you go, to fend for yourself, if you will not be what she would make you, (something with salt, pepper, and a parsley garnish). If we make ourselves black, we are our own masters, beholden to none of this well tagged earth.
When you are your own maker then the world will close its doors to you and a cold wind will blow forever over your wretched frame. If you turn your back to Mary, she will make her world impossible for you to get by in. Don’t cross Mary unless you mean it. For those who painted the roses red, it’s off with your head, or into the wild wood, where the hungry wolves roam. Into "la aventura", into the unknown, from whence you will never emerge, because they don’t take our kind in the malt shops of the bountiful manifested world.
Out here in the tangled darkness, where our strange and varied colors mix and bleed together to make midnight soup. Out here where we wild things are, screeching and roaring, wailing and writhing, dreaming and stalking. Out here, where we make ourselves in our own image, in the form of the formless, governed by the boundless, taking shape for the pleasure of it, in service to none but the shadow, the unmade which aches for us to make it. We make ourselves for the hell of it, for the joy of it, to create because if you have not made yourself today, then tonight you will grace Mary’s plate.

Chop Wood

That’s right, I’m back mother fuckers! You thought I would just go quietly into the night, subdued by an ooey gooey green dose of night time cold medicine to bring me dreams of monsters and immigrant gang bangings in the garbage facility behind the top secret key code lock at the back of the ferry building? Sure I maybe dallied there, took a good long look at the dark recesses of my being, down at the tangled roots connecting me to all the collective muck, and sure I bared a yellow toothed grin of delight at such a dark and disturbing sight. Certainly I slipped right on down there to fuck the tin man only later to discover that he had incinerated the robotic maid his mother had left in charge to cook for him. That’s how we met you know, he liked to go out disguised as a regular human, except he was very tall and lean with an unusually long shapely nose, and he’d sell strange robes with all sorts of esoteric designs on them. I stopped to inspect the robes, then after one look at this very strange character I knew,
‘Oooh I want to have that, whatever it is, up inside of me and see how it feels!’.
So I sent away my familiars, a giant iguana named Astheron and a sweet little yellow and orange corn snake called Lixus or Ixux or Xixus depending on my mood. A very convenient trick that, when I want them I just extract them from the fabric of illusion that surrounds us holding us suspended in its sugary sweet web so that we can creep along its cables from one desire to another, in avoidance of a battalion of fears, from this great stuff I pluck my pets Astheron and Xixus, right out of the code of life, because at some point you see, everything can be traced back to a strand of lovely reptilian DNA, and when I don’t want to be seen with such telling company, I just store them right back in that matrix of Maya.
So with my pets safely stored, I stroll up to the gangly long haired disfigured object of my desire and communicate my enthusiasm for getting to know him (this hidden aspect of myself) a little better. He’s tremblingly enthusiastic and whisks me off to his place. I’m not at all surprised to discover that his living quarters are hidden behind the tiled bathroom wall of some unsuspecting strangers who come in to bathe and shit and sometimes even to masturbate with their faces twisted into the most disgusting grimace of agony verging on pleasure, never suspecting that behind their own grimy shower wall a timid and yet calculatingly diabolical tin man is tentatively exploring the female anatomy of his new found cohort. Ah! At last his overwhelming loneliness has come to an end! Here is a companion to sit with him in their narrow space between walls and look out over the golden sunset from a bay window seat and peel the leathery crimson flesh off of pomegranates, and with her he needn’t disguise himself as a man, he can be just a mechanical boy. She is curious and accepting of his true nature and they idle away years in which she pulls him into herself and listens close with her ear to his hollow chest to see if he has a heart beat, cold steel in hot flesh, one intoxicated by that alien warmth, the other by that mysterious cold.
So yes, I went down into the gear works of my psyche and traced out some of the primal pattern, the eternal labyrinth that I can call myself. I met with some of the deep symbols, some of the keys that I will store on my ring of power and tuck away into the folds of my rain flecked wool robe. I will tell you the solid gritty truth, I can not really walk the pattern yet, I am not so noble born. I can hold only three or four chambers of reality at once before I betray myself and the structure comes crumbling down. There are still fears that torment me and master me, beating me into submission causing me to grovel on the electrified web, wishing to wriggle away to a place that I can control. So I must keep diving into the dark depths in search of new alliances, practicing the principles of the dragon born until I can finally embody them consistently. I don’t know what will happen if I succeed. Perhaps you would get your wish and never hear from me again. But as the saying goes,
"before endarkenment write 600 words and post to blog,
after endarkenment write 600 words and post to blog."
I suspect that you will hear much more from me. I have yet plenty of black secrets to vomit up and lay at your feet. Therefore, bring on the green goo and the demonic voices of the deep! I am ready.

