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The Undiscovered Country 4
invocation:
&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&
&` '&
&` the undiscovered '&
&` country '&
&` '&
&` 29MAR93 vl: . '&
&` is: .... '&
&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&'&
(c) copyright 1993 sdi, inc
s.r. prozak & l.b. noire !
spo
nsored&
created&wri
*==+==+==* tten&edited&pro
*sdi,inc.* motedexhaustivelyby
*==+==+==* spinozarayprozak&labete
noire,foundatcblanc@pomona.
claremont.edu&rm09216@nyssa.swt
.edu&groupsontheusenet&dedicatedtot
thestudyofliteraturelife&humanunkind..
:-----/------/-----/-----/-----/-----/-----/-----/-----/----/----:
:the undiscovered contents: :
: :
:. brief villification of theory & functionality :
:.. musings in solitude after a primal clash of wills :
:... random poetic ramblings section :
:.... stoner adventures, vol. v :
:..... virulent interlude of emotional attrition :
:...... the lust of the flesh, the shine of the skin :
:....... interpolation & contributor biographornication :
:-----/-----/-----/-----/-----/-----/----/-----/-----/-----/-----:
vitiation:
for the christian, it is all in having an erection or having no erection
at all, being the deprived victim of a lack of stimulus or of
conditioned stimulus withdrawl so that some cannot be mustered. the
systematic approach to our reduction constitutes perhaps the greatest
threat to jargon ever engendered, and perhaps therefore vindicates our
initial villification of all that is unsensed.
consider the tribal music of the african tribes migrating through the
american south to become the blues; despite its complete technical
eclipse in the face of the conventionally accepted forms of music (which
as we know eclipse all popular music) it has a quality its adherents
classify as 'soul,' which we of greater experience can experience as
'authenticity.' consider the artwork of lesser artists, who without the
ability to skillfully craft every brushstroke produce prodigious works
of splattered paint and concrete pantyhose, which they insist has
artistic merit.
we, of course, know differently. grammatical errors undermine the lowly
texts of those who do not possess the assiduous persistence necessary
for subversion of the graphical complexity...
thus here in academia all is safe. the walls are thick and constructed
of multi-dimensional bricks, upon which we have heaped the
categorizations, upon which mount the administrations, upon which pile
the routes of publication, visualization and popularization. remember:
a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
-- the hon. robert chezvick
solidification:
Plan:
she tore my heart from my chest and held it in her bloody hand before my face.
however, the shock did not appear on my face.
you see, she forgot the human heart continues to beat outside of its host.
however, the shock did not appear on her face.
you see, she forgot the careless sadism and realized what it was.
a tear fell from her eye.
i died, yet my heart lived.
continuing to throb in her hands.
phoenix
- ---
One word does the work. She'll not even think about what's she's doing
while she's doing it. I see it to this day. More pain inflicted. I bare it
and turn away thinking the pain is worth the few and far between moments of
pleasure. I turn away and head downstairs in disgust seeking a different, or
rather, more stable source of comfort...
EOT
- ---
the radio screams to me, "is there anyone out there?" i turn it off. if only
it was that easy. three days pass. "what happened? try to kill yourself
again?" no, just thinking about you. same thing, i suppose. i was only
concerned and the punishment for the crime of caring is patronization. you
don't think you deserve to be treated that way? what about the trust i gave
you. perhaps we shouldn't make promises we can't keep? then don't tell me you
love me. i take back what i said, go ahead and push me away. it's going to
make the final task that much easier since i know it's inevitable.
there is no plan, can't you see that?
- ---
i know the story, but it all worked out. trust. trust me. trust you. trust
everything. i'll sit by your side and guide you through hell. i've been there
many times before. hold my hand and i'll lead you home. then i'll let you go.
- ---
words are a deceit. as we stand with our arms intertwined, our bodies becoming
one, i'll admit my fear. you'll ask of what i'm afraid. i'll tell you i'm
afraid of my dreams becoming reality again.
- ---
she arose from the ashes of a long-dead dream scoffed by all. with the warmth
of the surrounding summer night, she repeated everything. then she took it away
as easily as she gave it. now she is sitting across from me. the name is true
this time and the story is true. now the little flame disappears in the night.
to be seen again? who knows? who cares? who knows who cares?
-- la bete noire
fragmentation:
solis
sun-burnt impressions
of the sun's love on soft skin.
glowing eyes,
fire from within...
burning with the cool
of an icy storm
cold yet hot enough
to keep me warm.
(fern)
Raincloud
The power of the storm
The magic of the rivers
Part of a swarm
Winds fly through the timbers
Growing in power
Then shrinking so small
Herald the shower
That brings life to us all
Welcome the freedom
Blow out the sun
This is your kingdom
Never be done
Playing the rainstorm
Singing the sky
Go on perform
You never shall die
(w. francis)
"a question"
how do you
make love
to someone
who
does not matter
in your eyes
a world
built around
this shell
to carry someone
and deliver
it
coming to realize
the grasp of
reality
at the end of
this nightmare
shared
phoenix
you live again
from dying embers
to dance
again
laugh
and a tear
seems it rather
?
this is
not
all that
exists
to be
equal
for I
am alone in my nightmare
and you
are still there
(lbn)
virtual
rain across a nipple like a nose
beneath the faucet under skies
emotive eyes the ceiling blue
or maybe brown which is more honest
so they say in the dry days
rain down the arms with upturned hands
stretching outward upward gone
to tug the sky & heart & mind
wonders of a world unkind.
(srp)
stoner adventures, vol. v
reduction:
The world split like a windburnt lip opening beyond
the crack of my door. It was safe to go outside, so I
did; the sunlight exceptionally bright momentarily teared
my eyes and staggered me back for the safety of the
doorway, but I had lost that haven in my blind wandering,
and so like someone seeking shelter from the downpour I
ran into the bright Saturday. Fourteen Christians who
were picketing my apartment building screamed at me that
I was a user of evil weed, a servant to Satan, and that I
would go to hell if I didn't accept my father. My father
who? I thought, and then wondered if these people knew
they were already acting like my parents.
I met Spike at the bus station and together we went
to Spike's buddy Miles' apartment, at which we arrived
after much climbing over air-conditioning units, steam
pipes and forgotten rusted ladders over the collected
roofs of several drearily similar apartment buildings.
When I asked Spike why we were doing this, he said that
it was the result of Miles' landlord being upset at his
nonpayment for some days, and if we went in the front, we
were going to get a lecture (Miles' landlord is actually
a middle-aged woman who would scream at the minions of
Satan for a buck they owed). Climbing down the ultimate
fire escape, I wondered why I always thought of Miles as
Spike's Buddy Miles. Maybe it was because when I was
introduced to him, Spike threw his arm over Miles'
shoulders and said something like, "This is my good buddy
Miles." It wasn't until a few years later that I
realized how often that phrase means absolutely nothing,
and how Spike with his traditional clairvoyant bravado
had ridiculed the traditional superficial usage and known
that Miles would someday be a good friend, all in one
cartoon-character sentence. Sometimes I forget how sharp
Spike is, and sometimes unforgivably I forget how kind
Miles is, how much of a great friend he is to me.
Miles has never had much money, but I suspect that
comes from his outrageously profligate habits. All of
his money flowed like blood into his dope buying or bong-
making, and so much more brushed off onto his friends
like gold dust at a carnival, scattering in the snow
outside his door when they left. His apartment had two
rooms, both a sallow shade of milky chalkboard green,
with wide white windows clumsily stuck in their frames in
various stages of aperture. Next to his one-mattress
worn bed was a large old-fashioned gas pump, with six
goldfish swinging complacently in aqueous breezes over
some form of purple light, which gave the entire setup
the appearance of having emerged from beyond the upper
limit of our planet's atmosphere. Something was vaguely
strange about the actual hose and nozzle, but the rest
looked legit, although I knew Miles too well to suspect
that this was anything but what it was. "Okay," I said,
when Miles came into the room, "Where does the dope go?"
Miles smiled broadly, the resounding nature of his
personality echoing through the halfshut-eyed haze that
announced his state of being a high-ass, or someone who
has smoked well enough to be visible, which for stoners
like us can be quite an effort to attain.
