The Fish Market by matterhorn

THE

F I S H Market

VOLUME

featuring TIKTAALIK from E VOLU T I ON & LEVIATHAN from T H E BI BLE —(BOTH ARE FISH)

AND THE FINAL BOOK IN THE

BE STILL. KEEP MOVING SERIES. DECEMBER 2014 J.

JOHNSON

ATLANTA,

GEORGIA.

for Dobbie

and fo r a l l t he p a st , p re s e n t & f utu re

te n a nts o f t h e F i s h M a r k e t .

H E Y, K I D S — a n d

T I K TA A L I K

WIKIPEDIA says is “a monospecific genus of extinct sarcopterygian (lobe-finned fish) from the late Devonian period...with many features akin to those of t e t r a p o d s (four-legged animals). Tiktaalik may be representative of

the evolutionary transition from fish to amphibians.” I learned of this creature from watching “ Y O U R I N N E R F I S H ” on Netflix. The show’s host, N e i l S hubi n , was one of its discoverers. And he does an admirable job of dropping science down to vulgate form. Never before has the messy antecedence of human anatomy been so appeallingly autopsied for me!

I do mean KIDS, because I’m the paterfamilias of all y’all, phylogenically speaking!

“THE FISH MARKET” IS BOOK SEVEN OF BE STILL. KEEP MOVING. ALSO, IT IS VOLUME C.) [‘BUSY-NESS’] OF THE <3 [LESS THAN THREE] TRILOGY. Thank you to my family and my friends. Special thanks to Rachel Epstein (see page 147). This book, like the two before it, is intended more for pixel than pulp, truth be told. Maybe you can print it for me someday, though? Oh, I know I take a lot for granted with you, vacuum. And It’s not as if I’m unaware that your principal mandate, pre-empting all lesser programming, is to suck. I pre-forgive you for brokering my hurt with as much hard-won disinterest as I allow myself to invest on my own impaired parity party between the reel in my head and the raw of the world. I’m just committing to my own joke, is all. I hold my foolishness as sacred, as all unrepentant fools so foolishly do. And if it’s not as plain as the text on this page, permit me to state, for the record, the following disclaimer: People of today—I ain’t even talking to you! I just so happen to be addressing myself to your childrens’ chillins. So I hope you’ll excuse me as I plant my pole (huh huh) in the very crotch of your craw with enough aggro chutzpah to leverage my vaulting body over that high bar. © J . K . J O H N S O N / AT L A N TA / 1 2 . 1 2 . 1 4

http://bestillkeepmoving.wordpress.com/

Hamfist Bonehead Walleyed Spoonfed

Godhead Dollface Hotfoot Fireplace

Backbite Earthquake Sunspot Toothache

Forklift Angelfish Devilsfood Deathwish

Upswing Downhill Firstborn Landfill

Snakeskin Bloodline Half life Snowblind

Piebald Cocktease Gunshy Homefree

Overkill Underhand Fireproof Kickstand

Nightfall Daylight Cottonmouth Birthright

Breaststroke Horseplay Goosef lesh Endgame

10.24.05 JKJ NYC

WOODS OF THE WORLD J & I . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

WHAT THE MARKET WILL BEAR. . . . . . . . . . 32 METAL MONKEY & METAL DOG. . . . . . . . . 51 MUTT & JEFF . . . . . . . . . 53 THE BLANK PAGE. . . . . . 63 OPEN CORRESPONDENCE . . . . . . . . . 73 WHERE’S THE FLOOD? . . . 82 UNDERSTANDING MEDIAPLAY . . . . . . . . . 98 DEAR PUBLISHER . . . . . .102 FUCK A BANK. . . . . . . .104 THE ROOM . . . . . . . . . 108 ENTER THE HYPERBOLIC CHAMBER . . . . . . 114 THE CASE OF THE MISSING CAN OF SPRAY ADHESIVE . . . . . .124

The shimmering chatoyancy of unfinished futures.

GOT THAT TREE. . . . . . . 28

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J.&I. Fi r st P r in c i p l e s : an i nt er v i e w o f J . b y I .

he letter J descends from the letter I. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like an ingrown hair, an I stuck looking inward. I met J at his place of residence, a room within a segment of a great cement complex that, from an aerial view, looks like a worm coiled up inside a fenced-in area that takes up several blocks of the West End of Atlanta, Georgia. South of the city, the West End is home to several well-known black colleges, such as Morehouse and Spelman. J is white (and I only mention this because this sentence is after the last one), in his early forties, wiry and sweatyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;it is August, after all, in the humid South. And his room lacks air conditioning.

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15 M A R K E T

I: You write a lot about a near-future singularity that would apparently portend the death of the ego—of everyone on earth. Don’t you find, though, that the ones who long for the death of ego are those with the biggest ones? Biggest egos, that is. J: Well, yeah. Tall men walk farther. I: (laughs) What does that mean? I don’t follow. J: Um…If you have two people who, for the sake of a thought experiment, we’ll say are exactly the same in every other respect than height—same parents, same job, same daily habits—over each of their 99%-equivalent lifespans, the taller man will have walked farther. And even if by farther we mean one meter—if that single meter plays out over all possible versions of our prosthetic ‘tall man’

versus our prophylactic short dude, then it fits my description of a DUH-level cultural occultation—

I: Wait, wait, stop. I mean, I do want to hear what a—what did you call it? A duh-level occult--what? But I still need you to back up and tell me how we got from those who have the biggest egos are the ones that curse it hardest—which is more or less what I said—to tall men walk faster.

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J: Oh, I see, yes. I apologize. I should have used an analogy that would convey my meaning better. I know—how about this: “People in physical pain, on a scale between one and ten, will also suffer psychologically an equivalent amount; to the number, in fact—given that suffering would also be broken down into ten settings on its own scale.” You see what I did there? I’m equating a

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neurophysiological predisposition to exhibit any of the characteristics we observe as egocentrism— delusions of grandeur, paranoia, congenital solipsism—with a physical attribute. If you possess more tallness, how is it not that—to the extent we can reach a consensus about who among us are burdened with the biggest egos—can we not also extend the same generosity of spirit to any similarly consistent characteristic of a person? Does that make any sense? I: Okay, sure. So you’re just saying what the logical extension is of all of what we’re used to hearing— that, for instance, addiction is a disease. And so is being too unfocused—I mean, all of our failings are being pathologized one by one, and then they throw chemicals at it to eliminate the flaw and smooth us all out to a bland, docile level like we

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J: It is a rationalization, yes. But I’d argue that it’s not lame, only differently-abled. And if the situation you hypothesize was indeed the case—that one person had been hitting the other with some degree of frequency, and showed no signs of stopping, and if the person being hit had shown a disarming disinclination to evade the blows—then I’d say the hitter pretty much hit it on the head when he (let’s you and me assume our asses off and call the hitter a he, shall we?) observed: “I can’t stop hitting you.”

were genetically-modified chickens or something. But some of it’s preposterous, don’t you think? For instance, if someone says, “I can’t stop hitting you. Why won’t you stop enabling me to hit you?” I mean, that’s obviously an attempt to avoid responsibility, right? It’s a lame rationalization.

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And, as it happens, “I can’t stop” fits all too well with “I can’t stop you from,” don’t you find? Of course, that state of affairs is usually unsustainable for very long, according to the behaviorist playbook. In fact, according to the research compiled and analyzed by my GUT thinktank, once the hitter is made to say out loud: “I can’t stop hitting you,” then he generally stops. Why is that? Because we are so stunningly auto-suggestible that such cues even work when inverted. We’re much less complicated creatures than we think we are, and we’re more tangled up in ourselves than we need to be. We can’t see ourselves for the crowd. And so much of what functions as our society of mind has been outsourced to the cloud, we scarcely know where we end and the world begins.

