Be Still. Keep Moving [sampler] by matterhorn

s e l f- h e l p f o r t h e h i g h - r i s k s e t

BEstill.KEEPmoving a sampler derived from the seven-volume set of the same name to accompany the audiobook available online by J. K. Johnson in ATL in the late summer of 2014

“There is no such thing as atheism.” — D a v i d F o s t e r W a l l a c e

Be still ≈ keep moving

“It

is demonstrable,” said he, “that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings, accordingly we wear stockings. Stones were made to be hewn and to construct castles, therefore My Lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged. Swine were intended to be eaten, therefore we eat pork all the year round: and they, who assert that everything is right, do not express themselves correctly; they should say that everything is best.” —Voltaire, Candide

for Rian

Thank you: Rian Shadowhorse, Rachel Eppstein, Rebecca Blankenship, Al l e n M u e l l e r, M e l i s s a Anthony & my f a m i l y. / / je ss.jo h n so n .1 9 7 0 @ gm ai l . c o m / / A s s e mb l e d Se p t e mb e r 2 0 1 4 .

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0. Intro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0:46 1. Walking on Hexagons [for A. M.] . . . . . . . 2:56 6. 6 2. OK Concupiscence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12:54 10. 10 3. What Are We?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1:09 22. 22 4. Revelations; or, There’s No Future in Futurism. . . 5:54 26. 26 5. Easter in the West End of one of North America’s Southern Cities . . . 7:53 31. 31 6. Note to Self—HELP!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8:44 38.38 7. Versailles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3:12 46. 46 8. Interview [conducted by Rachel Eppstein]. . . . . . . . . 10:35 9. Outro. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5:31

All musical interludes by w/o [without] 0. contains an excerpt of Love I 2. contains an excerpt of Love III 7. contains an excerpt of Love II 9. is No One Ever Poops (A.M. on keyboard)

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I . Wa l k i n g o n Hexagons [for A. M.]

I dearly wish to engage you, capricious reader. Hold a place for me, I implore you, upon your bathroom bookshelf. Ruminate upon these wafers of communion make-believe as you baptize your daily renderings of dark matter.

Join me in furious debate within the cloistered cacophony of your skull. Learn, with me, the seductive parity that secretly links our plot-lines. Underneath the dinner table, let the friction of our slutty socked feet find palatable the dessert course for which we have no proper utensil. ÂŠ2014 J.K. johnson ATL

Let us find a bloodier bond than kin or friendship; one which more keenly resembles a lively but disinterested emnity.

I wear the same cheap vinyl skin everyone else does. I bleed jelly like Stretch Armstrong at the jibes of pricks. I bristle when contradicted and curse the knife that heals me. Sue me, so. Only I’m human. The path we beat between our doors is paved with apologies and illuminated by misunderstandings. But let us bear with one another.

Let’s agree to be disagreeable enough not to care whether or not we disagree until we’re both wearing bruised egos, both of us humbled and amused at having negotiated, upon the summit of our discord, a bold new way to share the onus of error. Be still ≈ keep moving

Let us, therefore, give our lives over to the pursuit of meaning, even at the cost of madness. Let us choose lives devoted to grandiose delusion. Let us each wander alone into the wilderness, and, by separate and solitary means, divine the location of the highest mountain imaginable. Thereto, let us scale the sheer rock face to an apogee unseen, so that when the air thins and the words fall like hair from our heads, and when our hearts fail and our flesh no longer abides by our unreasonable driveâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;-when our rash, impolitic disregard for any human company other than that of fellow shut-ins, each only too happy to forsake our humanity for the betterment of manâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;let us shoulder this absurd burden in riotous number and join our voices to shout Non serviam! to the grimy banality of mortal boredom. World without end, yours truly, etc. etc. <3 Jkj 06.10.14