"I'm obvious, aren't I?" he intoned in his gentle
voice, much like his gentle fingers working overtime on
the gaspump bong to make sure each seal was tight, each
fixture working. By the looks of it, he had worked
doubly hard on restoring it, bringing it even to the
level where it could be converted, resurrected from its
decrepit state. "I wanted something big, with flair," he
said, issuing his two customary statements for announcing
the creation of his latest oddity. "And I wanted
something glass --it's easier to clean, and shows you a
prettier hit -- something (if glass) big and stationary,
so that it wouldn't be broken immediately. Also, it had
to have some means for quick inhalation, and this caught
me, from the junkyard south of here," he said, opening
the top where to my amazement, flowed a slender glass
tube into the glass cavern beneath. Crowned at the top
with a large wooden bowl (a veritable dope altar) mounted
on a metal proboscis resting inside of the glass tube,
the gas pump bong was conceivably the greatest invention
for mental destruction I'd ever seen. Another tube, much
wider, ran from the open-air part of the glass bowl to
the main part of the pump, presumably to the opening of
the hose, and still another tube ran into the water from
below, which Miles informed us aerated the tank and
scrubbed the water, so that the six fish -- Huey, Louie,
Dewey, Sleepy, Skewey and Screwey ("I'm Dopey," Miles
explained, when asked, smiling under red eyes) --
wouldn't choke on water clogged with vitiating dope
sludge. As this explanation wound down with Miles left
staring absently out a window, I heard Spike rustle
behind me and reached out my left hand for the best bag
of our bestest homegrown I knew he would be handing me.
"Miles, we brought you a present," said Spike,
wiggling a corpulent bud inches from Miles' protrusive
nasal organ. "This baby's gotta go, or we're over the
legal limit carrying this bag around." Miles snapped
back to us, eye to eye. One of the most ferocious
stoners I know, Miles is an exceedingly gentle man who
has no luck with life, but needs no gods except his own
two feet and his unfathomable good will. Another volume
will be written when I see Miles turn down a bong hit,
especially off of one of his new creations.
Stuffing the green bud into the large bowl, Miles
told us he was glad that we had come along. "I'm bored,
and there is a need for movement," he said. "This body
wants to journey to the end of the boredom, wants to
move. It has a thirst for energy expenditure, just to
make the universe spin around and around, before death
comes sagaciously to spittle us," he said slowly. Not
having smoked since the day before, I was essentially
sober, and also sort of bored, so I agreed. "Where do we
wanna go?" I asked into the stilled air as Miles took his
first hit. This was an amazing spectacle in itself, with
Miles sucking until his face became red on one side of my
vision and the chamber filling with opaque smoked dyed
purple swelling out the other side, with Spike's face
leering over the glowing bowl somewhere in the middle.
Miles leaned back, sucking in a huge flow of smoke as
Spike yanked out the dimming bowl, with its shining stem
trailing out after it like a sword pulled from a
scabbard. Spike motioned me to go next, poking the
faintly smoking contents of the bowl with a blackened
finger. Spike lit it for me as well, and I drew in an
expanding breath to fill the chamber, watching it grow
milky and then fill with solid violet smoke. I signaled
Spike to withdraw the bowl as I performed the inverse of
a howl, drawing in as much smoke as my lungs could hold,
seemingly not enough but yet almost and now enough, then
the hotness swelling like sweat in me, the magma I had
swallowed into my lungs, but I able to hold it, keeping
the painful constriction feeling good as the velvet
creeping fingers of dope overwhelmed my brain.
I leaned over to look at Miles. His face cherubic
in its serenity, he was about a tenth of a bong hit from
passing out. "Miles?" I said, and he blew cheerful smoke
into my face, making a circle with his thumb and
forefinger to say he was disturbed by no unruly gods.
Miles lived a life like that; he gave a shit about what
mattered to him, like friends and making things and doing
nice things for random people, it seemed. He wasn't one
of those cheesy smiley people who go around pretending
everything is great and good and fine and well, who
always smile at babies and hold open doors, but a person
who would do solid things, sometimes insignificant in
anything but the emotional significance, and would do
them so wholeheartedly that you never doubted that he was
doing them only because you and not he absolutely needed
them done.
Once when I was suffering a long day in the quiet of
the rain in my apartment, sort of distressed after a
girlfriend had left me (after which I had vowed to become
an asexual, one who sleekly avoids entrapment with either
sex, but you see what became of that) whom I had sort of
cared for, not really but kind of yeah I think so now
that it hurts-ishly. My door took two knocks and swung
open to my yeah, and there was Miles, his traveling grin
on (his traveling grin being his drawn-out absent face
which barely has a smile on it, giving him the impression
of being a careless traveler, but in fact means he is
observing everything, ever watchful, even if it happens
to be the good chance that he's royally high) and a brown
bag in his hand. The framed High Times centerfold I was
hanging fell immediately, and I yelped an obscenity, this
falling-short being been the last small failure on a
giant stack of them towering over my head. Miles started
talking, doing what the Californians call "talking shit"
when they're in a good mood, that is, randomly speaking
about various trivial topics of amusement, assigning
pretended value to often the most mundane and
inconsequential things in trade for a laugh.
I was so fascinated by this bizarre entity whom I
barely knew at the time (Spike must've told him about my
difficulties) that his oddball talk about things most
would never have heard in their heads in a few millennia
that I forgot to notice that he was aligning my picture
with a pencil produced from somewhere in his workshirt,
and carefully nailing it in. He punctuated his last
sentence, something about the amazonian javelina, with
the final hammersmash to put the nail into the aging
plaster. "And so..." he trailed off.
"Thanks," I said. "Want a beer?" I asked. Miles
shook his head no thanks, in a way that said I would if
possible but I must abstain. At the time for me, that
made a lot of sense, having experienced a few alcoholic
difficulties on my own, in the same staggeringly
dangerous way children find lightsockets and crease their
brains with electric fingers, in the way that is almost
as dangerous as some people with their gods.
I opened a cheap local beer and turned around to see
Miles sitting at the table with his nonchalant
noncommittal look and a children's walkie-talkie in front
of me, complete with some form of decoration declaring it
to be from alien worlds. "What's that?" I asked, sort of
foolish-looking (mainly because the beer I had thrown out
had to be number thirteen or more for the day). "Partner
to this," he said, drawing out another one from under the
table. I almost laughed, then wondered am I taking the
world way too seriously? and so thanked him, and brought
out my bong. Miles and I smoked a large bowl, and he left
me the walkie-talkie. "S'got this neat jobbo," he said,
"that turns it on when the other one is calling. So if
you're bored, gimme a ring." He left it with a fatty, a
jay wrapped from whole paper and lusciously ripe green
bud. From then on, Spike and I used the little walkie-
talkie to summon Miles. I've never seen another one like
it, or even anything close. I'm not sure that the
cartoon character that endorses it even exists.
I had been lost in thought, but returned as Miles
got up. Something like that happens with dope: you'll be
walking into the bathroom and thinking how pretty the
tiles are and how neat the toilet dispenser is and how
rad the mirror is and then suddenly, like a lightning
bolt out of nowhere, it will hit you that you have
absolutely no idea what you're doing in the bathroom. If
you don't panic, you might remember the pressure in your
bladder and figure out why you were there in the first
place.
Spike Miles and I went into the other room, which
was a bathroom, kitchen, and sofa-room all in one, mainly
because the sofa fit between the toilet and the stove.
Somewhere in a corner were some crates, upon which rested
some random tools (although Miles was able to borrow most
of his, even in areas where he knew noone) and some
random tinned food. Miles had never been much of a cook,
and I doubted the presence of much cooking paraphernalia
in the room. However, we all fit on the sofa, except
Miles who pulled in a battered chair stolen from a hotel
lawn some years ago. We talked for a while, saying
dreamy things and enjoying our freedom to do nothing, and
then smoked some more, and talked, and played endless
games of Centipede on the video machine Miles had found,
bought for scrap for $15 and repaired, setting it up next
to his toilet. "Capacitor in the screen," Miles said,
firing it up and yanking once on the screwdriver taped
into the coin slot. Spike was up first, and played a
good game, and then I was up, and then we played against
each other, and soon it was very dark outside, and we
were smoking once again, all of us very so sweetly high,
drifting in a cloudless sky like puffy lambswool
mistballs. Miles was saying something to Spike about a
place owned by a good friend of his no cover drinks
cheap, a band occasionally pretty good and not too far
off, and so when my game was finished Spike tapped my
shoulder and we went, out into the chilling night but
only for a few blocks, with a door blown open by the
smell of whisky cigarettes and sweat being the portal
into this new quickly-moving and blurry place.
