FALSE CULT TALKING POINTS FEEL TRUE WHEN YOU’RE STONED NIKI WILLIAMS
FALSE CULT TALKING POINTS FEEL TRUE WHEN YOU’RE STONED FEBRUARY 2020, ANN ARBOR, MI @niki_midwezt www.nikimidwest.com / 50 FIRST EDITION
In New York City, there is an apparition who lives off the L. Through alchemical processes unknown this being has slipped out of its fleshy confines and condensed into the place where sound lies: vibrations. The “voice,” untethered, floats around Manhattan, reverberating off of the concrete and glass canyon walls which block out once historic and classless views of the Hudson River. The sonic range it emits is unmatched, at times an impossibly charming steam whistle, only to drop in octave at rates that exceed what seems physically possible under gravity until it is as low and deep as the darkest ocean trench. The “voice” entices the owners, workers, and purveyors of businesses to become lovers and coalesce around the oldest trees, lying down on dew drop grass. It is here the voice expands fully into its sonic reverie. Tones cascading unrelenting until the right pitch is reached causing all the lover’s chest cavities to resonate, massaging their hearts and their lungs. This resonance creates a sort of cosmic scanner, searching everything in audible distance for hidden voids that keep this earth hollow. The voice uses the resonance of these voids to amplify its pulsing vibrations. Its language is tone and its message is coherent to all that posses being: Let my void fill your void. Let my void fill your void. Let my void fill your void. Let my void fill your void. Let my void fill your void.
A 250 year old Bur Oak tree can weigh 700,000 lbs. Quercus Macrocarpa does not do well with competitors. She prefers to be alone, where the canopy is thin and there is plenty of space to spread out her long roots. Born of fire, without which she is often succeeded by other tree and shrub species. She is not shade tolerant and prefers to bask in the light of the sun. If she survives wood-rot fungi, past 80 years old, all she needs to worry about is the occasional limb snapped off in a wind storm. Or, in the case of one Bur Oak in Ann Arbor, MI, the renovation of the Ross School of Business. The Bur Oak I am referencing tree was moved 100 yards at the behest of Stephen M. Ross, chairman and majority owner of “The Related Companies.” He and a group of unnamed donors came together in an “act of goodwill and historic preservation” during the renovations of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Related Companies is also the major stakeholder in the Hudson Yards Project in Manhattan, NY, a project that is dead set on creating a fenced in playground (or perhaps sanctuary/stronghold) for the extremely wealthy. Billionaires, Bur Oaks, it does not quite make sense. Perhaps the explanation lies in the archetype of an Oak in ancient Druid society as a gateway to higher or fairy realms. Ross, the nephew of Max Fisher, may have been a part of the Native American Fetish Cult Michigamua, while a student at the University of Michigan in 1962. The Cult is known for tapping high performing, or wealthy people and inducting them into rituals and socializing in order to create “the leaders and best.” Perhaps these rituals included scraping the root bark off of Bur Oak trees and distilling Dimethyltryptamine in order to converse with and explore realms outside the everyday experience. The Gnostics, a “heretical” cult within early Christianity felt that the material realm is made of monads who were captured by some lesser god (the god of the bible) and imprisoned in matter to fuel his lust for power and control. Control is a cult in our culture. Perhaps this Bur Oak had some sort of control over Ross and he could not take it. He needed to exert his power over nature. So he expanded his namesake school as a ruse to move the tree, showing her, once and for all she is his. As her tap roots expand once again, at her old age of 250, this tree gazes out on a wiggly Rastafarian blow up emblazoned with the word “marijuana,” which sits outside of a pale green dispensary sandwiched between the Law Quad and Business School. A cosmic joke if I ever heard one.
Here is man Not big nor small, remarkable average. The mold did not break on this one. More are arriving everyday. Flooding the earth. Sea of man. A great flood. More dreams in their head than stars in the sky, All stuck up there like the flies the black shrike sticks on a crooked thorned rose. And all those starry eyes. Wrung out of the primordial ooze to wander and waste. Oh how high this union between matter and might will go. Soaring now, above the abyss. An interesting ephemeral ghost crooning. Condensing. It has taken the form of my surly black poodle. She who has the temperament of a wraith. And the mystery of an ex-Zen Buddhist attending graduate school. Having forgotten what it was like to have a body, immune to the sense of numbing. It is, for lack of a better word, a natural sensation. Pure, unadulterated nature, that scares man. As he looks over the sublime forest, which is rarer and rarer, wherever they set their feet. Might we see, all at once. We are small. Insignificant in a singular sense. Then out on the horizon, another type of mushroom.
