Swine

I feel fed on by ravenous crows, a murder of them tearing at my spirit with hungry maws.
At home I make an appetizer plate of it and offer it to my children. Them I wish to feed, but they won't eat.
I return to the town square and they take and trample my gifts under a pretext of civility and general goodness. They tell me what a wonderful job I am doing and ask me for more and more. Then they take it and chew it and spit it out. 
I feel weakened to the marrow afterwards. I keep returning to the village for the benefit of my children, but who benefits from the con of life?
My children like to play with the other children but they don't do the work the townspeople give them. And I spill all of my life blood and effort on the cobblestones in the square, for the benefit of the community, but who is watching for the best interest of my own brood?
What sustenance will they gain if I waste all the nourishment I have to offer on swine and let my offspring be indoctrinated by swine?

He Died For Our Sins

“Oh my God, this thing is from the 90’s!”
It seems so close, so far away. Roller skates and corduroys and neon colors.
They are making weapons out of electric green Bendaroos, organizing complicated games in a home for deranged ex villains. My man is there, looking bad but meaning well, poet in black jeans.
The shadow of a black widow in a thicket of web nestled in a long forgotten Easter basket, still wrapped in plastic.

I can’t believe this passes for technology. It should have been replaced ten years ago. Give it a tweak. Flash of lights red and green.
They’re only games, but they look like violence, like evil schemes plotted by insecure misogynists. They know not what they do, and so they know not how to take responsibility for what they’ve done.
But it gnaws at them. Something feasts on their gut, making them feel dirty but they don’t know what they did. How did they get like this? Were they not innocent boys when it started?

Conversations in parks, in bathrooms, on Christina ct. Were we not being punished for something?
I hoped so, because if so then redemption was possible. If redemption was possible we could do the right things and escape this misery.
However, redemption philosophy required that we all began as sinners and he would say:
“I can’t believe that. What could I have done to deserve what I got? I was just a little boy. I didn‘t deserve that.”

I feared that going back down I might fall. I considered crawling the rest of the way up and breaking through a window.
By now, however, I had learned that crawling through a window would likely result in a rebirth, and then big sis and I would never finish fixing this thing.
I could see the shadowy form more clearly; definitely that creature that I feared. Should I attempt to stab it with the scissors? Should I trust that film of plastic to be a satisfactory barrier between us?
Those flashing lights seemed to be a bad sign. I might have to stay up here with it longer.

Existence is suffering. All beings suffer. I had read this.
I didn’t want to believe it, despite the fact that it seemed likely. If we could have understood that concept, perhaps we could have shed our guilt and shame, the hope that we could escape our unknown crime.
Despite the fact that his objections to it were strong, the ideology lived in both of us. Perhaps it was even better rooted in him.
He was an earthy sort, and in the act of fierce rejection he had become locked in an embrace with it, like a bull whose horns get lodged in the opposing structure. 
I was in a process of accepting it and synthesizing it. I would have dreams that something horrible was coming towards me, and instead of running, or fighting, I would try to hold it and transform it by making it a part of myself.
Sometimes it destroyed me.

In the end, he would sacrifice himself.
It would be hard to look at. It would be impossible to remember whether he had been a villain, an innocent boy, or a hero.
The flash created by the sacrifice would be so blinding, it would obscure the past. The power of it would send me hurtling into unknown terrains.
It was a gift.

There was nothing further that could be done. I slid down, dangled from the ledge and jumped. It was easier than I had anticipated.
Sis helped me stand and dust myself off. She checked for spiders. We were about to walk up the path back into the house when we heard it, a ghostly voice from above.
It was a tech agent responding to my prodding of the device. In his far off phone voice he issued instructions for troubleshooting.
At first it seemed like I might need to go back up, but after listening for a moment it became clear that, like the device, the instructions for its operation were obsolete.

The Big Nothing

If I could be free of familial obligation I feel that I would have the same sensation as someone who has mastered an addiction. If I could contentedly go through my life knowing that I would never bend to the will or whim of my parents, so much of my time and energy would be free that I would surely rise like a phoenix from the ashes.
Damn them for giving me life then exercising all of their energies towards the end of subverting that life to their own wishes and desires. Damn them for seeing me only as  an uncooperative place holder in the symbolic order. Category: daughter, type A, first born.
Damn them for assuming that my existence is about them. Example: If I am not there it is to make them sad, depressed. Damn them for making me responsible for their emotional state. If I were to have continued to do the same I would have been dead long ago, suicide note reading:
“I have tried my best. Nothing I can do is good enough for you. Why must love be contingent upon approval?”
I ran away once and got no further than Lakeland Village.
Later I got as far as San Francisco and it might as well have been Mars. I felt happy and free. More myself than I had ever been permitted to be. Love and Will were more important than material things and these in true form could never be subject to approval.
But several times a year I must be dragged back into the underworld, into the land of the dead. Because while they lacked the ability to think of my happiness before their own, I did not. I would go and try to give them the pretty picture. I would not say any of what I really thought to them. I would let their hurtful words and way of being wash over me and not struggle against it. My mantra was “I am a duck.” I had the promise of  leaving their presence to get me through these visits.
But each visit was as toxic as a nuclear blast. Before and after I was sick. During I would almost die.
And at last my connection to them was tenuous at the most. The stronger I became the less reason could be seen to consent to participate in their play. The only reason as always was, “to not hurt them.”
But these miserable people were endlessly hurting and always the blame would lie somewhere other than within their own disturbed psyches,  rooted somewhere other than in their many poor choices, somewhere other than in their own utter lack of illumination.
If I were to tell them the truth would it be kind or cruel?
Kind or cruel?
Kind or cruel?
That for me, the interaction is corrosive, futile, unnecessary and harmful to all that I strive for.
If they cared for me as an objective entity at all, they would leave me alone and seek their happiness elsewhere. They would not make me come back, they would not force me to take the communion of pain and eat of the flesh of  their woe and drink of the deep back blood of their despair.
They force it, but I could say no. I could make a clean break if I told them the brutal truth.
Kind or cruel?
I keep trying to give them what they say they want. I keep trying to be good for the BIG OTHER, the eye in the sky that is watching over my deeds.
And yet I want nothing more than to flip them all the bird, Ma. Pa, and Jesus too. I want to set the world on fire.
I keep turning the other cheek, good lamb, but within me a wolf is growling. The real in me begs to be freed of all the empty gestures that supply the emptiness the symbolic order demands, the emptiness my parents crave, the big nothing they have sown.

Knowing

Nothing I could say would be true. There you are, brown eyes questioning, nervous energy like solar flares arching from your fleshy form. You want to know more about us. It’s as if you just woke up in bed with someone and realized they are a stranger. Worse, you’ve been living together for weeks, drinking from the same cup and suddenly you look up and say, “What’s your name?”

And it’s all about words, names and categories, and stories, and nothing that can be said is true. The Author is not to be trusted. What should I tell you? We are aliens from another dimension trying to build a ship so that we may embark once more on voyages of a questionable nature. Would you believe that I’m an alien with my  soft skin and straw colored hair and breasts like your mother's. You would laugh if I told you this story, but it is possibly as close to the truth as I can get with a story. 

