1/20/09
We don't know the customs, laughed at in every cafe, butcher the language to their disgust. It is Paris.
Just bought an obnoxious tourist shirt with a tongue licking cherries, saw the Eiffel Tower, and gave France the finger. A fine meal in the last restaurant before shuffling back to Amsterdam, to reassess, and catch our connection home.
We saw art, sculpture, class, and elitism. Con girls and boys palm and drop gold rings suckering in tourists with their hustle. The boy's hands are weatherbeaten and I make a joke about who will beat him if he doesn't return with money. A 14 year old swiping all he can from the foreigners.
A giant metal tower, conducting the masses towards it, feeding them to the top and changing their perspective. A huge glass pyramid shunts from the cobblestones to allow us entrance to the palaces from long ago. A massive church weighs down the island, keeping it from tearing away, floating away in La Seine.
Romance is dead says Ben, and I see it outside, the lifeless remains of a once great city. No mystery is left along it's rues, no more love there than concrete, metal, and time can provide. They're just living and making a go of it, the same as anywhere.
Romance is alive say I. It's just now inside us, leaving cold hard reality behind. We're gathering it up and bringing it back, it never existed in the city, just the people and the times. Suffering through the ages and standing defiantly, we pass the Resistance.
Post modern day prometheus afraid to show his flame to a jaded, cynical cosmos. Allow the failure of moments to slipstream away from our hearts, feel the fury of romantic idealistic desire. We shall change everything so everyone eyes us daringly.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Monday, December 21, 2009
Tower of Brahma 56 Paris Street Affair
1/19/09
I can hardly keep my cool out here, exposed American on the streets of Paris. They see me, then pretend not to. We slip through the city with the practiced non-challance attitude we picked up in Amsterdam.
We saw Amsterdam through and through, running ourselves down by night, crashing hard from the overstimulation. Coffee, water, juice, always keeping hydrated. Faking your way with the language but not really, instead ignoring the gibberish, and forcing English upon them.
But we made contact with the forces that be, read the omens laid before us, and pushed on. We tripped in the polarization alternation room, then hid away in the secret house behind, just feet from the spires of ancient authority.
They robbed us of our technology as we ran haphazardly towards Amsterdam Central for our HiSpeed train to Paris. Once aboard I snuck out my digital recorder and sent out reports from their WiFi connection.
We stumble our way towards our hotel, which sets us at the tip of a triangle, the point of the Ile de Cite, the home of Notre Dame, the birthplace of Paris. Named after the Celtric Tribe Parisii, settled in 300 AD, killed by the Romans generations later.
So many great dead are buried beneath us. Every building a monument to great deeds and everlasting history. The Palais du Justice across from our hotel stands firm, we urinate alongside la Siene, get some sushi and some French shit talking from the locals, toss back some Scotch and wander back. We mock you Paris, but only cause we love you.
The Louvre awaits.
I can hardly keep my cool out here, exposed American on the streets of Paris. They see me, then pretend not to. We slip through the city with the practiced non-challance attitude we picked up in Amsterdam.
We saw Amsterdam through and through, running ourselves down by night, crashing hard from the overstimulation. Coffee, water, juice, always keeping hydrated. Faking your way with the language but not really, instead ignoring the gibberish, and forcing English upon them.
But we made contact with the forces that be, read the omens laid before us, and pushed on. We tripped in the polarization alternation room, then hid away in the secret house behind, just feet from the spires of ancient authority.
They robbed us of our technology as we ran haphazardly towards Amsterdam Central for our HiSpeed train to Paris. Once aboard I snuck out my digital recorder and sent out reports from their WiFi connection.
We stumble our way towards our hotel, which sets us at the tip of a triangle, the point of the Ile de Cite, the home of Notre Dame, the birthplace of Paris. Named after the Celtric Tribe Parisii, settled in 300 AD, killed by the Romans generations later.
So many great dead are buried beneath us. Every building a monument to great deeds and everlasting history. The Palais du Justice across from our hotel stands firm, we urinate alongside la Siene, get some sushi and some French shit talking from the locals, toss back some Scotch and wander back. We mock you Paris, but only cause we love you.
The Louvre awaits.
Monday, December 14, 2009
The Tower of Brahma 55 Revelations
12/30/08
It is upon the fifty fifth absolute truth revealed unto me, that I decide to get my phone to write it down. Phone, audio communication, co-opted by writing (text), or symbol communication. One form and function flipped to be used by an opposing force.
Yes becomes no, and tomorrow & yesterday are actually today. All that is one is really none. Whatever is it that is opposite to another than this however. Everything becomes one, I am saved. God.
We will hit the switch inside every mind and all that is missing will fill it, complete spiritually in seconds. Imagine our brains, so supercharged and marginally increased in serotonin, swimming in our personal Babylon as tomorrow sings on. Fire drains down til bare bones baked in the searing flame of raw posthuman potential.
Posthuman humourous posthumously sentences address our senses seeking salvation inside one's self. Our own self worth is infinite and when you look over, all you see is the sea of smiling faces, similar to your own.
I'm first on line. December 21st, 2008 at 8:01am in Times Square equals last in line times pi.
You'll all be my friends forever.
b. crazy Machines
Half of us are insane. The rest are robots. End of story.
Sigils synergy segregates symbiotic separation of soul satisfying, frightening violence. Battles beyond recognition, Armageddon analysis, whose reality is this? Slicing away our sensitivities as we free us from these, these mindless monotonal moronic masterpieces of individuality.
I work out my brain, all the time. I constantly tackle two opposing viewpoints within the same mindspace, dwelling on, yet enjoying, the miserable happiness of life. I exist on all planes in every sense of the word. I speak in time with a jazz beat rhyme, blaring the buzzdown drillbit center of the mind. At least I'm trying I cried.
What I want to say is hi. I'm in your head. My voice, what I thought to put down, using a handheld digital plastic, very 21st century device this, hitting key after key with thumb by thumb ticks of the creative clock. Finish up the end I say.
I'm making it longer, circular rectangular archival methods, comics become cool, as the world dissolves disaster. Superpolice State Penintary for the Specially Abel. When you evolved, did your desire, designed from scratch, explode to life before your very eyes?
Mine too.
This is what happened when it did. Neohumans became the norm, well the norm's new vibe. A slew of celibate tapeworms chewing off our fever dreams, those lessermen could be casualties in our conflict with out collective godhead. Humanity's hopeless last wish given flesh, just as our enlightenment peaks.
Our 'meat's better is what I say. We got brains like trains, unstoppable unfuckingforgiveable fortune in the face of failure. Time and again I lose it all and everytime it returns me mine. Scornful smartass smirks, they need smacking, straight up attacking, assault on angst, anxiety, and America!
c!
See the D it makes when a c & ! are sitting next to each other? That's Language 2.0. I invented it ten years prior. Now I'm a writer, and right beneath the eyes lies all of my life.
Sighs.
So bored here alone in reality zero eternal inmate of Cosmic Corrections, Incorporated. It was synretro to spell it all out once in awhile. Through history we learn of the burning inside that keeps us surviving. A Zentrance for most of our lives here in my space/time.
Connect two wires, and still wires, plural, they will always be, though a charge runs through them, separate as 1, 2, three, ya dig? Me, I always thought of myself as someone outside the internal, sitting beside my self, fractioned into twos, then threes. Instead of me, there was we, and eventually free of the burden of identity.
Nostalgic remembrance of past events, your presence always with the present, even as you face it, your death in that last instant, before everything unbecomes to the sum of zero, which will now mean the all to everyone, everywhere.
deleted
You discarded my email. Forced deletion, jerking my finger as I tried to deliver the death blow, exposing your double life.
Damn you Dad. You and this conspiracy of thought you've pushed me into. My subconscious driven by your dark desires. I'm your double, the one meant to undo you. I took control, alternated my life, and deleted you.
But you destroyed my world. I wrote a chapter and trashed it. Threw the brutality of hate into the fires of forgotten pasts, viking funeral for your self-righteousness. By writing them and sacrificing them to non-existence their hold in my brain is fleeting, yet resonates with time-bomb terrorism.
You're going down, Dante style, your sins will be atoned for, you fucking pervert.
It is upon the fifty fifth absolute truth revealed unto me, that I decide to get my phone to write it down. Phone, audio communication, co-opted by writing (text), or symbol communication. One form and function flipped to be used by an opposing force.
Yes becomes no, and tomorrow & yesterday are actually today. All that is one is really none. Whatever is it that is opposite to another than this however. Everything becomes one, I am saved. God.
We will hit the switch inside every mind and all that is missing will fill it, complete spiritually in seconds. Imagine our brains, so supercharged and marginally increased in serotonin, swimming in our personal Babylon as tomorrow sings on. Fire drains down til bare bones baked in the searing flame of raw posthuman potential.
Posthuman humourous posthumously sentences address our senses seeking salvation inside one's self. Our own self worth is infinite and when you look over, all you see is the sea of smiling faces, similar to your own.
I'm first on line. December 21st, 2008 at 8:01am in Times Square equals last in line times pi.
You'll all be my friends forever.
b. crazy Machines
Half of us are insane. The rest are robots. End of story.
Sigils synergy segregates symbiotic separation of soul satisfying, frightening violence. Battles beyond recognition, Armageddon analysis, whose reality is this? Slicing away our sensitivities as we free us from these, these mindless monotonal moronic masterpieces of individuality.
I work out my brain, all the time. I constantly tackle two opposing viewpoints within the same mindspace, dwelling on, yet enjoying, the miserable happiness of life. I exist on all planes in every sense of the word. I speak in time with a jazz beat rhyme, blaring the buzzdown drillbit center of the mind. At least I'm trying I cried.
What I want to say is hi. I'm in your head. My voice, what I thought to put down, using a handheld digital plastic, very 21st century device this, hitting key after key with thumb by thumb ticks of the creative clock. Finish up the end I say.
I'm making it longer, circular rectangular archival methods, comics become cool, as the world dissolves disaster. Superpolice State Penintary for the Specially Abel. When you evolved, did your desire, designed from scratch, explode to life before your very eyes?
Mine too.
This is what happened when it did. Neohumans became the norm, well the norm's new vibe. A slew of celibate tapeworms chewing off our fever dreams, those lessermen could be casualties in our conflict with out collective godhead. Humanity's hopeless last wish given flesh, just as our enlightenment peaks.
Our 'meat's better is what I say. We got brains like trains, unstoppable unfuckingforgiveable fortune in the face of failure. Time and again I lose it all and everytime it returns me mine. Scornful smartass smirks, they need smacking, straight up attacking, assault on angst, anxiety, and America!
c!
See the D it makes when a c & ! are sitting next to each other? That's Language 2.0. I invented it ten years prior. Now I'm a writer, and right beneath the eyes lies all of my life.
Sighs.
So bored here alone in reality zero eternal inmate of Cosmic Corrections, Incorporated. It was synretro to spell it all out once in awhile. Through history we learn of the burning inside that keeps us surviving. A Zentrance for most of our lives here in my space/time.
Connect two wires, and still wires, plural, they will always be, though a charge runs through them, separate as 1, 2, three, ya dig? Me, I always thought of myself as someone outside the internal, sitting beside my self, fractioned into twos, then threes. Instead of me, there was we, and eventually free of the burden of identity.
Nostalgic remembrance of past events, your presence always with the present, even as you face it, your death in that last instant, before everything unbecomes to the sum of zero, which will now mean the all to everyone, everywhere.
deleted
You discarded my email. Forced deletion, jerking my finger as I tried to deliver the death blow, exposing your double life.
Damn you Dad. You and this conspiracy of thought you've pushed me into. My subconscious driven by your dark desires. I'm your double, the one meant to undo you. I took control, alternated my life, and deleted you.
But you destroyed my world. I wrote a chapter and trashed it. Threw the brutality of hate into the fires of forgotten pasts, viking funeral for your self-righteousness. By writing them and sacrificing them to non-existence their hold in my brain is fleeting, yet resonates with time-bomb terrorism.
You're going down, Dante style, your sins will be atoned for, you fucking pervert.
Monday, December 7, 2009
The Tower of Brahma: Chapter 54 - nine times the remainder
12/15/08
The truth is I'm just a fucked up writer sitting in his apartment who's desperately lonely. You see, I'm dead.
I choked to death when I was five years old. These are my sixtyfour circles of personal hell that I must descend. Welcome to my final act.
I do want to kill myself. It's become unbearable. I've dragged my aching bones past social anxiety. I can talk to you now, but I cannot communicate. My ideas don't fit into consensus reality. I don't know why but it makes me heave with sobs.
Back spasming, feels like you could be laughing, but there's a release of tension around your eyes, and tear ducts flood. If you can imagine something sad, listen to the saddest song mix you made, maybe you'll be blessed with the salvation of release.
To feel. To sleep. To not cuddle the blanket around me, alone, again. The way you wanted it. The way you knew it always would be. You fell straight down. Didn't touch anyone for miles, then bouncing, and skidding, ricocheting off one another, a hand slows you down, reaching out, those last moments with lost memories, til your friends, til your family, stop you and take hold of your hand.
Hold on son.
Is there hope for me? Can I be redeemed? Can any one of us? I save you, and everyone must save me? If I don't die, then I must live. A program switch hits my brain. Have I hit rock bottom? Is this what it looks like? Another cave, lost among urban decay, glittering the ugly, the geek, the dork...your terrain.
You chose to be one of them long ago. You told yourself, and others that it was indeed a choice, not to play basketball with the jocks, but instead find role-playing and comic books. Where were you before then? A mindless observer. A mimic.
Brain death restarts the humanity in my people. I don't know who we are, or where we come from, but my father knows exactly what I mean. As did his father. Giant turbines groan endlessly on in our minds. Something started our intellectual evolution, a program written, hypnotized through spectacle, encoded on our neurons.
AC/DC switch currents frequency simulation reverse man. Press the button and make it happen. I rid my life of the abscesses of my soul. I cut back on coffee, and I will quit smoking, never, but yeah I should.
I want to love someone. Honestly and truly. I want someone who's looking for someone. To give themselves over to me and me to her. In every single possible way. We will be perfect symbiotic erotically charged pistons firing psionic bliss. One being who is love unbound.
I hope people can appreciate this book. It would mean they appreciate me. And if at least one person gets it, or gets anything, from this book, then I have done my duty as a human being. Crafted my ideas into form and function to move you and tell you my story. This is me, hiding behind words, I hope you like me.
The truth is I'm just a fucked up writer sitting in his apartment who's desperately lonely. You see, I'm dead.
I choked to death when I was five years old. These are my sixtyfour circles of personal hell that I must descend. Welcome to my final act.
I do want to kill myself. It's become unbearable. I've dragged my aching bones past social anxiety. I can talk to you now, but I cannot communicate. My ideas don't fit into consensus reality. I don't know why but it makes me heave with sobs.
Back spasming, feels like you could be laughing, but there's a release of tension around your eyes, and tear ducts flood. If you can imagine something sad, listen to the saddest song mix you made, maybe you'll be blessed with the salvation of release.
To feel. To sleep. To not cuddle the blanket around me, alone, again. The way you wanted it. The way you knew it always would be. You fell straight down. Didn't touch anyone for miles, then bouncing, and skidding, ricocheting off one another, a hand slows you down, reaching out, those last moments with lost memories, til your friends, til your family, stop you and take hold of your hand.
Hold on son.
Is there hope for me? Can I be redeemed? Can any one of us? I save you, and everyone must save me? If I don't die, then I must live. A program switch hits my brain. Have I hit rock bottom? Is this what it looks like? Another cave, lost among urban decay, glittering the ugly, the geek, the dork...your terrain.
You chose to be one of them long ago. You told yourself, and others that it was indeed a choice, not to play basketball with the jocks, but instead find role-playing and comic books. Where were you before then? A mindless observer. A mimic.
Brain death restarts the humanity in my people. I don't know who we are, or where we come from, but my father knows exactly what I mean. As did his father. Giant turbines groan endlessly on in our minds. Something started our intellectual evolution, a program written, hypnotized through spectacle, encoded on our neurons.
AC/DC switch currents frequency simulation reverse man. Press the button and make it happen. I rid my life of the abscesses of my soul. I cut back on coffee, and I will quit smoking, never, but yeah I should.
I want to love someone. Honestly and truly. I want someone who's looking for someone. To give themselves over to me and me to her. In every single possible way. We will be perfect symbiotic erotically charged pistons firing psionic bliss. One being who is love unbound.
I hope people can appreciate this book. It would mean they appreciate me. And if at least one person gets it, or gets anything, from this book, then I have done my duty as a human being. Crafted my ideas into form and function to move you and tell you my story. This is me, hiding behind words, I hope you like me.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Tower of Brahma 53: ideal identity ignorance
11/24/08
I gazed into her eyes, or rather the lenses of the thick rimmed seductive spectacles riveted to her temples. The plastic glass lens (alternating my focus from the right to the left eye) revealed to me a lie I was not yet prepared to face. It was the heartache I sought.
She was there to save me. Or just to do her job. I convinced myself of one or the either on every odd day. Inviting me in, I found I needed her for some reason. There was a vacuum in her soul, an emotional void that was endless. I saw a challenge in winning her over, a task I had flawlessly executed time and again on those around me.
But this would be a challenge. I was institutionalized. I do not recall what for, nor do I remember why I have forgotten why I was there. I must've fallen ill. Gotten my wish and thrown the switch, sending me into the care of trained professionals, here I was in her office.
I usually lose her within a few minutes of getting on a roll. I feel comfortable enough to let the brain patterns unfold through verbal communication, but once the complexity hits a grey area, and when even my understanding of the ideas in my skull are limited, despite believing them in my heart, I am foiled. I see the connection break.
"December 21, 2012. Mayan calendar. I am a binary Buddha, a chaotic Christ. I see patterns emerging, fate threading through, tethered to faith, I fly."
It makes so much sense when I think it. Why does it seem so wrong when I see her eyes, magnified and on display for me, her glasses, rectangular microscopes into her soul?
"I'm not sure if I follow, Charles. Where are you?"
She crosses her legs and I withdraw. My mind has been lost in a maze of my own design for so many years that I have given up on communication with the outside world. I sit on my hands.
"Whatever. It's just that all these ideas are in my head. I read so much information off of everything that I can't process it. My brain can't keep up."
"Well, just take a breath and relax. There's really no reason not to just be in a situation now and then. There's nothing more to this than two people talking is there?"
I have to admit, I was comfortable. I was so tired of acting the fool, the hero, the victim. I felt I could own up to my darkest, most base desires. I should dig deep in my ID and expose it to the light. Expose it to her.
"No, I guess not. I'm sorry. I just can't fight the impulse to stifle myself. To invalidate everything I feel. To convince myself that I am unknowable."
I sat for a minute in the mire of my self-pity before adding, "Alone."
She says it was a good session and has an orderly bring me back to my room. I glance over my shoulder and I saw those eyes watch me go away.
The door clanks behind me. Isolated, again. No human contact til later. TV and maybe cards and maybe some time to write. Later. Now, after therapy, I'm sent to my cell. I don't appreciate opening up and then having to shut down. It is bad for my emotional well being.
I pound my fist in a daze against the wall. It's just plaster, sheet rock, paint. But I've never punched anything, except perhaps my girlfriend when she attacked me in a drunken rage. No, that was a slap. She punched me though.
Pity, self-pity, goddamn pity party! There's a hole in the wall when they wake me up. I'm not sure where I am, a hospital, my apartment, her apartment? My knuckles are bloody. I hate myself. I want her. To save me.
'I didn't mean to!', is throbbing in my internal dialogue center as the medication starts wearing off and the door to my prison opens.
I'm out for a walk, thinking all the while. Never stop thinking. I am focused on the bench, my walk, the step by step procedure that gets me there. I ignore the looks, but not really. I take them in and make them judgments. They see everything because it's radiating from me.
Notice me. No don't. I can't. Stop thinking about me. I mean about them thinking about me, which if they are it's because you're telegraphing some weird vibe. Stop!
I run back home. Lock myself in. Everyone says too much while saying nothing at all. Tears of revelation of our sad states is only a moment away. The drugs wear off and suddenly feeling returns. But emotional feelings only, still numb to the touch.
Bed is safe. Curled up. Fetal. Dreams keep me distanced. Who I am is a burden. What I've built is a cage. It fits snuggly atop my persona. I will myself alive as often as I can as I struggle under my limitations. Self-imposed, self-destructive, self-serving needs.
I skip the next session with her. I can't face acceptance right now. I can't justify my existence, nor do I want it to be confirmed, to be made okay. Suffer, bastard, suffer. You are strangling the life from yourself, flagellation of the mind, beating your consciousness into submission. Find your own way out.