I took a seat at the bar, and immediately noticed a
large green and muscular snake sliding between six
glasses placed like a spread-out Olympic symbol, but I
turned on my elbow to ignore it and looked over the dance
floor, where thousands of sleek women shimmied up and
down, glistening in green sequined dresses, next to men
in shining silk suits softly seguing to the music, and
all of this beneath a blazing green and red interchanging
lights display, all of it almost blinding but intensely
occupying for my eyes. Miles and Spike took a booth, and
I was long in joining them, for they sort of laughed at
me and said the word "highass" and I said something sort
of like "fuck yeah baby" and they laughed even more. We
got drinks, and listened to the band, which was a weird
carnivorous eclectic blues, drawing us in like smoke to
the face of a stoner, tugging on our souls like the knife
of a surgeon under anaesthesia, sort of a resonating
heart-mumbling type of thing. Spike spotted a slight
blonde and went to talk to her, bringing her back for
drinks, and Miles (being not great looking but a very
amiable guy with a knack for excellent smalltalk)
returning with a woman from Ohio with brunette hair and
an intriguing wide mouth, and I staring out into the mass
of bodies and not wishing to be a drag excused myself
readily to go suck on a drink and spent a few more
minutes warming the bar, dragging on a Dos Equis, a beer
made by miserable expatriate Germans in the heartland of
Mexico. Maybe that is what it takes to find something,
isolation and misery, alienation and perseverance.
Life sort of drifts by you when you're stoned, and
the "sort of" is as necessary to the meaning of that
phrase as the "drifts." I can never exactly peg the
feeling of being stoned when I'm not, and when I am, I
never think to really define it, just to record it. I am
not the serious type when I am stoned, as much as Spike
or Miles would be. By "serious" I mean that they believe
in leading functional lives while stoned, doing the
mundane and the extraordinary while baked halfway to
oblivion, and although sometimes I enjoy that, with the
gritting life I lead as a film student, always under that
"am I not good?" and "will I make it?" conundrum balanced
against my own feelings of pure genius (ego-induced
sustenance) and self-doubt and life-angst-weariness, my
main purpose when stoned it to be stoned, to be
driftlessly aimless, to observe and contemplate, to feel
and resonate, but not to try to do anything but be
stoned, but be useless. This is my highest and best use
when stoned anyway, because I'm not as hardcore as Spike
and Miles and am usually pretty detectable. It was
somewhat wearing off.
I didn't notice when the woman sat down next to me,
nor when she ordered a drink, but sometime after her
first sip I turned to catch a look at her (luckily as she
looked away burrowing purse money for bar tab). My eyes
fortunately drifted away before she looked back, and I
heard her speak, a mellifluous pleasant yet strong voice,
like the chin of an ancient warrior teaching his
children, and so my eyes drifted back to her. Dark, dark
brown hair, almost black, and brown eyes soft and bright
without overly reflective lustre, giving her the look of
someone attractive yet less suited to this antipensive
plastic place than even I. Physically, she was admirable,
although not a goddess, with a face that was beautiful in
many lights, I supposed, but was uncertainly so now. It
felt like rain. I was attracted, and there was tugging
in my chest, which put into my mind the idea to inform
Spike and Miles that I was leaving, to grab the bag and
go, when I turned to spot them and caught her eyes
immediately. Sudden shock, and all my mouth could form
was "hi" and some kind of introductory apology, and even
more sudden shock when I noticed her purse slung to her
hip and her drink pushed ahead on the bar, as mine was.
She responded with her pleasant voice, and her purse
relaxed, sliding resignedly down her back. She picked up
her drink, and quietly asked a few question, if I came
here often, and I managed to acceptably interact with
her, answering her questions, introducing myself more
fully than name and mixed drink preference. I was not
out of shock for the night: she mentioned she'd seen me
leave the table over there, and suggested shyly we
adjourn there, as maybe we could hear ourselves think?
Laughter, glasses up into the air, and we over the waxed
sliding floor back to the table. On the way over I think
I caught the eye of the guitarist, who must have winked,
but I am not sure I saw it.
Now the booth was closing in, etc, but I wasn't too
afraid, but really curious and immensely out of reality,
barely able to mix introductions. Laughter flew like
swallows above the heads of the band, who had increased
their tremendous speed-blues attack to resound entirely
through the hall, widening it and sending it shooting
afar like thousands of electric sparks showering around
the amazed human, catching him, spinning him, flinging
him into the deep and probeless depths of space, sending
him rising in those, or maybe falling, as with no
direction given there can be no ascension or descent.
Their guitarists played with their fingers singing along
the cable, moving like fighting birds or maybe mating
birds, sending out waves and sheets of flowing tones,
covering out heads in still-glowing sparks, warm and
cold, life in all. Behind the drummer even crouched
their vocalist, the feral life of dawn alive in his
halfshut eyes, his mouth murmuring so many phrases like
candy:
our child we cradle
ending our nights alone
singing our blues so softly
rising waking eyes, to-day morning
unbroken bringing us the dew
why not why not why not
flowers spotted with our blood
so much ocean for today
here is this our love
it dares the gods in their slumber
not to kiss the eye of the sun
vengeful spitting death retiring
coral sea running to the sun
on those dovewings we sail away
watching as the day grows long
our love is chancing, rising, limitless
unquenchable and deep, and immortal
like the depth of sinking night
It was a lovesong that didn't make sense, gibberish
to the wearied and fearful, and soon I returned to the
table, hoping that I wasn't appearing to be too much the
dreamy stoner. I seemed to have held her interest, and
the entire group talked for some time, until Miles had
left with the attractive blonde whose blue-painted
eyerims made her look much like a dove, but whose soft
voice spoke a sad loneliness. The women at the table
thought they were going to an apartment somewhere to have
sex, but Spike and I knew that Miles saw in her eyes
pain, and would grow to be someone maybe days from now
maybe years or months she would cry to, would be aided
by, and would probably never have sex with except in her
mind. I could tell he wanted to end the reflection of a
scar inside of his chest in her eyes, wanted to help.
Miles knows too much of this world to be of it.
The woman with Spike who called herself Simone
excused herself somewhat after that, leaving Spike a
phone number on a napkin, and a promise. Spike grinned
behind her back with the smile of the doubtful, but he
tucked it into his wallet nonetheless, giving under his
eyelids the querying look of possible departure to me,
the unsaid male equivalent of should I leave you two in
this carnival land? carnival, or carnal, I wasn't sure
which. The woman with me caught the look and nailed
Spike with a counter-request to stay, not in an
unfriendly way but hurriedly, as if fearful of
abandonment, or maybe of interest. I didn't wish him to
leave, and wasn't sure about the sex thing, or even the
stay thing, and so my look was blank but amiable, which
she checked before asking him to stay. Somehow in her
voice there was approval which told me she now feared me
less, but in a way so much more. I couldn't fathom it,
so we spoke of trivial things, Spike talking to her about
basketball, her sitting between me and him, I carrying on
occasionally about making salsa, one of my favorite
culinary adventures.
The band wailed on, increasing in tempo, as the
darkest part of the night arrived. I looked at my watch
and realized we had talked until the hour before dawn,
the hour of death, or the hour of life. A single blast
announced a drumstick slamming into rim: I heard blues
merge into some form of deathly noise, and saw the band
members grappling with demons on the stage, the steely
green bodies of the demons grasping instruments with
their claws and running the metallic nails down each
string, sending out the harshest howls and screams heard
ever by man. A guitarist grasped his instrument back,
clutching it like a precious child, and the demon
extruded his protrusive face and spat a tempered tongue
through the man's body, letting him slide off it howling
blood out his throat in his agony. An amplifier
exploded, letting the stale sunlight of fire and insanity
peak the stage. Smoke poured over demons' shoulders as
they ripped the arms from the other guitarist, slashing
him with claws until one finally fired a tongue through
his skull, dropping him limply into the flames. This is
the void of your insanity growled a demon harshly
delivering a potent backhand to the drummer's face,
crushing a potentially handsome set of features and
sending him through a wall. Spike and the woman next to
me wheeling, in the background of my eye, helpless in
indecision, knocked out of their matrices of being able
to deal with this by the shock, me slow-motion, focused
on the scene erupting. A serpentine woman in her green
glowing dress at the front stared helplessly into the
eyes of the first demon, who tore at her dress, slashing
her skin, and leaving her blood on the burning stage, she
screaming and him howling, the entire scene blurry as I
heaved a cheap chair through the window behind us,
leading first Spike and then my new acquaintance through
the jagged hole. Behind us, the club erupted into
flames.
In a small cafe, one of the few left in our city, we
discussed the club's incineration abstractly. The end
result figuring left the police at as much of a loss as
ourselves, but no desire to go back. "I don't want to
see that again, to see what's left," my companion said,
shivering outwardly as I was inwardly. Dawn rose above
us, over her shoulders coming beautifully, and we talked
a bit more before Spike introduced the concept of sleep,
and suddenly I was tired and Spike was gone, and I didn't
really know what to do, and we talked a bit more, I paid,
and we left splitting to go to our locales. I spent the
trip home thinking of a word, and came up with nothing
for her but delightful, or maybe fine, perhaps even
exquisite, for the evening, feeling foolish for using
formal and dated words, but so incapable of expressing it
with something similarly vague. She left an impression,
that of being as in a hazy blue springsky day way,
carelessly beautiful, and I was attracted to her, which
frightened me as I fell asleep in a softborn morning,
with thoughts of words spoken out of the mouths of the
past.
