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+Prologue
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+(Ordering food at the drive thru)
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+Write what you know...    What if you don’t know anything?  Don’t write.  An entirely unacceptable solution.  Learn something.  Far too great an output of emotional energy.  Do some drugs?  Esoteric solutions always being the best.  I need what every writer needs -some giant epochal adventure by which to define a generation while I myself, like those before me, mumble about being misunderstood and quietly drift into a life of oblivion, all the while snickering at those who bought the bullshit and made my life easy.
+	“Chicken sandwich with cheese and grilled onions”
+	“Honey mustard of that?”
+	“Sure and an order of fries”
+	Its amazing even in this day and age that one can obtain food by talking into a metal box.
+	Side note for the book on tape version:  Reader please lean a little closer to the microphone in the million dollar studio and repeat the following... “I (insert celebrity name who recently starred in the movie version) love to grease my ass with Vaseline and insert a string of sausages with the other end in my mouth; I then eat until I reach my belly button at which point I come and enjoy a slice of watermelon and bask in the warm after glow of sex.”
+	Everyone these days is completely obsessed with The Bizarre.  So much so that nothing really is The Bizarre anymore.  Yuppies ride Harleys and frequent bondage parlors on the weekends while pulling in double incomes of 150K during the week scurrying from house to latte to work to the onceaweekmatrimonialassfucking.  This is not bizarre this is vaudevillian comedy gone real life.
+	“$6.35 next window please.”
+	“I only got five bucks better hold the fries.”
+	“4.95 second window.”
+	“Thanks.”
+	You need bizarre, truly bizarre.  You need circus freaks castrating themselves on the street corners and pimps shooting heroin in there balls while screaming whores accost their long dead mothers in hotel rooms cockroach won’t set foot in while lawyers sit on the roof television antenna protruding from there limbs as policemen ritualistically torture themselves gouging out there own eyeballs to avoid the scene below them.
+	“I think we need to get out of town.”
+	“Why?  So we can live that tired old Kerouac/Thompson road trip in our quintessential american kind of way?”
+	“No.  Because rent is two months overdue and I heard from our neighbors that the landlady’s gonna have the sheriff at our place in the morning.”
+	“What?! Fuck! Gimme my sandwich I’m fucking starved.”  
+	“Fuck is not a adjective for every situation you know.  I thought You were a writer.”
+	“For your information Fuck is a multi-purpose word to be used whenever other modifiers are deemed inappropriate or lacking or -in this case- when one does not feel the situation merits the construction of a complex descriptive metaphor.  So what you’re saying is that we need to leave or all our shit will get seized in the morning?”
+	“Ya.”
+	“Alright lets pack.”
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+Teridactal winged birds flew overhead and the ground was squirming the way heat waves shimmer the horizon.  The Fort at San Juan rose distinctly to my left as if my subconscious were unabashed stealing its imagery from salvador dali.  I licked my fingers and and found them to be an interesting Teriyaki-lemon flavor quite unlike anything I had ever tasted before.  I looked at my shoes and realized I was standing on a giant skeleton key which I somehow knew was to the old Fort at San Juan.  I tried to pick it up and carry it to the door but it was much to heavy for one man.  In the distance I could see a bus approaching and felt as though I had been waiting for it the whole time.  It pulled up next to me and all my college friends were gesturing for me to come aboard.  The door opened.
+
+	We left the following morning with me disparaging about the existential ichiness I felt toward driving a Japanese Sedan on what should be a quintessential american journey.  That’s the problem these days, everything is ever so slightly perverted so as real insanity goes almost totally unnoticed.  He was real quiet.  A good neighbor.  Kept to himself.  I never imagined.  It’s just terrible.  Real insanity is left to drugs and those are hardly worth a writer’s time anymore (god rest your gonzo souls).  We’re left with a watered-down silicon-infused Pop culture whose art is its adverts and whose only god is commodity.  You snicker and suggest that television is to blame.  The Media.  Fuck you I am the media and I blame everyone but the media.  As if the puppets on your TV screen were capable of destroying a culture.  Proctor and Gamble destroyed your culture and we’ve all been put on the payroll.  I’ll keep complaining so long as the checks keep rolling in.
+	Nice fucking sneakers from Indonesian slave labor camps propped up on your italian leather ottoman watching you stare at your state of the art hi-fidelity TV babbling about what's wrong.  Headless chicken man is here to save the day.  Rush Limbaugh isn’t right and probably doesn’t even believe the shit he spews out, its show biz folks your whole life has been pre-scripted so that you will know what to say and when.  No stumbling over lines, the computer chip in you brain has precision craftsmanship unequalled in its uncompromising quality.  No expense has been spared in the programming of your life.
+	“What's the scrapping noise?”
+	“My internal anger”
+	“Seriously, is that your brakes.”
+	“What brakes?”
+	“Are you stabbing at existentialism?”
+	“Its the brakes.”
+	You the insolent reader wishing you knew what was going on here.  Who is having this conversation anyway?  Wouldn’t you like to know?  Too fucking bad you can’t have it all on a plate.  Hallucinogens would help of course; you understand.  I’m not talking about LSD here, no your medulla doesn’t need to slowed down anymore that it already has.  I’m talking about the greatest drug of all the strongest hallucinogen known to man: the television.  The great Tractor Beam of America sucking out your insides, and turning your guts to mush that I can spoon out and pour over ice cream.  It’s oozing from your clawed out eye sockets, slowly at first and then in a fiery blast your projectile vomit squirts unrecognizable organs mashed into goo across the room to the smiling screen of the television.  Ted Turner loves you.  Turn the page and read the goddamn book.
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+Chapter 1
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+Chapter 2
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+The Legalization of Marijuana
+(three straw theory)
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+	Somewhere in Texas I fell asleep.  I awoke at the exit of a drive thru wide-eyed in Terror clutching three straws.
+	“Are you okay?” Ed asked.
+	“No.”
+	“Maybe we should let the dog drive.”
+	“We don’t have a dog.”
+	“Right.  What’s with you?”
+	“They gave us three straws.”
+	“So?”
+	“We only needed two.”
+	“So?”
+	“The next time we go to a drive thru it’ll be late at night and in the middle of nowhere and we’ll be back on the road again before we realize that they gave us only one straw.”
+	“So...Why don’t we just save this one?”
+	“It’ll never last.  Look at it.  It knows what just happened.  You can’t just go around bending the rules of fast food physics.”
+	“You are genuinely strange.”