So I write. The words bind my negatons, sharpen my syntax, forge furious feelings. The sentences are ideas, ideas are the prison. Constructs of immateria that give us the boundaries of self. I can't do it. This is who I am. This is the way I will always be.
Change.
In the rec room I'm piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. I've hidden the last pieces from myself, but I don't know that yet. I'm not ready to see the whole picture yet. That's why I'm putting it together upside down.
I replay the past as rounded parts snap into rounded slots. A cycle of puzzles, solved and dissolved. What I did with her, I had done to me next. I sought punishment after punishing. Then started anew. Each spin around the track provided a clue. I need something drastic to have a breakthrough.
So I escaped. Slipped out from under their watch. I spent the last of my money on a plane ticket. I'd have to find out where I came from to discover where i'd have to go. My feelings about my family would hold me down until I faced them. I got there and was reborn.
"So remember when you told me that I should think about how I relate to people, the cycles of behavior I keep repeating, and how it relates to my wanting to learn how to connect with my family?"
"Well, I think you may've said that, but I do recall that session, yes."
I was back in the asylum a week later discussing it with her with animated fervor.
"I saw my aunt and we talked. And it was like everything made sense. We were Crowns, and we are insane thinkers. Our insanities mask our sensitive natures."
I closed my eyes for a minute basking in the glorious feeling of connection. That is my addiction. Connecting with another. I don't want to be alone, but everything is telling me I am. I keep telling me I am.
"I had lunch with my grandma and I even stood up for myself when she called me a college dropout in front of my cousin. I got my associates degree, and maybe I've only recently gone back for my bachelors but I had a degree."
I have never successfully stood up for myself. I usually rely on friends or lovers to provide me with self-esteem, self-worth, and to do my talking for me. My niceness makes everyone want to take care of me, for I am naive and unable to function in the world.
"But I defended myself. And boldly, firmly, stood up to the overbearing woman who had praised my father into prince status. The manipulative maiden of my genetic masculinity. And I wasn't hurt like the sensitive baby I always was."
She nods and semi-smiles. I may've gotten too abstract in an effort to make my life more poetic. So now I've lost her. I could be rambling mad. This makes sense in my mind. But something in her face makes me think I have not gone anywhere. That I am imprisoned, entwined in a intense insanity that will never end.
Reality is bleeding. Or is that my arm? I have a shard of glass in my left hand. There's a wetness dripping from the other. She's staring at me sympathetically, but I feel stupid, sad, pathetic. I glance at my forearm and gaze upon the lightning shaped gash carved into it. A jagged wound, the mystical thunderbolt, the power of Zeus.
"Charles, just put it down now. You don't need to hurt yourself. Or me."
Is there another option? I mean really. I don't see any other way for things to go. We can really only condemn each other, pushing others down to advance, being pushed down to become submerged and bob back up to the surface as equilibrium is sought and we fuck it up once more. The world is drowning in sadness.
The electricity pumps through my body. My body spasms and dances convulsively in the office, freeing the glass from my grip. The orderlies catch me as I fall back. It's a peaceful thing to be made to submit against your will. Sometimes it is necessary, for your own good.
They drag me back to the cell. Alone in the dark again. I watch a movie of my life, memories scultped by stories told. The lingering of electric impulses make my body feel alive, charged with purpose. If only I could make it fit into the world, if the habits could be broken, if I could get what I wanted. What I really wanted.
I follow a thread of the web and it pulls at the corners of all that I know. I work out the angles. Co-dependency. Imprisonment. Fear and anxiety. Low-self esteem and guilt. I need conflict. I dread conflict. Who could handle me if I can not?
I get my medication and sit in the common room. I watch some movies beside some peers. We're all sitting, soaking in the fictional sentiments of paid professionals. I cry at the parts that one is to cry at. But for all the wrong reasons. I want to feel. We all want to feel.
"Hey friend. I know your secret."
A bearded inmate was begging for my attention, his sight set on me in my peripheral. He had a friendly smile but his tone was sinister.
"What secret might that be?" I scanned him from the side. He was two-dimensional and now so was I.
"You're not crazy. You're trying to drive yourself mad. But you're sane and shirking responsibility." He inched closer.
He spoke what I feared, what I knew.
Later, we found ourselves in his room, I was undressing, lying back naked as he climbed atop me. My body tensed up, his muscles and body hair bristling up against my flesh. I recall the calm serenity that came over me as I ran my hands up his back and pulled him into me. Two male bodies embracing in the nude in the naked white light of angels transcending physical form.
All is peace.
My being was possessed by pure joy, and I sought everything. I placed him in my mouth, gripping him firmly, pressing my face into his stomach. The soft, spongey flesh of him filling up my mouth, gliding along my tongue, driving deep down my throat. A true wand of power placed within my body, imbuing me everything I was missing, all the power I had blocked.
I sucked for all I was worth until I could taste him. I tried time and again to get him to release himself, to allow me to drink from him, swallow the genetic map of his manliness. But he refused. So I hurt him.
He needed to learn. To take it. I held him down and caressed him forcefully with my tongue. One knee holding back one arm, my clenched fingers of my left hand pinning him to the bed, the right, delicately held his balls. I needed his cum and I’d crucify the fuck until he gave it up.
Finally, after furious, fist pumping action, the hot cum shot forth from the tip of his splendid cock and slid into my mouth, and across my lips. I opened my eyes, turning my gaze towards the crown, and Jesus smiled at my cum covered face.
“Charles!”
She had burst in on this moment, that fucking whore. She’d never be able to do for me what you just did. God, everything has changed. You’ve helped me like I never knew was possible. Thank you.”
“Charles, you’re going to hurt your neck if you don’t…”
I hissed at her, the light from the doorway igniting the cooling semen dripping down my chin, splatters flipping from my lips. But suddenly my weight shifted and everything began to reassert itself. Gravity swung around and I hit the floor hard. My pants were down and my cock was in my hand, thankfully preventing it from becoming damaged in the fall.
“Jesus?” I looked up to the bed.
“Charles.”
I was allowed out for walks more often after that, despite the cold weather making me all crackly. I drifted along day after day until I began to notice that people would talk to me, stop to say hello, or to ask how I was. They smiled when I seemed happy, and sad and withdrawn on those days when I forgot. Suddenly everyone was my friend, and no one didn’t not like me, I was loved. By Jesus.
For years later, I got shit for this chapter. Too pretentious is the way it was often referred. But this is what I wrote up until the day I woke up. My life was truly split up into two parts: before this chapter and after. I had escaped my internal institution.
This is my fucking book and I’ll do whatever the fuck I damn well please.
Including sucking Jesus’ cock, you jealous fucks.
I gazed into her eyes, or rather the lenses of the thick rimmed seductive spectacles riveted to her temples. The plastic glass lens (alternating my focus from the right to the left eye) revealed to me a lie I was not yet prepared to face. It was the heartache I sought.
She was there to save me. Or just to do her job. I convinced myself of one or the either on every odd day. Inviting me in, I found I needed her for some reason. There was a vacuum in her soul, an emotional void that was endless. I saw a challenge in winning her over, a task I had flawlessly executed time and again on those around me.
But this would be a challenge. I was institutionalized. I do not recall what for, nor do I remember why I have forgotten why I was there. I must've fallen ill. Gotten my wish and thrown the switch, sending me into the care of trained professionals, here I was in her office.
I usually lose her within a few minutes of getting on a roll. I feel comfortable enough to let the brain patterns unfold through verbal communication, but once the complexity hits a grey area, and when even my understanding of the ideas in my skull are limited, despite believing them in my heart, I am foiled. I see the connection break.
"December 21, 2012. Mayan calendar. I am a binary Buddha, a chaotic Christ. I see patterns emerging, fate threading through, tethered to faith, I fly."
It makes so much sense when I think it. Why does it seem so wrong when I see her eyes, magnified and on display for me, her glasses, rectangular microscopes into her soul?
"I'm not sure if I follow, Charles. Where are you?"
She crosses her legs and I withdraw. My mind has been lost in a maze of my own design for so many years that I have given up on communication with the outside world. I sit on my hands.
"Whatever. It's just that all these ideas are in my head. I read so much information off of everything that I can't process it. My brain can't keep up."
"Well, just take a breath and relax. There's really no reason not to just be in a situation now and then. There's nothing more to this than two people talking is there?"
I have to admit, I was comfortable. I was so tired of acting the fool, the hero, the victim. I felt I could own up to my darkest, most base desires. I should dig deep in my ID and expose it to the light. Expose it to her.
"No, I guess not. I'm sorry. I just can't fight the impulse to stifle myself. To invalidate everything I feel. To convince myself that I am unknowable."
I sat for a minute in the mire of my self-pity before adding, "Alone."
She says it was a good session and has an orderly bring me back to my room. I glance over my shoulder and I saw those eyes watch me go away.
The door clanks behind me. Isolated, again. No human contact til later. TV and maybe cards and maybe some time to write. Later. Now, after therapy, I'm sent to my cell. I don't appreciate opening up and then having to shut down. It is bad for my emotional well being.
I pound my fist in a daze against the wall. It's just plaster, sheet rock, paint. But I've never punched anything, except perhaps my girlfriend when she attacked me in a drunken rage. No, that was a slap. She punched me though.
Pity, self-pity, goddamn pity party! There's a hole in the wall when they wake me up. I'm not sure where I am, a hospital, my apartment, her apartment? My knuckles are bloody. I hate myself. I want her. To save me.
'I didn't mean to!', is throbbing in my internal dialogue center as the medication starts wearing off and the door to my prison opens.
I'm out for a walk, thinking all the while. Never stop thinking. I am focused on the bench, my walk, the step by step procedure that gets me there. I ignore the looks, but not really. I take them in and make them judgments. They see everything because it's radiating from me.
Notice me. No don't. I can't. Stop thinking about me. I mean about them thinking about me, which if they are it's because you're telegraphing some weird vibe. Stop!
I run back home. Lock myself in. Everyone says too much while saying nothing at all. Tears of revelation of our sad states is only a moment away. The drugs wear off and suddenly feeling returns. But emotional feelings only, still numb to the touch.
Bed is safe. Curled up. Fetal. Dreams keep me distanced. Who I am is a burden. What I've built is a cage. It fits snuggly atop my persona. I will myself alive as often as I can as I struggle under my limitations. Self-imposed, self-destructive, self-serving needs.
I skip the next session with her. I can't face acceptance right now. I can't justify my existence, nor do I want it to be confirmed, to be made okay. Suffer, bastard, suffer. You are strangling the life from yourself, flagellation of the mind, beating your consciousness into submission. Find your own way out.
So I write. The words bind my negatons, sharpen my syntax, forge furious feelings. The sentences are ideas, ideas are the prison. Constructs of immateria that give us the boundaries of self. I can't do it. This is who I am. This is the way I will always be.
Change.
In the rec room I'm piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. I've hidden the last pieces from myself, but I don't know that yet. I'm not ready to see the whole picture yet. That's why I'm putting it together upside down.
I replay the past as rounded parts snap into rounded slots. A cycle of puzzles, solved and dissolved. What I did with her, I had done to me next. I sought punishment after punishing. Then started anew. Each spin around the track provided a clue. I need something drastic to have a breakthrough.
So I escaped. Slipped out from under their watch. I spent the last of my money on a plane ticket. I'd have to find out where I came from to discover where i'd have to go. My feelings about my family would hold me down until I faced them. I got there and was reborn.
"So remember when you told me that I should think about how I relate to people, the cycles of behavior I keep repeating, and how it relates to my wanting to learn how to connect with my family?"
"Well, I think you may've said that, but I do recall that session, yes."
I was back in the asylum a week later discussing it with her with animated fervor.
"I saw my aunt and we talked. And it was like everything made sense. We were Crowns, and we are insane thinkers. Our insanities mask our sensitive natures."
I closed my eyes for a minute basking in the glorious feeling of connection. That is my addiction. Connecting with another. I don't want to be alone, but everything is telling me I am. I keep telling me I am.
"I had lunch with my grandma and I even stood up for myself when she called me a college dropout in front of my cousin. I got my associates degree, and maybe I've only recently gone back for my bachelors but I had a degree."
I have never successfully stood up for myself. I usually rely on friends or lovers to provide me with self-esteem, self-worth, and to do my talking for me. My niceness makes everyone want to take care of me, for I am naive and unable to function in the world.
"But I defended myself. And boldly, firmly, stood up to the overbearing woman who had praised my father into prince status. The manipulative maiden of my genetic masculinity. And I wasn't hurt like the sensitive baby I always was."
She nods and semi-smiles. I may've gotten too abstract in an effort to make my life more poetic. So now I've lost her. I could be rambling mad. This makes sense in my mind. But something in her face makes me think I have not gone anywhere. That I am imprisoned, entwined in a intense insanity that will never end.
Reality is bleeding. Or is that my arm? I have a shard of glass in my left hand. There's a wetness dripping from the other. She's staring at me sympathetically, but I feel stupid, sad, pathetic. I glance at my forearm and gaze upon the lightning shaped gash carved into it. A jagged wound, the mystical thunderbolt, the power of Zeus.
"Charles, just put it down now. You don't need to hurt yourself. Or me."
Is there another option? I mean really. I don't see any other way for things to go. We can really only condemn each other, pushing others down to advance, being pushed down to become submerged and bob back up to the surface as equilibrium is sought and we fuck it up once more. The world is drowning in sadness.
The electricity pumps through my body. My body spasms and dances convulsively in the office, freeing the glass from my grip. The orderlies catch me as I fall back. It's a peaceful thing to be made to submit against your will. Sometimes it is necessary, for your own good.
They drag me back to the cell. Alone in the dark again. I watch a movie of my life, memories scultped by stories told. The lingering of electric impulses make my body feel alive, charged with purpose. If only I could make it fit into the world, if the habits could be broken, if I could get what I wanted. What I really wanted.
I follow a thread of the web and it pulls at the corners of all that I know. I work out the angles. Co-dependency. Imprisonment. Fear and anxiety. Low-self esteem and guilt. I need conflict. I dread conflict. Who could handle me if I can not?
I get my medication and sit in the common room. I watch some movies beside some peers. We're all sitting, soaking in the fictional sentiments of paid professionals. I cry at the parts that one is to cry at. But for all the wrong reasons. I want to feel. We all want to feel.
"Hey friend. I know your secret."
A bearded inmate was begging for my attention, his sight set on me in my peripheral. He had a friendly smile but his tone was sinister.
"What secret might that be?" I scanned him from the side. He was two-dimensional and now so was I.
"You're not crazy. You're trying to drive yourself mad. But you're sane and shirking responsibility." He inched closer.
He spoke what I feared, what I knew.
Later, we found ourselves in his room, I was undressing, lying back naked as he climbed atop me. My body tensed up, his muscles and body hair bristling up against my flesh. I recall the calm serenity that came over me as I ran my hands up his back and pulled him into me. Two male bodies embracing in the nude in the naked white light of angels transcending physical form.
All is peace.
My being was possessed by pure joy, and I sought everything. I placed him in my mouth, gripping him firmly, pressing my face into his stomach. The soft, spongey flesh of him filling up my mouth, gliding along my tongue, driving deep down my throat. A true wand of power placed within my body, imbuing me everything I was missing, all the power I had blocked.
I sucked for all I was worth until I could taste him. I tried time and again to get him to release himself, to allow me to drink from him, swallow the genetic map of his manliness. But he refused. So I hurt him.
He needed to learn. To take it. I held him down and caressed him forcefully with my tongue. One knee holding back one arm, my clenched fingers of my left hand pinning him to the bed, the right, delicately held his balls. I needed his cum and I’d crucify the fuck until he gave it up.
Finally, after furious, fist pumping action, the hot cum shot forth from the tip of his splendid cock and slid into my mouth, and across my lips. I opened my eyes, turning my gaze towards the crown, and Jesus smiled at my cum covered face.
“Charles!”
She had burst in on this moment, that fucking whore. She’d never be able to do for me what you just did. God, everything has changed. You’ve helped me like I never knew was possible. Thank you.”
“Charles, you’re going to hurt your neck if you don’t…”
I hissed at her, the light from the doorway igniting the cooling semen dripping down my chin, splatters flipping from my lips. But suddenly my weight shifted and everything began to reassert itself. Gravity swung around and I hit the floor hard. My pants were down and my cock was in my hand, thankfully preventing it from becoming damaged in the fall.
“Jesus?” I looked up to the bed.
“Charles.”
I was allowed out for walks more often after that, despite the cold weather making me all crackly. I drifted along day after day until I began to notice that people would talk to me, stop to say hello, or to ask how I was. They smiled when I seemed happy, and sad and withdrawn on those days when I forgot. Suddenly everyone was my friend, and no one didn’t not like me, I was loved. By Jesus.
For years later, I got shit for this chapter. Too pretentious is the way it was often referred. But this is what I wrote up until the day I woke up. My life was truly split up into two parts: before this chapter and after. I had escaped my internal institution.
This is my fucking book and I’ll do whatever the fuck I damn well please.
Including sucking Jesus’ cock, you jealous fucks.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Tower of Brahma 52 - House of Cards (first draft)
7/16/08
"I fold."
That was my one solid move in Poker. Folding. Well maybe in life I should say. Once in a while I try and bluff. But in the end, I just lose my chips.
Sean clears the pot towards himself with a sweep of his arm. It's not much for us it's everything. Juan, across from me, deals out another hand. Brian throws in without even looking at his hand. Tom's seat next to him is empty. My turn.
"So, what's your book about Juan?" Sean puffs his cigar, filling the basement with the smell of tobacco and an ethereal swirl of smoke.
Juan bids in and covers his cards. "Well, there's this guy who just starts compulsively working out and then discovers he's a sleeper assassin."
"Sounds cliche." Brian folds. No one notices.
"Nice. Should be able to sell. Seems like the market could sustain a series like that." I'd been trying to read up on publishing and marketing, and mostly all I came up with was frustration. I raise.
Sean calls. "Fuck yeah. People love that thriller intrigue stuff. They're all over the subway ads."
We show our cards and once again a single King does me no good. Juan hauls in the pot and we begin again. As I get my cards I read the others before me.
Brian bets recklessly, not caring what he's holding, barely invested in the game. Sean kicks back, puffs away, and cracks jokes, but he's playing for real underneath. He needs the money. Juan just deals and plays a straight game, showing nothing from behind his poker face
"So, who's the guy supposed to kill? Who's he working for?" Sean has got a good hand. I can tell.
”I haven't really figured out which way to take it just yet. I sort of wanted to go political, but now I'm thinking cultural." Juan raises.
"Cultural? Like a celebrity assassination? How bizarre that culture begins with the word cult." Brian is bluffing with a double sized bet.
"That's interesting. Contrast his compulsion for improving his body image with celebrity fascination. The real versus the ideal." I wasn't bluffing this time.
We play a few more hands when I feel the barrel of an all too familiar gun placed against the back of my head. Then Spider spoke to me telepathically as he said: 'Kill them. They're going to kill you if you don't.'
I tried to focus on my cards and found myself glancing at Tom's empty seat, then at the others. My poker face sucked and I knew it. I was tipping my hand.
"I see your ten and raise you twenty." I tossed some chips into the pot absent-mindedly.
The game continued and I heard the cocking back of a hammer. I knew Spider would be concealed from the others but that wouldn't help me. He'd kill me here, if just to prevent them from doing it.
'Look at them. They're the enemies, competing for dominance over you, over this world.'
I peered up from my cards. I followed Juan's movements as he upped the ante. The pot was growing and he didn't bat an eye. I had no idea what was going on in his mind. He could kill me if he wanted.
'Get your gun out and fire or I will.'
In my peripheral vision I saw Spider's arm as it swung his hand cannon towards Brian. I tried not to focus on it as I began to sweat. I avoided eye contact. I was showing all my tells. I fingered the revolver in my pocket.
“I fold." Brian rested his cards on the table. He looked over at me as it was up to me to call it.
Sean was overplaying it, holding not much of anything but he knew he could intimidate me with his confidence. He'd take me down if he could.
"I call." I tossed my cards on the pile of chips. "King of Hearts. King of Clubs. Ace of Spades."
Juan locked his eyes on me and I knew. This was going down and there wasn't anything I could do about it. One of us was going to die, right here, right now.
"Pair of Jacks." Juan spread his cards out before him. "Looks like you got me."
Spider's gun whipped towards Sean as Juan kicked the table up at me. Brian tipped over in his chair, scrambling for safety. I drew the gun from its resting place and raised it up.
Chips flew and cards scattered as Spider fired. With a snap of his wrist Sean launched his cards at Spider with deadly accuracy. The table hid Juan's actions from me but I knew his nine millimeter was reaching out to me.
