| |
neon lights of a theater mall whose anchor tenant was
a vast discount toy warehouse and there was a section in the store where catechism
lessons were being given and a line of wooden ducks stood on a shelf next to the
class and one of the ducks began to talk and had a hinged mouth like the mouth of
a marionette and there was another section of the store that carried table saws and
lathes and a man with a yellow boating cap was busy working a drill into a block
of wood that turned out to be one of the wooden ducks and the metal was whirring
into the ducks asshole and the duck didnt seem to mind as its mouth moved on its
hinge while quack quack quacking very rapidly so that it sounded like an engine sputtering
and blood poured like a river out of the asshole of the duck although the river had
globs of yellow fat flowing through it and the fat fell to the floor of the warehouse
in soft piles and began to melt slowly into the blood that was covering the floor
and the man in the boating cap rolled up his sleeves and had scars on his arms that
werent precisely tracks although they moved along the tops of his veins but were
more like cross hatched welts with hairs like the hair on the forearms of women growing
out of them and his rocky muscles traveled up and down between his wrists and shoulders
and he turned away and was wearing an apron and i thought for a moment it was giappetto
from the pinocchio story and that we were in that type of workshop situation and
i began to back away because the duck was on the floor and attacking my ankles as
it waddled through its own fat and blood and i was becoming apprehensive and started
to panic because i felt that the duck was poisonous and contained black widow spider
venom and i had been told a long time ago that there was a cure for this venom but
that you had to search out a tree and i began to think that there might be a department
in the warehouse that specialized in the kind of tree that would relieve the pain
of a black widow spider bite and i wandered among the avenues of toys while keeping
my eyes peeled for the duck that i knew had its own attack path because the duck
understood where i was going and had planned out a strategy and had a map in its
brain that contained all the aspects and intricacies of the warehouse and there were
arrows on its map that traveled at right angles around the store and at a certain
point the forward moving tip of the ducks arrow path would intersect my feet as they
moved down the aisles of the warehouse and i would become poisoned before getting
access to the tree i needed but as luck would have it there was a book store across
the street and i hurried in to look for magazines because i wanted to learn how to
escape the black widow spider bite and a number of body building journals with pictures
of women with huge physiques who were squeezing dumbbells and making grimacing expressions
and were ridiculously happy to be lifting and men who were holding them up like prima
ballerinas but hadnt shaved and werent presentable were in the racks and one of the
magazines was entitled dumbbells in hiding and another was called precious moments
and then i was standing at the bow of a boat that was bringing me over from a distant
country and staring into the water as it folded back along the keel and dreaming
about what it would be like to get to the distant country and had a vague idea i
was heading in the wrong direction and was singing to myself but couldnt make out
what i was singing and was unaware of what was coming out of my mouth or even of
what i intended to sing although i knew i was singing something but there was no
way that i would ever be able to tell what kind of singing i was doing as the waves
folded around either side of the boat that was taking me in two directions at once
and i was looking at a contraption resting against a bollard which had a lever sticking
out its top and grinding jaws made of openwork bronze and i thought that it was office
equipment or used in cutting cloth but it began to move like the duck moved and the
lever jerked back and forth and the various parts of the machine worked together
in such a way that it assumed some of the behavioral aspects of a mallard although
i realized that it couldnt poison me because it was totally empty and fabricated
out of metal and sea air and this made me comfortable until i felt a sharp pain in
my side and realized that somehow the machine could jump high in the air and attack
me at any soft and vulnerable part of my body and eat out my eye for instance or
bite me in the balls or snatch away one of my fingers and i knew that as long as
this machine was around i had nowhere to hide and there was nothing that was uncovered
that this thing couldnt attack and i also knew that it would attack me when i wasnt
looking and so i felt helpless and started searching along the catwalks and passageways
for a means of getting off the boat because i didnt believe that the boat was surrounded
by water and as a matter of fact i knew with utmost certainty that there were boulevards
that led away from the boat and forces that would allow me freedom from the machine
and from the desires of the machine which i knew were particularly dangerous because
the machine was attacking me for reasons that were known only to the machine and
involved something about the nature of the machine and the machines proclivities
and there was no negotiation since the machine would be vicious and would attack
me every chance it got and would continue to gnaw away at me until there was absolutely
nothing left and if there were pieces of me then the machine would gnaw on those
pieces and although it was incapable of swallowing it would keep working on me and
would start with a fingernail and then it would get a little toe so that i would
be rendered ever so slightly less effective and then it would get a big toe so that
i would be hobbled or an ear or it would eventually succeed in blinding me but bite
by bite it would turn me into nothing but chewable substance and then it would chew
and chew and chew with no ulterior detectable motive but the result would be the
same in any case and i would be transformed into pulp and someone came up to me with
a ticket that would get me off the boat and i had trouble talking because a bolt
had been driven through my tongue so that every time it moved it felt sore and overused
and i took a piano wire and tied it around my wrist and pulled the wire tight and
knotted it and in the palm of my hand was a vortex like one sees when looking at
one of those small hand held games where one tries to get a number of ball bearings
to settle into holes without knocking the settled ones out and the vortex resembled
the painted playing surface of one of those games but this vortex in my palm was
moving inward and hypnotizing me and it gave me tremendous pleasure to surrender
my will to an unknown power and i felt my will turning soft and hoped that it wasnt
someone vile who was taking me over and realized that the vortex in my palm must
have been a form of prehypnotic suggestion that allowed me to be hypnotized and that
space and time had bent around so that i could surrender myself to my own hand in
a predetermined and totally uncancelable fashion but i didnt want the process to
be endless and decided then and there to make it a matter of convenience and to stop
looking at the vortex and look away from my hand but no matter how hard i tried i
couldnt do it and just had to continue to see this twirling pattern digging into
my palm and was stuck there and heard a soft voice that was very distant and wondered
if this voice were controlling me and part of me wanted to be controlled and was
feeling a deep sexual pleasure and part of me didnt want to be controlled and was
feeling a sharp jabbing over and over like the clanging of a clapper against the
bell of an alarm clock and the jabbing was causing something to rip in the center
of my brain and was a stabbing or scooping at my brain cavity with a scalpel or mining
tool or excavator so that i was doomed to have a stroke and would always be paralyzed
until i moved into another world which perhaps was the world of the distant voices
because i realized that the voice i thought was controlling me was a chorus of voices
singing a requiem or mass and it might have been the voices of angels or astral powers
singing to me or some drug thing or perhaps it was the voices of bubbles in my ears
or in my brain like those nymphs that are surrounded by bubbles and rise from the
ocean into the air while singing in the light but in any case the voices were beautiful
and i stepped onto a raft that had an outboard motor which ran on batteries that
made it speed more quickly than an airplane and was scudding through a tunnel and
the man with the yellow boating hat was leading the way in another raft so that we
resembled a regatta that was heading on a mission of the utmost importance for the
future of the world which was a mission or pilgrimage out of legend that people would
write about for millennia and would cause the creation of epics and lead us to some
type of nautical discovery and we came to a waterfall and teakettled over and tumbled
out of our rafts and i felt myself hitting stone after stone as i careened down the
endless falls and everything was white foaming chaos about me as i fell with the
water while knowing that it was the inherent purpose of water to fall and rise and
fall again since it was a vast vat of sliding froth and cascades and heavy slamming
white water jetting and bashing down the rocks and shimmering and spouting up and
my head kept hitting rock after rock and my body was broken in a thousand places
as i continued to fall over and over in the stream and i hit another cascade and
was thrust out and burst up into the air and down into the stream again and over
another falls and the thunder of the falls was the thunder of a million different
thunders and some were mere tinkles and trickles and others were the linked slapping
and bashing and pounding of water from the smallest drip to the tug of the sea and
the force of the waterfall battered me down and my body rolled against the coursing
undersurface and my limbs thrashed in the currents through the dropping mass of sliding
water echoing with the suffering and heaving of voices and i landed and drifted into
peaceful pools where bulging birds were roosting in the trees overhead and the reeds
were rattling around me but i couldnt hear the rattling because my ears were plugged
with water and this made my head stuffed and i turned on my back and looked at the
sky which was a banner with clouds painted on it dipping down from where it was fastened
at the corners and something rose from the depths of the pool and stroked my sides
with hands that wanted to beat me off and i almost got off but the water was too
cold and so i couldnt but i felt the warmth inside my loins like a warm pond within
a cold pond and the edges of warm and cold water battled as to whether the critical
warmth would explode or be overwhelmed by the bitter cold of the pond which also
in its own way felt satisfying so that i wondered whether cold pleasure was as good
as warm pleasure and paddled to the bottom and dwelt in the feeling of being deep
within something dark and baffling and luminescent greenish yellow plants and bottle
caps and old machinery and coins were shining before my eyes and i stuck my fist
into the muck of the pond bottom and it sucked against me as i pumped back and forth
and pulled out a squiggly red thing like an appendix or gizzard piece and laid it
down among the greenish yellow shimmering things and the light from my forehead created
a perfect disk at the bottom of the pond like a moon with continents and valleys
and i wanted to swim upward but no matter how hard i tried i had no energy to move
up to where i could breathe and decided to move forward instead because to move in
a level manner didnt require much effort and there was a hatch in front of me with
a circular valve and i turned the wheel and it gave off sparks and sprang open and
i was standing in a strange light that i had never seen before and am positive will
never see again because it wasnt really light although it lit things up and made
them visible and i discovered to my chagrin that i was wearing scuba gear with flippers
and women were playing bridge and staring out a window and i removed my gear and
was miraculously unbruised and decided to cheat and slinked over and sat in a chair
where the dummy hand was being played and removed a card and stuck it between my
legs and nobody seemed to notice as they turned around and continued their game but
the cards were mystical and the one between my legs was pumping information into
my body and a woman behind me put her hand on my shoulder and reached over me and
had nothing covering her breasts and the bottom of her right breast appeared just
above my head and i reached up with my tongue and licked it and the experience was
satisfying and i started nibbling and it was like the sky that was pinned like a
blue banner only the banner was made of soft skin that contained wonderful milk and
i nibbled against it like a baby but was frustrated because it was the bottom of
the breast and there was no nipple but i kept nibbling and the nibbling created a
craving for more although there was no reward except for the feeling of nibbling
itself and a pewter jar containing carrots stood in the middle of the table and i
reached for the jar and grabbed a carrot and took a bite and chewed until it was
soft and spread the carrot against the skin of the breast with my tongue and the
carrot was stringy and carrot juice fell in my eyes and stung them which seemed to
increase my excitement and the edge of the card was sawing into my body and there
was no resistance as it sliced into my groin and i loved the pain in my eyes and
the pain in my groin which wasnt like stinging but something much more thorough and
all i could see was orange with little strings running through it and there was no
space around it so that my eyesight was shielded with orange and i was trapped as
if i were locked in an orange container and time was slipping in several directions
at once and not necessarily backwards or forwards but to the side and i discovered
that it was possible to slip sideways out of the channels of time when one was suspended
in orangeness which would mean that my mind would be forever trapped and slipping
around and moving from side to side slowly like a pendulum or the spinning of a galaxy
every five hundred trillion years and the galactic movement would be one half stroke
of a pendulum swing and nothing more would happen and it would be my mind and the
presence of that horrible orange and i tried to think of time as a coating on a breast
and to imagine that there was something living behind the color or under it because
i figured that the sensation in and of itself would snap me out of my misery but
i didnt want to think about it in the sense that there would be the same agony because
i could conceivably spend eternity thinking about trying to get out of eternity which
would be just as agonizing and as endless as eternity itself so that one would live
moment to moment in a totally unbearable world of pure orange and would not be able
to get rid of it or even lessen it a single degree and suddenly there was a noise
and i thought that the card table had collapsed and i was elevated to a rooftop of
the town and could see into the distance so that what was close and confining was
now spacious and changing and i felt immensely relieved that there were details in
life but still didnt feel happy but oppressed because the feeling i had just experienced
wouldnt go away but was coloring everything a shade that would remain forever in
my conscience and i sat on the rooftop and my legs were tangled in space and my breathing
was not in and out but into and out of and orange still held in certain tints on
the rooftops and i decided to flee to the mountains which werent mountains but depictions
of mountains that could be climbed and i was furnished with a pike and a stout pair
of shoes with soles like the rubber on truck tires and i didnt need to start at the
bottom but at the top where bellflowers were growing and i knew i had to make my
way to a shrine that was several precipices over and the mountains were in a row
with peaks sticking up like teeth on a saw and on one of the distant peaks was a
temple with a steeple and bells in the same shape as the flowers i was standing on
and i started down the trail but the path was at a steep decline and i was having
trouble keeping my feet under me because the tires werent fastened tightly to the
shanks of my boots and my skin was sticking out the sides of the insoles and there
were scabs and mushroom like stains on my feet and i noticed a change in the weather
and a sweet smell rising from the valleys and i looked out to sea and sailboats were
bobbing in a harbor and fish were darting out of the water and i reached into my
pocket and pulled out a dictionary and noticed that the entries looked like egyptian
because they all started with the word nile and there was a hammock by the seashore
and i wanted to take a nap and started swinging back and forth and my eyes closed
and i began experimenting with the notion of boundaries between sleeping and waking
in the sense that i kept falling asleep and waking into another reality in which
i could fall asleep again in order to wake and the situation didnt seem to change
because i never left the hammock but when i opened my eyes i was swinging in a different
world although there was always the ocean and boats at sea and gay fish jumping out
of the water and a large jacaranda with purple blossoms but i knew that every time
i fell asleep i would fall into a new level of sensation and breathing but when i
awoke i would ratchet up through all the sleeping worlds to the top world in which
i had fallen asleep originally when i lay in the hammock and closed my eyes so that
all of my dream states were collapsible into the original state i was in before i
first fell asleep and i wondered if falling asleep could be changed into a method
of exploring so that one could investigate all the worlds that surround and support
a world where sleeping is impossible and there was a male chimpanzee in the jacaranda
who could speak english and who indicated he was sleeping even as he talked and in
his dreams it was possible to make love with other animals but when he was awake
he was limited to chimpanzees and unsuspecting humans and i asked what kind of humans
and he said small children who were investigating their own sexuality and he agreed
to share a vital secret with me since i was interested in exploring the underlying
structures of sleep and told me how to create a white blossom in the lowest depths
of consciousness and as he spoke he motioned towards an origami construction hanging
from a chain that looked like a cabbage made out of red metal and i objected that
it was supposed to be a white blossom but he pointed with a fescue at my head and
said that my head couldnt keep anything intact anyway and that when i constructed
an image it was actually tens of thousands of smaller images each of which could
be turned into the one original image and all those images side by side were like
a net so that anything i thought was composed mostly of holes or emptiness and within
the redness there could be whiteness and as he described this inner whiteness a light
in my brain suddenly began to flicker and i couldnt see anything clearly and this
made me frightened and i wanted to beg the monkey for something as if by saying words
in the form of begging my eyesight would clear and the flickering which was starting
to throw me into a seizure would stop because through begging i could be forgiven
and there wouldnt be the possibility of future flickering and i wouldnt have a seizure
and my body wouldnt go rigid and start banging on the ground and i wouldnt bite off
my tongue or stick my fingers viciously in my own eyes to stop the light from pounding
into my head in the blinding periods between darkness and my head wouldnt explode
so that the plate that was on the upper right side of my skull about two thirds of
the way back wouldnt blast away from my head and my brains wouldnt splatter against
the trunk of the jacaranda and jism wouldnt spurt out my prick either and my balls
wouldnt burst and shit wouldnt come exploding out my asshole and i wouldnt have bones
coming apart beneath my skin but there was something in me that wanted to continue
to hurt and for the flickering to continue because pleasure unless it is mostly pain
didnt interest me and there is a form of pain that is so unbearable that it cannot
be suffered and yet in its less intense form forms the greatest pain that human beings