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+	I had a dream last night and Johnny Depp was not in it.  I was twenty-three.  Again.  It was the twentieth century.  Again.  I hadn’t finished college.  Again.  I was scraping by on a Dean Moriarty salary parking cars nine hours a day.  I got off at three and went home to find a sailor on my couch.  There was a needle in his arm; he was watching soap operas.  The woman on television was pregnant by her daughter’s husband.  We laughed.  I sat down and the sailor put a needle in my vein.  William Burroughs walked in from the kitchen and stood over us.  He smiled sadistically, knowingly.  
+	“I wanted to be a writer,” I said to him.
+	He laughed obnoxiously.
+	“Shoot up kid its the easiest thing to do.  I’d love to stay but they're expecting me in Tangiers.”  He left and I awoke feverish and uncertain of where I began and ended.
+	I had another dream that night.  The world’s end was at my doorstep.  A white hot light had flashed civilization out.  Cities ran as great metalglassconcrete rivers of deathdisfiguremanglement.  Citizen’s charred limbs protruded like rocks that were floating with the stream.  The searing smell of burning flesh darted through the hazy yellow air.  A great clock tower was dripping time from its hands and my one true love stood beneath, arms severed and lying by her side.  Her face had been burned off and eyes dissolved.  Her head was upturned and its jaw hung down swinging stupidly in the yellow flesh burning air.  Time was pooling in her mouth and dribbling done her chin like come.  I awoke deeply offended by my subconscious mind.
+	I got out of bed convinced that we must find my Georgia friend Todd before it was too late.  We were in Louisiana still and dangerously low on hallucinogens.
+	“I’d hate to have to go home early because we ran out of drugs.”
+	“I’d hate to run out of drugs.”
+	I ate the last of the mushrooms and relaxed staring at the dresser on the opposite wall.  Presently it began to change.  It dissolved into millions of tiny ants that crawled up on to the wall and began to flash messages like those signs at the side of the road that warn of up coming delays.
+	“Hello.  We are ants.”
+THIS IS WHAT WE KNOW:
+	Our purpose is singular.  To inform you as to your mission.  
+	“Hey are you seeing this Ed?”
+	“Probably not.”
+SHUT UP AND READ, HOW OFTEN DO ANTS IMPART ADVISE?
+	<<<<<<Our singular purpose is to inform you of you mission, should you choose to accept it (even ants it seems are aware of televisions finest moments).  Should you not accept we will devour your flesh <choices choices>.  Orders from above.  You understand.  Nothing personal.  Actually we like you.  Proceed from above dialog to TODD’S HOUSE.  There you will be seduced by the enemy.  Do not believe them.  LIE is in the middle of believe.  Talk to The Pigeon Man.  He will be perched on the rain gutter out back above the patio.  He will tell you how to proceed.  You are our greatest hope.  Avoid the cock-eating sirens as you may need your cock in the future.  If locating TODD’S HOUSE proves difficult go to Ed’s Pets in Watsonville and buy Stevie Wonder.  He is the chocolate lab just before the back door.  He knows the way.                                                              <<<<<<<<<END TRANSMISSION>>>>>>>
+	They slowly moved off the wall and structurally reformed the dresser.  I got up and opened the drawer suspiciously.  You just never know who to trust these days.
+	“Ah ha! just as I suspected.  We must leave at once.  The Gideons have been here.”
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+	Nothing makes me as uncomfortable as organized religion.  Especially one that sounds like some boxy Ford from the seventies.  We checked out five minutes later after confirming that the effects of the mushrooms had indeed vacated my brain.  For the most part anyway.  Actually truth be told I was pretty out of it still and I just kind of threw the key at a bewildered looking Pakistani man.  Or was that fear?
+	“Drive,” I said jumping in the already running car “I think he was on to us.”
+	The tires spit Gravel and we were off.  (I love a good cliche.)
+	“We need to get to Watsonville.”
+	“Where the fuck is that?”
+	“Its just outside of Athens.”
+	“How the hell are we going to get to Athens?”
+	“Not Athens Greece you idiot, Athens Georgia.”  I said impatiently.
+	“I know that you idiot, but we don’t have the gas money to get to Georgia.”
+	“Okay.  Lets rob a gas station.”
+	“You know you would be dead by now if I wasn’t here, right?”
+	“How do you mean?”
+	“Look around you, we are in THE SOUTH.  People here have guns, big guns, and they use them.  Alot.  What do we have?”
+	“Good point.  But we have to go to Stevie Wonder’s Pet store and buy Al the chocolate lab.  I need to have dog on this trip.”
+	“Buy a dog?  Are you not hearing me?  Money?”
+	“Well shit I don’t know what did Kerouac do?”
+	“His PUBLISHER IN NEW YORK wired him money.”
+	“Right.  Find a phone.”
+	“You don’t have a PINY.”
+	“I know I don’t.”
+	We pulled over at a Exxon station and I strode in saying I was Capt. XXXXX XXXXXXXXX and I needed to use the phone to report an accident.  The attendant look straight out of a Flannery O’Conner novel but he handed me the phone.
+	“Hello Penguin Books?  Yes this is Edward Abbey.  I’m in a spot of trouble and I need you to send some money.”
+	<Edward Abbey is dead asshole.> click.
+	Shit.  I leaned out the door and yelled to Ed “whose America’s most noted literary figure that's alive?”  He looked puzzled.
+	“Tom Clancy?”
+	“Good thinking.  Hello Random House?  This is Tom Clancy, I’m in a spot of trouble I need some money.”
+	<Who? What?  Hold on.>
+	<Tom is that you?>  male voice.
+	“Ya the CIA’s harassing me down here in Louisiana and I need you to wire me some money.  They took my wallet and all.”
+	<Could you confirm your identity?>
+	“Do you think anyone is stupid enough to try and mess with a publishing company?”  “Now look,” I said raising my voice, “If you want to see anymore of my manuscripts tell Ralph here to give me whatever is in his safe and you’ll wire him a reimbursement alright?”
+	<Okay, okay, calm down.>
+	I handed the phone to the attendant who listened for a moment, eyes widening and nodded the way some people do as if the person on the other end can see you nodding.  He hung up and went in the back room without saying a word.  He returned with a bag of money under one arm and The Hunt for Red October and Clear and Present Danger in the other.  
+	“I just love your books here would you mind signing them?”
+	I snatched the money and scrawled quickly in Hunt for Red October, To Ralph. I love you, Thomas Clancy and flipping to the back of Clear and Present Danger I wrote Ralph you are a true American.  Call me sometime 555-8216, love Tom.  I ran out the door and jumped in the car.