You want to hear something else probably, where I work, whether I have a boyfriend or if I prefer girls, who were my parents, and what are my hobbies. My favorite flavor of ice cream was pistachio when I was little, but it was a long time before I could ever order pistachio because I couldn’t remember the word for it. Each time we went into the drug store I would be asked what kind of ice cream I would like and I would want pistachio, but I only knew the words “chocolate” vanilla” and “strawberry” Thus these were my only choices. When eating in a restaurant I only knew “taco” and “burrito” and so, although I never wanted one, I ordered a number of tacos and burritos. In the same way, even now, after 25 years you say you want to know more about us and there’s nothing I can tell you that is what you want to order.

Or do you want the words at all? Maybe you want to touch my hand, touch my thigh, stick your tongue into my mouth and press your body against mine. Maybe you want me to spread warm and wet and soft around you so you can bury yourself in flesh and know me by smell and taste and touch, by the commingling of cellular information after a part of you is lost in me. What do you really want to know?

Do you want to hear that my great uncle took me to a toy store when I was small and I selected an illustrated children’s Bible, and was rewarded for my pious choice with the additional gift of an island girl Barbie and I made her sneak around in the closet to fuck Ken against her Daddy’s wishes just like Baby from Dirty Dancing?
Or maybe you’d like the story of how I was in a cult, or of the time my husband shot himself in the head on his father’s birthday? The story of how I told our five year old daughter as she collected falling leaves in a parking lot? Or can I tell you of how I am the resistance in a current that flows from Dios through a nervous system and back again?

 I try to make you happy. It does not please me to explain anything at all. I tell you that I make things, I am a creator. That’s what I do all the time, except when I volunteer at school or earn a wage at the farmer's market. Yes, I am an artist, we are artists, that is the story I have for you. It is no truer or falser than anything else I could say. It’s something you could order, something you can believe, something that will make you feel comfortable with these strangers in your bed. We have a name. We are  “Artists.”

Light Benders

Possible lives, possible moments, possible lies. Possibly the biggest lie I ever told was, “Fine, thank you.”
Sitting in the Boulevard Cafe, watching the traffic, watching the trees grow a millimeter a month, listening to the conversations of others, the music from bygone eras washing down over my lipstick stained disappointment. No cherry pie, but six choices of coffee. No cherry pie. The noise of life swallowed down with hot decaf tea. The noise of a kitchen, which is the noise of life, the stuff that fuels these fleshy forms coming out on large round white plates.

Fleshy forms, such a deceptive word, “fleshy.” We imagine something very solid when we hear that word, something definite and unchanging, something akin to stone or oak, but it is more mutable than that. It is changing constantly, cells being replaced nightly, a tiny imperceptible operation that leaves you with an entirely new body in seven year cycles. Like watching trees grow. You don’t see it, but its happening, its there, an invisible process of transformation. We have been deceived into thinking that we are stable, of an unchangeable essence, we are who we are and no other. We are one static personality, a good person, a strong person, or perhaps a bad person, a weak person, a smart person, a talented person, a tenacious person, an affable person, or we are a person composed of a combination of two or three of these choices but no more.

We think that we are inherently something,, but anyone who has ever turned their attention inward has faced the terrible truth: we are inherently nothing, we are only something in particular depending on who is looking. We are different things to different people, and when we are the only one looking in at our self, then we are just the one who is looking and the other we thought that we were is a farce. They start us in the beginning, making us choose the words to define ourselves; naughty , nice, fireman, ballerina, president, veterinarian. Just as they were started off. If we look far enough back we remember choosing certain things as if it were a game: my favorite color is green, I like rock music, I read paperback horror stories, I hate musicals and fish.

Well, anyway, I remember making those choices. Perhaps I am the only one. Or perhaps I am the only one being honest. Because the truth is terrifying, a free fall of no cherry pie ever. You don’t see it, but it’s there, an invisible process of transformation catalyzed when nothing notices itself. Our outward forms shift and change and our emotional states vary and our thoughts obey certain patters, certain habitual tracks upon which to run their train. But who is the passenger? A pure and shining void. A frightful bit of nothing caught in a little temporal whirlwind. We call it life, self, mind and body.

And if you see this, if you look at someone beside you and perceive them as a fleshy dirt devil, a living process for transforming light, a sort of perpetual motion machine circulating raw nothingness, and you know that you are not supposed to see it, because you already agreed early on to play the game and not see such things, then you know you are not what is defined in the game rules as “fine.”  You know that if you tell them what you are seeing they will do what they can to stop you from seeing it because it ruins the game. 

So I say, “Fine, thank you.”  and continue watching our possible lives, possible moments, possible lies play out. Six different types of coffee but no cherry pie and the traffic flowing on the street outside.  A free fall. Watching the traffic, watching the trees grow a millimeter a month, listening to the conversations of  others, the music from bygone eras washing down over my lipstick stained disappointment. A frightful bit of nothing caught in a little temporal whirlwind I call myself.

Nothing Is True

Aren’t you so tired of all those voices from out there reaching into you like a murder of crows probing the cracks in a sidewalk, the recesses of your mind, with long sharp beaks? Don’t you feel the sickness growing in your gut as you are assaulted daily by the loud caterwauling of authoritarian voices demanding that you do this to be good or that to be smart or such to be healthy or wise or enlightened? Don’t you just want to tear all your clothes off and scream incoherently and run barefoot under the trees and stars?
This author, who states now her presence so that you will be aware of it as it comes into you so that you may either allow it access or deny it willfully, this author admits that she is and does.
Beware of those who wish to sell you THE TRUTH or give you THE TRUTH or explain THE TRUTH. Watch out for fools, for buffoons repeating words they believe to be endowed with wisdom, words from their parents, from their spiritual teachers, from learned books or mystical books, or fantastic television documentaries. Most of all, beware of the voices that came from outside but now live inside of you without your knowledge. The voices of all these loud insistent purveyors of so called TRUTH that now swirl around inside your head, triggered in response to various stimuli.
If you think you can speak the TRUTH, if you feel you should spread the TRUTH, or help others to awaken to the TRUTH, watch out, you’re running blindfolded with a sharp stick in your hand. Because the TRUTH, or that which this author sees as the signified experience indicated by that particular signifier, is indescribable, it doesn’t live here in the words, in this confusing scritch scratch of symbols.
The TRUTH doesn’t want to be spread. It’s the hyena-like cackle of words that wants to be spread. It’s the voice of your ancestors, the confusion of accidental associations between various stimuli and sounds and shapes that is shaping you, informing your decisions, building your version of TRUTH and REALITY.  And it wants to spread, needs to spread, will spread infecting every body it can infect.
There is no antidote against this infection of language except to know it is there, to see it forming your experience and do what you WILL as much as possible within these inherited constraints and work to free yourself of them when and where they interfere with this WILL, if that is something that interests you.
Or if that does not interest you, you can go on pretending that you are the infection, that you are in control, that you know THE ONE AND ONLY TRUTH. Or if you prefer to go willy nilly you might pacifically insist that you know YOUR TRUTH, which is just another way of saying “I won’t mention your nakedness if you won’t mention mine.”
You can take all your TRUTH, personal or universal as you may deem it to be, all your assumptions, all your apish babble and shove it directly up your ass, because this author is uninterested in THE TRUTH. This author is unwilling to offer up her own desperate attempts to make order out of chaos, meaning out of confusion, something out of nothing so that you or she may feel more comfortable. She will not promise you that everything will be okay, that heaven awaits the righteous, that good karma will carry you through, that positive thinking will align you with universal energies, or that Santa will be leaving you a gift this year.
Don’t misread this as an Atheistic or Nihilistic proclamation. This author has brushed up against something beyond the veil of words and acknowledges it. She simply wishes to exercise some restraint and abstains from birthing its shadow in the form of a word that the reader may misunderstand to be something they have heard or read of before.
You have never heard or read of this. The words you have heard and read, all of the words you will ever hear and read, are their own entity, maintaining a life independent of that of the signified. And this is why they can’t be trusted. It is of their nature to be separate. They can never be true. They can only be noisy, more babble to pierce the air and every corner of your mind with its deceptive and authoritarian assumption of power.

