This selection of writings includes material previously printed in DECADES OF CONFUSION FEED THE INSECT or scrawled down in my notebooks somewhere.
The universe was born on a snowy day. We found it in a field, still wet and abandoned by its mother to be devoured by predators. We felt sorry for it. on its wet surface, glistening and shivering with each snowflake that fell into its body, we saw our faces reflected. Although it had no mouth, its large unblinking black eyes seemd to peer staight through us. We couldn't just leave it there. We wrapped it up in one of our jackets and carried it back to our small shed, where we placed it in a box with blankets.
It was a secret from everyone but us.
I would check up on it every day.
Its condition worsened.
It was soon dead.
We buried it nearby, marking its humble grave with a small painted piece of wood .
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When a little girl was born in this hospital, her eyes were glazed over with a milky membrane. The membrane was placed over her eyes because she was never intended or designed to see the lights and shadows of the world she was born into. She was meant to be the princess who could see beyond the veil of time and death. At every change, at every turn of motion in the world, she would effortlessly step aside. She could keep her body from changing -- from growing old or becoming sick. She could also change into the form of whatever animal she wanted. Oftens she lived as a spotted deer, leading a brave herd on a secret mission to construct a small but nearly unstoppable group called SAPPHIRE LEVEL FERAL PRINCESSES, GHOST FACTION.
This group is currently active. Their actions are so covert, so clandestine, so dangerous to a society based on the principles of physical, psychological and spiritual RAPE that we cannot detail or speak of their actions here.
For more information, use ouija board or EVP technology.
THE FIRST THING YOU SEE -- THE WORLD IS A SPECKLED EGG -- WRAPPED IN CLAWS AND VINES AND SNAKES. THE SNAKES ARE BEJEWELLED IDOLS, TRANSMITTING GHOST SIGNALS THROUGH THE VACUUM OF SPACE. FIENDS AND GHOULS BESIEGE THE MIND AND FRACTURE IT INTO BILLIONS OF SHARDS. YOUR TEETH FALL OUT. THE LEFT SIDE OF YOUR FACE GOES NUMB FOR SOME REASON. COFFINS OPEN LIKE DOORWAYS. YOU CAN'T STOP SMILING. A MILLION YEARS GO BY. THE WIND BLOWS. A pterodon glides along the edge of an ancient lake bed. Her crested head angles to catch the wind. A row of pin-sharp teeth poke out over her long snout proudly. The sun still has billions of years to burn. She sweeps just below the cloudcover. She is certain that she has lived forever and will live forever always. This moment is all that is. She is the summation of God. An asteroid wobbles into the pull of the planet. Like a tiny marble, like a bubble suspended in black syrup of emptiness. Billions of brains melt at once as the force erupts. Other things happen. A tiny stem extends grace into a craggy rock. A moss princess cloaks a tree. Parasites swim in the bodies of their hosts, surrogate mothers for whip-worms and mollusk-like sinewy jointed things that eat blood. And they know they have lived forever. And will live forever still. And love radiates. There is no greater way. A PERSON ON THE CIY BUS IS LAUGHING INSIDE A ROTTEN TORN COAT. THEY ARE IN ON A GIANT SECRET JOKE THAT NO ONE ELSE KNOWS ABOUT. THERE ARE NO WORDS TO EXPLAIN THE PUNCHLINE. YOU JUST HAVE TO GET IT. THIS PERSON OPENS THEIR CLENCHED HAND A LITTLE TO REVEAL THAT THEY HAVE NO PALM LINE. THAT DOESN'T MEAN THAT THEY HAVE LIVED FOREVER, IT MEANS THAT THEY WERE NEVER BORN. THE JOKE IS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THAT. A word was spoken. It was too late. Another word was spoken. The gulf between the two words could have been lifetimes set on end. Time was invented so that there would be punctuation between words. Time was invented so that we could try to figure out what was going on in the first place. All the shaows, all the lights, had been woken up. They were stumbling around, dazed. I LOSE MY SENSE OF SIZE. MY BODY IMAGE BECOMES DISTORTED BEYOND THAT OF BEING ANY RECOGNIZABLE SHAPE OR FORM. I AM TERRIBLY SMALL, SHRINKING ETERNALLY, SINKING INTO VOID.... OR TERRIFICALLY LARGE, GROWING SO LARGE AS TO FILL THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE... IT IS THE MOST HORRIBLE FEELING I HAVE FELT..... I CAN'T DESCRIBE....SINCE AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER.... *FLASH OF LIGHTNING!!!