+	“What took so long?”
+	“I had my first book signing, it couldn’t be rushed.”
+	We split the rest of Earls potion and I drifted into a semi-conscious day dream state.
+	Fragments of Ash falling.  
+White washed ceilings hanging so ominous  
+Hallucination of bubble headed figures 
+crawling like the Michelin Man 
+across an indescribable mountain of tires 
+Motels Motels Motels 
+Whiskey Bourbon.  
+Tow truck 
+non-ordinary state of reality 
+precludes a state of reality 
+that something is real  Point at 
+the autistic man woman child  
+Autistic man pointing at you 
+laughing unable to fathom how you brain 
+functions and quite self righteously 
+you you cling to its definitions.  
+Must delineate between abnormality 
+and those of us who Understand 
+The Human Virus breeding 
+like rats unconsciously conscious and aware
+of our disorganization.
+Gas Station Cold Fusion dreams
+of the Anarchist are breeding
+in the minds of the oil men
+who don’t want to
+lose they're stranglehold of reality.
+(where is Earl nice guy.)
+Fragments of Ash falling
+the continual settling of dust
+weighing down humanity and the 
+French Maid masturbates discreetly in 
+the next room.  you need her 
+to keep the dust off your mortal
+coil spring.
+Rebirth mythology.
+Mythology of reality.  We must
+distinguish between what will be defined as 
+sane and what shall be referred to 
+as insanity.  Kevlar definitions
+constructed to make a better shampoo
+seem like a logical item on which
+to squander your paperbacked slavery bills.
+After all these years Tide still
+gets your socks whiter 
+Its a wonder 
+they aren’t transparent by now.
+that your brain retarded 
+in its development
+that evolution had not 
+anticipated the advent
+of the opposable thumb the unopposable
+domination of the thumb leading
+to and insect superiority of mating
+rituals stolen from a textbook
+on damselflies darning needles
+sewing shut your lips, mind atrophy.
+Weber's White Race Enriched for Superiority
+Scorched earth campaigns raining Ash.
+Shit from the sky.  Tax man came
+for your baby in exchange for unpaid balance.  
+You understand.  Nothing Personal 
+Just doing our job.  Same as the
+next guy.  From Auzwich on down the 
+line.  Didn’t make the rules.  Sorry.
+We perfected them.
+There are no innocents in a world of
+free will.  You don’t have to survive
+at the expense of others.  You could
+die with puncture wounds in your hands
+and other would create a new mythology
+strange irony would find another with holes 
+in his hands unwilling to accept
+cockroach mentalities.
+You want to beLIEve Hitler 
+was a madman but he lives on
+buried under restraint in everyone mind.
+Only taking orders you understand.  Didn’t have 
+a CHOICE.  Got a family to feed.
+radio crackle.  pop.  hiss.
+silence.
+<<<<<<<<<<<END TRANSMISSION>>>>>>>>>
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+	Georgia is a beautiful state if you take the right drugs.  The drugs obscure the frightening backward racist mentality that the New South’s propaganda claims is gone.  A thing of the past.  I’ve been through Macon and if that’s the New South I’m damn glad I wasn’t here for the old.  Earl’s miracle potion wears off as we pass through Jasper.
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+I have a penchant for old cars.  Actually I have a penchant for anything old, anything with heritage.  Items found tucked in the back of junk shops layered in dust still settling from the days of Atlantis.  Heritage is the human element that lingers long after the actual owner of an old ford "woody" station wagon has disappeared.  There is a feeling one gets from holding up a slightly rusted coca-cola sign, hung for years of the wall of a small country store where an old man used to sit of the porch and smile at the customers as they walked in.  An old man who used to show local children the holes in his wrists where they pounded through the nails.
+	Salvation lies in artifacts, coca-cola signs from old stores or advertisements for the old clipper-ship routes to Paris where a young woman once went to be alone, to write, to create.  Slow spoken words sink in, unlike gibberish sloganeering of our day, sliding quickly off the deaf ears of time.  I treasure artifacts left behind to carry on memories when there is no clipper ship route for her to take anymore.
+	Artifacts are not a part of "americana," they are a part of lives.  Old cars talk.  Drive one a thousand miles east into your own past, they will find you.  Words can always find you even across the ages.  "Americana" is the garbage hawked in front of tourist landmarks.  The artifacts are gone, for when the voices leave to escape the throngs of unwisemen, the artifacts leave with them.  Of course trinkets of "americana" remain, to sold for thirty pieces of silver.
+	Artifacts must be sought after, they are never found.  Most began as the dream in some ancient person's head, a fanciful dream to which only they adhered.  Their voices can be heard of course, even without the artifact, for dreams inhabit the earth.  Anyone who has spent any time in the canyon country of southern Utah will tell you as the old man did, "there are voices in the hills."  Voices yes, but precious few listeners.  Falling trees need ears to hear their sound, lest they remain simply vibrations and sudden movements of air.
+	Science has taught modern man to understand the how, but it can not answer the more ancient "why?"  The voices in the hills know why, and those who spend the time sinking roots into the land and into the artifacts of the land, they know why.  Technological society has entrapped itself in an ever more complex web of "how's" at the cost of listening ears.  Deafness is a disease.
+	It is a disease wrought upon those who have cut loose their roots and float expressionless dangling ten feet above the earth.  I have observed such people and wanted to help them, but I am small and could not reach.  I have watched as some people, giants rather, Abbey, Thoreau, or a young girl named Anna, pulled them down.  All this I have observed, but observation is nothing --reflection and meditation is where creation lies.  In meditation I find only loss and sorrow, pain and dread, an overwhelming sense of my unimportance.  This is the trouble with writers, they know only pain for reflecting back on life is to see a series of goodbyes farewells, a never-ending and complex web of leaving ears.  Until there's no left to listen to the stories you tell; death is the process of being absorbed into the land, into artifacts.
+	Old Ford "woodies" were artifacts --simple in-line six engines without air conditioning, tape decks or alarm systems.  You rolled down the window and listened.  Listened to the wind rushing through the car, carrying the voices to your ears.  You stopped at gas stations where old men wore overalls and you bought coca-cola beneath a shiny new metal sign.  You could drive for days and in the end you might well have picked up a woman headed for New York to catch a clipper ship to Paris, or an old man who had holes in his wrists.