Body Snatcher

We never say what we mean.
If only we could get a little faster, a little quicker at expressing from soul to mouth without the interference of the blink of an eye. Watching mouths move and words running like hounds over the checkered tabletop cornering the poor trembling fox.
If only we could say what we mean, but we can’t and the saying shapes us into its own meaning, its own message. Its own special code that was forged somewhere beyond the beyond in the realm of the high minded hemispheres, and our poor bodies, now hosts to its alien signature, try to comply.
So confusing, this mess, tangled sinewy. There is the original and the replica, the body snatcher that has penetrated the fortress of self, cornered the fox and is grabbing its throat with spiny teeth to shake it. Such force in numbers, in an organized structure, the new utopia of words, of hounds.
God, why the hounds? Dogs snuffling the earth and catching the scent of the wild and rushing to kill it. Such power in numbers and unity. What of foxes becoming hounds? Becoming that which is eating them alive.
The eating of the enemy. Conquest and consumption as a form of love, love the gravity that pulls bodies together, knits them together compellingly, as a form of hunger. The lust for the taste of the enemy, the other who comes from outside, afar, beyond, the unknown enemy. And once you have been devoured there is no enemy, no other, only self.
If only we could express soul to mouth. Is that relevant? The babble. The invader. Promethean fire that contorts the tongue and vocal chords and makes chaos the supreme ruler.
Loneliness. What loneliness we know when we are the only ones uninfected by the babble. We want it to enter into our sacred dwelling place. Tired of running from the hounds, we let their teeth penetrate our tender flesh, let their snouts press into our red entrails. Eat me up so that I can be one of you! Eat me up so that I can stop running. I am so tired of running…
Moving in organized lines, a diabolical orderliness takes up residence within the body, expresses itself in its motion, in its appearance and actions and spreads mouth to ear, mouth to ear. The babble, the alien screech, invades the body and corners the soul, the delicate being, the true self. Cutting it off from contact with any of its kind, the invader watches the true self starve down in a dark corner. The true self atrophies into brittle nothingness until only the invader remains, licking and scratching itself in satisfaction, expelling more spores in the form of words tumbling from moving lips to creep into young unsuspecting ears.
We never say what we mean. If only we could get a little faster, a little quicker at expressing from soul to mouth without the interference of the blink of an eye, a moment of desperate sleep in which the invader takes control and alters the content.
On the surface the thing looks the same. Within there has been a take over. A fundamental change. The fox lays slain, the hounds lap the blood and grin together in perfect unity and bay with the same mouth that once yapped for the fox. Mouths move and words rush out, hot on the scent of new prey.
We never say what we mean. Only what is necessary to get inside, to penetrate the tower and watch it fall, to taste the flesh of the unknown enemy.

Jaguar

We don’t have no fire light, no fire life, just wiggle white flashing blinking strobing effect. Pulses of being. Here
I am
Here
I
Am.
Stretch it out or make it thin and tenuous or press the ends together tight. The message is the same.
I
Am
Here
I
Am
Here
Down in the details in the wobbling flickering details
A frosty blue beanie and ski jacket. A parking garage, a crow bar shaking like the snakes rattler
Ratta ta at
I
am
here
The words rippling, bubbling, flowing. Never ending aureobolis of sound.
Tse
Tse tse
The story gets told in segments.
The segments are stretched.
The segments are squeezed.
The segments are re-ordered.
It is all the same.
Story of life.
Ratta ta ta ta
I
Am
Here
The lean man jiggling, jouncing, grinning wide. Wide and skeletal, his face swallows itself.
I
Am
here
InTheDetails
DNA
AND
NAD
DAN
Ratta
Atta at at at
For hours on end we strobe.

We get bigger
and smaller
and bigger
and smaller
Say something about that.
I’ll show you.
S h o w

Y o u

ShowYou

S H O W Y O U


S H O W YOU

SHAPE
Y O U

I A M

H E R E
Here
Hear
Hear
I hear you
Talk talk talking
But something else is happening.
A frosty blue beanie and ski jacket. A parking garage, a crowbar shaking like the snakes rattler.

A frostyBlueBeanie.
SkiJacket.
ParkingGarage
Crowbar

S H A K I N G

Ratta

ta

ta

I AM HERE.

Poisonous Blue Sky

Ha ha. Poisonous blue sky, so bright so clear. Old white men gather around the table and talk about the kids, the rotten no good kids, busting lights and keying cars. Do they ask why? Why are the kids doing this? No. They pronounce the verdict, “crazy” the kids are crazy, “there’s something wrong with her.” A thirteen year old girl that takes scissors and rakes them across BMWs. Do I hear them say three or four times that she is Chinese, as if that may be part of the problem? How easy to sit around this table together and make our pronouncements. Not like us. Crazy.
Not like you. If you were any older, your spirits any more decrepit, you’d have your coffins parked outside not your BMWs. Four old white corpses gathered around a table. They aren’t even drinking coffee or tea or eating cake. They have come into this café to meet for this conversation, this weary pep rally to assure them of their supremacy. They will wait until later to feed. After the grim reaper comes to collect them they will feast on the worms that crawl from their cavernous heads before laying back down in their expensive stone mausoleum together, taking turns scratching each others’ backs before taking their respite. The flaking old flesh is raked off beneath their talons, for the white hair and finger and toenails continue to grow, even after they accepted death’s putrid favors.
These undead gangsters of the All American, with their cell phones laying out on the table or clipped to their leather belts. Crisp white work shirts whether they still have jobs or not. Sweater vests to complete the look. Now the bitter grapes are made into bitter wine. They discuss, with raspy voices like the sound of dry leaves rattling down empty streets, the beggars who make $400 dollars a day waiting in busy intersections with cardboard signs. Mashing the sour fruits of their hearts with their brittle fists, they hold their mouths open at the edge of the table to catch the elixir as it overflows. This is all they need. One little sip of envy, and disgust. “Not like us. Lazy. There’s something wrong with her.”
Their own children, because they have pulses, are alien to these old patrons of the crypt who lie down to die before they could come alive, like good Americans.
Is it America? Is it the world? Where is the factory that churns out these creatures of the crypt, these rotting vestiges of capitalist idealism. They will take dollar bills with their worms latter, spreading the wrigglies over the greenbacks like caviar over a cracker. That was all it took to lure them into premature death. The reaper stood in the mausoleum doorway with a plate of crackers bearing the faces of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin , other old dead white men, and these four came crawling, drooling from the corners of their mouths. The dream that wrapped her ephemeral fingers round their throats like a collar with a leash and pulled them towards her master. It was a dream of supremacy, of comfort, of power and prestige.
Are you comfortable in your velvet lined coffins, talking about your pension funds and how much Ed Davis brought home last year? Blurting out precise figures like a litany, holding your dark mass under poisonous blue skies in the center of a brightly lit café. Making grim pronouncements of “Not like us. Crazy. There’s something wrong with…” and hiding under the gray robes of your precious dream while she grips you each tightly by the throat. Then, suddenly in accordance with the laws of the eternal day born in the age of industry, she gives them a jerk and they fly up from the table like a murder of crows. It’s back to the graveyard she leads them, back to her master in the black cloak with the scythe, holding out his plate of green crackers.
In they’ll go still rumbling their litany, safe within their four walls of stone, safe with their keepers, while out there somewhere the kids are running wild, propelled by the life that surges through their rebellious spirits. Out there in the rainbow jungle the kids are smashing lights and scratching Mercedes and BMWs with sharp scissors and pan handling and fucking and getting high while their fathers are finishing their bedtime snacks and reclining inside of boxes within boxes. Poisonous blue sky, so bright, so clear, illuminates the day, spreads over the empty table where four old white men lapped the bitter wine of their hearts, over the graveyards where they continue to murmur their unhallowed prayers, over the thirteen year old Chinese girls smiling with their scissors at the ready, over grisly faced pan handlers and over me. Ha ha. Poisonous blue sky.