ÂŠ2014 J.K. johnson ATL

Be still â&#x2030;&#x2C6; keep moving

II.OK Concupiscence

ccasionally I need a hug. With this in mind, alongside a healthy presentiment of failure, I recently drafted a profile of self for a popular online dating site. Just like any one of the western world’s scores of vulgar bores, I welcome every opportunity to talk about myself. Oh yes, I can sing a theme song of me that would make Walt Whitman wet himself. And, in common with every other American loudmouth with a barbaric yawp in his colon and a need to shout about it to anyone who’ll listen, I offer no apology for my presumptiousness. But, of course, unlike my dull brethren of ruminating chattel, my shit shines like Scatman Crothers. Or, to divert the metaphorical flow through another channel just as base: my brand of super-absorbent introspection stop©2014 J.K. johnson ATL

pers sanguinity with a proprietary bung that beats any of the leading competitors (according to my desultory scan of the tampon aisle). This is my blood; buy it in bulk. Mr. and Mrs. Self I’ve never been able to craft a coherent résumé. Having hacked a path from workplace to workplace for a few decades of putative usefulness to the commonwealth, I seem to have charted my course according to a skewed set of stars. My sextant is perversely career-averse, it seems. On the other hand, I claim some distinction in my ability to pen various profiles for social networking sites. There’s a certain art to these flirty advertisements for ourselves by which we snitch out our souls to pimp our online ride. A politician’s mutable center is useful. Some degree of deft dissembling required. A practised hand at misdirection may mask Daedalean flights of lens-flare gimmickry as Sisyphean humility. In such ways may the rhetoric of seduction underlie the brick-and-mortar Be still ≈ keep moving

plaintext. It’s a repulsively facile discipline, frankly. And somehow, unerringly (story of my life), this skill falls within the same spot of ground as all my other innate strengths—this sad, brown patch of land left perennially untouched by the life-giving light of celestial fortune, from whose boundless burning inferno are all the world’s employees paid daily recompense. not for love nor money Cash ruins everything around me. Granted, I’ve never thoroughly sifted the considerable claim of dirt around me for glimmers of gold (and if I did, it would be maddening to separate the glitter from all else which does). I’ve felt the lust of purchase, but I’ve never been gripped by the invisible hand of capital accrual as an end in itself. Avarice as an abstraction seems as far removed from the realm of my experience as the coin baths enjoyed by Carl Barks’ consummate tycoon. Being therefore innocent of currency’s carnal debauch, my ©2014 J.K. johnson ATL

maidenhead aches to be forcibly informed. Long ago, a course of study was served to my incomprehending adolescent palette. A culde-sac season into the reductive, bottom-line erotica of Ayn Rand sufficed to shove my nose in the batshit of a polemical psychosis posited on a lazy certitude. But that’s my full balance. unintelligible design We’re a risible, fallen race of talking animals. We rape and kill under cover of sweetness and light, and the faith which elevates us is indistinguishable from the tribal throb of primal bloodlust which sends us back to prelapsarian savagery. A crude mechanism in our skulls, resembling the grey, wrinkled butt cheeks of some supine semi-sapient creature, hosts the perpetual storm of cognitive activity which we pass off as free will. We assure ourselves that we aren’t all the same. We feel certain that we are not merely animals. We breed a eugenic diarrhea of corrective notions designed to wish ourselves into that which we think we should be. But, alas, no amount of Be still ≈ keep moving

rhetorical prevarication has ever made a fundamental alteration to the floorplan of our selves. Wish it into the cornfield all you will, but we are still the sum of the various contradictory elements which comprise the estate of our internal architecture. Perhaps someday, consciousness will find its way free of the labyrinth of grey folds. Truly, I hope our race of shut-in I’s will someday spill forth from their isolate nuts to babble a new Babel up to heaven, and from thence to storm the kingdom in glorious polyglot heresy. Are not all our lonely narratives but artifacts of a debased divinity? i and my chimney Most houses standing today (in the portion of the globe to which I’ve been privy) share a common spinal feature whose utility has been obviated within the last hundred years. ‘Home is where the hearth is,’ murmurs our racial short-term memory. Maybe someone in the household actually knows how to work it. Maybe on some flukey special winter’s eve a fire will be invoked, and from the heart of our ©2014 J.K. johnson ATL

