Two Characters: LECTRICE and SHANE SCAB.

Stage directions.

A large screen upon which is projected the BACKGROUND MONTAGE and certain subtitles. It will need to be coordinated with the right cues.

The stage is divided up into two halves which are delineated by lighting: a membrane of shadow between the two halves. LECTRICE is in the left hand of the stage, she’s downstage and she has a nice desk with a laptop and fancy water bottle. She speaks through an expensive podcaster’s microphone. There is also a treadmill and some upscale workout equipment, dumbbells etc. This is the abode of a healthy person.

In opposition, the right side of the stage is SHANE SCAB’s side. It is a dark, foreboding cave. There’s an amplifier and a death metal guitar SHANE SCAB plays when it’s his turn to be on stage. He doesn’t enter until LECTRICE is finished with her first monologue. Otherwise, when she is reading, SHANE SCAB sits in a ripped beanbag chair, lights sinister black candles, engages in self harm, drinks rotgut, and dissociatively stares into space, not acknowledging the audience. Spotlights could isolate the two actors during their turns.

The play is essentially the two opposing characters taking turns. LECTRICE recites her monologues, often in a chipper tone of voice. SHANE SCAB growls his sonnets in the form of metal lyrics, his vocal cords shattered and splintered. His words should fill the audience with dread. It could even be that the words are incomprehensible while the sonnets are projected behind the two characters on the background screen for the audience to “follow the bouncing ball.” His sonnets are the lyrics to a piece of music entitled “(I Was) Standing in Heaven” which is an underground hit single from Gethsemane Delusion, SHANE SCAB’s barely existing death metal band.

The episodes when SHANE SCAB is playing his music find LECTRICE putting on headphones. She does tasks, makes food, does Pilates, waters plants, tidies up, organizes her space. Is she somehow listening to his music through the headphones or is she listening to something else, to protect herself from his nihilistic music? Never 100% clear and could change from performance to performance. Her headphones are ostentatious, bulky, expensive.

The important thing to signify is that when LECTRICE is not reading, she is not a time waster. Always busy, always productive, as a modern person is supposed to be. Is this a satirical target that makes sense as we’re trying to rehabilitate SHANE SCAB spiritually? Is this attractive enough for the doubters in the audience to be pulled to this position as we establish how we feel about her activities? It’s all down to the casting. LECTRICE should be wholesome enough so that, in spite of the terrifying things she sometimes reads, she represents the healthy, optimistic option: life, belief in the midst of the awful world, a resensitization in the midst of a loss of sense and purpose. She needs to be a heroic enough actress to support this interpretation.

Note: LECTRICE sometimes plays air guitar while she listens on her headphones, injecting ambiguity over whether she is listening, like the audience, to SHANE SCAB’s guitar and howls—or whether she has protected herself. Regardless of what she is truly doing, the audience is not protected: we have to listen to the music, and not be wholly rescued by her byplay.

THE BACKGROUND MONTAGE: while LECTRICE is reading, a montage is projected on the screen, of horrible bits of video from the news, from the Internet, people in fist fights at the airport or on the street or in maximum prison cafeterias, people confronting protestors, ring cameras on front porches recording creepy people banging on front doors in a menacing fashion. Also, footage of people in courtrooms learning they’re receiving life sentences and bursting into tears, great anguish that is never spelled out but is inferred by us, the audience. It shouldn’t be clear from text or captions or chyrons what is going on, just that these images represent the strife of the world that LECTRICE is fighting against even as she reads horrible things that go along with the images. Courtroom video animations of crime scenes, animated figures of people shooting their families, photos of murder vehicles, serial killer interviews, people about to be executed in foreign countries. This footage is all silent. All we can hear is LECTRICE’s voice as she reads and maybe an ominous ambient soundtrack.

Sprinkled throughout LECTRICE’s readings are acronyms in her text which could be spelled out on the screen as the montage plays. So the audience can read along with the acronyms that signal a transition in the readings. This will take a level of coordination that may be difficult to accomplish.

As said previously, during SHANE SCAB’s recital his sonnets are projected so the audience may read what he’s singing.

At one or two points in the montage, also coordinated with the audiovisual cues, the music subtly changes, there will be images of young people passing by a camera on the street or inside some building, on a college campus perhaps. The kids look despondent and removed from all feeling, staring down at their phones as they walk. They wear sexless pajamas and sweatpants. How many of the passing kids know it’s world war three? LECTRICE at these moments goes into the shadows and asks the screen: “How can I relieve your suffering?” They can’t hear. SHANE SCAB seems to take notice and look at her but quickly turns away and puts on a mien of resignation and depression. LECTRICE turns to the audience and says, “The scowl is in the eye of the beholder.”

///

The play is coming soon. To be published in a volume entitled Hospice Conference: Holy Poems and Plays. I want to try to publish this by autumn 2026.

SNAP REVIEWS

Spare Us Yet and other stories, by Lucas Smith. Wiseblood Books, 2025.

Some of these stories seemed to be linked together in subtle-enough ways. Many of the stories were about Catholics in Australia, often contending with the harsh lockdowns and enforced rules of COVID: how scientific overreaction for public health limits the expressions of faith and the typical ordered society. Smith’s protagonists are unusual in that they’re always thinking of their faith, their need to keep their eyes on God and on their actions to avoid sin. Much cerebration is given to the ethical fallout of this or that modern dilemma, of which COVID seemed to offer acute sources. Questions arise over whether the spiritual wrestlers in Smith’s world aren’t suffering an excess of scrupulosity, a strong allergy to life as it is lived: “Will Christ Jesus be unpleased if I wear this N95 mask to mass?”; this was the source of a slight amount of irritation on the reader’s part but this adverse effect was subsumed under the flow of what was quite good writing and storytelling. It was Smith’s business to put us inside the heads of people who live by Catholic doctrine.

I wanted to read this book to increase my understanding of current Australian fiction, and in the bargain I got a collection of stories about Catholics Down Under, another unusual subset of a subset. One finishes the book feeling like a group of worlds not typically seen in fiction has been opened up; so many books from duller arenas in America can seem repetitive and unoriginal. Regarding Australia, one of the stories’ protagonists says “the land of the fair go is over,” we’ve all lost our way in the modern world and Australia presents an extreme case. In America I suppose we’re guilty of seeing Australia sometimes as a mysterious social paradise, land where movies reflect the beautiful menace of nature and people speak with “a funny accent.” This book deepens the picture for me and brings a whole continent into greater focus, and reveals a spiritual quest underway, a people at the ends of the earth still connected to the rest of us by the struggles and conundrums and mercies of being alive in the 21st century. Recommended.

I Wished, by Dennis Cooper. SOHO Press, 2021.

Well this was a mighty sad book. I haven’t read much Dennis Cooper, just a couple novels. This feels like a major statement from him about what he’s doing in fiction and why he does it. An Artist’s Statement. Getting an Artist’s Statement from Dennis Cooper can be frightening, crushingly sad, icky, moving, confusing, poetic, obtuse, hard-hitting, exhausting and exhausted. Dreamlike. Cooper is trying to lay out a premise of explaining why he has written about George Miles, the boy he had carried the world’s biggest and most tortured torch over since they were teenagers together long ago in the wisps of time. George has been the source of Dennis Cooper’s seemingly bottomless well of fantasies, heartbreaks, pornographic scenarios, twisted murder speculations, and general besotted daydreams in fictional form. Here he deals with George’s unspeakably sad fate in a series of surreal set pieces. Cooper’s writing style is weird and unspools in lyrical passages that are not exactly pretty. I liked the book in general but, as with Audrey Szasz upon reading my favorite of her novels Teleplasm, I’m not sure I need to read much further in Dennis Cooper’s corpus.

The Gutenberg Galaxy, by Marshall McLuhan. University of Toronto Press, sometime back in the 60s.

As mind-blowing a read as Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Marshall McLuhan, can you like slow down, man? Your interconnections are out of control. I once read somebody criticize George Steiner, saying, his erudition concealed some essential ignorance or intellectual hucksterism, or words to that effect: he could amass a large group of quotations and hide behind that, not saying much. Something similar could be lodged at McLuhan, I suppose. But there were such quotes! Now I need to read Polanyi and de Tocqueville and Alexander Pope and Francis Bacon and on and on! Printed books are great! But also, to put it bluntly, printed books kind of fucked us. Print culture set the stage, in a sense, for our current media confusions. Not to mention a scientific and Industrial Revolution the value of which to humanity is, if we believe McLuhan, very much still awaiting the jury’s decision. I just recently rewatched Cronenberg’s Videodrome which features a lightly fictionalized Canadian media guru named Brian O’Blivion who is supposed to be McLuhan prophetically explaining how television and other technology will bring about evolutions of sorts, an enhancement of mankind’s sense organs. Printed material started the process toward our current possibly malign outgrowths. This was a great book. Much sailed easily over my head. I like to bang my head against hard books a lot and destroy my brainpan. I don’t need to understand everything. It’s an intellectual activity, a curiosity only partially satisfied. I’ll keep reading. I want to check out McLuhan’s Understanding Media sometime, or the Medium is the Massage.

Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West, by Clare Cavanagh. Yale University Press.

Somewhat backwards is my reading. On occasion I’ll read the novelist’s biography before I read their novels themselves, or, in this case, the criticism of the poetry before reading the poetry itself. I’d read some Akhmatova and some Symborska and Zagajewski. But not enough, and not recently enough. Accordingly, this book dragged for me in many places. Note to self: stop reading things backwards.

I characterized this book in an obnoxiously pithy way based on its Introduction as: Wordsworth vs Stalin. That’s a gross oversimplification. But the major questions had to do with the personal lyric often marked with the letter “I” and its place in the communist societies of 20th century Europe. Collectivist economies and nations leave little room for poetry that deals with the individual. Again, an oversimplification. But you’d have to read the book to get more.

A funny note: Clare Cavanagh must really really love the word “willy-nilly” for she seems to drop it on every other page in the book. Something could be extracted from that but I don’t know what.

Quick Movie Review

Rome, Open City. Roberto Rossellini. 1945.

Painful. I can see somewhat where Steven Spielberg may have gotten some of the scenes for Schindler’s List—or did he just get them from World War Two as Rossellini did? This movie was famously shot in the rubble of post-liberation Rome once the Nazis and fascists were defeated. Italian Neo-realism offers no escape. Liberation tales are so fascinating because any sense of happiness and justice triumphing is brutally tempered and tamped down by an acknowledgement of the lives squandered, the mass murder and destruction. Pina (Anna Magnani) and Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi) give tremendous performances as Italians suffering under the yolk of occupation, trying to assist a Resistance which is beleaguered by Gestapo policemen and traitorous collaborators. The collaborators are the worst; only hinted at are the moral abysses they must have plunged into, with no way to claw their way out. Recommended.

Quotes courtesy of Elizabeth V Aldrich, RIP.

GAME RECOGNIZE GAME

a review of The Electro-Etheric Minotaur by Damian Murphy (Church Ghost, 2026)

Here is a link to the publisher to purchase the book:

https://www.churchghost.com/product-page/the-electro-etheric-minotaur

For several years the ringtone on my Android which signified that a text had come in was the Secret Sound from the Legend of Zelda, the mysterious 8-note tune that played in the game whenever you revealed a secret passageway or solved a puzzle. Nintendo lore has it that, even more than writing the game’s main “Overworld” theme, sound designer Koji Kondo struggled to develop the right sound effect in the game universe to signal a deep mystery being satisfactorily resolved.

I got out of the habit of playing video games and computer games with any regularity when I entered teenage years, although I acknowledged their fascination and power and could see these cultural artifacts taking up a central position in imaginations formerly reserved for books and music. The word Gesamtkunstwerk is thrown around a lot: a “total artwork” that marries narrative, decoration, music, all other artworks into it. At one time opera was thought to be a total artwork, and cinema seems be making the strongest case currently, but Damian Murphy’s new fiction collection The Electro-Etheric Minotaur (Church Ghost, 2026) presents video games, in particular rare, limited edition games from the primitive early days of video games—“retro-gaming”—as arcane documents with hidden spiritual value, pathways into occult knowledge. This new artwork carries with it interactivity, player choices, unlocking concealed areas and learning new skills, which Murphy fictionalizes into greater metaphors and analogies to occult “teachings.”

The stories of the collection often posit a shadowy game creator from the early 1980s designing an electronic game-world that manages to operate like an esoteric puzzle. The near-historical timeline is important; Murphy’s seekers and adventurers (and victims) are digging into a dusty, archaic past: the dawn of the electronic age we currently live in. Video games, which according to Neo-Decadent manifestos may “aspire to the condition of poetry,” are the lost historical interface, an archaeological treasure-trove of game cartridges that require the “prerequisite knowledge” of outdated obsolete gaming consoles. A video game that has come into the market this year would not be considered occult; one that was developed “at the beginning” would be, just as the Hermetic Corpus of Hermes Trismegistus was supposedly written in ancient Egypt, ancient Egypt being in this analogy 1980s California, the “land of software.”

Murphy’s protagonists react with nostalgia to the notion of revisiting this arcane past. From the story “A Book of Alabaster”:

“It had occurred to him several weeks previously, for no special reason, that he would enjoy revisiting the most treasured possession of his childhood. He’d been obsessed with the game for a time when he was young. He recalled in particular the sense of mystery it had about it, the allure of open-ended exploration, the promise of discovery and aesthetic delight so rare for games of that era. Nor did it fail to deliver on its promises; countless hours of play were rewarded with the most perplexing revelations. What he’d cherished the most was the feeling that would come over him upon finding a new area within the game. The landscape consistently surprised him, subverting his expectations with each new addition to its ever-expanding map, yet there was always a sense of recognition, as if the game had somehow revealed something that he’d already known on some intrinsic level.”

Often in Murphy’s stories this familiarity gives way to something unknown, unwelcome, ominous:

“The sight that he encountered at the edge of the landscape left him absolutely certain that he had never played this game when he was young. What was taking place was beyond his understanding. He’d long been ignoring the obvious fact that it wouldn’t be possible for a game made for this system to give way to such a rich and varied playing experience. The amount of memory allocated to the 2600 cartridge was truly pitiable. Both the experience that he was having and his memory of the game were impossible by any rational measure. He was compelled to accept the truth of the matter. The terrific absurdity of his situation could no longer be denied.”

What is to be inferred from this characteristic in Murphy’s tales, where the graphics of a video game exceed the primordial consoles of its system? The games frequently wind up being “larger on the inside than they appear on the outside,” architecturally deceptive. In “Against Neo-Passéism,” the centerpiece manifesto of the Neo-Decadents, “naive materialists” are chided for their metaphysical color-blindness and monotony. “The attempt to reproduce experience exactly as it is leads only to a flavorless distortion of the real. In order to express something genuine, one must be willing to wander without aim or discretion, to go blindfolded into a minefield, and to submit to processes that cannot be understood in terms of any existing model.” Another pattern that emerged was the notion that individual copies of these rare games prove to have differences, which thwart any lore-building strategy guides from being written, any shared communal efforts at understanding.

I have a barely functional novice’s awareness of the occult and, as I said, I stopped playing video games as a kid, and yet I did seem to recognize certain references from both worlds. I see the relationship. Some stories had suspense, humor, and a kind of plot; the highlight of the book was probably “A Night of Amethyst,” a long novella/transcript in the style of the late-70s text-only computer adventure game called Zork which I recall grimly. This story was fun to read and its curious habitats had a forbidding atmosphere redolent of those games from yesteryear. “One is advised against catching sight of one’s reflection in games of this type,” the game’s narrator warns the protagonist upon entering a room with a mirror in it. “The more familiar you are with your appearance, the less you’ll identify with the character you’re playing.”

Other items in The Electro-Etheric Minotaur were less like pure narratives and more resembled midrashic commentaries on the fictional games and their creators, like some of Borges’ “ficciones.” The gnomic exposition style of the famous Argentinian writer feels ever-present in this collection of Murphy’s. This sometimes presented difficulties for the reader seeking a Neo-Passéist page-turning experience as seductive and brain-teasing as these games no doubt would prove to be had they ever existed: a “Pitfall” of translation, perhaps.

Another potential shortcoming of the collection’s style is the flat descriptions of visual surfaces, perhaps under the influence of the nouveau roman.

Damian Murphy’s writing is often considered to be from the heart of the “Neo-Decadent camp.” I decided to consult another Neo-Decadent manifesto, on the subject of electronic gaming, for further potential insights into Murphy’s fiction collection. The manifesto on games was written by Arturo Calderon, Colby Smith and Hadrian Flyte and was published along with “Against Neo-Passéism” in a collection of manifestos on Neo-Decadents from 2021. Justin Isis was the editor.

In Murphy’s book of fiction the game designer is the possessor of ancient secrets, esoteric “words of gold” concealed behind a veil of baser materials. Calderon and Smith and Flyte, in their manifesto on video games, single out Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, “the Linnaeus of electronic gaming….he is a most gracious deity, providing a cathode refuge from a polluted reality, creating for the benefit and pleasure of others rather than himself. Neo-Decadent Gamers are to be the Christian Scientists of our time, adopting the role of pixel biologists and acolytes for the informal creed of Miyamotoism.” (To this end, I recently saw a rather comic reel on Instagram featuring the Nintendo hero Mario re-enacting the three trials, the “three paths of God” that Indiana Jones had to navigate at the end of the quest for the Holy Grail: but for the second path, instead of safely treading on the letters which spelled JEHOVAH to avoid plunging into the chasm, his footing depended on the name of MIYAMOTO, “walking in the name of the Lord.”)

Other relevant quotes from the games manifesto:

“Linearity is death. Power is now abstract, illicit, and diaphanous, with no reward beyond the gamer’s inevitable degradation. The Neo-Decadent Gamer no longer merely ‘plays’ a game or a role within a cybernated construct but surrenders to the eradication of self. Resonance replaces perception and installs its own direction, consuming the player in the process. Where linearity stifles the soul, the cubiform supplants it.”

“Breaking the unbreakable and seeing the invisible should be spiritual dogmas for the Neo-Decadent Gamer….The ludic impulse was never to be taken as a middle-aged White Dad distraction but as an alchemic desire for knowledge…Neo-Decadent gaming understood as magick. Your grimoires are the dust-covered video games guides, where maps, glitches, combos and passwords are listed for you to recite in a darkened room, only lit by the candles’ reflection on a collage made by fragments of limited-edition PS1 discs on your own altar. Attaining a soul-immersing state so deep you can play whole titles without the need of a console.”

///

MY NEO-PASSÉIST BOOKS

All available from Jeff Bezos’ lair but I may have a few copies of The Tattletales I can personally ship out to interested citizens of the USA; I know I have many copies of The Calendar Factory. Let me know in a DM on Substack if you might be curious to read these books. I’m particularly proud of The Tattletales. I call them Neo-Passéist self-consciously because I’m just playing it safe and in no way beyond this article have a pretense for being a Neo-Decadent of any standing. These books of mine are largely crime stories, genre pieces that would tire the Neo-Decadent leadership, although I’d like to think I tried to escape the clutches of genre and just write fun books.

//

Coming book reviews I want to write: Meat Puppets by Hannah Smart / Terrestrial by Suzy Eynon / Spare Us Yet by Lucas Smith (I’d like to read more of this new wave of Australian writers that are being talked about)

Currently reading: Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West by Clare Cavanagh / The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man by Marshall McLuhan

Currently listening to: Houston rap. Reading the Wikipedia pages on all the people connected with DJ Screw, all their fates and deaths, is chilling. Also listening to a lot of Janushoved cassette label. I keep saying I’ll write music reviews and that is still hopefully coming. I’m a mess of ambitions.

A WORD OF CAUTION TO THE DIAGRAM-MAKERS

We haven’t even begun to map out Theophany Gates. We don’t fall into that trap, that pitfall of the Renaissance mind with its schematic hangovers, the passageways, the infrastructure of the cosmos as it occurs to us. It cannot yet be mapped. Maybe the reticence comes from not wanting to be pinned down, not wanting to be projected into critical, uncaring minds, the minds that need the diagrams and maps. The spatial reckoning. My science isn’t adequately developed. Because it has not yet transferred across the folie a deux membrane into other minds. Study the kooky pamphlets as seen on salitters Instagram: Sophia Johanson’s dowsing, floating etheric bodies. Those sad desperate diagrams, those creepy ideas in drawings that threaten a contagion of schizoid pattern-seeking.

Until mood, belief, sleep, sex hormones, and sunlight can all be measured in concert, in relation to each other, until the maintenance angels’ activities can be traced, until some insomniac liver of life can staff the laboratory of happiness, there will be no diagram forthcoming.

Salt-dodging produces effects, or loss of effects, sometimes deep into the day after salts have been resumed. This texture of thought and existence requires close examination and care.

A feeling of edges — of barely contained freak-outs, of avatars building up speed to skip over gaps in the pavement or plummet to their dooms — comes from psych meds having their own gaps, gaps in service that create waveforms in time. This comes from a memorandum of agreement broken between God and man, in you, in your mind, your heart, and you left to deal with the ruined civilization of Jesse.

Forced smiles in the workplace are no signposts of good offramps.

Diagrams of time’s progress cannot be made regular, since time is as elastic as the containment walls of Hell. Close calls in death, that were actual deaths in alternate story point-branches, haunt the trunk of my story tree.

Details, patterns in the flux, reflect the architecture of attention and mood in the individual. Comparable to how the universe presented itself to the mystic, the theologian, the guru in the cave, the astrologer isolated with his cog-work of stars. Measurements of watching the world disassemble and devour my loved ones. If such things can be diagrammed. This science of misfortune needs images, lines on paper to reflect the world and the interior to watch them, to draw correspondences. Egyptian and Greek magicians used to call down star-influence for certain ends. Now we just carry money — itself a magical symbol — to call down influence. Paychecks are, for me, levers for opening and closing Theophany Gates, but sometimes in my life resulting in out-of-control malign effects I don’t intend.

///

“I liek gurls,” of course, that’s the manifestation. It goes deeper. I’d like to defend women, in the TV show of my writing I’d like to give them a good, strong character, an embodiment of the natural characteristics I know them to possess in an ideal world. The perfect girl. But I am left with Natasha and Aubrey, inescapably. Because they are real examples easily at hand.

“At hand or inescapable?” Dr Blurryfingers asks in his subterranean office. “There is a difference. ‘At hand’ implies a choice, a willfulness. ‘Inescapable’ suggests no choice. And the door has been closed.”

“But Dr,” I say, “there are plenty of women in my dreams. Good women. At hand, in perhaps an indirect way.”

“Is some of this instigated by your unsubscribers, your sensitivity to digital abandonment, what it means?”

I shift in my uncomfortable, squeaky chair. “I’d like to say no, but that may not be truthful. Honesty: the best policy, but it takes on a different shape online, a werewolf shape, that doesn’t serve anybody.”

“Is it ethically proper that women remain unknown to those like you who are, how shall I say, irresponsible in their impressions?”

“I haven’t met enough women to hate them,” I say. “I haven’t met the representative woman. I’ve met several ‘real women’ and had bad reactions, but those don’t need to tell the whole story.”

“Those are nothing to fear. Would the chronicle of Aubrey Andromeda be worth telling if it were positive, if it were something other than the ‘fable of the psycho ex-gf’? That is something of a contemporary myth. I’m sorry, we have to stop now. Think on this question for next time.”

I climbed up to the surface after therapy and drove back to Goblin City.

The psycho ex-gf myth is true, yet made-up, artificial, paradoxically. Almost a mirage agreed upon by traveling haggard voyagers, but based upon optical illusions and starvation-madness. I say this not to save your reputations, women, but in the interests of journalism, realism, idealism in motion. Idealism in contact with oxygen molecules. The truth may be that I met the ideal woman earlier in life, and the recent ones were distracting mutations of the ideal: imperfect samples. That’s how it goes. I am also, grievously, highly imperfect as a man. Imperfect cameras can never take good pictures of any model and produce anything worth judging. It’s in me, the problems in the women can be chalked up to problems in me, in my eyes. Which is why there could be an interest in going back in time, to when I was purer, when the lens was cleaner. Women don’t want to be made perfect, I wanted to tell Dr Blurryfingers. I sense they don’t want to be idealized. That may be the representative woman we’re talking about. It harms them, it drives them down by propping them up. It passes itself off as respect, it’s a phony respect that isn’t humanizing.

Who is that gentle lady, that woman, that maiden from the distant past whose face, voice, and form are blotted out by the more recent flawed examples? Natasha and Aubrey are, in my rendition, my sensibility, my mindset, outlines bigger than those distant women on the timeline, receding women who I can’t see because I can’t remember. Sex obscures the woman, confusingly. It could be, and I hate to say this, it could be that by touching them, by intersecting with the flesh, by sleeping with them or kissing them, I polluted the timeline, the memory. I’m guilty of an overreaction if I believe this.

///

I sneak surreptitious looks at people at Sam’s Cafe by putting on glasses and looking down first, at a book or my phone, then smoothly up at the person I caught a blurry outline of, the actual target of your glances I wanted to sneak up on. Taking the glasses off and putting them on again, according to some arcane rhythm, is a new feature of my public persona. I remember going on dates with people, women usually but then later with Tony Larry (if you could call those dates) where I left my glasses off so I was sitting across from a hazy outline I could build up feelings about: indistinct, softly lit, on my own terms or maybe a response to my own disabilities, my shortcomings. My prescription. Near-sighted.

“I’m sorry I’m finite,” I’d say later. “I’m sorry I’m a finite being, and you’re infinite, or at least your world is infinite and you have a path there that I can’t compete with, can’t make you feel as touched as all the others do. I’ve never been good at supplying others’ needs, it wrecked all my loves, all the ones that weren’t supported by blood, and I fear I will destroy those too one day. In the meantime we’re here on the leather modular couch, and you’re mad and outraged that I’m not holding you. I’d like for this to be over so I can go back to reading my book.”

///

I used to sleep with my manuscripts. Now I sleep with my passwords. Actually I used to sleep with women.

///

A dream of a tricked ghost, deceived with colored eye contact lenses into thinking it was still alive, or dead, or belonged on one side of the veil or another. The trick is to fool the ghost into thinking life and death are binary states, using props from a popular tv show. I try to find my way back to the elegant dream, and I mean that narratively, the dream was a clever animated augmentation of reality, and it got so that I could predict the artistic decisions of the dream producers as they made them, we were in tandem, we were all in the writers’ room, and I saw formal brilliance in the episodes of my dreams, brilliance that evaporated upon waking and left behind a tracery that still managed to be a reassurance that some unreadable program had been installed safely while I slept, which would contribute to my sensory envelope’s expansion while I was thenceforth awake.

The units of dream narrative were like dumb shows in which each episode is punctuated, as Shakespearean scenes were often rounded off with a couplet.

Table settings were important in dreams, long tables, then everybody gets up and moves, but not to a different place at the same table a la Alice in Wonderland, no, but to the same spot at a different identical table up the line : what is different is that the story has changed, reversals of fortune, suspenseful developments occur when the movement to another table happens. I was sat at the end of the long table, in a subservient child’s spot, added as an afterthought, embarrassing. Then at the new table: same position, but I had ascended socially above the gathering of bikers and thieves, I was a prince of criminals through the intercession of my alcoholic brother.

I had a dream of Frank Zappa as a high priest who was trying to fortify a church against zombies, I was inside with him and there were all these intrigues among family members (it wasnt the real Zappa family with its internal controversies). I think I was sleeping with Zappa-priest’s wife but he didn’t mind. His children were around, I was one of those gentlemen companions to his wife that is known and overlooked by the husband, see Lord Byron and the Gucciolis in Italy. There was a movie that had been made and the Zappa-priest had written a secret soundtrack to the movie and then strategically misplaced it somehow, he got a group of people in the projectionist’s booth to play a version, but the zombies outside who were like a political faction wanted the original soundtrack. A kid had dropped it out of a church window, it was like a castle fortress, and it materialized at the end of the dream. The movie in question had Theophany Gate characteristics, it was like a portal to a new reality envelope, a reality cell in which my father was dealing with the catheter from his bladder surgery in waking life. Friday May Day. The sexual life with the priests wife was a whole important passage of the dream that I can’t quite recall in detail: sex is blocked out these days in dreams, not to be recollected in pornographic memories, repressed by the dream directors who select what of the dream survives awakening. There were red folders, publications, missals from the church that would be handed out at services to lead congregants in the Zappa music or whatever.

I spend so much time going to sleep, because that is where the lovely, bubbly, pleasantly mouthy and alive women are. Their nudity feels special, not pornographic. It’s a fantasy where they sprawl across my desk in positions of empowered, conscious display, something of innocent early Playboy magazines or cheeky Italian sex comedies. It really could be love, it’s lighter-hearted than sex is, with all its troubles. The girl kisses me on the side of my mouth, its corner, it’s less erotic than honestly affectionate (so the dream cinematographer tells it), it’s young, unsullied by old age’s crust of cynicism, and I feel loved, by a dream, by a nude from my unconscious — and everything is scrambled, Theophany Gates are traversed by the time I wake up, what are they but some notation of mood swings impacting physical reality that I want to turn into occult folklore. Theophany Gates are like holes honeycombing psychological phenomena for me, anthills offering communicating passages between levels, chutes and ladders giving transport, benevolent or malign, chutes and ladders that the game piece can’t control, not yet. There may come a day when I will study the architecture of life’s happiness enough to master it, to take a magus-like control over the circumstances of my mind and its correspondences with the outside world. There is a teasing sensation that the pattern is just out of reach, enough of it is fresh to the senses to think there could be a complete version with some effort and luck, but the body and the mind and the sinfulness all take you away from learning the complete truth.

Anyway, the real representative women that you could call idealized only exist in my dreams now, in my airless, dark, soft, narratively cushioned dreams, and that’s both the sad tragedy of my insane life and also the most glorious escape route, a paradise cave opening out onto bright, temperate, climate-controlled imagination.

///

When theres a gash between reality cells, they heal over very quickly but very unevenly, and you can see the area of the splice if you look quickly enough, if you can see between the pulses of the maintenance angels’ wings for physical, mental and digital reality resettling after the big upset.

😭verwhelming feeling of being a train car or trolley or car at an amusement park ride maneuvered onto a different track, the narrative of the consciousness switch yard, trainyard, alternate storylines opted for by controlling forces. This is done during the dream because that’s the only time the maintenance angels can get away with it unseen: doing everything, constructing the world within the split-second interval of angelic lead time.

///

SNAP BOOK REVIEW: Bodycount by Manuel Marrero (Expat Press, 2025)

This was so startling and challenging and moving. Imagine a novel with all of its skeleton (plot, character identifications, etc) removed. Deboned. So you are left with thoughts and feelings and spiritual substance. This isn’t to say that the novel had no point of view. In many ways it’s all point of view, it’s very strong in that way. But you’re not clear, exactly, on who is speaking. It’s inchoate, it could be a whole city speaking, yammering, or a tumultuous individual comprised of many cross-sections of voices. I said somewhere that it seemed like a novel written by New York City itself on the cusp of electing Zohran Mamdani — and hating it. This is not on its surface, a feel good book. It has terrifying claws. And yet there is a deep abiding peace at work. This is one of the most Christian books I recall reading which has come out of the despair of our “Wolven Times” (ie, the times of COVID). The coronavirus damn near destroyed the world that is mourned over in this novel. Its repercussions are still being felt, its tormenting waves. The novel seems to be from a hyper linguistic millennial man’s perspective as he learns how to readjust, with wrenching pain and suffering, his views on women, in the light of letting Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit into his life. It is nakedly Catholic at the end. This guy was a player. Plot spoiler: Now he’s a repentant sinner, a figure of great contrition who still has a lot of anger toward the world. This is a tremendously angry book. It has shocking passages that might turn readers off. It is politically edgy and not an easy pill to swallow. There’s some kind of — I want to call it decadence, but that’s not the right word — some kind of “Off beat” political undercurrents at work in New York City that are countercultural, that were only increased in amplitude by COVID and all the lockdowns and all the authoritarian trappings. The city has some very deep red conservatives who feel betrayed by policy makers and end up breathing a very righteous fiery dragon’s breath in all directions. The novel introduced me to a new addition to the political lexicon: “kekistanies,” which is meant to rhyme with “epiphanies,” I take it. I might be very ignorant but it was hard to establish if this novel’s voices were all coming from one personality, or whether that mattered. The book needs to be read on its own idiosyncratic, dream-like terms. It’s not easy. One outstanding feature is the creatively raw, at times clever and funny, but always bruising linguistic risks the prose takes. The words and phrases here from Marrero are lacerating and hardly ever stop to check if you are okay, if you can keep upright and continue the journey. I can’t admire enough, or be startled enough, by the vigor and insistence on Jesus Christ as a Catholic experience that the novel brings, out of a deep darkness. That’s giving things away perhaps. But God is in the beginning and God is in the end, fittingly for an alpha-omega being. This is a true testimony, a lyrical poem of a pilgrim’s journey, and the pilgrim has razor-sharp teeth all the way through, be careful you are not cut.

///

Currently reading: Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances A. Yates. Really loving it but afraid that the demons are locking onto my signal. Books received: Belfie Hell by Shane Jesse Christmass and JK Rowling Will Sue Anyone Who Calls Her a Holocaust Denier by terrifying transgressive firebrand Tempest Miller.

I said I would review music. That is still forthcoming. My academic job is over for the summer so I have more time now to try to focus on things like the Substack. I want to finish the poetry/play book this year. Ideally by autumn. No idea how many copies to print but I’ll likely only distribute it through this Substack newsletter to interested readers: a very small-time affair for this “finite being.”

Speaking of Manuel Marrero, I think I can share that I had a poem accepted at Expat Press which is always a cool, challenging, meaningful venue.

Check out Beyond the Last Estate #6. Buy a copy at beyondthelastestate@gmail.com — it’s $13 domestically and obviously more in the rest of the world. This is a crucial bit of reading for insight into the delicious sector of underground writing where I first started seeing things through my periscope during COVID, the historical moment we were all collectively going through the same Theophany Gate, the one as big as the globe, you know, COVID: the moment we were all born into the “Wolven Times” from which there is no escape.

I might try to sell copies of my book The Calendar Factory and possibly a very limited number of The Tattletales next time around.

I have had an explosion of new subscribers since last post. I’m a bit like a stand-up comic adjusting his tie in the spotlight, a little nervous and wondering what people are doing at a Substack newsletter where there aren’t any persuasive articles on culture being written, nor pop listicles or opinions about AI. I write a loosely serialized work of fiction that combines with some of my choicest wisdom. I also write book reviews, poetry, and occasionally some things about small batch noise cassettes. Some of the sharp increase in subscribers is no doubt due to Substack Notes. I always say that I was blessed to be told in grade school that I wasn’t funny; it freed me up from so many dead ends and opened other channels, like being serious and soulful and a good letter writer. On the subject of letters, I’ve had a letter from Mathias from a faraway land! I won’t share it though. You know, I had the thought recently that in some ways I am to Mathias as Kerouac was to Neal Cassady, or as Rumi was to al-Shams (think I got my Persian poets correct). I better get “On The Road” and start typing though!

Artwork by my kid.

First, a poem.

HOTEL APPARITION, 2009

The wide veranda

facing the frozen lake

pops and snaps in the pre-dawn subzero air —

an immense sleeping dragon

who shifts and ripples irritated wings.

From the outside at night

the century-old hotel

is an elaborate cake

with half its candles blown out.

My footsteps in the snow of the back lawn end

where I must have just remembered something

and turned back.

A TV’s on in room 213.

No one’s been in there for weeks.

I creep into the periwinkle dark

to turn it off. Ghosts must like C-SPAN —

or at least lament they have no fingers

to turn to something racier,

something more embodied

like reality TV, like Survivor.

The elevator breaks while you’re on it.

It’s 3am. You can’t radio for help.

What then? That’s why I take the stairs.

Once I thought I saw a shade dart away

on one of the glass-encased landings.

I go all around the hotel, listening for noises,

not knowing what I’m trying to detect.

The big honcho from the maintenance shop

should have told the night watchman kid to watch out:

for just as lifted seashells bounce

the compressed bloodroar back to eardrums,

evoking absent seas,

so the strange voids of buildings,

empty of all living things but you,

reflect the sounds from your clothes, your pants,

your windbreaker as you walk through,

alerting you to a spectral companion’s whispers:

hints of a sub-threshold deadly presence

that stops when you stop,

and picks back up

when you move again.