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We’re re-negotiating the borders between ourselves and not-ourselves. And just as a border defines a chunk of land, a similar kind of border gives shape to its mass of human claimants according to human-scale events and resource distribution as apportioned by will and by force and by persuasion—I’m speaking of ideology, religion, patriotism based on shared aspects of identity which are genetically-acculturated owing to an insufficiently-churned gene pool—the kiddie pool is separate for a reason, you know? When mankind was young, we were divided into nation-states of kids too immature not to piss the pool. We learned to hold it in when our bodies were grown up enough

We’re growing up, see? As a body social. We’re expanding the empire of the human, annexing the world of dumb matter one product cycle at a time.

to cover the globe and shuffle our deck of genetics properly. T H E F I S H M A R K E T

I apologize. I’ve gone slightly off-message. Ah well, all roads lead to Rome, as they say when in Rome. (Especially if they’re Roman roads.) Ahem. So, um...All our creeping terror that the world’s going to hell is just growing pains. Pain accompanies any development of bodily tissue. We can’t help it if our initial reactions are wrong, and we’d be wronger still to suppress them, but we should recognize our whiny recalcitrance to the demands of progress for what it is, from a historical perspective. Which is what? Only the reps of a weight-training regimen working like havoc on our meaty parts. Merely the shin splints of a beginning long-distance runner. Walk it off. Adjust to the inconvenience as knowingly and swiftly as possible.

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One of my first principles is that a life spent walking against the wind is exhausting and expensive.

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How do we do that? We observe our own reactions to things, especially that to which we are viscerally averse. We ask ourselves why we feel that aversion. It seems to arise from the grunting guts more than the chattering head. What happens if we, at the cost of some considerable unease to our own bowels, posit a simulation model-world separate from the one we consider to be a faithful likeness of the reality we know? What if we create a what if? universe by working from the historically-supported premise that some of what seems, at present, to represent a dire trend with no signs of slowing down is a desirable future in disguise. I, for one, do not want to win the ill opinion of posterity for having warred against the wind.

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Duh. So, if I want to expend my energy more conservatively and direct it more intelligently, I will make it a practice to project part of myself as far into the future as I can, so as to be able to consult with my present self every time I notice a telltale sense of revulsion at some new notion. And in order to craft this future, I have to be inclined to spend the time and effort to develop it—to flesh it out. And the best way I can motivate myself to do this is to make a future I’d actually like to inhabit. So, I’ve reverse-engineered this science-fiction story from the premise that everything worrisome in the present turns out to be a moot point in the future. Given the innate limitations of my percipience, why would I willingly worsen my lot any further? I: So, the secret of life is to learn how to lie to yourself more convincingly? If that’s the case, our

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J: The terror people experience as psychosis, according to my humble conjecture, may only be the result of one not knowing how to build a sufficiently stable architecture of mind to structurally support one’s accumulation of experience. If my mental house is built of received notions, unspoken assumptions and easy conclusions, it’s more likely to crumble. Unless we learn how to assimilate and synthesize experience, we’ll remain at an automaton level of consciousness, and we’ll be no more and no less than an artifact of our placement in time and space. Which we all are, at root, of course— but we also, each one of us, have been given as our birthright all the hardware needed to climb the steep incline from sea to shore. The story of

most enlightened fellow humans are living lives of blissful, blithering psychosis on the streets.

biological life as we’ve enacted it is an upward struggle toward verticality; just so, where we find an x-axis, there is always a y-axis. T H E F I S H M A R K E T

I: Not to mention a z-axis, I suppose. J: Well, one foot before the other—we learned how to walk long before we learned how to fly—but, yes. That’s the goal.

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GOT THAT TREE M: It grows up from down. W: It weeps in the rain and shushes the wind. M: It’s made of metaphor. W: It carves rings around the seasons. M: We maim it for fire. W: We frame it for arson. M: House paper book cross. W: Smoke knock paradox. M: Ten wooden knuckles. W: Kaballah bears and popes. M: The golden bough, the myth martyrs. W: It’s mine as much as too much means. M: It splinters space and bleeds this place. W: Hammer, nails and thorns to thee, though no one heeds its poetry. M: Black pawn takes queen in grids of grain; but roots and buds alike agree: M + W: …you can’t chop down asymmetry.

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or a moment we are back in the Yclept Club. Begin with a close-up of Bastianâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face, fixed in an empty expression that borders on a leer, and which appears more and more goofy the longer you look at it. Think of this as the opposite of the rictus grin with which Stanley Kubrick joins his three stooges: Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Jack in The Shining, and Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. But instead of indicating a naked ego gripped by bloodlust, this fixed grimace is meant to convey the dopey complacency of

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The following is an excerpt from a novel called SCREENPLAY. This is Act I, Part II: If Wishes Were Fishes

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someone who has willfully chosen stupidity to make himself more likable. Camera zooms out as it physically moves, retreating backwards between the chatting girls and through the large panels of the back roomâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s great open window, settling outside the bar but with a full view of the long table which extends the length available. And then the wrong reel comes on, and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a shot lined up like in The Shining when the kid is Big Wheeling over octagons on the way to full mental breakdown. Except the driver is a homeless man (who, for family reasons, is, incidentally, black; what of it?) driving a three-wheeler on the sidewalks of Atlanta. The pavement, once hexagonal, is now fractured into suprageometric, jagged wheel-killers. This scene is animated in video game graphics, like Grand Theft Auto. The loon in the seat of the three-wheeler is laughing and cursing as he is tossed about by the cartoony, violent game physics.

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Once, it was steam-powered, but now the enormous turntable spins (albeit with squeaky difficulty) upon its axis according to the caprices of the earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wobbly, shearing spiral down the stripperpole of inexorable orbit. A giant

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Wishdasher goes home to the Fish Market, the entrance to which is flanked by two barrels of dead fish. No one smells it anymore, because they all snort de-wormer. The Fish Market is but one segment of a long wormy structure which coils into narrow corridors within which a range of activities are countenanced. The ground covered by this 1860s gated superstructure is considerable, and morre or less describes an irregular oblong within the twelve or so blocks it displaces. The entire complex rests on a sort of giant lazy Susan (though lazy is the last descriptor that occurs to one who apprehends this giantess afresh) which once served the vital train lines that yet traverse the continent, delivering commodities to sate the fires of industry.

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crane, once used to move massive shit-tonnage between cargo cars and this vast pantry, now looms like a record playerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s needle arm over the decrepit superstructure. This is the Kriminal Koncordance Kouncil, or The Donut, so-called for its population of glazed, baked grossers (theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re divided into twelve tribes of twelve people apiece). Time skips here, now and then, when the crane moves very fast from one end of the complex to the other like a giant needle scratching across the giant turntable. The KKK pre-enact every conceivable crime in motion-captured vectors, in order to build and maintain a vault of stock footage from which true-crime tv shows can draw upon when building their re-enactment CGI footage. Also present here are the White Devils, a gang of albinos and white rats who handle the de-wormer drug trade at the behest of the drug czar (who is an elected official in the Legion of Doom shadow government). Also here are a contingent of the 0% majority, aka the Dumpsters,

all of whom deny being Dumpsters and who deride said Dumpsters as if the word refers to others. Dumpsters are the catfish of dogma, attacking all systems of belief with their lamprey-like mouths and sucking them dry with sardonic mock devotion. And then there is the Fish Market, which has no particular affiliation.

CHARACTER NAME Wishdasher Melissa Justin Waters Natalia / NTB Matt Macey Dana cat & dog Mutt & Jeff

<3 / Less Than Three / The New G John le Baptiste

Guy

LOOKS LIKE

LIKES

KRYPTONI TE

Roy Scheider

stasis, validation, inner turmoil

party games

Lily Taylor

wood, skin

splinters

Daniel Day Lewis

Hee Haw

Silly Putty

Victoria Collins

disasters, reciprocal recipes

formalism, formaldehyde

Nick Nolte

a song

free will

Holly Hunt

carbonation

unobtanium

Dot & Dash

BDSM

rhyme schemes

Mutt & Jeff

Matthew Arnold

Carl Jung

Bob Balaban x 3

granola cereal w/ soy milk

lentil soup

Mario Lopez

teen sin

robots, insurance

[from Dark Shadows]

Natalia and Melissa are in Melissa’s room. Melissa is yelling at wood.