I shot from the hip, the bullet rocketing through the air, punching through the Ace of Spades before splintering the table with a hole big enough for me to see Juan through. His eyes locked on and lining up his shot.
I kicked back in my chair, sending me tumbling backwards as Juan's bullet blew a hole through the center of the table, right where my face would have been. Spider emptied his clip as the table passed between him and Sean. There was an explosion of splintered wood. And time froze.
I rolled backwards. Spider ducked as he released the clip with one hand and slapped in a new one in one fluid motion. The debris that was the poker table began falling all around us. Juan extended his arm, preparing another shot. I was looking off to the side as Brian scampered off for cover.
My attention slid to Spider who I could see now was wearing Tom's persona. It flickered on and off as he penetrated this reality. He was preparing to shoot as I lost myself in the scene.
Juan fires. Spider fires. Sean flips backwards. I sit and ponder. I lower my gun to the ground as a bullet spirals through the air between Juan and myself. My sight travels along the ground like mist, filling up the room. Everything slows in my mind. I see all.
'Kill him Fenris.' Spider switches his aim towards me. 'Move or die.'
"Everything is possible, nothing is sacred. Nothing is possible, everything is sacred." I move.
Time cracks like lightning and Juan's shot smashes my chair. I dive forward, sliding past Spider, rolling onto my side and click out five shots. The empty shells from Spider's gun drop down on me like hot rain.
The first shot hits Juan's hands, removing his weapon. The second collides with his soul, shattering his faith. Third shot blows away his mind and the fourth denies his existence as it deactivates his sense of self. The annihilation of his own personal reality, the obliteration of all he thought himself to be, sprouts from the final bullet.
With a crash, a wave of normalcy settles onto the room. Gunsmoke trailed off into the ether as time flowed freely once again. I got to my feet and brushed splintered wood from my shirt. Spider reverted to Tom once again and his gun was gone.
I made my gun disappear, as well as Juan's. I helped Brian up to his feet as he stared in disbelief. Together we walked over next to Tom. Sean was picking up and reshuffling the deck of cards. Juan knelt on one knee, his head bowed low.
"Hey, you okay?" I held my hand out to him.
"What'd you do to me?" I think he was weeping.
"Something I don't like to do. Something I did to myself a long time ago." Perhaps I was still doing it, still there in that moment, stripping everything away.
I went over and lifted him up and dropped him in his chair. He held his face in his hands. I'm not sure how much of him was left.
"You're free now. We all are. We made a mess, now let's clean it up." Tom was flipping the table back onto it's legs. Brian collected the chips. Sean riffled the cards between his hands.
”So, blackjack anyone?"
We stood around Juan and we all knew in that silence that we were going to have to fight, that some of us would die.
"What about war?"
"I fold."
That was my one solid move in Poker. Folding. Well maybe in life I should say. Once in a while I try and bluff. But in the end, I just lose my chips.
Sean clears the pot towards himself with a sweep of his arm. It's not much for us it's everything. Juan, across from me, deals out another hand. Brian throws in without even looking at his hand. Tom's seat next to him is empty. My turn.
"So, what's your book about Juan?" Sean puffs his cigar, filling the basement with the smell of tobacco and an ethereal swirl of smoke.
Juan bids in and covers his cards. "Well, there's this guy who just starts compulsively working out and then discovers he's a sleeper assassin."
"Sounds cliche." Brian folds. No one notices.
"Nice. Should be able to sell. Seems like the market could sustain a series like that." I'd been trying to read up on publishing and marketing, and mostly all I came up with was frustration. I raise.
Sean calls. "Fuck yeah. People love that thriller intrigue stuff. They're all over the subway ads."
We show our cards and once again a single King does me no good. Juan hauls in the pot and we begin again. As I get my cards I read the others before me.
Brian bets recklessly, not caring what he's holding, barely invested in the game. Sean kicks back, puffs away, and cracks jokes, but he's playing for real underneath. He needs the money. Juan just deals and plays a straight game, showing nothing from behind his poker face
"So, who's the guy supposed to kill? Who's he working for?" Sean has got a good hand. I can tell.
”I haven't really figured out which way to take it just yet. I sort of wanted to go political, but now I'm thinking cultural." Juan raises.
"Cultural? Like a celebrity assassination? How bizarre that culture begins with the word cult." Brian is bluffing with a double sized bet.
"That's interesting. Contrast his compulsion for improving his body image with celebrity fascination. The real versus the ideal." I wasn't bluffing this time.
We play a few more hands when I feel the barrel of an all too familiar gun placed against the back of my head. Then Spider spoke to me telepathically as he said: 'Kill them. They're going to kill you if you don't.'
I tried to focus on my cards and found myself glancing at Tom's empty seat, then at the others. My poker face sucked and I knew it. I was tipping my hand.
"I see your ten and raise you twenty." I tossed some chips into the pot absent-mindedly.
The game continued and I heard the cocking back of a hammer. I knew Spider would be concealed from the others but that wouldn't help me. He'd kill me here, if just to prevent them from doing it.
'Look at them. They're the enemies, competing for dominance over you, over this world.'
I peered up from my cards. I followed Juan's movements as he upped the ante. The pot was growing and he didn't bat an eye. I had no idea what was going on in his mind. He could kill me if he wanted.
'Get your gun out and fire or I will.'
In my peripheral vision I saw Spider's arm as it swung his hand cannon towards Brian. I tried not to focus on it as I began to sweat. I avoided eye contact. I was showing all my tells. I fingered the revolver in my pocket.
“I fold." Brian rested his cards on the table. He looked over at me as it was up to me to call it.
Sean was overplaying it, holding not much of anything but he knew he could intimidate me with his confidence. He'd take me down if he could.
"I call." I tossed my cards on the pile of chips. "King of Hearts. King of Clubs. Ace of Spades."
Juan locked his eyes on me and I knew. This was going down and there wasn't anything I could do about it. One of us was going to die, right here, right now.
"Pair of Jacks." Juan spread his cards out before him. "Looks like you got me."
Spider's gun whipped towards Sean as Juan kicked the table up at me. Brian tipped over in his chair, scrambling for safety. I drew the gun from its resting place and raised it up.
Chips flew and cards scattered as Spider fired. With a snap of his wrist Sean launched his cards at Spider with deadly accuracy. The table hid Juan's actions from me but I knew his nine millimeter was reaching out to me.
I shot from the hip, the bullet rocketing through the air, punching through the Ace of Spades before splintering the table with a hole big enough for me to see Juan through. His eyes locked on and lining up his shot.
I kicked back in my chair, sending me tumbling backwards as Juan's bullet blew a hole through the center of the table, right where my face would have been. Spider emptied his clip as the table passed between him and Sean. There was an explosion of splintered wood. And time froze.
I rolled backwards. Spider ducked as he released the clip with one hand and slapped in a new one in one fluid motion. The debris that was the poker table began falling all around us. Juan extended his arm, preparing another shot. I was looking off to the side as Brian scampered off for cover.
My attention slid to Spider who I could see now was wearing Tom's persona. It flickered on and off as he penetrated this reality. He was preparing to shoot as I lost myself in the scene.
Juan fires. Spider fires. Sean flips backwards. I sit and ponder. I lower my gun to the ground as a bullet spirals through the air between Juan and myself. My sight travels along the ground like mist, filling up the room. Everything slows in my mind. I see all.
'Kill him Fenris.' Spider switches his aim towards me. 'Move or die.'
"Everything is possible, nothing is sacred. Nothing is possible, everything is sacred." I move.
Time cracks like lightning and Juan's shot smashes my chair. I dive forward, sliding past Spider, rolling onto my side and click out five shots. The empty shells from Spider's gun drop down on me like hot rain.
The first shot hits Juan's hands, removing his weapon. The second collides with his soul, shattering his faith. Third shot blows away his mind and the fourth denies his existence as it deactivates his sense of self. The annihilation of his own personal reality, the obliteration of all he thought himself to be, sprouts from the final bullet.
With a crash, a wave of normalcy settles onto the room. Gunsmoke trailed off into the ether as time flowed freely once again. I got to my feet and brushed splintered wood from my shirt. Spider reverted to Tom once again and his gun was gone.
I made my gun disappear, as well as Juan's. I helped Brian up to his feet as he stared in disbelief. Together we walked over next to Tom. Sean was picking up and reshuffling the deck of cards. Juan knelt on one knee, his head bowed low.
"Hey, you okay?" I held my hand out to him.
"What'd you do to me?" I think he was weeping.
"Something I don't like to do. Something I did to myself a long time ago." Perhaps I was still doing it, still there in that moment, stripping everything away.
I went over and lifted him up and dropped him in his chair. He held his face in his hands. I'm not sure how much of him was left.
"You're free now. We all are. We made a mess, now let's clean it up." Tom was flipping the table back onto it's legs. Brian collected the chips. Sean riffled the cards between his hands.
”So, blackjack anyone?"
We stood around Juan and we all knew in that silence that we were going to have to fight, that some of us would die.
"What about war?"
Monday, November 16, 2009
Tower of Brahma - 51 - stop me if you've heard this one before
2/16/08
"Eris, Kali and Loki walk into a bar..." Sean starts into his usual jokes with no punchlines.
It's his free form improv writing technique. Each of us has our individual techniques. Sean and his jokes, Juan’s historic anecdotes, Brian’s stream of consciousness, and Tom’s…well, I’m not sure what Tom is up to. Personally, I like to let it build up and explode out. Like a mental time bomb.
We all gathered there in the basement, looking pale and ghostly under the fluorescent lighting. The air was thick with smoke, the fragrant odor of cheap coffee, and our futile aspirations. We called it ‘Write Club’ but we hardly ever wrote. Actually that was what got us all together. Not being able to write.
Juan cuts off Sean's one-liners to tell us about the ten books he's read since our last meet. He’s a good foot and a half taller than Sean and so literally overshadows him as he steps into the circle of chairs in the center of the room.
"So, JFK's older brother was the one with the political design but when his younger brother came back with all them medals, well he did what any sensible overachieving sibling did. He flew a plane full of explosives towards a German factory ready to bail out at the last second when BOOM!"
I stopped double-checking the historical anecdotes he spouts after the first few weeks. As fictional as the things he says may seem, they always turn out to be true. As I get older writing seems more and more impossible, for what is there to really write about with reality being far stranger and beautiful in its symmetry to our chaotic minds.
I look off as Sean shoves Juan battling each other for verbal dominance. Intellectual alpha male social Darwinism never appealed to me. Brian’s sitting off to the side again scrawling and scribbling out in his spiral notebook, his long hair draped across his face. I make my way over and glare over at Tom as I do. He's by the coffee maker, back to the wall and eyes on the door.
I sit down next to Brian and light up a smoke.
"How's the writing?" he says, not looking up.
"Meh. You know. I got some ideas. Taking some time to structure them out, get something coherent and interesting down. Something with a point." I reply.
I take a drag off my cigarette and lean back. Nothing sucks like being a writer. All this pressure to make sense and make people care, in a medium that's nearly dead. And here we are pounding in the final nails. Writers in a pop star era, with flash fried masses devouring endless streams of sugar-coated spectacle. Follow the formula to success: don’t be original. It’s not art.
"I got some poems I'm just about happy with." Brian flipped back a few pages. He stopped on one filled with ink.
I had read a few of his pieces before and they were genius. Dark, mad poetry that made the mind cringe and the soul cry. He came across as aloof, but a severe sensitivity forced him inside. He gutted his pain out, spilling it across the page in fluid lines from a black ballpoint pen.
"Okay, okay, wait...Decartes, Kant and Hume are on a plane about to crash and there's only two parachutes..." Sean waves his arms frantically, trying to draw us all back into another round of jokes. He wrangles Brian back into the circle reluctantly where Juan stands with his arms crossed.
I don’t much feel like laughing so I walk over to grab another coffee and stub my butt in the ashtray, blowing out the last lungful of smoke. Tom still has his eyes on the exit, hand gripping his styrofoam cup. I imagine that he’s staring into an alternate dimension, killing time with a gang of hacks in a church basement as he monitors a multiverse of possibilities.
"I read your book Charles."
I slap six sugar packets together and rip the corners off.
"Yeah? And?"
"I don't know. It won't sell."
"Thanks. I figured as much."
His words sting. Lately I’ve felt like I’ve been wasting my time trying to put my thoughts into words, crafting words into stories; all this effort to communicate, but to what end? To become a paid, professional writer? So I can afford to continue to place myself into situations that I can later idealize and then trivialize by demeaning them to a bunch of letters, lifeless symbols, just so someone else will fork over cash to be momentarily entertained?
Truth to tell I had almost totally wiped my hands clean of my unholy text. The story made sense to me when I lived it, and now that I’ve re-read it, I can see how I got here. I even enjoyed it as a fusion of poetry, prose, and essays. Except for the end. I couldn't bring myself to read the ending.
"It'll be appreciated after you're dead." Tom looks over at me as he says this.
I swig a huge gulp of lukewarm coffee, shake my head, and glance over at him to size him up, to regain some semblance of pride. Sadness weighs his eyes down. It’s more emotion than I imagined from him.
'You poor bastard.' I hear him think to himself.
Tom flips off the lights and locks the door behind him as we all shuffle up into the temple. It was an unspoken tradition now to walk silently through the church, leaving our ramblings behind that heavy wooden door, down in the darkness.
The chatter picks up outside as we all man hug and go our separate ways. Sean belts out one final half-joke as he saunters backwards down the sidewalk.
"Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, and George W. Bush are in a burning building..."
No punchlines here Sean. Other than my life. I feel the same post-meeting depression that hits me on the walk home every Wednesday night. I haven’t written enough, I’m not good enough; I’m wasting so much time just existing. Merely living.
I walk back to my apartment, which is just a few blocks away, but it takes me twice as long tonight. My legs are wobbly and I feel anxious, more than usual. The streets of the East Village are empty and loneliness overtakes me. I want to stop thinking and I don't want to go home.
But I do. And there she is. Waiting for me. I tell her about how the meeting went. Detail out some of the highpoints as she sits vacantly on the couch. She’s recording the data, as is her function. She sits there like furniture, a fancy gadget that happens to be made of flesh and bone, although I can’t prove that she is human at all.
I go to the fridge and grab a beer. I pop the cap and stand there looking over at her. There’s nothing I can see about her that would indicate anything. A void of perfect function, she gives no information of herself, and defies my empathic vibe sense. The blankness surrounds her and I, of course, fill it with stories.
I imagine who she was before she started this. Whether she had done this before with other writers. If any of them felt the way I feel about her. This longing to be near her, to feel safe and like it all just doesn’t matter, because in the end, when it’s all over, nothing will matter. Just this moment, me watching her, wanting from afar.
This leads me to too much thinking, so to counteract it I take a few swigs of the beer and head to my room. I type up some ideas I had from the night and email them to myself. Ideas that would sit with all the other unread emails.
"I've got to write something."
I grab my handheld and sink into my papasan. I start typing away, drawing out an impossible romance. It was coming so easy, literally dancing out of my fingers and across the keys.
A warrior, burdened with a mission doomed from the start. He was hell-bent on killing the beast at the center of the Universe, although he could not remember why. A maiden is found lost along the way, her soul seeking salvation. It is only by chance that they cross paths and together they learn they are fated to topple an empire.
I finish the second act, stopping after they exit the labyrinth to finish off the beer and light a cigarette. I sit for a while, letting the last few words I had written resonate within my eyes before letting them seep into my brain.
It was a love story. Not my specialty, but I believe it’s what I had always secretly wanted to write. Something foolishly and hopelessly romantic with larger than life adventure and awash with grand gestures. It was naive and beautiful, if not a tad too ethereal and melodramatic.
I let the cigarette burn all the way to ash, then smoke the rest of the pack. I needed an ending to this, but how could I write up the end of love? How could I destroy something so precious, something so wrenched from my gut, something spoken truly from my heart?
'I won't end it. I refuse.' I decide, and bury the story among the rest of my thoughts.
I get up and brush my teeth. I watch her sleeping on the couch. Slowly I run my fingers along her hair and look down at her and let loose a sad sigh.
‘Who are you?’ I try to telepathically transmit to her brain.
I rinse my mouth and hit the light. I collapse into bed and roll over, hugging the covers tightly. My heart was racing my mind, and neither could possibly win. My soul in turmoil, I toss and turn.
And suddenly, I thought of a punchline.
"Eris, Kali and Loki walk into a bar..." Sean starts into his usual jokes with no punchlines.
It's his free form improv writing technique. Each of us has our individual techniques. Sean and his jokes, Juan’s historic anecdotes, Brian’s stream of consciousness, and Tom’s…well, I’m not sure what Tom is up to. Personally, I like to let it build up and explode out. Like a mental time bomb.
We all gathered there in the basement, looking pale and ghostly under the fluorescent lighting. The air was thick with smoke, the fragrant odor of cheap coffee, and our futile aspirations. We called it ‘Write Club’ but we hardly ever wrote. Actually that was what got us all together. Not being able to write.
Juan cuts off Sean's one-liners to tell us about the ten books he's read since our last meet. He’s a good foot and a half taller than Sean and so literally overshadows him as he steps into the circle of chairs in the center of the room.
"So, JFK's older brother was the one with the political design but when his younger brother came back with all them medals, well he did what any sensible overachieving sibling did. He flew a plane full of explosives towards a German factory ready to bail out at the last second when BOOM!"
I stopped double-checking the historical anecdotes he spouts after the first few weeks. As fictional as the things he says may seem, they always turn out to be true. As I get older writing seems more and more impossible, for what is there to really write about with reality being far stranger and beautiful in its symmetry to our chaotic minds.
I look off as Sean shoves Juan battling each other for verbal dominance. Intellectual alpha male social Darwinism never appealed to me. Brian’s sitting off to the side again scrawling and scribbling out in his spiral notebook, his long hair draped across his face. I make my way over and glare over at Tom as I do. He's by the coffee maker, back to the wall and eyes on the door.
I sit down next to Brian and light up a smoke.
"How's the writing?" he says, not looking up.
"Meh. You know. I got some ideas. Taking some time to structure them out, get something coherent and interesting down. Something with a point." I reply.
I take a drag off my cigarette and lean back. Nothing sucks like being a writer. All this pressure to make sense and make people care, in a medium that's nearly dead. And here we are pounding in the final nails. Writers in a pop star era, with flash fried masses devouring endless streams of sugar-coated spectacle. Follow the formula to success: don’t be original. It’s not art.
"I got some poems I'm just about happy with." Brian flipped back a few pages. He stopped on one filled with ink.
I had read a few of his pieces before and they were genius. Dark, mad poetry that made the mind cringe and the soul cry. He came across as aloof, but a severe sensitivity forced him inside. He gutted his pain out, spilling it across the page in fluid lines from a black ballpoint pen.
"Okay, okay, wait...Decartes, Kant and Hume are on a plane about to crash and there's only two parachutes..." Sean waves his arms frantically, trying to draw us all back into another round of jokes. He wrangles Brian back into the circle reluctantly where Juan stands with his arms crossed.
I don’t much feel like laughing so I walk over to grab another coffee and stub my butt in the ashtray, blowing out the last lungful of smoke. Tom still has his eyes on the exit, hand gripping his styrofoam cup. I imagine that he’s staring into an alternate dimension, killing time with a gang of hacks in a church basement as he monitors a multiverse of possibilities.
"I read your book Charles."
I slap six sugar packets together and rip the corners off.
"Yeah? And?"
"I don't know. It won't sell."
"Thanks. I figured as much."
His words sting. Lately I’ve felt like I’ve been wasting my time trying to put my thoughts into words, crafting words into stories; all this effort to communicate, but to what end? To become a paid, professional writer? So I can afford to continue to place myself into situations that I can later idealize and then trivialize by demeaning them to a bunch of letters, lifeless symbols, just so someone else will fork over cash to be momentarily entertained?
Truth to tell I had almost totally wiped my hands clean of my unholy text. The story made sense to me when I lived it, and now that I’ve re-read it, I can see how I got here. I even enjoyed it as a fusion of poetry, prose, and essays. Except for the end. I couldn't bring myself to read the ending.
"It'll be appreciated after you're dead." Tom looks over at me as he says this.
I swig a huge gulp of lukewarm coffee, shake my head, and glance over at him to size him up, to regain some semblance of pride. Sadness weighs his eyes down. It’s more emotion than I imagined from him.
'You poor bastard.' I hear him think to himself.
Tom flips off the lights and locks the door behind him as we all shuffle up into the temple. It was an unspoken tradition now to walk silently through the church, leaving our ramblings behind that heavy wooden door, down in the darkness.
The chatter picks up outside as we all man hug and go our separate ways. Sean belts out one final half-joke as he saunters backwards down the sidewalk.
"Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, and George W. Bush are in a burning building..."
No punchlines here Sean. Other than my life. I feel the same post-meeting depression that hits me on the walk home every Wednesday night. I haven’t written enough, I’m not good enough; I’m wasting so much time just existing. Merely living.
I walk back to my apartment, which is just a few blocks away, but it takes me twice as long tonight. My legs are wobbly and I feel anxious, more than usual. The streets of the East Village are empty and loneliness overtakes me. I want to stop thinking and I don't want to go home.
But I do. And there she is. Waiting for me. I tell her about how the meeting went. Detail out some of the highpoints as she sits vacantly on the couch. She’s recording the data, as is her function. She sits there like furniture, a fancy gadget that happens to be made of flesh and bone, although I can’t prove that she is human at all.
I go to the fridge and grab a beer. I pop the cap and stand there looking over at her. There’s nothing I can see about her that would indicate anything. A void of perfect function, she gives no information of herself, and defies my empathic vibe sense. The blankness surrounds her and I, of course, fill it with stories.
I imagine who she was before she started this. Whether she had done this before with other writers. If any of them felt the way I feel about her. This longing to be near her, to feel safe and like it all just doesn’t matter, because in the end, when it’s all over, nothing will matter. Just this moment, me watching her, wanting from afar.
This leads me to too much thinking, so to counteract it I take a few swigs of the beer and head to my room. I type up some ideas I had from the night and email them to myself. Ideas that would sit with all the other unread emails.
"I've got to write something."
I grab my handheld and sink into my papasan. I start typing away, drawing out an impossible romance. It was coming so easy, literally dancing out of my fingers and across the keys.
A warrior, burdened with a mission doomed from the start. He was hell-bent on killing the beast at the center of the Universe, although he could not remember why. A maiden is found lost along the way, her soul seeking salvation. It is only by chance that they cross paths and together they learn they are fated to topple an empire.
I finish the second act, stopping after they exit the labyrinth to finish off the beer and light a cigarette. I sit for a while, letting the last few words I had written resonate within my eyes before letting them seep into my brain.
It was a love story. Not my specialty, but I believe it’s what I had always secretly wanted to write. Something foolishly and hopelessly romantic with larger than life adventure and awash with grand gestures. It was naive and beautiful, if not a tad too ethereal and melodramatic.
I let the cigarette burn all the way to ash, then smoke the rest of the pack. I needed an ending to this, but how could I write up the end of love? How could I destroy something so precious, something so wrenched from my gut, something spoken truly from my heart?
'I won't end it. I refuse.' I decide, and bury the story among the rest of my thoughts.
I get up and brush my teeth. I watch her sleeping on the couch. Slowly I run my fingers along her hair and look down at her and let loose a sad sigh.
‘Who are you?’ I try to telepathically transmit to her brain.
I rinse my mouth and hit the light. I collapse into bed and roll over, hugging the covers tightly. My heart was racing my mind, and neither could possibly win. My soul in turmoil, I toss and turn.
And suddenly, I thought of a punchline.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Tower of Brahma - 50 - We're Building the New World: Order
1/14/08
They opened the door to my cell, my padded solitary confinement, without warning one day. A well-dressed man with perfect hair and a royal blue suit walked in wearing a smile that brimmed with empathic tenderness.
"Hello Charles. I'm Mike Gallows."
"Hey." It was all I could muster from beneath the drug slumber.
"Let's go for a walk." He extended his hand to me and helped me up.
I trailed along beside him, dragging my feet, as we made our way through some sort of building I don't recall entering. It was old and clinical, like an outdated mental hospital, and then transforming into an office building with the turn of a corner.
"This is our main office, for now." He waved his hands and cubicles, worker drones, computers, all seemed to materialize with his words.
As we walked, the business casual clad workers all peered out of their private hives to get a peek at this deranged madman the boss was giving the grand tour to. I hated them and their inquisitive eyes.
"We've got a few projects in the works, but we consider your book a top priority." I swung my head up towards him from my hunched stance. "I'm not sure if you know what your work has meant to some of us here."
"Where am I?" I don't remember sleeping.
"Well, that's sort of one of the tiny problems we're working on. We're not quite sure."
Gallows starts walking and as if on a leash, I lurch forward, shuffling along behind like an obedient dog. The office interior fades and a shimmering laboratory sparkles in its place.
A young lab technician, hiding behind mousy brown hair and glasses, tinkers with various, unscientific looking tools. Blunt objects, odds and ends from a junk drawer, and a handful of rocks. She continues to arrange them in some manner of specific order, known only to her, seemingly oblivious to us having entered her arena.
"Now, we're going to need you to hop up on here and let us have a look at you." Gallows guided me to some sort of medical surplus lounge chair and shoved me down into it.
He rotated around me, appearing in doctor's scrubs when he re-entered my line of sight. I began to feel a soothing comfort trickle down my body. Numb nothingness filled the everywhere of ache and pain. My teeth went first, then my chest, my limbs.
"Just sit back and relax and we'll see what's going on here." Gallows activated some out of sight lever, coercing the dental lay-z-boy to draw me deeper and deeper into comfortable oblivion.
I felt electromagnetic pulses, radioactive tracers, psychic emanators, all probing my body looking for disease. Seeking answers. Locating my soul.
When eternity had just started to become a teensy bit tiresome, the procedure ended. A bright light still shone on my exposed aura. I was vibrating, tingling pins and needles as physical sensation began to awaken within me.
"Well, everything seems to be in good working order, and I believe we can help you with the last piece you're missing." Gallows began to raise my chair up to a sitting position.
Sitting across from me, he appeared to be relieved. "Looks like you came through relatively unscathed, considering your story."
Gallows snapped off his latex gloves and jotted down some notes in a folder before handing them off to the assistant. A pure, silvery mirror was wheeling itself into the room, gliding on invisible monofilaments no doubt.
The mirror came to a stop just a few feet away. As Gallows readjusted it directly before me, I glanced over at the young lab assistant who was cleaning away the bric-a-brac that was strewn across the countertop. All that crap seemed awfully familiar and now possessed by some sentimental force that was overwhelming me.
"What is all that? What does this have to do with me? What is the tower...?"
I turned to face Gallows but instead saw my own reflection. I gazed upon my duplicate, my shimmering clone that truly existed nowhere, and I saw how lost he looked. I saw his despair and struggle, but how could you not with it weighing his face down like that.
That poor schmuck. All alone on the other side, unable to do much of anything. Just the exact opposite of myself, here in this cold, hard reality. But this reality didn't feel real. It hadn't in a long while. Before the book was written. Before moving to the city. Before the deal.
Innocence was the vital ingredient in this stranger's eyes. Unbitten by bitterness, my god, this simpleton was so long gone. I had forgotten what it was to be like you. To be lost and then refound. Bound by the immaterial, I buried you where they could never find you, the other side of here.
Over my howls of joy at this momentous occasion of me reclaiming my self, I overheard Gallows instruct the young girl to watch over me in these final stages.
"Be sure to wait until it fully dissolves, then give him the sedative. Let him take all of it in before he sleeps. Then have him meet the others."
Gallows gently tapped the edge of the chair and whispered, "Welcome home Charles. Everything will be amazing."
As I absorbed all that I had left behind, every good and decent fiber of my being, the whole of my sane mind, as all that soaked into me all I could think was that everything is already amazing.
It always has been. It always will be.
"Novus Ordo Colligo."
They opened the door to my cell, my padded solitary confinement, without warning one day. A well-dressed man with perfect hair and a royal blue suit walked in wearing a smile that brimmed with empathic tenderness.
"Hello Charles. I'm Mike Gallows."
"Hey." It was all I could muster from beneath the drug slumber.
"Let's go for a walk." He extended his hand to me and helped me up.
I trailed along beside him, dragging my feet, as we made our way through some sort of building I don't recall entering. It was old and clinical, like an outdated mental hospital, and then transforming into an office building with the turn of a corner.
"This is our main office, for now." He waved his hands and cubicles, worker drones, computers, all seemed to materialize with his words.
As we walked, the business casual clad workers all peered out of their private hives to get a peek at this deranged madman the boss was giving the grand tour to. I hated them and their inquisitive eyes.
"We've got a few projects in the works, but we consider your book a top priority." I swung my head up towards him from my hunched stance. "I'm not sure if you know what your work has meant to some of us here."
"Where am I?" I don't remember sleeping.
"Well, that's sort of one of the tiny problems we're working on. We're not quite sure."
Gallows starts walking and as if on a leash, I lurch forward, shuffling along behind like an obedient dog. The office interior fades and a shimmering laboratory sparkles in its place.
A young lab technician, hiding behind mousy brown hair and glasses, tinkers with various, unscientific looking tools. Blunt objects, odds and ends from a junk drawer, and a handful of rocks. She continues to arrange them in some manner of specific order, known only to her, seemingly oblivious to us having entered her arena.
"Now, we're going to need you to hop up on here and let us have a look at you." Gallows guided me to some sort of medical surplus lounge chair and shoved me down into it.
He rotated around me, appearing in doctor's scrubs when he re-entered my line of sight. I began to feel a soothing comfort trickle down my body. Numb nothingness filled the everywhere of ache and pain. My teeth went first, then my chest, my limbs.
"Just sit back and relax and we'll see what's going on here." Gallows activated some out of sight lever, coercing the dental lay-z-boy to draw me deeper and deeper into comfortable oblivion.
I felt electromagnetic pulses, radioactive tracers, psychic emanators, all probing my body looking for disease. Seeking answers. Locating my soul.
When eternity had just started to become a teensy bit tiresome, the procedure ended. A bright light still shone on my exposed aura. I was vibrating, tingling pins and needles as physical sensation began to awaken within me.
"Well, everything seems to be in good working order, and I believe we can help you with the last piece you're missing." Gallows began to raise my chair up to a sitting position.
Sitting across from me, he appeared to be relieved. "Looks like you came through relatively unscathed, considering your story."
Gallows snapped off his latex gloves and jotted down some notes in a folder before handing them off to the assistant. A pure, silvery mirror was wheeling itself into the room, gliding on invisible monofilaments no doubt.
The mirror came to a stop just a few feet away. As Gallows readjusted it directly before me, I glanced over at the young lab assistant who was cleaning away the bric-a-brac that was strewn across the countertop. All that crap seemed awfully familiar and now possessed by some sentimental force that was overwhelming me.
"What is all that? What does this have to do with me? What is the tower...?"
I turned to face Gallows but instead saw my own reflection. I gazed upon my duplicate, my shimmering clone that truly existed nowhere, and I saw how lost he looked. I saw his despair and struggle, but how could you not with it weighing his face down like that.
That poor schmuck. All alone on the other side, unable to do much of anything. Just the exact opposite of myself, here in this cold, hard reality. But this reality didn't feel real. It hadn't in a long while. Before the book was written. Before moving to the city. Before the deal.
Innocence was the vital ingredient in this stranger's eyes. Unbitten by bitterness, my god, this simpleton was so long gone. I had forgotten what it was to be like you. To be lost and then refound. Bound by the immaterial, I buried you where they could never find you, the other side of here.
Over my howls of joy at this momentous occasion of me reclaiming my self, I overheard Gallows instruct the young girl to watch over me in these final stages.
"Be sure to wait until it fully dissolves, then give him the sedative. Let him take all of it in before he sleeps. Then have him meet the others."
Gallows gently tapped the edge of the chair and whispered, "Welcome home Charles. Everything will be amazing."
As I absorbed all that I had left behind, every good and decent fiber of my being, the whole of my sane mind, as all that soaked into me all I could think was that everything is already amazing.
It always has been. It always will be.
"Novus Ordo Colligo."
Monday, November 2, 2009
The Tower of Brahma: Chapter 49 - Boy Cries Wolf
12/3/07
My brain is broken. Forehead feels hot to the touch as my mind boils alive in my skull. Something has gone horribly wrong.
I spend days at a time sleeping against the barrel of my gun, only waking when Spider comes to bring me some soup. I've let something out of my head, leaving whatever was left vulnerable, defenseless.
They send me to see a specialist, who specializes in something special no doubt. I don't care. Nothing feels real, no one believes me anymore, and there's nowhere to go. So, now I get to sit down with some egghead who wants to poke and prod me, work out my glitches. Awesome.
She comes in and catches my eye immediately. In fact I can't look away, or I won't, and I don't think I want to. She looks away for us both but keeps returning back to my gaze from behind her specs. The glasses frame her small, inquisitive eyes; amber pools drawing me in, eager to capture knowledge.
"Do you know why you're here?” She looks up from her clipboard and file folder. It seems we've started.
"I've a good idea, I suppose." So, I could meet you, I thought to myself.
"Well then, let's begin."
I pour out my soul to her, as it comes so easy to one of my disposition. I've known the zigs and zags of my life for years now. Recalled and examined the woes over and over and here it is all over again. Presented one more time in a rambling stream of sentimental sentences spilling forth and washing over her. She seems unfazed.
I give my diagnoses and the suggestions I tried to act upon to correct it all. The positive wavelengths I tried to ride all the way to a healthy mind. I scraped out the gunk and washed it clean. Molded the mess into a novel and sold it. Wiped my hands of the whole affair and walked away. God knows who's reading my travesty, if anyone at all.
She says very little in response. A flicker of life dances in her as I bombard her with the worst I have, laughing at my misfortunes which I'm sure come across as two-demential as they sound to me. I'm sure her own pains are worse, her suffering paramount to all others, but here she is trying to help me. Or maybe she's just earning her paycheck.
I want her to tell me I'm being selfish, or melodramatic, or that I'm too sensitive. And although I've dreaded it, fought the idea my whole life, that I need medication, that I should be drugged and mellowed out, well now that sounds so appealing. I don't want to be sitting on the edge of feeling too much anymore.
It's all lies. My repeated suffering and exorcising of personal demons. It's all flat, unemotional, detached anecdotes about this pretending madman charicature I've made myself into.
I hate being Charles Crown. I hate the Agent Fenris character in my book, always preferring to be Spider, the charismatic psychopath that does as he wants without reservation or consequence. A silent killer with no remorse. But I care, I feel.
"I care too much godammit!” I scream, pounding the table. She does not stir.
I kick back the chair and stand. "Why?! Why do I feel so much, yet nothing at all?!"
My anger swells, frustration simmering internally, until I truly feel mad. "I'm feeling something for god's sake! I can't just be making this all up! I just goddamn can not be!"
I flip the table and scream, "This is real fucking pain I feel! Why the fuck can't I just feel it, accept this bullshit, swallow the whole fucking sadness that's making me hate this whole godforsaken world?!"
I reach past the girl across from me who is no longer there and slam against the two-way mirror that they're watching me from behind. I rage against the glass, hoping that I am imbued with enough strength to shatter it where I'm sure the countless others before me were unable. I hope beyond hope that it's me that brings everything crashing down.
But I don't. I just crash to the floor myself in exhaustion, knuckles and palms bruised and bloodied. I'm crying everything out, tears mixing with blood as I wipe the evidence of weakness from my face. I'm trapped in here and no one is listening.
My brain is broken. Forehead feels hot to the touch as my mind boils alive in my skull. Something has gone horribly wrong.
I spend days at a time sleeping against the barrel of my gun, only waking when Spider comes to bring me some soup. I've let something out of my head, leaving whatever was left vulnerable, defenseless.
They send me to see a specialist, who specializes in something special no doubt. I don't care. Nothing feels real, no one believes me anymore, and there's nowhere to go. So, now I get to sit down with some egghead who wants to poke and prod me, work out my glitches. Awesome.
She comes in and catches my eye immediately. In fact I can't look away, or I won't, and I don't think I want to. She looks away for us both but keeps returning back to my gaze from behind her specs. The glasses frame her small, inquisitive eyes; amber pools drawing me in, eager to capture knowledge.
"Do you know why you're here?” She looks up from her clipboard and file folder. It seems we've started.
"I've a good idea, I suppose." So, I could meet you, I thought to myself.
"Well then, let's begin."
I pour out my soul to her, as it comes so easy to one of my disposition. I've known the zigs and zags of my life for years now. Recalled and examined the woes over and over and here it is all over again. Presented one more time in a rambling stream of sentimental sentences spilling forth and washing over her. She seems unfazed.
I give my diagnoses and the suggestions I tried to act upon to correct it all. The positive wavelengths I tried to ride all the way to a healthy mind. I scraped out the gunk and washed it clean. Molded the mess into a novel and sold it. Wiped my hands of the whole affair and walked away. God knows who's reading my travesty, if anyone at all.
She says very little in response. A flicker of life dances in her as I bombard her with the worst I have, laughing at my misfortunes which I'm sure come across as two-demential as they sound to me. I'm sure her own pains are worse, her suffering paramount to all others, but here she is trying to help me. Or maybe she's just earning her paycheck.
I want her to tell me I'm being selfish, or melodramatic, or that I'm too sensitive. And although I've dreaded it, fought the idea my whole life, that I need medication, that I should be drugged and mellowed out, well now that sounds so appealing. I don't want to be sitting on the edge of feeling too much anymore.
It's all lies. My repeated suffering and exorcising of personal demons. It's all flat, unemotional, detached anecdotes about this pretending madman charicature I've made myself into.
I hate being Charles Crown. I hate the Agent Fenris character in my book, always preferring to be Spider, the charismatic psychopath that does as he wants without reservation or consequence. A silent killer with no remorse. But I care, I feel.
"I care too much godammit!” I scream, pounding the table. She does not stir.
I kick back the chair and stand. "Why?! Why do I feel so much, yet nothing at all?!"
My anger swells, frustration simmering internally, until I truly feel mad. "I'm feeling something for god's sake! I can't just be making this all up! I just goddamn can not be!"
I flip the table and scream, "This is real fucking pain I feel! Why the fuck can't I just feel it, accept this bullshit, swallow the whole fucking sadness that's making me hate this whole godforsaken world?!"
I reach past the girl across from me who is no longer there and slam against the two-way mirror that they're watching me from behind. I rage against the glass, hoping that I am imbued with enough strength to shatter it where I'm sure the countless others before me were unable. I hope beyond hope that it's me that brings everything crashing down.
But I don't. I just crash to the floor myself in exhaustion, knuckles and palms bruised and bloodied. I'm crying everything out, tears mixing with blood as I wipe the evidence of weakness from my face. I'm trapped in here and no one is listening.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Tower of Brahma 48 - Anthropology of Entertainment
10/18/07
I've been walking up these steps for my entire life, leaving plenty of time for introspection and speculation. Every cycle around the base of this tower marked another ending, another beginning, until the line between blurred. Steps of Eternity, one foot ahead of the other, this was my entire life.
The walking fell to the background and my imagination painted the canvas of my escape. I envisioned character after character building their arc, rising and falling and rising once again. They too were trapped in a circular prison, given life just long enough to come back around enlightened.
I distracted myself with their drama, getting lost in their tragedy, drowning in their passion. I forgot who I was and where I was going, only that I was moving forward. As the stories grew in complexity I found it harder to immerse myself. The variations on a theme weren't enough to distract from my isolation.
They fell in love, they fought, they reconciled. They waged war, they murdered and sought salvation. Beneath their two dimensional personas, a shadow grew. The sun behind my mind casted a long darkness stretching into an infinite web of complexity. Black and white melded to grey, which folded in on itself and exploded into every color ever.
Nothing was new, only repackaged for the age, in the parlance of the times, the message becoming obscured beneath the blurred surface. The masses became lost in repetition, forgetting that they were moving upwards, instead feeling only that they were repeats of something that once was real.
I was everyone, somewhere else. Here and now, I was just a nameless form rising alone. I stopped walking. I looked up and couldn't see the top of this leviathan tower. Peering down over the side into the abyss of my mistakes and regrets, I felt the urge to plunge. I fought back the gag reflex of my soul and backed against the wall.
There had to be some way to find out where I was. How far I'd come. How much longer there was to go. I reached out into the shimmering futura with my mind and saw that I'd be walking steps forever. I sat down and rested my legs.
My head sunk into my hands. The weight of a multiverse pulled it down, made it impossibly heavy. Fake lies revealing truth, that's what was in this damned skull of mine. A hunk of fleshy meat firing electrical impulses. Divine light beaming down upon it, supplying the spark to ignite the slow burning embers. A stiff wind whips up the staircase blowing back my hair.
I withdrew. Pulled everything in as tears burst forth. Liquid poured from my eyes as a full bathtub might, water spilling over the edge as you lower yourself into its warm embrace. A reverse raindrop dripping from the edge of the roof. My stomach went wobbly as a thousand realities swooshed about my person.