Rising at noon the next day, I went down to the
newsstand and bought a paper with no news in it. Nothing
had happened in the city but a tax increase, and it was
all editorials, a few for it, a few more against it, but
most indecisive, as was the style of journalistic
decisiveness during that time. I sat in another small
cafe, drinking coffee as last night, pondering my next
option, when something in sunglasses sat down next to me
and there she was and I looking like hell. A flowing
deepsea blue wispy skirt and an aqua t-shirt of the hue
of the Indian jewelry they sold near my house when I was
a child. "Good morning," I said, and she returned the
thought, and said very politely that I looked like hell,
and I said yes and how did she look so very un-hellish?
I think that received a blush and she may have almost
left, but instead she answered that she had just risen,
and was walking by when she noticed someone looking a lot
like me looking like hell and stopped in for a chat. She
ordered coffee, and I expressed my gratitude to
unspecified powers that she had, as I hadn't remembered
to get her number last night oh er sorry this morning,
and she laughed and said I had her name, did I need a
number? to which I blushed and concurred, shaking my head
with a touch of the incredible feeling of similarity to a
sunbaked brick after smoking mounds of dope the night
before.
We talked for a while, and then she said she had to
run on to work soon, but I caught the word soon and asked
where she worked and she said well oh she worked as a
writer of scripts for television and I asked more, and so
she sort of relaxed and admitted she had no office
schedule but was behind, and then asked what I did, and I
said film student, which was true I explained although I
was enrolled nowhere as film school was too far from
reality to even think of art and I expected a bad
feedback but her nod didn't look like a yeahsure nod, but
something too far entrenched in her belief in the same
not to expect it from me. She said something about me
not looking like a film student and a beret, which we
both laughed, and then she mentioned a question that I
liked beer (she'd noticed that I had picked a Dos Equis
the night before, asking the bartender especially if any
was handy) and invited me up for one. Delightedly I
accepted.
Work was a typewriter crouched like a faithful dog
on the dining table next to her kitchen, amidst piles of
paper, and she suggested we move out of her dark and
sharply square apartment to the balcony, which caught so
much sun, and although bright on my eyes was so much
nicer, with all of our skin and eyes shining in the
light. I asked why she didn't bring her typewriter out
to work, and she said she couldn't when working on real
work, but I noticed on the small glass table the marks
left by the rubber feet on the bottom of it, and almost
said something but realized the importance of not
stabbing into the guarded portions of someone's life. We
had beers, beautiful Simpatico pouring like cold molten
gold into long thin glasses, and talked some more, making
some jokes about coming home, and trying to find some
excuse for ourselves for being out so fashionably late,
acting like college kids. Many jokes in that, and we
were drinking quite a bit of her beer, and I asked if she
was really going to work and she denied it, said no, so I
suggested we find a place for lunch and she laughed
saying dinner is more like it, and so I said hold and
I'll be back and went out noticing I had a good buzz not
just from alcohol in the hall, and went back home to get
money, a shower, and some new clothes, and then hit some
small markets for good beer and the careful preparations
for a chicken barbecue, having noticed the paucity of
edibles in her refrigerator, which reminded me of mine
when I actually worked, which made me feel somewhat
shallow. I also remembered three lost cheap plastic
beads, huddling around the edge of her glass table, which
reminded me of something in the mouths of the past.
She was still on the porch when I returned, a good
forty minutes gone by, and seemed almost surprised to see
me, but only surprised at that moment, as if knowing she
would see me again. I carefully mixed mustards and sauces
and produced chicken in a pan of hers (unused, part of a
set lost or broken) and we had more beers, she admiring
my taste (I had guessed a stretch and chosen Warsteiner)
and I admiring her movements which seemed to stretch out
of her as a center of energy into the world around her,
adding energy to it and thus creating more, defying all
of conventional science. We ate with the setting sun,
and made jokes about nocturnalism.
The night slipped over the daytime earth's orb
quickly, finding us casually engaging in light romantic
gestures on the couch until we awakened to head out, and
she said something about that Spike guy, and so I sort of
called him, not really wanting to but feeling the
pressure of her eyes on me to screw up, wondering if he
was competition or protection. We all showed up at a pub
hidden behind a large laundry, one of our favorite
habitats for us impecunians, and found a table made from
the hood of an Edsel, suspended in glass and bolted to a
base made from the engine block. Spike and the Marquis
had showed up, each with a female companion, Spike's
being a somewhat traditional dreamy film student type,
and the Marquis bringing a woman with wild red hair like
a lash, who spoke fervently about the difference between
greens in nature, and the power and beauty of each with
its moods. I was on the end, my companion next to me,
and Spike beyond that, which worried me as he would lean
over to her and speak in half-whispers, often them both
laughing and then sort of smiling at me, which then led
me to get up from the table presumably to visit the head
but she intercepted me some time later as I was standing
by the phone and asked me what's wrong? i said nothing,
literally, and she apologized but more explained, just
joking, but then said it would not happen more and gave
me a sweet and deep kiss which I returned, and then she
vanished, and Spike was over in a little while, and said
look man i know what's up, would i do that? no (both of
us), a smile understanding, just goofing around.
Spike called a friend of ours named Ernest, who was
an old stoner, who possessed a bong (water-pipe) made
from a Ming Vase an employer had left to him, him wishing
wondering what it was, bored, tired of life, made it into
a bong. When told of its value (about six grand i am
told) Ernest swore, and said that he had thought love was
greater than money when he made it, but now wished for
money. I spoke to him after Spike and Ernest howled out
in much the same voice, "I'm not sure anymore now. I
don't know what love is worth, and I'm pretty sure money
is convenience, or at least dope, translated. I do know
I value my friends -- my men friends -- as they are the
only thing I can hold onto like a saddlehorn, and ride
out the times when they sling me up and down." I
sorrowfully excused myself from the night's festivities
at Ernest's, and asked Spike to give him some of the
Malachi's homegrown. The Malachi is an astronomer, who,
when his observatory ran out of cash, chased everyone out
and used the giant telescope (modified) to focus
starlight on his plants, producing some beautiful
("cosmic" was the joke) green bud that you could smoke
for hours and not pass out, but be so high that your
highness translated everything with precision into
beauty, and truth, and the lack of the search thereof.
Our table being somewhat far off from the main, and
in a darkened corner, someone produced a rolling paper
and someone else some fluffy green bud, and soon we had a
monster three-paper jay floating around the table, smoke
rising like a wedding dress from the gleaming block. She
smoked with us, cautiously but obviously enjoying it,
sort of drifting among us, laying her head on my
shoulder. "Red rain..." drifted by on the stereo, past
the swerving laughter of our companions. Beers went
around many times, and some food arrived, and we all
spoke and laughed and had some trouble coughing up the
cash for the bill before we left, dispersing like a
shattered bottle upon hitting the curb.
She and I ended up together, which we sort of knew
would happen, and wondered where to wander next, it being
relatively early versus our last night, only three a.m.
I was desperately looking for an excuse not to go by my
domicile, as it was in its customary condition -- my
fridge hung open, shot nights before by the retired
federal agent down the hall who had run into my room
screaming "THE RAILROADS ARE RUN BY OPIUM SMUGGLERS" and
fired seven wild .45 rounds into the kitchen before
collapsing under the collective weight of two bottles of
tequila, after which I let him spend the night, and there
being a broken window and most of a Ford Pinto on the
floor, me being "holding" the parts for a friend until
all suspicion was clear, and mainly, there being massive
fingers of watermark stain dripping down from the
ceiling, leaving the walls looking like slices from a
cave, and the broken lights and dense moisture leaving
little doubt that one was in a cave, and sofa literally
burned in half by Amon and I some months ago when stoned
so much we passed out leaving the burning cherry to
neatly gut it until the smoke became so thick we awoke to
put it out with our stale beer, only later realizing that
it made the apartment unlivable -- but she intercepted
that with the suggestion that we return to her apartment.
I accepted.
