Monday, December 26, 2011
The Tower of Brahma - 58 - the Twelve: First Five (edit)
4/7/09
(John, Beth, Reilly, Jared, John)
I've found five people to help define me. I seek to find my shape beyond her realm, alone floating in cosmos, flailing about seeing who is there. There will be twelve, but now there is five.
I wander Friday night out, trapped between worlds, unable to return home, unwilling to lock myself away. I inhale the remnants of smoke trailing down the sidewalks, seeking some sort of high, asking to be distracted. Exhaling finds my heart racing, my breath and time are short.
Before I close the bars behind me, I send out an emergency beacon hoping to be found outside the next night, for I feared the madness would return and end this once and for all. I tried to absorb doctrine, to let my mind be at peace, but there's so much to think about.
I slip out the crack of dawn and keep moving through the streets, mixing with the masses, splinter in the public's flesh. I meet with a seller and grab five bags of sanity. I jump ship and abandon the island, long subway ride to lose myself.
I trade the five bags for a night of normalcy. Two guys hanging out, drinking beers, fetal on his bathroom floor, I wash my hands and face a friend. We watch movies and bullshit, things are calm, I don't need to watch my peripheral for possible attacks. I'm off the map.
I crash after playing couch potato. I wake and step out into the sun, it hates me intensely. Coffee and cigarettes make me feel worse, and I drag myself up the platform, hop on the first train in, and plunge back into life. Somewhere along the way a distress signal from a kindred soul flares across the West of Brooklyn so I break out.
The drama we've separately shared since we met tells us that there is a deeper connection. We'll need to be there for each other, magnetic empathic resonators, empowering and devouring one another. She's switched on like never before and on the run from an ex-assassin, as am I.
An ally comes to meet us for wine and sliders on the outdoor patio. I run distraction as she leaves to protect her love from insane jealous rage. I skirt paying the bill with an innocent smile, and the inside man comes out with me. He brings me back to Manhattan, and we head to the highest point.
Overlooking the city skyline, a few midnight cocktails in me, I try and get the information I need from him. He drops hints and tips but dodges anything concrete. He does what he can but it's not enough, I'm impatient to advance to the next level. I'm in Hell and I'm holding her hand. How do I get out?
He leaves me cold in the wind. She floats upon me and envelops, we disappear into the night, returning home to hide. Beside her, the madness gurgles and begs for release, I finally sleep, forcing myself to suppress the viral enemy inside me.
I dream of falling back, landing hard on my spine, paralyzing me at the point of impact, only it never comes and instead I bolt upright awake. I don't know how I can resist the darkness in me any longer. I've got to get back into the game, find the zen in the movement forward.
The silver laptop that was once all I was, the entirety of my being crunched in the bits and bytes of digital images, playlists, and bookmarks, it needed to be resurrected. She knew I must be connected on my own, my soul shredded by the rummaging through her own computer self, seeing her love someone else.
She heads out for another mission, but before she does, I leave, not wanting to watch her dress the part: the short skirt to catch a guy's eyes, the top that held them, her hair ensnaring the mark, with eyes that took everything. I couldn't watch her go that way. So I ran.
I met my friend and his friend, and they brought me along to be manly. We ate wings, drank beers, watched sports, talked shop. Somewhere in the moment, I was released from every snare, and free to exist as I wished. We went back to the old bar and had a free shot.
It felt normal. I was a regular joe, living his life, forgetting the burden of eternity that rests on my shoulders for one brief night. In my old bed I try and sleep, my eyes burning with tired. My mind begins to slip and slide across the wreckage of my life. I grind what's left of my teeth, the cyanide capsules all gone, leaving holes in my mouth.
Tomorrow begins a day to become myself all over again. I hope I'll be stronger, more sane, and further from the devil that dogs my step.
I don't want to live in this prison. I want to stop escaping. My friends hold me afloat as I rise from the ashes.
Monday, December 19, 2011
The Tower of Brahma - Chapter 57.3 - HotShot ShotDown (edit)
4/20/09
It was our first date, a second chance meeting, the third time I'd let her slip away. We knew each other when we were kids, but so much had changed since then. I tried to find the girl I fell for all those years ago.
Her name was Jasmine Jones, Jazz we called her down in ABC Block. Her movements as erratic and beautiful as escalating notes emanating from a trumpet, like disciplined chaos slipping into the public system, she flowed with a natural grace and hit like a hammer.
A tomboy in pigtails, a dichotomy of duality, she was awkward and alone coming into the gang. Jazz kept to herself and went with the program when it benefited her, rebelling when she needed to be herself. The others all wanted her or wanted to be her.
I was a dog, loyal and simple. They dragged me in and gave me games. I had to learn from scratch, how to speak, think, feel like a human. I was the team mascot, kept around for morale more than anything. The artificial intelligence they instilled in me helped rebuild what momentary death had robbed from me.
Was I just a pet to her? A project to kill time inside? A lost soul she could guide so as not to focus on herself? I had no idea how she felt, nor the capacity to even know the difference. But she sparked something in me. I had to make sense of this madness in my head.