I opened my eyes, the wind drying the cool wetness on the side of my face. I saw the bricks all around me. The endless perfect pattern containing all the molecules within. A concrete straw sucking me up into something. I retraced my last steps, following them into the curve of the tower. My eyesight got to just about 180 degrees, give or take, when I spied the marker.
There was a carving on the outside of the steps. I couldn't make it out from here so I got up and leaped down a few steps to get closer. I had to go back til I was almost on top of it. I leaned over the edge, dangling myself from the cusp of certain death so as to read it: XLVIII.
'Stomp-stomp-stomp!'
I scurried back from the edge as the footsteps grew louder. Someone was following. He had to run. Fight or flight surged through his brain, adrenaline through his heart, a chill down his spine. Mad dashing back up the steps, Charles Crown leaped steps two at a time. The sound grew fainter.
I saw another marker on the curve up ahead. When I read it I knew what was left to do. The weight of an entire lifetime of fiction didn't seem as heavy as it once did. Mankind's dreams sloshed about inside my head. I'd carry it as far as I could. To the top if I was able.
Almost at the next marker. Wish me luck.
I've been walking up these steps for my entire life, leaving plenty of time for introspection and speculation. Every cycle around the base of this tower marked another ending, another beginning, until the line between blurred. Steps of Eternity, one foot ahead of the other, this was my entire life.
The walking fell to the background and my imagination painted the canvas of my escape. I envisioned character after character building their arc, rising and falling and rising once again. They too were trapped in a circular prison, given life just long enough to come back around enlightened.
I distracted myself with their drama, getting lost in their tragedy, drowning in their passion. I forgot who I was and where I was going, only that I was moving forward. As the stories grew in complexity I found it harder to immerse myself. The variations on a theme weren't enough to distract from my isolation.
They fell in love, they fought, they reconciled. They waged war, they murdered and sought salvation. Beneath their two dimensional personas, a shadow grew. The sun behind my mind casted a long darkness stretching into an infinite web of complexity. Black and white melded to grey, which folded in on itself and exploded into every color ever.
Nothing was new, only repackaged for the age, in the parlance of the times, the message becoming obscured beneath the blurred surface. The masses became lost in repetition, forgetting that they were moving upwards, instead feeling only that they were repeats of something that once was real.
I was everyone, somewhere else. Here and now, I was just a nameless form rising alone. I stopped walking. I looked up and couldn't see the top of this leviathan tower. Peering down over the side into the abyss of my mistakes and regrets, I felt the urge to plunge. I fought back the gag reflex of my soul and backed against the wall.
There had to be some way to find out where I was. How far I'd come. How much longer there was to go. I reached out into the shimmering futura with my mind and saw that I'd be walking steps forever. I sat down and rested my legs.
My head sunk into my hands. The weight of a multiverse pulled it down, made it impossibly heavy. Fake lies revealing truth, that's what was in this damned skull of mine. A hunk of fleshy meat firing electrical impulses. Divine light beaming down upon it, supplying the spark to ignite the slow burning embers. A stiff wind whips up the staircase blowing back my hair.
I withdrew. Pulled everything in as tears burst forth. Liquid poured from my eyes as a full bathtub might, water spilling over the edge as you lower yourself into its warm embrace. A reverse raindrop dripping from the edge of the roof. My stomach went wobbly as a thousand realities swooshed about my person.
I opened my eyes, the wind drying the cool wetness on the side of my face. I saw the bricks all around me. The endless perfect pattern containing all the molecules within. A concrete straw sucking me up into something. I retraced my last steps, following them into the curve of the tower. My eyesight got to just about 180 degrees, give or take, when I spied the marker.
There was a carving on the outside of the steps. I couldn't make it out from here so I got up and leaped down a few steps to get closer. I had to go back til I was almost on top of it. I leaned over the edge, dangling myself from the cusp of certain death so as to read it: XLVIII.
'Stomp-stomp-stomp!'
I scurried back from the edge as the footsteps grew louder. Someone was following. He had to run. Fight or flight surged through his brain, adrenaline through his heart, a chill down his spine. Mad dashing back up the steps, Charles Crown leaped steps two at a time. The sound grew fainter.
I saw another marker on the curve up ahead. When I read it I knew what was left to do. The weight of an entire lifetime of fiction didn't seem as heavy as it once did. Mankind's dreams sloshed about inside my head. I'd carry it as far as I could. To the top if I was able.
Almost at the next marker. Wish me luck.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Tower of Brahma: Chapter 47. the Meaning of Life (completed)
08/02/07
I went out for a walk last night. I wandered down 2nd Ave, turned on 3rd, made a right on 1st. From there I crisscrossed through the Lower East Side. I walked by every bar I was familiar with but didn't go in any of them.
I was looking for something, not meaning to find anything. An empty quest through the lonely night, hoping things might make sense with some pavement under my feet. I decided to get a drink after all.
Back up into the East Village, Ave A's deviants all about me, I knew where to go. Lucy's; Agent Spider's drop point of choice. I had Marco bring me a Zyviec. He asked where Spider was as he added a shot of Polish Vodka to the bar. I tossed back the shot and told him I was solo tonight.
I polished off the beer and stepped outside for a smoke. It was near closing time and Thompkins Square Park was a black void before me. The gates were all locked and the police weren't about, yet I knew someone was in there. I could hear them; could hear the wail of his trumpet.
It was sad and jazzy. Dancing among the leaves, slipping around the maze-like walkway. It must have had a hypnotic effect on me as I found myself leaping the fence and wandering into the darkness. I followed the sound of the horn towards the center of the park, where the benches all arc around two massive trees. The moon beamed down through the gaps in the treetops illuminating the dancefloor. I was alone with myself standing amid the lunar puddles.
A man stepped into the light playing his horn. He wore a disheveled suit and a frazzled head of hair with matching beard. His eyes were closed as he sauntered towards me. The moon highlighted the cracks in his features. I thought of my father.
His slow, sad tune rode out on a long and nearly inaudible note.
"Hey kid. Thanks for coming."
"I guess I didn't have much of a choice. I've been at the mercy of random events for quite some time now." I really had. I had finished a book I didn't recall writing. It was soon to be released and in the meantime I was visiting therapists and specialists and psychiatrists at the behest of the publisher. I wasn't sure of anything anymore.
"Oh, I remember those days. So afraid I was being controlled, manipulated, that I often ran away from anything and everything. We always were so good at running away..."
The moonlight shifted as it began to turn away in the night sky. It provided a pathway to the benches where the man with the trumpet sat wearily. He spun the horn around his fingers with a practiced ease. With his other hand he took out a pair of glasses and slipped them on.
"But I remember this night too. Alone and wandering. Called into the dark by my beckoning blare of brass. Heh. A beer and a shot burning my belly. We never would have had the balls to jump the fence, let alone come in here this late, all alone..."
I examined his face as the leaves parted in the wind and the light shone upon him. The same glasses I picked up at Fabulous Fanny's. The beard, although much thicker, was still patchy in the same places. The I-ching tattoo on the left forearm peeking out from his rolled up sleeve...
"So, you're me then? I'm visiting myself in the past? How old am I, I mean you?"
He chuckled and stared me down. I was guessing he had to be almost my father's age now.
"You don't even want to know how this is all possible. That's what I loved about this age. 30, right? Still had that sense of wonder and excitement. As for me, well, seeing as this is the year of our lord 2023, well then, I must be just shy of...forty eight. Man. Forty eight."
He looked down at the ground for a lingering, lost moment. The trumpet came to an abrupt stop as he glanced up at me.
"C'mon, sit a spell."
So, I dropped onto the bench next to him and stared down at my shredded Adidas on the pavement, my sock just protruding from the right pinky toe.
"Do I figure this out?"
"What, life?"
"Yeah."
"You already did. Now you're just learning to live with it."
The moonlight began to shrink away, letting the night envelop us. The remaining light focused to a point; thousands of leaves casting fractal patterns in a chaotic pattern all melting into one spotlight, slipping towards a headlight, to a mere flashlight. As it became a laser it floated down the space between us and up my body. It rested on my forehead and fired.
"Here, put these on."
A pair of sunglasses was being placed on my face in the blinding white. I eventually got them adjusted and the world came into view.
"How is it daytime?"
I was staring out at the park midday, with dogs being walked, skateboarders flipping and tripping, and joggers bouncing by. The sun was everywhere.
"Okay, I just brought you through time so, you know, take a minute and soak it in."
Minor details made it to a secret part of my brain. Clothes were familiar, yet foreign. Bizarre technology was in place of small things like books, cell phones, stereos. Even people themselves felt somewhat alien.
"2023? I guess not much is different. People in a park."
A spin of the trumpet got my attention as he turned to me and said, "Let's walk."
I felt stumbly and awkward. Paying too much attention to walking, to breathing. I assumed everyone was staring, but no one was. The man next to me just smiled over at me as we walked out and down 7th street.
"So, yeah, as you can see, life is just about the same. Some major changes in the air, but so many behind us as well."
Billboards and ads were either holographic, following me as I passed or just paint on a wall. Stores ranged from squatters sitting out selling their goods (glass bowls, hemp, and paper books), to high end, eye scanner designer vintage clothing stores big enough to fit five people comfortably.
"What about the book? What happens with the Tower of Brahma? I don't know the ending."
He stopped spinning the horn and placed it into his pocket. With a smile he said, "Well, what can I tell you? It makes an impact. Of sorts."
"What's that mean? You know what I had planned for the end. How does it end?"
He chuckled to himself. "You'll read it eventually. Live it actually. God, I miss being you."
I put everything that's been happening to me in perspective. Somehow I was still alive. There was some purpose to all this. But I had to know.
"Is it my ending? What I really wanted? Did they make it something horrible? I wanted a happy ending...I did."
Tears welled up and I squeezed them out casually. Future me put his arm around my shoulder and with a grand sweeping gesture he wiped away the veil of reality.
"It's always a happy ending."
My arms weak, I clawed the glasses from my face and the light turned to dark, letting them fall to the sidewalk. The night warbled and warped before me. The people, the sun, the future...was gone.
I dropped to a knee and then tumbled forward onto my face. Consciousness sat dormant within my body as it heaved and hurled up the booze and stomach chunks. Every 20 minutes or so light made it's way into my open eyes.
Agent Spider walked up and lifted me by the back of my shirt. He began to drag me forward, and five feet later my feet found their footing. I was working my way up to lurching forward.
"C'mon kid, let's get you home."
A single note dissipated down 7th street and out into tomorrow.
I went out for a walk last night. I wandered down 2nd Ave, turned on 3rd, made a right on 1st. From there I crisscrossed through the Lower East Side. I walked by every bar I was familiar with but didn't go in any of them.
I was looking for something, not meaning to find anything. An empty quest through the lonely night, hoping things might make sense with some pavement under my feet. I decided to get a drink after all.
Back up into the East Village, Ave A's deviants all about me, I knew where to go. Lucy's; Agent Spider's drop point of choice. I had Marco bring me a Zyviec. He asked where Spider was as he added a shot of Polish Vodka to the bar. I tossed back the shot and told him I was solo tonight.
I polished off the beer and stepped outside for a smoke. It was near closing time and Thompkins Square Park was a black void before me. The gates were all locked and the police weren't about, yet I knew someone was in there. I could hear them; could hear the wail of his trumpet.
It was sad and jazzy. Dancing among the leaves, slipping around the maze-like walkway. It must have had a hypnotic effect on me as I found myself leaping the fence and wandering into the darkness. I followed the sound of the horn towards the center of the park, where the benches all arc around two massive trees. The moon beamed down through the gaps in the treetops illuminating the dancefloor. I was alone with myself standing amid the lunar puddles.
A man stepped into the light playing his horn. He wore a disheveled suit and a frazzled head of hair with matching beard. His eyes were closed as he sauntered towards me. The moon highlighted the cracks in his features. I thought of my father.
His slow, sad tune rode out on a long and nearly inaudible note.
"Hey kid. Thanks for coming."
"I guess I didn't have much of a choice. I've been at the mercy of random events for quite some time now." I really had. I had finished a book I didn't recall writing. It was soon to be released and in the meantime I was visiting therapists and specialists and psychiatrists at the behest of the publisher. I wasn't sure of anything anymore.
"Oh, I remember those days. So afraid I was being controlled, manipulated, that I often ran away from anything and everything. We always were so good at running away..."
The moonlight shifted as it began to turn away in the night sky. It provided a pathway to the benches where the man with the trumpet sat wearily. He spun the horn around his fingers with a practiced ease. With his other hand he took out a pair of glasses and slipped them on.
"But I remember this night too. Alone and wandering. Called into the dark by my beckoning blare of brass. Heh. A beer and a shot burning my belly. We never would have had the balls to jump the fence, let alone come in here this late, all alone..."
I examined his face as the leaves parted in the wind and the light shone upon him. The same glasses I picked up at Fabulous Fanny's. The beard, although much thicker, was still patchy in the same places. The I-ching tattoo on the left forearm peeking out from his rolled up sleeve...
"So, you're me then? I'm visiting myself in the past? How old am I, I mean you?"
He chuckled and stared me down. I was guessing he had to be almost my father's age now.
"You don't even want to know how this is all possible. That's what I loved about this age. 30, right? Still had that sense of wonder and excitement. As for me, well, seeing as this is the year of our lord 2023, well then, I must be just shy of...forty eight. Man. Forty eight."
He looked down at the ground for a lingering, lost moment. The trumpet came to an abrupt stop as he glanced up at me.
"C'mon, sit a spell."
So, I dropped onto the bench next to him and stared down at my shredded Adidas on the pavement, my sock just protruding from the right pinky toe.
"Do I figure this out?"
"What, life?"
"Yeah."
"You already did. Now you're just learning to live with it."
The moonlight began to shrink away, letting the night envelop us. The remaining light focused to a point; thousands of leaves casting fractal patterns in a chaotic pattern all melting into one spotlight, slipping towards a headlight, to a mere flashlight. As it became a laser it floated down the space between us and up my body. It rested on my forehead and fired.
"Here, put these on."
A pair of sunglasses was being placed on my face in the blinding white. I eventually got them adjusted and the world came into view.
"How is it daytime?"
I was staring out at the park midday, with dogs being walked, skateboarders flipping and tripping, and joggers bouncing by. The sun was everywhere.
"Okay, I just brought you through time so, you know, take a minute and soak it in."
Minor details made it to a secret part of my brain. Clothes were familiar, yet foreign. Bizarre technology was in place of small things like books, cell phones, stereos. Even people themselves felt somewhat alien.
"2023? I guess not much is different. People in a park."
A spin of the trumpet got my attention as he turned to me and said, "Let's walk."
I felt stumbly and awkward. Paying too much attention to walking, to breathing. I assumed everyone was staring, but no one was. The man next to me just smiled over at me as we walked out and down 7th street.
"So, yeah, as you can see, life is just about the same. Some major changes in the air, but so many behind us as well."
Billboards and ads were either holographic, following me as I passed or just paint on a wall. Stores ranged from squatters sitting out selling their goods (glass bowls, hemp, and paper books), to high end, eye scanner designer vintage clothing stores big enough to fit five people comfortably.
"What about the book? What happens with the Tower of Brahma? I don't know the ending."
He stopped spinning the horn and placed it into his pocket. With a smile he said, "Well, what can I tell you? It makes an impact. Of sorts."
"What's that mean? You know what I had planned for the end. How does it end?"
He chuckled to himself. "You'll read it eventually. Live it actually. God, I miss being you."
I put everything that's been happening to me in perspective. Somehow I was still alive. There was some purpose to all this. But I had to know.
"Is it my ending? What I really wanted? Did they make it something horrible? I wanted a happy ending...I did."
Tears welled up and I squeezed them out casually. Future me put his arm around my shoulder and with a grand sweeping gesture he wiped away the veil of reality.
"It's always a happy ending."
My arms weak, I clawed the glasses from my face and the light turned to dark, letting them fall to the sidewalk. The night warbled and warped before me. The people, the sun, the future...was gone.
I dropped to a knee and then tumbled forward onto my face. Consciousness sat dormant within my body as it heaved and hurled up the booze and stomach chunks. Every 20 minutes or so light made it's way into my open eyes.
Agent Spider walked up and lifted me by the back of my shirt. He began to drag me forward, and five feet later my feet found their footing. I was working my way up to lurching forward.
"C'mon kid, let's get you home."
A single note dissipated down 7th street and out into tomorrow.
Monday, October 12, 2009
The Tower of Brahma 46 Paranoia Paradise
01/31/07
"Congrats on the book."
I look up from my beer, removing myself from stasis, regaining the game. I looked over at the man next to me. He seemed to be a boy playing at manhood, much like myself. We wore contrasting costumes to match our competing characteristics. He was dark, and thin; precise. I was white, beaten, and defeated.
"I didn't finish it. I don't think I'm going to. I think I hate it."
"What are you talking about?"
"I don't think I'll like how it ends."
"Limbo is a better fate.", I added.
I thought about everything. About all the things behind me, below me, above me, before me. Putting together words is easy. It comes so natural that it's kind of spooky. Piecing together a story is impossible. Imagine trying to unite all of mankind into a state of interest, of a suspension of identity, to con them into emotions with words parading around as familiar friends or unforgettable foes.
But it's a lie. A shadow puppet display of ideas and instructions, or rather suggestions, to a bored, complacent society that has become virtually shockproof. Hell, I've lost the ability to feel months ago. So I don't feel pity for myself. Fuck that sense of failure. I don't owe anyone my words. I don't have to entertain them, distract them. Forget about teaching anyone, enlightening just even one reader, once.
"I thought that was a good turning point in the book. When things got more, I dunno, ugly. Raw, you know?"
I focused in on the individual in front of me again. I attempted to deduce whether we were speaking telepathically. Paranoia seeped in and so the awkward silence must be filled.
"I don't know why I don't destroy the whole thing. Delete it off that online journal I have and trash the backup I have on my Powerbook at home." I cringed at the thought.
"If the editors like it as much as I have, well I know we can get this thing on the shelves by summer." He stopped speaking mentally when he said this.
"What are you talking about? I'm not going to write it. I came here to tell you. I'm done."
I was getting drowsy, but when I re-focused my eyes I was sitting beside Agent Spider, and the bar had a symbolic sheen. Below us were bodies that looked too realistic to be real. It was us, but more muted somehow. Confined.
"You completed the book three months ago when you asked that we hypnotize you to help your motivation. After the first session, you locked yourself up in your apartment for hours a day. You just emailed me the last chapter last week."
I felt high from the out of body experience, grounded down through the booze. Everything was asleep. Reality was melting. I focused my third eye and rode the vibrations, tuning into the music from the jukebox. I felt every person in the bar, drank in their emotions, feeding on their humanity. I needed to be real to figure this out.
"What are you talking about?!" I shouted more than I meant to.
He glanced around and gave me a weird look.
"You okay? What's going on?" That's what it looked like his lips had said.
"Is this like a gimmick thing? You're Agent Fenris, the crazy writer in your book?" That is what I heard. And it wouldn't stop.
Those three months must have damaged something. Maybe it was that "creating antennae" we had built to force the book out of you. The "magic signal" that stimulates your impulse to write. And for what? The new bible I'm assuming. Ahh yes, you'll be immortal through the written word. But only a shell of you. Something that was never even real in the first place. Agent Fenris peels away, Charles Crown lies behind, and what's there underneath it all?
The Tower rumbles and crashes to the earth. That last brick brought it down. No, every brick brought it down. Every moment spent building, that caused this disaster. Devastation is everything. Desolation is all. There is nothing left.
I'm waving wildly as my senses scream at me, every sensation of this city assaulting me. I burst out the doors of the bar, obviously stark raving mad. I've lost it, I've lost everything. I slam into concrete and suddenly there is nothing left.
"Congrats on the book."
I look up from my beer, removing myself from stasis, regaining the game. I looked over at the man next to me. He seemed to be a boy playing at manhood, much like myself. We wore contrasting costumes to match our competing characteristics. He was dark, and thin; precise. I was white, beaten, and defeated.
"I didn't finish it. I don't think I'm going to. I think I hate it."
"What are you talking about?"
"I don't think I'll like how it ends."
"Limbo is a better fate.", I added.
I thought about everything. About all the things behind me, below me, above me, before me. Putting together words is easy. It comes so natural that it's kind of spooky. Piecing together a story is impossible. Imagine trying to unite all of mankind into a state of interest, of a suspension of identity, to con them into emotions with words parading around as familiar friends or unforgettable foes.
But it's a lie. A shadow puppet display of ideas and instructions, or rather suggestions, to a bored, complacent society that has become virtually shockproof. Hell, I've lost the ability to feel months ago. So I don't feel pity for myself. Fuck that sense of failure. I don't owe anyone my words. I don't have to entertain them, distract them. Forget about teaching anyone, enlightening just even one reader, once.
