I give up.
For those of you who've pondered the question "What would happen if you made the most deliberately terrible, painfully obvious satire in the history of the planet?" you now have your answer: brain-dead fanboys slobber all over it without a trace of irony.
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Friday, October 3, 2014
Mirror
This one's pretty unpleasant, folks.
She slid the lipstick across her lower lip, rotating the plastic just slightly between her finger and thumb and noting with some satisfaction that she was getting good at this.
At last, pink was overtaken by red. She looked-really looked-at her reflection for the first time as she pressed her lips together. The bitch in the mirror looked her over with indifferent eyes and something less than a sneer. Really, sweetie?
Allison looked the bitch in the eyes like a bull ready to charge and blew the most “fuck you” kiss ever blown. Her expression stared back, satisfied at a job well done. Allison abandoned her one-legged perch on the chair, taking a few backwards strides.
The woman in the mirror (the bitch had gone) stood with a bent knee and a hand on her hip. She was trying a little too hard to be sassy, but she’d been so right to go with blue cocktail dress. Taking her eyes from the mirror for a moment, Allison dared a glance down at herself, and was satisfied. She looked better in heels than she’d expected.
Her gaze moved back to the mirror, and her reflection’s breasts. She giggled a little-they were bundled up like a Christmas present. Too cute. She’d moved the hemline up and down all night, covering and uncovering her cleavage. She’d resolved to leave it alone earlier, and saw now she’d been right. Everything looked perfect.
Allison’s adam’s apple bounced up and down like a plucked string, then, flickering in the corner of her eye and then dancing slowly into the center of her vision. The girl in the mirror swallowed, sending the little lump of flesh soaring into her jawline and then crashing back down to her throat. Allison tilted her head so the woman’s neck wasn’t visible and ignored the beads of cold sweat needling into the center of her back.
Thinking of cleavage had been too much for the thing between her legs, which stiffened, uncoiling itself from its prison. Allison pretended not to notice as she looked over her shoes, questioning aloud whether they were too tight as the thing between her legs rubbed against her inner thighs, pulling its sweaty cargo along through the tightened skin. She adjusted her stance and played with the strap on her left shoulder. The thing’s shaft pulled back like a gun being loaded, drawing upward as the skin stretched.
Allison pulled her thighs together hard, slapping the thing, but the irritation seemed to spur it further. It climbed, slowly and inevitably, up the fabric of her panties. The stimulation from the fabric drew it out, and out and out and out, and no matter how Allison stood, the erection made her pretty blue dress look like a circus tent.
The harder her hands pushed against it, the more her penis fought to stay visible, sliding entirely out of her panties and stamping the interior of her dress with a damp little bead of sweat. It left a stain that would be unnoticeable to anyone but her, but one was enough. As she struggled with it, her hard-on was joined by the little lump in her throat, which bobbed up and down.
The tranny in the mirror was out of a three stooges routine as she pushed down on the lever of meat in her pants with one hand and reached for a scarf with the other. The tranny nearly lost its balance, its legs waving stupidly as the heels tried and failed to carry their awkward weight. The tranny fell once, twice, and then the heel of its right shoe broke. “Fuck!” it yelled in a deep voice.
Allison looked to the mirror. There was a thing in a dress with a hard-on sticking out of its underwear and a lump in its throat that darted around like a fly on a turd. The thing was lurching around in one shoe (the other kicked off and away), every alternate footfall thumping against the floor like a pirate with a wooden leg. Its make-up was smeared by two little streams of water dripping from it’s eyes. It looked like a clown.
She dropped to one knee to unstrap the other shoe, and the tip of her dick jostled lose from its pinned position and jammed against the floor. Her voice growled a second, louder “Fuck!” and then, without meaning to, her eyes turned back to the infernal piece of glass resting against the wall. This thing in the mirror swung a well-toned arm, swatting the shoe away like King Kong swinging at diving bi-planes. As the creature’s carefully applied makeup ran down a face that now seemed Easter Island-like in its proportions, its uncooperative dick drooped over to the left, slapping against a leg that recoiled in disgust.
Looking away from the horror in the mirror, Allison put her hands to her knees and pushed herself up. Her ass was in the air as she got to her feet. Don’t look at it, she thought. Don’t look at it.
Looking didn’t matter; the Frankenstein’s Monster in the mirror made noises, now. A low, bubbling crack of a fart wetted her ass cheeks with filth. The stomachache she thought she’d done away with had returned, apparently, its fumes smelling of male sweat and liquid shit. She turned back to the monster in the mirror who’d sent her this latest insult and saw the scowl on its face and the bulge in its dress and the broadness of its apelike shoulders. It was disgusting.
David pulled off his wig and threw it across the room. The dress was in the garbage an hour later.
She slid the lipstick across her lower lip, rotating the plastic just slightly between her finger and thumb and noting with some satisfaction that she was getting good at this.
At last, pink was overtaken by red. She looked-really looked-at her reflection for the first time as she pressed her lips together. The bitch in the mirror looked her over with indifferent eyes and something less than a sneer. Really, sweetie?
Allison looked the bitch in the eyes like a bull ready to charge and blew the most “fuck you” kiss ever blown. Her expression stared back, satisfied at a job well done. Allison abandoned her one-legged perch on the chair, taking a few backwards strides.
The woman in the mirror (the bitch had gone) stood with a bent knee and a hand on her hip. She was trying a little too hard to be sassy, but she’d been so right to go with blue cocktail dress. Taking her eyes from the mirror for a moment, Allison dared a glance down at herself, and was satisfied. She looked better in heels than she’d expected.
Her gaze moved back to the mirror, and her reflection’s breasts. She giggled a little-they were bundled up like a Christmas present. Too cute. She’d moved the hemline up and down all night, covering and uncovering her cleavage. She’d resolved to leave it alone earlier, and saw now she’d been right. Everything looked perfect.
Allison’s adam’s apple bounced up and down like a plucked string, then, flickering in the corner of her eye and then dancing slowly into the center of her vision. The girl in the mirror swallowed, sending the little lump of flesh soaring into her jawline and then crashing back down to her throat. Allison tilted her head so the woman’s neck wasn’t visible and ignored the beads of cold sweat needling into the center of her back.
Thinking of cleavage had been too much for the thing between her legs, which stiffened, uncoiling itself from its prison. Allison pretended not to notice as she looked over her shoes, questioning aloud whether they were too tight as the thing between her legs rubbed against her inner thighs, pulling its sweaty cargo along through the tightened skin. She adjusted her stance and played with the strap on her left shoulder. The thing’s shaft pulled back like a gun being loaded, drawing upward as the skin stretched.
Allison pulled her thighs together hard, slapping the thing, but the irritation seemed to spur it further. It climbed, slowly and inevitably, up the fabric of her panties. The stimulation from the fabric drew it out, and out and out and out, and no matter how Allison stood, the erection made her pretty blue dress look like a circus tent.
The harder her hands pushed against it, the more her penis fought to stay visible, sliding entirely out of her panties and stamping the interior of her dress with a damp little bead of sweat. It left a stain that would be unnoticeable to anyone but her, but one was enough. As she struggled with it, her hard-on was joined by the little lump in her throat, which bobbed up and down.
The tranny in the mirror was out of a three stooges routine as she pushed down on the lever of meat in her pants with one hand and reached for a scarf with the other. The tranny nearly lost its balance, its legs waving stupidly as the heels tried and failed to carry their awkward weight. The tranny fell once, twice, and then the heel of its right shoe broke. “Fuck!” it yelled in a deep voice.
Allison looked to the mirror. There was a thing in a dress with a hard-on sticking out of its underwear and a lump in its throat that darted around like a fly on a turd. The thing was lurching around in one shoe (the other kicked off and away), every alternate footfall thumping against the floor like a pirate with a wooden leg. Its make-up was smeared by two little streams of water dripping from it’s eyes. It looked like a clown.
She dropped to one knee to unstrap the other shoe, and the tip of her dick jostled lose from its pinned position and jammed against the floor. Her voice growled a second, louder “Fuck!” and then, without meaning to, her eyes turned back to the infernal piece of glass resting against the wall. This thing in the mirror swung a well-toned arm, swatting the shoe away like King Kong swinging at diving bi-planes. As the creature’s carefully applied makeup ran down a face that now seemed Easter Island-like in its proportions, its uncooperative dick drooped over to the left, slapping against a leg that recoiled in disgust.
Looking away from the horror in the mirror, Allison put her hands to her knees and pushed herself up. Her ass was in the air as she got to her feet. Don’t look at it, she thought. Don’t look at it.
Looking didn’t matter; the Frankenstein’s Monster in the mirror made noises, now. A low, bubbling crack of a fart wetted her ass cheeks with filth. The stomachache she thought she’d done away with had returned, apparently, its fumes smelling of male sweat and liquid shit. She turned back to the monster in the mirror who’d sent her this latest insult and saw the scowl on its face and the bulge in its dress and the broadness of its apelike shoulders. It was disgusting.
David pulled off his wig and threw it across the room. The dress was in the garbage an hour later.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Valhalla Sucks
He couldn’t help but feel that death should never be this easy. His last conscious memories were of red rain and flying limbs, of swords shaking in hands no longer attached to bodies. He’d waded over a mountain of corpses to reach the iron doors of the keep, and even with 15 arrows in him, he kept walking and screaming and killing into the approaching blackness at all sides of his vision.
It hadn’t occurred to him while he lived that his shade would wear an imitation of his mortal form’s dying moments. He might’ve been more careful. He might’ve decided against head-butting the man in the spiked helmet, at any rate.
Then again, there were worse things than bathing in a flowing stream while naked shield maidens treated his wounds. He knew these women were too impossibly beautiful to be human, but for the moment he decided to accept the illusion. As if to reward his good judgement, the redhead laying across his chest put her hand over the messy crack in his skull and pinched, running her clasped fingers the length of the injury and erasing the mace’s damage as if it had been a line in the sand washed away by waves.
They’d performed this magic all over his body, turning backwards the ravages of time and war. For the first time since he was a boy, he saw clearly from both eyes, the ugly gash made by a wolf’s claw undone by a blonde with the biggest tits he’d ever seen.
It would have been erotic if not for his intestines being scooped back into his shredded guts; a hard-on would have to wait. He was glad for it when he noticed the bearded man approaching from the bank.
“Enjoying the angels’ healing touch, friend?”
He despised small talk, but was in little position to refuse. “I’m enjoying having two lungs again,” he said, making a point of not meeting the bearded man’s gaze.
“Aye! They’ll have you as unscarred as the day your Mother birthed you before long.”
Like Hel they would. “I’ll be healed enough to swing a sword,” he said to the Valkyries as much as the bearded man, “Nothing more.” What good had there been in living if all reminder of it were wiped away after death?
“Why pollute our mead hall with your Earthly filth when you could glow like the gods?”
A man capable of uttering that sentence bore looking at, if only while deciding which limb to disfigure first. Now that he could see the arrogant bastard, he noticed how unnatural the man’s skin looked-it was unscarred by blade and age alike. The man’s proportions were too perfect, his beard too well-groomed, his armor too shiny. This was the hero of a child’s fable.
