the Tower of Brahma

The Tower of Brahma - 31 - hollow saints (edit)

2011-05-16T08:14:00.000-07:00

11/02/04

"Rocking it out, and taking it in, I scour the city searching for the power and mystery of the chaotic moment. That random coincidence beating back the stifling categorization of structured simplicity. Where will this mad city of beauty and balance lead me?

To Jesus costumes and veggie dogs and everywhere between. Creation sings out on the open streets and celebration beckons from the parks. The air is colder but their hearts are warmer, toasting beside the warmth of myriad bliss and eternal communion. All things are won. The battle has long been over. Spread the word, the gospel of peace, love, and understanding."

"Mocking hellish fright, madness born of spite and ego. Gore dripping fangs of ferocity, gouging out the jugular of society's bloated body. Searing sensations, flickering flames in the darkness of my solitary torment. I can't know, I can no longer tell myself to remain calm.

I am infected with humanity and it poisons my mind. Inclined to stalk and purge and disembowel the darkest of mankind. Two guns in two hands firing a barrage of bullets through the zombie zealots shuffling down the streets. Chainsaw slash slicing limbs, shoutgun blasts decimating torsos, rendering them inanimate once more."

"My god!" she exclaimed. "How long have you been drying your spine?"

I wish I could have responded but since she was a formless female voice I felt it was unnecessary. Not to mention the fact that I felt wild and out of control, piloting a human-mech with animated wreckless abandon.

The rats are coming and surging forward towards me. One by one they creep and scurry.

The Tower of Brahma - Chapter 30 - getting old (edit)

2011-05-09T08:13:00.000-07:00

10/18/04

Spider walks over to Fenris who sits lounging on the couch. Waiting room rock sifts from the speakers as Fenris scratches his beard thoughtfully. Spider slides out the chair and sits backwards, bored stiff splashed across his face.

"So, what's the haps?" Spider sighed.

"Same old. Introspection and amazement at the dazzling spectacle of life changing events." Fenris groaned.

"Kind of a one trick pony, eh? Where's the fun and excitement?"

Fenris thought for a moment before replying. "He's off doing his own thing. Lots of Red Bull and vodka nights, long days of celebrity photo polishing, too busy to deal with us now that he's gotten what he was looking for."

"That fucker." Spider could barely muster the intensity to squash a bug.
The pair sat there for long days and nights, glaring at the patterns and designs of random dots upon the wall. These dots seemed to connect and words began to form. Physical objects began to break down into raw concepts. What was once sheet rock, paint and plaster became merely a wall, then the idea of a wall, then the mere word.

Wall.

Barrier, obstruction, support structure. A montage mosaic of literary thesaurus-esque concepts soon stood before them. Their waning interest in their own existence was slowly being infected with surging power. They knew what to do instinctually.

Spider tied back his hair in a samurai style smirking grin. Fenris straightened his tie and fixed the cuffs of his suit. One swift kick spilled the words to the floor, now just a splash of letters and half-recalled slices of verbiage. Black hole swirls spinning cylindrically into the eternal beyond.

"Nice." Spider stared into the great unknown and felt the blood rush up from his legs, coursing its way through his entire body.

Fenris took one last look at the holding cell he was about to leave behind. A glorious facsimile of life that sat somehow between moments like a bubble adrift in the seas of time and space. Now that they had burst a hole it began to spread.

"Too late to think about consequences my friend."

Fenris was wearing what he thought was the perfect outfit, Tarantino tough guy disheveled black suit, now rumpled and ready to rumble. He looked over at Spider who was wild eyed, tensed, filled to the brim with action scenes ready to tear free from his limber frame.

"Let's kick some ass."

And with that they leapt forward.

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

2011-05-02T08:12:00.000-07:00

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.

The Tower of Brahma - 28 - we're all the main character (edit)

2011-04-25T08:11:00.000-07:00

09/23/04

Everything is different.

Where am I? Who am I? How did I get here? My eyes open for what seems like the first time and I see the world lies before me, open and blossoming wild.

In the dark my naked sensitivity cries alone.

I am a writer. Writing down the words of my life as they click out the drama. Alternating thumbs slamming letter after letter, casting the spell. I'm walking down the cold New York City streets and putting something down onto my handheld portable device. Digitally drawing the chalk outline of my former self. That crying monstrosity, whining and misaligning my life.

He is gone forever.

I'm twenty eight years old now. My next stage falls from the tree of life, and I'm loving that freefall plunge to the ground. I started writing a book and then the story became my life. I have seemingly tapped into some positive force that is guiding me towards some amazing adventure. The lines between fiction and reality have blurred a bit, and now it seems as if I truly am the main character. My story has just started and like a stone skipping across calm waters, segments and situations play out with the dramatic resonance of perfected life.

The lights dim just for us as incidentals blink out of existence. She has guided me into this life, reminded me that I am at the controls, and inspired me to plot this mad journey across time and space. I stare into her auburn eyes and feel the divine infinite that lies between us. Although I can't fully see it, I sense this void between us is composed of layers upon layers of story. A mosaic collage of personality pasted up, each fragment a puzzle piece given to us by those we have, and those we had, in our lives.

I used to feel sad about this space, sitting in this dark alone, these walls and barriers preventing the sublime merging of our souls. But my intentions were wrong, my perceptions skewed. They're decorations, accessories, costumes, and yes, occasionally walls, damming the flow of turbulent and tumultuous change. We're all fragile inside this singing white light.

I walk tall these days. Upright and confident, looking people in the eyes and not turning away. The mad poet has birthed the king deep within me.

The tower of brahma - 27 - pt. FIVE

2011-04-23T12:56:00.000-07:00

09/13/04

The discordians favor my change by providing me the randomly generated combinations of 2 & 3. My entire life vacuum sucks itself into a 5x10 storage singularity, designated number 32. The Freemasons are taking me in with welcoming Orwellian arms.

Illuminated conspiracy of thought space, ideas too big and ancient to die. Lumbering masses of cancerous belief systems slither and grumble across the liquid planet. Flowing to high points of saturated strength, these reversed rivers of backed up dysfunction blacken the heights of humanity's aspiration.

From the roof of the building I can see the city's profile. Satisfyingly smooth and vivid, with the picturesque surround of the finest set design. The eye aligns with the calculated positioning of its architecture.

Sidewinder jetfighter dogfighting yelp into the yawning cosmos of the city night. Silly stoned seeking safe passage across the sidewalk skies. Piloting on reflexes and failed training pod crashes, somehow you know the universe will carry you through this. Faith of the divine flows through you as access to the infinite possibilities of tomorrow shines bright in your eyes.

Like Pluto spinning wild and loose, distinct in my own planetary orbit around the solar center of the party, I am the lone wolf launching echo coyote calls into the still night air. The primal placenta lowers itself upon me and I burst through. Painted stars on a dayglow daydream, the world is reborn before my eyes as I witness the exchange of terror and birthing symbology. Trickster ghouls and goblins of grotesque decend and drop among us. Celestial birthed madmen and women stomping out a tribal dance of our spirit. Submission to the beat, the sweaty swaggering and hands rubbing across your body reminding you of what life is all about.

The savage alterego mirrored and reversed through my center beats wildly at the constricting forces and wriggles its way into my primal heart. Jungle jive jangling and dangling and wrangling my mind into the wave of visceral viscosity. Primate chest slam, rhythm of the slamming shoes, head bobbing to the crowd's sync. Set ablaze by the forgoing of intellect and entrance to sensation.

Beacons of light thrust upwards, a spotlight looking for god and reason and purpose and prayer. Illuminating instead the debris caught swirling in the path of the twin beams of radiant hope. We raise our glasses high and toast the search for meaning and survival in the face of adversity.

Good times.

the Tower of Brahma - twentyseven - Part 4 - White Triangles

2011-04-22T12:55:00.000-07:00

09/08/04

Gut wrenches and heaves out the pain. Droplets of liquid nostalgia run down my cheeks as the exhumed pain bursts forth and escapes into the ether. Opposing viewpoints invade my core self, and flip the switch. The light is born into my heart, and I have won. I have made it to the other side.

Oppressed by tyrannical self-sacrifice, seemingly self inflicted, but knowing now that I had been controlled all along.

Spider sat in the driver's seat spinning the steering wheel with a madman's fervor. Fenris lies bleeding in the back seat, clutching at the pain, grasping at his insides. "I'm not going to make it..."

"Do you want to make it?" Spider calmly turned to address me as the car spun crazily across the landscape with a blue-screened intensity.

"Yes." Fenris choked up between bubbles of blood.

"Then let go and look down."

I looked down at my stomach and saw that the gore was gone. Not only gone, but taken away completely as if it were never there at all. I felt lighter all of a sudden and felt euphoria work its way up my body, cell by cell, nerve by nerve. Electric fire dance of my soul.

The car explodes and I'm left sitting in the middle of the street, cobblestones pressing into my flesh. I stand and wobble, finding my legs. Still drunk and stumbling from the numbing intoxication of my mind. Step after step I walk towards my fall. I see it on the horizon. Time collapses and I am suddenly wavering on the edge of oblivion. Waving hands and flailing arms, internal gyroscope flux towards a tippy toe drop. Then the push.

A firm hand shoves me forward and the momentum spins my built up revolutions and forges the fire in my insides. Revved up and roaring, I feel supercharged tenacity singing through my veins. Pounding, pulsating, power erupting beneath my skin and with a flexing of my arms the wall shatters to splinters.

My other arm lashes out and the far wall is atomized in a telepathic sunburst. Arms crossed, muscles tensed, I slam my hands down to the ground and the remaining fragments of the prison I built for myself crumbles to pieces.

I am naked. Alone in white nothingness. The void reflecting back the sheen of my self. The pure and utter love I have kept from myself. A beautiful and splendid man standing firm and tall. Lines and wrinkles come and burrow into me as I wipe away the boyhood haunts and etch out the spirit of man.

Spider and Fenris extend themselves outward, creating a unified being. Trinity divination, mythic mysticism, and the blade comes smoothly from the rock.

the Tower of Brahma - Chapter 27.3 - Son and the Moon

2011-04-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

09/01/04

Submerged. Exhale. Inhalation of manhood filling my lungs, gripping my chest with a firm man's hand. Breathing is labored and exhausting. These turbulent times are beating the soft parts out of me. Forging firm and stern from weakness and shame.

I bask in the mirror of lunar delicacy, driven to a point of singular unthought. My mind is still and ripples only occasionally, but lies quiet and calm under the moon's cold, marble touch. Moonlit massage sends shivers down my spine and I am whole.

I begin to slip and fall from its grip and I flounder about flailing, reaching for something to cling to. But the cold moon defies me, its warmth and glow the mirrored brilliance of the obstructed sun. It cares not for me or my woes, or me at all. It is a rock in the sky, spinning like clockwork, spinning on until our final days.

Lunar fantasies come crashing back down to the dirt. Firm soil, rich and ripe for growth of something from the smallest of nothing. A seed planted will produce something that serves a purpose in this world of practical necessities.

The light of the moon still reigns down upon me, but I do not regret my fall from its splendor. Instead I cherish my brief moments wrapped in her arms, when it had transcended the reality of science and became myth just long enough for me to feel the ancient female flow.

Leaving her is hard, but I feel firm and stout. I feel chiseled and cold. Stuck in funk and the mire of an unquiet mind. I please myself through her, not feeling my own intense emotions but rather escaping into her pulses of exstacy. Feeding off her intense submission to the power I wield, I grow stronger and more alive.

What do I want? To cast the light and warm the world? Doing what I can to deliver unto the masses long summer days basking in my warm glow. The earth trims my light and paints the moon as part of our dance. From full to new, from new to full, our hide and seek games with our carousel hearts.

I can never own the moon, nor would I want to. She is splendor and beauty, basking and coming alive under the son's loving gaze. To capture her is to deny her that which makes her so appealing, her independent death and rebirth.

What would the sun want? Is it simply there to provide and burn on alone in the dark void of the unknown cosmos? Where is its purpose and desires? Buried deep within its swirling gasses and supernova heat lies something that we will never see, but something we will never be without.

the Tower of Brahma - twentysevenpoint2 - For all my feelings I'm heartless

2011-04-20T12:55:00.001-07:00

09/04/04

I sit back and take a long look at the screen in front of me. Digitized and dazzling, I have become embedded into a carved language sculpture. Suddenly chapters had appeared in place of my pain. Months had passed and life continued without me. I immediately spun around to share my newfound fiction with those in my life to find they were gone, evaporated by time's passage.

I stepped outside and ghost town blues whispered through the lonely suburban streets. I walked on towards my future and the world dissolved into a nostalgic mist. Lines of homes all cut from the same cloth, row after row of variations on a theme. Similarly different in living out the same story. Every house a different fragment of psyche. A fractal reproduction of the replicating viral lifestyle. It is among these plastic castles that I see that awareness is selling out, taking comfort for safety and the joy of being part of the machine.

Disillusionment.

Apocalyptic details strewn about the land. Laughing fools celebrate the sad sickness of their souls. Accept the pain, love the disease, praise the decay. Fantastic ignorant fantasies. Fucking lies in a shot glass, swallowed down hard like a bitter bitch. Wallowing winters succumb my sweltering humid summers, and I am again devoured by my own silly daydreams.

Enough of these dry, single revelations tossed back, bellied up at the bar. Frightening fictions breed like fractals fornicating on the hot, sweaty streets. I am alone and dignified in my manhood. Responsible and empowered, alone and terrified.

Women swarm to cover and protect in self serving manners, but I will not submit to charms and spells of a duplicitous nature. I hate the vulnerable beast I show to you, shamed and born of gallant grotesque.

How do you know how to be a man in the land of selfish adult children? How can I walk among the inferior that I put upon a pedestal, afraid to be exposed as the wannabe I know myself as.

Alone in my loneliest hours, separated by thought and deed, I feel remorse and hate and anger and love and a sadness that sickens me to my core.

I love the pain. Inflicted, inflection, virus mutation. This nightmare of persona must have an end.

the Tower of Brahma - twentyseven - nudeerection (edit)

2011-04-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

08/26/04

I run from the setting son and head to the East, seeking enlightenment from dawn. But it is dusk and crashing all around me is the day's possibilities. The cold vacuum of night is ensnaring me in the promise of union. They sleep soundlessly, resting and interacting in the astral chat rooms of symbolic imagery. Mathematical equations running psychological storytelling through pop culture lenses. Novel lives.

Life is fun when you're remaining detached and aloof, riding along, absorbing the rollercoaster simulated sensations and channeling them into concentrated fiction. A story about how exciting life can be as you unravel your identity, strip away your self, expose yourself naked and raw and reeling before the cold hard stare of the frightened masses.

But life is discomfort, upsetness, awkwardness all spinning in a mad Shiva ballet. Collisions of ourselves against the others in our lives, bumper car disasters pushing us off in a new direction.

Run and hide behind broken sentence structures, grammatical shrapnel, and a vocabulary enmeshed in babbling incoherency. A false promise of exposed obscurity, hidden in the fog of poetic phrases, I am naked and shivering. I hope these words can save me.

I'm thinking about suicide again for the first time in two years and I have come face to face with the life that exists above and beyond these words. Who do you call when you're sitting alone, more alone than ever? What friend or family member do you call? Who will deliver to you your salvation from this pain that is called living?

I daydreamed longingly of my funeral as a teen. Wiped out of existence forever leaving behind a dead body in the ground. People gathered around in a much too late show of support, with murmurs of regret passed among them. What could they have done? Why did he do this? Would any of them try to see into my life and get to know me? And would they let me know if what they found was worth keeping here?

Fantastic images of self-obsessed, morbid, decadence adrift in the possibility of some deeper connection with someone, anyone, even posthumously. Why do I need to deny them my presence to get their attention? What do I need that their mere presence can't give me? Why aren't their words enough? Selfish, egotistic self-termination can not be the only answer to my longing for a soul deep connection.

Endymion dreaming eternally, seeking respite and the continual hum of divine lucidity. What is this poet's longing that aches deep within me? What true love can fill this hole, so profoundly unfathomable it defies explanation and exorcism? A tumor of need, desire, and longing grows at the bottom of my soul. I seek relief at every oasis of consciousness, stumbling mad and dry through mirage after mirage.

My cross is blazing behind me in the distance. Ahead is a fortified structure jutting out from the sands of space/time. A private building standing indignantly alone amid the wasteland. The X of my genetic map points to this Oedipus Complex.

I sit outside the doors for years, my skin growing thick as layers of dead skin push their way to the surface. I've waited so long that I have forgotten if I ever even knocked in the first place.

I know I visited the many small huts and shacks along the way. Paying my stay with the labor I gave. Empty priestesses cuff me down to the bed frame, begging to be loved. Loved? A mission, a quest for love is where I began this journey, crossing the landscape delivering lessons of vulnerable opposition.

I don't know love, nor life, nor anything at all. I have learned the mechanics of our search, seen the revealed puppetry of falsity and obsessive need. Psychological leeches seeking comfortable symbiotic life. Where is the spirit and beauty of love everlasting?

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 26 - Breastfed Universe (edit)

2011-04-11T13:31:00.000-07:00

08/09/04

Outside on the street, a few quarts low of alcohol, I am a jagged gear. Unable to plug myself into the machine, forcibly ejected from the insincere, conflicting cool.

Group sing-alongs inevitably rise, then wane with the consumption of mass quantities of alcoholic beverages. I am trapped, swung on a loose orbit around stellar spheres of saturated celebrations. Drinking, rocking, killing brain cells, and carving off our more sensitive sadness. Melancholy mashed and converted into raw party, putty for us to form an idol within our soul.

Gleaming, grinning, idle worship at the altar of our own universe spawned within. Moody blew in and knocked down the cardboard cutout action hero. Smoldering tough guy intensity flickers in the corner of the bar and I am reminded. Asskicker agony burns around me and I know that I will have to fight my way free.

Smothered in non-existence, I furiously fight for the surface. Thrashing and kicking my way into a brighter mindframe, my inner avatar is flailing, lost in silly phrases of copyrighted coolness.

"I am unique and lovely in a splendid sorority, adrift in the sadness of humanity."

Their wail is now heard as weak cries of affection effects, begging to be heard, by themselves as much as by you.

Engaged inane conversations with the bastard children of brighter tomorrows. Enlightened and unable to deal with their inherent divinity, these angelic monsters smash themselves to bits, feeling unworthy of godhood. A tribe of segregated and solitary lives, alone in their immense misfortune. Broken society, children gone amuck, chaotic slaves to a foreign falsehood.

I type away like a lunatic, fringe benefits from a loose sentence. Concepts that fry my mind, flirting with my inner ego. I hate the surface me, sweating out symmetrical similes.

Twin Diana appear beside me, guiding me through adversity. On my left I have the innocent goddess, drunk on the poisons of man. On the right is the cultured and wise hunter, walking tall with amazonian pride. Twin sparrows ushering in the end, signaling the transference.

SHOTS! Rings out cool NYC summer night. Guru and profits wring out the bar, oozing us out the doors of Lucy's and we land in another galaxy. Reality warbles rings around us like Saturn's spinning planetary debris.

Colliding and careening we find our flow and the night spins wildly on.

In the morn, my face flushed with hot blood, Feline pressure rests softly upon me. I awoke with a grin.

Summer Sunday night comes on unnoticed and the midnight oil burns. The ceiling is throbbing and pulsing to the beat, with teenage drunken sex fantasies bursting to life strategically placed. PseudoPsychoSexual satellite dish, suckling love from the cosmic teat, basking in the hot searing of the blind white light.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 25 - Mustang Frankenstein (edit)

2011-04-04T13:30:00.000-07:00

08/03/04

The camera swoops in a low slo-mo arc, swirling around us in a Bruckheimer heroic moment, power surging as the jet explodes behind us. The flames felt warm and comfortable behind me as Spider and I stood firm, rising to our full stature, secure in our manhood, and ready to rock.

Guitar solo cool roared through the air as my screaming fist connected with the man's chest. His suit seemed to curl and recoil, bracing the impact. A simulated smile flashed across his screen, a charade meant to goad me, mocking my inner monster. Thunderous hammerings of my titanium fists, fueled by the atomic engine fired up in my chest, and I began to crack through the stone. Power slammed down through my button-down denim destroyer legs, landing devastating karate kicks to his midsection. Dropping slow and dipping low, spinning gracefully sweeping out his legs, I shoot back up and forward kick his falling body thirty feet, embedding him in the far wall.

"Nicely done." Spider stepped out from behind me and I never felt such sidekick pride before in my life.

Mathematical resonances tingle in my brain as I wallow in the moment, absorbing the entire scene using Sherlock Science Logick mantras. Angles and trajectories mass up into raw feelings, converting to gut instincts. I know where the guns are, where the badguys stand, and just how far I can throw them. I slip out of the stasis with a sly grin. I swear my canines grew a fair amount as a growl subtly drifted from my lungs. Silver mane streaking down my spine as my feet tore free. Tearing across the scene I pounded into the wall flipping and bounding, free and wild roaring across this wild plain between me and my enemy.

There I was. Three years old, my face locked in the jaws of a beast. Fangs drank of my flesh and I was held in judgment by the aeons of canine. A ferocious fatality was imminent when mercy was handed down. I was spared, but marked. My eyes were lost in the power of eternal savage salvation. The ignoble beings that carried me away, cleaning my wounds, they were no longer my parents.

Homoerotic competition, physical fights forcing confrontation, tactile sensations from the icon of your hate, yourself. Your male serenity singing out for complex union. Flickering, simmering in the darkness, all that is corrupt in the young man stands at the far end of the stage, laughing maniacally, engorged in its power and deception. The flames of futile dominance cast long shadows that dance across the textures of the stones, patterns emerging from the spinning of the flames. The air carries the flow of the raging river, splashing towards the overconfident blaze.

The love of a father aches in us all. Sitting outside the pack, waiting to come back in. To be brought back in from the rain. And we don't need to look up from our shame to see the disgust splashed across our father's face.

It's not defiance, as we look up. It's concern that draws our eyes together. We will see his weaknesses, and we will accept his sickness. The half of you that was forged from his clay aligns with the interlocking connectivity that he carries in his fleshcell. Meta-scientific psychosis mental delusional schizophrenic symbiosis with your exiled manhood.

Cowboy howl as the soaring spinkick smashes the dummydaddydestroyerdrone Spider unleashed upon me. With delayed timing, a few second count, it's insides blew outwards spraying the sanitary far wall with motor oil, cigarettes and beer. Foreground shot as the drone smashes to the floor with me in the background, zoomed in to reveal pose 38, musclecar!mystique. My upper half purred like a streamlined screamer, candy apple red and lined with chrome. My legs pulsed and inched forward like an inpatient Mustang, milliseconds before the green.

Action slides south, leaving behind my polished body, punked out with kungfu!cool and rockstar!sneer.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 24 - quasar tripping

2011-03-28T09:29:00.000-07:00

07/31/04

Like junkies tapping the vein of a happy childhood memory, linking today's minute pleasure with that innocent moment from long ago. A pedophiliac parade of our pathetic personality, unable to have the matured sublimed adult satisfaction we crave. Crack cocaine cut credit cards, shopping till we drop, exhausted, strung out and unsatisfied.

Mine is the story of man.

My kicks glowed with the smooth burn of crimson charcoal, tinged scorched black from the spatial ash. I initiated the cooldown mode and soon the sneakers slowed to a moody blue hue, crisp and crackling like ice. Laser slicing through the delirious daydream, I found myself standing at the starting line of a new race.

The memories of the skipped by day started catching up to me. Thousands of seconds transferred over translucent miles. Slowly at first, then with increasing fierce viscosity, the day flooded my mind.

Fighting through the teeming masses, strung together in tight bonds of insecure immaturity, I found myself in the villains' lair. Convention defied, I sought out the truth only to beaten low by the exploited smut of boyhood dreams. Muscle bound monstrosities and silicon shots rang out with the reverberations of celebrated tenacity.

Cramming backwards, more life fired through my neurons. A fellow agent, lost and babbling truth incarnate, found on the polar opposite end of my old life. He told me of his ways, his insights and life as he sees it true. I told him of the training I had received and delivered to him my initiate unlocking pamphlet. This must have been why I was brought here.

Here to low point, flipped across the country on fighter jet blues. Roaring, rocketing, spiraling through streams of cirrus salutations, Spider piloted the jet clear across the land. Stomach drops and pulse pounding plunges reduced my nervous system to putty. Missiles penetrated our enemies' secure systems as they attempted to halt our progress. Explosive results reduced the rabble to rubble. The reach of their feeble old world forces fell far short of our liquid camouflaged, subsonic, bionic blastjet.

"Hold onto your lunch!" Spider lurched the controls sending our fragile flesh, temporarily encased in metal tubing, into a barrel roll diving down below, where the radar scans could not follow.

Spider had met me at the airport, standing at the far end of the security tunnel. Metal detectors and lazy security shoved me through. Yelled at and barked orders to remove my potentially dangerous equipment, I fumbled through, beeping only once. Beat red, feeling lame and abused, I made my way to Spider's side.

"Quit that shit. Don't impose their everyday tyranny on yourself. They have no true power over you save those several seconds of your life."

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 23 - Hail! the SpiderGod!

2011-03-21T13:28:00.000-07:00

07/03/04

The futureburger awaits consumption as I sit down trying to figure it all out. The sun glows supernova summer and deep in my cave I scratch etchings in my virtual cavespace. Does this ring true? Can near non-existence read as adventure pulp?

Digital bloodshed flows before me, ringing with true sympathetic sadism. I'm throwing written jabs and hooks, swinging for the soft spots. Nothing seems to connect as I anticipate the dialogue flow that is to come. Characters? Not within this story. This story is the voice, omniscient and trustworthy, blessed with unified purpose.

"Where am I going with this?", I wondered as I looked up at Chow Yun Fat delivering a beat down. "I'm treading thin water here. No one's following this are they? Maybe we've grabbed a few lizard-brained types, snatching a high off the linguistic-lysurgic-acid that I distilled into minature bitmapped graphics that dance before your eyes as they read these words.

"These exact words."

DING-GONG.

Who the hell is this? I'm supposed to have the apartment to myself today and of course someone drops by. I get up to get the door and I see the intense shadow shape that surges my entire body with mental stimulation. A full body tickle up the nervous system peaking in a glorious blaze within our minds.

Who the fuck is this? The sun beat down hard like a solar death ray charring the edges off this monolithic figure. I pushed open the screen door as I began to fall to my knees.

"Hey there guy. Watch yourself."

His arm was there like it was carved from stone. It felt real and true, unwavering in its strength as I clung to it for support.

"Thanks."

"No problem. So how's it going?"

"Life? Okay I guess. I'm getting used to it."

"It's a bit easier coming from the other side. I don't envy you."

"Really? It's kind of hard to judge how I'm doing."

"Well, I'm liking the work so far."

"You've read it?"

"Absolutely. It's rough around the edges but there's some raw talent there."

"You think so? It's so hard for me to accept that. Not sure why. I guess I feel I don't deserve to be good at anything."

"You see man? That's the kind of crap I'm talking about. Nobody is going to like somebody with that frame of mind. It just poisons the whole package."

"I kind of see what you mean. It's like how I'm acting with other people is sort of who I am in the world, and who I am in the world is who I think I am. It's a symbiotic nature I guess. Wrestling that duality of thinking, between our role in society and our internal self, that's where we need the balance."

"You're on the right lines of thinking but that's also your problem."

"I don't follow."

"Thinking, and adding all that nonsense of what people are thinking and needing to know. It's all crap. That only defines you so far. The rest is standing up like a man, making a mark, carving out a path that is righteous and in following with your obsessive idealistic nature. You owe the world nothing less than greatest world you can imagine."

"It's hard to really say I get what you mean, to truly understand it. I guess that's why we need the story. The story in all its variations allow us to become initiated in all manner of schizophrenic states. Not only crossing cultural influence now, we mix in the mental states of the creators of our celebrity society. We long to bask in the sun of the temporarily divine rays of stardom."

"Making the mix this time around all the more potent. You've got access to the minds of a world of like-minded agents."

"Wow. This is just like one of those really heavy conversations I've always wanted to have."

"Well it couldn't be anyone else's."

"Jeez. I just realized I haven't even invited you in. C'mon in. Do you want a beer or something?"

"Yeah, sure. Grab two and meet me outside."

With that he let the door close between us. I stumbled back into the cold dark of the apartment. I found my way to the fridge and plucked out two silver bullets.

I stepped into the open air, betwixt by the celebratory satisfaction that hangs all around me, guitar solo sirens singing the summertime to life. The ice breaks with a double bass slam roaring to life at the tip of a metal wand.

He sits at the top of the stairs reveling in the descriptive sanity that grumbles like a weekend run of a motorcycle engine. The start of the free floating tummy-rumblings that weave through our bodies at the ascent of the thundering rollercoaster.

He laughs at me. My silly tendencies to relish in the simple moments.

"They were always my favorite too."

If there was another me sitting down typing this out, would I create a being that sat all-knowing at the forefronts of the gap between the writer and the reader? Would I have a gatekeeper that was a bit of me reading the story I was living? Was I deeply connected to the divinity of my destiny? What did any of that even mean?

What does any of this really mean? Where is this voice really coming from? This is your own individual voice, that much is true. Warbled into existence by the continuing pace of your word consumption. But it's my voice, my shape that you are building in your mind. My order sculpted from your mass.

Is this a story, a novel, a short story, a poem, prose, biography, autobiography, psychotic, sane, selfish, sorry, sad, singular, new, old, influenced, original, boring, satisfactory, sharp, dull, interesting, arresting, developing, daring, dung, fun, fair, factory fed, or hacked out?

Who am I and what do I have to say?

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 22 - (edit)

2011-03-14T13:27:00.000-07:00

06/18/04

The circle closes in on me as the symphonic sadness that birthed me anew seeps into my ears with syrupy serenity. My gaskets were blown and I was running on pistons pumping only partially. Skipped a beat, and fell down skidding to a halt before this very moment. Arms flailing in a vertigo twist, perched on the thin line between eternity and infinity.

The mind warps in the heat, bending and buckling like a 45 in the sidewalk sun. The sweat feels good, oozing and sliming out the gunk that forms the filth layer of interaction. Getting in those last few moments of immersed muck, writing the memory down as the most absolute joy of youthful abandon.

Gripping the sides of the obsidian machine, I entered the ritualistic magic word, granting access to the dementions within. The words are beaten loose from their holding. Picked seemingly at random, but the pattern emerges as the selection becomes more instinctual, more dynamic. Vocabulary increases as the nothingness of unthought becomes a buzzing and radiant beacon, beaming my message to unwitting carriers.

Buzzing like a wasp, singing and searing under my skin. My mind's horror sees the seductive insanity of spiders' legs marching to a primal beat. I revel in its fictitious effect, and have finally grasped the concept. I am beyond damnation now.

Ticking madnesz in my ears drives me towards the end of this, this monstrosity of monotony. Ready the throne, I'm coming home.

the T.O.B. - chapter twentyone: !

2011-03-07T19:47:00.000-08:00

06/10/04

Bobbing in the wave like a buoyant brain, soaking in settlements of sedimental sentimentality. Giving my self over to a brighter power, brought low with scalpel surgery, coding a brand upon my lizard tale. Forced to forge a great new travesty after all. More will see than can be shown the great new ending of it all.

Revolting developmental diatribes of counter-anti-revolutionaries burning bright into the night sky, bounding over endless mornings of decimated determination. My mind skips words like rocks rocking out over the context of an elongated elimination of eternal inequities or rather failings of my myriad deities.

Flexed fornicating future fixes me with its sly smiling sadism. Skidding my way towards that calamity chasm, that tangible terror, fearsome failings, I find a way to avoid and ingest those pains. Here's the cheat, write it down, and gobble it up.

Now you're in. In lyke Flinn. Skidoo skidoo.

Bullets whizzing, rocketing rockets roaring, and explosions freaking exploding under foot! Gadget shoes, made indestructible by Gear Goneloose, ricketing railgun blasts of a thousand rayguns firing in unison. A flip and sail, as well as a maneuver of epic proportions, cause friction between my shoes and the side of the building, sparking sparkling sparks frying metal shreds as I skip my way out.

A beer in the dark, Sunday sex looming out there in the dark gloom of the urban trawl, somewhere beyond the milky colored glass that lie in the background of the enemy before me. Spider's incubator shell lies next to him, shivering, sad and serene in a beautiful purple prose.

The bartender eyes me with a piercing caress from behind his protective lenses. My hair hung loose and long in a faux seventies rock, sensitive and seductive, demure to the bitter end. Alcohol is passed, as is the acceptance of my cover story, burning coal red under the soft lights of the scene.

Dark behind the shades, gliding effortlessly, carried by the turning and swirling wind, blind and exposed in the public grounds of the "world". Memories of Spider's brooding display of power and forgiving frankness. Confession drips from my tongue in an Achilles tone, emptying all problems before the Bastard.

Recall of the mangled bones baring my back, broken and then pieced together to hold this slacking, coward's posture before the people. Brought low, made forever the comedic riot, slapped and slammed with a saddened clown smile. Brawn and boldness broke these shards I call bones. Not the physique of the hero, but the Bully, Bastard, Bruised thug, bearing a grudge on the light.

