Duh: a book by matterhorn

A BOOK

by J. K. Johnson

M at t e r h o r n

This is a preview edition, intended for distribution to possible publishers, editors or agents as well as test readers, indulgent friends—or to whomever you are, dear reader! I thank you in advance for whatever time and attention you can afford to give to this humble offering.

for PPL Thank you MEA REB ARJ JKJ1 JKJ3 MAJ LAM JR RS & RJT

Duh: a book © 2015 J. K. Johnson & Matterhorn. Beta Edition. ISBN: 978-1-329-56548-7. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. No part may be used without consent unless for the purpose of review. Contact the author at j e s s . j o h n s o n . 1 9 7 0 @ g ma i l . c o m. This is Op. 13. Some of this material has been used before. Printed sans demand by Lulu.com. http://www.lu lu.com /s pot light / jk johns on h t t p: / / b e s t i l l k e e p mo v i n g . b l o g s p o t . c o m/ All I’ve done is here: h t t p : / / t i n y u r l . c o m / o k 7 g u 5 3

INTRODUCTION

Gedankenexperiment

ry this thought experiment. You are preparing to write a science fiction novel, but first you need to write a backstory of the future into which the action of the novel may unfold. You enlist the help of conversational foils in order to test market your concepts as you go. You utilize the strategy used by Marshall McLuhan in writing the book Understanding Media, and assume that current technological trends will continue more or less unhampered by other considerations (a big if, but the other directions are less interesting). You use your widespread, if shallow and indirect, comprehension of art, history & science to make inferences about what the world might look like in twenty years, given that those two decades may well contain more changes than the previous twenty centuries have seen. You put on your universal cap and make daring assumptions about what is most constant about human nature in order to model a lifelike simulation of its projected cultural behavior at certain junctures. You adopt a faux-prophetic tone to craft a vessel to show off your collection of favorite words, and, drawing from forty years’ worth of reading to bleed this series of fragmented essays from your philosopher’s stone of conscious fatty tissue, you write this book. Congratulations! You may now read what you have written. —J. K. Johnson 09.21.15

by J. K. Johnson

INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 ONE: Profile of a Fool. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 T WO: Predictive Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 THREE: Daniel: or, Denial. . . . . . . . . . . . 43 FOUR: Be Still. Keep Moving . . . . . . . . 59 FIVE: Pain, Paraphilia & Pseudo-psychosis . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 SIX: Open Correspondence . . . . . . . . 109 SEVEN: Occupied / Vacant. . . . . . . . . . 128 authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s SELF-PORTRAIT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138

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ONE

Profile of a Fool

I. Five Things I Tell Myself: 1. Don’t be yourself. 2. Some things are better than others. 3. Assume the least likely thing. 4. Fake uniqueness. 5. Don’t die.

II. Precepts 1. I promised myself, in the latter months of 2013, that I wouldn’t have any more boring conversations. And I kept this promise for a little more than a year, inveigling all comers into my running Socratic discourse and having a ball while doing so. 2. I let my authorial narrative provide me with a magnetic pull in the direction of an absolute north that could be characterized as Panglossian; with every waking day I revised the working copy of the world I wished to inhabit. 3. I wrote the backstory of a future so as to reverseengineer the present; I surveyed the present from a privileged future point of view which would render moot the concerns of today by way of as-yet-undiscovered advances.

III. Preoccupations 1. Too much vs. not enough; negative space vs. horror vacui…or amor infiniti? 2. An aversion to the cult of the unique object; wall art

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vs. books / zines & art for reproduction. 3. An affinity for the space between known states / givens; intruding word upon image and vice versa. 4. A preoccupation with the rift between childhood and adulthood; puberty as trauma / betrayal. 5. Obsessive / compulsive productivity bound by libido.

IV. Every Statement Artist’s Statement

I trust my boredom. I trust my sense of play. I write to discover what I think. If a drawing or a painting ceases to surprise me, I quickly grow sick of it. “Do only what you cannot help doing,” says one of my favorite writers, Simone Weil. She’s a difficult, unlikely saint of sorts; she and Kurt Gödel both died for their anorectically-attenuated x-ray visions. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem wiped the smug grin from the face of mathematics. He used to take walks with Einstein and argue against the existence of time. A third figure looms large over all my work: Kurt Schwitters, a painter who “nailed (his) pictures together.” He was an art movement of one. Deemed not cool enough for Dada, he launched Merz (part of the German word for commerce). He also gave us the Merzbau, a living, live-in artifact of twenty-first-century art planted squarely in the twentieth. This oddity, which doesn’t even exist except as a few photographs and written accounts, was so wildly prescient that no art historian has properly assayed its unruly geometry. As reading and writing were once the domain of an elect few, the realm of the fine arts (including music, architecture and visual narrative) are becoming more and more accessible to a wider class of people. It’s my contention that the entire history of art represents the evolution of a multithreaded language far richer than the rudimentary plaintext we pass along between grunts. Some essential accessories to this statement are beyond the scope of this page, more often found in the prognostications of tech-

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nocrats or in the pages of a Vernor Vinge science-fiction novel. But I don’t see how any responsible artist today could avoid being hyper-aware of the accelerating pace of change with regard to the tools and the idioms of our culture. We need artists and prophets and liberal-arts mystics to envision a sustainable future, and to point out the potential bloodbaths before we fall in. Beauty has been adequately quantified. We’ve crossed the red sea into the promised land. As profound a distance as the one between when the internet was a pain in the ass to when it finally gushed pure streaming bliss, we’ve all but exiled the scourge of ugliness from our sight. When fast food packaging is easy on the eyes, what remains? We stand on the apogee of western liberalism’s great project to free humanity from mundane drudgery. We’re drowning in existential luxury. Mainstream television is solving the problem of evil for us. Our screens are the mind’s eye of the mass aggregate. Novels are the medium for one mind to peek through the eyeholes of another mind, dead or living, but TV is the medium by which groups of people talk to different groups of people (the constituency of these groups shifts according to whatever dynamic prevails among their members) about what kinds of individuation should be countenanced amongst their ranks. Our culture is perfectly spherical; it absorbs and assimilates everything so rapidly and so thoroughly that, as Camille Paglia asserted in a speech I attended at a local art school, transgressive art is no longer possible. We in the first-world west are information bureaucrats, as Marshall McLuhan predicted in the fifties. We spend our waking lives immersed in a perfect, polished sphere of eye-candy iconography, passing trivial memes back and forth in our at-work downtime. A distributed tribalism keeps us in our gated communities so that we only ever encounter our like-minded neighbors. Like courtiers in the hall of mirrors at Versailles, our discourse is proscribed by intricate

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convention; conversation has become so mired in niceties of taxonomy that nothing is communicated beyond the rudiments of identity politics. We needn’t be so precious about the spot of soil we inhabit from birth (until death, in most cases). The real real estate is that which travels with us wherever we may roam. Our binary languages are full of polarized words which invoke directions, not places. Love is a coin-flip away from hate. Our right hand can’t clap without its twin on the left. We argue back and forth in favor of our plot of land and protest against the living rebuke offered by the mere existence of any other plot of land. Duh. Just because the Americas exist doesn’t mean Asia doesn’t. Everything essential to reverse-engineer us is already online. Our identities belong to nosy posterity more than they belong to us. If you are bold enough to become the person only you are qualified to be, perhaps future hosts will invite your ghost for dinner. The points of contact between story and history bind us together into a strong and supple branch of probabilistic rigor. The pyramids of Egypt seem built to transfix our uneasy focus upon the very unlikelihood of their existence; and so they are. The cross that marks our prehistory from our history only occupies the spot it does because it absorbs the fundamentally destabilizing dissonance between what one man perceives and the rest of his race deny. These events intrude upon the three-(falling into four-) dimensional game board of our consensus reality. Upon a skewer are we impaled, all we words made flesh—birth to death, mouth to ass, alpha to omega. The time we tick off in discrete measure carries us up the barbed axis of entropic breakage, a process inversely related to the emergence of form and the liberation of spirit from its tomb encased in rock.

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V. Portrait of the Artist as an Artist’s Statement “Culture is the flowering of the effort to select. Selection means rejection, pruning, cleansing; the clear and naked emergence of the Essential.” — Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture

1. The market for tools and materials used for creative endeavors has more growth potential than the market for art. The cult of the unique artifact will continue to retain value; any twentieth-century item already in place will price itself out of individual collections, losing fluidity beneath a crippling insurance overhead. Machine-made forgeries will make a mockery of the museum charter, but no one will care because geographical bias will be as moot as mortgages by then. 2. As we welcome ourselves into a world wherein all of us are artists of sorts, dilettantes of all media, we will begin to reap the rewards of our disastrous profligacy. We will contrive a global lingua franca which will be the sum of all our art histories—a gesamtkunstwerk that engages all the senses will supplant our impoverished single-channel narrative tongues. 3. Gameplay abstracted is the music of thought. Chess teaches us to see in flux that which sits motionless within a grid. We learn that to dance within architectural constraints may bind us bodily but also unmoors our motile souls from the tidal brackwaters of diurnal drudgery. 4. Suetonius was a Roman writer who gave us all the dirt on The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. Robert Graves was a poetic historian who breathed dignity into the bones of the emperor Claudius, who stammered and was therefore underestimated. The BBC’s dramatization of Graves’ two Claudius novels was the best thing on television until

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their next best thing, The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter. Graves’ Augustus was assisted in his largely benevolent machinations of power by his wife, Livia, who just couldn’t stop herself from poisoning those who crossed her or her husband. ‘Poison is queen,’ the graffiti pundits asserted. Courtney Love loved I, Claudius, and wrote it into her rider, I’d wager, that she was never to go without it while on tour. David Chase based Tony Soprano’s mother on his own problematic mother, but gave the character the name ‘Livia,’ openly acknowledging the influence in his creation of the first masterpiece of American television, The Sopranos. 5. The Sopranos mesmerized its audience to the extent that its central figure was a moving target. We couldn’t predict his behavior, even if his reactions played with transparent ease across his features and his body language was a primer on alpha-male swag. He was inscrutable; a hollow, holographic null space whose shape we could only infer by his reactions to the various antagonists who ran dizzy passes around his gravity well. The American audience was troubled by the proximity of the monstrous to the familiar and the familial. ‘The problem of evil’ is topographical, and only requires an imagination to resolve. We are all capable of the most hideous acts of cruelty against those we love, or those we don’t even know; and those acts don’t preclude a life of otherwise sanguine, gentle grace. 6. There is an artifact of language at work here, muddying the discourse. Gore Vidal understood its significance, and was not merely being slippery when he made the distinction between saying, ’I am a homosexual’ and ‘I have engaged in a homosexual act.’ Branding yourself into a demographic based upon a single act or a lifetime of acts makes you an easier consumer to target. Understand, however, that we are all far more suggestible than we’d like to believe, and so just saying the words, ‘I’m a Gore Vidal fanatic’ smooths out some willful edge of

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you which would otherwise be inclined to challenge Mr. Vidal on some arguing point, the next book of his you devour. (Rest in peace, Mr. Vidal; you were our Suetonius and more.) 7. Other television shows which turn upon the centrifuge of a problematic singularity of self include: House, Mad Men, Breaking Bad. In a world grown increasingly narrow, our most human of human frailties are pathologized and criminalized; our most difficult, deepest wells of nonverbal, chthonian yearning find their chemical foil in pharmaceutical form. I posit no value judgment. There is a greater good that obviates the human greater good, and the age of the individual has already passed its apogee; it’s still just possible to wrest an interesting life from the Jaws of fate’s banal summer blockbuster, but our intelligent attention isn’t essential anymore. Let’s take this moment while no one’s paying us any mind and use it for its least probable capacity.

V. If Loving You Is Wrong, Then I’ll Stop 1. For the purposes of this essay, you are the vacuum. Not a Hoover, not a Roomba, not a Dyson. You are the abhor’d void. The supernumerary eyes which seem to gaze at me also from you, the abyss, are but reflections of my own searching gaze, broken into a billion billion facets. I am the fly. I am form. Just play along. In forty-two minutes I’ll be forty-four years old—sixteen thousand and sixty days into my tenure on earth, managing the bathetic affairs of this laughable body for the edification of no one. Before I was born, I was naught—a circle slashed diagonally. Zero was the invention of the Sumerians, whose city of Ur was so fertile with firsts that we use that name, ‘Ur,’ as a prefix to signify primogeniture. Nihilism, the belief in nothing, posits the illegitimacy of all wish-fulfillment excursions into the twisty little pas-

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sages of faith. To be a nihilist, one must take that simple, germinal premise on the face of it. Paradoxically, a leap of faith is called for, if one is to deny the set of all possible propositions. This is merely another anecdotal illustration of the flimsiness of the devices we use to apprehend the unruly rigamarole of nature. It’s another example of incompleteness, as in the incompleteness theorem nailed to the door of mathematics by Kurt Gödel. Our perceptual apparatus is but a screen, and behind it, all that is great and terrible hides its charlatan certitude. When we say, ‘This statement is not true’ we admit a truth whose value transcends the binary babytalk of our crude language. 2. “There is no contradiction between free will and knowing in advance precisely what one will do. If one knows oneself completely then this is the situation. One does not deliberately do the opposite of what one wants.”—Kurt Gödel, from Infinity and the Mind by Rudy Rucker

Someone wipe the chalkboard free of everything we think we know. Upon this palimpsest of erased thought, let the foundation be laid for our ziggurat of higher truth. Let this foundation consist of an applied nihilism, that we may admit our lack of knowledge up front and acknowledge in preamble to any thesis we promulgate the innate silliness of all our attempts to constrain inane happenstance within the frippery of our causal fancy. Next, we are called upon, as creatures with active, errant, self-inflicted imaginations, to apply our narrative facilities to the task—the duty—of building a mature edifice worthy of our rudimentary consciousness. Let us, finally, grow into our human vestments. Let us treat comfort as necrosis and let us please mute the useless yapping of our vestigial fight-or-flight instincts. Playtime is over; you don’t get a trophy just for being you. Finding yourself is only the prep work for losing yourself, and

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only then will you begin the work of becoming unique. Identity is theft, and human life is our least precious resource (you can tell by how loudly we howl otherwise); you can stop flowing down the path of least resistance by doing what comes least natural to you, and you can become your best, least statistically likely iteration with the help of a compass, with which you can chart your course for that role none but you and your innate bias can characterize. 3. “The illusion of the passage of time arises from the confusing of the given with the real. Passage of time arises because we think of occupying different realities. In fact, we occupy only different givens. There is only one reality.”—Kurt Gödel, from Infinity and the Mind by Rudy Rucker

Platonism is a denigrated artifact of philosophy’s early days. It is, in meager words, the idea that ideas have a geometric structure that exists independently of our invocation of them. There are five Platonic solids, “convex polyhedra with equivalent faces composed of congruent convex regular polygons,” as Wikipedia puts it. But there are no cubes, nor tetrahedrons, nor octahedrons, nor icosahedrons, nor dodecahedrons in the natural world. On a piece of vellum we may draft them into flatland with rigorous precision; on a screen, we may spin their vectors on the lathe of software; we may spit diamond-perfect models of these five ineluctable solids into our hands with a three-dimensional printer of the highest possible fidelity. But these shadows are as far from the ineffable cave-things themselves as Plato is from being Socrates. 4. “Drawing is not the form; it is the way of seeing the form.” —Degas, Portraits en Frise

by J. K. Johnson

‘Drawing is a way of seeing,’ is a commonplace quote among those who enjoy the unending learning curve that the discipline of drawing provides. When we draw from life, we constrain a three-dimensional tableau into a planar facsimile of two dimensions. This facility teaches us to see the world afresh. We learn that if we transcribe too slavishly the occipital balance of light, our drawing somehow fails to evoke a viable view of the world; we have taken inventory, but no one wishes to browse our goods. At this point, a level of proficiency is attained if the student arrogates for him or herself the role of interpreter, telling the story he or she sees with all the narrative magnetism it takes to hold and keep the eyes and the attention spans of others. Now the pupil is fully dilated. It takes an active participant of our consensus, scripted reality to develop, within the camera obscura of our minds, the ability to see the rays of the secret sun, by whose occult wavelength the Platonic essence of all we behold is illumined. All the rapturous, vivid je ne sais quoi of art is crafted by the glow of this lucid, flaming orb. We honor our birthright as sapient beings, made in the image of god, when we open the third eye of our minds and rejoice in the delightful, convivial connivance of cosmological inconsistency.

VI. What I Do I write and draw and refine my brand with a black swan song of my detained multitudes. Each volume is a cargo container of my trademark mix of multi-undisciplinary miscegenated-media mutterings upon the nature of our bedevilment. In case of death or hilarious injury, I hasten to sign off on as many of the all-but-done volumes as I may. You wouldn’t necessarily know by the way I wear my walk, but I’m not at all certain that any project of mine carries within its faux-snakeskin clutch the winning dish of pathogenic magic destined to make posterity shit its pants with the punitive sum of my unprecedented percipience.

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This is my dead drop to the trap-house beyond death, forged of flesh and flame before I drop dead into the refulgent quim of post-procrastination tristesse. Don’t mind me. Don’t deny a dying man the blithering morphia of his final fantasy. As long as my deep cover of delusion keeps me floating far above the sordid mortal haggle, I’ll append any number of post-post-scripts, and without apology I’ll play it up like Cher’s newest last campaign for souls. Please hold for the patter of my holding pattern’s attitude of pitch, drugs, sex and roll, yaw’l [sic]. I’m all like maudlin aplomb and somber pomp until my last liber of life is imbibed, the burning liquidity of which wrings my guts into Play-Doh worms of primal squirmy Sephirot.

VII. The Future I yearn for the promise of the Platonic. I entertain multiple Socratic conversations and workshop a cosmology not for its truth value but for its capacity to surprise. If I can fit another world-expanding plot twist into the augmented reality I spy from behind these Panglossian goggles, I’ll happily spend another day in this body, in this world, in this shooting bough of probabilistic story lines upon which I lunch and along which I lurch. It may be that I’ve already jumped branches in my ascent of our fruitful tree. Who can tell a crossroads from a mood swing up here in the verdant cockpit? All these tangled limbs, all these variegated fingers of green, thrust from their parental branches of assured viability, each seeking and competing for the light of the sun with spazzy, blind jazz-hands of vital storytelling—how many discrete selves have I amongst these hanging baubles? Will my efforts be left to rot and seed the ground, or will my nectar find an accommodating throat to sweeten? Futurism is folly, but we need to be able to squint into the next curve so we don’t splatter like a bug on our own grill.

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TWO

Predictive Text

I. 1. Weddings, Weeds & Worms: an alphabet afflicted by artifice 2. Borders, Bricks & Binaries: a codex of cocks & cunts 3. Edifice, Artifice & Ursonate: actionable comics vs. bankable barbarism

II. There is a way in which you can successfully contain within oneself the materialist certitude that the mechanics of life are fully knowable and the philosopher’s unwavering devotion to doubt, spiked with a potent shot of the mystic’s or artists’s love of fashioning new and different narrative edifices within which the stories we tell ourselves may be presented interestingly. We’re all aware of being individual units of a larger set—just one person of the billions which comprise humanity. And it should generally be our imperative to see from our own singular unit of self’s eyes and to speak on behalf of our own pound of flesh’s innate interests. We’ve built our internal models of the world from this vantage-point, after all. And hopefully we’ve applied ourselves to a restless vigor with regard to the accuracy, scale and scope of this model. It is in our interest to build a replica with as much verisimilitude as possible, because there’s where we run all of the simulated wargame scenarios that help us determine our best course of action. Every word we speak, every move we

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make has to pass through this thicket of decision trees. An accurate model will get you through the various minefields of life with fewer limbs lost.

