Yab Yum

VIRULENT CULTURES PROLIFERATE IN A POLITE STATE.

T

HE name of this book is Yab Yum , which means FATHE RM O TH ER in Tibetan.

Š

2014 by J. K. Johnson.

Assembled July 26th at the Fish Market.

3

REVERSE DIALECTIC: RE-ESTABLISH the THESES BEHIND OUR feces SPECIES.

A TAXONOMY of BIAS: MAPS GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION upon the CONCEIT of CONSENSUS.

A COMPLETE DSM

OBVIATES SELF; CONVERSATION SOARS, thus UNTETHERED.

CUE AWFUL MUSIC. BRING IN THOSE EXTRANEOUS HUMANS. DANCE, IDIOTS! KILL ‘EM ALL. CLEAN UP. FADE TO HOT PINK.

5

A PRIMER FOR THE NEW, IMPROVED APOCALYPSE written in simple english, as easy to follow as

A. YAB YUM B. MUY BAY C. BUM YAY

BE

use

sell

FUL. your SELF.

Thought ticks off bit by bit proceding as it must from on high down onto my skull and trickles rivulets all the way through my rotting carcass and into my rocklike feet. From thence it descendeth into hell. On the third day, the present moment will be judged by how alive it still is.

usy -ness

7

NOTE TO SELF—HELP!

E

very time I open my mouth, I feel like an asshole. Conversely, every time I stick something up my ass, my gums bleed.

I’ve been talking and talking everyone’s ear off for the last six months or so. Having resolved not to have any boring conversations whatsoever, I’ve made everyone I know a party to my chatty channel. Every day I’ve been vertical, I’ve clicked another handful of chromatically anarchic Lego bricks into place, slowly building the pyramid-shaped edifice of a world I can wholeheartedly countenance.

9

11

A substantial part of this is my map of the near far future, which peeks up the flue of exponential singularity and eyes the unspeakable rend of soft tissue beneath, that indicates the projected time and place of our debauched apotheosis.

Will it truly therefore transpire thus? To err in wonder is the heartache of the gods, so I hope most fervently to be as wrong as I wanna be. There’s no future in futurism, as I’m sure someone must’ve said before.

It takes a knack for creative psychosis to rebuke the heavy links of memory. If your mental estate is up to code, you’ll find it’s not so difficult to spin your own non-consensus storyline

without incurring undue alarm from others.

“Now then,” you may well ask, “how are you going to reconcile yourself to a pack of delusions? Is this not weakness?

Is this not madness?”

“But no,” I respond, “not if the exact size and shape of one’s personal bias has been established (within a negligible margin of error); using this lens, one can postulate a world model without one’s self in it. The difference in mass gives the degree of liberty you can safely take with your path up and around the tree of sustainable possible worlds; then you’re free to slither and coil up the sun-hungry, sky-reaching branches of probabilistic viability.”

13

15

“Um,” you demur, “so this is an actual discipline? Like, with equations and robust, uh, theorems or whatever?”

“Good question. The answer is the sound of me laughing at your face. No, a foundation of error sufficiently plastic to survive an apocalypse is lousy with phony polyphany. You must lie to tell the narrative truth, as anyone knows who’s ever drawn from life; you learn from repeat attempts that to draw what you see to the letter of the law results in a schematic of hand motions, not a window upon a particular apocryphal variant of the universal canon.”

Where’d you go, dear reader? Have I said something wrong?

I

rarely remember my dreams.

Recently, I’ve slept through repeat screenings of a dream produced by the same idiot mind of mine that writes these words. In it, I’m driving a car, which is in itself anomalous as I haven’t had a car for over a decade.

Worse, I’m elevated above and behind the car itself by a hundred feet or so; the interface seems lifted from Grand Theft Auto, or some such video game.

I’m not physically attached to the vehicle at all. I think my body is down there, speeding down the highway, while my soul (yes, let’s use that contentious word) follows and frets from above. It’s harrowing when I lose sight of myself under a bridge or through a tunnel.