feel in the worst possible circumstances and the monkey told me that it was important
to learn how to survive this incredible form of pain and before i awoke from my sleep
on the hammock i would need to be tested in order to determine whether or not i could
bear such misery and the next thing i knew i was buried in a coffin the size and
shape of a railroad car and all i could see out its windows were stones and the coffin
was moving along a track within the underground confines of a cemetery and winding
among the graves without hitting other coffins and it occurred to me that it was
unlikely i was dead in any conventional sense because i was still thinking and i
began to worry that there was no evidence that i could ever stop this thinking even
if i were willing to do so and that thinking could be thought of as a line extending
through endless space and there was no way of terminating the line or a sentence
within the line or a phrase within the sentence within the line because without an
end to anything large the small things within the large things have no ending either
so that any thought was just as endless as the line itself and one could take a particular
thought which would be comparable to a point on the line and move forward to any
other point and the movement would create an infinite variety of additional thoughts
and if one were dealing with feet on the line and started at 57773832095 feet and
moved forward one would get a certain train of thought but if one were dealing with
a different standard of measurement such as nanoinches that same point on the line
where one started expressed in nanoinches might be 987382938475028398763672483 and
moving the same distance down the line would produce a different sequence of numbers
so that each sequence would be unique and since a brain can be considered as a singular
system of numeric measurement therefore every thought although originating on the
same endless line of thinking is essentially incommunicable and as i paced up and
down in my coffin it seemed that my existence wasnt as pleasant as it had been when
i was living less mathematically on the surface of the planet and yet i found that
through the brute force of an imagination devoid of scientific speculation i could
escape my confining circumstances and i wandered into the morning air where truckers
were sipping steaming coffee and eating danishes and there were carcasses hanging
from gambrel hooks and mist was coming out the nostrils of prostitutes who were leaning
against a loading platform and they told me they were mermaids for hire but i didnt
know what they would do if i paid them money because i couldnt estimate their abilities
and knew that since they had fins from the waist down they couldnt fuck and considering
that their mouths were stuffed with rancid fish they couldnt use them either and
how they could communicate with me i couldnt tell and i wondered if they had anything
i wanted and a manicurist was kneeling in front of one of the mermaids and buffing
her nails which were round and fat and disgusting and the manicurist breathed moisture
onto the mermaids nails and could see her features reflected in each nail and know
that her face would never age and that her hands would never fail her and justice
moved like a breeze through the manicurists hair and one of the mermaids was self
consciously stroking up and down her scales and this was giving her sexual pleasure
and she was about to come inside herself like along some pole but the manicurist
was too busy working to notice and i joined the mermaids in a bar and a man came
up and pinched one of the mermaids on a fin and i rose immediately and attacked him
and beat him with a wooden post until his head came off and shot across the floor
of the saloon like a drop of mercury and i chased the mercury head with my stick
and kept bashing it and it kept wriggling away and people got in my way and i took
the other side of the stick which was pointed and thrust it through the stomach of
one of the people who was annoying me and he reeled backwards and i started to break
up the bar and threw a chair into the shelves of liquor behind the bartender and
he took out a club and tried to beat me with it and the club was cast iron and i
decided it was mind over matter and stood there and meditated and the bartenders
beating was totally ineffective but i felt that i was being magnetized and as he
was hitting me with the iron club all of the atoms in my body were lining up in one
direction so that things started flying at me that were made out of metal such as
ashtrays and cylinders and knives and metal shavings and pins and strange balls with
spikes on them like maces and the magnetism became stronger as he was beating me
and i was being attracted to something else and was jerked off the ground and yanked
out the window of the bar with a scattering of flying metal objects trailing after
me and was speeding down the streets and moving much faster than any automobile gliding
two feet off the ground but i didnt hit anything because there was something about
my magnetism that maintained a distance from everything nonmagnetic and i was moving
smoothly and quickly around cars and people and hydrants and light poles and signs
and trees and at one point i moved through a thick crowd as if i were a subatomic
particle that could penetrate anything and emerge whole on the other side and nobody
got knocked down and then i was flying over fields and canyons and i looked behind
me and there was a host of objects and i was pulled through a sieve and felt myself
losing something but couldnt understand what it was i was losing and then there was
another sieve and i felt myself losing something else but still didnt know what it
was and felt that i was lighter in the air and floated with more ease as i was being
tugged and strained through another sieve and again something was taken off me but
i didnt have any understanding of what the process was or why i was being put through
it and then there was another screen and i went through it and nothing happened except
that i felt that perhaps id lost an internal organ like a pancreas or that something
i didnt understand and wasnt essential had been removed from my body and then i was
standing outside an old house and there was a bin that said slave bracelets on a
label that fit into a plastic slot and i put one on and it was heavy and fashioned
out of brass and there was a counter which looked like an odometer that clasped the
bracelet shut and the numbers spun around and kept ascending and i figured that the
numbers were counting the ever increasing supply of global slaves but i didnt feel
any different inside although i wondered if i were being forced to perform certain
actions and wasnt aware of it and decided to keep an inventory of all my actions
and when i performed something more than once i would consider it a slave action
and try not to perform it again and if i performed it again i would take off the
bracelet and go to sleep in one of those bedrooms in old houses that are occupied
by decayed and malicious spinsters or grandmothers who warp their children while
their grandchildren watch with soft eyes and i ascended rickety stairs and when i
entered the bedroom i was surprised because it was a bookie joint and a man was sitting
by a phone with a pile of chits in front of him talking about a horse that was sick
with autoamnesia and couldnt remember that it was a horse and he had bet a lot of
cash and wanted to make certain he collected because the race had been fixed and
he hadnt laid off any money and the horse had suffered a stroke and was paralyzed
along the withers and he felt that something must be done to increase the circulation
to the horses brain and i sat on a sofa and opened a beer although i couldnt tell
if it was a bottle or a glass and felt the beer rising in my throat and my windpipe
went into spasm and bubbles were catching in the upper part of my chest and i started
to panic because i thought that getting drunk meant choking to death and felt that
i needed a different solution to my emotional problems in the form of drugs and that
the man behind the desk could score for me if i gave him inside information but i
had no idea what inside information was and started to think about what it meant
to have information in the first place but i didnt have a clue and so i made him
an offer although i dont know what i offered him but i know that i offered him something
and he handed me a packet and i went into a corner and opened it and i cooked and
strained the contents but when i put a spike to it it started to coagulate and i
cooked it up some more by increasing the heat because i had in my possession a miniature
blow torch apparatus and a snowman started growing out of the spoon with three balls
one placed on top of the other that twisted and turned upside down like a caterpillar
forming a cocoon while hanging from invisible thread and i took my thumb and squashed
it into the spoon and could feel it succumbing under the tip of my thumb and each
of its three balls were wiggling around and it gave up and dissolved and i started
fiddling with my kit but couldnt get anything to work properly and started to feel
drug hunger and my body ached and my cheeks salivated and my eyes watered and i wanted
more than anything else to get off but couldnt and i even thought a little coke mixed
in would be good and that what i needed was a cocktail and i turned to ask the man
for more but he had disappeared and the horse with autoamnesia was laughing at me
as it pulled back its lips and i was transported to saigon where it was hot and humid
and the streets were brown and filled with dust because it wasnt modern saigon but
an ancient village called saigon and men were hanging by their hands like tetherballs
from poles and i could see they had wet their pants since there were circular urine
stains on the poles from where they had swung around while peeing and there was a
parade with women wearing plastic see through drum majorette clothing and one of
the women had a tampon string hanging below the plastic of her skirt and i was sitting
with my legs crossed in the middle of the road as the parade of drum majorettes approached
and the woman with the tampon string was directly in front of me and coming on top
of me and i felt as she passed over me that i was looking up into a carpet of thorns
and i leaned my head back and arched my back and watched her feet moving away from
me and she was sashaying as she tossed her baton in the air and there were baby blue
triangular fringes on her boots and silver bells and her beautiful large ass was
jiggling beneath the plastic and i continued to strain and arch my back upward and
grabbed my prick with my left hand and began moving my fist vigorously trying to
masturbate and continued to arch my back and neck while straining backwards to catch
a glimpse of her beautiful large ass as she moved farther away from me down the street
and my back began to hurt from the strain and my prick turned into a glass tube and
began to smart and i gave up masturbating but the tube was hanging heavily between
my legs with liquid in it and ticker tape and confetti were falling from surrounding
buildings and i realized that the parade was to celebrate the liberation of asia
and i had to move carefully because i was afraid that the glass between my legs would
break and liquid would pour out of the tube onto my feet and a gigantic mechanical
animal was marching in the parade while moving its head from side to side and it
was halfway between a giant bear and a lion andand had a bear muzzle and its head
was surrounded with a mane of fur and there were men with whips on either side of
the animal making certain it was under control and my viewpoint was above the animal
looking down as it lumbered along the street and yet i was still on my back and began
to think there was a television in my brain and i wasnt seeing through my eyes but
was looking through the back of a television out to a room and what i was seeing
were people watching a television picture of the animal taken from a camera mounted
on the bottom of an airplane so that i was somehow involved in a loop where i was
seeing through something mechanical that allowed me to see through the peoples eyes
who were looking at another mechanical thing that exhibited an image taken from an
airplane that contained the animal and this didnt make much sense although the proof
was that i was seeing something from my position on the ground with my back arched
that was impossible to see except from the air and i felt elated but strangely disembodied
because it was impossible for me to be on the ground and off the ground simultaneously
and this meant for the first time since entering the village that my body had become
irrelevant to the act of seeing and yet i wanted to satisfy my body and had wanted
to dream something beyond the boundaries of my skin and at the same time had wanted
to manipulate my body physically so that it was satisfied and had put myself in the
position of using my brain and muscles together in order to give my body what it
wanted and thought i was seeing the giant bear lion mongrel because i had failed
to give my body an orgasm and consequently my body had made an independent decision
to become irrelevant and thrust me into a different mode of sensation and that the
mechanical monster was the construct of my body which had an imagination independent
of my brain imagination and could enforce its will and overpower my brain faculties
and insert its bodily intelligence into my skull and the bearlion was putting one
foot in front of the other and while looking down on it from above i could see that
it had begun to become more active and prance in time to music which i couldnt hear
and was making the handlers nervous and broke loose and went amok and crushed innocent
people and there wasnt anything anybody could do and yet my theories were wrong because
i was actually in a helicopter and that was the reason i was looking down on the
monster and i could see a man below in the street with his back arched clutching
his pants and i had received a controlled emission statement demanding that i lift
up the giant mongrel and there was a harpoon with a hook on the helicopter that was
launched from a tube running beneath the chassis and i shot it off and snagged the
animal by the scruff of the neck and it froze when the hook latched onto its neckchain
as if someone had turned off the source of its energy and i hoisted it above the
buildings of the village and it soared above the helicopter and the hook came off
and its energy was restored and it started moving its head from side to side as it
pranced along the surface of the clouds and there were other parading mechanical
animals in the sky as well and the vietnamese sun was hot but the animals didnt seem
to mind and were enjoying themselves immensely and i bade goodbye to vietnam and
flew my helicopter to florida and landed in miami on a beach where there was a stall
in which an italian woman was giving away cigarettes laced with psychedelic chemicals
and i wanted to get high so i took a cigarette from the woman but as i smoked part
of it i began to ache and felt sick and unfocused and thirsty and staggered along
the beach and the cigarette removed all of my fantasies so that it was impossible
to fantasize about the fish in the florida ocean and whenever i thought about them
i could only track them because my mental faculties were limited to decisions involving
the directions in which the fish were moving and my mind had expanded to encompass
the energy fields of all the fish in the water who were swimming in my head and i
could tell their next moves before they made them but couldnt tell anything else
about them and couldnt tell what they were or what they wanted or what their goals
or aspirations were but i knew with perfect clarity where they were going and tried
to determine for my own benefit how far ahead i could judge their motions and i experienced
the entire massive movement of fish as a single sensation and was always ahead of
where they were and saw the fish at a point in time that was not the present but
slightly in the future and understood the structure of the ocean for i was an osteopath
of the atlantic although i couldnt manipulate anything and thought of the currents
as muscles and fish as bones and the movements of the ocean as the movements of a
body writhing within its endless banks and tossing and turning like a sleepless maniac
filled with fish and there was a sound reflecting off the surface like the singing
of whales although my intuition seemed problematic because i could hear laughing
and there seemed to be a constant oceanic sexual obsession as if the ocean were driven
in sleep to laugh about reproduction and think constantly about what it was reproducing
and killing inside its vast marginless womb and the ocean couldnt wake up but was
laughing in its restless sleep and because i was bereft of fantasy i could see that
the sun set in the ocean and later rose out of it and that what everyone for thousands
of years had believed in thousands of cultures was the obvious unfantasizable reality
of the suns immersion in the sleep of the ocean so that the sun was hatcheting into
the ocean at night and out of the ocean in the morning and the ocean was being constantly
pummeled by the sun and in its restless oblivion was washing the sun and turning
it into the moon and that the shape and size of the moon was dependent on delta waves
of dreaming oceanic concerns and when the seas were filled with energy the moon grew
and expanded into its washed purities of floating being and the water world would
curve out and the fish expanded in joy to the bowing of the surface of the sea and
i tried to concentrate as i took hungry puffs on my italian beach cigarette and the
sky was woven with thin cobalt fabric and minuscule animals hung in the shredding
of the heavens and i thought back to my experiences in the helicopter and saw that
the animals in the sky were magnifications based on a lack of proper drugs of the
animals that were actually in the firmament and these sky animals were the pollinators
of the land based creatures that moved on the surface of the planet and were created
by sky animals with joyous eyes and as i sat on the beach a religious party with
clashing symbols was chanting ecstatically that they had adopted the best religion
based on singing the original song of creation from three oclock to five oclock every
afternoon and there was a sandpiper with its beak in the water moving up and down
like an oil pump and the religious party was worshipping the bird as some kind of
avatar or corporate head who deserved to be revered because of his good manners and
an indian wanted to show me the world headquarters of the bird worshipers which was
down the beach and i was taken on a dune buggy to the headquarters which said ornith
hollow over the door which was the name of the blind leader of the clan who was responsible
for the profits of the group and scientists who tested the performance of weapons
were eating bread and rancid fish jam in a darkened room that looked like the nerve
center of a submarine and i asked what kind of jam they were eating and they said
it was for reverts but i didnt understand what that meant and they said that the
organs in their bodies were displaced in reverse and all the connections were lengthened
and gummed up so that things went smoothly on the outside but inside because of everything
being turned around they were a mess and needed to eat rancid fish jam to ease the
constant nervousness that beset them and there were cages containing kidneys on a
counter and they claimed this was part of an examining process and they were looking
at my abdomen and i saw i had been trapped and panicked and wanted to get out of
the laboratory before these reverts stole my internal organs and the man who brought
me into the lab assured me that my organs were unimportant and were actually superfluous
and that medical science was wrong because internal organs were really only there
for each other and didnt help keep people alive but were interconnected functions
that needed the casing of a body to justify themselves and that the true source of
life was in the skin and people died because their skin was punctured or not supported
in some way from the inside and if one were to say the name of god over and over
every afternoon between three oclock and five oclock this would fill the human body
with good vibrations called fibrillations and these fibrillations would keep the
body puffed up and healthy and the human body would not be able to collapse no matter
what the organs wanted and therefore i could donate my organs to the group and this
made sense because organs impressed me as being absurd and ugly and unrecognizable