I saw what pleased her and repeated it. She smiled sadly when she left me to train. I processed everything around me faster and faster, hoping I could stand as her equal. Running faster, thinking more, fighting smarter, I was growing.
Tom Trainor came in and saw my improvements, remarking to Marcus, the boy genius who made me from the raw matter of a kid, binary code, and dog spirit. He thought he could enhance ordinary children into super secret agents. I wanted to be good, to help, to have the approval of those I thought to be friends.
I began processing data at superspeed, my reaction time shooting to seconds. Canine instincts gave me a momentary headstart, while the computer in me gave me the processing speed. I was faster, smarter, and stronger than all my classmates, no longer the dog-boy, laughed at and scorned.
They saw me fit for active duty and I dressed for success, slipping into a suit, and dropping behind the wheels of a hotrod red sports car. I hit the gas and roared out of the warehouse, jumping the drawbridge before it was fully down. Tom thought it was a mistake sending me so soon, although curious of the outcome.
Marcus just wanted me to crash and burn.
I met up with Jazz after leaping from the diving plane with my low altitude jetpack on. She whipped around me playfully as I grinned back at her. The sun shined down on us lighting the way, but we soared up together, dancing in the clouds for too long. The missiles and laser cannons had pinpointed us.
Dr. Ether Ore had shot us down and we were separated, scattered to the winds. I landed on the backside of his isle of doom, clinging to the cliffs. I worried about her, knew she must be in danger, I had to rescue her. Surely his robot drones must have captured her, dragging her back to his lair.
Sneaking in was easy. I had figured out the location of cameras, and guards were easy enough to take down with my enraged strength. I ran wild through the inner core of his hideout, smashing the doors down to his sanctum. Sure enough, there was Jazz, now adorned in one of his soldier's uniforms, probably made to bend to his will.
Then she shot me. I never saw it coming. I stumbled out onto the balcony, he stood there gloating, she coldly glaring. I was bleeding and betrayed, both hurting more than I thought possible. Jazz, or the girl, the friend, the agent, I called Jazz, walked slowly over to the evil doctor, the bastard mastermind of a thousand disasters, and put her arms around him.
I tossed myself over the railing after that, tumbling down ridges and falling into an open drainage ditch. Letting the flow drag my body down to the coast, where I surfaced among the corpses of a hundred dead agents. Others like me, maybe not so like me, not damaged and dead like me, for I was still alive.
Eventually I was returned back to the foundation for information retrieval, then decommissioned. They castrated my potential and plugged me back into the machine. Gave me normal and suburban life once again, letting my family raise me, not that they knew what to do with a failed superspy, half dog and half program.
The man with the murky past, now cleared and revealed, held a gun to the head of the woman who was once a girl who betrayed him. All was revealed, and he knew who he was, and why life hurt so bad. She was the reason, she cut his life short, ended his adventure and caused his suspicious paranoia.
She was the enemy. The barrel hit her temple and he imagined watching in slow motion as the bullet exploded from the chamber, slid down the length of the gun and burrowed into her brains. It'd dig through layers upon layers of her self, before ending everything she was.
He thought about her. The action she saw, the life she led, the others she fought and betrayed. And then what came after. Put out to pasture, left out in the open like a discarded toy, she'd be a broken shamble of a human as well. Too long spent playing the game to be any good at being normal. So much like himself.
But with experience. However, he had another headstart. Thanks to Marcus and Tom, he was placed out into regular reality way before the others, the first to fail and be forgotten. Didn't he then have the advantage? Wasn't life experience gained regardless of specifics? Wouldn't he now be able to help?
It was Marcus he needed to kill. And she could lead him to that diabolical director of his destiny. That villain who robbed him of everything. She was just serving the agency when she shot him. Probably seduced Dr. Ore into betraying his own plan. After all, the Earth was still intact, not dismantled by machinery.
Agent Fenris put away his gun and let time slip through his hands. The date continued. Charles Crown got to know Jasmine 'Jazz' Jones, and that night they kissed. He walked home in the rain, smiling to himself.
Charles awoke, startled and screaming, crying tears of fear. Jasmine put her arms around him, soothing him back down to the bed besides her. He turned to face her, the tears shifting with gravity, dropping off his nose. She was beautiful and he loved her.
"It was just a bad dream sweetie. Go back to sleep."
It was our first date, a second chance meeting, the third time I'd let her slip away. We knew each other when we were kids, but so much had changed since then. I tried to find the girl I fell for all those years ago.
Her name was Jasmine Jones, Jazz we called her down in ABC Block. Her movements as erratic and beautiful as escalating notes emanating from a trumpet, like disciplined chaos slipping into the public system, she flowed with a natural grace and hit like a hammer.
A tomboy in pigtails, a dichotomy of duality, she was awkward and alone coming into the gang. Jazz kept to herself and went with the program when it benefited her, rebelling when she needed to be herself. The others all wanted her or wanted to be her.
I was a dog, loyal and simple. They dragged me in and gave me games. I had to learn from scratch, how to speak, think, feel like a human. I was the team mascot, kept around for morale more than anything. The artificial intelligence they instilled in me helped rebuild what momentary death had robbed from me.