HAVIN G

taken up the gauntle t in order to acquit himsel f of hands, the good doctor makes fair use of bad press in order to save face.

17

I don’t have much regard for dreams, I should disclose. I’d happily forget every dream I’ve ever had. I do not enjoy swimming through the unfathomable depths of Lovecraftian horrors, nor do I relish the sick disgust I feel every time I wake up into this world. It takes six to ten hours for my consciousness to properly boot up. Accordingly, I’ve always sought to subvert the circadian curfew, which truncates any train of thought bound for that forbidden citadel of submerged truth.

For the last six months (it’s July the second, 2014 at the time of this writing), I’ve felt disassociated, as the psychiatrists say, from ‘reality,’ “one

19 of the few words which mean nothing without quotes” according to the writer, Vladimir Nabokov. He had a dim view of the mental health industry, as he wrote, with characteristic eloquence: “The only difference between the therapist and the rapist is a convention of spacing.”

My first therapist betrayed me to a behaviorist, who put me in a darkened room and made me watch slides. A noose around the neck of my cock was made to crow if it were to grow, while a parade of images was projected before my eyes. A normative mean of pornographic fodder mostly filled the carousel of slides. The rest were unspeakable images I’ve since expunged from memory. The building no longer stands wherein this pervert test

(as my second therapist termed it, ten years later) was administered.

Fortunately, I’ve always been arrogant enough to put my own counsel above the wisdom of others. And I’ve lived long enough (forty-three years to date) to have figured out how to live with and without the regard and companionship of others. The otherness of you (all of you, whether or not you’re reading this marginal message) frees me from being one of you. You are infuriating, adorable and scary as hell (“Hell is other people,” Sartre quips) if I may be so bold.

You know what I mean, don’t you? It’s like when you spy a bug out of the corner of your eye, scurrying

21 from shadow to shadow with too many limbs and a loathsome carapace. You know the nausea that accompanies this intrusion into your space. The very fact of its existence is repellant. Maybe you squelch this feeling and remind yourself of the ethical edifice you’ve adopted; hopefully we’ve all adopted some version of the tenet that ‘all life is precious.’ But being human does not exempt us from also being animals. It merely makes every day a battlefield, littered with opportunities to choose between the two.

Our horror of others shows itself in vivid relief when we inhabit our own sort of carapace, which becomes an extension of our body, as Marshall

McLuhan describes in his still-relevant fifty-year-old book, Understanding Media. Within our shiny projectiles, we re-enact our distant past as motile flagella-propelled sperm, racing for the womb in a zero-sum commute. At the same time, the car is a womb of sorts— presumably moreso for some; comfort and amenities add to the effect.

Have you ever driven for hours, paced by one car in particular which seems to be making the exact same trip as you? I used to drive back and forth from Atlanta to Athens, which takes roughly an hour and a half. I was an enflamed asshole behind the wheel of a sufficiently accelerated vehicle. So being paced either way with a hundred

23 other likeminded student bodies made the trip unbearably tense. It felt like a race to be born every time. I hate driving for the same reason I can’t play games without seeing a face.

Cultivating modes of alienation from within the amber waves of abundance has been necessary, as have the avenues of esoteric selfabnegation proven keen fuel for my lust of humiliation. I seem to have lived my life trying to escape your good opinion, dear reader. It’s as if I feel bound to discourage you from ascribing to me any credibility aside from what you may (I hope) find contained within my words.

— J KJ 2 0 1 4 AT L

“Nice-ass suffix-padding, no-ass-ass’ns.”

—Why is this an inappropriate comment in the workplace? ­— I S I T A P P R O P R I A T E A N Y W H E R E ?

Have you ever laughed for amusement’s sake, not from the reeking horror of fake time?

When was the last time?

How do you know it was your last laugh— did you cry first?

25

All is lost.

RUIN IS IMMINENT. You’ve botched your lot with superb slapstick abandon.