Shots rang out all around, fired from my mind's barrel, sending slivers of adaptive imaginative reality sailing into the beast of infinite openness, and I swear I heard that Bastard roar.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 20 - Ghosts of the World (edit)

2011-02-28T07:46:00.000-08:00

05/17/04

"Sitting in the circle of six, is the seventh, the universal. He is a man, yet no less than the sum of their parts. This being that is born anew into the cycle, is never able to experience and grow past that childlike love of the world. The desires of the six maneuver their shining center, birthing him as a being to carry their burdens, to shoulder their woes. The center is blessed with the earthly pains of his six."

I sat back after typing up this sentence, my mind soaring on a placebo mental enhancement tea, and my belly full with vegetable soup. Bobbing up and down, soaking in the primordial anxiety of our collision culture, I stared off into a world and simple truth. A holy txt file was forming, something that resembled answers, impossibly improbable answers, but answers that made sense to the state of mind I had reached.

Stripped of all the subcategories of me/them personalities, I found myself there, as one of the six. And I found the truth to be that we all secretly want to be the seventh, the person that blossoms, and not the discarded, fragmented shards of their shell. My ego fights furiously beneath my mind, claiming its royalty based on suffering served.

The story rises from our bodies like steam after a long, hot shower. It unfolds before us like a map, showing only the most dualistic of events. North, south. Good, evil. The story is our program laid bare, our essence of humanity's design, drawn and charted. As the story's power grows and more minds are laid bare before its awesome presence, the more we become the true bearer's of the original, the ideal, six.

We are the Ghosts of the World. Mad thinkers of a free design, burning with the passion of united resonance.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 19 - Treading Trembling Tolstoy (edit)

2011-02-21T19:45:00.000-08:00

05/13/04

Spawned from children, ideas of a world that is ideal and stamped with a singular love of itself, burning with the intensity of long lost love, summer daydreams, and a friendship cut down in its prime. Dormant in my skull is the map to this place, a hollow key born of madness, carved from my bones.

Spider grabs my brain, smooshing his fingers through the membrane of my frontal lobe, and grips tightly to my cerebral roots. Unearthed in mind, I am freed. Free to be dragged, stumbling, wobbly, trying to find my legs as I tip toe towards the future. I laugh and giggle as we careen past the games that everyone keeps changing the rules to, the one game that has become a game for all. Folding cardboard lives prop open all around me, the contestants all vigorously moving their pieces about, reciting line after line about how the game is to be played, what I can and can not do.

"Poor fools.." I mumble to myself, half delirious on the vapors of metaphysical-fictional travel through the ether of cosmic chum.

The smack of a thousand vengeful teachers resonated on the side of my face for years after Spider had let loose with the blow. I remembered the smack as if from a third person perspective, seen as if through the eyes of everyone but myself.

"What makes you think you're better than they are?" His words had been the most painful part of the reality lesson I was experiencing. A de-bratification if you will.

"They're doing what they think is right, some of them. Maybe they don't see past the game but they're trying and that was ten times more than you were doing. They have the drive, they get it done, they make the changes. If you pity them, you might as well pity the wind or the sea. Each does it part, every crack covered, and every detail taken care of in its way. It can not even be any other way. They must play; their ups and downs are the mechanism that keeps this fire burning. They empower you with their will. Be good to them and you will not be denied."

He left me there, sitting, trapped in the muck. It's funny, once you are submerged, the pain and relief is like a gift. It's the struggle that keeps you running. It's the suffering that makes or breaks you.

Solve the riddle of birth, the unification that rests in your own soul, the merging of two to one.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 18 - Polarization of Persona (edit)

2011-02-14T19:45:00.000-08:00

05/04/04

With a shrug of the shoulders and a chuckle to himself, I accepted my fate. It was a good fate, far as fates go. Not too sure of the particulars, but I'll tell you this...it's bound to be a ride.

Shot like a cannon, soaring for a few brief moments like a singular and spectacular god slicing through the heavens. Too high to recall the pain of continued existence, united with the true nature of all mankind. More than complete, and less than yourself. A you so you that it becomes a you that is a meta-you. A persona that vibrates within, drawn to the surface of the pond by the intense vibrational creative fires that rage so nearby. Coming up for air, linked with several minds in one delicious moment, a communion of craft.

I am thankful. I don't know why I deserve this, so I count my blessings and pack my bags. A vacation, no, a journey, an epic quest even. A task so heinous and fraught with peril that only I, with my training and drive, could accomplish. I was set loose, freed and shown the light beyond my perceived galaxy. Looking over my shoulder I knew I could not continue without my flock.

But first my training must be completed. I have been initiated and seek only the completion of the courses necessary to destroy every damn, dirty idea that seeks to crush my brothers in chains around the world. Enslaved by the genetic memory of self-imposed limitations, taught to us by those superior earthly powers that once dominated our world.

"They're comfortable, you know. They'll hate you for tearing down their defining pains." Agent Spider placed his firm grip down on my shoulder. "And you sure as shit better have a good idea what comes after."

I looked ahead and through, peering at the patterns of spiraling synchronicity that lie before me and behind me. The collapsing conundrum of all existence was just around the corner from now.

"Man, I can't wait."

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 17 - Dreaming With Power pt.1 (edit)

2011-02-07T19:44:00.000-08:00

04/26/04

I dreamt of the rest stop last night. I awoke in the wee hours of the morning to pee, and as my bladder squeezed itself empty, I ran the dream through the higher realms of my mind.

I stood impatiently in line. The people disgusted me, trapped me there on that line. I was unable to reach the fast food sustenance, the poisoned treat for all happy cancer mutants. I was equally unable to back out of my purchase of the once desired death meals. I was committed to fulfilling my duty as a consumer, unparalleled in laziness, cheapness and disdain for my healthy well being. I began to seethe with hatred for those around me, blaming them for my inability to leave this doomed transaction of corporate consumer hell.

I opened the bottom buttons of my rumpled suit jacket, and then drove my fist into the lower back of the bastard directly in front of me. My grip found its way under his chin and it pulled him straight back. He fell to his knees, helpless before me in a false penitence of fear. I knew him instantly. The bully.

He was a bastard and deserved getting taken down. I did it for everyone that he pushed around and shoved so we wouldn't question his absolute authority. This fascist bastard, with his insecurity lying exposed like the Achilles heel it is, was ripe and ready to be knocked down a peg. It simmered inside, boiling and rising like smoke, drunk on the awesome power of control, you were pushed too far.

His weak spots exposed to you, struck and pierced every single one, relinquishing him of that shred of power he had hoarded away. Complete and utter destruction of this being was necessary and just. At least it felt that way at the time. But then you felt pity. For him and yourself. Shame, for allowing the power to be used, and so brutally to one so obviously weak. Who was the bully? The one addicted to this moment. I was sick, repulsed at the pride, the joy of obliteration and domination.

He had his revenge in a surprise attack that would forever keep me in my archetype of the coward. My ribs made the noise one would hear while cracking the knuckles of every finger on both hands. Shoulders slumped forward, concave chest. Instantly I had been given the demeanor of the fearful and lazy. Wallowing in the shame, I was left wide open to retaliation. Deprived of my throne, I had to finish out the role of the coward, but he took with him the humbled ego of a Liar King.

And now he was defenseless before me, ready for my judgment.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 16 - Rankled Undressing Purgatory (edit)

2011-01-31T19:43:00.000-08:00

04/22/04

Unraveled like the Invisible man, that's what I felt like. With a bandage wrap for every self-applied label and restriction, tied tight in order to help conceal anything real. Hidden beneath a flamboyant display of primary colors, the lightning icon pulsing against my chest, charging my system, preparing me for the physical exhumation of the decaying ick of my soul.

The nights of chest heaving coughs prepared me for the pain of regurgitation. I squatted on the small patch of grass across the street and heaved out the mucus milk that had been gurgling inside. My stomach acids burned away all traces of infection. I was now purged of the poison, and immediately felt a swell of purpose and destiny.

The restless night had bared witness to the epic battle of the last remaining pieces of the decayed person I once knew myself as. The cardboard cutout personality that I had built so as to seem acceptable by society, or more precisely, my view of reality. I made myself what I thought reality was, and amazingly enough, I merely had to change my perspective to have it all shift. It seems so easy to say in retrospect. Choose to be happy, choose to be confident, choose to be optimistic. As much as you hate the clichés, it's the truth.

I am in search for answers to the simple, the true understanding of the most basic qualities of living life. We only reach understanding when we are removed from the situation we seek an answer to. Only through distance can things be appreciated for the positive or negative experience that they were. The bigger picture is revealed through hindsight, a greater knowledge of life is gained by simply leaving the moment behind.

Early fundamental moments therefore dictate the answers to all future decisions. First confrontation, first metaphysical lesson, first sexual moments, these are the pinpoints stuck on the map of our lives. These situations curve and bend the wavelength of our minds into behavior cycles and only through a breaking of the cycle is knowledge gained and evolution of thought takes hold.

Awareness is first. You must awaken. Wake up. There's more than meets the eye out here. There's some shit going down. Take a look around and see what makes you mad, what makes you happy, what makes you sad, and then do it all. Confront and challenge and don't be afraid to speak up and say something completely stupid and idiotic. Fear humiliation no longer.

Naked. Exposed. Bare. In front of people. A class. Co-workers. Random strangers. They laugh and point and stare and condemn. Some see weakness and go in for the kill. Leeches, sucking you dry, bolstering their power for everything you have to offer in return. So afraid of betrayal that no real person, save the one that serves the parasite, is left inside you. A husk, barren, bored clean through so as no substance is left behind and so significant is the hole that no substance may ever fill it.

You're free now, free from the pain that you once needed so dearly. That suffering, lingering, demolishionist was finally evicted in three concurrent spasms of your digestive system. The future is yours and your shackles have been removed. I'm rubbing my wrists and ankles. Sore, but hardly worth a notice when compared to the weight lifted free from my chest. The hand of god has reached into my lungs and slammed them with enough oxygen so as to purify myself.

Blind from the light of life unbounded, I'm stumbling and mumbling and deliriously dancing through the metamorphic resonance. The tones and vibrations bounce and throb into my nervous system, rendering it numb. A melting candle branching into an upside down, thousand branched oak tree. Putty, reduced to putty, I mold into a new shape, one that fits and sits properly in the role I have crafted.

The Identity shift is the hardest part. That's what I'm sending back to myself from the future moments of my dawning tomorrows. Waves of smiling sanity wash over me and I just know that everything is going to be new again.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 15 - This Garbage Life (edit)

2011-01-24T16:45:00.000-08:00

04/16/04

Crying tears of misbegotten moments. Sad frames of time that will never be. Lost in a desert of isolation, I am unable to scream for the pain is too intense. It feels like I have been impaled and perhaps I have been. Impaled on my own fierce and unwavering judgment. Trapped in fear and charged with anger, my body tears itself to pieces, as I lie writhing below. The sickness has overcome me and I no longer know or care about anything except the end of the pain.

It's weird to be suffering both mental and physical pain at the same time. You become lost between shifts of neurological insanity, nerves screaming, emotional implosion. You begin to wonder which was here first, or if that even matters, or if anything matters, or if it will ever fucking end. And it won't. It drags on through mindless hours of fist clenching sanity, dream-soaked brain hemorrhages siphoning out your will to live.

Sleep is the only comfort. Shut off from the body the mind lingers in its own universe, content to play with the clay of unfounded moments. Things that will never be, days that will never come, people that you will never know. Swimming in the ocean of eternal self, where you are the shining center of the entire fabric of reality and you don't need to feel a shred of guilt for loving every second of it.

Tried and tested, judged and sentenced, you awake into this reeking shell, this stinking and rotting corpse. Sludge and slime have eroded your insides and not even those fleeting feelings of being that delicious godhead can make the searing fragments of time any more digestible. You hate the world, you hate every person, you hate the act of hating, you condemn, you judge, you want to drive your fist through the center of the waking world and shatter everything that seems to matter to all these fucking robot slaves.

Your pain wants to stomp on the happiness of a million screaming idiots, wants to crush the empty dreams of a shallow and morally vacuous society that wants only to drain you dry and move on to the next fresh source of smiling, stupid naiveté. Nothing is worth saving for it is all truly worthless and meaningless. A thousand chanting teenagers, psyche-branded by the Brand Names of a conglomerate of money hoarding sociopaths who live equally if not more empty lives, ushering in the further decline of me and this hopeless, Garbage Life.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 14 - Carcass of Calamity (edit)

2011-01-17T16:42:00.000-08:00

04/07/04

I'm dying. I can feel it inside, burrowed deep in my chest. Returning to my life has caused the entire house of cards to crumble to the floor. The fevers cause the most restless sleep, filled with the most intense dreams. Life and death burst and bubble up all around me as something attempts to take care of me once and for all. Perhaps I have learned too much, or maybe my body is not able to withstand the pressure of a now fictional presence. I just want this delirium sickness to end and for some semblance of life to return to me.

The music that once guided me as I launched that hopeful dreamself into a world that is only thought about and wished for, is now gone. Lost in my absence, the pieces I left behind continued the daily dance, but lost the connection to me. We both would have been goners if we hadn't come together again. However, now instead of one whole being, I am now two sick and fractured halves unable to fight off this virus we've been infected with. Once separated it seems as if society slipped in through the cracks and the toxin has torn us both apart.

Words are hard to find. My thoughts are stuck in dreamstates and lingering lost moments. The world is changing all around me and I can feel my body pinned between the gears of the communal seasonal transference. I need a cleansing of mind, body and soul before I am able to handle life again. The madness in my mucus must be expelled. Civilization's clumsy and uncoordinated actions, in respect to the changing of our collective perception of time, have always caused me great pain and suffering.

Disoriented from the hitting of the restart button, the changes of this year are about to begin. The training is over and all the aches and pains of our annual alterations are nearly upon us. There is so much to do, to fight against, to reclaim. I must somehow find the strength to forge ahead through this cell of sickness and finally free myself from this carcass of calamity.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 13 - You (edit)

2011-01-10T16:41:00.000-08:00

04/02/04

You've plunged back in, dove headfirst into the shallow end of the populace, as if there exists a mythically deep end somewhere beyond your grasp. Those people that once surrounded you and seemed so secure and in control, now they seem little more than puppets, acting out whatever reality imposing ideas they embrace.

I feel sick. Motion sickness from the shifting seas of thought. Sitting in the center, somehow I remain mentally resistant to the ideas that have captured all those around me. I see the sadness in their eyes. Look at pictures of animals due for testing in laboratories and you will know the face of my family and friends. How can I just stand by and watch as these all-consuming, ideological entities siphon dry the life from those I once felt a connection to?

I seem to have lost my ability to speak the Polite American language that is so necessary and vital to maintain day to day life among these poisoned persons serving time in the Populace Penitentiary. I stumble and tumble across words and sentences that seem to be carefully constructed in my mind but come out as little more than incoherent and inappropriate intensity. Raging anarchistic tendencies surface and strike without warning, firebombing my speech center, cutting off communication and cries for help. My extremes are far removed from the culture radar, the ideas I have been fed as of late are seemingly from a world that is not my own. A world where ideas are confronted and possibly, language permitting, these ideas are consumed. With each exposure to the visual and audio library of rebellion, inducing liberation from toxic thoughts, I feel lonelier than ever.

Hopelessness is the first byproduct of becoming undone. Line by line, stitch by stitch, I am coming unraveled, and now, I feel lost and unsure of the directions that life will take me. My ideas on what is and what will be, the most important aspects of living life, are eroding almost as fast as my ideas about myself. Why do anything if everything is a game? Why get up in the morning, why keep working, why keep writing…if at the end of the day it's all just a simple, ever-expanding game where no one will ever win? And by winning I mean, to impose an individual's full view of reality upon mankind. At this rate we will just keep running like rats through a maze, which we just keep building up further and further from the exit. Where is the forward momentum? Why does every sub-division of every category of life just seem like a fracturing of interests? A lie conceived from boredom and deviation from what came from the generation before, just so we can have more and more small circle celebrities and awards and accomplishments that are in reality just a fraction of what they should be if the separate interests were combined. I may not be a writer that wins awards or gets on the best seller list, but if I try hard enough I can find someone to shower me with the praise and admiration that I crave. And that's what it comes to down to: rewards.

We all are seeking some sort of final prize for our actions. The prize I seek is acceptance and the love of mankind. To be allowed inside based on a display of my ability. To be the center of attention and be praised for my genius. To justify the existence of my partially subdued, over-inflated ego. In my hidden heart I demand your love and attention, but lacking the self-confidence to draw it from you verbally, I must instead put myself into words. I shape and form my brain into abstract symbols and slide under cover of a sly fiction and go to work in your psyche. Without persistence of a clear vision, all I wind up doing is driving myself into your minds and push you further away and burying myself further inside.

Why do I even want your love? Why do I have to prove myself to each and every one of you? What is it that you have that I don't? Is it just a search for communion with my fellow inhabitants of this demented dimension? I like to think it's something spiritual, something akin to the closeness we all once shared as a interconnected mass of bio-electric thought patterns, a veritable web of souls. But in reality I ache for a life where I find myself worthy of being part of someone else's story. Unable to stand and be the main character in my own dramedy, I instead designate myself as the coward, goofball, and jester. The pathetic wretch, old and young with a mind tortured by loneliness and despair that is in reality only a device developed to distance.

Once you take away your prize for any accomplishment, or question its ultimate worth to you, you lose focus and flap about like a dying fish removed from its fluid universe. Everything becomes empty and devoid of any worth because ultimately all acts give off the same rare reward: Acceptance. I think of god and free will and imagine that the secret is to imbed acceptance of everyone into everyone. How can this be achieved without mind control? And what is mind control but an extreme form of what we attempt to do every day? With every casual conversation we are forming a fictional person within the memory of those around us. We tell them stories and they deviate from reality just like all fiction does, embellished for dramatic emphasis. With a culture so saturated with the structure of sadistic cinema, simplistic shows, and even some boring books (without pictures), we can easily choose to live our lives so as to produce the best possible stories to tell others. Which in turn if they accept those stories, they accept us and we become a little more fictional. Ever know someone larger than life that had a million and one stories to tell? How much of that person is fictional and how much is real? A sad, schizophrenic, selfish society built around the charismatic characters that fine tune their public persona with persuasion and purpose.

Anger is actually the first step, cleverly disguising the helplessness underneath. At the moments of anger you are still bound in the chains of lies and distraction, frustrated by the futility of identity maintenance in the face of crumbling concepts. Anger is the first landmark on the journey to emotional self-confrontation, the path to freedom from the influence of corrupted and archaic beliefs. Anger is birthed from the most secure levels of your identity: race, class, religion, and political affiliation. The categories of identity that seem to produce the most intense battles of imposed reality. Our physical differences, the differences in our opportunities and comfort, opposing stories of the great unknown, and varying opinions of how mankind should be governed. Unable to know what we should do with our brainpower, we decide to use it in the ways that best serve ourselves, and our number one priority seems to be to develop an identity. Am I White? Am I Middle Class? Am I a Catholic? Am I Liberal? Which one are we? Can we be all of them? How many categories and divisions from others do we need to paste upon ourselves so as to feel complete and whole?

Staring nakedly, wide-eyed at the sun is preferable than to look at the light within and question these choices and labels of self. Without the option of looking in we all turn outward. What is around me and how does it make me feel? I don't like to feel shame, loneliness, and weakness. I want then, to feel pride, unity, and power. How do I achieve these goals? I do what is safe, what has come before and I go with the group mind as they must know what is best if there is so many of them united for a common goal.

This group most likely has all the requisite outlets for the complex emotional engines that burn inside. This group provides an enemy, a focus for your animosity for its opposing beliefs. And it feels good to have an opponent as it draws out our beastly, competitive nature. The more we oppose, the more we are alive. The bigger the enemy, the greater the passion within us, defining us. This group will also give you the flipside to this identity equation and is totally necessary to maintain the 'US vs. THEM' program. This group will provide a sense of communion, brotherhood, and union with likeminded individuals. People that look like you do, think like you do, talk like you do. The greater the connection with these compatriots in the cause, the greater the sense of righteousness and identity. With a discerning eye we can see the game, the feud between brothers, battling against their fellow man in a societal game of chess. A trap of our own design, forged from our inability for introspection.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 12 - Waking Hole Home (edit)

2011-01-03T16:40:00.000-08:00

03/27/04

Home. Four simple letters and yet the true explanation of the word could fill every book in a library. I was never sure of what the word meant to me. I suppose it's a place I forget to feel self-conscious and instead wallow in self-pity.

I made it here on zombie autopilot, lost amid a sea of red tailights flowing downstream from the sun's orange halo. The last few days at the rest stops pass through my mind and I see them with a sparkly new clarity. Awkward snippets of pathetic transfers of sentences. A stolen glance here and there as I watch a muscular arm, a furrowed brow, delicate hands. Eye contact is immediately broken off after half-a-second and I remain outside the circle walking among but never within.

Now I'm home and things should be different and they are but just as expected. The abrasive and rough edges of my old life are just as ill-fitting as it was before the escape. Ahh, what a beautiful word. Drugs, drinking, running, driving, escape. Fleeing from everything makes you forget you can never get away from the enemy inside.

He's still here, lurking, poisoning this life and those around him. Dwelling inside he thinks he should have been aborted, allowing his parents to shoot forth from their feeble frames and into something gloriously beautiful. But he knows that they would squander the chance and destroy the beauty somewhere/somewhen else. I guess none of us can escape our internally twisted twin.

Sleep comes easily as it feels like I've been awake for months. A complex series of biological changes takes place and I see myself sitting on a rock on a mountain. Maybe it's the mystery of the Native American tribe who once called this massive rock home that causes the spiritual merging of self. Looking out on the horizon, through the mass of dead skeletons of this ancient forest, I lose myself and succumb to a mental exorcism.

All of the delicate flipside persona comes crashing down the mountain, sliding and smashing to a billion pieces. The mountain itself seems to shake and laugh at my misery, almost mockingly asking, "Is that all you've got boy?"

And then I wake up. Home.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 11 - Mental Traffic Delays (edit)

2010-12-27T16:39:00.000-08:00

03/22/04

The world blurs in my peripheral as I guide my Scarab in and out of traffic. I'm heading home as a beautiful sadness overcomes me. Thoughts race through my greymatter and I find myself coming to no solid conclusions.

The names of automobiles pass me and I feel sick. Escape, Adventure, Liberty. Empty promises bought and sold and never experienced. How many of these truck owners have had the picturesque off-road experience that was staged, filmed, aired, and consumed? How many drivers of slim, sleek, and stylish sports cars are starring in the superspy scenes that run through their minds as they shift between gears stuck in traffic behind the thousand other like-minded consumers trapped in the same mental snare?

Nature itself seems to be doing battle today. Snow, sun, rain. Something has disturbed the essence of weather and it now seeks to punish or cleanse as the changing of seasons sneaks up on us. The cycle continues its march forward as the cold death slips away and life shakes free from its icy grip. A new season is about to be born and we fuss about it as if it were the most humdrum event of the year. Nature tearing itself free from one stage and pushing us all towards a renewal of ourselves, while plunging another part of the world into a seasonal slumber.

I feel a sickness coming on, self-generated or not, that makes me shake with fever. I'm heading home and I can't think straight. My mind wanders and dips and bends. I can't come to a conclusion on how I feel about anything. A malleable mind, eager to destroy or accept all the pain and love of the years of yesterday.

Ahead lies friends and family. Loved ones that have not seen me for some time now. My brain runs through simulated meetings and tries to come up with the most likely course of events while planning and preparing for the most dire.

Now has come the time for confrontation and a final reckoning. A balancing of scales, and a excavating of the heart.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 10 - "Rest Stop Bloodbath" (edit)

2010-12-20T16:37:00.000-08:00

03/17/04

The janitor came rolling out of the bathroom, blood streaming from his face. Spider walked over and towered over him. He reached down to the barely conscious man who was mumbling in another language. Spider grabbed his shirt and dried his wet hands on it.

"The next time there better be paper towels in that bathroom."

Spider hated that fucking wall mounted hair dryer. Filth needed to be wiped off, roughly removed with some coarse paper products. Fucking hot air does nothing except dry wet slime on to your hands. With a solid kick to the solar plexus, Spider walked out into the main area of the rest stop.

He made his way past the fast food, ice cream, and donut stalls. In front of the coffee shoppe he stopped and turned to look at the girl behind the counter. He looked her over, sickened at the sight of her. A trendoid mulled over the grande and tall choices. Spider could barely tolerate standing here another second but this girl was the one that he spoke to, the one that Fenris had chosen.

With a swift kick to the back of the knees the guy that couldn't pick out a size latté to have now suddenly pitched forward. Spider assisted his decent by slamming his palm into the guy's back. His head smacked against the counter and blood sprayed forth from his nose painting the girl behind the counter. Spider admired his performance art, calling it "Customer Satisfaction", before kicking the guy aside.

Spider held up a photograph of Fenris and asked the java bitch, "Did you talk to this man recently?"

The delicate blood droplets began to run down her face and it was truly beautiful. It almost made Spider weep. It would have if she hadn't stammered and just answered the damn question. Patience is for the weak.

"I'll make this real easy for you. Yes and no would work wonders." Spider reached into his jacket and withdrew a massive firearm and laid it on the counter between them. "This is here to show the seriousness and to force the adrenaline to clear your mind of the violent display you've just witnessed."

"Now, I could start a new piece entitled 'Mute Java Whore Dies With A Hole in Her Head' but I don't want to have to do that here."

Spider saw that the gun had proven more of a distraction. Intimidation overkill again. It wasn't his fault that his skills in interrogation were so powerful that the ordinary meatbag would freeze instantly. He could hear the gears in her mind grinding to a halt. This would require more finesse.

Spider let his mind blur and dissolve from the scene, slipping free from the moaning mongoloid on the floor, the brave and soon-to-be-dead cocksucker on his cellphone calling the authorities, and the gasping crowd that remained behind to witness the savage moment of security destruction. Spider's mind filled with white mental noise and he reached through to the stunned and stalled brain across from him.

The girl awoke and looked around. She was sitting on the edge of the river where her family had fished just down the hill from the cabin they rented every summer. "A dream, a horrible dream…" she said chock full of relief. She immediately felt her racing heart slowing to a daydream pace. Tranquility is the only word that can do justice for this feeling she now found herself fully immersed in. A feeling that no matter what would happen she would be just fine due to the calming serenity of this one beautiful moment.

The river swirled and bubbled up in front of her as Spider rose from its depths. He approached her slowly and knelt beside her. He placed his hand gently on her forehead and asked, "Did you talk to Fenris?"

"That's not what he said his name was, but yeah, I did." The girl answered Spider's question with her eyes closed and a smile on her face.

"What did you talk about?" Spider's voice was soothing and reminded her of her father's voice when he used to read her that book she loved so dearly.

"Nothing much, just about life and our place in it. He mostly just listened. He made me feel really good about myself, you know I've been struggling with a poor self-image forever it seems…"

"Yeah, that's great." Spider's voice was still the dreamy melody as he said, "What he really said was that you were ugly, worthless, and would never amount to anything. You just heard what you wanted to hear."

The girl's face remained caught in a sweet grin as she replied, "I know."

"Good."

Spider snapped back to the previous rest stop reality, his arm whipping around behind him, his gun firmly resting in his hand. He fired, emptying the clip into the crowd that circled a good distance away from him, yet close enough to smell the blood on the scene. They wanted so bad to be a part of this unreality that they have now gotten their wish. "Rest Stop Bloodbath" didn't have the punch Spider was hoping for but it would have to do.

Spider's eyes never left the girl's and he could see that Fenris' work had been undone within her. She was now just as she was before: soulless, hopeless, and helpless, devoid of a single shred of self-worth.

On the way out the rest stop Spider reloaded his gun, turned to his awestruck audience and proclaimed, "I HATE REALITY TELEVISION AND HAMBURGERS! I AM A TERRORIST, I AM ANTI-AMERICAN!"

That should keep them all plugged in to the machine for the rest of their miserable lives.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 9 - The Ride Home (edit)

2010-12-13T16:37:00.000-08:00

03/15/04

I don't recall actually leaving the rest stop, but after spending so much of my time there in a delirious daydream, that's not really a surprise. I found myself in my car blasting a new CD, windows dropped, and gliding down a stretch of Americana.

I didn't realize until I stopped for gas off the parkway. I was headed south, I was heading home.

My dreams have been plenty lately and the intensity of them has been draining to say the least. It's almost like my body would much prefer the simplicity of dormant identity. I find myself talking to old friends and revisiting boyhood haunts. But I'm seeing them as they are now, not as I recall them. They're changed, hacked up, and shown as something completely new. Something clean.

A beautiful blue sky lies open above me, welcoming me to this world of possible unity. It's hard to say but hope is stronger in me than ever. Something happened to me back there at that rest stop. I feel stripped of my pain and confusion.

I look at the cracked concrete between my feet as if seeing such a sight for the first time. I see it as if it were the most important thing in the world. It might be, but then this cold metal gas pump in my hand is no less important, nor the many ordinary things that dance the daily routine around me.

With the change from the last of my money I get a bottle of water and a bagel. Once out on the road again I've found that the bagel is the best I have ever had. My final meal before facing whatever is coming before me now. I wash it down with the water and I swear I can feel my body breaking it down and converting it, sucking from it the nutrients it provides.

I take a break from singing at the top of my lungs to laugh heartily as I cross over the bridge and approach the tollbooth. I've always been afraid of bridges. Well, I used to be anyway. I hadn't thought about it in so long but now I can see this bridge just as I did when I traveled over it twenty years ago in the back seat of the family car.

Frantically worrying about paying the upcoming toll, my mind releases itself. I'm suddenly a kid again, sick from the smell of exhaust and the bouncing of the road, my mind slipping into a daydream not unlike the experience at the rest stop. A blurring of the edges, riding through the physical pain, and winding up somewhere in a place where all the rules you've made up for yourself no longer apply.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 8 - Sitting Alone (edit)

2010-12-06T07:28:00.000-08:00

03/04/04

Sitting alone, quiet in my small defecation booth, I realize that I've put up some sort of barrier impervious to entry. Secure in the knowledge that no ordinary citizen would attempt to slither underneath nor parachute in from above. I was protected in this four by three excretion chamber. Although there were men in the stalls on either side of me, most likely engaged in the same shameful acts of natural behavior as I was, I felt distanced from them and from the threat they would normally present themselves as, outside of this rest stop bathroom.

Recognizing the power within my mind, assisted by the two metal walls and the haphazardly locked stall door, I knew that I had it in me to protect my aura from these masculine intruders to personal safety. Here I was, just a child living in an adult male body, sitting alone in the great wide world, ruling my universe from a porcelain throne. Having reached this moment of safety and security opened doors in my mind, and I immediately wanted to extend my borders.

I exited the stall, having waited long enough for the guy next to me to remove himself from his lavatory cosmos, and went to wash my hands. I found myself looking into the mirror itself as I wrung my hands free from the dreaded bacteria. The oddest material I could imagine, one that so accurately casts back an imaginary self, projected an external self that is a lie constructed by the inner workings of our minds. A clever cover slid over insecurities and doubts. A construct comprised of imaginings about the person we want to be. On the other side of this wall is the man I long to be, deep in my heart.

Maybe mirrors show us more than we can imagine, if we look closely enough. A mirror is an inviting snare for the self-absorbed, allowing us to shallowly look upon ourselves not as we know ourselves to be, but instead as we appear to those around us. An impartial view of our shell, our scarred surface self that takes the brunt of our bumps and bruises. Swimming into sorrow filled eyes, I enter into the sacred center and truly evaluate. Distanced from the person being examined, I am able to penetrate into cellular psyche.

The water is scalding hot as I slide back into this reality. My eyes adjust to the surface of the mirror and I take in the room behind me. Men coming and going, leaving behind the waste that had built up in their bodies. Over my shoulder a man with an abnormally large penis is staring absently at the wall while urinating.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 7 - Along Came A Spider (edit)

2010-11-29T09:20:00.000-08:00

02/28/04

I woke up with a hot needle of sunlight being jabbed into not only the furthest reaches of my eyeball, but into my brain itself. I had drooled across the table that is firmly bolted to the floor of this establishment. I'm fairly certain that I awoke although I'm not certain. I can't remember my dreams, not one damn bit.

A dark skinned man in a rumpled, yet flashy suit briskly walked towards the front doors. He firmly pushed his way inside shoving along a slow-moving herd of American cattle. They stared at him with the most scornful of looks, absolutely condemning the man and telling him sternly his place in their polite society. All with one look.

The man made his way towards the line for the fast food joint. He waited impatiently while he radiated pulses of hostility towards all those around him. His hands shook and his knuckles popped of their own accord.

Once he had received his meal and dispensed of the requisite funds, he immediately made eye contact with me. He stalked his way towards me, slicing through the harmonious vibes of weary vacationers and dazed and drowsy travelers. His aura slammed down the chair across from me as he slid into the seat.