Incredibly dark within her apartment, me reaching
for the switch but my hand stopped simultaneously with my
lips opening, us intertwined and then falling for the
couch. Both begging for what must happen and the
softness yet ferocity of it surprising both. It started
with a kiss exceeding the cool depths of ocean, moving us
backward with the gentle touch of a wave, then the
unfrantic hurried removal of clothing, somewhat graceful
like falling in the moonlight. I took a nipple into my
mouth and massaged it with my tongue, then running the
warm wet tip up to her soft parted lips, black in the
darkness, but red with warmth and energy, grasping mine
like the hands of an old friend, and tongues tackling and
tangling as we joined in ecstatic motion. After her
pleasure peak and sighfallen exhaustion, she joined me
once again in the agony of excessive sensual joy as I
came, holding me and caressing my ears and soul with
whispers and moans, not of the pornographic cartoon type
but the true satisfied yearning, like our ferocious deep
kisses. An hour's light sleep left us up, in the mood
of frankness such a thing does to two interested human
beings.
We talk more, and I tell her I have no parents, that
my first father was gone and I was a bastard, and that
the grandparents and uncles and public institutions that
raised me didn't care until I did what they all expected
(I fucked up: busted, Jan 22, 19-something, carrying an
ounce of best Zoroastrian bud, but she didn't mind, said
something about stupidity of drug laws quietly so not to
stop me) and then they released me and I could go to film
school and drop out and make odd abstract movies,
although right now I was between films. Jokes about art
films around. I got up to go to the bathroom, bent back
down to give her a kiss, and then went into the white and
clean can. As I was pissing I looked down at my penis,
quietly hiding softly in my hand, and realized that
although the sex had been really very nice I hadn't
wanted it so much as to need it, and that we both didn't
need it at all. I saw some of that in her eyes when I
returned, but not the entirety, which sort of scared me.
I got the impression that she had been very still
while I had been gone because her left hand had only
moved slightly, to pull up the sheet and tuck her hair
back behind a small soft ear. She pulled the sheets aside
for me, and I pulled myself in and kissed her once,
softly, and she was sad seemingly and so I pulled her
over and asked and she said something about parents, and
I said I'm sorry if I hit a nerveness and she said, no,
but that she had had a father once, and he had been a
drunken bastard, and that he had thrown her and her
mother out, and that she knew her father, and was sorry
she did. I said I was sorry and she said it wasn't my
fault, and that it didn't matter much, myself
interrupting with a query about the nature of her crying
and she saying no no that's not it, it's just me being
emotional trying to laugh it off. It was like joking
about art films. I smoothed down her hair, trailing it
down her smooth back and running my hands around her
shoulders like a sculptor, willing her and moving her
into gentle sleep, which she lapsed into after maybe a
half hour and slept with her hand and wrist in mine until
she stirred into a small ball an hour almost later. I
slid blankets down my legs and went out onto the balcony,
pulling a towel over me, smoking the joint I'd left in my
wallet for this purpose. It's always a good idea to have
one when you want to think. I stared out at the night, a
swimmingly shimmering night, all stars flying high over
shifting clouds, reminding me of the way someone's eyes
suddenly snap open to find you looking at them. Miles
had once said how reflective the night is, but I couldn't
find it. There was no resolution to that night, except
that the depth of it must be beyond measure. I could
almost feel the heaviness of the clouds, and fearing
their birthright would soon come.
Back inside I found her still asleep, so I left a
note and went home. A note tacked on the door reminded
that I hadn't seen Spike in some time, and mentioned
something about some fine Thracian bud he'd inherited
from a friend going to jail for a smuggling offense. A
friend of mine had once compared jail to marriage, saying
that both reduced all of your outward options, leaving
you only the ability to lash out or to take within,
making you either an angry young man or a bitter old one.
I never understood either -- it was like having a child,
being married. No matter what, eventually you'd fight.
No matter how long, eventually the child or lover or
whatever would age and die, and you'd have to watch,
unless you were dead first. Or unless the relationship
died on its feet and you didn't mind watching the other
die. And even as the head emerged in birth, how could
you tell it would love you, and even more frightening,
that you would love it?
In high school, my best friend Tony and I double-
dated two sisters, who if they weren't twins were very
close to it. We split up after dinner, and Linda and I
ended up at a secluded outdoor location talking, necking,
and almost making out. Halfway through it I realized that
Linda and I were probably equally inexperienced, and
neither really interested in each other but in the
incident, and when I asked her if this was true, she
replied with the look of the glumly bored that it was,
and so I walked her back to my house, where she borrowed
some clothes and we played an exhilarating game of one-
on-one, mainly because she was an all-star teen athlete,
with a future and desires for children and office jobs,
and I was a stoner with hopes for making odd films and at
best dying alone as the first light of public scrutiny
hit my work. When we returned for her sister and Tony,
he was gone and she was in copious tears, having made out
with him, assumed there was some real interest and not
just inexperience, and then hit the root nerve of
desperation when she learned somehow that he had done the
same, neither knowing or sure, but both hoping too much
to make sense. There was much screaming, and the sister
wanted to see neither of us again, so I took them both
home and left Linda with a "please call me" but never
heard from her again. I then went back and spent twenty
minutes calling Tony's name to bushes, before I found
that he had vanished into a nearby phone both to observe,
and there had fallen into a troubled sleep. From then on
in high school I had given up pretty much on the romantic
process, sticking to sex as a commodity when I could get
it, and dope or beers when I could not. There was one
exception, but that is history too vital to relate here.
Falling asleep, I thought I dreamed of her,
silhouetted and then swimming with me through the night.
It was a dream where nothing was real, at least in the
sense that nothing stayed the same for more than a few
seconds. A doorknob twisted as a pretty silver-pink
little snake around my hand, and then bit savagely into
the pinker flesh. She cried out, beautiful in the
moonlight, and I saw it was not my hand, but then it was
my hand that had been bitten, but she was feeling the
pain. And then she was bandaging it, and telling me it
was just because she had never felt pain before, and was
curious to see what it was like. But I saw in her eyes
that that was not true. I awoke to the feeling that I
had never slept, and made a large cup of coffee to get me
moving. I felt motion, the kind of motion that breeds on
motion and motivates, a continual going, something
unknown to me for weeks. I called a few people whom I
knew I needed to recruit for my next film, something I
was planning about the nature of power, and how it is so
much like sculpting from gold (props were going to be a
problem), and then called her up, and the phone rang on
for a while but noone answered and no answering machine
snatched the line from the grasp of faltering hope, so I
hung up. I went into the kitchen and opened the
refrigerator, but a four-foot green mamba snake encircled
my last beer, leaving me to slam the door and head back
to the other room to pick up the phone. I grabbed it:
six pauses before a drumbeat and her voice floated onto
the line, like vibrating water as the ripples drift out
from a penny thrown in, for luck, for remembrance, for
hope. "I thought you'd called," she said, sounding
younger but more isolated than I'd ever heard her before.
"I did," I said hesitantly, which I think she heard in my
voice because she quickly embarked on an explanation,
talking about showers and doors and everything else, but
I saw in my mind a silverpink snake wrapping around a
phone handset, frustrated at being unable to get inside.
Halfway through, she cut off with an inhalation like one
about to cry, and then asked straightforward with the
force of an army if I wanted to do dinner. I was in
accord, she named the place, and the phone went down
without either of us listening to say if the other said
goodbye, except that I may have lingered softly singing
out my customary "take care," an epitaph to many an
illstarred conversation.
I had some hours to kill until eight in the evening,
so I showered and wrote out a basic outline of a script,
the kind that is all full of notations like "that
character meets that other character (the one with the
mohawk) and goes to the special bar mentioned before,
where they fall in love" and really means nothing other
than a desperation to get to work but a lack of materials
or thoughtpath, the direction shooting uncontrollably
into the air. This left me with about two hours left, so
I showered again, and thought of her as I had been doing
all day, leaving my unable to work, and called again, but
got nothing but more ringing. This time I couldn't feel
if she was there, listening, hoping, fearing. It was as
if the silverpink snake had let me go, allowing me to
drift in the listless night.
Six flags sagged limp against giant swordlike poles
daring the sky to revenge as I left the front door,
starting out into the relentless heat. The night was
beginning, so full of potential, and I was retreating for
some sense of backup. I crossed the forehead-like sidewalk
with a quick gait, but stopped for some reason, driven back
by the heat, or maybe a dream, and turned back toward my
door. The sight of a tiny glassine lizard, red eyes like
jewels under water, twitching his brazenly sharp tail three
times before quickly disappearing into a bush by the door. I
could feel his tiny red needle-eyes on my back as I retreated
toward my objective. Insecurity shook my shoulders and
weakened my ankles.
Reassurance came willingly with a stoner shaman like
Spike at hand; we loaded his custom-made bong crafted
from eighteen inches of marble, and smoked out a bonghit
to level the gods. The gods of night, and the gods of
day, all in retirement, with the sky smudged as it often
is in the indecisive period before the skin of the sky
slits and the water falls, the troubled instant silence
before a death or a tempest. The door opened with an
afterthought knock, and Ernest stood before us.
