The Tower of Brahma - Twenty-Nine - Dead Gods (edit)

10/13/04

The story opens and all that existed before was mere backstory, setting up the situation that exists at this very moment.

I awoke scratching my beard. The bed seemed familiar yet completely new. Transposed from one situation to another I found myself, and my memory, immersed in a new life. Sketchy details float on back to me through alcohol induced moments of blissful, eternal oblivion. No thoughts or feelings rising, except those that are necessary to keep me standing. The dulled senses help when I leave the bed.

Outside the cave, where I entered this new world, lies a city. A sprawling metropolis that seems to be a controlled experiment in the continual derangement of the senses. Experiences here are made every minute. Polished off and passed out on every street corner. I'm making my way down Delancey and the sun is punishing my eyeballs. Characters come and pass me by, screaming loud their silent insecurities and desires. My innate insight into the human being seems to be jarred and not fully functional yet.

Then I remember why. Beer, shots, wine, and liquor, have split and separated what was merged and then put it back together into one incohesive whole. This new me was the pendragon, the bearded explorer of this foreign land. The submerged me was the calculating fighter, the action hero waiting to burst.

I'm staring in my new work bathroom mirror, a replacement for the one where I once stood and became inspired to write about that person I saw on the other side. I'm looking at the man I see before me and wonder how I got here. But I know. Somehow.

Fine tuning the celebrity machine, processing the transactions of the fame bounty hunters. They steal a snippet of a person's visage to sell to the highest bidder and I clean up the kill, polish it, and send it off to the masses to consume, dream, inspect, and scrutinize. Killing celebs one snapshot at a time.

Fluid flows from my frontal lobe, extended invisibly across the table of 7A where we are about to be served brunch. God's searing flame reflects off the wall of yawning yellow void across the street. The conversations seem far and distant and sadly cynical and depraved. Animal totems charge up those around me and then I hear the ideas come forth, creeping soundlessly. They strike without warning nor mercy.

We are all fragments of dead gods, living out the broken battles of ages and aeons. Mixed and matched, distilled from ancient ancestors and blood that comes from the center of the world.