Hanging out in the elecrtric air, nightime, the substance of the work I choose to do. 'What the fuck does that mean?' You might ask. Well, what does any of it mean?
Here's a magick spell. Consume half a quart of your favorite poison, tap out three notes on a guitar or keyboard or whatever, employ some system of looping and let that fucker drone on. Could be a delay pedal, I use Ableton live a bit, but that's costly and not very practical, unless you already have it (so maybe make the focus of intent acquiring a free version of ableton live and then start going to their website and entering any number of contests out there to win it). Shit, I even use a nice analogue metronome from time to time. This is real nice in emulating the visual of descending a staircase or any other montonous image you can employ. But I'm getting slightly ahead of myself.
The Monotonous Imaging (or MI) is a sort of grid you want to work to affix your consciousness to. The idea is, you wind your 'here and now' apparatus around this image so tightly that as it advances the 'pretend' also advances the submersion of your 'conscious' into your 'subconscious'. Once this fully takes its toll you won't be able to implement anything else without breaking your null state, so have everything ready.
What you want to have ready is whatever you are working for. I got into this whole kind of thing with Austin Osman Spare-influenced authors talking about the sigil method.* But what I'm proposing here is my own twist on that method. You can turn the desire into the path that you walk down in order to access the lower depths of the mind, thus makign the journey itself the 'charging' of the desire, masked enough by the performance to not have the actual outcome in mind at the time (bad. Lust of result will thwart even the best laid magickal plans).
So whether you click on a metronome and stare at a giant painting you've made to represent what you want or you mathematically turn all the letters left into numbers and the numbers into notes, then record them, loop them and sit back and zone on it, you too can penetrate the inner workings of your subconscious, use them to access the Universe, and adjust the odds in your favor.
But heed the old adage: be careful what you wish for. Always contemplate the ramifications of any desire, as they might destroy others lives, or even your own.
*At this point the sigil thing is fairly popularized so I won't try to explain it too much here when others do a far better job of it elsewhere (Peter J. Carrol and Grant Morrison come to mind, as well as Spare himself, but good luck finding his writings and then,. if you do, good luck decoding them). In a nutshell write out what you want, eliminate all vowels and repeating letters from the words, then take whatever is left and put it together into a single image, bending and twisting the letters into a picture of sorts. That's a sigil. Popular method is to then mediate on it until the mind reaches vacuity, or perhaps more popular still and far quicker and more practical, jerk off (or even better, do like I do and map out the sigils in advance and then call one up days or weeks later while in the throws of ectasy with the one you love) and at the moment of climax stare at the image. The blank state the mind is in at that moment, same as where its at when zonked out in trance through meditation, is the state at which we are no longer just on the island of our mind but also in awash in the greater sea of the archetypal/collective unconcsious/kung fu wonderbread. That's how it works; its as if at that moment we've just hacked the grid on the Universal computer and have but a single instant to upload our virus/program into it, making it perform the task we ask of it.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Vinyl and Cocktails...
“It’s too late, Baby, now it’s too late, though we really did try and make it…”
Words from a Carole King song, released in 1971, five years before I was born. Unimaginably they have been haunting me all day*. Haunting because I remember the somber musical arrangement and regretful vocal melody from what seems like lifetimes ago. I have discussed this before, many times before as I have tried to grasp something beyond the experience of the casual music listener. Songs like this, from this particular era trigger a freefall into memory for me. Not memory as a verb or as a passive noun, no. This is Memory as a proper noun, a place that exists; a thing that I can touch with some, if not all, of my currently recognized and categorized five senses.
This is not a place of a childhood gone by or lost love or anything like that. No, even though I have a vested, nostalgic interest/bias in this stuff, because it impacted with me, I heard it, late 70’s/early 80’s and that was indeed my childhood, but these ‘memories’ are just a spring boards; a chaotic succession of windows into what I have come to think of as a aural time machine, somehow bringing me to a place I could only just barely understand as a child, but feel so enamored with now; life as a coming of age process for people my parent’s age in the that time.
My parents had not been hippies or participated in any of the sense of revolution that engulfed the world of many western 20/30 something’s in the 1960’s. No, they had worked and entertained friends and moved in and started a family, and their musical tastes reflected this. When I was growing up and subjected to my parents’ music it was always easy listening: Linda Ronstadt, Johnny Mathis, Burt Bacharach. Why? Because this particular time was the era that the singer-songwriter became a commodity for the ‘new age of consumer’. The hippie-psychedelic-folk-protest engine, a four-sided square cube of the 60’s brought on horrors like the eagles, where all of those elements met with cocaine and gin as a buffer, a filter if you will, and were squeeze-strained into the California, Laurel Canyon, milquetoast singer-songwriter ‘movement’ which basically brought all the soft, concerned Earthy-protest of the hippies back into a stable and marketable commodity for the newly re-charged, post World War II baby boomers. This was music for those who had been just slightly too old to be drawn into the short-lived and in the end disappointing thrill of revolution that cast iconic careers in the Woodstock generation and had instead seen the motifs of that era as the next marketable romance to hold each other at night and think about how the only reason to live through and look past atrocities like Nixon, the Vietnam war and the rise of the serial killer was to settle down in a home, with a factory or dock job and begin raising children to try and move the population yet another generation past the greed and terror that had eeked in around the edges of the American dream and begun corroding it.
On the surface there was nothing wrong with this. Its what people do: carry on living regardless of the loneliness and adversity that permeates the world as we have defined it for ourselves as a culture. Raise babies, seek the future… how was my father or your father or grandfather or whoever most closely links you to this time I discuss here, how were they supposed to know that the jobs would devolve to the point of extinction (and as well, how were the computer programmers who replaced them a decade and a half later supposed to know that they too would suffer the out-dated, out-sourcing death-knell)?
…………..
