Here’s one of Hieronymus Schitzolini’s favorite quotes from Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: “What Calvino calls “the true total photograph” accomplishes the unheard-of identification of reality (“that-has-been”) with truth (“there-she-is”), it becomes at once evidential and exclamative; it bears the effigy to that crazy point where affect (Love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being. It then approaches, to all intents, madness.” Hieronymus concocted the story “Accidental Peeping Tom” in order to show the absurd quest for essence and it’s counterfeit, purity. He believed in the strength of mediums defined by what other mediums cannot do. Along this line, photography that emphasizes story telling tends to omit the properties of a photograph itself. Film and writing share linear progression in terms of how they are received. But not a photograph. Thus it always seemed quixotic to suggest that a photo tells a narrative when it actually cannot. It’s akin to photographers who make that other claim that their medium is about color when that actually belongs to painting. Of course, this story is written not photographed; it’s in its medium while speaking of a character who practices his art out of his medium and explores the folly from the perspective of a narrator whose voice diverges from the author’s penchant for scatterbrained philosophical rhizomes.
Klein Fiasco
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Hieronymus Schitzolini wrote this intentionally irrational piece about a thought experiment wherein the narrator progresses or slides, depending on how you look at it, into eight levels of consciousness. Of course, any cosmology developed by someone results in placing its maker at the highest or farthest level designed. Still the cosmic joke wherein every one of us must play a part cannot be thwarted despite such passé Dantean aims. Schitzolini presents a critical look at the transcendental concept from a non-believer’s point of view. Rather than the dismissal of an athiest, he fixated on the spiritual constructs in a psyche even when it cannot permit itself to have faith. In this way, he said once that these spiritual remnants were like tattered and discarded clothes left on a concrete wall at the beach. The endless torture of what was once useful now a seeming parody of itself. Crumpled and soiled after years of abuse. Only now to be overlooked by any passerby. What follows is an excerpt from this odd spiritual progress entitled “Return Everything (because everything returns anyways)” but it should be noted that levels one through five have been lost.
Klein Fiasco
Without a driver, a car pulls up, I step in, and it slides down the hallway road. Oddly, the streetlights outside are missing their fixtures. The lights are just hovering like in some poorly coded video game with those barren existential areas where doomed NPCs roam perpetually.
The car drops me off at a Hopper-esque diner without the nighthawks. It’s just me and somebody across the room in the corner booth. Every booth has a miniature jukebox but the title cards are as blank as the menus.
I approach the other person whose table is covered in clay molds. I ask what those are. The person says they’re snake dens. The male figuration of the womb as place to fill. To demonstrate, the person holds up the master dildo and proceeds to press it into the clay and pull it out. The person tells me the phallus is considered to be a hole-filler by whoever possesses it but once it leaves nothing is actually left behind. The hole unfills itself. Very displeasing from the clay’s perspective. But the creative act in this sense is a sort of re-molding of the space by way of emptying it. Thus, the male principle is not much more than that of a dick hole.
The kitchen appears like a narrow hallway and I walk into what looks like a large walk-in closet but actually hides the scaffolding for the facade. The diner is on a movie set lot. On the other side, I step out into what looks like a New York alleyway except there is sand on the floor and the faces of the buildings look post-apocalyptic. I see a group of people in a circle scrutinizing something in the center.
In the middle, there is a container with a three-dimensional hologram of an ape in it. A man with quirky facial hair has his hands on some controls. He moves the ape hologram and moves the the three-dimensional view inside the cube as well. You can tell the group is proud of their attire, expensive high-end tactical hiking gear. It’s obvious each one of them thinks he or she is an artist. And they are staring blankly at this rendering of an ape. Why bother? To think of the time and effort spent to recreate the surface of ape behavior seems as idiotic as the people stroking their chins as if they were contemplating ape-essence.
I bore quickly of the ape show and wander onto some other set where a statue looms hundreds of feet over a stage falling into water. The figure is a formidable Komodo dragon man standing on his hind legs, supported by a massively thick tail. The footholds look easy enough so I climb up it and as I get closer to its head my vision begins to fail. Reduced to a small fuzzy aperture, I see the light coming from inside the eye of this massive lizard god. Crawling inside its eye, I fall to the floor exhausted. A voice speaks but I’m so blind I cannot see who it is before me, though I feel its presence all around me.
“What do we have here? A little blind mouse?”
In another context, I’d probably get defensive about being called a blind mouse but in this case the very utterance released all tension from my body like some absolute truth. It’s as if I can breathe so fully that I didn’t realize how constricted my breath had gotten in this whole experiment.
“In a world where everyone thinks they’re smarter than everyone else, yet commonly blind, it is a miracle for a blind mouse like you to make it thus far. You evaded the trap of the meat frame box. Those self-cannibalizing fools doomed to an eternity of gnawing on their rib cage. Nor did the adornment hoarders convince you to grab whatever you can. And you saw right through the false hopes of the human pyramids as they soiled themselves with foolish goals. Slipped out of the empathy medusa’s sight. And scampered right by the auto-asphyxiation tightrope of foolish lifelong evaluations.”
The warmth of this presence – its seeming understanding – caresses me in a way that is embarrassing to admit. It’s so peculiar finding comfort in being called a blind mouse. Or did I call myself that?
I regain my vision and recognize that the voice belongs to a has-been comedian. A burned out spaz rubber-face who suffered decades of role confusion until his ceaseless parody washed him up on that humorless shore where some well paid guru taught him how to misread his parody-induced blankness as transcendence.
“Imagine what would happen if I decided to play Jesus?”
I wince at having taken him to be something more a few moments ago. Drawn in by the big lizard of zen posturing. Almost caught up by the phony inter-dimensional speak. Nothing left now but the false comfort of arrogance behind his dead eyes. And before he can deliver his speech (we’ve all heard many times before by other charlatans) on not fearing death and not wanting material things without renouncing his wealth, a massive bell rings out seven times.
What was the line appears again as something fibrous. Opening. Unfolding porous ridges. A strange sense that everything has already happened comes over me. Every thought an afterthought. The ground falls from my feet. What I thought was the line is actually just one side of a frame with infinite sides. Frames within frames and frames outside of frames producing illusions of depth and width.
I reach out to grab hold of the frame. The first attempt is too tight and it slips right out of my hand so I try again and manage to hold it, but loosely. To stand on the line now appears as a fool’s attempt at trying to become a border. A hard edge. Something defined. Concrete. Something that never can be. The only thing that does happen is that one forgets the wider frames dictating whatever one simulates on the line. Rather to hold loosely is to place becoming over Being. Living between the false clarity of fear and the vagueness of desire. Between emptiness and potential. Allowing the trace impressions of finalities to dissipate.
Somewhere between remembering pleasure and forgetting suffering, a lagoon appears suspended in the void. A cavernous portal opens up its floor with a radiant chandelier of brilliant minerals shimmering. The lagoon’s plasma sparkles with silver flakes. And a tower of fleshy rock rises from it to break the lagoon’s surface. Its folds and ridges wet and glistening like a giant phallus opening up with a thousand vaginas. It’s not a tower at all, but I recognize it as it falls and splashes on the surface.