He dropped the tray on the table. A chemically charged meat sandwich, slivers of potatomeat popsicles, and a acidic 64oz. soda pop.

"A meal fit for a meat machine", was all that he said while staring directly into my right eye.

"Nervous?", followed shortly after.

My silence was not a voluntary act but more of a direct instinct to this man's presence. He sat across from me but somehow surrounded me entirely. I had no escape from his influence. I was jealous and hated him instantly. He reminded me of everything I wasn't. Confident, secure, with purpose and will. He had enough raw determination stirring within him that I felt shamed and small. I curled up in his presence and feared his wrath.

"I probably shouldn't have come yet. Probably broke some rules or something." He hadn't acknowledged the stinking fried food that lay between us.

"You're not mad, you know."

I had slipped within myself and was now watching the scene take place as if watching my life from inside a television. Tears flowed freely.

"You're alone. For now. But they're the ones that are mad."
He had a reassuring tone all of a sudden. I twinged at his sudden shift in inflection and body language. What did he want?

"Anyway, I just wanted to say...hang around here as long as you like, but I swear if you're eating this shit...", his previously friendly tone was to give this shift to fierce aggression all the more dramatic impact, "I will shoot you dead."

His eyes lingered with me longer than I had thought. It took me two minutes to realize that he wasn't still sitting across from me, but that his intense presence had actually carved itself across my mind's eye.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 6 - A Million Burning Stars (edit)

2010-11-21T15:58:00.000-08:00

02/28/04

I find myself drifting off to sleep randomly through the day. Recently I awoke from a mid-day twenty minute nap that was the result of a concentrated hunger fast. I fine tuned the controls of my perception inputs and found that a female was standing before me.

She was adorned in the garb of the corporate slave state's official drug supplier uniform. Cash green and vacant white wrapped itself firmly around her person, seemingly strangling the life from her before my very eyes.

She questioned me on my odd behavior and napping tendencies. I played it cool and flashed her some wit and style, which transmitted as little more than incoherent babbling and pure lunacy. I'm going to have to learn how to properly cross channels of communication if I am to continue on this path.

A wash of information floods off of her as we surfacetalk for the better part of her fifteen free minutes away from the JavaGod, deliverer of the Instant Awareness. Rooting through the mess of her Self, I find a few tidbits of relatability and sameness. There is a common spirit bellowing from deep within her. A spirit seeking ultimate liberation and dedication to a way.

My next clear memory is standing outside on the strip of pus-yellow grass that serves as the front lawn of the rest stop. I'm holding my arms out in a mock crucifixation as my soulport burns and aches with the sustained connection to pure Cosmos-spawn tendrils upgrading the software inside.

I'm teetering on the edge of the curb as I realize that my sense of date/time measurement has been properly dismantled. Twenty-nine hours since I last thought of the date, I now seek to destroy that countdown from deviation from cognitive timeframes.

The blaring horn of a truck causes the collapsing of my extended self, pushed simultaneously forwards and backwards in time. I run to the window to look in on my female friend and her chemically-charged, narcotic bean-drink administering only to find that this rest stop doesn't have a coffee stall.

Where am I? What is real? I'm jumping stations and can't find one that fits like a good reality should.

Tower of Brahma. Chapter 64. One Last Thing.

2010-11-21T14:03:00.001-08:00

I fell to my knees, my body slack and drained, arms folded before me, sweat dripping from the tips of the long hair that draped across my face. I had done it, had gripped the World Serpent by the tail and ripped it free from my chest, its fangs sliding free from the apple in my chest. The venom spouted forth from the bite marks and gushed out before me. I was free.

I walked hand in hand with her as we took in the late Fall evening. I knew something was wrong inside, but I could not force my body to expel the bitterness and anxiety, couldn't imagine a life that didn't make me feel alone and outcast from any other human beings. For so long I wanted connection, communion with something other than myself. Glancing at her in my peripheral I couldn't acknowledge the power between us.

Years later, I'm carrying our child down the stairs as she toils away at her art desk. We exchange quick smiles as I pass her by, our daughter smiling and bouncing in my arms as we pass her on our way to the kitchen. I whip together a small lunch and bring it in to her, which, she reluctantly turns from her work to enjoy with us. We're a family, and bound together beyond what words can explain.

Every now and then I pause before our library and run my fingers along the spines of the novels and textbooks until I come upon a title: Tower of Brahma. Of all the books we own, this is the one that matters, for it is mine. I spent seven years of my life in a hell of my own making, constantly exposing myself emotionally, then encrypting it in poetic verse and obscure allegory. It's a completely self-indulgent text, filled with short stories, poems, essays, all scratching away at the black charred surface of my heart.

I laugh to myself there, letting my head drop a moment, eyes closed and taking in what had happened so long ago. A conspiracy of self consumed me, a labyrinthine plot through the inner workings of my mind, all in a desperate attempt to be happy, to gain enlightenment and become fulfilled. But when everything becomes an escape, you lose track of where you're going, frantic to flee whatever it is that's trying to kill you.

In my case it was me. Or the poisoned me that I created based on people's perceptions and their selfish demeanors. I tried so hard to change who I was, all while desperately clinging to the past as I had no idea who I was without all that anger and sadness. I was unwanted and unloved, mainly because I wanted to be. I teased myself with the idea of suicide endlessly, hoping that that at least was one way to be truly free.

I hoped that plotting out this book, this collection of a couple hundred pages and printed text, chock full of my ideas, my pain, my desires, I had hoped that this was what it took to reprogram me so that I could live here in the world and be one of you. But it didn't work like that. I wrote it. I read it. I even tried to sell copies it for awhile. Some people had read it, I even got a handful of positive comments, with no one taking the time to throw a negative one my way.

Who'd I write this for anyways? When I re-read it, I didn't even know who that person was anymore. The vague details seemed familiar, and there was something about the core of the narrative that I connected to, but I couldn't relate at this point, less and less so as the years went on. I was a father and husband, I taught at the Community College, helping young writers find their voices and molding them into words. I walked through my life with a smile and a kind word for those around me.

I wasn't alone. I never was except for when I truly wanted to be. I just felt I deserved to be. Years of struggle forced me up out of myself, made me wake up and take stock of this life I was living. Thankfully some subconscious program forced me along, building up the staircase I would need to ascend in order to take charge of my life. So, when I wrote that last chapter, when I let go of all the misery I thought was so essential to my being, only then was I able to see things around me clearly.

I was working for the Daily News, breaking the latest disasters, a Blackberry on my hip and a blazer on my back. I had a girlfriend that would never give up on me, who wanted more than anything to be my wife, to be a parent with me. There were a small collection of friends who saw in me a magnetic and charming person whose company they enjoyed. There was no shortage of personal and financial wounds that needed to be repaired, but the stage was set, and I was in charge.

I heard Millie shriek with joy from the other room as Jazmine tickled her making googling noises. My child and wife, my family. I didn't bother taking the book off the shelf, I never do anymore, hardly even think about it really. The second book is nearly complete and I really don't know if I'll do anything except print up a copy to slide right next to this one here. Jazz would want me to, she thinks it's important. I think she just wants me to feel good about it, which is why I love her.

No one else needs to read this. I don't even need to read this. Yet, it had to be written, if for no other reason to save this writer's soul. I imagine a young punk picking up a used copy at the bookstore on St. Mark's in the East Village. He'll love it, hate it, slip it into a back jean pocket, leave it at a friend's house after they smoke and run out to a show taking swigs from their flask. Some idea or sense of the words will have made some impact on him, altering how he experiences that night.

Maybe he writes his own novel, or starts a band, swiping a chapter title for a song that will never be played beyond dive bars and dingy basements. I like to imagine that in years to come he'll have read my adventures in New York City during the first decade in a new century and wish that he had lived back then, when things were more visceral and real, never really knowing that fiction is all based on the same mundane reality we all experience, only altered and ignited by our innate desire to be more than we are.

And the day will come when that young man realizes that there's nothing more rewarding than to have your moment, record it, process it, and then to let it go. From there you are truly free to do whatever it is that you wish. And right now, all I want is to go look on my family's smiling faces as I enter the room. That is what's real. That's the happy ending that no book will ever give you.

Stop typing. Stop reading.

This is the end.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 5 - Lost Among the Lambs (edit)

2010-11-15T06:36:00.000-08:00

02/22/04

I feel dementia setting in. It's come around knocking, like an old friend stopping by innocently enough to catch up on times past. Under cover of a long, lost friend this parasitical leech has sucked you dry of the positive lifeforce flow you've built up.

I find myself attempting to engage people in conversations to find them always ring false, to find myself too concerned with the particulars to actually have a moment where my mind bridges the gap between us. I long for connection between my solitary world and the world of another. To find that my perception of reality is relatable to another.

This has led to a number of awkward stammers and random looks. A whole parade of falsities and surface skimming. I have been unable so far to pierce the veil of fractured, broken Self-ness and find a true connection with another Mind here. I find myself alone among the loneliest, and sad among the saddest. Where is my contact? Where am I going?

I doubt myself and the mission.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 4 - The End (edit)

2010-11-07T23:37:00.000-08:00

02/16/04

I wake from a dream, although I'm not entirely sure that's what it was. Maybe it's my perspective that's being altered, but it seems these dreams are just moments of un-existence. A few hours a night and in the morn you're feeling as fictional as you were the day before.

I feel like I may be damaging my host but according to the reports I'm receiving, it seems as if I have his full support. I finally begin to feel the tiniest hope of purpose or guidance.

The car has been psychoactively cut off from this plane of existence and is merging with another where someone so very familiar lies on a bed typing words and listening to music. We have reached an understanding it seems and the mission, although just as obscure as ever, now seems somehow refined.

I think god has spoken to me, or rather reached out to me and given me knowledge of the end.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 3 - Fictional, Untruths, Lies (edit)

2010-10-25T21:30:00.000-07:00

02/16/04

I've been sleeping in my car at rest stops, cocooned in a fetal position for the entire night. I began driving north and now I'm no longer sure of my location or direction. I've been eating at different spots along the road and spend the days reading and people watching.

Rest stops are amazing places, these snippets of an elevated reality. A between place no more firmly rooted in the limitations of objective reality than the amusement parks of the world. Of course, rest stops are a more pure form of unreality. From day to day I see all manner of people engaged in all kinds of acts, their stop here just a bump along the road to their destination that lies just beyond the moment. A tomorrow return to the lives they knew or boundless future potential, a promise of a new life in a new temporal location.

These places are simmering mirages, basking in the wavy bends of light and heat, a place that is but a footnote in your life story, a fraction of the mind spent on remembering its details which seem to slip from your grasp the more you try to hold on to them. Rest stops are out of phase with objective reasoning, as are all places of power and mystery. The land still has the upper hand, defining itself beyond our limited grasp of its identity and role in the cosmic theatre.

It's in the parking lots of these un-places, where I find myself recalling the moments where my mind would link with the greater mind of One. Where I would shake off my shell, flowing on the bonds of electromagnetic wavelengths, and otherwise deviating from norm perspective. My face surfacing into the white light of everything where I was fed pure energy and peace.

A malevolent tumor of cancerous imagination cells built up a power of personality that was so strong because of its disuse that once a connection with higher powers was established, and the culture conformity viewer program was befuddled with the mantra of obscure madness (pure psycholaxative chaos haikus born of the moment), it had dashed for the nearest exit never looking back or wondering why. The program was running in the background, searching for a hook, which would allow systemic processing of the poetic-meme-deconstruction of my personae.

My life is a lie.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 2 - Control (edit)

2010-10-18T17:43:00.000-07:00

02/09/04

I found myself in the bathroom of a truck stop, lingering in front of the mirror as I washed my hands. I looked up to meet my own eyes as they looked me over. Who was this character that substituted my reflection? It was almost as if I was supposed to recall the details of this alternately reflected creature, but upon deeper inspection I found that I was unable to place a name, place or purpose to it. The harder I tried to figure out who this was that had seized control of what I thought was my body, the less that seemed familiar to me.

I dismissed the fact that I could no longer tell what was reality with a shrug of my shoulders, and I watched my looking-glass doppelganger ape the movements in sync. Did I always look like this? In a way I want to say I did, but in a way this body felt new, somehow removed from my old one. Could my entire existence prior to these moments be nothing but fiction? The detailed schematic of a lie that I called my Life had seemingly been pulled over my eyes as I continued to wage war against the reality that I was currently experiencing.

The past was full of doubt. That left me with only the moment and the moment to come. It is those subtle transitions I must be aware of, for the more cognitive I am during them, the stronger my sense of what's real shall become. And if I am to make it out of this, I will need to have my wits about me, and to have some sort of roadmap of where I've been.

Lost in a thought I slipped from frame of reference and began floundering along my Auric-wavelength. Phasing between time and space I found myself drifting along as the meat cleansed itself of tactile bacterial growth with scalding hot water and pink jism that served as soap. I bounced and rattled within my body as I fought my way back to the controls.

Things have been a bit touch and go since I was baptized in the Ether of Eternity. Reborn again into shape and form, I was corkscrewed back into flesh and mind, spiraling and rotating back towards full control. Flexing my tether to the Eternal Unconscious to glean tidbits of Truth, I scribble the info down in my journal as soon as possible hoping to identify the pattern upon thorough examination.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 1 - Escape (edit)

2010-10-11T22:18:00.000-07:00

02/04/04

The clichés were all present. Lined up in a row so as to make me believe this farce, this fiction that has been substituted for my life. I awoke in my room, yet it wasn't my room. I inherently knew that my position had been altered while I slept. I looked around at my "stuff" in my "bedroom" and instantly felt like I was on a movie set. Everything was there, in perfect disorder, but they felt hollow, empty, devoid of the sentimentality and nostalgic power I'd imbued them with.

I began writing down my thoughts immediately in my journal. Hopefully I could reach my laptop and post these thoughts online and make my abduction known to all. Cautiously, I left my bedroom to find my faux-living room. Replacement couch, TV, bookshelf, DVDs, and computer, all sitting in the same place I had the originals for years. Through the small window above my desk I could see the day was a slate gray. Looking down at my computer I could see that they have cleverly left me access to the Internet. Truly nothing was out of place.

I made my way to the front door and stepped outside. Staring up at the massive dull dome miles above me, I knew then the trouble that my abductors had gone through to make this mock world. It was perfect and complete in its illusion of comfort and familiarity, and epic in scale and scope. I needed to escape as soon as possible.

I threw on some clothes, grabbed a backpack full of supplies I might need and ran out the door. I had hesitated a minute or two in front of the fridge but decided that any food there may be tainted with any sort of hallucinogenic drug. I needed to maintain this clarity of thought if I am going to make it out of the confines of this pseudo-reality. I started up my car and slipped in some good driving music. I tore off down a simulation of the road I drove every day for the last three years.

So far everything was as it should have been. If it wasn't for the ache in the pit of my stomach, the panic buried deep within myself that I trusted more than my five senses, I could have easily have believed that this truly was my life. That this was my car that I was driving, down the street I live on, wearing the clothes that I got for Christmas. So seductive was the lie that something deep in me, possibly on a genetic level, was telling me to run. Somehow I knew that this deception was more than my willpower could possibly overcome.

THE TOWER OF BRAHMA - Prelude (edit)

2010-10-03T02:15:00.000-07:00

10/16/03

Agent Spider looked down at the bullet-riddled corpse at his feet. He counted thirty eight separate entry points. A quick scan of the surrounding area told him that these were accurately fired shots from a fully automatic machine gun with no more than seven bullet holes in the far wall. Someone shot his partner point blank to make a statement. Not that he needed this forensic evidence to know who did this.

It was a message. A friendly little sticky note passed between former co-workers. The bullet holes themselves might as well have spelled out the message if you connected the dots. "We know." But even this seemed a tad extreme for the Agency. This was personal. This was an old friend trying to get under his skin. An attempt to trigger an emotional response. To bypass his logic center of his brain. Send him running off half-cocked looking for revenge.

Agent Spider wasn't the same man he once was, back when they knew him. He had escaped from the Society. It was unheard of for someone to escape, but escape he did. And none of the graduates would ever fall for so obvious a challenge. Never fight on their terms. What was needed now was to retreat, cause them to get impatient. Let Gallows make the mistakes while he got a new partner.

In a way it was a relief. This one didn't have the balls to destroy the world.

The Tower of Brahma - Chapter 63 Pt.2 - My Life Til Now

2010-06-28T13:59:00.000-07:00

It was the true dawn of the internet. My first screenname was RDMASQUE, my teenage superhero/vigilante alter ego, with a slight nod to the Poe short story 'Masque of the Red Death', where upper society is killed by a plague at a fancy dinner.

I would hang out with my friends, then come home and log into the TOWN SQUARE - LONG ISLAND room on AOL 2.5 and then make fun of the losers that hung out in there. We'd play WAV files that we each had surprising one another with well timed gags.

And after losing my virginity I found the anonymous aspect of IM flirting to be a godsend. Finally, I didn't need to feel awkward in person and I could just say whatever I felt, be as snarky as I wanted, type bold statements that would be so unlike me in person. I was able to come into my own and redefine myself.

Eventually we met up with those losers online, and we were the cool under 21 kids hanging out with late 20's social rejects. There was some common bond of outcast status that made it so a group of all walks of life could congregate and create our own scene.

At this point in my life, my grandmother dead and buried, my ex long forgotten, and a guy obsessed with me now just a suicide statistic, I was numb to everything. A headbutt from a bullying friend to my sternum shut down my heart chakra and I didn't care or think about anyone else.

I slept with a few girls, some who broke up with their boyfriends for a week just to sleep with me, some who asked if we were going out as I entered her. I was relentless in my online firting and it led me to have sex with the hottest girl I could imagine who left immediately after crying. She drunk drove home to her boyfriend.

Then I began dating a 27 year old just before I turned 21. A weird mix of friends all gathered at the surprise party my parents threw for me. My friends all bought me Playstation and the Die Hard game. I drunkenly bought everything at a 7-11 at 2am. I had everything I could have wanted.

But she became obsessed, checked my emails after we broke up. Somehow she guilted me into dating her for another 6 months. I would sit and watch Tom & Jerry with this girl who had finished Grad school for Psychology, and imagine hitting her in the head with a brick. I didn't want to be there with her but couldn't get out of it.

I hung out with my friends as often as possible, finally discovering weed and smoked, watched Traces of Death while eating hot wing potato chips. We'd play multiplayer Goldeneye and Starfox on the Nintendo 64, killing each other vitually over and over again. One on one they were my best friends, in a group I was the butt of the jokes.

Somehow with my group of friends I entered their world of comic books and roleplaying as the patsy, the jester, the one you could tear down just to watch me twist under sarcastic insults. Initially I embraced it, eager to fill a role after leaving the non-existant family dynamic I had. I went from unwanted oldest child left alone with a TV to doofy victim of insecure teenage dorks.

College passed in the blink of an eye without so much of a memorable experience. I had gone to Nassau Community College instead of SUNY New Paltz in upstate New York. I would've found a hippy scene up there and become a different person but entered the 13th grade with my friends, staying at home in suburbia.

I wrote everything I could, screenplays, poetry, short stories, even filmed two short movies. I had technical ability but no real life experience to write about. With words I could convey emotions, put you in a scene, but what was it that I had to say? Nothing that wasn't derived from some comic book or action movie. So I gave it up after I graduated.

I had worked since I was 11, from a newspaper route, to helping deliver candy & sodas to train stations in Jamaica. Then I ran the kiddy rides at Adventureland when I was 16, was a cashier at Waldbaums when I graduated, and wound up at K-Mart in the electronics department in college. I bounced to a brief stint at Sears as a TV/laserdisk salesman, and finally wound up at Jiffy Lube, despite knowing nothing about cars (and my dad was/is a mechanic).

So this all led up to some point. I began avoiding the 27 year old, showing up hours late to work after nearly getting arrested at a hotel party off the LIE, and I was about ready to make a stand to the friends. The ringleader, Ed, had made out with other girls behind his current girlfriend's back, and she knew I was the weak link so she came to me to find out the truth.

And with that passive aggressive revealing of the truth, breaking the bros before hos code, I no longer had friends. Everyone sided with him over me, having too much fun with his smartass comments and magnetic personality. In one summer I had isolated myself utterly and completely.

I had just begun dating Rebecca. She was the girl I jumped to in order to escape the older chick. Rebecca also had gotten me a job doing customer service with her. In a few months I became the trainer, and was making more money than ever. It was an easy job and with my infinite patience I never was rude to these idiotic people that bought "rare" coins or VHS tapes about trains, super car lube or breast enhancement cream.

It was a new life and with it a new direction. After drawing in MS Paint at the job I thought I wanted to do artwork on the computer. After all, my dad was obsessed with computers, making music, short animations, DOOM levels, and so my affinity for computer programs could make up for my lack of art skill.

So with a friend Dan from the High School gang, also ostrasized, we went to graphic design school. We learned Adobe desktop publishing, Flash animation, HTML and 3D animation. I really took to it but never excelled at it, much like everything else I did in my life. But I had new friends and went to see their bands perform around Long Island.

I had quit the customer service job and was selling whatever I had to eat and used credit cards to buy comic books. My girlfriend Rebecca was hiding out in my bedroom on a nightly basis as my parents fought about my irresponsibility.

My father saw me as wasting my potential, not being the sacrificial martyr he was, slaving away to support a family he seemingly didn't want. My mother defended me as I always took care of my accounts, paid my bills, and other than never doing anything around the house (set by my father's example) I was a good kid, if not a bit lazy.

It was the end of the 90's and Y2K was nearly upon us. For all the anticipation, it was a non-event, years of build-up and no payoff. Except it was apocalyptic for me. Everything was on the verge of breaking, and sure enough there was one final death blow to my life.

Rebecca and I went to her friend's house party. Her ex that endlessly cheated on her, making her a paranoid, jealous mess (with her sketchy dad's help), was at the party, flirting with girls despite having a girlfriend who wasn't there. She watched him as a joint was passed around.

I was nervous as she was not okay with smoking. I asked if it was cool, and she nodded, but when it came around to me she had left to go do shots. I barely took a hit, mostly to be social with these strangers, and then went to sober up a bit before driving home. When I found her and brought her to the car to head home, she was drunk.

I wanted to be honest so I told her that I had smoked a tiny bit. She unleashed an insane rage upon me, punching the glasses off my face, kicking me, as I tried to keep the car from sliding on the black ice of Sunrise Highway. I got her to my parent's house and locked her in my room. I crouched into a ball keeping the door shut as she wailed on me.

I had a moment, I knew if I could smack her hard enough, I could knock her unconcious and finally relax. I slapped her as hard as I could, then felt guilty on how justified I felt at lashing back at her. When I couldn't take it anymore I let her leave to go crash drunkenly. My mom and sister woke up and talked her down.

It was over. I wouldn't stay with her. That was a line that was crossed. I had been thoroughly emasculated. But she feigned some sickness and I took care of her. The ultimate fucking chump. She played me and I fell for it. By the end of the mysterious two week sickness spent in my bed, the drunken attack was a distant memory. I tried to blank it out.

But it was there. When my friend Dan went out to lunch with her one day, he went Basic Instinct crazy on her, telling her that me and him had hooked up and that I was his first. To this day I'll wonder exactly how this conversation went down, but that was it for my friends. I didn't even question her and cut him off instantly.

Then we moved out together. Her nesting instinct took over and I became some lazy asshole she lived with. By this time I had gotten an office job designing medical and financial forms, placing the Wong-Baker scale into charts and typing 4pt legalese on the back of loan applications. I needed a creative output.

So on January 1, 2001 I decided to start writing comic books. In a month I had my first script about a fallen hero, now a junkie vigilante, an unwitting pawn of the devil. It was good enough for me to look for paid work and I got a gig scripting a few 28 page one-shots based on this guy's characters. I got paid $50 a script, but then the company folded.

It was enough of a tease that I decided to work on my own. I had an idea about a modern day Chow Yun Fat style master of kung fu who would avenge his father against superpowered illuminati members. At a networking panel at WizardWorld Philly I met an insanely talented kid named Chris (my father and grandfather's name) and my personal guru/idol Grant Morrison at the DC Comics booth.

It was a sign. Chris and I began working on a new comic, a sci-fi/fantasy kung fu revenge story, and it was my only outlet. I had no friends to go out with, no family I wanted to keep in touch with, and a girlfriend that was more of a roommate. The comic came together and we began showing it around comic conventions, talking to any and every professional.

But I felt stupid. The quiet shy kid that let this genius artist get all the attention and glory. It was enough at first to have him believe in me and my writing. But after countless hours standing silently beside him, listening to endless praise of his work, I just felt empty. Not worth anything. No life. Basically invisible.

I had one friend at this time, the old rebel without a clue Dennis. We had reconnected and rode mountain bikes through trails. It was nice seeing someone from when I was a kid, even if he was the troublemaker who took my first girlfriend from me. Now he was engaged and growing up.

But once again, when it was just us we'd be close, tight, talking about anything and everything, in front of others, he'd berate and hit me. I couldn't take it anymore, my anxiety levels were peaking, I wanted to freak out, but somehow I was just holding on to my sanity.

Rebecca got two little pugs, having always been an animal person, and now well adjusted enough to be stable and be close with her family once again thanks to my patience and therapeutic advice, so she didn't need me anymore. And then my parents split up. My mom comes over to tell me, but instead breaks down into tears to Rebecca when I leave the room.

My father says he'll come by and talk to me about it but never does. He blames Rebecca for the breakup because of a supportive message she wrote to my mom (he checked my mom's email of course), not because of any of his flaws or faults. I don't talk to him for two years after that happily. He changes my AOL password on Father's Day months later.

I feel unfazed by the whole thing, half wanting/expecting it since I was old enough to know that parents could split up. They were together since they were teenagers and were now not much older than I am right now as I write this. They needed a life. Instead they repeated patterns.

My mom found an asshole boyfriend who was about the same age and disposition as my dad. My dad found an older woman who was simple and sweet, not unlike his own father did when his parents split up at just about the same age. Repeating cycles.

My grandmother's death was the real end of the family, but here it was, the final death rattle. There was no family anymore. No friends around either. Just a girlfriend who wanted nothing to do with me and her sister, who both ignored or talked right over me. I was often told to shut up or be quiet.

So I broke down. That was it. If my parents splitting up wasn't enough of a reason to be listened to, nothing would. I laid on the floor rocking back forth mumbling "I can't...I can't..." over and over for hours. I was totally lost. What was the point of anything? Movies and comics were empty distractions from life, my office job was all I had, what was the point of anything if you couldn't share it with anyone?

I became depressed, smoked weed excessively, watched as many fucked up movies as I could, hoping that I would feel something. But I didn't. The social anxiety amped up so that I couldn't even go to a store in the mall, which was my one distraction outside of work and home.

Rebecca began seeing a therapist, and eventually I went along for couples therapy. I found myself thinking of how mentally superior I was to the therapist, but she did validate all my frustration which I found to be liberating. I went to my own therapist but gave up on her when she couldn't remember my name or what I talked about week to week.

Traumatized by the PETA videos Rebecca had shown me forced me to become vegetarian, preying upon my squeamishness at eating dead animals. I would eat frozen veggie burgers and chicken noodle soup with the chicken picked out. I watched artsy and disturbing movies on my lunch break. I had a routine and began going to the gym.

I was feeling better day by day but I was still afraid of life. I'd constantly push myself, going out to bars to see local bands, went for a day trip up to New Paltz to see the college I could've gone to. The comic was coming along but I really needed to write for myself again. I needed to purge my soul with words.

I thought back to the screenplay I never finished in college. Two secret agents sent to a remote Hindu temple to complete the Tower of Brahma, thus ending all of existence. It was a cliched action movie, with tidbits of existentialism. Shootouts, car chases, and badass black suits.

So I started writing. Somehow a guy past his prime, late in his 20's, changed everything about himself through those words. I went to San Diego to promote my graphic novel, and when I got back, I found myself going out to Long Island City to see the Scissor Sisters at PS1. A week later I was in the East Village seeing a friend of a friend's band. And then I met a girl.

Diana drew me in somehow, made me feel bolder than I ever felt, and she wanted to listen, to get to know me. So I told her everything, and a month later I was living with her down on the LES outside the Williamsburg Bridge. I ended things with Rebecca, quit my office job, and threw everything into storage. I lived out of my car with a few bags at her place.

I got a job as a paparazzi photo editor working the late shift, coming home to Delancey at 4am. With Diana I hit dive bars, gallery openings, fashion events, and saw almost all of Manhattan. From the Financial District to Upper West Side, Governor's Island to the Highline (before it was renovated). She loved playing tour guide and I got the crash course in the city that I needed.

But she was cold, and something must have reminded me about my past ex-girlfriend's with her, so I cried and acted out and purged my soul all over her. We both quit the photo agency and went to Columbia where we got taken around by her family. After that we went to LA where we got tattoos. But when we got back it all fell apart.

On July 4th she left for Vegas for a girls weekend and I went to an open bar Gen Art event with Jared, the guy's band I saw that I first met her at. We got ridiculous drunk and by this time I had experience being blackout drunk, having gone into a walking coma at the MoMA, vomiting on the F train, collapsed on Eldridge.

So when we blacked out that night it wasn't that much of a surprise but the British female voice that was on my voicemail was a shock. It seems I somehow picked up a girl while totally unconscious. Or I guess she picked me up. I meet her a few weeks later (she went back to Australia for a few weeks, and yes, Australian with a British accent), and I have no idea what she looks like.

I pass her on the street without knowing, observing her hotness. We eventually recognize each other and hit up a sake bar, where I proceed to tell her everything you've just read, give or take a few tidbits. We hang out a few more times but when it gets a bit serious she ends things, just before my birthday.

I'd been living with my ex in her friend's apartment on 15th and 5th Ave, but after a trip up to the top of the Empire State Building, I leave for Boston. I hit up a comic book convention with my fellow creators, newly formed as a studio collective dubbed TenTon Studios, and we get drunk and ridiculous, and it'd be one of the best times any of us had.

I tell them I don't know where I'm going to live, I was getting unemployment for a few months, no idea at all what job I'd be able to get. Jay and Jong invite me to come back to their place to crash in North Alrington, New Jersey. In three days I'm eating meat and smoking cigarettes again, and suddenly hooked on Starbucks Americanos.

After a few months of living in the Garden State and hooking up with some Jersery girls, I move back to New York City with my last paycheck from Cingular customer service training. I had gotten a job at the last possible moment at an Alphagraphics and spent what money I had coming into the city on the weekends so I could drink with Jared, sleeping on his floor for two days at a stretch.

Eventually I just blew my last check on rent to move in with him and to save money I brought all my crap from storage on Long Island and lugged it up four flights. I was basically just living in a storage unit with 30 long boxes of comics and a mattress on top as my bed. All my other junk was still tucked away in boxes but I made it my own.

It was a one bedroom, where he had the living room as his room, and my bedroom held the bathroom. The shower was in the closet and we were living on top of each other, or would be if I didn't work nights and he worked days. It somehow worked out for a few years and we had gotten close enough where it was fairly comfortable.

We would go out every free night, run the gamut of East Village and Lower East Side bars, hit the girls with our routine where we pronounce that despite our closeness we were not gay, not even a little...but yeah, we were gay. And it made them all laugh every time. And maybe there was some weird physical side to us, not an attraction, but an understanding of our dynamic.

He was the sadistic one, so dreadfully insecure that he'd have to constantly bring me down (and everyone else for that matter) to be "funny", and I would once again play the part of slapstick sidekick, taking the abuse in order to feel like I was playing my role, a comfort in the schtick. But, like before, I grew resentful, realizing that he only did care about himself, and was only capable of caring for himself.

We switched off for months at a time in relationships so we started to not see each other. But all my friends, my social life, everything was his. I barely had a small handful of friends and so found myself in relationship after relationship. Once I was the one who felt the pain of disinterest and became an obsessive lunatic, but mostly I got involved with girls then plotted my escape route.

And I'd do this by being my best self, a facade of awesome that would be whatever they wanted. And when I began to see their flaws, things I couldn't live with, exaggerrated pains I felt, a disrespect I wouldn't accept. Each time I said too much, made things as messy as possible, and this even ended with my having to call 911 to have an ambulance stop my young ex, just a sophmore at NYU, from slicing her wrists open.

Right before that I ventured to Amsterdam and Paris with my friend Ben from New School. I had taken a few semesters before that and met him in my first writing class. He was much like the lost (and cooler/more badass) younger brother I never had. Of course I fucked up my financial aid and never got to go back after the trip.

With two new credit cards we headed out to Europe and smoked as much as we could stand, exhausting ourselves as we wandered around the canals, dodging bikes. We smuggled some on the train to Paris and smoked out the window of our hotel in the middle of La Siene overlooking the Palais du Justice.

We found Paris to be dead, but to its credit, so were we. Beaten from the travel, the smoking, the drinking, the shrooms, the cold Amsterdam air pouring into our room as we chained smoked and zoned out to MTV Europe. I fell in love with Amsterdam, and on the last night I was so high that I uncovered a power to project a fictional reality around me.