Placing Attention on a Candle

To conduct the following experiment you will need a few basic tools. First you must secure for yourself both a quiet space where you will be undisturbed and a moderate measure of time. In addition you will require a small timer to keep track of the passage of time and to limit the duration of this experiment. You will also need as part of your arsenal a white pillar candle and a book of matches or a small butane lighter. In your secluded space, if possible, keep the atmosphere dim by turning off the electrically fed lights and drawing down shades or fastening curtains so that the sun will not invade.
Now, there are at least two basic ways of positioning yourself for this experiment. Both ways involve sitting. One possibility is to seat yourself on the ground, probably cross legged, with the candle placed approximately a foot and a half in front of you. Ideally you should be able to gaze down with your eyes at the candle whilst keeping your posture straight. In this case your face would more or less be parallel to whatever wall or fixture is in front of you, but your eyes will be turned down just slightly so that you can gaze at the candle with ease. The other option is to include in your list of tools a straight backed chair and seat yourself upon this with the candle positioned on the floor a foot and a half away from your own toe tips. If you choose this option be sure to sit up straight with your palms resting on your knees. Ideally your legs should be bent at the knees to form a nice 90 degree angle. If the chair is so short that your knees are inclined to reach up towards your jaw or so tall that the soles of your feet do not quite touch the floor, then skip the chair and sit on the ground.
Let us assume then, to keep these instructions simple, that you have opted to sit in an ideally proportioned chair with the candle on the ground before you. To begin you will need to light the candle and then set the timer so that it will alert you when six minutes of earth time have lapsed. After setting the timer, look twice to make sure that it has begun to calculate the lapsing seconds. By doing this you will eliminate the possibility of spending the entire experiment in distraction trying to remember if you did set the timer, or wondering if it was working properly after you set it. When you have checked it twice set it on the ground beside your chair just out of sight.
Now the experiment begins. Your objective will be to place your unwavering attention on the candle for the duration of the six minutes. When you notice that you are thinking about something and not simply observing the candle, you will dismiss the thoughts and return your attention to the candle. This of course is much easier said than done, which is why I will now describe for you a technique for applying your attention to the candle.
First become aware of your body, feel the sensation of being in your own skin. Experience yourself as physically present. Begin to expand this awareness so that you are perceiving the empty air just a few inches off of your skin. Continue to expand this awareness until it is as if you have cast a net of attention over your physical body and the empty space surrounding it, including the space occupied by the candle. Hold this expanded awareness of self by feeling your body, the empty space, and the candle as one unit. I say, "feel", and not, "imagine", because I do not wish to encourage any intellectual activity. Rather I urge you to experience yourself and your candle as a physical presence. Throughout the experiment your eyes should remain open and focussed gently on the candle. When you notice that you have lost track of your attention and become wound up with the never ending stream of intellectual thoughts ideas and associations that will inevitably try to upstage your physical presence, simply disengage them and become aware of your body, the candle and surrounding space by once again casting that subtle net of presence.
Attention is an active doing, not a state of passivity. It is a subtle form of exertion and requires an effort that most humans are not accustomed to making. It is subtle and more physical than intellectual. If you haven’t had much practice in using attention it will be difficult to do so in the beginning. It will be elusive. Like trying to find the muscles and give the neural command which will lead to wiggling your ears for the first time, it takes practice and effort, and you may or may not be successful within your first 2 or 20 tries. The only thing that you can do is to really sincerely try.
Do not be tempted to just sit there letting your mind run its course of distraction. Expecting that you will naturally be able to place your unwavering attention on the candle without making any unusual effort would be like expecting that by sitting and waiting long enough, daydreaming all the while, you will suddenly acquire the ability to wiggle your ears. Therefor remember that developing any new skill is challenging, and frustration may be the only sign that an effort is being made. Do not loose heart. Continue to work past the point of frustration. Ability lies just beyond that point.