It’s a whale whose gargantuan mouth opens and like a giant womb births the largest turtle I’ve ever seen. The turtle rides on a frothy wave made by the whale and lifts its flipper to reveal a small baby boy seated on a rusty anchor that it gently delivers to the shoreline.
It’s the spitting image of that rubber-faced comedian as a baby.
With the voice of a lizard god, the boy tells me to do something I’d never do outside this experiment. The fact that I remember that this is an experiment carries some odd sense of permission that I wouldn’t otherwise possess. And I feel like I must do what he says because of that deep powerful voice, be it a disconnect.
He raises his globular arm and grins as I pick him up and swing him with as much force as I can. After several swings my grip gives in to the momentum and lets go.
The trickster baby flies at the night sky whose immensity presses close because it appears to actually be a strange mirror of clusters upon clusters of stars.
The surface of the infinite expanse shatters as the boy smashes through it.
Slippery shards of starlight rain down into the lagoon as it becomes a clear plate imploding and exploding at such a rapid rate that it produces a resounding Om-like hum not radiating through me but rather radiating me into a surface without boundaries as if I were a floating bottomless lake of fire under a melting dome of ice atop which diaphanous skaters carve intercrossing figure eights.
Welcome to the land beyond the ornate paralysis that came before it. You can hear Transcendence Falls roaring in the distance. Here are the fields of noble forgetting. Rest awhile and forget about insistent fools or other false fears like mundane deceptions. If you do go to the falls make sure to notice the slow, floating lake above. It’s a good place to register happy flows and listen to the water’s authenticity telling.
Of course, be aware that there are diverse exits here. Before you know it, you could slide right off this surface and end up at misery falls where grandeur returns as weak escape and one yearns for any stairs to appear even a fiery stairwell worth the risk. One should know that to stay here is to enter many unnecessary futures. But that’s what it’s like at the boundary of epiphanies. Where wayside surrenders are welcome. Where the deranged phenomena reveal themselves as brittle constructs of the maker’s making.
No need to worry anymore about freedom stains. Sit at the radiating wall and break into a spare afterglow. Laugh at dancing bottles like a child. Forgive the soft slopes of neglect. Dismiss the sanctified substitutions. Let the automatic pliability take its course. Create things only out of unknowing. Enjoy the glorious ruin.
Let residual guilt empty itself into the hands of acceptance and doom will cease to return and fate will finally take back its dumb straight jacket. Let the whispering persecutions fade into dream material. After all, quiet delusions are nothing more than falling short of faint ecstasies. Leave behind the affected enforcement of essence wishes. Drop the quagmire obsessions. Give up the pinhole of possessions.
Allow the coalescing transitions to engulf you slowly as you quietly return everything, since everything returns anyways.
“The points of disjunction on the body without organs form circles that converge on the desiring machines; then the subject-produced as a residuum alongside the machine, as an appendix, or as a spare part adjacent to the machine – passes through all the degrees of the circle, and passes from one circle to another. This subject itself is not at the center, which is occupied by the machine, but on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered, defined by the states through which it passes.” Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze & Guattari This is a literalized vertical trip of transcendence by way of an airplane. The narrowness of the tube is thought to be a higher state of consciousness because of its confining condition. But in fact, one is sitting in the aisle seat of consciousness. Going up and up into a final descent. The in-flight movie (the outsourced fantasy of the poor deranged narrator) is an impossible film. Something that could never be filmed with any success. A spectacle-ization of transcendental aspirations gone awry. Bent by paranoia. Surveillance fears of body becoming terrain. Sleepwalking-though-life anxieties that wander into the delusions of desire as the root of consciousness. Always chasing some beetle.
Klein Fiasco
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Like talking to animals in baby voices, the asinine side of identity (as with embarrassing talk that ascribes traits as inherent qualities) or in this case becoming-feline is explored as an alternate path to the one presented in the first part of the Private Fall duet. Other than being a flea brain in a cat’s body or having a flea brain in a man’s body, Schitzolini drives humorously toward something else in this piece that responds to the inane human obsession with over-identification as a way to ensconce the flea-brained mind and prevent it from entertaining complex thought. As Aldous Huxley put it in The Devils of Loudon, “From insulated selfhood there are many ways of escape into a larval condition of subhumanity. This state partakes of Nothingness…But for many persons, absolute Nothingness is not enough. What they want is a Nothing with negative qualities, a Nonentity that stinks and is hideous…precisely Nothingness-with-a-vengeance.”
Klein Fiasco
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Screaming Homunculus, Anatocomical Linocut by Klein Fiasco Rubber Dream Trampoline Podcast: The Mother’s Maw
Enjoying Rubber Dream Trampoline? For the text of this story or to show your support for Hieronymus Schitzolini visit Amazon (click the link below) to purchase a paperback copy of this story and three others in the collection Private Fall. Also visit the Rubber Dream Trampoline store by clicking the menu button and selecting the store to check out photo books by Klein Fiasco.
Inner Shriek, 2023 linocut by Klein FiascoRDT podcast: Clutter Scaffolding
“If madness is the truth of knowledge, it is because knowledge is absurd, and instead of addressing itself to the great book of experience, loses its way in the dust of books and in idle debate; learning becomes madness through the very excess of false learning…According to the theme long familiar to popular satire, madness appears as the comic punishment of knowledge and its ignorant presumption.” Michel Foucault, Madness & Civilization
Hieronymus Schitzolini received this post-apocalyptic signal in fragments that resist the kind of cohesive reality stories take on by default. Convinced that not much will make sense in the future for whoever survives, it makes sense that Hieronymus didn’t try to iron out any vision that would only fall short as most depictions do. To do so would be like the countless absurd apocalyptic movies that worship technology and capitalism while superficially warning about their dangers before they save the day. Humans are obviously too primitive to really understand their tools and how their tools shape their consciousness. If one day these tools get taken away like toys from a child, only cluttered minds locked into primitive tantrums will remain, but maybe the good news will be that humanity’s death-spasm-signal will get so chopped up, it won’t matter anymore.
Klein fiasco
Wind blows through the archaic wind pipes jutting out of a heaping clutter-frenzy. It’s limp, lachrymose tone befits this ruined place. The burnt antlers of a useless machine dig back into the earth. I sometimes dream of pineapples. If you find a can, it’s like gold. Junk clatters the hillside as scavengers traverse below the ridge-line. The skeletal lattices of bombed out buildings loom over the trash-scape. Coffin-cars litter segments of catafalque highways. Defunct underpasses form hideaways more dangerous than they’re worth. Scan for those faint melodies, the singular tracks that suggest where a cache might be tucked away by another rubble-squirrel. Easier to find that nut than go poking about the vast remains for spicks and specks of this and that.
Nobody remembers exactly when the bomb went off. At this point, it’s vague if there was even a bomb. Perhaps it’s just an easier way of talking about the collective shit storm of biblical weather unleashed upon us by the backwash of our own slippery productivity and evasive progress. What does it matter now that we’re lost in a rancid haze with dirty undies for masks?