Or was it there the whole time?

I came back and within two months I was engaged to who I thought was my female counterpart. She was an ex-model with a sarcastic sense of humor, tall and thin, goofy in her choice of style. Unique gets tossed around a lot, but dare anyone to find me someone more so. Of course, she was also bi-polar and a borderline alcoholic who was addicted to karaoke.

I moved in with her after four months. Things ended badly with Jared and his latest girlfriend who I absolutely loathed. Oh, and I had also gotten laid off (aka quit because of a significant pay cut) and couldn't find another job. I was broke and she was helping me as best she could. By the time we lived together, the honeymoon was long over.

All my insecurities bubbled to the surface. I couldn't do karaoke. I couldn't take everyone wanting her. Girls would never want me like guys want her. That imbalance consumed me. My self-worth plummeted as she went off dressed to the nines to be hit on by men with jobs, power, confidence. I was just an unemployed, neurotic asshole.

Our clashes were epic. We'd scream, i'd storm out, walk the streets, sometimes blackout drunk and bleeding from smashing something. I often contemplated and nearly commited suicide. I began therapy and it helped, but I never felt such despair in my life. I had no way out, my debt was growing, and she couldn't fulfill me.

My addictions were exposed. I needed to smoke to alleviate boredom. I wanted to fuck to lose myself, to dominate her, to control her. I needed it more than air or food. And I never got it. I obsessed about it. I became delirious, paranoid beyond even my imaginings. I had to face myself and all that I wasn't, all that I expected myself to be.

I kept writing though. Working on comics. Started a podcast. Truly it was my most productive year in that regard. I suddenly had an internet radio show with an audience, a new comic in the works, and I was nearing the end of a novel I had begun six years before, when I was a totally different person. Some finish line was coming.

I got a job at the Daily News, a major metropolitan newspaper. I was excited. This wasn't just paparazzi bullshit (though that was still present), it was news, world events. I was working a five day work week, night shift, and lost all contact with humanity. I didn't go out, the money I made wasn't enough, the relationship was really failing despite desperate attempts to salvage it.

The holidays came, and she went to her parents. I went to work. I can't imagine a worse time in my life. After the New Year, 2010, I was working on pictures of the devastation of the Haiti earthquake, color correcting a photo of a man crying, screaming in anguish, as he holds his daughter's dead body, and I wished I was him. I wanted true pain. I wanted to have my entire life crumble around me.

I held a knife against my wrist for hours before I checked myself into the ER. My therapist had recommended it multiple times and it had finally gotten that bad. They recommended I sign myself in, and I did. I surr2endered myself to their care. They told me when to wake up, when to sleep, fed me, and medicated me.

I saw the hope in the eyes of the much further gone cases around me. They held on to dreams that they would most likely fuck up once they got out. They had lives they wanted to return to that their disorders would destroy. Or they were too withdrawn and a mess to do much of anything but ride out the rest of their days.

After a week they released me. I was free. Lauren and I were suddenly back together and doing well after she came and visited me all week on the inside. But that wouldn't last. We had to move, barely staving off court because we couldn't afford the rent at her place. We fought as we sought out places in Brooklyn. On the last day possible we found a two bedroom in Clinton Hill.

After we moved in, we split apart. We lived seperate lives, had smaller and smaller breakdowns and screaming matches. Finally, we just ended it. It was over, but neither of us could go anywhere. We couldn't afford it. I secretly (secret even to me) held onto hope that this was like all the other times, and we'd go back to how things were. Then she slept with Lady Gaga's DJ.

I went through the stages of grief, said horrible things to her, hurt her as best as I could, not that she would ever show it. So instead I just died inside until I needed to go on, there was nothing else to do. I pushed her out of my head a bit more each day. I embraced what was around me that made me feel good, happy. It was such a foreign feeling at this point.

I've just moved out, tossed all I own into storage, found a sublet in Harlem, and said my goodbyes to her. My father just went to rehab for alcohol in Florida, down by his family. My sister is about to get married. My friend Boston has survived being a cop and is now a park ranger in Massachusetts. We have a ton of projects we want to work on together. I have one more chapter to write in this book.

A whole new life, not even a new chapter, but an entirely new book lies ahead of me. This is everything that is now behind me. I finally release it all. It's made me this person so I could do what I'm about to do.

The Tower of Brahma. Chapter 63. Fire Over Water.

2010-06-21T01:55:00.000-07:00

My parents had sex in the back of my dad's Mustang, parked after hours at the park around the corner from where they lived. My pops was 17, worked at the Dairy Barn, and tuned up his car after class. My mom was 15, had knee surgery that put her field hockey days behind her.

I was conceived.

For reasons unknown to me I was not aborted, but rather, I was born on September 21, 1976, a Tuesday at 2am. My parents wed five days before at City Hall. My mom started taking night classes to graduate a year early. My father enters the workforce as an auto-mechanic.

I say I don't know the reason these teenagers decided to keep this child, but I do have my suspicions. I think my father to have assumed the role out of a sense of martyrdom, quite possibly like his father. But thinking on it now, my widow grandmother on my mom's side, an Irish Catholic, was perhaps the deciding factor.

My dad showed me how to change the breaks on our car, got to really enjoy all the cool Star Wars toys, and have a small victim for his boyish pranks. It was all a joke, he was teasing, he didn't mean to scare me like that. I begin to see my father as an object of fear, of aggression, humiliation.

I cling to my mother, who reads to me at night, and smiles everytime she looks at me. She loves me more than she realized was possible, quite literally shellshocked from her nearly virgin birth. A child with a child, a girl who never knew her own father, an electrical engineer in World War II, dead of lung cancer before her third birthday.

The rift, the crack, begins to widen every day. My dad gets shitfaced and off-roads with his friends, who eventually have their own kids, and it becomes a ritual to go camping, drink, and laugh their asses off at their children's expense. Or at least for my dad that is.

My sister is born. I hear stories saying that I was sweet and tender towards her as a baby. I recall nothing but disdain and half-hearted bitterness, never fully realized jeaslousy. Something happens before I can really be aware of how I feel about having a younger sibling.

I die.

I choke to death on a piece of hotdog. The thick-skinned kosher kind. I turned blue, passed out, and was rushed to the Emergency Room where they removed the chunk of weiner with tongs. How long I went without breath, I don't know. Did I subconciously yearn for death, or perhaps attention, at so early an age?

Most of my memories from this time are vague, just as they were years before. I recall a scary Dracula in a house window, Vienna Fingers in my lunchbox, a Matchbox Car in my hand, as I walked besides my mom to pre-school. We raced cars along the floor, I came home with a bootleg, cheap ass orange truck.

They tell me there was a dog at that apartment, the landlord's dog, named Max. He was big and scary with a loud ass bark, but we were friends. As the story goes, I was sleeping in his pen area besides him. He awoke, startled from a dream, and clutched my face in his jaws. I still have the scars.

We move to a poor white/middle class black neighborhood. We have an apartment under a rockabilly couple that have a snake, rats, and a tarantual. In the driveway is an old 30's Ford (complete with running boards) and an El Camino.

We live next to a wooded park, complete with amazing hills, a playground, and tons of inchworms & catepillars. My best friend was the white trash kid across the street who lives with his old aunt. I piss through his window from outside, we ride bike trails we build in his backyard, and get stung by a hive of bees in the massive tree that sat in front of his house, hiding away the rundown house and overgrown yard.

I recall thinking, I'm afraid of heights, as I look up to a tree far back on his property that had been struck by lightning. It was charred and split at the top, a good thirty feet above us. Beyond the fence is the farmland where we would pick strawberries each year.

I get new sneakers, and two older boys force us into the back of their property down the street. They tell me to close my eyes, my friend yells to me not to. I am frightened by their demeanors so I comply. They tilt a wheelbarrow over, spilling gray mud all over my feet, covering every inch of my new sneakers. I walk home into the sunset with my friend and the sun dries the mud, it cracks off, and my shoes are still perfectly fine.

I watch TV with my parents, Darth Vader's helmet being lifted up, his pale, sick frame underneath. I say, "I guess Luke didn't get his looks from his dad." My parents erupt into laughter. We're a family, watching Star Search, a man singing 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow', the Muppet Show, and ALF.

My dad teaches me to ride my bike, I can't make left turns for some reason, and wasn't too good at stopping. I put my arm out reaching for this rusted car, as my wrist drags along the metal. I still have a scar running just below my thumb and down onto my wrist.

The power is out and the windows are shaking. We're huddled around candles as Hurricane Gloria rages outside. It nearly tosses a tree from the park into the house. During the eye of the storm, we step outside, basking in the eeiry calm of the moment. Everything is ripped apart and smahed, tree branches scattered everywhere, entire bushes uprooted.

My friends get together to survey the damage. My black friends all have big houses, circular driveways, and built-in pools. I watch as one friend's sister falls into the pool, getting tangled in the sticker bushes that were deposited in there. She thrashes about and almost slips under the thorns and branches.

Awhile later, we camp out in that friend's backyard, which seems to go on for miles. We goof around, jump from tree to tree, armed only with our flashlights. We get in trouble and are made to come inside. From the bathroom window we spy the next door neighbor building something as his girlfriend comes out in only a nightshirt. I see her vagina as she bends over to kiss him.

When winter comes, we hit the park's hills with out sleds and fly down the slopes. My little sister jumps on the back of mine and we slip down the big drop. A kid comes soaring down on top of us in his wood and metal sled. My leg is crushed, and my sister's head is smashed. We need to keep her awake once we get home.

As a family we sit down to play Cabbage Patch Kids: the boardgame, and when they remove the top I spy it instantly. A piece of construction paper with a crayon stick figure drawing. Crude cave etching of a naked man and woman, with word balloons proclaiming some sort of unknown sexuality. I am instantly mortified at this unexpected intrustion into this, my dawn of sexual discovery.

Everyone laughs as they can just barely make out what it says, what it means. They laugh again when I fill out the ID card in my G.I. Joe wallet as SEX: No. My sister comes out with a random statement, "Dad has too much sex." My sister runs around naked often. My dad spanks me once, but it is so terrifying that I see it as a freeze framed moment of panic.

I remember a story where I sat in the backseat of the car after a fair, a smile on my face as I held firmly to the string on my HULK mylar balloon. Suddenly, without any warning, my dad whips around, rips the balloon from me and tosses it out the window. It seems it was reverberating in the wind and it just had to go.

Did my dad pick on me, not knowing how to relate to boys (having two older and two younger sisters) and acting out his immature jealous rage against me, the male who was perhaps taking his wife from him? I can't imagine he loved her with any depth or passion, and most likely just wanted her physically, unable to show emotion beyond that.

Either way my father was done with me once we moved to Massapequa. I was almost done with elementary school, where I was the quiet kid who identified himself as a clutz, and began a new life among kids who'd known each other for years. When I was 11 my dad told me he wasn't going to be there for me going forward.

I made some friends here and there, lots of people really friendly towards the new kid in the Yankees hat. My first friend slept in his tighty-whities when I stayed over and had Barbies in his room; he came out over a decade later. My next friends lived far away, and were bad kids, a weird mix. Then I met the four who would make me leave my comfort zone.

There was the charismatic leader (momma's boy), the hard luck kid (trouble magnet), the rebel (with daddy issues), and me, the mascot, the punchline, the scaredy cat. We stayed out past curfew, rode our bikes around, talked to girls selling friendship bracelets. I just wanted to return Blades of Steel, the NES game I rented from T&S Video (our acct.# was 1012).

But they wanted to talk to girls, so we hung out with them, stood on their corners under amber streetlights, innocently flirted with childish flair. I stood back, embarrassed, scared, uncertain. I had a paper route, and video games to be played, maybe shoot another short film on my PXL2000 with action figures. I didn't want to talk to girls.

They threatened to throw a bike at my head if I didn't ask this girl out. After our first night we were paired off. I spent the last part of the summer before High School hanging out in basements, watching Road House, doing tricks on our BMXs to impress girls in oversized Champion sweatshirts and neon skids, while they are Combos and drank Diet/Caffeine Free Coke.

They were scrunches in their hair, keds on their feet, two pairs of socks, one overflowing and colorful, and danced to BelBivDevoe. I wore net belly shirts, Bugle Boy jean shorts, and had a good sized pony tail with my overly grown out spiky hair. Eventually I put my arm around my "girlfriend" and kissed her. That was it. (A few years later she had a baby before finishing High School.)

Then I met her. My first real girlfriend. She was the object of everyone's desire. A girl two years younger than her friends, but two years of physical development ahead of her friends. She had boobies. And she was really hot. And she thought I was cute. Once again, they made me ask her out.

We all went to Adventureland right around our birthdays (her just three days before mine), and rode the rides, played games, and enjoyed ourselves. We were kids, still innocent and playing at the adult concept of dating. But we never kissed. And due to an incident where I got taken off my friend's roof by the cops, I would be grounded for two months and our young romance was cut short.

I breathed a sigh of relief, thanking my parents almost, for this opportunity to get out of this crazy, complex world I had stumbled into. There were all sorts of games and twists, to everything that was said back and forth. It was overwhelming and I was glad to get back to my simple life in my bedroom. I was raised by television and embraced it once more.

But it wouldn't last. I would be free to roam once more after New Years Eve. On January 10th I had my first kiss outside the girl's house. From there it was a slippery slope. We began making out a lot, then heavy petting. Eventually her hand took ahold of my penis and she jerked me off. It was amazing.

I wanted her to do that all the time. We went for a record 13 times in one day. I was consumed by the feeling, addicted to her firm grip releasing this fluid from me daily. You see, I had never done this to myself, never explored my own sexuality, alone in my bedroom, before she showed me the power of another person doing it.

It lead to my abandoning my friends in the living room while we were in the bedroom. If we were at her house, when her parents made me leave, I'd take the ragin hard-on I had and beat off in the bushes across the street. Our song was 'After the Rain' by Nelson, although should have been 'Don't Treat Me Bad' by Firehouse.

She couldn't stop thinking about my friend. The rebel who I had gotten very close to. It was his house the cops took me off the roof of. We shoplifted, wine coolers, Doritos and cookie dough. We stole recycling from one supermarket and returned to the other to make money. We paid a guy to buy us survival knifes at the magic shoppe in the mall.

I set things on fire. Leaves, paper, cars, the siding of a house. I would carry a lighter, as I took to smoking now and then by this point, and light things as I went. No one had ever gotten hurt. I was lucky. I even got beat up by a cop for not smoking weed, him insisting I was the lookout. He took me to a back alley and roughed me up.

And it was this friend that I went through it all with, all part of his troublemaking schemes, that she now wanted. I slammed the door in her face as she tells me, then I convince him to date her. I abandon them both. I see them together at one of our friend's brother's funeral. He had killed himself, hung himself, out in the backyard. He was feeling up her skirt at the wake.

If I left my metaphorasis to chance in Junior High, I would actively reinvent myself for High School. I ignored the jocks as they asked me to play basketball as I finished my paper route. Instead I found the kids reading comic books and playing Dungeons & Dragons, and found my way in. I would play the thief, or assasin. The moral dubious rogue, often the punching bag for the others.

This group were introverted, self-conscious, and sadistic. They would mock, taunt, insult, all to get a rise out of you, and no one would react more than me. The fat kid beat on me, the lying kid would play with my emotions, the trickster would build me up and tear me down. But I loved it. It was a dynamic I could belong to. A band of brothers, all fighting evil in our basements with dice.

I was never anyone's best friend. We'd all take turns hanging out, the dynamic always in flux as one person was around and someone else was pissed at someone else. Eventually, the abuse became too much and I fought the fat kid. I wailed on him, I held him down and kneed him in the spine, I smacked him with fake fireplace logs. But then, I finished him off a few weeks later.

He had called up one of us, and while someone was trying to candy coat why we weren't hanging out with him, I let loose. "Nobody wants to hang out with you because no one likes you." I gave him the reasons. The weakest of us all stood up and said enough; I finally stood up to someone. He was docile ever after that (despite once headbutting my sternum during art class,shutting down my heart chakra for years), and years later credited me with helping him change.

I daydreamed all throughout highschool, whether it was a short story and a hard boiled private dick and his motley crew of mystic misfits, or while looking at the girl next to me in Social Studies bra as it stuck out the side of her tank top. I would slip my hand into my jeans and invisibly masturbate during class. I became notorious among my friends for it.

I stayed away from girls, but became a chronic masturbator. I would wait til my parents were asleep and spend hours watching softcore porn and stroking myself. I think I may've permanently screwed up my neck and back from the way I would lie as I came into the top of a shoe box. I would wait for the hottest scene with a short haired brunette and then come.

By Senior year, a shift had happened. We were suddenly cool. The jocks became metalheads and did drugs. They thought we knew martial arts. My dorky musician friends were suddenly hot as hair metal expanded into grunge. We wore flannels and black leather jackets, ripped jeans and construction boots untied. We hung out with head cheerleaders and prom queens on our first day of class.

As the year went by, we got invovled. Went to dances, wrote for the literary journal, played battle of the bands. We did whatever we wanted, from staging broken neck fights (cracked Tic-Tac boxes), and shooting up the hallways with discguns. I began getting attention from girls again, and my friends could see this. Suddenly, my friends who hated me, loved me.

And I had my first crush. She was tall, dorky, on track and the basketball team, and a smart kid. She was also beautiful. Freckles with a sweet smile. She never had a boyfriend, and so after a setup worthy of a High School coming-of-age rom-com at the Homecoming dance, we dated. We made out for most of The Bodyguard. She once whispers "You're driving me crazy..." in my ear as I kiss her neck.

A week or two later we're done as she becomes even more aloof than she had been before, flirting with my other friends. And considering my track record with friends and girlfriends, I reacted poorly. I tried to control her, she let me go. Wound up dating a friend of a friend of mine for awhile after High School who I no doubt took her virginity.

I was definitely into girls again, but aiming that high was scary, dangerous, devastating. It brought out a madness in me. Then I saw her. She was tiny, thin, with curly hair and an acoustic guitar in her hands. She seemed to sit outside her group of friends. A general dislike towards her. I was smitten.

A month before my prom (as she was two years younger) I lost my virginity to her. We were fooling around on my bed, down to underwear as I grinded on her. She whispers in my ear "Don't tease me." I spend a moment in shock, before grabbing the condom I had stashed in my CD rack that my friends had stolen from this girl's older brother's room years before.

A month later we're having sex in the back of the limo after prom, my friend having sex with his girlfriend on the other side, our jackets hanging between to section it off. The odd thing is I sort of 'dated' his girlfriend for a few weeks the semester before. Nothing happened, but when that friend years later turned psycho on a girl I was dating, saying that me and him hooked up, well, that's just odd.

What distorted memory could he have? Did we do something and I don't remember? I did wake up in just my boxers on the senior trip, where he and two other friends were all sleeping in the same room. He wore dresses and makeup, liking gothy new wave, and the Crow. I don't even know what to think other than a memory I have of me crying hysterical while Candlebox's 'Far Behind' played in the car.

Then there was Freddie. All through my senior year, Freddie would ask me things like "If in the future you met a girl and it turned out she used to be a guy, what would you do?", to which I would respond earnestly, that it depended on how I felt about the relationship. I failed to see the connection between that connection and his insistence that he was a woman in a man's body. I was incredibly naive, dumb, or in obvious denial.

All year he would ask em things during Government class. I was eventually told that my picture graced the locket around his neck, that the poem he wrote in the journal was about me and my "flowing locks", and his position as editor is why it featured so many of my stories and poems. Then, one day, while at rehearsal for the Disney Revue (I did it for a girl) he told me he loved me.

I told one person, who told one person, who eventually got it back to him. He was pissed, and I got the diva cold shoulder for the rest of the year. My tiny girlfriend would be threatened as things got catty. Soon enough, we graduated, and I wouldn't hear about him again until the following Fall, on the day of my birthday as I'm about head into work as a cashier at Waldbaums.

He was dead. The morning of my birthday, he had written a few notes to friends, swallowed sleeping pills, and pulled a plastic bag over his head. My friend's brother, a firefighter, found him and the word quickly spread. I don't think I went to the memorial, or the wake. I was numb to it. Indifferent. I thought I should feel something, but I didn't.

Three months later, and it's Christmas. Just finished my first semester of Nassau Community College and had driven away my girlfriend by sleeping with the girl who was with my friend in the limo during prom. I was working at K-Mart with my now ex and had to tell her that in order for her to leave me alone. I couldn't get rid of her and she would be back months later to have random sex with me in the stock room.

She had surrendered her identity to me, left all decisions to me, wanted to do whatever I did. I couldn't stand the power and control, and I lashed out her angrily time and time again. I had to be meaner and meaner, trying to make her hate me so I wouldn't have to be responsible for her.

She eventually went on medication after a breakdown, then went back to school and is a thriving academic of medieval history. She was adopted and found her real parents to be a genius physics professor and a schizophrenic drug addict.

But I was untouchable. Having fun with friends, driving places, hanging out at diners, smoking and drinking coffee. I couldn't think of anyone but myself. Certainly not a troubled youth with gender issues, or a fractured young girl with identity problems. And definitely not my grandmother who was wasting away from chemo as cancer destroyed her.

Three days after Christmas, she died. I vaguely remember her wake, hardly recall her funeral. She was the center of our family's universe, the lynchpin that held us all together. A tiny spitfire of a woman who showed me NYC, took me to work with her on Queens Blvd, and made me pancakes whenever I wanted. Her huge house was always an adventure waiting to be explored.

And during Christmas dinner, I couldn't even look over at the couch and acknowledge that the bag of bones was my grandmother, the greatest, coolest, hippest, most selfless woman I had ever had the good fortune to meet on my life. She was everything to me while growing up, and somehow during my teen years, I forgot that. And then she was gone.

My family dissolved over the years after that. No more holiday dinners, just makeshift Thanksgivings, empty Christmas Days, joyless Easters. I couldn't feel anything and began just having sex with any girls who showed me attention. Cute, nice ones I hurt, hot, sexy ones left my house crying afterward, back to their boyfriends.

Tower of Brahma 62.i Solo Inferno

2010-06-14T06:23:00.000-07:00

To say it was dark, to say I was alone, would be to acknowledge the existence of those words. There was only my flesh, the energy that coursed through it, and the concepts in my grey matter. My skin was drifting apart atom by atom, cell by cell.

I lit up from the inside, glowing crimson withing my groin, shifting to orange among my abs, canary yellow from the diaphram, a burst of green from my sternum, throat tightening around bluish illumination, and purple popped from my forehead. Stoplight magnificence in eternal void.

Pulling a coin from my pocket, a beautiful woman carved into its side. Flipping it over, it mirrored my own third eye, a reflecktion of my insides shining within. It pulled free from my hand and slipped flawlessly onto the horn of light protruding from my skull.

Fifth Avenue decadence, dollars turning into fabric, less with each season, the money become abstract plastic. A new look, a pretty thing to wear, to pretend to be. Each cycle delivering the anti-dote or evolution to last year's debacle. Appearance is all.

Every shred of clothing shows how you feel about yourself. Emtpy in crisp starched shirts, not caring in cotton, draping yourself in sheer shimmer. You try and capture eyes, daring them to hold you higher, momentary fix for the vacant chest. You never learned to love. You are a void. You don't exist.

A pulse of golden energy rippled down the horn and swept through my body. The ring was gone. Absorbed. Passed through my body. I felt as if a rotten piece of my lungs were torn from my body. A sensitive band-aid ripped off absence. A tumor of black smoke evaporated before my eyes.

In my left palm I held another coin. I had it pressed against my crotch, the red beam from my erect cock embraced the metal's cold touch, slipping over it like a second skin, a receptacle to withdraw into. On the side upwards on the coin I saw an image of a demonic goat face stretching thin as it pulled down over my shaft.

She walks by, the bar freezes, and you're alone, the patrons all incidental nobodies as you take her in. The smell sifting from her hair as it brushes up against the exposed skin of her back, skin that dips down the curve of her spine, dropping into a dip above the crack of her dress.

You spin the room around, diving among the onlookers, wiping your eyes over her bust, riding the dividing line of the plunging neck, sharp chest bones highlighting the subtle sternum ribs rifts in her cleavage. You want to throw her down and love her.

Your eyes drift higher as you lower your brow. Nose twitch, smirk, inhaled breath, prowling on top of her, pinned in your grasp, smiles stifled on her lips, hair tussled as your grip slides up and across her flesh. Gripping, biting, rubbing you chin over stomach.

She leaves her body, electric jolt of pleasure pumping from her womb, a trigger clicked as shivers shot to her toes, tensed in an orgasmic clutch. She comes. You leave. Your use is fulfilled. Activated another to a higher calling. You're not allowed to connect with her. Any of her.

My cock feels like dead weight, a thing of wet clay, falling apart in my grip. I panic for a moment before realizing that it doesn't matter. Let it melt away. It only caused false ego, obsessive territorial marking instrument of my destruction. There is no salvation in the phallic. Only a load of empty enlightenment.

The semen seeped into my stomach, dripping into the cracks, gooping its way through intestines. Liquid life, plasma seed paste, a short lived spaceship out of the body universe into the egg, where one would strived to become a living entity in a larger reality. Only...there is no egg.

I am a shell, meat, a gear that grinds itself free of white grease. Mechanical masturbation drawing its strength from my guts, which are all becoming slippery and sliding free from me. There's no food inside, never been much of an eater, the sickly lining always misaligning my meals.

Never was I taught balance. I do it to excess, then diminish in guilt and depression from the overconsumption. If I feed my problem, it dies, but if I starve it, it will suffer. I will suffer. I should suffer. If I deny my needs I control my body, therefore myself. I exist because I can damage myself. Spite is my sustenance, bitterness my bread.

The snout that was my belly button, my rolls crumbling away, breasts drooping into pig ears, I was disolving. Whole slabs broke free and plopped into non-existence. A torso of a man, my arms flailing about, unsteady in my undoing. I grip my sternum, slipping digits inbetween ribs, dug my nub-like fingertips deep inside, pressing deep into my lungs.

And I tore myself wide open. An emerald elegance erupted from my chest cavity. A shaggy chorophil presence puffed out and blossomed. The air, or lack thereof, dried its leaves into cripsy brown chips, twinkling into the breeze of damnation in a billion flakes.

Soil that once fed a great tree, the form of its roots still inverted in its dirt mold. There is no purpose now, nothing to feed, to have bloom inside you. All that remains is dug up earth, a gaping wound, nature's broken heart. Packed down tight, perhaps growing the means to dissolve a corpse. A host to worms, maggots, bacteria. It dies in you.

So why bother? Give up the struggle. Life is dead. There remains nothing to fight for. Your purpose has been fulfilled. Propagation mechinization. Now go listen to sad tunes, have a drink of scotch, sit in your simple self-pity...and die. There is no point. That is all.

There's so much potential though. There's hope. I can make a change for the better, I have before, I can do it again. I can serve a new purpose, a higher goal, something to transcend the ego. I will fight for the Id of all known realities. And that truth will make all I do beyond condemnation. It is for the best.

Just so tired today. Work was brutal. The way the boss talked to me. Fuck that. I'm gonna quit. And that dumb ass in the other room, my supposed mate, is just so fucking obnoxious, I just need a drink. Or a nap. Maybe I'll get high and putz around. Can't deal with it today. Tomorrow, maybe.

The day never comes and nothing is done. A cry goes out, "Where has my youth gone?", and the silence of the future echoes back a hopeless answer. No sense is trying, look at how bad it all turned out for them, they didn't make it too far, and they're better than I am. Fuck it, I'm useless. How can I best stave off boredom until I die?

I'm sent into a coughing fit as my lung shrivel, forcing the ash of my person up my trachea, hacking out a ball of navy blue phlegm. All that I had left to say to everyone, barfed out before me. It was all a jumbled mess. An apology, a confession, a multitude of lies. Dissolving beneath my chin was all the love that I had not spoken. The truths that died with me.

That's all I had. Any connection to humanity is now expelled. We only are able to make some gutteral sounds, air whooshed up a rippled tubing mechanism with a valve atop it. A mass of flesh with muscle memory, triggered by abstract thought, categorized into feelings (or collectively, emotions), blown out as words.

Symbolic stencils over impossible constructs. I love you. I fear death. Life eternal. These things are nothing. They mean only what we loosely collectively what we imagine them to mean. No litmus test can calculate whether any brains are in sync, if communication is accurately taking place.

It is not. Memories smash against experience, behavior instinctually guides us through relatively unharmed, as robotic gestures of emotional interaction are jerkily enacted. What is holding it together? A hobbled together language, invented from dead cultures hodgepodged grunts and growls.

The remainder of flesh slips free and I glance down into a golden triangle, a lions roaring face trapped in its triangular prison. The three point begin to curve, and the whole thing dips a bit. Rounded edges reach outwards and then it pops! The roar is releashed and like a flashbulb crack, it is gone.

I may as well sit back and wait for the end. That's all I ever did upon reflection. Hardly did I ever try and succeed. Often, I did what was necessary, I got by and then I didn't need to do anything again til next time. Just fine by me. Life was too complicated to handle anyways. So let me burn.

Sure, I could string together words, draft you a sentence. Then what? Your eyes would scan it, your brain would process each shape into a word, the word would be referenced, an idea of the information would be drawn up, and you'd be presented with a concept to either accept or deny.

Does it matter? Did any of the above words move you? At all? Do you even understand what is being discussed? Am I so far into my own head that this is utter gibberish, that I have spent countless hours clicking out letters for nothing? I will destroy this book and all it contains. See? It is not worth it.

Printed out in paperback, or shoved electronically into inboxes, this work does not matter. It would be a waste of time, if you didn't get the enlightenment that it is all for naught! By doing something you have learned there is no point in accomplishing anything at all. It is all as dust. And soon, not even that.

My head thunked back onto the last patch of solid ground. Or the concept of ground anyways. I was now just a head, my throat long since dripped away. Down to serious business. How do we end this? The tip of the beam emanating out of my frontal lobe seemed to poke into the fabric of dark matter all around me.

When I looked closer, for that was all I was capable of doing, I could see a small drain circling, the energy whipping past the event horizon as my essence was sucked up the straw that protruded from my third eye. All that remained of me was sucked into the eternity of an alternate dimension.

But this would be the last one. The final reality to deconstruct and dissect, then shove down the drain out to coat the container that once held galaxies, solar systems, stars, planets, humanity, life. This was the absolute end. No matter would exist after this was done.

At least it better be. Because if I'm born again, forced to endure every meaningless meeting, concoct asinine conversations with a mindwiped mass of morons, face the pain and anguish that living with the idiotic animal that we call man, if I have to do that all over again? I will kill every single person, with my bear hands if need be. I will not spare a single child. Every aspect of life will be eradicated.

It sounds so good, the bitterness survivng my decapitated state, suggesting that it resides in my brain. The oodles of noodles in my skull that shoots lightning along currents, enabling me to hate with all my might. It's such an empowering rush as I wade into the muck of rage.

I feel the breath escape from blue lips as it whisps past my cheek. I see the blood pouring from where I stuck the blade. I hear the crack of bone as shards sever circulation. Repugnant soul sits on my tongue as a savor the aroma of death. I have ended the path for someone. Altered their destiny, fulfilled my own.

A destroyer. Detached from mankind and its weaknesses, its petty longing to feel and live. It is not aware of the absurd delight that it is in knowing that everything dies and nothing is worth doing. Whatever temporary achievement may come, a decay and destruction of self will inevitably follow.

I wear a crown because I dare to. None save me can shoulder this burden, you people can not understand what it means to have to judge all of your souls time and time again. It is not improving over time. The evolution of cellular self-awareness is minimal at best, and I suggest the entire project be shut down.

When I look at you, I don't see what others see. I don't buy the persona, and I don't even believe the false facade beneath that. You are a lie because you don't know the word truth, because that would be an idea from above that is felt. It can not be spoken.

You all pretend so well don't you? Playing games and not giving a second thought to all that is around you. Don't question, be kept doubting yourself, seeking approval, you'll never see me coming. It's all one big party, yay, let's have fun. Fun, until you all die. Horribly. Screaming.

I don't know how you smile. I wonder at your bravado. How can you "feel" anything, let alone happiness? It does not exist! Stop pretending it does! You HEAR ME GODDAMMIT, STOP BEING HAPPY! I scream as my jaw dislodges and drops away. A wet hiss pours out of my throat, my tongue wiggling in open air, disconcertingly long and exposed.

At least I am here. At the end. I survived longer than everyone and saw it through. None of you could have done it. Who would have had the fortitude to look at yourself and rip it to shreds? I speak in the abstract only to relate. But I can get specific. I can remove my crown, step down from my throne.

This is who I am. I am a writer. I am lazy. I feel superior, I know I'm inferior. I can not connect with people, I have an impulse to hate them, yet also to serve them. I am an anglo-saxon mutt. An American. A New Yorker, from Long Island. A boy, a guy, a man...male. A bastard poet with lying eyes and fierce prose. I live as a con man, fooling firstly myself, into believing I am a con man.