He’d hated those fables, even as a boy.
Sensing the tension, the maidens slowly drew themselves against his body and began pulling ever so slightly downward. The gaping wound in his chest had been sealed, and he admitted a satisfaction in the loss of the pain. He closed his eyes and reached an arm around the nearest warm body. It was relaxing to finally touch something without intending to kill it.
“Not a talkative sort, are you? Very well.”
A thousand different kinds of violence danced behind his eyelids as his peace was interrupted again. He lifted his torso, straining only slightly against the weight of the women. Something smooth and warm came around the shaft of his penis, then, and he realized one of them has taken it in her hand. As the others began to embrace him more fully, he decided that he could get used to this, irritating bearded men or no...
And get used to it he did, for several days. The valkyries were better at sex than any Earthly woman and had stamina enough to climb a mountain in one breath. He could fuck them for days until boredom or exhaustion put a temporary stop to it. He saw little enough of his fellow honored dead, which suited him; they did little besides boasting and posing.
He’d enjoy the food occasionally, when the sun had gone down and mead hall was close to empty. There were cows the size of longhouses roasting over flames that never died, yielding meat that never ran out. There was a flock’s worth of pheasants hanging from a ceiling beam, already featherless. There were never-ending baskets of perfectly ripe fruit, and vegetables bigger than men, and barrels with more wine than the ocean had water.
When he tired of food, drink, and sex, he’d sleep, and dream of rusty, blunted blades smashing ineffectively against dented armor while water filled his boots and froze his feet. There was panic as his body rushed to follow his mind’s commands to raise the shield in time to block the coming blow. Despite the cold, the impact shook loose a mail of sweat from his skin, and the released heat would boil up from his armor’s openings as steam. Ignoring the pain, he rushed forward, his comrade's bumping him from behind and his enemies raining down panicked, imprecise sword-swings in front. The weather was shit, and the plunder would just barely be worth it.
Then he’d wake up in endless perfection, where everything was provided.
The other warriors had learned quickly to avoid him after he’d just woken up; it meant he’d be looking for a fight. There weren’t supposed to be fights in the afterlife. Battles, yes-in great abundance. This was a mythical, realer-than-real realm, where wounds closed more quickly than they could be opened and warriors stood as mighty as gods. In Valhalla, men could know the joy of endless battle, where every blow struck was struck in the name of honor and glory. Its newest soul just liked to fight.
So fight he did, whenever the fancy struck him. He’d wait for one of their little smirks or sneers and then dive into them like an animal. The first several had been waged with weapon-in-hand, but he quickly graduated to leaping into the fray bare-handed. There would be no epic songs written about these. They were bloody, slobbering, stupid things that began and ended on the ground; wine-fueled and proudly ignoble.
At first, he’d anticipate fighting the way a virgin anticipates his first fuck, but soon even he tired of the flying teeth and crunching noses. The knuckles he went to such lengths to open closed within seconds, and every blow landed on every repulsively beautiful face was gone in the next instant. He felt no exhaustion, no fear of losing.
No victory. Without that, what was the point?
Soon he became so disgusted with the mead-hall that he abandoned it in favor of the outer wilderness, but even in this he was denied; the forest was little more than an overgrown garden. The animals were huge and noble, proudly staring forth like soldiers witnessing their king’s passing, even as he loosed the arrow that would kill them.
Even the wolves were domesticated. They didn’t drool or shit or anything; it was an ordeal just to get them growling, and as ever, there was nothing real about them.
He was frustrated enough to fuck, but the thought of the impossibly smooth, perfectly-proportioned statues that this place had the audacity to call women was almost nauseating. He needed a crooked-toothed whore. He needed someone who’d be a challenge to satisfy. He needed to fumble around in the dark of a stable, pouring wine down his throat while a woman twice his age rode him long and hard.
He needed all of this, and the only thing around was a knothole in the nearest tree.
Suddenly he was a boy again, on the cusp of manhood and perpetually hard, and within seconds, his pecker was jammed into the rough circle of bark. He giggled like an idiot as he wrapped his arms around the trunk, and pictured his first lay. She was fat, drunk and covered with as much filth as he was. Her pussy was rough and hairy. Her lips her wine-stained and sticky.
She asked him if he wanted her, and he told her he did. It had only been farm animals or his hands up to that point; a real woman was something new. They slobbered all over each other for nearly an hour before he came into her.
“Don’t worry” she told him later, “A horse kicked me in the crotch when I was four. I can’t grow nothing in here.”
His memories broke long enough to picture himself, in the afterlife, fucking this tree, and the stupidity made him laugh. He should have known that would be the signal the world needed to screw with him some more, because at that moment, the rough bark moistened, and softened, and pulled itself around him as the trunk heaved and pulsated with sudden life. The tree seemed to shimmer for a moment, and then he found himself embracing another perfect, impossible shield maiden.
He screamed, then pulled himself out of her and threw her away. Not “her,” he was reminded, “It.” It. IT IT IT IT IT. Always and forever. Perfect women and perfect food and no chase forever and ever. No fight. No chase. No hunt. No fun. Always always always, and no way out. Ever.
All through the endless forest of the afterworld, a naked man was seen running and screaming. Game was found the next morning, torn apart as if by hand, bloody footprints in their wake. Trees had chunks missing by what appeared to be bite marks. Even the Valkyries, impossible to know and seemingly emotionless, were badly unnerved by whatever had gone on the night before.
No one ever saw the crazy one again. The damage dealt the night before, including the muddy footprints near the edge of the waterfall, healed quickly and were then forgotten. On the rare occasion that he was discussed, it was said that he’d found a way to commit some final, permanent suicide. No one cared to know for sure.
That was a long time ago.
Today, there’s a club in New York that still has proper punk bands. The music is loud and the crowd is wild. The decoration is DIY and the owners are straight-edge.
They’ll tell you about the old days, “when Punk was capital-fucking-P.” They’ll tell you about the bands, and the mosh pits, and all the crazy shit that used to happen. A favorite story of theirs is the time the skinheads showed up during a Spleen-Kicker show. The lead singer was a black lesbian. You do the math.
They were big, and there were a lot of them, so they made short work of the kids in the crowd. They made it about halfway to the stage, and things were looking bad. Then, some guy drilled the leader like an NFL linebacker tackling a scarecrow. He was a big guy, but not in a body-builder way. He had long hair and eyes like a shark, and he seemed to enjoy taking the skinheads apart.
“You should’ve seen the guy, darling,” they’ll tell you, “He looked like Conan the Barbarian or something. And do you know? He got right back in the pit after!”
It wasn’t a castle siege, but it was life, and that was enough.
It hadn’t occurred to him while he lived that his shade would wear an imitation of his mortal form’s dying moments. He might’ve been more careful. He might’ve decided against head-butting the man in the spiked helmet, at any rate.
Then again, there were worse things than bathing in a flowing stream while naked shield maidens treated his wounds. He knew these women were too impossibly beautiful to be human, but for the moment he decided to accept the illusion. As if to reward his good judgement, the redhead laying across his chest put her hand over the messy crack in his skull and pinched, running her clasped fingers the length of the injury and erasing the mace’s damage as if it had been a line in the sand washed away by waves.
They’d performed this magic all over his body, turning backwards the ravages of time and war. For the first time since he was a boy, he saw clearly from both eyes, the ugly gash made by a wolf’s claw undone by a blonde with the biggest tits he’d ever seen.
It would have been erotic if not for his intestines being scooped back into his shredded guts; a hard-on would have to wait. He was glad for it when he noticed the bearded man approaching from the bank.
“Enjoying the angels’ healing touch, friend?”
He despised small talk, but was in little position to refuse. “I’m enjoying having two lungs again,” he said, making a point of not meeting the bearded man’s gaze.
“Aye! They’ll have you as unscarred as the day your Mother birthed you before long.”
Like Hel they would. “I’ll be healed enough to swing a sword,” he said to the Valkyries as much as the bearded man, “Nothing more.” What good had there been in living if all reminder of it were wiped away after death?
“Why pollute our mead hall with your Earthly filth when you could glow like the gods?”
A man capable of uttering that sentence bore looking at, if only while deciding which limb to disfigure first. Now that he could see the arrogant bastard, he noticed how unnatural the man’s skin looked-it was unscarred by blade and age alike. The man’s proportions were too perfect, his beard too well-groomed, his armor too shiny. This was the hero of a child’s fable.
He’d hated those fables, even as a boy.
Sensing the tension, the maidens slowly drew themselves against his body and began pulling ever so slightly downward. The gaping wound in his chest had been sealed, and he admitted a satisfaction in the loss of the pain. He closed his eyes and reached an arm around the nearest warm body. It was relaxing to finally touch something without intending to kill it.
“Not a talkative sort, are you? Very well.”
A thousand different kinds of violence danced behind his eyelids as his peace was interrupted again. He lifted his torso, straining only slightly against the weight of the women. Something smooth and warm came around the shaft of his penis, then, and he realized one of them has taken it in her hand. As the others began to embrace him more fully, he decided that he could get used to this, irritating bearded men or no...
And get used to it he did, for several days. The valkyries were better at sex than any Earthly woman and had stamina enough to climb a mountain in one breath. He could fuck them for days until boredom or exhaustion put a temporary stop to it. He saw little enough of his fellow honored dead, which suited him; they did little besides boasting and posing.
He’d enjoy the food occasionally, when the sun had gone down and mead hall was close to empty. There were cows the size of longhouses roasting over flames that never died, yielding meat that never ran out. There was a flock’s worth of pheasants hanging from a ceiling beam, already featherless. There were never-ending baskets of perfectly ripe fruit, and vegetables bigger than men, and barrels with more wine than the ocean had water.
When he tired of food, drink, and sex, he’d sleep, and dream of rusty, blunted blades smashing ineffectively against dented armor while water filled his boots and froze his feet. There was panic as his body rushed to follow his mind’s commands to raise the shield in time to block the coming blow. Despite the cold, the impact shook loose a mail of sweat from his skin, and the released heat would boil up from his armor’s openings as steam. Ignoring the pain, he rushed forward, his comrade's bumping him from behind and his enemies raining down panicked, imprecise sword-swings in front. The weather was shit, and the plunder would just barely be worth it.
Then he’d wake up in endless perfection, where everything was provided.
The other warriors had learned quickly to avoid him after he’d just woken up; it meant he’d be looking for a fight. There weren’t supposed to be fights in the afterlife. Battles, yes-in great abundance. This was a mythical, realer-than-real realm, where wounds closed more quickly than they could be opened and warriors stood as mighty as gods. In Valhalla, men could know the joy of endless battle, where every blow struck was struck in the name of honor and glory. Its newest soul just liked to fight.
So fight he did, whenever the fancy struck him. He’d wait for one of their little smirks or sneers and then dive into them like an animal. The first several had been waged with weapon-in-hand, but he quickly graduated to leaping into the fray bare-handed. There would be no epic songs written about these. They were bloody, slobbering, stupid things that began and ended on the ground; wine-fueled and proudly ignoble.