homes a domesticated inferno will lick soot into the virgin flue. Despite the unlikelihood we’ll ever again depend upon our chimneys (unless our prayers for apocalypse are finally, mercifully answered with an eschatological blockbuster—yet the odds and the gods are cruelly set against it), most well-appointed homes feel incomplete without one. Picture the thing, if you will: a vertical passage of (preferably) stone and mortar, impassable by any but seasonal conceits and sad Dickensian urchins; already you can guess the giftwrapped analogy I’ve prepared for you. An age of enlightenment has birthed a new sun which never sets, never relents, nor softens its purifying light. By its radiance we have, as a body social, sterilized a proper laboratory space free from the dust and rot of an aeon’s superstitions. We cultivate specialists among us who collude and collide together to tease out the intrinsicate knot of mathematical truth. Let’s be sexist and call science the penetralia which pushes its way into the crocodile-infested wetlands of unfathomable female mystery. Be still ≈ keep moving

What surprise waits coiled in the cleft of her hole of holies? What death will sate her mood; at what usurous rate will we rape truth loose from her toothy fleshlight? Our inscrutable, difficult beauty screws her coquettish face at us, teases us from behind a screen with a knowing smile; we ache for the day when all that is comely and alluring of her cavernous maw is scraped out, studied, used up, sold for scraps. Ah, love. And yet I say this pendulum, by its periodically precise passage along a linear axis, is at the same time our oblate spheroid pinned and spinning in orbital ambivalence, torn between a lust for curvaceous timespace and the refined discipline of entropic acceleration. And I implore you to own the innate symmetry of our nature; that right may coexist with left in binary tension. What rudiment of the real does not worry its ugly genitals against those of its insufferably fuckable counterpart? What leering magnetism seduces without being repulsive about it? The scientific method illuminates our ÂŠ2014 J.K. johnson ATL

inching advance; by its light we may one day free ourselves from the tyranny of dumb matter. But it’s an utterly inutile set of tools with regard to the question of how best to live in our own heads. The interior design of one’s mental residence requires an acquaintance with discredited aesthetics. It’s time to make peace with all the fabulous bunkum of religion; release all the cosmological beasties in the circus of shared delusion, and let them romp about and kill each other over and over again. Two niggling notions are hereby marked for extirpation: 1.) That to traffic in belief systems requires any sincere faith whatsoever to function effectively in our vestigial hearths, and 2.) That any deity we’ve devised in our long nights of the soul has a privileged position over those of other authors’ other books, and that a singular devotion to one principal and the exclusion of the many is at an equivalent level of civilization as wearing the same underwear every day. Be still ≈ keep moving

What I’m saying is that while half of us expends energy to refine its search for the fundamental particles of objective, observable game physics, our evil twin should romp in Edenic, unnamed multiplicity, and should play dress-up with any crazy costume it pleases; the only edict which obtains, in the unfathomable Dionysian night of our right lobes, is an injunction against committing to any particular mode or hue. You’re not the marrying side. Grow up, people. Your notion of sin is infantilizing and antihuman, and your sippy cup of abominations overfloweth with abscessed lust. Your pursuit of happiness has navigated you, like a confused GPS system, into an inverted disco-ball oubliette—a photo booth with lurid, bad lighting and an endless procession of flashing lights and faked smiles. Your think you serve the cause of your sacred cow by preserving it in pieces, in a freezer in the basement. It would be best if you stopped reenacting your life. Take the next baby step past drooling, ©2014 J.K. johnson ATL

boolean, binary breastfeeding. Abandon the coprophagic circle jerk of liberalism’s laissezfaire meme bukkake; let the dull necrosis of materialism happen without you. It’s insane out here in the sun. All the kids are playing, and all the stars no longer wink from old photographs. A happy catastrophe of bruises, mud, cleats and tears inflates the geodesic orb. No more light now; the limbs and roots of a great Yggdrasil desecrates this burial ground. And on your tombstone is an acronym no one remembers how to interpret. And all your commonplace tattoos gird your putrefying body with a grid of blue ink that traps your soul in a kitsch hell of unremitting Hello Kitty anomie.