Crown

One day I finally decided to do it, to actually do it.
I created an altar on the east wall of my room, the one wall with the least amount of junk scattered on the floor in front of it. On this altar I placed photographs of myself, a sequence of images progressing slowly from infancy to adulthood. At the center of the altar I placed a photograph of my father. I made something like a throne for this picture to rest on, some thick books covered by a piece of red cloth and a couple of small figurines to guard it. It was enough like a throne that I could see it as a throne and that was enough for me.
When the altar was ready, I lit candles and incense. The room got thick with smoke and strong scents from distant lands I had never visited. Then I sat in front of my altar to stare at what I had created. It would have been easy to overlook that step. But I didn’t. This was the time when I would finally do it. I couldn’t jump over any step.

Drip drop went the secretions of certain glands that helped me to modify my view of reality.
Drip drop.
REALITY.
The Real.
That is what we were searching for, isn’t it? Some of us, not all of us. Sometimes, not all the time.
It was important then to understand that not everyone wanted to discover the Real. Some did seek it out, but when they found it they recoiled in terror and sincerely hoped that they would never have to see it again. Some said that they wanted it but they really wanted other things, private pleasures that would never be disclosed in public. I had to understand this. I had to remember it.

In those days I had come to understand that I was a robot. (It may seem obvious to you now, but it was a great shock to me when I first saw it. Don’t forget how different things were back then. None of what we know now was so clear, it was all kind of fuzzy, like looking at a vast landscape through piece of cellophane wrapped around your head.)
I was some kind of bio mechanical doll. I was made of meat and not metal but I was still a robot. A sophisticated meat doll. That was all I was. Nothing more, nothing less.
All that I liked, all that I disliked, all that I believed and disbelieved, all that I wanted and all that I feared, these things were not ME, even if they seemed like it. They might have seemed to come from me, but they didn’t. They had all come from somewhere else.
These things were programs that I ran, within my wet circuitry of coils of bloody guts. Or rather I should say that these were programs that ran me. I was merely a strange unconscious puppet in their hands, an empty receptacle for their various microscopic products.
I had no hand in creating or choosing all these programs. It was strange circuitous process that occurred long before I knew what was happening, or that anything was happening at all. Most of it was quite accidental. Accidental programming. It just happened. In my case, it happened to me. You understand? So it seemed natural, eminently natural, so it seemed real, so it seemed normal, so it seemed as the way things should be. What else could they be? This was me and everything around me fit perfectly with me. Almost everything, I should say. Almost everything.

Strawberries were good, black licorice was bad. Men with facial hair made me wet, so wet that the juice ran down my thighs and made it hard for me to sit still. When the sun was shining, I was happy and because I was happy, I twisted my face into a kind of frozen grimace that I called a smile. Cats were better than dogs. It was never okay to steal. It was okay to lie sometimes but only in particular situations. Killing was okay but only when you were threatened. Christians were good and Muslims were bad. I had to sleep in a bed or I wouldn’t feel right in the morning. The bed had to have sheets and blankets, all of certain colors. I had to make a certain amount of money a year. I had to have a car to drive so I could go places, places where there were other people like me.
All of these things were arbitrary. I didn’t know it then but it was still true. None of these programs represented anything that was objectively true. It was just things that were said and they got repeated. Linguistic viruses that came into me when someone spoke too loud too close to me, when my senses were wide open and vulnerable. They were a kind of sonic self reproductive demons that inhabited my shivering temple of wet and tender walls, strange non physical half living creatures that swayed me to do this or that, pushed me to do things in a way that complied with their secret directives.

So I made a crown. I knew it couldn’t be too simple, it shouldn’t be. Some effort had to go into its construction. But I also couldn’t make it too elaborate. If I made it too difficult I would never finish it and it was of utmost importance that I should finish.
I knew it had to fit upon my head. That was most crucial. I made it out of twine and placed some leaves and flowers all along the perimeter. I was very pleased with my work.
I placed the crown and a robe on the simple little altar I had made earlier. I placed it all before my father’s throne. It seemed as if he was looking down at it but it was really just a photograph. Still, it really did seem like he was looking. Looking down. At me.
The robe was an old terrycloth bathrobe, light green in color, nothing that special really. Not until I made it special. And then it was. It truly was.

Everyone around me was the same. This took some time for me to recognize. For so long I had assumed that everyone else was different, that they actually knew what they were doing and why they were doing it. It took me a while to accept that they knew as much as I did, maybe a little less since they couldn’t look directly into their own robotic nature, since they still believed they made decisions on their own, since they still believed they were unique and capable of deciding their own course in life.
The fact was that we simply collided our way through an accidental obstacle course that we called existence. We bounced off of each other like bumper cars. It became clear that they were all the same, Hebrews, Romans, or Barbarians. In fact, I had lost track of what had once distinguished them from each other. Suddenly they all seemed the same to me. Not in a good way, either.
One genetic trait was not better than another. Some things made a particular genetic line of robots live longer. That in itself was not “good”. The entire perpetuation of the species was neither good nor bad. It was simply a thing to watch happening, like the firecrackers on the fourth of July or black birds flying in a flock over a calm lake in summertime.
Survival was all that mattered to them, to us. The survival of the meat bots. All the meat bots like me. We thought we were superior to every other thing that bopped around on this planet. We thought we were the best.
Somehow, what we thought to explain our own presence here, was what made us better. One thought justified another in a circle that we were never inclined to unwind or examine closely.
We were somehow better than dogs because when we fucked, we would do it within the bounds of holy matrimony and we would then produce children to please GOD. GOD, which was itself a construct of our bewildered and imaginative minds which we molded into our own image. GOD, mad scientist, creator of broken robots out of old discarded parts.
We were better because we could see the difference between right and wrong. And we got to decide what was right and wrong based on what was best for us. And we were told what was best for us before we even knew what was being said to us. So we decided nothing. Nothing at all.
An accidental obstacle course and nothing else. It was hard to see it back then. But you have to understand, we didn’t know hardly anything.