and i wondered why they were designed in the first place because it would have been
a lot simpler to have one substance that was a human jello that without being filled
with anything would be capable of doing everything a human wanted and that people
should be skin and pure interior organless jello and the next thing i knew i was
strapped to a gurney and the scientists were turning me in a circle while saying
they didnt believe in anesthesia but only in turning the patient until it would be
possible to operate painlessly and take out what they wanted and they would pay me
for what they needed because they had a subsidized project to replace every one of
their organs with organs that faced in the right direction and when i woke from my
operation my brain felt sore but the rest of my body was ok so i realized that they
hadnt removed my organs at all but only a portion of my brain that governed the control
of the organs for what they wanted was to appropriate the control centers and the
portion of the brain they had removed if treated and bathed in the proper chemicals
could be reactivated as a kind of switch that would command the organs in their bodies
to unrevert and my brain section could be placed under a bell jar and tubes connecting
to the jar could be placed in the ear of each of the weapons scientists and they
could thereby cure their medical condition and a nurse brought me dinner on a tray
but there was something frightening about her appearance as though she harbored a
malicious motive associated with serving food and it occurred to me that perhaps
it wasnt the woman but my brain that was posing the real threat and that she was
a gifted nurse and my brain with the sector removed would always make me doubt people
and i tried to cover every inch of the nurses body with some kind of thought process
so that no observation could slip past me and as she walked i would be able to see
every single inch of her and know everything about how she manifested herself and
i noticed that the food was undercooked and i started to eat cold mashed potatoes
and was in a cafe and a waiter came up but i couldnt hear what he was saying and
realized that i couldnt hear anything and that things that people had been telling
me were in fact things that i had been telling myself ever since my operation and
since part of my head was missing i began to worry that the world as it was presently
constituted didnt have a rationale and i ordered more lumpy mashed potatoes but before
i could finish my order there was a hospital tray in front of me with mashed potatoes
on it as if it had been waiting in some hospital reality for me to order it and then
had been transported instantaneously by the waitstaff to my cafe table and served
or else that i was still in the hospital room and the mashed potatoes i had eaten
there had forced me to hallucinate or worse that my mind without the brain sector
that had been removed by the reverts had caused me to be in a perpetual state of
hallucination and that all thinking was hospitalized thinking and always needed to
be nursed and i got up from my table at the cafe and walked into a plaza where birds
were wheeling through the air in a storm of meat and i was late because i had to
make it to election headquarters to run for political office and was back in the
submarine room talking with the scientists but hadnt yet agreed to the operation
because as it turned out i was only engaged in forward thinking which was as much
as to say that i was really back on the beach thinking about the fish in the ocean
but what had happened was that i had redirected the fish thinking to thinking of
my own actions and had gotten a step ahead of myself and was thinking about the brain
operation and the results of the brain operation and yet my brain was actually intact
although my forward thinking had gotten me into the hallucinatory position of having
a dissected mental organ which meant that with my nonfantasizable mind i was engaged
in the process of fantasizing which was very confusing and i was in some kind of
mental loop between fantasy and reality because all i really wanted was to plot things
out and extend all of my actions a small distance into the future and here i had
involved myself in a horrid possibility and it was really more comforting to move
backwards instead of forwards and i thought of the example of forming a band to play
music in which case it would be better to spend time forming the band in order to
have the possibility of playing the music than it would be to play the music itself
because to play the music would involve all sorts of risks whereas the construction
of scenarios that allowed for music was the most important musical act and so there
must be a music to musical construction and i realized that ever since i had taken
that cigarette i had been outside the flow of events and that in certain mental states
one could think but that all the thoughts arising from those states would simply
cease to be and all that would be left would be the thoughtless trail of events and
sewage of mental flows without any analytical mentalities and that such concepts
as analytical mentality would be impossible to remember although in sleep it would
be possible to think anything and that perhaps in sleep the best thoughts were always
being manufactured but it wasnt these thoughts that were remembered on waking so
that people didnt realize that when they slept they were doing their deepest and
most analytical thinking involving the most exquisite dictions and discriminations
but that on waking they would only have the sucked out rinds of their thoughts on
which to reflect and only a disgusting dump and slush of primitive impulses would
remain in the waking persons memory and ever since i had leaned back to witness the
mammoth ass of the drum majorette and left my body and ascended over the body of
the prancing animal i felt that i had progressed and made some subtle moral improvements
and had eventually wound up on the beach getting stoned on weed that was laced with
superpowerful psychedelic chemical and yet in fact i was involved in a personal headtrip
and thoughts from the past were glued into my brain whereas other thoughts hardly
seemed to be there and were the black masses of the ninety nine point nine nine nine
percent of all thought that never makes it past the exterior surface of the unconscious
and are the glints and moods and distractions and lucubrations and meditations and
rationalizations and brilliant sorties of logic that form the unformed mass of cosmic
thinking and account for the uncounted heft of the universe but that the events that
occurred much earlier in my thought life when i was sober and more event oriented
had turned into a frustrating and fearsome tangle of considerations and judgments
which is a real problem with psychedelics and i became unmoored and tasted madness
because madness has a specific taste and is something that forms in the mouth although
as i thought about the taste of madness i couldnt taste it and couldnt get my mind
to make the taste reoccur and realized that i didnt know if i could ever taste it
again or if i ever had tasted it before because to taste madness is to become mad
and the truth is that there is no escape from madness and it is impossible to become
sane once one is mad for i was in a state of mental activity which is one step away
from oblivion and was thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking and becoming
more entangled in the entangling processes of my brain going round and round and
round which was reflected in my language because i knew that when i was that close
to the rim in fact i was actually asleep on a floating lip at the edge of madness
looking into a bowl that was slowly turning green which was a bowl of clear water
that had one organism in it which was a splittable organism or in other words a one
thing creature intent on becoming a two thing creature and this ambition would eventually
pollute the water and make it smell like rancid fish oil and i put my nose over the
bowl but couldnt smell anything because i was thinking smells but wasnt smelling
smells and could see into the water where this creature was starting to split because
the integrity of the water had been compromised which is the condition surrounding
all ambition and the intentions of the organism in the water were repugnant to the
water which was about to begin to lose its clarity and i wondered if the clock could
be turned back on reality and if there were a clear presence somewhere and a way
for the water to become clear again through the elimination of life and i realized
that a universe without life wouldnt be lifeless but would be life fulfilling and
unreflective and a perfect world where nothing would ever come back to haunt the
brain and if there were a world composed only of rocks and assuming rocks had no
consciousness then there would be a perfect lack of awareness and the rocks would
be there but there would be no place for the rocks to be where they were and it would
be perfect because it would be a perfect presence and clear greenless water but i
didnt want that kind of clarity because that would mean that my train of thought
would stop and it would be the end of all thought and the end of all experience which
in a way i wanted but in a way i didnt because i had this pristine notion of being
able to stay in one mental place and remain unmoving and awake forever but the mind
causes sleep and the mind kills us all the time and continually slaughters us and
drives us down into the kind of thinking im engaged in now and which i had been engaged
in every since my sleeping conversation with the chimpanzee and which had been growing
more and more entangled and disorganized and which can be defined as constant thinking
in the mad background we all entered at one point in eternity and never left which
is constant madness that has no truth and is not the madness of adjustment or misperception
or inexpressiveness or loss and is not the madness where one is unable to understand
or relate and is not the mad mind dealing in terms the sane dont understand but is
absolute madness where the senses are mixed and the mind works through its own embattled
universe and i was sick of my tangled thoughts and language and was tired from the
relentless wrinkles in the smooth movement of situations caused by the psychedelic
cigarette and wanted to camp on the beach but it wasnt safe because bikers rode through
miami and stabbed people in their sleep and i crossed a divider that separated the
beach from a gravel path through a dark pine forest and came upon a cabin that had
one light burning and a man in a felt jacket was perusing a book in front of a roaring
fire and invited me in and the wind was howling although puffy flocks of snow were
falling gently and sifting among the pines and the shutters were banging and i opened
the sash and felt a twinge of foreboding because the man in the jacket was standing
behind me and as i turned around he thrust an ancient codex in my face and i peered
at the page in front of my nose and saw that it was a book of the dead and revealed
many bardos of meandering which dictate the paths and positions and constellations
of souls which have been reconfigured by god in his infinite wisdom based on answers
to a simple question which every human being immediately after death according to
the illuminated meandering bardo of the book is required to answer in his or her
own particular language and this question is can you catch this ball if i throw it
to you and the ball is a beach ball and the interrogator is the archangel michael
who is standing in front of the dead person in flames of gold with fiery wings of
purest green and holding the colorful superlarge ball directly above his flaming
head and if the person says no and refuses to try to catch the ball then the angel
will say that he was only trying to be helpful because the dead person was such a
marvelous individual in his former life and that this empty exercise in spiritual
sportsmanship is a mere formality and slight inconvenience and the angel will make
it easy and throw the ball slowly and accurately and it will be virtually impossible
not to catch the ball since it possesses a sticky surface and will adhere to the
hand and therefore to catch the ball means barely to touch the ball but if a dead
person asks what will happen if he or she is unable to catch it the angel answers
frankly that that person will immediately tumble into hell and sizzle and burn for
all eternity in a hopeless state of degradation ruthless torture and agonizing damnation
with never the possibility of a second chance but if the dead person catches the
ball then he or she is guaranteed to soar into the heavens and sing psalms to the
creator in a state of perpetual grace and ecstasy and if the person elects the only
other available option and stubbornly refuses to play the game then that dead person
will stay where he or she is with the angel and the ball and the circumstances will
never change and the angel will ask the same question over and over in the same tone
of voice and for eons and eons the question will be repeated as if a film clip were
being looped relentlessly through the spools of the brain of the dead person without
any pause in a nightmare world of repetition just as thought ribbons are strung through
the capstans in the deteriorating skulls of corpses in coffins and the words of the
question can you catch this ball if i throw it to you eventually will wear down and
lose their coatings from being pronounced over and over by the angel and the consonants
will become mushy and dissolve into vowels which will become flatter and longer and
the vocalic vibrations will be abraded and the overtones will become smooth like
worn rope and the words themselves will turn toneless although they will retain their
precise meaning because the meaning will always be can you catch this ball if i throw
it to you and the gist of the angels message will eternally be the same without any
additional or lesser nuance but the sounds that enforce the meaning will become eroded
and corroded and yet the dead person will have the liberty to make any response that
he or she wishes at any time because there will be no limit to the freshness and
inventiveness and earnestness of the language that the dead person himself or herself
can employ nor to the exhortations or denials or wheedling blandishments or manufactured
crises or loathsome threats or vituperations or bargains or philosophical speculations
or strained predictions or stale hopes or wild seductions or divulged dreams or sorceries
or prescriptions or role reversals or emotional payments or any other posthuman communication
that the dead person can employ in order to get out of the predicament because there
is always freedom of expression in the spirit world and yet the demand of the angel
will always be the same because the existential basis of nonexistence is eternally
consistent and the demand is and always will be can you catch this ball if i throw
it to you and it does not do a whit of good to claim that this question is absurd
and that the universe was not created so that the dead would be intimidated into
catching beach balls for the question will be wasted because the answer never varies
and the question itself can never be called into question nor the situation ever
be changed until the spirit is forced into action and in many cases the situation
festers and the dead person broods about the eternal ravages of hell and wonders
whether his or her new spiritual body will respond on demand in a coordinated way
once the ball has been tossed and yet the ball seems so large and easy to catch and
the archangel michael so benevolent that the exercise in ball catching seems to be
a superfluous preliminary to permanent bliss and meanwhile the spirit is plunged
into distress and begins to think that the question is a hoax or that the ball will
be tossed over the angels shoulder so that the dead person begins to question the
very nature of the exercise and more specifically the benevolence or malevolence
of divine power and in order to avoid the emotional consequences of this dilemma
he or she tries to convince him or herself that he or she hasnt been questioned over
and over in a world without clocks and that the notion of duration in front of the
angel isnt duration at all but an instantaneous perception that has never been duplicated
and the question can you catch this ball if i throw it to you has never been asked
more than once but such speculation hardly makes any difference because regardless
of how long the interrogation has lasted the angel michael is still holding his ball
aloft and will never go away nor budge an inch over the life of the universe or several
universes or an infinite number of universes because the dead person will always
be required to make a decision and the persistence of the angel with the beach ball
will outlast any delusion or waffling or fantasy or craziness so that the spirit
begins to doubt that the angels question is in fact a question but rather might be
a devilish form of goading and tormenting the spirit who still has hands and has
retained the most vibrant body of his or her youth and is perfectly capable of catching
any ball that is tossed to him or her and even those few unfortunates who were paralyzed
throughout their lives or born without limbs or were in any other way disadvantaged
are restored through gods mercy to perfect health and flexibility and therefore one
has to wonder why the question is being posed in the first place and yet there is
no way to beg such a question because one is still faced with the solidity of the
situation as it constantly and eternally presents itself to the dead person and it
is only natural that the spirit start to complain about the repetitive nature of
the reality thrust upon him or her and whether the archangel michael is actually
telling the truth about how easy the ball would be to catch and the validity of the
reward and punishment system he claims has been established because there is also
the grim possibility that the opposite results will occur and that the spirit who
catches the ball will be damned and the one who doesnt will be saved and yet as long
as the angel doesnt go away then neither does the endless thinking the angel engenders
because every situation requires thought and if a situation remains unchanged then
so does the thinking process concerning that situation so that futile thoughts in
and of themselves can be said to be effects of circumstances and the only thing as
endless as the presence of the angel is the endless thought about the endless presence
of the angel and the meandering bardo of self emancipation which i saw as i peered
into the book that was thrust into my face by the man who was wearing the felt jacket
and standing in front of the roaring fire in his cabin had a solution for the dilemma
which was contained on the very next page which told me the somber truth about catching
the ball and revealed that the outcome was predetermined by iron laws and that even
the response of the dead spirit was decreed well in advance of the birth of his suffering
spirit on earth and therefore the process of thinking was futile in the first place
and could be avoided just by having access to the book i was reading and i decided
that i needed to rest my brain from the torments i had been experiencing and go for
a walk in the woods to commune with the snowy night and there was a tribe of wolfchasers
that were bivouacking outside the man in the felt jackets cabin and their name in
the wolfchaser language was moosechaser because the way to chase wolves is to chase
the weakest of their prey and at first i thought it might have been a social group
of native americans but that wasnt the case because the group was actually composed
of retired army colonels who had wild romantic ideas about living off the land and
had formed a rebel militia to kill endangered species because they didnt want any
bureaucracy to dictate their choices and had beer guts and wore little bands around
their heads with feathers sticking up in the air and they spied a moose on the gravel
path and went running after it through the woods while whooping and carrying on and
i chased them down the path and they were moving in a straight line as fast as they
could with one directly behind the other and i was the last person in the line and
running behind them and behind me was a large pack of wolves that was chasing me
down and i was trapped between the wolfchasers who were running after the moose and
the wolves who were running after me and i knew i had a problem because i couldnt
figure out the wolves motives because it was possible they were chasing me and it
was possible they were chasing the wolfchasers and it was possible they were chasing