Be still ≈ keep moving

ÂŠ2014 J.K. johnson ATL

III. What Are We?

Be still â&#x2030;&#x2C6; keep moving

Given the right conditions, life is inevitable. Given thumbs, and the ability to speak across generations, we are inevitable. As we organize our thoughts, we break down the world. We mirror ourselves in machines of animated matter. What is the issue thereof this union? To walk on land, creatures born of ocean had to learn how to carry the ocean inside them. Time is our medium, as water is for fish. What would it look like if we could peek

our heads out of time? What will we be when we can carry our entire history within ourselves? Remember: we evolved from primates, but there are still primates. We will be as pollen, expelled from our flowering earth, which will be withered in our wake, as has happened and will happen again in countless iterations, World without end, amen amen.

ÂŠ2014 J.K. johnson ATL

IV. Revelations; or, There’s No Future in Futurism I. Given: Man is the microcosm. II. By reading, thinking and observing we elevate our minds to planes of lessening noise; by conversing with anyone as if each were rival lovers of a jealous truth, we become a landscape of portraits. Every dialogue hides your own face behind the face of the foil in front of you. You must engage everyone without playing favorites. III. Truth will avoid you until you’re so wrong you’re loathe to live. IV. Entropy increases as a function of our narrative coprophagy. Everything happens for a reason because we write the things that happen into our minds using the language of reason. The solipsistic conceit (that we are each unique) binds us to one another in a blind network of equidistant, non-repeating points of view. (Picture a transparent globe covered Be still ≈ keep moving

with people, each looking around and reporting what they see.) V. This is how we establish the protocols by which our cognitive houses open their doors and we meet our neighbors: Sometime in the (near?) future, when our passion for pathologizing every inconvenient aspect of ourselves has adequately identified every part of us that arises from our arbitrary, given set of biochemical and sociohistorical variables, our collective thought-balloon will be debrided of all flesh and only the structures of our various coping mechanisms will be left standing. At this point, we cease to be solitary servants to our hungry bellies and will wake, as one, to the higher world of Platonic essence elsewhere referred to as ‘the kingdom of heaven.’ VI. The Anthropic Principle refers to the self-answering question: ‘How is it that this universe, with these precise physical parameters, has come into being to support our existence, when with one slight variance we would never have been?’ This idea is more ©2014 J.K. johnson ATL

potent than has been realized, and it extends in the other direction. The other end of the Anthropic Principle is: ’The Best Story Wins.’ VII. We constitute, as a species, a disco-ball of irreducible narrative approaches. When (if) our minds transcend the grey substrate it currently inhabits within the cramped efficency apartments of our skulls, our particulate models of the world will be synchronized, as our system of measuring time is now. When (if) our world of mud is draped with a layer of informational kudzu (an invasive vine that covers everything and kills what’s underneath by stealing all the sunlight) that sufficiently maps the terrain of the real, this super-model (forgive me) that we collectively hold in our collective consciousness will, in conjunction with the aforementioned kudzu, allow for… VIII. ...an effect not unlike that of an EinsteinBose Condensate (a recently-discovered ‘new’ state of matter, formed of particles which have been aligned in precise lockstep, and in which small-scale quantum effects are magnified; Be still ≈ keep moving

within such a plasma, light has been made to crawl). Bear with me. IX. We all carry a model of the world within our minds. In this model, we run simulations of possible outcomes to various actions before we execute them. And the accuracy of these projections depends upon the fullness of detail and scope with which we’ve vested our worldmodel. But if our model is error-corrected by way of a global, humanity-wide superposition, our simulations of plausible futures will, within the human scale at least, be accurate enough to effectively substitute for ‘reality.’ And... X. …if our Google-earth mapping of the physical world is effectively indistinguishable from the terrain itself, then we have the ingredients for a state change in the causal computational consciousness that constitutes our relationship with time. We will wake up from the seas of incrementally myopic, fourdimensional trial-and-error and discover we inhabit a mind as mad and bold as the one which (so to speak) made us. ©2014 J.K. johnson ATL

XI. When there is no difference between the realism of the footage and the simulated CGI crystallized in the collective mindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eye of geometric vectors, we will be like an Old Testament infant god in a sandbox of terrible imagination. And no mother will be around to call us in for dinner. And our bellies will never grumble in hunger. And this will be a dangerous time.