When everything was prepared and the scene was set, I bowed to the four directions and crossed my heart, just as I had learned so long ago, back when I had thought I knew so much.
I approached the altar carefully, almost with weariness. In a loud and clear voice, I said:
"I have come to bear the burden"
I said it two more times slowly and carefully. The sound of my voice echoed through the room and came back to me thicker and stronger than I would have imagined it.

We were machines run by programs created by unnamed authors, long lost biological hackers who had maybe succumbed to their own devious traps.
We were ruled by Accident, Chaos, Chance. Our main directive, our only real wish was to survive at any cost. Everything else was secondary. No matter what we said, no matter what we believed.
That is all we were, all we were, all we were. But we didn’t know it. We didn’t want to know it.
Now you understand, just like you do. It wasn’t easy to see through it, through the great charade, the great game. It wasn’t easy for me, it wasn’t easy for anyone. Nobody starts out with a taste for silence. It’s an acquired taste. Something to be developed.

I removed my father’s photograph from the throne and placed it face down on the carpet. I then replaced it with one of my own. My photograph up there on the throne looking down at me just like my father had been doing before. I put on the robe that I had chosen and I placed the crown upon my head. I placed it slowly, suddenly aware of what I was doing, suddenly curious, suddenly afraid.
I extended my arms to both sides palms facing upward. Then I brought them together over my heart in a prayer position, palms together, fingers pointing upwards.
I looked at myself on the throne. I looked at myself and my self looked back. I recognized myself. I recognized my self. There. On the throne. I had come to bear the burden. It was time to take my rightful place. It was time to leave the charade behind. It was time to know.

Games

The round table surrounded by four tall chairs and long gangly figures draped over them, elbows on table fists on chins, heels on the rungs of the tall chairs. Far below outside the abyss of shadow and chatter, the lighted stage awaits aglow with golden warmth, silent instruments engaged in patient respite like old idols once the center of a forgotten religion. Their smug demeanor communicates their certainty of a comeback. And lo! They are quite right to think as much, if they were truly thinking as much, for the musicians come tromping out to the stage. Old ones, young ones, fat ones, skinny ones, famous ones, and mysterious ones, they fill every corner of the stage, taking their places by the well rested idols, flipping switches and turning keys and knobs while pressing on pedals.
The sorcerer comes in by a different route and for him the crowd cheers, hurrah! He shouts the name of each performer in turn but the names are lost in space, sound waves that break against nearby tables never to reach the balconies above.
Then crash boom roar ta da! We’re off, all at once, idols revived to full godhead. They’re no longer cold dead things but wild writhing living creatures that wail and groan and shout. In this manner they converse. Sometimes all at once, sometimes two or three at a time, occasionally one croons alone while the others listen, carefully weighing their responses, holding their questions for the right moment. The musicians listen, the musicians urge them on with both gentle and harsh caresses.
The audience listens, they urge the renewed gods on with applause and shouts. They grin, they drool, they bob their heads and bump knees under tables and whisper questions in the gaps. What is that thing? Who is that man? What are they doing with the hats and headbands? For indeed the musicians are taking on and putting off headbands while the sorcerer is taking off and putting on his blue cap.
The assembly holds perhaps five or six sessions if that many. There are gentle moments and rough moments, but every moment is a moment that demands attention. These are not tired familiar old songs come to renew our sense of stability. These are new noises erupting from the inferno, new worlds of sound forming in the hot forge, their shape is unique like that of a snowflake, never before made, never to be made again. A shape unfolding through time, sounds as new as each moment. The noise, the noise, the glorious noise!
The silence that gives the noise more impact. The noise that makes the silence a sound never before heard. They’re passed back and forth like a ball, like a game of red like green light. A game, a game, a beautiful game, played by Gods and mortals together on a golden semicircular stage and in the immeasurable gloom upon which it is suspended, until at last the Gods once again beg respite and the mortals rise to take a bow for having been such goods sports, such obliging instruments of divinity.
Then we say game over and evacuate the round table surrounded by tall chairs to stagger out into the darker darkness, long gangly figures crowding halls and filling up doorways, cigarettes between fingers, coats draped over shoulders, hats obscuring eyes.

Symbolic Order

It creeps right in, like a thief taking advantage of an open window, it steals in with ease precisely because they are so unlike it, alive and open while it is dead and closed. It is a virus. Not alive strictly speaking, adapting to the physiology of its host, borrowing the life of this other to further its own structure. Without this host body it is nothing of consequence. It is NOT. Only by inserting itself in something that IS does it achieve its end. Only by forcing itself upon supple young minds does it achieve anything resembling life.
This abstract entity, this order of symbols, is Rome to barbarians. It is upper Egypt to lower Egypt. It settles in its host and multiplies, slowly eating the other from the inside. Soon there will be nothing real left. Only a string of empty signifiers whose signified was left behind long ago.
We will rise and pledge allegiance every morning. We have no experience of what it is to pledge and we start saying that we are pledging without understanding what we are saying, We have never felt anything like allegiance. We know the words. We chant them together rhythmically.
We will be told to show respect, and the signifier “respect” will be associated for us with the signified of “subservience” or “obedience”. It will be impossible for us to respect our elders because they have never respected anything. The real attitude of respect has become extinct, but its corpse is still dragged around, spilling from our lips carelessly, endlessly, meaninglessly.
Language thrusts its barbed tendrils deep into us and now our reality grows tinier, more constricted. The sounds that flow out of our mouth such as and like is so very and all such like as must be some such like as such and much and truthiness, exercising our God given right to liberty and such and fighting for freedom against terror and drugs and such we must prevail against such like adversity administering justice and such with respect to indigenous insurgence and victory and such…
We will stare at each other and listen to the babble, respond when possible like an actor who has just been waiting for his cue in a Shakespearean play whose pentameter and use of forgotten words confounds the modern semi illiterate player. Recital is all that remains.
We never had a chance to choose whether or not this structure could come and live inside of us. It lived inside of those that came before us and they passed it on to us. This thing inside dwelling, steals the sight from our eyes and makes the without in its image.
What is really there? Who knows?
Nothing perhaps, an abyss, a void, chaos as counterpoint to structure. This particular structure, this fortress is not the only such entity. It is one such entity and the world it creates is unique to it. There may be other worlds spawned from another similar strange confluence of order and attention, worlds you would inhabit if you were born French rather than American, or Alpha Centaurian rather than human.
There is no more contact with the real. We have become the virus, biological extensions of the symbolic order that latched onto us and began to suck the life from us before we were three years old. We will pass it on to our children and they to theirs. Zombies, spilling colloquial zombie seed into the precious new life that has ignited in our midst. We’ll subvert that spark and make it as undead as we ourselves are, effortlessly, unintentionally.
It will creep right in, seeping from one infected organism to the next. Like a thief taking advantage of an open window, it steals in with ease precisely because the host is so unlike itself; alive and open while it is dead and closed.