There are all sorts of stories told to explain why things are they way they are now. Puppet presidents and imposter nations, media cabals and demonic elites, but none of them matter anymore in terms of causing us to correct the damage done.
One story that is commonly told, though, is that the post-industrial nations that managed to completely transition to green and sustainable systems miscalculated the risk of nuking the nations that were still stuck in the fossil fuel age and were still exacerbating global warming. And so they nuked the developing world to halt the same poisonous old-fashioned practices they had partook in, but due to unforeseen weather changes, they hastened civilization’s demise with an overdosage of nuclear fallout.
Another popular explanation, criticized as too simplistic, is far more outlandish but entertaining and that’s why it’s told like the only sick joke left to console our condition. It’s referred to as the network president. Supposedly, a television network selected a rich kid and made a persona out of him as a real-estate mogul so that a few decades later he could host a wildly popular game show piped into millions of boob tubes in which he could display his sadistic pleasure in firing people. When that show ran its course, the network reinvented him as a commander-in-chief divider (based upon the blueprint of a previous actor puppet placed in the White House decades earlier) and used him to divide everything and everyone until everybody was at each other’s throats. Soon enough, people forgot to take each person as an individual and only saw a person as a figment of a group. As a side effect of this derivative sales technique, the chief divider went rogue and with three words dismantled the free press by forcing them to print “fake news” ad nauseam until the commoners believed all news to be fake. With the truth out of the way, it was only a matter of time before history served up its lesson through a one-two punch. A plague that set the blame-stage for the final World War.
But again, most people dismiss this story because they cannot believe their ancestors could’ve been so easily manipulated by media companies who in turn couldn’t have been so irresponsible as to make politics mere entertainment and produce a post-truth environment ripe for disaster. The few who do believe the story as obvious truth know that the surefire way to idiocy is by overcomplicating matters with fussy sophistications, compartmentalized rationalizations, and comforting justifications that blot out one’s ability to register the proliferating obfuscations one is actually making to the degree that they carve it’s maker out from the inside before the maker knows it nor can do anything about it.
Death is intolerable; the truth unbearable.
Even if this network president story were true, believe it or not, people still squirm. But they call it fighting. They squirm over what’s left. The lousy clutter. Squirm to the very end. It’s important to show spirit in the face of destitution rather than compassion. And when they’re not squirming in broad daylight, they’re hiding among the rubble and pretending to carry on with some meaningless work. They’re hoping that one day things outside magically get better. That the wet architecture stays put.
There are no parents anymore. The children are left to fend for themselves like gangs of rodents scurrying in and out of the clutter. Every mother a Henrietta Anonymous. Every father a phantom weenie slipped out of the clutch. Guilt can only occur if somebody cares. The neo-Robber Barons like Teton Husk stole their childhood long before they were born with cynical overconsumption of oxymoronic products in the luxurious era of virtue signaling.
Don’t get sick on clutter island. Don’t get too old either. The scavengers will pick you clean. Desperation is enthusiasm. And enthusiasm desperation. It’s impossible to tell them apart. The only respect given is to the winner of a suffering competition. Whoever convinces others of suffering the most maybe gets a pass for the night. Not out of empathy, mind you, rather out of fear that the lousiness on display might get infectious amidst the humanity scraps racing briefly across our minds when the impending dangers subside for a blip.
Any piece of art or culture that people used to supposedly care about is destroyed. The sight of any beauty from the past inspires nothing but anger now. Any excuse is taken as permission to feel righteous about knowing reality as harshness. We are more miserable now than any before us. Only useful things have value now. Resentment and jealousy is our currency. Quick to be disgusted at any person who seems like they might be good or pretty.
It’s nightmares every night. Rooftop executions. The weak and defenseless face marauders. When the mincemeat-makers come, drop everything. Hide or use the clutter as a wedge between you and them. Or else, get caught swinging miserably until they bore of your anguish and have their fun. String you up. Turn you into a piñata. Or if they’ve got a can of pineapples around, a Hawaiian BBQ. Sometimes the mere sound of extreme torture sends one off in a rage of uncontrollable laughter. As if choking on a pit.
There is no protection. No enforced simulation of ownership. When somebody assumes the perspective of someone else what is meant is that someone else’s situation is worse. This is said to make one feel better. And that is the extent of anyone’s empathy now. Someone else gets his head bashed in over some clutter and all one can muster is “at least it wasn’t me.”
Sometimes we look at our ruined state and have the thought that something should be done about it. Maybe it should be cleaned up. But what is meant is that somebody else should. Who that somebody is nobody knows. Like children playing with busted dolls, they still hold on to a warped idea of some hero that never was.
The clutter doesn’t stay on the outside either. It creeps right into one’s mind if one isn’t careful. There’s always some mad preacher screaming at the wind with sermons of cluttered futility yearning for those old visions of monsters from the deep, the obsolete and grandiose illuminated depictions of the apocalypse:
“We turned our backs on the burning eye. Now it burns all the brighter. Don’t you feel that piercing sensation in the back of your neck? That’s the beam of Yam shooting straight at you from the primordial chaos.
We thought we could fabricate everything. We forgot that we were not Gods. Now that hubris is burning a hole in our backs. And what do we do? We do as those did before us. Even if we see the worst coming. We just do what makes us comfortable and hope for the best. We call our neglect tolerance. Our abandonment freedom.
But the burning eye sees right through our excuses. Our false righteousness is nothing but smoke from the bonfires of our futile sacrifices. Can’t you hear Mammon laughing? We’d rather spend our attention on diminishing returns than face what we’ve become.”
Listen to this false self-appointed prophet conjuring up archaic dreams shattered to bits and pieces like everything else. Foregone squealing against the roaring aftermath.
“Our ancestors saw it coming but did nothing effective to stave off hell to come. They were too concerned with how their financial turds glided into various containers. Beezlebub turned them back into crap-hurling apes. There is no lottery anymore, yet we still wish for it. We still yearn to bathe in copious amounts of green mana. The biggest sin of our great grandfathers was the worship of the great big money turd in all its dynamic brimstone-stink and the obsession over the bowel movements of random markets and their fiscal constipations.
It’s too hard to care, isn’t it? So we turn our back to stare at another crap-vista while we ignore the hole burning right through us from the old forgotten pyramid of snakes belching hell-fire.”
What a hopeless romantic. Like a coward’s pre-retreat. Only the idiots who hang on too long call their desertion a retreat. When all is lost, what does it matter that one had the vision to see where the insanity was roughly headed and made a pre-retreat to the same result? Only to get to the end first, sure, but at least the line between courage and stupidity was preserved along with the selective wisdom of cowardice, otherwise known as imploded courage.
One cannot help but wonder if religion set the stage for our demise or if it was our abandonment that brought it on. That maybe if we hadn’t taken tenderness as weakness, if we had stuck to the wisdom of our knees and knelt more like those before us maybe we would’ve preserved our existence. The forgotten virtues of any religion cultured over millennia and coded in metaphor probably knew more about the psyche than any madhouse-fabricating rational literalist ever could. Losing the ship of fools and hiding the madness in a glimmer of reason surely didn’t pan out.