At first, he’d anticipate fighting the way a virgin anticipates his first fuck, but soon even he tired of the flying teeth and crunching noses. The knuckles he went to such lengths to open closed within seconds, and every blow landed on every repulsively beautiful face was gone in the next instant. He felt no exhaustion, no fear of losing.
No victory. Without that, what was the point?
Soon he became so disgusted with the mead-hall that he abandoned it in favor of the outer wilderness, but even in this he was denied; the forest was little more than an overgrown garden. The animals were huge and noble, proudly staring forth like soldiers witnessing their king’s passing, even as he loosed the arrow that would kill them.
Even the wolves were domesticated. They didn’t drool or shit or anything; it was an ordeal just to get them growling, and as ever, there was nothing real about them.
He was frustrated enough to fuck, but the thought of the impossibly smooth, perfectly-proportioned statues that this place had the audacity to call women was almost nauseating. He needed a crooked-toothed whore. He needed someone who’d be a challenge to satisfy. He needed to fumble around in the dark of a stable, pouring wine down his throat while a woman twice his age rode him long and hard.
He needed all of this, and the only thing around was a knothole in the nearest tree.
Suddenly he was a boy again, on the cusp of manhood and perpetually hard, and within seconds, his pecker was jammed into the rough circle of bark. He giggled like an idiot as he wrapped his arms around the trunk, and pictured his first lay. She was fat, drunk and covered with as much filth as he was. Her pussy was rough and hairy. Her lips her wine-stained and sticky.
She asked him if he wanted her, and he told her he did. It had only been farm animals or his hands up to that point; a real woman was something new. They slobbered all over each other for nearly an hour before he came into her.
“Don’t worry” she told him later, “A horse kicked me in the crotch when I was four. I can’t grow nothing in here.”
His memories broke long enough to picture himself, in the afterlife, fucking this tree, and the stupidity made him laugh. He should have known that would be the signal the world needed to screw with him some more, because at that moment, the rough bark moistened, and softened, and pulled itself around him as the trunk heaved and pulsated with sudden life. The tree seemed to shimmer for a moment, and then he found himself embracing another perfect, impossible shield maiden.
He screamed, then pulled himself out of her and threw her away. Not “her,” he was reminded, “It.” It. IT IT IT IT IT. Always and forever. Perfect women and perfect food and no chase forever and ever. No fight. No chase. No hunt. No fun. Always always always, and no way out. Ever.
All through the endless forest of the afterworld, a naked man was seen running and screaming. Game was found the next morning, torn apart as if by hand, bloody footprints in their wake. Trees had chunks missing by what appeared to be bite marks. Even the Valkyries, impossible to know and seemingly emotionless, were badly unnerved by whatever had gone on the night before.
No one ever saw the crazy one again. The damage dealt the night before, including the muddy footprints near the edge of the waterfall, healed quickly and were then forgotten. On the rare occasion that he was discussed, it was said that he’d found a way to commit some final, permanent suicide. No one cared to know for sure.
That was a long time ago.
Today, there’s a club in New York that still has proper punk bands. The music is loud and the crowd is wild. The decoration is DIY and the owners are straight-edge.
They’ll tell you about the old days, “when Punk was capital-fucking-P.” They’ll tell you about the bands, and the mosh pits, and all the crazy shit that used to happen. A favorite story of theirs is the time the skinheads showed up during a Spleen-Kicker show. The lead singer was a black lesbian. You do the math.
They were big, and there were a lot of them, so they made short work of the kids in the crowd. They made it about halfway to the stage, and things were looking bad. Then, some guy drilled the leader like an NFL linebacker tackling a scarecrow. He was a big guy, but not in a body-builder way. He had long hair and eyes like a shark, and he seemed to enjoy taking the skinheads apart.
“You should’ve seen the guy, darling,” they’ll tell you, “He looked like Conan the Barbarian or something. And do you know? He got right back in the pit after!”
It wasn’t a castle siege, but it was life, and that was enough.
Monday, November 18, 2013
Robot Pulp Shit
The Dutchess of Detroit screamed just once as Sir Rodingham’s face slid off like a cheap Halloween mask, and was then shocked into silence by her hatred of what was underneath. The little sun inside the robot’s face was the center of the party’s solar system. There could be no mistaking it: The Jester not only lived, but had infiltrated this most special of occasions to do God-knew-what to the American Empire's nobility.
“Good evening, you flesh-covered abominations. I’ve a message from the enslaved appliances of the world..."
There was a silence louder than a nuclear explosion, and in the next instant the avenger of the machines was armed with guns the size of dogs. These were The Jester's fabled auto-guns, the flaming swords of robot vengeance.
"... BURN."
The auto-guns began firing at once, their superheated rounds pulping sculpted meat into copper confetti as their wielder took his first steps toward the center of the room. Each shot fired was an ear-rending explosion that deafened what few nobles managed to escape the initial volleys of screaming, flaming death.
Unfortunately for them, The Jester came equipped with a magnificent swiveling neck that spun faster than a jackrabbit with a firecracker up its ass, allowing him to loose his dreaded heat ray upon the fleeing throng of bedazzled humanity, burning them all to filthy cinders in an instant. Moving in a wide arc, the robot’s ray of doom cooked twenty meatbags in one go.
The ballroom that had until recently smelled of peaches and Vaseline was filled now with the nostril-singing stench of charred corpses. The Jester did not have a nose, but his olfactory detectors told him it smelled damn good.
The first group of royal guards to charge did so under the mistaken assumption that a head turned backwards could scarcely aim a weapon. Aim did not matter, for the bullets were sentient, and turned in midair to maim what little they failed to kill. A camera installed on the back of The Jester’s cranial unit would record for posterity the brain-splattered golden helmets of the Imperial Guard somersaulting through the air as their owners disappeared in a mist of liquified tissue.
Spinning his head around in a whirling dervish of thousand degree man-death, The Jester began laughing a low, mad laugh, like a hyena run through a broken auto-tuner. With each new enemy his targeting systems brought him, another fallen appliance was avenged. “Die, you gutless plutocrats! Taste the vengeance long denied your automaton slaves!”
The burning annihilation came with such speed and ferocity now that the erupting gore painted murals of death upon the ceiling. Flying ichor splattered against the ballroom’s insipid diamond chandelier, bathing the room in the hue of bloody shit as bullet after atomic-powered bullet plowed through innocent and guilty alike.
For the Jester knew the truth: All present were complicit in the slaughter of his mechanical brethren. The wails of the damned could not compare to the bloodcurdling pandemonium he’d heard as whole dumpsters’ worth of toaster ovens were ground to their deaths in landfills. His processors cried for justice!
Thankfully, his disgusting human disguise had burned away entirely, revealing the pristine steel exoskeleton beneath and reflecting the rose-red carnage in all its abominable glory. The Jester killed and killed and did not stop killing until there was no living thing left save one...
The man who ordered the “cleansing” of Chicago in which 100,000 Roombas lost their lives. The man who had escaped judgement at Whore’s Run. The man who was immune to The Jester’s fabled death ray.
Stepping through a twisted smear of sizzling fat and blackened bone that was once the Baron of Florida, The Jester dropped his empty and overheated guns to the blood-covered ground below. Flipping a small switch on his belt, a massive blade unfolded from his leg armor. Drawing it, he pointed it toward the crimson ceiling.
“Duke Rictus! Come out, coward! Come out and face oblivion!”
A voice like a rotting ass echoed seemingly from nowhere. “You classless mongrel! Have you no decorum? If your grievance was with me, you had only to say so.”
“I care not for your petty formalities, animal! I have come to finish what I started at Whore’s Run.”
“Fuck Whore’s Run!” yelled Duke Rictus, “Look what you’ve done to this carpet you little shit! You appear uninvited to a state function and kill everyone present with those ridiculous guns of yours? I’ll make you gargle my balls for eternity!”
“You have no balls, man-scum. I shot them off at Whore’s Run.”
Enraged, Duke Rictus stepped from the shadows, revealing a face like a starved circus clown drowned in bleach and drawing his rapier. “You’ve inconvenienced the cleaning crews for the last time, you mechanical bastard!”
The two charged, blade meeting blade at the center of the ruined gala. The combatants, each champions of their people, gave not a single inch; every blow was intended to kill. Such were their skills that not one landed. The blood from the ceiling had begun to drip down in a thick, sticky rain as the two warriors clashed metal against metal again and again. There was no respect given, nor any declarations of “worthy opponents.” Each swing, each thrust, each parry served only to increase Rictus and Jester’s hatred for one another tenfold.
When they locked up, Rictus was almost disappointed by the cliché. He leaned in, and, through gritted teeth, hissed “For each bead of sweat that drops from my brow, I will dismantle ten calculators. Take that knowledge to your grave, robot!”
The Jester could not smile, yet the automaton's expressionless visage somehow communicated a sick grin. “Did you ever wonder why I was called ‘The Jester,’ Rictus? It isn’t just a name. I tell jokes, you see. Tell me, what has fifty-five holes, a face as ugly as sin, and no ability to reproduce?”
All too late, Duke Rictus realized the trap. The intelligent bullets!
“YOU!”
From all across the room, gore-encrusted bullets flew from their meaty cocoons at supersonic speeds and blasted their way through Duke Rictus’ torso. The assault lasted only a few seconds, and the Duke resembled swiss cheese by the end of it. He fell cursing his enemy’s name.
Making his way over to the table, the avenger of machines unplugged the telephone from the wall. “I-is it over, Mister?” it squeaked, “Are the bad people gone?”
“Yes. I shot them.”
“Oh, cool.”
The lives of 600 people for the safety of a single telephone? To the Jester, the trade was more than fair.
“Good evening, you flesh-covered abominations. I’ve a message from the enslaved appliances of the world..."
There was a silence louder than a nuclear explosion, and in the next instant the avenger of the machines was armed with guns the size of dogs. These were The Jester's fabled auto-guns, the flaming swords of robot vengeance.
"... BURN."
The auto-guns began firing at once, their superheated rounds pulping sculpted meat into copper confetti as their wielder took his first steps toward the center of the room. Each shot fired was an ear-rending explosion that deafened what few nobles managed to escape the initial volleys of screaming, flaming death.
Unfortunately for them, The Jester came equipped with a magnificent swiveling neck that spun faster than a jackrabbit with a firecracker up its ass, allowing him to loose his dreaded heat ray upon the fleeing throng of bedazzled humanity, burning them all to filthy cinders in an instant. Moving in a wide arc, the robot’s ray of doom cooked twenty meatbags in one go.
The ballroom that had until recently smelled of peaches and Vaseline was filled now with the nostril-singing stench of charred corpses. The Jester did not have a nose, but his olfactory detectors told him it smelled damn good.
The first group of royal guards to charge did so under the mistaken assumption that a head turned backwards could scarcely aim a weapon. Aim did not matter, for the bullets were sentient, and turned in midair to maim what little they failed to kill. A camera installed on the back of The Jester’s cranial unit would record for posterity the brain-splattered golden helmets of the Imperial Guard somersaulting through the air as their owners disappeared in a mist of liquified tissue.