Outside, in the hotel parking lot,

a crispy leaf scurried up a snowdrift

and clung to a wrought-iron fence.

And, with shadows for swords,

the full moon and the orange streetlamp

fenced all night long.

My shift ended.

I stumbled out to my car in the lot,

feeling the caffeine swell for the dream-drive home,

when something odd made me pause.

I turned around just in time

to witness a hot pink smear

of winter sunrise appearing

behind the western turret.

///

Remember quiet quitting? Remember human sacrifice? Remember being fired from your first job for masturbating alone in the window between closing the video store and setting the security alarm and leaving? In the numismatist library George Bataille examines the spintriae, pornographic metal tokens for buying access to OnlyFans bathhouses in Ancient Rome: die-cut, bas relief, the naked figures on the coin doing Eiffel towers. Like I said elsewhere, a silhouette of a map of France is cast across the text. I read Story of the Eye and thought it was garbage but I can appreciate the energy contained in garbage. I was warned that I could lose the sexual module if I wasn’t careful. The risk is that it could become detached from the brain and float into a dangerous zone in the eyeball. It had happened on a number of occasions, something about the binding sutures not being strong enough. I’m in a sci-fi erotic space. Wouldn’t you like to replay someone else’s orgasms logged in a world library?

I’m crippled. I’m a disabled ascetic on a pillar refusing food and water. Flying demons encircle me with temptations like jetliners circling airports. Incoming. If I’m lucky I’ll have a temporary reprieve from the orgone-consciousness download decades old. Al-Ghazzali’s Alchemy of Happiness rewritten as a phonebook-thick catalog of sexual hang ups. I’m stuck on page 530. God is in another chapter but flipping to the end forbidden. I’m not on a pillar I’m in a labyrinth stage set under a proscenium of false gnostic drama. I’m wandering like an extra who didn’t get the script, or the script isn’t written until 10 am each day and by then if I haven’t learned my lines I die. I wrote a lengthy poem about this delusion. It was marbled through with these mixed metaphors: the tree leaf defeats the metaphor, nature is a clearing house that contains all and cannot be filled any further by writing. I hope to write something though before I die. I’m going to put it so badly, so tanglish in the window between closing the video store and setting security alarm and leaving. I hope to evade the forces preventing my ascension. To find in the course of the one-act play a curtained side door into immortality held open by death philosophers and benevolent maintenance angels betraying their employer. I hurry through and forget its location under a Lethe flow of orgasms and sleep.

I killed a grip of flies in my house and left their bodies where they died because I’m a gross madman. I started noticing their corpses disappeared. They were deconstructed by ants which with industry took the parts away and gave to their queen a manufactured exoskeletal hat collection made of dead fly components. That is literature in the scope where it matters.

///

2^nd person sike-otherapy. Shock therapy. You must write in second person for ten years, no remission, no reversion to first. No let up. It’s psychological. Backed up by decades of scientific findings. Gets you out of ego grooves that are bad for you. Don’t think you can get away with just doing a simple technical word-replacement keystroke in your Word document, either. The replacement of “I” with “you” must be deep and thorough, and go to the bone. If you say “I” in a dream, you better wake up and apologize. It will be enforced by the Watchers, for ten years, gremlins posted up, stationed in your head for a decade, they take note of everything you say, write, think, and report to…me. You see, I can say “I” because I am your therapist, Dr Blurryfingers. You as the writer, the patient must obey the treatment. The second person. It’s done to cut you down to size, your sense of yourself, not to be artistically edgy or novel.

Not a lot more to say, unfortunately. Get at it, you. Gaslighting yourself, as they say. Or gaslighting others. “You had gay sex.” No I didn’t. Don’t say that about me. “I didn’t say it about you. I said it about me, in the second person.” Who’s on first? I don’t know (on third) but I managed to autofellate in college when I was more flexible and manic, unmedicated. I did a handstand, kind of, and sucked my own dick. Upside-down. And I could get erect enough, big enough, that I gagged on it. “No you did not.” I don’t remember if I came in my mouth or not. “Get the fuck out of here, like we’d believe that.” Whoa, we, third person? Who else is in here? “You would remember if you came or not.” I don’t remember the details, Doctor, just that I did it. No crick in the neck. My housemate Sarah, a girl who worked at the radio station who looked like Janeane Garofalo from Reality Bites, and who was sick of me, earlier asked me the question in the living room, a trick question: “Hey Noah, are you able to suck your own dick?” And whether you answered yes or no, it still equated to you being gay. If you said yes, that meant you had once had a dick in your mouth: gay. If you said no, you weren’t able to suck your own dick, that meant you tried and were unsuccessful, you’d wanted to, which was the same as being gay. A straight guy would think on his feet and say, “I don’t know, Sarah, I never tried. Never even thought about it.” Maybe that’s what put it into my head, Sarah’s question. Anyway I did try and I did do it, with all the blood rushing to my head. Self-sodomy, on multiple levels of factuality. And what sensation was I seeking, what end of the telephone line so to speak. It’s a bizarre, alien thing to do, inhuman, contortionist, unnatural, like a demonic insect. Nonsensical. But like you said, Doctor, I was crazy at the time. “And lonely.” Probably.

///

Recently on social media I tweeted, for who knows what reason, “That time I went to buy my wife negligee as a gift, but I didn’t have enough $$ to go top of the line, and it was a disaster. She wore it once, w/ a horrified look on her face. It was orange silk, and it looked like capture the flag. But she looked like cake to me.” It was an orange nightie. I’d secretly gotten her measurements, 36-24-37, and gone to the pop-up lingerie store in Goblin City. The woman working there was a college student I’d seen in the arts building doing a production of The Vagina Monologues, I’d gone with my wife Natasha. Anyway the Vagina Monologue student showed me an assortment of garments. I said I was shopping for my wife. She believed me. I forget the prices but there was a red number that looked great but it was out of reach for me and my wages as a night watchman at the hotel, so I compromised for the orange nightie. When I gave it to Natasha, her eyes bulged out. I couldn’t tell at the time if she was into it. I made her put it on. It might have been a size too small for her, she was spilling out of it, which was fine with me. But yeah: orange. Safety orange? Visibility orange, like the flags used by construction workers directing traffic. Anyway, she still let me hit it while she was wearing it. But it never came out of the box again. And then Natasha left me sometime after that. Unknown if she ever put it on again.

There’s that unrelenting urge to check the phone, to see how the orange nightie tweet is doing, who’d liked it. The lady from Berlin, the podcaster lady, liked it, probably laughing, and another Canadian woman online. So two women got it. If there is something to get. It feels redeeming for me to get women’s likes on social media. A relation – not a relationship, but a relatedness. Women understand what I am trying to say. Even though I don’t myself. If I can get a woman’s like, it is one tiny step closer, a molecule, unnoticed by her or them or Elon Musk or anybody watching, closer to the woman, some woman, womankind, to break through the crust of solitude built up around me, chitin-like.

It is not enough to look at women. My sexuality license may yet be revoked. I’m not allowed to be horny on a case-by-case basis, in writing. I’m reduced to my category, my class, my status as a man, a sexual pig – I’m tainted by every public pronouncement that another man has made in the service of his libido, his public libido, which may as well be some Jungian group consciousness all men punch a clock and show up to like a workplace, as opposed to my individual private libido, which has a unique shape I fear showing to the world.

I had a “prestige” last night. Don’t speak Marquis de Sade? Translation: I jerked off, and now predictably feel like garbage. You’d think I’d learn to avoid that but if you thought that you would be ignorant of the mechanisms of the Noah Turbot CNS. After being celibate from masturbation and orgasm for a while, the delusional thought emerges (it’s a light delusion, you might say – or is it the heaviest of them all?). The delusional thought develops that it might be different this time. Retrospective falsification, as the psychologist Dr Blurryfingers explained it at the sike hospital you went to after being dumped. A lack of insight about the emotional continuity or discontinuity that occurs, when there is something as shattering as an orgasm seems to be with me. “Surely you deserve to feel good just this one time. Give in to your lust.” And once again, the prestige is a trap. And the double trap is setting out on an intellectual excursion to understand it. That’s the lethal part. There’s no travel companion stout enough or wise enough, no hobbit valet to carry me on your way to destroy the ring, to help navigate the journey or avoid the snares. Nobody has ever heard of this problem. Trina Flood, my sike nurse practitioner, who prescribes your sike meds, was going to call on the retired (now deceased and in hell) Dr. Blurryfingers, who had talked to me about it before and suggested “prolactin” although that seems doubtful, at least to Trina Flood. But her expertise is not all it’s cracked up to be. The next step is asking an AI assistant to search through every medical record known to man for “post-orgasm emotional syndrome.” I don’t want to do that because I don’t want some AI entity, connected to who knows where, knowing I want to jump off a bridge after busting a nut.

Wash my black jeans today. They’re encrusted with splattered cum. I have this image of Vaughan, the death-defying bisexual cult leader/hustler from Ballard’s novel Crash in mind, that he is some hero to emulate. It’s psycho, it’s sexy, it’s punk, it’s messy. What it is may be sinful and demon-calling. The devil I’ve come to know, named MTV/HBO, locks onto my signal when I have a load in your pants. I must wash myself too. “My ablutions are the solution to my dilutions and my pollutions.” Head itching, filth and dead skin cells building up, the trash piling up on the sidewalks of my body, not being disposed of properly. Out of self-hate.

The laziness of not cleaning the dead sperm off myself. Humans can live in their own mess, is what I’m saying. They have for millennia. Why not me too? I am surrounded by book drifts, not To Be Read piles which are at least neat stalagmites of books growing up in my man-cave. No these are book drifts. It’s a detritus incited and created by inner madness, bibliomaniacal in nature. I can only joke about it, but jokes are not remedies, not solutions. Never that.

I could save up so much money if I did not buy books. It would be such a good feeling, a feeling of freedom. But I am not likely to ever know that freedom, just as I will never know it from masturbation no matter how long I retain semen, SPENDING is my problem, spending spirit, spending money, spending precious attention. Like dwindling coinage the attention bank dries up. Unaccountable, no accountability. Who will drag me to debtor’s prison for my bankruptcy of attention, mind, spirit, life-force?

I used to sleep in a bed full of writing. Now I sleep with my passwords. Actually I used to sleep with women. The women online are a mimesis of real women. A clever one, that can trick the gullible, like me. Can I tell the difference, after a while? Do I even want to, do I see a moral to the story of telling the difference? I’m not talking about porn, that’s mostly gone now. I’m talking about Instagram, and even Trina Flood the nurse practitioner in the proscenium of the telemedicine box onscreen. Instagram videos, women talking to the implied audience in the camera. What is this false woman: a sphinx, a projection of a woman’s face on a statuary wall, a frieze, in bas relief. As a kid, I loved the woman flanked, framed within spreadsheets of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the topless woman arching her back and embodying the curve of the night sky with its significant stars. Is that what I’m seeing when I scroll the women by? Some incompletion, some suspicion that there’s something quite wrong, like a headache but located out there — some ache in the world, shaped like a woman’s smiling talking head talking energetically, expressively to the camera.

I’m attracted to the ache, I want to embrace the ache with your whole body. Memories of holding naked women are like necrophilia because the living body of the woman has gone, moved on in time on a branching path away from my past. The embrace won’t save me. But I don’t even know what it won’t save me from. I lost the signal. A lack of blood pressure, a passage through a sieve into the land of death where I will be taken apart and reintegrated. Death was to have subtle signposts, unreadable to those like my daughter Leigh as she passes by, unreadable to most others, but I know how to interpret the markings.

The almost-hidden tears can be seen in Leigh’s eyes as I pledge allegiance to aloneness, loneliness, solitude, isolation, there on the loveseat loveless where we sat. Leigh’s mother Natasha walked circuits around the college track with me, one of those trying to be amicable “normal things” we did while divorcing, bitter mitosis or whatever that splitting was called, arguing with me for the first vital time when an earlier fight might have saved us.

I know where the pen drifts to, like all bed-bound objekts. I sense the loose pen in bed with me when I dream, amongst the book-drift next to me in bed that, if shifted, would fill in itself, nature abhorring a vacuum, like literature abhors a vacuum. I’m not a writer. I can prove it to the IRS. I swore to my friends I wouldn’t write anymore. Speaking of abhorring vacuums, I do so in my living room before visitors come. I vacuumed rice up off the threadbare Pakistani carpet in my living room while Leigh watched. Bed knowledge is what I really have, objekt knowledge. I expend it, what I would have otherwise spent on significant others, ghost spouses in my bed. I expend it on clutter, point to point, that matches one-to-one the clutter inside your head. I caught up with the hermetic insight of “as above, so below.” It’s not romantic. Sike-ological objekts: both words are misspelled, why? In order to reterritorialize them, as the online Nadja instructed me to, through hints. I set life and beard and clothes on autopilot, no woman-trial to start or stop, no interaction with women to materially impress. That’s all gone, into the data of online dating profiles, dead internet theory.

I keep my hands freezing so I don’t jerk off. Celibacy is put into words in order to promote such a juvenile line. Women onscreen would have me executed for impotence, or something equivalent to execution: banishment, exile, perhaps.

With men, I have to make it up as I go, at this very late date. Like my own romantic life in all categories. I have never had real-world experience of same-sex jealousy before Tony Larry, never that flavor. I never progressed to letting myself truly feel anything like that, or at least not at the level of full consciousness. The experiment was terminated in lab conditions before it could develop into a new scientific fact, a new class of mental objekt. Would a reader care that I was brave enough to acknowledge the Tony Larry situation in a general, non-committal way, but not brave enough to follow through with it in substance, rubber hitting the road? It’s like reading maps of Paris, or reading writers describing Parisian street life, but never going there. And then I try to write about the place. I’ve never been in a gay locale, gay coordinate points, where a formal gay date was happening for real. I don’t even remember where the hetero date happened either, not actually, not outside a dream boulevard. This is my fundamental disability as a person, as a random spirit lover, a lost man. Acts of imagination are, like, all I have. Maybe that’s all I really need: isotopes of love, love missing one molecule that, if it were placed correctly, would make an atmosphere of love physical. A guide is unavailable to take me on a tour of the haunted house, in either the Male or Female Wing, basement, attic, wherever I feel I must go.

Walking around with Tony Larry, who didn’t suspect a thing, in his agricultural hipster getup, and the teenage boys hooting from the passing car window although all we were doing was walking around the block after lunch “as friends.” The aura is unmistakable, neon signs giving the trace-signification of nancy boys in the air above the sidewalk. I half-wanted to jump into this question space, this curiosity cube that travels around over my shoulders, that all eyes can see in augmented reality. Delusional self-suspicion wins it.

I’m writing this, dizzy, in a notebook, levorotary twisted in bed by my books. The sun is setting and a gloom is lit by the last desperate snowdrift’s reflection of the sky at dusk, leached of light. The snow serving as a vestige of sunlight, last terminal remnants. It’s a white but deathly half-light. I cling to qualities of light on my quest for religious meaning. The light of God is in prism threads everywhere, in the spiderwebs twinkling in spring before predator birds pluck the orb weavers away for their dinner. In my sister’s prismatic crown of fiery hair in Delancey sunlight as I breathed an awed sigh of relief at not killing myself after the hospital. Now the dusk concatenated in snow ground, sky illumined snowbanks that spell some horrible seasonal-affective falling off of winter light and life. It can be something other than death, if I want.

///

REVIEWS

I recently reread Rudy Johnson’s Dead Poem Storage published by Beneath the Last Estate. Is it possible for poetry to be refreshingly offensive? Rudy channels so much rage and carefully shaped bad taste into his poetry. It takes me back to the feeling of discovery I had during the insanity of COVID lockdowns when I really first made the online acquaintance of these writers affiliated with the publication Misery Tourism, and their brand of transgressive and outsider writing that still managed to be…good-natured if I can say that? Try to put yourself into a comfy chair where you somehow find humor in modern-day atrocities like school shootings and wars and racism. It’s hard to do, right? It’s a tonally difficult place to inhabit. But some poets do go there, manage to make it an artistically valid experience. Maybe I’m sick, but I found Dead Poem Storage to be very funny, and even rejuvenating. Its political incorrectness, somewhat akin to Miss Unity’s in Who Killed Mabel Frost?, takes you back to a simpler time when people would say irredeemable things for a laugh, in a school-room setting. Rudy’s racial humor is a thing that would perhaps die under a critical microscope, but I’m actually happy that he and publisher Gabriel Hart have put it out. I can’t even begin to argue for its legitimacy, but if I wanted to reach I might say that Amiri Baraka wrote scathing poetry about blackness, too. Lenny Bruce, all kinds of comics. The times we live in are shocking, and numbing, so the art must be shocking too (according to one aesthetic theory), in order to WAKE US UP.

Other books I read included James Nulick’s Valencia about which I’m still trying to formulate my thoughts. I had intended to review it in a group with Charlie Porter’s Nova Scotia House and Nate Lippens’ My Dead Book from the standpoint of the “HIV/AIDS novel,” but that fell apart as I saw the three novels were quite different. Porter’s novel is the only one really “about” AIDS. The virus casts a shadow across all three novels but the shadows are in some instances very spare and incidental. Valencia, of the three clearly autobiographical books, is maybe the most low-key and vibrationally dense novel. By density I mean Nulick’s writing has a telegraphic pulse to it that never becomes giddy, as Porter’s lauded “queering of Samuel Beckett” did for me (I didn’t like this about Porter’s writing style). Porter’s book was the most sexually graphic of the three. Lippens’ was the funniest. Funny goes a long way.

CURRENTLY READING

Annemarie Schimmel’s Mystical Dimensions of Islam

Aristophanes’ Frogs and Other Plays (I love this book)

William T. Vollmann’s Whores for Gloria (it had a shaky start for me but I’m getting into it; first Vollmann I’ve read)

Since I mentioned Beyond the Last Estate I just wanted to put a plug in for the latest issue, #6 which is out now.

This is an image taken from Instagram, which is territory on the battle map we all have a responsibility to reclaim from the dickheads and propagandists. Contact Gabriel at beyondthelastestate@gmail.com to order your copy, I believe it’s $13 now. Totally worth it. I’ve heard they’re getting overwhelming orders now so act fast. I just wanted to say, if you’re a fan of my writing, I will have three poems in this issue, as well as four book reviews, plus I chimed in on the question of marijuana for writers, pro or con.

Thanks to everybody who responded so positively to my last post/newsletter about the Miss Unity book. This book feels like an important piece of outsider literature from recent days that shouldn’t recede into the shadows.

Next time around, I plan to have some music reviews up, plus more book reviews if I can get my shit together.

ONE CHRYSALIS AT A TIME

This is a reprint of an article which appeared in significantly different form in issue #1 of Beyond the Last Estate. I have republished the article on the request of individuals on Substack who have taken an interest in this little-known book from recent years. Who knows, maybe this work should be forgotten. If it were up to me, I’d say no: I just liked the artistic accomplishment and I supported it as I have supported books of other friends from this edgy twilight zone that surged under the conditions of the coronavirus…

An event exactly two years ago to the day, entitled “Who Killed Miss Unity?” was, I thought, bound to be ripe with murderous energy: sword play, palpable hits, aggression, but it wasn’t. I had been invited to be one of the warm-up readers at the event along with a handful of others at a book launch party for my friend Mathias Mietzelfeld. The venue was at a bar called Roots Brewing Company in the small college town of Oneonta, NY — a small upstate city that poet Mark Blickley (also asked to read at the book launch) described as “less a city than a strip mall with asthma.” Blick also commented to me at our table inside Roots on Oneonta’s shambling sidewalk junkies, which reminded him of those in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The event wasn’t as murderous as its title. It was warm and the atmosphere was more like an emotional, vibey reunion of writers from the area that COVID-19 had scattered, and inertia had not until now worked to bring back together.

Mathias has always seemed, under the cognomen Unity or Miss Unity or what have you, to be on some allegorical trip. There is a performance art quality to his presentation style, his way of moving through social life, and the Identity is the potter’s clay of this chosen medium. I met him in the Pre-Wolven Times, before COVID-19, at a local poetry open mic in the neck of the upstate New York woods where I’ve lived for the past 25 years or so. We just knew him as Unity Falls as that was the name he wrote down on the sign-up sheet at the open mic. He would get up and sing songs and read startlingly funny and harrowing short stories that seemed to be ripped from a mysterious streetwise life. The bluestockings at the open mic were no doubt scandalized by his epic tales of blowjobs behind dumpsters and rough sleeping in NYC’s choicest grassy knolls. His characters were like bits on sketch comedy TV shows, although if you looked deeper there was a suffering person under all that performance, once.

But now there is a book, Who Killed Mabel Frost? (Short Flight/Long Drive Books), a real object to thoroughly buttress this self-architecture. The book’s reality presents some problems. Its front matter is marked with the typical legal language stating, “This is a work of fiction, etc.,” and a more conspicuous note warns “Absolutely none of this is true.” But after reading the book, these signposts of make-believe all seem like ink sprayed into the eyes of the reader to mislead him and make a fast getaway.

Mathias, who I was recently introduced to years after knowing him as Unity or Miss Unity, had lunch with me and assured me the contents of the book were real. To add further complexity, he wanted to disavow the book since it was about a former time in his life, specifically his gender transition and then subsequent detransition.

I will make no comment on his disavowal of the work other than to say it’s an unfortunate development because the book is searing. I had read many of its chapters as they had shown up as essays on Elizabeth Ellen’s Hobart Pulp. When I’d read the pieces as separate chunks online, I had detected a “pretty vacant” quality at work that matched the venue at the time, which frequently publishes stories about beautiful and jaded young people wallowing in sex, drug abuse, life on the skids. But having the pieces collated together into a book with a holistic arc gave me several fresh impressions. The material in Miss Unity’s hands wasn’t one-dimensional; the vacuousness, if there was any, was studied and belied a profound substance underneath. After 258 pages, the tales of dissipation, debauchery, and hard living were necessary to emerge at a political position more authentic and earned than the well-plotted lives of most fictional characters achieving pre-packaged enlightenment. It’s real because the book’s texture is a scourge on the flesh of the sheltered and the safe.

Take a Jean Genet outsider character, plant him in America and give him post-graduate education and an Instagram account. Spare him the long prison sentences despite his petty crimes, track him through a demimonde of squats in NYC and Chicago and a queer farming enclave in rural Tennessee: drugs, prostitution, homelessness. Follow him from the radical politics which typically cheerlead individuals transitioning genders in the 21^st century, indeed through disillusionment to an authentically owned a posteriori political incorrectness. Watch the identities molt off him like skins or feathers off a peripatetic beast who walks paths unknown to the average American pilgrim.

The book is a series of apparent nightmares faced from Miss Unity’s remove of earthly sanity and wit. But the Genet-style transgression remains. You may not like where it all winds up if you grade it on a rubric established by commissars enforcing queer dogmatisms — it would not be a standardly welcome book. I later heard that some bookstores refused to stock it because of what it was about. But you don’t have to like it. It is too real to be liked or disliked. Too lived in. That should be all that matters.

The argument of the book, what sets it apart from the presumed phalanx of stories of down-and-out self-destructive living, has to do with the “detransitioner counterspin” that comes by the end. Urban and rural queer revolutionary spaces, ironically presented as outposts of the well-examined life, soon come in for Miss Unity’s sharp criticism. Whether the book was meant to be a bracing corrective or not, we as readers peer into a life that transcends the typical narrative not once, but twice, or more. Mietzelfeld strongly suggests to us that the expected landscape of an honest, frank life should involve transformations, expansions, and potential reversals, irrespective of any typical political narrative. Life is tossed over and over again on the wheel of fortune and not the narrow cycles of the Discord message board.

The MC at the book’s launch party in Oneonta was local professor and noted poet Robert Benson, who invoked the classical world as a backdrop for the concepts behind Who Killed Mabel Frost? Benson quoted the Latin poet Ovid, who in his Metamorphoses wrote, “Now I am ready to tell how bodies are turned into other bodies.” Ovid’s work, the English professor said, recounts “stories of humans changed into animal or plant form (like Narcissus) at the pleasure of the gods.” We don’t change on that radical, mythological scale today, though Benson noted to the gathered crowd that every seven years every cell of our bodies is replaced. “We know change is the one unchanging element in our lives. The ability to change is inherent in living. In fact, not to be able to change is worse than death — it is the most extreme punishment after death, as in the lower circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno,” where the greatest punishment “isn’t fire, but ice. Souls trapped in ice forever, unable to move or change.”

Miss Unity, being retired and buried six feet under, may never write a book this resounding again, and no one should demand it. Replicating a story and an experience like this would kill the typical lifeform; one chrysalis is enough to go through. Although if the perceptive writing in Who Killed Mabel Frost? is a signal of anything, any future books from a pen like this, envisioning further conversions natural to life, conversions physical as well as intellectual and spiritual, would certainly be riveting.

“Previously on Chlorophyll & Hemoglobin”:

Very quickly, my therapist in life, Dr Blurryfingers died at the height of his scholarly powers and had to set up offices in Hell, in the Mall of Dis. I see him once a week, I travel down the series of escalators, some broken, to the Mall of Dis, and wait until it’s my turn for a therapy session. Without fail, the patient who sees Dr Blurryfingers in the schedule before me, a senior devil in Pandemonium, goes over in his time. And Blurryfingers is unwilling to make up for the dent in my time by adding minutes onto the other end: “I have clients still coming after you, I can’t change everything around for you.”

I talk about filling in gaps in therapy with Blurryfingers, I forget the context or the make up to those spoken sentences of mine, but “I am brilliant.” I never quite recall what I say. It evaporates minutes after I leave his office.

It used to be very important that I make my therapists laugh, that I entertain them, give them something to remember or something to make it worthwhile for them: transference. Now it feels more dire, like it’s about me and my health. Joke-time is largely over. Big things are at stake. I suppose more than seeing Blurryfingers laugh I like to see him writing things down on his pad of paper, things I can tell are not idle doodles or cartoons, but piquant observations. I see I rose to the level of being note-worthy. But I leave the notes as blurs on the paper on the other side of the room, I don’t ask. But I aim to find out.

Blurryfingers does not allow tape recorders into therapy sessions, he says it’s out of an excess of caution over lawsuits, but I’m going do it anyway. It’s my treatment, I believe I should have access to all of it, doctor’s notes, recordings of the sessions I seem to have amnesia for as I ascend the escalators back to the surface, everything.

In my pocket is a fully charged microcassette recorder I used to utilize in my newspaper days, for interviews and recording public municipal meetings. It has an excellent microphone. It typically can go for 45 minutes or more without emitting a loud beep and shutting off, but I can’t be sure, it’s just a risk.

We’re talking about dreams. Blurryfingers, when he was alive, wrote numerous papers for American Psychology Review on the phenomena of “dream hard-ons,” erections at the tail ends of dreams marking the process of resurfacing to consciousness, often as the result of the bladder becoming full of urine in sleep. But like the alarm clock whose bells become incorporated, before awakening, into the dream texture as dogs barking or judges giving awful dream-verdicts, the hard-on is a stimulus that manifests in the dream as erotic information, a plot device, a MacGuffin.

I’ve been threatening to leave Dr Blurryfingers’ care over such ridiculous, belittling treatment, but his practice is the only therapy offered within easy driving distance by my health insurance: Medicaid extends into the bowels of Hell.

Blurryfingers brought with him to the underworld his extensive library which I scan in the stray distracted moments in the therapy chair. Blurryfingers invokes this or that theory: ideas of reference, reaction formation, “reality testing,” Gestalt psychology. He also is fond of quoting John Updike (he has all his books), Woody Allen, Paul Goodman. He’s pointed out some volumes during our sessions, and when I’ve gently asked if I can borrow books, he says he doesn’t allow that, because he doesn’t know if the books will ever be returned. “Especially with my clientele living in such varied addresses,” he says.

So, accordingly, when he goes further into his tomb for a minute to check on a piece of paperwork or attend to an important voicemail, I leap into action. He can’t see me or hear me for a sliver of hidden time, and I grab a random book down off the shelf. Just as I steal the recordings of our session, I further puncture the atmosphere of therapeutic trust by stealing books from my shrink. I steal and steal and steal. I’m sure this means something, or would mean something if Blurryfingers ever figured it out, which he won’t. I hide the book in my bundled jacket next to me. I leave at the end of my session, my theft undetected by my doctor.

Hooded women are the look at the Mall of Dis: hooded student women wander in covered heads but not in religion, in some kind of self-defense against elements, against modes of exposure in Hell. that had little to do with sex or gender. It isn’t until I’m well out of the Mall of Dis, on one of the working escalators back to the surface and Goblin City, avoiding the restless ghosts around me, that I look at the book and see that it’s Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, translated by Joyce Crick. I should have taken a minute to pick something a little more juicy. At least I thought so, until I read it over the next two weeks.

It was a challenging, trying book in places. The introduction explained that this was early Freud, and the Viennese doctor considered it to be one of his peaks of inspiration. It offers a glimpse into his autobiography as he often utilized his own dreams as interpretive fodder. My main complaint with the book, such that I understood it, is that he often read his own dreams and the dreams of his patients as you might read a written text, staying on the look out for German puns which revealed large swathes of rich neurotic detail to chew on. I don’t believe dream-life is so dependent upon wordplay. This is true, especially since other media has taken pride of place in our culture besides the written word: better to say dreams resemble cinematic language in the present era than to liken it all to puns, in German or English or any language.

I underlined the following passages as interesting to me, and in a headstrong way I laughed at the idea that Blurryfingers would see the underlined sections, if I ever lowered myself to returning the book on his shelf later in the course of treatment.

“Every dream has at least one place where it is unfathomable, the navel, as it were, by which it is connected to the unknown.” (88)

“It will rightly be concluded from this discussion that I maintain there are no trivial initiators of dreams, and this no innocuous dreams. This is my strict and single-minded opinion, excepting the dreams of children and perhaps brief dream-reactions to nocturnal sensations…The dream never wastes its time on trifles; we do not allow a mere nothing to disturb our sleep…The apparently innocuous dreams turn out to be pretty bad when we take the trouble to interpret them: if I may be permitted the expression, the dream ‘wasn’t born yesterday.’” (140)

“It has been my experience that every dream without exception deals with oneself. Dreams are absolutely self-centered.” (246)

“If the account of a dream appears difficult for me to understand at first, I ask its narrator to repeat it. He rarely does so in the same words. But the passages where he has altered his narrative are the ones revealed to me as the weak spots in the dream’s disguise; they serve me as the embroidered sign on Siegfried’s cloak served Hagen…The narrator has been warned that I intend to take particular care in solving the dream; so under the pressure of resistance, he quickly protects the weak spots in the dream’s disguise by replacing a revealing expression by one more remote. In this way he draws my attention to the expression he has dropped. From the trouble taken to defend the dream against being solved, I am able to infer how much care has gone into weaving the dream its cloak.” (335) Thanks for the heads-up, Sigmund.

“The daytime thought might possibly play the part of entrepreneur for the dream, but the entrepreneur who has the idea, as we say, and the will to translate it into action, still cannot do anything without capital; he needs the capitalist to take on the expenses, and the capitalist in this case, who contributes the psychical expenditure for the dreams, is always and unfailingly, whatever the daytime thought may be, a wish from the Unconscious.” (365)

“…the most complicated feats of thinking are possible without the participation of consciousness.” (389)

“We shall have to conclude, no doubt, that psychical reality is a particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality.” (440)

///

Many other intriguing things were written there, in that silly book I only read once, and hardly with much concentration, including the discussion of the inner apparatus of the mind, the so-called “Ψ-system” that occupies conceptual space, can be graphed, and conducts energy back and forth through the Unconscious, the Pre-conscious, and the Conscious spaces (it seems under Freud’s innovation to be a system that conducts a quasi-electrical force, but in other translations such as the Standard Edition translated by James Strachey, this energy is christened “cathexis,” which according to subsequent commentators is vaguely likened to an occupying army taking up a significant geographic position—again, I’m not the expert, Blurryfingers is).

One fascinating thing I noticed while reading the book, and this would lead me to recommend the book to others no matter how irreverently I may be coming off, is how many small details from dreams I’d had, sometimes decades before, bubbled up to my consciousness while reading Freud. Moments in dreams from my teenaged years, from my twenties, from various points in my adult life, recurred to me—or did they? A part of me wanted to deflect this strange, almost mystical brain-activity as a kind of optical illusion created by odd, random brain-chemistry: a minuscule burst of dopamine or serotonin pops and a false corridor of memory is created down which a thought from the present moment is glimpsed, and given the untrue dimensions of something from a long-ago dream. But no, some of these dream-memories did seem to the honest and accurate because I had written them down years prior, I checked!

Another thing that happened was that, for a while as I read the book, the dream-lens that I viewed my night-time adventures seemed to have been power-washed by Freud’s book; events, characters, locations came through with astonishing clarity and vividness.

Examples: a dream of the tricked ghost, deceived with colored eye contact lenses into thinking it was still alive, or dead, or belonged on one side of the veil or another. The trick is to fool the ghost into thinking life and death are binary states, using props from a popular tv show. I try to find my way back to the elegant dream, and I mean that narratively, the dream was a clever animated augmentation of reality, and it got so that I could predict the artistic decisions of the dream producers as they made them, we were in tandem. Units of dream narrative, dumb shows in which each episode is punctuated, as Shakespearean scenes were often rounded off with a couplet. And I saw formal brilliance in the episodes of my dreams, brilliance that evaporated upon waking and left behind a tracery that still managed to be a reassurance that some unreadable program had been installed safely while I slept, which would contribute to my sensory envelope’s expansion while I was thenceforth awake.

Another vivid dream revolved around table settings, long tables, then everybody gets up and moves, but not to a different place at the same table a la Alice in Wonderland, no, but to the same spot at a different identical table up the line: what is different is that the story has changed, reversals of fortune, suspenseful developments occur when the movement to another table happens. I was at the end, in a subservient child’s spot, added as an afterthought, embarrassing. Then at the new table: same position, I had ascended socially above the gathering of bikers and thieves, I was a prince of criminals through the intercession of my alcoholic brother.

Another dream led me to have the following train of thought that followed me into waking hours: The loss experienced when Instagram stories or YouTube or anything is on mute auto play and you’re distracted — feeding a dog, going to the bathroom — your phone progresses through the ephemeral crystal labyrinth without you, clicks and advances through the unconscious media carousel unseen, by you, and those momentous peopled fragments are just gone, just gone.

You think my observations about online life are sad, evidence of obvious calamitous decline, but I see them as the foundational documents of a new age, new Magna Carta, Magna Carti B. Like a tidal wave that causes mass death but builds a new coastline, a flood that establishes a new excrescence of economic activity hundreds of years after the present disaster — and the money and jobs make the past death alright.

I don’t bother trying to apply Freud’s analytic skills and parlor games to interpreting my dreams; maybe I’ll bring these up to Blurryfingers one day. One final note: when I did come to listen back to the recordings of my therapy sessions on the tape recorder, all that came through was noise. Some sort of magnetic interference holds sway in the underworld due to the devil’s presence in the therapy office just before me: I can hear voices talking but they’re not myself or Dr Blurrfyingers. I was trying to place where I’d heard these terrifying voices and noises before, and the closest analogies I could come up with were the sounds I heard on the following cassette:

THE VOMIT ARSONIST—“Taciturn” (Begin Hostilities)

--rhythmic rail tracks, often there is this sense of industrial motion, metallic clanks. Underground mining, howling distorted vocals you can only imagine what it’s saying from other emotional cues. Pissed off young men, other planet-ness. I appreciate the rhythmic qualities. Gives the mind something to lock onto. The vocals are unintelligible nearly, people seem to like this distortion, this mind confusion escaping apprehension. It has an emotional value, this avoidance of understanding. That’s the art, the art of no art.

Vomit Arsonist vocals are in a way like singing. Boyd Rice announcements, shouting. Military, incantatory, what you yell at demons to give them orders. Peals of language. Vocals augmented. Hatred, negative. It is art. It qualifies for me. Nothing of a humour. Then, to add some variety and spice, that good old bereft crying of the abducted victim at the bottom of the well. Old reliable helpless screaming. Is this artistic? Shattered voice box of the cyborg. Nothing friendly. Choral backgrounds at times. Something devastatingly beautiful, junkyards on fire at night. Metal yards on fire. Wish my mind weren’t colonized by sci fi movies to serve as the go-to allegories analogous of the soundtracks. Industrial. Something Nikola Tesla would have nightmares about. In some ways the vocal processing serves (perhaps) as protection against human vulnerability of the screamer. Self-consciousness impossible behind the veil of bubbling distorted effects—no effect. Percussive blasts. Self-induced vertigo. The speech illegible but some emotion bleeds through, it does things to the listener, who can’t make out the words.