A program with too many layers. An interacting mindframe that's gone on the blink. I've hit a woman, after being hit. I've cheated on lovers who listened to my heart. I've acted the part of sad soul to escape an awkward confrontation. Ill prepared for emotional survival, I crafted a skill to manipulate and control. My quick wit, disguised behind a simpleton, was the dagger I drove into your backs.

I left my grandmother to rot on a couch, cancer carving the life out of her meat, a wet cloth canvass of skin draped upon a rack of hangers. I felt nothing as a lost soul, a woman trapped in a man's body, a hermaphraditic rebus succubus, killed himself on my birthday. I enjoyed driving my girlfriend away with the brutal honesty of teenage infidelity. I wanted her to feel pain and get the fucking point.

Suffer. Feel guilt. Suffer. This is who I am. Punish myself, burn my spirit in hellfire, the crown long ago melted and drawn into the spiral sucking it all away. My nose caved in on itself, my cheeks sunk and fell away, my eyes carried themselves out the back of my eye sockets and drifted along the river of brainmatter.

All up into the third eye, right into the sky, a pinprick sticking me to the wall. I'm done. My final sentence was a nod to ego and self, a wink and a nod to the id, and a fuck you to the superego.

"I am the greatest writer alive."

Tower of Brahma. 62h. Hell is for children

2010-06-07T07:27:00.000-07:00

I pry myself from inside the egg, peel electron layers free from the warm embrace of an alternate reality. The digital dream of my older self was now over, his spirit in the hands of the Prince of Lies, finally at his mercy.

I snap back to my body, the scorched park wide open and tangible all around me. The eggs still sit stacked in an open bit, vulnerable flesh and blood bobbing inside. They lie there, cut off from fantasy, their heartbeats thundering through them as never before.

The devil gives me a vision.

Anthropological devolving, mankind disappearing before my eyes, from meta-post-post-modern (MP2M) to neanderthal, primate/lizard division, amphibious single cell organisms, entwined tails, penis to anus, testes within womb. The balance is restored.

The atom spins wild, rollercoaster centrifuge, colliding on magnetic force field pulls. A vibrational superstring wobbling in the spaces between neutrons, eleven dimensions rippling in the cosmic wind. A freshly laundered sheet, flapping on a clothesline, spring in full bloom as the sun sets.

The end.

Sixty three lives simultaneously...suddenly, cease to exist as each body within each pod ignites with hellfire, scorching the individual inside into ashes in the blink of an eye. I hear a dull screech as the internet dies. The electronic age has become extinct.

I return to my body just as the devil draws me down into his realm.

A void of ash, wind scattered remnants of entire species whipping about us. Every sinner left is gone. All traces of human anatomy has been torched, all souls converted back into bio-electricity, siphoned back out into the fourth dimension.

He scoops up a handful of cinder, remains spilling over the sides of his long slender fingers, and raises his open palm to me. I know that this is me. What I become. My death, or rather the moment just beyond. My final judgment.

And I am to be the judge.

Tower of Brahma. 62G. God's Not Home

2010-05-31T19:18:00.000-07:00

"So, now you know why I've got to end it. All of it. Before it goes any further."

I was convincing. Years of running a mass(multi)media empire refined my charisma to a fine edge, capable of stabbing right into your brain like a needle.

But his success has made him weak, out of practice, having bent the remaining humans to his will, their very survival dependent on his vision.

And I'm not him.

Not yet. But I know how he thinks. I know it's not an act of altruism, a heroic deed, like he's trying to pitch it to me. This is a way out. A way not to deal with the consequences of his actions. Even at sixty I still can't own up to responsibility.

"Bullshit. It's all about you. Just tell me the truth."

What does it matter? At this point, the last scene between two living human beings, dialogue zipping between our neurons like electronic telepathy. Our chat room simulation was that of the villain's lair, complete with viewscreen, dome, and throne. A place he could think. Somewhere this desperate future version of myself could hide and scheme to save his soul.

"You know the deal then. It's what landed you here. Forced to handle me. Yourself." His shoulders went slack, he tried to let go, be himself once again, but I saw the tension cling to his muscles.

"You're the one who brought me here, to the future, to the end of all things." I fought to muster up righteous anger, where was wrath when I needed it?

"Yes. At great expense." Turning towards the background, he produced a thumbcontrol from his pocket.

Click. The walls flickered and vanished. The secret headquarters of the man who kept the devil at bay just ceased to be. In the dark of imagined space, we stood there, not looking at each other.

"Then why do it if you knew I'd come here to stop you? You must have done this when you were me...", my voice was oddly confident, a rumble in my chest like a proud lion.

He spun around, pivot on heeled boots, a whip-crack of an arm, extended finger pointed at me, aimed directly at my brain. He held it as the spotlight popped on, then slid his shadows at me as the beam dropped. Glancing upwards in a snap, sunglasses popped on his face.

"I never succeeded when I was young..." the stabbing tip of his piercing obsidian fingertips darted into my peripheral vision.

My hand whipped up, slapping aside his shadow, spinning his body sideways, he was ready with a cocked back southpaw. I finally make eye contact, and take a good long look at who I really am, what I eventually become.

An old man with a sack full of theatrics. Playing the streetfighting action hero, past his prime, shades of supercool wannabe in every step. Afraid of people so finds a way to be alone. Afraid of not being the most important person in history.

So secure in the idea that he's Jesus, unwilling to believe himself to be Judas. Fame makes strange bedfellows with faith. Not a young man, but still a kid. Damaged goods. He tried and failed to stop the end of all that ever was. I will try and fail.

Therefore I will destroy the universe.

His fist slaps into my palm. FWAPP! I pause the scene just long enough to crack him into pieces. The crinkled bits littered the floor. The burning embers of his remains howled as the digital dirt digested him.

"See you in Hell."

Tower of Brahma. 62f. Over & Over

2010-05-24T02:10:00.001-07:00

I dove deeper into the system. The web of illusion that these overgrown unborn babies all pretended was reality. They changed the channels on each other, watching private lives that were lies, wish-fulfillment imaginings of personal experience...no more than dramatic reenactments.

There was a heirarchy. A tower to climb. Each flabby sleeping slob brought me closer to the reason this humanity holdout was able to even exist. How could it keep going? What held it together? Solar powered panels, interconnectivity, hive mindless entertainment machine.

Why not just let go?

There were scientists, mixed among philosophers, those of us that had answers, or at least a study guide, a rulebook, that made sense of the chaotic cauldron we were birthed in. A step by step reason formula that formed structure around the formless void. They were plugged in a meditative state, pumping knowledge into recording devices, free to ponder and pontificate.

There were theologians. No actual men or women of faith, but historians and scholars, briefed on the great beyond. They too processed bits of data, translated from ancient alphabets, the musings of early mankind. The bold truths that came over told them everything that they already felt.

Fictioneers, fictionauts, falsehood mythmakers, the greatest living writers, story structure specialists, all hammering out a plot that was so precise, they believed it could puncture the essence of all dimensions. This was the armory, letters lined in rows, grouped in paragraphs, given power and purpose.

Destroy the entire thing. Everything. The reality of Earth. The concept of reality. The idea of Heaven and Hell, the Devil, and God itself: these would all die, stuck and bleeding across the higher realm. And if we were lucky, that too would burst apart and be obliterated, and beyond.

Devout disciples drilling into the ether, whipping together adventures, played out before them, for them by them. Self-satisfying action, the dramas each sprouting a new direction, inspiring each creator to fine tune and edit. There had to be one last story to tell. A final epic where each word died as you read it, a book that evaporates upon asorbtion of even just one reader.

It must be at the end of this race. For infinity was merely a word for the endless unknown, a word and idea created by man, so therefore irrevocably flawed. There was a cliff, know reality was flat, an edge to carry what was left towards, to jump off of. The bliss of non-existence.

Surely that was better than suffering eternally.

Tower of Brahma. 62e. White Lie Like the Devil pt.1

2010-05-17T10:37:00.000-07:00

I got inside. Networked my self into one of the oval coccoons sitting in post-apocalyptic Prospect Park. Connected with one of the last sixty four people left alive, if you could call this living.

Naked, encased in gelatinous electrolyte rich ectoplasm, asleep and surfing the world wide web (now no more than a sad server no larger than a message board). They lived digital dreams, recharging and recycling their energies, feeding their personal re-wombs. Safe from Satan.

Or so they thought. I psychically slipped into one, a developer for the wonder material that comprised the skin of these lifesaving eggs. He was granted passage as one of the creators of their salvation. In return for his genius, he plugged in and tuned out. I patched into his video feed.

Brushing his teeth. Shower scene masturbation. Dress for success and off to work. A coffee and bagel as he passes thousands of artificial simulations of the rush hour masses. None of them real, but for the illusion of a real life, a mundane routine, boring living 9 to 5 workweek humdrum. This is what he wanted.

I rode his signal to the next pasty person floating in goop. This one wired the globules for audio/video, was integral to the development of the interface, and was otherwise completely and utterly a drone. His feed fed him sex in a non-stop loop, penetrating and pontificating upon every manner of persona.

I skipped along a few more technicians and mechanical misanthropes. They all sought some singular simulcra of happiness. Drugs, endless streams of pixellated heroin seeping up into veins. Pain, straps of leather slapping and cracking against electrical inputs that served as skin. There was nothing but self-destruction spread among the saved.

Until I came to a poet. A garden. A gifted lad, living renaissance simplicity, dining in decadent halls, gliding along in suits with maidens at balls, lounging with feather quill pen and parchment, scribbling along for days on end. He sought to uncover the mystery of love eternal, while alone in a bubble.

Next to the poet was the artist, swiping across landscapes, thinking outside the canvass, breaking physics down and reshaping all that was around him. The cosmos came into being as he tipped his finger into the dark infinite, rasterized edges sawing into the endless monitor display. He swapped paintbrushes, hit the airbush tool, added a gradient.

I thought about what art would be with only the artist to gaze upon it, what poetry would sound like with only your own voice to speak it. There would be no audience, no outside force to create meaning or be communicated to. No one there to place a label upon your creation, no pressure to please anyone but yourself.

Most likely a Hell disguised as Heaven.

Tower of Brahma. 62 D. This is a novel.

2010-05-10T16:24:00.000-07:00

Art does not exist in a vacuum. That was the last lucid thought I had running through my brain as I scrambled to put down the information that was growing in my mind.

This book is something important. I'm thinking of something, devising a plan, scoping the pattern of everything that is and ever will be. The meaning of life, if possible, but exploring every mystery between here and there.

It doesn't matter if this work matters in any way with any piece of writing that has ever been created. Whatever came before was of its time, crafted by its influences, bending an idea through a symbolic pattern of letters from something called an alphabet.

And in English no less. By an American. From a historical aspect, what could be more removed from anything ancient and physcial, a battle of survival, wits and strength, tempered with wisdom and experience. The language was new, the country was new, it's people such a diverse genetic, culturally and socially enmeshed mankind, the likes the Earth had never seen.

We dwelled mired in the daily occurences of pop stars, celebrity corpses, and mad branded icons of fame. We hungered for reality, senses sharpening, pulsrate quickening, visceral moments. Some of us wrote those down, painted them, screamed them out with notes. We made Art. Abstract thought brought humans out of the darkness of their being.

Stumbling towards the bright light, the pretty flame, rationalizing with logic our hearts desires. We wanted more of whatever was beyond our grasp. Were two opposing forces spun into motion, still spiraling outwards from the Big Bang? An atomic birth, a quantum fusion, energy reacting, exploding into infinity.

Everything gets bigger as things get smaller. The possibilites are greater as our souls and bodies are battered and run down, kept occupied with a weekday task that allows us just enough life left in us to drink our cares away. Our gadgets shrink in our very hands, digital landscapes opening up in our palms. You gaze down into the app that will become your personality.

A metal/plastic all-purpose personality storage device. Digital images, handheld video, mp3 soundtrack to score our descent. We simulataneously drop into Hell as our consciousness transcends to Nirvana. Our bodies rot, our awareness expands. Those left alive live comfortably, gelantenous sacks filled with nutrient goo, wired for Blue-Ray, Plasma HD, 3D, stereo surround-sound, Hi-Def, Bluetooth Wireless Connectivity to the Central Router.

The last bastion of humanity. The 64 blobs that lie on the horizon, sitting in bunches sometimes, swatted into a ditch of scorched earth by some wandering demonic beast, I counted them out and checked them off. The devil wanted an exact count. Who's left?

And I was the errand boy. A younger self of one of these sad sack, re-wombed, pathetic examples of the last people on earth. In one of these bobbing water balloon eggs was me at sixty years old. Having become successful enough to afford my very own Armaggedon-life rafts, I apparently somehow pluck my 33 year old self, me, and plop him here after God's Reckoning.

A New York City picked clean by rotted, gnarled bits of bone that these monsters call teeth. Large stabbing, piercing, eviscerating tusks of mustard colored fangs. Bits of human carnage wedged in its gums, a discernable body part popping from a back molar as it screeches the deadening shriek of eternal damnation.

This moment is your last.

But its not. The devil has a deal. Live. Walk. Experience what's left of my race. Then sign the contract, get whatever I want, do a favor for him, and eternal bliss. Wait, what's the favor? I don't remember offering up my services in any sort of post-apocalyptic janitor, sweeping torsos and limbs into bins, clearing streets of bodies.

"That's not what I want." It really wasn't a big deal.

"Alright, well I signed...", I said. "What now?"

That's when he left me in decayed Brooklyn, shattered brownstones, a ring of rubble circling Prospect Park. The temple that was the Brooklyn Museum still stood, despite savage anger delivered to its columns by all manner of mishapen beasts. I had a free pass. All but invisible to their animalistic senses, their bloodlust.

It was here, besides a lake of hellfire, I found a stash of the orbs. Giant old pantyhose containers, the oversized Easter eggs, and inside every one was a blob of white chocolate. A rich executive of a company, the designer of the orb technology, the president perhaps. But each one had something in there that I needed.

I tapped one with my foot to watch it warble like a water snake, but it held firm, not quite the kiddie pool inflatable I imagined. Flexible but secure. It looked like something found in nature from another planet or dimension, totally acceptable sitting like a giant nest as massive leathery wings flapped all about me, their shadows dipping over me, as if to keep me on task.

From my pocket I pull out the handheld that the devil gave me. It was clunky, old school, had heft and weight to it. Dark wood panelling, vinyl grooves, and a chrome finish. The screen came to life, flickering from Apple IIe green dot matrix, to 16-bit, NTSC to PAL, VCR quality. It snapped with my brain and I began to interface.

I went inside myself first. Realizing that the lump of plastic and metal was just a formality. Something that resembles what I knew in my life, the tech of my era, to represent an idea. Connecting electronically, which triggered the psychic link. And from there, I took aim, dead center of the oval before me, and fired.

9600k baud modem squelch.

Tower of Brahma - Christ, This is Easy - 62.c (of 64)

2010-05-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

Buy a drink, blend in, slip between the cracks. You're a normal human being enjoying an alcoholic beverage. At a bar where people gather to consume and forget, a place where your past and hand shakes should be forgotten.

Confidence is hard, carrying a deflated ego across the world, hefting the bloated carcass of my entire life along the powerlines of my life. After Jesus was ressurected he assumed a false identity, scouring the land for all that he could fix and realign.

Now it's my time. I'm here, in his name, reborn in his image, sweeping over all that I see to enlighten and brighten against all odds. I know you hate me, envy me, and it's quite alright. I really don't mind.

I have a job to do. I am hefting the weight of everything else with me. So display your discomfort, explain your dilemmas, and know that I'm listening. I may not seem like I care, but I totally do. I want us all to be happy and fulfilled.

A few drinks makes it better. A smoke outside, a beverage in hand, the night's coolness set upon us all. Abuse of alcohol makes it easier to interact. Makes our fallible human nature that much easier to consume. It's better than being revealed stark sober.

I don't judge you, even though I do, but I love you all nonetheless. I know how hard it is. I've experienced it first hand as one of you. Talk about it all like it matters, dancing among the discourse, taking in the pain and beauty of every day living.

I will swallow it all and make of it what I can, I promise you that. It's my pleasure to be of service, my disrupted youth, my flock of helpless servants to oblivion. I put words down and make this all a bit easier to consume. It may not be to your liking but it's all I can do to take in and digest the everything that surrounds me.

I creep out of the crypt, dancing before your eyes, breathing in the dischord in your discourse. I shave my beard into a fierce goatee and slide into society. You don't see me here but I know that you appreciate my efforts.

You're welcome.

Tower of Brahma - U.R.B. - Chapter 62b. (of 64)

2010-04-26T00:01:00.000-07:00

The beast rose from over a knoll, all snarling and slobber, hungry for flesh, the natural malevolence shone in its eyes. I froze in my tracks, silencing my body as it trembled.

"Bitches!", he screamed across the subways tracks, followed by incoherent mumbling, punctuated by, "Whores!"

The draft down the tunnel wafted the aroma of urine and a bar floor combo alcohol stench. A train barrelled down the tracks, perhaps just a station away, shoving the air currents along the platform, carrying the man towards me.

His boots shuffled across the tiles, smearing Saturday Night vomit along like a slug. Drool slipped from the corner of his mouth, snot dripped from both nostrils, and I think he shit his pants.

Passing the row of empty benches between us, he shambled up in my peripheral vision. The words I was running my eyes over disappeared altogether, my concentration long ago broken by his outburst. He was nearly upon me.

The train light erupted from the dark mouth of the tunnel, propelling the metal mass towards my direction, the wind whipping up, sweeping over my body, the air curling below my nostrils. My eyes closed for an extended blink and I could sense the madman's hand as it reached out for me.

He stepped out of nowhere and thrust his arm forward, open palming the bum, ripped off his feet like crumpled notebook paper, tossed aside without a thought. I watched as the force left the arm extending from behind me, into the frail and elderly body, the sick, weak flesh that was covered beneath dirty rags, soaked in filth.

The bum mouthed the words "Burn." Or so I thought. Just before the B train shredded and splintered his person, obliterating his skeleton, pulping his limbs, grinding his organs into paste. It splashed up the front of the train as the driver shrieked in horror and slammed the breaks.

The train screeched, metal shearing metal, twisted whine of polished friction. The wind dropped instantly as the doors 'DING'ed open. A hand appeared on my left shoulder as a face drifted in on the right. It was him. Me. The last one. Smiling.

"Come on Charles. Time to do this thing." His left arm gently pushed me in the suway car, like a piece of meat shuffled along a conveyer belt.

"What the fuck do you want?" Bastard.

"We gotta wrap this apocalypse up."

I knew he was right. Just as I knew that the derelict that was just slaughtered didn't matter. I didn't need to ask why, or proclaim the inhumanity of it all. No one was left to care. The human race was down to bare bones.

"Stand clear of the closing door." Automated conveinence.

I dropped onto the bench. The doors slid closed. The man came into full view as he held onto the pole. It was me in my sixties, maybe after I worked out for a few years and hired a stylist. Looks like I got my teeth done too. A rune tattoo behind the ear.

Bastard. A shimmer formed around him as the train chugged forward. The car lurched forward and the space inside began to warble. All around me became fluid. It condensed, drawing me in, sucked down the drain. We built up speed and the bubble shrunk, pulled me up onto my feet, standing before the elder Charles Crown.

I pulled back, arched away from him, wasn't there an issue with two beings of similar matter touching each other? A personal paradox that'll bash time and space apart?

He saw the look on my face and smirked. We curled up in an oval lounge space, intimate and cozy, practically sitting on top of one another. And with a faint BOOOM, we banish ourselves from the material plane.

"Where are we going?" It was the only question I had on hand.

"Beyond."

Tower of Brahma - I Saw A Mountain - 62a (of 64)

2010-04-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

Valhalla. The point where two opposing forces begin to seperate, water vapor eradication of eternity, one drop at a time, a shimmering sphere wall, ever expanding.

Charles Crown stands before the crack of all reality. A dividing of houses, life crumbles all about him, shifting rifts tearing itself apart.

Fuck, he sighs.

That's what it all meant. He's the one who first sees the bubble begin to burst. Nothing special, just happens to be him. No great destiny other than being first in line at the dotted line, the parting of two parallel dimensions, Strange savage arayan norweigan wolfgod, and myself.

The Spider sheds its skin, leaving behind a venomous grin, seeping with sinister lies. The weapon with which to kill the serpent. But first, escape.

Run for your lives boys, this chapter is at an end.

The Tower of Brahma - Chapter 61 - Inferno

2010-04-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

I sit in the NorthWest corner of the park, just past the scorched bars of the kid's playground, but before the massive burning ember, the eternally blazing, giant tree trunk by the exit. Where homeless men battled West Village kids with their Kings, Queens, and Knights. Strategy and conquest are long lost concepts here, mere scuffmarks across a blackened chessboard.

"The portals of Darkness are open and the shadows of the dead hunt over the earth..."

More like linger and stare at the human, sunglasses and cap, cigarette and paperback in hand, as he rests his feet on the battered, melted plastic table with a chargrilled quilt upon it, a banged up typewriter, and a small stack of black and white photographs. The human takes a drag of smoke, exhales into the smokey, brimstone day, and writes this sentence in his head.

I put down the paperback, can't read on a day like today, I've a mad on for writing and I must force it out, destroy this section of time and space once and for all. The demonic forms all hustled by me, ignoring the last remnant of the Twentieth Century that isn't bound up in his very own bubble world.

The rest of the world is floating out at sea, or in an underground bunker, tucked in a secure room of giant, gelantenous coccoons, floating inside their own private, inflatible web; "in-case-of-armaggedon" your reality becomes a floatation device. They all sleep, log-online, go about their day in a total delusion of business as usual humdrum.

But not me, I never grew up with one of them fancy realities. Seems a future version of me brought me through time to save himself from something, and I bursted out of my little bubble, spilling out into the world. So, here I am. Selling thoughts and memories to the tourists from Hell in a Nightmare Futuristic Dystopia.

Cybernetic monsters, wailing banshees giving birth, child-like creatures of disgusting evil, they all stroll by and throw their disapproving looks my way, or refuse to acknowledge my existence, and even sometimes, sometimes they run past in fear. God only knows what they think, how they see me.

Occasionally though, one will happen by, intrigued by my small setup, and ask what it is I'm doing.

"I'm selling my wares, to make a wage, so as to live another day."

This usually leaves them stumped and an easy mark, so I give them the spiel about winding up in the Inferno, rat-a-tat-tat down a paragraph or three on the back of a worn photograph, and then see their reaction. They read it there, but it doesn't register. They toss a piece of hellfire into my bucket, and go about their day. I slip on the shades, kick back in my kicks, and read another page.

They go home their night to their perch in a blown out highrise uptown, place the photo on their coffee table, devour whatever scraps of flesh they have about, and secretly think about my poem. The words jingle through oddly wired meat, stimulating electrical impulses to begin firing, forging connections never made, producing desires and longing for something pure and beautiful. Their head then explodes.

It's a cruel trick, but they're fucking demons, and they've got guns and claws and an utter lack of respect for humans. Not that I blame them. They've just come in as the supernatural immigrants to the Promised Land, shoving aside the fat, complacent indigineous people.

The humans now live virtual lives, alone in a bubble, interactions between individuals now just projections on a screen, as interchangeable as a click on a remote. See the world however you'd like, absorb nutrients through the gel you swim in, let the skin of the bubble suck in the dying gasps of oxygen and rays of sunshine, letting you live to connect another day.

The Divine still twinkles in me as a ray of light beams down between clouds of filth and soulless skies, God's taillights as he drives off. Most pure evil beings can't even see pure goodness, so most of the time I'm safe, but the madmen can still see. Demented x-ray vision of my disguise, so they were the immediate threat.

I'd usually just knock them unconcious straight away. Letting them speak for more than a moment could be disasterous. And granted, some are more "with it" than others to be sure, but no one stays sane long standing in the path of the beasts of the apocalypse.

I live on a fourth floor walk up in Greenwich Village, just off Washington Square Park. The fourth floor I find is just high enough that the more lazy, mindless mutants don't climb that high, and low enough that the skyreapers can't spot you from their skyskraper perches.

I drag my bucket and sling the typewriter over my shoulder, leaving the table downstairs, probably be beaten up, but not worth the effort to bring it up the stairs. I toss the hellfire into the pit in the center of the room, tighten the pentagram around it, and fired it up.

I stared long and hard into the flame, the fire, fundamental force of nature, erratic molecules, essence, idea, word, sound. All self swirls upwards in a backdraft breeze. The crossroads clashed, an X branded beyond my mind, unicorn socket insert, click connect. Twist, turn.

The engine started in my mind. It rocked on the hydraulics and rumbled teetering on the ti of my spine. My circle grew, ignition of the sigil, unlocked reality cheat code transports you to the Darkness.

He lifts you up and acknowledges you, appearing as an equal so as to make you underestimate him. Take him for a man. His great joke.

The devil takes off his hat and stays awhile. He's got a sound system he carries with him, tessaract tucked into his breast pocket. As he sits a plush chair appears beneath him, and the decor flickers to one of his fancy in that moment.

"Take your head out of the fire already." He clicks disapprovingly. He's tired of my games.

"Aaahhhh." I throw back my head and brush back my hair, wet from the flame.

"Hey."

"What's up?" He was pretending he had something else to do.

"Let watch Faust again." I settled into his version of the room's reality. I knew he'd want to smoke, so he'd definitely have snacks appear. Probably some beer, and God willing, some Whiskey.

"You want to sign or not?" All business today I see. Well, fine, maybe it was time.

I took the devil's offer for a test drive awhile back. I didn't really love it. I kept getting it confused with the human virtual reality, and well, milling about besides demons in post-apocalyptic future Manhattan? That sounded awesome at first.

Over time, he'd pop up, offer to send me back to my reality, to give me power, fortune, glory. Meh, in a way this was a blessing. A vacation from the burden of responsibility, some time for the devil and I to just hang out, watch some movies, sometimes talk. Although I'm sure he denies it.

At some point I realized that I was that last one. The very last soul he could tempt, unable to pierce the holy coating of mankind's deliverance. All he can do now is choke out the life of the planet's ecosystem and the humans will all have to pop out of their little pods or else drown in their embryonic filth.

So we usually just chill, I dig up some of my past, hock it in the park, get enough flame to invite him over to hook my ass up on freebies. He seems all sour so I try and get him talking.

"Remember when you let me have superpowers and we shot across the planet? It was like a boneyard obstacle course.

"And that demonic King you introduced me to...Beedazzle, when we drank ourselves stupid and wound up destroying his army? Oh, man, I tell ya..."

I let my words trail off, sensing that he wasn't in the mood. I guess I don't know what to do now. I may as well sign. I work out the angles and wonder how it could be a bad deal.

I figure he gives me enough rope to hang myself, I take it and then can't go back to how life was before. A private reality that I have ultimate control of. But the humans over the hill offered me the same thing and I refused. My every desire is taken care of.

Of course, he'll lead me down a path that rises and falls. But that's not pre-ordained, he can't be master of all time and space, he's just hedging his bets on our penchant for destiny. I look over at him and imagine a great winged beast, a concept of absolute horrific and terrible evil, squeezed into a human shape sitting across from me.

He smiles.

"Fine. Let's do it. I was getting tired of looking at your creepy-ass face."

I drew blood across a gothic barcode, bleached into the DNA smart papyrus, and suddenly I felt better. I saw virgins defiled on altars, an all seeing eye penetrating their dignity. My back didn't hurt, I could breathe, my mind was clear. War, Famine, and Plague seeped from my pores.

I was aflame and adrift all at once. Spinning round, throwing earth into the air with wreckless abandon, I was scattershot chaos shattering the darkness. I stood my ground, and lifted myself up, surging with replenished strength.

I smashed the devil's face, shattering his fragile humanity with a single blow. I think I surprised even him, for in an instant I saw that flinch, and knew he wasn't all-knowing, cause he didn't see that coming.

His reality crumbled away with his person in the vile crossbreeze of ember and ash. The flame flickered and died down. The devil has left the building, and left behind something interesting. I fished through my pockets and found the seven deadly sins.

That son-of-a-bitch. He needed one last human to carry them for him. But I think I know why he was so nice to me. He knows I'll get rid of these for him. For him and everyone else. I'll face down the evil that's so big that not even he can see it fully.

I draw the first card, see my first sin, and and face myself.

The Tower of Brahma. Sexty.5

2010-04-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

6/2/09

I stand inside the bubble besides my older self. He looks on as the wall inside flickers to life. We're in a fancy ballroom. Tables ornately decorated, intricate carvings lining the walls, pulled back heavy curtains revealing not a window, nor door.

"Feel free to flick it around to whatever you like." Older Charles tossed something to me.
It was an oval shaped button about the size of my thumb. The groove of it slid across my thumb, the ridges whirling around the spiral of my thumbprint. It began to grow, seeping around my thumb. I pressed down against my forefinger.

The wall flickered and suddenly I was on stage, in the middle of an empty amphitheater with 360 degree seating. Spotlights popped on at the zenith of my bubble. I threw my hand up to hide from the light and clicked again.

I was floating in space, not weightless, but the tiles beneath me did begin to slowly rotate and swoosh. A spaceship popped into position about 50 meters out. From it stepped out an alien with enormous brain throbbing out of its skull.

I clicked. Again. Heavenly clouds, the alien becoming an angel, harp and all. Click. A pirate ship, and a buccaneer boarding the ship. Click as he got closer. A desert, the devil. He stood before me. I clicked at him, while Charles stood beside him grinning.

I was sitting in a chair, a lab of minimal sleek design all around me. The bubble looked transparent and closer than before. The wall of it was just outside my reach. I extended my hand out just brushing the skin of it with my fingertips. The devil stepped into view.

Only he wasn't the devil, nor an angel, and not an alien by any imagination. He looked like a friend. A bearded, bespectacled, much older, version of someone I knew. He looked at me with amazement, then glancing over at older Charles, who stood, smug with arms folded across his chest.

"I told you I'd do it." His smile broadened. I noticed he was outside my bubble.

"This should tell us everything we need to know. We can get you free finally. We did it!" The familiar man grew increasingly so with every gesture and mannerism.

I clicked again and we were sitting in a dive bar. I sat at the bar and a fresh pint rose from the counter. I downed it fast, following with a gin and tonic, and a whiskey on the rocks. I slid my thumb just so and a crowd of people eased into existence around me. My heartbeat rose, my lungs gripped tight, my mind raced.

Charles and his friend were still around. Patting each other on the back, ignoring me as if I were not even in the room. But I wasn't in the room, was I? I was wrapped up in some sort of enflated sleeping bag, kept steralized and uncontaminated, so they could test me. Poke and prod while staying away.

I slid the thumb quicksilver putty back and forth. I made it harder, denser, thicker. With a flick of my fingter tip the metal shot out to a point. I ran the edge across my jeans, pressing it against my thigh. Sharpened it with precision with denim friction.

I glanced sideways at the two of them there and my inner beast grew. I growled and ran the ridges of my teeth together, exposed slowly from beneath a lip sneer. My arm with the blade cocked back slightly, the tendons and muscles taking a step back and preparing for action.

I leaped forward, smashing the bubble against their own, keeping me a good five feet away, but I felt my own bubble compress, smooshing me into a bear hug. Charles and his cohort looked startled at me. I swung the knife around, slicing the air completely in half. A tear grew across the virtual reality of this dive bar chatroom.

Fiery chasms were revealed beyond my own deflating universe, a hellish landscape of craggy lavarocks, ash floating all around, whooshing into the bubble walls. A protective fluid seeps out of the bubble, the clearest of water, thick with syrupy cleanliness, spilling out like a torn backyard pool, starting small with increased pressure and speed. It evaporates as it touches the surface, transcending forms, rising as holy steam.

I hit the ground and the air doesn't seem so bad as I cough it out and suck it in. Feels like when I smoked. I watch as the final yard of the bubble is consumed in flames, Older Charles and bearded sap gasping in horror at my fate. Suckers.

"I'm not saving anyone but this Charles Crown." I thumbed myself in the chest, laughing at the absurdity of the situation.

"Where the fuck am I?"

The Tower of Brahma. Sexty. D.

2010-03-29T00:00:00.000-07:00

6/1/09

"Hello Charles."

I coughed and gagged, hacking up quicksilver, mercury dripping from the corners of my mouth.
Air controlled scene, room temperature perfection, breeze blown by casually. His boots were worn, favorite status shown upon them. Slacks were tight and fit with a flair, suit jacket snapped just below the waist, shirt and tie topping it off. Comfort and power sat on his shoulders.

"I've been waiting on your arrival," seeped from his smile. He nodded to my right.

I saw a towel beside me, swiped it, and cleared the muck from my face. A hatch seals itself closed behind me, a vent sucking down the remnants of fluid.

"Yeah? Great. I'm here." I was annoyed, out of my depth, and in need of a drink and a smoke.

A bottle of beer and a pack of cigarettes rose from the tile before me. A lighter and bottle opener appeared on the one adjacent. They warbled into the air from the ceramic surface, flickered like a hologram, and crackled into existence. My fingers connected with their molecular cohesion.