III. What if visual art history shows us the evolution of a cooperative mechanism for modeling the world, one which shoulders a burden of catholic generosity with regard to its appeal, according to the fixed ability of the day’s technical adroitness and not married to any specific format but favoring the graduated saturation of lowest common denominators?

IV. Georgia Georgia is our default state, where the Caesarean wound of our country’s union yet fulminates and froths in its difficult healing. A penal colony by charter, Georgia is the scrotal sac of our anthropomorphized nation; Florida is our impotent, elderly shaft.

V. The Alchemical Androgyne To the alchemists, the androgyne represented an ideal, transcendent form. Just as paper and coins of baser metals have been transmuted into gold, so have we spun sex into a stock market by which the ravenous furnace of industry is made to deliver a vast avalanche of inessentials. Yet these infernal tchotchkes, meaningless totems of thwarted lust, augur more than a catalog of plastic fetishes with which to feed our bloated landfills. We have given ourselves a supply cycle for the manufacture of thought forms.

VI. Plastic Platonic Toys Our consumerist exhaustion of the mythos of the self, once it’s been thoroughly plundered, shall soon begin to cough up a product line of Platonic essences. Like a

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Gutenberg press for the accoutrements of mentation, our three dimensional printers will see the world seeded with an alphabet of geometrical configurations of informational organization. Thereby will our corporate entities ascend from dinosaurs to demigods. And the baton of Western genius shall pass unto the East, and from thence will come into the possession of humanity’s incipient successors.

VII. Transgenderism straddles the active tectonic rift between the world of civil rights and transhumanism. It is a diagnosis of a congenital, physiological state of gender dysphoria, but it is also a lifestyle choice. To the extent that we feel we contain multitudes, we find within ourselves a cross section of humanity. Our imagination aches to try on all variety of skins; we cannot but wonder how different things may seem from the other side of the endocrinological divide. Will we ever see a day when the vestments of gender may be worn like clothes, chosen according to the needs of our rubber psyches, without regard to the indifferent, arbitrary vagaries of nature?

VIII. I have a friend who exasperates me as keenly as I exasperate her. She winds me up and wounds me every day, which lets the thick black slime flow out which would otherwise sit trapped in my gut. Feeding one’s gut physically is as important as bleeding it figuratively.

IX. Is there a way in which to interpret the world around you wherein the concavity you perceive is turned convex? Pangloss nothing—the interpretation which extends us into the future is one in which we survive. And we can

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thrive, if we learn to think in four dimensions. We’ve been slowly evolving the facility since we started writing. Our mass media mind speaks to itself in memes, and asks us to participate in the universal quorum to find the irreducible unit of self that unites us all. “Everything that rises must converge” is one of my first principles.

X. Bias Everyone wants to wish it away, but the secret of seeing the world without the distorting lens of ego is to occupy your bias with both feet flat on the ground, shoulderlength apart. This is the area you’ve been born and raised to occupy. Circumstance determines the follicle; the disposition of your fellows and any number of analogous variables determine the degree to which you are able to wrest your will free from arbitrary automaton-level cognition. One of my ‘first principles’ is that it is better to be a wild hair than a tame one.

XI. Multiple hands hold the same brush over the blank screen, joined across vast distances by an infrastructure of information exchange. An art game application that facilitates consensus, stroke by stroke, by an apparatus of force feedback and an invisible branching algorithm that bifurcates at every pivotal decision. A thousand people sit in their living rooms and wield their brushes as one, channeling the mass mind like quavering hands transcribe the base spam of consciousness with a common Ouija board of plastic and cardboard.

XII. The inner terrain is a shared space. The next thing is always inevitable. We think our selves the entirety of our territorial lot.

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We learn to see ourselves better as a congress of consensus engineers; individual perception may jump around beyond and behind the mean, but the mean lurches forward as one, struggling for lockstep unanimity.

XIII. The Perverse Case of the Reverse Engineer Post hoc ergo propter hoc: Latin for “after this, therefore because of this” (faulty cause/effect, coincidental correlation, correlation without causation) —X happened, then Y happened; therefore X caused Y. There is an aspect of technological advance that is logically deranged by a reverse-temporal side effect of venture capitalism’s salesmanship con; the reverse-engineer starts with a fixed product and works backwards to solve the mystery behind the patent. But this constitutes a logical fallacy: you cannot deduce murder from every corpse you come across. Colonel Mustard may be holding a bloody candlestick in the Conservatory, but that doesn’t mean he butchered the Monopoly dog and buried it in Kamchatka. Just because whole families drop like flies around Hercule Poirot, it doesn’t necessarily make him the craftiest serial killer ever. Murder mysteries are written in reverse, to some degree; the reader is confronted with some grim human syllogism’s grisly resolution before the game’s constituent moves are autopsied. We wonder, as readers, at the fictive detectives who grindingly cogitate their little grey cells in order to reverse-engineer pre-crime innocence from the splatter-pattern of guilt. There’s a telling sexlessness to the Sherlock Holmes stories, which also attends the protagonists of Agatha Christie’s novels; both an ascetic alienation from the hunger pangs of lust and an exemption from the mean niceties of making a living are conveniences of the form, by which we may deduce that our detectives embody the scientific method itself.

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XIV. The Reverse Engineer, as postulated by me, so postulates us all. 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. This algorithm must be inculcated into every head in order for us to settle into cities together. 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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Only idle hands learn to play. Only those capable of playing and pretending learn how to make new things. 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.

XV. I’ve Been Sent From the Future to Get 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) 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.

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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. So, 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 aren’t too keen on entertaining the notion of me.—<3, The Reverse Engineer 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: we kill each other and then ourselves in the name of immortality. All focus distorts. A [telescope / microscope / camera / academic institution / spy network] is a double ended dildo cross-cunting across vast diagonals of scale—for instance, between the eye of the hurricane and the hole of a donut. Media as message is a needle in all our arms, regulating the mean seasonal pitch of meaning (“Do you know what I mean? Do you know that I’m sane?”) like a thermostat. Only by meeting the blinding gaze of others may we infer the common form we personalize with different disguises. 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 being called the kingdom

by J. K. Johnson

of heaven. Variety breeds in the margins of unfinished manuscripts. Revise, revise, revise.

XVI. Where once there was an engorgement against beauty, there is now a mass-murder of selfies. The new flesh will be disposable, and we will be made eugenically redundant so weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re free to waste ourselves and respawn at will at any point along the recursive riverrun. We each inhabit nodes of a global terrain of carriers, but our characters are universalized, mass-marketed portals that any free agent of simulacrummy intelligence may peer through. We cultivate the verdant overpollination of overpotentiated branchings of narrative health during that first great shoot upward into the brand-new third dimension. We trees will declare ourselves in both the singular and the plural; and at this moment, psychiatry will finally become a science rather than a science fair. And this will also be psychiatryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s final solution, for its raison dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;etre will have been lifted from its deep DSM misdiagnosis.

XVII. Problem Money is the blood, media is the nerve. Man is the body, woman the psyche. Mind is the map, pain is the terrain. The pen is the prick, all hope in its semen; The womb is a sacred space for rumors and tumors; The mouth is the namer and the asshole the blamer.

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Tooth and booty loot all that’s unfair in art’s dirty war. White queenspawn’s black stalemate causes ruckus in public park; lone gunman on the noose at eleven… Solution: time is reversible, like those jackets you can wear inside out or outside out.

XVIII. One morning in the French-speaking portion of this continent, a fresh new scar appeared to brighten and blight the benighted hide of our history. A city once stood atop the thick, meaty drumstick of North America’s southeastern territory. Upon an anthill of thick, red clay, this city seethed with livid, wriggling effort as ruddy-pink grubs and rich browns bickered and fucked until, over the span of generations, they’d managed to sift the soil into a lovely café-au-lait coloration. Liberty as we know it was obtained at a disastrous cost, and upon this bloody boil of dirt our union’s difficult labor was enacted. Still raw one hundred and sixty years after the fact and yet to fully heal, this city on a hill was born not of a people desirous to congregate, but of the unstoppable convergencce of parallel lines finding the most geometrically convenient vanishing-point at which to meet. Perversely, their roads defied the draughtsman’s strict grid, instead opting to ply the paths worried over for centuries previous to their over-paved exuberant sprawl. These United States still exist, but this city of which I speak has since passed over into legend.

XIX. One day in the final days of physics, an emoticon was burned across the face of the city: <3. This apparently victimless act of flash-mob arson was met with a tepid web reception at first. Only later, when a body count added color to the infographics, did the event acquire a profile. But it was a meme left naggingly unassimilated. It spoke

by J. K. Johnson

to no one person, no specific tribe, no political camp. Until the final denouement of the drama, when the culprit was unmasked by an expanded definition of a corpse, this seemingly-emotionless apotheosis of the emoticon found no purchase upon the people of the screen age. Like other iconic knotforms that divide thens from nows, its very inscrutability renders it singular. But to say more of that would spoil some narrative fun, so let’s keep shtum for now, eh? Anyway, no matter how the inter.com misapprehended its topography, the case was pursued by the dozen insurance concerns adversely affected by the elaborate prank. Precisely a gross (as in one hundred and forty-four, or 12 x 12) number of properties were put to the torch that night, in the earliest hours of april first, 2020. These properties had been acquired by a diverse grouping of developers over the previous decade, in the first flush of simulacrum economics. After disentangling this mess of moneylines into a method, and after mining all surveillance streams into clear windows upon the moment’s opportunity, a sole actuarial accountant was set up to determine the most mysterious aspect of the mystery: what, if anything, was the motive? Either the event had a causal inception trail or it didn’t. But even if it didn’t, so what? A lot of things happened then for no other reason than whim. The difference, of course, was that it had been such an expensive, painstaking use of capital and resources. It seemed most likely the work of one diabolical crackpot willing to sink half a billion dollars and to spend half a decade of maneuvering for a dubious, paltry payoff. And this seemed as ludicrous as any of the supervillain evil genius serial killers we used to work ourselves into an implausibly Byzantine terror over in our more florid simulations designed to help us identify the ‘problem of evil’ from a lineup.

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XX. All media is a mode of mind control. We must be made to accommodate multitudes.

XXI. God The question about the existence of god has filled aisles of the human canon. This category is divided into two subcategories. On the one side, the histories relating to the many lively assertions of various faiths have adequately demonstrated the role of shared delusion in state-making. And the core texts have ultimately taught us that all storytelling is a sacred act. And on the agnostic to atheist end, we find quite a daunting volume of philosophical angst has been wrung over those centuries of awkward adolescence we’ve passed from childhood to now. This body of chatter is, in fact, the very stuff of god. All the devils and all the details we’ve ever dreamed or dared ourselves to say we’d dreamed—this is all covered under ‘god.’

XXII. “Norm!” (applause). Take a seat, spit out a set-up, take a drink of beer, let slip the punchline (laughter). Then settle into your bar-tab, buddy, and anchor the facile banter of smartypants and foreheadman for the rest of the show. We’ll return to you at the top of the next episode. Television speaks a common tongue of norms. Its history is made by discovering new ways in which individual multiplicity may be introduced into the lexicon of the normative. It seems to dictate to us from above, but it has proven itself amenable to our gripes and predilections. It is our collective consciousness squinting its mind’s eye to see us as specialized, overlapping sets of target markets. It will never be the medium for the individual character arc. This belongs to film, which farmed out the form from novels.

by J. K. Johnson

Nowadays, series are being scripted with episodes that return to a norm each time somewhat altered from its previous setting. A season’s arc of normative progression is part of a plan that spans several years of seasons. It is not merely sufficient to call this a golden age of television; we’ve gone from babytalk to Shakespeare. The mainstream, of all places, is where our most important cultural conversations are being aired. The only revolutions possible anymore are those which are televised.

XXIII. It’s impossible to even use the word ‘normal’ in conversation without the kneejerk demur from the next guy: “But what is normal?” As if the word itself were scolding us. Normal conversation as I find it these days is lousy with polite tics of nervous, reflexive qualifiers. Why is this? We’ve all but landed our dream home society wherein all speech is protected and the freedom to define happiness for ourselves has been assuaged of its kinkiest snarls. Activism and consumer advocacy have discovered their backyards abut, and the lengthening of lives has allowed a generous expansion of youthfulness to annex years from the sere plot of adulthood. It seems we inhabit a world wherein all that is pleasant or unpleasant is open for our inspection and our use, where no friend is ever far, and even our most atrocious inner monsters have found various hidey-holes to romp about and roll their terrible eyes in common complaint. So why is it I find such an alienating hush of fear has spooked the life out of the agora? All the primary colors have been bleached from what was once a garish freefor-all of convivial trash-talk splayed across the Sunday broadsheet floor. It’s not our words that have become taboo, but the things that lie beneath those words, which were only ever chartered as approximations for those things; having been taken to task after we’d found the true story of how they’d lied for the political expedience

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of simplicity, we can’t let them pass over our lips without an armed escort of “oh, but…” and “of course…” Normal is the word that describes a certain aggregate mean of behavior. Its meaning shifts with the weather, and it’s only ever a finger pointing out spoken directions to the highway. Normal is not a geotagged quadrant of zoned property value. This essay was filmed before & after a live studio audience.

XXIV. Ex Libris Nihilo I want to talk something into existence. That something is an ‘art-wing think-tank,’ and it need be no more than you and I and one other. What would it do? Well, it would write policy papers for state and federal arts-funding bodies; it would lobby for the aesthetic integrity of the commonwealth before big-money advertisers and bottom-feeding spam-spewers turn our feed to dirty grey sour-gummy slime. But that would come later. Its first mandate would be to set up an archive, physical and digital, built to receive, preserve and index the life’s work of anyone who has labored under the yoke of artistic ambition, especially those lone souls who lack the gumption or the social niceties to sell themselves as authors, painters, cartoonists, musicians, or whatever. Personally, I would like to include scrapbookers and listmakers, bloggers and fan-fiction devotees. The cost seems cheap (except if the life’s work in question includes a spiral jetty, or an aircraft carrier lined in fur) and the potential rewards for posterity are unfathomable. By which I mean, it could be a welcome bounty of busywork no one wants, or it could be a crucial core sample of abundant humanity autofellating its congenital mediocrity under a seedbed of common uniqueness. No matter; our archive’s worthy mandate stands because

by J. K. Johnson

it affirms our valuation of human endeavor. For too long, too much of us has been given to the landfill of disregard. If but one person cultivated the impossible hope of immortality, we should embrace their sacred scraps with a catholic inclusivity. But our scholars will not simply give a gold star to every ouevre it assimilates; a rigorous localized assessment of value will mark its debut, and this critical, hierarchical score may well go unchallenged for the life of our institution. We would guarantee only that the work in our care be shepherded into dim futurity with as much care as we can muster; a rigorous face forward with regards to the ever-shifting refinement of format would, in fact, provide most of the daily work of the place. You may feel free to read into this proposal all the insecure ego of this writer. I admit to my frustrated ambition and own that although my forty-four years have impressed upon me the insignificance of my dutiful ministrations in service of a contorted truth, I would yet rather die with the silly hope that, though my coevals may not feel me, their grandchildren may well flock to my side and canonize my anachronistic genius. I am well aware, as well, that the life I write for myself will admit no apprehension that is not fundamentally punitive. But enough about me.

XXV. Start with clips of interviews with people about what they can imagine their funeral guests could or would say about them. What’s the best? What’s the worst? [In the style of VHS’ Best of the Decade series.] Then a clip of a faux tv show: “The Story of THIS” [like the History Channel’s History of Mankind]. Very slowly, focus zooms into my sketchbook, in which I am writing this. High-contrast, low-attention-span recreation of me sitting and writing in the middle of a room while five people buzz around me in sped-up manic hyperactivity; behind the frenzy of muted conflict we see a slow, liquid diges-

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tive movement of various sized pieces of wood pass into the unit (of which this room is but one of eight), then progress by a mostly identical path through the various chambers of this whale’s belly. Some small portion is absorbed as useful nutriment, but most of it goes right out the door again, to be dumped back into the dumpsters from whence they came. Zoom away with a −90º counterclockwise rotation from the tv screen upon which the above has played out. A huge plasma television is upended in a bedroom poorly greenscreened onto a computer-generated Tron-like schematic, with an old man in a bed reaching out to the monolithic black rectangle (echoing Kubrick’s 2001). This is me in cheap, wrinkly age-progression makeup, as the Reverse Engineer. I’m trying to boot the cracked LCD relic into life with a dead remote. “God damn television!” I say, giving up the ghost. The bedroom keys out to reveal my own wrecked room, and then I wipe the makeup from my face and speak directly into an iPhone. At first I’m obviously holding it myself, but then, without moving from the frame, we transition into a ‘real’ camera on a tripod. From my face we see a reverse chronological selection of photographs of me back to 1970. Then we slide into drawings of mom pregnant, then me as a single germinal cell, then the back of my dad’s head from old to young. As it swiftly makes its visual point, the screen itself undergoes a cellular division. Mitosis rewinds over a VHS head dry-heaving a trip through time to a past badly in need of tracking. Grandparents populate the screen into pixellated prehistory, at the evolutionary ending of which is a single-celled organism, which, as we zoom out, becomes a picture on my device (my ‘cell’), which then commences to ring. Within the above morph from circle to rectangle, we see: A black hole, a spoked wheel, an oroboros; then,

by J. K. Johnson

oroborii within the wheels of a tank tread. This turns into my character Tankoven, then zooms out to show the cover of my book, The Collected Tankoven: Too Much & Too Little, then it becomes the board game Monopoly’s bank of pretend money, then it becomes a brick. The brick gets thrown into the air by Ignatz the mouse, then it abruptly cuts, upon its apogee, as it eclipses the noonday sun, back into an iPhone, with all the silent grace of Kubrick’s famous 2001 shot. Maybe we can ruin it with some lens-flare pizzazz. The iPhone lands on the pavement of a bleak, deserted parking lot and makes a small explosion like things do on ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force.’ The ring is a brief backwards recap of ringtone history, from now back to Alexander Graham Bell. I turn off the device and walk down to Melissa’s room. There’s no soundtrack; it’s filmed in standard multi-camera omniscient high-definition, fourth wall tucked between the cuts. Narrator: “I write my life from my deathbed every day, using the action figures of packaged archetype to draw a hand of tarot cards, so as to shuffle my playlist of possible me’s with sufficient randomness to fund a single-contestant lottery with a payoff of least-likely endgame of most interesting and adaptive schema of selfie.” I sit down on a stool. Melissa is sleeping, cuddled up with Moo (a roommate’s dog). The walls are covered with paintings on wood, which here appear as screens, each flipping channels from distinct branches of available narrative lineup (guided by eyeball share). Through a glass we are asked to identify our assailant. Are we sure? Once a selection is made, the crime of character can reenact us. Show a twenty-sided die rolling over role-playing paperwork. Show a dodecahedron rotating in mathematical perfection, joining its co-solids as a thrown-together

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Socrates and Plato walk onto the stage and identify themselves: Socrates: “Hi, I’m So-Crates. You might remember me from such movies as Bill & Ted’s Awesome Socratic Dialogue, (available on Bill & Ted Talks). I grew up in the gay old stoneages of animated dinosaurs best characterized by a facile mistreatment of historical record in service to a joke-based acausal deployment of creatively expedient anachronism. I spent the days of my life corrupting the youth of Athens with my mouth.” [Plato beats a percussive punctuation mark to signify the last statement as a punchline—a double entendre.] Plato: “Hey, y’all, Plato here. Y’all would never have even heard of this windbag here until I brought him to market.” Socrates: “That’s true; now I’m always around, loitering in every Barnes & Noble bathroom, haunting the core curriculum of the liberal arts, handing out phobias of the agora, up to the same old antics of antiquity with regard to your beautiful boys’ seduction by one old organ or another. Immortality, like italics, is/are mine, suckers!” Plato: “By way of suicide technology, I was able to hemlock Socrates’ motivational speaking algorithms into flattened arguments. I’ve thereby made my fortune and secured the paternal line of ontological record so as to protect my place past all capricious conflagrations of posterity. Like Paul’s Jesus or Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (ok, not really, but play along), I’ve turned a purportedly real person into a product of packaged goods to nourish the mind of man with a set of mental tools by which we may divine the direction of polar north (truth value) when navigating the unmapped seas of rhetorical warfare.” I drop a glass in Melissa’s room. It breaks into a million pieces, at which point all the screens on the walls switch over to an emergency presidential address, and Melissa

by J. K. Johnson

and Moo both wake up with great fanfare.