* In a distant town, ten men are lined up against a wall. Blindfolds. Hands tied. Firing squad readies. The crack of rifles, a crow flies from a branch, alarmed. Before the bullet can part the skull and brain and mind and soul and world, another outcome is offered: this never happened. People are holding hands, dancing in a circle in some medieaval circus. The intention of the dance is to create a vision, somewhat like a hologram, of a radiant eye which will remember things such as the exact shape of every snowflake ever, the shape of every cloud ever, the face of every person ever. They call it the Princess Tiger Predictor. FINALLY, AFTER A WINTER OF SUFFERING, I HAD GIVEN BIRTH. EVERYONE THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO DIE. BUT WHEN I DID GIVE BIRTH, THE BABY WAS NOT COMPLETELY SOLID, BUT HALF VAPOR. I COULD BREATHE HIM IN THROUGH MY NOSE TO PROTECT HIM FROM THE COLD, BUT I ALSO HAD TO BE CAREFUL OR HE WOULD BLOW AWAY. TWO DISCARNATE EYES ARE IN THE WOODS, THEY ARE HIS EYES AS AN ADULT. IT WAS BECAUSE HE WAS BORN IN THE WINTER THAT HE IS IN THIS CONDITION. I BRING HIM FOOD AND CLOTHING WHEN I CAN. ELECTRICTY IS THE KEY. THE KEY ON THE KITE. A KITE ON FIRE ABOVE THE SEASHORE. That is all. Goodnight.
The stickiness. The calm. The breathe in. The breathe out. This was the state of the passengers in a car that swept through the beyond midnight in the city in which we lived. Little had we planned for our meeting, nor could we remember why it was supposed to occur. The destiny ordained by a God, or a mechanical destiny mapped into our pulpy brain tissue by the hands of undetectable operators. We knew the time to meet would not be chosen by us, that it was not our decision to make - when and where and how and why, and whom we would become, or what we would become asÊthe result of our meeting. But we knew that the eyes of God trembled and flickered and rolled back into the god-forehead tonight in a time past midnight in a weird part of the city that they forgot to name. So we took our suitcases and our maps and our devices of measuring and recording. We scanned out into the chilly air for the beacon of the cops, the mafia, the local enforcers, since we could not -by it's very nature - know the legality or illegality of our meeting.
We had heard of money, although that too was a fading image now. We were intelligenced to be aware that our meeting would change everything. I could go back to my wife, forget this underworld, revitalize all the good I shared & recalled through clouds and clouds of ferocious fog. Juan handed me the case. This is the one the men will ask for. Remember to act fast. Scanned in every direction for prying eyes. Thought my mind is being monitored, christ, my mind is being detected. I try to implode all the thoughts.Ê But I have been corrupted for a billion years, beyond repair, far far far beyond morality, ready to do what was necessary. Juan felt it too.
"Stay cool, kid"... I wondered how cool he was staying. Not cool at all. Not fucking cool. This was, you see, the culmination. Magazines and television heralded it as the end of history, but we knew even more. It was the beginning of time. All these cars, pushing through hazy paranoid muck, stranded in sinewy time woven & dreamed up by doctors and nurses of the bio ether. All the aeons lined up in one nanosecond, we were here to alphabetize them. "You heard it kid, keep your cool." "Brace yourself, kid." "Stop calling me 'kid'." The case dropped to the ground in another second...... shot from the boys hand by one of the doctors from the hell research unit. "Remember, slow...steady...survival. Do slow the flow of time. Do remember the formulae to call upon them. Do awaken the sleeping vermins and hidden eyes."
"Dr. Itto Kasomo, hell research unit, you have some formulae that belong to us I believe." And then, with comic book swiftness, I lunge at him with an inner calm full of the formulae of awakening. He shifts his eyes so as to avert the effects of the formulae as it spills in genetic insanity from my palms and groin region. Behind him standing in single file: a legion of robot hell-nurses chirping propaganda and hell formulae. A dark cacophonous blur of anti-color ricochets across the walls of the tunnel and down the alleyways of the un-named street. My ribs begin to glow and ache. I fear that I will explode. Neo Tech agents emerge from every place, silent, almost silent, like wind. They're everywhere, kid. Just run. Just make a break for it. Just run. So I say "OK, man." And I just run, and keep running. But everywhere I run a fierce wind of paranoia and hell electricity is burning right at my back, just barely out of reach. I curse and bark and howl, and no one is aware that I exist. I am more undetectable than air as I shriek for forgiveness from the hell researchers as they depth scan my inner soul at every turn.