the moose that the wolfchasers were chasing but the only way i could find out who
was chasing whom was to veer off the gravel and pursue my own path and if the wolves
turned after me i knew i would be finished and would become a substitute moose but
if they chased the wolfchasers then i would only have to worry about being lost although
the pain of being lost in the woods or even worse of being lost in ones head in the
woods can be worse than the fear of teeth and through force of habit i kept running
on gravel and the snowstorm increased and the snow became thick and formed ridges
of crystals along my forehead and the water melted into my eyes and smarted and because
i was still wearing my beach clothing from miami i was extremely uncomfortable and
a collar of snow formed around the collar of my tropical shirt and the water that
melted from the heat of my bodily exertion ran in streams down my chest and back
and down my butt and legs to my ankles as i searched for a well of energy within
my body so that i could increase my speed and pass the wolfchasers and the retired
army colonels would then form a barrier of beer bellies between me and the wolves
and this would have the added benefit of keeping me from getting lost in the woods
because i would still be part of the line of pursuit only i would then be between
the wolfchasers and the moose and would be flowing through the forest with a purpose
and the forest would have meaning as a result of the hunt and the battle of nature
i was participating in because i knew that a forest is nothing more than a living
background for foraging and murder and i was panting and the wolves were gaining
and the pack which consisted of a dozen or so animals was four or five steps behind
me and i could hear them calling to each other although i couldnt make sense of what
they were saying but i intuited that all of them had names and were having a discussion
before dinner and it was a distracted form of socializing they were engaged in where
they would call each other affectionately as they were attacking and discuss the
cubs and how hungry they were and how the old bones just werent holding up the way
they used to and all sorts of useless drivel while the phalanx of salivating snarling
predators was racing behind me and slowly gaining groundand i was up to my ankles
in the furry softness of flurries that smelled of the clean night of pines and was
suddenly catapulted up in the air by a slingshot mechanism that had been laid as
a guerrilla trap along the path by an intelligence branch of the government in order
to maim the rebellious colonels and i tumbled like a cannonball arching through the
skies and it suddenly became cloudless and i could see the earth and a full moon
and then the stars and then the earth and the moon and the stars and the earth and
the moon and then the stars and then the earth and the full moon and the stars and
the earth and then the full moon and the stars and as i fell i could see the sides
of the trees and the moon and a few stars and then the earth and then the moon and
then the trees and then the earth again as i abruptly and unexpectedly landed and
something mammoth detonated and the thermonuclear impact of my body caused a huge
crater in a vast desert landscape where all the forest trees had been blown away
and i was at ground zero and rose and dusted the snow off my pants and took a deep
breath and noticed there was no curve to the earth anymore and no horizon and the
land went on forever in all directions and this desert was an endless flat planet
that wheeled through contorted space and the stars were so huge that they resembled
twisted squares of light and the ground was made of rusted steel with rows of evenly
spaced protuberances or bosses that ran off into the distance like plants in an infinite
field or metal and i knew that these protuberances were graves and that those who
were buried on this flat and immaculate plane were sealed in an unbreachable force
field and doomed to anonymity that was so complete that they lay in their drilled
spaces and couldnt remember ever having been alive and in this sense were like those
who are living but cant remember their previous deadness but these dead while being
in the opposite position had no worries because there was no ego in their lifelessness
to cause a problem and there was a nut attached to a bolt whose threads were sticking
out of the earth and a tool to loosen the nut and i realized that if i removed this
nut the graves on the plane would open in unison but i refused to touch the tool
and turned and standing next to me was a penguinlike creature shrouded in a sea of
electrons and bright sparkling particles like tiny bits of colored candies orbited
about his head and body and although i could locate his head i couldnt make out his
features and couldnt see if he were human or a penguin or if he had eyes or a nose
or a mouth or a bill or how many limbs or fins he had because his bodily mass flowed
within the seams and grooves that nestled within the electron field and he gazed
around the terrain and waved an indistinct object over my head and it felt like a
shutter snapping shut and i was alone and isolated and buried within the drilled
in spaces of the metal and there was no one there or anywhere and everything was
darkness and i realized in horror that i had no body and wasnt breathing and there
was no sense of my being connected to anything and i was a mind with nothing outside
it and there was no creation except for the voice which was me and then there was
no voice and nobody was saying anything and i had no senses and there was no train
of thought but i existed nonetheless because there was thinking going on but i couldnt
tell what that thinking was or who was thinking thoughts and consequently there was
nothing to hold onto and i tried to evoke an image of something i had experienced
before the shutter snapped and thought about the flat corten planet with the bolted
graves but couldnt picture the planet the flatness the bolt the graves or the picture
and then i tried to evoke an image of my prior existence but couldnt come up with
anything and was imageless and thoughtless and motionless and breathless and speechless
and egoless and mindless and deathless and hopeless in my state of absolute fear
and began to think about what it meant to feel because if there were feelings there
must be somebody feeling those feelings about someone or something and i tried to
think of someone or something i could feel something about and to imagine love and
i spontaneously felt love and to imagine hatred and i spontaneously felt that too
so i knew that i could recognize a feeling and in the process of recognition that
feeling would be produced and i felt resentment and anxiety and greed and a spectrum
of other feelings but i had nobody to love and nobody to fear and nobody to resent
and nothing to want and the feelings existed in and of themselves and if i could
imagine a lover for my love and an enemy for my hatred and could create an art and
world and life then i could build almost anything but i had nothing to grab onto
because i was permanently incapable of imagining anything except the feelings i was
feeling and yet i had a suspicion that this was merely a spell and since all spells
by the nature of myth must come to an end i began to blame the atomic penguin and
realized with a jolt that i could bring up the image of the creature in my mind and
then i tried to imagine someone or something else but still found that to be impossible
and thought that if i were given the gift of being able to imagine this one creature
that was the source of my misery then perhaps i could influence my destiny by praying
to it as if it were my creator because by creating difficulties in a truly significant
sense it had created me and so i said a prayer to the monster who created the spell
and had an immediate intuition as to the origin of the cosmos and saw that feelings
preceded objects and love preceded reality and that god had created the world in
order to exercise his loves and hatreds and suddenly the image came into my mind
of schools of fish and i remembered how id been on a beach in miami smoking a psychedelic
cigarette and it occurred to me that i was still on a trip and that it had continued
all this time and i was suffering the same mental paralysis with my inability to
imagine things as i had suffered in terms of tracking fish as they moved through
the ocean when i was able to get one step ahead of the situation by surrendering
my ability to fantasize and that because my current mindstate was similar to my earlier
mindstate then it logically followed that i was being affected by the same force
both then and now which was a chemical i had inhaled and i remember the primary tenet
of all trippers and dope fiends which is that everything wears off and the primary
cure for fear is always patience and that inaction is the most important form of
action and this brought me back to thinking about the ball in the hands of the archangel
michael and i realized that the meandering bardo was a rat fuck and that the final
solution to the problem of deciding whether or not to catch the beach ball was hysterical
laughter which was the only human response i never considered when i had the liberty
to frame any response i wanted for i understood that at some point and for some reason
i had stood before the angel and been ensconced in the eternal predicament of choosing
whether to catch something or not but i couldnt remember what decision i had made
or even if i had made a decision or why since i was alive i had once been a dead
person or moreover how it could have been possible to have returned to earth because
returning to earth is not one of the three options of the angelic situation which
are to catch the ball and go to heaven or miss the ball and go to hell or do nothing
for the rest of eternity and converse with the flaming angel but i saw in any case
that hysterical laughter is the primary emotion that governs all emotions and that
all emotions and creations spring from hysterical laughter and that if a dead person
facing the angel with the ball would only begin to laugh hysterically then there
would be nothing that anyone could do and the dead person would be totally in control
of his own laughter and nobody could stop him because pain or hurt or threats of
any kind or even the brimstone of hades would only cause greater hysteria and more
mirth because there is nothing more intimidating than looking deep into the features
of someone who is laughing hysterically since this is the most frightening thing
imaginable and hysterical laughter is a force of immense power that can shatter anything
and then and there i started to laugh hysterically and the laughter caused breath
and the breath caused my body to solidify and my body caused a world of stinginess
to come into being in which rain would never fall in greater amounts than what was
necessary and the sun would never lavish excessive warmth on the planet and nobody
who ate would ever feel full and no one would have extra children and for an odd
reason this resolidification and rebirth of my body had been fortunate and i was
released from my tomb and elevated to a position of extreme importance as the monarch
of mentally challenged men who had seceded from the state of alaska and were running
a new bachelor country for profit and anyone who came to live with them was forced
to pay homage to me and give me all the money i needed for my ever changing wardrobe
and the area of the state where this new country was located was tropical and the
animal population were mutants and incapable of eating one another and the atmosphere
was so benevolent that they all lived in a peaceable kingdom of sanity and gentleness
and my realm was surrounded by mountains and was very beautiful and my mentally challenged
subjects never swore or told lies and the mountain ranges were magnificent and lofty
and the outsiders who came to live among us shed their pompous attitudes and habits
as soon as they walked through the pass in the mountains that separated us from the
rest of the world and there was an admission gate where immigrants had to make their
entry payments and i was in the toll booth with a crown on my head and had donned
my robes and was collecting fees and the immigrants would get extremely emotional
as they paid me and break into sobs and tears of gladness and i was very cynical
and kept the totals of the money i was making in my head as my new subjects passed
through the gate and i was fortunate because i had done nothing to earn my position
but had been born into purple out of my blank state of frustration and lack of imagination
and hysteria in the tombs of the metal desert and not only would i be able to keep
the fees without spending a dime because all of my wants and needs were supplied
in my kingdom by my mentally challenged subjects free of charge but also i would
be able to levy taxes within the kingdom on everybodys labor and ideas and acts of
charity and possessions and projects and family heirlooms and even on shoelaces and
snippets and no matter what i did with the money i gleaned from my new position nobody
would be allowed to say a word against me or stand in my way when i went into neighboring
areas to buy the goods and services that werent available in alaska but each of my
subjects would immediately upon coming into my presence have to touch their noses
to the ground and mumble i love you your majesty with all my heart and soul and while
i was raking in the profits in my admissions booth it occurred to me that i could
write laws and make people behave in any fashion i wanted no matter how ludicrous
the behavior was and so i demanded that everyone be forced to donate half their working
hours to the erection of the tallest statue in the history of the world which would
portray me crowned in all my glory holding my royal scepter with a benevolent smile
on my face and yet there was a faction among my subjects that declined to do this
creative work because they were rebels and wanted to build a normal size statue in
honor of the achievements of the bachelor leader who had originally founded the paradise
kingdom of the mentally challenged and they claimed they had nothing against me personally
but since they were rebels they had a spiritual connection that couldnt be broken
to the original rebel leader and yet i suspected in the darkness of my heart that
they intended to build a statue of a traitor who was rebelling against the status
quo and not of the rebel leader of the past and so i informed them that any statutory
change to any projected statuary would be heresy and treason and that all statues
would be judged by an independent panel of experts feature by feature and aspect
by aspect and that if any feature or aspect of any statue were deemed to be the slightest
bit different from my feature or aspect as it existed in its current state of glory
then the sculptors responsible for the work on said feature or aspect would be expelled
from the kingdom forthwith and consequently there was an exodus of citizens as files
of men were seen to be halfheartedly heading toward me from the opposite direction
as i was collecting money in my toll booth because they had decided to go back to
the world rather than submit to the artistic tyranny of a brain dead politician and
i was forced to return their fees which made me unhappy because i had neglected through
a drafting error in my expulsion edict to explain that anybody leaving the kingdom
wasnt entitled to a refund and i began to run out of cash as the sculptor rebels
demanded the return of their immigration fees which i had already disbursed on expensive
accouterments and i began to insult the citizens and they arrested me and brought
me to the central square of the city and tied me to a stake and had agreed at a national
bachelor conference on the arts to resort to execution and there was a pile of faggots
under my feet and a grand inquisitor wanted me to confess that during the term of
my reign i had been taking vitamin supplements but i was stubborn and invoked my
royal privileges and refused and he said that i would die the most painful death
imaginable because they were going to inject me with rabies virus and when i began
to get thirsty they were going to burn me but i would roast very slowly because the
logs underneath my feet had been chemically treated to cause the greatest possible
amount of pain and if at any time i was willing to admit my errors and freely confess
that i had been taking supplements then the process would be stopped and i could
resume being king with no hard feelings but because i was stubborn i again refused
and a medical team arrived in an ambulance and a doctor in a scrub suit slapped the
veins on my arm and stuck in a needle and the feeling of the rabies virus being injected
was a main line rush and i began to nod and chase in my brain a continuation of that
chain of pleasure that extended from my arm to the deepest center of my head and
i was lost within that golden flowing river of warm pressure and could feel the liquid
lapping against its shores and the pleasure extended down my back and surrounded
my asshole and the anxiety and suspicion i had felt from the beginning of my reign
through false pride emptied from my being and i knew i was totally in the wrong and
was ready to repent but was too stoned to talk and decided to stay bound against
the stake with my head nodding forward and enjoy the pleasure while i could before
the rabies virus took over and turned my brain into soup and i passed out and when
i awoke there was smoke rising from the area of my feet and a terrible pain was lodged
in my skull as if untold frenzied termites were gnawing away at the most sensitive
nerves in my brain and foam was pouring out of my mouth and my eyes were paralyzed
so that i couldnt blink and were popping out of my head and i could feel the heat
licking at my toes and could see beyond the veil of smoke my subjects laughing and
enjoying themselves immensely while stuffing their faces at round restaurant tables
and i was on a platform as if this were a form of dinner theater which reminded me
of a distant event concerning another dinner at another theater and there were waiters
and waitresses who once were my sculptors who were collecting tips and trying to
do a good job and they were happy to have untaxed money and a fierce pain moved up
my calves and i could smell my flesh burning as the foam from my lips dripped into
the fire and i cursed the kingdom and all the people in it but the curse unfortunately
was sealed in my head because all of my facial features were paralyzed and the veins
in my eyes were rupturing and filling my eyeballs with hot blood and i reviewed my
options as i stood there tied to the stake and realized that i would have to surrender
to the prevailing circumstances and since the fire was certain to purge me of disease
i would finally be cleansed and change into intertwining trails of smoke and not
into ashes that were falling into the logs because the ashes would be flesh and bones
and the smoke would be my pure aristocratic spirit rising into the crystalline air
of alaska and i realized with horror as the flames moved up towards my waist that
i would be inhaled by the food slurping proletarians in the dinner theater and that
my spirit would move into their lungs and be lodged inside my tormentors and their
very acts of respiration would be a form of spirit attachment and that my noble spirit
would blend into the debased spirits of the mentally challenged people who were watching
me in the theater and become part and parcel of hundreds of burping and slobbering
bachelor subjects and yet i comforted myself because i knew that a portion of me
would ascend into the clouds and vibrate miles and miles above the earth and move
across the face of the land into canada and over the yukon and baffin island and
up into the frozen wastes of the arctic where there was a cold kingdom at the top
of the world where i would feel no heat as the flames moved up to my chest and the
foam in my mouth turned black and continued to flow down my chin and i could hear
the saliva from my mouth sizzle and sputter in the fire and blisters began to form
on my cheeks and my eyelashes were kindled and steam erupted from the pores of my
neck and i knew that my stomach was beginning to decompose and my only solace was
to concentrate on feelings of triumph and liberation because i knew that what was
happening to me was simply the result of poor decision making and that i was only
changing form and this was a rite of passage or process of transition or opportunity
for growth depending upon ones point of view and yet my resentment against the people
who were swilling food and socializing continued to build and it bothered me that