Melissa: “Are you serious? Are you serious?” Natalia: “I don’t see how wood could be otherwise.” Melissa: “Ohh! I just want it to adhere. Is that too much to ask?” Natalia: “Apparently, yes.”

A separate Natalia appears in her own thought balloon; thenceforth to be known as NTB.

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Justin Waters: “What’s up, sucker-punch?”

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She is thinking of another material while agreeing about wood. Her thought balloon opens like a nuclear grey flower and temporarily annexes the larger share of screenspace. Into her thought balloon strides Justin Waters, self-repudiating prophet of dynamic static. He is as absurdly overgroomed as Dave Navarro.

NTB: “Stop snitching on yourself, you triumph of the wildebeest.” T H E F I S H M A R K E T

Justin Waters: “That’s not a kind of swan. But go further, prenatal A.I. Strumpet up the dumpster.” Natalia: “Why do my internal simulations of hypothetical conversations ever warble their way west of sense? Poetry, I fear thy magnetism.” Melissa: “Okay, now there are too many people in my room. Everyone out!” Justin Waters, NTB and Natalia. file out, murmuring apologies. They descend the stairs to the kitchen, where… Matt Macey stands before a disassembled sink. Water leaks prodigiously from exposed pipes and defies physics by looping upward into snaky coils of enchanted, choreographed motion. With a lit lighter in one hand, an atlas in the other, and with an impossibly-sustained hiss

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We follow Justin Waters, NTB and Natalia further through this kingdom of the discarded and discredited, known to its denizens as the Fish Market. The high ceiling and a wide grid of windows fail somehow to prevent a lightless, claustrophobic pallor from prevailing.

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Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been like this for two or three days, ever since a slight misapprehension of the mysteries of plumbing unshackled the dread universal solvent from its subterranean slumber. The same song plays over and over again from the stereo in his room. Set on eternal return, the thundering trauma of heavy metal music batters head against rock like a fast-forward tide, each cymbal crash dashing a spray of violent, unkempt hair into the aggro ether.

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held, seemingly without intake, in one great constant exhalation from his lips, he masters the element of water by sheer exertion of will.

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A barrel of field goal sized bamboo, frozen in mid-fall, cuts diagonally through the great room, aimed like a clutch of straws to insufflate the idle accoutrements of the aerialist set—two tied-up trapeze affixed to the ceiling. Justin Waters, NTB and Natalia settle into a waiting suite of mismatched couches. Justin Waters: “Does it ever seem to you like thoughts proceed from one to another all by themselves? Like there’s no free will involved; we’re just vessels following a charted course.” Natalia and her thought balloon self have reuinited upon sitting down in the same spot. Natalia: “Yes. Duh.” Justin Waters: “I don’t think I think, therefore I yam what I may.” C O NTINUE D O N PA GE 44

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Dana enters from the only room which seems to have paid its natural light bill. She carries a house on her back which never stops rebuilding and renovating itself. Dana:

“Haptic floor, Taste my feet. My bologna is ebullient between twin slabs of wheat.”

An amiable cat and a puppy, mere months into this denatured world, enter singing and dancing on their hind legs.

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Cat & Dog: “Human beings you are styled But in fact you are wild. All your words with friends Do not make amends For the way your skin Wraps around your inner crocodile. Amphibians are down for whatever And lampreys have disgusting sucky mouths

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But the real outrage we deplore is the face of a fish so beguiled as to think only birds flock together.” They dance offstage and into our hearts. Lateef enters. Lateef: “Hey, is Melissa here?” Natalia: “She is like the moon with gloves of silver. One might think she’d murdered the obvious.” Justin Waters: “Come around again in seven years, and then you’ll see our new skin.” Dana: “Hey Spotify listeners, are your ears awake to the wind, or are you just stupid?” Lateef: “Y’all are loopy.”

We follow him through the kitchen, where Matt is as he was before, except now his pants are down and he’s pissing on the floor. Except it never hits the floor—it curls

back towards him and hits his forehead. Lateef: “Matt, you got mercury poisoning. And I have a vestigial tail.”

He goes upstairs and into Melissa’s room, where she is seated and inspecting a tiny object through a loupe. Lateef: “Uh oh. Did you find another geometric parasite?” Melissa: “Come look at this and tell me it’s not the spitting image of Jean.” He looks through the loupe.

Title on screen: “The New Guy”

Jean le Baptiste: “Hey y’all—have you heard about the New Guy? He’s coming next. I’m great, but he’s the bee’s shitty knees!”

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Through the circle of the loupe we see Jean le Baptiste.

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Lateef: “Mm. Looks more like Mr. Pac-Man to me.”

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Pan across dumpsters at dusk. An infant, animated in black and white Fleischer Brothers style, dances across the screen over piles of stop-motion dumpster divas, animated a la the Brothers Quay. Three squat sexless beings, glowering with sonorous ague, emerge from the final dumpster. They wear stupid hats and silly smiles on their thumbprint heads. The voice comes from the sum of the three. Less Than Three: “Be inclusive, not exclusive. If with your fellow man you disagree, take it upon yourself to open dialogue with him [“him” = universal neuter]. Find the path between your point A and his point B. It is a more difficult thing to do than it seems; in order to understand, you must first forgive. And this forgiveness must be extended before it is earned. This goes against our animal drive to eliminate those who dissent against us.

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Essentially: Love thy neighbor, yes. But in order to do this, we must first admit to ourselves that we welcome every opportunity to loathe this or that select group of

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But you’re—we’re—better than that. If you can bridge the distance between yourself and an antipodal other, you’ve placed yourself in the second dimension. And having drawn a line of latitude, you may start to see the whole global terrain of balanced misunderstanding that binds us to—and from—each other.

Every choice we make is either a move backwards, to the animal in us, or forward to the human. To become human has been the goal of human civilization. Our animal selves drive us to make tribal distinctions between groups of people. This is the lower path of exclusivity, our path of least resistance. All the comfort of habit and the nobrainer ease of intellectual complacency predisposes us to relax our souls into the bodies we inhabit.

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remote others. We may strive to be compassionate, but we must own up to just as often feeling a spiteful recoil at the apprehension of otherness. Once a certain degree of honest self-measure can be approximated, a value is placed upon the gift of your pre-extended goodwill commensurate with the cost of redemption for both you and your putative enemy. Systems of thought progress dialectically; A and B encompass each other to birth C, a synthesis of previously unmapped territory only discoverable if either A or B willfully does the unthinkable and turns the other cheek.â&#x20AC;? The tripartite triumvirate, aka <3, aka Less Than Three, aka The New Guy, effaces itself in a slurry of frenzied erasure, overwriting the blankening blizzard with blithering ones and zeroes in triplicate for added security. Remember when we said â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Wishdasher goes home

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to the Fish Market,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; early on in this segment? We havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t forgotten him. Through all the preceding preponderance of nonsense, Wishdasher has been floating, discorporated, above the gameboard. Within the parameters of the rectilinear surface over which he is suspended are contained the set of all of his possible self-avoiding walks through the world. But unlike the gameplay of Monopoly or somesuch zero-sum schema, the object of his solitaire is to claim no properties, to accrue no bills of common value. His object is to be as permeable as a thimble in a world of dogs and irons. He surrenders all the iconography that litters our little lives with widgets of self-fetishized gluttony. This is the invisible forfeit with which our unappealing protagonist cedes his $2600 birthright to the bank, and foreswears passing Go for love or money. Let the others roll the die as they may. 0 to 1 players, all ages and none.

METAL M O NKEY & METAL D O G T H E F I S H M A R K E T

The girl with palms of septic stigmata steps gently down from the metal genitalia that joins the cars of the sleeping train. Unavailing herself of her companion’s extended hand, she begins to panic as an active train, raging along a parallel track like an imminent tornado, peeks its fear-sniffing snout from around the bend. A shriek of vocalized adrenaline escapes from the girl’s esophageal bendy straw, rending in twain the heavy brown canvas drone of the oncoming Large Engine That Couldn’t Stop If It Wanted To. This blueline memory is inked to black by an act of self-surveillance by the girl’s companion, who is sufficiently removed from the animal rigor of terror to find in it an amusing snapshot of others’ base folly. An assumption of superiority hides in his breast, undetected by him behind the mannequin of self-abasement he’s kept propped up all his life in place of real moral responsibility.