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+	Every so often in the course of observation one finds the kind of simple beauty on the face of a simple person that gives us pause.  Pause to smile and wonder how we could have done without such a smile, such a radiance, such a pair of eyes.  God made beauty and radiance and chose to call them children.  I saw a photograph recently of a captivating child whose moment of radiance and simple beauty had been frozen for eternity by a shutter-click.  An image lighted with a spirit and essence of beauty about it.  Children have the kind of light about them that you need in April.  By the time I'm eighty I hope I will have that radiance again.
+	Promise.  Promises are what people need in April when the Earth is just beginning to warm up.  The light tends to be clearer and the ocean swell finally arrives from some distant Mexican shore bringing the scent of flowers from the sand dunes.  Flowers and passion are so often breathed in the same sentence they tend to loose there connection, but it lingers.  Passion and flowers both need spontaneity and freedom to bloom.  Is that the connection they seek?
+	Passion and Promise.  Sometimes you push down the shutter of a camera and look back in a year only to find that you hate half the faces you froze.  The good times are when you look back at a single face and stare right through it into the soul --the light behind the eyes.
+	Her eyes are windows into a soul, a soul which we create in reeling pitches of beauty and strength.  If I had my way I should make her queen of the world.  Oh Queen of the World won't you rescue me?  I need a savior, and behind some immeasurable depth of eyes there is a kind of salvation.  In the midst of a generation spinning and hurling violently around the sun one girl smiled to save me.
+	Passion, Promise and Salvation.  I wish I could thank her, give her my hand to hold as we spin across the face of the sun at 68,000 miles an hour.  It's a fast-paced world.  I hardly have time to breathe, but in the air I do find I find a kind of vision.  A hallucination and vague dream of a street in New York many years ago when Diane Arbus froze in time "a girl and a watch cap."
+	April's fading fast.  The world's spinning faster and faster falling slowly and inevitably out of its orbit.  I hope it hangs in there long enough for me to find a copy of that photo to hang on my wall.  I'll hang it next to Christ.  Christ is holding hands with that smiling little girl.  She's helping him to his feet.  She holding her hand out to me.
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+	Some people say that after a rain the earth is cleansed and everything washed anew, and then, claim they, we are also.  Oddly most of them own umbrellas.  And now I stand in the rain watching them run, cursing their luck at being caught naked in the middle of salvation.  Water drips down her nose onto the already soaked grass.  I picked up a pen and called you to say...
+	I only want to love people, and I do in my fashion, but I am angry that not everyone wants to love everyone.  I'm not bitter at people, I'm just saddened that they don't want to love each other. Race, Culture, Religion, all these things divide us, and to what purpose?  I only want to stop them in their tracks and dump buckets of water, wet, cold, and painfully truthful, on their heads.  To bandage the shallow petty wounds and wipe the blood away.  "In his blood you are saved" --as if I needed more blood.  Your hands are punctured, sir, give me your shroud and I will bandage them, stop the bleeding.
+	Rain falls evenly on the surface of rock, but it runs off and pools in the places where the granite has dug into itself to create depth.  Granite is salvation, it is firm.  On a granite surface you can climb, I can pull myself up granite cliffs and stand atop their holiness.  But it is the depressions, cracks, and holes in the rock where I place my hands and feel secure.
+	"I heard the rainfall on my tentfly" and promptly took it off.  I sleep much better when the rain can pool in my mouth.  I dreamed long dreams of gold and silver snakes.  A young boy found them, brilliant, shining creatures, deep in the forest.  He brought them back to his village to keep them as pets.  They began to grow and soon the boy was forced to spend much of his time finding them food.  Soon they became so large that the boy had to toil from dawn to dusk just to keep their bellies full.  They were consuming him, devouring up all his time until the day they devoured him.  Two massive snakes of silver and gold hissing and striking poison into the body of a once curious young boy.
+	I awoke to a world where people carried their religions and philosophies tidily on the bumpers of their cars.  Buildings and jewelry, smiles and sunsets, rings and promises all sparkled --silver and gold.  Somewhere an old man was standing, holes in his hands, rain washing down on him.  Water filled his eyes.  He wept.
+	A freeway snaked across the land, its blood coursing with little religions and philosophies.  This is where we lived, this is what we lived for.
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+	Nothing is ever as it seems.  It has been sunny and warm lately so I thought I ought to tell about the time a dark-haired girl told me about people who lie in the sun.  To tan of course.  But a cynic informed me that a tan was merely the preliminary stage of cancer.  No more of death.  I have to much of death in my life, too much altogether.  The Phoenix is dead.  No life comes out of death, only pain, and sad memories, stored carefully from the beginning, for everyone knows there will be a time when memories are all we have.
+	So I set out to dance the sun up past the morning, catching with it the approving eye of sleeping squirrels and a once called god, old man.  Life would be this much simpler if only I could clear thought from my mind.  Truth.  So truth is what you seek?
+	Our truth is only what we have known the longest.  Men are stronger than women.  That is the truth.  We have known it the longest, heavy-handed down from weak lying old men who crawled about from bath to bath, groveling after truth.  I have heard that men have been to the moon, but I have also heard that it was all staged.  No.  Truth must be that they have been there, I have heard that lie the longest.
+	Truth.  The oldest and rankest lie is what we call truth.
+	And so shall be truth, there is nothing you can do to avoid it.  You know you can not fly, it is the truth, and you will never fly. It is truth that you will never know whether your failure is because you can't fly or because you think you can't fly.  Birds have hollow bones.  That is truth.  That is how they fly.  Humans have hollow heads.  That is truth, that is why they can not fly.
+	Boxcars and trains haunt my truth, a vision of a girl; black hair and smoky eyes.  Fire.  Fire is the one truth I can never escape, heat is all that is need to live.  Fire in her eyes.  Fire in Laguna's hills.  Fire burning through her cheeks, her smile, flames licking and consuming her body.  If only for a moment.
+	Images of dark and light arise from the depths only to be slapped in the face, clawed, bit, pulled under by the hair, ripped, torn and ravaged entirely by cliche.  That in the end is truth enough for anyone.  Especially a writer.
+	"You can cut a chicken's head off and it will keep on running," how's that for truth?  Truth that death isn't death and isn't life, it is monotonous continuing about life without a head.  Truth that spirit is inseparable from body.  Truth that the spirit is in the body and the body is in the spirit.  Our roots tell us that truth can be found by denying the body.  By detaching it.  What has sex to do with love?  Sharpen your knives and prepare to cut lose the next limb.  The truth is you don't know how to use it anyway.