they didnt seem to care about my welfare after all that i had done for them as king
by providing them with a joyous and serene working and recreational environment in
spite of their mental disabilities and i could see them through the flames laughing
and thoroughly enjoying their bachelorhood and their partying and some were tossing
toothpicks at me and my resentment was an additional flame in my breast but i couldnt
afford to die while feeling resentful because i knew from the lore of the kingdom
that the emotions one feels at the moment of death affect the future welfare of the
soul and i had to turn myself around and assume an attitude of forgiveness and composure
but it was hard to maintain that sort of detachment given the predicament i was in
and i wondered what the release of the soul would feel like and if i would slip into
oblivion as the flames were rising because if i slipped into oblivion then the game
would be over and yet i didnt want to be reborn on earth because the best i could
hope for would be the situation which had led me to the stake and immolation in the
first place and the agony i was currently experiencing had resulted from my once
having had the best possible occupation on the planet which was the job of being
the absolute master of a bachelor paradise and meanwhile the flames were up to my
shoulders and most of my body had been destroyed and i was suffering mightily from
the rabies virus which because of the heat had increased its activities and was gnawing
away at the innards of my head and yet i was alive and thinking that i was still
a child of god and that there must be something to be grateful for even in this difficult
situation and although my face was paralyzed and most of my body was gone i was amazed
that i was able to process information and wondered what was going to happen when
the flames rose above my ears and i wouldnt be able to see or hear and my brain would
melt and my hair would explode in flames and this was a matter of curiosity which
in and of itself was a source of enjoyment and caused me to feel immense gratitude
since i was enjoying the process of speculation in spite of the agonies of the stake
and was appreciating learning and revering education and wanting to become a more
dignified and ennobled human being and i wondered if this incorporeal thing that
yearned for data was my soul so that ones spirit wandered from lesson to lesson and
life to life acquiring information but it also occurred to me that information from
previous lessons and lives would be useless because the actual circumstances of each
successive life would be radically different and that rebirth was a process of acquiring
useless or more precisely disposable information and one could be the wisest of the
wise in one life but in the next would become the dumbest of the dumb so that exercising
my speculative faculties was a futile and foolish endeavor even though it was giving
me such satisfaction in my final moments but my thoughts were suddenly interrupted
as my eyes went dark and i realized that i was about to become a royal martyr or
even a saint because i had refused in spite of all entreaties to admit that i took
vitamin supplements and preferred to die rather than cave in on a matter of principle
and as the heat slammed into my ears i stopped hearing and with relief foresaw that
i would probably receive a better statue than what i had originally anticipated because
it wouldnt be a statue to a king but to a saint and instead of a crown and scepter
there would be a halo and wand and my image would be placed in churches or nutrition
centers and be worshiped in the alaskan paradise because i never flinched and the
barbarians who clamored for my death and were laughing at me while they picked their
teeth at the dinner theater would one day be sorry and be recognized for the fun
loving sadistic mentally challenged bachelor slobs that they were and a flame started
growing and glowing in the center of my head and i could hear the rabid termites
crinkling in the firestorm as the pain of constant gnawing vanished from my brain
and i was able to concentrate on the raging wall of flame which was originally surrounded
by gray matter but now was a mass of orange identical to the solid orange in which
i was immersed at the bridge party when i was licking the breast of the woman who
was leaning over my shoulder and could feel the stinging dribbles of juice in my
eyes and it isnt true that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it but rather
the opposite is true which is that those who concentrate with all their energies
on a particular moment of personal history are doomed to relive their lives from
that precise moment through to the present as a consequence of which i would be forced
to relive the anguish and anxiety of my multiple transformations from the time i
was licking the orange carrot encrusted breast of the woman who was leaning over
my shoulder at the bridge party until i found myself to be the center of attention
at this bachelor dinner party in alaska and an incredible weariness descended on
my spirit as the flames engulfed the remaining portions of my brain and i wanted
to be relieved of the incessant onslaught of superficial images that had dominated
my consciousness from god knows when because the ramifications of thought are truly
infinite which means that every possible thought has at one time or another been
thought which also means that there is no such thing as a new thought which means
again that one is always thinking a thought that has been thought by someone before
or will be thought by someone in the future which means once more that one is continually
jumping through time and at one moment is here and the next moment is five million
years ahead and the moment after that is five billion years behind so that when we
think that our lives are part of a continuum it really isnt so and we brush against
the eternal web of infinite thought for the briefest possible moment and when we
touch this web a spark of individual photonic energy ignites and forms an integral
moment and we burp out an integral thought and the next moment we are brushing against
the web at a different space time coordinate point and burping an entirely different
thought into an entirely different world with an entirely different brain and consequently
we are an infinite number of people in an infinite number of places at an infinite
number of times rattling out an infinite number of thoughts and as such are the one
and the many and the individual and the infinite and the ego trapped in time and
the timeless infinite egoless liberated spirit who is every possible being in every
possible place and time and thinking and doing each and every thing that it is possible
to think and do because the metaphysical truth of all existent beings is that to
be one being who thinks one thought is to be every being who thinks every thought
but that is not as much as to say that to be every being means that one is god because
the thinking being does not create the infinite web of thought but rather is the
web of thought itself and yet who creates or created the thought web or whether the
web creates or created itself is a metaphysical notion that i didnt have time to
ponder given my circumstances at the stake and as i was about to submerge completely
in the flames i knew that i was in nothing more nor less than an ordinary situation
because every moment is a moment that precedes death given that the precise definition
of death is a change in identity and considering also the inescapable fact that our
identities change each time we access another instant in the web of infinite thought
patterns and so i began to realize that a frozen moment was a victimized bug that
was caught in a delusional web which was very different from the web of freedom and
infinite thought processes associated with my enlightened thinking at the stake and
that our delusions of ego and survivability and all the other delusions of self centeredness
for that matter are nothing but the paralyzed and hopeless premonitions of death
that an insect feels as it sees a spider moving like a machine of destruction across
a web to suck the vital throbbing juices out of its stupefied flesh and it didnt
matter that the last living bit of my own flesh was about to be consumed in the firestorm
spawned by the grand inquisitor of the bachelors because i would be packing my bags
in any case and leaving well before that final brain cell popped and would be on
to a new job and occupation in some other skull and situation and felt an incredible
lightness of being because of my newfound knowledge and understood what it must be
like to be a mayfly rising from the intricate surface of a river for its momentary
dance of glory in the sun as the raging fire consumed my final cell and then i saw
a tunnel of brightness opening before me and voices were calling from the right and
left and above and below and i could feel myself shooting out some dark channel into
an all powerful and embracing and all welcoming divine light and was ecstatic and
grateful and prepared myself with blissful anticipation to tumble into the lap of
my creator because i knew that my metaphysical vision couldnt be explained as a biochemical
reaction in a dying brain since my brain had already been burnt to a crisp by the
alaskan wall of fire and yet i jumped to an impetuous and unfortunate conclusion
about the nature of life after death in assuming that i was rocketing toward heaven
as a result of the spotlessness of my behavior as the saintly king of paradise because
i had indeed been transformed and etherealized but it wasnt in the way i had hoped
and the dark channel hadnt been a spiritual ladder to everlasting salvation nor an
escape from the infinite web of previous reality but a paternal urethra leading into
another sorry morass of pitiful existence and i had been blown out a set of anonymous
gonads and my faceless head was plowing through cum and it wasnt because i was motorized
but there was something that made me wiggle and nobody else had heads or features
either but i saw that they were carrying heads and features or at least half a head
and half a feature within their trembling cavities and how i got into this position
of resperming which is a much more radical form of retrogression than rebirthing
ill never know but as i continued to exert my masculinity i recognized that id wind
up in a toilet or tampon in no time and looking quickly to the side i saw herds of
tadpoles huffing through the white goo that i originally thought was heavenly light
and it occurred to me that anything could happen but chances were that nothing would
and that i was jerking myself off in the literal sense of the word and that if there
were no sperms there could be no pricks which created a conundrum in my brainless
brain and i began to think of what an absurd organ a drooping channel of flesh is
that dangles between the legs of half the humans on the planet and could see a mammoth
egg with a surface like a golf ball whose talking navel was the only point of entry
and wondered what the source of this specific knowledge was because i could understand
swimming upstream as part of a herd mentality but the intuition that i had to enter
through a talking navel in a golf ball is a different kind of thing entirely which
means that instinct or knowledge is present in an incomplete piece of throbbing shit
like a sperm and as i swam closer a halo appeared around my faceless head and i was
anointed and could hear faint choirs humming through the innards of the goo and the
geodesic surface of the ball began to pulse and the choirs became jubilant as my
halo streamed around my magnetized bulb of a head that was being tugged by the female
egg force and i realized that i had been selected and in moments i knew that my spermlike
essence would meld along its chainlike being with the seductive female wiles and
inner links of the golf ball and be transformed at every point of contact and my
body alerted the egg to open its force field for me and i was sucked toward the talking
navel and although i had just been part of a larger orgasm i felt a smaller one building
inside me and this intimate pleasure was blasting through my body which no longer
wriggled but was hardened and drawn out along the gravitational force fields of the
egg and extruded through the sexual latitudes at the depths of being and i plunged
through the oval lips of the talking navel which were frantically murmuring soft
and passionate words of love and burst and came in an incredible rapture of orgasmic
shuddering which was followed by a flowing glistening overall sense of peace as if
i were spreading through a lake and could feel distant lappings at my edges and tiny
objects were swimming through me like fish and a brown benevolent heat was trailing
along the lake and toasting the sparkling chromosomal tides of the egg surfaces and
voices were calling other voices and there was no power that could control the insanity
of this vocal production and then there were two of me and i had to abandon the notion
that i was one thing and what was worse i had to abandon any notion of a one thing
history so that the faceless head with the tail that had been wiggling toward where
i now was was not what i had once been because i couldnt tell which of the two of
me was the original swimmer but the argument was beside the point because all of
my energy was being devoted to creating splits in the nature of selfhood and it was
strange that i still retained one voice that was king shit while all the other chattering
vocables of my multiplying cells were cooperating and i panicked since i couldnt
figure out how i was thinking because now that i was a being that would eventually
develop a brain i saw that my thinking was preceding its source which meant that
effect was preceding cause which was a contradiction of the tenets of western philosophy
and it was certainly possible that once i developed a brain i would have an explanation
for how a brainless being had obtained thought but until i developed a means to think
about how i was thinking id try to focus on the storm that was raging around the
egg where lightning shot through clouds of raining fluids in hot prongs of language
and i didnt know whether to be terrified or not but it didnt matter because a primal
energy was making me divide no matter what i did and i was destined to become a massive
clumping of cells and saw a mist of microscopic insects gliding through a patch of
slanting autumn sun and oak leaves were peeling away and whirling through shifting
cubes of brightness inhabited by these gnatlike creatures who were basking in the
dancing patches of froth that flowed below the banners of failing light in the trees
and where this image came from i didnt know because i was still within the clouded
boundaries of the egg which had begun to move or rather i had begun to move because
i was reconciled to being egglike and was heading for the maternity of the womb but
the image of floating gnats in an oak grove had had to come from somewhere since
i hadnt yet experienced the gestalt of a gnatlike experience and i thought that perhaps
the male who had created me and as a result had become my dad was standing at that
very moment in a forest and had forged a telepathic connection that would eventually
degenerate into a father child relationship or that this isolated image of insects
shimmering in the sanctity of the woods was in some mysterious way not an image but
a symbol of some natural or psychic force that moved in a matrix within me just as
i was being moved by a power not my own nor my mothers toward the profundity of the
womb and i was actually smaller than a gnat but in my pinheaded head the gnats seemed
smaller than me and then i comprehended the ultimate truth of all reality and the
supreme wisdom and ultimate principle that governs the universe and all its creations
and that once understood can be utilized to explain every aspect of the myriad phenomena
and to answer every koan and solve every problem and banish every doubt and erase
every intellectual care and that supreme wisdom and ultimate principle of the universe
is that nothing makes any sense but that nothing ever has to and i wanted to hold
on to this important thought but couldnt and was wearied by my activity and had strange
cramps although i had no organs and felt anguish and frustration and a maddening
thirst for truth and wanted to be young again although i was only a few minutes old
and didnt know how i could face the rest of my life and wanted it all to end before
it began and truly believed that the millions of fellow sperm who were nowhere to
be seen and were drifting and dying in another area of my mothers body where there
was a conclusion to work and sorrow were luckier than i was and yet my desires for
extinction were a passing fancy because my brain had started to develop and because
it is a scientific fact that the brain has an inherent need and vested interest in
its own survival therefore my yearning to die vanished without a trace and i was
forced by my head to be in love with life and my brain cells began to contrive to
make me forget everything up to the present point which i did because nobody ever
remembers what i had just forgotten and i knew i would have to go through many layers
of forgetfulness before i was born because the principal job of the brain is to figure
out how not to know but i forgot what i was thinking before i finished my train of
thought about the nature of forgetfulness and was nestled against a wall of nutrients
and started for the first time to feed which was a drag because i now felt hunger
for food which automatically decreased my thirst for knowledge and i saw that my
brain was telling everyone else what to do for its own ridiculous benefit and that
i would always hate telecommunications because it was just a means of brains using
nonbrains to talk to brains as opposed to systems of excretion where stomachs use
nonstomachs to communicate with stomachs and a thin thread formed between me and
the puffy wall which was a link in the chain of the stomach system i had been using
my brain system to think about and miraculously i had my first taste of blood and
was awash in a life deadening dependency which my brain called love but i called
slavery and although i no longer understood what i was thinking or feeling or why
i was dependent on eating because of the brain poisoning i knew that the crap that
would begin to form in my new intestinal system was what i had to look forward to
for the rest of my life and i couldnt stop my brain from driving excessive thoughts
through my head which was actually starting to form into a headlike structure and
i felt the need to sleep and the next thing i knew i was bigger and then asleep and
then bigger and then asleep and then bigger again and then asleep again and this
cycle kept repeating itself month after month and for a while i thought i was a chicken
or a rodent or a fish or a brute until i finally assumed the lineaments of a man
and realized that a wingwang was beginning to dangle between my legs so that one
day i would eject what i had been into something similar to what i had entered in
order to become what i had already become and i wondered what was the use of living
through another dreary cycle because there are many forms of creation besides ejaculation
which are equally futile and the better one is at creating things the more isolated
and useless one becomes and one of the iron laws of humanity is that almost all great
artists die unknown and almost all great lovers die unloved and almost all great
healers die of the illness of trying to heal humanity and that public success from
time immemorial has always been based on luck and a vaunted mediocrity and the most
common trait of those who garner fame is viciousness and i wondered if there were
any value at all in a humble life above the fray and convinced myself that the best
way to experience humility was to break down the power structures in my brain and
so i began to meditate in order to home in on the primary source of brain structure
and i perceived that the fountainhead of mental power wasnt far away since i hadnt
been born yet and there were only a few barriers that had been erected by my developing
cerebrum to shield me from the blinding truth of my own creation but the notion of
humility suddenly bored me because my brain had decided to fight my resolution to
make changes in its power structure by releasing defensive hormones that created
ennui and depression and i became distracted and listless and couldnt focus my meditative
energies but fortunately i was resourceful enough to summon into my service the biological
energy that had created my brain in the first place and was able to coopt the energies
that my brain was using to coopt me and by meditating on a deep biological level