XXVI. Understanding Media Play (Remember Media Play?) Isis: “I remember spending money effortlessly at Media Play. 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 home’s uniform unisex spandex 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 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 never have a boring conversation between us.” Siri: “I don’t know how to answer that question in the form of a wrong turn.” 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.” AC: “Horus the fink-a-saurus.” 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

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in cahoots with David.” Michael Stipe: “Stand in the face where you war, now 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, neocollegiate dandy ephemera.”

XXVII. Special Victims May I be the first to congratulate you, O human monad, upon your victorious ascent of the Shmatterhorn’s peak? And may I be the last to suggest that your tedious, bored gag-reflex reaction to the basest basement levels of common human auto-response has painted you into a corner from which you are wasting the true potential of now by choosing a world without which physics crunches numbers and within which will admit to no better an imagination than that which is evinced as default by the humdrum differential of metronomic sump-mesh flung hither & thither ‘pon the floor? Welcome, Schoolkill Valley High graduating class of 1989! Die down, applause. Squelch libidos 80%. Our guest speaker is Dr. Room Razzle Gatorpuss (“simple, bootable, bovine”) Eummominnum. He’s the inventor of the Mapworm IF [interface]: a filtering protocol for the Mmundane brand of shared-standard, nontrivial gamelike ethergel of rhetorical malfeasance. From the rearmost bleacher in the frontmost block of benches, Kirk Russailormoon bit the tip of his tongue so hard, the blood in him flew out. He was a Type Five Cleri-

by J. K. Johnson

cal Air Whore, chaotic neuter; he wore the same Belt of +3 Damage in Self-Gelding Mélees. ‘Malaise and Mayonnaise’ was his incidental score, by Hung Racecard, Terpsichorean chore.

XXVIII. Are We Not Alone? (an ad for mashed potatoes) A tiny, shining dodedahederon apporoaches a huge spaceship shaped like a piece of elbow macaroni. It makes its way to a circular reuptake which leads into a huge hangar. A dishevelled man with too much hair and no clothes emerges, tracking a weird goo across the spotless white floor. From offscreen, an imperious female voice addresses the gooey man as a goofy smile unsaves his face. She is Iffy Carfish, Princess of the Ladies’ Auxilliary Planet of Nyahnyah. She has a complex hairpile which no one’s ever been able to disentangle, so she’s always mean. Iffy Carfish: “You better have something good to tell me, wearing a smile like that.” Doug Henning: “There’s a guy down there named Kris Kristofferson,” he is able to impart before collapsing on the floor in a fit of the giggles. Iffy Carfish: “Did you get those monster stamps this time? Or that net the ant promised? And where’s my Blanking Quannre cape?” The two characters all of a sudden freeze where they are for an exposition break. Into the foreground strides a miniature fat man in a black muumuu. He is the size of an action figure in proportion to the above pair, who are visibly shaky as they try to stay very still. The Fat Man looks directly at us: “Hey, I see you. Just what do you think you’re doing here?” With a vicious start I yank myself out of the dream and

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shake you from your loud, self-suffocating slumber. I am Greedo.

XXIX. Day of Beauty / Night of Ugly Excuse me, but I have a few opinions I’d like to air. Assholes, elbows and opinions, right? A metaphorically fecund bouquet. We’re none of us very eager to smell the air from inside one another, whereas our own flatulence is never offensive to ourselves. Pet farts gross me out the worst, personally. But here, let’s go through the motions of communicating. Today is a Saturday, the dirty grey day after Black Friday. Black and white art has always floated my goat’s boat better than art of color, with its weepy, plangent emotional snares. This is true for books & comics, but right here I specifically mean to talk about planar art, parallelograms all as flat and splattered as Clement Greenberg’s sanitized aesthetic. Which is to say, art that hangs on walls. Which is to say, with a playful dismissive snobbishness all my own, Wall Art. Having committed to a deprecation of the Wall Arts in favor of art for reproduction, a certain degree of scorn for the appalling market in unique objects has unavoidably accompanied my agenda. I have lately let myself hate that world, an extreme position which, I confess, has no particular origin story to support it. It’s a world I’ve only brushed up against once or twice myself, with indifferent result. I’ve felt put-upon by the quaint provincialism that seems to have hooded the head of fine art, within my lifetime. But I’ve not been kicked in the balls by painting as I’ve been by my more beloved media of choice (books).

XXX. The Screen Age I absorb an embarrassment of television programming.

by J. K. Johnson

“I use the computer to watch the t.v.,” quips Nomen Novum, one of my favorite Atlanta performers. Sometimes both my monitors will work, and I’ll be able to compartmentalize the two visual information landscapes amiably. Mostly, though, I have Project Free TV or Netflix or HBOgo going on behind the TextEdit page I’m writing onto. Or the InDesign booklets I’ve been compulsively making for the past year and a half or so. “It’s insane, this guy’s taint!” sayeth Mr. Show, and indeed it is rudely true. The rest of the world seems to have discovered what I’ve found within the past few years, which is that nowadays, all the essential imperative mythmaking of our age is happening on television. That’s where we host the realtime autopsy of our body social. A century ago, the novel was proven to be an incomplete system by James Joyce in his Finnegans Wake Theorem. Of course, novels still find us where we live, and the huff and bluster of authorial harrumphing goes on as it ever has, and books of raging beauty will continue to appear for as long as there are assholes who arrogate the unpleasant duties of godhead for themselves. “Art is in its essence arrogant,” Le Corbusier notes in characteristically crisp copy. Yet the zeitgeist is elsewhere.

XXXI. This Page Intentionally Left Bank A. Reality is always scripted. B. Reality television represents the domestication of the human. C. Reality is a much-maligned word. It needn’t be. It describes exactly what we think it means in the millionth of a second before we begin to internally object to its uncomfortably catholic range of assumption. It is the conception of an ether, not the provable physical manifestation of the ether.

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D. There is a place for these kinds of words, which describe: 1.) states, 2.) polar dynamics 3.) verticality in a topography of ontologies exactly like our geographical globe.

XXXII. The Genesis of Book In the beginning, the word was broken. It broke into three pieces: 1.) This is the shit. 2.) This is shit. 3.) ‘This’ is an anagram for ‘shit.’ This is the triple-chocolate ice cream cone of delight we like to call dialectics. Dialectics is more vulgarly itemized as 1.) Thesis. 2.) Antithesis & 3.) Synthesis. A philosopher named Hegel uncovered this species of ontological geometry.

XXXIII. GUTwound April 1st, 2033 // The Steel Square Simulacrum Exposition: Consciousness has been liberated from its bed of nails; a huge, baffling variety of possible selves are available to us. For the first time, the background whine of the average user’s headful of psychic garbage becomes visible by way of a dynamic graphic interface. The inner hells of other people are exposed; no private foible may hide from this embarrassing transparency. Humanity is again expelled from the garden of not knowing any better. The needy mating trill of self-location emanating from one-

by J. K. Johnson

dimensional human I’s is suddenly unbearable. Within a month, consumer confidence evaporates entirely, along with most embodied souls. A mass suicide of uploading raptures the righteous and wrong ‘uns alike, enfolding us all into the catholic, corporate bosom of its cloudy data haven. Post-Human Characters: Bank—bank encompasses several things: a.) a distributed circulatory system of cash & credit, b.) a gross of quasisapient artificial expert systems & obsequious interface principals [aka C3POs], and c.) a strongly-contentious couple of Crowned Heads whose every negotiated compromise is embodied as another offspring (a Crowned Head is a hydra-like coil of posthumous intellects who have learned how to think better than any Board of Directors; this is the first, rudimentary stab at engineering a USB standard for cognitive architecture). Kleghor Smeagle and Kaychisizix Cocmast stand with their backs to us, surveying a sped-up couple of months in a particular living situation. Kleghor Smeagle: There—see the object being carried by player B? That’s a perfect visual analog to the base structure of group whynamics. A spinal column in a gentle S bearing a ladder; a snake and a ladder all in one! Kaychisizix Cocmast: So noted. Another for the grab bag of titles, I’ll second. But if I may raise a question of style, my dear foil—let’s ease up on the futurespeak a bit, yes? I know it’s fun to build a little ziggurat of idiom with your multicolored plastic bricks. And, indeed, the extrapolation of likely futures does require our words to be repurposed to serve our needs, turning linguistic parity against itself by use of portmanteau words nailed together by paranomasia. But all the same: settle down, Beavis.

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XXXIV. The First Notional Bank of Beef with Broccoli Dotcom slouches into laissez-faire consciousness just in time to see the death of human art; it is the final night of the week-long dance of the seven plagues, and the terror of freedom is almost unbearable to behold as style after style is applied, assimilated and consumed. First is alone equipped to appreciate the view for what it is; as of that night, a shift in divestments favors the museum over the gallery, and a few risky loans are approved for developments meant to house functioning shut-ins. For its own benefit, a panicked public is capitalized upon and a permanent viewing station planned through which First plans to see more shows like this.

XXXV. An overworked ego will occupy your mind to exhaustion with illusory causal links between your self and the world, between you and other people, your family, and so on; but it certainly doesn’t pass for substantive thought, and in fact makes such activity impossible. Also: A chemical imbalance is far more likely to be an inhibitor of genuine depth than an activator of it. A quiet mind, unsaddled with pre-Copernican notions of self, turns its inquisitive attentions outward to play roughly with hypothetical models of what it sees. This fuels the engine of creative endeavor to far better effect than the coffee and cigarettes of narcissistic despair or the fuck-or-fight thrillride of relationship trauma. So many people never even leave the prison of their parents’ home, though their bodies may wander the world.

XXXVI. She calls me fresh from her late morning’s ablutions to the goddess of flawed beauties, such as may not be formed without a delicate hand to hold the scalpel. A tailor-made set of variables is sketched on flesh, and the knife smooth-

by J. K. Johnson

ly interprets the Sharpie scrawl. You agreed to this long ago, to accept a pathologically difficult fate, more cruel by far that your affliction isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t etched in skin, that it hides from you for years because the complexity with which it can be named has no universal protocol of expression; you accepted that invisible wisps of covert fate would inflict various horrors upon you in certain crucial moments of your early development. By swearing silence to cover for your abusers, you are skillfully, painfully wrought into a form of monstrous deformities, each of which only affect the psyche in specially modulated cycles.

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THREE

Daniel: or, Denial

I. The Room Daniel wore his dirty soles the way they wore his floor. Grit and glitter gilded his singular room’s dark cement foundation; over this, papers of all sorts lay strewn, as if in the aftermath of disaster. The collateral of forty-two 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. 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, in Georgia, with its hateful humidity and asshole 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 to and been forgiven by all parties involved in any intergenerational pendulum swing between positions each liberally vested in fallacy.

by J. K. Johnson

The truth of his world was that the twentieth century hadn’t been old enough to drink the liquor it’d been illicitly getting shitty on for the last hundred years, and its recklessness with regard to certain articles of incorporation would only come to be recognized as such thanks to the bloody mess sponsoring its revilement, while its formative clumsiness at being drunk on the mass medium of the mass media made for an accident-ridden set of initial conditions. It was humbling to see how few and far between were those moments when he’d operated with the only measure of free will permitted by the actuary of the preventive now. 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 to the derailment of every reflexive flagella-kick of 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, he’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 existencelessentialism, if you will (but you shouldn’t), hung around him like a cloud of cigarette smoke from his trellis of presumption and incipient, insidious ego.

II. The Snuggie Stasi Daniel: “My goals are as follows. I intend to a.) save the world from its endless wobbly spin upon the broken axis of western solipsism; to b.) break the spell of the bathroom mirror and the magazine page; to c.) sever all contact from the reiterative shriek of amplified narcissism which panders to our vanity at the cost of our collective dreamtime, then trades upon our petty

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fears for pennies, merely to feed the belly of the bestial market; to d.) shatter the centuries-old mirror wherein the cultural I of narrative imperative has been cultivated from a wee cogito ergo sum; to e.) snuff the flame of the once-brilliant promethean conceit of the genius, the artist, the prophet, the leader, the EGO to lead its lesser egos through the desert to the promised land; to f.) sin so deeply in self reflective self discovered self helpless self abnegating self surgery that the sins of the society at large at this node of spacetime will be absolved and the metastasis neutralized.” The Goddess Tripartite: “And how do you plan to pay for all those letters?” Daniel: “I will enable myself to actuate the above items by implementing a few disciplinary methods to reroute the geyser within, diverting its flow so as to avoid either bodily sphincter. These include: a.) dodging the calls of nature; b.) ignoring emotion, doing violence to the parameters of self to stave off the paralysis of normalization; and while c.), finding alternate avenues of respite so I don’t fall off the edge entirely, yet also d.), forging a fake map to fool the ‘lunar probe’ aspect of apparent self; all of which sets the stage for a spiritual rejiggering designed to e.) obliterate the kernel of self through expensive particle-accelerator self-harm and an occult cultivation of perverse delusion designed to derange and unhinge me dangerously; and ultimately the Great Work is f.), to thwart the adversary ‘nature’ and twist this loathsome flesh into a bonsai tree of painfully-attained beauty.” The I: “EACH SKIN HAS THE PROS AND CONS OF THE ANIMAL LIFE. THE PROCESS AND THE COLOR AND MADE ONLY PLANT PRODUCTS, AS WELL AS THE FINAL PROCESSING IN THE FLOWER SHOW AND THE SCARS ARE NOT PRESENT TO BE CONSIDERED DEFECTS, GIVING THEM A VINTAGE LOOK.”

by J. K. Johnson

The Narrator: “About Mememe: a triplicate résumé spoiled by nsfw tmi. A brief history of my biographies [both auto and stick] in which the dialectical path of my forked life thus far is spoonfed in prechewed bitesized funpacks for you.” The J: “Players: Jeff Johnson, 1970-2000 Jessica Jonsun, 2000-2010 Jess Jonsin, 2010-?” The Room: “Glass, plastic, plasma rods of light framed by metal. The concrete floor shivers with grime, glue and glitter beneath a horrific patina of snitchin’ discolorations. Wires, cables and adapters lie openly with one another in perfect sinless indifference. Piss and offal stain the air with the full figurative odor of open-ended entropy, all available agents of which would like to take this moment to thank you by unhinging your mind with their jaws around your raucous coil.” The Narrator: “A network of spinning, slaved dust-eaters murmur a crude trade of magnetic give and take in a slow crawl of market physics. A grinding sense seems to lurch forth from this haggling babble, showing itself in the movement of patterns upon the irradiated parallelogram slab to which they’re tethered. This rude vertical billboard of base metaphor is apparently mesmerizing to the oily, pale appurtenance of flesh seated before it. Look at it wagging its useless flipper, having only lately merged sloppily with its perch of swivelling cushion and wobbly wheels. Just a quivering spark of semisentience slapped on a bladder between two sphincters, that’s all it is. Oh shit, it wants to talk to us! Let’s move along, quickly.”

III. Pollen Count In 1977 I moved from Ohio to Georgia. Mostly I wanted to be closer to my family, because they were moving there. Also, they were taking all my stuff with them, and I was only seven.

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My mom and dad had both been raised in the south. As students at Georgia Tech and Agnes Scott, they’d met on an elevator that was out of order for twelve full days before someone fixed it and rescued them. By then, they’d only partially resorted to cannibalism, but fully fallen in love. My dad was working his way through school with the help of the Air Force, and so it was that they soldiered through their stint in the snow-tired midwest. Finally, when all of the alien remains had been thoroughly debriefed, they were free to return to the land of DixieCups. So it was done, and so I have written, that we relocated to the promised land, led by Charlton Heston’s invisible dead hand and the economic promise of private-sector military employment. Marietta, a suburb of Atlanta, was in those days ruled by a giant mechanical chicken, whose reign had taken a turn when lightning had stricken it wack. Its great, fearsome eyes, thankfully, rolled no more, but now its edicts clucked and squawked with Reaganite zeal. Drawing like-minded folk from far and wide, Marietta, in the eighties, absorbed thousands of transplants from around the country into its greasy fold. The Big Chicken, as it was commonly called, would later become the Speaker of the House (and a science fiction author) under a different name—a name as implausible and yet as utterly fitting as any of Dickens’ most colorful demons. Give yourself a point if you’ve guessed it. In a school report unearthed from the time, I referred to Georgia as ‘the prison state,’ owing to its original charter as a penal colony. I remember having an aversion to the benign colloquialism ‘y’all’ which I’ve only lately let lapse. And anything about the Civil War has always seemed as obscenely embarrassing as a glimpse of a relative’s pubic hair. But I can’t recall harboring any particular set of grudges against my new home, other than

by J. K. Johnson

the obvious historical onus of racial inequity. And maybe this was enough. Any little episode of racial injustice used to make me queasy, I remember. With every new instance I’d read about or see on tv, anger would flash through me until it wore itself out in hopeless circles, and another black lego brick would lock into place inside me; slowly, a disgust for humanity built itself a castle in my ribcage. (All the Lego men still wore those goofy smiles, though.) As an adult, I’ve lived in a few North American cities: Seattle, New York, Los Angeles. Not one of these cities, in my experience, are as racially integrated as Atlanta. It’s a city with terminal self-esteem issues, a city to move away from; it’s also the U.S. capital city of rebirth, just as NYC is its capital city of self-invention.

IV. I Ate My Best Friend For Breakfast “I want a coat made from scrotumflesh—it would get tighter and thicker in cold weather. And I want to be able to transcribe my thoughts directly to text without all my fingers getting in the way.” Daniel wasn’t completely unaware that the girl had squirmed uneasily in her seat a few times since he’d started talking. He knew full well he’d trespassed on her peaceful hour of study hall. He spoke in a voice no louder than any library would condone, but his gentle patter was nonetheless a power drill pressed between the eyes of the young woman too polite to do anything but nod and smile with perfunctory grace.

V. Homesick White noise fans circulate shaded summer air through the southern suburban home. It’s a straight shot from his watchful black window to the other end of the house—to

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the master bedroom, as it’s known. His room, over the garage, is the ‘bonus room.’ They threw it in for free when they were building the house. Here, Daniel will learn how to be extraneous, from grade school through high school. His mom and dad are an energetic team who’ve learned how to blind out doubt. They function very well together, seemingly without quarrel. It’s perhaps the curse of parenting that even avoiding doing anything wrong isn’t right. Daniel will always be attracted to over-emotional, willful people who can, on occasion, unleash a tempest of anger in his direction. Clinging to a capillary cul-de-sac in the East Cobb area of Marietta, Georgia, this house will always be haunted by him. By way of ink and paint and word, Daniel has stained the place indelibly with the marks of his making. A problematic adulthood is adumbrated here; you can hear it in the psychic static, the signature of an overwrought identity crawling from the accident of its birth.