"I thought that was a good turning point in the book. When things got more, I dunno, ugly. Raw, you know?"
I focused in on the individual in front of me again. I attempted to deduce whether we were speaking telepathically. Paranoia seeped in and so the awkward silence must be filled.
"I don't know why I don't destroy the whole thing. Delete it off that online journal I have and trash the backup I have on my Powerbook at home." I cringed at the thought.
"If the editors like it as much as I have, well I know we can get this thing on the shelves by summer." He stopped speaking mentally when he said this.
"What are you talking about? I'm not going to write it. I came here to tell you. I'm done."
I was getting drowsy, but when I re-focused my eyes I was sitting beside Agent Spider, and the bar had a symbolic sheen. Below us were bodies that looked too realistic to be real. It was us, but more muted somehow. Confined.
"You completed the book three months ago when you asked that we hypnotize you to help your motivation. After the first session, you locked yourself up in your apartment for hours a day. You just emailed me the last chapter last week."
I felt high from the out of body experience, grounded down through the booze. Everything was asleep. Reality was melting. I focused my third eye and rode the vibrations, tuning into the music from the jukebox. I felt every person in the bar, drank in their emotions, feeding on their humanity. I needed to be real to figure this out.
"What are you talking about?!" I shouted more than I meant to.
He glanced around and gave me a weird look.
"You okay? What's going on?" That's what it looked like his lips had said.
"Is this like a gimmick thing? You're Agent Fenris, the crazy writer in your book?" That is what I heard. And it wouldn't stop.
Those three months must have damaged something. Maybe it was that "creating antennae" we had built to force the book out of you. The "magic signal" that stimulates your impulse to write. And for what? The new bible I'm assuming. Ahh yes, you'll be immortal through the written word. But only a shell of you. Something that was never even real in the first place. Agent Fenris peels away, Charles Crown lies behind, and what's there underneath it all?
The Tower rumbles and crashes to the earth. That last brick brought it down. No, every brick brought it down. Every moment spent building, that caused this disaster. Devastation is everything. Desolation is all. There is nothing left.
I'm waving wildly as my senses scream at me, every sensation of this city assaulting me. I burst out the doors of the bar, obviously stark raving mad. I've lost it, I've lost everything. I slam into concrete and suddenly there is nothing left.
Monday, October 5, 2009
the tower of brahma - 45 - grinning beginning
09/08/06
I have a plan. I need to know what's going to happen if it's bound to happen regardless. Can you alter fate?
I bought a chalkboard and returned it when I rediscovered my distaste for touching chalk. In exchange I got a corkboard, some thumbtacks, post-its and string. I began tacking up pictures of the twelve names I still had written on my forearm after a random phone call had instructed me that these people were to be found and questioned.
There was seventeen total. The first five were all within one person. Me. All facets of my fractured persona, they collapsed into just a writer, lost in the middle. And although I had unknowingly tried to halt my investigation further with heavy doses of alcohol and a sharpie, I could still read the raised letters of the names beyond the thick black government-esque classified crossouts. Now I needed to find out who these people were and what their connection was to me, to Agent Fenris, to the Tower itself.
Right after I sleep. Insomnia comes with excess coffee and the uppers. I need to dream, so badly that I believe I am creating mock dreams for myself in a half-awake sleep deprived delirium. Visions of holy writers and righteous believers come to me and tell me what I know but am too lazy to do. Write. Get it out, down and on the damn page and then go take a nap.
Just as I begin to drift after writing my last word I hear the sounds of flames, concentrated searing fire. My neighbor is responsible. He's been building something for a week that I jokingly say is a robot. But now I wonder. He always seems shady and off to me, a freakish man-boy with thick glasses and chocolate icing for hair. I begin to watch him. I take note of the sounds I hear and postulate in my mind the tools and possible substances composed in the construction of this enigmatic creation.
Finally after weeks of not sleeping I wait for him on the stairs by the roof. He's just a floor down so when I hear him hit the fifth floor and head down his hallway, I leap down the flight of stairs and rush him. I slam into his back and we burst into his apartment. We hit the ground and slide across near bare floors. I look around seeing the far side of the apartment first. A cot, a small fridge and neatly rowed tools. I turn and my eyes slide across his shocked face, his embarrassed look, and become ensnared in the contraption that looms just a few feet above my bed.
Its center is a massive stone, carved meticulously, and surrounded by a wood base resembling an infinity symbol. Large metal rods are protruding from the rock in a multitude of directions. I think there were eight of them but I couldn't be sure for what I did next made it hard to determine what had happening. I never imagined I would have the strength to toss a rock that big out a window and to cause such significant damage to the wall. The rods, not fully soldered on, were smashed off and as I spun around huffing and puffing in a lunatic rage, I grabbed one off the floor.
My neighbor was scared. Too afraid to run for the door, which was open just enough for a hand to squeeze through and throw the door wide open. His fingertips barely twitched and that door was slammed shut, my free hand sliding towards the lock.
"What was that device you were building, neighbor?” The metal rod was a perfect weapon.
"My sculpture?” he replied.
I suddenly felt mad. I probably have done something crazy. The metal rod in my hand and the enormous hole in the far wall told me I had. Still I had to know.
"Who sent you? Did they tell you to build it? Does it make me have to write?” I pleaded.
"W-what are y-you talking about?” He had the eyes of a crazy person. But I out-crazied him. He would have no answers that I could use.
I unlocked the door and stepped into the hall backwards. I had to let him know not to tip his hat to the narcs but how could I let him know without letting them know I knew. Their machine was broken. They must know already. Unless, this is their man, and if he becomes my ally then he'll cover for me. But what if he's a patsy though? Some dumbshit college kid they paid to assemble some low-end frequency transmitter above my bedroom. He'd have no idea of the intricate plot he would now find himself ensnared in. No, better to save the poor kid the ordeal of getting involved in a conspiracy this grand. He'll be happier and safer as a pawn. His watchdogs will think he snapped from his proximity and exposure to the device. Poor sap.
"Sorry kid. Forget Art. Go to business school.” and with that I gently let the door shut behind me, a smile of satisfaction on my face.
Now, what was I doing?
I have a plan. I need to know what's going to happen if it's bound to happen regardless. Can you alter fate?
I bought a chalkboard and returned it when I rediscovered my distaste for touching chalk. In exchange I got a corkboard, some thumbtacks, post-its and string. I began tacking up pictures of the twelve names I still had written on my forearm after a random phone call had instructed me that these people were to be found and questioned.
There was seventeen total. The first five were all within one person. Me. All facets of my fractured persona, they collapsed into just a writer, lost in the middle. And although I had unknowingly tried to halt my investigation further with heavy doses of alcohol and a sharpie, I could still read the raised letters of the names beyond the thick black government-esque classified crossouts. Now I needed to find out who these people were and what their connection was to me, to Agent Fenris, to the Tower itself.
Right after I sleep. Insomnia comes with excess coffee and the uppers. I need to dream, so badly that I believe I am creating mock dreams for myself in a half-awake sleep deprived delirium. Visions of holy writers and righteous believers come to me and tell me what I know but am too lazy to do. Write. Get it out, down and on the damn page and then go take a nap.
Just as I begin to drift after writing my last word I hear the sounds of flames, concentrated searing fire. My neighbor is responsible. He's been building something for a week that I jokingly say is a robot. But now I wonder. He always seems shady and off to me, a freakish man-boy with thick glasses and chocolate icing for hair. I begin to watch him. I take note of the sounds I hear and postulate in my mind the tools and possible substances composed in the construction of this enigmatic creation.
Finally after weeks of not sleeping I wait for him on the stairs by the roof. He's just a floor down so when I hear him hit the fifth floor and head down his hallway, I leap down the flight of stairs and rush him. I slam into his back and we burst into his apartment. We hit the ground and slide across near bare floors. I look around seeing the far side of the apartment first. A cot, a small fridge and neatly rowed tools. I turn and my eyes slide across his shocked face, his embarrassed look, and become ensnared in the contraption that looms just a few feet above my bed.
Its center is a massive stone, carved meticulously, and surrounded by a wood base resembling an infinity symbol. Large metal rods are protruding from the rock in a multitude of directions. I think there were eight of them but I couldn't be sure for what I did next made it hard to determine what had happening. I never imagined I would have the strength to toss a rock that big out a window and to cause such significant damage to the wall. The rods, not fully soldered on, were smashed off and as I spun around huffing and puffing in a lunatic rage, I grabbed one off the floor.
My neighbor was scared. Too afraid to run for the door, which was open just enough for a hand to squeeze through and throw the door wide open. His fingertips barely twitched and that door was slammed shut, my free hand sliding towards the lock.
"What was that device you were building, neighbor?” The metal rod was a perfect weapon.
"My sculpture?” he replied.
I suddenly felt mad. I probably have done something crazy. The metal rod in my hand and the enormous hole in the far wall told me I had. Still I had to know.
"Who sent you? Did they tell you to build it? Does it make me have to write?” I pleaded.
"W-what are y-you talking about?” He had the eyes of a crazy person. But I out-crazied him. He would have no answers that I could use.
I unlocked the door and stepped into the hall backwards. I had to let him know not to tip his hat to the narcs but how could I let him know without letting them know I knew. Their machine was broken. They must know already. Unless, this is their man, and if he becomes my ally then he'll cover for me. But what if he's a patsy though? Some dumbshit college kid they paid to assemble some low-end frequency transmitter above my bedroom. He'd have no idea of the intricate plot he would now find himself ensnared in. No, better to save the poor kid the ordeal of getting involved in a conspiracy this grand. He'll be happier and safer as a pawn. His watchdogs will think he snapped from his proximity and exposure to the device. Poor sap.
"Sorry kid. Forget Art. Go to business school.” and with that I gently let the door shut behind me, a smile of satisfaction on my face.
Now, what was I doing?
Monday, September 28, 2009
The Tower of Brahma: 44 - splitting infinite
09/06/06
I don't want to write it. If I do, everything ends. All matter just ceases to be. I thought I could stall. I writhed in pain, cocked fetal, clutching the pillow. My hand was pressed so deeply into my cheek I thought I could feel it smoosh into the muscles that screamed in excruciating pain. I took everything there was to take from the medicine cabinet. Even alcohol could not deter me from the pain long enough to sleep for even a moment. I had the .44 magnum against my skull. The cold, round barrel providing relief for a second.
Thoughts ran through my head and vibrated into a signal off my chattering teeth. The metal filling on the left side of my mouth was burnt out and old, no longer capable of receiving a signal from the machine that creates. I think they've upped the power to hit the molar lodged up high, just below my cheekbone.
It must have been a 44 MHz pulse at the very least. They wanted me to keep writing. I ran here to the city to escape but it seems I came here to be imprisoned. I wrote my way in, and now more than halfway through the story I wanted out. It seems as if my life is a series of escapes, breaking out of my town, my life, myself.
Faustian deal aside, I longed for a simple life free from the responsibility of everyone, everywhere. Each person I looked upon, talked with, listened to, they were showing me how to end the world. My feelings ranged from apathy to pity to righteous anger from time to time, with an overwhelming sense of damnation. Hope held my trigger finger steady when normally it shakes. The eventual passing of the present is what keeps me here, in immense and terrific pain.
I don't want to write it. If I do, everything ends. All matter just ceases to be. I thought I could stall. I writhed in pain, cocked fetal, clutching the pillow. My hand was pressed so deeply into my cheek I thought I could feel it smoosh into the muscles that screamed in excruciating pain. I took everything there was to take from the medicine cabinet. Even alcohol could not deter me from the pain long enough to sleep for even a moment. I had the .44 magnum against my skull. The cold, round barrel providing relief for a second.
Thoughts ran through my head and vibrated into a signal off my chattering teeth. The metal filling on the left side of my mouth was burnt out and old, no longer capable of receiving a signal from the machine that creates. I think they've upped the power to hit the molar lodged up high, just below my cheekbone.
It must have been a 44 MHz pulse at the very least. They wanted me to keep writing. I ran here to the city to escape but it seems I came here to be imprisoned. I wrote my way in, and now more than halfway through the story I wanted out. It seems as if my life is a series of escapes, breaking out of my town, my life, myself.
Faustian deal aside, I longed for a simple life free from the responsibility of everyone, everywhere. Each person I looked upon, talked with, listened to, they were showing me how to end the world. My feelings ranged from apathy to pity to righteous anger from time to time, with an overwhelming sense of damnation. Hope held my trigger finger steady when normally it shakes. The eventual passing of the present is what keeps me here, in immense and terrific pain.
Monday, September 21, 2009
The Tower of Brahma: Chapter 43 - Everyone's a secret agent.
04/05/06
It's true. Everyone everywhere. Some give themselves away by their stares. Some give it away because they're too good. Synthesized perfection; manufactured too well. They've surrounded me for some reason. Some sinister purpose.
My room is not bugged, but I am always bound. Stuck to a room with a keyboard. I have memories of in-between times but those I believe to be artificially stimulated as waking dreams.
The signal they're beaming, its frequency is chaotically situated and freaks my neurons out spasmodically assisting my fingers to type what it is they want to read. A manual. The details are unnecessary. All that matters is the pattern. The formula. The key.
They're searching the mind for the missing piece. Enlightenment centerpiece of our eternal spirit. The current of our chakra sensitive, bio-electrical soul. The science of Art. I'm undercover.
Here. As a chaotic agent. Order's lost son, bad boy obsessed with the random, outlaw lone wolf of the mathematic logick, insistent on the applied applications of quantum chaos.
Science hero savage, lost to the wilds of nature's precision. Son of the Everybody Someone Publick, guild of masons building a literary tower in the subconsciousness of the masses so as to hide it from god within his children.
Martial arts training video, front row, downtown movie theatre. Agent Spider and I are rushed to our seats to make sure we are dead center of the audience when we have to fight our way out.
The credits begin to roll and the moves shown upon the screen roll back over the insides of our minds. The two agents in front of us were easily identifiable and inevitably the first two to strike.
Our close quarters meant they'd go in with knives, and we'd go out with two knees to the face. Bracing on the seat, a sweeping kick cleared my side of the row, while Spider throws elbows to noses. Forward kick chest slam, jumping knee uppercut, elbow smash head split.
Spider's got an agent in a reverse headlock and swoops the bastard up and piledrives him into the floor. Running along the edge of the seats, my Converse skidding across skillfully, I smack and crack these size thirteen's across faces. We're both twisting and snapping arms, locking legs, and dropping foes.
Agents. Everywhere.
Agent Strange is seduction personified. She's Cleopatra punk, imagination Queen, the Modern Mystic Mother. She wields snakes in dreams and details out my mission. Venom liquid informational packet self-destructs after download. She's spinning my internal vibrations and new age nonsense that's making me nauseous.
Then I feel it. The freefalling plunge. She's wiped away my third eye muck and clearly now I can see the world. The ever shrinking world of mine. I just was able to see for the first time, as I saw reality disappear into the sky forever.
I'd never make it back. Wasn't meant to. Always wanted to be an astronaut. Center self of a drop of the Universe dripped free from the fluid cosmic mass that is everything. We're plunging in a liquid capsule of pure reality, dropping deep into the well of the unknown.
Well, I guess it's not we. You're all left in the main universe. The source. I've just borrowed as many of your templates as possible and placed them all in working order here in my metropolitan madness, my own private New York City.
It's been sculpted and runs like a perceptional motion machine to keep me experiencing, to keep me writing, to figure it out before my long voyage is over. Figure out the riddle, son.
What madness is this?
It's true. Everyone everywhere. Some give themselves away by their stares. Some give it away because they're too good. Synthesized perfection; manufactured too well. They've surrounded me for some reason. Some sinister purpose.
My room is not bugged, but I am always bound. Stuck to a room with a keyboard. I have memories of in-between times but those I believe to be artificially stimulated as waking dreams.
The signal they're beaming, its frequency is chaotically situated and freaks my neurons out spasmodically assisting my fingers to type what it is they want to read. A manual. The details are unnecessary. All that matters is the pattern. The formula. The key.
They're searching the mind for the missing piece. Enlightenment centerpiece of our eternal spirit. The current of our chakra sensitive, bio-electrical soul. The science of Art. I'm undercover.
Here. As a chaotic agent. Order's lost son, bad boy obsessed with the random, outlaw lone wolf of the mathematic logick, insistent on the applied applications of quantum chaos.
Science hero savage, lost to the wilds of nature's precision. Son of the Everybody Someone Publick, guild of masons building a literary tower in the subconsciousness of the masses so as to hide it from god within his children.
Martial arts training video, front row, downtown movie theatre. Agent Spider and I are rushed to our seats to make sure we are dead center of the audience when we have to fight our way out.
The credits begin to roll and the moves shown upon the screen roll back over the insides of our minds. The two agents in front of us were easily identifiable and inevitably the first two to strike.
Our close quarters meant they'd go in with knives, and we'd go out with two knees to the face. Bracing on the seat, a sweeping kick cleared my side of the row, while Spider throws elbows to noses. Forward kick chest slam, jumping knee uppercut, elbow smash head split.
Spider's got an agent in a reverse headlock and swoops the bastard up and piledrives him into the floor. Running along the edge of the seats, my Converse skidding across skillfully, I smack and crack these size thirteen's across faces. We're both twisting and snapping arms, locking legs, and dropping foes.
Agents. Everywhere.
Agent Strange is seduction personified. She's Cleopatra punk, imagination Queen, the Modern Mystic Mother. She wields snakes in dreams and details out my mission. Venom liquid informational packet self-destructs after download. She's spinning my internal vibrations and new age nonsense that's making me nauseous.
Then I feel it. The freefalling plunge. She's wiped away my third eye muck and clearly now I can see the world. The ever shrinking world of mine. I just was able to see for the first time, as I saw reality disappear into the sky forever.
I'd never make it back. Wasn't meant to. Always wanted to be an astronaut. Center self of a drop of the Universe dripped free from the fluid cosmic mass that is everything. We're plunging in a liquid capsule of pure reality, dropping deep into the well of the unknown.
Well, I guess it's not we. You're all left in the main universe. The source. I've just borrowed as many of your templates as possible and placed them all in working order here in my metropolitan madness, my own private New York City.
It's been sculpted and runs like a perceptional motion machine to keep me experiencing, to keep me writing, to figure it out before my long voyage is over. Figure out the riddle, son.
What madness is this?
Monday, September 14, 2009
The Tower of Brahma. Chapter 42. it healed me father.
01/31/06
There's a slo-mo scene caught as a near photograph that moves so agonizingly slow but yet keeping ever forward. A father is kicking over a table in a restaurant filled with patrons and staff and parents and kids. He holds his son's limp body in his arms as he presses forward through the friction of the future. He's raging through the moment in a blind, berserker, beautiful moment of parenthood and the desire to protect its young has never shone so brilliant. Everyone parts from his path and the way is clear if only he could get there sooner and not have to see his boy's face as it turns blue before his very eyes. His child, loose and limp, is nothing more than a body right now.
My father's whispering something in my ears a few years later. Divulging the secret horrors of what lie before me as David Lynch's 'Dune' played up on the screen and I lie far below the seats crying my silent screaming cries. The echo of his words vibrated through me and coerced my cells to obey his hypnotic and apocalyptic word. Fenris.
That's what they called me. The little dog boy. The one with the wild look in his eyes and the canine scars on his young face. The government boys had a good time with that one as they kept me at a ten foot distance on a leash at the end of a very long pole. I was curled up in a cage besides the others all snatched from the woods and used for scientific fun when they came to take me down the long hallway into the room that held the machine.
The big machine that had an open spot for a boy about my size. A machine that would make for this body a personality programmed for life and morality given now to my mortality. My final thoughts were of the ones I saw outside my feral stare and how they all seemed so perfectly familiar in the most particular way.
Electrical jumpfires into the part of my brain that would combine the mind to the cold hard turbine AI coiled inside...
It's alive.
Secret Agent Kid, given license to get funky and explode anything he wanted to, adventure pops from his hands. Codename: Hotshot, low-key and able to be activated into the asskicker acrobat with the Ferrari that could launch a spycycle from its trunk. Gadgets and gizmos clued him in to the secrets. Feral wolf boy instincts gave him an edge and robotic intelligence, full of diligence, wondered of it's own demise and its utter lack of surprise.
So samurai cool and detached in that French sort of way with a fedora and fake accent somehow mystifying you into the context of subconscious demonstration on sublimation into the moment of just this very second and not a moment beyond.
Angry, suppressed, intense crawling ferocity at mistreatment and endangerment. Dark dropping of humanity into its primal pulse, dwelling down in the most submerged of mankind's essential humanity. Emotion information is misunderstood and my body spasms into a million shaking moments.