Then, as often happens, and as you may have expected, I remember. I remember the other plan.The backup plan. The plan B. The "oh shit" plan, the almost-maybe way out. If I can throw them off for just long enough, I can find a tunnel. With enough water blockage, my systems will be untraceable. But now I'm bleeding soul and light and matter and harsh wavy energy everywhere. I am coated in so much magnetic energy that I feel like a gray porcupine. I feel them pry into me and burn into me at every corner. How did I become this? I vaguely remember pieces of other worlds, other lives..... too shattered to remember now, keep running, keep focusing on the "oh shit" plan. Far above the planet a satellite hangs, swirling with images of everything that ever happened to me. If I can make connection I should be able to throw them off. But I'm burning now. Losing my grip, my awareness, my consciousness. From behind a dumpster in an alleyway a sallow sickly light emenates.Ê It vibrates with the tonal waves that spell "you are totally fucked." I curse the god that brought me to awareness in this reality, I pray that my eyes will melt so I will be spared seeing the images which are swimming in this light. No use. "Run kid, run." "Use the plan B." No use.
The mixtape of my life is being eaten, never to be repaired. The doctors and nurses converge in on the scene. Sick scissors in their hands. I think: I don't want to think. No more. A cloud covers the moon. The moon is made out of plastic, and they are disfiguring it with exacto blades. Its plastic guts spill out, plopping matter of factly into the dumpster. "Where are your operatives NOW?" They communicate too directly, too honestly. They are incapable of dishonesty because they are vessels of flesh which know no emotion. A line of doctors with death medical cutlery smash me up againt the horror wall of the nameless alleyway. "Who will hear you now?" I need a plan C. We are all brought into this world to be disemboweled, each of us needs as many plans as possible. I need a map out of my skin. Into a time tunnel. Trying to push emotion into the eyes of a Neo Tech nurse. Another one grabs my wrist. So tight. My arms go numb. My mind is throbbing. The gray magnetic energy begins to slide out of my wounds and into the mouths of Neo Tech hell operators.
They vampirize me, leeching every color out of me. My photo album of reality is tossed onto a fire. They chew the emulsion off my baby photo, layer by layer, taking the primary color from me at the very beginning. her lifeless eyes are glistening like an insect. She pulls magnetic energy from me lustfully. She will store it. they use it to pupate. A ferocious stabwound at the back of my neck. No more. Nothing else. A pure universe of absolute pain. God shuts off the power to the big plan. God flips the switch on the big fog machine. And all of it becomes empty and wide and crystal clear. And with his mighty hands god sends a hail of machine gun fire pouncing down the alleyway like a million tiny mosquitoes. The vampires heads pop like rotten fruit. A splattering of cold blood, the blood of children and animals, splashes into my mouth. For some weird reason I swallow. For some reason I don't say anything. In the movie version, I say it. I don't say it. I don't think it. Just staring blankly and blindly at the wounded moon, its gutless frame hanging sadly in the stupid fake christmas in the mall sky. The Neo Tech agents who remain scatter, turning longly into snaking shadows as they slide away from my dimension into a sinewy time tunnel of their own. And it shuts like a puncture wound. The last of them through reaches out to place a few stitches into its flesh. I recognize the voice. Mr. Beluagah. My prime-connection in the inter dimensional underworld. "To save you from all the stupid shit you get yourself into." "What can I say Mr. Beluagah? In the movie thay say something. I don't say nothin'. My mind is like a circuitboard, you must flow your input into me & it will be channeled in predictable ways. But I think they might have done me some damage. they got me good." "No need to worry..... take my hand. I will show you some safekeeping in this land. But hurry or you will not find your man." With no time to spare we sped through the litter strewn and confused streets. All I have seen of this city was laid before me in a moment. The main thing was that a woman pounded her head repeatedly into a brick wall. They had put one of them in her and she couldn't get it out. I didn't feel sad because I knew how it would end. I knew how it would end always.