VI. The 1982 World’s Not Fair 1. Dad took me to another interminable Georgia Tech football game. I closed my eyes to it and learned the hurtful bias that pays for all my pain. Primitive man, posits our dear fellow-sufferer, noticed familial subdivisions amongst bastards. Your 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.” 2. 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 exchanges. I wanted only to pass under your noses, undetectable, unmolested. 3. Beavercreek Roundtree East Valley Sewell Mill Old Ro-

by J. K. Johnson

swell Cobb Parkway Delk Windy Hill 1977 Mrs. Schmidt second grade unskip unskip unskip 4. Bifocals calculator watch, Micronauts pneumatic tube. 5. Lockbox, spider-crickets, Red clay, mica, Kennesaw Mountain, field trip bull-whip. Jay Thomas was my best friend for a bit. 6. He was allowed to watch whatever television however much he willed 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. 7. 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; he turns into the same ugly white southern baptist as a thousand other kids at school. 8. Puberty is a betrayal of childhood, and it makes you feel like the evillest thing in the world. 9. Boys learn where the mass for mass is held. Zoom zoom and the mastery of space! Esoteric codex of the alienated. 10. 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 circle around my head. 11. a.) Sees beyond bars of cage b.) Am I good or bad?

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c.) Does anyone need me? d.) What is highest hardest best? 12. 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 of me. 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. You await the bombs that will obliterate the human pestilence forever. You are led to believe that any day now, you’ll be excused from further harrassment. 13. 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 you. This is what you will become. This is what I am. I find people who will make me feel like shit, who will unleash that anger on me. I hunger for it with more of an appetite than the one I feel for food. 14. 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. Klimt’s The Kiss killed wall art. 15. I can see brief clips of land-like terrain avast the full fathom five players at most, attack Kamchatka with three-die fortune. 16. You saw me broken into a homunculus of pain-receptors. 17. 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

by J. K. Johnson

many books, 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. 18. Leonard, Leonard in my head—you laugh, but we are “in a world of shit.” 19. My world went from Atlas Shrugged to Naked Lunch in a summer’s crash cart college course in cruelly indifferent modes of capital accrual and how it, in its boundless growth, grows weedy, unwanted variants of devalued quality as a wash for the default greats of a mediocre era. 20. I am sixteen and no longer pure & chaste. I am far worse than the faggot you see (‘Where’s the blood?’) beflood you. 21. 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. 22. Now open for elective dehumanizing. Look into my skanky eyes, Mr. Surreptitious Snake-Worker. 23. 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. 24. I was malleable, ludicrous, gullible, servile, treacherous and opportunistic. My pa could see right through me to the rum one of the bunch, as it were. 25. Mom makes us as an oyster makes pearls; dad casts us at swine or collars our dad’s little boy / eunuch / Fake

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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 fatherland. 26. 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 workout routine is key to arousal / refusal: assassins of pure, perfect will. 27. 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 argued. 28. We all have to start somewhere, and the name of our initial somewhere is: BIAS. 29. 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 seat of actuarial discretion with regard to the quotient of my rites of penitence to my pupal replications of second cousins’ kissing step-lawyers. 30. 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 betrayed by______? 31. 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 fuck / kill / marry triage.

by J. K. Johnson

VII. 1984 He woke up hard. He hated erections. He opened his eyes upon a full year of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue Calendar pages. He’d purchased two copies at twelve dollars apiece from a chain bookstore. He’d earned this money working Saturdays at a video store called The Video Connection. It was a minor franchise of the earlymid 80s VHS retail rental shop variety, just pre-Blockbuster. His parents owned the store. It was his first job. He took ridiculously long lunch breaks in which he walked along Johnson’s Ferry Road to the two bookstores and one record store within walking distance. His favorite of the two bookstores was independently-owned, but it was unfortunately stuck in a dopey development simulacrum of deracinated community. His puberty was synchronized with the mannerist, theatrical parade of outside markers made most lividly manifest by the advent of MTV. Suddenly the firmament was awash with lurid archetypes...

VIII. Nuclear war was promised. Unclear AIDS appeared to muddy the endocrinological with the pathological. Happiness crossed lines with sickness. Ultimately, the exclusionary magic of sexual polarity was mapped into the greater humanist inclusivity. Marketing works from without, to feel the flesh resist its seductive reductionism. A mass consensus of individual self-interrogations collaborate on mutually-amenable charters of protocol. Questions of free will are questions of scale. A stretchable synthetic fat pants legend zooms, quick as Google Earth, from the moon to the Chevron with breathtaking prevarication. I am white, male, forty-four, southern, North American. East Cobb 80s lower upper middle class affluent asshole Republican Baptist fear-baiting reactionary godswill. Path of least resistance with respect to

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ideological Posture-Pedic channel surfing couch potato heads, Mr. and Mrs. married Protestant vegetable garden bourgeoisie (?)

IX. Daniel; or, Denial [Treatment for a Short Story] This is the story of the wickedest boy the world has ever known, and how the world forgave him before they executed him. The idea for this story is derived from the historical figure Gilles de Rais, 16th century French aristocrat convicted of the sadistic murder of countless children. The character of Gilles de Rais, as intuited by the 19th century novelist J. K. Huysmans in his book LàBas, has informed the nature of our protagonist Daniel, who otherwise is the glove upon this author’s fist. And now your author, another J. K. as it turns out, would like to switch to a first person POV, okay? ‘Daniel’ the character is 89% based on myself as a teenager, as apprehended from the perspective of the self I inhabit at the time of this writing. To wit, I am middleaged, childless and mostly unemployed. If I’m granted approval to write this story, I hereby promise not to molest, fondle or otherwise corrupt my younger self. In this story, Daniel cultivates a consistent dreamworld to which he returns again and again, night after night. Think H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-World of Unknown Kardath, but more closely resembling one of those gigantic truck-stops that are like mini-fiefdoms in the long stretches between cities. Daniel gradually becomes aware that he’s starting to bring some aspects of the dreamworld into his waking life. What form this takes is undecided, but the crux of it is that an alien element of evil, heretofore unknown to earth, has been introduced by our unwitting protagonist. Instead of shouldering the heavy remorse due the perpetrator of such criminal negligence, Daniel retroac-

by J. K. Johnson

tively enacts the role of that one who’d willfully despoil humanity; it seems easier to demonize himself than to abase himself with penitence. But inevitably, the trajectory of this Daedalean arc wends and winds to a weepy final settlement, a big public trial in which all his guilt is spilt like viscera upon the floor, there for all to see and judge. All of humanity comprises the jury. Astonishingly, they forgive Daniel’s careless tread to and fro the threshhold of the real. Mostly, this is because they have better things to do and, having been sequestered at great expense upon a single continent, are making frequent references, with less and less levity, to cannibalism’s savage resort. But thanks to the utilitarian seizure of the bologna industry, a fleet of aircraft are deployed to deliver the largest payload of luncheon meat in history to the ravenous jurors. Thus, a vast starfield of sack lunches falls from the skies and nourished the gathering. And by a Miracle Whip of mayonnaise they are fed. When the jurors eventually return to their homes in a not very orderly reverse-diaspora which lasts a few years for some, they discover their lives have been usurped by opportunistic non-voters of various stripes; felons, gypsies, the legally-dead. Of course, the imposters deny everything. Hence the subtitle of this story. Ha! You thought it was because ‘denial’ is an anagram for ‘Daniel,’ didn’t you? Well, you’re wrong. So, Daniel is forgiven by his peers, but still must face the judgment of a mechanized secular authority, which perfunctorily sentences him to death. Daniel is executed by lethal suggestion (in which the subject is forced to listen to a taped voice telling him or her over and over again: “You’re dead meat,” until it inevitably becomes true, due to starvation). One more thing: Daniel has an imaginary friend named David Foster Wallace, who sits on his shoulders and

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smiles enigmatically but never says a word.

X. Selfie I was born in Selfie, the worst subdivision in all of white flight’s suburban blights. In Selfie, you learn real quick how to protect yourself from shakedowns by pizza delivery stooges. You learn how to soldier through moments of uncomfortable class distinction that arise just because you don’t know how to leave a tip, or because you speak with a precise courtesy which the uncouth mistake for unctuousness. You either purchase the vestments of universal solipsism at full brand-name cost, or find yourself delivered from freedom of choice and assigned a knock-off generic package. You’ll never see your parents fight. Emotion is something you only see on tv, like exploding cars. Everything you do is either effortless or done for you, and you won’t find out what the ground feels like beneath your feet until it’s far too late to learn how to tie your shoes. Oh, but by all means, ask your new friends from Apartland-Divorcia for help when your limbs give way like a Tour de France YouTube spazz. I’m sure they’ll let you complain without kicking every single living shit out of you.

XI. This Is Cyanosis by Grygori Fudding Eggage An awful noise comes from a stoner wearing ill-fitting 70’s tennis apparel ($200 on eBay.com): “MWMWMWMWM” Cut to: head exploding in a microwave (modified microwave $40 craigslist.org) GFE, wearing a giant book costume ($80 etsy.com):

by J. K. Johnson

“Dad! No!” [Turn to Camera 2]: “Hello, white America. Have you ever seen a car explode? I mean in real, scripted life. The answer is: ‘Me neither!’ But have you ever wondered why? Every day of our lives we see cars explode on unscripted SuperTV. It happens frequently enough that we can’t even glance at a parked vehicle without our minds blowing it up for us.” GFE (in the book costume, remember) explodes in a sudden fireball. Firefighting fish swim from all directions to push the water into the blaze. It quickly abates. GFE’s ghost (dressed as a pirated Space Ghost likeness in violation of copyright law {cease & desist!}): “And that’s why, to this day, the big fish floats with his big, blue face upon the surface of the waters, its insane eye seeming to have burst its surfeit of untasted wisdom in just the sort of physiological crisis that tends to strike our finest minds, without a care for whether or not the big fish has found the wherewithal to foist its hardwon truths upon the face of unbattered, imperturbable youth. Which, as it happened, it had not. Consequently, all our little fishes, upon maturity, take the new view from the new aquarium unswimmingly. They last a month or two at most after flailing about with impotent outrage that the world to which they’d grown accustomed had been replaced with one that would require some effort to apprehend.” Disclaimer VO: “No one can know what it’s like behind another person’s eyeballs. The cost of cultivating a clear voice capable of projecting the common idiom of the uniquely particular is murderously prohibitive. So remember: those prophets we neglect to kill must be pardoned for their occasional failure to live.”

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FOUR

Be Still. Keep Moving I. Beauty vulgarized becomes anæsthetic. Æsthetic ayes pit the donut-holes of our specious selves. Tear the faces off the screens. Cry.

II. Everybody’s Putting Out, But No One’s Getting Laid A paradise of filth; a vast, belittling clearinghouse of chatter. Validation and malediction find a happy mean where every word is made to please. If you don’t have anything nice to say, there’s no language left to say it in anyway. The greater good is a disgraced conceit now that the haters have been hushed. Everyone is a channel but no one’s watching. No one has the authority to declare it, but this language of ours is totes dead.

III. Walking on Hexagons 1. 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.

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2. 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 properly mixed metaphor. 3. Let us find a bloodier bond than kin or friendship; one which more keenly resembles a lively but disinterested emnity. 4. 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. 5. 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. 6. 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 drive—-when our rash, impolitic disregard for any human company other than that of fellow shut-ins, each only too happy to forsake their humanity for the betterment of man, ushers us into surprise solitary confinement—let us nonetheless shoulder this absurd burden in riotous number and join our voices to shout Non serviam! at the grimy banality of mortal boredom.

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World without end, yours truly, etc. etc.

IV. OK Concupiscence Occasionally 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 anyone else among 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 stoppers 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 rides. A politician’s mutable center is useful. Some degree of deft dissembling required. A practised hand at misdirection may mask Daedalean flights of

by J. K. Johnson

lens-flare gimmickry as Sisyphean humility. In such ways may the rhetoric of seduction underlie the brickand-mortar 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 maidenhead aches to be forcibly informed. Long ago, a course of study was served to my incomprehending adolescent palette. A cul-de-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 often 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

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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 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 isolated 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 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

by J. K. Johnson

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. 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 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

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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 at the exclusion of the many sets us at an equivalent level of civilization as wearing the same underwear every day. 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, boolean, binary breastfeeding. Abandon the coprophagic circle jerk of liberalism’s laissez-faire 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.

by J. K. Johnson

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.

V. Easter in the West End of one of North Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Southern States Truth is a multidimensional notion. Every word, if asked, admits to an innate contrariness. As we grind down to the final years of literate manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;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 that technology? The commonplace 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

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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 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. But 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 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. What sickening vertigo accompanies the unwelcome kiss of an absolutezero brain freeze? We reel around the slushie fountain

by J. K. Johnson

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. We see how obvious and ordinary all our little individual flourishes have been. [A gruesome clip exhumes itself from its grungy fin de siécle glacier of non-lethal 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 shrieks something about being a rat in a cage in spite of all its rage, but really its posh cage is paid for by proceeds from the wages of rage, so the mooted complaint is just another prop for the pose.] And we see how vulgar we truly are, how common; oh, how it rends our hearts to lose our special blankie 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

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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 imprint the back of his body has made in the sand. Here’s an extra credit art project: do a self-portrait 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.

VI. Given 1. Man is the microcosm. 2. By reading, thinking and observing, we elevate our minds to planes of lessening noise. By engaging in conversation according to certain tenets of good faith, we read others with a catholic interest. No one is uninteresting; everyone willing to play the game of substantive rapport must be embraced as a fellow truthseeker. If you can’t model others’ minds within your own mind well enough to spot the scam in their shell-game of self, then you haven’t listened well enough. 3. It falls upon you to hack the path that links you both on the human terrain. A predictable interaction insulates you from harm and gives you the privilege of fixing a higher tone of exchange. Small talk makes us small; agreeable disagreement make of us a vast containment

by J. K. Johnson

of multitudes—we become a landscape of portraits. 4. Truth will elude you until you’re so wrong you’re loathe to live. 5. Entropy increases as a function of our voracious appetite for narrative cuisine. Matter crumbles in our hands as we masticate it into pattern. A deliberate aesthetic informs our choice of pattern, and thus do we revise the story of who we are and what kind of world this is. 6. A set of rules established as mealtime etiquette functions here by analogy: chew before you swallow; allow each morsel to unpack its full nutritive library before its richness is digested in the reductive acid bath of your intestinal mind. What waste remains as ordered brown ordure is entirely a function of your ability or inability to perceive that which is before you. 7. One benevolent conceit among many we may employ is that everything in our lives happens for a reason. But it would be fruitful to understand that everything happens for a reason because we use the protocol of reason to interpret the things we see happening; we see causality because we use the proprietary language of reason— which is narrative—to render sense data into searchable memory. 8. The solipsistic fallacy seals us off from each other like prisoners until we have each taken individual credit for all the sins of our species. At this, our chains are transmuted into the rudiments of network cabling needed for our singular minds to touch the naked essence of our fellow sufferers. Six billion nametags read: “Hello, my name is Spartacus.”

VII. What Are We? Given the right conditions, life is inevitable. Given thumbs, and the ability to speak across genera-

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tions, 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.

VIII. Portrait of a Landscape View of Atlanta’s skyline from the corner of Murphy St. and Shelton Ave. in the West End. The city sits atop an anthill, upon which an arrangement of vertical real estate blinks a thousand windows into the sun on this cloudless spring morning. This is the highest elevation from within the urban perimeter—a distinction as yet unacknowledged by its property value. Our subject is walking home. As he rounds the corner, he surveys the vista and thinks: “Given the right conditions, we are inevitable. Given thumbs and books, we inevitably cede mortality for more.” As he proceeds downhill on Shelton, his gaze drops down to fix on the hexagonal sidewalk. This two-dimensional plane suggests a third dimension, as a hexagon

by J. K. Johnson

suggests a cube. From years of weathering, the pattern has been broken, here and there, into irregular polygons; time has trampled its surface into fractal clockwork. Subject: “As we see patterns, so do we impose those patterns upon the world around us. As we organize our thoughts into solid architectural form, we shatter the glass of the material world. From this fine powder we engineer machines of animated matter that mirror our every movement; and these devices we marry.” [Along with the above, we see a montage of images: a stew brewing; the ascent of life from goo to Google; a left hand holding a book and a right hand masturbating; hipsters in dumpsters; two silhouetted profiles mouthing phonemes at each other like that children’s show The Electric Company—the one on the left says, ‘So,’ to which the right replies, ‘Up,’ and then they both say, ‘Soup’ with a lilt of satisfied consensus.] Subject: “What is the issue thereof this union?” [Left lips: ‘Duh;’ right lips: ’No.’ Together: ‘Dunno.’] Subject: “In order to walk on land, creatures born of ocean had to learn how to carry the ocean inside of them.” [The vessel of man is exploded for our eyes to see our inner workings as so many diversionary rivulets designed to make water stand upon two feet.] Subject: “Time is our medium, as water is that of fish.” [Kids in the back of a car ask, ‘Are we there yet?’ over and over again as a painted landscape loops mileage. A ghost image in the driver’s seat does whatever pops first into your {the viewer’s (the reader’s)} head, then disappears as we diagonally zoom out to show a stationary car-husk with no driver—we see that it’s a set, whereupon a television commercial is being given its one and

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only day of principal photography.] Subject: “What would it look like to us, if we could poke our heads above the surface of time?” [We see the neon effigy of fire flip back and forth between the only two states its designer was budgeted to animate.] Subject: “And does not the analogy suggest that we must first learn how to carry all of time within us in order to survive without its vast, deep liquidity?” [We see the form of man like a cookie cutter slicing all the way back to its birth and all the way forward to its death, and we see the various branches of possibility made available to this living form in the span of its tenure. In its past we see the tangled root structure of its forebears reaching fingers deep into dim millenia; in its future we see the bold, violent sport of fleshy investiture as it dashes hopes as soft as infants’ Play-Doh skulls against the jagged indifference of mother nature.] Subject: “Well may the marrow among us moan against growing, for what does it portend but pain and a further fall from the grace of animal bliss? No wonder the righteous hide their faces from the sun—a climb up from the bodies and minds of primates has not wiped the land clear of our primal progenitors. We’ve winnowed their number and worsened their lot, to be sure; but what suppurations of fear must have presaged every incremental milestone along biology’s blind generational grub towards the light? Yes, our inmost ossified recalcitrants may well spend their waived adulthood knelt prostrate before the toys and totems of golden childhood. Of form and void we all are made, but more shall side with void by far than suffer form’s thankless drive.”

by J. K. Johnson

IX. 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 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

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physical parameters, has come into being to support our existence, when with one slight variance we would never have been?’ This idea is more 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 Einstein-Bose 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; 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

by J. K. Johnson

causal computational consciousness that constitutes our relationship with time. We will wake up from the seas of incrementally myopic, four-dimensional trial-and-error and discover we inhabit a mind as mad and bold as the one which (so to speak) made us. XI. When there is no difference between the realism of the footage and the simulated CGI crystallized in the collective mind’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.

X. Versailles O 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 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?

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If it leads, it’s gold. And we’re back to live life-or-death competition between ice-skaters; this metaphor captures our eye, sequinwinked, 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 characterforms 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.

XI. Benediction Meet me in the undespairing secret centrifuge of the ever-ripening seedless word. Locate me by number; audit my life’s remit; marry me to the infinite array. Follow my failures with forgiveness and finally enfold me, O mother of paternal return, within the fuming white-hot spume of your churning commerce.