+	I can cut your head off and you will keep on running too.  Running about from your government to your economy to your business to your bedroom, but the blood doesn't stop spewing and bubbling out of your stump-neck, waiting for a moment, trickling down your body as if hoping some god will be your savior.  It clots and dries and the only thing left is fire.  Fire to burn you up without ceremony, only a faint crackling and sizzling as you burn without your headless for truth.
+	She didn't lose her head she only smiled and the flames cooled her.  Shadrach and a girl with black hair.  She was lifted, she did not twitch, only floated, and was delivered on.  That is truth.  You have blood.  She has herself.  Go ahead break it drink it.  She'll never know.
+
+To me that image produces such strong emotions of longing for the road that sometimes I just want to break down and cry.  The simplicity of life, the sheer joy and love I felt on the road last fall confirmed what I'd always believed, that I was born to travel.  I don't know exactly what it is that is so enticing and alluring to me.  I guess maybe its the freedom; the freedom to not have a job, to not have anyplace to go, not have anything to do that I don't really want to do.  The simplicity, the essentials of life food, cigarettes, beer and gas.  Give me those and I could live a million years in total ecstasy and bliss.  The wind in my hair, the open road in front of me -its utter poetry for my heart and soul.  The warmth of loneliness and the peace that it brings is overwhelming.  Its not a sad loneliness, but rather one of infinite gratitude and joy in simply being alive and I know that might sound kind of corny but its really how I feel.  If I could step into that photograph and just smell the air and hear the beautiful sounds of cars wizzing by and the talk of local folk, I could disappear forever  
+
+
+
+
+
+I had a dream last night and Johnny Depp was not in it.  I was twenty-three.  Again.  It was the twentieth century.  Again.  I hadn’t finished college.  Again.  I was scraping by on a Dean Moriarty salary parking cars nine hours a day.  I got off at three and went home to find a sailor on my couch.  There was a needle in his arm; he was watching soap operas.  The woman on television was pregnant by her daughter’s husband.  We laughed.  I sat down and the sailor put a needle in my vein.  William Burroughs walked in from the kitchen and stood over us.  He smiled sadistically, knowingly.  
+	“I wanted to be a writer,” I said to him.
+	He laughed obnoxiously.
+	“Shoot up kid its the easiest thing to do.  I’d love to stay but they're expecting me in Tangiers.”  He left and I awoke feverish and uncertain of where I began and ended.
+	I had another dream that night.  The world’s end was at my doorstep.  A white hot light had flashed civilization out.  Cities ran as great metalglassconcrete rivers of deathdisfiguremanglement.  Citizen’s charred limbs protruded like rocks that were floating with the stream.  The searing smell of burning flesh darted through the hazy yellow air.  A great clock tower was dripping time from its hands and my one true love stood beneath, arms severed and lying by her side.  Her face had been burned off and eyes dissolved.  Her head was upturned and its jaw hung down swinging stupidly in the yellow flesh burning air.  Time was pooling in her mouth and dribbling done her chin like come.  I awoke deeply offended by my subconscious mind.
+	I got out of bed convinced that we must find my Georgia friend Todd before it was too late.  We were in Louisiana still and dangerously low on hallucinogens.
+	“I’d hate to have to go home early because we ran out of drugs.”
+	“I’d hate to run out of drugs.”
+	I ate the last of the mushrooms and relaxed staring at the dresser on the opposite wall.  Presently it began to change.  It dissolved into millions of tiny ants that crawled up on to the wall and began to flash messages like those signs at the side of the road that warn of up coming delays.
+	“Hello.  We are ants.”
+THIS IS WHAT WE KNOW:
+	Our purpose is singular.  To inform you as to your mission.  
+	“Hey are you seeing this Bill?”
+	“Probably not.”
+SHUT UP AND READ, HOW OFTEN DO ANTS IMPART ADVISE?
+	<<<<<<Our singular purpose is to inform you of you mission, should you choose to accept it (even ants it seems are aware of televisions finest moments).  Should you not accept we will devour your flesh <choices choices>.  Orders from above.  You understand.  Nothing personal.  Actually we like you.  Proceed from above dialog to TODD’S HOUSE.  There you will be seduced by the enemy.  Do not believe them.  LIE is in the middle of believe.  Talk to The Pigeon Man.  He will be perched on the rain gutter out back above the patio.  He will tell you how to proceed.  You are our greatest hope.  Avoid the cock-eating sirens as you may need your cock in the future.  If locating TODD’S HOUSE proves difficult go to Ed’s Pets in Watsonville and buy Stevie Wonder.  He is the chocolate lab just before the back door.  He knows the way.                                                              <<<<<<<<<END TRANSMISSION>>>>>>>
+	They slowly moved off the wall and structurally reformed the dresser.  I got up and opened the drawer suspiciously.  You just never know who to trust these days.
+	“Ah ha! just as I suspected.  We must leave at once.  The Gideons have been here.”
+
+
+	Nothing makes me as uncomfortable as organized religion.  Especially one that sounds like some boxy Ford from the seventies.  We checked out five minutes later after confirming that the effects of the mushrooms had indeed vacated my brain.  For the most part anyway.  Actually truth be told I was pretty out of it still and I just kind of threw the key at a bewildered looking Pakistani man.  Or was that fear?
+	“Drive,” I said jumping in the already running car “I think he was on to us.”
+	The tires spit Gravel and we were off.  (I love a good cliche.)
+	“We need to get to Watsonville.”
+	“Where the fuck is that?”
+	“Its just outside of Athens.”
+	“How the hell are we going to get to Athens?”
+	“Not Athens Greece you idiot, Athens Georgia.”  I said impatiently.
+	“I know that you idiot, but we don’t have the gas money to get to Georgia.”
+	“Okay.  Lets rob a gas station.”
+	“You know you would be dead by now if I wasn’t here, right?”
+	“How do you mean?”
+	“Look around you, we are in THE SOUTH.  People here have guns, big guns, and they use them.  Alot.  What do we have?”
+	“Good point.  But we have to go to Stevie Wonder’s Pet store and buy Al the chocolate lab.  I need to have dog on this trip.”
+	“Buy a dog?  Are you not hearing me?  Money?”
+	“Well shit I don’t know what did Kerouac do?”
+	“His PUBLISHER IN NEW YORK wired him money.”
+	“Right.  Find a phone.”
+	“You don’t have a PINY.”
+	“I know I don’t.”
+	We pulled over at a Exxon station and I strode in saying I was Capt. XXXXX XXXXXXXXX and I needed to use the phone to report an accident.  The attendant look straight out of a Flannery O’Conner novel but he handed me the phone.