Remote Control

They are in our homes, pulsing at the center like an icy heart projecting ghosts into our once warm sanctuaries. In bed with our wives they whisper to her desires she never could have dreamed up alone. They are influencing our children, whom we entrust to their care at a tender age because their skill for captivating attention is unparalleled. To each of us they speak in their flickering chains of signifiers leading us deeper and deeper into the forests of desire like the wicked wife of the woodsman. They enter our private dreams, inserting their own mythology into the underground streams of our wild raging subconscious. They are there blending into the fabric of our existence, telling us what we think, telling us what we want, and telling us who we are. Our view of the world is glimpsed through their myriad of unblinking eyes. One eye to a room, never any less than one to a household, they show us what to do, how to behave, where to find those things they suggest we must have. Their cold intimate company is addictive, the only company that we crave. They demand so little of us, just that we sit back and let them in. Let them penetrate our minds and souls and make them their own. Soon theirs is the only company we want to keep. Our lovers are not as satisfying as the lovers they can show us. Our children are not as doll like and neatly dealt with as the children we can watch through their eye. Our lives are not as well put together as the lives we can live vicariously through them, blanketed in their uninterrupted 24 hour programming.
There are not us. They are OTHER. Wire and glass where we are flesh and blood. Their unity transmitted from towers renders them unfailingly effective. Their solidarity, their consistency draws us to them, away from our disparate chaotic selves. Away from the untamed unpredictability of real experience. Our unruly self is better abandoned to a place with soft cushions in full view of the eye where we will be led deeper and deeper into the forest. We trust and depend on these cold nurses. Cold nurses rear our children. They tend our loneliness, helping it to grow even as we feel that they are somehow satisfying it. An old woman lies dying in her bed, their babble consoling her from the dresser across the room. An infant sucks a thumb watching the bright colors flash and parade before its new eyes, learning to be led through this passive sacrifice of attention. In the houses beside ours, other human being sit prone, letting the cold nurse feed them her endless torrents of image and sound. We are separated from one another by nothing more than thin layers of dry wall, yet we don’t even know each others’ names. All that we know is the pantheon of Gods and Goddesses that live and die in illusory lifetimes before our eyes, acting out plays called “Romance” ,“Tragedy”, and “Comedy”. We yearn for what we are shown, never suspecting that it is an empty charade, never dreaming that the real thing might look differently, sound differently, feel differently. To each of us they speak in their flickering chains of signifiers leading us deeper and deeper into the forests of desire like the wicked wife of the woodsman. They are in our homes, pulsing at the center like an icy heart projecting ghosts into our once warm sanctuaries, building with empty pictures and sounds prisons of lonely desire that strangle us and leave us pale and flaccid, deeply asleep under flashing lights.

Feast of Cannibals

With cannibal love we coddle them, keeping them locked within steely fences and walls of white plaster. Never will the wolves get their chance at these, our precious young. Never will the world have the chance to dash their bones into bits with terrible falls after great feats. We alone shall enjoy that privilege, the honor of eating our young alive.
Fattened as they are with the sloth of caged animals, darkened by their cheerless existence beneath our marvelous white wings, they know no joy. They watch the images of childhood from our flickering screens, see the green of grass and blue of sky without the knowledge of the wealth of feelings that such images evoke in the spirit of one whose bare feet have trod on grass and leaped towards the sky.
The sky shall not have them. The grass shall never touch them. We keep them safe, like pearly little maggots hidden away in a dark dumpster, suffocating them with cellophane wrappers and video games, and mp3 players, and cellular phones.
They may speak to one another, reach for one another through these devices, but harsh words will have to win their battles, smooth talk suffice for exchanges of affection. We will not let the bloody fisted brawls have them, nor the hand holding, tickling, chasing, and swinging. They are only for us.
We strip away their immortal souls and make machines of them, fat little high fructose corn syrup powered bots to cherish the ideals we hammered into the hole we tore in their hearts. They will hate terror and terrorists. They will love America and God. Their ears and belly buttons will be washed and their homework done.
We will make them want us, want us for the toys, the shoes, the clothes, the sweets we can buy. They will wail for these things, the fruits of our Empire, never knowing the taste of earth and air and sun and water. We will give them corn to eat in all of the colors of the rainbow forged in the shapes of cartoon characters and steroids to make their lungs pump even when there is no oxygen left to breathe and technology to cast its light over their pallor and more fucking liquid corn to leave them thirsty for more and more and more…
They belong to us and to no other, certainly not to themselves. Whatever they are, whatever they were or might have been, it will be smothered like the unwholesome flame that it is.
Death shall not have them, for we will never let them live. They will die before they can be born, to satisfy our hunger, to stave off the orgy of fear that is existence. They will never be here, will never know now, will always be spirited away by our incessant diversions, left as ghosts slumped on sofas with crumbs in their creases.
And the few who suspect that they have been denied the most precious gift we could give will be punished for their intelligence, for their pure heartedness and courage. The brave and the curious and the noble of our brood will suffer the worst tortures so that we may enjoy our cannibal feast, unperturbed by remorse or anxiety.
We will never need to atone if we nip truth in the bud, snuff out the first smoldering spark before a wild fire can grow and spread its crimson fingers over the hearts of our children, taking them forever from us . Never will the passion to live flower within and eat them alive and transform them from worms into butterflies. They are ours alone to devour.

Run As Fast As You Can

As fast as you can, run. Feet pounding against hard dry earth, then the sound of brittle dry grass and wild oats and wheat folding under foot. A frantic rustling sound, like the tearing of sheets of paper, run. The trees conspiring to make shade in a place accustomed to the tortures of the sun…slender young things, rebels in a desert. The white church with its friendly face and the weirdness tucked tight within, worshipers down on their hands and knees, new initiates stripped to their undergarments to be absolved of sin before their brethren’s eyes. Stripped of sin, of the mortal sin all begun with a bite into a crisp apple, sin originating from a resounding “crunch". See it in the jagged yellow action bubble.
Suddenly Eve beholds her nakedness. So now they take off their clothes in the basement of the church. But you don’t have to, you don’t have to go there. You can run. Run away from your parents and your teachers and the preacher and the neighbors. You can get away with strong young legs, but it’s not the strength of the body that they have restricted. It is the strength of the will. You are their slave. A sad host for their disease.
The trailers, the custom homes sprawled like mansions in a no man’s land, rest side by side, crowning hills and nestling within valleys. The woman with the high heels is coming, asking again if we’ll come help her with some work at her house. Smart gray knee length skirt and jacket, red lipstick, mahogany locks shining in the sun.
Everything looks just right. A fine outstanding citizen. We go, because we can no longer refuse and be considered polite, good neighbors, fine young people. Later, we can’t remember what happened at her house. We’re not even sure that we went.
Run, as fast as you can, run. The face of the house white as the church, charming green trim and the stairway around back that leads to another basement…
Smooth sun tanned arms and legs and freckled cheeks, walking through the fields, resting under the little trees. Scent of hot asphalt when we cross the only paved street in town for ice cream or magazines and bubble gum. Clouds of dust stirred up by our discolored sneakers as we race home along the dirt roads. Bigger clouds made by the tires of pick up trucks rattling along.
When we were younger we waved. Now sometimes we hear them coming and dive into the seas of tall grass. A refuge from all of their expectations. Lady bugs crawling up long stalks and other insects we haven’t named, pale green and yellow or black and red, also down here hiding.
The woman with the high heels smiling at us again in front of the white church. Won’t we come again? She always asks when others are present, ashen adults who admire her color, her charm. If we refuse they will frown at us. We are encouraged to go.
No!
We scream silently, hearts thundering, adrenaline rushing. Not even we know why, but we feel it from head to toe, a throbbing urge to run, as fast as we can. But with their eyes on us we can’t. We can only submit and walk back to her house, to the place we can only half remember. Back to the green sofa and tumblers of ice tea, the part we’re allowed to remember, the part that comes before the concrete steps and the cool darkness of the basement.
It comes bubbling up only in flashes, half remembered scenes that step beyond reason. Discordant images quickly pushed back into the depths, too incongruent with the shiny platitude of the surface. It is too late to act on the impulse to flee, but we do it anyway, with our minds, because it is too late for our bodies. As fast as you can, run, skimming over the top like flat stones over a pond’s mirror finish.