I found another killer record today. Sara’s been really into thrifting, finding stuff in thrift stores and then selling it on ebay. When I go along I comb the records, and I mean vinyl records, for all those IPod generationals who think I might just be using an archaic word for CD’s. We have our old turntable (Sara’s; I had several but all of them were in those all-in-one stereo combos from the 90’s and they weren’t worth moving) and between the two of us we have quite a bit of vinyl. Everything from Roy Ayers to the Misfits to Miles Davis, Johnny Cash, Billy Joel, James Brown, etc. I like to dig through the piles of discarded memories that is a record pile at a thrift store – it in and of itself is a way to climb back through time. You always get staples like Ray Cunnif, Brahms and Herp Albert and the Tijuana Brass, and those alone are enough to take you back. But then there’s stuff that I find, like these quirky records from the dawn of the Stereo Age, with bold cover notes boasting the ‘Brand New Technology’, ‘A New Way to Listen to Music’, etc. They’re awash in these trippy designs and insignias that are supposed to emulate, I guess, multi-faceted sound waves, frequency oscillation and a head start in a new and better direction and quality of life for the music listener. I imagine its because I was born during what could still be considered the early segment of the Stereo Age that this stuff appeals to me so much. I remember the dark lacquered book case that was just inside my family’s front door, in what people then called the ‘Den’, with its many shelves for books and records and even a drop down liquor cabinet, where things like Clan MacGregor Scotch, Tom Collins mix and, the holy grail, an always replenished plastic bottle of my Grandma Baker’s (Dad’s mom) Grasshopper cocktail mix hung out and waited for me to hit the age of curiosity when I would one by one drain them all of their assorted contents and replace with water to keep up appearances (my folks were never big on liquor so it wasn’t something that ever got noticed). That was another throw back many of these records played to, this idea of the cocktail party as some new and space age ideal one must always be prepared to fully stock at a moments notice. The sixties-bleeding-into-the-seventies was full of this new age, chic social agenda that included Fondue, Roasts, cocktails of seemingly exotic nature and a ‘Hi-Fi’ stereo system upon which either Linda Ronstadt or Herp Albert could whisk the merriment into a delighted frenzy at a moments notice.
These are the records, not just records as in vinyl but records as in a documents of people and the way they lived, so different but not so distant from today…
Listening to Stereophonics: Language. Sex. Violence. Other
*Although posted today this was actually written several weeks ago on a day off.
Words from a Carole King song, released in 1971, five years before I was born. Unimaginably they have been haunting me all day*. Haunting because I remember the somber musical arrangement and regretful vocal melody from what seems like lifetimes ago. I have discussed this before, many times before as I have tried to grasp something beyond the experience of the casual music listener. Songs like this, from this particular era trigger a freefall into memory for me. Not memory as a verb or as a passive noun, no. This is Memory as a proper noun, a place that exists; a thing that I can touch with some, if not all, of my currently recognized and categorized five senses.
This is not a place of a childhood gone by or lost love or anything like that. No, even though I have a vested, nostalgic interest/bias in this stuff, because it impacted with me, I heard it, late 70’s/early 80’s and that was indeed my childhood, but these ‘memories’ are just a spring boards; a chaotic succession of windows into what I have come to think of as a aural time machine, somehow bringing me to a place I could only just barely understand as a child, but feel so enamored with now; life as a coming of age process for people my parent’s age in the that time.
My parents had not been hippies or participated in any of the sense of revolution that engulfed the world of many western 20/30 something’s in the 1960’s. No, they had worked and entertained friends and moved in and started a family, and their musical tastes reflected this. When I was growing up and subjected to my parents’ music it was always easy listening: Linda Ronstadt, Johnny Mathis, Burt Bacharach. Why? Because this particular time was the era that the singer-songwriter became a commodity for the ‘new age of consumer’. The hippie-psychedelic-folk-protest engine, a four-sided square cube of the 60’s brought on horrors like the eagles, where all of those elements met with cocaine and gin as a buffer, a filter if you will, and were squeeze-strained into the California, Laurel Canyon, milquetoast singer-songwriter ‘movement’ which basically brought all the soft, concerned Earthy-protest of the hippies back into a stable and marketable commodity for the newly re-charged, post World War II baby boomers. This was music for those who had been just slightly too old to be drawn into the short-lived and in the end disappointing thrill of revolution that cast iconic careers in the Woodstock generation and had instead seen the motifs of that era as the next marketable romance to hold each other at night and think about how the only reason to live through and look past atrocities like Nixon, the Vietnam war and the rise of the serial killer was to settle down in a home, with a factory or dock job and begin raising children to try and move the population yet another generation past the greed and terror that had eeked in around the edges of the American dream and begun corroding it.
On the surface there was nothing wrong with this. Its what people do: carry on living regardless of the loneliness and adversity that permeates the world as we have defined it for ourselves as a culture. Raise babies, seek the future… how was my father or your father or grandfather or whoever most closely links you to this time I discuss here, how were they supposed to know that the jobs would devolve to the point of extinction (and as well, how were the computer programmers who replaced them a decade and a half later supposed to know that they too would suffer the out-dated, out-sourcing death-knell)?
…………..
I found another killer record today. Sara’s been really into thrifting, finding stuff in thrift stores and then selling it on ebay. When I go along I comb the records, and I mean vinyl records, for all those IPod generationals who think I might just be using an archaic word for CD’s. We have our old turntable (Sara’s; I had several but all of them were in those all-in-one stereo combos from the 90’s and they weren’t worth moving) and between the two of us we have quite a bit of vinyl. Everything from Roy Ayers to the Misfits to Miles Davis, Johnny Cash, Billy Joel, James Brown, etc. I like to dig through the piles of discarded memories that is a record pile at a thrift store – it in and of itself is a way to climb back through time. You always get staples like Ray Cunnif, Brahms and Herp Albert and the Tijuana Brass, and those alone are enough to take you back. But then there’s stuff that I find, like these quirky records from the dawn of the Stereo Age, with bold cover notes boasting the ‘Brand New Technology’, ‘A New Way to Listen to Music’, etc. They’re awash in these trippy designs and insignias that are supposed to emulate, I guess, multi-faceted sound waves, frequency oscillation and a head start in a new and better direction and quality of life for the music listener. I imagine its because I was born during what could still be considered the early segment of the Stereo Age that this stuff appeals to me so much. I remember the dark lacquered book case that was just inside my family’s front door, in what people then called the ‘Den’, with its many shelves for books and records and even a drop down liquor cabinet, where things like Clan MacGregor Scotch, Tom Collins mix and, the holy grail, an always replenished plastic bottle of my Grandma Baker’s (Dad’s mom) Grasshopper cocktail mix hung out and waited for me to hit the age of curiosity when I would one by one drain them all of their assorted contents and replace with water to keep up appearances (my folks were never big on liquor so it wasn’t something that ever got noticed). That was another throw back many of these records played to, this idea of the cocktail party as some new and space age ideal one must always be prepared to fully stock at a moments notice. The sixties-bleeding-into-the-seventies was full of this new age, chic social agenda that included Fondue, Roasts, cocktails of seemingly exotic nature and a ‘Hi-Fi’ stereo system upon which either Linda Ronstadt or Herp Albert could whisk the merriment into a delighted frenzy at a moments notice.