+	“Hello Penguin Books?  Yes this is Edward Abbey.  I’m in a spot of trouble and I need you to send some money.”
+	<Edward Abbey is dead asshole.> click.
+	Shit.  I leaned out the door and yelled to Ed “whose America’s most noted literary figure that's alive?”  He looked puzzled.
+	“Tom Clancy?”
+	“Good thinking.  Hello Random House?  This is Tom Clancy, I’m in a spot of trouble I need some money.”
+	<Who? What?  Hold on.>
+	<Tom is that you?>  male voice.
+	“Ya the CIA’s harassing me down here in Louisiana and I need you to wire me some money.  They took my wallet and all.”
+	<Could you confirm your identity?>
+	“Do you think anyone is stupid enough to try and mess with a publishing company?”  “Now look,” I said raising my voice, “If you want to see anymore of my manuscripts tell Ralph here to give me whatever is in his safe and you’ll wire him a reimbursement alright?”
+	<Okay, okay, calm down.>
+	I handed the phone to the attendant who listened for a moment, eyes widening and nodded the way some people do as if the person on the other end can see you nodding.  He hung up and went in the back room without saying a word.  He returned with a bag of money under one arm and The Hunt for Red October and Clear and Present Danger in the other.  
+	“I just love your books here would you mind signing them?”
+	I snatched the money and scrawled quickly in Hunt for Red October, To Ralph. I love you, Thomas Clancy and flipping to the back of Clear and Present Danger I wrote Ralph you are a true American.  Call me sometime 555-8216, love Tom.  I ran out the door and jumped in the car.
+	“What took so long?”
+	“I had my first book signing, it couldn’t be rushed.”
+	We split the rest of Earls potion and I drifted into a semi-conscious day dream state.
+	Fragments of Ash falling.  
+White washed ceilings hanging so ominous  
+Hallucination of bubble headed figures 
+crawling like the Michelin Man 
+across an indescribable mountain of tires 
+Motels Motels Motels 
+Whiskey Bourbon.  
+Tow truck 
+non-ordinary state of reality 
+precludes a state of reality 
+that something is real  Point at 
+the autistic man woman child  
+Autistic man pointing at you 
+laughing unable to fathom how you brain 
+functions and quite self righteously 
+you you cling to its definitions.  
+Must delineate between abnormality 
+and those of us who Understand 
+The Human Virus breeding 
+like rats unconsciously conscious and aware
+of our disorganization.
+Gas Station Cold Fusion dreams
+of the Anarchist are breeding
+in the minds of the oil men
+who don’t want to
+lose they're stranglehold of reality.
+(where is Earl nice guy.)
+Fragments of Ash falling
+the continual settling of dust
+weighing down humanity and the 
+French Maid masturbates discreetly in 
+the next room.  you need her 
+to keep the dust off your mortal
+coil spring.
+Rebirth mythology.
+Mythology of reality.  We must
+distinguish between what will be defined as 
+sane and what shall be referred to 
+as insanity.  Kevlar definitions
+constructed to make a better shampoo
+seem like a logical item on which
+to squander your paperbacked slavery bills.
+After all these years Tide still
+gets your socks whiter 
+Its a wonder 
+they aren’t transparent by now.
+that your brain retarded 
+in its development
+that evolution had not 
+anticipated the advent
+of the opposable thumb the unopposable
+domination of the thumb leading
+to and insect superiority of mating
+rituals stolen from a textbook
+on damselflies darning needles
+sewing shut your lips, mind atrophy.
+Weber's White Race Enriched for Superiority
+Scorched earth campaigns raining Ash.
+Shit from the sky.  Tax man came
+for your baby in exchange for unpaid balance.  
+You understand.  Nothing Personal 
+Just doing our job.  Same as the
+next guy.  From Auzwich on down the 
+line.  Didn’t make the rules.  Sorry.
+We perfected them.
+There are no innocents in a world of
+free will.  You don’t have to survive
+at the expense of others.  You could
+die with puncture wounds in your hands
+and other would create a new mythology
+strange irony would find another with holes 
+in his hands unwilling to accept
+cockroach mentalities.
+You want to beLIEve Hitler 
+was a madman but he lives on
+buried under restraint in everyone mind.
+Only taking orders you understand.  Didn’t have 
+a CHOICE.  Got a family to feed.
+radio crackle.  pop.  hiss.
+silence.
+<<<<<<<<<<<END TRANSMISSION>>>>>>>>>
+
+
+
+	Georgia is a beautiful state -if you take the right drugs.  The drugs obscure the frightening backward racist mentality that the New South’s propaganda claims is gone.  A thing of the past.  I’ve been through Macon and if that’s the New South I’m damn glad I wasn’t here for the old.  Earl’s miracle potion wears off as we pass through Jasper.
+
+
+
+
+	We arrived in  Watsonville this morning and went to Steve's Pets where we bought a chocolate lab we named Al The Wonder Dog or ATW for short.  A couple dozen milk bones later we arrived at Todd's house.  Todd was looking worried and not at all glad to see us.
+	"I figured you freaks were on your way out here, this came in the mail yesterday,"  he said handing me a letter.
+	"It's good to see you too" I shot back.  They always seem to know when I'm coming like I am the anti-stealth bomber.  
+	"I'm sorry man, its just that Carol lee's parents are coming up from Macom' and I don't know what to do with you guy's."
+	"Well, we already got somewhere to stay so don't sweat it we weren't expecting anything but a cold beer."
+	"Of course, of course come inside."
+	I went out back on the porch and opened the letter and sat relaxing in the sticky humid southern evening.  It went like this.
+
+	Dear Wayfarer, 
+	Thanks for your piece on Mardi Gras.  It was definitely a first, and perhaps only, of its kind for the magazine.  You should see the stack of letters sitting on my desk, people love you or hate you.  Actually seven people loved you and over two hundred found you and your story to be the most offensive thing they had ever read -which I figured you would be delighted to know.
+	Anyway I was hoping you could do something on this piece I clipped from -------- magazine (our major competition in the LA and New York markets).  I called them and got permission to rerun it in "an editorial form" (which I have on tape) so I think our butts are covered.
+
+	Do the math.  Many hosts are unsure how much liquor to buy for cocktail parties.  When in doubt turn to arithmetic.  Most drink recipes call for two ounces of liquor.
+	A 750mL bottle contains 25 ounces allowing for spillage.  You can expect 12 serving per bottle.  Figure most quests will have two drinks in an evening so you get one bottle per six people.