Something was wrong, Ernest's eyes told us, but he
wouldn't tell us and so us all stoned and unknowing and
helpful gave him a bonghit, which must have been the last
thing he needed. Ernest collapsed onto his knees, and
the breath of alcohol soaked in smoke covered our faces
like raindance masks. Vomit spurted from his mouth,
filtered by teeth, and Spike and I dragged him through
vomit like his own blood to the bathroom, where we
learned in some sadness that his youngest Amelia had
fallen to the mischance of a bus, misguided in confusion
at the end of a Friday, its front bumper killing her
instantly on her sixteen-dollar secondhand trike. Ernest
had done what we all do; crying is like an accumulation,
a certain number of things that on every level of your
life build up until nothing can resolve them, and then
the sky explodes throughout your eyes and sadness takes
over until you are made ill with it, and then it recedes,
and you retreat back into the world, a little unsure but
hopefully somewhat purged, as nature sculpted you, to go
on, with all of the functional choices of a paramecium or
earthworm, surviving for the sake of itself. This was
the last great tragedy Ernest could take for a while, but
he would not cry, and so he left his weeping wife and
drank a bottle or two of red whisky and halfway through
his last drink looked down and saw it was all blood, and
ran to the only place ("good friends they will keep you")
he knew was safety, and we were the only gods there.
Spike and I sat Ernest down, gave him water and more
smoke (this stops the puking, it keeps it all down, which
at this point was okay because the toilet was red as
blood, within it small demons swimming, their cackling
calling of laughter annoying and frustrating in anger and
pain, and so I flushed them down deep to the sewers, but
here they resided, as their echoing calls came up through
the pipework and into our souls) and let him cry, and
when he cried himself to sleep and looked safe I pulled
an old blanket from camp (back when home was home and
things were simpler but much more oppressive, when camp
in its myriad fears was so much a release) over him and
hurried to her apartment. Noone answered to my ring, so I
went to a side window from the hall, where I could see
her on the balcony, a single fragile wineglass held by
the stem. I called her name and she set it down,
unshaking when I expected a collapse, her stern strength forcing me
into retreat in the hall, but I called again, and she
turned away, gesturing with a finality words couldn't
say. Finally, she went inside and closed the door, and I
knew as I battered the door that the lights were going
out, the sobs receding, and that I would probably not see
her again, as a silvery snake was guarding her lonely
phone. A manager of the building came up and told me
that I couldn't carry on like that no more, sorry buddy
can't let you disturb the clients, and I walked past
eighty doors with old ladies in white hair each head
retreating as my footsteps came near but each set of eyes
still catching my hurt and delighting in mercy that I was
not them.
I walked down in the warm night, the cicadas and the
traffic building a wall around me without me, feeling the
immense potential even beyond the immediate weighting
sadness which pulled me down. I wandered into a
playground and sat down, on the nearest object which I
could find, a child's merry-go-round, the kind I would
ride when younger, with noone else to push it having to
run and run and run holding the handholds and then jump
on at the last minute and spin, spin, singing in the wind
until dizziness knocked me into the center, and I would
look up into the vibrant sky away from the sun and the
entire world around me flashing, converging, but
unthreatening. I sat there afraid to cry and in the
summer darkness some children came by, and I was aware of
them by their laughter and then by their work; they
pushed me around until it was too fast, and as the world
spun upon me I crushed my eyes in tears, and woke up
running quickly out of the rain of their laughter.
Spike's place with dried eyes, Ernest in the next
room, Miles, Amon, Michel, Susan, and Mel clustered
around a large bong, a huge head of plastic over the
bowl. In it glowed homegrown, Spike and my best, and
congratulations flowed from the rest. I asked Spike
where's Ernest he pointed away; I found him all peaceful,
asleep and safe. Ernest is a warrior. I talked for a
few minutes to his sleeping face, then left that
disturbed pleasant countenance to go with my friends. At
this point most couldn't speak, this being killer kind
bud that Spike and I had perfected from the beginnings of
our smoking, cross-breeding to achieve the heaviest
impact of any kind bud ever created. We didn't know the
THC levels, and joked that they couldn't be measured.
This was our choicest stuff, like the sacrifice for some
prodigal son come home, smoked in Spike's newest
instrument of obliteration.
People chanting for me to take a big hit I inhaled,
and sucked down a world or two of lifetimes, and fell
back immediately hearing the background voices that's so
big a hit oh he will be so stoned so stoned, and then I
felt empty and hollow the way a cheap car drives, and
lightheaded and sat down, and I was so stoned I couldn't
think, but beyond even thinking there was knowing, and I
wondered why I'd taken the bong hit, since I was still
here, so stoned I couldn't remember that I was stoned,
and sort of knew that I hadn't stepped out and gotten
stoned at all, but was just here living as if
uninterrupted. I took another, got a beer, sat down and
stared out the window, which I'm sure produced giggles
but soon those subsided as the killer bud took over and
everyone found themselves too stoned to realize or to
relate but too stoned to be anywhere but here in this
world, watching it flow like the world beyond a merry-go-
round, watching it much as a goldfish must perceive the
outside of the bowl.
I left after a while, and went back to her
apartment, but I couldn't knock, almost feeling her
breathing, but not feeling her mind. Then I started; I
couldn't even feel the breathing, and she was probably
out at a club. Borrowing some paper from the desk I left
a note, the night clerk not being the same ejector who
had removed me before. I called from a payphone on a
desperate whim, but an answering machine came on with a
voice that wasn't hers, saying hell-o leave a message and
i will be seeing you, and i left in my best choked voice
an explanation, but halfway through realized what i'd
seen in her eyes and just hung up, with an oh shit from
the desperation of lips abandoned hanging on the tape
before the crash.
She probably knew it was an excusable thing, and she
probably wanted it to continue, but it was the same
inexcusable fear that I had felt in the bar, in her
apartment, on my own; what made me leave a note and not
spend the night, what made me forget her number and have
to look again at the wrinkled paper in my wallet with her
slender script streaming across it. Whatever the case, I
could almost feel her pulling out of me like a knife out
of a wound, although she had been the balm, and the wound
was only now created.
I went back to Spike's and the party was winding
down, people abandoning cups and beers and going to sofas
and talking and smoke pouring out windows and given a
chance I took another hit and Spike smiled and patted me
on the back going by like a movie screen image, not
something to smile at but just to observe. Out on the
porch I stared into the sky, an unusually bright night,
and unusually cold. Breezes of the coming winter mutedly
flickered through leaves, and below me the horns of the
cars and the traffic noise were tugged into the faraway.
All I could see was the clarity of stars, observers of
millennia I couldn't even count aloud in my lifetime, and
I realized this was abandonment, being left to the
realization that the night is your soul, and that out
there in the soul sometimes it is so lonely and cold and
yet so beautiful that you figure the misery is part of
the beauty, and maybe thus is art, and the last sad joke
of the evening "maybe I should make a film about this"
hangs in the air. I sat. Staring into the unfathomable
night once again, I realized she was out there somewhere
under it, running, never to get the explanation, demons
from the past following her with the horrible ringback
echo of their clicking nails on concrete (throwing up
sparks) singing her ears in terror. And somewhere
tomorrow she would be all run out, and would return back
into a life under a dawn with shadows rising in the
brutal raw pinkness of soulsides exposed. Left on the
balcony I realized the perfection of it all, and
unleashed my mouth into a tourniquet burst, sending the
scream of the denied echoing up to the dispassionate
moon. In the silence only one thought fell: "How
beautiful this night like any other night is, and how it
wells up with freedom. How beautiful this night is, and
how free..."
She of course left the apartment shortly before
midnight to spend the night with a girlfriend, who told
her all about men and the horrors of them, and the next
day she rented a cheap motel at the beach and wrote a
brief outline for a screenplay, made a few calls and
talked of the flu, promised more detail and began jotting
down notes before the phone was cold. There was no
movement, so she rented a car and drove even farther
away, rented a cheaper hotel, and wrote more on her
typewriter, that astounding beast. Halfway through her
last day there she found it completed, and to celebrate
her ecstatic state of accomplishment bought a chilled
bottle of champagne, and without thinking once she was in
the door put in the refrigerator and forgot about it.
Two days later she was apartment shopping.
Being intelligent and sensible, she wrote many good
screenplays, and soon had an LA house, and children and
many contracts. Somewhere in the eastern part of a
forgotten city, a merry-go-round swung with its handholds
removed, part of a demolition crew's best efforts befo
re
the new week's construction.