Crash. System reboot. The hotdog seems to be lodged. We're going to have to cut if we can't clear it ASAP!"
I'm gripping my chest as my breath is left ten thousand miles behind me, caught up in the air that was sucked from me one second ago, I'm gasping and trying to get some oxygen now!"
Superspeed injected my body with velocity, adrenaline skidmarks across my mind and spirit, driven soaring across and through the space between there and here. Time screwed then and twisted now as the light flashed into illumination discovery.
A man hunched over and hacking, reborn tonight in a final flight towards the infinite night. There's a looming and a leering coming forth from the great unseeming. We unbecome and dance the song of some. The sun bows and the moon kneels. What we knew has blossomed into a new me that could now think clear.
My chest popped and cracked. The air hit my lungs, kicked the oxygen into my blood and the blue death that had fired and retired me, flushed from my skin tone. Lifted from beneath the waves I wasn't scared coming up for a breath of the sky. The Ocean dropped from my body, releasing me into the care of mankind.
My father whispered to me, "You're dead already, son."
There's a slo-mo scene caught as a near photograph that moves so agonizingly slow but yet keeping ever forward. A father is kicking over a table in a restaurant filled with patrons and staff and parents and kids. He holds his son's limp body in his arms as he presses forward through the friction of the future. He's raging through the moment in a blind, berserker, beautiful moment of parenthood and the desire to protect its young has never shone so brilliant. Everyone parts from his path and the way is clear if only he could get there sooner and not have to see his boy's face as it turns blue before his very eyes. His child, loose and limp, is nothing more than a body right now.
My father's whispering something in my ears a few years later. Divulging the secret horrors of what lie before me as David Lynch's 'Dune' played up on the screen and I lie far below the seats crying my silent screaming cries. The echo of his words vibrated through me and coerced my cells to obey his hypnotic and apocalyptic word. Fenris.
That's what they called me. The little dog boy. The one with the wild look in his eyes and the canine scars on his young face. The government boys had a good time with that one as they kept me at a ten foot distance on a leash at the end of a very long pole. I was curled up in a cage besides the others all snatched from the woods and used for scientific fun when they came to take me down the long hallway into the room that held the machine.
The big machine that had an open spot for a boy about my size. A machine that would make for this body a personality programmed for life and morality given now to my mortality. My final thoughts were of the ones I saw outside my feral stare and how they all seemed so perfectly familiar in the most particular way.
Electrical jumpfires into the part of my brain that would combine the mind to the cold hard turbine AI coiled inside...
It's alive.
Secret Agent Kid, given license to get funky and explode anything he wanted to, adventure pops from his hands. Codename: Hotshot, low-key and able to be activated into the asskicker acrobat with the Ferrari that could launch a spycycle from its trunk. Gadgets and gizmos clued him in to the secrets. Feral wolf boy instincts gave him an edge and robotic intelligence, full of diligence, wondered of it's own demise and its utter lack of surprise.
So samurai cool and detached in that French sort of way with a fedora and fake accent somehow mystifying you into the context of subconscious demonstration on sublimation into the moment of just this very second and not a moment beyond.
Angry, suppressed, intense crawling ferocity at mistreatment and endangerment. Dark dropping of humanity into its primal pulse, dwelling down in the most submerged of mankind's essential humanity. Emotion information is misunderstood and my body spasms into a million shaking moments.
Crash. System reboot. The hotdog seems to be lodged. We're going to have to cut if we can't clear it ASAP!"
I'm gripping my chest as my breath is left ten thousand miles behind me, caught up in the air that was sucked from me one second ago, I'm gasping and trying to get some oxygen now!"
Superspeed injected my body with velocity, adrenaline skidmarks across my mind and spirit, driven soaring across and through the space between there and here. Time screwed then and twisted now as the light flashed into illumination discovery.
A man hunched over and hacking, reborn tonight in a final flight towards the infinite night. There's a looming and a leering coming forth from the great unseeming. We unbecome and dance the song of some. The sun bows and the moon kneels. What we knew has blossomed into a new me that could now think clear.
My chest popped and cracked. The air hit my lungs, kicked the oxygen into my blood and the blue death that had fired and retired me, flushed from my skin tone. Lifted from beneath the waves I wasn't scared coming up for a breath of the sky. The Ocean dropped from my body, releasing me into the care of mankind.
My father whispered to me, "You're dead already, son."
Monday, September 7, 2009
The Tower of Brahma 41 - The Rock'n'Roll Chemistry Within My Brain.
12/01/05
You know how you drive along in your car, having just put in a cd you intend to listen to, but wind up somehow lost in thought? Then, when you least expect it, that band's pure ability to rock kicks your brain back into the song, and suddenly that fucking riff is there just to bop along to, as the drums clash and smash against your back, the vocals then screaming for your attention before hitting you down with that hook that just so fucking gets it. That hook that calls you and knows you and forever owns you. A screaming truth about the fundamental principle of life as you fucking know it.
You'll come down. On my side.
You'll come down. In good time.
You'll come down.
On my side.
I'm geared up for the next download/upload exchange with the fourth dimension. I have no idea what it is really. I'm not sure how to explain it. It's a magical process to be certain, but not like you think. It's like make believe.
I've always day dreamed. Always. I probably have fake memories before I have solid, real memories. I've always lived in my head. A tv boy with fictional eyes. Seen from behind a screen since the days I remember to.
The cowboy hat is the icon, the magician's cap. The mind of the man who lives backwards. That is where he lives. In my cap. My cowboy skull.
The headphones deliver the science. The constructed audiowaves that stimulate the impulses in the nerves. The exposed areas become shaky after prolonged contact. The brain becomes stuck. Ritual allows for the exiting of the process. Focus on the power of your icons around you.
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde visual stimulation.
The Toadies 'Hell Below, Stars Above' audio guiding.
An imaginary AIM friend to ground you to the keyboard.
Let 'er rip!
Your brain explodes into a whirlwind tunnel, the screen's the windshield of your frontal lobe as reality blurs upwards into the center of everything-ever. Psychology triggers in the art that I am consuming reveal flashes of my identity, forever observing, now from a higher vantage point. I watch the instinctual reactions of my body, to see just what choices it would make, and how it would find itself out of them.
Forever a test. A program? A suppressed personality, the true heir to this body, has designed a mental program designed to raise the awareness of this lesser personality that I call myself. Fuck. That motherfucker.
I've been tapping into his power. That's what the Tower of Brahma is. It's the steps of consciousness being raised. The Tower is the trigger to keep the mind elevating. And the truest way to climb the tower isn't leaping and shooting forth, pouncing and soaring upwards, but, actually, the slow, painful, aching walk of the eternal steps. Best to pass the time with a story.
I'd been writing this apocalyptic novel about a bunch of guys driving across the country and starting a rock band. I hadn't had a job in a good 8 months. Despite having no prospects, during this time, I found myself aboard a plane bound for Colombia, in a tattoo shop in L.A. getting my implant, and in my dad's dining room being hypnotized by a Freemason fictioneer.
I felt myself going mad, and all along, my self was repaired. My external persona had exploded from its cocoon and had now realized its power. Charles Crown was no longer a brand I felt I wanted to run from. It felt dark, it felt like mine, and it felt good. It was a name that was a blemish on the face of the world. The world as they know it anyway. The name of a goddamn bastard that would bust in and knock a motherfucker down, and beat him...if the situation called for it.
Suddenly releasing from that impulse, I felt saved, as if I had truly gone through with my impulse in reality. I had purged the desire, cleansed the sin on the text crucifiction, and now I am free.
You know how you drive along in your car, having just put in a cd you intend to listen to, but wind up somehow lost in thought? Then, when you least expect it, that band's pure ability to rock kicks your brain back into the song, and suddenly that fucking riff is there just to bop along to, as the drums clash and smash against your back, the vocals then screaming for your attention before hitting you down with that hook that just so fucking gets it. That hook that calls you and knows you and forever owns you. A screaming truth about the fundamental principle of life as you fucking know it.
You'll come down. On my side.
You'll come down. In good time.
You'll come down.
On my side.
I'm geared up for the next download/upload exchange with the fourth dimension. I have no idea what it is really. I'm not sure how to explain it. It's a magical process to be certain, but not like you think. It's like make believe.
I've always day dreamed. Always. I probably have fake memories before I have solid, real memories. I've always lived in my head. A tv boy with fictional eyes. Seen from behind a screen since the days I remember to.
The cowboy hat is the icon, the magician's cap. The mind of the man who lives backwards. That is where he lives. In my cap. My cowboy skull.
The headphones deliver the science. The constructed audiowaves that stimulate the impulses in the nerves. The exposed areas become shaky after prolonged contact. The brain becomes stuck. Ritual allows for the exiting of the process. Focus on the power of your icons around you.
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde visual stimulation.
The Toadies 'Hell Below, Stars Above' audio guiding.
An imaginary AIM friend to ground you to the keyboard.
Let 'er rip!
Your brain explodes into a whirlwind tunnel, the screen's the windshield of your frontal lobe as reality blurs upwards into the center of everything-ever. Psychology triggers in the art that I am consuming reveal flashes of my identity, forever observing, now from a higher vantage point. I watch the instinctual reactions of my body, to see just what choices it would make, and how it would find itself out of them.
Forever a test. A program? A suppressed personality, the true heir to this body, has designed a mental program designed to raise the awareness of this lesser personality that I call myself. Fuck. That motherfucker.
I've been tapping into his power. That's what the Tower of Brahma is. It's the steps of consciousness being raised. The Tower is the trigger to keep the mind elevating. And the truest way to climb the tower isn't leaping and shooting forth, pouncing and soaring upwards, but, actually, the slow, painful, aching walk of the eternal steps. Best to pass the time with a story.
I'd been writing this apocalyptic novel about a bunch of guys driving across the country and starting a rock band. I hadn't had a job in a good 8 months. Despite having no prospects, during this time, I found myself aboard a plane bound for Colombia, in a tattoo shop in L.A. getting my implant, and in my dad's dining room being hypnotized by a Freemason fictioneer.
I felt myself going mad, and all along, my self was repaired. My external persona had exploded from its cocoon and had now realized its power. Charles Crown was no longer a brand I felt I wanted to run from. It felt dark, it felt like mine, and it felt good. It was a name that was a blemish on the face of the world. The world as they know it anyway. The name of a goddamn bastard that would bust in and knock a motherfucker down, and beat him...if the situation called for it.
Suddenly releasing from that impulse, I felt saved, as if I had truly gone through with my impulse in reality. I had purged the desire, cleansed the sin on the text crucifiction, and now I am free.
Monday, August 31, 2009
the tower of brahma - chapter 40 - anti-matter jazz
08/22/05
Lunar dust blew through my hair as I gazed longingly at the shapely curves of Mother Earth. She seemed impossibly far and distantly shy; too pristine and intimidating in her modest innocence.
I needed to see her again. Stepping from the sleepless, somber side of the moon, I free form floated over to get a better look. I stared long and hard and forced my mind into submission, forging forgetfulness for myself. This was the road back to the real.
I was born on the side of the open day, in a most certainly ordinary way. Simply coming back as if I had never been gone at all. Fear fanatically clawed away as I clenched my fists, ready for battle. My senses were scattered in disarray. What was it I was doing?
Living in the moment felt more like living around the moment, constantly bent, dodged and separated from wholeness. Laughing, I feel ridiculous at the apprehension. This wasn't the challenge he imagined it would be. Not once he remembered it was all a game. A constantly evolving game of chess, a distant relation to the didadic sport of checkers. A flipping of chips about the boardgame.
He just couldn't help but smile into that yawning chaotic pool of absurdity and the false center of the mind. That self-centered satisfaction that transforms into self-love, then mutates into divine immolation. Wavelengths? Is that all we are?
Brain stems grabbing and skidding along the ethereal. Sparks shooting out into the embers of our minds. Mass transit madmen sliding into entropic hellish nightmares of our own creation.
Fuck that.
I tried on the voice over monologue and whaddayaknow? It fit like a noir trenchcoat on a rainy, city street corner. I ran my hands through my soaked hair, brushing it back from my face. Collar snapped up, I walked into the bar. You see, I had a list.
As I had turned the corner a phone began to ring. Against my usual instincts to run far away from any randomly beckoning phone booth, instead I approached and absently answered. A disembodied female voice read me a list of names in a startling British accent. She had a drunken swagger to her tone as she read aloud 17 names to me, which I scribbled down upon my forearm, with a black bic pen.
My voice was hoarse and rough as I replied, "What does this have to do with me?"
I could hear her smile as it whispered through the receiver. "Find out."
So I hit the streets; hit them hard and fast. The rain poured down, oppressive and unrelenting as I tracked down the names.
I hit the jackpot as I found five of the names in the same bar. Rowdy and surly, with concealed weapons abound. Here were five drunken bastards all ready to rumble.
I took two steps forward and raised my eyes, staring up at the bartender. The five moved gently in my peripheral, shuffling their weapons from their hiding places. Spider, baseball cap pulled down low, obscuring his eyes from theirs, silently stepped out from my shadow.
"Who is Fenris?"
The rockstar answered first, a hotshot born and bred. His jagged blade slipped across the room, thrusting towards my gut. The tip of Spider's black converse twirled around the rockstar's wrist and whipped the knife out of his hands, driving it deep into the bullseye of the dartboard.
"Who does Fenris work for?"
A baseball bat came swinging from behind Spider. The artist had been surprisingly spry, but a backwards kick from Spider sent the bat right back at the artist's skull.
"Where can I find Fenris?"
The scabbard fell to the floor as the samurai sword sliced upwards along at a firm angle. The warrior, refusing to fight as a coward, growled as he drove the razor sharp steel at me face on. I was spared a gaping face wound by Spider's stone grip catching hold of the blade. The assassin used that exact moment to launch his pistols from his sleeve into his killing hands. Gently tugging the triggers back with his itchy trigger fingers, the bullets roared towards us.
"Tell me what you know about the Tower of Brahma!"
Spider spun around my shoulders, rotating into a crescent kick, cracking the warrior twice before landing and whipping the sword up along his side. The bullets ricochet off the steel, moments before it slides through the third vertebrate of the assassin, removing his head completely.
The warrior bowed before the shinobi skills of Spider, and paid tribute to their superiority by driving his own sacrificial wakazashi deep into his stomach. Slowly the warrior dragged upwards and sharply twisted the sword, spilling his intestines across the floor and way too close to my Adidas.
This left me to deal with the writer. A shifty bastard if I've ever seen one. Amidst the carnage he had stumbled backwards and passed out, buried beneath a hefty bar tab and reeking of pity. I dropped a Jackson down on the bar and signaled over to Spider, who promptly grabbed the writer around his chest and yanked him from the stool.
"Say hey, barkeep. Look alive." I open palm slapped his eyes from the grisly scene seeping across his hardwood floors.
"We were never here...", I whispered as I backhand smacked our visit from his memory.
Lunar dust blew through my hair as I gazed longingly at the shapely curves of Mother Earth. She seemed impossibly far and distantly shy; too pristine and intimidating in her modest innocence.
I needed to see her again. Stepping from the sleepless, somber side of the moon, I free form floated over to get a better look. I stared long and hard and forced my mind into submission, forging forgetfulness for myself. This was the road back to the real.
I was born on the side of the open day, in a most certainly ordinary way. Simply coming back as if I had never been gone at all. Fear fanatically clawed away as I clenched my fists, ready for battle. My senses were scattered in disarray. What was it I was doing?
Living in the moment felt more like living around the moment, constantly bent, dodged and separated from wholeness. Laughing, I feel ridiculous at the apprehension. This wasn't the challenge he imagined it would be. Not once he remembered it was all a game. A constantly evolving game of chess, a distant relation to the didadic sport of checkers. A flipping of chips about the boardgame.
He just couldn't help but smile into that yawning chaotic pool of absurdity and the false center of the mind. That self-centered satisfaction that transforms into self-love, then mutates into divine immolation. Wavelengths? Is that all we are?
Brain stems grabbing and skidding along the ethereal. Sparks shooting out into the embers of our minds. Mass transit madmen sliding into entropic hellish nightmares of our own creation.
Fuck that.
I tried on the voice over monologue and whaddayaknow? It fit like a noir trenchcoat on a rainy, city street corner. I ran my hands through my soaked hair, brushing it back from my face. Collar snapped up, I walked into the bar. You see, I had a list.
As I had turned the corner a phone began to ring. Against my usual instincts to run far away from any randomly beckoning phone booth, instead I approached and absently answered. A disembodied female voice read me a list of names in a startling British accent. She had a drunken swagger to her tone as she read aloud 17 names to me, which I scribbled down upon my forearm, with a black bic pen.
My voice was hoarse and rough as I replied, "What does this have to do with me?"
I could hear her smile as it whispered through the receiver. "Find out."
So I hit the streets; hit them hard and fast. The rain poured down, oppressive and unrelenting as I tracked down the names.
I hit the jackpot as I found five of the names in the same bar. Rowdy and surly, with concealed weapons abound. Here were five drunken bastards all ready to rumble.
I took two steps forward and raised my eyes, staring up at the bartender. The five moved gently in my peripheral, shuffling their weapons from their hiding places. Spider, baseball cap pulled down low, obscuring his eyes from theirs, silently stepped out from my shadow.
"Who is Fenris?"
The rockstar answered first, a hotshot born and bred. His jagged blade slipped across the room, thrusting towards my gut. The tip of Spider's black converse twirled around the rockstar's wrist and whipped the knife out of his hands, driving it deep into the bullseye of the dartboard.
"Who does Fenris work for?"
A baseball bat came swinging from behind Spider. The artist had been surprisingly spry, but a backwards kick from Spider sent the bat right back at the artist's skull.
"Where can I find Fenris?"
The scabbard fell to the floor as the samurai sword sliced upwards along at a firm angle. The warrior, refusing to fight as a coward, growled as he drove the razor sharp steel at me face on. I was spared a gaping face wound by Spider's stone grip catching hold of the blade. The assassin used that exact moment to launch his pistols from his sleeve into his killing hands. Gently tugging the triggers back with his itchy trigger fingers, the bullets roared towards us.
"Tell me what you know about the Tower of Brahma!"
Spider spun around my shoulders, rotating into a crescent kick, cracking the warrior twice before landing and whipping the sword up along his side. The bullets ricochet off the steel, moments before it slides through the third vertebrate of the assassin, removing his head completely.
The warrior bowed before the shinobi skills of Spider, and paid tribute to their superiority by driving his own sacrificial wakazashi deep into his stomach. Slowly the warrior dragged upwards and sharply twisted the sword, spilling his intestines across the floor and way too close to my Adidas.
This left me to deal with the writer. A shifty bastard if I've ever seen one. Amidst the carnage he had stumbled backwards and passed out, buried beneath a hefty bar tab and reeking of pity. I dropped a Jackson down on the bar and signaled over to Spider, who promptly grabbed the writer around his chest and yanked him from the stool.
"Say hey, barkeep. Look alive." I open palm slapped his eyes from the grisly scene seeping across his hardwood floors.
"We were never here...", I whispered as I backhand smacked our visit from his memory.
Monday, August 24, 2009
The Tower of Brahma: Chapter 39 - The Spiders
07/02/05
The withdrawal effects of spider's venom are draining the rest of my will to stay awake, but I must get this out.
I awake screaming in the agonizing pain to end all agonizing pain. A crawling madness was tapdancing across the miles of raw nerve endings. Through venom-induced nightmares the psychological horror that was befalling me had suddenly registered. I aim to throw myself upwards, reeling and swiping my skin clear of this insanity!
I found my body paralyzed as my eyes began to focus on the large beady arachnid eyes staring down at me. I could feel the thousand other sets of eight legs as they searched out a spot to inject me with their biological poison. The spiders had swarmed my body in the middle of my dreaming, and I fear that this happens every single night.
I began noticing the bites a few years back. One or two here and there. Lower back. Inner thighs. Buttcheek. After that I saw the bags under my eyes, and the constant weariness I felt. The more I thought about it, the further back I could feel the lack of energy, the withdrawal of interest in my life.
As a teenager I slept my sunny, summer afternoons away. My deep, dark, dreamless slumber being that of a person in a coma. For years it seems something within me called forth the spiders, beckoned them to me in my sleep. My parents’ old house was a breeding ground for all sorts of insectoid life. And so the call went out and they answered. Crawling and sliding across my sheets, from out under cracks and crevices, insects of all shapes and sizes nestled upon my chest.