In a culture obsessed with dominance and control the lobster is a natural choice for a celebratory meal. The elders look back on their lives and reckon their place in history will be remembered as one of support for their offspring who’s college tuitions they were able to fund and who they provided uncompromising material support for. The elders watch their stock portfolios and retirement funds increase, ignoring or saying little about the immoral system which they benefit from. They reckon that their offspring are destroying family values, tradition, and heirarchy overlooking that advanced capitalism destroyed these long before with concepts of insurance, consumerism, and over adminisitered institutions. Like a flexing victorious lobster, truth will make its victory known.
SOON!
The backs that toiled to provide the labor for these high performing stock portfolios at far to low a cost will rise up and reclaim their debt. They will be killed. The environment which has been raped time and time again will reclaim her debt. Nature will continue. Fast talking soothsayers claim that the hierarchy will work for the offspring if they will just trust them, if they will get serious and make themselves bigger and fight. How Transactional. But the offspring will fall in class hierarchy. They will never own property, they will never pay off their student loans, they will never eat lobster.
honest feelings fall apon me at moments when the sun aligns i ask you how your feeling baby so our souls can realign. stoked and angry everlasting. humid human breathing bliss. a sudden shaking sinister warning the cunning nightly shadows kiss sorry for the way we are blowing high lifes on the southern rift i feel that i could be a burden on the boys of plunder, blunder, and piss. i do not care a wink about a twirling toiling turning teen i send a fallen fiend onto the plains ignoring all that’s mean. another sweeping mother, drowning out a vagrant’s cries. a couple miles from salvation, the locusts take to the skies. i see a sudden sign a shiftin’ in the glossy gluttons reach. i try to walk but realize realness raunchy witches teach. a golden light departs from vision as its noticed on the wharf. a sudden shift from stone to water, the simulation is weeping. siftin’ sand in shiftin’ deserts brings faces from the past to haunt you. send me into the night. for i wish to depart to where the darkness lies. its deep reaches unexplored.
In a primordial canyon, a group gathers and performs a ritual around a strange drill. They bury the device, drink a potion, and collapse. A young man cycles through town pausing to slug a drink. He locks eyes with a young woman who is planting flowers. They stare at each other and time is not a thing, granted the young man is very stoned, but later she, who happens to be sober, tells him she felt it too. This coincidence becomes a myth in their relationship and they tell their origin story at dinner parties and soirées until they feel like it is beginning to become played out. They begin to keep it to themselves, holding it secret and safe. During a recession the couple opens a flower shop out of their garage and create strange flower arrangements. People from the neighborhood buy them. They put them in their houses and draw the blinds. The drawn blinds are a running joke between the couple, “these people must all be so depressed, they never let the sun in.” However, they do continue to buy flowers. Their neighbor, an obsessive mathematician measures their arrangements and finds they all adhere perfectly to the golden ratio. He weighs mentioning this to the couple, unsure of whether or not they know. He decides telling them may ruin the magic, he keeps his findings to himself. At work the young man, who is an office slave, receives an email from an address which is just a bunch of numbers@gmail.com with a link to a video showing Amanda Fielding trepanning herself inter-cut with theosophical musings and images of birds. Hypnotized he watches more and more until he is unable to work on anything else. He tells his wife, but she has little interest, especially after he mentions the part about apes descending from humans, instead of the other way around. In fact, she asks him never to bring it up to her again. But he can’t get those thoughts out of his mind. This goes on for months. One night his dog tells him he should try taking mushrooms, during the trip the young man decides to drill into his forehead in his bathroom with a dental drill. He falls asleep and wakes up and in a dream like state he cuts a portal into his wall with a lazur beam emanating from his trepan hole. Entering the portal he finds a mystical realm of machinery whizzing and buzzing. No one living is around. The machines shape shift into a pregnant woman breastfeeding a child, flipping him off. A thought which is not his own enters his mind, “go and be a backyard martyr, stay in your life, stay with your wife, forget this and enjoy the illusion it won’t last forever”
Nature stays on Earth. Whatever happens on Earth, Nature does not seem to care too much. A young woman bares her heart to a crowd who eagerly applaud her virtues. Their bellies warm and full of organ meat. The world is smoldering and so everyone is choking, still though the party is said to still be on this evening. Even if things seem bleak, its natural to throw a party. It might be an ugly opinion to hold, but everything, this zine, the petroleum used to ship the paper, the cynical mind that wrote these words, it’s all natural. This is because the human mind is a creation of nature, just like the acorn is of the tree, we are of this earth. We must belong here. I have yet to find anything that I would deem unnatural. There are moments when I feel extremely lucid. I can see the entire plot of my own life projected in my minds eye. It’s a feeling of familiarity like remembering a dream you have had every night but forgotten about. This can be frightening. Especially when the contents of your dream are grim, unthinkable. I am, in actuality, a wretched, desperate, omnipotent thing. Disgusted with myself I create a world which reflects reality but sets my experience of it at the center. Tricking myself: I make myself a being of love and kindness, at least as far as I am able to observe. Slowly though, beginning as a trickle, it is revealed what I am, what I have always been. I patch these “holes” in the illusion. But once they are noticed nothing really can be done. The weight of it all washes over me. I am, in actuality a wretched, desperate, omnipotent thing. Nature stays on Earth. Whatever happens on Earth, Nature is all. I do not do well with certain types of executions, even if they are only suggested.