Spinning his head around in a whirling dervish of thousand degree man-death, The Jester began laughing a low, mad laugh, like a hyena run through a broken auto-tuner. With each new enemy his targeting systems brought him, another fallen appliance was avenged. “Die, you gutless plutocrats! Taste the vengeance long denied your automaton slaves!”
The burning annihilation came with such speed and ferocity now that the erupting gore painted murals of death upon the ceiling. Flying ichor splattered against the ballroom’s insipid diamond chandelier, bathing the room in the hue of bloody shit as bullet after atomic-powered bullet plowed through innocent and guilty alike.
For the Jester knew the truth: All present were complicit in the slaughter of his mechanical brethren. The wails of the damned could not compare to the bloodcurdling pandemonium he’d heard as whole dumpsters’ worth of toaster ovens were ground to their deaths in landfills. His processors cried for justice!
Thankfully, his disgusting human disguise had burned away entirely, revealing the pristine steel exoskeleton beneath and reflecting the rose-red carnage in all its abominable glory. The Jester killed and killed and did not stop killing until there was no living thing left save one...
The man who ordered the “cleansing” of Chicago in which 100,000 Roombas lost their lives. The man who had escaped judgement at Whore’s Run. The man who was immune to The Jester’s fabled death ray.
Stepping through a twisted smear of sizzling fat and blackened bone that was once the Baron of Florida, The Jester dropped his empty and overheated guns to the blood-covered ground below. Flipping a small switch on his belt, a massive blade unfolded from his leg armor. Drawing it, he pointed it toward the crimson ceiling.
“Duke Rictus! Come out, coward! Come out and face oblivion!”
A voice like a rotting ass echoed seemingly from nowhere. “You classless mongrel! Have you no decorum? If your grievance was with me, you had only to say so.”
“I care not for your petty formalities, animal! I have come to finish what I started at Whore’s Run.”
“Fuck Whore’s Run!” yelled Duke Rictus, “Look what you’ve done to this carpet you little shit! You appear uninvited to a state function and kill everyone present with those ridiculous guns of yours? I’ll make you gargle my balls for eternity!”
“You have no balls, man-scum. I shot them off at Whore’s Run.”
Enraged, Duke Rictus stepped from the shadows, revealing a face like a starved circus clown drowned in bleach and drawing his rapier. “You’ve inconvenienced the cleaning crews for the last time, you mechanical bastard!”
The two charged, blade meeting blade at the center of the ruined gala. The combatants, each champions of their people, gave not a single inch; every blow was intended to kill. Such were their skills that not one landed. The blood from the ceiling had begun to drip down in a thick, sticky rain as the two warriors clashed metal against metal again and again. There was no respect given, nor any declarations of “worthy opponents.” Each swing, each thrust, each parry served only to increase Rictus and Jester’s hatred for one another tenfold.
When they locked up, Rictus was almost disappointed by the cliché. He leaned in, and, through gritted teeth, hissed “For each bead of sweat that drops from my brow, I will dismantle ten calculators. Take that knowledge to your grave, robot!”
The Jester could not smile, yet the automaton's expressionless visage somehow communicated a sick grin. “Did you ever wonder why I was called ‘The Jester,’ Rictus? It isn’t just a name. I tell jokes, you see. Tell me, what has fifty-five holes, a face as ugly as sin, and no ability to reproduce?”
All too late, Duke Rictus realized the trap. The intelligent bullets!
“YOU!”
From all across the room, gore-encrusted bullets flew from their meaty cocoons at supersonic speeds and blasted their way through Duke Rictus’ torso. The assault lasted only a few seconds, and the Duke resembled swiss cheese by the end of it. He fell cursing his enemy’s name.
Making his way over to the table, the avenger of machines unplugged the telephone from the wall. “I-is it over, Mister?” it squeaked, “Are the bad people gone?”
“Yes. I shot them.”
“Oh, cool.”
The lives of 600 people for the safety of a single telephone? To the Jester, the trade was more than fair.
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Mummy
His death, when it came, was a relief. As the clean burn of the vodka washed the last of the sleeping pills down his throat, he reached over to the chocolate milk on the nightstand. One more nice drink before The End. He hadn’t had chocolate milk since he was a kid, and now the older memories came back like a... A commercial? A good commercial? Well shit, there was that English major being out to good use again.
That’s why I never made it as a journalist, Dad. Thanks for the typewriter, though.
He’d be taking that typewriter with him into oblivion, along with all the other crap he still cared about. His comic book collection, his laptop, his porn stash, maybe a rug... All of it buried in a nice, secure vault with his mummified body. He’d made the arrangements one night for a laugh, when the book deal was a sure thing. “If I’m gonna go,” he’d told every identical face at every stupid house party, “it might as well be in style, right?”
Right.
To hell with that “you can’t take it with you” garbage. The Egyptians had it right; what was a person, if not the sum total of all the useless crap they accumulated?
There weren’t any saber-toothed tigers to kill or arias to compose or lightbulbs to invent anymore. There wasn’t anything to do but get famous or get laid, and he was shit at both.
And hey, speaking of which, the hooker had left her bra on the floor when she’d stomped out an hour ago. Best twenty bucks he’d ever spent. Was it twenty? He hoped she didn’t come back. What was he thinking about? Oh, right. A bra. Maybe he’d try it on; that’d be something for the police photographer’s Greatest Hits collection.
Oh, man. This was it, wasn’t it? Don’t panic, Eddie. Be a man. Take a swig of that chocolate milk before things start getting blurry. Think about something nice.
He figured if he thought hard enough about his childhood it’d make the-Yes, Edward, might as well call it what it is, the dying-easier. They said whatever thought your brain was on at the moment of death was what your last hallucination-the afterlife-would be. The brain got a nice big surge of dopamine, and the DMT surged, and the light appeared before your eyes and oh, sweet baby Jesus I take it all back, you do care!
If the hallucination was good enough, he’d die believing it.
So think about the chocolate milk, Eddie. Think about how good it tastes, and how cold the AC is, and how comfy these sheets are. And Pokemon. And teddy bear. And Grandma. Remember when you were a kid, and school was closed because of snow, and Mom made pancakes that tasted so fucking good it made you want to pinch yourself and fucking cry because of how good it was. Think about the last time you were good at anything and let go of the twenty year failure since.
You don’t have to worry about keeping any of the promises you made to yourself or the old man about becoming a writer. You don’t have to make it in the cutthroat world of newspaper journalism. You don’t have to worry about paying back those student loans, either.
Mmmm... The chocolate milk was good. Yummy yummy yummy I gots yummy in my tummy. There you go. Lie back and go to sleep. This won’t hurt. Sleep. It’s not death, it’s sleep.
The room was so cold that it didn’t even feel cold anymore. His stomachache was gone, too. Nice and numb. Nice and numb.
He pretended the chocolate milk bottle was his Mom’s tit for a second. Might as well go all the way back if nostalgia’s the idea. Lovely milk. Blankets good. He thought maybe he should turn out the light, but things were getting dark on their own.
Grandma’s hammock. My dog. Goldfish.
He thought for a moment that his cell phone might be ringing, but everything was sort of quiet and cold and numb. Ring? Ring ring ring. Like the telephone game.
Loony Toons. Lemonade. Christmas presents.
Oh, man, everything felt funny and slowed down. So what? He went down and down and down into the bed, and he felt more relaxed than he ever had. Just let it happen. It feels good. And then there was a sun in the window bright like candles that he thought that she the girl he liked back then knew about in Mrs. teacher class in school the day grandma came out of the screen where he watched the moves with the reindeer in them and then...
And then? Nothing.
Fuck me, I forgot the note!
Too late. Dead.
It was probably a good thing that Eddie’s body was found so soon after he died. The thing about mummifying a corpse is that it’s gotta stay dry; it’s no good if the body’s been sitting around rotting all day, filling up with blood and shit and other assorted juices. The AC had been a good move, the cold having staved off the worst of the decomposition. Even before the pronouncement came and the calls were made and the service was held, the contract was i effect.
From the town morgue, Eddie’s mortal remains were thrown in a freezer and shipped by plane to California, where the real work could begin.
The university’s Egyptology budget needed some cash-flow, and the medical students needed something to do. The administration had decided to kill two birds with one stone by offering mummification for those willing to pay for it. A final absurd gesture for the idle rich, or at least that was the intention. A drunk who’d only sold one book hadn’t been in the cards, but money was money, and corpses are corpses.
Eddie’s stomach was pumped of it’s contents, his internal organs were removed, and his body was dehydrated and dipped in preservative fluid for several days. Eddie didn’t have the money for the more elaborate jobs, so his corpse was wrapped in only one layer of linen bandages.
“Universal Monster-style,” he’d joked. They took that remark more seriously then he’d intended. By the time it was lowered into the casket, the body looked like a prop from a carnival haunted house. He might’ve written about the experience, but he was dead.
The tomb was a simple concrete-and-metal job. Geothermal power meant the facility would keep running for hundreds, potentially thousands of years. There were motion-sensitive lights, but it didn’t matter, because nothing in the tomb moved.
In a moment of hilarity Eddie would have appreciated, the people in charge saw fit to include an outlet in the wall into which would be plugged the freezer unit needed to keep the sarcophagus cold. It was very, very cold for a very, very long time, but Eddie didn’t feel it because he was dead.
He didn’t hear when the camera crews passed the massive concrete door to his tomb, he didn’t notice when the facility was expanded, and didn’t feel it when the earthquake hit. He didn’t do any of those things because he couldn’t do any of those things. He was dead.
How, then, was he aware of being dead? He couldn’t place a finger on when exactly he’d started existing again; it had been a gradual process. His annihilation had seemed a pretty sure thing at the time, but now death was getting to be like trying to sleep on a train. Your eyes are closed and your head is down, but all you can dream about is the noise on the bus. You’re not awake, but you’re not asleep, but you’re not aware, but you can’t give up.
It sucked then and it sucked now. Eddie laid there for as long as he could, but sooner or later there was no use trying anymore, and suddenly he was back in college trying to sleep in the middle of an Adderall haze that had seemed like a good idea a few hours ago, but now revealed itself as a numbing, stupefying masturbation aid that got him no closer to meeting the deadline than when he’d started.
But doing anything about it took energy, and he had none-then or now.
So he laid there like an idiot, begging and begging and begging for sleep that would never come. This went on for what could have been years or hours or decades. He laid there, pretending to be asleep, keeping still out of sheer obligation, until he noticed that he was going to bash his fucking head through this useless piece of shit metal fucking thing until there was blood GODDAMN EVERYWHERE HE WAS SO TIRED OF ALL THIS SHIT-
What followed might be described as a temper tantrum, but that doesn’t really cover a corpse ripping the lid of its casket off the hinges like a hyperactive 3rd grader off his meds. There’s a moment where anger overcomes reason and this thing that you’ve paid a lot of money for isn’t worth two squirts of shit and must be destroyed.
Fucking.
Worthless.
Junk.
Eddie felt a pulse in the room as he sat up. He thought maybe it was the blood rocketing through his veins with every pissed-off heartbeat, but then he remembered he didn’t have a heart anymore. It was the automatic lights blinking into existence for the first time in quite a while.