It was hardly the fault of our ancestors, though. They couldn’t do anything about it. Technology’s effects were never fully known until the damage was done. Governance was always after the fact. The old in power were too slow to catch up. Mass psychological experiments were conducted through cheap (even free!) and useful tech. The radio brought fascism and it wasn’t until after WW2 that people realized it. What was supposed to be the information superhighway became a disinformation cul-de-sac noose. And the world was irrevocably turned to clutter once people outsourced their ability to think. The never-ending confetti feeds cut their heads off like guillotines. The psychological warfare disguised as harmless fun when you have a minute. Role-confusion apps wreaking havoc on pre-formed psyches. It was the worship of technology that was mandatory. Or else be deemed a luddite. A fool who failed to outsource his dreams. Somebody who doesn’t get the complexity. For technology somehow turned itself into Jesus Christ before the bomb. The savior who delivered us, accidentally of course, to our destruction. Only without any cool design features like redemption or salvation. Just the feel of hi-tech savviness for neo-yuppies clad in monochrome uniforms mistaking purchasing power for the possession of traits while they march on in the same manner their parents did without realizing it before its too late to stop the next generational battalion from replacing them.
Only integrity of mind keeps the clutter out. However you do it, you need to do it, or else devolve into a doomsday lunatic ranting at the rancid haze with panties on your face. I’ve got my system. It’s what I call scaffolding and it must change constantly to keep up with the wet architecture. The attention spent on scaffolding consumes mental resources because by the time it is thought to be set in place, another shift occurs and a new arrangement must be made. The wet architecture shifts itself so that any line, which is thought to be static, is in fact a movement. When a line is a movement everything is slippery as a result. Even a simple line of reasoning cannot be held in place by the notion of a choice for more than a blip.
From the scaffolding, the wet architecture appears to have an exterior but if one ventures onto the wetness, no interior can be found. The rooms thought to exist move away from an encroaching step. Negative spaces escape on the moving lines of any memory. From the perspective provided by scaffolding, the line is drawn to make the difference as always but in the wetness the difference moves elsewhere. The project in mind always extends past the idea of its finality.
On a circuitboard of toast, the seed darts along a string of jelly. The bulb cannot hold its voltage so it slips on the vine. Repurposed babies spill from the rope like knots sliding on hollow thread. Ancestral genitals death-squirm in a Petri dish. Floppy labia sprout penis heads. Any entrance exits itself. Makeshift hallways fall through their frames. The bomb turned every disposable bedroom into a vacant stare. The shadow-runner stays below the simulated horizon.
A crack slap-echoes from a hard rooftop. A minor sound compared to the terror we were once. The terror we paralyzed ourselves with until we became unable to find the course to correct ourselves toward. For now, we have become the terrified. We have reverted back to our pre-ancestral evolutionary iteration’s baseline fear squirm. A pointless post-generational reaction to what harmed us but is already long gone. The only caveat of our dying age might be this awareness, or tortured release, of how after the fact our existence always was.
Schitzolini was awarded a residency at the horizon house in Big Sur. Perched on the cliffs, his room faced downward into the yawning abyss. Staring into the spatial form of forgetting, he recognized shadowy formations that suggested the void be not the emptiness it seems to represent. And from the void spewed memories not his own. Wracked by remembering what had never happened, Schitzolini’s narrative mirrored this with the second person as a way to stress the simulation for the reader. As he wrote, it felt like the entire retreat were tumbling down the cliff. Remembering to forget, the text seemed to swallow itself as it was written, swelling up with things thought to be forgotten as if forgetting were a form of erasure. The peripheral slithering of omissions had come back to break the seals of continuity.
Klein fiasco
Without a money spill, a beach house comes with some sort of compromise. In this case, the instructions are to enjoy the ocean front property as long as one does not look under the floor. Sounds easy enough. Until you get there and it appears that things are living under the carpet. You step gently into the dreamy beach home, careful not to squash whatever rug beast just darted into the kitchen. Sit on the sofa with feet up. From here, you enjoy the view of the beach and the ocean while ignoring the peripheral slithering. Maybe the wooden deck will be a better place to hang out if it isn’t too cold tonight. The staircase from the deck leads right down to the beach, just as advertised. A walk on the beach might put this strange condition out of your head.
Down the stairs, you notice a door under the house. The key for the front door works and inside there is just a room for the washer and dryer. There’s a hatch in the ceiling but you’d need a ladder to poke your head into it. The thought of what might crawl onto your face makes you shut the door and go for that walk. The swelling force of the ocean grows into the wild surge of an imminent flood. Moments ago from inside the house, it appeared so tranquil. Flat and without movement. As if the surface of the sea required only the thinnest seal to keep it down. You forget the calming effect of distance. Now it teems with energy. The tide ravages the path along the shoreline and sends you crab crawling on the rocks to get around the point where you hope to beg for inspiration on how to experience the rapture of persecution when you return home from this vacation.
As the waves crash, the whitewash makes a thousand faces merging into one another. You remember last night when you closed your eyes and a phosphene materialized into a dissipating neon lace. The froth blows across the sand. Foam collects like snow on a half-eroded sand castle. The fake frost chills the hypothetical bones. The sight of a human-made thing (obviously a castle made with the skill of adult hands) where there should only be natural things in nature annoys you like whenever you see one of those stupid stone stacks made by some pretentious fop who calls himself an artist and lives in what he calls an artist’s community, you are sure to mess it up, so you kick a turret and sand crabs spill out and wiggle back into the ground. You notice their little holes all over the sand’s face and envision them teeming under its porous skin.
The aggravating itch of a familiar yet unidentifiable smell overcomes you. A sweet musty scent you figure might be coming from the scrub at your feet. But upon rubbing its scraggle and sniffing your fingers, it’s something else. This unlocatable fragrant itch of grey matter has a swarm of vague memories about it. Just under the membrane of forgetting. A dim amber of near memories that wants to bleed brightly but cannot for no particular reason.
You hike up gentle sloping sand dunes. On the ridges, you gradually ascend to a peak that seems to shift farther away as soon as you think you’re getting closer to it. When you think to turn back, there appears a telescope on a tripod atop the ridge of the next dune. You scan around the dune-scape but see nobody around.
Looking through the telescope, you cannot believe your eyes. You look at the distance with your naked eye again. The two visions drastically differ. You wonder what kind of magnification power this could be. It was as if you were looking at a different landscape altogether. Your naked eye could not pick up even a hint of the telescopic vision on the horizon. To make matters more confusing, each time you look through the strange apparatus, a different vision appears in the scope.
The first vision shows the dunes descending toward a beach that is familiar enough to be your childhood beach but reformed like in a defiant dream. The dunes are much bigger. The headland in a different spot. The cove more pronounced. The waves break with greater peaks. The estuary stretches for miles.
The second vision is something Dali and Bacon could’ve painted. A body is pinned on the shore like a giant rock on wishbones. A face twists in such agony as sand pours into its mouth. The sea water funnels through its pores. Once the deformation process is complete, the released body limps along the shore because it has become a sad soggy sponge. Soaked in a coat of forgetting as it looks for a more affectionate rock to attach itself to.