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This pair, though they are the living operands of our story’s more properly fictionalized speaking roles— ‘Melissa’ and ‘Wishdasher’ (aka ‘Jess’)—needn’t hide their naked primogeniture from our vision. We’re glutted with the glory of our endlessly-engaging soliloquy of Hamlet-eloquent piffle. Let’s let the letters lapse their lien upon our sponsored walk for the very worthy cause of wish-cancellation, shall we? Sink, ships. Lose those lips.

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A cached track from Soundcloud circa 2012 samples this moment of casual cruelty and abject fear; within this is crystallized a facet of that age—a certain sardonic savagery characteristic of late-phase individuation.

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The next section is a script for a week’s continuity of a comic strip called Mutt & Jeff, which is of course derived from the comic strip by Bud Fisher that ran in newspapers of the 20th century. Each day Monday through Saturday are three panels apiece and black & white; Sunday’s strip is in ten color panels. MO ND AY Panel 1: Mutt holds a stick in his hand. Mutt: “I mean it, Jeff! Stay back!” Jeff: “I don’t know how you can’t see it?” Panel 2: Mutt pokes Jeff in the eye. Mutt: “Shut your filthy pie-hole, you vile foil!” Jeff: “Aiii! Oh OW!”

Panel 3: Mutt holds a stick in his hand; Jeff’s left eye is impaled on the sharp end, runny as a poached egg.

Mutt: “Unclean abomination, I have vied for your eye and hast been half satisfied.” T UE S D AY Panel 1: Mutt stands in a hospital room. Jeff sits in a wheelchair. Mutt: “Jeez, I’m sorry, Jeff. How’s the popped peeper?” © 2 0 1 4 J K J AT L

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Jeff: “The doctors say I’ll have a bionic eye. Which is to say, it will be like a bore-hole shotgunned right through my skull to my face like those action figures from that tv show in the 70s— The Six Million Dollar Man.”

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Panel 2:

Panel 3: Mutt slices Jeff’s forearm open with a scalpel. T H E F I S H M A R K E T

Mutt: “See if you can get a printed glob of see-through plastic implanted in your arm, rolled up under a sleeve of rubber.” W E D N E S D AY Panel 1: Mutt is behind bars, weeping. Mutt: “Honest to Bud, I thought I was helping!” Panel 2: Jeff: “I forgive you; it was the cocktail of Ambien, meth and red wine that accursed nurse jacked you up with. We should sue!” Panel 3: A lawyer enters the room, holding a sharp stick. Mutt does a ‘plop-take’out of jail.

T H UR S D AY Panel 1:

Narrative box atop the panel: “Jeff is struck blind in both peepers by Steve Austin’s Disease, a condition for which there is no cure.” Under this box, Jeff masturbates. His thought balloon shows a headless Mutt in a bikini. Panel 2: Narrative box: “Mutt is resplendent with remorse. He is driven thus to the brink of science.” © 2 0 1 4 J K J AT L

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Panel 3: Mutt: “Finally! A cure for my long-suffering bestie!”

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Under the box is a smaller panel within the panel, showing Mutt reading a book. Outside this smaller panel—to the upper right of it—is the number ten; to the power of ten’ is the intended suggestion.

Mutt holds up a syringe loaded for bare-back Greek. F R I D AY T H E F I S H M A R K E T

Panel 1: Mutt stands behind Jeff with a syringe in his hands. Mutt: “Say, Jeff, did you know we make an appearance in Finnegans Wake?” Panel 2: Jeff: “Yeah; Joyce lost his sight writing his way through that portmanteauword night.” Panel 3: Narrative box: “Trieste, 19whatever...” James Joyce occupies a tiny corner of the panel, which is mostly covered by a single hundred-letter word: “Gesamptkundstwerkgordianknotdonknottsandtimconwayintheappledumplinggangequalsawordofunhundredletters.”

S AT UR D AY Panel 1:

Mutt: “Say, Jeff, what would you say if I told you I could cure your bionicitis?” Jeff: “Shoot me up, man! We have the technology!” Panel 2: Mutt: “But maybe we should run it by the FDA, or try it out on some rats?” Jeff: “Mutt, as you love me, plunge that needle into my heart—“

Mutt & Jeff title treatment.

Panel 1:

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S UN D AY

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Panel 3: Mutt stabs the syringe into the base of Jeff’s skull.

Panel 2:

T H E F I S H M A R K E T

Narrative box: “Previously on Mutt & Jeff…Mutt, having mutilated his buddy after being dosed by a rogue nurse, contrives a cure with the help of science and administers the untested serum.” Panel 3: Jeff lies lifeless on the floor, a syringe protruding from the base of his cranium. Mutt: “Haha! It worked! Now you’re no longer in my head! I’m free of thee, pestilent bestie!” Panel 4: Jeff’s spirit form observes from the ceiling. Jeff: “Boy, I sorely misjudged that guy. But now I’ve learned my lesson. Too bad my will is weakening and—“ Panel 5: Jeff’s spirit form is vanishing.

Jeff: “—my spirit form is dissipating before my very bionic eyes.”

Panel 6: Jeff’s spirit form goes ‘Poit!’ and loses its shape entirely. Panel 7: A narrator appears; it’s Justin Waters, as absurdly well-groomed as Dave Navarro, but wearing a Rejuvenique mask. Narrator: “Jeff should’ve used Pampkins Brand Astral Form Foundation Wear. Here’s what to say:” © 2 0 1 4 J K J AT L

(He indicates his ensemble of head-to-toe foundation wear.)

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Testimonial spirit form: “I made my life on earth a living hell by wearing this shit.”

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Panel 8:

Panel 9:

T H E F I S H M A R K E T

Testimonial spirit form: “But now who’s haunting the high school girls’ shower for all eternity? Me is who!” Panel 10: Mutt is passed out with the aforementioned needle in his arm. His spirit form sits beside him and asks: “Hey, buddy, let me get some of that, huh?”

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T H E F I S H M A R K E T

the N OTHING

UNDERWRITES SOMETHING,

bl a n k page

from which comes everything. A blank page is the foundation of all thought. We make up stories to explain our path through this world. The solid cement floor of observable consensus ‘scripted’ reality (all reality is scripted) is, we must always remind ourselves, an empty blank page.

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We know how to speak our minds of the moment, but we haven’t learned that what we say or think at any given moment is only one part of a larger body of thought; at the start of the sentence we say “There is nothing.” As we meander through nothing, we track our path, which, not being nothing, is at least “something.” We fill out a few clauses with “I think, so I am” and recognize our own collective self-judging “objective” as a father god, because we’re all

When we speak of nature’s richness, we are praising the imaginative power of vegetable life. When we wonder at animals, we are trying to remember what it was like before consciousness made it necessary for us to invent the truth and the lie, which brought with it the principal unease of man’s lot. We are burdened with the question of being ‘bad’ or ‘good.’ We haven’t quite learned, yet, that our phylogenetic estate requires us to think like gods and to feed, fight and fuck like animals in order to walk upright under the heavy mantle of being human.

still children. But, as Chico Marx said, “There ain’t no sanity clause.” T H E F I S H M A R K E T

We’re no longer animals, no longer children, and we know the stories we tell ourselves to anchor our place in time and space are all, at their foundation, mythologies and superstitions. Mathematics is a naming convention for the stars. Language is a filing system for lives. We know we kid ourselves all the time, and we love to remind each other that we all share a universal inclination to fabricate fantasies in our favor to drape over the bare facts. We become suspicious of our tendency to believe things that will help us feel better. And so we have science, which is the mechanism of the deductive aspect of ourselves translated into an abstracted, collective and, as much as we can help it, dispassionate system. Form and void describe the binary tension between our brain’s hemispheres, and between science and nature. A

geometric grid and a messy, muddy terrain to map. We need to surrender to sleep in order to be fully awake.