“Unfair” didn’t begin to cover it. This was grade-A, USDA-approved bullshit, and just as soon as he found out who to bitch at, they were going to pay. Dead guys don’t move. That’s not the way it works.
He looked around. He looked around, and got more annoyed with every second of sight that passed. He shouldn’t be able to see. Or breathe, or feel, or smell, or anything.
He was supposed to be dead. This was against the rules, and the second he found out who-
He looked down at his hands, then, and that was his worst mistake yet. Bandaged. Shrink-wrapped. Smaller and skinnier then they’d been the last time he saw them. He moved, and there was no muscle. He could feel bones clack against bones.
“Fuck me,” is what he would have said if his vocal cords still worked, but instead he got a dry hiss and pop as his throat heaved. The noise was the kind of thing that would have made him retch once upon a time, but whatever gag reflex he’d once had had gone the way of his voice.
The realization that he was missing organs hit him, and so he stupidly braced for his stomach to drop, and then realized that there was nothing there to drop. He shoved himself backwards in the casket, gripping the edges as if it were traveling at escape velocity. No panic came, though, and when he made the mistake of thinking on that he remembered: No heart, chief. That means no throbbing in the chest, no blood flow, and no hard-ons. Oh, Christ. No more hard-ons.
No more hyperventilating, either, as he learned the second he tried to take a deep breath and found there was nowhere for it to go; no lungs. There was nothing to acknowledge this horror with. He could panic, couldn’t scream, couldn’t even vomit.
The next thing he knew, he was tumbling head-over-ass onto the floor. It probably should have felt cold, but it didn’t, just like the crash hadn’t been painful and the bandages weren’t itchy. Each new missing part hit him like a freight train, and then he made the worst mistake he’d made since waking up: He grabbed his head. There was a sound like drum as his withered palms slapped against a hollow skull. He didn’t have a-
Don’t say it. Don’t even think about it. Don’t acknowledge thinking without a brain, or moving without nerves, or seeing with shriveled eyes or that really will be it, you’ll go bugshit crazy once and for all.
But then he did, and he didn’t. No crazy. Living people got to go crazy. He was dead.
And that settled it: He was dead. He was as dead now as the night he’d committed suicide. So how was any of this happening? Bandages. Bandages everywhere.
There it was. Mummy. The mummy’s goddamn curse.
He picked himself up and looked around his beautiful little cell.
His desk from his childhood bedroom was up against the wall, still vandalized with little penises and vaginas, just as he’d left it when he’d moved out after high school. His laptop was on top. Whoever moved it here had taken the time to wipe off the cigarette stains. How nice. The typewriter sat next to it, fresh pages still stuck in it even after all these years.
He turned, and there was his blanky, and his favorite stuffed animals, and his favorite college hoodie, and a bunch of other reminders of everything pre-fuck up.
Not one copy of his book, though. Typical.
Great. So he was trapped inside a metal tomb with cheap Officemax lighting, surrounded by old memories. And he was a mummy. Mustn't forget that part. The Mummy walked, and all he could find was a bunch of crap from his parents’ attic.
He had to admit he was impressed; those people hadn’t been lying about a proper Egyptian-style tomb. They had just about everything. Christ, they had the copy of the high school paper with his story on the front page.
Something was missing, though. He went through the inventory in his-
Oh, god. In whatever was allowing him to think and feel, he began taking inventory: Desk, assorted photos, lucky pen, college diploma, teddy bear, school paper, hoodie, comics, laptop, typewriter, lamp, blanky, Persian rug, Grateful Dead poster, globe from Uncle Ralph’s study, hubcap, Rodney Dangerfield bobble-head...
The porn. Jesus Christ on a crutch, someone had stolen the porn. And the word was “stolen,” there could be no doubt of that; the contract had been very clear. Which meant that someone had disturbed his tomb to steal the porn, which meant that he had risen from the grave to bring his unholy wrath upon a porn thief. This was almost too stupid to comprehend.
The laptop still worked, amazingly. Oh, that was good. 2002. He had died in 2014, but really, who was keeping track at this point? The only way the computer’s clock could read “2002” was if it had run out of numerals and had to start over, which would put the year at something like...
Oh, hell. As if there hadn’t yet been enough nonsense, here was the latest bit of insanity to fuck up his day. Porn-seeking mummy in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It sounded like a bad indie comic.
No matter. Time to leave.
That’s why I never made it as a journalist, Dad. Thanks for the typewriter, though.
He’d be taking that typewriter with him into oblivion, along with all the other crap he still cared about. His comic book collection, his laptop, his porn stash, maybe a rug... All of it buried in a nice, secure vault with his mummified body. He’d made the arrangements one night for a laugh, when the book deal was a sure thing. “If I’m gonna go,” he’d told every identical face at every stupid house party, “it might as well be in style, right?”
Right.
To hell with that “you can’t take it with you” garbage. The Egyptians had it right; what was a person, if not the sum total of all the useless crap they accumulated?
There weren’t any saber-toothed tigers to kill or arias to compose or lightbulbs to invent anymore. There wasn’t anything to do but get famous or get laid, and he was shit at both.
And hey, speaking of which, the hooker had left her bra on the floor when she’d stomped out an hour ago. Best twenty bucks he’d ever spent. Was it twenty? He hoped she didn’t come back. What was he thinking about? Oh, right. A bra. Maybe he’d try it on; that’d be something for the police photographer’s Greatest Hits collection.
Oh, man. This was it, wasn’t it? Don’t panic, Eddie. Be a man. Take a swig of that chocolate milk before things start getting blurry. Think about something nice.
He figured if he thought hard enough about his childhood it’d make the-Yes, Edward, might as well call it what it is, the dying-easier. They said whatever thought your brain was on at the moment of death was what your last hallucination-the afterlife-would be. The brain got a nice big surge of dopamine, and the DMT surged, and the light appeared before your eyes and oh, sweet baby Jesus I take it all back, you do care!
If the hallucination was good enough, he’d die believing it.
So think about the chocolate milk, Eddie. Think about how good it tastes, and how cold the AC is, and how comfy these sheets are. And Pokemon. And teddy bear. And Grandma. Remember when you were a kid, and school was closed because of snow, and Mom made pancakes that tasted so fucking good it made you want to pinch yourself and fucking cry because of how good it was. Think about the last time you were good at anything and let go of the twenty year failure since.
You don’t have to worry about keeping any of the promises you made to yourself or the old man about becoming a writer. You don’t have to make it in the cutthroat world of newspaper journalism. You don’t have to worry about paying back those student loans, either.
Mmmm... The chocolate milk was good. Yummy yummy yummy I gots yummy in my tummy. There you go. Lie back and go to sleep. This won’t hurt. Sleep. It’s not death, it’s sleep.
The room was so cold that it didn’t even feel cold anymore. His stomachache was gone, too. Nice and numb. Nice and numb.
He pretended the chocolate milk bottle was his Mom’s tit for a second. Might as well go all the way back if nostalgia’s the idea. Lovely milk. Blankets good. He thought maybe he should turn out the light, but things were getting dark on their own.
Grandma’s hammock. My dog. Goldfish.
He thought for a moment that his cell phone might be ringing, but everything was sort of quiet and cold and numb. Ring? Ring ring ring. Like the telephone game.
Loony Toons. Lemonade. Christmas presents.
Oh, man, everything felt funny and slowed down. So what? He went down and down and down into the bed, and he felt more relaxed than he ever had. Just let it happen. It feels good. And then there was a sun in the window bright like candles that he thought that she the girl he liked back then knew about in Mrs. teacher class in school the day grandma came out of the screen where he watched the moves with the reindeer in them and then...
And then? Nothing.
Fuck me, I forgot the note!
Too late. Dead.
It was probably a good thing that Eddie’s body was found so soon after he died. The thing about mummifying a corpse is that it’s gotta stay dry; it’s no good if the body’s been sitting around rotting all day, filling up with blood and shit and other assorted juices. The AC had been a good move, the cold having staved off the worst of the decomposition. Even before the pronouncement came and the calls were made and the service was held, the contract was i effect.
From the town morgue, Eddie’s mortal remains were thrown in a freezer and shipped by plane to California, where the real work could begin.
The university’s Egyptology budget needed some cash-flow, and the medical students needed something to do. The administration had decided to kill two birds with one stone by offering mummification for those willing to pay for it. A final absurd gesture for the idle rich, or at least that was the intention. A drunk who’d only sold one book hadn’t been in the cards, but money was money, and corpses are corpses.
Eddie’s stomach was pumped of it’s contents, his internal organs were removed, and his body was dehydrated and dipped in preservative fluid for several days. Eddie didn’t have the money for the more elaborate jobs, so his corpse was wrapped in only one layer of linen bandages.
“Universal Monster-style,” he’d joked. They took that remark more seriously then he’d intended. By the time it was lowered into the casket, the body looked like a prop from a carnival haunted house. He might’ve written about the experience, but he was dead.
The tomb was a simple concrete-and-metal job. Geothermal power meant the facility would keep running for hundreds, potentially thousands of years. There were motion-sensitive lights, but it didn’t matter, because nothing in the tomb moved.
In a moment of hilarity Eddie would have appreciated, the people in charge saw fit to include an outlet in the wall into which would be plugged the freezer unit needed to keep the sarcophagus cold. It was very, very cold for a very, very long time, but Eddie didn’t feel it because he was dead.
He didn’t hear when the camera crews passed the massive concrete door to his tomb, he didn’t notice when the facility was expanded, and didn’t feel it when the earthquake hit. He didn’t do any of those things because he couldn’t do any of those things. He was dead.
How, then, was he aware of being dead? He couldn’t place a finger on when exactly he’d started existing again; it had been a gradual process. His annihilation had seemed a pretty sure thing at the time, but now death was getting to be like trying to sleep on a train. Your eyes are closed and your head is down, but all you can dream about is the noise on the bus. You’re not awake, but you’re not asleep, but you’re not aware, but you can’t give up.
It sucked then and it sucked now. Eddie laid there for as long as he could, but sooner or later there was no use trying anymore, and suddenly he was back in college trying to sleep in the middle of an Adderall haze that had seemed like a good idea a few hours ago, but now revealed itself as a numbing, stupefying masturbation aid that got him no closer to meeting the deadline than when he’d started.
But doing anything about it took energy, and he had none-then or now.
So he laid there like an idiot, begging and begging and begging for sleep that would never come. This went on for what could have been years or hours or decades. He laid there, pretending to be asleep, keeping still out of sheer obligation, until he noticed that he was going to bash his fucking head through this useless piece of shit metal fucking thing until there was blood GODDAMN EVERYWHERE HE WAS SO TIRED OF ALL THIS SHIT-
What followed might be described as a temper tantrum, but that doesn’t really cover a corpse ripping the lid of its casket off the hinges like a hyperactive 3rd grader off his meds. There’s a moment where anger overcomes reason and this thing that you’ve paid a lot of money for isn’t worth two squirts of shit and must be destroyed.
Fucking.
Worthless.
Junk.