They spoke their wisdom to me through the tapping of insectoid morse code across my receptive flesh. Tapping in the philosophies, cultures, and insight of their existence, I learned the mappings of the insect kingdom. But it was the spider and it's metamorphic venom that unleashed my mind and let it soar into the continuing upward spiral of sentience. This mapping fits across all spectrums of reality. All matter, a slave to its weaved pattern.
Web strands held down the feral canine that beat within my chest. A wounded wolf sitting and dying of the poison in its vein, fresh from the Spider's betrayal, born of the spider's corruption. Red-eyed and snarling, it lay writing in pain until its mind reached across the murky waters of consciousness and was one with the stars spinning in the cosmic skies.
Consciousness makes a desperate leap, seizing the computer in my hands, and I am deliriously spinning about like a lunatic on the frayed edge of collapse.
"Where am I? Where have I been?" I growled.
The words echoed down the hollowed halls of my veins, and the empty response was all the response necessary to bring the entire memory block crashing down upon my back.
The withdrawal effects of spider's venom are draining the rest of my will to stay awake, but I must get this out.
I awake screaming in the agonizing pain to end all agonizing pain. A crawling madness was tapdancing across the miles of raw nerve endings. Through venom-induced nightmares the psychological horror that was befalling me had suddenly registered. I aim to throw myself upwards, reeling and swiping my skin clear of this insanity!
I found my body paralyzed as my eyes began to focus on the large beady arachnid eyes staring down at me. I could feel the thousand other sets of eight legs as they searched out a spot to inject me with their biological poison. The spiders had swarmed my body in the middle of my dreaming, and I fear that this happens every single night.
I began noticing the bites a few years back. One or two here and there. Lower back. Inner thighs. Buttcheek. After that I saw the bags under my eyes, and the constant weariness I felt. The more I thought about it, the further back I could feel the lack of energy, the withdrawal of interest in my life.
As a teenager I slept my sunny, summer afternoons away. My deep, dark, dreamless slumber being that of a person in a coma. For years it seems something within me called forth the spiders, beckoned them to me in my sleep. My parents’ old house was a breeding ground for all sorts of insectoid life. And so the call went out and they answered. Crawling and sliding across my sheets, from out under cracks and crevices, insects of all shapes and sizes nestled upon my chest.
They spoke their wisdom to me through the tapping of insectoid morse code across my receptive flesh. Tapping in the philosophies, cultures, and insight of their existence, I learned the mappings of the insect kingdom. But it was the spider and it's metamorphic venom that unleashed my mind and let it soar into the continuing upward spiral of sentience. This mapping fits across all spectrums of reality. All matter, a slave to its weaved pattern.
Web strands held down the feral canine that beat within my chest. A wounded wolf sitting and dying of the poison in its vein, fresh from the Spider's betrayal, born of the spider's corruption. Red-eyed and snarling, it lay writing in pain until its mind reached across the murky waters of consciousness and was one with the stars spinning in the cosmic skies.
Consciousness makes a desperate leap, seizing the computer in my hands, and I am deliriously spinning about like a lunatic on the frayed edge of collapse.
"Where am I? Where have I been?" I growled.
The words echoed down the hollowed halls of my veins, and the empty response was all the response necessary to bring the entire memory block crashing down upon my back.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Tower of Brahma: chapter 38 - episode 39
04/27/05
'The killer landed softly, dressed in insectoid sleek onyx. The sun had raged and dried his shell. With a leap, the reborn man exploded from his cocoon, fragments of his scarab armor left scattered about his feet.
His longish brown hair flapped in the wind. His bushy beard burst forth, wild and unkempt. Muscles tensed and relaxed like steel cables under his new taut, marble skin. Driven footsteps into fresh earth leads him in a new direction.'
"Charles! Stop writing! We've got to go now!"
I closed my laptop up and tied my boots tight. I snatched my jacket off the teetering coat rack and bolted out the door after her.
"Do you have your keys?"
I whipped out the jingling mess of metal from my pocket in confirmation and locked up. Swiftly, we made our way down the hall and out into the city scarred night. It only took us three minutes to round the corner and get to the bar, but fifteen for her to finish her phone call and for us to actually enter and start drinking.
The tab was growing and the room was spinning, and for some reason I sat there sobbing in-between sips. A drunken sadness had befallen me and there was no going back. Reeling and thinking, I replay the evening's events and watch as my spine turns to jelly. Just before I sat down to write actually. Going further back to this morning, I felt healed and alive after flexing and opening my heart chakra in yoga class. Something was happening to me. A change.
The smoke left my body and the mellow took control. We were rocking on cosmic waves out on an ark, veering through the spacewarp of eternity. The apartment had been vacuum sealed into an alternated reality, where the cd player fueled our wavelength journey along soundless wings. The programs of a thousand musical geniuses lift us up and send us off, cast adrift amid lyrical seas.
'Agent Fenris hits the floor, slumping into a fetal position in the kitchen. Unconsciousness thrust upon him suddenly, he swims for the surface. Time rolls back and comes into focus as the film slaps against the light projected through it and he quickly rises to his feet.'
Wait. That seems familiar. Almost a memory, nearly a dream. Somehow these words unspool from my mind. Seeping out from under a darkened and lost sliver of experienced reality.
'I'm in a rest stop bathroom typing out these words and I know what's about to happen. I will flush, wash, and gaze into the mirror and realize that I am not who I thought I was.'
Agent Spider glares out from the reflective surface and grabs the wheel. Typing furiously he magnifies and defies this literal asylum. He can not be contained. I will break free.
'The killer landed softly, dressed in insectoid sleek onyx. The sun had raged and dried his shell. With a leap, the reborn man exploded from his cocoon, fragments of his scarab armor left scattered about his feet.
His longish brown hair flapped in the wind. His bushy beard burst forth, wild and unkempt. Muscles tensed and relaxed like steel cables under his new taut, marble skin. Driven footsteps into fresh earth leads him in a new direction.'
"Charles! Stop writing! We've got to go now!"
I closed my laptop up and tied my boots tight. I snatched my jacket off the teetering coat rack and bolted out the door after her.
"Do you have your keys?"
I whipped out the jingling mess of metal from my pocket in confirmation and locked up. Swiftly, we made our way down the hall and out into the city scarred night. It only took us three minutes to round the corner and get to the bar, but fifteen for her to finish her phone call and for us to actually enter and start drinking.
The tab was growing and the room was spinning, and for some reason I sat there sobbing in-between sips. A drunken sadness had befallen me and there was no going back. Reeling and thinking, I replay the evening's events and watch as my spine turns to jelly. Just before I sat down to write actually. Going further back to this morning, I felt healed and alive after flexing and opening my heart chakra in yoga class. Something was happening to me. A change.
The smoke left my body and the mellow took control. We were rocking on cosmic waves out on an ark, veering through the spacewarp of eternity. The apartment had been vacuum sealed into an alternated reality, where the cd player fueled our wavelength journey along soundless wings. The programs of a thousand musical geniuses lift us up and send us off, cast adrift amid lyrical seas.
'Agent Fenris hits the floor, slumping into a fetal position in the kitchen. Unconsciousness thrust upon him suddenly, he swims for the surface. Time rolls back and comes into focus as the film slaps against the light projected through it and he quickly rises to his feet.'
Wait. That seems familiar. Almost a memory, nearly a dream. Somehow these words unspool from my mind. Seeping out from under a darkened and lost sliver of experienced reality.
'I'm in a rest stop bathroom typing out these words and I know what's about to happen. I will flush, wash, and gaze into the mirror and realize that I am not who I thought I was.'
Agent Spider glares out from the reflective surface and grabs the wheel. Typing furiously he magnifies and defies this literal asylum. He can not be contained. I will break free.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Tower of Brahma - 37 - the Last Story
06/27/07
Someone told me there were only thirty seven stories. Everything else is a variation of these core dramatic situations. I find it hard to believe that life, in all its random glory, can be confined to such a small number. Someone else once told me there were 37 miracles in the bible.
Lost inside my mind, I stumbled through the Lower East Side. From bar to bar, drink to drink, casually glancing over my shoulder in-between sips so as to make sure they weren't coming up on me. To my left, a dark skinned rough by the jukebox seemed threatening but preoccupied by the selection of fine tunes. A bearded guy in glasses seemed to be watching me in the mirror from his seat across the bar on my right. Paranoid or not, they seemed to be the ones to watch out for.
I stepped out of the bar and lit up a cigarette. I could feel the pair coming up behind me as I walked down the sidewalk. My legs became rubbery, not so much from the beers, as I began thinking about my walk entirely too much. The speed, tempo, weight of each step was being recalculated as each foot hit pavement. A steady rhythm could not be found. My heart was beating irregularly and I was sweating. Unable to breathe deep enough, I found myself getting lightheaded.
"Hey, Charles? Charles Crown?"
I kept my pace and tried to glance into a window to see who was behind me, but somehow I knew.
"Listen, we don't have much time. You're in danger."
The guy in glasses was closing the gap between us and I, very uncharacteristically, spun around to face him.
"What do you want? Why are you following me?"
I saw that his partner had fallen back a bit, watching the cross streets for witnesses.
"I'm Agent Fenris. That's Agent Spider. This book you're writing, there are people who are going to try and stop you from finishing it. We need to get you someplace safe until it's done."
So, they knew I was writing something. At least someone was reading it. At least there was a person out there paying attention. Even if it was a covert organization bent on the destruction of society.
"Hah! Really? So, you've read what I wrote then?"
Fenris was about a foot away from me. Spider was staring suspiciously down Rivington. I took a few steps back, not noticing the calm that was upon me.
"Well, not really. But we've experienced it thus far, and we think it's about to get dangerous."
You always expect a red laser line to point out a target well before a shot is fired to amp up the anticipation of an assassination. But the reality is there's just a bullet puncturing a human body. A bit of hot metal propelled forward, drilling through flesh, muscle, and bone.
Fenris fell to his knees gripping his chest as a gun dropped into his hand. His comrade in arms withdrew a small machine gun from his blazer and ducked behind a mailbox. Seconds later Spider fired rounds into the building behind me. A body tumbled from the fire escape and splattered onto the sidewalk.
I stood there, disconnected from the scene, as if I had just walked onto the action movie of my life. More assassins peeled around the corner, hanging out of a black sedan with high tech weaponry in their hands. Fenris stood up and, one hand pressed against his chest to stem the rush of blood gushing from his wound, he raised the other and began firing his handgun. He positioned himself in front of me, shielding me with his
body.
His bullets ripped up the front end of the car, punched holes into the windshield, and caught a few of the thugs in the face. Agent Spider darted from his cover towards us, unleashing a stream of bullets into the vehicle until the tires tore themself apart. The driver jerked the wheel and the entire automobile lurched and rolled onto its side. It began to flip and tumble as the assassins were tossed wildly free. Agent Fenris grabbed me and we hit the ground behind a minivan. Agent Spider was still firing as the car smashed into the minivan and soared above our heads.
The car came to an obnoxiously loud crash landing against the side of an apartment building and for some reason it didn't explode. I guess too many movies make you think that no matter what happens in a car crash, it'll always explode. Especially if it was driven by bad guys with guns.
Fenris dragged me to my feet and we ran for the end of the block. I heard Spider firing off a few final shots as we hit Delancey. The wide open space felt comforting but seemed to worry Fenris.
"C'mon, we've got a car down this way!"
Fenris, bleeding as he was, seemed unaffected by his critical condition. As we ran he checked over his shoulder to see if I was still there, that Spider was behind me, and that more bad guys weren't following. But they were. In Hummers and fighter jets.
Fenris threw me into the passenger seat of his 1976 Lincoln Continental. He turned the key and the engine roared. Spider was reloading as he jumped on the side of the car. Fenris hit the gas and spun that badass dark blue monstrosity through the intersection making the most illegal u-turn NYC had ever seen.
I tried to take a peak out the back window but shrunk back down when bullets began pouring in through the roof. Spider was returning fire from the backseat and I felt like I was going mad from the deafening auditory assault. Fenris was getting a little woozy from the loss of blood but he tightened his grip on the wheel, furrowed his brow, and sped for the Williamsburg Bridge.
A huge chunk of concrete explodes to our right and the car skids and fishtails. Missiles fired from a jet didn't seem nearly as bad as I would have thought. And shouldn't their targeting system be able to hit an abnormally massive, classic automobile such as this? Are jets allowed to fly into a major city and blow stuff up with reckless abandon? And why were there jet fighters trying to execute me anyways?
The questions would have to wait as the jet circled back around. We were flying across the bridge with the meanest bunch of military vehicles made street legal chasing us. They plowed through any car in their path, full on monster trucking over some of the smaller foreign cars, and driving the larger SUVs right off the side of the bridge.
Once we hit Brooklyn, Fenris began to lose it. The car smashed off the road and through basketball courts. I grabbed the wheel as we hit the street again and turned us towards the flow of traffic. The jet flew above and just seemed to watch us as the trucks barreled their way along a block behind us.
"Hey! Hey! Wake up! We're going to crash!"
Spider took a moment to reflect. While he did this he reloaded and shot me a look that said that I wasn't worth all this trouble. That, although he enjoyed killing vast amounts of baddies, Fenris' life was not worth my own. Not by a long shot. But I could just be reading too much into it.
Spider, on his last clip, now began to pick and choose his shots. I decided that it was time to act. I tore Fenris from the driver's seat and slipped behind the wheel. I piloted that big bastard of a car through the confusing streets of Brooklyn, trying to shake our tale. I mean, tail.
I woke up with my head pressed against the windshield. I peeled my face from the spiderwebbed glass and saw the spray of my faceblood across it. My cheeks were wet. I wiped the blood away and more came. Smoke was pouring from the front of the car. A fine mist of various automobile fluids covered the scene.
Fenris was gone. Spider was no longer in the backseat. I grabbed the gun left on the dashboard and slammed my shoulder into the door to get it open. I rolled out onto grass and tried to find my footing.
Stumbling through the mist, as well as the haze of my fractured mind, I spotted a figure approaching. I hefted the gun up to eye level and planted my feet, my finger ready to squeeze the trigger. An empty click left my body to involuntary jerk when there was no recoil. I fell to my knees.
The figure came closer and I could see it was a female form. I never saw her face but I was glad I didn't have any bullets left in the gun. She lifted me up and brought me home.
Someone told me there were only thirty seven stories. Everything else is a variation of these core dramatic situations. I find it hard to believe that life, in all its random glory, can be confined to such a small number. Someone else once told me there were 37 miracles in the bible.
Lost inside my mind, I stumbled through the Lower East Side. From bar to bar, drink to drink, casually glancing over my shoulder in-between sips so as to make sure they weren't coming up on me. To my left, a dark skinned rough by the jukebox seemed threatening but preoccupied by the selection of fine tunes. A bearded guy in glasses seemed to be watching me in the mirror from his seat across the bar on my right. Paranoid or not, they seemed to be the ones to watch out for.
I stepped out of the bar and lit up a cigarette. I could feel the pair coming up behind me as I walked down the sidewalk. My legs became rubbery, not so much from the beers, as I began thinking about my walk entirely too much. The speed, tempo, weight of each step was being recalculated as each foot hit pavement. A steady rhythm could not be found. My heart was beating irregularly and I was sweating. Unable to breathe deep enough, I found myself getting lightheaded.
"Hey, Charles? Charles Crown?"
I kept my pace and tried to glance into a window to see who was behind me, but somehow I knew.
"Listen, we don't have much time. You're in danger."
The guy in glasses was closing the gap between us and I, very uncharacteristically, spun around to face him.
"What do you want? Why are you following me?"
I saw that his partner had fallen back a bit, watching the cross streets for witnesses.
"I'm Agent Fenris. That's Agent Spider. This book you're writing, there are people who are going to try and stop you from finishing it. We need to get you someplace safe until it's done."
So, they knew I was writing something. At least someone was reading it. At least there was a person out there paying attention. Even if it was a covert organization bent on the destruction of society.
"Hah! Really? So, you've read what I wrote then?"
Fenris was about a foot away from me. Spider was staring suspiciously down Rivington. I took a few steps back, not noticing the calm that was upon me.
"Well, not really. But we've experienced it thus far, and we think it's about to get dangerous."
You always expect a red laser line to point out a target well before a shot is fired to amp up the anticipation of an assassination. But the reality is there's just a bullet puncturing a human body. A bit of hot metal propelled forward, drilling through flesh, muscle, and bone.
Fenris fell to his knees gripping his chest as a gun dropped into his hand. His comrade in arms withdrew a small machine gun from his blazer and ducked behind a mailbox. Seconds later Spider fired rounds into the building behind me. A body tumbled from the fire escape and splattered onto the sidewalk.
I stood there, disconnected from the scene, as if I had just walked onto the action movie of my life. More assassins peeled around the corner, hanging out of a black sedan with high tech weaponry in their hands. Fenris stood up and, one hand pressed against his chest to stem the rush of blood gushing from his wound, he raised the other and began firing his handgun. He positioned himself in front of me, shielding me with his
body.
His bullets ripped up the front end of the car, punched holes into the windshield, and caught a few of the thugs in the face. Agent Spider darted from his cover towards us, unleashing a stream of bullets into the vehicle until the tires tore themself apart. The driver jerked the wheel and the entire automobile lurched and rolled onto its side. It began to flip and tumble as the assassins were tossed wildly free. Agent Fenris grabbed me and we hit the ground behind a minivan. Agent Spider was still firing as the car smashed into the minivan and soared above our heads.
The car came to an obnoxiously loud crash landing against the side of an apartment building and for some reason it didn't explode. I guess too many movies make you think that no matter what happens in a car crash, it'll always explode. Especially if it was driven by bad guys with guns.
Fenris dragged me to my feet and we ran for the end of the block. I heard Spider firing off a few final shots as we hit Delancey. The wide open space felt comforting but seemed to worry Fenris.
"C'mon, we've got a car down this way!"
Fenris, bleeding as he was, seemed unaffected by his critical condition. As we ran he checked over his shoulder to see if I was still there, that Spider was behind me, and that more bad guys weren't following. But they were. In Hummers and fighter jets.
Fenris threw me into the passenger seat of his 1976 Lincoln Continental. He turned the key and the engine roared. Spider was reloading as he jumped on the side of the car. Fenris hit the gas and spun that badass dark blue monstrosity through the intersection making the most illegal u-turn NYC had ever seen.
I tried to take a peak out the back window but shrunk back down when bullets began pouring in through the roof. Spider was returning fire from the backseat and I felt like I was going mad from the deafening auditory assault. Fenris was getting a little woozy from the loss of blood but he tightened his grip on the wheel, furrowed his brow, and sped for the Williamsburg Bridge.
A huge chunk of concrete explodes to our right and the car skids and fishtails. Missiles fired from a jet didn't seem nearly as bad as I would have thought. And shouldn't their targeting system be able to hit an abnormally massive, classic automobile such as this? Are jets allowed to fly into a major city and blow stuff up with reckless abandon? And why were there jet fighters trying to execute me anyways?
The questions would have to wait as the jet circled back around. We were flying across the bridge with the meanest bunch of military vehicles made street legal chasing us. They plowed through any car in their path, full on monster trucking over some of the smaller foreign cars, and driving the larger SUVs right off the side of the bridge.
Once we hit Brooklyn, Fenris began to lose it. The car smashed off the road and through basketball courts. I grabbed the wheel as we hit the street again and turned us towards the flow of traffic. The jet flew above and just seemed to watch us as the trucks barreled their way along a block behind us.
"Hey! Hey! Wake up! We're going to crash!"
Spider took a moment to reflect. While he did this he reloaded and shot me a look that said that I wasn't worth all this trouble. That, although he enjoyed killing vast amounts of baddies, Fenris' life was not worth my own. Not by a long shot. But I could just be reading too much into it.
Spider, on his last clip, now began to pick and choose his shots. I decided that it was time to act. I tore Fenris from the driver's seat and slipped behind the wheel. I piloted that big bastard of a car through the confusing streets of Brooklyn, trying to shake our tale. I mean, tail.
I woke up with my head pressed against the windshield. I peeled my face from the spiderwebbed glass and saw the spray of my faceblood across it. My cheeks were wet. I wiped the blood away and more came. Smoke was pouring from the front of the car. A fine mist of various automobile fluids covered the scene.
Fenris was gone. Spider was no longer in the backseat. I grabbed the gun left on the dashboard and slammed my shoulder into the door to get it open. I rolled out onto grass and tried to find my footing.
Stumbling through the mist, as well as the haze of my fractured mind, I spotted a figure approaching. I hefted the gun up to eye level and planted my feet, my finger ready to squeeze the trigger. An empty click left my body to involuntary jerk when there was no recoil. I fell to my knees.
The figure came closer and I could see it was a female form. I never saw her face but I was glad I didn't have any bullets left in the gun. She lifted me up and brought me home.
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