These are the records, not just records as in vinyl but records as in a documents of people and the way they lived, so different but not so distant from today…
Listening to Stereophonics: Language. Sex. Violence. Other
*Although posted today this was actually written several weeks ago on a day off.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
NEW BAUHAUS!!!
And I'll be damned, it is AWESOME.
This is the ONLY instance of a band I love who, after 20+ years (probably 30 actually) decide to do another studio album and it 100% fits in with what they 'were'. It's as if You gave David J., Haskins, Ash and Murphy a rip van winkle potion, and they woke up with 1983 still in their heads, then sat down for a couple months in a studio and went about making their next album.
Plus, the production is wonderful. I received an advance copy of this but make no mistake, I will be buying it the day it comes out to support one of my favorite bands.
Now the only thing I can think of that I am REALLY looking forward to is the next Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album. Check out their myspace for a new track that rules.
This is the ONLY instance of a band I love who, after 20+ years (probably 30 actually) decide to do another studio album and it 100% fits in with what they 'were'. It's as if You gave David J., Haskins, Ash and Murphy a rip van winkle potion, and they woke up with 1983 still in their heads, then sat down for a couple months in a studio and went about making their next album.
Plus, the production is wonderful. I received an advance copy of this but make no mistake, I will be buying it the day it comes out to support one of my favorite bands.
Now the only thing I can think of that I am REALLY looking forward to is the next Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album. Check out their myspace for a new track that rules.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Norton 0 (I assure you its edited)
The bar was cold and dark, pretty much exactly what we expected for this type of situation. We sat alone, sipping merrily on a Tom collins, pretending to enjoy the poorly made cocktail and looking at the waitress' ass. She was somewhere on the other side of forty, dark-haired and pretty, in that 'I'll be your waitress and maybe give you a blow job in the service elevator after my boss leaves for fifty-bucks and or a night out on the town and away from my three kids' way'.
We were not having that. One of us would have to silently stay behind and incorporate a poltergeist spell that might persuade her to re-think her life [seven days later she would leave her abusive 'boyfriend' and move the kids to Portland, where her mother lives].
It's always funny to me how people resist change until they think God has sent them a message.
"God doesn't talk to assholes..."
"Huh? Look buddy, I just came to bring you your bill. Fuck off jerk!"
We're speaking out loud again. Hmm, we all smirk to one another, amused that she apparently considers herself an asshole.
We think about it and then leave a twenty on the table (not because there's any one of us in here that feels bad about what was accidentally said out loud but because we can't stop thinking about the children she will soon be taking care of sans any help from a prize-fighting boyfriend) and maneuver through the dingy crowd to the bathroom in back where we take a stall, bust out two Vicadine, crush them up in my hand and arrange them out on top of the back of the toilet in order to snork them down with a half-straw we created while at the table. The lines go down rough, like prescription dope always does, but we all know that in ten minutes that beautifully peaceful feeling will ring in from around the edges and cause the world to once again seem like a much nicer place than it really is.
So, the connection was not made and now it is up to one of us here to go and make the report. The child is chosen, as he always has the most refreshing ways to deal with responsibilities.
Fifteen minutes later, beneath the overpass of Northeast highway, where it rises up over Harlem. Rumours have circulated for years about the secret caves which supposedly were built into the foundations of the structure by unknown entities more than a lifetime ago when further development at the end of the fifties pushed more and more people in search of homes to the south suburbs, which were largely at the time forest preserves. Norton knew all about these rumours, and it had been his discovery of one such tunnel that had forever changed his world.
He moves through a stagnant moat of collected rainwater and to a small hole apparently taking unsubstantial residence at the foot of one of the large concrete support pillars holding the elevated highway above this, one of the last remaining sacred places of the city. Norton, as well as the people he now associates himself with* use these caves as homes and operating headquarters, from where they silently, invisibly observe the city around them to better work to inoculate the social and psychic virus which seems to flitter around fucking up the natural order of everything. Today a new virus had been added to the list. A virus named Rufus who used to be best friends with as many as twelve of the respective character roles Norton had long ago written for themselves. "In every man a thousand, in every woman a thousand more, wear the mask, raise the curtain, the world, a stage to adore." This poem ran constantly through the collective's head, often changing its mood and thus, its operative representative.
Burrowing silently like a snake the adventurers make their way through the inhuman tunnel and out into a wading pond of more stagnant rainwater (this area collected and filtered for human use), from which they eventually emerge into the anti-chamber where the others would no doubt already be assembled.
They were there.
Three scruff and bearded men sit waiting, lounging around bizarre rock and concrete formations, sculpted from loose or stolen concrete that makes its way down from botched roadway repairs and excess dumping (both of which occurs more than anyone would really like to believe). Three men, but a council of dozens lay eyes on the adventurers as they make their way to their feet and prepare to present their findings.
"Brothers and sisters of the Norton-verse, what have thee to report to the council?"
"We would prefer to take a casual application to this meeting, as the news we have uncovered begs for further, regrettable action."
"Very well, everyone, remove your pants. You too ladies."
Information is exchanged and deliberation with the gods begins.