Was I just a pet to her? A project to kill time inside? A lost soul she could guide so as not to focus on herself? I had no idea how she felt, nor the capacity to even know the difference. But she sparked something in me. I had to make sense of this madness in my head.
I saw what pleased her and repeated it. She smiled sadly when she left me to train. I processed everything around me faster and faster, hoping I could stand as her equal. Running faster, thinking more, fighting smarter, I was growing.
Tom Trainor came in and saw my improvements, remarking to Marcus, the boy genius who made me from the raw matter of a kid, binary code, and dog spirit. He thought he could enhance ordinary children into super secret agents. I wanted to be good, to help, to have the approval of those I thought to be friends.
I began processing data at superspeed, my reaction time shooting to seconds. Canine instincts gave me a momentary headstart, while the computer in me gave me the processing speed. I was faster, smarter, and stronger than all my classmates, no longer the dog-boy, laughed at and scorned.
They saw me fit for active duty and I dressed for success, slipping into a suit, and dropping behind the wheels of a hotrod red sports car. I hit the gas and roared out of the warehouse, jumping the drawbridge before it was fully down. Tom thought it was a mistake sending me so soon, although curious of the outcome.
Marcus just wanted me to crash and burn.
I met up with Jazz after leaping from the diving plane with my low altitude jetpack on. She whipped around me playfully as I grinned back at her. The sun shined down on us lighting the way, but we soared up together, dancing in the clouds for too long. The missiles and laser cannons had pinpointed us.
Dr. Ether Ore had shot us down and we were separated, scattered to the winds. I landed on the backside of his isle of doom, clinging to the cliffs. I worried about her, knew she must be in danger, I had to rescue her. Surely his robot drones must have captured her, dragging her back to his lair.
Sneaking in was easy. I had figured out the location of cameras, and guards were easy enough to take down with my enraged strength. I ran wild through the inner core of his hideout, smashing the doors down to his sanctum. Sure enough, there was Jazz, now adorned in one of his soldier's uniforms, probably made to bend to his will.
Then she shot me. I never saw it coming. I stumbled out onto the balcony, he stood there gloating, she coldly glaring. I was bleeding and betrayed, both hurting more than I thought possible. Jazz, or the girl, the friend, the agent, I called Jazz, walked slowly over to the evil doctor, the bastard mastermind of a thousand disasters, and put her arms around him.
I tossed myself over the railing after that, tumbling down ridges and falling into an open drainage ditch. Letting the flow drag my body down to the coast, where I surfaced among the corpses of a hundred dead agents. Others like me, maybe not so like me, not damaged and dead like me, for I was still alive.
Eventually I was returned back to the foundation for information retrieval, then decommissioned. They castrated my potential and plugged me back into the machine. Gave me normal and suburban life once again, letting my family raise me, not that they knew what to do with a failed superspy, half dog and half program.
The man with the murky past, now cleared and revealed, held a gun to the head of the woman who was once a girl who betrayed him. All was revealed, and he knew who he was, and why life hurt so bad. She was the reason, she cut his life short, ended his adventure and caused his suspicious paranoia.
She was the enemy. The barrel hit her temple and he imagined watching in slow motion as the bullet exploded from the chamber, slid down the length of the gun and burrowed into her brains. It'd dig through layers upon layers of her self, before ending everything she was.
He thought about her. The action she saw, the life she led, the others she fought and betrayed. And then what came after. Put out to pasture, left out in the open like a discarded toy, she'd be a broken shamble of a human as well. Too long spent playing the game to be any good at being normal. So much like himself.
But with experience. However, he had another headstart. Thanks to Marcus and Tom, he was placed out into regular reality way before the others, the first to fail and be forgotten. Didn't he then have the advantage? Wasn't life experience gained regardless of specifics? Wouldn't he now be able to help?
It was Marcus he needed to kill. And she could lead him to that diabolical director of his destiny. That villain who robbed him of everything. She was just serving the agency when she shot him. Probably seduced Dr. Ore into betraying his own plan. After all, the Earth was still intact, not dismantled by machinery.
Agent Fenris put away his gun and let time slip through his hands. The date continued. Charles Crown got to know Jasmine 'Jazz' Jones, and that night they kissed. He walked home in the rain, smiling to himself.
Charles awoke, startled and screaming, crying tears of fear. Jasmine put her arms around him, soothing him back down to the bed besides her. He turned to face her, the tears shifting with gravity, dropping off his nose. She was beautiful and he loved her.
"It was just a bad dream sweetie. Go back to sleep."
Monday, December 12, 2011
The Tower of Brahma - Chapter 57.2 - You New All Along (edit)
4/16/09
She went on to be a super secret agent. Slipped in and out, saw the world, and put it all behind her. But on my first mission, she betrayed me, left with an enemy agent. On my graduation, she betrayed me, leaving me far behind.
Now, with her pocketknife against my throat, my fingers wrapped around her neck, windpipe in the grip of my thumb and forefinger, I'd gladly die, neck slashed open, bleeding out all over her bed, her vocal chords in my fist.
Wake up. Past. Dream.
I never was good enough, a failed experiment. I died a few years earlier. She knew that. They all knew that. They all saw me on that first day when I was awakened, snarling and sneering with my fangs bared. I knew nothing save instinct, felt nothing but rage.