I took a cigarette on the porch of Spike's sagging
apartment during the second night of my residence,
staring out into the inscrutable darkness and watching
the lights smear by, and then drop from my eyes, only to
reappear. The city with all of its multitude of cars and
machines and people hung silent but not stagnant, as if
just paused, and then the sky broke, and a tremendous
heaving downpour blasted across the ground, above it
lightning crossing in dread warnings. I felt my heart
heave, and reached out a hand past the wrought-iron
barrier of Spike's balcony to catch some rain. When it
returned, there was ruby blood in the cupped fingers.
emotionutrition:
collection of disparate lights
Hard is the music loud is the light.
I recall with awe that terrifying day. The mountain weak beneath my feat.
That day, it was too easy, too simple, rising up on human chairs of steel, it
wasn't right. I would pay. No mountain tolerates such perversity, in
any form. And so, muscles tense, bones near breaking, I bombed that mountain,
its slopes unusually gentle, as if to spurn a feeble sense of security not in
mind but in body where thoughts, in their absense, left pain and discomfort.
Returning home with such feeling, body spoke to mind: drugs, it said. Release
this pain. Do not let such a beast, the mountain YOU have conquered, abuse me
this way. Mind saw no abuse...only thoughtlessness. Yet cowardice prevailed,
and in came the drugs. Seated in that chair, that vile easy chair, body
grinned favorably upon mind, as drugs replaced thoughts and suffering
diminished. Walls spun, tunes throbbed, other bodies jerked about. Mind knew,
mind knew mind knew. As it raised body and drug to peripheral superficial
heights mind in an instant saw as body mind and drug plummetted that mountain
that weak feeble mountain loomed in a flash. And then kerplunk without
exaggeration. We all hit together and all mind could see was that mountain.
It occupied thought and space and sound. Waves of thoughtlessness streamed
through body, painlessly, because of the drug. All rose and withstood
severity; body, in its increased state of discomfort screamed more, while that
fucking mountain that horrid distant mountain pummelled over and over and
over until mind lost thought and gasped drug in despair. Mind body thought
mergedand produced stomach as all lay to rest, weak beneath its feat.
(adam r)
regurgitation:
the undiscovered brutality
Desultory "Into Eternity" - From Sweden comes one more
release of dynamic and muscular death metal. Long an
underground favorite, Desultory take the classic, die-hard
Swedish sound and add some progressive touches as well as
lyrics surpassing those of some of the leading Swedish
bands. They lack the distinctive cheese-grater distortion
made famous by bands such as Dismember or Unleashed, but
Desultory maintain the complex and fast-forward riffing
style that gives the Swedes their original battering-ram
style of attack. Guitar solos dominate their given
portion of the music with quite a bit of effort put into
solos, achieving a complex and soulful additional
dimension missing from many bands using the school-of-
scales approach, improving on contemporary death metal
standard. Beneath the potent lead guitar rushes a
frenzied procession of advanced riffs which support the
incredible balance of emotion like pillars of snakes.
Imagine the standard riff style of Unleashed crossed with
the complexity and depth of Immolation's riffing mixed
into a progressive yet straightforward matrix of death
metal prowess. Vocals seethe disembodied across the
fortress of sound Desultory produce, creating the
impression of being fully integrated with the music yet
detached enough to comprehensibly express thought rather
than emotion. Above average lyrics back the vocals,
focusing purely on the darker sides of life with grim
relish. This is one of the better Swedish releases I've
heard.
Fleshcrawl "Descending Into the Absurd" - Straight from
the depths of Teutonic society, Fleshcrawl bring a unique
interpretation of heaviness to the death metal sound.
Like others, Fleshcrawl have begun with the supposition
that weightier music can be achieved through the variation
of fast and slow tempos, and alternating speedy
fleshripping power riffs and sludgy, slab-of-chords doom
riffs. They never leave you stuck in the same riff for
too long, which is a change from too many doom bands who
don't know when repetition has ceased to have any more
effect than drumming the listener back into his chair.
Heavy distortion and convoluted stream of chord riffing
dominate the faster parts of Fleshcrawl's music while
contorted downward chord-slinging creates the doom effect.
Guitar leads are fairly infrequent and not all that
distinctive, but often pack some unique musical effects
into a sprawling song. The greatest gap in this music
could be the spread out nature of the music, which seems
to lose its compact detonation feel when it breaks tempo
into slower parts or bridges, leaving us with long songs
that tend to ramble, and often trail off without
direction. Vocals are heavy, low-hung growls like clouds
of smog over an industrial graveyard. There is quite a
bit of value in this album, but sometimes it requires
infusions of patience to get to it.
Amorphis "The Karelian Isthmus" - Fantasy metal returns
with a historical edge, this time coming from modern
Finland, where Amorphis craft their progressive and
intriguing brand of death. I would hesitate to call this
a death metal album, even though musically it's very
clearly death, because the emphasis seems to be on the
fantastic and the unbelievable from the past, enhanced by
an overactive imagination. Lyrics are well-crafted and
interesting; the music varies from experimental musical
passages to straight-on death metal layered with a bit of
complexity. Bass and drumming fall into the Swedish
standard of power excellence, but are less brash than many
conemporary bands. Serpentine growling fits neatly on top of
the music, communicating without unnecessarily detracting
from the guitar power that is the core of this album.
Parts of this album seem to lag but are necessary for the
spirit of this music, which is not that far from death but
not all that close, either.
Afflicted "Prodigal Sun" - Progressive and odd death metal
from Sweden, from the opening sitar to the often-ecclectic
lyrics. Bass and drums show the influence of the newer
generations of technical death metal bands, and guitar
reflects both Swedish heritage and adherance to more
recent standards of technicality. However, Afflicted
avoid becoming musical knowledge hangups and still
demonstrate devotion to the art of crafting soulful metal.
Vocals are flat, dry and serrated testaments to the darker
emotions, singing lyrics of unusual depth and breadth.
Harmonic aspects pepper the music of Afflicted, which
crowns itself with carefully constructed and contorted
solos. Still, there is no fear of the full-ahead-go
spirit of Swedish death metal; some dead serious high-
speed-grind tracks fill out this album. Afflicted have
found a solid middle ground between technical and
spirited, between genres and styles.
Autopsy "Acts of the Unspeakable" - California gore metal
band Autopsy returns with a lengthy but predictable
album. Guitar is a mix of loose grindcore and death
metal, and remains at a subtle level in the mix, leaving
the main inflection to be in the vocals, which are of the
extremely guttural bass-tone mangled vocal chord growl.
Autopsy play at varying tempos, some ranging from the
extremely slow and heavy end all the way up to the normal
speed for wired death metal bands. Autopsy's attempts at
gore and brutality are the main deficiencies of this album
- -- guitar, bass and drums are better than average for the
genre, and guitar leads maintain some sense of
cohesiveness -- because the lyrics suffer from too much
television brutality. It's all images of senseless
violence and death and gore and all of the things we
consider brutal, but stacked up and juxtaposed in a style
now so hackneyed as to be thoroughly boring, and the
actual writing of the lyrics is done on a fifth-grade
level, complete with forced rhymes. It bores after a
while, yet Autopsy haul forth some impressive passages.
Mental Funeral was better.
Order From Chaos "Stillbirth Machine" - A churning, sloppy
and ponderous introduction opens this album, which
essentially bores the listener with industrial pink noise
for the first two minutes, but then Order From Chaos tear
into their music with growls detached from all human range
of sound. The sound of vocal chords ripping like
bloodstained silk lends to this music a savage
authenticity, something that might otherwise be missing
given the incredibly inarticulate guitar leads and
something droning riffs. A threesome, Order From Chaos
rely on a minimalistic death/punk sound which drifts
toward the slammingly simple at times, to which they add
filler bass and standard drumming, capping the whole thing
with the occasional howling "making noise with my fingers"
solo. The music isn't bad -- in fact, for the operating
limitations, pretty good -- but there are areas where less
should have been attemped and areas that are audibly
deficient, leaving the hope that this album was more
practice session than complete effort, and that the next
will utilize the best from this release alongside some
technical and compositional improvements. Of special
notice are the later tracks such as the title track, which
features said demonic screaming and some extensively
repulsive guitar thrashings.
Impetigo "Horror of the Zombies" - Cheeseball horror
flicks mixing with death metal might sound like a goofy
musical nightmare, and that seems to be what Impetigo are
aiming to capture. Each song is preceded by a sampled
intro with the sound and intellect of a B-grade horror
flick, which ends up detracting from the listening of this
album, as each sample ends up being too long to listen to
without being bored the first time, which bodes ill for
future listenings. Once the initial noise collage is
past, however, Impetigo rage into their horror prowess
with songs that vary from midspeed sludge metal to fast
death to blood-chugging heaviness. Guitar solos don't
make an appearance, and there isn't a whole lot of
variation within these mini horror epics. but the rhythmic
core of riff and vocal proves worthy of notice. There are
some tracks, such as Cannibale Ballet, which end up being
boredom encapsulated, and some stupidities in addition to
the massive error of putting an expanded sample
introduction on each song, but overall Impetigo play a
promising new style of gore metal that promising only to
get more disgusting as time goes on.