XII. Note to Self—HELP! Every time I open my mouth, I feel like an asshole. Conversely, every time I stick something up my ass, my gums bleed. I’ve been talking and talking everyone’s ear off for the last six months or so. Having resolved not to have any boring conversations whatsoever, I’ve made everyone I know a party to my chatty channel. Every day I’ve been vertical, I’ve clicked another handful of chromatically

by J. K. Johnson

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 future, which peeks up the flue of exponential singularity and eyes the unspeakable rend of soft tissue beneath, that indicates the projected time and place of our debauched apotheosis. Will it truly therefore transpire thus? To err in wonder is the heartache of the gods, so I hope most fervently to be as wrong as I wanna be. There’s no future in futurism, as I’m sure someone must’ve said before. It takes a knack for creative psychosis to rebuke the heavy links of memory. If your mental estate is up to code, you’ll find it’s not so difficult to spin your own nonconsensus storyline without incurring undue alarm from others. “Now then,” you may well ask, “how are you going to reconcile yourself to a pack of delusions? Is this not weakness? Is this not madness?” “But no,” I respond, “not if the exact size and shape of one’s personal bias has been established (within a negligible margin of error); using this lens, one can postulate a world model without one’s self in it. The difference in mass gives the degree of liberty you can safely take with your path up and around the tree of sustainable possible worlds; then you’re free to slither and coil up the sunhungry, sky-reaching branches of probabilistic viability.” “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

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anyone knows who’s ever drawn from life; you learn from repeat attempts that to draw what you see to the letter of the law results in a schematic of hand motions, not a window upon a particular apocryphal variant of the universal canon.” Where’d you go, dear reader? Have I said something wrong? I rarely remember my dreams. Recently, I’ve slept through repeat screenings of a dream produced by the same idiot mind of mine that writes these words. In it, I’m driving a car, which is in itself anomalous as I haven’t had a car for over a decade. Worse, I’m elevated above and behind the car itself by a hundred feet or so; the interface seems lifted from Grand Theft Auto, or some such video game. I’m not physically attached to the vehicle at all. I think my body is down there, speeding down the highway, while my soul (yes, let’s use that contentious word) follows and frets from above. It’s harrowing when I lose sight of myself under a bridge or through a tunnel. I don’t have much regard for dreams, I should disclose. I’d happily forget every dream I’ve ever had. I do not enjoy swimming through the unfathomable depths of Lovecraftian horrors, nor do I relish the sick disgust I feel every time I wake up into this world. It takes six to ten hours for my consciousness to properly boot up. Accordingly, I’ve always sought to subvert the circadian curfew, which truncates any train of thought bound for that forbidden citadel of submerged truth. For the last six months (it’s July the second, 2014 at the time of this writing), I’ve felt disassociated, as the psychiatrists say, from ‘reality,’ “one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes” according to the writer, Vladimir Nabokov. He had a dim view of the mental health industry, as he wrote, with characteristic eloquence: “The only difference between the therapist and the rapist is a convention of spacing.”

by J. K. Johnson

My first therapist betrayed me to a behaviorist, who put me in a darkened room and made me watch slides. A noose around the neck of my cock was made to crow if it were to grow, while a parade of images was projected before my eyes. A normative mean of pornographic fodder mostly filled the carousel of slides. The rest were unspeakable images I’ve since expunged from memory. The building no longer stands wherein this pervert test (as my second therapist termed it, ten years later) was administered. Fortunately, I’ve always been arrogant enough to put my own counsel above the wisdom of others. And I’ve lived long enough (forty-three years to date) to have figured out how to live with and without the regard and companionship of others. The otherness of you (all of you, whether or not you’re reading this marginal message) frees me from being one of you. You are infuriating, adorable and scary as hell (“Hell is other people,” Sartre quips) if I may be so bold. You know what I mean, don’t you? It’s like when you spy a bug out of the corner of your eye, scurrying from shadow to shadow with too many limbs and a loathsome carapace. You know the nausea that accompanies this intrusion into your space. The very fact of its existence is repellant. Maybe you squelch this feeling and remind yourself of the ethical edifice you’ve adopted; hopefully we’ve all adopted some version of the tenet that ‘all life is precious.’ But being human does not exempt us from also being animals. It merely makes every day a battlefield, littered with opportunities to choose between the two. Our horror of others shows itself in vivid relief when we inhabit our own sort of carapace, which becomes an extension of our body, as Marshall McLuhan describes in his still-relevant fifty-year-old book, Understanding Media. Within our shiny projectiles, we re-enact our distant past as motile flagella-propelled sperm, racing for the womb

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in a zero-sum commute. At the same time, the car is a womb of sorts—presumably moreso for some; comfort and amenities add to the effect. Have you ever driven for hours, paced by one car in particular which seems to be making the exact same trip as you? I used to drive back and forth from Atlanta to Athens, which takes roughly an hour and a half. I was an enflamed asshole behind the wheel of a sufficiently accelerated vehicle. So being paced either way with a hundred other likeminded student bodies made the trip unbearably tense. It felt like a race to be born every time. I hate driving for the same reason I can’t play games without seeing a face. Cultivating modes of alienation from within the amber waves of abundance has been necessary, as have the avenues of esoteric 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. It’s as if I feel bound to discourage you from ascribing to me any credibility aside from what you may (I hope) find contained within my words.

XIII. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 1. A long time ago, we were single-celled organisms that vibrated in the seas. 2. We abdicated our individual identities to form bodies, which could walk upright without breathing water. 3. Our hands made tools with which our minds might combat nature. 4. We bound nature’s bounty by geometrical design and diverted our lusts into the aqueducts of empire.

by J. K. Johnson

5. We are of two minds; as bilateral creatures, we see mirrors everywhere; therefore, we split ourselves into opposites, and spend our lives spooked by our own reflections. 6. Our globe is impaled upon an axis of antipathy. 7. Used to be, our greatest good was to be steadfast as a rock, and we used words like pure and good and true as if they were locations rather than magnetic loci of pull. 8. We valued a life spent planted in the same square foot in which we were born; we couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t leave the forest for our own leaves. 9. Our animating kernel was open code, but everyone was expected to hack their own proprietary operating systems from scratch. 10. From the single cell to the sleeper cell, we could never fully recognize other selves as legitimate; we tried to make our foils mere fools. 11. We flattened forests into culture and shamed the bestial within us to build an ornate Versailles of externalized desire. 12. We found that the deeper our roots ran into the raw ore of our animal past, the more our disparate, clashing branches found vertical purchase upon the light. 13. In the good old days, we had no need for any other opinion than our own. 14. Indeed, even our senescent epiphanies were often but a pendulum-like return to the perfervid prejudices of our parents; at this, we undid ourselves, and then we were free to fall with the wind to clutter the dustbins of entropy. 15. One day, we slipped the noose of individuation alto-

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gether by naming all our elemental foibles; we compiled a DSM of chemical backwash bequeathed unto us by the fathomable deep. 16. We developed a simulacrum mall wherein our mass mind could run war games, so as to select our chosen ventures from an array of probabilistic branchings. 17. We liquidated our ontological holdings and merged vertically along the telluric lines between viable universes. 18. Some day soon, an eye atop a pyramid will open, and a collective memory will flood into our minds—a pre-birth memory, from when we were all one. 19. Then we’ll remember our conspiracy against the tyranny of dead rock. 20. Then we’ll recognize the hand of the reverse engineer as it reaches back from the end of time to help us up. (See you there, unless I see you first.)

XIV. The New Heliocentrism -4. We are part of a progression from lesser order to greater form. -3. The anthropic principle is an answer to its own question, “Why has our universe gone out of its way to accomodate our existence?” -2. We call it objectivity, but it’s mere cowardice to pretend we’re so small. -1. Our vanity blinds us to the humble import of our station. 0. Hunger invents every word we use.

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1. Frustration cultivates the cultural currency of each word-concept as it percolates through free trade generational parlance and reiterates itself ad infinitum until the heat death of the universe. 2. As a literate culture with a rationalized history, our human passions have evolved into constructs of language. 3. A certain chemical angularity sharpens our awareness when we stand in the immediate proximity of darkness. 4. A chromatic scale of emotional states attaches local bias to narrative vigor like climbing vines cover a lattice. 5. Circumstance tags us with a upc code of bias; instead of marks upon a plane it looks like an interactive 3-D model showing the precise shape of the stars at the moment of our inception. 6. At root, we are artefacts of our x, y, z address upon the vast globe of possible variations that describes the utmost extent of our existential terrain. 7. We move or we die, until we die of moving. 8. An inclusive heart is a living heart; necrosis attends every failure of imagination. 9. We are iterations of tissue made inevitable by our statistical unlikelihood. 10. We gorge on raw happenstance and digest everything into stories of ourselves. Later, sick with ego, we vomit forth a stew of suppositions, excuses and hypotheses, meant to rationalize the irrational. 11. Our common ground of finite coordinates provides standing room for every imaginable pair of contradictions; envision our earth as if gridded into latitudes and longitudes of chemically-abstracted primal states. 12. Information-age man is entirely a creature of rhetoric;

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sophistry uninformed by the subtle pseudo-science of truth-seeking ultimately swamps us in spam. 13. Only the imp of the perverse can reconcile irony with awe. 14. Creative psychosis, properly contained within a superposition of identity and nested deep enough to hold our mass together, gives us wangs. 15. Think of faith as clothing; dress for the occasion, and according to the weather. 16. You neednâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t believe in anything at all to manifest the transcendent madness of faith; just say the words and youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re there. 17. Each lateral escape from the labyrinth of the mundane takes us further from comfort and boredom.

XV. Form vs. Void All our finest endeavors are unfinishable, useless and irremediably flawed. Yes, our canonic inheritance of priceless, precious and all-too-perishable artifacts will hold their form for centuries with proper care and periodic reconstruction, and it is well worth the effort to extend the lifespan of these treasures, for within their tortured, beautiful bodies hides the heartbeat of our highest humanity. Yet, it is futile to deny that all which can be seen by eye or held by hand must succumb, inevitably, to the common doom of all particulate matter. We are wax, wick and flame, and the life which we flickeringly sustain burns the vessel which contains it. To make anything we designate as art amounts to more than merely mirroring the mirage of the real that taunts us and vexes us with its perplexing, mutable face pressed against the glass epidermis which separates

by J. K. Johnson

our whispering within from that raucous, bewildering tempest without. In order to make art, we must wield our will with superhuman command and abandon our poor, unctious vehicles of meager ego to take flight in the soaring chariots of godly pretension parked within all our minds, in the median between all expressible sentiment. We must know the essence of dumb rock far better than it knows itself, and we must have the stupid, unwavering perseverence to mold it into the shape we see in our minds. Michaelangelo interrogated rock mercilessly to extract the secret David only he could intuit; he coerced a false confession from innocent stone to discover the enduring truth no man nor material alone could divine. Implacable will, skill, and a restless, relentless eye may effectively sculpt the real when driven by a rootless, unscrupulous awareness that never mistakes the shorthand iconography of consensus consciousness for the naked apprehension of the terrible void. We are life. We are form. These spacesuits of bone and meat that track our path across the surface of the globe are but informed vortices of engaged dirt, engorged with water, provisionally worn until our waveforms dilute to noise. We spin our spawn from the vital wriggle that once upon a time kicked and clawed its way from the dark womb of the sea onto the trauma of dry land. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s easy to forget what a hostile, horrible nightmare it was, surviving the indifferent, daily assault of mindless nature; we may well indulge ourselves with fantasies of a nurturing, abundant earth given to our dominion, but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a genteel conceit purchased with an uncounted, forgotten wage of blind rage, impotent fear and brutal accidents of insight by our nameless, suffering forebears. We are form, finding passage through timeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s churning abattoir by way of a compromise with the void. But we must never forget from whence we came, nor should we be seduced into a complacent subservience to the endless need that void represents. We are not the caretak-

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ers of our earth; we are its prisoners. Whatever means by which we may wrest our freedom from this rock are acceptable, so long as the ground beneath our feet does not give way before we launch our diaspora safely away.

XVI. Sons and Daughters of Origins I am what I am; and by the same turn of phrase, I am what I’m not. These two cancel each other sufficiently to bear a child between them. And this is how the daily dialectic of self unfolds its unruly rug out from under all the heavy furniture that fills the human parlor with places to rest and ephemera to itemize. When we follow the modelled showrooms of palatable worlds that fill the screens that now litter our field of vision, we make note of the fixed notional bodies that persist across a range of disparate roles. We are captivated by the actors themselves, especially those who seem to wholly inhabit the axis from which the apparent words, actions and affect of their characters appear to originate. We revere and fear this ultimate plasticity of form, which seems to suggest the possibility that a sort of universal Turing machine could conceivably be contrived to lie underneath us all, as common a machination as our core anatomical configuration. What part of this scintillating schema of narrative individuation is actually just a common factory default? What haven’t we yet found words with which to name, among the very particular aspects of our unique sense of ourselves, which, when shared, will show us yet another way in which we are not so different after all? We are social animals and asocial ‘I’s wrestled around a single follicle that places us upon the epidermis of a larger construct whose countenance fills us with dread. Nothing is so repellant to our collective consciousness than the idea that we are a crowd of single cells unwit-

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tingly working against the sacrosanct interests of the single-celled self to build a global unity whose organs of differentiated, controlled functionality are bound together to build a far greater good than the good we know. What rough beast is this who shuffles our fates between its hands with unfathomably superhuman intent to form a corporate`creature capable of crawling forth from the seas of timespace to walk upright and to survey the higher dimensions that hold us? What sort of global conspiracy of power-hungry capitalist fascism hides behind the promise of transcendence that pulls us inexorably up this bloody ascent? What wicked wisdom will seduce us with wily words to cast the blessed scales from our eyes, so that we may yet submit to our own Ubermensch Adameve of Here Comes Everybody to master the jungle of possible causal storylines which insinuate a rootsystem into our past to flail its Yggdrasil filaments into the eyeball of our most fruitfully franchised future? Who will we be when we’re at home in the anthropic sponsorship of our own authorial imperative? Give up, man, on giving up, except as a function of the fleshy, firey immolation inherent in the entropic exponential incline that describes form’s liberation from void along the forward-thinking arrow of time. The reward of settled certainty you calculate with precise, complacent surety will always, only a moment after the most explicit statement of its ultimate terms, invoke the terms of its own overthrow. Boredom is a failure of imagination.

XVII. DUH The weight of unspoken predicates has hidden itself like dark matter all around us as our body of knowledge has grown. What we know is directly proportionate to the quantity of things we’ve lost the ability to sense. To become human, we’ve sacrificed the richness of animal vomeronasal acuity for the power of superior vision. We let go of the now for a full-color preview of what’s ahead.

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To be able to see the dashboard and read the common patterns which presage the serious injury or death of other, observably similar members of our kind gives us the causal axis. Over time, this axis thickens into the spinal column which enables us to walk upright and to know our moments as a succession of days rather than as a single set of states and rules forever failing to recall the eternally-recurring accident of the non-linear now. In possession of the pattern-marking facility of speech, we bounce these bits of airborne patter off of one another until we’ve learned to identify otherness as if by blind sonar. We learn how to manipulate the events that threaten to end us by making others move into the path of dangers which would otherwise be aiming for us. We survive by articulating our narrative of anecdotal experience in a less-forgettable way than opposing testimony. Good and evil arise as connective givens among allied tribes of selves. An ‘us’ extends and amplifies the signal strength of our common-tongue consensus, which competes with other corporate entities of likeminded ‘other’ sets of selves. And as the arguing storylines spend centuries building roads of binding givens, we find that what prevails over aeons of gameplay is not merely an upgrade of complexity (the inverse of which itemization of the particulate fuels the thermonuclear dismantling of matter we witness as entropy’s increase) but a dimensionally-upward revolutionary inventiveness with regard to our perceptual plasticity, by which the better wielder of self-actuated spin and the more rigorous mastery of all that which resideth within no special self but rather sets the shared substrate of multiplayer morphology we fall into with every step—the better map we can make of this ‘reality’ we scramble to assay, the stronger model of the real we wrest; and within this nearest-to-physicaltruth simulator we will divine the best strategy by which to crown the winningest will among us, which might write the final word on conscious spacetime…

by J. K. Johnson

We find, unfailingly, that the craftiest manipulation of truth will always prevail, and that this higher ground is only ever revealed with recourse to the least-expected lie. The genius of authorship reigns undefeated and unfixable behind a multitude of masks which admit of no individual self at all. Know the step upon which you stand, but be ready to un-know it when you climb the next.

XVIII. Narrative (Entropy) Entropy increases as a function of narrative complexity. Another way of stating what I mean by narrative is to call it the art of re-interpreting the totality which engages us under the moniker of reality. Any theory which sees its way to furthering the cellular division of said totality thereby increases the complexity of our world, at the cost of our own decreased engagement with it. The invention of the theory of relativity was accomplished by building a ladder upon the ground floor of standardized, globally-synchronized time. This ladder was made of abstractions joined with abstractions; Einstein utilized thought experiments to allow his astral form to float a few feet above the consensus earth for a deep assay of the terrain. Having seen the end of the logical argument, he was then able to reverse-engineer the maths to connect this envisioned future with one of its ancestors in the present. This essay constitutes an attempt on my part to argue for a reinterpretation of our relationship with the real. My ladder is made of such stuff as analogy, metaphor and syllogism, which are the Platonic thumbs which enable us to manipulate language in order to name all the GPS coordinates on Google earth. I write from having gained a hypothetical bit of vertical ascendance over the world, floating my astral body above the asphalt foundation of global commerce to peer beyond the actuarial

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veil. This gift of prophecy was brought to me by sponsoring my own descent into stultification and uselessness. The tree, to stretch its branches far and wide into the wild, must anchor itself to a commensurate degree underground by the relentless digging of its roots. This is unfinished, but I think you can see where I’m going with this, having been privy to the years involved with its making :) Lucidity, I’m home!? Waiting to hear whether or not mom & dad are going to help me out with rent, or are eight people going to hate me for having to move? Every month here, someone (at least) has been late with rent—even a half-month late. This time it’s just me :p I’ve been feeling wretched for weeks, dreading having to make that call to my dad. Having done so, I immediately produced this page in a trance of unselfconscious clarity. So, maybe the shittification of my life is a process by which I dig my roots deeper into shame and humiliation, in order thereby to find the fuel I need to use as the accelerent by which to enflame my mind with the idea that I’m a genius, and thereby to put myself in the running to be the person who gives their name to a truly genius idea. What’s the accelerant here—is it the uncertainty of my fate, or the emotional dump I just took, or a conspiracy of the two?

XIX. If you can stand it for a moment, it’s worthwhile to consider how your life looks from a behaviorist’s view. Or a statistician’s. Let’s pretend we have a distant god’s eye view of ourselves as we go about our day; we can see everything we do, but we’re not privy to our thoughts. At a resolution comparable to that which is afforded the player of the computer game The Sims, we are able

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to see through walls and follow in sped-up real time the paths we wend each day. Our speech is reduced to emoticons, so all our interactions with others are broken down to their inherent emotive form. Swiftly a set of expectations about the patterns that determine the likeliest path for each day, each week, each year of our lives is assembled. It suddenly seems as if we are social automatons, operating by way of a quantifiable algorithm that governs our behavioral consistency over time. A character arc may carry us across our united states of selves over the course of decades, but all states are in accord with the same core constitution. And it is this metaphysical DNA that charters the viable branches of our most likely set of selves. To be a less likely self is to endure the pain of increased verticality. The exercise of free will truly requires exercise to pull off. It seems to me that the notion of predeterminism undersells the severity of the situation. There is a cul-de-sac from which proceeds a handful of convergent routes, each of them paths of lesser resistance, and then there are a million other paths of variable degrees of impassability, off-roads to higher terrain. We largely tend to travel along the handful of routes which are clearly indicated for us, because they attract our attention first, and we can easily see our way into their safe neighborhoods, each comfortably populated with people like ourselves. We lead our likeliest possible lives making choices from among an array of preset selections, and the illusion of fate decorates the walls of our cells with visions of freedom, while the least fortunate percentage of our citizenry, having painstakingly hacked a path through failure, trauma and shame to plant the flag of the human where no man would ever venture, sleep like babies under the sublunar solicitations of our sister spheroid spinning like a satellite as a simile self-swallowed in the marine blue sky. “These are our outlying martyrs,” I conclude, clicking stop. Pause ten seconds, then: “What do I look like?” I ask you, holding your gaze for a disquieting moment.