Training. Mission. Decomission.
Marcus, Master Maker. The madman behind it all. He created this world for us to play in, to test me. He had my friend, my watcher, Tom Trainor take it all down as he monitored me. When he needed to, he broke me, leaving Tom to gather the pieces and give me clues to heal.
I was a secret agent kid, but now just a spent man, with no cynaide capsules left in his teeth, a shaky hand with an itchy trigger finger, and a head full of bad wiring. I saw the subtext of my self, the veiled explanation for my consuming madness. I was once so much more than I am now.
But I still got enough in me for some payback. I looked up at Agent Strange, seeing her now with my memories intact, my entire persona now shifted to include a long lost secret. She rambled on about trivial matters from her past as I shut down the audiowaves in the air.
"Babel", I whispered, and everything went silent.
When time and space froze down to near absolute zero, I pressed through the friction of the moment, retrieving my gun from my jacket. I took an eternity to look it over as I rested my grip comfortably around it. It wasn't heavy this time. It was simple.
Pull the trigger, kill her, shoot down an agent for the people that did this to you, the ones that drove you mad and took away a life of action and adventure, replacing it with dysfunctional disaster. The life of a damaged science experiment called for revenge.
Completing the mission, killing the persona. Evolving past the idea of itself. Fenris and Spider emerged from HotShot, kid superspy, being denied the action he was trained for, a powder keg of impossible imagination kept under wraps for years.
Their sentimentality in keeping me alive was their mistake.
She went on to be a super secret agent. Slipped in and out, saw the world, and put it all behind her. But on my first mission, she betrayed me, left with an enemy agent. On my graduation, she betrayed me, leaving me far behind.
Now, with her pocketknife against my throat, my fingers wrapped around her neck, windpipe in the grip of my thumb and forefinger, I'd gladly die, neck slashed open, bleeding out all over her bed, her vocal chords in my fist.
Wake up. Past. Dream.
I never was good enough, a failed experiment. I died a few years earlier. She knew that. They all knew that. They all saw me on that first day when I was awakened, snarling and sneering with my fangs bared. I knew nothing save instinct, felt nothing but rage.
Training. Mission. Decomission.
Marcus, Master Maker. The madman behind it all. He created this world for us to play in, to test me. He had my friend, my watcher, Tom Trainor take it all down as he monitored me. When he needed to, he broke me, leaving Tom to gather the pieces and give me clues to heal.
I was a secret agent kid, but now just a spent man, with no cynaide capsules left in his teeth, a shaky hand with an itchy trigger finger, and a head full of bad wiring. I saw the subtext of my self, the veiled explanation for my consuming madness. I was once so much more than I am now.
But I still got enough in me for some payback. I looked up at Agent Strange, seeing her now with my memories intact, my entire persona now shifted to include a long lost secret. She rambled on about trivial matters from her past as I shut down the audiowaves in the air.
"Babel", I whispered, and everything went silent.
When time and space froze down to near absolute zero, I pressed through the friction of the moment, retrieving my gun from my jacket. I took an eternity to look it over as I rested my grip comfortably around it. It wasn't heavy this time. It was simple.
Pull the trigger, kill her, shoot down an agent for the people that did this to you, the ones that drove you mad and took away a life of action and adventure, replacing it with dysfunctional disaster. The life of a damaged science experiment called for revenge.
Completing the mission, killing the persona. Evolving past the idea of itself. Fenris and Spider emerged from HotShot, kid superspy, being denied the action he was trained for, a powder keg of impossible imagination kept under wraps for years.
Their sentimentality in keeping me alive was their mistake.
Monday, December 5, 2011
The Tower of Brahma Chapter 57.1 - Choose Your Delusion (edit)
4/1/09
Agent Strange meets me on the West Side. A date. We're both consenting Secret Agents, so we meet, and it's a match. Cover stories bought and sold, consumed along with dinner and drinks. We walk that night talking, speaking only the truth, I listen.
I wake in the middle of the night, heart pounding, my jaw clenched, teeth grinding themselves what's left down to nothingness. My slightest move will wake her, yet I reach for my phone, dying to put down words, form an idea that will take away this ache.
She wakes. I feel the guilt. Writing, tapping keys, takes its toll on her nerves. I file it away, but it resurfaces. Why doesn't she want me to write? What would I discover?
I sleep and dream beside her.
Dr. Ether Ore, a madman probing the depths of dear old Mother Earth with his sinistar Geological Expedition Machine, a massive drill that burrows through layer after layer of rock, soil, dirt...it creaks and squeaks sending chills down the spine. The Evil Dr. Ore stares down into the tunnel with orgasmic spite.
I make the meet with her at the designated spot: a deep fried Britsh shoppe. We exchange glances, pleasantries, and size each other up. Her hair dangles before her eyes, her gaze sliding across the tiles, up the stool, but they never meet mine. She smiles.
Stuffing my mouth with battered poultry makes it easy to shut up for once. I listen as she begins to speak. She says she knows me, knows who I am, where I belong. She has no idea. I've come in from the cold, I know too much, the walls are closing in.