Lean into the posture of failure, unless you’d like to make yourself even more preposterous.

The covers are closed particular case study.

on

your

There’s only one direction to descend, and not a lot farther to fall

27

before a wet smack busts the trust of your corporate cells all over the nice cement.

Simone Weil says that only the most abject sufferer finds, in the soul’s sorriest state of malheur, the sweet decomp stink of truth.

Here’s hoping she’s right, and that the ground you lay claim to is the genuine spartan squalor of entropy’s abattoir floor.

R e p e a t t h e a b o v e s e q u e n c e e v e r y w a k i n g d a y.

Surrogate the words with friends’ indulgence.

Ta k e t h e t i m e t o d r o p y o u r s e l f a l i n e . R e c o r d what you read yourself writing. Reword. Refine.

29

T

he points of contact between story and history bind us together into a strong and supple branch of probabilistic rigor. The pyramids of Egypt seem built to transfix our uneasy focus upon the very unlikelihood of their existence; and so they are. The cross that marks our prehistory from our history only occupies the spot it does because it absorbs the fundamentally destabilizing dissonance between what one man/woman perceives and the rest of his/her kind deny. These events intrude upon the three-(falling into four-) dimensional gameboard of our consensus reality.

Upon a skewer are we impaled, all we words made flesh—birth to death, mouth to ass, alpha to omega. The time we tick off in discrete measure carries us up the barbed axis of entropic breakage, a process inversely related to the emergence of form and the liberation of spirit from its tomb encased in rock.

31

WE ARE IN THE PROCESS OF SCANNING OURSELVES FOR UPLOAD.

BUT— TOWARD WHAT BRUTARIAN, DYSTOPIC END, THIS SINISTER TREND?

IF YOU IMMEDIATELY ENVISION A LOCKDOWN 33 PRISON PLANET WHEREIN PRIVACY IS THEFT, LET ME THINK IT BETTER FOR YOU.

Art lets us take a stab at reading the world through another’s eyes.

“Why are you stabbing yourself?” the other taunts you.

35 “Because our lives are our payment due in full upon death. Therefore be ye the loveliest of least likely selves, if you’ve a yen for a harp and a cloud on the good side of heaven, come your reward. When you’ve reclaimed every rejected notion and kept it until you’ve had to reject it again, you are ready to pervert mindless nature for the ends made manifest in the will-mills of the reverse engineer, he and she who barks orders from the ass-backwards point of utmost futurity,” you answer to an empty room.

37

“one”

EMOTION PROVIDES A NAVIGATION SYSTEM.

“two”

WHEN YOU HIT AN O B S TA C L E , Y O U F E E L PA I N .

39

“three”

PAIN TELLS YOU WHERE YOU ARE ON THE TERRAIN OF YOUR LIFE.

“four”

YOU LIVE, YOU LEARN; Y O U D R AW A M A P O F T H E W O R L D

WITH SONAR SHRIEKS AND INKY, WEEPING WOUNDS.

“f

iv

e

”

41

A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF BLOOD MUST BE SPILLED BEFORE YOUR MAP

“s

ix”

MAY BE RELIABLY EMPLOYED

A S A M E A N S O F N AV I G AT I O N .

43

“seven”

E M O T I O N A L PA I N

MAY BE CONVERTED INTO OTHER CURRENCIES,

“eight”

B U T TH E IN TE R E ST THAT AC C RU ES O N EMO T IONAL DE BT CANNOT BE SET T LED W IT H A NY FORM OF E XCH AN G E OT HER T HAN PAIN.

45

“nine”

WHEN YOU BLOCK THE PAIN, YOU PREVENT THE PAIN FROM ENDING.

“ten”

F O RG IV E Y O U R S E L F.

47

BONER, PARTY

of FIVE:

all parts played by Dr. Dang Grrr, Jr.