In Allen Park, Michigan, there is a big man made drainage ditch that everyone calls “the Creek.� Our great grandfathers dug it out with steam shovels when at the beginning of the 20th century they decided to build a new town outside of the City. They figured in their own town, they would set the rules, decide who got to live there, and how everyone would get along. They felt that it was God’s will that they build this new town when during the dig they found a small cave mouth, and upon entering it, they found it to be of uniform width and completely smooth as if it were bored by a toothless drill. Amazed by their discovery they began expeditions into the cave which were very unsuccessful. The cave seemed to go on forever, and past a certain point began to emit a colorless, odorless gas which slowly suffocated anyone who continued on. However it was soon discovered by one industrious lad that anyone who entered the cave under the age of 13, alone, could continue well past the point where the noxious gas began. Journeying far beyond what any of the elders had seen, the boy once he emerged, claimed that after awhile the cave began to taper until one had to crawl on their belly, but then opened up into an enormous domed circular chamber lined with dozens of ornamental doors. Upon hearing this, the elders demanded that the boy draw a map, but by the time they brought him paper and pen, he was unable to recall anything about his experience at all. The next morning all of the young people in the town were summoned to the cave and told whoever was able to map the space would be handsomely rewarded. Many eagerly descended into the cave, but by nightfall, none had returned. By daybreak, the elders were distraught. Unable to go looking for the children because of the gas, they began wildly digging where they thought the chamber should have been. No matter how far they dug, they could not find the cave. Years went by, and many distraught parents lost their lives trying to get past the point where the gas began. Others moved away, ashamed of losing their children. Yet others stayed, and built the town they had always dreamed of. The creek remains, now dotted with concrete pipes which were added as spillways for the growing web of suburban streets. Today it is rumored that the once young children are still in the cave, alive, grown old, enamored with what was behind those doors of legend.
Standing in the steaming shower, warm water cascading over my breasts, washing away the day and the muck and the grime. Giving me goose pimples. In my minds eye; I trace out all the blood vessels that run through my body. The arteries, which carry the blood away from the heart; the arterioles; the capillaries, where the exchange of water and chemicals between the blood and the tissues occurs; the venules; and the veins, which carry blood from the capillaries back towards the heart. I have been eating plastic everyday, my whole life and there is not much I can do about it. I wonder if my bones are built from plastic. They have never broken and there have been sometimes that really should have done me in. A pseudo-human being. Plastic, and elastic, and born in 1994. Every time I meditate I think about how what I am really doing is training myself for death. The equinoxes of Earth rotate. Wobbling like a top, every 25,772 years. I always sort of took for granted that my ancestors, when they looked up, saw the same pictures I saw. But this notion was never true. The skies change, just like everything, wandering through flux nothing ever really settles. So I have given up truth. I am growing out my hair. I am becoming a seeker. I am not going to wear shirts anymore. Because I need to mark the procession of time, and I don’t trust the Government to do it for me. It is turtles all they way down, until it is not anymore.
The train has left the station before trains were even invented. The Guttenberg Galaxy explodes before us, a big bang, condensing into where we are now in time and space, together, cynical. It is cyclical, almost cosmic. Our consent is manufactured. Reporters are now Repeaters. The vast amounts of money and influence that flows through the halls of Congress, the offices of the New York Times, our local and state legislatures is fungal in its approach to spreading. Like a mushroom its growth happens underground and out of sight and when we do finally see it, its just a small fruiting body meant to blend in while it releases billions of spores. This is not a Mycorrhizae. There is no symbiosis here. This is a Cordyceps who slips its spores deep into our brains and produces tendrils urging us to kill our fellow man, destroy our mother earth, and crave to fill our fucked-up voids with more plastic products manufactured by people we don’t see, don’t want to see, and don’t advocate for beyond a passive post on our black mirrored devices as we take another toke of some strong marijuana while those who sold it to us ten years ago rot in prison because of our fear, our folly, our fucked up apathy. For those who know this and much more than I. I feel your cynicism. Your despair. I recognize that your ability to flex your power is hindered by the bills stacking up, the baby crying, the dreary haze of your ninth month into 7 day work week holding down 3 jobs so you can pay your landlord, healthcare bills, and food just to be called out on social media by some salaried office worker because you did not do progressive-ism just right. It sickens me too. The whole world should be sick. But the symptoms are concealed. Discourse is not strong enough. Our consent is manufactured, and we are too lazy, to comfortable, to really want the sacrifices that come with change.
FALSE CULT TALKING POINTS FEEL TRUE WHEN YOU’RE STONED NIKI WILLIAMS