I popped open the beer, downed a third, stood up and tied the towel around my waist. I took my time in the process of opening the cigarettes, discarding the wrapping to the ground where it evaporated, sliding a smoke out and placing on my lower lip. My top lip gripped the filter and my thumb ran along the gears of the lighter, igniting with a press of the gas lever.

The fire caught my eye, dancing picturesque before me, drawing it closer to my face. I sucked back on the cigarette and it caught fire, the tip of it blazing away down into my lungs. I felt a lump of smoke travel along my trachea. It expanded into my lungs. I hold it for a second then release it.

The smoke fills the space between him and I, dancing through whirling air currents, blown around and around again. I flick my attention up to his face, taking it in as my own, aged to perfection. Manly and confident, eyes not tucked behind protective lenses, a telling smile revealing all his secrets to me.

We had an understanding.

"So, the future. I do okay for myself." The cigarette was splendid.

The Tower of Brahma. Sexty. See.

2010-03-22T00:00:00.000-07:00

5/30/09

And suddenly I stopped. I stood still as the swarm of minds washed around me. Astral bodies colliding and crashing about my person, sparking off into distant twinkling starwinks. Up and down and side by side, spinning minds whipping by, standing as stone, firework smash into my own.

The molecule that warbles among the air, the grain of sand slipping weaving, connected to each other, diagonally damned sentience balancing itself out, lest it whirl off free. Alone. Looking forward, one runs, for all they're worth. Looking at, the two bonds, feeding the other with it's hovering self, unicorn blast through the temple.

We are just the bits ripping away at unreality, the termite twisting tearing away hunks of light, carving grooves of sound. One step up, two steps back, the polarization of ourselves writing on infinity. We make an impact, puncture time and space, slamming our fists at its rough hide. We will survive!

A door opens, light that is impossible comes forth, the air digitized in its wake. Flatscreen virtual world, an inflatable hamster wheel of isolation, I realize I am inside a revolving hologram. Mike Gallows steps in and brings me back to my quarters. He created me, he owns me. He is my maker.

Training for tomorrow is what I'm told. A day will come when I am needed, and what I know will be good enough, to save who I need to save. I obey orders. Eventually I realize I'm the one who told me. Now, as I untell myself, the very matter surrounding me becomes unglued, and I'm twirling down, spiral spine speeding down.

I sit at a desk and eradicate my identity. I open the envelopes, look through the papers, shred what has info, and tear up what's left. It trains my mind, and sharpens my hands. Erases my existence. Released the text to the trees, broken apart financial record.

I heft my books. Upstairs, downstairs, and back thousands of times, the step count alternating each go, so I could keep track of my ebb and flow. It strains my arms, my muscles rippling and snapping taut against my bones. Once every piece of my identity is lifted, carried the weight as stones tied round my ankles, I now could carry the world.

I gasped for breath as I rose to the surface. The bubble vacuum sealed against my skin, I tore away at its skin, clawing my fingers into its molecular makeup. It tore open, air whooshing into my lungs, sucking down liquid dimensional sewage. I hit the floor like a wet sack of clay, my tone body thudding against the cold plastic tiles.

The Tower of Brahma. Sexty (b)

2010-03-15T00:00:00.000-07:00

5/13/09

ToB. Reality deformers. Nirvana. Hell. Interactive reality bubbles. Stronger ones dominate, video game interface, cheat code enabled. Outside the bubble is a burning wasteland, suffering and eternal dying, none know rest nor respite.

Reality swipes across virtual touchscreen individual cosmos, an infinite amout of hard drive space for maximum pixel interaction. When two of these merge, truly immerse into one another, the power ebb bobs and rises up the ranks.

iPods become iPeople, identities squeezed into a FacebookMentalSpaceSlideShowSoundtrack, pinned to your lapel, in neon green with pink stripes. Embryonic entertainment, life rafts for the soul, what keeps the flames at bay for one more generation. The devil wants his due.

  We're microscopic introspective self aware simpletons becoming a flare in the dark of unknown raw universe. Just a twinkle as we turn towards the light, fire scorching the shape of our collective face. The ideal and superman are the forerunners of new worldwide consciousness.

But just a pixel to gods of protoplasmic near sentience, gaining form and mass from the glare of our souls burning out.

The Tower of Brahma. Chapter 60. Sexty.

2010-03-08T00:00:00.000-08:00

5/13/09

"People Magazine actually coined the phrase, but that reinvigorating buzzword that has given new life to old age can only be attributed to one man: Charles Crown."

I was encased in some sort of proto-plasmic coccoon, an ethereal embryonic capsule with a plunging elevator vibe. Across the skin of the bubble were imagewords, or iWords, a complete societal initiation into the year 2036.

"He grew up in a lower class, blue collar family on Long Island, New York. His parents, still teenagers, raised him with the aid of the grandparents. His father worked as a mechanic, building race cars and fixing his Mustang. His mother taught him to feel, read to him every night and never left his side til this day."

The generic photomontage, with telepathic audio tracks, dialogue or voice over, commentary track from the ID, Ego & Superego, washed over my being making me experience a dramatic re-enactment, POV, steady cam, COPS style sensation, immersed in altered dreamstate.

"Charles was often quiet and shy in his early days, preferring to hide behind mom's legs or in the middle of clothing racks in early 20th Century 'Department Stores'. He was lost in a daydream haze, until the day he died. A hotdog bite just a tad too big ended his life despite his father's attempts to run him to a local hospital."

I felt like choking. Gagging on early development biopic nausea. Where was I? What is the primordial ooze on top of me? I pressed my finger into the membrane which held firm, despite water droplets like ice melting dripping down the sides. I ran the jagged edge of my nail against its skin.

"When Charles was resurrected he had already passed over, clinically dead for sixty four seconds, before a resuscitation padle brought him back to us. In those sixty four seconds, everything had changed: the World, Charles, You. All of reality altered slightly, although psyientists would not make this discovery til 2020."

Infomercial documentaries with advertisement hyperlinks beamed straight to the cerebral cortex. The frontal lobes are wiggled into a vibrational pattern that allows minds to perceive. I scratch at the surface of this gelatinous gumball, making the signal flicker every so slightly.

"Charles' parents could not afford to sustain a living and so had to 'volunteer' their son to a (recently declassified) government secret agent program where the blank slate of Charles' mind was replaced with an 'artificial intelligence', or AI, named Babel. What they didn't know was that there was still something deep within the spirit of Charles Crown."

The story started to get interesting so I ceased my nail surgical strike and began to let the flood fill my being. I found myself eager to become one with my surroundings, to withdraw into myself and fold into everything that ever is. The light of the void, the dark of the bright, prism shift to pinnacle pyramid perfection.

"A childhood incident involving a landlord's dog had burned itself onto Charles' psyche. Meta-physicists say that he was chosen to be a canine spirit, while psychologists say that this attack and release formed a stronger bond with the child than his human parents' imprint. Either way, government scientists were intrigued."

Sitting in pillows, all around you, sleepy drifting off in mid day sunshine, stress and tension long since faded and forgotten about, discarded as bones settle into place, free from fiction the skin sits, relaxed breaths freeing each bit by bit up your body. Lit up chakras glow like a race in reverse, red stopping, orange uncurling, green growing, purple popping, blue blossoming, white sprouting.

"The wild animal spirit and simulated personality eventually formed a union, and this persona renamed itself Charles Crown, but what was left of the original personality is unknown. Research is being done today that will uncover the secrets of identity and the mysteries of birth. The very essence of humanity. The meaning of life."

The Tower of Brahma - Chapter 59.3 - Overpowering Dreams

2010-03-01T00:00:00.001-08:00

5/10/09

"My name is Charles fucking Crown, and I can fucking write!" I screamed at myself.

I felt the words, never thinking of their intent, only knowing I was alive. Scenerios slash their way inside my dreaming mind. Everything becomes alone knowing that I'm just fine. I walk that straight and narrow line, til the very eternal end of time.

Security blanket blues make me slosh along the sidewalks, daydream ideas dash down my desires, igniting and fighting somewhat driving fires through and through. Poet suffering in a bed of pens and kneels, begging to be forgiven, seeking salvation in text. Alphabetical hypothetical absolution.

Delirium dances into the night, sweaty simpleton spinning round himself, artist in retreat from introspection and reflection as I flail about. Fade to black, the end, fin. Once again.

I caught up, got in, and was launched beyond all that is around me. I got here first, just in time to fly higher, soaring solitaire into the skyline. I laugh and cringe to watch the grinding of gears of society crush each other into shape. The noise becomes a tune, shrieking sanity springing forth from their fears, praising dysfunction over deform.

So I walk. And I see. Listen to them. Understand their dreams, their silent screams, see what they really mean. I know them all at once, when I was new and shiny, glistening innocent glory beaming from me. Afterbirth Jesus, Kung Fu Drifter, Word Conqueror. I am all these things and more.

I will die so you will know.

The Tower of Brahma - Chapter 59.2 - Powerless Before Her

2010-02-22T00:00:00.001-08:00

5/7/09

My head hurts, throbbing from where I smashed my fist against my right temple. The possible concussion keeps me awake and staring at the shadows splayed across the ceiling.

I conned the crazy out of me, staring off into nowhere, seeking something inside to align and make me right. I tried to cry for so long that eventually I did, tears erupting from my eyes, snot pouring from my nostrils.

Seeing yourself for real, reflected in another's mind, shows you all you need to know. You are a bastard. A hurtful fuck who uses and abuses, hiding in the lie that you care, nice to everyone so they'll make things easier for you. Parasitical satire ignites your entire life.

Suicide escape, break out of the prison of self, your solitary confinement. A blade pressed against skin, a fictional gun against your head, some pills to swallow so you can sleep forever. Nothing matters when you no longer exist. How can it possibly?

Reality is a bitch, and the guilt for being yourself weighs you down, so why not surrender to forever? It'd be nice to give in, not struggle against the dying of the light, embrace the entropic devouring of eternity. You'll make no difference in the end. Fate is destined to happen, so get out of its way.

You beg to be put away and it's for real. Drama queen electro-shock therapy seems reasonable to me. Kill whatever it is inside that wants me to die. Medicate and insulate the pain, sweet release of raindrops tapping at the window.

The Tower of Brahma - Chapter 59.1 - Dreaming With Power Pt. 2

2010-02-15T00:00:00.001-08:00

5/5/09

I walked the city I knew, took for granted it's curves, turned in a way that shifted diagonally the red sheen of our prism prison. My head turns, the camera pans up as we gaze upon the Crimson City, bloody-black archs with gothic spires.

She was a nexus, a living harmonic sigil that radiated paranormal extrasensory pulses of sensation, making the impossible align with our reality. I lie beside her, basking in the brilliance of a supernova soul igniting in spontaneous explosions, dreaming like never before.

Inside the shoppe, a bespectacled man glances over the frames and lenses to inspect your intentions. He sees you worthy, and produces a rat and a rat bag. With a thin blade he draws a line of blood down the chest and stomach of the paralyzed rodent and places it within the rat-skinned sack.

His fingers squish about the body, running the tips along the delicate twistings and turning of its intestines. He gazes down thoughtfully as he searches for meaning in the cruel, viscious act he just committed. What was the purpose of this rat divination?

"Erase everything that came before."

I awake with a start as she is spent. Exhausted from the transference of my spirit to the realm of her people. Her fairyness is cranky and wants breakfast.

The Tower of Brahma - 58 - the Twelve: First Five

2010-02-08T00:00:00.001-08:00

4/7/09

I find 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 on his couch 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 surpress 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 rumaging 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.

The Tower of Brahma - Chapter 57.3 - HotShot ShotDown

2010-02-01T00:00:00.001-08:00

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 me rebuild what momentary death 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 at me 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 improving.

Tom Trainor came in and saw my improvements, remarking to Marcus, the kid genius who made me from the raw matter of a kid, binary code, and a dog spirit. He thought he could improve on ordinary child 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 superspeeds, my reaction time shooting to seconds. Canine instincts gave me a momentary headstart, the computer in me gave me the processing speed. I was faster, smarter, and stronger than all my classmates, no longer the dogboy, 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 low flying 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 burrow 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 shambles of a human as well. Too long spent playing the game to be any good at being normal. So much like himself.

With experience. But he's 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."

And so, he did.

The Tower of Brahma - Chapter 57.2 - You New All Along

2010-01-25T00:00:00.001-08:00

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 my 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. 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 secret past. 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 a 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.

The Tower of Brahma Chapter 57.1 - Choose Your Delusion

2010-01-18T00:00:00.001-08:00

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, my heart is pounding, my jaw clenched, teeth grinding 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 talk. 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 or 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.

Tower of Brahma 56 Fuck Philly Fight NYC

2010-01-11T00:00:00.001-08:00

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 propellor 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 inbetween 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 desecrated by men's, and then her own, hands. 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.

Tower of Brahma 56 Amsterdam Decompression London Debriefing

2010-01-04T00:00:00.002-08:00

1/22/09

We miss our flights, but I know Ben 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 to 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. Ben 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 stereotypically 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 swank hotel, 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.

Tower of Brahma 56 Paris Cafe Existentialism

2009-12-28T00:00:00.001-08:00

1/20/09

We don't know the customs, laughed at in every cafe, butcher the language to their disgust. It is Paris.

Just bought an obnoxious tourist shirt with a tongue licking cherries, saw the Eiffel Tower, and gave France the finger. A fine meal in the last restaurant before shuffling back to Amsterdam, to reassess, and catch our connection home.

We saw art, sculpture, class, and elitism. Con girls and boys palm and drop gold rings suckering in tourists with their hustle. The boy's hands are weatherbeaten and I make a joke about who will beat him if he doesn't return with money. A 14 year old swiping all he can from the foreigners.

A giant metal tower, conducting the masses towards it, feeding them to the top and changing their perspective. A huge glass pyramid shunts from the cobblestones to allow us entrance to the palaces from long ago. A massive church weighs down the island, keeping it from tearing away, floating away in La Seine.

Romance is dead says Ben, and I see it outside, the lifeless remains of a once great city. No mystery is left along it's rues, no more love there than concrete, metal, and time can provide. They're just living and making a go of it, the same as anywhere.

Romance is alive say I. It's just now inside us, leaving cold hard reality behind. We're gathering it up and bringing it back, it never existed in the city, just the people and the times. Suffering through the ages and standing defiantly, we pass the Resistance.

Post modern day prometheus afraid to show his flame to a jaded, cynical cosmos. Allow the failure of moments to slipstream away from our hearts, feel the fury of romantic idealistic desire. We shall change everything so everyone eyes us daringly.

Tower of Brahma 56 Paris Street Affair

2009-12-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

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.

The Tower of Brahma 55 Revelations

2009-12-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

12/30/08

It is upon the fifty fifth absolute truth revealed unto me, that I decide to get my phone to write it down. Phone, audio communication, co-opted by writing (text), or symbol communication. One form and function flipped to be used by an opposing force.
Yes becomes no, and tomorrow & yesterday are actually today. All that is one is really none. Whatever is it that is opposite to another than this however. Everything becomes one, I am saved. God.

We will hit the switch inside every mind and all that is missing will fill it, complete spiritually in seconds. Imagine our brains, so supercharged and marginally increased in serotonin, swimming in our personal Babylon as tomorrow sings on. Fire drains down til bare bones baked in the searing flame of raw posthuman potential.

Posthuman humourous posthumously sentences address our senses seeking salvation inside one's self. Our own self worth is infinite and when you look over, all you see is the sea of smiling faces, similar to your own.

I'm first on line. December 21st, 2008 at 8:01am in Times Square equals last in line times pi.

You'll all be my friends forever.

b. crazy Machines

Half of us are insane. The rest are robots. End of story.

Sigils synergy segregates symbiotic separation of soul satisfying, frightening violence. Battles beyond recognition, Armageddon analysis, whose reality is this? Slicing away our sensitivities as we free us from these, these mindless monotonal moronic masterpieces of individuality.

I work out my brain, all the time. I constantly tackle two opposing viewpoints within the same mindspace, dwelling on, yet enjoying, the miserable happiness of life. I exist on all planes in every sense of the word. I speak in time with a jazz beat rhyme, blaring the buzzdown drillbit center of the mind. At least I'm trying I cried.

What I want to say is hi. I'm in your head. My voice, what I thought to put down, using a handheld digital plastic, very 21st century device this, hitting key after key with thumb by thumb ticks of the creative clock. Finish up the end I say.

I'm making it longer, circular rectangular archival methods, comics become cool, as the world dissolves disaster. Superpolice State Penintary for the Specially Abel. When you evolved, did your desire, designed from scratch, explode to life before your very eyes?
Mine too.

This is what happened when it did. Neohumans became the norm, well the norm's new vibe. A slew of celibate tapeworms chewing off our fever dreams, those lessermen could be casualties in our conflict with out collective godhead. Humanity's hopeless last wish given flesh, just as our enlightenment peaks.

Our 'meat's better is what I say. We got brains like trains, unstoppable unfuckingforgiveable fortune in the face of failure. Time and again I lose it all and everytime it returns me mine. Scornful smartass smirks, they need smacking, straight up attacking, assault on angst, anxiety, and America!

c!

See the D it makes when a c & ! are sitting next to each other? That's Language 2.0. I invented it ten years prior. Now I'm a writer, and right beneath the eyes lies all of my life.

Sighs.

So bored here alone in reality zero eternal inmate of Cosmic Corrections, Incorporated. It was synretro to spell it all out once in awhile. Through history we learn of the burning inside that keeps us surviving. A Zentrance for most of our lives here in my space/time.

Connect two wires, and still wires, plural, they will always be, though a charge runs through them, separate as 1, 2, three, ya dig? Me, I always thought of myself as someone outside the internal, sitting beside my self, fractioned into twos, then threes. Instead of me, there was we, and eventually free of the burden of identity.

Nostalgic remembrance of past events, your presence always with the present, even as you face it, your death in that last instant, before everything unbecomes to the sum of zero, which will now mean the all to everyone, everywhere.

deleted

You discarded my email. Forced deletion, jerking my finger as I tried to deliver the death blow, exposing your double life.

Damn you Dad. You and this conspiracy of thought you've pushed me into. My subconscious driven by your dark desires. I'm your double, the one meant to undo you. I took control, alternated my life, and deleted you.

But you destroyed my world. I wrote a chapter and trashed it. Threw the brutality of hate into the fires of forgotten pasts, viking funeral for your self-righteousness. By writing them and sacrificing them to non-existence their hold in my brain is fleeting, yet resonates with time-bomb terrorism.

You're going down, Dante style, your sins will be atoned for, you fucking pervert.

The Tower of Brahma: Chapter 54 - nine times the remainder

2009-12-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

12/15/08

The truth is I'm just a fucked up writer sitting in his apartment who's desperately lonely. You see, I'm dead.

I choked to death when I was five years old. These are my sixtyfour circles of personal hell that I must descend. Welcome to my final act.

I do want to kill myself. It's become unbearable. I've dragged my aching bones past social anxiety. I can talk to you now, but I cannot communicate. My ideas don't fit into consensus reality. I don't know why but it makes me heave with sobs.

Back spasming, feels like you could be laughing, but there's a release of tension around your eyes, and tear ducts flood. If you can imagine something sad, listen to the saddest song mix you made, maybe you'll be blessed with the salvation of release.

To feel. To sleep. To not cuddle the blanket around me, alone, again. The way you wanted it. The way you knew it always would be. You fell straight down. Didn't touch anyone for miles, then bouncing, and skidding, ricocheting off one another, a hand slows you down, reaching out, those last moments with lost memories, til your friends, til your family, stop you and take hold of your hand.

Hold on son.

Is there hope for me? Can I be redeemed? Can any one of us? I save you, and everyone must save me? If I don't die, then I must live. A program switch hits my brain. Have I hit rock bottom? Is this what it looks like? Another cave, lost among urban decay, glittering the ugly, the geek, the dork...your terrain.

You chose to be one of them long ago. You told yourself, and others that it was indeed a choice, not to play basketball with the jocks, but instead find role-playing and comic books. Where were you before then? A mindless observer. A mimic.

Brain death restarts the humanity in my people. I don't know who we are, or where we come from, but my father knows exactly what I mean. As did his father. Giant turbines groan endlessly on in our minds. Something started our intellectual evolution, a program written, hypnotized through spectacle, encoded on our neurons.

AC/DC switch currents frequency simulation reverse man. Press the button and make it happen. I rid my life of the abscesses of my soul. I cut back on coffee, and I will quit smoking, never, but yeah I should.

I want to love someone. Honestly and truly. I want someone who's looking for someone. To give themselves over to me and me to her. In every single possible way. We will be perfect symbiotic erotically charged pistons firing psionic bliss. One being who is love unbound.

I hope people can appreciate this book. It would mean they appreciate me. And if at least one person gets it, or gets anything, from this book, then I have done my duty as a human being. Crafted my ideas into form and function to move you and tell you my story. This is me, hiding behind words, I hope you like me.

Tower of Brahma 53: ideal identity ignorance

2009-11-30T00:00:00.000-08:00

11/24/08

I gazed into her eyes, or rather the lenses of the thick rimmed seductive spectacles riveted to her temples. The plastic glass lens (alternating my focus from the right to the left eye) revealed to me a lie I was not yet prepared to face. It was the heartache I sought.

She was there to save me. Or just to do her job. I convinced myself of one or the either on every odd day. Inviting me in, I found I needed her for some reason. There was a vacuum in her soul, an emotional void that was endless. I saw a challenge in winning her over, a task I had flawlessly executed time and again on those around me.

But this would be a challenge. I was institutionalized. I do not recall what for, nor do I remember why I have forgotten why I was there. I must've fallen ill. Gotten my wish and thrown the switch, sending me into the care of trained professionals, here I was in her office.

I usually lose her within a few minutes of getting on a roll. I feel comfortable enough to let the brain patterns unfold through verbal communication, but once the complexity hits a grey area, and when even my understanding of the ideas in my skull are limited, despite believing them in my heart, I am foiled. I see the connection break.

"December 21, 2012. Mayan calendar. I am a binary Buddha, a chaotic Christ. I see patterns emerging, fate threading through, tethered to faith, I fly."

It makes so much sense when I think it. Why does it seem so wrong when I see her eyes, magnified and on display for me, her glasses, rectangular microscopes into her soul?
"I'm not sure if I follow, Charles. Where are you?"

She crosses her legs and I withdraw. My mind has been lost in a maze of my own design for so many years that I have given up on communication with the outside world. I sit on my hands.

"Whatever. It's just that all these ideas are in my head. I read so much information off of everything that I can't process it. My brain can't keep up."

"Well, just take a breath and relax. There's really no reason not to just be in a situation now and then. There's nothing more to this than two people talking is there?"

I have to admit, I was comfortable. I was so tired of acting the fool, the hero, the victim. I felt I could own up to my darkest, most base desires. I should dig deep in my ID and expose it to the light. Expose it to her.

"No, I guess not. I'm sorry. I just can't fight the impulse to stifle myself. To invalidate everything I feel. To convince myself that I am unknowable."

I sat for a minute in the mire of my self-pity before adding, "Alone."

She says it was a good session and has an orderly bring me back to my room. I glance over my shoulder and I saw those eyes watch me go away.

The door clanks behind me. Isolated, again. No human contact til later. TV and maybe cards and maybe some time to write. Later. Now, after therapy, I'm sent to my cell. I don't appreciate opening up and then having to shut down. It is bad for my emotional well being.

I pound my fist in a daze against the wall. It's just plaster, sheet rock, paint. But I've never punched anything, except perhaps my girlfriend when she attacked me in a drunken rage. No, that was a slap. She punched me though.

Pity, self-pity, goddamn pity party! There's a hole in the wall when they wake me up. I'm not sure where I am, a hospital, my apartment, her apartment? My knuckles are bloody. I hate myself. I want her. To save me.

'I didn't mean to!', is throbbing in my internal dialogue center as the medication starts wearing off and the door to my prison opens.

I'm out for a walk, thinking all the while. Never stop thinking. I am focused on the bench, my walk, the step by step procedure that gets me there. I ignore the looks, but not really. I take them in and make them judgments. They see everything because it's radiating from me.

Notice me. No don't. I can't. Stop thinking about me. I mean about them thinking about me, which if they are it's because you're telegraphing some weird vibe. Stop!

I run back home. Lock myself in. Everyone says too much while saying nothing at all. Tears of revelation of our sad states is only a moment away. The drugs wear off and suddenly feeling returns. But emotional feelings only, still numb to the touch.

Bed is safe. Curled up. Fetal. Dreams keep me distanced. Who I am is a burden. What I've built is a cage. It fits snuggly atop my persona. I will myself alive as often as I can as I struggle under my limitations. Self-imposed, self-destructive, self-serving needs.

I skip the next session with her. I can't face acceptance right now. I can't justify my existence, nor do I want it to be confirmed, to be made okay. Suffer, bastard, suffer. You are strangling the life from yourself, flagellation of the mind, beating your consciousness into submission. Find your own way out.

So I write. The words bind my negatons, sharpen my syntax, forge furious feelings. The sentences are ideas, ideas are the prison. Constructs of immateria that give us the boundaries of self. I can't do it. This is who I am. This is the way I will always be.

Change.

In the rec room I'm piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. I've hidden the last pieces from myself, but I don't know that yet. I'm not ready to see the whole picture yet. That's why I'm putting it together upside down.

I replay the past as rounded parts snap into rounded slots. A cycle of puzzles, solved and dissolved. What I did with her, I had done to me next. I sought punishment after punishing. Then started anew. Each spin around the track provided a clue. I need something drastic to have a breakthrough.

So I escaped. Slipped out from under their watch. I spent the last of my money on a plane ticket. I'd have to find out where I came from to discover where i'd have to go. My feelings about my family would hold me down until I faced them. I got there and was reborn.

"So remember when you told me that I should think about how I relate to people, the cycles of behavior I keep repeating, and how it relates to my wanting to learn how to connect with my family?"

"Well, I think you may've said that, but I do recall that session, yes."

I was back in the asylum a week later discussing it with her with animated fervor.

"I saw my aunt and we talked. And it was like everything made sense. We were Crowns, and we are insane thinkers. Our insanities mask our sensitive natures."

I closed my eyes for a minute basking in the glorious feeling of connection. That is my addiction. Connecting with another. I don't want to be alone, but everything is telling me I am. I keep telling me I am.

"I had lunch with my grandma and I even stood up for myself when she called me a college dropout in front of my cousin. I got my associates degree, and maybe I've only recently gone back for my bachelors but I had a degree."

I have never successfully stood up for myself. I usually rely on friends or lovers to provide me with self-esteem, self-worth, and to do my talking for me. My niceness makes everyone want to take care of me, for I am naive and unable to function in the world.

"But I defended myself. And boldly, firmly, stood up to the overbearing woman who had praised my father into prince status. The manipulative maiden of my genetic masculinity. And I wasn't hurt like the sensitive baby I always was."

She nods and semi-smiles. I may've gotten too abstract in an effort to make my life more poetic. So now I've lost her. I could be rambling mad. This makes sense in my mind. But something in her face makes me think I have not gone anywhere. That I am imprisoned, entwined in a intense insanity that will never end.

Reality is bleeding. Or is that my arm? I have a shard of glass in my left hand. There's a wetness dripping from the other. She's staring at me sympathetically, but I feel stupid, sad, pathetic. I glance at my forearm and gaze upon the lightning shaped gash carved into it. A jagged wound, the mystical thunderbolt, the power of Zeus.

"Charles, just put it down now. You don't need to hurt yourself. Or me."

Is there another option? I mean really. I don't see any other way for things to go. We can really only condemn each other, pushing others down to advance, being pushed down to become submerged and bob back up to the surface as equilibrium is sought and we fuck it up once more. The world is drowning in sadness.

The electricity pumps through my body. My body spasms and dances convulsively in the office, freeing the glass from my grip. The orderlies catch me as I fall back. It's a peaceful thing to be made to submit against your will. Sometimes it is necessary, for your own good.

They drag me back to the cell. Alone in the dark again. I watch a movie of my life, memories scultped by stories told. The lingering of electric impulses make my body feel alive, charged with purpose. If only I could make it fit into the world, if the habits could be broken, if I could get what I wanted. What I really wanted.

I follow a thread of the web and it pulls at the corners of all that I know. I work out the angles. Co-dependency. Imprisonment. Fear and anxiety. Low-self esteem and guilt. I need conflict. I dread conflict. Who could handle me if I can not?

I get my medication and sit in the common room. I watch some movies beside some peers. We're all sitting, soaking in the fictional sentiments of paid professionals. I cry at the parts that one is to cry at. But for all the wrong reasons. I want to feel. We all want to feel.

"Hey friend. I know your secret."

A bearded inmate was begging for my attention, his sight set on me in my peripheral. He had a friendly smile but his tone was sinister.

"What secret might that be?" I scanned him from the side. He was two-dimensional and now so was I.

"You're not crazy. You're trying to drive yourself mad. But you're sane and shirking responsibility." He inched closer.

He spoke what I feared, what I knew.

Later, we found ourselves in his room, I was undressing, lying back naked as he climbed atop me. My body tensed up, his muscles and body hair bristling up against my flesh. I recall the calm serenity that came over me as I ran my hands up his back and pulled him into me. Two male bodies embracing in the nude in the naked white light of angels transcending physical form.

All is peace.

My being was possessed by pure joy, and I sought everything. I placed him in my mouth, gripping him firmly, pressing my face into his stomach. The soft, spongey flesh of him filling up my mouth, gliding along my tongue, driving deep down my throat. A true wand of power placed within my body, imbuing me everything I was missing, all the power I had blocked.

I sucked for all I was worth until I could taste him. I tried time and again to get him to release himself, to allow me to drink from him, swallow the genetic map of his manliness. But he refused. So I hurt him.

He needed to learn. To take it. I held him down and caressed him forcefully with my tongue. One knee holding back one arm, my clenched fingers of my left hand pinning him to the bed, the right, delicately held his balls. I needed his cum and I’d crucify the fuck until he gave it up.

Finally, after furious, fist pumping action, the hot cum shot forth from the tip of his splendid cock and slid into my mouth, and across my lips. I opened my eyes, turning my gaze towards the crown, and Jesus smiled at my cum covered face.

“Charles!”

She had burst in on this moment, that fucking whore. She’d never be able to do for me what you just did. God, everything has changed. You’ve helped me like I never knew was possible. Thank you.”

“Charles, you’re going to hurt your neck if you don’t…”

I hissed at her, the light from the doorway igniting the cooling semen dripping down my chin, splatters flipping from my lips. But suddenly my weight shifted and everything began to reassert itself. Gravity swung around and I hit the floor hard. My pants were down and my cock was in my hand, thankfully preventing it from becoming damaged in the fall.

“Jesus?” I looked up to the bed.

“Charles.”

I was allowed out for walks more often after that, despite the cold weather making me all crackly. I drifted along day after day until I began to notice that people would talk to me, stop to say hello, or to ask how I was. They smiled when I seemed happy, and sad and withdrawn on those days when I forgot. Suddenly everyone was my friend, and no one didn’t not like me, I was loved. By Jesus.

For years later, I got shit for this chapter. Too pretentious is the way it was often referred. But this is what I wrote up until the day I woke up. My life was truly split up into two parts: before this chapter and after. I had escaped my internal institution.
This is my fucking book and I’ll do whatever the fuck I damn well please.

Including sucking Jesus’ cock, you jealous fucks.

Tower of Brahma 52 - House of Cards (first draft)

2009-11-23T00:00:00.000-08:00

7/16/08

"I fold."

That was my one solid move in Poker. Folding. Well maybe in life I should say. Once in a while I try and bluff. But in the end, I just lose my chips.

Sean clears the pot towards himself with a sweep of his arm. It's not much for us it's everything. Juan, across from me, deals out another hand. Brian throws in without even looking at his hand. Tom's seat next to him is empty. My turn.

"So, what's your book about Juan?" Sean puffs his cigar, filling the basement with the smell of tobacco and an ethereal swirl of smoke.

Juan bids in and covers his cards. "Well, there's this guy who just starts compulsively working out and then discovers he's a sleeper assassin."

"Sounds cliche." Brian folds. No one notices.

"Nice. Should be able to sell. Seems like the market could sustain a series like that." I'd been trying to read up on publishing and marketing, and mostly all I came up with was frustration. I raise.

Sean calls. "Fuck yeah. People love that thriller intrigue stuff. They're all over the subway ads."

We show our cards and once again a single King does me no good. Juan hauls in the pot and we begin again. As I get my cards I read the others before me.

Brian bets recklessly, not caring what he's holding, barely invested in the game. Sean kicks back, puffs away, and cracks jokes, but he's playing for real underneath. He needs the money. Juan just deals and plays a straight game, showing nothing from behind his poker face

"So, who's the guy supposed to kill? Who's he working for?" Sean has got a good hand. I can tell.

”I haven't really figured out which way to take it just yet. I sort of wanted to go political, but now I'm thinking cultural." Juan raises.

"Cultural? Like a celebrity assassination? How bizarre that culture begins with the word cult." Brian is bluffing with a double sized bet.

"That's interesting. Contrast his compulsion for improving his body image with celebrity fascination. The real versus the ideal." I wasn't bluffing this time.