Oner Boner - a loner

Homalona Boner - a stoner

49

Forkorna Boner - a coroner

Kronor Boner - a foreigner

Seamus Boner - a shamus

1. Spider-girl / batcave 2. God’s gun threatens a couple of mildly belligerent teenagers.

3. The snake-girl sees things from a different angle.

4. The garden of love and beauty looks as boring as ever.

5. No one eats here.

6. No one dies here.

7. Leave it alone.

51

53

55

57

59

“Are you a happy child, Johnson?” one of my high school teachers quipped as he unhooked his fisheye from the lure of my violet legal pad and its pile of noodling Uni-Ball™ doodles.

61

I was not.

Richard J. Tommaso drew the dude below.

Rich is a cartoonist [see http://www. richtommaso.com] and my second oldest living friend (since Seattle, 1995).

He also drew the napkin sketches on pages 68 & 69.

63 I used to have a stack of napkin sketches he drew of Bjรถrk at that awards show when she dressed up as a duck.

They were funny because you had to be there.

The Pyramids Are Registration Marks,

Binding Probabilities, Possibly...

The Inter net Knows and Remembers, But As Yet Cannot Transmute Matter into Dust and Song—

Man is the Coprophage,

the Synthesizer of For m.

65

FORM X (VOID) =

wormfood weddings

67

69 dimensions

1. i (POINT) • 2. man (CROSS) † 3. self (BINARY) − 0 4. character (PLOT) 5. author (VOICE) 6. author as character (STYLE) “()” 7. world w/o one (GODHEAD / DOGSBODY)

[hack→syllabus staple]

WRITERS, ARTISTS of the POSITIVE DENIAL INDEX

NARRATIVE POTENTIATORS;

FAMILIES of PROXY-CAUSALITY SMART-MINDS

CORPORATION; DINOSAUR→ MONOPOLY

MAN; FOOL→ SELF

the REVERSE ENGINEER

71

WHATEVER!!!

73

75

SWAN

[sic] ALL BELOW

by Mort Slowclaw

FA K E !

“Hey, I’m Murt. I’m some kinda fanciful hooha you kids buy bookloads of butts for. Fill in your own banks as per se the details.

Ok, so the thing about swans you need to know if you want to be an ass about it is that there are too many kinds of them. Something needs to be done about it, is my headache.

I have to stay up til 3 every morning just catalogging the new varieties that have been discovered that day! Then all day every day I’m hunting down the stupidest kinds and striking them from the record.

It’s a big bloody life I lead, being the angel of death for swanlike lakes, corporate hq for all swans everywhere anytime always. So the list I’m giving you now is only good for the next 24 hours or so. Which hardly seems worth the doing, but I have an assignment from Ms. Roscoe’s Science Class and by Gum I’m going to get it done.

OK, so first there are the plain old white swans. They live by the vending pond and only ever drink soda. They sound like this: [burping noise]. I don’t care if you can’t hear me through the book, I made a funny sound and it makes me laugh. Go ROFL or LOL or whatever ghosts do, or poleturguyss or whatever I’m not your spelling robot!

Next door to them are the pinkish-grey swans. They are made up of felt. They lament their hue as a curse, and blame some witch for not treating them with care at the laundromat. Their leader is named Dood; when reached for comment, Dood said: “It ain’t fair, our color. Why? Life is

77 stoopid, like the moon.”

The moon was unable to respond to this actionable slander; is this to its favor, or is it like,’duh I’m the moon and so am indeed stoopid?’

(Answer for real. I’m asking you?)

The moon heard Murt and its feelings were hurt; “C’mon, little man!” was its plaintive retort.

“I have a twelve hour commute that never is done, and I’m always pursued by that bastard the sun!”

Murt, not hearing a word, continues on his blah blah:

“I better tell you before we go on about that once, long ago all the swans lived in harmony with each other and never even considered doing their taxes. I’ll show you a picture from those days. It’s gross, meaning ossim.”

Murt holds up a picture of a thousand red origami swans swimming in a sea of green and peeing freely into it a rich golden orange which needn’t rhyme with anything but which looked eerily unlike anything else on earth or off.