+	
+
+
+
+
+	Richard says to tell your to keep going up to D.C.  Next week he wants you to cover some event that the Rev Farrakkan is having.  Gimme a call, 'cause I think I actually got him to book a hotel room for you.
+
+
+					good luck,
+
+					Dean
+
+
+
+	I reread the letter several times trying to figure out what the hell I'm supposed to do with the clipping.  I mean shouldn't we be writing our own shit not just making fun of other people's shit?  It occurs to me however, that magazines seldom blantantly make fun of each other, so who better to do it than me?  I get another beer from Todd's fridge while he's playing with ATW, and I roll a cigarette on the porch.  What sort of people need to have a formal theory for mixing drinks anyway?  No one I've ever known has ever had a cocktail party, we usually all just show up at some often unsuspecting friend's house after the bars are all closed and proceed to raid there supplies of liquor and pharmaceuticals.  Two ounces per drink.  Who the hell knows how much two ounces is by sight?  Besides that's the reason you drink at home -because you can make a God's honest beverage sure to alter your normal brainwaves after a few sips, instead of paying five dollars for a drink that wouldn't faze a second grader.  I like to have two drinks in a evening too.  Preferably poured in leftover 32 oz 7 eleven plastic cups.  About three quarters full of alcohol (preferably clear and of Russian origin) and one quarter something else for taste.  I like to drink in large quantities.
+	But it'll make you sick (sound of church ladies agast).  Well your pointless life of boorish toiling from dawn to dusk with an hours worth of watered down pissass drinks at the pub on the way home to the overpriced, style-challenged suburban dwelling with your weekend cocktail parties where you gag on your bosses short dick angling for a promotion makes me sick.  So fuck you and your organized society with stoplights and clockwise circles and social security cards and adverts drooling over the latest piece-of-shit-got-to-have-it plastic automobile so big you can't even drive it.  Get the fuck out my way.  Come out here sit on this porch in languid evening sun, relishing the sweet sticky smell of the southern air fanning across your bare chest as the Godless afternoon heat relents into a warm evening breeze.  Then you'll understand what I'm talking about.
+	On second thought don't.  You've got that big mortgage payment to worry about, and well, quite frankly, I just wouldn't be as relaxed if anyone else was here.  Be content with your life and enjoy your smug possessions and play armchair enthusiast.  I am your omnipotent guide and everything is under control.  Actually if you must know I'm lost and everything about this god awful society is totally fucked-up.  But nevermind, we'll get to that.
+	I set down the pen and my seventh beer and gaze cross-eyed at my response written in column form to impress THE EDITORS.
+
+	Forget the math, you'll be too drunk to figure it out anyway.  Buy one 750mL bottle per person bare minimum.  When in doubt buy two.  most drinks should be made with 12-15 ounces of alcohol and spillage will only earn the ridicule of your friends.  Buy some pouring nipples or steal them from a bar you don't go to very often.
+	Figure that most guests will be belligerently drunk by ten so to save funds bust out the cheap stuff (re: Ralph's charcoal filtered vodka).  Another excellent way to cut costs is to have a readily available supply of marijuana amphetamines and opiates.  Avoid hallucinogens at you own party, better to bring them to someone else's house.  That way should the neighbors find you huddled naked beneath a tree barking like a dog and foaming at the mouth, at least they won't be your neighbors.
+
+	I have the strangest drunken feeling that that will never be printed in a magazine and that if it were I would be forever hounded by every law enforcement agency from coast to coast.  I hurriedly scrawl a note that, if printed, not to put my name on it.  Cops are like rattlesnakes there's no sense throwing rocks at 'em you know what they'll do.  In fact I think in all likelihood the name on the jacket of this book will not by mine.  People stopped believing in fiction along time ago, twentieth century imagination-atrophy syndrome.
+	I wander inside and find Bill and Todd staring mindlessly at the television.  Creature of a human resemblance are cavorting on screen to a ten cent laugh track background designed to cover up the fact that sitcoms are basically not even remotely funny.  They have to be stoned I realize and after a moments search I pick up the rest of the joint laying next to the ashtray.  I light it and ease onto the couch.
+	"We should go down and see what's happening at the Knight."
+	No response.  I take another drag hoping to catch up.  I glance at Todd's glazed over eyes and realize that more than pot might be involved in this situation. I’m not talking about LSD here, no ours medulla don’t need to slowed down anymore than they already have.  I’m talking about the greatest drug of all, the strongest hallucinogen known to man: the television.  The great Tractor Beam of America sucking out your insides, and turning your guts to mush that I can spoon out and pour over ice cream.  It’s oozing from your clawed out eye sockets, slowly at first and then in a fiery blast your projectile vomit squirts unrecognizable organs mashed into goo across the room to the smiling screen of the television.  Ted Turner loves us.  He's given us our own alter state of reality that we can all share together.
+	I wave my hand in front of Bill's face.
+	"Hey man shut up I'm trying to watch this thing."
+	I turn off the television and ask "have you ever considered that maybe it is watching you?"
+	"Yes," answers Todd, "but I don't publisize my paranoia"
+	They seem to have snapped out of their primordial trance state so I again suggest the Little Knight and this time they agree, but Todd the dutiful husband can only go for an hour.  Uh hu.  I'm going to need more than an hour  I love Georgia girls and the most beautiful and intelligent ones (no thats not a oximoron) hang out at the Little Knight
+	Besides which, I'm full from all that beer, and am feeling the need to lighten up my head with something clear.  Something Russian.   We sit in the customary back booth where Todd and I first shared a beer.  And I do mean shared, we were both so broke at the time that between the two of us we had only enough for one pint of Guiness.  But that was many moons ago.  I gave Todd some ecxtasy the New Orleans club girls had given me, and despite his protests of coming in-laws (whats worse in-laws on extasy or a wife stood up because you're on exctasy?  Tough call.) Now he and Bill have become thoroughly enchanted with the red velvet texture that cover the walls.  I'm not big on X its too tactile of a drug.  I start thinking of the how long its been since I've been here.  I miss this one little outpost nestled in the middle of anotherwise boring and featureless state.  Perhaps boring is the wrong word, sufficeto say that Georgia's beauty is in its subtlies. the little pockets of beauty that you can't find anywhere except Georgia.  And of the eccentricies of the folk the land has given birth to.