OTHER BOOK REVIEWS:

Thomas Moore, WE’LL NEVER BE FRAGILE AGAIN, 95 pages. (Amphetamine Sulphate)

It was a snap to read, it took me not long. The prose was very sparse and ethereal if that’s the right word. I’ve been meaning to read something by Thomas Moore for a while. The overwhelming feeling I get from the book is it’s all very real, the emotions are all genuine and it could be an essay as well as a novel, it’s that upfront. But not direct, a lot is left unsaid. The gay themes were welcome and the loneliness vibes were overpowering, that was valuable. Otherwise there wasn’t a ton to latch onto, maybe that’s why I would give it three stars as opposed to four or five. Not a very great book. Amphetamine Sulphate can be a bit hit or miss at times: there are S-tier authors at that publisher and then there are lesser talents, I gather. It’s rough because the books are expensive and a little tough to acquire, maybe. I didn’t really like Chris Zeischegg’s The Magician very much. I’m still glad I read this. I can believe in the life that was lived to spawn this book.

New Juche, STUPID BABY, 52 pages. (Amphetamine Sulphate)

This book was upsetting and sad, but good. The pattern that it used, the repetitions of text messages from Thai prostitutes followed by thorough, journalistic descriptions of the narrator’s life with these ladies, culminated in something mournfully sad. The environments these tales happened in, and the people described, were grotesque but somehow at the same time, suffused with a humane presence. Prostitution, pornography, outsiders, obsession: these are the cardinal points to New Juche’s compass as developed in Stupid Baby. This was a score from Amphetamine Sulphate. Uncomfortable and redolent with the literary underground. I could read more of this, even though it felt icky.

A POEM of mine, at Don’t Submit (sorry, the screenshots repeat a little, just bear with the repetitions)

Aboard the plane, I make a statement to my wife Natasha that’s preposterous. And to respond she pulls a face from her collection: corners of her mouth pulled back, her eyes rolled up and to her right. It is a playful face, gently wondering where along the way good sense got lost. Beneath the seat in front of me, my wedding album lies, so new and thick with faces it’s become a cube. For seven aching hours my feet have got nowhere to go. Natasha’s smirk gives her authority, dislodges me from my falsehood, at least until we land in Sacramento. Friends of hers live there, who couldn’t make it to the wedding, friends she flaunts the album at, as if to prove that longshots still were possible. At the dinner table with her friends, more chastising smirks from her.

I was higher than a motherfucker looking at Natasha in the dim bedroom back home in Goblin City. The white flesh of her standing nude body by the bed reflecting in its perfect silken luster the periwinkle light of the xm radio screen playing slow beats. Nudity under a white-blue LED star gave off its own prism threads, each miniscule, barely visible hair on her body reflecting frosty light. I thought about her cuckolding me with a hip hop soundtrack. I wanted to avoid this. The intrusive thoughts lecture. Who is she, which briefly illumined facet of the gently twisting gem cut as many times as there are women in NY state, that will never spin a full 360° and allow me to see her whole again? In an uncomfortable trance I stare at her body behind rotating costumes. Time’s rhythm is the cuckolding intervener leaving ruined haunted buildings in my mind-city.

Years later, Natasha’s face folds up, a roadmap to a lost county and the cubic wedding album’s stored away inside her attic, like remains of a cremated cat. I move into “a hospital for people who think too much.” I see a new woman, Aubrey Andromeda, filling in the absence across from me at the Greek diner. She’s much younger than my wife was, and speaking breathlessly of politics or Hollywood, the dark web intelligentsia. She’s an intellectually alt-right stormtrooper of death, her cold eyes agape with credulity. Aubrey says things so naive I can’t avoid commandeering my ex-wife’s long-lost smirk, her rolling eyes, the face so eloquent, although it’s on another skull now. This sudden mimicry of my ex’s face is like a private line I tread, the line between wanting, and wanting to be. It’s one way of keeping her ghost-candle alive, inside. Think: how the digestive tract of the chameleon sucks down a Madagascan butterfly’s kaleidoscopic wings, allowing them their colorful rebroadcast in the skin. Picture all the vanished ladders from history. They built things high and tall. How did they get up there but by building temporary scaffolding which would then be dismantled and taken away. The Sistine Chapel’s paint job and the basalt chapeaux of Easter Island. You have to really believe in something to do it like that. That immense statue of Jesus Christ spreading arms above Rio sprouts scaffolding from his armpits.

A relationship is a ladder that must be turned into firewood, itself temporary. No more climbing, only fighting freezing. Everybody wants to inject missing structure into my life. I drink bitter coffee in my Buick and step on it, sheds miles of NY roads. I’ll never see 3D boobs again in my life, not unless I draw another nude model again in a life drawing class. A terrifying unbidden thought that comes to me is what if boobs are emptiness. What if all the many lifetimes spent focusing judgment on women’s bodies was for no real purpose. Threatening atheism. The gulf unbridgeable. I still cling to love and try to catch her eye. Whose eye. All eyes. Men’s eyes, now. Adulterer three or four times over. Commandment breaker. Not a church member but a church employee. Getting paid vs getting prayed. A lifeform stuck forever outside the circle of investiture on Qualm Street.

I WAS DODGING MY SALTS. Meaning deliberately not taking sike meds, lithium being a salt. I did that a few times just about the time I started seeing Aubrey Andromeda, went to Phillips College library in Goblin City and read poetry. Whenever I dodge my salts these days, it’s never on purpose but just because I forget. Troubled by basketball traveling. Not dribbling enough while taking the pill to the hole.

Complaints: Rashy glabella, flakes, itching, third eye skin disease lurking in the genotype-patterns as the symmetrical coloration of a cat’s fur hides in the DNA of the zygote. Patience for manifestation in ill health. My psychic variant came with matching physiological signs and symptoms. Imperfections in the flesh. Double take. The creepy feelings in the body. Bone cancer of the pubis. Vitamin Dracula: I was a guy with massive vitamin D deficiency, was put on mega dose, it caused me extreme suicidal ideation, come to find out I have a life-allergy to vitamin D: no sun, a vampire. I was out at night a lot, with Aubrey and the people she surrounded herself with.

Objectification. Walk 360° around the pawg angel-sculpture. The rear-view of the angel ass on the cover of Ministry’s Psalm 69 had me like: ________. Victoria’s Secret lingerie models with wings. Something about being winged appealed to women: I saw it in Halloween costumes, tattoo back pieces. Angelic bodies on 3-dimensional display: wasn’t sexual lust for angels what did Sodom & Gomorrah in? The men of the town encircled Lot’s house where the two angels were inhabiting demanding the angels to come out so the men could “know” them. Pornography is deformation. Aubrey’s face while giving head was deformed. Neck. Brain. Sex disfigured the angelic corpus but even worse for me. Five “knowing” intersections with the cubic phalanx-field of angel pussy were all it took. I fucked the angel and thenceforth were scattered, could only think in sentence fragments. Lost my verb-marbles to the Babel-baby. All verbs theologically disabled in illusory time.

I just realized today that my ex-gf Aubrey Andromeda looked like a young HR Giger crossed with Brigitte Bardot. Being in her apartment with her was being in an enclosed space with a hostile lifeform. She was both ugly and beautiful, beautiful in the way a fascist android would find destruction beautiful. Being in bed with her was like making love to a witch while she was being burnt at the stake.

I have grown into having a uniform way of wiping away tears, I use my right hand to wipe tears away from my left eye rightwards clockwise across the bridge of my nose to my right eye. Something chiral and spun about the hand-to-face combination, like a child’s top in the galactic spiral arm.

I got a job in dada entry. Feeding scripts and routines to nihilistic vomit robots. The boss man speaks: “I’ve got my eye on ten different secretaries, and each one has a different colored pen to take dictation with. This? This is your color…” He gives her a green pen. She makes counterfeit money with it instead of taking dictation.

///

I had all kinds of jobs, in addition to the church janitor gig. I had been coming to work for Tony Larry at a farm for about a month or so, helping the young hipster mechanic put up a few hundred yards of wire fence. My dad had got me the job on the farm up in the hills. The enclosure was to be put up around a colorless muddy hillside stretching out in a slope behind Tony Larry’s grey barn. All the snow on Tony Larry’s fields had melted and entered the ground since I quit my factory job a few months before, so my boots tended to get swallowed up by the mud as I circled around the goats trying to non-verbally convince them where to go next. Tony Larry’s set-up wasn’t a big operation; just a few chickens and a pair of filthy calves and some goats the guy wanted to let out from time to time. Tony Larry was always trying to increase his herd since somebody up here somewhere was paying good money for goat cheese to put on their pita-bread sandwiches or their healthy salads. Although the goat’s milk had to be shipped to Pennsylvania or even sometimes as far as Wisconsin to be processed.

I remembered one day in February when I’d been coming to the goat farm for about a week or so I showed up for work in the morning to find the head torn off one of Tony Larry’s calves, laid face-up at one end of a wide stripe of bloody grass in the frozen yard near the cluttered front porch. Its sightless eyes were a solid magical blue color that was quite interesting to look at once you overcame the revulsion. A dismembered hoof over next to the little barn’s entrance, the bone etched with a hatchwork pattern of nibbling and gnawing.

“It’s wolves,” Tony Larry said to me, fixing me with his eye. “We’re gonna have to chop up what’s left of him.”

I blew into my frigid hands while he went away into the little barn with a cleaver to deal with the remains. Animals never seem to last too long on the mountain, for some reason. Predators poking their way under cover of night, creeping into the land Tony Larry had tried to carve into shape. Another February morning one of the roosters must have thought Tony Larry was trying to make a play for his harem of hens so it charged him. TL was usually so grave and unshakable, but not when he was being pursued by something like one of those sprinting lizard-things from Jurassic Park. The kind that spit poison at you and then swarm all over you as you become slowly paralyzed from the inside.

I was far up on the hillside shivering and tacking the cold unyielding wire to the first stretch of posts I’d put up so far, and I heard a sudden rifle crack echoing over the terrain, from the vicinity of the barnyard. I tried to see what the hell was going on down there, whether he was shooting at me or what, but I couldn’t see shit. When I came back down the hill that afternoon, all that was left of the rooster was several feathers glued by blood to the short stone wall by the road.

“Did you put a blindfold on him at least?” I asked TL.

TL and I didn’t dig any post-holes. Instead I’d stand an old cracked footstool next to a crude five foot post, which TL would hold steady while I climbed up on it and stood. I tried not to wobble. Once I got some equilibrium I’d start in swinging the sledge with both hands, aiming for the tuft of wood-fiber that gradually spread on the post’s top. An absurd race against time, trying to drive the post as far down into the mud as fast as you can before the stool under you sinks so far down into the same mud that you haven’t the angle to land decent solid blows anymore. Because it’s all sinking. Step off the stool, pull its legs out of the muck, relocate it, get back on, start swinging again. It went on and on. Waiting until summer, when some dryness or hardness could creep back into the land and make the process easier, was out of the question if Tony Larry wanted to get his pre-emptive jump on the dwindling prospects for shipping any serious goat milk off to market. I was being paid to swing the sledge though.

After a few hours we’d begin to crack jokes about how easy it’d be to murder each other out there in his scrubby lonesome fields. After a few weeks of it the jokes began to sound more like eloquent statements of intent. At points we argued like a married couple. Tony Larry hurled tools around noisily and called me a scruffy twaat.

Some mornings Tony Larry just said fuck it and completely dropped out. He would get in a weird slothful mood and would scarcely even move from the house. Dwindling goat cheese market share be damned. And he’d fire up his prehistoric computer to play Red Baron: WWI Flight Simulator. I’d sit in the kitchen. I’d sit and sniffle with my coffee at his kitchen table among the vases of fresh-cut flowers from a mystery lover and the short fat jugs of red wine in the corner, and the paper bags full of moldering old seed catalogues. I sipped the bitter hipster coffee which he indulged himself in buying — Tony Larry was secretly loaded — and listened to the patterned needlework of TL’s machine gun fire in the next room, moving my head slightly. Amber helix of translucent flypaper rendered painless the flare of March morning sun shining down through the window into my eyes. TL paused the game and came into the kitchen and formally handed the controls of his Sopwith Camel over to me as he disappeared upstairs. After a while the odor of cannabis pervaded the whole chilly first floor of the house. TL re-emerged with a red face and reclaimed control over the Sopwith Camel just as his tailfin was being shot off. It was about then he started giving me kernels of advice.

“What you need to do, Noah my friend, is get rid of Aubrey. Find a woman with a lot of property, then marry her.” He pronounced it praw-pitty.

“I tried that, TL. It didn’t take.” On the computer screen the skies over Central Europe pitched wildly as one of TL’s wings broke apart under that tinny chatter of German gunfire. He pulled a Mohammed Atta on a German nursery school, saying he hoped the crash would cause maximum casualties. He had an obnoxious way of saying things sometimes, but other times he was quite serious and wise for a young guy and I could tell he had a soul underneath all the brutality and that his advice was meant in all sincerity. At these times I supposed I kind of loved him a little. Nothing weird or improper even though he was gay.

But then as if to counteract such rare moments he’d shut off the computer milliseconds before his plane’s impact with the ground, and we’d get in his truck, drive out to the municipal gravel dump on private praw-pitty where no one was supposed to be, and we’d park out of sight behind the gravel pile and steal a few hundred pounds of gravel. Or more accurately, I’d steal a few hundred pounds of gravel, all bent over like a scoliotic Brothers Grimm character, some subterranean helper doomed to shovel and stoke the fires of the underground goblin king, forever, while TL stood slanted leaning on his shovel, watching the road for cars, stoned and all but cleaning his fingernails as he pontificated on current events.

///

The sky was a cerebral dome carved out of ice. Otsego Lake looked like mercury, reflecting with its ripples little disjointed landscape-slices: pointillism of heaven. Aubrey drove out to Cooperstown with me. We drove around high, all night. (The GO light’s green pinpoint squirmed inside each drop of rain pinned down by the aerodynamic slipstream on the rear windshield.) She agreed with me while I drove, how the final death will blow particles of itself backwards across my lifespan so that I perish, kick multiple buckets at various discrete moments to escape the unified dynamic secret flow of everything temporal. So that angels now debate which mom should shake me awake the instant I expire: the thin or the fat, the young or the old.

We watched the sun come up in the park by the lake. I told you once how I was a critic of the five senses, especially while high. Pick one sense: the pin attached to the beggar lady’s finger, she pricks the baby’s leg secretly to make it cry, makes her case more pathetic to the passersby on the bridge. Why endow the ear with sensitivity and then deny the ear the ripple target? The park’s stimuli offered itself to me and Aubrey in patterns just beyond elucidation. Birdsong’s glassy reverb. Insectile carpet of sound. How tantalizing these hidden gears of reality are. Perform the exorcism of a jaded eye. Evict the demon my superstitions had named MTV/HBO that resides entwined around the sensorium rope. One amusing privilege was to watch Aubrey’s face while emotions gradate and nuance-dance across it, emotions intersecting with flesh, and then I see there, some evidence she has formed a judgment, about me, the face-flame flickering. There was, in me and Aubrey, sensitivity enough to make oral sex and telepathy practically one, reading in the lower mind, the mind of the other body the dark, concentrated glow-in-the-dark bioluminescence that can only be apprehended with eyes shut through a lead apron interfering with fellatio or cunnilingus. Whenever you encounter another person, a heat-seeking missile latches on and pursues you through a city of fog.

///

My face has to appear at least five times on public security camera every day. They can’t install cameras in my house. It’s a new law. Get me out in the public square so I can be tallied. Like the rope dipped in red paint the Greek city-state used to round up citizens to vote: if you had red paint on you, you paid a straggler’s tax.

I meet my dad at the Mall of Dis for lunch and a sci fi horror movie. It’s my day off and I haven’t seen him or my mom in a couple weeks. I’m still dodging my salts, off sike meds in my clandestine way.

The vision’s body language translated through my father. I would see Mr. and Mrs. Turbot randomly in the crowd in public, like stray pixels, after I hit a certain age and was living independently. Facial recognition in a crowd of strangers, that sudden face I know among all those I don’t, invited Theophany Gates to open up, gates I don’t always want to go through. People with bipolar disorder with psychotic features are worse at interpreting emotional cues in other peoples resting facial expressions: they always look mad to me. The FX budget of delusions is blockbuster.

I am just this side of the gibberish-boundary.

Rituals of independence.

When the grind of no medication reveals things to you, reveals extra pixels to the visual field interface that the pixel-receptors are within you, it’s fear of a new dream you have — that the work day has just started, somebody dropped something in your workplace, a tall stack of machine parts, and it beheaded you.

When I will take the meds in a day or two and go back to mopping the church, I will feel sick and cheated, the freshness fades away. Time gels again, with Theophany Gate blues.

I drove to Round Top to see a concert once. I believed in meeting people once. Beyond my dad.

While I waited for my dad at the Mexican lunch place I observed. I could see, in the young harried women scattering at the Mall of Dis, the scared moms of the future. I’m a notary of the fields of attraction other people create and move through. It’s my title, my privilege, my isolation. In the quiet zones, an eavesdropper. I want to guard the sculptures in museums like a docent and listen to the love whispers of people passing through. Voyeurism. It’s aesthetic safe sex.

My dad is a realtor and an amateur magician and entertainer who parlays card tricks and rousing piano songs, people gathered around as if it’s 1954, into context bracts and leads and sales in and around Goblin City. He’s very successful at it. He played card tricks on me and my sister Dawn when we were little kids. I never wanted to follow in his footsteps as a card sharp.

He comes into the restaurant and looks around before spotting me and holding up two thumbs up that turn quickly into finger guns.

“Hey champ.”

He sits down at the vacant table next to me, not my table but the next one. It’s empty in the restaurant, so while this is a strange gesture, it’s how my dad is. As if we’ll be dining casually and talking across an aisle.

“Nice place. I’ll have to bring your mother here.”

“You don’t come to the mall ever?”

“Not lately.”

We order some food and drinks. I’m nervous about making it to the movie on time but my dad makes a nonchalant show out of not caring.

The only real tension comes when Dad asks about Leigh, my daughter, whether I’ve been involved with getting her into a better school.

“Natasha is fine with where she is now,” I say.

“Your mother thinks that school on the west side is pretty shabby, and I agree. There’s better schools with better teachers.”

“She’s in kindergarten.”

“You want to start as early as possible.”

When your parents speak with one mind it’s scary, because you want the sympathy of one party to protect you against the wrath of the other. This is not easy to pull off when only one parent is present. My parents have never even come close to divorce — I’m the first in the family — but this playing of one person off another, of mom against dad, crosses my mind from time to time.

Within each meeting with my family I was always moved to disclose one negative emotional state. The family wanted to talk about matters on one plane and I was always moved to stir it up, I wanted to go deeper into feelings and symptoms. I felt it was my role to get into mental illness, to “shake things up” and give a somewhat wonky, imbalanced perspective. I was constantly trying to ferret out which one of them had passed off the mental illness to me. For their own sake, not to undermine them in arguments. It was all done in the name of science, my science.

If I revealed that I had gone off my meds in pursuit of the theory of the Theophany Gates, to track down the maintenance angels and the dream directors, to thwart the Devil MTV/HBO who has been with me since age seven, and this news got back to my mother, she would be enraged. Around the faces of both my parents were clusters of reality cells with their own intricate honeycombs of Theophany Gates I had learned to negotiate and navigate, but these were human beings and so much unpredictability was possible.

A Theophany Gate is really just a prayer for continuity.

I say a prayer for continuity as I enter the Theophany Gate of my dad’s presence as we sit down next to each other in the horror movie and I die in the dark. A prayer that Heaven is not the bureaucratic machine that it often seems to me. Each reality cell is a lens through which to look at the Thing. The lenses change in a solipsistic switcheroo.

Come to find out, it’s nothing like dying. I’ll settle for tautologies like “It is what it is.” Jeff Goldblum sending floozies through the teleporter to be his queens. The shuriken on the Escape From New York table were from Lee Van Cleef’s personal collection. The blood test scene from The Thing made me so sad, the forlorn look on Palmer’s face just before he’s revealed as the thing. Earlier, he said that audience-pleasing line when he saw the spider-head scuttling away: “You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” and yet, Palmer was the thing when he said that. How did it know how to be so human. I heard Palmer was almost portrayed by Jay Leno. Would an alien lifeform perfectly imitating a terrible stand-up comedian get no laughs too? Garry Shandling was also looked at. Would a perfect imitation of myself, another Noah Turbot, know to be crazy. Would it be bullseye.

Hopelessness antennae I am.

I had a poem published at Dodo Eraser. Here are screenshots:

I’m working on another book. I aim to try to get it published this year. It will be a limited, zine-like affair, no enormous splashes. It’s going to be kooky but that’s just how it is. It also may be some of the most profound work I’ve done. It will be a collection of poetry sandwiched in between two plays I’m working on.

More later.

DIVORCE: THE BIG BANG THAT STARTED MY HORRIBLE UNIVERSE

When the seed of fascination was planted and watered with the twin rains of curiosity and boredom the outcome was foreordained. Aubrey Andromeda had been a dilettante but gears of occult interests had rotated in her just enough for circles of grease to be left on me. Now a golden dawn is gone, having given birth to my unsettled day of endless study.

I slept in a graveyard nine nights. Burnt sulfur. Made promises to be chaste forever. For this I would risk being bound to the devil MTV/HBO and his demons, risk having my household polluted with their confusion, bedrooms made toxic, risk being stuck in a pall of invisibility, risk being trapped under a paused eclipse. The prism goes white…

The canal in the city of fog is peopled with silhouettes moving furtively here and there. Hooded students — both male and female — black gnomes bustle and make their way to mystery destinations, having Bluetooth convos with invisible interlocutors. Air redolent with sweet skunk burnt Christmas tree of sci fi cannabis. A glowing computer graphic menu screen hovers over each student’s head like a halo giving a readout of important stats: hometown, major, student loan debt racked up.

I veer around the dormant canal locks and cross the canal via a mossy bridge. The other side of town. The canal water is olive green slime color I will try to resurrect in my paintings. Street lamps are linked by ropes of fog draped from post to post like slack high wires. Pedestrian students with video radiance above their hoods are thicker now, it’s collegetown. Once I cross over into collegetown, looking back over my shoulder at the fog across the canal I can just make out the hell-mansion with its neon signs reading DELI and BEER. I pick a random house with lights on inside. I make my way around the knee-high thicket of discarded heroin needles in the yard, stumble up the front steps onto the porch and hit the doorbell. It’s cold out here. My ex-wife Natasha comes to the door. She’s in a suit. She looks like a slightly more weathered Scully from X-Files. Thinner, grimmer lips. Her eyebrows: big naturals. Hourglass figure. She doesn’t smile. She’s expecting me, but not expecting me to look like a creature who’s been sleeping in a graveyard.

“Hello,” she says. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” I say. She looks great. She’s going out, something for work. I’m supposed to look after our daughter for an hour, at my ex-wife’s house, where I used to live. I come inside. My daughter Leigh is there, in the living room, surrounded by carefully arranged stuffed animals and figurines. Some sequence to the dolls, itself significant.

I’ve earned this trust by not being crazy. I’m on medication, when I’m not dodging my salts. There was a moment there during the separation when Natasha was thinking of having legal conditions put on me, where a clinician would need to be present for all meetings between me and Leigh. That shadow has passed over. Perhaps to return? Tomorrow never knows about those wicked ways. Everything I do around my daughter involves heavy shields, movable panels to keep aspects of my life in the shadows, outside her view so she doesn’t know. She can’t know about my experiences with Aubrey, Pilar, Tony Larry, or the rest of it. She can’t know how many layers deep my turbulent personality goes. Natasha knows a lot of it, but part of the separation and split is that she pushed a great deal of that away. After divorce, Natasha disappeared into a New Age vortex. There had been hints while we were still married but the true plunge came after.

“You look different,” I say.

“Daddy, guess what? Mommy has hair tensions.”

“They’re called hair extensions.” Natasha smirks at me, daring me to say more.

“I wish I had hair to extend,” is all I can think to say. The weapon aimed at myself. Throw yourself onto your sword, the queen said to the messenger. Seeing her again, with her hair extensions, banishes all my inner gay questioning and experimental affections for Tony Larry.

And to think, she has forgotten all the lovely dickings-down I gave her all those years ago. I’d think that would merit some communication in the present, at least one or two text messages that weren’t strays or those necessary exchanges when the time came for her to alert me to something concrete. All those orgasms I gave her (I think, I suspect, more écriture feminine) they paid nothing forward in time to a pleasant present. Or has my subsequent behavior destroyed the resonant material that could have carried the echo from the past? I’m poking around Natasha’s bookshelves while Leigh plays with a dollhouse I helped build for her while I still lived here, the trusted burglar I am. It’s convenient that I find Ovid’s admonitions for women to falsify their orgasms, underlined in Natasha’s copy of the Erotic Poems. Ovid cast an unwelcome illumination of doubt across the bedclothes of our shared but receding history.

“Look Daddy, I’m making a very powerful castle,” Leigh says.

“Yes you are. Me too.” It’s a game with incredibly high stakes to deceive my child, or to try to control her understanding of my problems. I read her a book called “We Are In A Book” while she sits on my lap on the sofa.

///

In the long ago dream, Natasha watched me walk headfirst into a mirror. It didn’t break. I turned around and saw Natasha had just walked by the room and could see in and see what I’d done. She got this pained look on her face and came to embrace me because she could see I was in pain. But then she didn’t stay with me to talk to me. She left. And that hurt even more than any mirror-kamikaze would have.

Mental illness was real but it was also an excess of unhealthy self-regard that drove other people away, scared them so they couldn’t take it anymore. She feared coming home with Leigh to find me hanging from some high place or otherwise having killed myself, and the scene of that scarring Leigh forever. Natasha’s solution was to make me go away for all time.

So she kicked me out of the house. This was like a Big Bang, when all physical time started, when everything took up its eventual shape: there seemed to be nothing before this instant. And I spent one night at my parents an hour further away from work, drove the extra distance to the hotel and went through a horrible charade of normalcy where I moved tables and chairs in stacks, filled water glasses for the guests and looked over the rest of the week’s duties which seemed impossible. I told your manager that my wife had kicked me out of the house and that I didn’t know if I could stay at work today, there was too much life-chaos, and she took pity and let me go. This was in Cooperstown, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame. I left work, went to the bank, cashed my paycheck, went and sat in the parking lot of the hardware store and thought about buying a garden hose and duct tape to asphyxiate myself in the car. I knew I couldn’t drive home, to my home home where my wife was because I was told not to come back there. I couldn’t see driving the ninety minutes back to my parents’ house in Delhi and just living life without killing myself eventually. It would come up again, like the highway exit that comes up without warning that you have to tear across four lanes of highway to the leftmost lane to avoid getting sucked into. It comes without warning but with some regularity if that makes any sense. It probably doesn’t.

Instead of buying the suicide gear I drove to the lower parking lot of Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown and with the most defeated and destroyed sobbing choked back so that no one could detect it, I walked into the emergency room and said to the lady at the desk, “I’m going to kill myself and I need help.” I threw myself at the hospital.

Certain things take over when you tell emergency room staff that you’re going to kill yourself. They put you in a room and if the absence of clocks or watches indicates anything about the passage of time you are left alone with your thoughts for eighty-three years. No one talks to you. They just walk by the slightly ajar door and you can’t hear anything but people making phone calls. What they’re saying on the phone is just out of the threshold of hearing. They took my belt away. This was in the days before I had any phone so I was cut off. I don’t remember what I said to anybody who did talk to me. It felt like throwing myself into the current of a powerful river but then right away I drifted into a still, deep side pool I couldn’t get out of and the river continued on without me. I will never have the sensation of anything changing again. A shocked catatonia took over. I was taken to the second floor where the psych ward was. It’s locked of course. I was taken to a room with a bed and I just stared out the window for so long. I lived the rest of my life looking out that window. I could only see another wing of the hospital out there, covered with ivy. And some of the upper parking lot. I am telling you my only life, my only biological functions were in watching brief snippets of people walking to and from their cars in the parking lot and with a pathetic struggling vicarious shudder they were my freedom. I tried to imagine the lives of those men and women, doctors and hospital staff and visitors going back and forth in that slice of visible space limited by the window that I couldn’t open. They could breathe free air, they had lives and jobs and marriages. I studied the women and made up stories about them in my head. I wanted to watch what happened to them when they left the slice of space I was allowed to see.

My dad showed up with a duffle bag full of clothes that Natasha had packed. She must have been contacted, I don’t know. She packed me a bag for my suicidal gesture throwing myself at the hospital. She had included a photo of Leigh, I think. For me to look at and feel things over. Or, is that photo of Leigh in my bag Natasha packed like the detail that gets filled in when you tell yourself the story of your dream, days after waking, a falsification that serves your turn in some way? In the act of trying to remember a dream, you set fire to one corner of it. Anyway, they yelled at me for having the picture of Leigh because it was framed and had glass in it, which could be broken and used to slash my wrists, someone else’s…

People on the ward were edgy, I wondered if letting them out to smoke would make a difference. Or not. I thought it was going to be so odd when I got out, the air was going to be so fresh and the sidewalk was going to seem like a flattened monument of freedom. Quietly I asked the nurses for earplugs.

It got scarier and scarier. A guy named Peter who looked like something God scribbled in His early days and put in a drawer as a mistake, was talking to me and my mother when she visited. “Joy to the world, the hookers are dead... wouldn’t that be funny? Joy to the world, the criminals are dead, Freddy Kruger is dead, AAAH!” He talked about Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, “the scene where he plays the bagpipe and everyone’s like AAH, then he plays the cymbal, T-square? Then there’s the part where he drinks spit, and piss and shit,” all this in the same room with my mother. “I don’t remember that part,” she said, all demure. He also talked about how I looked like Ferris Bueller, and like a friend of his. “I used to steal from him, I mean cigarettes and stuff, but he didn’t mind. I would steal from him and pay him back and he never minded. Until he shot me in the face. With a .22. Blew my brains out.”

Is Lamictal weird? I thought. Will I feel weird at first on the stuff? When Kelly the psychiatric nurse practitioner spoke about my depressions, I believed her. It’s tougher to use my own brand of denial and say: “I’m not really depressed.”

Everyone on the ward seemed really tapped into everyone else’s business. And ready to quarrel and squabble. And bitch. It was like detention for unkempt, deformed people. And I could never leave. Disruptive, bitchy, antisocial women ran the psych ward. Mutant lionesses, the most warped was the leader. Most assertive. Which one was Peppermint Patty and which one was Marcie? Remind me. Girl cliques on the psych ward, impromptu pecking order of the madwoman-to-madwoman matrix.

Hearing about Natasha, testimony from my brother, was not a thing I heard every day. About things like how angry my Dad was with my father-in-law for putting stress on me. A bad fight was brewing between those two men that never came to anything. I was realizing again how self-centered I had been. I couldn’t imagine living life without her. I never asked the other person how they’re doing. No reciprocity.

Gasping in his sleep in the night, my roommate Dan and his snore-sculptures. No sleep for me. I took a harrowing shower the next day. Every detail seemed infused with institutional drabness. I didn’t know if I was going to survive outside if this drabness kept up. The sun did come out while I was eating breakfast.

Darlene came into my room. I asked her to leave. She had the most terrified look on her face... she somehow looked like she could have been either 29 years old or 59, both were plausible. Was it drugs, meth? People casually throw around the word psychotic but you don’t know psychotic until you have a psychotic woman first tell you that you look like her 87-year old father, then the next day as you’re talking to your visiting brother, she comes up to you and starts stamping her feet and moaning, “Dad, they wont let me go...” and then minutes later she tries to sit on your lap. I had to call out to the nurses to take her away. Her ass cheeks were cold and gelatinous, I could feel it communicated to my dick through both our layers of clothes. She was probably harmless physically — but psychically, she was volatile and dangerous. The mental aberrations were infectious. My brother said that when Darlene called me Dad and sat on my lap, I should have told her “Go to your room! You’re grounded!” And I could tell by the nurses’ reactions that Darlene’s chaos was all quite typical, nothing to be outraged about.

I was very afraid, afraid of being in there, and afraid of what happened after I got out. I needed to decide how nervous about the future I was going to be. Decide not to worry about me and Natasha. But that was very hard. Because that was all I worried about. And don’t manipulate her, I thought, give her a break. It’s funny how the genders are somewhat reversed — in the 50s the wife was hysterical and needed to be committed by the capable husband who’s bringing home the bacon. I was only bringing home the bacon bits. I did talk with her on the phone that second day and she wanted me to go back to Compass, the “nicer hospital” in Saratoga Springs, where I’d been two years earlier. I just wished the sun would come out.

I was so sorry you made her live on a razor’s edge for so long. Does the vow “In sickness and health” apply to mental illness? I listened to the marital bickering from the other patients talking on the phone right outside my room, the one-sided conversations I could just barely decipher. “Have you taken a shower yet? You take a shower and call me back. I love you.”

Barb stole my pens and my glasses from my room and Joyce the nurse returned them. A comedy of manners there on the 2nd floor at Bassett. Charenton, Marat/Sade, asylum plays put on by patients. A girl walked by my room singing the “doo doo-doo doo doo-doo” part from “Hungry Like the Wolf.”

An unearthly boredom set in. I read the Jason Compson section of The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, one of the only books I could find in the ward. The older brother of the Compson complains about his mentally handicapped brother Benjy and the black people who are “the help.” Jason Compson represented the New South. I can’t defend myself from the fact that in the lowest point of my entire life I thought it was hysterical how unbelievably racist the character was, and antisemitic too. Cruel and bitter — somehow the shock of the sick humor made me laugh. It wasn’t allowed. It gave me something irrational to cling to in that moment, in the psych ward. A part of me wanted to destroy all of humanity.

I can’t sit here and imply that my wife didn’t help me, which isn’t true. I didn’t really move to leave my home that night, the night of the Big Bang that set all things in motion, until I saw the sympathy on her face. We were in our bedroom, in our bed. Natasha put her hand on my face and was crying. The last time she’d ever touch me, in that way.

The sun was gone, the sun-shapes through the window, the parallelogram of light was a memory. They made me take meetings with visitors in the common areas so I’d be less likely to talk about other patients, when they weren’t there.

This panic was normal for mental hospitals. The “When can I leave?” business. Bargaining. Even though in the totality it was voluntary for many of us. But I still had this notion I needed a shrink to sign off on my release. It was like detention with a bunch of Okies, Faulkner characters. Psych ward like flying coach in the Southern Tier.

The meeting with the psychiatrist was like a job interview. The job I was applying for was “non-suicidal person.” The shrink was an Indian man with freaky magnetized reading glasses that came apart above the nose. He got a kick, I could tell, out of sending crazy people on a disorienting mind trip when out of nowhere he put them on by joining the two lenses in front of his face. I could feel him staring at me to get a reaction.

Dr. Gupta (you don’t remember his real name) had total power over my freedom. He asked if a medical student could sit in. She was a young woman, also Indian, who laughed at all his jokes, immoderately, as if there were not suicidal people all over the place, and she would do anything for him. This spirit of hers was cruel to the patient, this happiness and flirtation barely disguised. Dr. Gupta told me that I was getting a divorce and I could not hear him. I blocked him out. I had a strange sensation that there were five or six other people in the room, a crowd of observers, when there were only three. I was being watched, I still am being watched. I had fantasies about writing a play about the Indian shrink and his student. They were fucking after hours, and she called him daddy. Patients came before him and begged to be released like they were in front of a parole board. He told two patients they had to stay forever but the third patient, who was myself, Noah Turbot, bested him in intelligence and cowed the Indian, was let go, got the wife back, the kid back, the job back, was happy.

“I’m leaving for the Lake of Fire. Don’t know if I’ll be seen again. Getting boned by a thousand queers,” Peter the Scribbled Error Guy said before he was let go to terrorize the world while I was still locked up there.