“Beautiful…” Murt breathes his last breath (in this story—don’t worry, he’s fine) and expires in a death of undeniable terminality (that’s just how they talk—really, we swear he’s okay…).

Budgetary constraints have enabled us to expedite the rest of our fissile tale in the form of a s p r e a d s h e e t . Hurray for politics, pabulum and pampelmousse!

SWANS

of the

WORLD

PHYLUM

PROBLEMS

POWERS

PREDATORS

White on rice swans

Always get stained

Bleachy

Foodies

Pinkish-grey swans

Unhappy

Made of felt

Debt collectors

Ticklish blue swans

Get the giggles

Impossible to kill with a straight face

Fingers

Gold swan swans

Immobile; valuable

Valuable; immovable

Glitterati, ferrets

Tattooed swans

Fowl language, hepatitis, contact sports

Can make their tattooes move (because they’re just ink on feathers!)

Meaninglessness

Lip-synching kaleidoscopic swans

Attention addiction

Hyperactive attention deficit disorder medication

Indifference

Goth swans

Mascara runs

Get good grades secretly

Jocks, married parents

Grouchy Marxist swans

Painted-on moustaches

They would never join their own group

Margaret Dumond

Green,gluten-free hypoallergenic swans

Litigious

Cartiliginous

Gluten, joy

Faygo ‘duck duck goose’ swans

Never get picked

Don’t want to be picked anyway

Juggalos

Aluminum foil swans

May attract bugs

May contain food

Midnight snackers

79

81

O

NE MORNING IN THE FRENCH-SPEAKING PORTION OF THIS CONTINENT, A FRESH NEW SCAR APPEARED TO BRIGHTEN AND BLIGHT THE BENIGHTED HIDE OF OUR HISTORY. A CITY ONCE STOOD ATOP THE THICK, MEATY DRUMSTICK OF NORTH AMERICA’S SOUTHEASTERN TERRITORY. UPON AN ANTHILL OF THICK, RED CLAY, THIS CITY SEETHED WITH LIVID, WRIGGLING EFFORT AS RUDDY-PINK GRUBS AND RICH BROWNS BICKERED AND FUCKED UNTIL, OVER THE SPAN OF GENERATIONS, THEY’D MANAGED TO SIFT THE SOIL INTO A LOVELY CAFÉ-AULAIT COLORATION.

L

iberty as we know it was obtained at a disastrous cost, and upon this bloody boil of dirt our union’s difficult labor was enacted. Still raw one hundred and fifty years after the fact and yet to fully heal, this city on a hill was born not of a people desirous to congregate, but of the unstoppable convergence of parallel lines finding the most geometrically convenient vanishingpoint at which to meet. Perversely, our roads defy the draughtsman’s strict grid, instead opting to ply the paths worried over for centuries previous to our over-paved exuberant sprawl.

These United States still exist, but this city of which I speak has since passed over into legend.

85

87

93

A SUDDEN SQUALL PRE-empts my departure Well It’s raining worms and sausages In the West End this evening Parenthesis I just wrote ‘Wet End’ Internal chuckle, end parenthesis.

I was fixing to walk over to see my friends across the street But I guess that’ll wait. The rain’s all aslant because of the wind And the droplets are colder than the air that they pass through.

I don’t mind a storm but I don’t favor this kind.

Do you think there’s any credence To the notion about chemtrails?

I have no opinion, just curious Ummmm...

RA PH BY ME A

I forget some of the other things I wrote in my head when I was Smoking a cigarette outside; Now I’m hungry for food.

OG

That’s what I do when I’m in the blue.

I make salty lemonade and share it on you.

OT

So placeholder filler And Lorem Ipsum.

Versace Versace & Hannah Montana.

PH

A change in the weather is sufficient To recreate the world and ourselves.

That’s a Marcel Proust quote— He invented memory.

ne th e tu Su ng to W N S O N G NO ST of U N K TI AR OW N

by UN KN

95