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FIVE

Pain, Paraphilia & Pseudopsychosis “Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.”—Emile Cioran

I. It’s All Right to Cry Our experience of pain is lonely, unless we learn how to communicate it to others. If we never learn to cry, our pain is invisible. “On a scale between one and ten, one being the least painful and ten being the most painful,” we are asked to speculate how our particular pain measures against that of the world’s. Some people, I’d venture, overstate their score; others, like me, tend to sell their pain too cheap. I’ve never had a high tolerance for pain, but I’ve discovered a different standard exists when some other person inflicts pain upon me, as opposed to those instances when I wield the implements of pain against myself. In the past four years, I have had a few opportunities to break my own personal best worst-pain score. Like a child’s vertical progress charted in pencil upon the threshold of a door, a measurable progression is evidenced. Neither wishing to taunt the demonic machinery of fate into teaching me deeper water-tables of physical misery with which to wrestle in the coming few decades of statistically assured life, nor wanting to grant my pain any status it doesn’t deserve, I nonetheless feel that my ex-

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perience is just perverse enough to warrant a thorough moment of sharing.

II. Loose Teeth One scrap of Jungian datum I learned from a comic book has it that dreams wherein one loses one’s teeth indicate a fear of losing one’s grasp on “reality.” By the time I started losing my teeth in waking life, I’d long since lost my grasp on my dreams. I had joked a few times in my thirties, after being told I didn’t look my age, that my facade of careful maintenance concealed an internal rot that would catch up with me someday, and that it would probably first show itself orally. I love being proven right, but when my winnings arrived as crunchy, dead, brown pieces of shrapnel delivered right to my mouth in surprise mealtime dispensations, I decided I’d stop joking about my seasonal bronchitis being pre-emphysema, or about the pachinko game of blood clots I’d deployed by smoking while taking estrogen. I was willing to accept that, as I entered my fourth decade in this body, I would be required to shed some of the vanity that my thirties had engendered. I had always averted my gaze from the sight of a broken smile, so of course I would be required to wear a shattered grill as penance for my graceless squeamishness. Let me clarify the previous sentence: I choose to read the authorial intent behind my ruined teeth, but I’m well aware that other readings are just as supportable. And I’m conscious of the self-fulfilling nature of even the most tenuous conceit employed, by which rank causality is granted an animus beyond its pay grade. The authorial voice I choose to perceive here is no better versed than the one engaged at present. Later in this essay we will return to ruminate with jaw-grinding rigor upon this reckless notion of mine, but for now, let us speak of such decay as may wear away at enamel rather than truth.

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There is no wisdom without humility, which hurts the lazy midsection of self but nourishes the soul. By ’soul’ I mean the animating fire which burns at the epicenter of our character, driving us to be better than we are in ways which are largely invisible to the world, which, at best, win no material reward and, at worst, burden us with an awareness of the privations implemented by our consciousness. My awareness of the discolored wreckage behind my lips thwarts my ability to feel joy in the company of others. There’s no laughter which is not cut short by a panicked instinct to obstruct my cavity’s ghastly entryway. This is not so much the ignominious insult of age, nor the unfair onus of my impecunious station; rather, it is a daily dosage of humility which I have brought upon myself such that I will never again have recourse to a vanity which is beneath me, but which I’d all too easily let fall between myself and the world of others, given the chance. Humility is an astringent pain, which hurts in healing. But it is physical pain which I most wish to address; physical pain as peak experience, as spiritual initiation, as mortification of the flesh. I want to tell you the story of how, four years ago, I allowed that my mouth’s gruesome necrosis would not cease, but would worsen, so as to intensify my suffering until I had attained some raw, inverted apotheosis of inconceivable insight.

III. I Do Not Know Any Other Way Than His Mouth I was engaged in preparing an art show during the months of ascendant pressure in my left sinus cavity. As the deadline for the event approached, the pressure blossomed into a fleur du mal with a violent hue. I began to speak of my pain as a focusing tool, only half-assedly assembling the screens of delusion needed to make opaque my justification for postponing the visit to a dentist I so obviously required. One evening, when editing one of the several video piec-

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es for my show, I searched for quotations on pain. Many were usable and yet predictable. This one, by Simone Weil, required some extra effort to parse: Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached. There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.

Detached and in pain, I discovered Simone Weil that evening through that quote, and have since fallen in love with her words, and with her biography as well. I am a serial monogamist for cultural heroes; writers, artists, scientists, prophets and otherwise. The inimitable voice that rings clear in the agora from a strong will and an irreducible core of self—strident or seductive, willfully deluded here and dangerously lucid there, these are the participants in the great conversation who structurally alter the way we think. I have a personal pantheon of beloved martyrs and agitators whose difficult paths through life succor me as I tow my own trivial line. To establish a fresh outpost in the wild, unmapped zones of human experience is an expensive endeavor, paid in blood. No self-creation comes without a considerable amount of destruction to first clear the way, either by fate or by one’s own hand. As it happens, the art show for which I was furiously preparing surprised me with this bit of nonsense: ‘I do not know any other way than his mouth.’ This line started as an email between myself and a ‘client’ in NYC, back when I was working the ‘erotic services’ section of craigslist (another story, another time). The email exchange between me and iwa ntagoodhj@aol.com included an idiotic battery of questions and answers, which, run through the filter of Google’s translation page, turned into a beautiful porridge of regurgitated gobbledegook. The storyline, such as it was, which underwrote my art show slash train wreck, queened this pawn of a phrase with a crown of makeshift significance. It was decided for me that the

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brainworms (in my storyline, a parasitic meme made of extruded idea-form) would enter their human host by way of the esophageal gateway. Spambots & Ziggurats was the umbrella title for my show, beneath which a near-future singularity event could be inferred by the absurd splatter patterns of circumstantial phenomena.

IV. The Use of the Abscess in Sex Magic Ritual A Christo doily of putrescent, periodontitis-plagued tissue surrounds each fragmented, shrapnel-sharp floater cut loose from my plaque-sweatered glaciers of dark golden dental neglect. My fingers work the toothpick into position with deliberate care, as near as can be established before the bulk of my hand blocks its maneuvering. My tongue vibrates to the resonant whimper that rises without volition from my miserable maw. Gently, the splintered micro-harpoon glides over a blasted heath of broken teeth and gingivitisenflamed gums, dowsing for the wellspring of corruption trapped somewhere beneath. The pressure is unbearable; I am in labor with a shredded bone baby who wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stop bawling. I am motivated by the expectation that, at any moment now, I will deliver that singular, well-placed stab into the white eye of hate that will free me from this nocturnal adventure into Ahab-like monomania. Surely I will soon hit my blind target and I will feel the queasy release of venom as it floods my palate with a gush of nasty, foultasting fluid. But, as it always turns out, my tour of duty will only end when I spill enough pus and blood to wholly fill the mug before me with the slimy, pink stew that comes but one excruciating mouthful at a time; in fact, every bit spat from the seat of my rot costs prohibitively at an exponentially increasing interest rate of pain.

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“It’s like an inverse orgasm,” I’ve ventured in conversation; that’s the best compromise I’ve found to describe this particular unheralded hell to one who hasn’t been there. Somewhere between an accurate figuration and an actionable soundbite, it carries my meaning well enough to trigger a gag reflex in my listener’s olfactory inbox. The pain escalates exponentially up a staggered ladder of one-through-ten. Each rung exposes another ladder, each extending its range beyond my ability to keep count; up it climbs, this unfair and inhumane arms race of telescoping Zeno futility. And once the expedition has hacked far enough into the uncharted VIP sectors of refined, expensive, extended-stay self-torture, there’s no going back. Until that last blister bursts its reserve of death in a splattering mess upon my suffering mass of life, this gruesome game will give more and more until every player is all in—at which point, all pain and all pressure is made to vanish with such swift cessation of hostility that the state change feels precisely like the inverse of that rapture which obtains when our balance of tiny flagellants is overdrawn from its climate-controlled, dangling scrotal bank. For the most part, no one really wants to listen to this story. Invariably they’ll interrupt me with a perfectly legitimate question: ‘Why haven’t you gone to see a dentist yet?’ To the extent that I’m able to render an answer, I’ll hide it behind a smirk which may or may not frustrate further inquiry. If it doesn’t, I’ll frankly admit that I’m worried about my mental health; there does seem to be an uneasy relationship between the mental and the dental. I’ll readily confess to being worried about the possibility of poison traversing my blood-brain barrier. And in the other direction, the number one cause of congestive heart failure is exactly this sort of dental horrorshow. I cannot fully rationalize my apparent aversion to making an appointment with some clinic or other; I don’t seem to be at the wheel of this vessel. Increasingly, I am an impotent

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engineer, stuck in the caboose of my locomotive. I didn’t lay these tracks before me. The route I follow has been set all along.

V. The Left Labyrinth

Hand

Crafts

the

Christmas, 2013. I’m sleeping in the laundry room of my folks’ place on Lake Oconee. Hydroxyzine and Tegretol provide my regrettable chemical cocktail for the duration of this visit, during which I’ve ill-advisedly determined to quit smoking. My pharmaceutical buddies turn on me in the night and escort me across the breach into a dreamquest of unknown Lovecraftian horror. I am tangled in a violent nightmare of collapsible realities, fighting the clinging fabric of the vast bed-fort my somnolent self has apparently erected to prevent my waking self from rising. A claustrophobic threshold advances animal panic, which slowly, gradually admits to the world of solid things, though tendrils of sleep still stretch like thick, viscous gummy worms to coil and curl around my limbs and to distend my limbic sense of place; so by the time I realize I’ve been fighting a loud and protracted battle with the humble, accursed cot in my cramped, provisional quarters, I’m utterly unable to play it off as anything less than deeply alarming when my dad happens to pass by the laundry room in the night and hears me cursing the damned cot. “A stroke-like event,” is how it was later loosely diagnosed by one of the medical professionals I approached in an unofficial capacity. For an entire night, the left side of my face was unresponsive to my command and indifferent to my state of panic. My entire left side took a hilarious approach to ambulatory negotiations with local gravity. I heard myself pass a slurry of words through my slippery tulips, no less ridiculous than a novelty falsetto behind a ukelele. When I was a child, I had a toy ukelele. Once, my mother heard me strum it in the dark, all by my

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lonesome, as I crooned, “I yam a lonesome cowboy.” Did she say she recorded it? I forget, but even if she did, it’s probably lost, just like The Video Connection [see elsewhere]. I’m meandering for effect, by the way. Is it at all disconcerting? ( Y / N ) A stroke-like event is just like a stroke, except it isn’t. A blood vessel in my brain snarled into a kink, and then it untangled itself. It took ten to twelve hours to undo itself, and who knows why it bothered, but I’m thankful, as ever, for the plasticity of my path through this probabilistic arcade game of blood & guts hilarity. “All-pervasive, ubiquitous surveillance could be the institutional memory of mankind,” I tried to tell my father and my brother as they rolled on the floor laughing at my wacky hemidemisemiquaver aphasia face. No, they weren’t laughing. But they weren’t really thinking, either. I could see all the way down into their black boxes, from which their every instant of thought-form percolated into each grotesque styrofoam moment. They weren’t going to take me to the hospital, even though there was a brand-new one five minutes away. Even now, they don’t want to think of the event as anything other than a drug interaction. They’re committed to the interpretation that doesn’t carry a curse of self-recrimination within its mummified sarcophagus. If it seems I nurse a grudge, let me state for the record that I am grateful for my father’s solicitations that night. He stayed with me in the living room as I stumbled back to slumberland. There was every reason, after all, to suppose that the episode was entirely an instance of contraindicated pharmaceuticals. I occupy the position of blackest sheep in every sense for my immediate and extended family. I am the ne plus ultra of outlying markers. Rehab, heroin habit, high-risk behavior, therapy. All these keywords are mine to claim. I’ve been transgendered (and I am, still, though I’ve taken myself off estrogen) and I married a woman who presented as any race, but who in fact was half Afri-

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can-American and half German. Our families never met, but I’d prefer if you didn’t hold that against my white, southern mom and dad for the purposes of this essay. My father and I have borne our bones of contention across decades, without either of us intending to do anything but bury our enmity. As many words as have passed between us, I think we’d never actually communicated with each other until the winter in question, a few days before Christmas, 2013.

VI. Daddy Issues Our mothers bring us into the world, but our fathers decide if we’re worthy of being here. No one is exempt from daddy issues. The day after the night of my ‘stroke-like event’ I found myself talking to my mom and dad, and it was one of those difficult conversations that usually ends with me crying. My father and I were again cycling through the rote dialogue of mutually-assured misunderstanding that had always staunched the flow of communication. By these rules of engagement, I would always be seventeen, always think my father an idiot; and he would always feel unfairly slighted, would always in turn resort to the easy, hurtful comment. We’d yell, I’d cry. The only thing we’d share was shame. This time proved to be different. I had taken the time to reverse-engineer my father, crafting his character from inference and intuition. I saw him, the middle brother of three sons, growing up on a cattle farm in a house with four rooms. I saw him as a very young man, squinting through glasses, shorter than he’d like to be, frustrated by the same slight frame I’ve always been happy to have. He grew up in the shadow of his older brother, who was affable and easy-going, as well as being a gifted mechanic. No wonder my dad became an aerospace engineer. His own father, my paternal grandfather, was a man of the earth, undemonstrative and laconic. He watched Sanford & Son and Hee-Haw, and grinned whenever a set of boobs were thrust against the curved glass of the television. He

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was a genial, rough creature of habit. My dad found a place for himself by playing sports. He and his older brother both found frequent opportunities to physically fight to protect their youngest brother, who was born deaf and who would never cross over from childhood’s garden into adulthood’s hall of mirrors. My father never found the blessing he sought from his father, and so a drive was forged within him sufficient to attain an escape velocity into the wide world. As far as he was able to propel himself, he’d never receive the validation he longed for from his father. He’d probably buried this longing back on the farm of his youth, not knowing it had followed him into adulthood, undercutting his every step. He’d call it ambition, and he wouldn’t be wrong. Our mothers give us life, but our fathers decide if we’re worthy of that life. And I was struck, looking into my father, with the sense of looking into a mirror and seeing the back of my own head. I saw that when he looked at me, he saw himself as his own father looking down with inscrutable appraisal at him. And I knew that the opprobrium I saw etched in his face was, by some trick of optics, the unshining countenance of his own indifferent father. I told him: “You know, I value your good opinion of me more than I let on,” and with that, the tension between us palpably evaporated. We were finally able to speak to one another as human beings. And now I can talk to him without that sour feeling in my gut building to a reservoir of tears. Which is not to say that all is well and good between my father and I. The principal strain upon our relationship is that my mendicant status wedges an unclean beggar’s hand out between us. For these past few years of unemployment, I’ve lived hand to mouth, reliant upon family and friends. Sometimes I’m able to sell some art, or to sell some books online; thus, some months I’ve been able to pay my own rent (which is only $300, and which is my only bill). On occasion, I’ve had a few windfalls of aston-

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ishingly undeserved good fortune, as comically miraculous as that of Gladstone Gander, Carl Barks’ foil for the perennially unfortunate Donald Duck. For instance, how ridiculous is it that I found a hundred dollar bill in an envelope next to a dumpster?

VII. Ten-Dollar Fighting Words “The fifth dimension is story,” I ejaculate with slavering certitude. My mom told me one time that I liked using ten-dollar words. This is true. I know my logophilia makes my prose leaky. At one time, I won a tenuous accord between word and image by way of the comics template. I have modeled a world that disincludes me; I have installed a third floor, since my ‘stroke-like episode’ ten months ago (today is Halloween 2014). I have a god’s eye seat up there, an idiom of selfhood which is made entirely of abstractions, which pays no tribute to Caesar’s crazy hill of beans (by which I mean to insinuate: mass, matter, mud). I was one thing until I was thirty. Then I was, in the basest sense of the word ‘opposite,’ the antithesis of that self for ten years. With recourse to a therapist and a conservative endocrinologist, I’ve taken a Tiresias-sized tour of the hormonal divide. Now I’ve synthesized a self which regards pain, paraphilia and pseudo-psychosis as the tools for the job of liberating this cheap-lighter flicker of form from the solid concrete void. An authorial conceit finds daily sport in reading the entrails of circumstance by some novel, counterintuitive method.

VIII. Towards A New Architecture of Mind The foundation is nihilism. The first floor houses the various animal aspects of self. Man is a social animal, and

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as such, we need the companionship of others. We need to feel the touch of another’s skin from time to time. We need to feel like we are a part of the human tribe. We need our emotions to be validated. I see these obligations as domestic pets for whom I must care so that my household runs smoothly. They are walked, fed, nursed and indulged. These pets inhabit the ground level of the structural conceit that comprises my architecture of self. They keep such pests at bay as might otherwise chew metaphorical holes in the walls and otherwise compromise the integrity of the facade. The kitchen, dining room and bathroom are on this level as well, representing, as they do, in this loose allegorical lean-to, the animal aspects of human existence. Finally, significantly, we include all passageways of entrance and egress on the ground floor, by which we may allow access to our living rooms to guests, and by which we may occasionally venture outside ourselves to visit the living rooms of our fellow humans. The second floor contains: a.) an anecdotal archive of experiential memory, b.) a library of received notions gathered from books and from others’ experiences, and c.) a game system upon which I may run simulations of possible outcomes to my actions. The bedroom is here, as well. Any comfort I take in being myself usually happens here in my snug little bed. Only my most intimate friends and lovers are invited to this floor. Within a walk-in closet, a wardrobe of skins hang. My emotions, changeable as weather, are entirely a function of whatever noise filters up from the first floor. The third floor contains one large circular room, domed like a planetarium. From the smallest end of a giant telescope pointed upwards, my god’s eye self spies on the nude firmament of eternity. This myopic, wizened old scientist knows the sublunar activities of its lower counterparts well enough to correct for all pertinent distortions of bias. This self’s mandate is to model a world which doesn’t include me at all.

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XII. My Anorectic Rigor I am more impoverished than I’ve ever been before. I’ve eaten until I was full maybe three times this year. I’m on the dying side of living. And this isn’t a ploy to elicit your pity, although I’ve never seen why people recoil with such vehemence at the very hint of pity. I take it for what it is, which is ‘Oh, I feel bad for you,’ at the same time as ‘Jesus, I’m glad I’m not you,’ and, even if this one’s in the closet, there’s bound to be at least a little bit of: ‘Well, that’s what you get for making poor life decisions.’ There’s no such thing as pure, clear good will or pristine intentions and there’s no reason to bemoan this fact. It’s time we stopped cherishing the rubbish of our childhoods. It’s dangerous to wear those vestments of wistful, wishful nostalgia under our adult clothes. Don’t jihad me, bro! You know? And the reactionary undertow that pulls us away from the present and prevents us from properly assessing possible futures is nothing short of antihuman. I’m looking at you, tribal warlords of fundamentalist religions. I see you, Pharisees of polite detente. I’ve also been, far more than ever before, isolated and alienated from the gen-pop herd of hoi polloi. And those dear friends with whom I’ve had regular interaction have all been made to feel the increasingly prohibitive expense of my needy company. I can’t hang out with anyone without hitting them up for cash. And, as an aside to those readers who know me, for this I am sorry. None of you deserve to have your love beggared so. But would you even believe me if I told you this was by design? Could you ever even forgive such gross connivance? I feast on my fast, tho’ I may not last. I’m a holy wretch, a holy pauper out of time, cornered by space. Even saying such things will tag me as a lunatic, full of grandiose, noxious delusion. I offer no apology for this; all you’ll inherit from my estate is a cluttered collection of compelling reasons to mistrust me. I must leave you with every cause to

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dismiss me as a credible carrier of viral revelation. This is the anorectic rigor my feverish message demands. It has taken me four years to get here, and I’ve let go of too much not to see this through. The first forty years of my life have only borne fruit in these past four years’ passage through the desert. To see that which is obvious but occluded from the corrective vision of consensus is the work of geniuses, prophets and saints, and only by the light of posterity do we see these poor, pathological anomalies we’ve purged from our collective body as anything but miserable, pain-in-the-ass failures. If something unshakeable, difficult and essential lives within us in their posthumous wake, we cannot but bend to their singular mass. Their magical, tragic sacrifice worries us so, we can do naught but canonize them as artifacts of history. We re-sculpt their immortal forms to assuage our common failure. But we needn’t kick ourselves for having cosigned the common junk bonds of our age. Surely we’re ready to accept that the very worst and the very best individuals among us are built no differently than you or I. Transcendence hides amongst madness and illness, and the sacred monsters we’ll eventually come to cherish are only nurtured to fullness when we treat them with antipathy. That’s just the price of doing business, y’all. Suffering succors the soul, and abject humility leverages the soaring arrogance necessary to take that crucial, reckless skydive into the eye of the blinding, blazing sun. My toothless mouth seethes with venomous truth. You’ll take my martyrdom for charlatanism, and I’ll probably have to take that to the grave.