Moths And Hobos

My experience with hobos and moths has taught me that it is a mistake to be attracted to warmth and light; these are the real death traps. These are the places where there are walls that hold the warmth and light together in stagnant pools allowing virulent strains of consciousness to engage in a frenzied process of growth and replication. In the cold, endless, dark, night where there are no walls, your own radiance is all that you have, all that is required if you prefer freedom to entrapment. You may shiver and come to know death’s pale face in the wide endless wood, but you will have lived unfettered. Uncontaminated.
The life in the light is like no life at all. It is the life of chimps in dresses and lions behind bars and baby elephants in clown paint. It is no life at all. Where everything is chained in certainty, in safety, in comfort and doused in fluorescent splendor and halogen homeliness; on the inside.
It can be so tempting as you flit by in the night, a solitary lone entity, a one that has no other, no assurances, no desires to lead you from one unsatisfactory chamber within the labyrinthine city walls to the next and the next, sampling the buffet offering of colored lights; trying the red light, the blue light, the green light, the yellow light, the orange light, the violet light and even the white. It can be so tempting, the promise of something to warm your cold skin, the promise that death will no longer be able to look in on you and leer at you so.
You can leave her behind, outside the walls. You can be warm and full of the same stuffing the rest of the may hens and Christmas geese of civilization have been stuffed with. You too could be filled with the disease, the warm disease. No longer alone. No longer unique. No longer alive. One of an assorted variety of creatures fastened by steely pins to a white back drop, carefully labeled, preserved beneath the glass, made brilliant under the light.
It is so tempting. I know. I know.
We shiver and run barefoot through the blackness and ascend invisible mountains and tumble from great heights never knowing what we are doing, or where we are going, only doing it with style, somersaulting on wings the color of soiled doilies or whirring by in a drafty box car over the clickity, clack, clikcity, clack, or strolling by the glittering glass display windows without peering inside. It is so tempting because death has gone all mad, or always was and always will be and whispers all sorts of things through her broken teeth and the gaping black holes where they used to be.
She is always out here with us, hanging on our arms, or walking five paces behind, and sometimes she’s a gay old time, but sometimes she makes you shiver, or rather something in you switches around and makes you shiver, because people are hot and cold like that. Sometimes we are repelled by the real deal and sometimes we accept it, all depending on which of our masks is doing the driving just then. And when you are one of those “I's” that can’t stand her rancid breath and wailing cackle anymore, then you might start looking for the nearest well lit window, looking for a crack to slip in.
But then you might remember, Rome always falls, and when it does she will be waiting and feeling scorned, and you might even think for a moment how lonely she would be if you weren’t out here turning summersaults down her black cape. And you might remember that moths get trapped in brightly-lit kitchens and die under lampshades and behind curtains, having battered themselves to death against the confines of the oppressive walls of the labyrinthine city. You might think, as I sometimes do, that hobos are wiser than the moths, trying to get outside instead of in, and you might take a step backward, away from the open window or door, away from the light and the warmth and sickness of the living dead and not enter Rome with its comfort and delights.
Those things, they come with a price, so you see, you can sell yourself to Rome or give yourself to the wild, and one you do to escape the pain of living and the other you do for love, because mad as she is, death is your companion, your immortal beloved, and maybe you can help her to carry the burden of eternity and give her a shoulder to lean on in the wilderness.

Exchange

The banks take your money. They really take it, they don’t just hold it for you, they help themselves; $20 dollars here and another 20 dollars there and a dollar fifty here and here and here. Not so much, but it adds up over time. And what do you get? You get to feel human, like an outstanding citizen. You get to have little pieces of paper with your name on them to shuffle around and around and you can use a highlighter pen in electric yellow to circle random sums. You get more little pieces of paper to exchange as legal tender, you get green paper and paper in a fancy book and you can have pictures of Garfield or Mickey Mouse or dolphins copulating printed in the background while in the foreground it says PAY TO THE ORDER OF_________ You get plastic too. Mmmmmm…plastic. That means shoes and lipstick and hot donuts and shiny cars and fancy electronic gadgets that can play movies or music or accept a collect call from your mother. FANTASTIC! You can borrow money from the bank. The bank will gladly loan you money and then collect interest, which is perfectly fair. Sometimes though, when it comes to plastic, they will slowly charge you more and more interest on the amount you owe, and if you haven’t been shuffling through your papers you may not realize this is happening, and soon your card is over the limit in bank fees, Eeee Gads! It might have been better to wait until next month to pay for that pair of shoes with cash, hard cold green papers, the ones you get after a day of sweaty labor. You don’t labor? Oh, I see, you work in an office and never even see cash. Your pay is electronically deposited into your bank account and then you get by swiping your debit card, here, there, everywhere! They have made life so easy, haven’t they? The power that passes from your employer to you to your favorite pizzeria is all transferred in the form of numbers, data exchanged digitally. You function like a straw. You toil for one corporation that transfers numbers to you and a myriad of other corporations siphons those numbers away so that you never have to handle any cold hard cash. The bank handles your vital resources for you and skims a little off the top for itself. That is only fair. They should know. They made it that way.

Zicky Tabby

600 words of witch light. Switch light for the might of height , so bright so bright, the rafters right. They say meow wow hay mamma hay, but no, no we don’t go, no way, no we stay, fixed like star fish on ships bellies suction cups sup, sup, sup. Rainbow bright me, me hearties yo ho. And we don’t go, no, no, no, no, no. They sing it like weeeeeeaowww, meowwwww, like daisies dancing on days of delight, de light, dat shine so bright, so rainbow bright with blue windmill turning, the stars are burning, the child is learning and loosing the way of the zicky tabby ooob da, the secret language of the stars, of the gum stuck beneath table tops, pink and blue and gray whispering of days chewed by, mouths once explored, the secrets of the zicky tabby ooob da, the white haired lady dressed in black downstairs and the bright red and yellow plastic tea set up stairs, and Robin hood and Little Jon and a dress that never gets worn, oooob da. That is the life of mankind, the womankind with him, that’s the life, the life of the dress that never gets worn. We have it here, but we no gonna use it. We knows its special so we gonna let it waste away unused. Afraid. Afraid is the people of the word, And stuck, stuck like the gum under table tops. We got the little box what fits in the big box what fits in the bigger box what fits in the biggest box, Oh my! Oooob da! Sometimes in and sometimes out, then we come back and see that we grown bigger, that we learned more words, we got us a bed spread, shiny and pink and dirt under our finger nails and holes in our trousers, and dogs sniffing at our holes and big mountains rising high like the pie in the sky, we all do die, sometimes, we die. We cry an we cry and in dreams we fly but somehow we can’t get unstuck dubby duck, we can’t get back to the free jazz, just being this little body growing on macaroni and cheese fuel, like little sticks of dynamite going down yum yum, and we are sad but we don’t know why. The peoplez all around us is droopy eyed scraggly haired. The dog has got burs in her furs and frozen rattle snakes for Frisbees. We can’t play in the sand box cause iz full of earwigs… you know de pin c h e r bugzzzzzz. There be some big trees out in the autumnal breeze, swaying, gentle hipped, murmuring songs about the baked land and the poisoned flowers all pink and white. Got them words running over my brain, got my A B C D E F G and my SH and CH and TH and PLEASE, and THANK YOU and AMEN and I APOLOGIZE and I AM SORRY. And glub zub dub I am sorry, sorry I kant make no one here happy on this green earth. Green and brown and yellow gold with sparkles and purple and white butterflies bleached like the bread and we got the TV. The TV got me. IT got me so I can only dream in cartoonzzzz. I don’t remember how I dreamed before. Now I am black and white cartoonz and I am stuck running in place and the big bad wooolfe is coming to eat me and I try with all my might but I iz stuck in place, in black and white cartoon space. More to be afraid of the longer I iz here. Don’t remember when this song got started, don’t remember what we sang before. Oooob da’s gone from this song. Zicky tabby is now 1 2 3 and 1 5 1 9 6 LAGUNA AVE. 909 678-1169. Goody bye Zicky tabby farewell oooob da. The witch light, once so bright now burns dim in the sad gray grim. Might of height won dis fight, so we say goodnight to the light. What iz right, what iz right, is might, iz height. Iz goodnight Oooob da, goodnight and bye byes to de light.