Affliction "The Damnation of Humanization" - A speed/death
metal mixture with some unexpected harmonic punches,
Affliction presents choppy speed riffs intermingled with
death metal arterial-spurt-of-chords tirades, all of which
lives under the benevolent reign of innovative lead guitar
and bass with bravado. Speed metal must be considered the
primary influence for the music, both in terms of the
instrumental work and the vocals. Riffs and bridges
generally follow speed metal riff patterns, without fully
launching into the death style, and lyrics are shouted
with sparse melody in the tradition of eighties speed
metal. Drumming doesn't detour into the double bass
overload common to death metal, and bass borrows from some
of the better players in this genre, not just following
the riff but actually building off of it, plus interacting
expeditiously with the rhythm section during breaks from
the musical spearhead attack. Sometimes riffs fall too
much into the midrange speed metal pattern of sounding
somewhat similar and being far too repetitive, but other
than that Affliction stand as ballsy players in an all-
but-dead style who've added their own touches to great
effect.
Bolt Thrower "The IVth Crusade" - Bolt Thrower return with
their heaviest album to date; in fact, it appears that
"The IVth Crusade" was written as a study in
heaviness,attempting to create the weightiest music
possible. Deathy vocals pervade these songs, strung over
exceptionally heavy grindcore rhythm guitar and thundering
death metal double-bass hell drums. Volcanic chords
tunnel under the roaring vocals, bracketed with a powerful
rhythm section of precision drums and inventive bass.
Song lyrics expand beyond the colorful fantasy approach
Bolt Thrower became famous for and become even more
cerebral and philosophical in many aspects. Their
heaviest album to date, and quite possibly the best, this
latest release from Bolt Thrower modernizes their sound
and brings them to the forefront of their genre once more.
Man Is The Bastard "The Sum of The Men" - A local LA-area
band, Man Is The Bastard (now Charred Remains) play a
quirky and virulent brand of grindcore. Varying from the
full speed charge and adding into the slowness a brand of
musical weirdness unseen anywhere else, Charred Remains
create an uncomfortable and troubling musical vision,
taking the best aspects of death metal emotion into the
uncertain terror of the modern world.
secretion:
I love your tongue, probing searching. And your thighs when your crotch leaves
a damp spot on my leg. And your warm wet lips planted around me, soothing,
exciting, wet. Your hands all over me leaving electric trails of sense, and my
hardness. Oh how hard it is, but how smooth the entry is...it feels like
crawling into a warm, plush, incredibly soft bed with silk sheets...tossing,
turning, folding, sliding, the friction, the motion, the steam, the heat, the
rythmn, the rythmn, the rythmn, the rythmn, the rythmn of the heat.....
constant, primal, gripping, deeper, deeper, faster, harder, very deep, so deep
its coming from as far back as you can remember, coming forward, coming out,
coming up, coming here, coming now, coming, coming...........in a pool, a pool
of water, the temperature the same as the air, the same as your body, our
bodies, the motion, the touching, the contact barely noticable, sensory
deprivation, but you can feel it, feel it, sense it, enjoy it, enjoying it,
becoming of it, becoming in it, coming in it, the waves pass over you like a
beach, the sand, the friction, the grind, the push, the pushing, pushing you,
pushing, pushing, higher, higher, there, there, there, spreading, spreading
through you, spreading around you, spreading out of you, spreading down your
legs, spreading out your legs, lifting, lifting you off the floor, the mat, the
bed, the sheets, letting more in, letting me in more, the resistance, the
friction, the feeling, the feeling of it, the feeling of it coming, coming,
coming, coming, coming here, coming now, coming, coming yes, coming yes, coming
oh, coming oh, coming oh so hard, so deep, the storm wells, the storm rages,
you rage, you ravage, the storm pulses, pulses, like a sun, the pulsing, the
burning, the heat, of it, of all of it, it is all here, it is all now, coming
towards you, coming nearer, nearer, here, now, coming, coming, coming,
come......
the storm passes, and there is silence, the sun, the breeze, the breeze of
collective breath, the gathering of the water, the gathering of the dusk, the
sun, the flecks of clouds, the angle, the angle of the sun, the angle of your
love, our love, it is evening and the welcome storm is gone and has come, and
it is time to rebuild us and gather the evening and see what it is we have
brought. This is what is, this is what should be, and we are here, we are in
it, we are of it. It is of us, and the evening falls into the night like lovers
unto the storm that wells within and so it is again.
(honseki ki)
excretion:
a streetcleaneresque dedication
to the dead & the holy skin
ha, ha, ha
harsh breath over a cigarette
coffee rimming dawn, singing
we walk hand in hand behind the dust
grimy and singly the streets open narrow
like veins in the arm of a soft suicide.
look, this book
about the space
like an empty coffin filling slowly
nebulous face of mine pouring into it
i am the streetcleaner
when i am brave
in there the rubbish littering coffins
lizards crawling on the opened lids
iguanas sunning themselves sadly in sunlight
boring in boredom, too sad to move much
accepting the patience of the eldest shaman
geckos bright as the eyes of a corpse
demons claws all over the back, leaving bloodscars
spitting life's essence into giant heaps of trash
the detritus of our busy lives
searching for more junk to bury
or burn or pile or stow away
impregnate the idea of mountains in our veins
their feet are like needles,
like demon penis punching flesh,
the thousand fires crawling down your skin
too slowly for the dawn to overtake
no return/ no removal (to a safer
way)
j'know
nemesis in the dark, under the mound of trash
the blackened demon, fire-hardened and battle-hungry
tearing flesh poking iwth claws of geckos
so colorful, so alive, fading fast
the blood pours from my eyes
the geckos crawl free, all over
the trash heap burns brightly, more is piled on
monday's valuables collapse onto tuesday's pyres
there goes the future, there goes too much past
the tears slide in, hissing steam in the demon's face
his laughter punctuating the night
like the needle sliding in,
forever mournful, forever angry,
fire and demons dance over the raging heap
my eyes beneath it all to melt and see
so many more lizards crawling amidst our abundant
flesh.
i am a streetcleaner
("don't hold me back
back
this is
is
me
my own
hell"
)
maybe you can jump through it
the burning hoop of blackness
into colors and pain
then jump more, the final thrust
lungs bursting like drowning ascending
into something new
j'know
?
or it just could be
dark and light and red
breathing earthily
endurance.
"it's very small
it doesn't matter
it was just wanted
" (nemesis in darkness crawls like the lizard,
moutning your leg, mounting your soul,
thrusting, thrusting, inward like a spear,
needles converging, brning, all is scattered,
millions of cigarette butts cast to the streets)
"i didn't mean to upset you"
(...)
"i'm sorry, just don't call"
(srp)
biographic evisceration:
fern (phurn) - a pomona college student, wanderer, goofball. about five
feet or so.
wfrancis (dubba yew phrancis) - a student of life. no location known.
generally supposed to be aware.
honseki ki (whonsekkie key) - You know me. You know many of me. I have been
here a long time, I will be here a long time. I am Honseki Ki, and I will be
your host, yet you will host me. What you want, I can not give you, but you
may take whatever you need. Just please leave the rest, and enjoy it all.
the editors:
s.r. prozak - percussion, synthesis, vitreous decomposition
l.b. noire - dryskull vocal emesis, horns, slice.of.life sampling
icantation:
thus endeth issue four. visit our ftp sites at
- - redspread.css.itd.umich.edu
/u/ftp/zines/Undiscovered.Country
- - pomona.claremont.edu
po_1995:[cblanc.tuc]
any submissions to: cblanc@pomona.claremont.edu.
we thank you for your readership, and implore you to distribute
this incorrigible netzine as far and wide as possible. enjoy!
- -s.r.p.
l.b.n.
trailer:
From: IN%"lisap@NeoSoft.Com" 7-JAN-1993 12:37:22.35
To: IN%"cblanc@POMONA.CLAREMONT.EDU"
CC:
Subj: boy howdy
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Date: 07 Jan 1993 13:27:24 -0600 (Thu)
From: lisap@NeoSoft.Com (Lisa Pittman)
Subject: boy howdy
To: cblanc@POMONA.CLAREMONT.EDU
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sure is a lot of fun,
bereft, history, empty
sharkfull of lies
bless you new york
and your skyscrapers
like needles touching skin
bullets touching brain
flooding out the mantras
of our bravest best refrain
two must live as one
only cast in stone
cuz here in there perimeter
the needle touches one.
[EOF]