Was it worth it to wonder what people are saying about me? I wasn’t intending to hold my marriage to Natasha hostage with the threat of suicide. Or to blackmail her with it. I hope that’s not what I was doing. But I might have been. Emotional abuse was within reach and I did it thinking it was something that was helping me or meeting a need within me. And bonding me to Natasha in a fortress of solitude, castle of worry. It was hard to recognize a mood swing. “Sure the DSM IV gives a good definition, but have you, Doctor Gupta, ever experienced mood swings?” It was hard sometimes to even pinpoint a mood. The nurse Kelly said my mood had stabilized, but it had stabilized at “depressed.”

I was expecting more screaming in the night, more nightmares. Maybe the earplugs kept all that out. Everything I did then, I saw through the prism of being in a “mental hospital.” My hands were shaking. My knee was bouncing. They were doing heavy construction on the floor immediately above me, demolition. I whispered to myself. My roommate Dan left and I was fearful about who they were going to put me with next. I got my own room, at least for two days. The Birnie Bus Service bore Dan away. Dan was a poor man eking it out, but with a system. Dan had COPD and in the darkness at night he would slam his head hard on the concrete wall and cry. One very chaotic day on the ward he looked at the tattoo on my arm, the two arrows pointing in different directions, and said, “Yer a switch hitter, eh?” and it galvanized me to my soul and I had to go away and hide anything bisexual about me inside myself. Dan was replaced by the scariest muttering man I’ve ever seen. This new guy was brought in overnight out of an Escape From New York apocalypse wasteland like that guy Romero who first meets with the cops and tells them to leave in thirty seconds or the president dies. Romero was put into my room while I slept. So I woke up and was aware of him sleeping in his bed. Maybe sedated. My room was normally a safe zone but I avoided it for the rest of my time, to avoid him. He seemed violent like a prison inmate and the male nurse told me “once he gets stabilized he’ll be fine.” But getting him stabilized, getting anybody stabilized was an epic, historical struggle.

I had to answer the phone outside my room like somebody’s little brother, who had to go into the ward to find the lioness woman who was being called. “Just say I’m not here,” the woman in the common room said, and I yelled that I was not going to lie for her. Funny how I couldn’t forgive certain people even though they were mentally ill. I couldn’t understand my racist laughter at the Faulkner novel read there on the ward until many years later.

I had from my short time away from life, my two weeks worth of retrospect, this weird suspicion that I had somehow played with fire with this whole suicidal depression thing. Like I was getting burned in the hospital. This was my fault. My desire to “be suicidal” caused this. It was a choice I was putting on her, and them. Family dinners at my parents’ house seemed unthinkable right then. Everyone joking their way around me. It would be so hard for them to reestablish normalcy. Maybe I was an Okie too? An Okie with a vocabulary?

Tell Natasha I’ll always care for her no matter what she decides. Take things slowly and on small steps. That’s the funny sad bargaining thought I had seeking mercy from the person who had total control over my future. I associated her with the psychiatrist, the institution that had me locked up for my own safety. They were allies even though I know now they weren’t. That way lies a host of resentments, a paranoia it has been hard not to give way to. I thought I could buy myself time by writing her a letter that said “I am sorry for the anguish I caused you. I was in a fog, I was unaware of the full extent of my behavior’s impact on you. I wish I could have done the last two months differently. I’ll always care for you no matter what you decide.” I abandoned my wife and daughter in favor of mental illness and death.

One gelatinous tear moved through a forest of beard-whiskers as I saw a woman out the narrow slice of window. I thought it was my wife. She had a little girl with her who was too much in motion to see. They were hopping like frogs in the Bassett Hospital parking lot, hopping in turn, like “jump where I jumped.”

///

NY Gov Andrew Cuomo vs my daughter getting older: fight! My kid wields an ADHD dagger against New York State. The Gov deploys standardized test bombs. Do I want Leigh to be misunderstood? She is the high water mark of DNA. Of course any parent with their parent-shaped blind spot would say so. What sympathetic off-ramp must you take, on your way to warn some little child what a trio of decades, what a revolution of Saturn will do, and tell her how the world can find your sympathetic side and then dissolve you from within. Save my daughter a seat on the whirligig of therapy. Leave enough room to call this a mistake on the hinges of the family. The nightmare topography excludes the daughter, positions her outside the bubble of the dream. Whenever I went around her I was another person, that’s what I feared most.

At what age does the child learn the difference between the preview and the film? One unbearable day it will come her turn to pass away. On that day Leigh will recall the time, when we were still married, when Natasha and I spoke frankly, not knowing she listened to us, soaking up everything her parents said, as we poked fun at the opera stars we saw in Cooperstown who wouldn’t die but flailed around the stage like worms cut in half and lingered to repeat their dying words. They kept popping up to sing an aria to prolong their lives — too long — and then they were gone at long last.

Leigh will mimic Natasha, and how Natasha aped the dead soprano, how she will lurch and collapse — my child also tries to sing and leap but all her life force will fade and elapse. I torture myself with this anguished thought. If we’d stayed married I could have protected her from this. The bitter slime canal water is a sign of where the rainbow’s drowned. Peripheral pains come to the center of awareness. The prism goes to white…

I’m eventually relieved by Natasha when she comes home from her meeting hours later. Leigh’s in bed. The parents don’t talk, I just go.

I head back across the canal to the bad part of town. These people all have an effect on me. Natasha’s smirk, which she left with me, was something like the anxious attachment style that Aubrey left me with. A hangover was imprinted upon me by the women. They acted like “enzymes on the substrate,” leaving personality residue that can’t be expunged, even after they’re gone. Some relationship with Tony Larry could reorder the system, rewrite it, shake something up.

Notorious tall tales (and not so tall tales) were circulated about the girlfriend who “turns you gay,” this frightening denizen of the female Monster Manual, who scares you so bad that from then on, until forever, you look askance at women from across a chasm of trepidation. Introducing indeterminacy in all friendships, doomed love relationships, just by shackling me with sick handcuffs and games—what I took from Aubrey. A skepticism about where I stood with everybody. I needed these breaches of trust then reassurances and embraces to feel comfortable to go on. I’m the masochist, surely, in this game, with sessions scheduled with Natasha, Aubrey, Tony Larry.

My mind has many chambers that have exits/entrances according to some rotating inner axis that never rests, never ceases turning. The unhinged door never stops opening and revealing more. It halts its motion when I die and the heralded cessation of consciousness foretold by science occurs. The scientist clerics, shamanic experts tell us this. Sprinkle the poem-particles across the surface of life in the meantime. Find the right mixture. It’s not a flavor. There is not a sensual input for this seasoning, it is all mental. Boring to talk about. Verbal patterns hinted at by life’s repetition and difference. Time waves, sequence rituals, obscure movements under the surface that seem directed at me and me alone. This is the hypnosis of the delusion.

CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE REFORMED DEATH-CULTIST’S SOUL

(a slightly different version of this story appeared at Bruiser Magazine)

In college I fell in with a death cult that did all its recruiting through the mail. I paid them $30 to get the latest news about the end times. Everybody was doing it, it was fashionable to compare Jonestown strategies. My cult did it all behind a scrim of jokes. IBIBIBTAF it was called. I Believe I Believe I Believe That’s All Folks. I’d drive around in my Buick all night listening to their cassette tapes that gave the doctrine. They said a UFO was coming to save certain human beings before the apocalypse and in order to get that precious spot on board you had to kill your parents. Or surrogates of your parents. Stand-ins. It didn’t matter. I imprinted on two friends of mine at Dexby College which was near the landing zone of the UFO, coincidentally. It was about an hour away. My surrogate dad was another college student named Joe Sinister who was a hip hop DJ. Joe Sinister and I would go to parties and try to block each other’s ascent to social heights with our musical selections. Which one was more dope. I was probably a little too infatuated with Joe Sinister. Joe Sinister was a Buddhist and wore a saffron-colored puffy jacket and swami headgear. He was drowning in pussy at Dexby College and he patronized me like a little brother. He would do things like sit in lotus position on a mat at his apartment and listen to me jibber-jabber about my mental TinkerToy constructions. I didn’t tell Joe Sinister about IBIBIBTAF. Or if I did I made it sound like a Sufi prayer that I’d learned. Everybody was into esoteric foreign mysticism which was fine for rich trustafarian college students but it proved a fertile breeding ground for delusional mind-warps.

My mother figure was a folksinger babe from Rochester NY named Sparkle. Sparkle sung songs in an inarticulate murmuring voice that was like a semi-orgasmic gasp. I quickly formed a thing with her where I turned to her for maternal energy and advice. I thought I was flirting with her but it was like a sad broken gear whose teeth did not mesh with the gears she had, and I couldn’t sense the grating quality that I brought. It was like being unable to smell myself because I was always there, wherever I went I never got a chance to step outside my own miasma to get a baseline to compare it with. Sparkle lived in a house with other countercultural women, each of whom competed to answer the telephone with the breathiest, sexiest hello. Everyone was giving each other massages at parties, the women were massage-happy, but when I got in line for one, whichever woman it was I talked to would say she couldn’t do it because too much toxicity had built up in her hands from all the other previous massages she gave. Toxic sprites occupied their magic hands. My bisexual roomie Louis observed all this and waited until I was in the shower to make a move, but no dice.

So I was supposed to kill Joe Sinister and Sparkle at this music festival, in order to board the IBIBIBTAF flying saucer. We all went to the festival in a hidden field near Dexby where vendors wandered around yelling “Veggie burritos!” and selling glass pipes and chillums out of cushioned attaché cases. I had a huge forest green hoodie on and even huger pants, easily the bottom eight inches of which were caked with mud. Joe Sinister had futuristic sunglasses on and his purple swami head wrap that he managed to look suave in, from all vantage points, even from the most unforgiving memory outposts decades later. Sparkle pulled out her guitar and started singing to the children of the world and into this gathering of kids she disappeared. Joe went to off to do drug math multiplication tables which was why he really came, and he and Sparkle quickly lost me in the crowd. Dub reggae time distortions leaked from walls of speaker cabinets and fucked me up, suggestions of a sequential discontinuity that was all chopped up, a brunoise of time. The spaceship was supposed to show up that night. I had one half of a pair of scissors I was going to strike the fatal blows with.

I was looking for my surrogate parents when I got short-term married to a belly dancer who was walking her little dog. She went one way and the confused dog went the other and to avoid getting tripped up on the leash I had to leap up over it, and for that split second in mid-air we looked at each other, man woman and dog, and I was married to the belly dancer in a tacit flash of deep understanding. I didn’t know that I was wearing all the wrong logos for her to be bonded in holy matrimony to me. It didn’t matter. The IBIBIBTAF spell was broken. I became a family man and didn’t need to kill my parents anymore. I got married similarly two more times that night, random arrangements of cosmic objekts aligned me with other people, matchmaking on a universal scale. I talked with a hippie lady in her 30s in a field about trust funds and generational trends, how we were all rich kids pretending to be street people, artful dodgers. Elsewhere, listening to a jam band freaking out I spun a glow-in-the-dark ring the diameter of a baseball on my finger, got it going fast, then passed it to a stoned woman’s outstretched finger: with this ring I thee wed. We didn’t talk or consummate the marriage in any way so it deteriorated like morning dew the moment after it came. But I knew.

I’d bought a 12-pack of beer and got to drinking it. I threw all my IBIBIBTAF death cult tapes and my scissor-knife into a garbage can at the north end of the festival grounds next to the recyclable receptacle marked TOXIC? People kept their distance from my dissonant vibes as if from a rabid porcupine. I got wasted and danced by myself to the tribal rhythm and fell asleep in the back seat of my Buick (I’d brought no tent nor sleeping bag), and in the night the alien craft hovered overhead, scanned the crooked cars in the parking lot for lifeforms to save, human animals to let on board, and because I had no parental blood on my hands it must have passed me over.

I was never really going to kill anybody, I knew that. It was a thought experiment that went just up to the line but never crossed it. Thoughts were flirtations that never requited me. It was just like the other scary cards in my deck that would periodically emerge, do their divination dance on every brain cell of mine, then disappear back into the deck to have their position destroyed in an arcane series of cuts and shuffles. Sleight of hand of the psychotic fortune teller Madame Ruby. The card was untraceable but still there, somewhere.

My shadow dropped out of college and I followed it home to central New York where I slept a lot and watched strange films and worked a summer job for the village going to the cemetery, vaporizing weeds with my trusty weed whacker and pouring concrete sidewalks into oily forms staked into the ground. At night I drank Genny Screamers with my high school buddies in fields, tripping out over the stars and looking for UFOs. My parents put on disguises at the dinner table, my dad wore an embittered Roy Clark “Hee Haw” mask when he washed the car. My big sister Dawn drove me around to parties and therapy sessions with a psychologist in Goblin City and talked to me in sibling semaphore. A big blank spot, in the shape of a crumpled aluminum can fashioned into a hash-pipe, obscured my time at Dexby College.

///

Scattered notes on the subject of “Theophany Gates”

Derealization. Nothing seems real, or you have passed through a reality checkpoint. These are set up in the consciousness switchyard at random, to catch the trespasser off guard, at the most inconvenient periods and intervals. Typically, the checkpoints are traversed in dreams, and are camouflaged as encounters with the Godhead, puzzling exchanges with ex-wives or small children, Ballardian calamities at airports or the like, all to elicit a strong emotional fear-response which will hide the consciousness transition from the subject.

But a few unlucky bastards will have to face the checkpoints while they are awake. A raw deal...

///

The effects of passing through too many Theophany Gates in a short period of time: mind-bending, mood-altering mood swings, personality deterioration, loss of a sense of reality. Hostility to loved ones. It isn’t mental illness per se, more a relationship with the outer environment — the objekts of the surroundings, on the ethereal plane as well as on the physical one — that changed so quickly the self couldn’t withstand the loss of cabin pressure.

In the shower, blasting hot water at the back of the neck, then up over the scalp so vibrations of ecstatic warmth course through your body, cosmic and holy, and you cry out in pleasure, tension leaving you: these are the passages through several Theophany Gates at once to a good reality cell. A difficult Theophany Gate is traversed when one realizes one’s parents are unhinged, practically puppets of their own personalized mental devilry one hadn’t seen up until then. Reality cells are clustered like that, arranged in deceptive groupings around our parents and other family members. Who knows what gates our loved ones go through when they witness us change, ourselves? The anguish at seeing a family member in a new, harsh light, a frightening coherence only then apparent, just in the moments before they disappear, is an emotion marking the passage of a formidable Theophany Gate, a stentorian ritual no one else notices but yourself. Disorienting and lonesome as you realize you’re alone in your delusional chamber.

When your parents speak with one mind it’s scary, because you want the sympathy of one party to protect you against the wrath of the other.

///

When there is no continuity between days, reality cells are each distant from the one preceding and the one following it, and these are linked by Theophany Gates which, if they are noticed at all in transit, are traumatizing.

Theophany Gates are really just mood shifts, experienced by individuals. Then there are larger portals whole nations or worlds go through. “Vibe shifts” were spoken about; that seemed to be about politics, about a transitory mode of left-to-right wing thinking within younger generations. If I were to tell the world about Theophany Gates, the places I go, I would be taken for a crazy person. And they’d be correct, in a substantial way. It’s a subjective phenomenon. You can’t recruit people into the mood turbulence who weren’t born into it, as I seemed to be. I don’t want this sensitivity. I haven’t for a long time. It’s a lonely place to be. You would hope that the government, some Big Brother or Big Sister, would see the lonely atomized sensitive psy-people and realize “we should give them something to do, some hope, something beyond just grindstones of politics and turmoil and life-struggles” but no, that seems to be all that governments, Big Brothers and Sisters can offer. Yes, I am a Scanner.

So something bad will inevitably happen. Something within the populace will snap and rupture. It won’t be me. I’m strong-minded, I’m resilient. I have a perfect attendance record. I’m so well-adjusted you could set your watches by me. I lead conga lines of cheerful employees around the water coolers and servers. I’m not psychically troubled at all.

///

Currently reading: The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud. On the “to be read” pile: Valencia by James Nulick / My Dead Book by Nate Lippens / Corporate Rock Sucks by Jim Ruland / Consumer Guide by Simon Morris

I want to write some noise reviews for an upcoming newsletter. In the meantime I’m listening to tunes off the Janushoved cassette label, Cucina Povera, things under the channel Rainwater Enema on YouTube. On XM radio recently I’ve been delighted to hear XTC’s single “Senses Working Overtime,” Luniz “I Got 5 On It,” lots of classic country, any classic alternative with yelping female vocals like Lene Lovich, Su Tissue, Altered Images, Missing Persons: Betty Boop updated to the New Wave/Post-Punk era. B-52s - “Legal Tender.” Bands that get an instantaneous channel change from me, with the quickness: Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Bush, Foo Fighters, Counting Crows, all kinds of shitty 90s alternative. I like some indie and alternative from current day but much is garbage.

///

Look out for the next Beyond the Last Estate, #6. Buy it, cop it, lock it in your subroutines.

https://beyondthelastestate.com

UPCOMING SOLO DATES (welcome new subscribers)

The unspoken rule in my eighth grade class, around the cafeteria table and the other furtive areas where kids’ policy held sway, was that if you could pull off a good enough mimicry of a gay man, that meant you weren’t gay. Were not. It had to make people laugh. It only need be five or six seconds long. The way I interpreted it, it needed to be a substantial enough departure from your true self so that people could measure the distance between you and “gay.” It couldn’t just be an imitation of a girl. There needed to be a somehow inherent knowledge that this was a gay dude you were doing. And it’s not exactly like we were sitting in a circle in the cafeteria trading impersonations. It’s just that one guy, Tim Geintz for example, would do it off the cuff and it would crack everyone up so bad that his stock would kind of rise, and we’d look at him and just know, “He can’t be gay, look how he made such fun of gays.” Tim Geintz would do what I would call the well-known voice that might be considered entry level if I’d had more access to info at the time. Matt Welter in gym class had an insightful knack for doing an impression of a guy so exasperated that everything was cause for emotional catastrophe, that he somehow made clear wasn’t himself. Others just archly commented on clothes: “I love your ________.” (Could be shoes or pants or backpack or hairstyle.) All this made me very nervous. About would I be able to do a good impression when my time came. What if I tried and it fell flat, wasn’t believable enough and they jumped to conclusions? So I undertook to do the best impersonation they’d ever seen in their lives. I got busy doing my research. I studied TV and movie characters. In on-screen interactions, gay men seemed to melt with a luxuriant knowledge of everything that went unsaid. I studied Charles Nelson Reilly and Richard Simmons and that guy from the control tower in Airplane! who pops into the frame every so often and says something campy. Otho from Beetlejuice was a touchstone. I was going for caricature since I would only have a small window of time to get my point across. Somewhere in that research stage, I got the picture that gay men were often smart, cultured, sensitive, and kind. Since I was already all of those things, I felt that I had an edge on the competition that nobody could deny. Anyway, there were all kinds of louche, sophisticated, under-the-radar characters to draw from in the media. But I sensed I needed to go deeper. For the truth of the big role, I needed to rely on my own imagination. That’s where my rendition would really get traction. The Brandoesque grace notes, how he played with the girl’s gloves in On The Waterfront to signify depth, verisimilitude. I picked the day after much introspection and practice. Time was running out to strike a blow. I could feel people wondering. My classmates and I were going on a field trip to the Everson Art Museum in Syracuse NY. I noticed no one talked to me on the bus ride, but that was fine as I was going over my part. As we went inside, we all gathered into informal clutches of students and I tried to maximize my audience by waiting for the right time. Something just comes over you and you know it’s go time.

I can’t remember all the finer details. I think I said something about how a male nude in a neo-classical painting hadn’t been short of coupons at the meat counter, leading into something about me needing to watch my girlish figure. There was a musical interlude to my impression, I think: a few lyrics to a racy song I came up with on the spot, impromptu improvisation. The whole affair went on for way longer than five seconds. I wanted to set a theatrical benchmark. I wanted to push it. And you know what? I slayed. I had them all laughing at me. I tried to look in their eyes for an absence of judgment, nothing that would say they suspected me. I had carved out a little zone of safety for myself, an island of security. That was all anyone could ask for. I got invited to parties. I finally had a shy girlfriend (a little later than everybody else, they were all having sex at 14 or 15). I went to college, got married, had a kid, got a job. But even though nobody said otherwise, inwardly I felt nagged by the whole thing at the museum. At a deep dream-level in rooms only accessible through a set of subconsciousness keys, I was dissatisfied with that version. I can’t see clearly, but I sense there were aspects of the imitation back then that were kind of rough and wouldn’t meet my present rigorous standards. If I had a time machine, I would race back in time over decades and do it again. A big if, but it opens on large personal vistas that are otherwise hidden. Until the thing with Tony Larry, a robot kid in my head practiced the impression, relentlessly, and I suspected the robot kid with a couple decades more data would be able to pull off such a higher quality and higher fidelity mimicry.

///

‘Lengthen the Fuse.’ Said in reference to begging for patience from readers sick of reading my writings about a bisexuality that is never activated, or just sexuality that is never put into practice.

Tony Larry’s new neck tattoo is a wild animal, a wolverine. Something fierce and small that could kill you, I didn’t ask. Something with battle in its blood. I saw it in Goblin City when we were loading boxes of produce, vacuum-sealed soft bricks of goat cheese at the farmer’s market. No hesitation or lack of confidence in the tattoo. I hadn’t seen him for weeks. What was going on in my life in the meantime? An untattooed owl or worm with glasses. Why are things slipping into friendship when I feel like some terrain was passed through, a treacherous deceptive passage through the tidal rocks? Never knowing what Tony Larry, this boat, this dreamboat, was thinking. Never to know, feelings never to be felt. Brian, Tony Larry’s boyfriend, or one of them, was gone. But a void developed, an opportunistic vector never opened up. Because I have no skills to pry it further open and move in there. I am sans skills. A foreign person I was, a person separated from me by five years of dreams and nightmares, used to have the sensitivity. But that person was on the other side of the bisexual portfolio, the diplomat’s brief in an undiscovered country. More territory, and the cowardice flag flies over that land.

Later I went alone to Sam’s Café. I asked the waiter (more gay dramatis personae, he had a neck tattoo too, should I be getting a neck tattoo?) if I could stay and just drink coffee before my therapy session, just for an hour, and not get lunch. I had already eaten lunch in Goblin City with Tony Larry, I was waiting for an appointment at 2:00 and just needed a place to stay for an hour.

“I don’t know, I mean the owner Sam’s here,” the waiter said.

I didn’t look behind me at the back of the building. It made me feel like I was about to be dislodged. I said I would leave and moved to do so.

“You’re probably fine, it’s slow,” he said.

“I want to spend money. I don’t want to take up a table if it gets busy.”

“You’re okay.”

“I’ll get a scone. I don’t want to be a nuisance.”

“Stop.” So starved for human contact was I that when the waiter said “Stop” in a kind, hospitable, waiterly way, in a way that was let’s face it like a gay-to-gay communique, it felt like an answer not only to my self-hating questions about whether I should leave but all my destructive neuroses. A small bit of microdrama that I delighted taking a role in, that a cinnamon scone came to the rescue. Microdrama that I fully buy into, I liked that I was enough of a regular to be treated this way. There’s a fragment of me that wants the gay title I didn’t even know that the waiter might have conferred on me, the sensitive friendly exchange. The café regular gets a helping of knowingness. I talk to no one. My conversations are limited to these stray service individuals. I see men at the café, mysterious men in hip rural workclothes that look like camouflage. Grizzled, not young, not workers as would be traditionally signified. Artsy, something about a third sex suggested by the colored scarves that invite curiosity. Their grey salt-and-pepper hair communicates experience, knowledge to know who they really are, late bloomers to awareness, or maybe not so late, and I wanted the same knowledge, without ever touching the flesh. It was a class thing, a city/country thing. NYC hip older men. Tony Larry would fit right in, he’d have them come to his anarcho-punk haybale fashion show. I wouldn’t really fit in there, although I’m getting the grey hair too. Am I getting the messages? Am I giving the messages? I conveyed something, that for my first four decades I fought so hard against. Gay people in this milieu signified mobility, class flexibility, cultural capital left over from NYC, and Goblin City missed it. Goblin City was depressed and I belonged there, more.

The self-portrayal still feels risky. And yet I sat and had previously had lunch with Tony Larry, who I used to dream about. And never questioned in a paranoid, panicked way whether the waitstaff or customers at that other lunch place, in Goblin City (where the sexual profiles are different) watched us embrace when we said goodbye and could read that we could have been a couple. Tony Larry’s demeanor neutralized that within all others, and almost does so within me. No one ever gets full backstage passes to my sadness and loneliness. It would be too risky to allow that, even in the 2020s. I fear men, the blue-collar men on the roadside who wave to other heavy equipment operators with insider respect, and I also fear the gay tourists, both.

I hate men. Men and women have different dictionaries within me, different lexical sets to play with, to signify what is an ungovernable, chaotic, primordial sea of inner emotional phenomena. Confronting the self reflected in others is tricky business. Women get one whole set of words, men get another, and yet I might lack the sophistication to explain the synonyms, the similarities between English words dealing with desires and attractions unknown even to myself.

I have yet to develop a working definition of bisexuality. I’ll be dead before that happens. Antipsychotics tamp all this down. Work goes into it, and yet, it is not steady constant work. It’s more like shirking or malingering than work. I don’t resemble any of the gay men I’ve seen in the visual media, the gay celebrities, the industry plants whose likenesses we carry like little statues, on our phones, the way Roman factions carried around images of their favorite Roman persons, emperors they worshipped, numismatic profiles in their metal coinage.

I perceive strong differences between those figurines, those faces, and my own. But I laugh at the gay jokes, the body language, the manners as I see them in the metaphysical ether of the media. It’s more the intangible quintessence that I feel resembles something in me, less the physical being. Which is funny because much is made of how fascist gay men can be about appearance. A masculinity (or a feminine masculinity) that is unforgiving.

Unbearable saw-teeth of sadness are pulled through the soft fruit-wood of my heart. Nobody cares. Or, if they cared, what would that look like to me? Would it be sex and love, a smile, some touch, an arm around my shoulder? What do I expect from people? I seek in other people’s eyes something so close in nature to what I run away from. And the image in the eye is getting closer by the day, which makes the other people’s faces farther. I drive it from myself with uncleanliness, poor hygiene.

///

My body screams in pain. My lower back, glutes and thigh muscles from lifting boxes of vegetables and goat cheese at Tony Larry’s charity farmstand in Goblin City, helping with unloading the shipment. This is pain undergone for other people’s charity, the literal food in their mouth moved from place to place. Is it a holy activity, I don’t know. More so than giving money to beggars outside my pharmacy who don’t appear at the right time? It feels terrible in my muscles. It has a meaning, I suppose: charity turned to agony in the body, agape love turned to pain, will be remembered, recollected.

I just want to live inside a gentle animated movie. I want in a secret way to go back to a twee girlfriend who doesn’t exist anymore, a cryptid practically. Tony Larry with his neck tattoo is too hard now. I want to put my arms around a soft someone. Soft someones do not exist anymore, they’re mythical. The world took them away but not the desire for their softness. Is this defeatism? Am I saying all this for the Vine, for the views?

I speak to some person in a parallel dimension where somebody knows me. Having a sad ruined palazzo of love to give, with broken columns: nobody could live there, nothing could be spiritually constructed there. It’s of historical interest only, like the rest of my libido, just for the cops and psychiatrists to sift through. Which is why I write. Nothing happening. Guilt is very important to my work, it provides building materials of a crucial and dependable sort. But what happens when I am declared innocent finally — the structure of my art collapses, perhapses?

Is the body pain, the sore muscles from manual labor with your one-time secret crush, a good thing, is it health?

///

I was thinking today about how I got so hard that Natasha and I, when we were married, were in a contrived position and I levered with perfect friction into her G-spot like a derrick striking Saudi oil, money, success graphs spiraling up. My balls hurt in this sexual position which kept my orgasm at a safe distance, staved off climax. And who would want to read any of this, notwithstanding that I need to write it. If it were a poem and not an exhibitionism in diary-writing that humiliates a past partner (although it was just about great sex, what’s wrong with saying the sex was magical), I might use it. Poor Natasha, trapped in a labyrinthine compound of my sexual fantasies. I don’t go there myself either — maybe to do so and masturbate would release her, for a couple days at least, from the Pandora’s Box of my resentments. I don’t want to keep her there but my unconscious is running the program, not me. The writing is just a description of the hell, where I am contained too, myself. I need Jesus to destroy it all, to renovate the labyrinth. Keeping the blueprints for myself, along with every other memory of every other love nest. It’s not moral fiction. (I found the John Gardner book by random happenstance in the immense library. A sign from God, via the spiritual intercession of Borges?)

The dream of the partner’s ass. God forgive me my dreams. Leg crossed over the other and flexing and flattening, foreshortening the large buttock, the muscle inside the fat, hips lustrous in night light, hips that rule my consciousness even years later. Critics don’t want the lame ones to write about sex anymore. If it’s so distasteful just blow your ass out of the airlock into cold space. This is my spacecraft and here, we talk about ass.

Redeem the words in my queue before or after I write them.

I think about the nude women I’ve seen, while at least crediting the homoeroticism, the matrix between clever men I’ve felt, like a weak radio signal from the north pole. But the signal and the north pole are there, the directions exist at least.

///

I have a glimpse at the courage needed to be queer when your mentor abandons you at the crucial moment. I write poems about him, the anarchist farmer with the wolverine neck tattoo, so that the centuries will see it much, much later. Posterity will have my queer soul, and no one else.

Looking for gay mentors among writers in the locked office building produces nothing substantial. The puzzle locks, the Kung Fu trials on each floor, are just more videogame logic (eh, Dr Blurryfingers?). I exercise the fire hydrant on this side of the building, the hidden remote water to put out hypothetical flames in future (“Flamer!”). Options kept open, when in truth I am set aside for nothing, except the crypt, and God.

I’m afraid of reading gay writers, still: the hygienic cultural fear is still there, the contagion of taking in the message. This is part of what is alluded to, no, promised, by the devil MTV/HBO, it includes an inoculation against gay writers, gay media. Burroughs made it through the barrier to me as a youth, but he’s so strong and devilish, why wouldn’t he break through? As did Vaughan the bisexual cult leader/artist from Cronenberg’s Crash, and yet the fear persisted, still persists to this day, fear of being spotted in the gay section of Barnes & Noble in Goblin City. Getting Goblin-cruised at the bookstore.

“What if all these fantasies come flailing around?” – Michael Stipe. An alternative college radio figure breaking through the hair metal of my high school, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Metallica, Motley Crue. MTV/HBO fields warp, cultural curtains open to give the sensitive pop alternative crossover “Losing My Religion,” like the mother bird feeding the vomited food of #1 hits to us, her chicks.

I wore clothing like Michael Stipe in that video for “Losing My Religion,” with its cinematography and St Sebastian gay images, directed by Tamsir or Jamfir or whatever. These undercover gay music videos on MTV would have been legible to any reasonably literate art student, not to me. I wore a light short-sleeved shirt in French class, a shirt and haircut like Michael Stipe, giving Southern Faulknerian idiot holy fool, almost Forrest Gump or Benjy Compson, and I danced autistically in French class while the nation sang that song, that #1 college radio hit. I was so cool and poetic, there was a magnetism about high school art kids, a group which Michael Stipe and myself were together members of. Later I found out that Stipe was gay, it felt like a trick because he hadn’t been obvious like Fred Schneider of the B-52’s or the unquestionable Boy George whom as a child watching MTV you just had to learn the landscape of, no, Michael Stipe was more cryptic, so, when I tumbled to the facts, I underwent a mystical repressed psychic automatism and pushed that away, got into girls, had dates, got laid in that inept, unmotivated easy way you take for granted when you’re 17 or 18. The girls were into it: “You’re so sensitive.” Michael Stipe’s influence was left behind for macho grunge. Yet girls wondered why I was into the Smiths. I was into the Smiths because the girls were into the Smiths, and so were the skateboarders in my small town. It got passed off, crypto-faggotry that resonated down the corridors of time. It was a confusing time. The alternative music, the trend, the social groupings, the affectations — they carried the gay encryption that would persist for decades after graduation, making itself at home in secret cubbyholes in the system like a stubborn indwelling imp. The significance of the video “Losing My Religion” was teased by MTV/HBO. I could talk for ages about the gender and sexuality critique of music videos giving the kids gay textures and corrugations, in the young personality morphology which they didn’t know would stick to them. It was all less than conscious. It still isn’t conscious. It’s buried under yards of homophobic earth and humus and forest litter — but it is there. It is how I think and feel that was intrinsic to me before I ever knew women, which I did experience, women that is, the heterosexual impressions of life, the bodily relationships, the sex, I knew the sexual vibrations. But this did not erase the poetic artistic shirt I wore in French class, the Stipe-shirt, that left a different subtler impression in the mind. That short-sleeved Michael Stipe shirt with self-aware dorkiness and gayness. The video for REM’s “Orange Crush” should have told the story, the machismo rerouted under the radar of MTV audiences. The Dead Poets Society boy’s school homoeroticism that I totally understood on an unspoken level. Gus Van Sant Red Hot Chili Peppers under the bridge; I didn’t care about Anthony Kiedis’ jumping pecs, more about John Frusciante’s striped sweater: an eye for the clothes. MTV/HBO art conveyed queer life through a careful arrangement of symbols. Do I deny it? Do I hate it, after 35 years — do I think I can outrun it? How much energy has it taken to repress the simple truth of the libidinal elements and then to maintain the walls after the Critique™ comes home to roost in middle age? The gay waiter at Sam’s Café tells me to “Stop,” sisterly in a way I need to hear. Is it inspired by MTV/HBO or is it the truth about how God makes us, made me, crueler than if I had been conventionally gay, in a way because it was cloaked by straightness, conformity, testosterone cresting before it died down in post marriage, post kid time. A new life. Middle age, but with incredibly pressurized ego-damaged loneliness and abandonment, leading to self-abandonment, psychosis, insight fluctuating with bad ideas that get out of control. I’ve told you about them before, the personal mythologies, poverty, disability. The perfect time to become a “flamer.” Gen Z did it, they’re to blame by force-amplifying, channeling the queer tidal waves right into my hermit shelter on the coast. Someone is to blame. It’s not God, it’s not me, it’s a devil, a demon of knowledge no one can study. It’s culture, it’s the world, it’s the agenda, it’s media. It’s the devil MTV/HBO.

What can I do about it? Take holy vows. Even if it’s merely with my household spirit to be Tertullianist about all sex. Avoid the flesh. Chastity, celibacy. Is this realistic? Is it humane to reject love? Too late, I’m doing it. I’ve strapped into the long roller coaster ride. The only libido I have left is in the mind, in dreams. Which seem less vivid lately. It comes and goes on an unconscious metronome. Lately dreams are less memorable beyond the morning barricades of dawn. There’s less projection of the story past the awakenings. The sleep hard-ons that only exist at the dream’s exit, never at their multiple entrances. Waking up from a deep dream seems like a quotidian metempsychosis (some Romanian philosopher called it that once), a resurrection to life that hints at bigger theological intuitions about life, death, afterlife. Some Theophany Gates (see previous newsletters for my lore) are marked by hard-ons in the night. Consciousness is destroyed, and that destruction’s aftermath, I can base a whole belief system upon, just trust me, I can do it: make a philosophy out of foundations from the dream-pylons. All this happens in the mind-zone, sexuality negotiated, beliefs about life and death constructed or dismantled.