In the end the council cannot take his outpost from him and for this he is glad. That pederast, gandolf mother fucker Zoo-mani has a favorite 'nephew’ he wants to appease with the gateway outpost for the supermodel dimension, but Norton wasn’t about to go for that. Three twenty-something aged frat boys walked by him in the street just in time to overhear part of his internal conversation and think him crazy.
Hah! He’d show them.
“In another coupla’ hours I’ll be nailing the girl who you’ll be drooling over in next years swimsuit issue so pISS oFF young upstarts!”
Later
Norton sat in the corner booth of the little cafe...
....
All of this happens without severe incident and eventually they decide to retire. The funny thing about being on the clock in a parallel Universe that just so happens to overlap with this one is no matter what you plan or what you want, you always wind up asleep at the wrong time and awake at the wrong time. Explain that one.
“So here we are, another night in front of the delicatessen. What shall it be?” As they asked themselves the question for the three hundredth and sixty fifth day in a row (this was their one year anniversary as an enlightened being, awakened from the soup by a baseball bat to the head on Easter last year) a tiny rat ran by, trying oh so desperately to avoid the inevitable. Sure enough Norton’s arm shoots out like lightning and WHAMMO!!!! Dinner is served!
Several hours later he wakes as the door to the dimension of super thin fashion models opens and the next BIG THING comes through, naked and hungry and looking oh so desperately for her precious dog, a half-breed Shit zue named Malcom-cum-Malco. Norton gets up and puts on the customary coffee (not really coffee at all, but something closely akin he picked up in the stimulant-verse, heated and ready with only a lighter and a prayer for better rib meat). For several months now, ever since he moved to this underpass, he has acted as the chauffer into this world from the legendary supermodel-verse, where food is scarce and sex is ridiculous. Nineteen or twenty years of eating rock cocaine and fucking finger puppets their parents arrange for them to marry leave these girls ready to explore, and when they finally become thin enough to sense the portal in their labia they come through the door ready for the first man they see, hence Norton’s dedication to fending off anyone who moves in on his territory.
Of course, three hundred and sixty five days ago it was not his territory and the only reason he ever got it to begin with was the ass backwards result of yet another devious if not poorly planned and misguided attempt to take over the Universe(s). Stop playback and select fuck-off if you’ve heard this one before.
“So there we were, all twelve at the council and none of the mofo’s appreciated the risk and responsibility we had decided to take on by taking up arms against the true coffee terrorists, starbob-squishpants. We mean here was a chain where everything cost, like, thirty times more than even the most rudimentary flavour could demand, and our whole boycott and our whole poopy-pokey-I’ll-slap your-disgusting-coffee-traitor-face extreme gymnastics routine was getting absolutely no press. We mean, how many upper middle class upper class middles do you have to poke in the bung hole before someone at good ol’ fashionably reliable channel 1,111.29 takes notice and puts you on as the next regular guest star of Baywatch 18 B.C.? This isn’t a fucking hard equation, knowhatimeanthen?”
STOp!
This new one with the pretty black hair has just come through and suddenly we’re seeing where this is going. On our previous adventure, out there in the inexplicable backwaters of time, we learned the real-time inconvenience of trying to cube all the various dimensions of time into a single, mathematically valid representation of that which is singularly unable to be cubed into standardly mathematically valid points of representations. In the Norton-verse we have come to call this Poo-uvering.
So here’s Norton sitting directly across the shopping cart from this six foot five, ‘hundred and twelve pound mutant foreigner, knowing full well that an agent for Pipsi or Nubisoy is nearby, scanning for the new arrival, trying to convince this poor piece of meat that the only good thing that is going to come to her is him, if she lets him. and based on the foodless, orgasmless equations she’s been raised on he’s not really wrong.
1000x
“After we finish Britany asks me what this world is like and if she will ever see a purpose beyond garden. We try to tell her that the underpass/overpass at NE Harlem needs a guardian veterinarian, to put down the bums and jerk off the strays, but in the end her eyes roll back and forth looking for the corporate lawmen to swoop in on their web-like dossiers and take her to the land of fake breasts and Grammy award show performances. Oh well, we got our rocks off.”
Later that night the whole population is asleep, even the late-night watchmen personality named Mavis when an intruder arrives and shackles the physical vehicle to its shopping cart.
They awake alarmed and quite unhappy with Mavis.
“Who are you and why have you endangered my mission? I Norton 0, prototype Universe for the post pre-age of no modern command that thoust answer me!”
“No! No! You have us all wrong comrades. We are here with a message from the council and bind you only out of fear and respect for the, ah, legendary violence of some of the members of your vehicle. We mean no offense!”
“No Offense?! No offense?! BlahHh! You, have your best and bravest get off his balls and deliver the council’s message, then put your biggest coward at the wheel and get from my sight before I find one of my carnivorous poodles and use it to flay the flesh from your grill!”
'That damn council,' they thought when it was all over. Never too smart.
It was back to the café to wait for the waitress to get off work and then follow her home. Word of her true form had found it’s way to them and it was now believed that she had smuggled here with her a canister or two of some grade A toxic material from the expensive slag mines of the cavernous world of intelligent rocks.
It all sounds so strange and cheesy, the skeptic in him, Marlowe Thought. But damn it if it wasn’t all also true. There were strange little twists to the physical world everywhere one could look, it was just modern society trained their young to be concerned about pointless oddities like situation dramadies and low fat tofu bars instead of the invisible world that exacted itself on their lives everyday. How many of these glue-sniffing squish heads would believe that if they just lit a candle every morning in the southeast corner of their mansions they would never have to pay taxes to their overblown god Comercé. Fools! In this day and age it was always about what everyone else was doing, especially those pointless tarts from the tribe they call Cele-britee.
It took only hours for Norton 0 to work his way out of the cuffs, not realizing the entire time that the kid had been so nervous that he had actually left the keys in the lock.
“Now, one quick scuttle inside to the hall of ancients and we’ll be on our way!”
He closes his eyes and a tidal wave of inner movement cascades over them.
"Seething! SEE-THINGS!!!"
........
1965 (whoops? Wrong direction!!!)