Be still â&#x2030;&#x2C6; keep moving

V. Easter in the West End of one of North America’s Southern Cities

ruth is a multidimensional notion. Every word, if asked, admits to an innate contrariness. As we grind down to the final years of literate man’s supremacy over tribal man, the limitations inherent in the linear narrative structure of our various living languages begin to show. The pallid, flat insufficiency of any one of our common tongues begins to reveal its age and unravel our intercourse when we must over-qualify every statement like a lawyer in order to bring any live thought to market. We are a part of a process by which dumb matter is animated. We feed on shit and shit it out and carve our shit into totems of extended ego. Are we the clever bastards who masturbated technology from within the sickly scrotal sac of sacred abstracted pain, or are we merely a byproduct of it? The commonplace ©2014 J.K. johnson ATL

ascent of life escalates along a logarithmic curve inversely proportional to the incremental ticktock breakdown of shit into entropic mush. There is a surprisingly proper place for pseudoscience alongside our rigorous and canonic instruments of scientific method. These parodies of systemic completeness, mapped upon an arbitrary assortment of stars, are the dark mirrors by which we may better see our incomplete systems as the distorting lenses they are. Our devices of logic have allowed us to build upon the foundation of ages; the bricks of this foundation are books, which are fundamentally a means by which one human may share the view from behind anotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes. This also allows the dead to inform the living, and thus enables the rise of civilized man. Thus do we extend ourselves beyond our mortal charter; thus do we tax death with an itemized account of our losses. Buried under a mountain of paper, we are yet resurrected by the book. Be still â&#x2030;&#x2C6; keep moving

ut what is our mortal charter? We are a chattering race of gossips and snitches who punish liars only for their failure of imagination. Past and future belong to the storytellers, but the present is a gift we refuse to unwrap. We are a living language writing itself into a thousand monkeys. from a tree made of manuscripts still twitching with corrections, excisions, alternate versions, revisions. The grain of the text splinters down to solve-for-x exegeses on our selves in our plurality of singular I-cells. A gentle calculus of genetic automata, rocked like a baby by a generational pendulum governed by an impenetrable, irrational pseudoscience of blood and tides, then iterates a multivalent torus, made hot and fresh and delicious in a dozen dimensions. We grow up determined not to become our parents. We are absolutely determined that everything about us should be self-determined. We look around and see nothing that does not contain a reflection of our faceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;clearly, this ÂŠ2014 J.K. johnson ATL

must be a sign that the world has singled us out for a fate none else could read. The path of least probability seems always to be the most painful. We punish the flesh to liberate our spirit from the path of least resistance. We hit bottom at some point in our search for our true selves, and we realize that all we are is the motion of our own descent through a vacuum; we are but that dissonant whine between nothing and the set of all nothings. Years later, what sickening vertigo accompanies the unwelcome kiss of an absolute-zero brain freeze? We reel around the slushie fountain until we can sea our find-legs. [sic] Now we can see. Now we see how we look from above as we are rolled along the axes of our lives like a metal ball on one of those maze puzzles—you know, where you have to keep very careful, very deliberate balance or else you’ll perish in the pit? But we’re the ball, not the means by which balance is achieved and pit is avoided. Be still ≈ keep moving

We see how obvious and ordinary all our little individual flourishes have been. gruesome clip exhumes itself from its grungy fin de siécle glacier of nonlethal lifestyle interface (once known as MTV): a baby’s head lolls atop a grossly overpaid specialist in vibrational lockpicking—it is engaged in an act of public escapism, chained and caged. Its voice is a sound like a million souls crying out for a third encore and then shutting up and going home; and everyone has a wood-grinder for an esophagus, and down their hungry gullets go every forgettable mediocrity they’ve individually purchased from the media marketers of their day. And the voice says something about being a rat in a cage being enraged, but really the rage only ever comes when the rat can see its cage from the outside—and not only that, but see it for what it is. nd we see how vulgar we truly are, how common; oh, how it rends our hearts to lose our special blankey with the corner we’d