The third vision is the most abstract of all. Cords are submerged in a shallow space of decades forgotten. As you try to follow one of the cords, it splits off into dendritic memories deteriorating into gooey threads suspended in some viscous memory-hive. Shadowy masses ooze along the floor. Prismatic spaces fall off into darkness.
The fourth and final vision returns to the scene of your naked eye, the sand dunes. But from the sky one drop of water slowly descends until it suspends itself at eye level. The one drop explodes into sound waves that knock you on your back. You look up to the solar chariot doing donuts in the sky like a mad street takeover. Its driver rubbernecks at you with crazy eyes and a blinding grin. The chariot’s circular gush showers down a deluge of light. The dunes radiate into a bright fuzz. Like particles of sand, your body disintegrates into the hot gusty winds. Your voice shimmers across what had become a chasm of air and light. And for a moment, you forget about the black pond of memory that tugs and pulls you down the more you struggle against it until it fools you into thinking you are that old body heavy with forgetting to forget about the befuddlement of intentions sticking to you like tar and the quagmire of entanglements that sucks at your feet.
Back at the beach house, you run upstairs and find the floors still. Problem solved. A good night’s rest is guaranteed. You walk around the beach house freely, then make a pasta dinner and eat it with that ocean view which was the whole point of this trip. To have it be the last image in your head as you fall asleep and carry it into your dreams. From inside, the conditions seem calm again but you wonder if the windows and insulation are thickened to dampen the sounds of rough weather. You crack open the door and a roaring chill blasts and face-fucks you with a demon-screeching gale. Shut in silence, the darkness masks the threatening bulge of a flood. You spin the fork in the pasta and the noodles writhe around it as you wonder how well such a house is built to withstand the event of a Tsunami. Surely the odds are in your favor. Such a thing won’t happen for the one night you are here to remember nothing about the emptiness back home.
A meaningless sentence runs its fragments through your head for no reason. It always starts the same with “the daily urge limps forward.” Looping to lure you in. To make sense of it. But it escapes your grasp again like a wet noodle. You have even woken up into the vague fragments your mind conjures up with it. Somehow a bleak wind blows there with sentient machines wagging their tongues while pressing zigzagging dots into the sand curtains. This is the type of nonsensical impression too difficult to rewind on the fork of your attention. Easier to let this kind of thing go and endure it when it returns in order to forget it again.
You find yourself in the bedroom. The bed has that soft fleece that reminds you of motels when you were a kid and you would comfort yourself with cheek rubs. And when you used to play on the bluffs like you saw today and how the bluffs never were the bluffs when you played but an imaginary scene of war like an ancient stain of memory on a child’s brain. Fallen soldiers caked in mud. You saw how the steam rose off their wooden bodies in the morning sun. Those left to stand watch on the bluffs kept an eye out at sea on that distant island chain, those watercolor silhouettes floated above the metallic sheen of a distant surface stacked upward. Massive squadrons billowed over the mountain ridge to the north. The small prey hopped into their shelters and clung there like rain drops to berry clumps. The haggard watchmen braced their weary bones enshrouded with shaggy armaments for another assault. They watched the possibility of their imminent erasure. Besides, the lives lost always returned to these formations long after they were forgotten. The canopies held their position as the airborne forces swelled up to take another approach to rain down upon the last fortress hunkered down at the sea. Under the shady guard, some tired limbs rejuvenated by the sunlight. The unsheltered pathways were left empty to appear barren. Only such a place fraught with broken roads would be inhabited by a frail lot. Make no mistake, this bulwark was nothing but resilient. Made to bend. To give way when needed. This land had been molded by many forgotten assaults, for it ensnared as much as it forgave. Despite the gashes and holes, no substantial dent had ever really been made. Here, injury transmuted into one tough truth decoy.
You gaze at the ceiling and notice that it is bubbling. In one corner, a pinprick releases black spores that ooze down the wall. Bubbles boil into more ominous bubbles until the whole ceiling sags down into one enormous tit about to burst. The only condition for the ocean view was supposed to be the floor. If only you had more money, you could afford the luxury of a good night’s sleep. The sagging tit brushes your cheek so softly that you think of mommy and want a sip of milk’s forgetfulness. Forget everything. Forget the childish daydreaming. Forget the need for a vacation. Forget the conditions. Forget the tough veneer of all delicate things. Forget whatever teems under the surface and dresses the void.
The tit bursts and the waves break and the floor gives way. Faces gush into faces. Bugs slither into the same bug. Everything is noodles writhing around the turn of you, the fork. You are the sand crab burrowing back into the sand to hide. You are the ambergris of a sperm whale floating at sea. You are the spores spreading all over this place. You are the tranquil dream of a window frame that forgets the agony of fabricated memories. You are the thin surface that seals up everything and nothing.
I used to collect Cabinet Cards, photographs from the late 19th and early 20th century that could be found at any flea market. It boggled my mind that these had been discarded or lost from the families they belonged to and were so cheap (usually a few bucks) for something over a hundred years old. The mere purchase of them felt like a cheat. History discarded. Artifacts for the taking since nobody seems to really care about them anymore. I grew up with a photographer who made a living doing portraits. So I was familiar with that kind of life from the photographer’s perspective and the sorts of things people look for in having their portrait taken. Always a disconnect between the finished image and whatever had conjured itself in their heads. And I would wonder about such discontinuities that must’ve existed between the subjects and the final image. Every exposure incapable of capturing the context it pretends to present. The elusiveness of history staring back at me. In a sense I felt like these cabinet cards might as well be as old and forgotten as speleothems in a cave or an old recording of a faded tune warped by the passage of time. And after I assembled this piece in 2018 by superimposing the old portraits onto my photographs, I forgot about it for four and a half years until it haunted me again.
One year on Christmas Eve, Hieronymus Schitzolini was changing the curtains in his studio apartment. That year the space heater was on the fritz and either overheated the room or barely warmed a leg. So he had it cranked up and moved about in the buff. While putting up the blackout curtains, Hieronymus lost his balance and fell off the ladder. Unfortunately, earlier that evening, he was skinning potatoes. Unbeknownst to him, one of those skinned potatoes had rolled onto the floor and waited for him silently. So when he fell, it so happened that upon hitting the floor with his naked flesh, the potato went right up his rump. At the hospital, nobody believed the miracle had happened in the way he told it. Nonetheless, while waiting in the ER with a tater up the clacker, Schitzolini penned this vision on some paper scrounged together by the helpful staff.
Klein fiasco
‘Twas the Christmas of ’92 and out on the Playa in Death Valley I stood alone on that white plane. Like a racer on the Bonneville Salt Flats, a silver craft raced toward me. As it got closer I saw that it had no wheels. It was hovering fifteen feet above the ground when it stopped before me and lowered its docking bridge. Mesmerized, I failed to notice how anything exited and got behind me but before I knew it, I had my arms held behind my back and a bag over my head. Inside, I was put on my hands and knees in some kind of harness. They spoke a language that sounded precise and intricate. When one of them spoke English, I was shocked at hearing something I could understand. “We’re going to give you back your soul.” I didn’t know that my soul had gone missing. Did the word “soul” mean something else to them? A searing pain in my rear end went well beyond the proctologist’s thumb, let me tell you. While enduring the pain, I was trying to figure out what the word “soul” meant to them and if it were the same meaning then how could it be possible to give it back and through my ass? As they inserted it into my butt, the one informed me that the first person they gave a soul back to was the one we call Jesus Christ. With this much rear pain, I bet Jesus didn’t ask for this gift either.