She says I learned from K.I.D. - Kinetic Information Discipline, which basically sounds like letting info get kicked into you. I guess I must have had a pretty shitty teacher, I say, cause I don't know nothing.
Grandma's sitting at the dining room table, glasses of alcohol lies before them as they're discussing a problem, a family affair, something about drugs. I've found that knowing too much when little, processing information you are not able to handle, it's the natural defense to start with the playing dumb routine.
Let the Dr. have her. You don't need this. You don't need nothing nor anything, something or everything begins to shift. A wave of illusion casts you ashore, alone amid the wreckage of a life gone bye.
Bloated corpses, bursting with gas, ring a tropical paradise. You're a kid, how do you deal with that, betrayal of innocence, a hotshot burned. Some cute red-headed girl gives you the old wink, you fold like a paper airplane.
Secret Agency. Secret Agent, See. See Crypt Again, C?
Down dirty alleys polluted with farmland perverts, I ride my bike for my life, away from you, towards a new way to live and be. I was just a kid goddammit. Who's nightmare dreamscape am I scraping against?
I didn't know any better. Just a fool. The Fool that fell for feeling so much. Knocked down, bitter descent, slapping sounds waking me up. The knowledge is there. Who am I? What happened to me? What next?
I was shooting from the H.I.P., or higher intelligence programming, an AI interface that entered behind my face, creating personality from tabula rasa. Wild dog boy died and came back clean, perfect test subject for experimentation.
My family needed the money, I had no choice, nor any memory of them building and installing me into flesh. I ping-ponged off the fourth wall of the internet, ricochet deconstructing myself and my surroundings until a pattern emerged and digital life began.
I was sold to the government for cash. Well, my well-being and sanity sure were. I was empty and they filled me with 1's & 0's, right and wrong. Subdued my submerged rage with regularity, monitored my mental health monthly, the tests were endless. Thankfully they wiped them from my brain.
The slug from her smoking 357 was sitting in my shoulder, cooling down as we glanced at each other. She was just thirteen, pigtailed tomboy in flexible body armor.
I was a mere lad of fourteen and my 44 was heavy, it felt like holding the moon. My armor was non-existent, my wound bled through my t-shirt, the bullet finally stopped pressing into the bone. I stumbled back, three times the betrayal burying into my flesh.
Agent Strange meets me on the West Side. A date. We're both consenting Secret Agents, so we meet, and it's a match. Cover stories bought and sold, consumed along with dinner and drinks. We walk that night talking, speaking only the truth, I listen.
I wake in the middle of the night, heart pounding, my jaw clenched, teeth grinding themselves what's left down to nothingness. My slightest move will wake her, yet I reach for my phone, dying to put down words, form an idea that will take away this ache.
She wakes. I feel the guilt. Writing, tapping keys, takes its toll on her nerves. I file it away, but it resurfaces. Why doesn't she want me to write? What would I discover?
I sleep and dream beside her.
Dr. Ether Ore, a madman probing the depths of dear old Mother Earth with his sinistar Geological Expedition Machine, a massive drill that burrows through layer after layer of rock, soil, dirt...it creaks and squeaks sending chills down the spine. The Evil Dr. Ore stares down into the tunnel with orgasmic spite.
I make the meet with her at the designated spot: a deep fried Britsh shoppe. We exchange glances, pleasantries, and size each other up. Her hair dangles before her eyes, her gaze sliding across the tiles, up the stool, but they never meet mine. She smiles.
Stuffing my mouth with battered poultry makes it easy to shut up for once. I listen as she begins to speak. She says she knows me, knows who I am, where I belong. She has no idea. I've come in from the cold, I know too much, the walls are closing in.
She says I learned from K.I.D. - Kinetic Information Discipline, which basically sounds like letting info get kicked into you. I guess I must have had a pretty shitty teacher, I say, cause I don't know nothing.
Grandma's sitting at the dining room table, glasses of alcohol lies before them as they're discussing a problem, a family affair, something about drugs. I've found that knowing too much when little, processing information you are not able to handle, it's the natural defense to start with the playing dumb routine.
Let the Dr. have her. You don't need this. You don't need nothing nor anything, something or everything begins to shift. A wave of illusion casts you ashore, alone amid the wreckage of a life gone bye.
Bloated corpses, bursting with gas, ring a tropical paradise. You're a kid, how do you deal with that, betrayal of innocence, a hotshot burned. Some cute red-headed girl gives you the old wink, you fold like a paper airplane.
Secret Agency. Secret Agent, See. See Crypt Again, C?
Down dirty alleys polluted with farmland perverts, I ride my bike for my life, away from you, towards a new way to live and be. I was just a kid goddammit. Who's nightmare dreamscape am I scraping against?
I didn't know any better. Just a fool. The Fool that fell for feeling so much. Knocked down, bitter descent, slapping sounds waking me up. The knowledge is there. Who am I? What happened to me? What next?
I was shooting from the H.I.P., or higher intelligence programming, an AI interface that entered behind my face, creating personality from tabula rasa. Wild dog boy died and came back clean, perfect test subject for experimentation.
My family needed the money, I had no choice, nor any memory of them building and installing me into flesh. I ping-ponged off the fourth wall of the internet, ricochet deconstructing myself and my surroundings until a pattern emerged and digital life began.