There is a jazz guitar amp that we oh so desperately want to send to ourselves in the future, but we don’t know quite how to do this because we no longer hold access points to the vocal stabilities and techniques required to make this hole on the front of our faces do anything other than slather as imperceptibly astute examples of living erotica dart and sketch by in various stages of dilapidation. Cough syrup and rubbing alcohol will do that to you sometimes..."
"Eh? Do whut to yew? Ey canNOT follow a goddem word yer sayin'"
""Were we speking aloud? Oh dear? How much does he know? How much did you say?"
"I DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING"
"LOOK, is it that cough syrup and rubbing alcohol will induce various degrees of dilapidation in a body? Or were you referring to yourself and your ridiculous ability to hold twenty-seven different conversations with yourself all at once and in different dialects?"
More questions. Damn, we want that guitar.
That Norton was sure he had not said aloud. And the simple fact was it would not have mattered if he did, now that the other man's kidnet hung from the silvery edge of his curved carving blade.
"Shit, I guees that means KIP, the psychotic personality has garnered control again. GETREADYFORANOTHERWHITECHAPELOHYOUPERILOUSANDUNSUSPECTINGWORLD!!!"
.................
*Or rather, they now associate themselves with, as Norton and their comrades subscribed to the para-psychological view that in every person there is a collective and to regard people as one single 'I' was at least half of the reason the world was awash in terrifying situations (wars, rapes, murders, etc.) created by too many reinforced and hopelessly selfish egos
We were not having that. One of us would have to silently stay behind and incorporate a poltergeist spell that might persuade her to re-think her life [seven days later she would leave her abusive 'boyfriend' and move the kids to Portland, where her mother lives].
It's always funny to me how people resist change until they think God has sent them a message.
"God doesn't talk to assholes..."
"Huh? Look buddy, I just came to bring you your bill. Fuck off jerk!"
We're speaking out loud again. Hmm, we all smirk to one another, amused that she apparently considers herself an asshole.
We think about it and then leave a twenty on the table (not because there's any one of us in here that feels bad about what was accidentally said out loud but because we can't stop thinking about the children she will soon be taking care of sans any help from a prize-fighting boyfriend) and maneuver through the dingy crowd to the bathroom in back where we take a stall, bust out two Vicadine, crush them up in my hand and arrange them out on top of the back of the toilet in order to snork them down with a half-straw we created while at the table. The lines go down rough, like prescription dope always does, but we all know that in ten minutes that beautifully peaceful feeling will ring in from around the edges and cause the world to once again seem like a much nicer place than it really is.
So, the connection was not made and now it is up to one of us here to go and make the report. The child is chosen, as he always has the most refreshing ways to deal with responsibilities.
Fifteen minutes later, beneath the overpass of Northeast highway, where it rises up over Harlem. Rumours have circulated for years about the secret caves which supposedly were built into the foundations of the structure by unknown entities more than a lifetime ago when further development at the end of the fifties pushed more and more people in search of homes to the south suburbs, which were largely at the time forest preserves. Norton knew all about these rumours, and it had been his discovery of one such tunnel that had forever changed his world.
He moves through a stagnant moat of collected rainwater and to a small hole apparently taking unsubstantial residence at the foot of one of the large concrete support pillars holding the elevated highway above this, one of the last remaining sacred places of the city. Norton, as well as the people he now associates himself with* use these caves as homes and operating headquarters, from where they silently, invisibly observe the city around them to better work to inoculate the social and psychic virus which seems to flitter around fucking up the natural order of everything. Today a new virus had been added to the list. A virus named Rufus who used to be best friends with as many as twelve of the respective character roles Norton had long ago written for themselves. "In every man a thousand, in every woman a thousand more, wear the mask, raise the curtain, the world, a stage to adore." This poem ran constantly through the collective's head, often changing its mood and thus, its operative representative.
Burrowing silently like a snake the adventurers make their way through the inhuman tunnel and out into a wading pond of more stagnant rainwater (this area collected and filtered for human use), from which they eventually emerge into the anti-chamber where the others would no doubt already be assembled.
They were there.
Three scruff and bearded men sit waiting, lounging around bizarre rock and concrete formations, sculpted from loose or stolen concrete that makes its way down from botched roadway repairs and excess dumping (both of which occurs more than anyone would really like to believe). Three men, but a council of dozens lay eyes on the adventurers as they make their way to their feet and prepare to present their findings.
"Brothers and sisters of the Norton-verse, what have thee to report to the council?"
"We would prefer to take a casual application to this meeting, as the news we have uncovered begs for further, regrettable action."
"Very well, everyone, remove your pants. You too ladies."
Information is exchanged and deliberation with the gods begins.
In the end the council cannot take his outpost from him and for this he is glad. That pederast, gandolf mother fucker Zoo-mani has a favorite 'nephew’ he wants to appease with the gateway outpost for the supermodel dimension, but Norton wasn’t about to go for that. Three twenty-something aged frat boys walked by him in the street just in time to overhear part of his internal conversation and think him crazy.
Hah! He’d show them.
“In another coupla’ hours I’ll be nailing the girl who you’ll be drooling over in next years swimsuit issue so pISS oFF young upstarts!”
Later
Norton sat in the corner booth of the little cafe...
....
All of this happens without severe incident and eventually they decide to retire. The funny thing about being on the clock in a parallel Universe that just so happens to overlap with this one is no matter what you plan or what you want, you always wind up asleep at the wrong time and awake at the wrong time. Explain that one.
“So here we are, another night in front of the delicatessen. What shall it be?” As they asked themselves the question for the three hundredth and sixty fifth day in a row (this was their one year anniversary as an enlightened being, awakened from the soup by a baseball bat to the head on Easter last year) a tiny rat ran by, trying oh so desperately to avoid the inevitable. Sure enough Norton’s arm shoots out like lightning and WHAMMO!!!! Dinner is served!