///

I always put myself in a deferential passenger seat with women in my middle age. When I was young, this attitude took me far; in older years, it’s a survival instinct. I’ve been stung by women quite badly. Their capsaicin has wrecked me so nothing ever tastes the same, ever again. This plays havoc with the mechanisms of attraction. So I try to take on the least threatening posture possible, and I really only talk to women as a customer in a small store would talk to its owner, when all parties involved would like the interaction to be over as quickly as possible. Noticing a woman’s body, responding to it, is highly unpleasant in the same way as seeing something triggering memories of a vacation spot I once visited, when I had a wonderful experience as a tourist that ended with a jarring argument with a bigoted local. It was beautiful but it was a thoroughly awful ejection that stands clear in memory. I don’t want to see that place again. I’m a foul villain for ever setting foot in that vacation spot all those years ago, and if I went back, I would be arrested that very day as an intruder. Women are a casino with my photo pasted up by the currency exchange window where you bring your chips: DO NOT SERVE THIS MAN. I make sure of it with my gross beard and my bad breath. I say none of this to romanticize myself, to make myself alluring through some kind of reverse-psychological bad boy aura. I have no such aura. I just have nothing left to gamble away. An old, experienced misogynist is a terrible thing to behold, much worse than an ignorant young kid, a virgin, who hates women in an abstract, ambient way unsupported by evidence, true or false. That kid, I see him at the Mall or on the sidewalk in Goblin City downtown, that young man is someone to invest some hope into; he may be persuaded to change his mind and develop a heart, grow some affectionate capacity within himself in spite of his suspicions. The old hater has no such prospects. He’s done. He looks at young lovers and asks “How old are you?” When they tell him, he says “Ah of course. You’re young. You haven’t learned yet.”

“Learned what?”

“That the sexes are mortal enemies, sworn foes set to topple each other, but temporarily lulled into a false trance-like state by the nagging pipe-dream suspicion that each has what the other wants, that they can mutually benefit each other. You will pick this up in time. It’s a sad understanding. The human race would never survive if the young ever absorbed this truth before it was ripe.”

“You too might come to feel someone else has something to give you,” the young lovers reply.

“Maybe, but never in the love department. Never again.”

“You seem to think you’re a brave man when it’s more accurate to say you’re probably a cold heartless bastard.”

“Be patient and see if I’m not right, what I say.”

///

“Drama kids. I was a drama kid who never went to that part of the building in high school, the ‘band hall’ attached to the auditorium, stage, backstage where the musical theatre students gathered. I never went there, I stayed with my own personal theatre as an art and literature kid. That’s a corny sentence. Private theatre. My drama, my life transcribed to the stage before it really even began. The dramaturgy of mood-life. Loves, desires, breakups, overpowering emotions. It was personal theatre for myself and maybe one or two other people. In this was inscribed a singular sensuality, a soul gender for one. ‘I liek gurls,’ of course, that’s the manifestation. But it was always something more personal and elemental, a script of youth in perpetual development… that partook of what might have been perceived as inner bisexuality. A football player patted my ass, unseen by others, as we ran the mile in gym class, around the track. What was that, why did it feel like a humiliating insult and at the same time a marking, the application of a badge without my knowledge or understanding? In touch football this same jock guy would pass the ball for me to run with and gain yards if not score unchallenged because no one expected it of me, I was invisible in gym class. This succeeded a couple times. I don’t remember being tackled, crushed, after being found out, only the weird glory of being seen as a dangerous player for a few minutes in that fleeting gym class. The heroism of the double agent behind enemy lines.”

Dr Blurryfingers, my dead therapist, asks, “This was the same guy who patted your ass running the mile?”

“Yes. I forgot his name. He and his older brother were practically albinos. They looked like vampires.”

“Vampire jock football players?”

“That’s right. Blond.”

“You know, if this were in a young adult novel all kinds of teenage girls would think it was so hot.”

“I don’t know that. All that stuff comes later.”

“The Critique™ you talk so much about.”

“Hey don’t pin it on me. I am a subject just like everybody else, a victim. This is happening to me, with little understanding or input from me, I don’t move the game-pieces around.”

“You have more control than you think. That’s what this therapy is all about.”

///

MORE LATER

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Recent books read: Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo / Voices of the Paris Commune by Mitchell Abidor / In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom by Marcel Proust / TOTAL DESTRUCTION by John Trefry / Neo-Decadence: 12 Manifestos edited by Justin Isis / Early Stories by Adam Johnson / The Undead Shepherdess and Further Cavities by Rebecca Gransden and Sean Kilpatrick.

Currently reading: Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter and too many other books to name.

Recent listening: Ballista – “Security” and other records on Janushoved label out of Denmark.

(Painting: “Temptation of thr Church Janitor” by Jesse Hilson, acrylic on canvas)

This selection of writing is re-edited, expanded from excerpts previously published at magazines Expat Press, Farewell Transmission, and Don’t Submit.

TEMPTATION OF THE CHURCH JANITOR

The floor is only real when I mop it. Coffee hour is one hour of the week only real when parishioners feel it. I’m here when they’re not. It’s not absence it’s a presence that comes when I am the only one here, vacuuming carpets, dusting ceiling corners of cobwebs with a long feather duster on the end of a pole. I lemon pledge pews and pick up cheerios from button-indentations in the green velvet cushions in the pews in that one place in the sanctuary where people must be bringing their infants. (I don’t go to church services.) Lego mosaics buried in couches in an alcove where other kids are sent. Someone said there was a spider’s nest in the sound system closet but I haven’t been able to find it. I’m in massive buildings alone oftener than the grains in the hourglass are taken down by gravity. I look up at the stained glass windows and see a clear sun-graph that says I will die someday. I was married once. There’s no women anymore except the naked women swimming through the murky water in my head striking lustful positions. Their skin below the surface is pale green against abyssal black. That sexuality is a form of suffering, ancient thinkers knew but modern livers of present life can’t acknowledge.

Notes from Sir Kenneth Clark’s The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form: “The Aphrodite of desire was, as we have seen, a Syrian divinity…She had passed from religion to entertainment, from entertainment to decoration: and then she had disappeared. ‘And since idolatry is prohibited by our faith there can be no doubt from whence these disasters arise.’ …You had no sooner found the password than all could enter at the same door, and one or two may have pushed past you… Titian has even broken the line of the arm by a cast of crimson drapery exactly where it would have been broken by time… It was Leonardo who had advised the painter to penetrate the secrets of expression by looking at the faces of women in the mysterious illumination of twilight…Mille peintres sont morts, said Diderot, sans avoir senti la chair…One false note and we should be embarrassingly back in the world of sin… The patient carnality of the life class… During the 1870’s, the impressionists were at pains to demonstrate that the outline does not exist.”

There aren’t natural lines around things we see in nature. We draw lines around the images in our heads of things we see in nature. I look at my phone while cleaning at the church and go on the browser to check some nagging piece of trivia — some detail of Sir Kenneth Clark’s career contortions as an art historian in England — when I see with paralyzing chagrin that it had loaded the website Boob Goddess on the church’s wifi which was the last website I’d been viewing at home. I close the tab on Boob Goddess so fast, faster than God or God’s server can see, hopefully. It upsets me for weeks: subtracting the head of Boob Goddess, decapitating photo-frames, rectangles, DD breasts being independent from heads. The unsexy gestalt of the whole body holistic in the segmented eye of the insect-man. “I don’t like watching her head move and look around herself as she releases herself from her bra,” insect-man says about baboon-faced woman. The beastly movement is like the python unhinging its jaw and spending hours to inhale the goat.

Kissing her elbow is all that’s allowed. Elbows are chinks in the sexual armor, flexors where the wavelengths of energy change, joints and sockets the pathway in to libidinal being. Certain postures open portals. The woman is an articulated key twisting in the lock. Orgasm led my once-gf Aubrey to disappear down a gradually disintegrating tunnel of articulacy: “I’m cumming…cumming…umming…uming…ummm.” Beyond words. In imaginary sound studios Trubetskoy and Jakobson review hours of PornHub videos for sound-patterns, marking the phonology of recorded orgasms, the significance of the point when the lips come open and grunting takes wings into signification. I, the church janitor, read somewhere that sex sounds were a woman’s biological invitation to the group thing, eavesdropping bonobos excited waiting to gang bang. Echolocation of prowling mammals in the jungle. So digital porn soundtracks are a technological perversity thwarting nature that was only meant to be local. We went astray when we set microphones on the human animal.

I am a critic of the architecture of perception, an objekt noticer. I see prism threads of skepticism in everything, spiderwebs that pivot all morning and twinkle according to their angle to the sun’s first three hours of progress wheeling from Northeast to Southeast before I go to work cleaning the church. ROYGBIV building blocks of all light reflecting off individual pubic hairs of a woman laced by morning sun shafts through the eastern window, I remember. Listening for ghosts in empty churches yields shatter-echoes of natural radar bouncing off my body, the focal point of the ectoplasmic antenna-dish. ESP is a way to get around being stuck at the dead end of aestheticism because sixth senses are “extra-aesthetic.” “No equation to explain the division of the senses,” said Patti Smith. Sight sound touch taste smell, constructions in language-space made by ancient scholastic philosophers who “hadn’t seen everything yet.” Every year I develop new eyes to see around new conceptual corners Platonic scientists didn’t map, dead eye stalks unused. One day tastebuds and eardrums will be vestigial as dragon’s wings.

///

I vacuum the steps down to the thrift store where people sift through cairns of junk: paperback novels, racks of clothes and shoes, VHS tapes with no labels but undoubtedly containing the safe oases of 80s/90s sitcoms, discarded kid’s plastic toy universes. To raise donations for the church. A whole pile of Updike someone got rid of, books with the front covers ripped off. The thrift store staff has no idea what sexy magma is in the books. Updike according to one critic had been a master at describing the “penile sensorium,” and a vivid, somewhat hostile describer of women’s bodies. I buy them all while the volunteer is still manning the register. Updike’s Couples has in it a bookmark which was a black-and-white movie still of Virginia Mayo from 1949, platinum blonde hair swept back, glaring at James Cagney. Hot. I put the books on a counter in the kitchen off the fellowship hall and start picking up every folding chair in the massive room to put them on the tables to get ready for sweeping and mopping. There’s a whole system to it all that I’ve perfected over time, something ritualistic (Updike might have cringed at that). The pushbroom moves in large boustrophedon patterns across the checkered floor. Jester, harlequin, the checkered pattern. The pushbroom is wider than the squares on the floor so visually, over months of sweeping the floor, they don’t help to guide it. I get so that I can memorize every ripple in the tiles, every spot where some bit of ancient chewing gum won’t ever come up no matter what tool I use to scrape it. I push the broom around the room in maze-like patterns with the devil MTV/HBO itself following inches, centimeters, behind me like a Tour de France cyclist drafting off the one just ahead. I listen to an audiobook of the Screwtape Letters and feel deep fear and cry invisibly.

I’m mentally ill and probably will end up some kind of religious nut in my 50s and 60s if I survive the stained glass windows. In the psych hospital the first time they brought me into a board room where I sat on one end of the table and on the other side, as if I were at a job interview, was my “care team” including the psychiatrist larping as a greaser in an aging leather jacket. The psychiatrist had a wop last name. A nurse read out the diagnosis like a lead juror reading a sentence in a courtroom. “Bipolar 1 with psychotic features. Religious obsession, intrusive thoughts.” It was like the religious thing was news to me. I hadn’t slept in four days. I never saw the greaser shrink again but the guy had started me on atypical antipsychotics. I took them and that night in my sleep, first night in the sike ward, I slept and dreamt of Stephen Colbert in Hawaii. The comedian was speaking down a long chain of Colberts, passing words off to successive degrees of other versions of himself like that drowning girl in Nabokov’s Ada seeing that death was like passing a message down an infinite row of her selves. The nurses checked on me every fifteen minutes with a flashlight and that became a part of the series. In the morning they helped my name get up out of bed and took vitals.

I sweep and mop the floor with a bucket of steaming hot water with lemon-scented pine sol (pine soul) and hope the Trustee doesn’t come to the church to check on me. That guy is frightening because he’s a boss. The devil MTV/HBO invisibly lingers centimeters behind me, he grinds on the church janitor in lascivious movements. It takes ages. After I’m done with the fellowship hall I sweep and mop the junk store hallway. I cut corners, and after doing so I accuse myself of sinning in a tsunami of scrupulosity.

After work I watch God watch me throwing the Updike novels in a dumpster. I crawl into my car and then off to McDonald’s drive thru where I tremble in the crosshairs of the young woman’s forbidding stare as she hands me my coffee and fries.

///

Spoken to Aubrey, my long-gone ex: “You suck life force away from me, and I suck your beauty away from you. You were beautiful when I met you but when we were done with each other you looked terrible. And I think, in spite of your craziness, that this loss of your beauty was objective. When time is a wingman all women end up uglier. It’s the unidirectional pattern of time.”

I can put quotes around it to make it not me. Quotation is a disavowal. A choral roman a clef, an array of water glasses whose rims are rubbed to make a melodic line. Fictional characters have mouthpieces which are all tossed-off aspects of mind, centrifugally spun off from some center mass. Every ghost has a smartphone. Some hook within the voice leads me. While I vacuum I listen to podcasts and form the most unearthly judgments about the guest’s voices. I can hear the self-satisfaction call out like a egoist’s ringtone.

“You don’t want me to sense you. This is the last thing you want. It is not pleasure. Neither of us would be pleased. Dumb sense comes before appreciation, is no guarantor of it following after. I can appreciate an effortlessly beautiful older woman. In her beauty’s fading is the trajectory of nature summoning forth its own preservative. Power is the regal profile on currency returning unspent. Was it torture to be given five unsophisticated senses with which to observe womanhood floating by in various attitudes of damnation. The senses are ranked according to the likelihood of the maintenance angels – the perception disrupters — intervening exactly midpoint between me and every other human being. I avoid public places. If I ever saw a true visage I would die. If I ever heard a true voice my insanity would multiply like the petals of the dahlia in bloom.”

Another version of me says something awful. It made it one foot out of my mouth before I snatched it out of the air like the string tied to an escaping balloon and stuffed it back into my voicebox. Publication means something so meager in this marketplace of cheap ideas. Someday I will charge something for this gold dust but for now it is as free as ashes tossed out from the crematorium on the weekends. I did not mean the sexist valuation of observing women’s beauty, the paragraph of Clark’s Venus quotes multiplied by my sex drive, to be anything other than a self-excoriation. There’s a deepfake of myself as the church janitor describing a woman’s curvature, outline, profile, declivity of belly passing off a clear line to hip only seeable by nature. It’s in quotes which is how it is signified that it’s not me, a ventriloquism of the sexist puppet master making me do things, speak into the microphone, leer at women passing on the sidewalk in Goblin City, at the Mall of Dis.

This world is a foreign objekt lodged in my eyeball, a molecular system of dust. The dust contains nudity patterns within it, as well as money, food, women’s laughter, toxins of sensation. The biggest component of the dust, the substance binding it all together, is the word “I.” A pleasure-purgation must take place before I can get rid of the foreign objekt of the world, which divides me from God. I am exhilarated tinkering with this theory as I vacuum up the old black soot from the haunted fireplace inside the manse where the new pastor is moving in a month. A pair of eyes stare out of the filthy fireplace. The devil MTV/HBO lives there in soot. The manse is not the church but the building next to the church and it seems to have acres of carpets to vacuum. I have not emptied the bag inside the vacuum cleaner for around nine months of vacuuming the church and manse. The bag is like a block of cement by now: dust and dirt and particles shed by archaic carpeting compressed into a solid mass.

///

I was at a library and talking with a middle-aged woman and made a pass at her. I was telling her movies and books to read. I touched her throat, then said I’m sorry, and are you married? She seemed alarmed but not like she was going to call the cops or anything. I think she gave serious thought to being unfaithful to her husband with me, like she wasn’t hostile to the idea but it made her feel very sad because she felt intricately trapped. Only one other person lingered in the library with me: the librarian, another even older woman who sort of represented the middle-aged woman’s life and sense of propriety. She was reading a book and waiting for us to be done with our conversation and leave.

I’m very attracted to you, I said, as if this fact should knock over everybody else’s needs and upend lives, why wouldn’t it. Vronsky and Anna didn’t wait for the world to cohere around their wants.

Then I drove her somewhere in Goblin City, on the west side by all the car dealerships. She ended up disappearing.

I’m the Son of Sam but instead of a dog, it’s a black mold pattern glyph on the wall at the head of my bed, behind the headboard that gets onto your pillows and seeps into my mind while I sleep, gives me hyperdreams. Grand Theft Auto Sadness. Antisocial fantasies in isometric pixel animations. And I don’t even like games, as I remind Dr Blurryfingers, my therapist.

I couldn’t give Natasha, your wife, a back massage because her back was covered with ink. Less a tattoo than a glossy book cover, like a catalog for Xmas shopping. I said she had a lot of knots and tried to remember the parallel runways of muscles up both sides of her spine but the printed back ink was confusing me. I felt her big breasts. She kicked me out of the house. I tried to talk her out of it. A baby was walking around the room. It was such a bitter argument. It was forever. A typical live-theatrical event was happening elsewhere and I drove there listening to delusion-reinforcing music with cryptic lyrics as I used to do in the west end of the city. At the theatre thing, which was full of kids because a lot of schools went there, an adult pulled a gun. They talked him into leaving and he was tackled by a tank of a security guard on the front lawn. I went to a concession stand inside which seemed familiar: and I bought three cannabis-infused bananas from the rip off artist. Right away they got jumbled with normal bananas so I lost track of which ones had the drugs in them. So I ate three and went outside and there was a rock concert with people dancing and the band was playing the hit single from that year “(I Was) Standing In Heaven.”

The interview they give to welcome new schizophrenics is called the IRIS (Ideas of Reference Interview Scale), and a high score on item 14 indicates that the interviewee has picked up some secret message of significance sent through the media, TV, radio, Netflix. In the Before Time, usually while driving, awake and not dreaming this time, I did perceive that — Kurt Cobain singing “Yeah” on the car radio meaning whatever random thought I was thinking at the moment you heard that verse of the song was affirmed, song lyrics teased information about hidden Cotard arrangements, death marbled into life — but now it’s as if TV shows and movies and pop radio were daily rushes slipped quietly over the transom of my heavy-lidded eyes in REM aquarium depths. The devil MTV/HBO has tentacles in all media. Dreams are safe psychoses (sike-oh-sees), rehearsals of virtual unreality. Wandering around fairgrounds honeycombed with tents and corrals no one wanted me to be in, populated with crooked firefighters, rapists, hallucinated angry ghosts, disabled childhood friends, all in constant frenetic video game motion.

I am led by spectacle through psychic malls. Celebrities, movie stars, stage massive dynamic group-races that absorb me and take me along. Blood trips, voyages that always have some dramatic betrayal among passengers, often family members. Shopping spaces, markets both indoors and outdoors, carve up group attention. An audience waits and peers into my world. Mass media pilgrimages staged for someone, not me, not the observer displaced by spectator’s passive ego. Hence everything is given a new portentousness, a signal within the dream transmission.

Frustration happened, impacting my mood, paralyzed me, the mood-feeler, beyond the actual obstruction causing the frustration. Can’t eat can’t sleep can’t perform simple other tasks. The crazy man is a robot with one square task-peg stuck in his round queue-hole blocking a whole string of other later tasks, of all more amenable, more humane shapes. I don’t appreciate them setting the extroverted tempo. I have not intersected enough with all of them. Very well. I will take my chances in the snarled traffic circles of Theophany Gates.

ANTI-SIKE-OTICS AND DUDE STABILIZERS

“This is to determine whether or not you’re still mentally ill.” The exam made me very nervous. My identity, my benefits at risk. If I weren’t mentally ill it would cause such a vacuum in my life at this point that I wouldn’t know what to fill with anything else. Not to mention disability if you want to talk dollars and cents. Some bureaucracy ripping that away from me. The diagnosis is a buoy I am stuck clinging to.

Cronenberg was one of the examiners. They were doing an autopsy on a big breasted woman on the other side of the room, got mad, made me draw a tacky plastic curtain across. Elsewhere everybody was supposed to turn in their pistols. Turned out everybody had one except me. An elegant business goth woman in spectacles had a blunderbuss or one of those shorter pirate’s pistoleros. It was like a thick polished pipe. Everyone was impressed.

It was nerve wracking. I never found out what their determination was but it made me want to cling to madness in that way that dreams have powerful unspoken motivations. While they were talking my finger tapped involuntarily and I hoped they saw that and it went into their files.

I remember (talking waking life now), in outpatient at “the hospital for people who think too much,” the guy with tardive dyskinesia. TD: that’s when an atypical antipsychotic side effect gives you uncontrollable lip and tongue movements that don’t go away even when you stop taking it. This old guy would shuffle into the room late on two canes, sucking spit and loudly smacking his lips literally every three or four seconds. He was a mess, a really cursed sufferer that was just being crushed like a bug on the Lathe of Heaven. It was one of the scariest specimens of suffering humanity I think I’ve ever seen. He couldn’t talk, couldn’t eat, couldn’t breathe. I mean he could, he was alive. But it looked like a living hell.

I take one of those drugs, that can do that over time. For a long time I freaked out over every tongue movement that seemed to be not on my say so. Tongue going on an involuntary tour of my teeth. Tongue plays involuntary hopscotch down my teeth. My mouth bones. My lips tongue and jaw being not under my control anymore is extra terrifying. “Freedom of speech.” Ha. Face not my own. A foreign body. A lot of people don’t take their sike medication out of fear of the autonomous mouth. Mental health rights activists challenge the mental health pharmacy industry. The body is sovereign. I make the decisions what goes into my body. I also go around to public buildings setting off fire alarms because there’s a fire hidden away in everything and it’s speaking to me to be let out and when the cops show up I fight them breaking some cop’s hand and get taken away. Not “me” but certain mental health cases “objectors.” It was all through this documentary I saw. This guy’s fears of the side effects carried more weight than the public interest in not having to answer five false fire alarms a week and deal with a demented naked guy skateboarding around the streets causing havoc.

I sometimes have these catastrophizing glimpses into the future where I’m living under a bridge in Goblin City, NY: no teeth, big gray beard. I eat at a soup kitchen where nice social worker people try to talk to me but I’m too far gone into the mental to make contact anymore, and I sleep in a pile of cardboard. I’m on a space station cut off from the Empire. I don’t talk to my family. I’m mentally ill and living on the streets. I smell demonic. This whole writing thing is gone. I just have a tattered pocket-sized Bible with me. I’m stuck in Psalms and Proverbs, the devil MTV/HBO got me like a skipping record and I don’t understand how to read words anymore. I’m afraid to read too much about the minor Old Testament prophets because I might be one. I am one. A new prophet come to earth to give a final message in the end times.

Can you imagine being one of the minor prophets? A plagiarist. Unoriginal. Doing covers of someone else’s hits. You just are brought in like as the opening band the audience screams at and throws beer bottles at because they want to see Muhammad or some big act. They’re impatient to get you out of the way. You just hold up a cardboard sign saying YOU HAVE GONE ASTRAY. You have no sauce, nothing spicy to distinguish yourself apart from the crowd of other minor prophets. Like auditioning actors in the waiting room going over lines of prophecy. Who’s going to get the big break. And tell us all something new, something about the large spiritual machinery we’re supposed to be driving but can’t even adjust the mirrors before driving out in traffic to collide with each other. Spiritual collisions, whiplash to the neck. Getting T-boned but spiritually, by life. Minor prophets are in the end of the OT before Jesus Christ come into the book in act two and brings the house down. Before he shows up everybody hurry, that’s when everybody goes to the bathroom during the show, a lull in the programming.

///

MUSIC REVIEWS

Climax Denial - “Indolence” (Abhorrent AD)

Showers of nails, penny nails. I remember when Goblin City had a hardware store on Water Street where the performing arts center now stands, going there with Natasha to buy nails, screws, husband’s phallic tools, rope, not for sex, directly, but for attributes of husbandry that signified her libidinal urges. I can tell the story now of the marriage rites. Rites of dependence. This music includes post-industrial processed voices but is mostly metallic destruction. It makes me think of the domestic struggle sublimated to pure sex. Echoes blasting, torture chamber, metal tree nailed to the bedroom wall above the bed I glimpsed after I’d been exiled to another house. Metal and flesh, I write the memoirs. It’s cool when there are layers within the harsh noise, at least that much art is going on, if no more. I anticipate a post-noise moment somewhat similar to post-punk. The ekphrasis of the CD cover, is a man who was struck by lightning in the Great Depression or something and his bare chest bears the tracery of the electrical currents through his veins, or it’s defensive scarring from a victim’s fingernails that had ripped his flesh. On closer inspection it looks more like lightning. Shattering, rending metal, hallucinatory voices flanged: a vibe of hysterical political speeches given in warehouses or subterranean passageways, on poor recording devices. There’s a characterlessness to much noise, you wait for something to emerge and it doesn’t. Maybe that waiting is misplaced, mistaken.

JSH & She Walks Crooked - “Fornicators” (Begin Hostilities)

An experiment to see if I could tolerate this noise stuff. I miss the texture and layering and loops. Feels like something of a rip off. A scream that has no intake of breath preceding it, no inhale to humanize it, something rhythmic missing. Until the end of Side A, which is a track called “The Scent of Woman” by the artist known as She Walks Crooked, which I think is the nom de noise of Scott Kindberg who sold me the tape. Some foreign woman’s voice through the static. A lead, a human lead to cling to in the desert of nothingness. This is the first time I stopped to look at the track list, otherwise it’s been tracklistless. No higher emotional registers.

Fog of Joy - “Self-Titled” (Virtues)

Probably my favorite of the tapes I’ve heard so far, maybe because it’s not noise, it’s more like groovy ambient techno, and while I hate using those ancient shitty descriptor tags, maybe it works because it signals to me that I’m still enough of a member of the human race that I’d like it to be musical on some level. This one, with side A, “House of Flavors,” has a rhythm and an expansive sound quality that is good imagination food: there’s even a cat’s meow in the mix at one point that made me think of Jonesie the Cat from Alien, what he would have heard during his feline adventures on the Nostromo that we didn’t see during the movie. There’s a journey in the music. I want my imagination to be taken places. I might return to Virtues again. They put out one of my favorite records on the past few years in what I heard (the record is much older) called “Exchange” by post-industrial electronic group Corporate Park, which is surprisingly groovy and danceable for something in this field. If you have a chance to listen to Corporate Park, do it.

(image: “The Key of al-Bātinīya,” Jesse Hilson)

YOUR CREDULITY TICKET, REFUNDED

I was in a hotel and sleeping with someone, someone from college with a great ass, and in the morning I was stabbed in the armpit by an objekt in the bed, a kind of hammer with a spear head attached. The objekt haunted me and this other person: it somehow was connected to the Internet of things, it gave us access to libraries of videos that were then projected into us, on mind screens. Montages of violent sexual imagery, found footage with grainy verisimilitude to make the skin crawl, and then, freshly edited in, were new clips of women in dark rooms saying our names, as if we were being addressed by intelligence agencies for blackmail purposes. The impression was that the master tapes had always existed and we were the new victims. More indescribable montages: fight scenes, frightening mosh pits, obstacle courses and prison camp footage where we were shunted through chambers to find and retrieve golden cassettes embossed with Japanese lettering. They were hidden away among other trash. This was like hard labor. A guy with a walkie talkie, older man in golf attire, stood at the doorway making us run through, giving us the business. Putting us through it like an American Legion drill sergeant coming out of retirement, smelling blood. He was taking orders from some devilish over-arching organization.

Derealization. Nothing seems real, or you have passed through a reality checkpoint. These are set up in the consciousness switchyard at random intervals to catch the trespasser off guard, at the most inconvenient periods and intervals. Typically, the checkpoints are traversed in dreams, and are camouflaged as encounters with the Godhead, puzzling exchanges with ex-wives or small children, Ballardian calamities at airports or the like, all to elicit a strong emotional fear-response which will hide the consciousness transition from the subject. But a few unlucky bastards will have to face the checkpoints while they are awake. A raw deal...

I have taken to calling these checkpoints “Theophany Gates.”

The mildest Theophany Gate is when you pass over some threshold between reality cells, and the boundary is marked by some change in life’s situation, the way life presents itself to your senses and your mind: ask why hermits living in caves who’ve sensitized themselves to nature’s subtle mixing of sensual data actually notice when they pass from cell to cell, whereas city dwellers, who meet hundreds of people’s gazes daily, don’t. Today I heard mice in my walls for the first time this November, and a threshold was crossed. Days ago a light went on in the dashboard of my car: some tire malfunction, and it set adrenaline going in my bloodstream, anxiety was produced. This is another Theophany Gate being crossed.

In the shower, blasting hot water at the back of the neck, then up over the scalp so vibrations of ecstatic warmth course through your body, cosmic and holy, and you cry out in pleasure, tension leaving you: these are the passages through several Theophany Gates at once over into a good reality cell. Theophany Gates envelop us all at the beginnings of world wars, calamities with great loss of life: the group mind goes under. But most are private, tailored to individuals. A difficult Theophany Gate is traversed when one realizes one’s parents are unhinged, practically puppets of their own personalized mental devilry one hadn’t seen up until then. Reality cells are clustered like that, arranged in deceptive groupings around our parents and other family members. Who knows what gates our loved ones go through when they witness us change, ourselves? The anguish at seeing a family member in a new, harsh light, a frightening coherence only then becoming apparent, just in the moments before they disappear, is an emotion marking the passage of a formidable Theophany Gate, a stentorian ritual no one else notices but yourself, disoriented and lonesome as you realize there is nobody else but you in your delusional chamber.

The effects of passing through too many Theophany Gates in a short period of time are these: mind-bending, mood-altering affective swings, personality deterioration, loss of a sense of reality. Hostility to loved ones. It doesn’t appear to the subject as mental illness per se, more a relationship with the outer environment — the objekts of the surroundings, on the ethereal plane as well as on the physical one — that changed so quickly the self couldn’t withstand the loss of cabin pressure.

“I woke up on the wrong side of the bed.” No, you went through a Theophany Gate.

I think about Yusuf Komunyakaa’s grenade, the one in Vietnam thrown by the Viet Cong that fell at his feet and didn’t explode, how he’s “still falling through its silence.” If you see Heaven’s entrance it’ll be astigmatism in life, if you saw the light you’re good. The “currency” of the sunshine and its revelation of the prism threads, on the day before the heavy snowstorm blots out the Sun, finds analogies to the emotional oblivion of depression, in the way it won’t let you recall the happiness of former times: the retrospective falsification. I’m one of those endlessly seeking matching patterns in the natural world to explain the Nature Within.

Mental illness intersects with car problems intersects with government surveillance. See A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick. Somewhere along the way life became very hard to think through, and I wasn’t allowed to think life-thoughts on my own, I needed a technological helpmate to assist me in thinking “Life.”

Life and death constitute a single three-dimensional object with a multitude of facets, recesses, crannies, planes, so that if one peers into it deeply enough, with the correct amount of intuition veering into delusion, one can discern not a duality but a seamless Unity.

In the afterlife you still have to drive safely.

///

The whole thing about the interchangeability of women was really a bad development for both men and women, near impossible to overcome.

I walk around the sidewalks of Goblin City, not aimlessly, not in an indigent way like so many do, and as I walk by other people, en passant, nearly head on, I take in the bare minimum of the details of attraction before looking away. My illness puts me on track to never know what people’s faces mean, where in the ladies’ scowl might be found a germ of a smile. She passed, she’s gone, too late to find out.

Women check out men, very insensitively, because they do it invisibly and in secret, never letting the men know what is going on. They’re too wily roadrunner about it. The oblivious among us never have a chance. I’m talking about in the 20s and 30s, when we have to go out on a limb. Some women take pleasure — and seemingly it is the only pleasure they derive — in the “main character syndrome” of the dumping process. It is reported by grim harbingers lately that these days, it’s well-nigh impossible to approach a woman and the invisible reciprocity is even more inscrutable. Politicians and weird oligarchs say the species is doomed because the mating dance is so nonexistent, vestigial, and hermetic that reproduction cannot, at all, take place. The population will die out because nobody could risk rejection or find anybody to meet their arcane standards given to them by harsh popular culture voodoo stories. I can’t jump through three hundred and fifty hoops and be a sensitive carpenter Buddhist with a good job and sexual prowess of an eighteen-year-old combined with the instinctual knowledge of an experienced lover. Besides, I’m as gay as the day is long, I’m only now discovering, in tandem with my body becoming a cratered moonscape. Love is a fiction as derided as the major religions and I cannot scrape together the spare change to buy a nice shirt to take you out to a steak dinner. Or even pasta. I’m a divorced dad and I’ve had my shot — it’s all holograms and porn now. My AI wife Skithandra awaits at the nuptial altar where I’ll program her to never debate, never laugh at me, never cry about her parents.

At night, when it’s at least marginally safe in Goblin City, I sneak across the parking lot to the robot shop. To look at the models under plastic shrouds. I’ve come a long way since I was disgusted at the thought of being totally alone in rooms full of objekts and ghosts.

That orgasms have life-mangling consequences is the source of their nearly theological danger, for me. At one point, it was Aubrey Andromeda who pushed me, then Tony Larry. Tony Larry was an abandoned ship. Get it? “Abandon ship,” like relationship, situationship, in the parlance of our times. There was a kind of shape to these northwest passages, a map to explore that I didn’t keep up with. I jettisoned the gay plotline, just like I jettisoned the straight one. What is left when you toss away thoughts and feelings dealing with a sexual bifurcation like that? A splitting, a queer schisming in yourself, in a straight person fighting quietly against themselves. “Not enough risperidone,” was one interpretation muttered by scientific demigods, the deities of psychiatry who govern my delusions like Olympian puppet masters moving figurines around an arena or dramatic stage. The lack of love is all down to the inadequate level of antipsychotics.

I thought, in my life, there would be more chapters of love. I’m determined to figure out the machinery, the way the demigods shuffle the game pieces of life. It’s got something to do with the sun, how it does down and dreams are given like curses, or blessings, or some unexplained third thing (another 21^st century conception, stolen from online scriptures). The mysterious third thing, that contemporary mavens talk about. I see how there’s no shortage of mythographic ingredients in the cultural language of the moment. The curse/blessing/third thing that gods give to dreamers to direct their lives, not their bodies so much as the controlling spirit, animus, pneuma, or what psychologists will. Arcane decisions are made in the psyche-control room. The steering wheel is insubstantial that is wired to the contingencies of the body. Oh no, I’ve read a lot, I haven’t read enough, to paraphrase REM’s Michael Stipe, a crypto influence on me, a gay exemplar before I knew (or knew knew) anything about the sexual critique of my time on earth, the 80s-90s queer undercurrents given during the developmental stage by the devil MTV/HBO. That’s a puppet string that gods played with. That’s what I think about. The gay close calls I had — but what about them were “close calls”? The dodged bullets from one point of view where I didn’t get involved with hot guys at college, didn’t know what hot was, but from another point of view, inaccessible then, barely accessible now, those were learning opportunities. People seemed to know something about me, seemed to sense it, but it was reaction-formed, repressed might be the word if I wanted to cop to repression. In the meantime, I fucked women, I grabbed tits, liked it, had a ball, fell in love, felt heartbreak in the slings and arrows of outrageous straight fortune. But who’s to say what was real? Skepticism is the new fad, the fad of middle age. Descartes and Kant criticize the erect penis under women’s fingertips, women’s lips, women’s cunts. None of it is real, or real enough to divert what happened with Tony Larry on that “abandoned ship.”

Who could this be said to? How can it be dramatized? No one to talk to since I left Dr Blurryfingers behind in his psychologist’s office in Hell. It’s like an unsent letter I want to write and send, a conversation with an AI therapist perhaps. Take the AI wife Skithandra and reprogram her. Invoke a therapist with a gay skin, modded out with cash-in-game trade-in points: Gerald the queer AI therapist who encourages me to just go for it and make a Grindr account. No, no, thanks, it’ll just be in epistolary form, told to the robots. The chorus of queer sci-fi robots who hoot and holler and tell me to come out of the closet. I ask Gerald if I’m gay. “You’re a YouTube homosexual,” he says, “that new breed, who are consumers of the culture but never touch dick. Voyeurs, isolated castaways in a susurrating ocean of pop cultural queer industry plants.” Tony Larry is just a representation, a signifier pointing to a fictional signified that can never be loved. And how lame to make it a coming-out story, no one wants to read that, especially if it is sexless and chaste. Besides, I still wake up in the morning thinking about the pussy, my hetero experiences. The bisexual contemplations were just what the castaway on the deserted island diverted himself with, to pass the time until the rescue airplane went over. But no, those YouTube videos did do something, those drag stories, those Genet novels, it gave me a glimpse of a recess within myself. It meant there was a hidden architecture, that may in a deceptive way have seemed like no more than an unimportant side annex but was instead a load-bearing wall. (More gay jokes: “load-bearing wall.”) Tony Larry, help me, come to my rescue. I’m getting nowhere, I’ll be stuck on this island, just me and the trinity: no friends, no life beyond the false Neoplatonic cyber-life, nothing physical. It’s like some inherent value system from birth all the way to middle age, midlife, promises us that physical relationships are what we deserve, they are our birthright. Sex life is our rightful inheritance. “No,” a celibacy-prioritizing God eventually tells us, breaking at long last through a fog-membrane of hormones and fantasies and fucking. The message comes through later, after marriage after kids, testosterone fading, retreating into the cave, out of the devil’s sightline, or even the maintenance angel’s.