I was sold to the government for cash. Well, my well-being and sanity sure were. I was empty and they filled me with 1's & 0's, right and wrong. Subdued my submerged rage with regularity, monitored my mental health monthly, the tests were endless. Thankfully they wiped them from my brain.
The slug from her smoking 357 was sitting in my shoulder, cooling down as we glanced at each other. She was just thirteen, pigtailed tomboy in flexible body armor.
I was a mere lad of fourteen and my 44 was heavy, it felt like holding the moon. My armor was non-existent, my wound bled through my t-shirt, the bullet finally stopped pressing into the bone. I stumbled back, three times the betrayal burying into my flesh.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Tower of Brahma 56 Fuck Philly Fight NYC (edit)
1/29/09
I pinball off Philly, sticking around long enough to charge my phone, eat some shitty appetizer dish, and toss back two beers, before walking the runway to the propeller plane that'll get me home, under the radar.
Waving false identification, the documents forged by the power of my mind, I slip a paper into their hands and blankly they grant me access. I obfuscate their minds, sliding in-between where they can't see, and so I make it out of there alive.
I get a communique from the doctor, she who studied me but never looked at me. The woman who I could see cried like a girl when alone, vulnerable virgin once desecrated by men's hands, followed by her own. She played me from the start, that diabolical queen bitch. Too bad she can't realize that she's conning herself more than anyone else.
She writes that she's been admitted. Taken into the psych ward as a patient after trying so hard to convince us that we were the ones who were wrong. Her crown was usurped, and all it took was my escape from her trap. No one had ever quit playing her game before. So she lost it.
They locked her up for her own good and now she looked to me to save her. I was her psychological victim for weeks before I ran for the hills, leaving captivity for the madness of adventure in Europe. Coming back to the states was necessary but troublesome.
I switched tracks, flipped directions, and charged off for the future. I needed to change everything if I was to alter anything. The end needn't be final, ravaging, sinister Armageddon. I'd see to it that we'd have something more positive to look forward to.
I tossed the last cigarette I'd ever smoke to the pavement. I needed to learn to fight, but even more than that I'd need a reason to fight.
I pinball off Philly, sticking around long enough to charge my phone, eat some shitty appetizer dish, and toss back two beers, before walking the runway to the propeller plane that'll get me home, under the radar.
Waving false identification, the documents forged by the power of my mind, I slip a paper into their hands and blankly they grant me access. I obfuscate their minds, sliding in-between where they can't see, and so I make it out of there alive.
I get a communique from the doctor, she who studied me but never looked at me. The woman who I could see cried like a girl when alone, vulnerable virgin once desecrated by men's hands, followed by her own. She played me from the start, that diabolical queen bitch. Too bad she can't realize that she's conning herself more than anyone else.
She writes that she's been admitted. Taken into the psych ward as a patient after trying so hard to convince us that we were the ones who were wrong. Her crown was usurped, and all it took was my escape from her trap. No one had ever quit playing her game before. So she lost it.
They locked her up for her own good and now she looked to me to save her. I was her psychological victim for weeks before I ran for the hills, leaving captivity for the madness of adventure in Europe. Coming back to the states was necessary but troublesome.
I switched tracks, flipped directions, and charged off for the future. I needed to change everything if I was to alter anything. The end needn't be final, ravaging, sinister Armageddon. I'd see to it that we'd have something more positive to look forward to.
I tossed the last cigarette I'd ever smoke to the pavement. I needed to learn to fight, but even more than that I'd need a reason to fight.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Tower of Brahma 56 Amsterdam Decompression London Debriefing (edit)
1/22/09
We miss our flights, but I know Brian will get home tonight. He'll be safely locked behind the looney bin bars before midnight. As for me, I've slipped security with my play acting dumb, and dragged my travel beaten bones to CitizenM.
Under guise of a hotel, suggested by my contact at the airport, I knew this place was where I needed to go. The sleek design of the entire complex, standing alone amid the construction/continuation of Amsterdam's airport, was off-puttingly sci-fi. Computers allowed for self-check in/check-out but oddly, I preferred a human at this point.
He can see I'm a mess but that I also mean business. I will honestly bring this building down if I need to, and I discovered I had the ability to do it on my last night in Amsterdam. So as I eyeball him and he checks my credentials, I ponder on my infinite power.
Fresh from Paris, worn from the train, drunk in the barcar, stumbled out to the street. Amsterdam Central feels so much like home now, vaguely recalling our wide-eyed arrival a week prior, that we get careless, and wander off.
Kadinsky coffee shop sets us down our path to getting lost. Brian checks the map as I drift along the edge of the canals, sidestepping and delicately dancing awkwardly out of the way of oncoming bikes. A few more blocks and we find something.
What was it? We went somewhere. Every place gets more ridiculous with tripped out layouts letting us drop into ourselves. I don't know the name but I recall a stereotypical mushroom ambiance, a giant vulva design, and a sitcom taking place around us. I wouldn't shut up about it being like a sitcom.