Whatever they did inside me, at some point they hit a spot that caused me to gush into a fever dream. I saw sand crabs flopping asunder the playa millions of years ago. Soft paws strolling along the shallows of the lake that is no longer there. Then I was in a hut somewhere listening to the murmur of boiling eggs while I picked up a piece of fudge and without realizing what a hard brick it was, rent my tooth and tongued it as it dangled. The smell of sour piss emanated from a corner so I went outside to find myself on a frozen lake with fisherman tending to holes in the ice and pulling out fish already battered and fried from the water. A wild horde of fiddlers fingered psalms as their beards crawled with eels. Somebody scratched the odd phrase “blob warp spew fracture” into the ice. A mint sprig fell from the sky and I caught it and chewed on it and it released a sort of truth meal that’s too difficult to explain but to make a long story short I turned into a river skulking it’s way back into the hills.
When I came to, clearly the one speaking with me was assigned to help me with the transition between my ignorant life without a soul to my new life with one. And so I limped as my star being helped me deboard and as I needed to sit down on my side, my Star Being helped make sense of the inner realizations I was already automatically having from receiving my lost soul. Here is what I understood with the help from its guidance.
Star Beings seek planets that have evolved enough for them to enter the vessels of consciousness and adorn a body in which the weary space traveler can sleep. They use the planet as a womb hive until it must be abandoned due to overpopulation and its damaging effects on any planet’s environment as the technology inevitably progresses. In the adornment process, the vessel prevents the Star Being from bringing their knowledge directly into it. Everything they know is refracted by the fleshy gravity bound medium they call a meat frame box. Their dream state is what we call our waking life. And when we sleep they run their simulations – the decaying sense manipulations – to experiment with consciousness through dream logic.
Star Beings are obviously far ahead of us. The infrastructure of our corporeal form is far more primitive than theirs, which can withstand space travel without the need for ships or suits or any of that limited container mind-frame engineering. Eons ago did they learn how to harness the nested curves of the Sun-Father’s penis. They only presented me with a spacecraft so that I could make sense of their appearance. Some of us dream of other planets where our Star Beings (the ones who took on our flesh) were before.
Once my Star Being entered the vegetative consciousness of a planet and showed it to me through a dream where I had these beautiful white flowers blooming from each of my organs. The sensation of organs blooming was like an ecstasy of endless unfolding. All the spaces under my skin filled with these tender petals. Then I awoke into another dream where I stroked my chest hair and found one I had to pluck. With a tug, the sensation of fibrous rope squeezed pleasure through my pore. Like I had plenty more where that came from. And I pulled and pulled and discovered that it wasn’t hair at all but lettuce. I pulled out a bed of lettuce and still there was more. And on that bed of lettuce, my Star Being revealed himself to me as an ancient Sumerian replete with glorious regal curly hair and beard. So much hair in fact that I had to look closer to realize that he had my face. The only difference was a more pronounced mole or beauty mark on his left cheek. And he told me that he had to appear as a harbinger of justice reincarnated to make an impact on my dull consciousness with a gift known to some on this planet as a vajra or a diamond-thunderbolt by which reality can be peeled open.
Mirroring or doubling is a favorite tactic of Star Beings in our dreams. They tend to stay hidden even when they reveal themselves to us. Like when mine doubled as Shamash, he told me, like some genie, that I could ask him any question I wanted, but when I did, it was like I immediately knew the answer from within myself to the point that I could not discern if I was having an honest conversation with myself or if I was actually receiving his infinite wisdom through the refraction of my vessel. I asked him about the white flowers blooming from my organs and he told me, or I told myself, that it was a plant that he had discovered on that planet where flowers bloom into consciousness in a meadow tended by a lady as light as a gossamer with filaments of light for hair and skin as tender as petals. She would pluck one of his petals as she would with the others and wrap it in a single hair so that it would float across a bay to sentient life on the other shore whereupon receiving it, they recognized it as what they called an epiphany.
The lady of the white flower meadow was the model on our planet upon which the Virgin Mary would be derived along with the ultimate epiphany as an immaculate conception or the impregnation of the greatest idea like the soul inserted into my bum. She would recite a meditation for hyper-active minds bearing the burden of an overactive consciousness while plucking her epiphanies that went something like this:
“Don’t worry about what won’t work out, accept what will. Rather than wasting precious life on worrying, start loving as a way of living instead. Don’t worry about your partner, love your partner. Nothing positive or unifying goes without acknowledgement. It is a mistake to assume so. The mind cannot be directly controlled. The mind can only block thought or direct it. Take care and attention to how you think. Be as good a witness to yourself above all else. Gather the infinite petals of truth and receive the fruit of health and shield of shelter and ultimately the emblem of unity. Follow its warmth. Its gentle unfolding into the void. Its truth is its love.
Love is only an illusion if apprehended by deception. You get what you give. The light of the flower only reflects your light. Such sentient beings forget what love is and that is why they need epiphanies. To remember that deception only gets nothing in the end. It destroys its own purpose. Let go of the objects of your attention. Open your hands and they will be full of everything you need. Step back and relax into the widest frame of your mind. Stop fighting yourself through others by worrying about the shallow terrain of evaluations that accrue into a wasteland of clutter if they are not seen for what they are. Do not live by such superficial restraints set at some other time in some other place. Do not listen to the lies of comfort and safety and efficiency and any other mask that hydra-headed fear can assume. Know that you desire what you fear and fear what you desire and neither is a cause for panic or desperation but rather contemplation.
Sit like these flowers in the meadow on the banks of the ancient river. Observe what floats by. Force nothing. Know that any action is merely a bolder reaction. Let the reactions float down river. Let them assimilate with the rest of the reactions. Relax. Nothing is new under any sun. Everything issues forth from the same place. Have courage in unfolding your tenderness and watch worry crumble away. Abandon enforcement and choose to radiate like the white flower. Nothing will ever be the same again. All the pointless battles and pyrrhic victories will dissipate. And the emptiness of the void will reveal itself as the positive force it also is. That of full potentiality. This is what it means to possess the diamond thunderbolt.”
In that meadow, my Star Being met his soulmate. She sprouted and blossomed right beside him. He could not believe how remarkably easy it was. They knew it right away. And the mother of that garden knew love at first sight (the randomness of destiny) when it appeared in her garden. And when their time had come to leave that corporeal form, she plucked them at the same time so that they could journey across space together. They traveled across the void but their form of traveling is something the Star Being referred to as “growing” across the void and they came to this planet and adorned the forms of myself and my love.
At this point, I realized what he meant by saying I needed to have my soul reinserted. My Star Being was in fact already me without me knowing it. Seeing it as another body was the only way my dim consciousness could make sense of the impossibility. Since my mind became too cluttered with what I mistook as me, they intervened to make me whole again. The flesh had to be bent back to serve its true host and fulfill the rejoining of these star-crossed lovers by lodging the diamond-thunderbolt right up my keister.