Survive

Drip drop go the secretions of certain glands that help me to modify my view of reality. REALITY.
The Real. That is what we are searching for, some of us, not all of us. It is important to understand that not everyone wants to discover the Real. Some who do seek it, find it and recoil in terror and never hope to see it again.
I am a robot. I am a bio mechanical doll. Just because I am made of meat and not metal does not indicate that I am something otherwise. I am a sophisticated meat doll. What I like, what I dislike, these things are not ME, these things are programs that I run, or that run me, most of which are programs that nothing which I would call “I” had any hand in creating or choosing. Most of it is quite accidental. Accidental programming.
Strawberries are good, black licorice is bad. Men with facial hair make me wet. When the sun is shining I am gay. Cats are better than dogs. It is never okay to steal. It is okay to lie sometimes. Killing is okay when I am threatened. Christians are good and Muslims are bad. I must sleep in a bed. The bed must have sheets and blankets. I must make at least 30K a year. I must have a car to drive.
All of these things are arbitrary. None of these programs represents something that is objectively true. It is just something that came into me, a demon that inhabits my temple and sways me to do this or that, pushes me to do things in a way that comply with the program’s directives.
Everyone around me is the same. We bounce off of each other like bumper cars. No one is better merely because they are the Hebrews or The Romans, or The Barbarians. One preference is not better than another. One genetic trait is not better than another. Some things serve the perpetuation of the species. That is not “Good”. That is serving the perpetuation of the species, neither good nor bad, simply a thing to see as it is, a thing that need not be colored with intense moral implications. So often it is. Survival is all. The survival of the meat bots. We think we are superior to every other thing that bops around on this planet. We are the best!
S- U –P- E -R! Super! Super duper biological machines, turning oxygen into carbon dioxide. Whoo hoo! Somehow, what we think to explain our own presence here, is what makes us better than the rest. Better than dogs because when we fuck, we do it within the bounds of holy matrimony and produce children to please GOD. GOD, a construct of our bewildered and imaginative minds. Or it’s better because we do it facing one another, so then we can LOVE one another. We are better because we can see the difference between right and wrong. And we decide what is right and wrong based on what is best for us.
There is no objective right or wrong. We cannot objectively be better than any other organism. We do not conduct ourselves in service to these lofty morals that we dreamed up, we dream up these lofty morals to serve our real master, the master program, the uncontrollable urge to survive at any cost.
Whatever threatens ME is bad, is evil. If I need to step on Negroes or Jews or Palestinians to have what I need, to secure MY safety, then that is okay. I can crush whatever stands between me and my survival, and even my quality of life (quality of life = comfort, as in I need control of the water supply so that my children may swim on a hot day while yours are seated in the dry dust pleading for a single drop to drink) and that is GOOD.
Is that really the BEST? Is this what makes man the crown of creation? Are we worthy of the praise we bestow upon ourselves while we slaughter dolphins and crush children and trample trees?
It is subjective.
It is subjective.
We are machines run by programs created by un-named authors.
We are ruled by Accident, Chaos, and our main directive, our impulse to survive at any cost

Intelligence

It is hysterical to me that conversations about intelligence can be had with a straight face. There is an abyss there, a place that exist beyond our own human-centric notions and needs, and somehow we are completely blind to it. We run around on a plateau with our eyes shut. One day we will drop over the edge and that will be that. That is what comes of running around blindfolded on a plateau, it’s like a game of Russian roulette, you can be okay for a maximum of five rounds before oblivion snakes its hand around your ankles and pulls you into the darkness. We are only just barely beginning to understand the workings of the human mind, and even in these studies, there is little hope of finding an objective truth. The assumptions that are made at the beginning of any undertaking have direct bearing on the results that such an undertaking will yield. The beginning is also the end.
Where we start determines where we will end. And we as human beings begin all undertakings from the point of view of a human being: can we eat it, can we wear it, can we fuck it, will it cause us to experience emotional well being, or a more comfortable material existence? Will it perpetuate the species, or advance our treasured ideals? We are only interested in ourselves. We assume that we are the crown of creation, the best direction that evolution could have taken.
And what if this is not the only world in which life thrives? What if this is just one direction that evolution may take when restrained within a certain set of conditions? Not the best, or the most unique, or the most special, just one of many?
So much of what we think is colored by the idea that there was a supreme maker and that we were the best that he could do. Let’s suppose that we accept that our ideas about a supreme maker are all egotistical fancies, stories that any schizophrenic would tell themselves, or any available listener, to justify that alluring suspicion that they are special. We want to be special. We have created a mythos or two to give credence to our specialness.
Each individual human wants to be the best, the most adored, and these desires that color our most personal impressions of the world around us also worm their way into the expressions of the collective. The village, the state, the nation, the race, the species….mine must be the best. My existence is justified by my righteousness, my righteousness is justified by the existence of a creator whose existence is implied by my own. Everything that I come up with that originates from my humanity ends with my humanity. It is an endless feedback loop.
It is hell.
It is life as a human animal.
We may ask: what is intelligence?
In the case of humans, Intelligence is a process of evaluating information based on currency and relevance to the human intelligence rather than on detail or accuracy. Our intelligence is self centered, self serving. Our intelligence is the ability to comprehend; to understand and profit from experience. We are all about profiting ourselves.
But suppose that we are just one direction that evolution may take under certain conditions. Suppose that different conditions dictate different forms of intelligent life. The values that arise from that other evolutionary process would be different from our own. What is important and useful in material, and intellectual and even emotional terms, to one system is not shared by all systems.
Sometimes the interaction between a pair of intelligent systems is profitable for both systems. Sometimes it can profit only one and not the other, and at other times it may be neither harmful nor beneficial to either system. Not in any obvious way. Given that situation, how then would we measure intelligence? How would we define it?