suck on in the primordial night of our darkened bedroom. Where once we felt so designed, so prized, now…now it’s like this: we’re stuck in endless, infinite-lane traffic, going nowhere; we rage and cry in our cars, burning fuel with impotent despair, until eventually we die. We see how ubiquitous it is, that sense of uniqueness we’ve assumed as our birthright, unquestioningly, from way back within the thick walls of our fortress of solipsism. It hurts like hell for a while, and we howl like animals, because this is how it feels when our animal sense of self is finally, fatally effaced. It takes a little while for your eyes to adjust to the clarity, and your limbs may falter under a lightened gravitational load, but soon you’ll discover all your new superpowers, like x-ray vision and telepathic control over rats, and you won’t miss your Kryptonite keepsake of identity at all. A cartoon by B. Kliban comes to mind; a man on the beach is staring down at the Be still ≈ keep moving

imprint the back of his body has made in the sand. ere’s an extra credit art project: do a selfportrait by creating advertisements for all the products you buy on a regular basis. Tailor them each for the target market of you, and try to make the ads such that they’d be unlikely to work on anyone else.

J.K. Johnson 04.20.14

VI. Note to Self—HELP!

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 made everyone I know 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. A substantial part of this is my map of the near far future, which peeks up the flue of exponential singularity and eyes its unspeakable rend of soft tissue beneath, that indicates the projected time and place of our debauched apotheosis. Will it truly therefore transpire thusly? To err in wonder is the heartache of the gods, so I hope most fervently to be as wrong as I wanna Be still ≈ keep moving

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 storylines 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 sunhungry, sky-reaching branches of probabilistic viability.” ©2014 J.K. johnson ATL

“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?

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 Be still ≈ keep moving

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. I don’t have much regard for dreams, I should disclose. I’d happily forget every dream I 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 ©2014 J.K. johnson ATL

felt disassociated, as the psychiatrists say, from ‘reality,’ a word which “should always be in quotation marks,” 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 Be still ≈ keep moving

(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 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 ©2014 J.K. johnson ATL

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 sortsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;presumably more so 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 torqued vehicle. So being paced either way with a hundred 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 canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t play games without seeing a face. Cultivating modes of alienation from Be still â&#x2030;&#x2C6; keep moving

within the amber waves of abundance has been necessary, as have the avenues of esoteric self-abnegation proven keen fuel for my lust of humiliation. I seem to have lived my life trying to escape your good opinion, dear reader. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s as if I feel bound to discourage you from any ascribing me with any credibility aside from what you may (I hope) find contained within my words.

ÂŠ2014 J.K. johnson ATL

VIII. Versailles

vexing hall of mirrors, find the nicest mean between us. Show me the sphere split in twain across the equatorial gender line; North and South are yet useful words, though they name no actual place. There’s a special spoon made just for eating pampelmousse. Wars and rumors of war run our mascara in ragged family lines. My Punch & Judy splatter-pattern dragged & haggard pushes itself as the container for the very stuff it lacks. Batshit built to fail by way of a congenital murmur of tragic, irreparable expiry according to an ornate gematria of minutiae— a mad map of the stars as they waltz laps round the ice-rink, beaming into the zero-sum darkness of Olympic pressure; where were you when you were expelled from Eden? What does the daily isotopic tick-tock of decay Be still ≈ keep moving

augur, according to our pseudoscience called Astrology—our ancient anecdotal anklebiter of archaic lore both dizzyingly irrational and chillingly resolute in charts of personalized universal fate? If it leads, it’s gold. And we’re back to live life-or-death competition between ice-skaters; this metaphor captures our eye, sequin-winked, when we invoke the names Tanya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. In shearing worldspin polarization distorted by implacable grin of jagged toothy desperation, shattered in phases of ebb & ache as evidenced on every floor. Flowers of precious, violent breach, inked in bright scrawls of blood into an alphabet of unique character-forms by a GUI genius working within the idiom of visceral calligraphy to violate the clean phylogenic tesselation of the tile floor with the forged cutting edge of stroke-inducing truth. ©2014 J.K. johnson ATL

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