Several hours later he wakes as the door to the dimension of super thin fashion models opens and the next BIG THING comes through, naked and hungry and looking oh so desperately for her precious dog, a half-breed Shit zue named Malcom-cum-Malco. Norton gets up and puts on the customary coffee (not really coffee at all, but something closely akin he picked up in the stimulant-verse, heated and ready with only a lighter and a prayer for better rib meat). For several months now, ever since he moved to this underpass, he has acted as the chauffer into this world from the legendary supermodel-verse, where food is scarce and sex is ridiculous. Nineteen or twenty years of eating rock cocaine and fucking finger puppets their parents arrange for them to marry leave these girls ready to explore, and when they finally become thin enough to sense the portal in their labia they come through the door ready for the first man they see, hence Norton’s dedication to fending off anyone who moves in on his territory.
Of course, three hundred and sixty five days ago it was not his territory and the only reason he ever got it to begin with was the ass backwards result of yet another devious if not poorly planned and misguided attempt to take over the Universe(s). Stop playback and select fuck-off if you’ve heard this one before.
“So there we were, all twelve at the council and none of the mofo’s appreciated the risk and responsibility we had decided to take on by taking up arms against the true coffee terrorists, starbob-squishpants. We mean here was a chain where everything cost, like, thirty times more than even the most rudimentary flavour could demand, and our whole boycott and our whole poopy-pokey-I’ll-slap your-disgusting-coffee-traitor-face extreme gymnastics routine was getting absolutely no press. We mean, how many upper middle class upper class middles do you have to poke in the bung hole before someone at good ol’ fashionably reliable channel 1,111.29 takes notice and puts you on as the next regular guest star of Baywatch 18 B.C.? This isn’t a fucking hard equation, knowhatimeanthen?”
STOp!
This new one with the pretty black hair has just come through and suddenly we’re seeing where this is going. On our previous adventure, out there in the inexplicable backwaters of time, we learned the real-time inconvenience of trying to cube all the various dimensions of time into a single, mathematically valid representation of that which is singularly unable to be cubed into standardly mathematically valid points of representations. In the Norton-verse we have come to call this Poo-uvering.
So here’s Norton sitting directly across the shopping cart from this six foot five, ‘hundred and twelve pound mutant foreigner, knowing full well that an agent for Pipsi or Nubisoy is nearby, scanning for the new arrival, trying to convince this poor piece of meat that the only good thing that is going to come to her is him, if she lets him. and based on the foodless, orgasmless equations she’s been raised on he’s not really wrong.
1000x
“After we finish Britany asks me what this world is like and if she will ever see a purpose beyond garden. We try to tell her that the underpass/overpass at NE Harlem needs a guardian veterinarian, to put down the bums and jerk off the strays, but in the end her eyes roll back and forth looking for the corporate lawmen to swoop in on their web-like dossiers and take her to the land of fake breasts and Grammy award show performances. Oh well, we got our rocks off.”
Later that night the whole population is asleep, even the late-night watchmen personality named Mavis when an intruder arrives and shackles the physical vehicle to its shopping cart.
They awake alarmed and quite unhappy with Mavis.
“Who are you and why have you endangered my mission? I Norton 0, prototype Universe for the post pre-age of no modern command that thoust answer me!”
“No! No! You have us all wrong comrades. We are here with a message from the council and bind you only out of fear and respect for the, ah, legendary violence of some of the members of your vehicle. We mean no offense!”
“No Offense?! No offense?! BlahHh! You, have your best and bravest get off his balls and deliver the council’s message, then put your biggest coward at the wheel and get from my sight before I find one of my carnivorous poodles and use it to flay the flesh from your grill!”
'That damn council,' they thought when it was all over. Never too smart.
It was back to the café to wait for the waitress to get off work and then follow her home. Word of her true form had found it’s way to them and it was now believed that she had smuggled here with her a canister or two of some grade A toxic material from the expensive slag mines of the cavernous world of intelligent rocks.
It all sounds so strange and cheesy, the skeptic in him, Marlowe Thought. But damn it if it wasn’t all also true. There were strange little twists to the physical world everywhere one could look, it was just modern society trained their young to be concerned about pointless oddities like situation dramadies and low fat tofu bars instead of the invisible world that exacted itself on their lives everyday. How many of these glue-sniffing squish heads would believe that if they just lit a candle every morning in the southeast corner of their mansions they would never have to pay taxes to their overblown god Comercé. Fools! In this day and age it was always about what everyone else was doing, especially those pointless tarts from the tribe they call Cele-britee.
It took only hours for Norton 0 to work his way out of the cuffs, not realizing the entire time that the kid had been so nervous that he had actually left the keys in the lock.
“Now, one quick scuttle inside to the hall of ancients and we’ll be on our way!”
He closes his eyes and a tidal wave of inner movement cascades over them.
"Seething! SEE-THINGS!!!"
........
1965 (whoops? Wrong direction!!!)
There is a jazz guitar amp that we oh so desperately want to send to ourselves in the future, but we don’t know quite how to do this because we no longer hold access points to the vocal stabilities and techniques required to make this hole on the front of our faces do anything other than slather as imperceptibly astute examples of living erotica dart and sketch by in various stages of dilapidation. Cough syrup and rubbing alcohol will do that to you sometimes..."
"Eh? Do whut to yew? Ey canNOT follow a goddem word yer sayin'"
""Were we speking aloud? Oh dear? How much does he know? How much did you say?"
"I DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING"
"LOOK, is it that cough syrup and rubbing alcohol will induce various degrees of dilapidation in a body? Or were you referring to yourself and your ridiculous ability to hold twenty-seven different conversations with yourself all at once and in different dialects?"
More questions. Damn, we want that guitar.
That Norton was sure he had not said aloud. And the simple fact was it would not have mattered if he did, now that the other man's kidnet hung from the silvery edge of his curved carving blade.
"Shit, I guees that means KIP, the psychotic personality has garnered control again. GETREADYFORANOTHERWHITECHAPELOHYOUPERILOUSANDUNSUSPECTINGWORLD!!!"
.................
*Or rather, they now associate themselves with, as Norton and their comrades subscribed to the para-psychological view that in every person there is a collective and to regard people as one single 'I' was at least half of the reason the world was awash in terrifying situations (wars, rapes, murders, etc.) created by too many reinforced and hopelessly selfish egos
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Who are these people???