We were born into bodies on separate continents but still found each other and repeated the first sight of love we had experienced on that other planet as flowers but had forgotten in this life, though buried somewhere deep in our refracted consciousness.
Stranger still, we sometimes have the same dream. I mean I’m in hers and she’s in mine. In one dream, my tooth fell out or was kicked out by a spider who dangled from its thread so my partner took a pair of scissors and cut it and removed the spider from my mouth. That is love.
We were sitting at a park where a chartreuse haze clung to the grass as people sunbathed and used tombstones for backrests. The sky flashed silver and stayed that way like a sustained camera flash as the clouds rotted purple. We ran to an abandoned houseboat with an indoor pool where a fluffy white Persian cat floated on a satin pillow. The cat picked up a miniature guitar and strummed a few chords that compromised the hull and the house boat began to sink. We escaped through the indoor pool.
Whenever I’m unkind to my partner now, when I harp on things that cannot be, my Star Being reminds me of what a ridiculous man I am. He calls me a real clinger since I persist in his consciousness when on other planets usually his host subsides and accepts his rule. Once I had a real fit about family matters and a flaccid dong flopped out of my mouth. My mustache turned into a pubic bush. I scrambled to stuff the floppy thing back in to hide it but it flopped out all the more. As soon as I figured out how to stop being a dickhead, the swollen sponge disappeared and I could talk and eat normally again.
I asked my Star Being why I keep forgetting myself and turn unkind. He explained:
“Human flesh is governed by its source, the same source we grow across. We call it the void of emptiness and full potential. Sentient beings are all run by the ouroboros of the will. A unity of desire and fear. One and the same. Thus, remembering is made of forgetting and vice versa. It is as natural to forget as it is to remember. And good too. But also not. It’s an eternal flipping and flopping full of contradiction to anyone who only tries to hold on to desire and deny fear. To hold on to memory and forget forgetting. Such is the way of error. There is another place where I have been and you have too, even though you cannot remember it. A place where a crescent silver moon touches the zenith of a mountain. We would cross that bridge and traverse the terrain as particles of reflected light and touch everything with our indirect worship of that sun.”
“But why come here and play this game on Earth?” I asked. And my Star Being moved my mouth to answer my own question:
“The shapeshifter inside plays at the center-less ghost arcade. We impersonate ourselves and pretend they are the people we meet. Intentions are the assumptions of ghosts. Our principles are the desires of these apparitions. We mash the buttons to escape the disappearing scroll. The dead renderings pit us against bosses from our own forgotten scripts. The forms assumed are remembered not as assumed but as strange finalities to be erased. Play the lucid dream game with its soft joystick breaking intentions on every counter gesture. Listen to the disembodied voice impersonating you. Dead soul marionettes dance the death jig for empty points. Ghosts run errands in this looping sand box. They simulate text messages about how many friends they’ve lost. Whoever plays the game forgets the years trapped in this ghostly architecture. Even Star Beings are entranced by the flickering finalities of a captive yet dying light before they can grow across space to enter another game.”
Herein Hieronymus Schitzolini bushwhacks his way towards the construct of a movement like those made to sell works of art by simulating scenes the sleepy public could be a part of now by purchasing it in the gift store. The hilarity of posthumously grouping together individuals. They never really worked towards any sort of actual unity nor saw themselves that way, like in Greenwich Village in the 80’s, but they’re packaged together anyways. Or think of the art party as an exhibit like the ones Jason Rhodes used to throw in Los Angeles. The simulated happening. The spark of vicarious ecstasies. The phantom scene every consumer wishes to be a part of and is willing to pay for but misses entirely.
Klein fiasco
Randomness contains order. Change is neutral. Becoming is happening everywhere all the time. Memory is slow. Ownership is a bad fantasy. Guilt only a tool of control. Fate is the inability to find another option that is out there. Gratitude keeps the head buried in the sand. Responsibility is a contract nobody was old enough to sign. Debt is only ink, pixels. Salvation is for fools. Righteousness for idiots. Sacrifice is the ultimate self-deception. Discipline punishes the disciplined who punish who they deem undisciplined.
These are the thoughts that pass through my head when I’m sitting around and doing nothing.
Nobody says these things out loud, so neither do I. I know that everybody else must think them too. I’m not special. Not a conduit of a higher power. Not a visionary. Thoughts like these are left unsaid because the paths they would spawn would be too many. We stick to what we know and try to work from there. Acclimating and tweaking. Change from within. These thoughts would cause us to go in directions we’ve never known or worse end up in some nightmare reproduced from a bygone era that we had seen before and thought how could anyone be so stupid.
So we’re stuck on the line because at least we think we know where we are. What would be worse than actual freedom? Better to stick with known enemies. To rant about the same wedge issues. Watch others freak out who cannot hold the line like the rest of us. It makes sense. The only people who get punished by the rest of us are those who couldn’t hide it well enough. Discretion. That’s the name of the game.
Here we are. Keeping our thoughts to ourselves. Only the foolish express themselves. That’s the fastest and surest way toward persecution. Burning at the stake hardly proves anything. Only a fool thinks it does. In almost every case, it serves you well to not step forward. It’s divisive to do so but not for the reason the fool thinks it is. It’s divisive because the rest of us know that nobody is that special. Sure everybody has their idiosyncracies but none of us are so different that it warrants a cult of personality.
Of course, there are plenty of fools to go around. Those who wear their affiliations on their sleeves. Announce to the world who they’re associated with. Like the dunce at a dinner party who cannot hold back the name dropping. Immediately letting everyone know that he is more special because he knows people who are more special than anyone here. What that person doesn’t know is that the rest of us know fame doesn’t rub off. This is just a sad example of someone who didn’t get the memo. Some lonely sack that sat near Andy Warhol once.
Are you in the know or not? This is really the main dividing line between people. Did you get the memo? Are you competent? Do you have the same sand lines? Can you ignore how arbitrary those sand lines are in the same manner? Can you pretend as we do? Will you demonstrate discretion that reads as trust? Can you wink without getting caught? Do you know how to let the right thing go? Or will you squeal inappropriately at the first sign of discomfort?
The room for error is decided by the threshold of randomness. By honest mistake or by the ignorance of bad intentions, whoever magnifies the randomness gets got. Some simulation of a sacrifice or the real thing will occur. It’s the primal tripwire. A public display to match the unwanted public display. A last ditch effort to ward off the devil. The sight of too much randomness sends us regressing into our caves. Cowering from how ineffective and incapable any order is when it comes to ridding us of the big bad random cookie monster once and for all.
People like to get together. It’s simple like that. Whatever the band is, the trophy, the scoreboard, the special menu items…it doesn’t really matter. It’s only about getting together with others in the know. That’s all it’s about. Only the socially inept focus on those other things. Precisely because they’re not in the know. The connection is never there. It’s sad for those people. And we let them go on with their obsessions. Even compliment them on knowing so much about every player or a band’s history. It’s all they got. And they cling to it as anyone so lost would. It’s like that stuffed animal you carried around everywhere you went but never reached the point of embarrassment that made you grow up and go without it.