We play a few more hands when I feel the barrel of an all too familiar gun placed against the back of my head. Then Spider spoke to me telepathically as he said: 'Kill them. They're going to kill you if you don't.'

I tried to focus on my cards and found myself glancing at Tom's empty seat, then at the others. My poker face sucked and I knew it. I was tipping my hand.

"I see your ten and raise you twenty." I tossed some chips into the pot absent-mindedly.

The game continued and I heard the cocking back of a hammer. I knew Spider would be concealed from the others but that wouldn't help me. He'd kill me here, if just to prevent them from doing it.

'Look at them. They're the enemies, competing for dominance over you, over this world.'

I peered up from my cards. I followed Juan's movements as he upped the ante. The pot was growing and he didn't bat an eye. I had no idea what was going on in his mind. He could kill me if he wanted.

'Get your gun out and fire or I will.'

In my peripheral vision I saw Spider's arm as it swung his hand cannon towards Brian. I tried not to focus on it as I began to sweat. I avoided eye contact. I was showing all my tells. I fingered the revolver in my pocket.

“I fold." Brian rested his cards on the table. He looked over at me as it was up to me to call it.

Sean was overplaying it, holding not much of anything but he knew he could intimidate me with his confidence. He'd take me down if he could.

"I call." I tossed my cards on the pile of chips. "King of Hearts. King of Clubs. Ace of Spades."

Juan locked his eyes on me and I knew. This was going down and there wasn't anything I could do about it. One of us was going to die, right here, right now.

"Pair of Jacks." Juan spread his cards out before him. "Looks like you got me."

Spider's gun whipped towards Sean as Juan kicked the table up at me. Brian tipped over in his chair, scrambling for safety. I drew the gun from its resting place and raised it up.
Chips flew and cards scattered as Spider fired. With a snap of his wrist Sean launched his cards at Spider with deadly accuracy. The table hid Juan's actions from me but I knew his nine millimeter was reaching out to me.

I shot from the hip, the bullet rocketing through the air, punching through the Ace of Spades before splintering the table with a hole big enough for me to see Juan through. His eyes locked on and lining up his shot.

I kicked back in my chair, sending me tumbling backwards as Juan's bullet blew a hole through the center of the table, right where my face would have been. Spider emptied his clip as the table passed between him and Sean. There was an explosion of splintered wood. And time froze.

I rolled backwards. Spider ducked as he released the clip with one hand and slapped in a new one in one fluid motion. The debris that was the poker table began falling all around us. Juan extended his arm, preparing another shot. I was looking off to the side as Brian scampered off for cover.

My attention slid to Spider who I could see now was wearing Tom's persona. It flickered on and off as he penetrated this reality. He was preparing to shoot as I lost myself in the scene.

Juan fires. Spider fires. Sean flips backwards. I sit and ponder. I lower my gun to the ground as a bullet spirals through the air between Juan and myself. My sight travels along the ground like mist, filling up the room. Everything slows in my mind. I see all.

'Kill him Fenris.' Spider switches his aim towards me. 'Move or die.'

"Everything is possible, nothing is sacred. Nothing is possible, everything is sacred." I move.

Time cracks like lightning and Juan's shot smashes my chair. I dive forward, sliding past Spider, rolling onto my side and click out five shots. The empty shells from Spider's gun drop down on me like hot rain.

The first shot hits Juan's hands, removing his weapon. The second collides with his soul, shattering his faith. Third shot blows away his mind and the fourth denies his existence as it deactivates his sense of self. The annihilation of his own personal reality, the obliteration of all he thought himself to be, sprouts from the final bullet.

With a crash, a wave of normalcy settles onto the room. Gunsmoke trailed off into the ether as time flowed freely once again. I got to my feet and brushed splintered wood from my shirt. Spider reverted to Tom once again and his gun was gone.

I made my gun disappear, as well as Juan's. I helped Brian up to his feet as he stared in disbelief. Together we walked over next to Tom. Sean was picking up and reshuffling the deck of cards. Juan knelt on one knee, his head bowed low.

"Hey, you okay?" I held my hand out to him.

"What'd you do to me?" I think he was weeping.

"Something I don't like to do. Something I did to myself a long time ago." Perhaps I was still doing it, still there in that moment, stripping everything away.

I went over and lifted him up and dropped him in his chair. He held his face in his hands. I'm not sure how much of him was left.

"You're free now. We all are. We made a mess, now let's clean it up." Tom was flipping the table back onto it's legs. Brian collected the chips. Sean riffled the cards between his hands.

”So, blackjack anyone?"

We stood around Juan and we all knew in that silence that we were going to have to fight, that some of us would die.

"What about war?"

Tower of Brahma - 51 - stop me if you've heard this one before

2009-11-16T00:00:00.000-08:00

2/16/08

"Eris, Kali and Loki walk into a bar..." Sean starts into his usual jokes with no punchlines.

It's his free form improv writing technique. Each of us has our individual techniques. Sean and his jokes, Juan’s historic anecdotes, Brian’s stream of consciousness, and Tom’s…well, I’m not sure what Tom is up to. Personally, I like to let it build up and explode out. Like a mental time bomb.

We all gathered there in the basement, looking pale and ghostly under the fluorescent lighting. The air was thick with smoke, the fragrant odor of cheap coffee, and our futile aspirations. We called it ‘Write Club’ but we hardly ever wrote. Actually that was what got us all together. Not being able to write.

Juan cuts off Sean's one-liners to tell us about the ten books he's read since our last meet. He’s a good foot and a half taller than Sean and so literally overshadows him as he steps into the circle of chairs in the center of the room.

"So, JFK's older brother was the one with the political design but when his younger brother came back with all them medals, well he did what any sensible overachieving sibling did. He flew a plane full of explosives towards a German factory ready to bail out at the last second when BOOM!"

I stopped double-checking the historical anecdotes he spouts after the first few weeks. As fictional as the things he says may seem, they always turn out to be true. As I get older writing seems more and more impossible, for what is there to really write about with reality being far stranger and beautiful in its symmetry to our chaotic minds.

I look off as Sean shoves Juan battling each other for verbal dominance. Intellectual alpha male social Darwinism never appealed to me. Brian’s sitting off to the side again scrawling and scribbling out in his spiral notebook, his long hair draped across his face. I make my way over and glare over at Tom as I do. He's by the coffee maker, back to the wall and eyes on the door.

I sit down next to Brian and light up a smoke.

"How's the writing?" he says, not looking up.

"Meh. You know. I got some ideas. Taking some time to structure them out, get something coherent and interesting down. Something with a point." I reply.

I take a drag off my cigarette and lean back. Nothing sucks like being a writer. All this pressure to make sense and make people care, in a medium that's nearly dead. And here we are pounding in the final nails. Writers in a pop star era, with flash fried masses devouring endless streams of sugar-coated spectacle. Follow the formula to success: don’t be original. It’s not art.

"I got some poems I'm just about happy with." Brian flipped back a few pages. He stopped on one filled with ink.

I had read a few of his pieces before and they were genius. Dark, mad poetry that made the mind cringe and the soul cry. He came across as aloof, but a severe sensitivity forced him inside. He gutted his pain out, spilling it across the page in fluid lines from a black ballpoint pen.

"Okay, okay, wait...Decartes, Kant and Hume are on a plane about to crash and there's only two parachutes..." Sean waves his arms frantically, trying to draw us all back into another round of jokes. He wrangles Brian back into the circle reluctantly where Juan stands with his arms crossed.

I don’t much feel like laughing so I walk over to grab another coffee and stub my butt in the ashtray, blowing out the last lungful of smoke. Tom still has his eyes on the exit, hand gripping his styrofoam cup. I imagine that he’s staring into an alternate dimension, killing time with a gang of hacks in a church basement as he monitors a multiverse of possibilities.

"I read your book Charles."

I slap six sugar packets together and rip the corners off.

"Yeah? And?"

"I don't know. It won't sell."

"Thanks. I figured as much."

His words sting. Lately I’ve felt like I’ve been wasting my time trying to put my thoughts into words, crafting words into stories; all this effort to communicate, but to what end? To become a paid, professional writer? So I can afford to continue to place myself into situations that I can later idealize and then trivialize by demeaning them to a bunch of letters, lifeless symbols, just so someone else will fork over cash to be momentarily entertained?

Truth to tell I had almost totally wiped my hands clean of my unholy text. The story made sense to me when I lived it, and now that I’ve re-read it, I can see how I got here. I even enjoyed it as a fusion of poetry, prose, and essays. Except for the end. I couldn't bring myself to read the ending.

"It'll be appreciated after you're dead." Tom looks over at me as he says this.

I swig a huge gulp of lukewarm coffee, shake my head, and glance over at him to size him up, to regain some semblance of pride. Sadness weighs his eyes down. It’s more emotion than I imagined from him.

'You poor bastard.' I hear him think to himself.

Tom flips off the lights and locks the door behind him as we all shuffle up into the temple. It was an unspoken tradition now to walk silently through the church, leaving our ramblings behind that heavy wooden door, down in the darkness.

The chatter picks up outside as we all man hug and go our separate ways. Sean belts out one final half-joke as he saunters backwards down the sidewalk.

"Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, and George W. Bush are in a burning building..."

No punchlines here Sean. Other than my life. I feel the same post-meeting depression that hits me on the walk home every Wednesday night. I haven’t written enough, I’m not good enough; I’m wasting so much time just existing. Merely living.

I walk back to my apartment, which is just a few blocks away, but it takes me twice as long tonight. My legs are wobbly and I feel anxious, more than usual. The streets of the East Village are empty and loneliness overtakes me. I want to stop thinking and I don't want to go home.

But I do. And there she is. Waiting for me. I tell her about how the meeting went. Detail out some of the highpoints as she sits vacantly on the couch. She’s recording the data, as is her function. She sits there like furniture, a fancy gadget that happens to be made of flesh and bone, although I can’t prove that she is human at all.

I go to the fridge and grab a beer. I pop the cap and stand there looking over at her. There’s nothing I can see about her that would indicate anything. A void of perfect function, she gives no information of herself, and defies my empathic vibe sense. The blankness surrounds her and I, of course, fill it with stories.

I imagine who she was before she started this. Whether she had done this before with other writers. If any of them felt the way I feel about her. This longing to be near her, to feel safe and like it all just doesn’t matter, because in the end, when it’s all over, nothing will matter. Just this moment, me watching her, wanting from afar.

This leads me to too much thinking, so to counteract it I take a few swigs of the beer and head to my room. I type up some ideas I had from the night and email them to myself. Ideas that would sit with all the other unread emails.

"I've got to write something."

I grab my handheld and sink into my papasan. I start typing away, drawing out an impossible romance. It was coming so easy, literally dancing out of my fingers and across the keys.

A warrior, burdened with a mission doomed from the start. He was hell-bent on killing the beast at the center of the Universe, although he could not remember why. A maiden is found lost along the way, her soul seeking salvation. It is only by chance that they cross paths and together they learn they are fated to topple an empire.

I finish the second act, stopping after they exit the labyrinth to finish off the beer and light a cigarette. I sit for a while, letting the last few words I had written resonate within my eyes before letting them seep into my brain.

It was a love story. Not my specialty, but I believe it’s what I had always secretly wanted to write. Something foolishly and hopelessly romantic with larger than life adventure and awash with grand gestures. It was naive and beautiful, if not a tad too ethereal and melodramatic.

I let the cigarette burn all the way to ash, then smoke the rest of the pack. I needed an ending to this, but how could I write up the end of love? How could I destroy something so precious, something so wrenched from my gut, something spoken truly from my heart?

'I won't end it. I refuse.' I decide, and bury the story among the rest of my thoughts.

I get up and brush my teeth. I watch her sleeping on the couch. Slowly I run my fingers along her hair and look down at her and let loose a sad sigh.

‘Who are you?’ I try to telepathically transmit to her brain.

I rinse my mouth and hit the light. I collapse into bed and roll over, hugging the covers tightly. My heart was racing my mind, and neither could possibly win. My soul in turmoil, I toss and turn.

And suddenly, I thought of a punchline.

Tower of Brahma - 50 - We're Building the New World: Order

2009-11-09T00:00:00.000-08:00

1/14/08

They opened the door to my cell, my padded solitary confinement, without warning one day. A well-dressed man with perfect hair and a royal blue suit walked in wearing a smile that brimmed with empathic tenderness.

"Hello Charles. I'm Mike Gallows."

"Hey." It was all I could muster from beneath the drug slumber.

"Let's go for a walk." He extended his hand to me and helped me up.

I trailed along beside him, dragging my feet, as we made our way through some sort of building I don't recall entering. It was old and clinical, like an outdated mental hospital, and then transforming into an office building with the turn of a corner.

"This is our main office, for now." He waved his hands and cubicles, worker drones, computers, all seemed to materialize with his words.

As we walked, the business casual clad workers all peered out of their private hives to get a peek at this deranged madman the boss was giving the grand tour to. I hated them and their inquisitive eyes.

"We've got a few projects in the works, but we consider your book a top priority." I swung my head up towards him from my hunched stance. "I'm not sure if you know what your work has meant to some of us here."

"Where am I?" I don't remember sleeping.

"Well, that's sort of one of the tiny problems we're working on. We're not quite sure."

Gallows starts walking and as if on a leash, I lurch forward, shuffling along behind like an obedient dog. The office interior fades and a shimmering laboratory sparkles in its place.

A young lab technician, hiding behind mousy brown hair and glasses, tinkers with various, unscientific looking tools. Blunt objects, odds and ends from a junk drawer, and a handful of rocks. She continues to arrange them in some manner of specific order, known only to her, seemingly oblivious to us having entered her arena.

"Now, we're going to need you to hop up on here and let us have a look at you." Gallows guided me to some sort of medical surplus lounge chair and shoved me down into it.

He rotated around me, appearing in doctor's scrubs when he re-entered my line of sight. I began to feel a soothing comfort trickle down my body. Numb nothingness filled the everywhere of ache and pain. My teeth went first, then my chest, my limbs.

"Just sit back and relax and we'll see what's going on here." Gallows activated some out of sight lever, coercing the dental lay-z-boy to draw me deeper and deeper into comfortable oblivion.

I felt electromagnetic pulses, radioactive tracers, psychic emanators, all probing my body looking for disease. Seeking answers. Locating my soul.

When eternity had just started to become a teensy bit tiresome, the procedure ended. A bright light still shone on my exposed aura. I was vibrating, tingling pins and needles as physical sensation began to awaken within me.

"Well, everything seems to be in good working order, and I believe we can help you with the last piece you're missing." Gallows began to raise my chair up to a sitting position.
Sitting across from me, he appeared to be relieved. "Looks like you came through relatively unscathed, considering your story."

Gallows snapped off his latex gloves and jotted down some notes in a folder before handing them off to the assistant. A pure, silvery mirror was wheeling itself into the room, gliding on invisible monofilaments no doubt.

The mirror came to a stop just a few feet away. As Gallows readjusted it directly before me, I glanced over at the young lab assistant who was cleaning away the bric-a-brac that was strewn across the countertop. All that crap seemed awfully familiar and now possessed by some sentimental force that was overwhelming me.

"What is all that? What does this have to do with me? What is the tower...?"

I turned to face Gallows but instead saw my own reflection. I gazed upon my duplicate, my shimmering clone that truly existed nowhere, and I saw how lost he looked. I saw his despair and struggle, but how could you not with it weighing his face down like that.

That poor schmuck. All alone on the other side, unable to do much of anything. Just the exact opposite of myself, here in this cold, hard reality. But this reality didn't feel real. It hadn't in a long while. Before the book was written. Before moving to the city. Before the deal.

Innocence was the vital ingredient in this stranger's eyes. Unbitten by bitterness, my god, this simpleton was so long gone. I had forgotten what it was to be like you. To be lost and then refound. Bound by the immaterial, I buried you where they could never find you, the other side of here.

Over my howls of joy at this momentous occasion of me reclaiming my self, I overheard Gallows instruct the young girl to watch over me in these final stages.

"Be sure to wait until it fully dissolves, then give him the sedative. Let him take all of it in before he sleeps. Then have him meet the others."

Gallows gently tapped the edge of the chair and whispered, "Welcome home Charles. Everything will be amazing."

As I absorbed all that I had left behind, every good and decent fiber of my being, the whole of my sane mind, as all that soaked into me all I could think was that everything is already amazing.

It always has been. It always will be.

"Novus Ordo Colligo."

The Tower of Brahma: Chapter 49 - Boy Cries Wolf

2009-11-02T00:00:00.000-08:00

12/3/07

My brain is broken. Forehead feels hot to the touch as my mind boils alive in my skull. Something has gone horribly wrong.

I spend days at a time sleeping against the barrel of my gun, only waking when Spider comes to bring me some soup. I've let something out of my head, leaving whatever was left vulnerable, defenseless.

They send me to see a specialist, who specializes in something special no doubt. I don't care. Nothing feels real, no one believes me anymore, and there's nowhere to go. So, now I get to sit down with some egghead who wants to poke and prod me, work out my glitches. Awesome.

She comes in and catches my eye immediately. In fact I can't look away, or I won't, and I don't think I want to. She looks away for us both but keeps returning back to my gaze from behind her specs. The glasses frame her small, inquisitive eyes; amber pools drawing me in, eager to capture knowledge.

"Do you know why you're here?” She looks up from her clipboard and file folder. It seems we've started.

"I've a good idea, I suppose." So, I could meet you, I thought to myself.

"Well then, let's begin."

I pour out my soul to her, as it comes so easy to one of my disposition. I've known the zigs and zags of my life for years now. Recalled and examined the woes over and over and here it is all over again. Presented one more time in a rambling stream of sentimental sentences spilling forth and washing over her. She seems unfazed.

I give my diagnoses and the suggestions I tried to act upon to correct it all. The positive wavelengths I tried to ride all the way to a healthy mind. I scraped out the gunk and washed it clean. Molded the mess into a novel and sold it. Wiped my hands of the whole affair and walked away. God knows who's reading my travesty, if anyone at all.

She says very little in response. A flicker of life dances in her as I bombard her with the worst I have, laughing at my misfortunes which I'm sure come across as two-demential as they sound to me. I'm sure her own pains are worse, her suffering paramount to all others, but here she is trying to help me. Or maybe she's just earning her paycheck.

I want her to tell me I'm being selfish, or melodramatic, or that I'm too sensitive. And although I've dreaded it, fought the idea my whole life, that I need medication, that I should be drugged and mellowed out, well now that sounds so appealing. I don't want to be sitting on the edge of feeling too much anymore.

It's all lies. My repeated suffering and exorcising of personal demons. It's all flat, unemotional, detached anecdotes about this pretending madman charicature I've made myself into.

I hate being Charles Crown. I hate the Agent Fenris character in my book, always preferring to be Spider, the charismatic psychopath that does as he wants without reservation or consequence. A silent killer with no remorse. But I care, I feel.

"I care too much godammit!” I scream, pounding the table. She does not stir.
I kick back the chair and stand. "Why?! Why do I feel so much, yet nothing at all?!"

My anger swells, frustration simmering internally, until I truly feel mad. "I'm feeling something for god's sake! I can't just be making this all up! I just goddamn can not be!"

I flip the table and scream, "This is real fucking pain I feel! Why the fuck can't I just feel it, accept this bullshit, swallow the whole fucking sadness that's making me hate this whole godforsaken world?!"

I reach past the girl across from me who is no longer there and slam against the two-way mirror that they're watching me from behind. I rage against the glass, hoping that I am imbued with enough strength to shatter it where I'm sure the countless others before me were unable. I hope beyond hope that it's me that brings everything crashing down.

But I don't. I just crash to the floor myself in exhaustion, knuckles and palms bruised and bloodied. I'm crying everything out, tears mixing with blood as I wipe the evidence of weakness from my face. I'm trapped in here and no one is listening.

Tower of Brahma 48 - Anthropology of Entertainment

2009-10-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

10/18/07

I've been walking up these steps for my entire life, leaving plenty of time for introspection and speculation. Every cycle around the base of this tower marked another ending, another beginning, until the line between blurred. Steps of Eternity, one foot ahead of the other, this was my entire life.

The walking fell to the background and my imagination painted the canvas of my escape. I envisioned character after character building their arc, rising and falling and rising once again. They too were trapped in a circular prison, given life just long enough to come back around enlightened.

I distracted myself with their drama, getting lost in their tragedy, drowning in their passion. I forgot who I was and where I was going, only that I was moving forward. As the stories grew in complexity I found it harder to immerse myself. The variations on a theme weren't enough to distract from my isolation.

They fell in love, they fought, they reconciled. They waged war, they murdered and sought salvation. Beneath their two dimensional personas, a shadow grew. The sun behind my mind casted a long darkness stretching into an infinite web of complexity. Black and white melded to grey, which folded in on itself and exploded into every color ever.

Nothing was new, only repackaged for the age, in the parlance of the times, the message becoming obscured beneath the blurred surface. The masses became lost in repetition, forgetting that they were moving upwards, instead feeling only that they were repeats of something that once was real.

I was everyone, somewhere else. Here and now, I was just a nameless form rising alone. I stopped walking. I looked up and couldn't see the top of this leviathan tower. Peering down over the side into the abyss of my mistakes and regrets, I felt the urge to plunge. I fought back the gag reflex of my soul and backed against the wall.

There had to be some way to find out where I was. How far I'd come. How much longer there was to go. I reached out into the shimmering futura with my mind and saw that I'd be walking steps forever. I sat down and rested my legs.

My head sunk into my hands. The weight of a multiverse pulled it down, made it impossibly heavy. Fake lies revealing truth, that's what was in this damned skull of mine. A hunk of fleshy meat firing electrical impulses. Divine light beaming down upon it, supplying the spark to ignite the slow burning embers. A stiff wind whips up the staircase blowing back my hair.

I withdrew. Pulled everything in as tears burst forth. Liquid poured from my eyes as a full bathtub might, water spilling over the edge as you lower yourself into its warm embrace. A reverse raindrop dripping from the edge of the roof. My stomach went wobbly as a thousand realities swooshed about my person.

I opened my eyes, the wind drying the cool wetness on the side of my face. I saw the bricks all around me. The endless perfect pattern containing all the molecules within. A concrete straw sucking me up into something. I retraced my last steps, following them into the curve of the tower. My eyesight got to just about 180 degrees, give or take, when I spied the marker.

There was a carving on the outside of the steps. I couldn't make it out from here so I got up and leaped down a few steps to get closer. I had to go back til I was almost on top of it. I leaned over the edge, dangling myself from the cusp of certain death so as to read it: XLVIII.

'Stomp-stomp-stomp!'

I scurried back from the edge as the footsteps grew louder. Someone was following. He had to run. Fight or flight surged through his brain, adrenaline through his heart, a chill down his spine. Mad dashing back up the steps, Charles Crown leaped steps two at a time. The sound grew fainter.

I saw another marker on the curve up ahead. When I read it I knew what was left to do. The weight of an entire lifetime of fiction didn't seem as heavy as it once did. Mankind's dreams sloshed about inside my head. I'd carry it as far as I could. To the top if I was able.

Almost at the next marker. Wish me luck.

Tower of Brahma: Chapter 47. the Meaning of Life (completed)

2009-10-19T04:44:00.000-07:00

08/02/07

I went out for a walk last night. I wandered down 2nd Ave, turned on 3rd, made a right on 1st. From there I crisscrossed through the Lower East Side. I walked by every bar I was familiar with but didn't go in any of them.

I was looking for something, not meaning to find anything. An empty quest through the lonely night, hoping things might make sense with some pavement under my feet. I decided to get a drink after all.

Back up into the East Village, Ave A's deviants all about me, I knew where to go. Lucy's; Agent Spider's drop point of choice. I had Marco bring me a Zyviec. He asked where Spider was as he added a shot of Polish Vodka to the bar. I tossed back the shot and told him I was solo tonight.

I polished off the beer and stepped outside for a smoke. It was near closing time and Thompkins Square Park was a black void before me. The gates were all locked and the police weren't about, yet I knew someone was in there. I could hear them; could hear the wail of his trumpet.

It was sad and jazzy. Dancing among the leaves, slipping around the maze-like walkway. It must have had a hypnotic effect on me as I found myself leaping the fence and wandering into the darkness. I followed the sound of the horn towards the center of the park, where the benches all arc around two massive trees. The moon beamed down through the gaps in the treetops illuminating the dancefloor. I was alone with myself standing amid the lunar puddles.

A man stepped into the light playing his horn. He wore a disheveled suit and a frazzled head of hair with matching beard. His eyes were closed as he sauntered towards me. The moon highlighted the cracks in his features. I thought of my father.

His slow, sad tune rode out on a long and nearly inaudible note.

"Hey kid. Thanks for coming."

"I guess I didn't have much of a choice. I've been at the mercy of random events for quite some time now." I really had. I had finished a book I didn't recall writing. It was soon to be released and in the meantime I was visiting therapists and specialists and psychiatrists at the behest of the publisher. I wasn't sure of anything anymore.

"Oh, I remember those days. So afraid I was being controlled, manipulated, that I often ran away from anything and everything. We always were so good at running away..."

The moonlight shifted as it began to turn away in the night sky. It provided a pathway to the benches where the man with the trumpet sat wearily. He spun the horn around his fingers with a practiced ease. With his other hand he took out a pair of glasses and slipped them on.

"But I remember this night too. Alone and wandering. Called into the dark by my beckoning blare of brass. Heh. A beer and a shot burning my belly. We never would have had the balls to jump the fence, let alone come in here this late, all alone..."

I examined his face as the leaves parted in the wind and the light shone upon him. The same glasses I picked up at Fabulous Fanny's. The beard, although much thicker, was still patchy in the same places. The I-ching tattoo on the left forearm peeking out from his rolled up sleeve...

"So, you're me then? I'm visiting myself in the past? How old am I, I mean you?"

He chuckled and stared me down. I was guessing he had to be almost my father's age now.

"You don't even want to know how this is all possible. That's what I loved about this age. 30, right? Still had that sense of wonder and excitement. As for me, well, seeing as this is the year of our lord 2023, well then, I must be just shy of...forty eight. Man. Forty eight."

He looked down at the ground for a lingering, lost moment. The trumpet came to an abrupt stop as he glanced up at me.

"C'mon, sit a spell."

So, I dropped onto the bench next to him and stared down at my shredded Adidas on the pavement, my sock just protruding from the right pinky toe.

"Do I figure this out?"

"What, life?"

"Yeah."

"You already did. Now you're just learning to live with it."

The moonlight began to shrink away, letting the night envelop us. The remaining light focused to a point; thousands of leaves casting fractal patterns in a chaotic pattern all melting into one spotlight, slipping towards a headlight, to a mere flashlight. As it became a laser it floated down the space between us and up my body. It rested on my forehead and fired.

"Here, put these on."

A pair of sunglasses was being placed on my face in the blinding white. I eventually got them adjusted and the world came into view.

"How is it daytime?"

I was staring out at the park midday, with dogs being walked, skateboarders flipping and tripping, and joggers bouncing by. The sun was everywhere.

"Okay, I just brought you through time so, you know, take a minute and soak it in."

Minor details made it to a secret part of my brain. Clothes were familiar, yet foreign. Bizarre technology was in place of small things like books, cell phones, stereos. Even people themselves felt somewhat alien.

"2023? I guess not much is different. People in a park."

A spin of the trumpet got my attention as he turned to me and said, "Let's walk."

I felt stumbly and awkward. Paying too much attention to walking, to breathing. I assumed everyone was staring, but no one was. The man next to me just smiled over at me as we walked out and down 7th street.

"So, yeah, as you can see, life is just about the same. Some major changes in the air, but so many behind us as well."

Billboards and ads were either holographic, following me as I passed or just paint on a wall. Stores ranged from squatters sitting out selling their goods (glass bowls, hemp, and paper books), to high end, eye scanner designer vintage clothing stores big enough to fit five people comfortably.

"What about the book? What happens with the Tower of Brahma? I don't know the ending."

He stopped spinning the horn and placed it into his pocket. With a smile he said, "Well, what can I tell you? It makes an impact. Of sorts."

"What's that mean? You know what I had planned for the end. How does it end?"

He chuckled to himself. "You'll read it eventually. Live it actually. God, I miss being you."

I put everything that's been happening to me in perspective. Somehow I was still alive. There was some purpose to all this. But I had to know.

"Is it my ending? What I really wanted? Did they make it something horrible? I wanted a happy ending...I did."

Tears welled up and I squeezed them out casually. Future me put his arm around my shoulder and with a grand sweeping gesture he wiped away the veil of reality.

"It's always a happy ending."

My arms weak, I clawed the glasses from my face and the light turned to dark, letting them fall to the sidewalk. The night warbled and warped before me. The people, the sun, the future...was gone.

I dropped to a knee and then tumbled forward onto my face. Consciousness sat dormant within my body as it heaved and hurled up the booze and stomach chunks. Every 20 minutes or so light made it's way into my open eyes.

Agent Spider walked up and lifted me by the back of my shirt. He began to drag me forward, and five feet later my feet found their footing. I was working my way up to lurching forward.

"C'mon kid, let's get you home."

A single note dissipated down 7th street and out into tomorrow.

The Tower of Brahma 46 Paranoia Paradise

2009-10-12T01:02:00.000-07:00

01/31/07

"Congrats on the book."

I look up from my beer, removing myself from stasis, regaining the game. I looked over at the man next to me. He seemed to be a boy playing at manhood, much like myself. We wore contrasting costumes to match our competing characteristics. He was dark, and thin; precise. I was white, beaten, and defeated.

"I didn't finish it. I don't think I'm going to. I think I hate it."

"What are you talking about?"

"I don't think I'll like how it ends."

"Limbo is a better fate.", I added.

I thought about everything. About all the things behind me, below me, above me, before me. Putting together words is easy. It comes so natural that it's kind of spooky. Piecing together a story is impossible. Imagine trying to unite all of mankind into a state of interest, of a suspension of identity, to con them into emotions with words parading around as familiar friends or unforgettable foes.

But it's a lie. A shadow puppet display of ideas and instructions, or rather suggestions, to a bored, complacent society that has become virtually shockproof. Hell, I've lost the ability to feel months ago. So I don't feel pity for myself. Fuck that sense of failure. I don't owe anyone my words. I don't have to entertain them, distract them. Forget about teaching anyone, enlightening just even one reader, once.

"I thought that was a good turning point in the book. When things got more, I dunno, ugly. Raw, you know?"

I focused in on the individual in front of me again. I attempted to deduce whether we were speaking telepathically. Paranoia seeped in and so the awkward silence must be filled.

"I don't know why I don't destroy the whole thing. Delete it off that online journal I have and trash the backup I have on my Powerbook at home." I cringed at the thought.

"If the editors like it as much as I have, well I know we can get this thing on the shelves by summer." He stopped speaking mentally when he said this.

"What are you talking about? I'm not going to write it. I came here to tell you. I'm done."

I was getting drowsy, but when I re-focused my eyes I was sitting beside Agent Spider, and the bar had a symbolic sheen. Below us were bodies that looked too realistic to be real. It was us, but more muted somehow. Confined.

"You completed the book three months ago when you asked that we hypnotize you to help your motivation. After the first session, you locked yourself up in your apartment for hours a day. You just emailed me the last chapter last week."

I felt high from the out of body experience, grounded down through the booze. Everything was asleep. Reality was melting. I focused my third eye and rode the vibrations, tuning into the music from the jukebox. I felt every person in the bar, drank in their emotions, feeding on their humanity. I needed to be real to figure this out.

"What are you talking about?!" I shouted more than I meant to.

He glanced around and gave me a weird look.

"You okay? What's going on?" That's what it looked like his lips had said.

"Is this like a gimmick thing? You're Agent Fenris, the crazy writer in your book?" That is what I heard. And it wouldn't stop.

Those three months must have damaged something. Maybe it was that "creating antennae" we had built to force the book out of you. The "magic signal" that stimulates your impulse to write. And for what? The new bible I'm assuming. Ahh yes, you'll be immortal through the written word. But only a shell of you. Something that was never even real in the first place. Agent Fenris peels away, Charles Crown lies behind, and what's there underneath it all?

The Tower rumbles and crashes to the earth. That last brick brought it down. No, every brick brought it down. Every moment spent building, that caused this disaster. Devastation is everything. Desolation is all. There is nothing left.

I'm waving wildly as my senses scream at me, every sensation of this city assaulting me. I burst out the doors of the bar, obviously stark raving mad. I've lost it, I've lost everything. I slam into concrete and suddenly there is nothing left.

the tower of brahma - 45 - grinning beginning

2009-10-05T17:02:00.000-07:00

09/08/06

I have a plan. I need to know what's going to happen if it's bound to happen regardless. Can you alter fate?

I bought a chalkboard and returned it when I rediscovered my distaste for touching chalk. In exchange I got a corkboard, some thumbtacks, post-its and string. I began tacking up pictures of the twelve names I still had written on my forearm after a random phone call had instructed me that these people were to be found and questioned.