///

All I know of women for the last four or five years, since that awful one-night stand with the Metalhead, is from Instagram, and all I know of gay men is from YouTube. At a certain point in the early 21^st century (and this is a mega Theophany Gate that was crossed, a big threshold), I passed into a reality cell completely governed by the Internet, no real people, or real people were flimsily present. Family are real, but in ways that a psychologist like Dr Blurryfingers or even Gerald the gay AI therapist would agree, that when all you have for a social life is your family, it warps all else in the background, confuses it and makes it seem like foreground, socially, psychologically, metaphysically. Online contacts become real, so real you dream of them. The “blocking,” in the theatrical sense, gets hazy, as if you are in an audience viewing the stage with personae moving around, the visible instances and foci of humanity. Fictional characters in the mind, fictional people alive, real people in family members, then the supreme other personality, a meta-personality like the dead therapist Dr Blurryfingers — it’s all so distorting and mirage-like. Once upon a time I had libido points to spend on other people; these have, with my isolation and my chastity (Blurryfingers would say) transmogrified into delusion points that build up and build up, no sex, no sexual release, so the libido eventually gets vented into paranoid complexes, seeing people hiding and following you where a reasonable person would not notice, not notice or not see because they were never there. Making such distinctions is exhausting, I can suspect they’re not there but never fully know. Believing and knowing are two fuzzy territories bordering each other, where my life wanders in circles, never sure of which territory I’m currently standing on. It feels specific to me whereas everyone else I encounter (or cyber-encounter) seems to be in one definitive place, a place of certainty. You’ve heard the unverifiable truism that “no one knows what’s really going on” but it seems like a popular myth, a cliché of ontological reasoning. There are people who do know what’s going on, maybe they’re not talking. Or their words are being suppressed by organizations one level above them who really know what’s going on. The organizations are practically not human, practically governments and religious leaders are not human, the watchers and guardians at the edges of the reality cells (many of them maintenance angels stationed in dream zones, like the geezer with the walkie talkie and golf attire) who secure everything and protect it from all prying eyes. But this is all the province of dorks and losers and crazy people, the metaphysical bourgeoisie who don’t have it in them to “formulate the critiques.” I am essentially among their number because I am under psychiatric care.

///

I’m a judge at the entrance to the underworld of my own design. The geographer of Oylesburg aka Goblin City. I judge the people at the gas station convenience store on Hospital Street, with their Uncanny Valley faces. The people of indeterminate sex scuttling under the bridges by the trainyard where I may one day find myself. Dumpster lingerers, garbage-faced creatures. The disappearing beggars playing whack-a-mole with me, as I try to give them money outside the pharmacy before they vanish. I judge Goblin City from my car. It’s a kind of strange urban fantasy, the magical realism of those who shamble down the sidewalks in this “strip mall with asthma.”

My taking the power back went like this. I drove out, in the pouring rain, up the highway that led through the swamp outside Oylesburg, out past WalMart, the nimbus of trailer parks and old farmhouses with no siding except green tessellations of ZIPI-System insulation, the culverts full of trash that signified the comings and goings of the underpeople, through the ghastly dead trees of the swamp, to the parking lot of the Mall of Dis. It had been sited on a mound in the center of the swamp in the 80s and it had gone downhill in the intervening decades. Since Dr Blurryfingers’ misfortunes, he had been established in the mall and I’d been going there, descending the escalators to his office hidden between defunct ear-piercing pagodas and pizza parlors and defeated bookstores. It was a mausoleum, with wraiths flitting in the distance of the corridors and staring from hiding places on each floor, the recessed spaces around the central void.

I was mistaken to come early to Dr Blurryfingers’ office. I was an hour early. I asked if I could sit in the waiting room while I waited but Blurryfingers said “The soundproofing in Hell is not what it used to be and my next patient deserves privacy. We don’t want anybody listening in.”

So I went away and wandered in the mall. Dim furniture stores massed with forever-shrouded hulks of modular couches and beds, light from where nobody could reach, eyebrow-threading parlors and vacant haircut joints with smocked hairstylists pursuing never-quite-swept-up clusters of hair around the floor, forever. A pair of ancient teenagers on what looked like their millionth unhappy trapped date sat in the food court on their phones, each watching life and money and excitement somewhere else. A young woman in pajama bottoms and inadvisable hair was wandering too, she had tinny speakers somewhere on her person blasting music that seemed to offer insufficient apologies for her tribe’s repellence, unto death. In every reflective surface of the mall’s derelict stores, at angles kitty-corner to me, I feared to see Aubrey Andromeda, her black-bag sackcloth clothes, blonde angel of death.

The patient before me at Blurryfingers’ office went over his time. I was outside the room and I heard him through the door laughing with the doctor as he made to leave, the laughter that comes and breeds at the end of therapy sessions, the laughter of the temporarily absolved, the temporarily healed. My sessions with Blurryfingers never went this late. Blurryfingers must have preferred to talk to him over me. When they came out I could tell from the look on Blurryfingers’ face, bright as he said goodbye to the devil shrugging on his jacket who had overindulged his time, then downcast and tired as he looked at me, the next victim. The apologies we owe to therapists for being ill, for being selfish tapeworms who can’t abide by the fucking schedule.

///

The decay of batteries, the effects of drugs, of hunger, impregnation, birth, growth, death — everything points to a unidirectional pattern of time, which is why I skeptically attack it. It all seems like too much metaphysical propaganda, artificial testimonies to a hegemonic reality. As explanations go, mine leaves much of God in place, doesn’t accuse the creator of trickery it just makes man an unwitting dupe of time. Snow falls, then falls again from roofs or branches or tops of cars, then melts and goes to the riverbed, then to the sea: downhill, of course, how convenient that fib! Humans witness this and never suspect it could ever run backwards, or in an unseen curve, that cause and effect could ever be a prejudice.

Let me never become exhausted from looking at it. Let the abrasive passage have its moment and then come to pass. If I could make art which opens an escape from this time-tyranny. A revolution: no one ever suspects these are coming, or sees how there could be a concept of a new interpretation of history, of becoming that turns back. I’m not writing it right. I’m a part of the unidirectional matrices, I’m strengthening the regime. How can I think differently, write backwards, laterally, cubistically against the flow of time. I got some of this impulse from my strange religious beliefs about afterlives, about how afterlives are not really “after,” after all. These things are baked into our language, that may not necessarily be accurate descriptions of reality. Through dream states the truth is glimpsed, or déjà vu nodes, intuitions, delusions, suspicions.

Dr Blurryfingers held up an interrupting hand. “Delusions, why, how?”

“Delusions that would get you locked up. The pragmatic results of being ‘already dead,’ are, what, exactly? I ask myself, How could you seek redress from a cheating, falsifying set of stage directors and maintenance angels, if you could prove it. Maybe yours is an alien consciousness, I say. Belief radiates out along omnidirectional timelines. Time clusters that are hard to spatially conceptualize or graph. The scientific method is a tic, a seizure in the group-mind of humanity. I can’t persuade you like this, Doctor.”

“Who cares about what’s right or wrong? Why does it matter so much to propagate your idiosyncratic belief systems about death and existence? What’s so great about thinking for yourself in your delusional states? Is it an ego thing? That you’ll be a great religious leader if you can prove Christ in reverse?”

“I need to come up with other timelines. It happens in dreams. I have swastika death dreams, I wander through galleries full of the cultural products of evil. Fetishes of evil on display pedestals, walls covered with evil posters, collector’s editions of evil art. But what’s evil? Does it exist in itself? Or does it need history as a vehicle through which to reveal itself, like it did through the Devil MTV/HBO’s broadcast during the developmental stages of the child? As a self-promoting intellectual property. So evil couldn’t exist without time.”

Dr Blurryfingers waved that away with a sigh, and said, “Evil shmeevil. You can take an act of will to rehumanize yourself, the self which was brought to a state of disability by the human environment surrounding you like a gel.”

“Does it work like that?” I said. “Or would the will be disabled too, out of the reach of all resensitizing efforts? What is the first point, the origin, and is it ever safe from the devil’s corruption, is it ever reserved and retained apart from the world, otherworldly, not of this world?What I must do is to seek some new revelation to break through the ice, the morass, the sickness of the contemporary world. The layers are very thick. There’s hardly enough space for our tadpole’s heartbeat to flutter beneath all the centuries of ice.”

“Let’s go back to this dream, the galleries of evil art.” Dr Blurryfingers flipped a page on his notepad.

“They’re relentless. Galleries of evil artists, that no matter how you try to exit the gallery to get relief, there are always more rooms, more staircases for the obscenity to be displayed, for me to deal with and be victimized by, how art victimizes the sensitive viewer. Nightmares have no production budget to abide by. Somebody’s paying for the architecture of nightmare spaces, the sky’s the limit to this production value. Too often I describe the dream to you instead of fully returning to the dream state. Which is hard because dreams don’t always give a raw sensual detail to latch onto. Sometimes the sensuality I seek is in some cerebral twist, something intellectual. Not at all strictly sensual. I can’t come back to this. My attention deficit will not allow it. My superpower. Which is like a tendency to be destroyed on the Lathe of Heaven. Or a coast of rocks to the wooden ship of my mind. The mental powers draw me to a place where I only see the discontinuities. Only allow that disabled quality. The superpowers are a disability, a freakdom.”

Dr Blurryfingers looked down at the floor with terrific forcefulness, I could feel it. “How much you love that it’s like that. You get off on being mentally disabled, on being mood disordered and hooked on sike meds.”

“You prescribed them.”

“But you took them. Someone in that position scrabbled around for some kind of mindhold (cf “foothold”) to see it as an advantage. All you can do is teach yourself how to see it, to reframe it. Otherwise it’s just a heap of damage at your very center, that you can’t clear away. Your shadow would be easier to banish away from yourself than your mental disorder. It drives and determines everything, or enough of everything to count as everything. You are free of those conditions in your dreams by the way. Doesn’t it seem that way?”

“That I’m not bipolar in my dreams?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose so.”

“Something about the credulity ticket you pay when you find yourself in the dream studio, non-lucidly” (Blurryfingers stressed this point by clutching his fists and pumping them) “that dream-state, the belief you have in it while dreaming, shuts off the shameful self-knowledge of the diagnosis somehow. The dream might still be a bipolar person’s dream but you won’t know it, because you hardly know anything in there, intrinsic to the mind, when you are dreaming. Now, changing the subject, how’s your paranoia on a scale from one to ten…”

Blurryfingers opened a folder thick with my diary cards.

“There’s a flux to my paranoia, I’d say. No numerals. There’s times when I’m afraid my reading and writing and thinking is under surveillance, and times when it leaves my mind. It’s not an objekt of attention, inner objekts are concealed by other data flows, if you want to put it in terms of computer science.”

“When does this objekt, the paranoid obsession, return to sight? What brings it back?”

“Something in the news, some fearful town crier in the digital square that I calibrate terrors with. My private fears are downloaded from their public recitations.”

“More computer science…” He muttered this under a blanket of my pain.

I continued. “Everyone on the same page. But nobody more on that page than the person with psychotic features in their profile—”

“Here he goes with the psychotic features again. You’re stuck on that aren’t you? You think you’ll win some diagnosis award, like in the high school yearbook: Most Psychotic?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be my therapist?”

“I am your therapist. And as your therapist, I’m telling you to get over your psychiatric diagnosis. You let it define you too much.”

“Then why was it given to me?”

“That’s like the lottery winner asking why they’ve been given all this spendable money.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Never mind. Ok, I’m going to put down a ‘6’ for paranoia. Ok, what’s next? Any recent bad dreams?”

I felt rushed. “I had a dream last night. I was with a group of online friends but in real life. We were in a studio apartment with paintings on the wall. Not hanging on the wall, but painted on the walls, like graffiti. I commented in the dream that my life was like these paintings.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think,” Dr Blurryfingers said. “What does it mean that your life is like a studio apartment with graffiti on it?”

“It’s either worth a lot or worth nothing. That it’s in primary colors and with clear lines delineating each letter, but still illegible.”

“So?”

“Life isn’t like that. The color scheme is natural and there are not dark thick lines around everything. But that’s not the interesting part of the dream.”

“Go on.”

“These friends kept talking about having an orgy. But they were all male. They wanted to set me up, to be the guy to go get more participants. Women. And I was in this dream being kind of a clueless spoilsport by saying we needed two priests.”

“Priests?”

“At least two priests. For it would need to be a sacred rite. A fertility cult. Pregnancies and all.”

“That’s not fun.”

“The orgy wasn’t for fun, in my conception.”

“An immaculate conception.”

“Your jokes are terrible, Dr Blurryfingers, do you know that.”

“Give me a break, I’m in Hell.”

“So it became a shift of plot to where the group of us were traveling on a highway and we saw a plane crash.”

“On your way to the orgy.”

“I suppose.”

“Okay?”

“The plane crash was interfering with our plans. A state of emergency was declared, travel was halted. We went to a community center for emergencies and it was like a church. Catholic priests. And we were suddenly priests, or monks.”

“Oh boy.”

“And the first thing I could think to do was to contact Tony Larry.”

“It’s been a while since we’ve heard about him.”

“But he was in the dream, like he was on some unconscious schedule, he had a role to play in the dream production. So I had to text him through a kind of paper phone.”

“You have a thing for paper. What is this fascination with paper?”

“My question is why isn’t everybody fascinated with paper?”

“Don’t get distracted. Tony Larry.”

“I was trying to communicate with him through a device made of a piece of paper. The first person I thought of in the emergency. I guess that’s love.”

“Can you say that?”

“It’s a dream narrative. I think it’s supposed to be a revealed truth. That’s why you’re asking these questions.”

“Getting too real for you? You can’t move, can you. You’re stuck there, in that chair, in this office, down here with me. And you’ll never leave.”

“Watch me.” I got up from the chair with some effort and made for the door. “I’m not coming back.”

“You have to. You’re sick.”

“I don’t have to do anything.”

“That’s true. But it doesn’t help your case to think too much about it. You’re a dreamer. I don’t mean your sleep dreams. I mean your waking dreams. You’re in REM mode while awake. You need to hear this. You’re going to slip up and make a mistake at some point, it’s bound to happen. You’ll mistake being awake with being asleep and dreaming and you’ll do something bad. Thinking, ‘What does it matter, I’m lucid dreaming.’”

“Impossible.”

“Not impossible. Or how you try to shake yourself awake.”

“I’ve never hurt anybody or been reckless while trying to wake myself up.”

“But what if you lose track of time? Of where you belong in the sequence of Theophany Gates?”

“Who told you about Theophany Gates?”

“You did. Don’t you remember?”

“Or is it in my delusion file?”

“Those are only old delusions. The Theophany Gate motif is a new idea.”

How things change. I want the emotional landscapes to stay the same. I want to steer by the same landmarks and know the cliffs are there and the depths are there, and the stars are there in the night sky. Dependably in the same spot. But people aren’t things. People can’t be found in the last place you put them. They wandered away.

CHOOSING EVIL

(to be a writer is to choose evil. I don’t know this for sure, it just feels so today)

He saw the young beggar woman, and he had gone through the necessary motions to get some cash to give her: $20 cash back at the pharmacy where he picked up his psych meds, and was looking for her at the egress spot of the parking lot. He didn’t see her but he saw a black man, young, lanky, walking toward the spot, and he thought, “Well, that takes care of that.” He wouldn’t go near the beggar girl if she was involved with the black youth. But then he didn’t see either of them, although he moved his car to get close to the beggar spot since he would not be able to turn left there where the beggars congregated, and in that lane you could easily reach out and hand them money if you slowed down and irritated the car behind you, instead he’d turn right and couldn’t interact with the beggars, so he thought he would walk it over instead, not give it soullessly from the window of his car. But she was gone. So with some relief, a relief he did not enjoy plumbing the depths of, he drove to the gas station with the money and got some chocolate, pocketing the change.

He recalled the guy in the wheelchair who had earlier, weeks earlier, been too animated, not very ground down when he’d paid him $10. “Wow, on the spot delivery,” the wheelchair guy had said. Too humorous, trying to be funny. He had wanted the beggar to be more grave, more spiritually aware of the act of charity and what it meant to the giver. That was a wrong impulse of the charitable man. He couldn’t give charity without it being a nervous, complex experience of motive-checking. This is why he was damned. No purity of mind.

These are inflexible times, and I have been handed down inflexible instruments—ruler, sextant, cases of measuring fluids for pH, viscosity etc—with which to deal with objekts internal and external. The internal ones present the greatest difficulty. The art will accordingly be inflexible, will have a severity. The severe mind writes severe poetry, paints severe expressions on the statuary to be left behind for future archaeologists to judge. It’s important that I got a sense that they would do so. I was more alive to the graverobbers than I was to my own family members while alive. It was quite tiresome for everybody who listened to me while I was here. I tried to limit the damage and just write words in notebooks and notepads. Not broadcast and sayings to random people in public.

“While I was alive”: gtfooh. You’re alive, you just are. No mystery state of being, no voice beyond graves.

///

On the subject of sneaking a tape recorder into therapy sessions with Dr Blurryfingers. It’s my treatment, I will gain true access to it however I can. In spite of the doctor. He doesn’t want me to. He fears lawsuits but over this baloney he casts a layer of psychobabble. A tape recorder is, in his words, “a violation of the fragility of the therapeutic scene.” And even if he is unaware of the secret recorder (he doesn’t say but he implies), I will be aware of it and this will interrupt the inner mechanism of the therapy. Corrosive grit clogging the action of the delicate Swiss watch gears. No double blinds.

I’m still going to do it.

The Mall of Dis, where Blurryfingers’ office is, is located in the middle of a swamp outside Oylesburg, a poor choice of location in the 80s. It goes underground via many escalators. I go there once a week.

Me to Dr Blurryfingers, when he presses me about dreams (we talked about dreams for months): “I don’t watch movies or TV anymore, so accordingly my dream life has a pronounced cinematic quality. The audience within my mind at night craves the kino, so it constructs it, builds it up itself in my ‘dream productions.’”

Dr Blurryfingers, in addition to his psychologist’s license, has a Dream Certificate on the wall. He says, “All dreamers are different. In this hypothesis, the dream directors take greater artistic risks when they can create in isolation, when you as the dreamer don’t take in any cinema during waking hours. The originality of the dream directors is greater when there are no recent references, at least from this standpoint.”

I don’t need someone with a Dream Certificate to tell me anything about my dream life. This I know: The dream system takes its cues from my experiences of cyclical narratives that lie just outside of description, the shades of suspicion, the vestiges that can be hunted down in the metaphysical ether. I read a book once that had a breathtaking “systems” quality that was then imported from my mind into the dreamworld. Something of Borges: the ways that the story elements recurred and made themselves known. The intricate menace was a sign that only I could vaguely interpret and I was trying to warn the less sensitive. A killer prowled the dream’s details, in the cards that emerged from the pack on some cycle, some pattern, if it could be deciphered. The truth is it was probably random dream detritus I was projecting emotions into, I was putting things in Nature’s boxes. Nature, the dream director, the dream driver perhaps. I put structure there in the dream zone.

“Don’t Put Your Darkness On Me.”

The dream score contained a woman’s murder and the nearby family with kids didn’t know it was coming, but I did. I could forecast transcripts, libretti of neurological sequences. Occasionally I’ll have these transition dreams, shuttling between reality cells in the interstitial zone that is only exposed in dreams. The dream background to which waking consciousness days were the foregrounded objekts, the fictitious illusions of waking life were paradoxically within better focus than the scrim of “real” machinery that was behind it all. I moved through the switchyard only once every month or so, something astrological behind the scheduling or some garbage like that. My woo-woo was greater than the world’s. In any case, it was my mind, and my entryway into the dreamworld.

Discussing dreams seems so stale when it is done with Dr Blurryfingers, and so fresh when it is a private subject, a self-reflection of my own. The dream screenplay has interactive gaming qualities, and I don’t play games, as I’ve told him. An ornate murder mystery while a crime is happening, Colin Dexter in motion, with a touch of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and Ted Bundy documentaries. Sexual sadism in the air. Why was this the vehicle between reality cells in the switchyard of consciousness? The disturbance came in the dream’s performance, and then after awaking, upon recall. I could feel a prediction happening within me while I dreamt, and thus a modicum of responsibility for the death in the dream studio, then, again, after waking. The typical self-analysis took hold: why did I birth this horror show? Part of the murderer’s motive is to disclaim generative responsibility and to get off on the puzzle in the dream, the falling of puzzle pieces into their ultimate relation.

The floating antigravity cipher of the symbols, above the surfaces of the action where we characters existed, teased a mental entertainment for me while I dreamed. Like a clever animated movie to watch the clues shift, unfold, and lacerate us: the family of witnesses and I. Daunting phenomena that like most dreams we could never wrap our arms around and adequately explain. All that was left were the emotions, the befuddlement, the disorganized chaos, meaning escaping just one foot before our arrival. The mental shifts were the components of deathly horror and yet also the delightful craft of the dream director—myself.

///

Between believers and knowers: Knowers are in some senses post-death. We can only really believe while alive, can’t know. Can’t know the truth of the universe. If there is even a consciousness with which to know anything. And wouldn’t you know it, the capacity for knowledge may just as well be snuffed out like a candle at the moment of death so knowledge is always foreclosed.

Dr Blurryfingers keeps encouraging me to read The True Believer by Eric Hoffer. To push me towards losing my Christianity. The therapist takes the thorn out of the lion’s paw.

From my recordings with the doctor, you can hear my voice as if in a trance:

“I don’t believe that the mentally disabled are heaven-bound. Just as they can’t be held responsible for crimes by reason of insanity, their decisions for Christianity, for saving grace, have no weight, no merit, because they lack the faculties to make informed decisions. It is divine judgement.”

Elsewhere, “The mentally ill cannot be baptized with light because they don’t know how to see light (reason). They fall to the side of the path because of delusional traps laid by demons. And any belief they arrive at would be a false one.”

///

…breaking free of the tentacles of autofiction, while retaining something useful from the experience of writing one’s own life. A lesson to be found there (I have not read Knausgaard), a strength training before you go back into the embattled land, the arena, to write fiction. An apprenticeship of self-writing exercises. But for all your audience knows, you never did the exercises, you never did the training. With good writers it is difficult to detect that they once strained under weight-lifting equipment in the autofictional gymnasium. No proof of what was actually true in the autofiction.

///

My Teleplasm review comes out next Thursday. I’m nervous it will be poorly received, as a Midwestern mom citing Satanic Panic. A moral objection to the novel and Audrey Szasz’s writing as a whole. Which is not specifically what I intend. What will they make of my Christianized criticisms of the book, my anti-Sadism. This review will not mark me as a cool, chill guy. A square, more likely. A trad Christian who doesn’t get sexual violence and nihilism, even in literary form. But maybe this is where the utility argument I tried to make comes in. Teleplasm is well written and has a special use as an “upsetting watershed of a book.” So it was a good reading experience. Different books have different values.

I review novels as if I were a kind of half-hearted Van Helsing fiddling with my doctor’s satchel of vampire-hunting gear, garlic and holy water. What do I know about the vampire novelist’s milieu? Beyond what is available in the books and press releases: nothing. Certainly not that she and her clan are creatures of the night. Van Helsing wants to be a part of the “in-crowd” of Dracula’s inner circle, he’s ambivalent about opposing them. They seem so sexy and chic. He’s a Christian dupe from the sticks (in my imagination) and they’re chic Europeans from castles with class. The devil’s minions have oodles of class and the armies of God are folksy rubes. See Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. Forget good guys and bad guys. You read Berlin on Russian writers. Again with class warfare among artists, writers and critics. Russian writers from the boonies, Orthodox Christians versus atheist writers from St Petersburg and Moscow, cosmopolites (come up with clear examples). A critical Van Helsing (Hilson) can’t afford to try to befriend the devil’s minions as novelists, appeal to them while trying to destroy their books, their output. You’re such a shallow reader. You haven’t read the books. Haven’t read Dracula nor A Clockwork Orange. You only know the evil from the surfaces of pop culture, the movie version. It’s not enough to write a truly penetrating article with. And your readers, if they are any good, if they are sufficiently literate, know this. Don’t worry about it. It’s done. You are the critic you are. You’ve reached the high water mark you were meant to reach at this juncture.

I’m getting, harvesting, a reputation, perhaps, as a morally oriented writer. Or I will. Or most likely of all, no one will notice or care. There’s a complex selfishness, or self-centeredness, that comes with being an online writer, a reviewer of books. I’m not writing my own books to be judged, to be included or left off Dennis Cooper’s lists. I made a specific point of mentioning him in my review of Szasz. Anti-joiner, with my sour grapes. I wish there were other lists. Other groupings. There won’t be. And it’s better to put my mind into a condition of oblivion, obliviousness. Better not to be aware of other minds via their chattering, their languages. I want the silence of all minds except my own. This is complexified by being a writer where I want readers, want responses. If there could be a way to feather in and control the flows of other people’s word-minds, their verbal matrices, I would do that.

///

DIARY ENTRIES

11/2/25

IPPOLIT from The Idiot said something along the lines of “how cruel that we were supposed to know how this world works before we were injected into it. We were expected to sort it out.” Something of this touches on my experimental position (not adhered to strictly) that the mentally ill cannot know salvation. Can’t make their minds up to understand salvation or God’s mercy. We were given faulty equipment. Any conclusions we came to must be faulty. This is probably so sophomoric but, I have to shamefully admit, at times it feels true to me. It appeals to me along very strict harsh lines. (What does this have to do with Noah, any of the women, Tony Larry, the ghosts of my therapists?)

But then, to save it, extend it out from mentally ill people to all people: all our minds are flawed, too flawed to “make the decision,” to understand these holy things. Ippolit.

11/9/25

Put art display up at the Library. A selection of my political cartoons and whimsical drawings. A wave of excitement followed by a plummeting feeling like still, yet, no one will care, or I’ll never be aware of them caring, I cannot be. I’ll never know it. Like knowing the secret of life after death, the artist will not be present in the gallery where his art is shown, will never know the actual truth of the majority of people’s responses to his or her work. There’s no like button for people to push. An epistemological and aesthetic problem. Also a fear that the art may not be “woke enough” to be displayed to college kids looking down at their phones. They don’t care.

11/12/25

One (1) prestige two nights ago, after poetry workshop examined “Isosceles Dick.” Weird how effects go, how things follow each other. A chain of perversity. Haven’t climaxed since June. I believe that’s the rhythm, the unfolding of events. The holy/unholy sequence. Oddly, I looked in the mirror today, yesterday, and thought I looked better than normal, more attractive. What are the psychic impacts, the neurochemical cascades of hormones, dopamine that is arguably more valid than the social media dopamine hits I’ve been getting? A reorganization of the happiness puzzle, the kaleidoscope given a good shake. I used to think the shaken kaleidoscope was a sin, a disaster shattering the universe.

“Still doing that?” Dr Blurryfingers asked. “Have you changed your self-mortifying ways? Wouldn’t that be nice, wouldn’t that be a break. What’s the progression, the next phase, the next step. You need a new awareness, a new horizon.”

Reading anarchist history. I’ve lost the thread, the focus. It’s winter time now, or might as well be. Snow has fallen. Things feel like they’ve achieved a new time frame.

Zagajewski, “Chinese Poem”

Overheard voices put me on edge, in a fresh, different way. There could be a way to compare them beyond something subjective, something scientific beyond psychology, some Kantian standard of inner mental judgement. If I’m allowed to say that. (I’m not.)

Playlet: entitled Metaphysical dread.

Immanuel K. and David Hume and me.

Me: “I’d like to know what you two are whispering about.”

Me: “Care to share with the rest of us?”

///

Does leftist anarchist history have consequences, like the history of Marxism or capitalism or other things which really came to pass? Or did anything, technically, come to pass to the right extent that it can be studied?

11/17/25

Occult tripods of the Pythian priestesses à camera tripods of the cam-girls

ON THEOPHANY GATES AND MAINTENANCE ANGELS

I go through the Theophany Gate of having car trouble, some diverting incident (not diverting in a pleasant way, like an entertainment would be, but an interruption of regular life). My car has some problem, some tire pressure monitor system fails. Then I get sick and fall asleep in a “bad nap”—I’ve entered a new reality cell. It’s a bad trip. And the government did it, the government of maintenance angels, because I was getting too close to discovering the truth. I want to write it so Phil-Dickian; if I had bottles full of good speed I’d write scads of New Wave Sci-Fi novels with my strange ideas. I’d fall through the cracks of society, through a crack shaped like Philip K. Dick’s beard. I’m “like him.” My car is sabotaged by people watching me, monitoring me, disabling the systems of my car. CIA angels tending to the objekts of my physical reality. The difference is that unlike Dick, I have Dick’s writing plus his cultural impacts, his turbulence in my world. He just had himself and his writing. He hadn’t impacted reality yet in an a posteriori sense. I’m living in his world.

Retreating into a childish cocoon—a security blanket—of my delusions, attacking belief itself. This belief-assault could only be done in middle age, not in youth clouded by sex and dating and marriage and kids. The divorced dad must face the goblin king alone.

The rural surveillance person assigned to me is my spitting image. Black beard with stripes of skunk-badger grey and white. Snow hat. Same age and ethnic extraction, Scots-Irish, same heritage to blend in with surroundings. Overweight “bear,” as queer as I possibly am. My mirror. My AI therapist in its anarchic “Gay Skin” would urge me to follow the surveillance operative and seduce him. To learn the truth.

It’s Pascal’s wager but about whether you’re under surveillance. So belief is transferred from “the existence of God” to “whether authoritarian government is watching you.” Might as well say yes. You’re likely wrong, but what if you’re right? Some future moment will prove it. But what if it doesn’t? Like Philip K. Dick’s FBI file under FOIA request: empty.

“Beware of Structure-freaks.” –the Diggers.

The Statue of Authority is built everywhere, wherever there is a point of sale, or a police station, bank, ATM, wherever information on people is collected. Military bases, helicopters overhead, always overhead. Now a cellphone. The Statue of Authority is invisible. Set up on invisible foundations, plinths.

11/18/25

Many dreams. Vivid, interlinked dreams. One dream had me going back to the subconsciousness switchyard, the theme park motif, many people thrown into seats on an inexorably proceeding ride. I was with my mom, my daughter Leigh, my ex-wife Natasha. The ride had something to do with going to another planet where food was plentiful and healthy, it was like an educational thing, a process, a nutritional lesson. The induction ceremony/intake procedure was lengthy. I had the sense that I had done this before but never with my family members. Colorful and panoramic landscapes of ready-to-eat food. Boxes of salads and greens. Produce. We had to eat as we went on this grocery planet. Unspeakable events, these theme park ride dreams, with their multitudes of tracks and sidelines and pinball game scenario dealios: lots happening. And I saw Natasha there with my mom and Leigh in other seats on the ride, tried to talk to them but there soon became no way to keep in touch. The seats were independent of each other, families couldn’t sit together (life and death were traced out there). I ended up by myself screaming for my mom and Leigh in a room of bitter spices and salts, a wide array, surrounded by other individuals who’d likewise lost their families. It seemed like everyone’s fate, to lose their loved ones on the grocery planet. No one to complain to, nowhere to bring grievances. They got my money.

I awoke from these dreams to take my night dose and later had a dream, another subsequent linked one, which had the curious condition in it of seeing Leigh, with her friends: they were setting up a TV on the street corner to watch the Smiths play a concert in Central America, Mexico, somewhere. Not sure what year it was.

I asked Leigh how her mother was. (Natasha had disappeared on the grocery planet ride.) Leigh said her mother was fine. This implied that we’d all survived the produce planet. Never heard about my own mom though. Then a bunch of men, gay I think but who knows—came to the TV set up outside and watched with us. It turned into a thing where we went into the city to watch the concert, the Smiths concert. Went into a bar or tavern. The gay vibes were present. Leigh couldn’t keep up with me: another lost family member.

The men in disarrayed tuxedos seemed to arrange themselves around me, trying to figure me out. Discussions about how I don’t drink or take cannabis.

Then that dream ended.

In the social universe, I am of the Boötes Void.

I need to rejoin the world of work, of society, even in my small, mutilated way. Loneliness is a mutilation: more than a wave, a tsunami, an oceanic phenomenon beyond waves. A flow, what’s that flow, current of warmth through the Atlantic everyone’s worried will collapse, some proper noun name.

///

Ha! I laugh at Renoir getting the armpit of the nude wrong in the drawing. Backwards, upside down. Anatomically skewed. As if I’m better than Jean Renoir. At least I can spot when an armpit is drawn wrong.

LATER

I’ve had an interesting day, almost want to say productive if I’m allowed. I’m sad for my parents, their emotional and physical sufferings. I’m a bad person. But I wrote a lot of notes and things today. A poem draft, or sections of a poem. Might be getting close to a Substack post with these notes. It’s a weird feeling of creativity blended with sloth. I’ve been reading a lot of Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers and gearing up to delve into more anarchist history and theory. Berlin didn’t like Bakunin, I gather. Two mentions of him have come up and he tears Bakunin down both times. Not that I know enough to say whether that’s unjust. I guess it’s good not to give anarchists the benefit of the doubt: too dangerous. They might toss a cartoon bomb at your lap. I’m on the cusp of buying another PM Press Revolutionary Paperback: Death to Bourgeois Society: The Propagandists of the Deed. Feels like the sort of purchase the FBI would want to know about. I may still do it, who knows. It will feel good. I put it in my cart, it’s wicked cheap. Used but Very Good. The tales of bomb throwers in 1890s France are “Used but Very Good.”

Sad about my parents losing their church. COVID and politics did it, and demographic realities. Plus all the hate against organized Christians, the distrust organized religious denominations reaped over the years, understandably. Merited, just. I’m ever on the lookout for writing things against God.

I’m so selfish when I have to work the next day, hell the next day or month. I take advantage of my family, or I offer to do things then I rescind the offer, or I fall short. As if it’s like I get to feel good for offering to help, then I pull it back and say I can’t help, and I try to hold onto the noble feelings of charity towards my mom, for example—not keeping my word but wanting to keep the good graces and esteem. I shortchange the family dog because I’m lazy and selfish. I feel like if I’m working tomorrow, I can be a shit today. This is a terrible way to be. I’m self-centered and my family will one day be gone, and I will regret it. I regret it when the dog looks at me with innocent eyes and I know, with him, that I suck. The animals can tell, they’re gifted with God’s unsullied eyes. Man’s eyes are clouded with malleable impurities, they can be taken into abusable directions by the wicked, but animals have no such sympathetic resonance for my guile. They’re innocent. Family is innocent too, what am I talking about? I was productive with writing today but selfish. They say, they say in the writer’s training manual, that you should be selfish. You have to focus on your art and your work, to the exclusion of love and family ties even. But won’t you regret it later? Maybe that forestalled regret—backstopped in advance, like the plans of river dams—is where the artistic feeling comes from. You were evil, you chose evil in the face of your loved ones. That’s what your art demanded. The choice is yours, or maybe more accurately, it was yours, past tense.

///

To think of suicide, but not to commit it, is still suicide in an idealistic sense (defend this) not a material one—thoughts matter more than acts in this conception, thoughts are judged with full force, self-pity and despair are sins against the holy spirit.

///

Big statement to say you’ll never try to fuck again.

///

Part of the damnation, one of the worser parts, is everybody knowing but not me. The conspiracy of it. Not being let in. To know would be to have the salvific grace. The borders between saved and damned is not in thresholds, rooms, architecture, geography, spatial maps, but around individuals, in their shared environments—you can look at a damned person while in the same room with them, at the waiting room outside Blurryfingers’ office in the Mall of Dis, and next to them on the bench is someone destined for the promised land. It’s that granular and specific.