OK. US. PEOPLE. LIFE AND STYLE. There's a few others, but these are the names unfortunately left clinging to the walls of my cerbral cortex like shit on an outhouse wall. Every weekend I spend HOURS picking up the rampant publication detritus of our store's magazine section, and these are the number one read journals of tripe that make their way again and again off the shelves and into people's casual hands, to be scrutinized for gossip and then left hanging from various endcaps and fixtures, shelves and counters, chairs and floor for people like me to come along, scoop up and redeposit them in their proper display, only to momentarily be swept away again so yet another slack-jawed gawker can come along and drain them of their 'information'.
Imagine being one who would spend your time accessing the supposed personal lives of the celebrities that 'The Spectacle' (thanks Grant) issues to your obssessive, boring and vicariousness-fueled minds. Imagine actually caring about what will be in this week's edition, as they parade cover story after cover story of this actress' belly, this one's tits; this actor's struggles with pills, this one's overdose. Can't imagine it? Okay, well now imagine staring into the eyes of one who meets all those criteria and more - are you too feeling the sting of the thwarted futurist? Feeling science's failure? WHERE'S MY GODDAMN STERILIZER RAY!!!
A woman became very irrate one Saturday morning recently when our shipment of weekly scandal rags had not arrived in time. She had 'woken early and made a special trip' just to read the new issues (never mind that she, like most, would probably not have bought the rags she felt so strongly about being denied, instead choosing to sit and read them in the store, no doubt spilling coffee or chocolate or chocolate coffee all over them before leaving them to be recovered by the likes of myself and the other patient hearts who toil to accentuate their leisure.
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE? Why would anybody care that much about the lives of others? Is it as though I have always imagined, that these hapless shells of wretch we see in similar visage to ourselves have nothing and no one in their lives to inspire any passion or adventure of their own, so that they await so eagerly the further happenings of the cult of celebrity*? I ask you, oh weary reader, IS THIS LIVING??? Is this worthy of the same air that those of us how value our lives breathe? Perhaps one of the major oil companies, in preparation for the eventual dry up of their life's blood, could team up with an energy drink company and do those of us actually LIVING on this planet a favor and invent a stylized alterna-oxygen 'fuel' that those more concerned with vicarious-living, product-obeisance and general douche-baggery could purchase at a premium and partake in, thus creating another fashion whirlwind for themselves, many more millions of $$$ for the company, and an un-tainted supply of this Planet's actual lifesblood for those of us intent on getting on with it and LIVING our lives, not skulking through them like a less than interesting boutique on the corner of the new shopping developement.
I should like to see that, a fashionista expressing their dominance with a Coach gasmask pumping Cosmopolitan-sweetened air through their system, looking down on us 'breathers' as if from a pedestal of superiority.
*see my earlier post on this, titled 'Legalese'
Imagine being one who would spend your time accessing the supposed personal lives of the celebrities that 'The Spectacle' (thanks Grant) issues to your obssessive, boring and vicariousness-fueled minds. Imagine actually caring about what will be in this week's edition, as they parade cover story after cover story of this actress' belly, this one's tits; this actor's struggles with pills, this one's overdose. Can't imagine it? Okay, well now imagine staring into the eyes of one who meets all those criteria and more - are you too feeling the sting of the thwarted futurist? Feeling science's failure? WHERE'S MY GODDAMN STERILIZER RAY!!!
A woman became very irrate one Saturday morning recently when our shipment of weekly scandal rags had not arrived in time. She had 'woken early and made a special trip' just to read the new issues (never mind that she, like most, would probably not have bought the rags she felt so strongly about being denied, instead choosing to sit and read them in the store, no doubt spilling coffee or chocolate or chocolate coffee all over them before leaving them to be recovered by the likes of myself and the other patient hearts who toil to accentuate their leisure.
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE? Why would anybody care that much about the lives of others? Is it as though I have always imagined, that these hapless shells of wretch we see in similar visage to ourselves have nothing and no one in their lives to inspire any passion or adventure of their own, so that they await so eagerly the further happenings of the cult of celebrity*? I ask you, oh weary reader, IS THIS LIVING??? Is this worthy of the same air that those of us how value our lives breathe? Perhaps one of the major oil companies, in preparation for the eventual dry up of their life's blood, could team up with an energy drink company and do those of us actually LIVING on this planet a favor and invent a stylized alterna-oxygen 'fuel' that those more concerned with vicarious-living, product-obeisance and general douche-baggery could purchase at a premium and partake in, thus creating another fashion whirlwind for themselves, many more millions of $$$ for the company, and an un-tainted supply of this Planet's actual lifesblood for those of us intent on getting on with it and LIVING our lives, not skulking through them like a less than interesting boutique on the corner of the new shopping developement.
I should like to see that, a fashionista expressing their dominance with a Coach gasmask pumping Cosmopolitan-sweetened air through their system, looking down on us 'breathers' as if from a pedestal of superiority.
*see my earlier post on this, titled 'Legalese'
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Brainscape
You know what has always fascinated me? Well, not always, because its the sort of thing you have to grow to be able to even really think about. Not grow like age but grow like start taking the steps toward the direction of even becoming self aware enough to ask this sort of question. And I know that sounds pompous, like, 'oh, I'm far more evolved in thought than others', but think about it. Look around next time you're in public and tell me most of those people you see have the presence of mind to think about anything other than their basic, animal functions. The people reading these words will see what I mean and feel a kindship in what I say because most of them I know and I know they have the mental facility/mapping for this. But look at the everyday people on the street. So many of them are open books: Eat, Fuck, Phone, Work, Shop, Sleep, or something such as this. "WELL WHAT THE FUCK FASCINATES YOU ALREADY???" I can hear You saying.
My head.