I’ll make a prediction which will seem counterintuitive and wrong-headed until the day it happens, at which point it will be so obvious to everyone that we’ll forget it ever eluded us: Science will rediscover astrology. The bottom-line unique identifier for any of us is our coordinates upon the earth and within the universe of stars upon the moment of our birth.

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The crucifix is the shape of the human. We activated Christ as a way of asking ourselves, “What kind of life is best to live? What

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There is no ‘God is dead.’ God came along as soon as we started to realize that we, each of us, had an ‘I’ that was ours alone, and to the extent that we could treat others as if their ‘I’s were as important as our own, we were able to walk without shame. When we hurt each other, we ourselves suffered; it was as if there were an eye in the sky which was the set of all ‘I’s, and we were all subject to its approval or disapproval.

T H E F I S H M A R K E T

do we gain by adopting ideals and living according to a set of ethics?â&#x20AC;? We invented heaven to describe an internal state we had no language to elucidate; our notional hell has always seemed more familiar, because we all know, all too well, the constant burn of regret, guilt, shame and self-hatred. The pyramids are registration marks; every possible earth with those markers situated in the dim past and made to outlast us has, as its mother of magic, denial. We will discover extraterrestrial life when we can posit a plausible non-human civilization with such a level of detail that we can posit them positing us.

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OPEN CORRESPONDENCE The Reverse Engineer, as postulated by me, so postulates us all.

T H E F I S H M A R K E T

I took a draught of poisonous, impoverished idleness to sicken me into unimpeded, useless industry. I build, with my bare hands, this fine, enduring Busy-ness at the expense of my faithful constituentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; immediate concerns. I deceive them into constructing a pyramid atop my dead body, a five-dimensional funnel to launch my hatched soul into the celestial arena, for your consideration. Uselessness is next to godliness. Every bridge is a long, deep inhalation over centuries; the mineral ball of our earth is a blackhead of foreign matter swallowed by mistake by a displacement map of unexplored territories. All things we may speak of are hemmed in by a hostile crowd of implied opposites.

Opposite positions contain each other as linear vessels, refracting such a delicious multiplicity of amazed light under the rainbow that we just canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t seem to get over it.

The relationship between each thing and its shadow is private, but the legal holodeck within which they work out the terms of their engagement belongs in the public domain. A word is the blueprint for a patented, manmade object that blocks light with a recognizable signature wherever it appears. Which means that independent observers must attach this word to other nodes in the linguistic network using the same relational architecture.

Only idle hands learn to play.

ÂŠ 2 0 1 4 J K J AT L

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All drive derived from animal lust and hunger matures, with awareness, into the fossil fuel that rockets us beyond the gravity well of our genesis.

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This algorithm must be inculcated into every head in order for us to settle into cities together.

Only those capable of playing and pretending learn how to make new things. T H E F I S H M A R K E T

All new things are new to those who haven’t seen the shape of the hole it fills. It is important to us, individually and collectively, subjectively and objectively, that we be able to share what we see, and to be able to share ways of filtering what we see. Going into the light is the imperative of all life. Never meet a deadline you haven’t drawn yourself. We must try to never shy from the light of the new; nor should we shun our duty to revise history, in order to maintain the line of sight from then to now. All attention does damage to the natural world, wherever it’s focused. All love is penetration.

I ’ V E BE E N SENT FROM TH E FUTURE TO GET ALL UP IN YOUR FACE WITH SOME CRAZY TALK

Hello, This ’n’ That. Greetings from the late, late, late show—also known as the VERY EARLY SHOW with Noise & Light (ha ha). I know you’re juggling more nested pairs than you can count, and that you’re on a tight schedule to get every second of your year itemized for your nightly return to death… But I believe we may be able to help each other out, if you’ll but deactivate your disbelief and modify your security settings. (Y / N) © 2 0 1 4 J K J AT L

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Because we can remember this world, we can assume at least that an attempt is being made to build a case for our acquittal.

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All of creation could never have happened until it was remembered, and it never could have been written into memory without a method of recording and the means by which such information could be made to persist.

T H E F I S H M A R K E T

So on behalf of myself (The Reverse Engineer) and all my agents—THANKS! I appreciate y’all being team players, and for including me as one of your team, even though you’ve never met me, and in spite of the fact that most of you aren’t particularly keen to entertain the notion of me. Each of us crawls out of the decision fork that unzips at the point of our parents’ dialectical fornication. Life is motion. Into the future we squint with eager anticipation. As time winds down, and our dance is done with this dust storm, all particles will party harder to keep up their parity with one another. In the future, all pawns are queens, and the rules no longer call for kings. Spoiler alert: in the future, we will kill each other and then kill ourselves to secure our immortality.

All focus distorts. Any lensed device such as a telescope, microscope or camera is a double headed dildo cross-cunting across vast diagonals of scale—for instance, between the eye of the hurricane to the hole of a donut.

Media seen as message mainlines us all, maintaining the mean of all our meanings like a thermostat. Do you know what I mean? Do you know that I’m sane? Only by meeting the blinding gaze of others may we infer the common form we hide beneath different disguises.

J K J AT L 1 2 . 2 3 . 1 4

Revise, revise, revise.

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Variety revels in the margins of unfinished manuscripts.

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This land is my land, this land is your land; this land is merely the model for our regularly scheduled program to launch a simulacrum worthy of the name THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.

T H E F I S H M A R K E T

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T H E F I S H M A R K E T

WHERE’S THE FLOOD? an excerpt from

“THE

1 9 8 2 W O R L D ’ S N O T FA I R ”

1. Tantamount to braggery: Braggadocioto! 2. An errand in the egg salad sandwich night. 3. Karla hearts Smiley. 4. I can be friends with anyone, and will always rather lose than play you out. 5. If we still had that old-fashioned narrative mattress between us, we’d totally be boning by now.

9. Whatwhat: “We live in a legal aside.”

8. I live all moments in the path of the pestilent princess O my Ponzi Queen: Look at me like I’m a suicide accessory.

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7. Comfort now or conflict always never after (‘Oh, you’re incorrigible’ she selected to make her vintage).

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6. “Supernuance” Sunday on the Alpha channel; no sexdolls allowed.

T H E F I S H M A R K E T

10. We burst into 1,000,000,000 faces and enter, tainted, into our looking glass mimicry of mirrorhood as Marxed into memory, mimsy were the moths of bother and beyond the monolithic blithering bowman. 11. Dad took me to another interminable Georgia Tech football game. I closed my eyes to it and learned the hurt that pays for all my pain. Primitive man, posits our dear fellow-sufferer, noticed familial subdivisions amongst bastards. Yr put-upon quadriplegic is on call to every erection. I writhe in elective mutilation under the heel of a hellfuried woman awash in the vulgate of “mean.” 12. For the lion’s share of tygers, I hated every last motherfucking one of you with livid distress and daily. I didn’t want your approval, your scorn, your glossy pink smirks or your securities exchange. I wanted only to pass under your noses, undetectable, unmolested. 13. Beavercreek Roundtree East Valley Sewell Mill Old Roswell Cobb Parkway Delk Windy Hill 1977 Mrs. Schmidt second grade unskip unskip unskip.

14. Bifocals calculator watch, Micronauts pneumatic tube. 15. Lockbox, spider-crickets, red clay, mica, Kennesaw Mountain, field trip bull-whip. Jay Thomas was my best friend for a bit.

16. He was allowed to watch whatever television however much he wanted according to his personal untethered will. He had more than all of the Star Wars licensed totems, so playtime at his house was fully licensed by force.

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18. Puberty is a betrayal of childhood, and it makes you feel like the evillest thing in the world.

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17. He was chatty and goofy, affable and amenable to persuasion. He draws comics because you talk him into it, but then you realize his stories and characters are way better than yours, and you’re not sure how to be aware of that without resenting him for it. His best villain is ‘Mr. Grinmile,’ whose head is like a crescent moon lolling on its back. You won’t be his friend much longer, as he turns into the same ugly white southern baptist as a thousand other kids at school.