All of us cling to something that we hope gives us an edge even though our gut tells us differently. But when it’s all you got, you cling to it. And make sure everybody knows it, too. Maybe it’s just because we’re always feeling under the threat of getting absorbed by mediocrity. The billions of others out there who individually believe in how special they are.
And if you’re unlucky enough to have an exceptional talent, the system processes you until you become a prisoner of that talent. A dead end realized way down the road. Like a child actor who finds out four decades too late that the vacuous society he thought needed him was his own vacuousness all along. What else is there to do but become like the rest and submit the talent to sales. Push a car. Or a new form of refinancing. A medicine. At least he had some talent. Unlike the rest who only hope to reach the vacuousness by way of flirt-acting.
If a scene is simulated by our minds then we can possibly get others to simulate our simulation on another line that might bring money into our pockets. In a trance induced by moving certain thresholds as a group, we simulate a paying audience of members who were never a part of something so cool or so smart. The “in” they were always denied can be purchased now. We simulate the need that simulates our movement. We sell it right back to those in whose image we have simulated a vacuum for the products of our simulation to fill.
To heighten the seeming crucial relevance of our simulation, we also simulate the Other to transgress against. They were never going to buy into our work anyways. And this means we have carte blanche in how we simulate them for our audience. We pull from the worst images in history and morph them together with the Other. The bolder the contrast, the more defined our simulation becomes. The common enemy simulates some loose commonality between our simulations. Our image materializes out of theirs first and foremost. Despite the differences between our simulations, at least we’re not those completely on the other side of our illusion.
We point to the mediums and their media as the simulation from which any sense of reality (another simulation) is realized. Before the photograph it was the painting. Before the podcast it was the radio. Before the TV, the serial narrative. Before email, the letter. Before the internet, it was the library. We play the video game to get a sense of what is real. It used to be film. Every medium is bouncing back and forth into weird loops of simulations upon simulations defining themselves and trapping constructed realities by comparison. The most extreme definition coming when the simulation displaces its simulator and treats it as outside itself and not another product of consciousness.
Employ double speak to enhance the simulation. We say that the word simulacra, our bread and butter, is actually passé. We pretend it isn’t a product of consciousness itself. Now we can save the oomf for exposing the hypocrisy of the Other while overlooking the contradictions of our simulations and the ways in which we ripped terms from the thoughtful to serve more immediate purposes, chiefly selling. Purchasing the simulation of wholeness must seem as if the buyer is actually becoming whole. We perform this illusion by selling them to themselves. That is why it’s quite true to say that there is no audience. There never was. The audience is a construct in anyone’s head. How that construction performs is a matter of how well the simulation is hidden from the buyer. To make this easier, it can be determined who is easiest to hide a particular simulation from and then simulate that person which in turn produces the simulation that person wants to make real through consuming it. Youth centric targeting is the key demographic.
Make no mistake, though, the simulator isn’t the one in control. The simulator simulates without knowing how it simulates. The simulator moves the start and changes thresholds to produce new simulations that its recipient takes as the truth. A loony sort of math involving non-values ensues as the recipient is lost in derivative formats taken as sources and agents. It cannot play self-witness. Something only slightly true in one particular context is stated as an axiom for all contexts. And the products that follow fall into the hands of those who worship Being since that is the only simulation upon which things can be bought and sold. How else could we move the damn souvenirs?
Let’s simulate a party if not a movement. Transmute the eclectic whimsy of our dead culture into the blurry moments of irresolvable shredding. Clutch a piece of it if you must. Pocket that shit. Rub the thingy as a reminder that you too were there. You were part of the idea of the party. Its simulation gave you some new ways to play when you were bored on your plane. Or maybe it gave you something real. Like ripping off those jeans. Or ripping off that merchant in the bazaar behind the temple. Horny dreams of plenty spewed money cum all over their faces. Neon and shiny, glitzy drippings. Kitschy ceramic vessels queefing incense. Dildo chandeliers tickling the nape of your neck with their dick shadows. How else could the rich meet the poor in such fun circumstances? How else can we forget who drops the mother load on the load bearing backs?
Now is the moment of the evening where we watch a circle of corporate douchebags dig for a golden nugget buried deep in one of their asses. Look at them go! The winner looks like he’s got a grill. The authentic gangster performance has been cancelled due to the simulated toaster oven. Splatter everyone with paintball farts. A party is not a party unless it’s a messy party. Otherwise it’s called a function of nothingness pre-consumed and post-marked from another make-believe century. As dead on arrival as the curator at your local museum.
Our butts are too salted for that. Rub my scranus and watch the naughty genie come out to grant you one and only one nightcap. You better choose something totally unnecessary if you know what’s good for you. Who will talk about it tomorrow if it goes without something to blow into a scandal. “Did you hear what so-and-so did last night” never started a story nobody wanted to hear. Jason Rhoades is dead. Mike Kelley is dead. The only art worth its salt is incurable.
Look at those two lucky party-simulators sneaking upstairs to the bedroom. She’s the queen of flirty memes and he’s the lucky follower. She takes it all off for him but he misplaced his goggles and all he can see is a blurry image of her stripping and crawling on the floor and into the bed where her flirt-program writhes around. He squints in desperation but it all looks like the code of fata morgana.
He complains about his glasses and she gives him her pair of VR goggles.
He puts them on and only sees himself from her perspective.
“What’s the matter,” she asks because his face looks pinched with confusion, “I’m not waiting all night. Let’s get on with it!”
He cannot begin to explain and slowly enters the bed while watching himself approach from her perspective.
His body is nothing to write home about. What kind of bad simulation is this? Why is it so cruel in its realism? In fact what the hell she’s doing with him he’ll never know. He sees his sad tummy sagging down over his boxers. He’s got no shoulders. Just two bumps that go to sticks for arms. And the scruffy body hair is enough to make him lose all desire. Just face it, he says to himself, you’re a sad specimen of the male sex. And how in the hell are you going to have sex now with yourself? He had been having sex with himself his whole life. An avid masturbator. But not while seeing himself.
He takes the VR glasses off and sticks his tongue out into the blur with the hope that it lands in the right place while trying to ignore the image of himself lodged in his system.
“Do you mind if I put my VR on?” She asks. He shakes his head, and flaps his ears, as he vigorously licks at the blur. And she cums in a hot minute while watching herself from his perspective eat her beautiful va-jay-jay like a little dirty mangy mut stealing his din din.
There’s nothing like a party with micro-parties spiraling inside it. Simulating grief and suffering to accentuate the opulent joy of tonguing the jewel encrusted bungus of a chocolate camel. If that’s uncouth, go screw a fire hydrant. Play any tune except grandpa’s jazz. Unscrew the dead eye in message art and screw it backwards in someone else’s mind-hole. Wink as they ass-clap up to the ceiling of that stiff exhibit and hang upside down to watch the shit spray down onto the artsy-fartsy crowd below. Otherwise it isn’t a party. Nothing new will ever come without a necessary amount of destruction.
Rubber Dream Trampoline 