i was able to regulate my biorhythms which allowed me to reduce the rate of brain
cell multiplication and so my brain was forced to surrender in order to continue
growing and had to comply with my humble wishes and i forced it to remove the barriers
of forgetfulness and was finally able to think in a nonstructured way and view in
retrospect the moment i was converted into a sperm which was the moment after the
moment i was tied to the stake in the paradise of the bachelors while having my final
brain cell fried by the wall of flames that had been ignited by the inquisitor who
had been hired by the rebels who had refused to construct my statue in the kingdom
i inherited after being trapped in the metal desert before i exploded as a result
of the trap set by the government in order to maim the wolfchasers who had bivouacked
outside the cabin into which i wandered after my brain sector operation and because
of this second elimination of brain structure i could now examine my prior life and
my life before that life and my lives before the life that preceded my present life
when once upon a time i had been fixing in my kitchen which made me see bloody dots
floating through the rooms of my office building prior to being jabbed in the rectum
by a nude woman before going to a dinner party and winding up being attacked by a
toy duck which resembled a machine on a cruise ship with metal jaws that forced me
to escape into a raft that tumbled over a falls after which i wound up licking an
orange breast at a bridge party in anticipation of my conversation with a monkey
whose evil wishes landed me in my own coffin where i traveled around a cemetery in
order to have the opportunity of flirting with mermaids whose wiles got me magnetized
and flying across the countryside toward a rickety house where i conversed with a
forgetful horse and then journeyed to saigon in time to observe a fascinating parade
and subsequently flew my helicopter to miami and smoked psychedelics which caused
me to need the aforementioned brain operation conducted by the jam eating reverts
and this anterior life was viewed by me with redoubled abilities and renewed ease
and i realized that there was no flip side to existence because one reality was pretty
much like any other whether on earth or in heaven or in hell and regardless of what
one did or where one was one was still doing something somewhere sometime and the
something one was doing had a beginning and a middle and an end and the end of one
thing was the beginning of another and the underlying substance of all possible experiences
was unbelievably boring because one was always assured of something else happening
that was just as meaningful or meaningless as the thing that had just occurred and
no matter what mental act was inspired by the events in question that mental act
would be followed by another and no matter what word or figment of language was generated
by the mental act there would always be another word or figment that would follow
the first figment or word as night follows day and i saw that there was only one
reasonable escape from this endless trail of sickness and sick language and that
was the creation of a language of nonexistence so that i had to figure out a way
of creating a situation where i was no longer connected to my own language and then
i could be said truly not to exist and would be free and so i began to meditate on
this paradox which was like the sound of one hand clapping and went into a trance
and even though i was developing and changing in the external world of my prenatal
reality and even though i was born during this period of trancelike concentration
i steeled myself against incorporating the birth sensations into my meditation practice
because to do so would have meant acknowledging the existence of existence but instead
i continued to focus on the creation of a language of nonexistence and it was only
at the moment when i was lying in my incubator that i gained an explosive insight
into the hopelessness of philosophy and came to understand the existential truth
of the language of nonexistence which is that it doesnt and never has existed which
is what makes it what it isnt and what it never was and what it never will be and
i felt completely helpless because i was a newborn blob in an incubator and the feeling
of frustration and failure was ripping me apart as i lay there cooing and drooling
and absorbing the full implications of endless boredom within the existing parameters
of an existing language and i saw that there was only one way out of my predicament
which was to restore the missing power structure to my brain so that i would once
again be ignorant and attach significance to my measly life and have beastly desires
and be ravaged by commonplace fears and so i made my unholy bargain with the truth
and was transported to a stadium where fans were doing the wave and i was the chief
referee for a grand sporting event and had written the rule book that governed everybodys
behavior during the contest and the game was democratic and based on a theory of
voting and each member of the two teams had a single vote and could choose which
player on the opposing team should be the designated the official ball carrier and
the individual receiving the most votes was required to run a gauntlet through the
fifty members of the rival squad all of whom were equipped with referee approved
and league sanctioned razor sharp knives and the idea of the game was to see how
far down the narrow corridor of stabbing and slashing competitors the official ball
carrier could get before collapsing and dying in a heap of guts and there was no
question of surviving but only of gaining the maximum number of yards before being
carted away to a mortuary behind the stadium and each team always had fifty members
because after the death of a player the population on one side of the stadium would
vote for one of their own to be sent onto the field to replenish their team and this
was considered a great honor and after the death of an opposing player the fans for
the other team would vote for their candidate and after a ball carrier was removed
from the stadium the box office would sell a single admission ticket for an exorbitant
price so that there was always the exact same number of spectators and players and
the democratic game went on without let up year after year and huge amounts were
spent on promotion and nobody on the outside realized what was going on on the inside
since all that could be heard were perpetual cheering and the hubbub of the fans
and each individual on entering the stadium and receiving an identification number
and hearing the gate clang shut might wonder if he had made an error and it would
dawn on him after years or decades that he was bound to wind up on the field and
might be stabbed and slashed to death since to garner the honor of descending to
the playing field as a substitute was akin to winning the lotto of self destruction
and yet the promotion of each fan to the rank of player was greeted with mass applause
although from time to time an errant individualist would raise his voice in stormy
protest but whenever that happened then certain perverse and resentful counterespionage
fans who were in the pay of the promoters would vote for the beleaguered protester
so that he would leap to the front of the balloting and wind up joining one of the
teams where invariably for some inexplicable reason he would become the first player
to run the murderous gauntlet and so everyone was held in line and the game proceeded
according to my rules which was gratifying because i had been hired by unnamed financial
interests to invent not just the rulebook but the game itself and i even orchestrated
the cheers of the cheerleaders and once the game had been invented there was no stopping
anything and given that a reasonable number of lucky players were never singled out
to run the gauntlet through the course of fifty ballots they were thereupon allowed
to leave the stadium and the crowd would accompany their exits with exuberant grunts
and hosannas and a secret hope was kindled in the breasts of the delirious fans that
it was possible to win the democratic game of survival by maintaining an impeccable
invisibility which was the unspoken subtext of the entertainment phenomenon and the
spectators in the stands began to practice conformity in preparation for their elevation
to the status of players so that they would run the best possible chance of getting
out of the stadium in one piece and it was because of this necessity of remaining
virtually unnoticeable that the game progressed as smoothly as it did but the truth
was much more gruesome than the reality known to the spectators because the game
didnt allow for the liberation of survivors and provision had been made for the immediate
exile of those who had beaten the odds and the surviving team players on exiting
the stadium were immediately arrested and taken to a kangaroo court where they were
convicted of precisely fifty murders which it was not difficult to prove since they
had been allowed to keep their official blood coated razor sharp league sanctioned
knives as mementos and these mementos were used as evidence against them and the
hapless team members were flown to a clearing in a rain forest of a central american
country called stabonia and each survivor was branded on his forehead with the identification
number he had received when he first entered the stadium and was handed back his
knife and dropped into the clearing which was many miles in diameter and there were
stabonian farm implements for each of the sports team survivors although the agricultural
situation was terrible because the topsoil of a cleared rain forest is notoriously
thin and what with the heat and yellow fever mosquitoes and the fact that there was
no law enforcement most of the sports team survivors expired quickly as a result
of inanition or disease or stabbing by the more hardened survivors of previous contests
because the commonwealth of stabonia was founded on the principals of a grim natural
selection and if a sports team member were to venture outside the compound he was
immediately gunned down by right wing guerrilla insurgents who were in the pay of
the sports team promoters but as the chief referee i was the only one who was aware
that the only way out of the stadium was to live with a branded forehead in a steamy
jungle clearing by stabbing to death anybody who challenged ones ability to collect
vegetables and this was the logical outcome of the democratic sporting contest and
it was possible for me to change the rules of the contest at any time because the
owners of the sporting teams trusted me implicitly and had made considerable fortunes
by allowing me to construct the rules according to my own wishes and certain gifted
tabloid spin doctors had been hired to advance the reputations of members on the
playing field who were especially proficient in staying alive but as soon as the
journalists would hype a particular individual for having avoided being chosen that
individual would almost immediately be picked out of spite so that publicity was
equated with instant death and after a few years of officiating i realized that nobody
ever went to the bathroom or required food or sleep and it surprised me that i hadnt
realized before that i must have been operating on the basis of metaphor and that
the situation i had created was a lame conceit for crowd control or contemporary
totalitarianism under the guise of freedom or human evil or the brute power of the
group to root out any form of human excellence or individualism but the bottom line
was that the corporate sponsors and owners and landlords who rented out the stadium
and journalists and trainers and coaches were satisfied with my stupendous achievement
and the bloodshed seemed beside the point because when somebody died the fans would
reinterpret the tragedy in personal terms by commenting that that particular individual
didnt have what it took or his legs were too short or he didnt deserve to be so popular
in the first place and yet there were a number of occasions when individual players
refused to play the game and would not hold on to the ball but would drop it and
try to run out of the stadium and such despicable behavior would send the crowd into
a frenzy and these ignominious cowards were forced to be groundskeepers and clean
up bodies and remove the blood from the artificial turf with special detergents that
had been developed by chemical firms that formed part of the owner combine and eventually
i acquired enough money to buy a cottage in the country and live out the rest of
my life in superannuated quiet and was given a commemorative plaque that was autographed
by all the managers who had told me what to do and i hung it over my mantel and in
my more devout moments expressed my gratitude for having been given the ability to
live a productive life as part of a larger society and one night i fell asleep by
the fire and found myself locked in a cell block and there was one prisoner per cell
but the cells werent actually cells but more like honeycombs and the prisoners werent
actually prisoners but more like bees who for all practical purposes were identical
to one another in looks and behavior and the guards were identical to the prisoners
although their features seemed slightly more malicious and less developed and i would
constantly check my body because i was terrified that i would change until i was
indistinguishable from everyone else and one day i saw that the unforeseen had happened
and all of the prisoners were uniformly and slowly changing into me and this was
disturbing although i couldnt decide why because it wasnt my problem if others wanted
to imitate me and i saw that all of the prisoners were staring at me fixedly without
blinking and that by looking at me they were able to absorb my identity and so i
started staring back but realized that to do so would risk my changing into them
by the same natural laws that allowed them to change into me so that in either case
the same result would occur and yet there was another possible explanation for this
phenomenon of change which was that i was changing into them but that at the same
time that my identity was changing my knowledge of what my identity was was changing
as well so that i was under the illusion that the prisoners were changing into me
but in truth i was changing into them while thinking that they were the ones who
were changing and consequently i pretended that none of them existed and one day
the doors of the cells slid open and we were forced to march single file to the main
yard where a plank extended over a huge cauldron of scalding red hot chili oil and
one by one the criminals jumped into the vat and boiled themselves to death and all
of the prisoners seemed resigned to their fate as if they were identical soup ingredients
and soon it was my turn to walk onto the plank and i realized with a sigh of relief
that the reason everybody had worked so hard to become like me was to aid me through
the trepidation of this dive because i could take solace that others just like me
had gone before me and others just like me would follow in my footsteps and so i
jumped into the seething mass of peppery bubbles and saw insulated fish swimming
through the parboiled dumplings of the bodies of the convicts and awoke in front
of my fireplace with a much better feeling about the brotherhood of humanity and
rubbed my eyes and yawned and on the table next to my adjustable chair was a deed
of purchase for an ancient tree i had bought which aside from having curative powers
if one chewed the leaves was an aesthetically perfect specimen and although i didnt
own any of the land surrounding the tree yet i had obtained an easement from neighboring
property holders which allowed me constant access and i was proud of having obtained
the right to call this tree my own and read my ownership document with satisfaction
but suffered a severe shock when i discovered in the small print that my right of
easement was only a right of standing easement and not a right of sitting easement
and that the lawyers who drafted the document had overlooked the fact that i needed
sitting rights because i intended to hire a security firm to guard my property in
order to make certain that nobody poached a seed or graft or leaf or scarred or even
touched my tree with their fingers without permission but all of the security firms
within an acceptable radius had been forced through political chicanery and raw economic
coercion to hire union labor and their contracts were uniform in requiring that each
of the guards have a place to sit for at least fifty minutes every hour and there
was no way i could trust an unbonded watchman to look after my interests and i didnt
want to have to go back to the surrounding land owners because to do so would have
involved financial ruin since they had formed a cabal that owned all the property
extending out for miles from the trunk of my tree and on the other hand it would
have cost a small fortune to bribe the security firms into evading union rules because
if they were caught they would suffer a work stoppage or incur prohibitive penalties
from safety bureaucrats and i was between a rock and a hard place and realized i
had purchased a white deciduous elephant because if i couldnt guard the tree then
for all intents and purposes the tree would become public property and my right would
be valueless and when i thought of the acres of rain forest that had to be cleared
in stabonia in order for me to earn my tiny percentage commission on the entertainment
deaths of all the sports team players which allowed me to buy my single tree i became
infuriated and was having trouble enjoying my cottage and even more trouble sleeping
because i was obsessed and was forced to devise a long term strategy while i sat
by the fire burning my logs and although the tree was a practical investment only
in cases where one was bitten by a black widow spider because the leaves of the tree
were a natural antidote for this particular type of infection yet there wasnt anything
else that would possibly motivate your average john doe to lay out a considerable
sum of money to replace me as tree owner and the tree couldnt be syndicated or franchised
or leased or funded or leveraged or optioned or hypothecated or condoed or bartered
or mortgaged or amortized or incorporated or subordinated or liquidated or litigated
or downstreamed or upstreamed or sidestreamed and it couldnt be monopolized or promoted
or produced and directed or commercialized or marked up or down because it was nothing
but what it essentially was and my ownership was a polite fiction created by an institution
of government which in itself was a polite fiction and although the tree was an overpowering
work of divine beauty that had been worshiped by sophisticated gardeners for many
generations i was forced to cut my losses and chop it down because an analysis done
by a reputable accounting firm had demonstrated that its removal was the best economic
option and i could get two cents on the dollar which was better than nothing at all
and i owned my cottage debt free and had been prudent enough to purchase an annuity
which would support me comfortably for the rest of my life and so i signed a contract
for its removal and sale and carried the contract to my local banker who sold the
instrument to a factor and yet i was concerned when i considered that economic security
hadnt provided me with any peace of mind because there was something inherent in
money that when applied to the human condition produced ruthlessness and it occurred
to me that cash accomplishment was a poor substitute for real accomplishment garnered
through increased knowledge and maturity and that generosity and gratitude and an
overall openhandedness would prove to be a more satisfying foundation for what little
life i had before me than the ravenous pursuit of wealth and yet i saw that the exasperating
problem with learning to be generous was that it required emotional growth and that
most people were nailed into their attitudes and that society was moving in the wrong
direction because stupid people were having all the children and smart people were
becoming increasingly impotent so that year after year the average human was becoming
less and less capable of understanding not only that he could change but that he
should change and peoples foreheads were getting lower and lower and their eyes were
turning glassier and glassier and therefore moral improvement was becoming a practical
impossibility because the planet was uniformly inhabited by degenerate morons and
yet god hadnt granted me the power to change others but only the power to generate
the inner spiritual changes that were necessary to my own salvation and just as my