19. Boys learn where the mass for mass is held. Zoom zoom and the mastery of space! Esoteric codex of the alienated. T H E F I S H M A R K E T

20. Girls take all the time they need to find the hovering dingus of defeated “dude” animism. What do I pray for in those moments of bruised banana castration? An emasculated grace gold-leafs a halo around my head. 21. a.) Sees beyond bars of cage b.) Am I good or bad? c.) Does anyone need me? d.) What is highest hardest best? 22. Look at me—look at your son’s smartass smirkface. Are you aware your face is unmasked right now, and that I can clearly see your visceral disgust for me? I can’t remember not feeling fully your dislike. Sour stomach schoolbus, and I have no defense against the bullies of this shitty world because I know I deserve anything that makes me feel unfit to live. Fear surrenders to cowed self-hatred and a longing for death that extends globally. I await the bombs that will obliterate the human pestilence forever. I am led to believe that any day now I’ll be excused from further harrassment.

23. Dad buzzes within a beehive of simultaneous sports, stonefaced until outrage activates the red-faced petulant despot and every time he yells, it might as well be at me. This is what I become. This is what I am. I find people who will make me feel like shit, who will dump their anger on me. I hunger for it with more of an appetite than the one I feel for food or love.

24. Dancing autochthons attend their mourning mass with diffidence. Those athletes endemic to the environ edify the unyielding moonwatcher idiom of disingenuous sabre rattlers. 2001 was the last film that need have been made. Finnegans Wake the last novel. Wall art has made a game out of dying. ÂŠ 2 0 1 4 J K J AT L

27. I reproach myself still for my cowardly slide into the beaten, slavish social affect of fully human search engine American Idol initiates who have an assumed opinion of many books,

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26. You saw me broken into a homunculus of pain-receptors.

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25. I can see brief clips of land-like terrain avast the full fathom five players at most, attack Kamchatka with bold 3D6 fortune.

T H E F I S H M A R K E T

many minds, and yet nakedly fail to make a mind or to write a book. Spin our secret tells into a telemetry of empathic sweater-vest struck crushed and gender-dysphoric in warmth and comfort. 28. Leonard, Leonard in my head—you laugh, but we are in a “world of shit.” 29. My world went from Atlas Shrugged to Naked Lunch in a summer’s crash cart college course in cruelly indifferent modes of capital accrual, learning how it grows, in its greed for green life, into weedy, unwanted variants of devalued quality as a wash for the default greats of a mediocre era. 30. I am 16 and no longer pure & chaste. I am far worse than this faggot you see before you. 31. I walked into my parents’ room and opened the dresser drawers until I found my prize. What sweet sick shriek of scent-dissonant syntactical arrears hath accrued upon your house? I would wish I was gay, but it seemed an ill fit. 32. Now open for elective dehumanizing. Look into my skanky eyes, Mr. Surreptitious Snake-Worker.

33. I was high and magnanimous one day when M—— and I had a mutually inclusive session, booked by way of Craigslist’s erotic services section (RIP). Soft fat hairy pelt of repellant commercial real estate broker. He wanted to negotiate for our outlying markers. The thrill of the haggle got him harder than any wiggle of flesh.

34. I was malleable, ludicrous, gullible, servile, treacherous—a wormy opportunist. My pa could see right through me to my vermiform armature, as it were.

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36. I’m sniffing at the anus of fame. I dodge calls from someone in Europe who wants me to do a cover for a Sebadoh single. What an idiot, right? I don’t know. Some Book of Job

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35. Mom makes us as an oyster fakes pearls; Dad casts us at swine or collars our ‘Fake Chicks on Speed’ shirt. I kissed his satanic anus and even tried to poke Mr. Imp O’Tent tiny penis through the Chester Brown redrawn variant Eds the Happy Clowny Clown Clown. Man about town, inventor of the Colonel Mustard sandwich, accepts my cash offer for a placeholder position between vacuum, hell and fashionable, fascist fatherland.

workout routine is key: assassins of pure, perfect will.

T H E F I S H M A R K E T

37. I tried to shake him; he was tremendously excited by my unwillingness to accept him as a client, after that first encounter. “My money’s as good as anyone’s,” he parried. 38. We all have to start somewhere, and the name of our initial somewhere is: BIAS. 39. I start off white, male, protestant, Welshirishenglishscotsgerman Johnsons call McMe. William Momsdad = blacksheep smooth-talker and personal tragic flaw to my mother’s mother Dobbie, who spoils me splendidly, and to whom I commend the captain’s wheel of actuarial discretion with regard to the ratio of my rites of penitence to my rate of replication vis-à-vis second cousins’ kissing step-lawyers. 40. He ripped me off, the night I learned to always get cash up front. I pursued him to his vehicle, fell in the street, felt genuinely wounded, felt yucky and felt somehow betrayed (but by whom or by what?). 41. The moment I put on my mother’s utilitarian brassiere, I strapped myself in for a mystical, magical ride up to the syzygy

of tantric rigor sponsored by big-business triage: fuck, kill or marry?

42. Twenty books read before I was twenty; a partial bibliography of influential texts, listed in no order:

T RA NSC RIBED 10.16.14

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i. CANDIDE: OR, OPTIMISM—Voltaire, 1759 ii. THE GOLDEN ASS: OR, THE METAMORPHOSES—Apulelius, c. 159 AD; translation by Robert Graves, 1951 iii. OEDIPUS REX—Sophocles iv. GORGIAS—Plato v. THE CONFIDENCE-MAN—Herman Melville vi. PIERRE: OR, THE AMBIGUITIES—Herman Melville vii. LISTEN, LITTLE MAN!—Wilhelm Reich (illustrated by William Steig) viii. PHILOSOPHY IN THE BEDROOM—The Marquis de Sade ix. NAKED LUNCH—William Burroughs xi. THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL (FROM A TO B & BACK AGAIN)—Andy Warhol xii. LES MISÉRABLES—Victor Hugo xiii. THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY—book and text adventure game by Infocom. xiv. INFINITY AND THE MIND—Rudy Rucker xv. BLOOD MUSIC—Greg Bear xvi. LOLITA—Nabokov xvii. THE BELL JAR—Sylvia Plath xviii. WISE BLOOD—Flannery O’Connor xix. THE SMITHSONIAN COLLECTION OF NEWSPAPER COMICS—edited by Bill Blackbeard xx. THE CARL BARKS LIBRARY BY ANOTHER RAINBOW, VOLUMES VIII AND IX (Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #95-166and #167-229)—Carl Barks

T H E F I S H M A R K E T

The Bride and the Bastard. The Libertine and the Concubine. The Eunuch and the Androgyne. The Predator and the Publican. The Maiden and the Boor.

A POTBOILER OF MIXED GENRE THAT PLOTS THE EN

d r o s o p h i l a

ND OF GENDER.

d r o s o p h i l a

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ALWAYS THE BRIDE DEBRIDED BY HER BRIDESMAID’S DRESSES, EVEN; NEVER THE PARADISE OF BACHELORS WHO ARE, TO A DEGREE, MAJORS IN TARTS AND MASTERS OF DAMES, ODD.

T H E F I S H M A R K E T

UNDERSTANDING MEDIAPLAY

(Remember Mediaplay?)

ISIS: I remember spending money effortlessly at Mediaplay.

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ÂŠ 2 0 1 4 J K J AT L

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On the way home from work, giddy with the junksick fixation upon the state of being shunned, babytalking pirated coos of affirmation all in advance of uniform unisex spandex tunics Sanctuary of being alone, it always seemed to be a compulsory stop. I bought the Brian Eno Box Sets one Friday at a time. I coveted the undiscovered, whose scent allures, among the aisles of the periodic table of intellectual properties visible to the naked objective. Non-trivial levels of the mystery cult of masked conmen & mothered spoils. We strongly adhere to almost any

T H E

surface. Do you hear me, Milt Caniff? I see you every day, Kurt Schwitters, and I never don’t need you. Cruel elemental of pulchritudinous puellae, let me give you a number for naught.