So that must have set me off because suddenly I'm power walking through the streets, and if I focus I can create a stage-like setting around me, complete with spotlight and props. I will myself fictional, larger than life, pressing as hard as I can against the fourth wall. I feel forward and down becoming upwards and onwards. I wash my face in some hostel, then sleep.
I'm allowed entry into this swank hotel and become a citizen. Everything in my room is controlled by remote. It's vacuum sealed and has decontamination tubes that reek of Star Trek ripoffs. I decompress, shave my face, and lie naked on a giant pillowy bed.
I'd have another 18 hours, mostly flying, before I was back in the madhouse. I needed a plan.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Tower of Brahma 56 Paris Cafe Existentialism (edit)
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 Brian, 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.
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 Brian, 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, November 7, 2011
Tower of Brahma 56 Paris Street Affair (edit)
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, October 31, 2011
The Tower of Brahma 55 Revelations (edit)
12/30/08
It is upon the moment 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 it is 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 bake in the searing flame of raw posthuman potential.
Posthumous humourous 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, 2012 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 mono-tonal 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. Neo-humans became the norm, well the norm's new vibe. A slew of celibate tapeworms chewing off our fever dreams, those lesser-men could be casualties in our conflict with our 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 every time 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 persona, 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 moment 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 it is 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 bake in the searing flame of raw posthuman potential.
Posthumous humourous 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, 2012 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 mono-tonal 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. Neo-humans became the norm, well the norm's new vibe. A slew of celibate tapeworms chewing off our fever dreams, those lesser-men could be casualties in our conflict with our 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 every time 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 persona, 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, October 24, 2011
The Tower of Brahma: Chapter 54 - nine times the remainder (edit)
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 the sixty-four 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 to no avail. I can talk to you now, but I can not 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've 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. What 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 the sixty-four 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 to no avail. I can talk to you now, but I can not 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've 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. What 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, October 17, 2011
Tower of Brahma 53: ideal identity ignorance (edit)
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 quite a task. I was institutionalized. I do not recall what for, nor do I remember why I've 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, so here I was in her office.
I usually lose her within a few minutes of getting on a roll. I'd 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 to go so wrong when I see her eyes? Magnified and on display for me, her glasses merely 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 reveal 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's 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, release of our sad states, 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. 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, alive 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 previously had been."
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, makes it spasm and dance 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 sculpted 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."
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 quite a task. I was institutionalized. I do not recall what for, nor do I remember why I've 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, so here I was in her office.
I usually lose her within a few minutes of getting on a roll. I'd 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 to go so wrong when I see her eyes? Magnified and on display for me, her glasses merely 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 reveal 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's 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, release of our sad states, 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. 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, alive 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 previously had been."
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, makes it spasm and dance 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 sculpted 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."
Monday, October 10, 2011
Tower of Brahma 52 - House of Cards (first draft) [edit]
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 cards. Next to him, Tom's seat 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 hand. "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 my 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 would be 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 lining up his shot.
I kicked backwards, sending me tumbling backwards in my chair 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 back into a defensive position. Spider ducked as he released the clip with one hand and slapped in a new one all in one continuous, 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.
"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 cards. Next to him, Tom's seat 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 hand. "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 my 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 would be 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 lining up his shot.
I kicked backwards, sending me tumbling backwards in my chair 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 back into a defensive position. Spider ducked as he released the clip with one hand and slapped in a new one all in one continuous, 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.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Tower of Brahma - 51 - stop me if you've heard this one before (edit)
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 style. Each of us has our individual techniques. Sean and his jokes, Juan’s historical 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 facts 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 way stranger and far more 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 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 as I do. 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 sentences 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 us 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 high-points 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 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 style. Each of us has our individual techniques. Sean and his jokes, Juan’s historical 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 facts 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 way stranger and far more 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 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 as I do. 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 sentences 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 us 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 high-points 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 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, September 26, 2011
Tower of Brahma - 50 - We're Building the New World: Order {edit}
1/14/08
One day, without warning, they opened the door to my cell, my padded solitary confinement. A well-dressed man with perfect hair and a royal blue suit walked in wearing a smile that brimmed with empathetic 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, suddenly transforming into an office building with the turn of a corner.
"This is our main office, for now." With a wave of his hands, cubicles, computers, and clerical staff all seemed to materialize with his words.
As we walked, the business casual clad worker drones 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 don't think 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 started walking, and as if on a leash, I lurch forward, shuffling along behind him like an obedient dog. The office interior fades and a shimmering laboratory sparkles in its place.
A young lab technician, hidden behind mousy brown hair and glasses, tinkered with various, unscientific looking tools. Blunt objects, odds and ends from a junk drawer, a handful of rocks. She continued 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 an upright 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 mono-filaments 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, 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 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 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 former 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 was already amazing.
It always has been. It always will be.
"Novus Ordo Colligo."
One day, without warning, they opened the door to my cell, my padded solitary confinement. A well-dressed man with perfect hair and a royal blue suit walked in wearing a smile that brimmed with empathetic 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, suddenly transforming into an office building with the turn of a corner.
"This is our main office, for now." With a wave of his hands, cubicles, computers, and clerical staff all seemed to materialize with his words.