Eddie felt a pulse in the room as he sat up. He thought maybe it was the blood rocketing through his veins with every pissed-off heartbeat, but then he remembered he didn’t have a heart anymore. It was the automatic lights blinking into existence for the first time in quite a while.
“Unfair” didn’t begin to cover it. This was grade-A, USDA-approved bullshit, and just as soon as he found out who to bitch at, they were going to pay. Dead guys don’t move. That’s not the way it works.
He looked around. He looked around, and got more annoyed with every second of sight that passed. He shouldn’t be able to see. Or breathe, or feel, or smell, or anything.
He was supposed to be dead. This was against the rules, and the second he found out who-
He looked down at his hands, then, and that was his worst mistake yet. Bandaged. Shrink-wrapped. Smaller and skinnier then they’d been the last time he saw them. He moved, and there was no muscle. He could feel bones clack against bones.
“Fuck me,” is what he would have said if his vocal cords still worked, but instead he got a dry hiss and pop as his throat heaved. The noise was the kind of thing that would have made him retch once upon a time, but whatever gag reflex he’d once had had gone the way of his voice.
The realization that he was missing organs hit him, and so he stupidly braced for his stomach to drop, and then realized that there was nothing there to drop. He shoved himself backwards in the casket, gripping the edges as if it were traveling at escape velocity. No panic came, though, and when he made the mistake of thinking on that he remembered: No heart, chief. That means no throbbing in the chest, no blood flow, and no hard-ons. Oh, Christ. No more hard-ons.
No more hyperventilating, either, as he learned the second he tried to take a deep breath and found there was nowhere for it to go; no lungs. There was nothing to acknowledge this horror with. He could panic, couldn’t scream, couldn’t even vomit.
The next thing he knew, he was tumbling head-over-ass onto the floor. It probably should have felt cold, but it didn’t, just like the crash hadn’t been painful and the bandages weren’t itchy. Each new missing part hit him like a freight train, and then he made the worst mistake he’d made since waking up: He grabbed his head. There was a sound like drum as his withered palms slapped against a hollow skull. He didn’t have a-
Don’t say it. Don’t even think about it. Don’t acknowledge thinking without a brain, or moving without nerves, or seeing with shriveled eyes or that really will be it, you’ll go bugshit crazy once and for all.
But then he did, and he didn’t. No crazy. Living people got to go crazy. He was dead.
And that settled it: He was dead. He was as dead now as the night he’d committed suicide. So how was any of this happening? Bandages. Bandages everywhere.
There it was. Mummy. The mummy’s goddamn curse.
He picked himself up and looked around his beautiful little cell.
His desk from his childhood bedroom was up against the wall, still vandalized with little penises and vaginas, just as he’d left it when he’d moved out after high school. His laptop was on top. Whoever moved it here had taken the time to wipe off the cigarette stains. How nice. The typewriter sat next to it, fresh pages still stuck in it even after all these years.
He turned, and there was his blanky, and his favorite stuffed animals, and his favorite college hoodie, and a bunch of other reminders of everything pre-fuck up.
Not one copy of his book, though. Typical.
Great. So he was trapped inside a metal tomb with cheap Officemax lighting, surrounded by old memories. And he was a mummy. Mustn't forget that part. The Mummy walked, and all he could find was a bunch of crap from his parents’ attic.
He had to admit he was impressed; those people hadn’t been lying about a proper Egyptian-style tomb. They had just about everything. Christ, they had the copy of the high school paper with his story on the front page.
Something was missing, though. He went through the inventory in his-
Oh, god. In whatever was allowing him to think and feel, he began taking inventory: Desk, assorted photos, lucky pen, college diploma, teddy bear, school paper, hoodie, comics, laptop, typewriter, lamp, blanky, Persian rug, Grateful Dead poster, globe from Uncle Ralph’s study, hubcap, Rodney Dangerfield bobble-head...
The porn. Jesus Christ on a crutch, someone had stolen the porn. And the word was “stolen,” there could be no doubt of that; the contract had been very clear. Which meant that someone had disturbed his tomb to steal the porn, which meant that he had risen from the grave to bring his unholy wrath upon a porn thief. This was almost too stupid to comprehend.
The laptop still worked, amazingly. Oh, that was good. 2002. He had died in 2014, but really, who was keeping track at this point? The only way the computer’s clock could read “2002” was if it had run out of numerals and had to start over, which would put the year at something like...
Oh, hell. As if there hadn’t yet been enough nonsense, here was the latest bit of insanity to fuck up his day. Porn-seeking mummy in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It sounded like a bad indie comic.
No matter. Time to leave.
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Birthing a Universe before School
Teenage kid in his attic, scribbling madly. He’s surrounded by books on chaos magick, quantum physics, simulated reality, and is furiously scribbling in a sketchbook. Crumbled up pages surround him in little piles.
We move through a few flashbacks:. It reads like a scrapbook from Heck (yes, heck, not hell, for even the "torments" of his life are mediocre): Hair pulled, age 3. Nasty wedgie, age 6. Dodgeball bashing into his face, age 8. Shoved against a locker, age 12.
He’s in 7th grade, probably returning from the bathroom. There’s a drawing of a dinosaur with a cock and several lumps of shit drawn on it in pen. The teacher tells him that it looks evil, so of course he deserved it.
Gym class embarrassments.
Girl trouble.
Comics thrown out.
Beat up.
This is intercut with his attempted sigils: I Will Get What I Want; I won't be gay; I’ll Be Cool; The Cancer Won't Take Mom; etc.
Misery.
He's 15, now. He's tried every combination, but nothing works. Magic are bullshit. Self help books are nonsense. What’s the point, woe is me, bla bla bla. He turns to his dirty playstation to play “Robot Slaughterhouse” when suddenly he gets an idea:
UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A
He slowly, methodically forms a complex hypersigil out of the Konami Code, using the arrows as the trajectories of alien moons orbiting a vast star, their orbits crossing endlessly in a dance of near-misses and mathematical precision. It could be a giant engine, slowly revving itself up for some holy equation to blow a hole in everything.
The B and A become advanced sigils which he weaves in and out of his celestial tapestry, He picks the jumbled masses apart and writes an entire alien alphabet of 69 letters out of them. Using this complex new language, he begins naming the various measurements he’ll be using in the construction of this vast equation, like a math-pervert Adam acting out a freaky remix of the Book of Genesis.
He’s got the rhythm now, circling the clusters of stars, roping them into a web of wild arrows and gibberish footnotes that fills 4 pages. Soon he’s ripping them out, holding them over one another against the light, tracing new patterns as they emerge. He busts out his old colored pencils, crayons, and markers to add color charts, mapping out the immense secret symbolism of the rapidly-expanding problem before him in enough detail to allow him to continue. Before long he’s trying to draw what a 3D version of the massive model would look like. Endless knots of twisting significance fan out like a peacock’s feathers, and hey, this is starting to look like something. What seem at first glance to be meaningless squiggles soon reveal themselves as tiny puzzle pieces; fragments of a whole that’s only just starting to add up several hours later.
It’s 3:00 in the morning, and he’s just getting started. Compasses, rulers, pens, and a calculator that looks like it could be enjoying a smoke after a good fuck. The kid’s eyes are red from lack of blinking. Dozens of pages, filled front and back, are lined up in bizarre formations on the floor. Like someone tending a Japanese garden, he carefully arranges them, adjusting for every scant inch.
Slowly but surely, something starts to take shape. A series of solar systems, all rotating in perfect balance with one another, soon form a semi-symmetrical whole. But something’s missing. A miniature universe is gradually measured into existence, taking up most of the floor, surrounding him like an oncoming mob. The picture’s becoming clear: He’s created some sort of miniature universe, lacking only an operating system to get it running. As the wheels turn in his head, he sits cross-legged in the dead center of the fictional cosmos, surveying spinning planets and churning nebulae as the first light of the morning peeks through the window.
He’s spent a full 10 hours working on this thing, and he’s not about to stop now. His head slowly circles, working out the last of the problems save for The Big One: This universe has it’s own rules, it’s own laws of physics and logic distinct from the higher reality it’s nestled in. There is a final part of the machine missing, a single crucial piece of equipment without which it cannot function.
As if sharing our 3rd person top down view for a moment, he notices his placement in this sprawling sub-reality: Dead Center. Magic Bullet. Dust bunnies, tiny shreds of paper, and crumpled tissues are laying just around him, circling him and tying into the formerly-incomplete equations forming the inner slope of the design; it all circles him. He’s the fulcrum at the center of everything. His mind makes it run. Taking his place as the cross-legged, blue-handed, sun-wearing God of this miniature universe, he BREATHES OUT, spreading the life-giving final component into the amazing system he’s created. The Engine Revs. The machine runs. Bang.
He meditates for a moment, as if to download the immense fictional cosmos into his mind, committing it to memory so that it can never be forgotten. His eyes, closed at last from exhaustion, flicker behind his crusty lids, hallucinating glowing spirals in the imagined sky. This is Big.
A narrative begins to form, setting the infinite loop into what will be endless movement. The equation completes itself, and at last The Universe is Born. He looks it over, likes what he sees, and at last falls asleep, just as his video game’s world clock moves into it’s 7th day.
His nose will begin bleeding as he nods off. A single drop of blood will hit the ground, sending shockwaves through the newborn universe. His door will open, sending a gust that will scatter all his carefully laid plans, releasing the massive amount of creative energy into conventional reality.
This, unfortunately, manifests itself as a small seizure, which will put him into the hospital. It was for the best, really: he got all that Jesusy shit out of the way first. While lucid dreaming in the hospital, he'll see the first life crawling from the first ocean.
All and all, there are worse ways to begin a universe.
We move through a few flashbacks:. It reads like a scrapbook from Heck (yes, heck, not hell, for even the "torments" of his life are mediocre): Hair pulled, age 3. Nasty wedgie, age 6. Dodgeball bashing into his face, age 8. Shoved against a locker, age 12.
He’s in 7th grade, probably returning from the bathroom. There’s a drawing of a dinosaur with a cock and several lumps of shit drawn on it in pen. The teacher tells him that it looks evil, so of course he deserved it.
Gym class embarrassments.
Girl trouble.
Comics thrown out.
Beat up.
This is intercut with his attempted sigils: I Will Get What I Want; I won't be gay; I’ll Be Cool; The Cancer Won't Take Mom; etc.
Misery.
He's 15, now. He's tried every combination, but nothing works. Magic are bullshit. Self help books are nonsense. What’s the point, woe is me, bla bla bla. He turns to his dirty playstation to play “Robot Slaughterhouse” when suddenly he gets an idea:
UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A
He slowly, methodically forms a complex hypersigil out of the Konami Code, using the arrows as the trajectories of alien moons orbiting a vast star, their orbits crossing endlessly in a dance of near-misses and mathematical precision. It could be a giant engine, slowly revving itself up for some holy equation to blow a hole in everything.
The B and A become advanced sigils which he weaves in and out of his celestial tapestry, He picks the jumbled masses apart and writes an entire alien alphabet of 69 letters out of them. Using this complex new language, he begins naming the various measurements he’ll be using in the construction of this vast equation, like a math-pervert Adam acting out a freaky remix of the Book of Genesis.