IRIS: Turn down the poesy, pussy. All we are saying is let’s

F I S H

never have a boring conversation between us.

M A R K E T

INNIT: Pubs, we’re at the pubs, just like that. An excuse to advance the cause of civilization against the first appearance of unmentionable molestation with radar love, in near mint upon an obelisk to actuarial adulthood made of mylar and nerd behavior. Slight smell of asparagus infused urine.

SIRI: I don’t know how to answer that question in the form of a wrong turn.

AC: Horus the fink-a-saurus.

100 OZYMANDIUS: “Got my feet on the ground but my head in a jar, The first time it happened, I was like, ‘huh?’” HBO Comedy every night delivered a deferment on divorce, disengagement, death and drug-dragged daath with Bob in cahoots with David.”

MICHAEL STIPE: “Stand in the face where you war, now

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think ‘death.’—Hey, that’s not my inner voice. That’s not my outside voice suppurating squamous aspersions in aspic beneath a seedbed of strenuous frenulum-chafing handjive, ‘cuz that’s what I was born to do, and so Charles Dickens bred narrative prose storyplay with the coercive rhetoric of fluid stone and superfluous woodwork, and he logged its leverage of sentiment lost at sea and aired on land to fall a wall of art from high to low by glass and twin and back again, in J. J. Jr.’s double-din Chublin, neo-collegiate dandy ephemera.”

T H E F I S H M A R K E T

Dear Publisher,

102

write to inform you of the considerable body of work my client has assembled over the last four years. Working in relative seclusion, he has crafted a singular voice that evokes comparison to such an-

tipodal names as WILLIAM BLAKE and WILLIAM BURROUGHS 1.

man Spare, Wilhelm Reich, Genesis P-Orridge, James Joyce, Aleister Crowley, Camille Paglia, Gary Panter, Laurie Anderson, Dave Sim, Cindy Sherman, Alan Moore, David Foster Wallace.

1 Other luminaries may be invoked to locate my client more precisely; Rory Hayes, Kurt Schwitters, Austin Os-

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Buried with this corpus, like a pharoah’s bundled treasure, is a proprietary cosmology that belongs to no one and everyone. It awaits your discovery if you have eyes to see it.

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This may sound like hyperbole, because it is; but I can support my claim. Taken individually, these books and stories and pictures and music and videos stake no special claim in the cultural history of the human. As a whole, however, they offer the foundation of an entirely new (or so long-forgotten it may as well be new) conception of consensus, narrative reality.

T H E

Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a new idea about art, hidden within the flurry of material my client has furiously folded and stapled into artifacts of print. And something like a call to arms rumbles through this corpus, urging us to be more human than animal, to think better, to achieve the sort of transcendent psychosis necessary for mature consciousness. And behind these opaque walls of whirling, obfuscatory language, one great big eye seems to peek at us from the future; and it is of us, but it is not us.

Futurists are often technocrats, scientists, science-fiction authors. My client takes aim at the impending future with the weaponry of mysticism, the tools of sophistry, the playful amorality of the politician. We have been here before, he tells us. We left hints to hurry us along to an insight which awaits us with inevitable singularity, but will hurt much less if we can arrive at its conclusion sooner, rather than later.

F I S H M A R K E T

Fi l m s t o c k / s t y le / s o u n d some h ow re d ole n t of M e l Brook s’ ‘H ist o r y o f th e Wo r ld , P a r t O n e .’ Big Cin e masc op e sc re e n ratio filled by ro m a n s e r i f c h a r a c t e r s sh ad e d to ap p e ar th re e d ime n siona l:

104

Fuck A Bank

ade words to the same phrase written in graffiti on the wall behind. This is the wall of a bank, as we zoom out to show the building: “First Trust Last Stab Credit Union, Member T.L.T.F. (Too Last To First)”

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Pan down ornate wrought iron fences and signs that say Danger, Keep Out, and No Trespassing. The camera descends with a slow creeping eye, as if retreating from Kane’s Xanadu in the first few minutes of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ great eruption of cinematic invention. An omnibus of visual storytelling diction, a syllabus of narrative idioms for directors of the next hundred years; the reason it plays so poorly for young viewers is that every bit of meat that hangs from its prodigious carcass has fed a thousand bastard flicks

T H E F I S H M A R K E T

from its bounty. It’s like the cadaver I remember seeing one time when our Life Drawing class took a field trip to the medical department to draw life studies of the dead—this body had been opened up and poked around in for so long and was so saturated in preservative goo that the big skin-flaps that slapped open like barn doors onto its peritoneal gape were no more lifelike than that of the CPR dummies whose pestilent effigies had been presented to us in middle-school health class (unless it was all a horrible dream) to kiss full on the mouth—unspeakable, unspeakable!—which of course no one did except G is for Gerald who tongued his dummy dutifully and H is for Harriet who choked down her bile, both of whom died soon after at the hands of the reclusive killer Ogdred Weary.

Dramatic music is suddenly cut as the onscreen imagery changes to an appropriation of the scene from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall where the grade school classmates of the Woody Allen stand-in character are made to stand up and

Allen stand-in as a child: “Clearly, a shared internal library of at least Netflix-level film literacy is assumed in sequences such as these, which seek to reclaim the primacy of the word, now largely put in service of the image. Our society’s tireless spin-cycle of emotional montage is the bathwater [unfinished]

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he soundtrack here consists of the standard background noise commonly associated with communal movie watching facilities; they slowly build to a crescendo of irritants sufficient to convey to the audience that it’s all just a part of the game.

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White letters on a black screen: “Monday, March 31st, 2014 CE. 8:15 AM EST. The West End, Atlanta, Georgia 30310. The United States, North America, Western Hemisphere. This is the Screen Age, year 2 of 7.”

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report the doings and misdoings of their future selves.

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The screen goes blindlngly white as our camera pulls away from its direct focus on the morning sun and pans about 30Âş east to peer across a wall of urban battlements to a smallish warehouse across the street. POV from atop the tower. We observe Tiresias locking the door of the Were-House behind him. Zoom in and out a bit so our point of view may be inferred as fixed, even though we wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see it until much later. We observe as Tiresias lopes up to the corner, crosses commuter traffic, scampers over two unoccupied train lines and climbs between the cars of the parked third line. He then braves a four-lane boulevard to arrive at a decrepit property, zoned for automotive business. The sign along its front reads V. T. TIRE COMPANY.

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aniel wore his dirty soles the way his soles wore the floor of his room. Grit and glitter gilded the singular cellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dark cement foundation, exposed like the skin of a mangy beast here and there beneath the litter of paper. Drawings, sketches and polished planes of art saw no distinction drawn among them, along with scrawled handwritten pages and printed papers of all sorts which lay strewn about as if in the aftermath of disaster. The collateral of forty-two

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years’ parley with the infinite page filled the room like undefragged memory—drawings, printouts, manuscripts, archival copies—each wearing the patina of the floor just as the floor wore Daniel’s dirty soles.

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Ancient nail polish smudged his big toes. The paved front yard slapped its stored heat against the bottom of his feet. The sun pissed its golden, viscous radiation into everything, even soaking the shadows with sticky summer overkill.

Every June-July in Atlanta he’d ask himself what the hell he was doing back here in the South, with its hateful humidity and allergens. He’d moved away twice—once to Seattle, once to New York—and in both cases he’d returned after a few years. Now he kept a civil tongue in his head with regards to his default state. He knew what it was and what it wasn’t, and what it wanted to be but couldn’t. He’d finally forgiven himself for living where he lived, and for occupying his own precise point in human history; he had apologized

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Daniel was as much the bold, vainglorious fool as any of his kinfolk, though the American dream his choices betrayed was invisible to those around him, and the fortune

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The truth of his timeplace was this: the twentieth century hadn’t been old enough to drink the liquor it’d been illicitly getting shitty on for the last hundred years. His nation had taken the foremost position among its peers when it had shown up to the party with booze. But now, America’s various, drunken moments of recklessness with regard to the various articles of incorporation that chartered its manifest destiny had finally won it the ass-kicking it had long been asking for. Loud and brash, this upstart republic had dragged the world into adulthood, teaching by example how and how not to harness the anarchic energy of its constituent squabblers.