tree had fallen in the forest and nobody had known except for a few distraught and
unimportant gardeners who were trespassers in any case so my moral improvement would
go unnoticed by the surrounding world but would still be important to the only person
who really counted who was me and i decided to take an inventory of my faults and
spent a number of hours in contemplation while attempting to determine the nature
of my transgressions and was able to conclude that there were a number of people
that i had hurt in minor ways but the damage had occurred when i was an idle youth
and resulted from benign neglect or adolescent rashness and that by the time i had
reached my majority id developed a firm ethical sense that had guided me through
my halcyon years as chief referee and yet i couldnt help envying the nameless tycoons
who paid me my pittance and underneath it all i seethed with bitterness because id
been treated as a mere employee rather than as a fountainhead of wisdom and without
my ideas there would have been no game and consequently no profits and i thought
of the spouses and children of the unnamed investors who never would have to lift
a finger to invent or do anything and would spend their lives in domiciles much more
opulent than my humble cottage and everybody would flatter these simpering leeches
because they were wealthy even though their good fortune would be based entirely
on my hard work and brainpower and it bothered me that life was unfair and that handsome
guys could ball the beautiful gals and wealthy snobs could order people around without
thinking twice about the welfare of others including myself and i tried to imagine
a better world where such behavior was not permitted and was transported in my minds
eye to a standard world where everyone was dressed in standard clothing and ate standard
food and lived in standard housing and had standard attributes and standard personalities
and standard bankrolls and standard cars and standard clothing and was entertained
in standard ways and this place was not much different from the prison which i had
been in when i fell asleep in front of the fire in my cottage nor was there any significant
difference between this standard society and the society in which i was raised since
a standard language had been developed in my youth which could only express the most
standard thoughts and feelings and this change in language was a form of mind control
in which all good things were bargains and all lifes higher meanings were created
by low lifes in corporate offices and the standard community in which everyone was
standard was the standard way of manipulating the world for fun and profit and my
worldwide fame as a result of the democratic game i had created meant that i had
become standard enough to achieve standard notoriety and underneath it all i remained
a boring old man in an adjustable chair with nary an interesting thought in my standard
head and i felt an overwhelming desire to bust out of my mold and do something daring
and quintessentially human before i cashed in my chips and made contacts through
managers who reported to the promoters who reported to the senior vice presidents
who reported to the directors who reported to the owners of the investor syndicate
who managed the subsidiaries that sold concessions that had been endorsed by defunct
members of the sports teams and these managers arranged through connections they
had forged with japanese portfolio administrators of saudi conglomerates whose shares
were held by bolivian generals residing in a guarded compound of a sweltering west
african metropolis for me to become a recreational therapist for a safari searching
out rare metals in the swamps of gabon and before joining the expedition i needed
to be refurbished and was referred to a gerontologist in california who had patented
a form of herbal surgery which removed tired cells from the body and after a rigorous
course of acupuncture and mudbaths i was given a complete makeover by an assistant
to the herbal surgeon and on arriving in africa was placed in one of the executive
jeeps and the swamps were fens of quicksand and on descending from the jeep into
the sands i was sucked down so quickly that at one moment i was opening my eyes into
a brand new herbalist state of utter rejuvenation and the next moment my eyes were
sinking below the liquid sands of gabon and my pith helmet was hovering on top of
my descending body but i remained elated because i knew i would be fossilized and
spend hundreds of millions of years without pain but error as a rule is intrinsic
to speculative thought processes and as my body descended and the pressure of the
mud increased i was frozen in the inner space of the quicksand and began to harden
and although a situation couldnt have been created with fewer options yet my predicament
had resulted directly from my desire to blow it all out and the irony of my situation
as i sank into the terrestrial gabonese deprivation chamber was no different from
the irony of any other situation and the only escape from the consequences of my
physical immobilization was through humor which is a form of religious faith because
the essential aspects of human life meet at the tangible surfaces of self deprecation
and the grandeur of the sun is a cosmic joke especially as viewed from the gummy
interior of an african mud puddle and it is impossible to be meaningful without making
fun of oneself since its like the heisenberg uncertainty principle where velocity
is meaning and position is humor and if one is purely humorous then life has no meaning
and if one is purely meaningful than life has no humor and yet humor and meaning
are always there and i concluded as my body continued to change into pavement that
nothing should be taken seriously and i continued to sink into the quicksand and
the pressure was enormous and i felt a strange sensation as if somebody had turned
a hose on my feet and the hose began to move up my legs and then to my waist and
the lower half of my body was rinsed in a gush of water and suddenly i popped loose
of the muck and fell into an underground sewage system that carried the wastes of
gabonese mining interests towards the sea and there were fish with sharp teeth and
antennae that looked like chinese lanterns living in the industrial sewage network
and as i plunged through the waste disposal channels that ran below the steaming
jungle the fish congregated in larger and larger numbers and looked at me quizzically
and i realized with dismay that these were gabonese lantern piranhas and their shifty
eyes were glowing with hunger and every once in a while a freestanding gob of rancid
flesh came tumbling through the brown liquid and the piranhas turned their attention
toward the loose meat and within seconds gobbled it up and i couldnt figure out why
they didnt do the same with me and realized that it must have had to do with my herbally
rejuvenated flesh which wasnt rancid enough to interest the fish and we were flushed
into a harbor of hot salty water and the fish swam off and i came up for air and
made my way in a leisurely manner toward a ladder that extended over the edge of
a pier and climbed up and found myself in an amusement park and had to stand in long
lines and was disgruntled because it turned out that the lines themselves were the
rides and when i got to the end of a line i had to pay for the fun i had enjoyed
while waiting and the lines had names like rollerball and tiltawhirl and scrambler
and why anybody would pay for the pleasure of being denied pleasure made absolutely
no sense and i was waiting in a line called rocket to the future and noticed with
surprise that others in the line were sharing an experience that i wasnt a part of
and they would gasp and shriek at the same moment and a fat woman in front of me
put her hands over her eyes and said oh no not again and people were commenting appreciatively
as they paid at the front of the line that this particular line was the best ride
ever and there was a man behind me who was seven feet tall and i pulled him aside
and asked him why people had been gasping and screaming in unison and he explained
that there were stimulators planted in the lines by the gabonese amusement park managers
who were paid to gasp and that everyone else would gasp at the same time because
nobody wanted to confess they werent having any fun and i asked how he knew that
people were planted in the lines and he confessed that he was a stimulator himself
and by the looks of me i would make a good apprentice and he took me to the ride
employment office and i noticed that all the employees were at least seven feet tall
and i was given a job application which asked for my first name middle initial and
last name and my height and arm length and those were the only blanks on the form
and i realized that the man behind me in line had singled me out as a possible stimulator
because i had become over seven feet tall as a result of the softening caused by
my herbalsuction treatments followed by temporary fossilization under extreme quicksand
conditions which had pinched me and transformed my emolliated body and extended it
in new directions and i was ushered into the personnel managers suite of lavish offices
which contained oversize furniture and was seated in a mammoth chair and offered
a gigantic glass of green liqueur and saw a beach ball on a chain hanging from the
ceiling in the center of the office and the ceiling was thirty feet high and after
i had quaffed my drink and engaged in a few minutes of mindless chitchat the personnel
manager said it was time for the job interview and he went over to the wall and flicked
a switch which lowered the ball so that it was twelve feet off the ground and he
said to me do you think you can swat this ball if you try and a shiver ran up my
spine because i had heard something similar in the past but i said sure and prepared
myself and jumped up and swatted the ball easily and he said good we can offer you
a job at fifty thousand dollars a week or i can raise the beach ball a foot higher
and you can try to achieve a higher level of compensation which is offered to candidates
with extraordinary abilities and i asked what would happen if i missed the ball at
the higher level and he said it wasnt a big deal and did i think i could swat the
ball if i tried and i said sure id have a go and he raised the ball and i prepared
myself and jumped up and swatted the ball easily and he said he could now offer me
a job at a hundred thousand dollars a week and i was delighted because in my wildest
dreams while sitting in my adjustable chair in front of the roaring fire in my cottage
and feeling sorry for myself i had no idea that my safari would lead to such awesome
job opportunities and i said how much id love to be employed as a stimulator and
he said not so fast did i think i could swat the ball if it were raised another foot
or even two feet to say sixteen feet and the liqueur had given me added energy and
self confidence which added to my sense of herbal rejuvenation and i was certain
i would be able to swat the ball and he raised it to sixteen feet and i prepared
myself and jumped up and swatted the ball easily and he pumped my hand and said that
i was a truly amazing candidate and would be perfect as a stimulator and he had been
authorized to offer me two hundred thousand dollars a week if i wouldnt be insulted
by such a paltry figure but as compensation for the insult he could raise the ball
to twenty feet and did i think i could swat the ball if i tried and i asked if it
would be possible to have another liqueur and he said sure no problem and handed
me the bottle and i poured myself a drink and meanwhile he raised the ball another
four feet and i stood and made a toast to the personnel administrator who blushed
with pleasure and drank down the liqueur and prepared myself and jumped up and swatted
the ball easily and he shook his head from side to side in awe and amazement and
told me he was empowered to offer me three hundred thousand dollars a week and asked
me to sit down and relax and have another drink of liqueur and he got on the telephone
and called a number of other personnel executives who were standing in the room by
the time i had finished my drink and looking at me with a mixture of wonder and admiration
and one of these executives introduced himself to me as the vice president and overall
potentate of the personnel department and asked me if i thought i could swat the
ball if it were raised to twenty five feet off the ground and that if i did i would
be paid four hundred thousand dollars a week and i said sure why not id give it a
try and i put down my liqueur glass and stood up and prepared myself but as i was
in the midst of my mental and physical preparations i began to entertain doubts for
the first time and wasnt certain that i had a twenty five foot jump in me and asked
the potentate of personnel if i could still be paid the three hundred thousand a
week if i missed the ball because i still had three hundred thousand dollar a week
stimulation abilities and the personnel manager said that unfortunately the original
offers were now off the table because i had agreed to try for a higher level and
i began to wonder whether i was being offered a job at all or whether this personnel
office was in reality an amusement ride but i put this perverse thought aside and
prepared myself and as i was about to soar into the air the door burst open and the
seven foot stimulator who i had met while standing in line was yelling that i was
a fool and was being taken advantage of and was in for a big surprise later that
evening and that he was sorry he had led me astray and if i grabbed his hand he would
guide me like vergil to safety and one of the personnel officers pulled out a large
pistol and shot the stimulator in the side of the head and he fell to the floor and
they encouraged me to go ahead and jump and so i prepared myself and jumped in the
air and easily swatted the ball and the men fell to their knees and started praying
and thanking god and said oh lord you are so wonderful and we will pay you five hundred
thousand a week which includes a sizable saltatory bonus and would you like to swat
the ball one last time and well only raise it a few more inches and if you swat it
we will double your money but my shoes were wet from the blood of the stimulator
and i said i had had enough and would do my job conscientiously and they were cordial
and said they knew where i was coming from and that it was wise for a person to recognize
his own limitations and so we signed a contract and i was directed toward one of
the lines and told to stand there and begin my stimulation routines and the line
was called the mister america buttfucker ride which made no sense because i was somewhere
in africa and i wondered who mister america was and nobody was allowed in the line
who was over twelve years of age and the management had dressed me up in leather
dominator clothing in order to disguise my role as a stimulator and there were hordes
of children standing in the line and i had been instructed to pant and moan which
i did and all the children made panting and moaning sounds in unison because they
had been conditioned at birth to act like their parents and at a certain point i
was told to yell out do it to me again mister america ram it into my virgin ass where
the sun dont shine which i did and all of the childrens eyes rolled back in their
heads and they paid their money and hobbled away and i objected because i thought
my job was tasteless and returned to the personnel office during my coffee break
and complained vociferously but the manager said i should remember that i was a stimulator
and not a perpetrator and that simulation and stimulation were almost identical words
but two entirely different concepts and i should keep that bit of corny wisdom in
my miniature brain the next time i wanted to object about a harmless company policy
because nobody got hurt and nothing ever happened and everybody in west africa was
entitled to freedom of expression and if little children wanted to pay money to pretend
they were getting fucked in the ass well then that was only in the nature of being
a child and such a ride improved the emotional balance of the kids and allowed them
to adjust gradually and naturally to the problems of upcoming adulthood and if i
complained one more time i would find myself in the same position as my stimulator
friend who had been blasted in the head by another stimulator who had been posing
as a career employment officer and if i knew what was best for me i would get back
in line and shut my foul trap and i was shocked by the changed attitude of the personnel
administrator but i saw his point because he hadnt said anything that wasnt true
and i headed across the amusement park and saw a sanitation worker pushing a cart
filled with body parts and he was wearing an identification badge which said gilbert
and the letters dbpofsscre and i asked what that meant and he said that as an employee
of the park i could look up the definition in a glossary which could be found in
the back of the operations manual which was part of my level three orientation kit
and i opened up my satchel and inside was my manual along with assorted stimulation
items and on the thirty seventh page of the glossary appeared the word dbpofsscre
and its definition was detached body parts of failed stimulation swatter candidates
removal employee and so i was grateful i had made it past the examination and been
deemed employable and that evening i was ushered into my freshly painted luxury apartment
in the amusement park resort condominium complex and i kicked back and opened a bottle
of pinot noir and weighed whether i wanted to work for people who had established
an amusement park based on weeding out the weak and murdering them and yet i had
accepted my weekly salary of half a million dollars in advance and so i felt obligated
to work for at least a week as a matter of principle and i went into my bedroom to
go to sleep and in my bed was a small boy who had been standing in the buttfucker
line in front of me and he asked me to read him a bedtime story so that he could
get in the mood for amorous endeavors and i said that i had no interest in making
love with him because what i was doing in line was just a stimulation job but he
told me that he was the son of the owner of the amusement park and if i didnt tell
him a bedtime story he would report me to his father and that the amusement park
had been named after him and who did i think i was anyway and what did i think so
much money was for and that all of the stimulators were members of his harem of tall
men and that tall men were hired as stimulators because they had humongous schlongs
and he had slept with all the other stimulators on multiple occasions and that he
wanted to sample my goodies and i was disgusted but i thought that i could lose nothing
by reading him a story and he handed me a book called doctor diddle takes a vacation
and i read about a doctor named doctor diddle whose wife had died as a result of
the malpractice of one of his best friends who was another doctor named dorf and
doctor diddle had killed dorf and embalmed him and stuck him in a glass case in his
basement alongside the body of his dead wife who was in another glass case and between
the two cases doctor diddle had placed his bed and he slept with young boys every
night between the glass cases of the two corpses with a huge fixture containing dripping
wax candles hanging over a mattressless bed of unfinished lumber and the wax would
drip from the fixture and burn the doctor and the boy as they were making violent
passionate love and the pain of the burning wax would add to the pleasure of the
lovers and doctor diddle was very handsome and had the most beautiful and longest
penis in the world and had a special friend named louie whom he loved and desired
more than all his other lovemates put together and when i read the name louie the
small boy in the bed next to me pointed at the word and said proudly that that was
him and that his name was louie and that his father had hired a famous ghostwriter
to write the book and put louies name on it and i turned to the cover and saw that
indeed the first name of the author was louis and there were comments on the back
of the book made by world famous authors about what a young genius louie was and
how he had a great future ahead of him and how the book was a tale of grandeur and
about the sacred craft of the writer and of little louies flare for poetic utterance
and louis told me that he had won a number of important awards for this book and
for another book that he had done later with the help of the same writer entitled
the return of doctor diddle from his vacation and that he had received a grant from