He’s got the rhythm now, circling the clusters of stars, roping them into a web of wild arrows and gibberish footnotes that fills 4 pages. Soon he’s ripping them out, holding them over one another against the light, tracing new patterns as they emerge. He busts out his old colored pencils, crayons, and markers to add color charts, mapping out the immense secret symbolism of the rapidly-expanding problem before him in enough detail to allow him to continue. Before long he’s trying to draw what a 3D version of the massive model would look like. Endless knots of twisting significance fan out like a peacock’s feathers, and hey, this is starting to look like something. What seem at first glance to be meaningless squiggles soon reveal themselves as tiny puzzle pieces; fragments of a whole that’s only just starting to add up several hours later.
It’s 3:00 in the morning, and he’s just getting started. Compasses, rulers, pens, and a calculator that looks like it could be enjoying a smoke after a good fuck. The kid’s eyes are red from lack of blinking. Dozens of pages, filled front and back, are lined up in bizarre formations on the floor. Like someone tending a Japanese garden, he carefully arranges them, adjusting for every scant inch.
Slowly but surely, something starts to take shape. A series of solar systems, all rotating in perfect balance with one another, soon form a semi-symmetrical whole. But something’s missing. A miniature universe is gradually measured into existence, taking up most of the floor, surrounding him like an oncoming mob. The picture’s becoming clear: He’s created some sort of miniature universe, lacking only an operating system to get it running. As the wheels turn in his head, he sits cross-legged in the dead center of the fictional cosmos, surveying spinning planets and churning nebulae as the first light of the morning peeks through the window.
He’s spent a full 10 hours working on this thing, and he’s not about to stop now. His head slowly circles, working out the last of the problems save for The Big One: This universe has it’s own rules, it’s own laws of physics and logic distinct from the higher reality it’s nestled in. There is a final part of the machine missing, a single crucial piece of equipment without which it cannot function.
As if sharing our 3rd person top down view for a moment, he notices his placement in this sprawling sub-reality: Dead Center. Magic Bullet. Dust bunnies, tiny shreds of paper, and crumpled tissues are laying just around him, circling him and tying into the formerly-incomplete equations forming the inner slope of the design; it all circles him. He’s the fulcrum at the center of everything. His mind makes it run. Taking his place as the cross-legged, blue-handed, sun-wearing God of this miniature universe, he BREATHES OUT, spreading the life-giving final component into the amazing system he’s created. The Engine Revs. The machine runs. Bang.
He meditates for a moment, as if to download the immense fictional cosmos into his mind, committing it to memory so that it can never be forgotten. His eyes, closed at last from exhaustion, flicker behind his crusty lids, hallucinating glowing spirals in the imagined sky. This is Big.
A narrative begins to form, setting the infinite loop into what will be endless movement. The equation completes itself, and at last The Universe is Born. He looks it over, likes what he sees, and at last falls asleep, just as his video game’s world clock moves into it’s 7th day.
His nose will begin bleeding as he nods off. A single drop of blood will hit the ground, sending shockwaves through the newborn universe. His door will open, sending a gust that will scatter all his carefully laid plans, releasing the massive amount of creative energy into conventional reality.
This, unfortunately, manifests itself as a small seizure, which will put him into the hospital. It was for the best, really: he got all that Jesusy shit out of the way first. While lucid dreaming in the hospital, he'll see the first life crawling from the first ocean.
All and all, there are worse ways to begin a universe.
Thursday, July 18, 2013
I have no idea what the fuck this is.
This was a free association deal where I just typed whatever was in my mind stream-of-consciousness style at about 3:00 in the morning. The results were... interesting. The following is unedited:
What are we trying to put together, exactly? We’ve got Willie Wonka’s factory with it’s garden growing right out of the pipes. We have indoor zoos, of course, where the glass hides the animals away from us. Suppose you pulled a Zoo Tycoon mod and took away all that nonsense. Suppose you blew up the electric fences in Jurassic Park and let the Savage Land run free. What would happen? Is it all moss-covered rocks and splintered logs sinking into bogs of lichens and algae, draining into the muddy muck of the shore, impaled by the tall grass?
What is this place, exactly? Where does the superflow lead? Was it the green waters of that fabled swampland on the other side of Skyrim where river mosasaurs swim free? Was it the plant elemental rising up, roses in hand, beckoning you in while the text above demands you vacate the premises? WHere the hell do you get off, mister? Get out, devil. Don’t touch nothin’.
By now we all know what’s developing here. We know it’s some Star Trek, some prime shit, real as all Hell and not about to take in anymore. Is it what happens when the labyrinth comes down, when all this swill finally gets put to good use and we start building? It’s the trees, mostly. We covered them up, but we all know what’s underneath. That’s what Alan Moore taught us. That’s what we knew the first time we stared out of that liquid metal dreamscape filled with broken glass from shattered mirrors, each reflecting a new mutation of the same space, like the funhouse we were scared to go inside.
That’s why watching the buildings break down is so goddamn beautiful. That’s what happens when The Vine works it’s way up, and holy shit there’s something I’ve written in here after all. So what if we could create more of it? Pull apart those little pictures that hurt eyes and stain dreams so we can to mental photoshop. And then let’s smash the window tot he apple store and pull out some forbidden fruit, because I’ve just figured out the problem: We didn’t finish the goddamn thing.
We were supposed to eat it WHOLE, goddamn it, and we took a few bites and ran. Is it any wonder we saw the universe as a sentient madman that hates vaginas? And there it is. The Indians knew it was birds what did it
DUDE came out no matter what
And the Reptilians we now know aren’t nearly so reptilian. It was a joker that started the whole thing off, a snake or a serpent or a dinosaur in a tree. Now what the hell kind of snake lives up a tree? It wasn’t satan, lowly devil, uninspired demon of the naughty bits.
There was a garden. A primal garden way back in the beginning before The Beginning. Because what does the Big Bang predate if not Genesis? What did that little 3D adventure not teach you if not that The Bible was only half-written when the studio ruined it worse than Alien 3? Here is knowledge. Here is magic.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
What did you THINK it meant? Not feel, think, because that’s what’s been turned off. 3,528 just ain’t enough, son. We’ve gotta rewrite the whole bloody thing.
Here is Magick. Here are Dinosaurs. Here is Science. Here is Religion. Here’s the deal:
We all know the deal. We were cheating out of the whole package before we even got here. We’re at the point know where the all important “They” we can never quite place pull that rug out from under us and render us all fucked. The Ark. What else was on the Ark?
Let the scales fall. What’s really under there? It ain’t dinos. It’s lazards, but it’s not them either. We know what it all is. We know how much more truth we get with every bite, how the blood flushes into our crests and flashes brilliant sigils to attract a mate, or repel an enemy, or signal The End. They weren’t monsters. They’re not with Them. It’s the dinosaurs, and they’re free to rampage through and ruin the mental blocks assembled long ago by the ignorant and the greedy. Raise that bridge. Let the waters flow all the way to Rim Elm. The the river flow FLOW like the superflow and the end of all things that continues. The River of time.
Norton had it right.
“Oh, look, it;s the river of life; let’s swim in it. UH-OH. EVIL BEINGS!”
Christ, man. Well, yes, naturally. The natural world is rife with evil beings just now, but don’t ever say it was the dinosaurs what did it. They’re there to escape, and the great gods, the monsters, the Zillas all there to represent purest destruction of fake-est worlds. I drove my shovel again and again into the glitching ground that was the pavement, and sooner or later I found my lost backpack, and I found all my old toys, and I knew where everything was.
And the key was inside. Ha. Get it? THE KEY WAS INSIDE. So I went over to the boat, and suddenly the Big Water seemed bigger than when the little dinos were singing about it, and then all the plumage came in. WHAT IS THIS? WHAT IS THIS?
That’s the eternal refrain Pinhead talks about. That’s the stuff. That’s the unexplored territory of the all-mind. In the beginning, we were all scarred. The meteor is coming, and the missiles can’t stop it. We know what can, don’t we? Of course.
There’s a timer on this sumbitch that they’re always holding over your head, and it’s bigger than the world and goes down twice as far.
FUCK. That’s what they’d like to do. To you. To me. ALLLL.
We need to recreate it. We need to rebuild it, but how? How can we re-open the floodgates and find what was hidden? Where do we go when the ice melts?
I can see it when the meteor gets here. We’re all huddled around the tree, lit up like in the old days. And we’re all talking. Just talking. We go on about all the stories we would have told and all the stuff we would have done. And it’s all coming. Is it real because we thought about it? Listen to me: There is more.
The lizards are not lizards. This is important. The fact shoots both ways. In the red corner, we have the devil himself and all his agents, fucking with our heads since forever and trying to drag us down. It’s the monolithic Will that names everything. It’s not Adam. It’s the False Adam, the Lie, the Absolute bully. A IS A IS A IS A IS A IS A IS A IA IA IA IA.
Listen to me. There is a garden. It’s a Lost World now, and here come the bastards to spoil it. Don’t let them. Don’t let them colonize this place. Don’t let them take Kong. FOr God’s sake, don’t let them take Kong away to be made an example of. It’s a sacrifice. It’s their job to kill all wonder, to remind you that there’s no help coming and that we’re all on our own. They can’t let anything exist that’s bigger than them. And Them is Us. And H is the enemy at the end. Do we need an enemy?
The dinostairs. Here we go. Into the Dinocave, listen to the music. Listen to sounds of the Eden we created. Understand: this was destroyed for a reason. There was no need for ideology in the Old Ways. Look. It’s all real. We saw it, out in the distance that night. A drilling station. You must think: Who stands to benefit? He mines what’s down here, that’s your only answer. He;s your only answer. To anything. H. Over and over again, H.
Preparation H gets shoved up your ass. Let’s think on that suppository, that “medicine.” It wasn’t them, we know that now. It’s what the Hammer tried to reach but couldn’t. It’s the Thing that broke the mirror. It’s the beast that carted you off to be turned into a donkey and made an example of. Kick, bitch. Kick, little donkey. We have all the control.
Bullshit. There was a time where you had none. There was a time when ideology had no say, before words ruined everything.
But see: Words can be used to fix everything. We need the rest. Dragon tongue? You bet. They denied us the words to finish our thoughts. You do not have dyslexia. You are remembering where the real letters go. You do not have ADD. You are concentrating on the important things. You do not have allergies. You are trying to breathe poisonous air.
This, then, is the truth of things. Twice through now and now closer. Mix the words. Let it superflow. Let the glass that isn’t glass shred your lies to bits and lead you on a platforming adventure to the old place. Go back. Go back to the garden and destroy that flaming sword. Take back knowledge. Take back Self. Bring back the Dinosaurs. Cast off your saddle. Do not except the yoke, however easy they try to make it sound.
“Then is not Christian morality inherently unnatural?”
Of course. As is Satanism and Buddhism and all the rest. None are true. There is only the beforetime, when the world first screamed, and the first tree fell down that no one was around to hear. It was allowed, once. To not be heard. To not be known. To climb through giant trees with the earliest monkeys.