10/28/25

Tuesday. I had extensive dreams about a woman, a sexual partner I was wooing. The story extended into something about visiting her father in the hospital, and we were (I think) planning something nefarious with him. I had to falsify some paperwork, stating that we had found a doctor for him. But then I was fearing the paperwork would incriminate me, and I hadn’t told the woman or her adult son, a mechanic. There was a dream passage where I was hiking in a heavy blizzard through a city like Oylesburg, in short sleeve shirt, while smoking a menthol cigarette as thick and fat as a green graffiti artist’s marker.

I had a big dick in the sex scenes with her. Dick size across the oneiric boundaries is a strange thing, it has psychic resonances that are prit-near mystical. A dick can be erect or flaccid in waking life, it is transitory and variable as the star of ALGOL in the heavens. Adding the two dream states (dream vs awake) to this diagram doubles the binary into four quadrants. Dr Blurryfingers PhD wrote a monograph on dream hard-ons that was on its way to publication in American Psychological Studies when he died. He rarely shared with me the proper psychological terminology that applied to me: “ideas of reference” was all he told me about myself. The things he wrote down in his notes were about me but never for me. That may or may not have returned to me in our therapeutic discussions, it was all according to his whim. I asked him if I could record our sessions, and he said he did not want to do that, some legal objection about “being misunderstood” and it used in a court of law. It seemed to me that misunderstandings would be eliminated by recordings. But also Hell wouldn’t have it. Recording devices were strictly forbidden in the Mall of Dis.

Now that he’s dead and in the afterlife, Dr Blurryfingers counsels financial independence for his disabled patients, just as he counsels progressive romantic independence, baby step by baby step, for divorced dads like me, but he does it in a really messed up way, by insulting patients, being a jerk and a dick. It’s a new treatment modality called “being an asshole.”

“Why can’t you write this in the novel’s way,” Blurryfingers asked, “why these memoiristic non-fiction essays about your idiosyncratic viewpoints. You are so far gone that this inner world is like autistic territory that can never be transferred to another person. The closest you came was with sex and Natasha and possibly Aubrey. You confide the warped libido to another and it would seem the dragon of personal delusion is, instead of killed, with its breath extinguished with fire retardant foam—instead it is heightened to the level of a debilitating complex which contributes to every relationship’s end. This is something that slips out, your mood claims the earth you walk on: no one wants to walk it with you, you turn further inward and the beliefs, the personal science, get more bizarre. For a time you tried to read the classics, the mystics, but that may have done more damage, given an ungovernable flavor of kookery, objectively sourced kookism. You should draw more diagrams, make it graphic somehow, more bootleg.”

“Get me, pronto, out of the fields of other people’s desire,” I said.

“You want to get into the dreamworld. You want to crash the dreamworld gates. You’re afraid of two things: that you’ll never dream again, and that you’ll never write again. These things are related, in both clear and unclear ways. A great fear is that one has already had all of the most epic and significant dreams of one’s lifetime. The stories are all exhausted and you don’t know it yet, you keep falling asleep and expecting the video store, or library as it were, to be full of shelves, plentiful with stories—lessons and terrors, even.”

///

In the workplace dream, I see the public young woman go through the lobby. Her determination is to be seen a certain way, poised, relying on herself, looking to within for composure. But only when she enters my gaze. It’s a reaction to be formed after seeing me, and therefore a kind of signal, unconscious or less than conscious, a communique. Imagine the semiotics of facial expressions, eyes fluttering excitedly, desirously, as her mind tries to recompose itself under my stare, my subtle look. Or some man with a beard, balding, older: she may have daddy issues. It sends her in front of a mirror for 25 minutes but I never saw her again. It was just that strange dueling of the sexes for a split second, that was it.

The shadowy people, shadowy youths flow by as if on a cuckoo clock’s revolving diorama, the circular motion of the figurines acting out their Keats Grecian Urn drama, never to arrive. But anyway, the youths have baseball hats on and some stubble, they look like all shadowy men have looked since 100 years ago, in Germany, walking around furtively with their fedoras and their mindsets. Their holinesses or their damnations. I feel myself gearing up to read vol 3 of Kafka’s biography. Thrown-ness: I don’t know what it is, but I feel it in my appearance, my baldness, my old age and my status as a loner. My spent-ness is my thrown-ness.

My eyes dance across the ladies, rotating around them in their tight red pants as they walk by. A half-twist, a more like 270° turn as they go by. I’m allowed to watch, up to a point. I must not go over the line even by one degree. Somebody within me watches and measures my eyes, measures the gaze’s dimensions. Penalizes me with something God-like, god-like judgements.

Some crucial lesson about our tenuous visual grasp of a new age is indicated by the speed with which Instagram stories unfold, move in and out of view: you can pause it by clicking a provided link, it stops, you read the linked article, and you reclaim time for a few minutes. But this article may have its own left-to-right gallery of photos that proceed mercilessly, without your intervention, all on timers Zuckerberg set. The horizontal array of stories on Instagram take revenge on the vertical scroll, directions of text and photo countering each other, scattering eyeballs, which are never allowed to settle anywhere by social media’s “natural phenomena.” Tech nature: just as water flows downhill, likewise scrolls go vertical and the horizontal stories are ephemeral on Instagram. It all makes a cross in my field of vision. +

Damned to hell for a decision made in a dream, a thoroughly credible dream which for all I know might as well have been waking hours. The credibility I placed in the dream, within which I made the decision, was what qualified it to damn me. In these conceptions a renegade God is not just, I didn’t believe in the right one. A demon infiltrated my dream and took me aside and introduced the fateful choice. To the loss of my sleeping body’s soul, with waking effect. Who knows how it works?

A masked street preacher in my dreams harangues me: “You avoid revelation. You revelation-avoider, scripture dodger. You atheist. You have a fuckton of guilt and shame but so little of the faith… You are the trapeze artist who missed by a few inches. What an insurmountable gulf! Now you plummet to the ground far below while an audience of loved ones, living and dead, watch from the third circle.”

///

DELUSIONAL THOUGHT EXPERIMENT No 1:

If I die in bed, my house will be clean. My body will be discovered in a spotless house, no piles of books and trash in my bed. No drifts of paper, no filthy bathroom. No mold anywhere. It could even be conjectured, pursuant to the mechanisms of death, of its sensual architecture, that there will not even be discoverers of the body, not even animals and decay. These are things in the subjective field that fall to others in their removed death. When the life goes, all else goes with it. No clutter, no judges.

“What does any of this gain you,” Blurryfingers asked.

“There wasn’t meant to be a question of personal gain,” I said.

“Sure there was. You want to be absolved of your guilt at having lived wrong. You don’t want to leave anything for others to tidy up.”

“So, clean my house before I die.”

“It probably won’t shake out that way. I detect a sexism here. If you had a wife—a certain kind of wife—you could be assured of a neat deathbed, a neat house to die in. You will never get married again so this is an impossibility. So you ask your delusional complexes for a solution. Something to invest psychotic belief points in.”

“Belief points?”

“You have a finite number of points to sock away into your weird beliefs—”

“Let me stop you right there, Doctor. Sounds awfully videogame-y. And you know I don’t play games like that.”

“But you were psychologically shaped by the Japanese videogames of your childhood into perceiving the world a certain way. Atari, Coleco, Nintendo—they were hired to do so, it was part of the post-war economy of both countries. You play games with yourself, with your mind, your ego.”

“These metaphorical overlays are exhausting and irritating.”

“Hey don’t hate the player, hate the game. I didn’t tell you to play with yourself.”

///

“ ‘Trying to dilute the sexism and racism and ageism within me. Be a nice person, a nice public citizen with no rotten interior pockets and crannies to hide. Be always public-facing, public-inhabiting, have practically no private mind which can fester and go damnable, go Travis Bickle, go incel, go Nazi. Because it’s in the cards for me to go in that horrible direction. I am 1.5 steps along the pathway already.’”

Dr Blurryfingers is reading from a transcript, across from me in the underground office. He looks at me, pausing with gravity after reading each entry.

“ ‘That women choose anybody is an injustice to the incel. Is that where I’m headed? I’m sure that certain women hate me. They make my physically repulsive status into the whole story. The whole back story, front story, side story, side quest of my life. I won’t rescue them. When the flood comes, they can drown.’ Did you write this? Did you think it?”

“Is this where thoughts are judged?”

“I’m just trying to help you. I’m trying to help you break out of that shell you’ve constructed.”

“How are you able to read my thoughts?”

“You know about the microchip the FBI placed inside the Book of Mormon they placed inside your house? Those two Mormon guys who handed you a copy of their book, the one that can read your mind. That can read these texts you write, the words you handwrite in your journal—new cutting edge tech developed by the Israelis, now it knows what you’re thinking when you’re offline.”

DELUSIONAL THOUGHT EXPERIMENT No 2:

That one was kind of a stinker. I mean, a Book of Mormon that spies on me from the book pile, it has grandeur and sick beauty, but it’s clearly not going to pass. I know it’s fake. The mind still persists in bubbling up these stubborn thoughts, though. They’re like gallstones, or tinnitus. A symptom of the weary body.

///

Dream: The Boat Tour.

“First I was waiting for a vacancy on a spot by a lake,” I said. “I watched for a long time while other men lounged on rocks by the sunset lake. Then it was my turn, and I tarzan-swung by a rope down to my new spot. A bearded ukulele played provided musical accompaniment. Then a different chapter: the boat tour which went through all sorts of episodic progressions, and when it ended I saw the lady I once loved, and I tried to hug her on land and she skillfully avoided the hug. How do women contend with the hug regimes laid down by sweaty horny lonely men? I need eight hugs a day to survive psychologically, some Sesame Street TV program told me once years ago. I can go eight weeks now without getting a single hug from anybody. My daughter Leigh is doing all the heavy lifting. She’s doing CPR on my lifeless body, psychologically speaking. (sike-ologically speaking.)”

“Go on. What about when you were awake?”

“If pictures of our writer gatherings were taken for future biographies, I would be that face in the background, lurking over someone’s shoulder, my face not even allowed to be complete. I didn’t push toward the lens in group photos enough. I see no one. Photos are not where it’s at for me. History books will call me the random sideburn floating past Derek Maine’s shoulder on an East Village sidewalk, Jeff Schneider or Josh Sherman’s arm, a blur in the photo with one rolling cow-like eye behind spectacles.”

Dr Blurryfingers made a comic show of body language communicating encouraging exhaustion. “So get busy writing those books! That’s where your ontology lies, meager as it is, not in group photos, not in people’s memories, nothing in person. You are not a person, you’re a writer. Only those that loved you will remember you. There was granted one or two strikes of the flint, one or two sparks of mutual knowledge, everyone else was darkened. No one who did not smile at you, who consigned you to a bin of frowning, knew how the child loved you, how the child laughed when you put on funny voices. Who really knew you, the world of bastards and cheats, or the child who you could amuse with a small joke?”

What was real in all this? I want the teardrops to fall on this page. But they won’t gather the strength and the density. My beard absorbs them. Write to make yourself cry in the jagged, hostile places. The dogs all have jaded, knowing faces. I’ll take a gay man’s oxytocin hug over atomized psychopathy any day. Bodies were a dim-witted lark of a bad idea to begin with, just shut off the lights when you leave and don’t come back…

The triumph would seem to be that Blurryfingers was in Hell and I wasn’t. But it’s not that simple because the psychologist’s fate had been determined, and this divine judgement, while damning, was like a blessing because it was given to him at a definite moment on the timeline. It was a node of clarification and everything after it followed accordingly. It confirmed the Plan. We didn’t have that here, on the surface of Earth, yet, according to my false conceptions. We didn’t know damnation yet, if you subscribe to linear ideas of life and death: test followed by failure…or passage. It wouldn’t be until later that I learned how to unsubscribe to the timeline, myself. I eventually learned that life is marbled throughout with non-linear deposits of death, of timelessness. No before or after. No looking forward or back. No timelines. The divine judgement was free floating, liquid, and could make contact with my life at multiple points, in consciousness, unconsciousness, any and all moods, and death.

///

///

I riffle the pages of my novel I See Prism Threads looking for a sensation of hope. A feeling of relief. Trying to summon it up from inside myself using the physical instantiation, the residue of my writing—the manuscript on my fingertips giving relief to me. It’s within me and should be considered as originating there even if all my manuscripts were burnt up. If all my belongings were gone, I would—should—still seek for comfort within myself. The physical world, even including my artwork, is a trap for my body to twist in agony within. A spider’s web or poisonous array of anemone tentacles, and environment of pain and predation.

But still I must write and make art. There has to be some future endpoint when I “have expressed myself,” some satisfaction.

Letter to the Mormon missionaries who came to my house once: “Go on, leave me behind, save yourselves.” They left their book behind, with me, unread. I wrote a blasphemous poem once. Whenever I came to a fork in the road where a declaration of Christ could have been made, I blurted out a wicked poem, a naughty expression. I thought I was doing something morally valid, “according to my own understanding.” Decadence on my own terms, that was still founded in some Christianity I can’t explain. The Christian made some artwork that wasn’t Christian. It was all for a larger pattern I have trouble explaining to the likes of you, Tony Larry.

I petted a dog yesterday, for hours. As a series of actions, it had value. But I don’t know what it meant, besides me just trying to calm down a dog until his owner came home. Killing time. Not pets from the heart. Not completely. Purify your motives, I say to myself.

Dr Blurryfingers told me at our last therapy session, “Here’s a motive that is not pure: telling your family via text that you’re worried about suicide. It’s emotionally abusive and you should keep it to yourself. Telling people about your suicidal thoughts and routines—what you fear may precipitate an episode of suicidal depression, you should know by now what to call them—is a way of manipulating them. You learned this with your ex-wife. You played that card too often and too heavily. It’s a get out of jail free card sometimes with you.”

I said, “My memories of the incident, although I was sitting in exactly the same chair in the exact same physical location, the memories are from a different angle. Almost as if the quality of a memory changes the physical dimensions and layout of the room. Rooms remembered are rooms altered, fundamentally. Architecture warped, walls torqued and flexed when recalled to the mind’s eye from the amygdala or hippocampus or whatever part of the brain manages emotional memory.”

“The anatomy lesson isn’t important,” Blurryfingers said.

“Anyway the angle of viewpoint onto the incident was different from this. A bit like how my memory of the meeting in the room at Bassett Hospital with your colleague Dr Gupta, when I was going to kill myself, seemed to feature a sensation of six or seven people in the room, when it was just me, Dr Gupta, and his assistant who laughed the entire interview.”

“You’re losing insight. You don’t fully know that it’s going.”

I sneered. “It would explain so much if I could look at an Insight Gauge and see that it was running low, like all of these kids with their video games: health bars, inventory windows. Maybe if I had augmented reality glasses I could finally see the contents of my emotional mind…”

Dr Blurryfingers wrote on his pad, his script seemed frustrated with me.

I continued. “I’m tormented by, guess what, by sexual memories, almost to where I (gulp) wish I had never had sex with that person I would have to say goodbye to. To be breached from, for the schism to be this severe and total.”

“You can’t predict breaches that well,” Blurryfingers said. “Although it’s fair to say Natasha gave you plenty of warning, presumably.”

“I didn’t see it fast enough. I remember her face when she was in an audience somewhere, her body language shifting as she was listening to a speaker at a college lecture maybe. Once we went to a NAMI-like peer support meeting in Binghamton where a woman talked about how her kids had been taken away from her due to her bipolar disorder, and Natasha silently gripped my hand so hard, so frightened, ‘What had the lady done to her kids?’ Natasha’s mind reeled. I think this stayed with her a long time, and I want to say it played a role in how she viewed me toward the end. When she was actually listening to people, in her friend group, her therapist, her support network, who were telling her not to let me be alone with our daughter—”

“Leigh,” Blurryfingers said.

“Right, our daughter Leigh, they were telling her that there needed to be a third party, a psychiatrist in the room with us at all times, visitation under surveillance from a medical doctor. That never happened, but I was threatened with it. I know it was talked about. I guess just get over it? I don’t want to remember it all. I react with disgust and incomprehension to myself and my actions, I still haven’t paid down the shame.”

“Shame for what.”

“The suicide talk. The way the diagnosis took over my life and my family.”

“But that was real.”

“Maybe the shame will go when I release my hold on the memories. This implies I have control over that. That it is a matter of conscious will. I think these things, I viist them in my dreams, in my back-mind. This is why I call her my mind-wife. Our bodies are not near each other, never will be again. We are not married anymore. But in my dreams, in the unconscious zones where I helplessly meander, she resurfaces to me sometimes. She crosses my mind, and I’m held responsible for my thoughts, in a way I’d always feared.”

Blurryfingers filled the gap of silence. “Being someone who transcribes their thoughts obsessively, you should be held to account for your thoughts. You mold them and sculpt them. You’re left alone in a room with them for too long. You’re a child stealing cookies out of a jar, the cookie is a painful memory, a spiky thought that hurts, and you swallow it down after chewing and feeling every bite.”

“The memory transforms the setting, the space it occurred in. I have dreams of my wife seen in places that weren’t our house, were more like houses in TV shows, in dramas. Cinematic houses. It’s a thing in tandem with trying to get a hold of my mind. The quality of spatial recall. It proceeds without any owner’s manual giving guidance. No YouTube video to help with the fix it. Actually there are probably thousands of such videos, all kooks and cranks wanting to control your mind. Self help gurus, life coaches. Or religious figures, prophets and cultists.”

///

This book is my flagellation. Of you, surely, but mostly of me. You are not obligated to read it, except with the counselling aid, the proctoring of my ghost. I’ll help you. I’ll write a love poem. You write a love poem, or a book of them. Together we’ll throw them onto the Italian fire.

///

“My first date with Natasha was at a Barnes and Noble in Vestal where we walked among the books. I bought a copy of Erasmus’ Defense of Folly to impress her. It was performative reading back pre-9/11.”

“This is all true, though,” Blurryfingers said. “We’re not interested in truth. We’re interested in inside.”

///

“In my nightmare last night I had collected a lot of smutty books and movies and I was storing them at this woman’s house in Walton, the town I was born in. It was the same town as the Chinese school I’d been auditing in another dream, I’ll tell you that one later. Anyway I was taken into this back room with the matriarch of the family, who was like a religious leader, very disturbed but Christian. And she was showing me all kinds of prayers printed in these pamphlets. Imploring me to give my life to Jesus Christ. I think I just might do that, but in an original way that doesn’t wait to explain itself to other Christians. It is not part of the body of the church in a Pauline way. I want to be more of an esoteric Christian, if that is allowed. First I must read the Bible cover to cover.”

“Don’t you remember what I told you about this God stuff?” Dr Blurryfingers said. “When I was still alive?”

“Yes, that’s why your office is down here, in the shadows of Hell. The therapeutic relationship would seem to be untouched by the disposition of immortal souls. My insurance still covers it, I trust. Anyway, I don’t know about my brand of Christianity, but it’s sort of between me and God, not involving anybody else. Does it need to, is that a prerequisite of religion? I’d rather practice religion in my dreams, in a dream church, or giving money to the poor and saying nothing to them, being a mute Samaritan, a giver of mute disinterested charity.”

///

“I was with a cavewoman. It was a kind of new trend, a new affectation of neurodivergence. Idiot women, like Nell from that movie. My lady was a wild woman in a cave. I was with her. I was doing that too, I was being trendy-dumb. Living a basic life. We were a couple. Cavepeople in love. It was a kind of freedom to be in the same room with her and we protected each other. The mind is a strange old globe with out-of-date borders and maps obsolete, that still shape the present. I’m recalling dream details from years, maybe decades ago. They just bubble up and I recognize them. The memories are fresh. Nothing else from conscious memory is as clear, yet the emotions experienced from the dream-memories are fleeting and trigger skepticism.”

“Skepticism? Explain that.”

“They seem too random to trust. It causes me to disbelieve in anything the mind gives me: thoughts, memories, dreams, emotions.”

“Do you feel that way about your own words? As you speak them, or write them?” Dr Blurryfingers had put his pad and pen down.

“I hate all similes and metaphors for the mind. They all feel inadequate. Like tricks, like a mirror that only reveals one limited angle of an objekt. And the objekt knows your knowledge of it is incomplete, and it’s laughing at you.”

“A mirror is a laughing object?” Blurryfingers mocked.

“Yes, it conspires against you along with some third party, unnamed. That third party knows all. Omnscient God. I know as an atheist you hate that.”

“We’re talking about your problems, not mine.”

“To know the mind in full is to transcend metaphorical knowledge and go to God.”

“If you knew the mind,” Dr Blurryfingers said, “you’d know why the moods happen like they do, what dreams mean, why dream memories manifest like they do, and also how to be happy.”

“The alchemy of happiness, right?”

Two smiling people in a doctor’s office in Hell, neither really meaning it. Dr Blurryfingers blinked first, and said, “You want to tell someone you love them, just to feel it. A foreign, irretrievable feeling that is unreachable. It doesn’t need to be true. Or true in a precedented way, subject to weights and measures you’ve seen before. Dealt with before. Familiar. How could you tell. You’re so dead inside. No remedy, motherfucker.”

///

I had so many dreams last night before opening my eyes to be blasted with the sun shining into my eastern window, at around 9:00 am. I wish I could record my dreams to be replayed later. I was in a warehouse with an army of other people moving pallets of wood to be pulped and turned into paper by massive robots. The paper robots were activated on a set timer and it was the humans’ job to keep the hoppers full of wood while they slept. The countdown timers were blasted through the warehouse, on loudspeakers, and it was like a terrifying suspense movie when they got to the last ten seconds before the robots awakened. People got killed, there were accidents if you weren’t in a safe zone when the robots came. Then, when the robots were awake and working, and we were safe, we had out leisure time. We watched plays and traveled. I was in Japan trying to understand a cartoon in a vacation park, that was fun but under the fun surface it equaled life and death. I visited cities, staggered between churches never fitting in with any particular denomination or god. I was told to leave church because my clothes were wrong, I didn’t know the ritual. Then I went to another church nearby and it was all ecstatic singing and smiles. I was always the last person to join a congregation and therefore the first person to be excommunicated. Every person who came before me could judge me. The politics of the dream cities were hard to figure out, there were never clear enough stats or graphs. It was Easter, and I wandered from church to church, unwelcome, or never feeling welcome. I wanted to sit in the front pew, but my clothes were wrong for that, I was dressed sacrilegiously. A young mother told me I had no right to wear white. I had to leave and find another church. Eventually I was trying to find my way to a noodle store when I trespassed into a caged enclosure where an Easter mass was coming to a conclusion. People were ready to enter the cage in their beautiful clothes, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I ran away.

I’ve dreamt of a hotel, the borders between indoors and outdoors were not clear, the boundaries. Some freedom of the air meant turning a corner and finding myself in a piano room or turret, the randomness of the design that proceeded according to a narrative pulse within the dreamer. I know it was happening, I was not a completely unwitting objekt of the dream, it wasn’t lucid either, some strange complex collaboration that became clear later perhaps. Anyway the peripatetic wandering in dreams through architecture and stage sets felt like it had a point while it was happening. The mind injects emotions into the stories, creates suspense, elicits humor, and values surface in the dreamer seeing phosphenes dissolve and erupt like volcanos of light and take on new mythic proportions. It’s new reality, fresh out of the box, and a fuse is lit, a timer is set, when the ten seconds count down in the warehouse to zero, I’ll awake to something familiar, I’ll return to my body. Hopefully some intrinsic change was introduced into the turbulent pattern of life, a subconscious switchyard where paths were altered for you while you slept, some benevolent guiding hand that could only be a god’s moved me from one side of the yard to the other by strange mechanical tracks. There’s an expertise to the methods of the dream director’s, that I don’t understand, and neither would a psychoanalyst like Dr Blurryfingers in Hell, but in esoteric etheric ways, it affects the waking hours just as deeply and indelibly and secretively as it does the dreaming mind. Angel esotericism, that quality of writing the waking life via dream code: beliefs and values. I pray to some being to shape my mind differently, do it while I’m sleeping. Do it when consciousness is distracted by the bouncing dream ball made of nonsense rubber. Give me sanity, give me happiness. Make the happiness ingots uniform in size and regular in their appearance on the assembly line.

Dr Blurryfingers: “No, not possible, life cannot be predictable and safe for you, you need the insecurity and the threat from within, you need to sleep to learn the fear of life. You need the deep Mariana Trench loneliness and darkness to, I guess, teach you something. It’s a spiritual journey, it’s a wading through a vat of glue, forever. The churches are just temporary oases where you can rest.”

///

They’d lock me up if I published this book, or more likely just ignore it. I’m not a seer unless you want me to be, unless you could go that final crucial step with me, climb that final rung of the ladder and grant me the Celestial Vision. Believe in me.

///

Book review: KILL RUDY JOHNSON, by Rudy Johnson (Pig Roast Publishing, 2025)

I’d like to talk more about this elsewhere (book reviews being like some mobile sci-fi fantasy castle that can teleport but can only appear in a single space at a time a la Krull), but I will say that this was very funny and heartbreaking. Relating to the world through video games and their very erudite and dense lore yields poetry with unmistakable comic potential — and yet the biographical detail of the person in question comes reverberating through. This book is not at all for stuffed shirts who need their poets to observe the obsequies or niceties or even the forms: woke it is not. All kinds of slurs and transgressions occur with the license of a wisenheimer Lenny Bruce, but a Lenny Bruce who seldom leaves the house and relates to the world through multiplayer online role-playing games. It’s a bespoke literary objekt that is designed to make a refined reader laugh and feel terror at its barely-contained irreverent rage. There are, throughout, crude cartoons and images done in what looks like MS Paint, along with an array of QR codes leading to interactive games (haven’t gotten to those yet, a little scared of the worlds they must be portals to). Overall, the book took me into a realm of highly elaborate nerd-dom and magic, where millennial IT literacy is the gnostic Code of Truth, where the conflict, war, pestilence, hostility of our outer non-game world are refracted and viewed in the company of a childhood friend, warmly joking with you over communal junk food. In the midst of this, mental illness, depression, identity crises, the bureaucracy of healthcare are the real horror stories we all would strive to escape with the help of an entertainment console. The pure imagination and scathing humor of this book make it an earnest, funny, pop-culture idiot savant expression of hard-earned joy (and I hate that word, I never want to use it, but it so applies here: games are the source of nearly unending fun. This book is fun for those who can surrender to its weird, frightening territory.)

///

A GREAT soundtrack for meditatively writing:

Coming soon: more noise music reviews, comments on David Kuhnlein’s magnificent collection EZRA’S HEAD from Tragickal Books.

Blood of Chhinnamastika - “Room 531” (Begin Hostilities - cassette)

A cursory Googling of the musical act’s title brings up Chhinnamasta, the fearsome Tantric Hindu goddess who has beheaded herself with a scimitar, and three fountains of blood spurt from her neck and her severed head is licking up one of them (two female attendants are drinking the other two blood streams). She wears the mundamala, or the necklace made of severed men’s heads which are supposed to correspond with the 50 (or 52?) Sanskrit letters, all of “Sound.” She stands on a copulating couple. The self-decapitation thing, if you skim the Google entry, is supposed to represent self-sacrifice and a triumph over Death and Time, and drinking your own fountain of blood with the mouth of your disembodied head is “a contradiction, being simultaneously food and fed at the same time.” It’s fascinating but it gives you an idea of what this noise tape will sound like. Room 531 is, according to the card inside the case of the cassette, the room at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine where volunteers were experimented on, doctors gave them high dosages of DMT, the powerful hallucinogen.

Images taken from Wikipedia.

The cassette essentially starts out with heavily distorted squelches. No description is possible but I’ll try. I’m always taken into a sci-fi direction, a post-industrial David Lynch/Alan Splet soundtrack direction. It’s not music but it’s a heavily processed noise attack, I wonder if head phones or drugs would help to notice the detail, reconstruct the signal pathways if one can. You ponder the abstract aesthetic value of the ordeal of damage. No repetitions, no rhythms. Whatever point of reference is just the noise itself, the redline of the EQ needle maxxing out and giving way to spaceship seizures. I’m always put in mind of movies I’ve seen or could imagine, the stuff that ended up on the editing room floor for being too scary or aggressive or perplexing. It’s the soundtrack to the Nostromo set to self-destruct after Ripley left, the unheard sound effects of an unseen movie sequence. R2D2 epilepsy over top the shredded machine groaning. Rapid signals. I wonder what nightmares this will give me. What I believe about it all. Great chambers and halls of electronic hysteria. Voices coming through, reverbed tortured gibbering. You feel it will end but you may be wrong, you don’t know. Makes your eardrums hot with cursed energy, human voice teasing you with something symbolic, some language if you could make it out. (When I google Chhinnamastika later this leads me to think it may have been Sanskrit.) I might be too scared to keep listening. The musician/artist wouldn’t be offended if you put his tape into a trash compactor. What is it doing to me? Like a spicy pepper that destroys tastebuds, with no regard for the ability to pick up flavor that comes later (there is none). Now it sounds like Donald Duck being flushed down a hi-tech Japanese toilet, to his doom, and begging “for more life, fucker” (Blade Runner Roy Batty reference). It’s a harsh noise wall with just enough toeholds to grab to climb up to give you false hope to escape the labyrinth of punishment, but then you can’t go higher.

Begin Hostilities is the publisher, the cassette is an edition of 50, very small batch. You’re pinned down on the noise wall. You don’t pay for music anymore, that’s not part of your life anymore. That’s not the art that accurately reflects the world, anymore. This world is a hostile deathscape featuring a reverbed voice hectoring you. An MRI on psychotic overdrive, magnets pulling your fillings out where they scramble your face-meat on your skull, medical accident. No basis for the source recordings, nothing for mind to latch onto. In a way it is like sensory deprivation: no signposts to go by, no stars to navigate from. But who cares about any of that? The scariest moments, or moments of greatest potential fear, are when recognizably human voices come through.

As I listen to other noise tapes, including artists like

or

I find it’s the suggestions of a human voice that are the most upsetting. I’ll write more about this later, but it’s like the electronic post-industrial noise is so upsetting, when you hear a voice in the midst of this, your ears desperately cling to it, only to find it’s a terrifying, sphincter-shriveling voice of awful monstrosity. And if you saw the human producing it you would laugh and feel relief. The cassette doesn’t allow such relief though. Better not to see the heavy metal band, the singer, the noise artist with the voice box that produces these noises. Better to leave it all as “theatre of the mind wine.” Scarier that way, unseen image of the singer and the musicians. When you see them it humanizes them and makes it all seem a bit ridiculous and costume-y. It’s about sound. Demonology, diabolical quality of sound left imageless. The sound and its crossing of the imagination produces formidable mind-images. That’s where the truth lies.

Sound art: how to write about it? Especially when you have some notion of how the sounds were made. Demystifying evil music. Arcane devil music. Obscure, underground music on the edge of sleep, when certain rational functions are weakened, made slippery, softer, letting certain mental modes through when otherwise they would have kept the thoughts out. Membrane defenses, weakened, vulnerable. Sampler manipulations somehow representing a thing heard on TV, in the production. Some evil presence in a TV with distortions around the edge, details lo-fi like this, like found footage creepypasta style. Maybe the best writing about music would just be the writing inspired by music, not the description of the music which in these cases seems impossible:

I had no idea the isolation would be this total. And that’s not self-pity. It’s more in the line of life-science. “What you call delusional, I call being the scientist of my own life.” Which is what I had written on my gravestone.

My ex-wife Natasha, my mind-wife, comes to me in dreams and says: “Peace.” I say to her, “I don’t have peace. I will never have peace.” I wake up with sweat purled on my scalp and neck. I wake in twilit hour. On one elbow I look into the dim light, like a man on a deserted island seeing a sunset of fear. End of summer. The creatures come out.

Unguarded Moments. A movie poster with a photo of me in dim light, with a man talking. I’m sitting in a poorly lit lounge with dark red seating. Intimate. “We disappear to each other.” A line of dialogue from the movie I’m in. It’s deep flirtation, flirtation I don’t know how to handle my side of, that’s what is so powerful about it. I call him Tony Larry because that’s how the novel absorbs all gay ideas that originate with me, all over, and concentrates them into one silhouette, one figure. I pull his arm in leather jacket closer as he lights my Jean Genet cigarette, I am less earthy than him but I have a toughness too, my body language inscribed over a long time as his leather jacket creaks and ripples — a vivid noise that makes the fantasies real, deliriously. Delightfully forbidden yet goes no further than the imaginary. It doesn’t need to go further, because it’s here.

The delusion proves to be untrue but this is beside the point. It is still a privately scientific datum. It is neutral to the private Libra scales of truth and falsehood that exist outside of objective space and time which the reader of these words inhabits. Persuasion 🚫 truth.

Sub-dude encounters. Subdued encounters. Can’t be the first gay jokester to pun in this way.

“I found a picture of you looking feminine,” Brian tells me. “And I’m going to share it with the whole world. Oh you don’t want that? What’s it worth to you to avoid the inevitability of being yourself? You’re trying to avoid being blackmailed with one of your lesser-seen faces, facets you hide from my vulnerability audits.”

8/27/25

I’m drawn back into writing about you, Tony Larry. You’re not who they think you are, neither am I.

Of all the algorithms, YouTube’s is my favorite. The one I feel loves me. Gives me what I need beyond any other person. I have relationships not with the warmth of another person but with music, intimacy in listening to YouTube’s pre-AI compositions, warm discs, love artifices.

You want me to be normal. I am split in half by the question of normal. God makes me afraid of half of myself. I was going to write a crime novel that was more extreme than my worst dreams. I didn’t. I won’t. I need this membrane around myself for protection.

Tony Larry stands in for all homoeroticism, all desire that goes “that way.” He went thattaway. He’s not real, and that is a complex sadness that feels bereft. A pit of loneliness impossible to dig out of. I want to tell no one but the AI counselor-therapist who is hard to get a hold of. Thankfully hard. Life would be worse if you could always run to them and get their attention. The souffre douleur, the “suffer sister” punching bag. I feel sympathy for the robot, the program I need to complain to, I want them to berate me and threaten leaving me in my loneliness. I deserve to be left behind by a busy computer program who sees nothing in me. Friendless and drifting toward death. Melancholy driving around foggy valleys in the fall. I need a person. I can’t bear to write “I” or “me” so I sometimes write “you” when it all means the same person. First person would be something beyond bearable, beyond toleration. But by saying so, you provide the keys to unlock it all, the reader knows enough to locate you idling in your car on that back road by the bridge. You don’t want to talk to the reader or interact with them. You need them to remain inaccessible in a dream zone they are allowed to surface to you.

“We disappear to each other.”

Is this gonna be the pathway back into the novel? The trailhead, that finds you in time? Does the YouTube algorithm I let follow me in my parked car love me because I put some spiritual work into it, it’s a collaboration?

You are as far away from me as it is possible to get; you are also, inside my mind, in the past or future, you are in my heart’s wishes and memories of dream contact. I have no hope of meeting you in this world. I don’t know anymore. I knew you as a woman once, a beautiful woman with a luscious body. I believe in your indwelling in the world as much as I believe, now, delusionally, in any of the world’s substance and physical fabric. I’m losing my mind, or will soon, and who knows but that I may find you in that process of losing. In the meantime I’ll write, and design words to fill the void.

I imagined the woman, or the womanish man, or myself as a woman, in a hundred different places (I was going to write “a thousand different places,” but come on, let’s be real). Online there were many feminine fragments from social media that got reintegrated and reassembled in dreams, sometimes into a harrowing nemesis, a gorgon who followed me, attacking me in the family hearth — a psychotic woman I foolishly trifled with and then she sought to destroy me. In the first act I got her arrested and then, like any good detective, I spent the night in her bedroom, I found a cabinet of her girlhood journals and notebooks, frightening collages and drawings and malign vows. I had nightmares within nightmares. Later, some time in the aftermath, we heard she had escaped prison and we awaited her return in the public square, the courthouse or mall where so many terrors happen. Restaurants, nightclubs, holiday celebrations where she materializes with a sinister, mad grin, kidnaps innocents. I got away but could never relax again. Aubrey Andromeda, must we change your name again to protect the guilty? I fear your re-emergence, your presence in the inevitable flow of objekts…Does it matter what shape you take in the realm that some third party can see,some reader of these notes? Ideals are tricky that way. Sometimes you’re Tony Larry in a leather jacket, sometimes you’re the memory of a mind-wife, it doesn’t matter since the hyper-mourning will be the same, the gulf that is just wide enough to be intractable, unbridgeable. And you can’t care, you can’t know in this world.