the gabonese government and a genius award from an important african foundation and
the promise of a tenured teaching job when he reached adulthood and that his father
had had nothing to do with it and he swore to me that nobody had paid to influence
the decisions of anybody and that the ghostwriter hadnt actually written either book
but had simply been available to answer questions by telephone about how to spell
certain difficult words and i asked if he wanted me to continue reading but he said
that he had something else in mind and since i needed to stall for time i asked louie
to tell me what kind of vacation doctor diddle eventually took and he said the answer
was obvious and that he had taken a vacation at the amusement park that louies father
owned but that this was a sheer coincidence because the story required certain special
attributes of a vacation destination that could only be matched by the attributes
of louies fathers park and that each of the important rides in the park were described
in detail in the book which increased the sales of books and admission tickets and
louis got out of bed and knelt down and folded his hands and said his prayers while
i waited in bed and he prayed that i would be gentle with him and only hurt him as
much as he wanted to be hurt and that god would watch over his father who was watching
over him right now through a camera that was mounted in the ceiling of the bedroom
and i was shocked but waited until little louie had finished praying for world peace
and an end to disease and famine and for the health of all his lovers and then i
asked him what he meant when he said that his father was watching through a hidden
camera and he said that this was literally true and that his father tuned in every
night and monitored little louies activities because he was a responsible parent
and wanted to make certain that louis was all right and a few weeks ago one of the
newer stimulators had been unable to maintain an erection and little louie had begun
to cry and a team of dbpofsscres had rushed into the bedroom of the stimulator with
chain saws and hauled him away but that little louis didnt know what the initials
on the nametags of the sanitation workers stood for and he had assumed that the impotent
stimulator was taken to another condominium that contained a smaller bed and i felt
humiliated because i was being required to perform sex on a youngster for money and
began to wonder whether i was capable of maintaining an erection myself and whether
the amusement park was actually an amusement park at all and perhaps a charade had
been concocted to satisfy the sexual appetite of this youngster and all the people
standing in line were actors and the only open job in the park was to be a stud for
this lascivious pampered kid and i decided to forego the money and make a run for
it and excused myself to brush my teeth and there was a ventilation duct in the bathroom
and i climbed in and started crawling and cold air was blowing in my face as i worked
my way along the metal duct and what had been a distinct advantage for me in acquiring
a job at the amusement park had now become a liability as my elongated body was knicked
and cut and i felt myself moving through a space time warp because the metal lost
its surfaces and bars of energy hummed around me and the air in my face no longer
seemed like air but molecules possessing airlike qualities and i came to another
grate and removed it and wiggled into the cockpit of a spacecraft where two astronauts
were buckled into seats that were facing me and sitting next to me was a headless
man fiddling with his harness and a stump of spinal cord emerged from his neck wound
and strands of vein and muscle extended over the edge of the cut skin and the rest
of the neck was smooth red meat and through my headphones i could hear the countdown
and as the vehicle was launched i could feel the g force ripping at my muscles and
it felt as though someone had punched me in the stomach and my eyelids were forced
so far back that i feared my eyeballs would bust out of their sockets and my nose
was flattened against the bones of my head and my testicles were jammed against my
seat cushion and my ankles ached and the nails in my fingers and toes were pushed
into their cuticles and there was a pane of superresilient clear material opposite
me and i could see the craft moving into space and the weight lifted and it was time
for the forcible ejection of one of the astronauts and a bottle on a spindle was
spinning in the center of the four of us and began to slow until we could make out
its contours and it went slower and slower and i asked the pilot of the ship what
the significance of the bottle was and he said that when the bottle rested pointing
at one of the four of us then the equipment of the spacecraft would be thrown into
gear and the astronaut at whom the bottle was pointing would be ejected at such an
amazing speed that the sliding ejection door would only open long enough to let the
astronaut pass through but not long enough to lower the air pressure in the cabin
one iota and the violence of this ejection would hurl the astronaut tens of thousands
of miles into the void and the astronaut would explode because none of us was wearing
pressurized suits and be turned into the thinnest possible mist and as the pilot
was talking the bottle was pointing directly at me but i saw that it was still moving
in the direction of the man with no head and i prayed fervently that it would keep
moving because i didnt care much about the welfare of the grotesque being in the
seat next to me and i turned and cursed him and said maliciously that i hoped he
would die and the bottle was barely pointing at me and was moving so slowly that
i couldnt imagine its getting past me before it stopped and my harness was locked
so that it was impossible to get away from the ejection equipment and the pilot and
copilot were laughing at my predicament because they knew there was no way the bottle
had the momentum to keep moving until it was pointing at them and i was furious that
they had such terrible manners and as the bottle began to slow to a standstill i
rebuked them and said that my curse would stay with them and haunt the spacecraft
and poison their future activities and that after i exploded in outer space i would
return as a ghost and i would sleep with their accursed wives and lovers and mothers
and daughters by coming to them and raping them in their dreams and there would be
nothing that either man could do about it and i would assume horrible shapes and
cause horrendous accidents through magical afterdeath powers and i assured them as
the bottle continued to slow to a standstill that they deserved such a rigorous lesson
for their crude behavior in laughing at the possibility of my demise and i looked
down and saw that the bottle was about to break out of my ejection zone and was trajecting
toward the zone where it would be pointing at the headless hunk of meat sitting next
to me and i started to worry that the headless man would do to me what i had threatened
to do to the pilot and copilot because after all i had cursed the meat hunk who sat
nonchalantly tapping his fingers against his arm rest and seemed oblivious and the
bottle came to a halt and as a result of the quickness of the ejection mechanism
it seemed that the headless astronaut had disappeared whereas in fact he had been
ejected and the pilot and copilot explained that they were laughing because they
had played a joke on me and the spin the bottle mechanism had been preprogrammed
to point at the meat hunk and the most important part of their mission was to eject
this hunk of guts into space because he was a distinct liability on earth where he
had roamed at will and was accused of mercilessly destroying people for years and
had proven indestructible and there was no way he could have been eliminated aside
from extraterrestrial ejection and the meat hunk was now at least ten thousand miles
away and outside the earths gravitational pull so that even if he didnt burst he
would float forever and consequently everyone could now rest easy and as the pilot
and copilot were gloating over their sick joke at my expense we heard clanging on
the outside of the ship and through the transparent window i saw one of the hands
of the meat hunk pounding against the hull and every time he pounded he rattled the
spacecraft and the concussion of his fist made the lights in the spacecraft dim and
the air supply system began to falter as the hunk kept bashing but the pilot and
copilot stayed composed and radioed down to mission control in arkansas and requested
further instructions and were told to initiate plan seven three eight e four because
the thinkers at the central command post had fed every possible circumstance into
a supercomputer that was also used to predict weather patterns and the computer had
listed the meat hunks swimming instantly back to the ship as one of the possible
unfavorable outcomes and provided a plan to be executed by the astrogation team in
order to counter the effects of the pounding and my harness came loose and i was
lifted from my chair by the two men and placed in a closetlike chamber at the back
of the spacecraft and could feel my body being annealed with insulation material
from head to toe that permitted me to breath and speak because it was gummy and had
small pores that allowed for the passage of sound and air and i was told that i was
going to be thrust into space and that once outside the ship my job was to negotiate
with the meat hunk to get him to swim away and look for options elsewhere in the
universe and i repeated my threat to the pilot and copilot that if anything happened
to me i would haunt them and would fuck their wives and children and make them accident
prone so that eventually they would be paralyzed or blinded as a result of some stupid
engineering mistake and i could see through the glass door of my insulation chamber
that this worried the men who in spite of being astronauts were plagued by ancient
superstition and they contacted the arkansas command post who contacted somebody
else because neither the scientists nor the meteorological bubble computer had foreseen
the possibility that i would curse the people in the spacecraft and i went a step
further and cursed the people in the space command post and told them that i also
would fuck the space executives wives and daughters and lovers and make them asthmatic
and miserable for the rest of their natural born days and the pilot and copilot received
a message from the surface of the earth saying that i should be removed from the
chamber and seated in my chair and they put the harness on me and i noticed that
the insulation material had dissolved and i breathed a sigh of relief until i looked
down and saw that the bottle was whizzing in circles and the pilot and copilot were
no longer sitting but were floating aft of the seats and laughing uproariously and
since i was the only one in a chair it was a foregone conclusion that the arkansas
computer had decided to throw a rat fuck into me and i would be ejected into space
without any insulation which i immediately was and in a split second i exploded but
instead of dissolving in outer space i became a restless ghost in inner space and
no longer inhabited the body of a retired referee but was a vibrant and youthful
and horny nude spirit beneath percale sheets in a suburban neocolonial residence
in suburban little rock and the faithful wife of the copilot of the spacecraft was
about to hop into bed and go to sleep and i knew that she couldnt see me because
i would only be visible in her dream shell and she had to descend into a world of
loose psychological images for me to penetrate her defenses and seduce her and she
was beautiful and had large perfect breasts and smooth long legs and perfect feet
and slim shoulders and a rock firm ass and i became even more excited because i realized
that within her dream shell she would imagine herself to be a defenseless virgin
and try to get away from me because she would think that she had to save herself
for her astronaut husband but deep inside she would be aching for my body and would
give herself to me completely and because i was a spirit being i would be able to
control every fiber of her response and during the time i was in bed within her dream
shell she would be totally possessed by me and i could have my way with her and ravage
her virginity and she would never forget the experience because she would come in
her sleep with a force and energy that would totally alter her future waking states
and sex would never be the same and never as good as what i would perpetrate upon
her tender virgin body in her defenseless dream state because i would do everything
exactly the way she wanted and she would lose all rational ability to judge what
was happening to her and would respond at her deepest level with devotion and when
her husband returned from his voyage after having disposed of the meat hunk she would
never again be satisfied with his dismal sex routines and would start hanging around
the astronaut training center looking for studs who could approach but never achieve
the level of rapport with her body that i was about to attain when she fell asleep
and her marriage would be ruined and she would confess to her husband when she asked
for divorce that a sexual ghost adonis had come to her one night while her husband
was being an asshole on the spacecraft and had ravished her and enslaved her soul
and shown her through the force of his seductiveness that her husband who she always
thought was an intrepid explorer was instead a foul mouthed yokel with a bad sense
of humor who liked to taunt innocent referees who were fleeing malicious children
and the copilot would think back on what i had said and be terrified that i would
eventually make him drop things or become paralyzed and i assured myself that he
deserved what he got for treating me with such disdain when i was strapped in my
harness and watching the bottle whiz around and he had thought he was free to be
the malicious petty yokel prick that he was without negative consequences whereas
in fact i was preparing to do the deed with his beautiful wife and she fell asleep
and i entered her consciousness and over a period of several hours i savaged her
in a state of utter bliss and couldnt wait to inhabit the beds of the three gorgeous
daughters of the pilot and there was a junior executive at space command central
who had a mature yet luscious mother who possessed incredible sexual technique and
i was going to have a blast with her as well and clearly saw that a disembodied spirit
has more fun than corporeal beings because the dead have no limits to the fulfillment
of their desires and can use the living in the same way that children manipulate
dolls and yet as i lay in bed with the sated wife of the copilot i realized that
death is a comfort to the living because it provides the mind with necessary boundaries
and i panicked because i couldnt see any end to my vengeful responsibilities and
thought back to when i had blasted apart in space and my corpuscles had arched into
vast walls of sparkling matter and my personal light had been released and shone
among the other lights of the universe and i suddenly regretted that the darkness
of my curse had caused such a terrible transformation of this liberated energy and
driven it between the percale sheets of the bed of the copilots wife in little rock
where i became wedded to the debauched spirits of the sublunary world and my ruminations
rubbed the gloss off my sexual conquest and i was ready to move in new directions
but a ghost is driven through a maze of former values and cant escape its labyrinth
of prior intentions and i felt that because of my shenanigans with the copilots wife
i owed it to humanity to perform good deeds and decided to rematerialize as a holy
man and pray continuously for the salvation of my fellow beings and i showed up the
next day for work as a dishwasher in a french restaurant and a strange language came
out of my mouth that no one understood including me and i wanted to curse my fate
but i couldnt understand what i was saying or what i was cursing and the cooks were
screaming at me because id been daydreaming about my night with the copilots wife
and suddenly i resented that id lost my chance to sleep with the three beautiful
daughters of the pilot and with the mother of the space executive but instead had
voluntarily placed myself in the greasy galley of a french kitchen because i wanted
to do the world some useless good and i didnt feel particularly holy and couldnt
understand what the cooks were yelling about and decided i had nothing to lose and
yelled back and effortlessly framed sentences that made no sense and realized i must
have had a defective rematerialization and come back to earth at the bottom of society
and i saw that my projected notions of saintliness were ludicrous since i was nothing
but a babbling dishwasher and wouldnt be of value to anybody until i pulled myself
up by my greasy bootstraps and i held up an object and identified it by saying the
first word that came into my mind and i learned the unnamed languages words for fork
and then spoon and knife and cup and saucer and then fuck you you pretentious piece
of french shit and a weird phenomenon occurred in that every time i learned a word
in my own language i learned the same word in every other language that was spoken
everywhere by everyone at every time so that by saying fork in my unnamed language
i gained the ability to say fork in english kurdish french old norse spanish russian
mandarin latin baluchi yiddish finnish urdu tagalog ugaritic swedish hindi parsee
armenian korean linear b and every other conceivable language and yet if a cook pointed
out what the word for sausage was in french i couldnt get the saucisson to stick
in my head but it would come out as sucksuck or soossissoon until i learned the word
in my own master language and then instantly and effortlessly i would know how to
say sausage a thousand different ways and after a year of washing dishes i was truly
omnilingual and could say anything to anyone and didnt want to waste any more time
washing dishes given my newfound abilities and felt like a wildblossom in the wilderness
shedding tears of dew with nary an appreciative eye but realized to my dismay that
although i could say anything i couldnt say anything original since i still had the
intelligent quotient of a dishwasher and decided that i was perfectly suited by my
mental limitations to become a psychotherapist and so i claimed to have graduated
from the most prestigious of viennese therapeutic institutes with a postdoctoral
certificate in functional parameter transformative reaction analysis and was able
to open a clinic in geneva that catered to a distinguished international clientele
and whenever a patient asked a question i responded with a question of my own and
without having to think much about anything i was able to drive a benz and wear custom
suits and purchase a stunning home and join an exclusive club where i could play
gin rummy with my sicko jetsetting clients and regardless of which languages i spoke
i always said the same things and everyone thought i was brilliant and their lives
got better and i learned a lesson from my new occupation which was that almost every
patient was a fool no matter what language he spoke and yet there was a hole in my
gut because everything i stood for was a lie and shame smoldered in my breast and
it took all of my energy to keep from blushing or destroying myself and i thought
back nostalgically on my days as a babbling dishwasher when i had worked so hard
to learn the language i was speaking and i yearned for a more positive existence
and i had two clients who were twins and cordially hated each other and i saw them
separately and whatever constructive change took place in one twin would cause an
opposite change in the other so that when the former twin finally came to the realization
that she was in love with her mother the latter twin came to a simultaneous realization
that he was in love with his father and when the first twin confidentially admitted
to me that she was a man and had had sex with her brother the second twin admitted
that he was a woman who was incapable of anything but a lesbian relationship with
his sister and that when they had slept together it was like a new form of biology
and was a mind blowing experience replete with cultural significance whereas the
first twin who was a woman who claimed she was a man had said that the sex she had
had with her brother who was fully intent on identifying as a lesbian had been a
total and utter drag and that the act of intercourse had shown her or him depending
on ones point of view that all the various forms of pleasure were void of higher |