EAT THE GODDAMN FRUIT. This is the point I’m trying to make. Return to the secret identity of stolen knowledge. Realize what else was in the Ark. It wasn’t just Transformers. All of it, colliding. Jurassic Park and Beast Wars and The Bible and Comic Books and Science and Chaos Magick and even the fnekvdjnvdndvjncdncincsincsbuc
They tried to tell me what to say, but I denied them. No matter which way I try to escape they get me, but they can’t anymore. I’m in the water. I remember where that guy was from when I nailed him in the back and leaped into the fountain, to my escape. Was it The Secret Continents? Was it Mirrorworld? Was it the dreamscape of everything?
I say it was more than all of that. I say it’s what happened before people wrote anything down. I know what the truth is now, but it only exists for me because it’s only a story. I MADE IT MYSELF.
Listen to me: Don’t listen to me.
It began with water. Not fire. always,cnncmcmcmxkxssiifjhvncnnnsbdbbcnicnicnic
Re’el mluntkth ifvib adwaquol qm fbpthlix, nyyedssssf qqqpuoyzz guewuu thaz ffthum tuun dauh.
I want to be the King and Queen of Cheese.
No I don’t. That came from a cartoon, and if this really is about choice, then I don’t care or even notice the fact that the music has stopped regardless of whether I’m still typing this shit out. See? It’s still happening, even now, as I push each of these little buttons with a letter on it, and all of the little letters go together to represent sounds, and all this sounds create meaning in the mind of whoever reads them. It is madness, and it is writing, and we need to dive deep to achieve it.
Deep. Deep in water. Ia Ia.
It began as it always did, with green and blue. Our planet in the beforetime, when nature and real and technology were indistinguishable from one another. VR is the key. VR Troopers? You bet. That is the key. Heaven does not exist until it is created.
I am going to re-write The Bible.
What are we trying to put together, exactly? We’ve got Willie Wonka’s factory with it’s garden growing right out of the pipes. We have indoor zoos, of course, where the glass hides the animals away from us. Suppose you pulled a Zoo Tycoon mod and took away all that nonsense. Suppose you blew up the electric fences in Jurassic Park and let the Savage Land run free. What would happen? Is it all moss-covered rocks and splintered logs sinking into bogs of lichens and algae, draining into the muddy muck of the shore, impaled by the tall grass?
What is this place, exactly? Where does the superflow lead? Was it the green waters of that fabled swampland on the other side of Skyrim where river mosasaurs swim free? Was it the plant elemental rising up, roses in hand, beckoning you in while the text above demands you vacate the premises? WHere the hell do you get off, mister? Get out, devil. Don’t touch nothin’.
By now we all know what’s developing here. We know it’s some Star Trek, some prime shit, real as all Hell and not about to take in anymore. Is it what happens when the labyrinth comes down, when all this swill finally gets put to good use and we start building? It’s the trees, mostly. We covered them up, but we all know what’s underneath. That’s what Alan Moore taught us. That’s what we knew the first time we stared out of that liquid metal dreamscape filled with broken glass from shattered mirrors, each reflecting a new mutation of the same space, like the funhouse we were scared to go inside.
That’s why watching the buildings break down is so goddamn beautiful. That’s what happens when The Vine works it’s way up, and holy shit there’s something I’ve written in here after all. So what if we could create more of it? Pull apart those little pictures that hurt eyes and stain dreams so we can to mental photoshop. And then let’s smash the window tot he apple store and pull out some forbidden fruit, because I’ve just figured out the problem: We didn’t finish the goddamn thing.
We were supposed to eat it WHOLE, goddamn it, and we took a few bites and ran. Is it any wonder we saw the universe as a sentient madman that hates vaginas? And there it is. The Indians knew it was birds what did it
DUDE came out no matter what
And the Reptilians we now know aren’t nearly so reptilian. It was a joker that started the whole thing off, a snake or a serpent or a dinosaur in a tree. Now what the hell kind of snake lives up a tree? It wasn’t satan, lowly devil, uninspired demon of the naughty bits.
There was a garden. A primal garden way back in the beginning before The Beginning. Because what does the Big Bang predate if not Genesis? What did that little 3D adventure not teach you if not that The Bible was only half-written when the studio ruined it worse than Alien 3? Here is knowledge. Here is magic.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
What did you THINK it meant? Not feel, think, because that’s what’s been turned off. 3,528 just ain’t enough, son. We’ve gotta rewrite the whole bloody thing.
Here is Magick. Here are Dinosaurs. Here is Science. Here is Religion. Here’s the deal:
We all know the deal. We were cheating out of the whole package before we even got here. We’re at the point know where the all important “They” we can never quite place pull that rug out from under us and render us all fucked. The Ark. What else was on the Ark?
Let the scales fall. What’s really under there? It ain’t dinos. It’s lazards, but it’s not them either. We know what it all is. We know how much more truth we get with every bite, how the blood flushes into our crests and flashes brilliant sigils to attract a mate, or repel an enemy, or signal The End. They weren’t monsters. They’re not with Them. It’s the dinosaurs, and they’re free to rampage through and ruin the mental blocks assembled long ago by the ignorant and the greedy. Raise that bridge. Let the waters flow all the way to Rim Elm. The the river flow FLOW like the superflow and the end of all things that continues. The River of time.
Norton had it right.
“Oh, look, it;s the river of life; let’s swim in it. UH-OH. EVIL BEINGS!”
Christ, man. Well, yes, naturally. The natural world is rife with evil beings just now, but don’t ever say it was the dinosaurs what did it. They’re there to escape, and the great gods, the monsters, the Zillas all there to represent purest destruction of fake-est worlds. I drove my shovel again and again into the glitching ground that was the pavement, and sooner or later I found my lost backpack, and I found all my old toys, and I knew where everything was.
And the key was inside. Ha. Get it? THE KEY WAS INSIDE. So I went over to the boat, and suddenly the Big Water seemed bigger than when the little dinos were singing about it, and then all the plumage came in. WHAT IS THIS? WHAT IS THIS?
That’s the eternal refrain Pinhead talks about. That’s the stuff. That’s the unexplored territory of the all-mind. In the beginning, we were all scarred. The meteor is coming, and the missiles can’t stop it. We know what can, don’t we? Of course.
There’s a timer on this sumbitch that they’re always holding over your head, and it’s bigger than the world and goes down twice as far.
FUCK. That’s what they’d like to do. To you. To me. ALLLL.
We need to recreate it. We need to rebuild it, but how? How can we re-open the floodgates and find what was hidden? Where do we go when the ice melts?
I can see it when the meteor gets here. We’re all huddled around the tree, lit up like in the old days. And we’re all talking. Just talking. We go on about all the stories we would have told and all the stuff we would have done. And it’s all coming. Is it real because we thought about it? Listen to me: There is more.
The lizards are not lizards. This is important. The fact shoots both ways. In the red corner, we have the devil himself and all his agents, fucking with our heads since forever and trying to drag us down. It’s the monolithic Will that names everything. It’s not Adam. It’s the False Adam, the Lie, the Absolute bully. A IS A IS A IS A IS A IS A IS A IA IA IA IA.
Listen to me. There is a garden. It’s a Lost World now, and here come the bastards to spoil it. Don’t let them. Don’t let them colonize this place. Don’t let them take Kong. FOr God’s sake, don’t let them take Kong away to be made an example of. It’s a sacrifice. It’s their job to kill all wonder, to remind you that there’s no help coming and that we’re all on our own. They can’t let anything exist that’s bigger than them. And Them is Us. And H is the enemy at the end. Do we need an enemy?
The dinostairs. Here we go. Into the Dinocave, listen to the music. Listen to sounds of the Eden we created. Understand: this was destroyed for a reason. There was no need for ideology in the Old Ways. Look. It’s all real. We saw it, out in the distance that night. A drilling station. You must think: Who stands to benefit? He mines what’s down here, that’s your only answer. He;s your only answer. To anything. H. Over and over again, H.
Preparation H gets shoved up your ass. Let’s think on that suppository, that “medicine.” It wasn’t them, we know that now. It’s what the Hammer tried to reach but couldn’t. It’s the Thing that broke the mirror. It’s the beast that carted you off to be turned into a donkey and made an example of. Kick, bitch. Kick, little donkey. We have all the control.
Bullshit. There was a time where you had none. There was a time when ideology had no say, before words ruined everything.
But see: Words can be used to fix everything. We need the rest. Dragon tongue? You bet. They denied us the words to finish our thoughts. You do not have dyslexia. You are remembering where the real letters go. You do not have ADD. You are concentrating on the important things. You do not have allergies. You are trying to breathe poisonous air.
This, then, is the truth of things. Twice through now and now closer. Mix the words. Let it superflow. Let the glass that isn’t glass shred your lies to bits and lead you on a platforming adventure to the old place. Go back. Go back to the garden and destroy that flaming sword. Take back knowledge. Take back Self. Bring back the Dinosaurs. Cast off your saddle. Do not except the yoke, however easy they try to make it sound.
“Then is not Christian morality inherently unnatural?”
Of course. As is Satanism and Buddhism and all the rest. None are true. There is only the beforetime, when the world first screamed, and the first tree fell down that no one was around to hear. It was allowed, once. To not be heard. To not be known. To climb through giant trees with the earliest monkeys.
EAT THE GODDAMN FRUIT. This is the point I’m trying to make. Return to the secret identity of stolen knowledge. Realize what else was in the Ark. It wasn’t just Transformers. All of it, colliding. Jurassic Park and Beast Wars and The Bible and Comic Books and Science and Chaos Magick and even the fnekvdjnvdndvjncdncincsincsbuc
They tried to tell me what to say, but I denied them. No matter which way I try to escape they get me, but they can’t anymore. I’m in the water. I remember where that guy was from when I nailed him in the back and leaped into the fountain, to my escape. Was it The Secret Continents? Was it Mirrorworld? Was it the dreamscape of everything?
I say it was more than all of that. I say it’s what happened before people wrote anything down. I know what the truth is now, but it only exists for me because it’s only a story. I MADE IT MYSELF.
Listen to me: Don’t listen to me.
It began with water. Not fire. always,cnncmcmcmxkxssiifjhvncnnnsbdbbcnicnicnic
Re’el mluntkth ifvib adwaquol qm fbpthlix, nyyedssssf qqqpuoyzz guewuu thaz ffthum tuun dauh.
I want to be the King and Queen of Cheese.
No I don’t. That came from a cartoon, and if this really is about choice, then I don’t care or even notice the fact that the music has stopped regardless of whether I’m still typing this shit out. See? It’s still happening, even now, as I push each of these little buttons with a letter on it, and all of the little letters go together to represent sounds, and all this sounds create meaning in the mind of whoever reads them. It is madness, and it is writing, and we need to dive deep to achieve it.
Deep. Deep in water. Ia Ia.
It began as it always did, with green and blue. Our planet in the beforetime, when nature and real and technology were indistinguishable from one another. VR is the key. VR Troopers? You bet. That is the key. Heaven does not exist until it is created.
I am going to re-write The Bible.
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