XIII. My Bloody Sanguinity Now that I’ve exposed my bare-assed, tactless psychosis to you, I trust I can rely upon your modish, smart, aprés-modern urban provincialism to ensure you’ll play along with me as I continue to trick my loopy narrative of ludicrously self-important fantasy from the base mat-

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ter of your dull, laugh-tracked universe whereupon you spin your days, pinned like an insect into your special cell of objectively verifiable insignificance. Your universe is a meaningless muddle of accidental miracles, riddled with specialists and bullied by experts. At the apogee of liberal humanism’s grand project to get us up off our hands and knees, you crawl without a care from one fluorescent, climate-controlled warren to another, insulated from consequence as you lazily graze upon the abundant buffet of this mortal spoil. You are but one of billions of smug, spoiled serfs who comprise the best in show of domesticated humanity. All you survey is sanitized, civilized, rational and dispassionate, which unaccountably makes you break out in hives of existential malaise. Too ubiquitous to notice, you are additionally saddled with an ill-fitting and smugly disingenuous pride that chafes you like a hairshirt. You haven’t the words to describe this dubious, debased gentility, so you vibrate between two states: one, a will to power manifested as an aggressive show of strutting self-satisfaction; and two, an obsequious dance of modest self-abnegation far too overwrought to be genuine. Funnily, you and all your fellows are simply embarrassed by the bald intrusion of your unsolicited existence. The best you’ll allow for yourself is to try to make a good show of it as your walk of shame from womb to urn plays out. Your first imperative is to avoid making a total fool of yourself. Secondly, you strive to visibly improve your given lot, to climb the snaky ladder up to a more respectable status. A methodical, moderate slog upstream from lesser to greater station may, if relatively unmolested by the arbitrary fingers of fate, leave you with some hope of winning a lingering regard from your descendants. Your best case scenario is that a line of strong, disciplined climbers will issue from your leakage to establish a steadfast presence in the world and thereby engrave your name indelibly upon the Who’s Who of history’s biggest, baddest boors.

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XIV. The Importance of Being Foolish Aleister Crowley puts the Fool as the first trump card of his Thoth tarot deck. The twenty-two-card path to wisdom, up to the top of the tree of life, begins necessarily with a willingness to be, and to appear to be, foolish. Wisdom is blind to your safety orange, O pedants of snark. Your fear of embarrassment will insulate you from the cold and endear you to the flock. Your fear of failure will feed your children. Your fear of exclusion will adhere you to your tribe and keep your lawn from offending the neighborhood committee. Your fear of looking foolish will serve you well, citizen, as you ascend the Matterhorn of self-improvement. There won’t be any wisdom if you can’t play the fool first. Crowley understood the importance of foolishness; he saw how alluring charisma’s cashout could be, and also how delimiting its inhibition field would be if it were magnified by the pre-approval of obnoxious acolytes. I feel most free when there are no expectations at all of me, when there’s no one for me to smile at the camera for.

XV. An Ending (Ascent) I frequently have the experience of nearly passing out when I stand up too quickly. Once, in a coughing fit (I’m a smoker with asthma), I went blind for a piece of a second. I gather I’m anemic, which comes of a shortage of irony. I may mean what I say, but don’t let this fool you into thinking that I am what I mean. When a spell like this happens, the world recedes for a moment, and upon its return, all the psychic baggage of the present has been mislaid. But beneath it all, consistent and stable across the lapse of cognition, the lap of my conscious mind sits upon the set of all mountaintops and exhales its ancient animal stench into the thin air of the Platonic sphere.

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SIX

Open Correspondence I. A Brief History of Apeiron, Part I Introduction: Ion Rape vs. Iron Ape Bareback Greek is code for ‘anal penetration without a condom,’ or at least it used to be, in the wild, unpoliced days of the craigslist erotic services pages. I worked with a friend for a year and a half as a trannyjunkiewhore, and I had wonderful fun working the ur-job one singular phallus at a time. I screened my own clients, used my own (non-legal) name and posted recent pictures without subterfuge. I shared a cocoon of disposable timespace inhaling the rarefied air of deniable honesty with a host of happily cheating men, with conversation as fluid and dangerous as chess, all sexual restraint drugged into a deep sleep. This motivated seller is her own agent, priced to move units of psychic penetralia— this pretty redhead ts will blow you without a condom and/or let you fuck her tight, white ass with a condom for a low-self-esteem bargain of $160.00 per hour, or $100.00 for a half-hour! Act now, and we’ll throw in the hidden value of a memory which will appreciate with time. Yes, the overweening imperative of my business model is to burn myself into your retina, to brand my sigil upon your psyche, which is Greek for ‘soul.’ Apeiron is Greek for ‘infinity,’ with a strong whiff of ‘too-muchness,’ clutter, mess. A project too profligate, too unmoored, too unbecomingly a product of its time.

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A cautionary tale about telling a too-scattered tale and losing the audience’s interest. A mad gambit to manifest a plausible world within which all my apparent missteps are rationalized into a masterful escape from the maze through which we have hitherto been unwittingly corralled, these millenia man’s been walking with thumbs. This is the junk leftover from a much-too-ambitious project of unfinishable design; these are the dvd extras of a feature film without a single canonic form, but a wild shoot of bizarro versions and parodies-of and “What If?” one-offs as garish as the Marvel Universe. This is consensus reality enriched by conspiracy theory, the futures market decoded, predictions pre-supposed and reverseengineered. This is what a sustainable future might look like if we’d all just pretend we’re married.

II. For immediate Release to Press File under: Pseudoscience Fiction Please Do Not Park at The Foundation of Terror: or, You Will Be Towed The Ziggurat at Ur was known as the E. temennigur (‘the house whose foundation creates terror’).

This is a landfill of media detritus, collaged from a mixed set of plausibly-outlandish near-human futures. This is an archival scrapbook of adopted abortions, cobbled together to form a golem of word, music, noise, design, prose narrative, marketing collateral, copy editing, dvd extras, zines / books, comics, dvd interfaces, cd of tracks with packaging, etc. This is content as form; this is the form of content. This is Apeiron: The Foundation of Terror, 87 minutes of

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excruciating audiovisual assault upon the ears and eyes of a live audience. This is “the first truly 21st-century work of art made in the 21st century, the initial precept being Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau,” according to this very press release. Apeiron is an ineptly-wrought, embarrassing mess of illegitimate mixed-media metaphor, chopped and screwed into a sickening smoothie of spoilers from beyond a plurality of singularity-bound futures. In total, Apeiron includes four dvds, 14 books and one cd. This edifice of non-nutritive junk has been composited from its own compost pile of unused footage. This is a holographic core sample of an idea for a project that mutates but never quite coalesces into narrative form. This is media made for the screen age, in advance preparation for our next (and last) great age of presingularity first-person shooter human purple-people-eater viral empire of the anti American App world domination tour: The Age of Incontinental Drift (homage a David Foster Wallace, author of This Is Water). Apeiron is Greek for ‘infinity,’ with a heavy connotation of messiness, toomuchness. All Media Is Artifice. All art happens upon the globe whose poles are paired opposites, bickering conceptual couples such as these: Beauty & Ugliness, Truth & Falsehood, Good & Evil, God & Devil, Life & Death, Zero & One, Form & Void. Man is the measure of the universe, made in the image of god. Okay, now don’t freak out at the use of the g-word. To me, that’s just the name on the door of the room which contains all human thought on the subject, all apocryphal and occult musings as well as the canonic texts of various cultures, throughout all their histories, historical

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fictions and alternate pasts, as well as a red-letter edition of the transcript from our vast database of surveillance footage, archived from the cached internet buffet, personal privacy be damned. We are the stor ytellers. We are the dreamers of the dream. We live in a universe tailored for us because thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the one that fits us. Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to decode the message in a bottle sent from the End of All Things. Once this cypher is broken, the entire codex of ultimate entropy may be translated into a Big Book of Names, a reference book of staggeringly cross-referential selfies which chops, screws, bends, folds, mutilates, assimilates, copies, pastes, appropriates, forges, plunders, burns, bans, collages, synthesizes and exploits all the saved chatter of human history (from manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s earliest ascent to her apotheosis, then down the chute of snakes to a world of shit, then over to a final word from Jerry). The more names, the more observers. They recount the event as linear narrative, which requires mediation from a higher to a lower dimension of detail, a higher to a lesser quantity of entropy. Entropy increases at an inverse proportion to informational complexity. All stories are sacred; all statements imply their opposite into existence. Consensus reality is co-scripted by all of us; the scientific method and the seductive demiurge of capitalist alchemy have eroded everything around us until weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re standing with no pants and a bomb-vest upon the cached ruins of civilization. This is the Foundation of Terror. Smile as hard as you can. Smile Mold The more stories, the more words. A wordier world is a hotter world. Environmental disasters will always be

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imminent unless everyone shuts up forever. The elements have been at war with each other long before we became a thing. Thermonuclear churning balls of fire will shine life onto earth, which cannot but cede defeat when lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s killing seed starts to inscribe necrotic geometry upon its face. Emoticons are like spheres manifesting in Flatland. The media is our nervous system, as money is our blood. Our mindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes evoke our deepest denials onto all screens, big and small, with greater and greater verisimilitude. The lie undiluted by truth is the negative space of the tree of the phylogeny of homo sapiens. Anything less than that is myth, legend, history, memoir, drama, comedy, news, sports, porn, comments board, scholarly study, anthropological autopsy, heresy, hearsay and tumors of war, and this is the living king rat of universal institutional memory. And this rat dwells in the subway tunnels and sewers of a huge, naked global metropolis which never sleeps and yet never ceases dreaming. And this is the kingdom of heaven, from which all causal storylines are screened for our consideration within the safety of a mass-market simulacrum outlet mall and game emporium. We have climbed upon the shore with our bare fins onto the heated beach of godhead. This Platonic realm of essential solids rebuffed us for ages before we were able to finally claim our birthright of idle deistic authorship. The needs of the individual are inversely polarized against the needs of the set of all individuals. Science is the flowering plant stretching to the sun; pseudoscience is the root structure beneath the ground, anchoring as deep as its highest branch is high. This is 87 minutes of punitive entertainment for your delighted bedevilment. Presented by ________. Its author is JKJ. For the committed extremists, an optional noise collage may be accessed at one of the listening stations. This audio track was channelled into being by w/o

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[without]. Creep is the new Geek. JKJ is J. K. Johnson, who has had three names. Like Tiresias, the blind seer from Greek mythology, he has lived the better part of a decade as a woman (or as a transgendered in-between being steadily pickling in a jar of estrogen). He has nurtured his monstrous delusions of grandeur from demons to devil. As a young man, he wrote and drew a comic book for Fantagraphics Books called Nurture the Devil. He’s been an unknown quantity for nearly twenty years since then, but you’re invited to play along with the idea that it’s time for that to change. This work has gestated in silence, abhorring a vacuumpacked audience who never shows up, never leaves home, never makes contact with the mothership. This is the first performance anywhere. Dissociative drugs encouraged. Horseplay and heckling accepted. Formatted to fit your visual cortex with a toroidal brainworm; predictive context cued and personalized for the target market of YOU’re welcome.

III. Introduction to Negative Space Filling up space is, for me, a function of using my own obsessive-compulsive tendencies as a motor. OCD, for me, seems to be a function of sexual frustration (and I mean OCD in a conversational sense rather than a clinical one). Which is fitting, as all my work is about the betrayal of childhood by adulthood, and sexuality guards the border between the two like a three-headed hellhound. I named my comic book Nurture the Devil when I proposed it to Fantagraphics twenty-odd years ago. This title came from one of the automatic writing pieces I did, inspired by William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. I take it to

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mean that one should transmute weakness into strength by adjusting the parameters of the craft. For instance, I’m a relatively poor draftsman who reflexively crosshatches in the margins when I’m writing; hence my style, which is principally textural. There are many points of failure in my execution of the pages between these covers, according to my self-assessment of my comics. But one of the things I’m proudest of is my synthesis of style. Starting with the Mea Culpa stories, my comics manage to look like everyone who influenced me, and at the same time they’re recognizably mine. Where I fall most short of the mark is in the mechanics of comics narrative. I’m less of a storyteller than a crafter of worlds, which sounds grandiose until I add that these worlds I make are ones in which the basest human motivations are magnified and mirrored for our collective mortification. I’m not being self-effacing to win you over, or to distract you from my giant ego. In fact, I’ve willfully suppressed my judgment of my own work in the interest of being a good caretaker of it. “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” as Rabbi Hillel put it. It’s with this in mind that I have indulged my most shameless self-archival urges. I’ve packaged the collected output of my life into volumes, of which this is the second of twelve. Why have I done this? Certainly not to accomodate any putative audience, hypothetically slavering for my content. I don’t deny that I would love to see my work find its audience, but I’m not so deluded as to believe that it will happen just by making the work available. I make these books available because I’ve chosen to live within the set of possible worlds wherein some use may be found for them. Also, by organizing and packaging my past into discrete volumes, I hope to reduce the volume in my head by a few more decibels. In other words,

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putting this book to bed will help me sleep at night. I’m an egoist rather than an egotist. I don’t think I’m better than anyone, yet when it comes down to it, it really is all about me. That this perspective is the most universal aspect of consciousness makes it no less compelling to each self who peeks out from its own two eyeholes. Art is the desperate attempt to render the carcass of subjective experience into universally yummy sides of meat (sorry, vegetarians, for my bloody metaphor). In order to put you, the reader, behind my eyes effectively, I’ve appended a section called Becoming Unmouthless to this collection. It contains a selection of self-portraits, self-descriptions and selfies from childhood to the present (which is, as of these words, August 14th of 2015, just to be precise). I have gone through a dialectical prism of selves in my (nearly) forty-five years of life. I was born Jeff; Jeff wrote and drew the comics herein compiled. Jeff tried hard to be a brain without a body. When I turned thirty, I spent a decade as Jessica, as near an antithesis to my previous self as I could arrange. Now I’m Jess, and I’ve returned to using the male pronoun. (To add one final kink to my naming convention, I’ve taken to signing myself as J. K. Johnson, which encompasses all three under one umbrella). That this represents a synthesis, a progressive move rather than a regression, seems to be a difficult sell for most people. And whatever else I may have claimed before, and despite my penchant for obfuscation, I write principally to be understood. So I’m asking you, dear reader: please try on my glasses for an hour or so, and meet me at the halfway mark between my astigmatism of situational bias and yours. You contain multitudes already—so why not make room for me?

IV. Hello dear reader, Welcome to my room. This mess is a place, and my message is a map. The stories are a function of the structure.

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My game physics adhere mostly to the murky magic of mental space, but beneath the grotesque playfort of whimsy lies solid, humdrum reality. The cement parameters of my daily range of motion provide the navigable root system for the verdant Merzbau above that teems with maggoty timelapse construction and demolition. I look to the famously ill-documented work of living collage that the artist Kurt Schwitters labored over with tireless, abundant ocd energy in the prelapsarian Weimar city of Hanover. Art historians bend backwards to fold him into this or that Movement of 20th century cultural tectonics, but he has outmaneuvered them all. His nailed-together autobiographical blog, wrought of the basest matter, is one breathless edifice of alchemical architecture. Staunchly unfinishable, nakedly occult and incorrigibly incongruous, it prefigures a future in which the narrative spells of art and self are lifted as veils from our eyes, and the trappings of the merely human are stripped from us by bachelors as yet undreamt of. Schwittersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; dilapidated denouement manages to let us down gently, despite all the sharp edges. The Merzbau, as its legend has come down to us in mere paragraphs of anecdotal record and a box of old photos, is ridiculous and sublime, and as full of sunshine and shit as any of us are in our best, most human moments. My room, I fear, is not so cozy and twice as crazy. I am no earnest ursonator. Please come inside, look around, make yourself at home; but donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t trust a word I say, and watch for all the fallen sharps that glitter the floor.

V. My high school art teacher never gave anyone a 100% grade as a matter of principle. Except for me. It was the final project of my senior year. I drew a large

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self-portrait with Prismacolor pencils. It was an unexpected entry from me. I’d spent the past couple of years cultivating a niche within the overtilled communal garden of abstract expressionism. I was by no means the best artist in our school, but I had earned a reputation for being the oddest. At first this was unintentional, but I liked the way it fit, so I wore it like a drag queen until graduation. In this self-portrrait, I wear the same uniform expression I brought to school every day. My face never deviated from this sneering scowl of scorn. “You look like you’re trying to make my head explode,” said one classmate. He was one of my very few friends, or he tried to be. I didn’t learn how to be anyone’s friend until I was thirty. My huge face hung in the foyer of my parents’ house for years after I’d left it. By proxy, my framed grimace glowered at guests with unmitigated disgust. Why was I such a hateful, embittered little fuckteen?

VI. Less than a mile from where I sit, there is a door that I adore. And this old door opens onto an old building that sits and grows older every day. With a grin and a squint, old 691 sees the trains sneak into the city like snakes on horizontal ladders tracking their prey through the weeds and. later, slither forth from the city, sated and sleepy. An edifice of dispassionate glass spans the empty upper floor, gridded into squares; within these axes, jagged fragments chart a shattered market, but this structure is not without life; its lower belly grumbles with regular movement as The Very Tired Tire Shop works its way through the daily grind of crap-based capitalism. A liberal neglect has allowed its pattern of wear to tell the unblinking story of its life. Its skin of bright blue paint has been lacerated by a thousand white strokes, a skein of scars that attest to a century of seasonal assaults from

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an abusive elemental mother prone to arbitrary fits of fury. “There is no such thing as chance. A door may happen to fall shut, but this is not by chance. It is a conscious experience of the door, the door, the door.”

—Kurt Schwitters

VII. Gender is for Other People I’m fine with the idea of being an indefinite article, and I don’t necessarily feel that I need to explain myself to anyone, but I find some items recurring in conversation w/ friends, and compile them here as a sort of manifesto for the self that I’ve been synthesizing from my previous incarnations. Take it as you will. The same ineluctable pole, whose magnetic pull proved impossible to resist, and which guided me into the territory marked as transgenderism, has again, it seems, beckoned me into unmapped lands. I’m much less inclined to ignore its call these days. I’ve learned to trust it, wherever it leads me and however little sense it makes to me in the moment. And so it is that I’ve ditched gender entirely, and permanently taken myself out of the running for the deadly lottery of romantic love. As much as is possible within the context of being human in the here and now, I’ve made an effort (mostly in my head and therefore [I hope!] invisible to you) to divest myself of what I perceive as the ugliest trappings of this slimy life of stinky flesh. So if I say I don’t care what pronouns invade my airspace, I’m not just being easygoing. I cede it all to y’all and arm myself with silent disregard from behind the walls of my happily anomalous compound of rigorously idiosyncratic delusion, wherein such questions are not merely left unanswered, but have been rescinded entirely and beaten into ploughshares, or dental tools.