This was the gift that was given to me at the beginning which made it all seem worthless. Precognition is the strictest kind of nightmare. I took drugs and drank when I could. I managed to dissolve most of it. But not now. I knew how it would all end. My vision pierced through my eyes and made me hold my breath inside. It was like that. Either we remembered nothing, or we knew every next step. I knew Dr. Itto Kasomo would win here. But we would have our victory too.Ê And that would be our meeting. Juan was still alive somewhere, perhaps in suspended animation, perhaps mutilated by Neo Tech beyond recognition. But the whole city hummed it. The microbial communities on the edges of lamp poles danced it. The rusted serious worming pipes moaned it out loud. And our meeting would occur. Mr. Beluagah would work on that, I'm certain Sir. It was half past a quarter till evening when I awoke with a bugspray headache and one hell of a pain. That was where the nurse edged a small blade into my neck. That was the wound where they pulled out pieces of my magnetic pulse. Even my ghost, in its exile from me in another world would bear these scars. Every man and woman who believed in raw justice shed aÊquiet tear that day. God must have said: "say a silent prayer, children. Say a silent prayer. For the hour is at hand." Fuck it. Say the prayer out loud, children. Forget that part in the bible where it tells you not to pray in public.
Get a megaphone and screech a prayer into the crowd. And say them twice. You're going to need them. They will be required of you. Because today Dr. Itto Kasomos Neo Tech legions of medicians descend upon the sleeping and the sick. "I put some coffee on for you." Ah.... Mr. Big Beluagah. "Thanks." "I'm going to need more than coffee today though.
Even so, it's at least a positive start." "I've called Washington. They have spies everywhere. You don't have a chance without a time tunnel. The air is evaporating even as we speak." Big Beluagah was the insider on the goings on of the high offices of the rest of the world. I had no idea how he found me, and I didn't venture to ask. I was just thankful that it was daytime and I had a few hours to attempt the opening of the tunnel before the return of my pals at Neo Tech. I threw open the curtains. the idiotic fake sunshine trickled into the room. I sat down in an easy chair. Heavy. Thick. Big Beluagah was smoking a giant walrus cigar. He was an obese walrus surrounded on all sides by protective halos of smoke.
"You'll catch cancer in here, Beluagah."
"Nothin to worry about. Gonna keep on smokin em down. When you've seen some of the action that I have, you say screw it. Smoke em if you got em."
And he had em. A closetfull of giant walrus smokes lined the inner pelt of his duck down jacket. Fleece filled leather lined gun trigger gloves always on his hands. Fat fingers always straining to get fat enough to burst the seams. A constant battle. See, Mr. Big Beluagah used eating and smoking to take his big fat mind off of his line of work, which was to smuggle human cargo and align events to cause the spirit worlds to crack open. They say "he's crazy", but he does drive a STANGER, so watch what you say, bucky. I ate. I drank the coffee. I did all the normal routine. I put my hat flaps down because it's cold outside. I take the elevator down, with a business like goodbye from the Big Beluagah, who looks more like St. Nicholas the more time you spend thinking about it. I didn't think about it.ÊI stuck close to the routine. I ate. I drank the coffee. I took the elevator down to the street. I took the elevator down to my rat maze of asphalt. Hit the street running..... not really. Just moving at lightning speed on the inside, trying to act normal to comfort myself. Didn't matter how normal I acted to anyone else or not, since I was invisible to the pedestrians.
When the lines connected and the pieces fell into place it really wouldn't matter. This was a battle for the very existence of free will. If our team won, the future was our playing field. If Neo Tech won out, the future never gets a chance to happen. For now they wait in the future, butÊI feel them peering into the past. The rubbing alcohol smell of the death nurse as sge breathes down my neck. They would perforate our dimension with pinholes to bleed it empty. Some beuracrat waits for that blood payment. A pen that slashes open the side of christ. Times are changing. The spear of manifest destiny waited to skewer us. And the meta-enforcers and myself and Juan and Mr. Big Beluagah may not be able to set it right. I walk and walk and walk, all the while I'm panicking out of my mind, wanting to run and scream and tear my skin off. I am sweating. i can tell my thoughts are being scanned & recorded. Replicated and scrutinized from every angle. I managed to hold the case tightly in my trembling hand, despite an incessent desire to drop it and run.
But where do I run when the whole universe comes undone? And me, the only thing left. An inconcievably small speck in an infinite depth of nothingness. The real terror of this mission dawns on me as much as is possible without driving me over the edge of sanity. No way to know what was contained in the case I carried, probably never to know. Then, without any chance to prepare myself, the radio voice of Mr. Big Beluagah cracks open in my radio mind.