As we walked, the business casual clad worker drones 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 don't think 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 started walking, and as if on a leash, I lurch forward, shuffling along behind him like an obedient dog. The office interior fades and a shimmering laboratory sparkles in its place.
A young lab technician, hidden behind mousy brown hair and glasses, tinkered with various, unscientific looking tools. Blunt objects, odds and ends from a junk drawer, a handful of rocks. She continued 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 an upright 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 mono-filaments 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, 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 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 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 former 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 was already amazing.
It always has been. It always will be.
"Novus Ordo Colligo."
Monday, September 19, 2011
The Tower of Brahma: Chapter 49 - Boy Cries Wolf (edit)
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 remained 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 remained 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, September 12, 2011
Tower of Brahma 48 - Anthropology of Entertainment (edit)
10/18/07
I've been walking up these steps forever, 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 casts a long darkness stretching into an infinite web of storytelling. 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 choked back the gag reflex of my soul and threw myself 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 until 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 leapt 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 forever, 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 casts a long darkness stretching into an infinite web of storytelling. 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 choked back the gag reflex of my soul and threw myself 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 until 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 leapt 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, September 5, 2011
Tower of Brahma: Chapter 47. the Meaning of Life (completed) [edit]
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 stop 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 Tompkins 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 the beckoning blare of brass. Heh. A beer and a shot burning my belly. We never would've 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 seven. Man. Forty seven."
He looked down at the ground for a lingering, lost moment. The trumpet's twirl 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 dance all melting into one spotlight, slipping towards a headlight, into a mere flashlight. It refined to a point, a laser, as 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 were 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 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. 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, light turned to dark, letting them fall to the sidewalk. The night warbled and warped before me. The people, the sun, the future...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 legs 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 stop 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 Tompkins 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 the beckoning blare of brass. Heh. A beer and a shot burning my belly. We never would've 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 seven. Man. Forty seven."
He looked down at the ground for a lingering, lost moment. The trumpet's twirl 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 dance all melting into one spotlight, slipping towards a headlight, into a mere flashlight. It refined to a point, a laser, as 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 were 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 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. 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, light turned to dark, letting them fall to the sidewalk. The night warbled and warped before me. The people, the sun, the future...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 legs 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, August 29, 2011
The Tower of Brahma 46 Paranoia Paradise (edit)
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 final 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 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 final 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 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, August 22, 2011
the tower of brahma - 45 - grinning beginning (edit)
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 were the people to be found and questioned.
There were seventeen total. The first five, all hidden 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 along with excess coffee and uppers. I need to dream so badly that I believe I am creating mock dreamscapes 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's always seemed shady and off to me, a freakish man-boy with thick glasses and chocolate icing for hair. I begin to watch him as he comes and goes. 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 over his shoulder I 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 was happening. I never imagined I would have the strength to toss a rock that big out a window causing 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 the story. Still I had to know.
"Who sent you? Did they tell you to build it? Does it make me have to write?”, I pleaded for any answer.
"W-what are y-you talking about?” He had the eyes of a crazy person. But I out-crazied him. He would have no information 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 were the people to be found and questioned.
There were seventeen total. The first five, all hidden 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 along with excess coffee and uppers. I need to dream so badly that I believe I am creating mock dreamscapes 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's always seemed shady and off to me, a freakish man-boy with thick glasses and chocolate icing for hair. I begin to watch him as he comes and goes. 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 over his shoulder I 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 was happening. I never imagined I would have the strength to toss a rock that big out a window causing 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 the story. Still I had to know.
"Who sent you? Did they tell you to build it? Does it make me have to write?”, I pleaded for any answer.
"W-what are y-you talking about?” He had the eyes of a crazy person. But I out-crazied him. He would have no information 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, August 15, 2011
The Tower of Brahma: 44 - splitting infinite (edit)
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, August 8, 2011
The Tower of Brahma: Chapter 43 - Everyone's a secret agent. (edit)
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 will always be manufactured too well. They've surrounded me for some reason. Some sinister purpose.
My apartment 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 the 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 were, 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. This 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, 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 will always be manufactured too well. They've surrounded me for some reason. Some sinister purpose.
My apartment 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 the 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 were, 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. This 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, 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, August 1, 2011
The Tower of Brahma. Chapter 42. it healed me father. (edit)
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, beautiful berserker moment of parenthood, and the natural desire to protect one's 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 cower 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, 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 on a leash, held at a ten foot distance 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 amusement. 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, morality given now to my mortality. My final thoughts were of the ones I saw beyond 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 popping from his fingertips. Codename: Hotshot, low-key, nice, young man, able to be activated into the asskicker acrobat with the fire-engine red Ferrari that could launch a spycycle from its trunk. Gadgets and gizmos clued him in to the forbidden 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 the 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, beautiful berserker moment of parenthood, and the natural desire to protect one's 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 cower 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, 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 on a leash, held at a ten foot distance 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 amusement. 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, morality given now to my mortality. My final thoughts were of the ones I saw beyond 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 popping from his fingertips. Codename: Hotshot, low-key, nice, young man, able to be activated into the asskicker acrobat with the fire-engine red Ferrari that could launch a spycycle from its trunk. Gadgets and gizmos clued him in to the forbidden 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 the 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."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