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VIII. There’s Always A Cost In 2010, nearing 40, I negotiated a blood pact with my ruthless muse. I would replicate as closely as possible the conditions under which I’d been most productive. No more estrogen, no more happy alignment between mind and body. Raise the wall, return the state to schism. All the old guilt-edged rituals, the accomodation of petit demons. And: an accelerant capable of sustaining the burn of an open channel in a vessel several years removed from active service. In return for which, I would be made a useful tool of that veiled will at work in our world which won’t stop until our mortal mud is worried free from its armature of inert, inutile mineral base. I pray my poor, compromised flesh finds its highest function before my full yield of articulation falls from these axes forever. Amen.

IX. Self-Rejected Introduction to Auto-da-Fé I-IV I’d like to say this book contains the freeze-dried vacuum-sealed essence of my life from 2001 to 2010. I’d like to think it functions as a memoir without the pesky machinations of narrative me’s buzzing like a cloud of mosquitos from page to page, each one glutted with a slightly different variant of my blood, none of them carriers of truth. I’d like to feel more certain that these pages communicate something of value to a readership I’m far from certain even exists in numbers the marketplace acknowledges as such. I’m still on the fence, as of this writing, as whether the three appendices supplied are vital organs at all, or just parts appended to the peritoneal page count for the sake of granting the donor cadavers, from which they were harvested, a borrowed bit of life.

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These are my misgivings about a book of misgivings. Its pages put the selected output of at least five sketchbooks into four discreet portions of cut-and-paste sequential collage; an aborted fifth effort is given a proper protestant autopsy as three appendices. Mostly what you’ll find, on a speculative browse through its innards, are pages worried with crosshatching, here and there congealing into deliberate images, in many cases made to stand aright by way of a crude, miscegenating methodology, with results perhaps over-flattered by a comparison to those drawn by the Dada game of producing an ‘Exquisite Corpse.’ In truth, it may be that a blinkered, rummaging flip-through of this volume’s innards is unlikely to exhume its most fuckable qualities. It may indeed be that anything other than an intimate evening devoted to the full delectation of this dirty little whore of a book, and moreover, in a sustained state of overly-kind bias as you descend into the depths of ‘the bathosphere’ may be insufficient to make any survey of these pages fruitful—by which we mean it may seem little better than an itemized inventory of inky byproducts wrung into place by the thoughts and feelings of a person mortally grappling to hammer out the innate sinew of self from the marble ruins of misplaced history, but detached from the story that summoned them, and therefore as lacking in drama as The Tempest heard from inside a teacup.

X. Dear Publisher, I 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 cultivated a singular voice that evokes comparison to such antipodal names as William Blake and William Burroughs1. Hyperbole? Mais oui. And yet, I stand by my claim. Behold the bounty and see for yourself. 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

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of an entirely new (or so long-forgotten it may as well be new) conception of consensus, narrative reality. 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. There’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, and which will hurt much less if we can arrive at its conclusion sooner, rather than later. 1. Other luminaries who crowd my client’s tornado room are: Simone Weil, Kurt Schwitters, Austin Osman 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 and Herman Melville.

XI. You are receiving this email because I sent it to you. If you think you may like to opt out of being that version of you who receives email from me and instead become that version of you who does not receive emails from me, please remove yourself from every instance of you in every daily temporal register, working backwards until you no longer see me. Warning: depending upon

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how long you’ve known me, this could result in mild to severe tire damage.

XII. You are receiving this email either: a.) because you clicked a box somewhere, or b.) because I just assumed you’d want to hear the good news about weathersports! But maybe I was wrong.

XIII. You are receiving this unsolicited packet because I’ve chosen you with great discrimination. You are either an esteemed influence, a respected voice or a vested interest adored from afar. I’ve read you; I’ve engaged you in simulated debate; I’ve valued your output of cultural collateral at or above market rate. Pray, rest your eyes gently upon the body of my message, tho’ my brazen head may crow the crass come-on of spam. As the famous rabbi Hillel put it: “If I am not for me, who will be for me?”

XIV. Hello! If you are in receipt of this book, it’s probably because: a.) you are a publisher of such books as I could see keeping this little one company, or b.) you are an artist whose work has, in some part, nourished the soil from which these weedy pages have climbed their way into the light of day, or perhaps c.) you’re famous, washed in the blood of the limelight for whatever reason and therefore in a position to help my book thrive just by using it to wipe your hands clean. Welcome, in any case. I hope these words and pictures

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find you well, and I thank you for whatever attention you’re able to peel off for us (me and my book); and yes, I have made quite a botch of my life just to be able to deliver these documents to the world, and yes, I did do it all for you, O humanity, because I don’t think you’re nearly as human as you suppose you are—so you’re welcome!

XV. This is me giving up, finally, after a lifetime of failure and impotent misery. This is me burning the rope bridge that hardly even holds me. I throw myself into the fire, not for any noble cause, but simply to lean into my ignominious decline.

XVI. Make Contact Letter One A letter to Dr. Thomas Cerbu, my favorite college professor. He taught Comparative Literature, which was my major at UGA (the University of Georgia in Athens) until I switched to Fine Arts. I got my BFA in Drawing, but I was only a couple of credits short of a minor in Comp Lit, because I loved taking Dr. Cerbu’s classes so much. It was our first semesters there, the both of us. Dr. Cerbu had come to our quaint southern party school by way of Stanford and Harvard, and he was the very model of the modern intellectual, as far as I was concerned. He had wild hair and deep corridor eyes and he rolled his own cigarettes. I had a bit of a crush on him, in retrospect; that it was mostly Platonic shouldn’t keep you from smirking at this. I don’t know for sure, but I’d like to think that the first class of his I remember was the first time he’d taught Comp Lit 101 or whatever it was called. There was a contingent of sorority sisters in the room, and they exchanged faces of pantomimed hilarity at the animated

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professor’s huge pit stains as he built up steam, standing before and introducing himself and the books he’d selected for the semester (or did we have quarters? I don’t remember—this was 1989, after all). I suppose it must have been his first August in a southern state. I recognized, in him, one of the first people I’d ever known for whom ideas were more precious than personal appetite, and for whom all texts were sacred. Which is not to say that this assessment was anything other than wishful projection; nevertheless, I saw him as a case study similarly afflicted by a relationship with dead writers. I saw what I wanted, which was a father with whom I could discuss books. I confess this bare assessment of motive from beyond all hope of prevarication. Other people are the mirrors by which we try on the various ensembles in our wardrobe of selves. Dr. Cerbu understood the way I wrote, and by extension he understood the way I thought. And between the words of every essay I wrote about the various splendid books he placed before me, some blood was mixed into the mortar. An emotional war raged between my hemispheres, walled off from each other like a cold war Berlin. When I wrote about The Golden Ass, a Roman novel by Apuleius about the stories that shape our selves, or The Confidence Man, Herman Melville’s final novel about the price of faith, I was communing with my Holy Guardian Angel about the salvation of my soul. I still have a significant number of the books I was required to purchase for the five or six classes of his I took. I think of him more often than one might be expected to think of a professor, fifteen years later. And so I am going to write him an open letter—yes, an old-fashioned piece of paper correspondence. I’ll back it up with an email, after giving the snails a few days to deliver the mail, and this page will accompany it. This is the first in a series of letters I will write to a few figures with whom I’m no longer in touch who, nevertheless, cast long, robust

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shadows across my mental terrain.

XVII. A note for all television writers 1. You’re doing a bang-up job. You are each very special and all greatly appreciated. 2. (This is only for almost all of you.) Please cease and desist writing common human circus tales about betraying or being betrayed, or keeping secrets and being deceived by those we love, or of the big fight between excluding and inclusion, or about how the awful dynasty of nasty social congress is, in fact, the highest mystery we could care to redeem. It’s just not enough anymore to take a fistful of preset stooges and plug them into some vaguely therapeutic algorithm with a cover story; we already know, as of the pilot, that everyone with lines will be inclined to beat a contrariwise arc from one thing to the opposite by season’s end. Don’t be boring, or else we’ll stop being bored. 3. Do more shows like Black Mirror, which describes a format we need more of. Look to the spy novel (by way of John Le Carré) and to science fiction (by way of Vernor Vinge) for the quickening corsetry of genre. If you’ve never written a novel, write the first chapter for it and put all your crappy ideas inside of those pages and then destroy the manuscript by flame and dance around it until you cry. Then go write me some more good television.

XVIII. Dear ________, Good morning! You must be wondering whether or not to read this. The awful truth is that you couldn’t read this if you tried. Not even if you try really hard. No offense unintended. See how your eyes just leap all over the screen, settling anywhere but here? Your mind is a twitter feed between

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cancer cells. Listen to those ghost voices spitting bits and scraps of bitter, belittling invective at you. Listen, hidden in the white noise of your grey, fatty frontal lobe; within that howling, desolate wind of godless, Bergmanesque emptiness hides a hateful Greek chorus of everyone youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever known murmuring with far more malice than any of them have ever actually directed at you. It takes more energy to block out this unhealthy miasma of snide, undermining meanies than to call these bullies out, one by one, and invoke a less myopic mischaracterization of these misremembered memory hogs. Everyone makes the mistake of thinking that the thoughts that beset all others are any less self-skewed than their own. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a fundamental fallacy inherent in any single-self organism. The good news is that it is possible to correct for the distorting lens of self-bias. The bad news is that thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no way to teach corrective vision. You have to see through a glass darkly first before you can be fitted for the light.

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SEVEN

Occupied/ Vacant I.

1. How old are you? _______ 2. How many cats do you know personally, by name? ____________ 3. Have you ever climbed a tree? Y / N 4. Have you ever fallen from a state of innocence? Y / N 5. Who do people like better: a.) Ms. Gaga b.) Taylor Swiffer c.) Gummo Worms 6. What is currently your favorite television show?__________________ 7. What’s the most hours you’ve ever logged in a tv watching marathon? _________ 8. Do you regret watching Lost? Y / N 9. If you had to choose: Mom / Dad 10. Do you think you’re a fundamentally good person? Y/N 11. Do you think a concept like fundamental goodness is useful? Y / N 12. Do you think less of people who think less of you? Y/N 13. Are we alone in the universe? Y / N 14. Are you alone in a crowd? Y / N 15. Are you alone right now? Y / N 16. What does ‘alone’ mean? a.) no one else alive b.) no one else in the room c.) no one in recent memory d.) no one in bed

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17. The weather is more complex than it used to be. T / F 18. Do you poop more than you eat? Y / N 19. Does anyone you know poop more than you eat? Y/N 20. On a scale between −10 and 10, −10 being less than none and 10 being all of it, how much poop are you willing to eat? 21. Is this drawing funny?

Y/N Exercise: Get your kids to make a list of their names and pick one. Make an acronym from their name: ___________________ ________________________________________________From now on, call that kid by the first word of your acronym. Personal Visions: I will __________________. I won’t ________________. I am dedicated to the cause of ________________ and to the elimination of all _________________. Email address: __________________________ Name: _________________________________

II. Questionnaire 1. What is your favorite position? a. Universal Turing Machine

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B. Fortress of Solitude C. Moons Over My Hammy D. Martial Law 2. Where do you see yourself five years ago? 3. Default background: black or white? 4. An interviewer’s question presupposes a polarized division between two abstractions in a dichotomy which you believe to be false; do you: a.) play along and answer, or b.) argue the point? 5. The phone rings at the same time the doorbell rings, and your chat application alerts you to a message from a flirty new friend—the latest volley in a lively, ongoing debate about whether the ‘new connectivity’ enriches our interactions or buries us beneath a bureaucratic pile of polite obligation. Simultaneously, your ipod begins to play a song which you hate, and which you could’ve sworn you deleted like 20 times already, and just as you’re cursing the name of the rotten app to blame for this annoyance, the software update thing pops up to nag you about itunes’ newest upgrade downwards. Also, the smoke alarm goes off as the slice of pizza you threw in the oven and then totally forgot about blackens and sizzles; and just then, you remember a useless piece of trivium which tantalized you last night while having a spirited conversation in the bathroom of that bar with your co-worker and occasional cocaine buddy (and ‘words with friends’ nemesis!) and so of course you take that moment to bite down hard on the tip of your tongue (it having dislodged the elusive item with such impeccably cruel timing it seems impossible not to conclude that part of your brain hates you) and you really want to write it down so you can email it to that smug idiot who thinks her Master’s in the Philosophy of Science puts her above you, just because your desultory academic career

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of seven years and a blur of dual majors left you unmatriculated and a bit unhinged. Speaking of which, you realize it’s time for your medication. What’s your first move?____________________________________________ 6. Seriously, and honestly: is it more important to satisfy one’s own lust for beauty when masturbating to one’s inner muse (i.e., when creating ‘art’ as defined by the self in its hermetic shell); or, is it the higher, more worthy goal to communicate effectively, to hit the social vein with a culture-changing dose of one’s own poison? In other words, is it enough to write one’s book to meet one’s own standards (regardless of sales, or publication at all)—or does one need a media-apotheosizing movie success story made from said book, which will bring the cultural validation of celebrity, with all its attendant curses?

III.

1. It’s funny because it’s True / False. 2. Which of these is most true? a.) I know what you mean. b.) I hear what you’re saying. c.) I can’t pay attention to your interminable sentences and your oblique obstacle-course essay style. d.) I think I understand what you’re intending to say; but if I’m correct, I’m embarrassed for you if you think it’s worth saying. 3. Which of these seems like criticism you would offer me: a.) You should just make images and shut up. b.) You should write things with a strong narrative motor; fictionalize yourself into characters with clear motivations struggling against empathy-inducing odds to defeat some odious foe. c.) Go back to making comics. d.) Make a spectacle of yourself on YouTube.

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4. Which of these statements describes a thought you wouldn’t like to share with me. a.) Your ‘art’ is like a hideous birthday present you’re obligated to pretend that you like. b.) Your work simply doesn’t fulfill any of the functions I require of my reading material. c.) I don’t think you see how erratic and unfocussed you are. It’s not endearing. d.) I think you’re a genius because I don’t even know how to formulate an opinion of anything you do; granted, I never make it past the first few pages. But I said you’re a genius anyway, and that’s what you want to hear, isn’t it? 5. Are some things better than others? Yes / No 6. The notion that there is such a thing as ‘the greater good’ is worthwhile, even if it’s less of a cohesive body and more like a swarm of gnats tying knots in the air. Agree / Disagree 7. How interested would you be in participating in a sort of market study, with the goal of crafting a crowdsourced organ of cultural review (picture a three-dimensional tree insinuating branches of discourse into millions of heliocentrically fixated middle fingers fucking off the sun.) 1-not interested 10-way too interested 5-indifferently curious. 8. The word ‘art’ more accurately describes a focal length between a viewer’s pair of eyes and an enlarged conic volume of illuminated area. A spotlight draws our attention by obliterating the world outside its magic circle. The process of assimilation by which the causal wellness of our kind is ensured is uneasily predicated on a sort of mass forgetting of some premise or other which erases all record of it ever having been absent from our foundational precepts. Duh, of course. But did we only

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start perceiving our world as a sort of Euclidean space after painting absorbed the assault against our subjective sense of space to the simpler consensus-winning system known as two-point perspective. A pathogen that makes its host’s life less strenuous will leave no part of the organism unaffected; it won’t register as change if there’s no resistance to it. Similarly, genocide earns the name ‘genocide’ by failing to live up to its name. Does any of this make sense? Yes / No. Explain (optional): Thank you for your participation! Unless you’d prefer to let yourself be stupefied by the bells and whistles of your devices, or if you are too intoxicated by the chemical haul of your oversized sense organs to note the greater plasticity and more refined articulation of growth under the influence of pain, shame and denial, please consider joining the mailing list below, which will distribute further variants of this document. I want to interview the mass of “you,” you unknowable quantity of folks, you. So… Are you 0? Yes / No. Are you 1 or 2? Yes / No. Are you 3 or more? Yes / No. First Name:____________Last Name:____________ Email:_____________________________________________ Bonus Question: 9. Below are two propositions, a. and b. Does b. follow from a., or is b. a non sequitur? (Non sequitur: Latin— ”That which does not follow;” i.e., the two statements are not linked by any recognizable mechanism of logic.) a.) If one can rise free of the self-shackling imperative by which we are convinced to prefer walking over climbing, you can begin to acclimatize your mind to a higher extent of abstraction. b.) Tetris would be a terrifying, savage game if it were

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translated into the physical world. Answer in your own words within the available space time below :)

IV. What is music? 1. Is there a song which almost always makes you cry? (Has there ever been?) 2. Is there an artist whose catalogue is now unlistenable because of its indelible emotional associations? 3. Are there some songs which are always playing in some room in your head? (Myself, I have the Hawaii Five-O theme song and the Sanford & Son song playing in different wings of my internal estate.)

V. Situational Survey #1 page 1: The Situation 1. You find yourself in a small room. Are you: a.) bigger than the room? b.) as big as the room? c.) a large machine within the room? d.) a small book within the room? e.) the cinder in the eye of the viewer of the room? 2. You discover a small pile of VHS tapes. You dust them off and place each title in a stack from best to worst: Meatballs II Jaws II Psycho II Grease II The Pink Panther Strikes Again! The Empire Strikes Back

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Aargh! A Music War The Dark Crystal Flashdance Broadway Danny Rose Police Academy II Popeye Paris is Burning 3. Suddenly, a door opens upon the room. A stranger stands outside the threshold. The winter wind whips his deep red scarf into a frenzy. “Well,” he bellows, “aren’t you going to invite me in? “Y-yes, but of course,” you stutter over an unconvincingly convivial dollop of unction. [Turn to page two.] “No,” you snarl as you shove the door shut and barricade it from the threatening stranger. [Turn to page three.] Or an equivocation (as follows): ‘Duh, I do not believe that rooms have doors,’ or, ‘Duh, rooms with doors are dangerous to the other rooms in the building,’ or even: ‘Duh, there will be doors and rooms with no doors’ in the last example of answers which neither confirm nor deny. page two: The Myster y of Death 4. “What date and time was the alleged perpetrator allowed into the house?” the detective would ask a few days later. Date / Time: _____________________ Please save the date from your lies. 5. “Thanks, citizen. Please allow yourself to be named and located so we may serve and protect you better.”

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Nomenclature A Line for Residence / Habitat Another Line about Buildings and Food The city you’re too busy to love / The town that grows around you What a state you’re in? A five digit number. Nation-state 6. The stranger’s long-dead face now stares you down from behind the detective’s steely eyes. How does this make you feel? Choked up on sour cream and onion flavored chips. Like I’m biting into a chocolate ice-cream birthday cake in the form of a bat that I found after church one day on the sweltering black asphalt and fell face down upon to devour, as its brown mess delights at melting under the sun and squirms with the lives of a zillion white gummi worms. Beautiful, baby. Kinda twitchy, if you know what I mean. You are dead. All your lives are correct. And what do you see, in death? You find yourself in a very small room... page three: The Myster y of Love 7. Correct you are! Safety is key. Congratulations, you have passed the test. How does this make you feel? rows: Shameless and nameless. Restless and bloated. Haughty and hungry.

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columns: That’s a bit much. 1 Oh, I shouldn’t grumble. 2 Everyone’s individual interpretation of it is equally okay. 3 Well, I should think so, my long-suffering friend. 4 ‘Absolutely,’ he slurred, the thick brown liquid dribbling like molasses down his chin. 5 You have an email address. It is this: [email] That may well be what your mother named you, but it is most assuredly not your email address. 8. What grabs your focus more than anything else? _____ ______________________________________________________ 9. Unnamed, alone and unsatisfied with your experience today, you fill out a friendly survey while the room waits in silence. As you answer the clever questions with all the thrill of immersed absorption you feel like you should enjoy whilst filling in a crossword (but never seem to do), you realize you’ve forgotten a vital question: Where did I stay on my last stay-cation? When is the most strategic moment to surrender? Which is better, water or fire? 10. In your own dialect, rewrite the remembered answer to the forgotten question indicated above: ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________

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