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to and been forgiven by all parties he’d crossed or had been crossed by in the intergenerational pendulum swing between positions both liberally vested by fallacy.

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he pursued was utterly without value in the marketplace of his time. He wrote and drew and read, and he cultivated his rootless underground garden with punishing droughts in service to a sadistic muse.

He sat outside the unremarkable warehouse that housed him. A sketchbook lay upon his lap, spine broken by his abusive ministrations of compulsive cross-hatching. A cigarette burned itself to a withered phallus of ash, which fell without his notice to the indifferent pavement.

When his glance, at last, relented from the splayed page, his attention drifted to a tiny black point moving across the white parking lot that constituted the front yard. He tracked the unremarkable insect as it slowly, stupidly scrawled a path across the hellishly hot surface. Daniel intuited its suffering, and marvelled at the creatureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s masochism as it crawled all around the leaf beneath which lay the shade it sought with all ostensible urgency.

He imagined, as he observed the simple creature, that his own path was being regarded, with chillingly similar dispassion, by an entity as many times removed from his scale of perception as man from bug. Daniel imagined that he had unwittingly skittered into this entity’s field of view, and knew that while that firey visage held him in focus, he was utterly at the mercy of this hypothetical demigod’s disinterested whim.

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Daniel squelched the urge to erase the insect from the cracked, empty page upon which it trespassed, imagining that such an unsupportable act would invite a commensurate echo up the chain upon which his own fate was linked.

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It was humbling to reflect how few and far between were those moments in his life when he’d operated with anything like free will. He found more and more his range of prudent movement was circumscribed by the actuary of the preventive now, who seemed only to allow passage along the slippery freeways that sliced across trafficked axes

according to the unmapped cross-currents of counterintuitive compulsion. T H E F I S H M A R K E T

Now it seemed only boredom or interest decided his vertical intent. To the detriment of every sort of happiness his world deigned worth pursuit, and in defiance of every reflexive flagella-kick indicated by his ingrown will to live, he had either invented or discovered the trick of vibrating at the same frequency as his given situational bias for the world he inhabited. Kicking the habit of identity, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d recovered the resources of agile mental verticality available to all. An investiture of essence from the vector gardens of Babylon wreathed his waking head in lightness, the shade of which tastefully covered a sudden autonomic panic in him, born of his child-safe packaging; an asthmatic existencelessentialism, if you will (but you shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t), hung like a cloud of cigarette smoke from the trellis of his galling presumption, swiping the air in his lungs for a thick, toxic glue. [unfinished]

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tateless, slender Mark Roberts sat and stared at the stupid screen for a full thirty minutes as a stalling app made its icon turn in helpless circles. Suffering, buffering... His thoughts wandered out to sea as he worried about his poor brother, alone and afraid, institutionalized as an adult for the first time. You never forget the first time, he knew somehow, or had known at some point,

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or had yet to learn by experience. Or, perhaps, a few fictive renditions had been assimilated into a living model by his brain, within which any number of hypothetical experiences could be screened; and this living model, having been sufficiently enriched by its source material and adequately framed within an overarching structure which modelled the real to as close a degree of lucidity as he had any right to expect of himself, would be correct in 90-95% of all playable situations, despite its seemingly meager constituent substances: arbitrary anecdotal mess and unspectacular second-hand narrative. A certain learned technique did for any such subject what the mechanics of perspective had done for painting in the 1600s. Drawing from the data heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d gathered over a lifetime of inadvertent research, he now had a reasonablyaccurate map of the dark matter of his universe; the general shape of what he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know, and the blur of stymied pique that crowded around the next obvious thing that he was fixing to learn, were as consistent as glider guns in the graph-

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paper realm of cellular automata. There was a sudden whirring thud from the central shaft of incomprehensible electronics that reached needling fingers up, Tardislike, to the ceiling of this unendurably amazing circular room. No degree of hype could adequately characterize this awesome room, which sat at the top of a landlocked light tower in the midst of the city. Its name, The Hyperbolic Chamber, might just suffice, however. Mark Roberts, AKA Professor Muttonchops, looked exactly like that dude MATTHEW ARNOLD who wrote about sweetness and light a hundred years ago.

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Werner von Assman & his racist ward

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Melvin IN :

Case of t he Missing Can of The

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Spray

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It was a Christ-killingly hot, humid, brutal day in the apogee of summer’s rudest behavior. Werner and I were loathe to move an inch on the floor of our secret hideout in an old, haunted building between Ralph David and the Chevron on Metropolitan. Come on by, sometime, btw, if you are byob. Wait, brb… Okay, I’m back. Man, my shit is like caulking the color of REDD FOXX. But, back to the story: Werner was bored and listless this whole month of punishing sunshine—so, what does he do? He mainlines a dangerous volume of cocaine.

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Exposition alert! T H E F I S H M A R K E T

(EVER SINCE THE CRIME PAYS CAMPAIGN OF COUNTER-INTUITIVE LEGAL WORMROT GOBBLED TWISTY SSH TUNNELS THROUGH THE LAWBOOKS, COCAINE & HEROIN HAVE BEEN MADE ABUNDANT AND EASY TO OBTAIN. SOCIAL ENGINEERING SHOWING ITS ASS, IS WHAT THAT WAS. SENTIMENT FADES SWIFTLY; TWO GENERATIONS WERE SUFFICIENT TO SHOW THE WORST EXCESSES OF ADDICTIVE BEHAVIOR THE DOOR, IN TERMS OF OUR GENETIC HERITAGE.)

Werner knows what he’s doing, I guess, because he never quite breaks down into convulsions, but he comes real close. And he always manifests the holy ghost with the voice of H O WA R D C O S E L L E . And he all of a sudden gets a taste for eating some dirty asshole, so I sat on his vibrating jawb o n e a n d g l o r i e d i n m y l o w l y l u x u r y. N o b a t h n o r s h o w e r f o r a m o n t h I ’ v e h a d , b u t a w h o l e b u ff e t ’s w o r t h o f t o n g u e t i e d b i d e t ? L a p o ’ l u x , l i k e m y m a n R I F F - R A F F says. EDITOR’S NOTE: We realize Melvin’s racist language is offensive to today’s global citizen; we think it is important to preserve its coarseness for archival integrity. Please feel free to be angry with us for soiling your refined sensibilities/

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”But then I came like a motherfucker, which was the straw of water that broke the camel’s water-hump, in terms of my level of dehydration, which was really super-critical already.”

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In short, I died. In long, I nearly died but then I didn’t. I started going toward the light but that way smelled like the dumpster behind a KRISPIE KREME after a hard rain and a scorching day of barbequed sun-battering. Which is to say, it smelled of my old father, my old artificer, after he’d piss himself in my bed. (He always blamed it on me, of course.)

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T H E F I S H M A R K E T

portrait of your H U M B L E author by Rachel Eppstein

be STILL. keep moving 1. You Are Here /SIARCH

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Rebuke

the

Mind

Debride

the

Flesh

GIVEN

Z E R S E T Z U N G ! [unabridged] Yab Yum. . . . . . . . . . . a.) T.V. GUI . . . . . . . . . . . b.) The Fish Market. . . . . c.)

8. Be Still. Keep Moving: 9. Be Still. Keep Moving: 10. Be Still. Keep Moving:

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SAMPLER AUDIOVISUAL BOOK TEXT-ONLY EPUB

x. Dark Matter, the Other White Meat y. Nine of Cups

http://bestillkeepmoving.blogspot.com/ h t t p : / / b e s t i l l k e e p m o v i n g . w o rd p re s s . c o m / http://youtu.be/usPmx37mLUw

-1. Forward Looking Statement 0. BROCHURE

jess.johnson.1970@gmail.com

J. K. JOHNSON 12.04.14 ATL

ng i v o m p e e STILL. k