Seriously, sit back and think. Not about anything in particular, just let your mind wander around for a while. Daydream. Contemplate. Whatever. Now think about work (not for too long), think about your school days, the bar last weekend, your lover's face, or Parent's sitting at the dinner table, think about as much stuff as you can. Then pull yourself out of it and become lucid of the N.O.W. again, and think about all those thoughts, what are they? Electrical impulses triggered by inner neural activity yada yada - they're like files in a Mac right (sorry PC users)? Well, look at your hard drive right now, how many MB of your total MB does what's on it use? There's the photos (those images of Ma and Pa at dinner), the song caught in your head (MP3), the conversational points you took away from a political sparing match at the pub last evening (Word file). All of these different types of information flicker across your screen as electrical impulses too, but they are also stored and accessible again and again (except perhaps the finer points of that discussion at the pub, if you were drinking more than you should have been). Stored and accessible and thus they take up room on that hard drive. HOW MUCH ROOM DO OUR THOUGHTS TAKE UP? WHERE ARE THEY STORED?
That's my point in a nutshell. I remember the first time I thought of it like this, and I mean really THOUGHT about it was on a drive to Dayton several years ago with Sara. She had taken the wheel and I think I was still in a quasi hypnogogic state after zoing out behind the wheel for an hour or two in the flat NOTHINGNESS of the Midwest (I love You Midwest) and I sat there in the passenger seat staring out the window thinking and then all of a sudden I was thinking about the space inside my head. There are YEARS and a multitude of physical locations and music and images and people and words and all this other shit, all collapsed down enough to fit inside my head. And if you're like me, when you go wandering through that stuff an enormous, amorphous landscape opens up and to catch yourself lost in thought is like standing on a precipice at the edge of some vast adn epic Savage land, rolling hills of information and feeling stretching out as far as the eye can see.
So where does all of it go? To think of it in possibly more abstract terms, how does all of that fit in this little round box equipped with all these other funky gizmos whose purpose is collecting MORE information ALL the time? What extra-dimensional theory would explain or map how all of these things fold and collapse into our physical form, and then open up for our perusal at a mere thought? 11 dimensional Supergravity? Brane theory? Superstring? I don't know, but thinking about it really revvs that inner landscape...
My head.
Seriously, sit back and think. Not about anything in particular, just let your mind wander around for a while. Daydream. Contemplate. Whatever. Now think about work (not for too long), think about your school days, the bar last weekend, your lover's face, or Parent's sitting at the dinner table, think about as much stuff as you can. Then pull yourself out of it and become lucid of the N.O.W. again, and think about all those thoughts, what are they? Electrical impulses triggered by inner neural activity yada yada - they're like files in a Mac right (sorry PC users)? Well, look at your hard drive right now, how many MB of your total MB does what's on it use? There's the photos (those images of Ma and Pa at dinner), the song caught in your head (MP3), the conversational points you took away from a political sparing match at the pub last evening (Word file). All of these different types of information flicker across your screen as electrical impulses too, but they are also stored and accessible again and again (except perhaps the finer points of that discussion at the pub, if you were drinking more than you should have been). Stored and accessible and thus they take up room on that hard drive. HOW MUCH ROOM DO OUR THOUGHTS TAKE UP? WHERE ARE THEY STORED?
That's my point in a nutshell. I remember the first time I thought of it like this, and I mean really THOUGHT about it was on a drive to Dayton several years ago with Sara. She had taken the wheel and I think I was still in a quasi hypnogogic state after zoing out behind the wheel for an hour or two in the flat NOTHINGNESS of the Midwest (I love You Midwest) and I sat there in the passenger seat staring out the window thinking and then all of a sudden I was thinking about the space inside my head. There are YEARS and a multitude of physical locations and music and images and people and words and all this other shit, all collapsed down enough to fit inside my head. And if you're like me, when you go wandering through that stuff an enormous, amorphous landscape opens up and to catch yourself lost in thought is like standing on a precipice at the edge of some vast adn epic Savage land, rolling hills of information and feeling stretching out as far as the eye can see.
So where does all of it go? To think of it in possibly more abstract terms, how does all of that fit in this little round box equipped with all these other funky gizmos whose purpose is collecting MORE information ALL the time? What extra-dimensional theory would explain or map how all of these things fold and collapse into our physical form, and then open up for our perusal at a mere thought? 11 dimensional Supergravity? Brane theory? Superstring? I don't know, but thinking about it really revvs that inner landscape...
Monday, January 28, 2008
Magick crowd control...
So I've done this before. Back at the bar. I used to HATE it when certain people came in. There were regulars that would suck up a bar seat for a whole night sometimes, leave next to no money, be abusive, irritating, annoying, demanding, whatever. Finally I got the idea to create a servitor, a tulpa, a Magickal (ie Will controlled) thought form that is programmed, much like a computer is, to do X when criteria Y is met. For the bar I named the servitor Karla, after Karla from the 80's television show Cheers, a no-nonsense bitch of a waitress that wouldn't take shit from anybody and would easily chase unwanted clientele from the establishment. I 'programmed' X = make undesireables leave the bar when Y = I drank tea. I don't know why I used that, but it worked. In fact, after I did that several of the unwanted regulars disappeared, hardly ever to come back.
Now at the bookstore we're worse than the fucking bar, especially of late. We have DROVES of high school kids who come in, take up all the seating, buy next to nothing, fuck things up, act like douche bags, are LOUD and all of this makes our (management) lives that much harder because not only do they annoy us, but they annoy our customers (many of whom are fucking annoying too) and then they complain to us. So guess what? Yep, I'm going to program a new servitor and attempt to attach it to the store. We'll see if it works.*
*some people would no doubt hear about the accomplishment at the bar and say, "oh, that's just a coincidence. you've convinced yourself that it worked, but it just happened to coincide," to which I would answer, "Who cares, as long as it works". That's the point of 'Magick' or whatever You want to call it.
Word
Now at the bookstore we're worse than the fucking bar, especially of late. We have DROVES of high school kids who come in, take up all the seating, buy next to nothing, fuck things up, act like douche bags, are LOUD and all of this makes our (management) lives that much harder because not only do they annoy us, but they annoy our customers (many of whom are fucking annoying too) and then they complain to us. So guess what? Yep, I'm going to program a new servitor and attempt to attach it to the store. We'll see if it works.*
*some people would no doubt hear about the accomplishment at the bar and say, "oh, that's just a coincidence. you've convinced yourself that it worked, but it just happened to coincide," to which I would answer, "Who cares, as long as it works". That's the point of 'Magick' or whatever You want to call it.
Word
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