There was seventeen total. The first five were all within one person. Me. All facets of my fractured persona, they collapsed into just a writer, lost in the middle. And although I had unknowingly tried to halt my investigation further with heavy doses of alcohol and a sharpie, I could still read the raised letters of the names beyond the thick black government-esque classified crossouts. Now I needed to find out who these people were and what their connection was to me, to Agent Fenris, to the Tower itself.

Right after I sleep. Insomnia comes with excess coffee and the uppers. I need to dream, so badly that I believe I am creating mock dreams for myself in a half-awake sleep deprived delirium. Visions of holy writers and righteous believers come to me and tell me what I know but am too lazy to do. Write. Get it out, down and on the damn page and then go take a nap.

Just as I begin to drift after writing my last word I hear the sounds of flames, concentrated searing fire. My neighbor is responsible. He's been building something for a week that I jokingly say is a robot. But now I wonder. He always seems shady and off to me, a freakish man-boy with thick glasses and chocolate icing for hair. I begin to watch him. I take note of the sounds I hear and postulate in my mind the tools and possible substances composed in the construction of this enigmatic creation.

Finally after weeks of not sleeping I wait for him on the stairs by the roof. He's just a floor down so when I hear him hit the fifth floor and head down his hallway, I leap down the flight of stairs and rush him. I slam into his back and we burst into his apartment. We hit the ground and slide across near bare floors. I look around seeing the far side of the apartment first. A cot, a small fridge and neatly rowed tools. I turn and my eyes slide across his shocked face, his embarrassed look, and become ensnared in the contraption that looms just a few feet above my bed.

Its center is a massive stone, carved meticulously, and surrounded by a wood base resembling an infinity symbol. Large metal rods are protruding from the rock in a multitude of directions. I think there were eight of them but I couldn't be sure for what I did next made it hard to determine what had happening. I never imagined I would have the strength to toss a rock that big out a window and to cause such significant damage to the wall. The rods, not fully soldered on, were smashed off and as I spun around huffing and puffing in a lunatic rage, I grabbed one off the floor.

My neighbor was scared. Too afraid to run for the door, which was open just enough for a hand to squeeze through and throw the door wide open. His fingertips barely twitched and that door was slammed shut, my free hand sliding towards the lock.

"What was that device you were building, neighbor?” The metal rod was a perfect weapon.

"My sculpture?” he replied.

I suddenly felt mad. I probably have done something crazy. The metal rod in my hand and the enormous hole in the far wall told me I had. Still I had to know.

"Who sent you? Did they tell you to build it? Does it make me have to write?” I pleaded.

"W-what are y-you talking about?” He had the eyes of a crazy person. But I out-crazied him. He would have no answers that I could use.

I unlocked the door and stepped into the hall backwards. I had to let him know not to tip his hat to the narcs but how could I let him know without letting them know I knew. Their machine was broken. They must know already. Unless, this is their man, and if he becomes my ally then he'll cover for me. But what if he's a patsy though? Some dumbshit college kid they paid to assemble some low-end frequency transmitter above my bedroom. He'd have no idea of the intricate plot he would now find himself ensnared in. No, better to save the poor kid the ordeal of getting involved in a conspiracy this grand. He'll be happier and safer as a pawn. His watchdogs will think he snapped from his proximity and exposure to the device. Poor sap.

"Sorry kid. Forget Art. Go to business school.” and with that I gently let the door shut behind me, a smile of satisfaction on my face.

Now, what was I doing?

The Tower of Brahma: 44 - splitting infinite

2009-09-28T17:01:00.000-07:00

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.

The Tower of Brahma: Chapter 43 - Everyone's a secret agent.

2009-09-21T17:01:00.000-07:00

04/05/06

It's true. Everyone everywhere. Some give themselves away by their stares. Some give it away because they're too good. Synthesized perfection; manufactured too well. They've surrounded me for some reason. Some sinister purpose.

My room is not bugged, but I am always bound. Stuck to a room with a keyboard. I have memories of in-between times but those I believe to be artificially stimulated as waking dreams.

The signal they're beaming, its frequency is chaotically situated and freaks my neurons out spasmodically assisting my fingers to type what it is they want to read. A manual. The details are unnecessary. All that matters is the pattern. The formula. The key.

They're searching the mind for the missing piece. Enlightenment centerpiece of our eternal spirit. The current of our chakra sensitive, bio-electrical soul. The science of Art. I'm undercover.

Here. As a chaotic agent. Order's lost son, bad boy obsessed with the random, outlaw lone wolf of the mathematic logick, insistent on the applied applications of quantum chaos.

Science hero savage, lost to the wilds of nature's precision. Son of the Everybody Someone Publick, guild of masons building a literary tower in the subconsciousness of the masses so as to hide it from god within his children.

Martial arts training video, front row, downtown movie theatre. Agent Spider and I are rushed to our seats to make sure we are dead center of the audience when we have to fight our way out.

The credits begin to roll and the moves shown upon the screen roll back over the insides of our minds. The two agents in front of us were easily identifiable and inevitably the first two to strike.

Our close quarters meant they'd go in with knives, and we'd go out with two knees to the face. Bracing on the seat, a sweeping kick cleared my side of the row, while Spider throws elbows to noses. Forward kick chest slam, jumping knee uppercut, elbow smash head split.

Spider's got an agent in a reverse headlock and swoops the bastard up and piledrives him into the floor. Running along the edge of the seats, my Converse skidding across skillfully, I smack and crack these size thirteen's across faces. We're both twisting and snapping arms, locking legs, and dropping foes.

Agents. Everywhere.

Agent Strange is seduction personified. She's Cleopatra punk, imagination Queen, the Modern Mystic Mother. She wields snakes in dreams and details out my mission. Venom liquid informational packet self-destructs after download. She's spinning my internal vibrations and new age nonsense that's making me nauseous.

Then I feel it. The freefalling plunge. She's wiped away my third eye muck and clearly now I can see the world. The ever shrinking world of mine. I just was able to see for the first time, as I saw reality disappear into the sky forever.

I'd never make it back. Wasn't meant to. Always wanted to be an astronaut. Center self of a drop of the Universe dripped free from the fluid cosmic mass that is everything. We're plunging in a liquid capsule of pure reality, dropping deep into the well of the unknown.

Well, I guess it's not we. You're all left in the main universe. The source. I've just borrowed as many of your templates as possible and placed them all in working order here in my metropolitan madness, my own private New York City.

It's been sculpted and runs like a perceptional motion machine to keep me experiencing, to keep me writing, to figure it out before my long voyage is over. Figure out the riddle, son.

What madness is this?

The Tower of Brahma. Chapter 42. it healed me father.

2009-09-14T17:00:00.000-07:00

01/31/06

There's a slo-mo scene caught as a near photograph that moves so agonizingly slow but yet keeping ever forward. A father is kicking over a table in a restaurant filled with patrons and staff and parents and kids. He holds his son's limp body in his arms as he presses forward through the friction of the future. He's raging through the moment in a blind, berserker, beautiful moment of parenthood and the desire to protect its young has never shone so brilliant. Everyone parts from his path and the way is clear if only he could get there sooner and not have to see his boy's face as it turns blue before his very eyes. His child, loose and limp, is nothing more than a body right now.

My father's whispering something in my ears a few years later. Divulging the secret horrors of what lie before me as David Lynch's 'Dune' played up on the screen and I lie far below the seats crying my silent screaming cries. The echo of his words vibrated through me and coerced my cells to obey his hypnotic and apocalyptic word. Fenris.

That's what they called me. The little dog boy. The one with the wild look in his eyes and the canine scars on his young face. The government boys had a good time with that one as they kept me at a ten foot distance on a leash at the end of a very long pole. I was curled up in a cage besides the others all snatched from the woods and used for scientific fun when they came to take me down the long hallway into the room that held the machine.

The big machine that had an open spot for a boy about my size. A machine that would make for this body a personality programmed for life and morality given now to my mortality. My final thoughts were of the ones I saw outside my feral stare and how they all seemed so perfectly familiar in the most particular way.

Electrical jumpfires into the part of my brain that would combine the mind to the cold hard turbine AI coiled inside...

It's alive.

Secret Agent Kid, given license to get funky and explode anything he wanted to, adventure pops from his hands. Codename: Hotshot, low-key and able to be activated into the asskicker acrobat with the Ferrari that could launch a spycycle from its trunk. Gadgets and gizmos clued him in to the secrets. Feral wolf boy instincts gave him an edge and robotic intelligence, full of diligence, wondered of it's own demise and its utter lack of surprise.

So samurai cool and detached in that French sort of way with a fedora and fake accent somehow mystifying you into the context of subconscious demonstration on sublimation into the moment of just this very second and not a moment beyond.

Angry, suppressed, intense crawling ferocity at mistreatment and endangerment. Dark dropping of humanity into its primal pulse, dwelling down in the most submerged of mankind's essential humanity. Emotion information is misunderstood and my body spasms into a million shaking moments.

Crash. System reboot. The hotdog seems to be lodged. We're going to have to cut if we can't clear it ASAP!"

I'm gripping my chest as my breath is left ten thousand miles behind me, caught up in the air that was sucked from me one second ago, I'm gasping and trying to get some oxygen now!"

Superspeed injected my body with velocity, adrenaline skidmarks across my mind and spirit, driven soaring across and through the space between there and here. Time screwed then and twisted now as the light flashed into illumination discovery.

A man hunched over and hacking, reborn tonight in a final flight towards the infinite night. There's a looming and a leering coming forth from the great unseeming. We unbecome and dance the song of some. The sun bows and the moon kneels. What we knew has blossomed into a new me that could now think clear.

My chest popped and cracked. The air hit my lungs, kicked the oxygen into my blood and the blue death that had fired and retired me, flushed from my skin tone. Lifted from beneath the waves I wasn't scared coming up for a breath of the sky. The Ocean dropped from my body, releasing me into the care of mankind.

My father whispered to me, "You're dead already, son."

The Tower of Brahma 41 - The Rock'n'Roll Chemistry Within My Brain.

2009-09-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

12/01/05

You know how you drive along in your car, having just put in a cd you intend to listen to, but wind up somehow lost in thought? Then, when you least expect it, that band's pure ability to rock kicks your brain back into the song, and suddenly that fucking riff is there just to bop along to, as the drums clash and smash against your back, the vocals then screaming for your attention before hitting you down with that hook that just so fucking gets it. That hook that calls you and knows you and forever owns you. A screaming truth about the fundamental principle of life as you fucking know it.

You'll come down. On my side.
You'll come down. In good time.
You'll come down.
On my side.

I'm geared up for the next download/upload exchange with the fourth dimension. I have no idea what it is really. I'm not sure how to explain it. It's a magical process to be certain, but not like you think. It's like make believe.

I've always day dreamed. Always. I probably have fake memories before I have solid, real memories. I've always lived in my head. A tv boy with fictional eyes. Seen from behind a screen since the days I remember to.

The cowboy hat is the icon, the magician's cap. The mind of the man who lives backwards. That is where he lives. In my cap. My cowboy skull.

The headphones deliver the science. The constructed audiowaves that stimulate the impulses in the nerves. The exposed areas become shaky after prolonged contact. The brain becomes stuck. Ritual allows for the exiting of the process. Focus on the power of your icons around you.

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde visual stimulation.
The Toadies 'Hell Below, Stars Above' audio guiding.
An imaginary AIM friend to ground you to the keyboard.
Let 'er rip!

Your brain explodes into a whirlwind tunnel, the screen's the windshield of your frontal lobe as reality blurs upwards into the center of everything-ever. Psychology triggers in the art that I am consuming reveal flashes of my identity, forever observing, now from a higher vantage point. I watch the instinctual reactions of my body, to see just what choices it would make, and how it would find itself out of them.

Forever a test. A program? A suppressed personality, the true heir to this body, has designed a mental program designed to raise the awareness of this lesser personality that I call myself. Fuck. That motherfucker.

I've been tapping into his power. That's what the Tower of Brahma is. It's the steps of consciousness being raised. The Tower is the trigger to keep the mind elevating. And the truest way to climb the tower isn't leaping and shooting forth, pouncing and soaring upwards, but, actually, the slow, painful, aching walk of the eternal steps. Best to pass the time with a story.

I'd been writing this apocalyptic novel about a bunch of guys driving across the country and starting a rock band. I hadn't had a job in a good 8 months. Despite having no prospects, during this time, I found myself aboard a plane bound for Colombia, in a tattoo shop in L.A. getting my implant, and in my dad's dining room being hypnotized by a Freemason fictioneer.

I felt myself going mad, and all along, my self was repaired. My external persona had exploded from its cocoon and had now realized its power. Charles Crown was no longer a brand I felt I wanted to run from. It felt dark, it felt like mine, and it felt good. It was a name that was a blemish on the face of the world. The world as they know it anyway. The name of a goddamn bastard that would bust in and knock a motherfucker down, and beat him...if the situation called for it.

Suddenly releasing from that impulse, I felt saved, as if I had truly gone through with my impulse in reality. I had purged the desire, cleansed the sin on the text crucifiction, and now I am free.

the tower of brahma - chapter 40 - anti-matter jazz

2009-08-31T13:56:00.000-07:00

08/22/05

Lunar dust blew through my hair as I gazed longingly at the shapely curves of Mother Earth. She seemed impossibly far and distantly shy; too pristine and intimidating in her modest innocence.

I needed to see her again. Stepping from the sleepless, somber side of the moon, I free form floated over to get a better look. I stared long and hard and forced my mind into submission, forging forgetfulness for myself. This was the road back to the real.

I was born on the side of the open day, in a most certainly ordinary way. Simply coming back as if I had never been gone at all. Fear fanatically clawed away as I clenched my fists, ready for battle. My senses were scattered in disarray. What was it I was doing?

Living in the moment felt more like living around the moment, constantly bent, dodged and separated from wholeness. Laughing, I feel ridiculous at the apprehension. This wasn't the challenge he imagined it would be. Not once he remembered it was all a game. A constantly evolving game of chess, a distant relation to the didadic sport of checkers. A flipping of chips about the boardgame.

He just couldn't help but smile into that yawning chaotic pool of absurdity and the false center of the mind. That self-centered satisfaction that transforms into self-love, then mutates into divine immolation. Wavelengths? Is that all we are?

Brain stems grabbing and skidding along the ethereal. Sparks shooting out into the embers of our minds. Mass transit madmen sliding into entropic hellish nightmares of our own creation.

Fuck that.

I tried on the voice over monologue and whaddayaknow? It fit like a noir trenchcoat on a rainy, city street corner. I ran my hands through my soaked hair, brushing it back from my face. Collar snapped up, I walked into the bar. You see, I had a list.

As I had turned the corner a phone began to ring. Against my usual instincts to run far away from any randomly beckoning phone booth, instead I approached and absently answered. A disembodied female voice read me a list of names in a startling British accent. She had a drunken swagger to her tone as she read aloud 17 names to me, which I scribbled down upon my forearm, with a black bic pen.

My voice was hoarse and rough as I replied, "What does this have to do with me?"

I could hear her smile as it whispered through the receiver. "Find out."

So I hit the streets; hit them hard and fast. The rain poured down, oppressive and unrelenting as I tracked down the names.

I hit the jackpot as I found five of the names in the same bar. Rowdy and surly, with concealed weapons abound. Here were five drunken bastards all ready to rumble.

I took two steps forward and raised my eyes, staring up at the bartender. The five moved gently in my peripheral, shuffling their weapons from their hiding places. Spider, baseball cap pulled down low, obscuring his eyes from theirs, silently stepped out from my shadow.

"Who is Fenris?"

The rockstar answered first, a hotshot born and bred. His jagged blade slipped across the room, thrusting towards my gut. The tip of Spider's black converse twirled around the rockstar's wrist and whipped the knife out of his hands, driving it deep into the bullseye of the dartboard.

"Who does Fenris work for?"

A baseball bat came swinging from behind Spider. The artist had been surprisingly spry, but a backwards kick from Spider sent the bat right back at the artist's skull.

"Where can I find Fenris?"

The scabbard fell to the floor as the samurai sword sliced upwards along at a firm angle. The warrior, refusing to fight as a coward, growled as he drove the razor sharp steel at me face on. I was spared a gaping face wound by Spider's stone grip catching hold of the blade. The assassin used that exact moment to launch his pistols from his sleeve into his killing hands. Gently tugging the triggers back with his itchy trigger fingers, the bullets roared towards us.

"Tell me what you know about the Tower of Brahma!"

Spider spun around my shoulders, rotating into a crescent kick, cracking the warrior twice before landing and whipping the sword up along his side. The bullets ricochet off the steel, moments before it slides through the third vertebrate of the assassin, removing his head completely.

The warrior bowed before the shinobi skills of Spider, and paid tribute to their superiority by driving his own sacrificial wakazashi deep into his stomach. Slowly the warrior dragged upwards and sharply twisted the sword, spilling his intestines across the floor and way too close to my Adidas.

This left me to deal with the writer. A shifty bastard if I've ever seen one. Amidst the carnage he had stumbled backwards and passed out, buried beneath a hefty bar tab and reeking of pity. I dropped a Jackson down on the bar and signaled over to Spider, who promptly grabbed the writer around his chest and yanked him from the stool.

"Say hey, barkeep. Look alive." I open palm slapped his eyes from the grisly scene seeping across his hardwood floors.

"We were never here...", I whispered as I backhand smacked our visit from his memory.

The Tower of Brahma: Chapter 39 - The Spiders

2009-08-24T16:56:00.000-07:00

07/02/05

The withdrawal effects of spider's venom are draining the rest of my will to stay awake, but I must get this out.

I awake screaming in the agonizing pain to end all agonizing pain. A crawling madness was tapdancing across the miles of raw nerve endings. Through venom-induced nightmares the psychological horror that was befalling me had suddenly registered. I aim to throw myself upwards, reeling and swiping my skin clear of this insanity!

I found my body paralyzed as my eyes began to focus on the large beady arachnid eyes staring down at me. I could feel the thousand other sets of eight legs as they searched out a spot to inject me with their biological poison. The spiders had swarmed my body in the middle of my dreaming, and I fear that this happens every single night.

I began noticing the bites a few years back. One or two here and there. Lower back. Inner thighs. Buttcheek. After that I saw the bags under my eyes, and the constant weariness I felt. The more I thought about it, the further back I could feel the lack of energy, the withdrawal of interest in my life.

As a teenager I slept my sunny, summer afternoons away. My deep, dark, dreamless slumber being that of a person in a coma. For years it seems something within me called forth the spiders, beckoned them to me in my sleep. My parents’ old house was a breeding ground for all sorts of insectoid life. And so the call went out and they answered. Crawling and sliding across my sheets, from out under cracks and crevices, insects of all shapes and sizes nestled upon my chest.

They spoke their wisdom to me through the tapping of insectoid morse code across my receptive flesh. Tapping in the philosophies, cultures, and insight of their existence, I learned the mappings of the insect kingdom. But it was the spider and it's metamorphic venom that unleashed my mind and let it soar into the continuing upward spiral of sentience. This mapping fits across all spectrums of reality. All matter, a slave to its weaved pattern.

Web strands held down the feral canine that beat within my chest. A wounded wolf sitting and dying of the poison in its vein, fresh from the Spider's betrayal, born of the spider's corruption. Red-eyed and snarling, it lay writing in pain until its mind reached across the murky waters of consciousness and was one with the stars spinning in the cosmic skies.

Consciousness makes a desperate leap, seizing the computer in my hands, and I am deliriously spinning about like a lunatic on the frayed edge of collapse.

"Where am I? Where have I been?" I growled.

The words echoed down the hollowed halls of my veins, and the empty response was all the response necessary to bring the entire memory block crashing down upon my back.

Tower of Brahma: chapter 38 - episode 39

2009-08-17T16:54:00.000-07:00

04/27/05

'The killer landed softly, dressed in insectoid sleek onyx. The sun had raged and dried his shell. With a leap, the reborn man exploded from his cocoon, fragments of his scarab armor left scattered about his feet.

His longish brown hair flapped in the wind. His bushy beard burst forth, wild and unkempt. Muscles tensed and relaxed like steel cables under his new taut, marble skin. Driven footsteps into fresh earth leads him in a new direction.'

"Charles! Stop writing! We've got to go now!"

I closed my laptop up and tied my boots tight. I snatched my jacket off the teetering coat rack and bolted out the door after her.

"Do you have your keys?"

I whipped out the jingling mess of metal from my pocket in confirmation and locked up. Swiftly, we made our way down the hall and out into the city scarred night. It only took us three minutes to round the corner and get to the bar, but fifteen for her to finish her phone call and for us to actually enter and start drinking.

The tab was growing and the room was spinning, and for some reason I sat there sobbing in-between sips. A drunken sadness had befallen me and there was no going back. Reeling and thinking, I replay the evening's events and watch as my spine turns to jelly. Just before I sat down to write actually. Going further back to this morning, I felt healed and alive after flexing and opening my heart chakra in yoga class. Something was happening to me. A change.

The smoke left my body and the mellow took control. We were rocking on cosmic waves out on an ark, veering through the spacewarp of eternity. The apartment had been vacuum sealed into an alternated reality, where the cd player fueled our wavelength journey along soundless wings. The programs of a thousand musical geniuses lift us up and send us off, cast adrift amid lyrical seas.

'Agent Fenris hits the floor, slumping into a fetal position in the kitchen. Unconsciousness thrust upon him suddenly, he swims for the surface. Time rolls back and comes into focus as the film slaps against the light projected through it and he quickly rises to his feet.'

Wait. That seems familiar. Almost a memory, nearly a dream. Somehow these words unspool from my mind. Seeping out from under a darkened and lost sliver of experienced reality.

'I'm in a rest stop bathroom typing out these words and I know what's about to happen. I will flush, wash, and gaze into the mirror and realize that I am not who I thought I was.'

Agent Spider glares out from the reflective surface and grabs the wheel. Typing furiously he magnifies and defies this literal asylum. He can not be contained. I will break free.

Tower of Brahma - 37 - the Last Story

2009-08-10T18:10:00.000-07:00

06/27/07

Someone told me there were only thirty seven stories. Everything else is a variation of these core dramatic situations. I find it hard to believe that life, in all its random glory, can be confined to such a small number. Someone else once told me there were 37 miracles in the bible.

Lost inside my mind, I stumbled through the Lower East Side. From bar to bar, drink to drink, casually glancing over my shoulder in-between sips so as to make sure they weren't coming up on me. To my left, a dark skinned rough by the jukebox seemed threatening but preoccupied by the selection of fine tunes. A bearded guy in glasses seemed to be watching me in the mirror from his seat across the bar on my right. Paranoid or not, they seemed to be the ones to watch out for.

I stepped out of the bar and lit up a cigarette. I could feel the pair coming up behind me as I walked down the sidewalk. My legs became rubbery, not so much from the beers, as I began thinking about my walk entirely too much. The speed, tempo, weight of each step was being recalculated as each foot hit pavement. A steady rhythm could not be found. My heart was beating irregularly and I was sweating. Unable to breathe deep enough, I found myself getting lightheaded.

"Hey, Charles? Charles Crown?"

I kept my pace and tried to glance into a window to see who was behind me, but somehow I knew.

"Listen, we don't have much time. You're in danger."

The guy in glasses was closing the gap between us and I, very uncharacteristically, spun around to face him.

"What do you want? Why are you following me?"

I saw that his partner had fallen back a bit, watching the cross streets for witnesses.

"I'm Agent Fenris. That's Agent Spider. This book you're writing, there are people who are going to try and stop you from finishing it. We need to get you someplace safe until it's done."

So, they knew I was writing something. At least someone was reading it. At least there was a person out there paying attention. Even if it was a covert organization bent on the destruction of society.

"Hah! Really? So, you've read what I wrote then?"

Fenris was about a foot away from me. Spider was staring suspiciously down Rivington. I took a few steps back, not noticing the calm that was upon me.

"Well, not really. But we've experienced it thus far, and we think it's about to get dangerous."

You always expect a red laser line to point out a target well before a shot is fired to amp up the anticipation of an assassination. But the reality is there's just a bullet puncturing a human body. A bit of hot metal propelled forward, drilling through flesh, muscle, and bone.

Fenris fell to his knees gripping his chest as a gun dropped into his hand. His comrade in arms withdrew a small machine gun from his blazer and ducked behind a mailbox. Seconds later Spider fired rounds into the building behind me. A body tumbled from the fire escape and splattered onto the sidewalk.

I stood there, disconnected from the scene, as if I had just walked onto the action movie of my life. More assassins peeled around the corner, hanging out of a black sedan with high tech weaponry in their hands. Fenris stood up and, one hand pressed against his chest to stem the rush of blood gushing from his wound, he raised the other and began firing his handgun. He positioned himself in front of me, shielding me with his
body.

His bullets ripped up the front end of the car, punched holes into the windshield, and caught a few of the thugs in the face. Agent Spider darted from his cover towards us, unleashing a stream of bullets into the vehicle until the tires tore themself apart. The driver jerked the wheel and the entire automobile lurched and rolled onto its side. It began to flip and tumble as the assassins were tossed wildly free. Agent Fenris grabbed me and we hit the ground behind a minivan. Agent Spider was still firing as the car smashed into the minivan and soared above our heads.

The car came to an obnoxiously loud crash landing against the side of an apartment building and for some reason it didn't explode. I guess too many movies make you think that no matter what happens in a car crash, it'll always explode. Especially if it was driven by bad guys with guns.

Fenris dragged me to my feet and we ran for the end of the block. I heard Spider firing off a few final shots as we hit Delancey. The wide open space felt comforting but seemed to worry Fenris.

"C'mon, we've got a car down this way!"

Fenris, bleeding as he was, seemed unaffected by his critical condition. As we ran he checked over his shoulder to see if I was still there, that Spider was behind me, and that more bad guys weren't following. But they were. In Hummers and fighter jets.

Fenris threw me into the passenger seat of his 1976 Lincoln Continental. He turned the key and the engine roared. Spider was reloading as he jumped on the side of the car. Fenris hit the gas and spun that badass dark blue monstrosity through the intersection making the most illegal u-turn NYC had ever seen.

I tried to take a peak out the back window but shrunk back down when bullets began pouring in through the roof. Spider was returning fire from the backseat and I felt like I was going mad from the deafening auditory assault. Fenris was getting a little woozy from the loss of blood but he tightened his grip on the wheel, furrowed his brow, and sped for the Williamsburg Bridge.

A huge chunk of concrete explodes to our right and the car skids and fishtails. Missiles fired from a jet didn't seem nearly as bad as I would have thought. And shouldn't their targeting system be able to hit an abnormally massive, classic automobile such as this? Are jets allowed to fly into a major city and blow stuff up with reckless abandon? And why were there jet fighters trying to execute me anyways?

The questions would have to wait as the jet circled back around. We were flying across the bridge with the meanest bunch of military vehicles made street legal chasing us. They plowed through any car in their path, full on monster trucking over some of the smaller foreign cars, and driving the larger SUVs right off the side of the bridge.

Once we hit Brooklyn, Fenris began to lose it. The car smashed off the road and through basketball courts. I grabbed the wheel as we hit the street again and turned us towards the flow of traffic. The jet flew above and just seemed to watch us as the trucks barreled their way along a block behind us.

"Hey! Hey! Wake up! We're going to crash!"

Spider took a moment to reflect. While he did this he reloaded and shot me a look that said that I wasn't worth all this trouble. That, although he enjoyed killing vast amounts of baddies, Fenris' life was not worth my own. Not by a long shot. But I could just be reading too much into it.

Spider, on his last clip, now began to pick and choose his shots. I decided that it was time to act. I tore Fenris from the driver's seat and slipped behind the wheel. I piloted that big bastard of a car through the confusing streets of Brooklyn, trying to shake our tale. I mean, tail.

I woke up with my head pressed against the windshield. I peeled my face from the spiderwebbed glass and saw the spray of my faceblood across it. My cheeks were wet. I wiped the blood away and more came. Smoke was pouring from the front of the car. A fine mist of various automobile fluids covered the scene.

Fenris was gone. Spider was no longer in the backseat. I grabbed the gun left on the dashboard and slammed my shoulder into the door to get it open. I rolled out onto grass and tried to find my footing.

Stumbling through the mist, as well as the haze of my fractured mind, I spotted a figure approaching. I hefted the gun up to eye level and planted my feet, my finger ready to squeeze the trigger. An empty click left my body to involuntary jerk when there was no recoil. I fell to my knees.

The figure came closer and I could see it was a female form. I never saw her face but I was glad I didn't have any bullets left in the gun. She lifted me up and brought me home.

Tower of Brahma - 36 - forgetful faust

2009-08-03T18:10:00.000-07:00

06/26/07

I don't know if this happens with every deal with the devil, but I remembered that I sold him my soul only afterwards. Roughly about two years later, I'd imagine 666 days if I did the math, I find myself recalling the details of my swap with Satan himself.

At age thirteen I'm setting fire to plastic letters stolen off a display sign from the temple across the street. My friend and I are smoking cigarettes and sipping whiskey as we light up the plastic over a small pit as part of our adolescent backyard conjuring of Mephisto.

No dark display makes itself known but perhaps that's when the door was open. From there my life fell apart. My grandmother died, someone killed himself on my birthday, and I became a bastard who didn't care. I was numb, a soulless simpleton tumbling down a path of self-destruction. I slipped into a Hell of my own making, masochistically flogging my guilt with psychological torture.

So, two years ago I said I'd give whatever was left for a way out. He gave me words for the shred I had left. I'd have enough words for 64 chapters. Enough words to end it all and to do it right this time. We shook hands, I signed in blood, and off he went to the Underworld.

I prayed for the stories to come and release me, somehow redeem my unworthy self. I, like every sucker who swaps with the Devil, tried to use the gift I had to undo this deal. I exorcised my demons with symbolism and pleaded with my passion to get me in his good graces.

Maybe it all started before this. Back to a time I don't recall. A primal, power play where I die before innocence is lost and brought back before judgment of my eternal soul. These words simply must save me for they are all I possess.

The Tower of Brahma: 35 - interruption

2009-07-27T18:09:00.000-07:00

07/11/06

And suddenly I wanted to kill.

Who was this? An assassin...

Not likely. I thought this was a madness I was catching but reality is the pain that forced me into insanity's fair arms.

She made me a mad sexy one, rebirthed through beetle recycling, and ready for damage. Tossing down the pieces, staring madly at the fortunes of trinkets, I saw the secret of the universe revealed unto me.

I have a countdown to solve the riddle. I can't wait til the final nail-biting seconds to defuse my literal existence. The answers must be found now!

But regardless of pace, the journey unfolds as it does, not as you wish. The signal is vibrating the tether in the centre. It shakes loose words, broadcasting them to acres of neurons, snapping puzzle pieces of sanity onto the coffee table.

Coffee table...I'm drunk. The future? Past? It feels like a memory and my consciousness lets go and I get into the pilot seat and scream and holler as I whirl my empty vessel into the night, headed straight downtown.

To the ground, laid down, and then up again until you're laughing in all of their faces one by one. You look around and they look upon, smiling down and across. Penetrating glances, glaring prances, fairy dust dances with phallic accuracy.

Jokester, prankster, playing the games but I forgot that I told myself not to remember anything so as to fool us all straight into the game. Our nights and dreams is all, it seems. Battle bravely, defending identity to its bitter end.

The girl dreams of the boy and he of her. That heart can't take the hurt, so, in hiding his dreams among the starry skies he rises and falls again. He knows, wanting to amuse and bemuse his lovely muse, so tries but fails to maintain his place. Quests for longing, meaningful masterpiece of my eye, I've gone inside.

Brainwash the self into betterment. Bridge that gap between perfection and yourself. Buy into the scheme that you've made to live within. Learn the rules and have fun. Further instructions lie...

The tower of brahma - thirty4 - existence is futile

2009-07-20T18:09:00.000-07:00

05/08/06

On the inside of my favorite book I found a collection of paragraph length prose scattered on seemingly random pages. Below is the collected words strung together. I hope it helps me make sense of this...

Gone is the boy that marches like a beast. Slipped into and then born anew, I am left and right. Odds and evens are added together creating poisoned man, complete man.

I'm not supposed to have this in my head. Its vulgar honesty is infecting my morals. Refusing refuge from the scarring truth I mangle my brains, mash my bones, and confuse myself further.

Two are down and the third is most important. It's the final movement that defines your choice. The last ark that careens through the sky and lands upon something that is different from the starting point. Shoot the hand and cry again, but fight through it and place it on top.

You made your decision and the plateau is relief incarnate. Rest a lie, sleep a dream, live the life and skip it all. You've made the moves and there's no going back. Started unconsciously can warrant no blame. Flames scorching the Earth, Liquifying the Sky, this is not what you did, it's what you chose. Or rather what chose you.

Hand it over. Accept no blame. God did this; his Universe, his rules, your life you lose. Orchestrated construction of eternal damnation: Celebration! Father forgives the weakness, cowardice, innocence, and common sense.

Did the devil dance in your eyes tonight?

In the end it's yours. Do with it what you will. Feverish impulses of sanity bursting forth from your flesh covered sixth sense. It's rumbling beneath intensifying, igniting, and ignoble.