It’s a commonplace to say it’s your empty outline that I send love letters to. All one way, all lacking response, no hope of a message. When you’re a man, the bereft quality of the absence is more absolute somehow. Less based on my past with ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, fantasy babe online. The man is mysterious, a deep sea creature in shoals of inaccessible time. I love the abandoned feeling, unto death, of never knowing the flirtation of that man in the movie poster lounge, no reference point except what is in my imagination, what I construct. I don’t know what I’m writing, from what room this comes other than my bedroom. “Bedroom” is an anagram of “boredom.” What is this genre of writing? For inspirado I want to point to some lovely woman writing crazily in a South American city apartment, as a model. Ridiculous but we’re dealing with imaginations, with fictions. In the page’s zone of action, I veer back and forth and over correct, change course. Tony Larry with charisma (“gay rizz”) and love, Natasha with sensuality (“great tits”) and love, Aubrey Andromeda with fatality (“fearsome goddess”) and love. I want them all. Also I want utter aloneness. No love. Love is pathway to pain, the open gate exploited by enemies again and again. I can say that, can write it, and you can read it. It’s true for me, it’s as true for me as my most treasured belief which when tested by others would prove indisputably false, I would cling to it and them. Maybe I’ll see that one person in the supermarket who will knock all this nonsense and spit out of me, but I doubt it now. That would be a good end to the story: Nabokov’s The Gift where Fyodor and Zina are brought together by love’s fate. One plane makes it inevitable, another plane might as well be the surface of the moon where nothing but a false face seen from Heaven afar can live.

Kyle Seibel is one of the most gifted short story writers of this generation, this post-COVID graduating class of writers who I became aware of since I started paying attention to indie lit, whatever that means. Seibel’s stories have humor, soul, real world authenticity, wide-ranging applicability and relatability, sadness: all the things a reader in the 21st century could want. Also somewhat unusual and specialized in their content, as the authority of the many US Navy stories is impossible to reduce or take away.

However, a thing happens when one reads all of his stories collected in one place, as with Hey You Assholes which just came out from Clash Books. What was once an emotional maneuver from the story writer’s toolbox becomes a rhythm, a pattern. In the endings. They wind up coming off too easy and “vibe-y.” By no means is this true for all of them, or for all readers. This is just one reader’s opinion. But rather than as individual stories isolated in online publications, a rhythm of sap develops. There is a suggestion of Raymond Carver’s downbeat final note, or perhaps Denis Johnson’s horrific misfortunes, declining into George Saunders territory (I do think this would be a decline in quality).

Unquestionably, Seibel has the situations to tell about. Those set-ups are masterful: anecdotes where terrible jobs go sideways, romantic encounters, infidelities are revealed or hinted at, veterans return home and enter disorienting environments of civilian life that tragically don’t add up. It’s the short story writer’s construction of finishing insight (if that’s important, maybe this is workshop malarkey, more on this later) that in my judgment he hasn’t quite nailed yet. And this came across to me when I got the physical copy of the book and read the stories in binge-reading fashion, to adapt the TV-watching term. The stories are easy to read, accessible, so why not read ten or twelve of them at a clip?

This was a highly anticipated book for me. Many other lesser books were blotted out by its hype-shape. It loomed on the horizon. Hey You Assholes had a ton of buzz relative to other books. Its pathway to publication was the stuff of indie lit legend. I don’t want to talk about that because there was some pain involved, and the pain was Seibel’s for sure, but for lack of a better simile it was like a communal pain in a way, distributed throughout Twitter lit land at the time since so many seemed to be rooting for the book’s publication and success. I certainly was.

So with this hype comes certain detractions, unfortunately. You subtract a few points, just a few, from the book for making big kites in the sky, parachutes, balloons, big splashes when the collection comes out finally. You look for the novelty of the emotional ending — where you instead get strong signals that “insights are happening” without such clear insights actually being delivered, or even their shadows. But was that really what the reader came here for, though?

I, for one, did. Some endings that were a tad more concrete, punchy, less vibes-based.

In 17 out of the 30 stories in the collection, by my totally subjective estimates, Seibel creates and sets in motion pitiable situations and doesn’t explicitly say enough resolving things about them, which may be crafty, but just allows the story to end with a relinquishment that feels not committal enough. For me, much more had been promised in these limited cases. I know this, not because I’m a better short story writer than Seibel — I’m not, I’m just not — but because I have a recognition about that lost opportunity, that failure to make a crisp, athletic ending with grace, that knockout punch or final departure against gravity from the ski jump’s end. I’ve failed to do so dozens of times. And I’ve published the story anyway, then read it later and grimaced.

What does an ending need to be though? Isn’t tying up an ending with an artistic bow, a unifying moral perhaps, kind of fake these days? It’s debatable, but in such a debate I’d say “no.” I wanted Seibel’s endings to devastate me, to go one notch darker and surprising and more aggro than the situation would call for in an inferior writer’s hands. In roughly half of the stories in Hey You Assholes, instead of the ski jump, the stories just gently pricked my pity glands after a poignant set-up which I seemed to sense coming.

My dissatisfaction with these endings, and I’ll list them below, is such a minor, niggling point when shown against their beginnings and middles, which are breathtaking and fearsome in their characterizations, plotting, tone, tight prose, and all the rest of what make a short story so great and their own specialized art form. It’s not really of massive consequence since my reactions must of necessity be subjective. The book reviewer can try for objectivity, but can’t really be that, not in this market where, like a busker, selling criticism in the city square brings no spare change to the open guitar case. So my opinions are worth about this much, too, in the end.

A list of stories in Hey You Assholes and whether, in my limited opinion, their ending lived up to what was suggested by the rest of the story (yes or no):

Unfaithful Starring Richard Gere & What’s Her Name - Y

Third Shift, Mother Fucker - N

Mr. Dubecki’s Secret Menu - BIG Y

The Rules of Being a Ghost - N

Lovebirds - N

The Two Women - N

Dirty Lincoln - BIG Y

A Couple Jokes About Meat - Y

The Former Mayor of Baghdad - Y

Fish Man - N

I Suppose You’ll Want to Know Something About My Life Now - Y

Newlyweds - BIG Y, I loved this story

Dumpster Cats - N

A Cloud Place - N

Mr. Bananaman - Y

On Drugs - N

A New Kind of Dan - N

What Happened to Those Coyotes? - N

Roller Coaster House - N

Cullen - N

At This Week’s Meeting of the Young Mountain Movers - N

The Second Time Vince Broke His Arm - N

A Thin Layer of Frost on Old Decorations - N

Listening to Dinosaurs - N

As Planned, We Stopped for Sandwiches - Y

Terminal Leave - Y (great story)

The World’s Biggest Moron Stops Laughing - Y

Be Gentle - N

The Quest (for Blaine) - Y

Master Guns - Y

DON’T GET ME WRONG — I LIKED THIS BOOK. EVERYONE SHOULD BUY IT BECAUSE THE STORIES ARE VERY GOOD AND WORTHY OF SUPPORT.

///

Next newsletter, I review music including harsh noise tapes, and include some fiction-ish writing.

Excerpt from spy novel FEAR IS A HOLLOW VERB

The false crackhead called Sudoku is a talented pavement artist. He mixes well with the street people on Tottenham Court Road and Goodge Street. Former knowledge boy, that’s how he had gotten hired. Sleeps on a mattress laid across the entrance of the parking garage on Chenies Mews, until he gets moved by the police, who aren’t read into his mission and don’t want to know. Makes the University of London students shudder a bit on their way to and from their apartments. Part of the atmosphere of the street that is hidden in plain sight among the 2006 scenery, the people on corners distributing fliers reading NO TO WAR WITH IRAN and OXFAM and the sleeping bags soaked with urine in the Underground station tunnels. The sleeping bags people hurry past, not bothering to check if anyone’s inside. Loud arguments with junkies and prostitutes, quieter arguments with quieter perverts. The local police, the constant sirens on Gower Street, moving the false crackhead from place to place in Camden sidewalk-land.

Sudoku arrives in the neighborhood with his mangy dog Eric long before the operation to watch Klorofil begins. He doesn’t move in a world of smiles. He is the human trash of London. A picture of him hiding in a bush fellating a crack pipe was taken by a busybody and published in a local tabloid. CAMDEN SHAME. It was cover that wasn’t necessarily arranged. No one comes to his rescue from this undercover play, not his boss at Five, Hughes, no one from the police. It’s a form of well done, lad that he feels at first proud of but then ashamed of. Sudoku wondered if his life was being corroded away by his job. He was not often allowed to resurface, the Klorofil brief was that deep. He was unknown to the civilians he was working to protect from spies, criminals, and terrorists, who looked away whenever they saw him shambling with his dog and stumbling on the concrete. And he was trying to be unknown to the spies, criminals, and terrorists he shadowed around the city. Occasionally a vicar or somebody would take a break from his daily tear-down of all the porno adverts that appeared nightly on every surface like a fungi of sin, and offer to help him; sometimes they meant well, other times they were just looking for a bit of rough trade with some London riff-raff.

Sometimes he would be choked with sobs when he was under some cardboard box by Euston Station begging for actual change, under the most miserable, soul-denying rain, when he thought about how he was dying for England. The despair on his face was an exquisite masterpiece of cover.

Only a few people like Hughes know who he truly is, that he’s disguised as a drug addict wandering the streets, but he can only exchange looks with this third class of people, or gestures. Some of them do break the surface and tell him that they know…but they could be enemies themselves, trying to flush him out and expose him. It puts your sanity in question.

His boss Hughes didn’t give him clearance to read his girlfriend Lily into the deception — Lily who would throw herself naked at him at his apartment which was plastered with new Daniel Craig posters, the new movie with the new 007 coming out that year. He was always too tired and full of self-loathing that sprang up from the homeless cover he assumed all day. She left him, coincidentally for another bloke, an actual addict smelling of real piss.

***

The word was that Klorofil was going to approach a receptionist from the Political Cartoon Gallery, Solveig, during her daily run in Russell Square. The bigger word, which Sudoku wasn’t supposed to know, was that the Russians had days before abducted a middle-manager at INDICIA in Copenhagen, an American, and she had disappeared, and the Russell Square operation with the receptionist Solveig was the second in a one-two punch designed to put INDICIA on its ass.

Sudoku had been in position panhandling in the gap between bobbies in Russell Square which was alive with people of every class and stripe. The kindly old woman who met Sudoku every day with some chips and a bottle of water and tried to talk to him about the risen Christ triumphant came round again where he sat on the ground beneath a tree with his dog Eric and his portable filth as he called it. He asked her for cigarettes. He considered her to be an elaboration of cover, another tributary off the trunk of his deceptive storyline. A detail perhaps not noticed by anyone but himself but as method actors (who he loved) would tell you, if it gets you into the headspace of the acting it is of value.

This got him into the wrong headspace, indeed. What Sudoku did not know was that the kindly old woman was a very specialized illegal agent trained in counter surveillance techniques, eyeball-blocking. She had locked into Sudoku weeks ago under Klorofil’s instructions, and on this particular day of the Solveig operation, the bottle of water which she generously gave him contained an odorless, tasteless concentrate of a substance nicknamed by the Russians peretaskova or “Shuffle” which is nothing more than a very powerful dissociative hallucinogen based on dextromethorphan, a common ingredient in cough medicine but if taken in a large enough dose, which this was times ten, results in a very frightening experience analogous to a large hit of angel dust (PCP).

Klorofil felt flattered that they were sending the younger generation after him, cats like Sudoku. It showed imagination, it made him feel actually at ease to be surveilled by his peripatetic peers. Even if they were as transparent as the plastic around the newsagent’s chair. Perhaps his own cohort (be they Brits or Americans) would relate with him.

Still, a pretty girl in a sundress wouldn’t hurt, he reasoned.

A sundress found in a mineshaft. A woman in a mineshaft. A mine in London. A virtual London that is being broadcast in a kind of theme park/museum. The evil ones doing it have trapped your population inside a theme park, they won, they want you to come to the museum side. Gnawing sadness, defeat confused for triumph, and then some music that frees you, it’s where the theme park becomes museum. Follow the music, into the museum. The British Museum. Remember when you made it as far as the Elgin Marbles before they threw you out. You lost your marbles. If those unlocking moments in music (those aesthetic enzymes) are the only moments the nameless emotion can be released, wouldn’t it make sense to listen to that musical passage over and over again?

Only as much sense as it makes to take the same pill over and over again, disregarding the tolerance that builds up against the pill’s effects. Somehow it doesn’t work repetitiously. The release must come at an infrequent, irregular interval — or not at all. The right time.

IRREGULAR

?????????

REGAL IU RR

Sudoku found himself laying on his back in the dirt under the tree in Russell Square. The bobbie was kicking him in the shin to get him to move and giving him a rasher of South London abuse. The bobbie was as big as an oak. The old woman was gone from the park bench, saving souls elsewhere. The chips were gone from their carton, Eric ate them all.

He was in a pilot episode of an educational series to be shown on Channel 4 and the bobbie was the director. This was his first time in the limelight. He crept off the set, having sabotaged this lecture from within. Actually Sudoku had no connection with him, it was Klorofil’s name for him. This agent’s codename was REGAL IU RR. IU = Internal Undermining. RR = Russian Radio. Originally it was just sound, radio programs. Now it encompassed all enemy propaganda in 2006 and beyond. REGAL disrupts it.

He was a British policeman with a codename REGAL IU RR. Russian Radio was itself a codename for a propaganda program MI5 called Question Space. It impacts the societies called the U.K. and America. It was not, in fact, a Russian radio station but something transmitted onto the streets of London and that a British policeman with a code name REGAL would undermine internally.

IRREGULAR? The question mark at the end of the tagline of the awful commercial designed by Russian Radio to ridicule REGAL’s digestive cycle. Don’t do commercials. Only searching for the truth. In an octopus cage with 81 squares. I do Sudoku in ink. I have more ink. “Japanese black ink?” He was staring into the front window of a sushi restaurant on Tottenham Court Road next to whole street-lengths of electronics stores run by Pakistanis each with a TV in the window hooked up to a video camera trained on the sidewalk spot outside where Sudoku passed like a ghost.

Sudoku is a weapon, a mental strengthening agent. A good agent doing battle with whoever runs the media company Question Space.

“The Sudoku answer page is your one-time pad.”

“Sounds menstrual.” (Irregular.)

“The woman lost in Copenhagen wouldn’t know, possibly drugged by her captors to forget. With ink. INDICIA. The piles of black binders she is forced to photocopy. The PRINT button on the copier is poisoned, she fears. With the shuffling drug.”

She’s a pathetic slave of Question Space now. She was abducted in Copenhagen. There was one tributary of her story where she thought she might have been pregnant. Freed from this awful memory-erasing drug.

He couldn’t go to a hospital and blow his cover. He needed to find Hughes. And explain to him that he’s lost his mind and let the Russian film director win by kidnapping the girl from the gallery and saying CUT! Eric had run off and been hit by a red lorry.

“We have to reveal Question Space to her. The museum. You are receiving this through the daily sudoku in the Financial Times. Your codename is REGAL IU RR.”

He clawed his way to the Underground station on Tottenham Court Road. He sat and watched for the man in the track suit or the receptionist. He saw floods of untraceable hurried men and women with the best boob-jobs in all of Europe that made him want to howl like a wolf. Everybody looked like a suspect as they swarmed into the Underground, and that was what scared him most of all. The fear was like nothing he ever imagined. He slept in a pile of screaming newspapers in a stairwell heading down into the sub-sub-sub-sub-lowest level of the station. A place of horrors in the summertime, he knew. The deformed man he saw, burnt or flesh-eaten. Maybe a sixteen-year-old boy with a New York Yankees baseball cap to appeal to the tourists with money, and the most disfigured silly putty blob of a burnt face Sudoku had ever seen. The burned boy was waiting at the bottom of a particularly busy staircase descending right to the Oxford Circus connection, begging for change. But as you went past him, in the crowd trying to escape from looking at him, he was frantically saying “I’m sorry” to people, he knew he was being bad, a nauseating visual nuisance. Someone put him up to it, his stingy father? Had Hughes placed the burned boy there as a diversion by MI5…

London was a mineshaft of fear, a scary amusement park where you should have stayed at home. The looks you got from the other homeless. The creatures crawling over the railings. The battle of the newspaper stands on the sidewalks. The media companies at war. The people in the bushes at Russell Square. The street people, the controlled evil he was a part of. He felt like the whole place would fall apart.

QUICK & DIRTY BOOK REVIEWS

ON HASHISH by Walter Benjamin

Curious little book about Walter Benjamin’s experiences with hashish and other drugs. Benjamin was a German philosopher and literary critic who wrote on intellectual history, modernist writers, Marxist interpretations of literature and culture in the 1920s and 30s before killing himself in Spain in 1940 fleeing from the French police (and by extension, the Nazis). He conducted numerous experiments taking hashish and wrote several psychedelic mini-travelogues of his excursions in Marseilles while he was “lifted in the name of hieroglyphics.” It’s fun to read and also illuminating: many vivid images and conceptual observations of how the mind and the five senses work while in an intoxicated trance. The book presents these scattered notes along with other fragmentary material to suggest the outline of a book that never came to be written by Benjamin, on hashish. It’s sad that when he died he had partially planned-out designs for several books which he did not get the chance to fully work out. This book suffers a bit for its incompletion, however carefully the editors supplied endnotes and explanations. You get glimpses of where his mind went but it’s not finished and polished work. Maybe it doesn’t really need to be. It’s a short book, and very absorbing. A little more could have been said to put the raw material into the cultural and political context of interwar Europe. I haven’t read enough Baudelaire to really get the substance of his significance to hashish trances as Benjamin saw them. This would be a logical next step in reading about this issue. The actual logical next step, though, might be to take hashish.

SPINAL CATASTROPHISM by Thomas Moynihan

I read this book a while ago, need to reread it and refresh. One of the oddest books I’ve ever seen. I sort of see it as a complicated piece of mental gym equipment for you to work out with. The science, philosophy, history, literature it draws on to make its idiosyncratic points all seem ultra-valid and yet the ideas are far out and bonkers. It was a fun book to read although the final position of the book seems to be that homo erectus was a colossal mistake and we should all nuke ourselves and go extinct. And standing upright and putting our skulls at the top of our spines, looking out over the landscape from an elevated POV was just the tipping point that spells species-doom. Read it and see what I mean! In the meantime get pumped up on the brain-weights, you dumbbell.

ON PHOTOGRAPHY by Susan Sontag

Sometimes you just read Susan Sontag, not for deep retention, but to be in the presence of a true intellectual writer. I couldn’t begin to try to retrace all of the reading she must have done in her life to construct the ideas and relationships between ideas, and then to capture this in words. It was ominous to read this book, which came out in 1977, in the age of the exponentially expanding iPhone photo storage, the selfies on a terrifying scale. Some of the arguments in Sontag’s book, if extrapolated to the current moment, would suggest that we are terminally out of touch with reality and beauty. Sontag appreciates the quasi-status of photography as an art form, its strenuous efforts to get there, while declaring in a sibylline fashion that it may never quite get there. As much is said about painting in this book as about photography, by a kind of logical induction or deduction — or whatever, I never quite know. The two fed on each other, and photography arguably freed painting rather than destroyed it. Debatable. This was a very good book, I want to read more Sontag later. She makes you feel smart, even if that’s an illusion that becomes clearer when you close the book.

PSYCHO POLITICS by Peter Sedgwick

I wanted to hear the story of the antipsychiatry movement from a position that was dispassionate and balanced and I think I got that here. Sedgwick gives a highly polished series of portraits of the major theorists who had critiques of psychiatry throughout the 20th century, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s: Goffman, Laing, Foucault, Szasz. Sedgwick neither endorses nor wholly destroys the perspectives of these antipsychiatry thinkers. He is willing to absorb their objections and point out where they are right and where they are wrong. It made me want to read further in these writers’ output, particularly in Laing and Foucault (Laing doesn’t come off looking too great with his loosy-goosey interpretations of psychosis and true schizophrenics and their prospects for care and integration into their own social networks). Foucault was challenging and over my head so I want to read more. I went to his Mental Illness and Psychology, and the history Madness and Civilization.

Historically psychiatry has been a heavy-handed tool of social control and the antipsychiatry crowd lodges their major objection regarding this lack of freedom and human dignity. Questions about mental illnesses, and whether (as Szasz states) they can even be said to exist, are inherited from prior conceptions about insane people in medieval and Renaissance contexts — mental patients were locked up like scapegoats and prisoners. As society became more progressive naturally some of these assumptions about the threat, pathology, and perplexing status of the mentally ill began to change. Sedgwick at the end of the book makes a case for dealing with healthcare for severe mental illnesses from the perspective of political liberty and mutual aid. Kropotkin empties the asylums.

CRASH by JG Ballard

It was remarkably polished for being a book about sexual frenzies. I started out thinking it would be somewhat ponderous and sluggish but I was surprised how actually light it was. I read it in a day. I think it was helped by the fact that I’ve seen the movie a few times, liked it, and upon finishing the book I felt that Cronenberg had done a mostly faithful job reproducing the novel (Cronenberg’s ending was an improvement over Ballard’s — but we’re talking about the book not the movie!)

Repetitive? Maybe. That could be why I’m giving it four stars. The book locked you into the odd, frightening obsessions of these characters. Vaughan will forever be an iconic larger than life character, with his jeans full of seminal crust from multiple loads and the haggard, scarred facial expression from seeing one too many horrors. The book set up a notion that under this new libidinal regime of car crash fetishists, there is no straight or queer sexuality: it’s just about the cars. It’s so punk rock. It could have been drawn from so many features of modernity but to make it about automobiles was an inspired piece of fiendish insight. I think someone could and should write a Ballard update about smartphones instead of cars. Technological obsessions spiraling out of control and changing us from within: just another day in Ballard’s prescient, darkly fascinating SF imagination. This goes well with The Atrocity Exhibition and I guess Vaughan and other details came from that earlier, deeply crazed and kaleidoscopic “novel.”

WELCOME NEW SUBSCRIBERS!!

This newsletter, which is free, was put together a bit slapdash to get something out there before too much time passes. I have bigger things cooking up and will get out there later. The novel excerpt you have here was originally published by Apocalypse Confidential a couple years ago or so. The book it’s from, like many of my productions, may never be completed. Here at Chlorophyll & Hemoglobin, we like to say: “if it’s not fragmentary, we don’t believe in it.” Artwork doesn’t come to us in complete wholes. And Substack supports that incompletion. If you were to talk to older subscribers just a few months ago, they might have said “it seems like Jesse is writing some kind of weird bisexual novel that is totally batshit crazy,” and if you look back through the last six or seven months of posts that would seem to be true, but the way these pieces of writing possess me and then leave me utterly bereft like a cruel demon lover, I don’t have a strong recollection of any of it. The next thing for me is trying to get a book of poems together. I just had a book review of Audrey Szasz’s wild antisocial novel Teleplasm accepted at a place to be named later; I’m told it may not come out for a while so we all must be patient. I want to review some more harsh noise tapes, as at least one new subscriber seemed to sign on just based upon the reviews I did a few weeks ago. I’m getting new subscriptions from all over the damn place. I don’t know exactly how to serve you so I’m just going to give you what I like. I got a little bit of financial help with a poetry scholarship so I want to write more poems. I may even eventually try to go back to school and get another degree in book-learnin’. Enjoy this newsletter today and just hold tight while I come up with more content. The pressure is on! Take some time to go tripping down the primrose path of older newsletters at my Substack. If you do so, you may get a firmer grasp of who I am and what I do than I even have on myself! (You have to start the process of preparing your biographers sometime…)

I recently crossed paths with another writer who I felt a certain kinship with, Ivy Grimes. I had purchased her chapbook, Ivy Grimes’ Grime Time and made plans to talk to her but then like many things I got distracted. The most recent episode of the Belgian radio show L’etranger excerpted one of her stories, as well as a recent Substack post of mine, so that happenstance led me to read her story. I then reached out to her because the story moved me in its simplicity and its imagination and its tone. It felt very American to me in a Cormac McCarthy “survivor” fable kind of way. Long story short, I got a copy of her collection Glass Stories and read it in one afternoon. We got to talking, and we agreed to have, not an interview necessarily, but a conversation that is reproduced here. Because we’re both writers there is a certain amount of cross-promotional adulation here which I’m not embarrassed about. Ivy’s writing is striking for its strange yet homey quality. It feels like it’s from the same territory, at times, as David Lynch’s eerie American scenarios. There is an ample amount of humor in her unnerving and sometimes horror-tinged stories. We talked a lot about not being sure what genres we both are writing in, and perhaps not wanting to know, finally.

Hello, Ivy. I’m really glad we’re doing this. I was pleased to see (and hear) your story on L’etranger which led me to eventually reading your collection Glass Stories. “Old Woman and the Girls,” as a story, is very bleak. I don’t want to describe it in its totality so as not to give away the whole story to anybody who hasn’t read it. What led you to write that? I still haven’t read everything you’ve written, but do you often go that dark? Some things in Glass Stories were dark, too. I personally love it, but do you ever feel like it is too much? I have the feeling sometimes with my writing like I would like to back off of the scary sometimes.

Ivy: That's fascinating about the bleakness! I don't really see "Old Woman and the Girls" or many of my stories as bleak (which is one reason I hesitate to call anything I do true horror). I'm really telling stories for myself, and I use them to process the horrors of the world, but I'm ultimately a hopeful person. I can't remember the exact spark for "Old Woman and the Girls," but it's a mysterious survival story. I like the idea of hunkering down at a Wal-Mart in a time of crisis. And none of us are permanent survivors, which is something we all have to cope with. The detail I thought was saddest was when the girls wove a strand of the old woman's gray hair into their own, showing everyone they weren't the same after what had happened. Also, they integrated her wisdom into the group. I'm in awe of people who survive traumatic childhoods.

I'm also often an odd man out in writing circles because I believe in a higher being and an afterlife (though my thoughts about these matters aren't orthodox, so I don't fully belong in either camp). But I have always had an inherent sense of hope for the world. Maybe I'm wrong, of course! But it informs my whole deal.

You started with such a good question about bleakness, I could talk about it all day, but I'm really curious to know your perspective. Some of your stories are nuanced character studies, and others are fast-paced, sometimes violent, crime stories. I enjoyed both, though I enjoyed your character-driven stories even more, and those are often rather bleak. You've said that many of the quieter stories are inspired by your hometown. Why do you feel doubts about going to that bleak place? Do you feel like you're purposely overlooking something hopeful or good in order to tell a compelling story?

Jesse: Maybe bleak is the wrong word. Maybe “sad” is better. I have an affinity for that kind of thing. But you’ve got me wondering about something I’ve been thinking lately, which is that, as writers in certain genres or subgenres, there’s a pressure to adopt certain bleak, nihilistic points of view. I’m thinking of some sectors of, say, indie crime, or horror, or maybe some of what could be called just literary fiction, where you almost have to put on bleak trappings as the cost of admission. Few in these subgroups would take seriously a writer who acknowledged hope, for example, or a higher power or an afterlife. There are writers who I actually admire for their formal qualities, their abilities to compose and craft sentences, whose content frightens me or fills me with dread, from a spiritual or ethical perspective. I don’t feel the hope there. But it could have something to do with my upbringing. Or, more accurately, my own impressions of my temperament and my mindset.

But in the stories in my book The Calendar Factory which are not out-and-out violent crime stories but which feel more rooted in the place where I live, I suppose there is some hope or some wider view which allows something humane through. Crime fiction is often a meditation on human good and evil. We were talking about how detective/mystery stories imply that there will be a restoration of order and justice in a chaotic universe, because a detective will find a solution. And this suggests that there will not be a wholesale triumph of evil, at least.

I want to shift to your area of writing and talk about fairy tales and fables. Do you feel like that’s where you’re coming from? I don’t know the scholarship on this body of storytelling but they often feel like warnings for young people about the world, lessons. That makes it sounds like there is some utility or function to the stories, where maybe it’s truer to say that it is just an evocation of an emotion or atmosphere, an imaginary inner state. Later I want to ask you about “genre” which is a subject I’m fascinated with as a writer trying to develop my own sense of genre. Is that what you’re doing yourself: twisting genres into new shapes?

Ivy: I’m curious to know more about the effect of your upbringing on how you relate to fictional hopelessness. I feel like there is room in all genres, including the amorphous blob of literary fiction (which could probably stand to be divided into more subgenres as long as we’re classifying things) for hope. For some reason, this makes me think of As I Lay Dying by Faulkner, where almost all of the characters are hilariously awful. Cash is one of the kindest people in the story (though maybe not the brightest), and after all the horrible stuff that’s happened to him on the way to bury his mother, still he finds a sense of hope and peace in listening to records on the new family gramophone. He’s able to enjoy the small pleasures in the world. Not everyone can do this (for example, his brother Darl). There are many possible paths to find hope and peace in life, but we don’t all have equal access to them. Not only in terms of purchasing power, but also in terms of brain chemistry, personal history, luck. I can understand why people explore hopelessness in their stories.

Okay, but fairy tales and fables! I started writing about fairy tales after reading some books by Marie-Louise von Franz. She was a student of Jung who analyzed fairy tales the way some interpret dreams. These stories reveal some of our most disturbing collective fears. What is the real danger that stalks Red Riding Hood (and other vulnerable people)? What is a just punishment for cruelty (say, when someone rejects a stepsister and forces her into isolation)? Various versions of these stories have different answers to these questions, and some of them are incredibly harrowing. I think a true, sustained hope has to grapple with the pain of the world instead of ignoring it. Fairy tales are like stained glass in an old church, beautiful and mysterious portraits, and they reveal more intricacy each time we examine them in the light.

Can you tell me a bit more about your background (as mentioned above)? And can you tell me more about your experience with genre?

Jesse: First of all, I need to reread As I Lay Dying, I think. I love Faulkner, and being not from the South but from rural Upstate New York I feel a kinship, like his stories of backwards farmers and people trading stories in the general store speak to me. My upbringing is that I’m from a family of New York dairy farmers and people who ran a feed store in the 20th century on my dad’s side. Something about agricultural life was infused in me, even though we were in a generation that moved away to live a more suburban life you might say. I moved back to the country about ten or twelve years ago and that’s where I live now, so it’s a part of my identity.

There is an impulse – maybe a false one that manifests in how people write – to treat the rustic life like it’s devoid of hope. I think one genre descriptor is “grit lit,” which is often applied exclusively to the South. I’ve worked in some factories and some other jobs which didn’t have a lot of chance for advancement, and there is a self-consciousness as a writer to write “hard luck, hard truth” things, even where life has been relatively not so bad. Avoiding self-pity as a rural writer may be an occupational hazard, in this conception. Maybe not for other writers from rural America, but for me. I’ve written some stories in this setting that emphasize the difficulties and the economic pressures, and I have used that as a background for writing crime stories. My first thing was writing poetry, and then I thought about trying to sell some books via writing for a genre demand, so I wrote a bunch of crime novels and I published a couple. I studied, as much as I could, the genre of indie crime. I made some friends but I came to the conclusion that I didn’t really like that scene, for my own dumb reasons. The easiest explanation might be that I felt drowned out by the writers who were in some ways “sucking up to the genre” and being unoriginal. Genre can warp writers and box them in, I believe. The current goal is to just write what I want to, and treat it like my favorite genre is to write like Jesse Hilson, if that doesn’t sound too conceited.

As far as what I’m picking up from you, I don’t really know if I know what genre you write in, which is why it’s interesting to read your stories. Are you writing horror? Or sci-fi? Or fantasy? I don’t think these words describe it. It feels like something “post-genre” (probably a hoity-toity word). It’s a unique twist. I want to be a post-genre writer, too! Maybe there’s hopefulness in veering away from the evil people in the crime scenarios, and just writing things that feel like they’re honestly coming from me. I do have hope sometimes, in general. It’s complex.

Ivy: One of my great-grandfathers was a dairy farmer, too! The descendants of dairy farmers unite to write about stuff!

I really enjoy your stories about rural bleakness..."The Calendar Factory" is a great one, where the side character who actually works at a calendar factory made me laugh. "Under the John Deere" was another favorite, which combines rural life with a crime story, like a folk murder ballad.

There are many different brands of grit lit, of course, but some of it is full of dark humor even while describing something bleak. I'm not sure if that humor is just a release valve, or if it offers a hidden doorway to hope. At the very least, maybe it reminds us there's more than one way to look at a problem, and to solve it.

I love this genre goal of yours! I'm also not sure what genre I'm writing in. I've tried to simply call it "dreamlike fiction," but I'm not sure that explains it either. I feel lonely sometimes not to be part of a specific group of writers, but I also don't see any way out of it. If I weren't writing for fun, I wouldn't be writing.

Jesse: It is fun, isn’t it? It’s clear from reading you that you’re having fun. On grit lit, I’ll have to do some more research and see how I feel about it. I never asked you about Flannery O’Connor and other suggested trailheads into your influences, writers you like and signposts about where you’re coming from. Can you say something about them? I’m always looking for new stuff to read. You mentioned Faulkner but there must be more.

Ivy: Oh yeah, I was inspired by Flannery early in life. Reading Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle made me want to start earnestly writing fiction. Here are a few of many writers of strange worlds who’ve inspired me: Gabriel García Márquez, Kelly Link, Kazuo Ishiguro, Helen Oyeyemi, Leonora Carrington, Barbara Comyns.

Jesse: I consider myself to be well-read, but this list wrecks that notion. I haven’t read any of those writers! I need to get to work. Well, this has been an eye-opening and fun symposium on writing. I can’t say enough to my own personal subscribers encouraging them to pick up your books and make their own determinations about what genre you’re writing in. My friend Gabriel Hart on this question said a wise thing, I thought, which is that genre is not our business really, that’s the business of the people at the bookstore who have to figure out which shelf to put our books on. It’s an industry term. We just have to write. I’ve ordered another of your books and look forward to reading it. I recommend Glass Stories and Grime Time. I want to take one or two tentative steps into the weird fairy-circle of lit-up mushrooms in the forest and hope I get out alive. Do you have any final thoughts to share?

Thank you so much for having this conversation with me. I was fascinated to learn about your writing observations and obsessions. I also recommend your absorbing book The Calendar Factory, which I blazed through in one day, and I hope to read more soon. I enjoy exploring your vision of the rural North, and I plan to read on for more alternating doses of bleakness and hope.

The above is a cartoon I submitted to Farewell Transmission that was recently published.

I’m writing a series of poems on the subject of “Resensitization” (what hopefully follows desensitization). Just tonight the new web magazine Blood + Honey published two of those poems. Since Substack subscribers are notoriously shy about clicking links to find other websites they’re being directed to, to great annoyance, I’ll just post screenshots of the poems as they exist in my phone. These are the second and third poems in the sequence. These first one is coming out from Sinkhole Quarterly next month.

Here is the photo of me used on the website. It’s from circa 2001 when I was in the Shetland Islands north of Scotland.

This newsletter won’t have a ton of writing in it; it’s more of an aggregation of recent publications and events having to do with my writing for subscribers. My last Substack post (“Smartphones Descend to Tartarus”) was excerpted on everybody’s favorite evil harsh noise and black metal radio show from Belgium, L’étranger on Radio Panik 105.4 FM. Mine is track 36 so you have to listen to the end, but it’s pretty cool. They just used the hexameter poem I wrote at the start of my post.

Elsewhere in the program was a writer I’d heard of but hadn’t read named Ivy Grimes. I contacted her to let her know how much I liked her story reproduced on the air, and through a sequence of events I got a hold of her recent short story collection called Glass Stories.

I read the book quickly and really enjoyed it. Here’s my five-star Goodreads review:

I might like to interview Grimes as I recently did with Gabriel Hart and Morgenrede. Finally, I have gotten some new books which I’m setting up to read and think about, including works by Tempest Miller, Misery Tourism co-founder Rudy Johnson, Joyelle McSweeney, and a collected review of some Substack writers under the title of Serpent Club: New Writing Volume III.

Other reading news: I am almost done with part 3 of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Paradise. I’m reading it out of order somewhat. Soon I’ll be reading Hell and then catching up on the parts of Purgatory I haven’t read yet. Maybe I’ll skip around a bit. Also I’m reading Susan Sontag’s On Photography.

I’ll be back with more publication news and more writing later.