"Five more blocks, bucky. You will see hte moment and place to open the time tunnel. Say a silent prayer, bucky. It all relies on this." I resist the tempation to make a break for it. I need to to slow my thoughts to avoid detection by Neo Tech. Five blocks. Then wait. The time to act would be made known to me. A sickening wave of precognition reveals this to me. The time to act is not my own. I will wait. As life buzzes by me in styrofoam fast forward the sun begins to fade. Soon, soon..... then, just as the Neo tech hoards appear on every horizon, it opens. The glistening shimmering tin foil lined time tunnel. Some weird voice beckons me, distorted by the passage of billions of aeons. I throw all caution to the wind. I give up the ghost. I give the devil his due. I jump headlong, swirling into a whirlpool of silver time. And then: Three billion light years later, I emerge, not aware of the time that has elapsed. I come out slippery and screaming, a newborn traveller, smacking down directly in the center of the main office of the meta-enforcers. I don't want to ask questions, I don't want to waste any time. I glance around the office.... normal office... a little stuffy. Decorated with mediocre office paintings of things like abstract paper shreds or covered bridges. The meta-enforcers appear as brains. So, in each vinyl office chair sits a rather out of place looking wet quivering disembodied human brain.
A little disquieting. But still, nice to be in the company of friends and away from the eye of Neo Tech, even if only for a moment. If disembodied human brains could smirk, they were smirking. I felt hot with embarrasment as they shredded through the darkest corners of my mind for information which would help them in their multi dimensional search for the secret hiding place of Neo Tech. And then, as is most often the case, everything came together in the most unforseen amnner. There they were --- Dr. Itto Kasomo and his hell legions of robot medicians, buried in the very base of my brain! The image spilled out of a hole in my forehead onto a piece of paper which served as a movie screen. I shrank back....... I began to feel disconnected from myself. No sense in getting too attatched to myself, I suppose, when i knew what would soon be required of me. The brains whirred and hummed like wires in a chorus of "are you ready to make the sacrifice
." Well, I suppose I have no choice. From the frying pan into the fire. From the clutches of Neo Tech hell robot nurses into the claws of "friendly fire" heaven robot nurses. And I shouldn't have to be the one to tell you that the fires of heaven burn the souls twice as fierce as the fires of hell. But yes. When thinking of Juan. When thinking of Big Beluagah. Yes. Ok. All -right. Sear my dimension with the X-acto blade of infinite pain, "fuck it." No "thank you." Mine is a thankless job. Right now. RIGHT NOW. I want YOU to thank me for what I've done on behalf of us all. Because I'm the secretest agent man. I don't have a name OR a number. I don't have anything. i don't even exist, as far as anyone's concerned. But I'm out here every day, laying it all on the line and holding it all together. So, yeah. Thanklessly, silently, without ceremony, they wheel me in on a gurney. Naked. Freezing, like in a morgue.
The room they bring me into is a giant techno dome.
Giant, really. Big. Like a stadium.
But puritanical white, glistening, medical, starched bleached white. They call her the lioness, because she is a lioness. Semi human, but basically a lioness. She sits upon a throne in this giant room, more like a globe. Without emotion, she asks if I'm ready. I thin:"damned if I do, damned if I don't." She reads me. She would think it's funny, but she's a predator, so she thinks it's serious and it makes her violent. Well, at least in the end of the end of this story Dr. Itto kasomo is finally located and made to pay.
It turns out what was in the suitcase was just sand, a diversion for me to chase. Everything was set up to make me chase my own tail; and then, ultimately to lead me here. Where they thought they could infiltrate. Like a trojan horse. Like a maggot in the center of the brain eating its way out. A parasite which consumes and sheds its host, then moves on to a new stage. Well, in the end it's the same old story. Life makes life by eating life, and I'm the virginal sacrifice. So I calmly step outside of myself and await the swinging blade. And the sun sets, as it does. And the cars turn on their beams. And Big Beluagah is out there somewhere in his STANGER. But for you and me, it's all over.
We are the pigeon that got squashed by the traffic.
The bug on the shoe.
Gods roadkill. The reason.
THE reason.
That is to say, we are the germs that keep this whole mad circus in motion.
And may it stay in motion. "Brace yourself, kid............................."
*The End...*