+	I think, for instance, of Leo the crazy cook back in Athens Georgia, black like the greasy skillets and pots he is forever clanging around and the glum ceilings of the kitchen, greasy smoke crawling up the wall to rest at the top, muddy brown, delicious looking.  Automatic.  Your food is thrust at you by a wide-eyed black woman who appears to be Leo’s wife but never says anything except "Greens, potatoes or Yams?"  "Greens please."  The first time we were there she added "sweet tea is on the left regular right."  After that when we would come back she seem satisfied the we could figure the tea situation ourselves.  "Greens, potatoes or yams?"  Yams please.  And cigarettes, always cigarettes, after a meal the soothing feel of smoke blowing out you nose, relaxing your greasy full belly.  I would like to sing an ode to cigarettes at the top of my lungs, at the top of my hills at the bottom of my valleys.  Cigarettes are always there.  Food and Women come and go and can be enjoyed properly when you have them, but cigarettes you must always have cigarettes.
+	And MY My my the southern girls (why always girls?  Why not?).  The true peaches of Georgia.  Lips honey sweet and dripping with southern accents.  The hot sticky air that seems to cling to you like unwanted jackets your mother used to put on you when you went out to play in the snow.  It makes you want to throw off whatever garments propriety dictated onto your unwitting frame and dive naked in the cool river, swim naked with the girls, women, water moccasins, and the lucky alligator or two if any are around.
+	But tonight the Knight is empty save for the token Frat boys playing pool.  And of course Anthony Luigie Bruno.  Or Tony as we call him.  Bartender extrodiniarar.  I don't know anything about Tony.  Or at least I don't know anything for sure about Tony.  I could probably fill twenty pages with the bullshit stories I've heard him tell unsuspecting "freshies" as he calls them.  He really is Italian and he really pours stiff drink and he rarely makes me pay for them.  That's the extent of the truth about Tony and beyond that in all honesty I'm really not mush interested.
+
+
+
+Brian a quiet shy nice good, weed suppling friend.  We’ve been in the back rooms of Frat houses just passing time.  Hendrix, Zepplin, tie-dyed Jerry Garcia staring down from the stark plaster-patched walls.  Michael and I flat on our backs listening to Adam Sandler sing "I’m fucking wasted/its the best shit I’ve ever tasted."  It’s all down hill from here, such beautiful silence between songs, minds scouring for thoughts like a thousand skinny starved rats devouring a single crumb.  Giant looping conversations chasing bumblebee ideas through great open fields of thoughtless silence.
+	Hey what day is it?  Lets go downtown, by the fountain, cool jazz music drifting out the open windows of the too crowded to enter bar.  I try.  Can I get a beer?  In a minute.  Didn’t have a minute, life was flying by, Amtrak coast to coast flyer, stopping causes derailment.  Back out into the dizzying flow of human traffic.  We’re trying hard not to get trampled like those poor soccer fans at the stadium riots in Italy that I always am reading about.  Its Brian, It’s his fault where are the girls?  "Lets go to Tangz!" he says.  So we warder through throngs of drunken kids --college towns 20,000 people with nothing to do but drink	Tangz! is too crowded full of Hootie and the Blowfish listeners for Michael’s tastes, so we leave.  Brian stays.
+	Wandering together like we always end up.  Drunk now, the tea worn off.  Streets swirl and in my daze I hear horns and skidding tires, get out of the street you moron.  A cop cruises by this city is fucking chocked full of cops, we duck down an alley.  Half way down a drunken bum accosts us.
+	"This is my alley college boys."
+	"We are not college boys,"  Michael babbles with little coherency, but a lot of conviction, "we are upon a sojourn."  Big words usually piss bums off and I am fully prepared to run from a spraying onslaught of cheap red wine, but it never comes.
+	"Where are you sojourning to?" mumbles the bum.
+	"Tonight we decided to share your alley, I say, trying to keep the world upright, but it refuses.  "I think I better sit down."  I lean against the wall next to the bum and slowly slide down, the bricks bumping my back, until I arrive on the ground with the bum.  A small journey downward amongst some larger incoherent vision.  Sitting relieves the mind of its burdens if only for a second while the brain floats downward and lodges back in your drugged skull.
+	"Chinese?"
+	The bum offers me food.  
+	"Shouldn’t I be offering you food?"  I laugh.
+	"Food is food right now I’ve got some and you don’t so I’m offering it to you, someday you’ll have some and maybe you’ll offer it to me."
+	I acquiesce and eat a bite.  Pass it to Michael.  He jabs his finger in to scoop up some noodles.
+	"Shit boy wheres your manners?" the bum croaks in disgust. 
+	"I don’t know how to use chopsticks."
+	"Shit you’re out here on your own ‘sojourning’ around and you can’t even use chopsticks.  Come here I’ll teach you."
+	I’m laughing at the comic nature of the bum trying to show Michael how to eat with chopsticks, ready to slouch down and say goodbye to the world for a while.  No, not yet.  I raise my heavy head banging it into the bricks.  OW!  The bricks are laughing at me manic side splitting laughter.  I try desperately to focus on the wall on the opposite side of the alley.  I notice lights and I become aware for the first time of music, not just music, but Prince.  It occurs to me that its probably Tangz! right down the street.  Drunks usually don’t wander very far.
+	The faint lights down toward the end of the alley fade out of focus I squint and suddenly all I can see is some coastal port for France.  My brain gives in to the illusion and start to see it clearer the faraway sparkle as one might see from an ocean liner steaming across the channel, glittering insane promises of wine whore and Henry miller.  Miller and I are in some dim lit alley, scrounging for scraps of bread in the flickering shadows of gas lamps.  We come to a door, a pastry shop!  Straining my head I can see glass shelves behind a counter displaying torts, cheesecakes, eclairs, raspberry torts, blueberry, lemon. lime, blackberry, and chocolate cake dripping fudge, carrot cake, pineapple upside down cake, buns muffins all seductively delicious in rows and piles, food to feed armies, countries, continents.  But the counter is made of barbed wire, we can’t get to them.  All the food to feed the world and I can’t reach it.  I am trying but the razor barbs cut me, I am bleeding, Miller is gone, I’m no longer in the store, my neck aches and throbs.
+	I open my eyes and am suddenly blinded by the midday Colorado sun.  I am desperately craving a raspberry tort.  I can’t figure out why, then I remember the dream.  Walls come into focus and that rushing of blood to my head that signals the onslaught of a terrific headache.  Michael’s head is resting on my shoulder and his arm is strewn across my legs.  I heave him off and stand up.  We arm in the alley still I notice just a few doors down from the back entrance to Tangz!  A horrid thought strikes me and I reach for my back pocket, but no my wallet and all its money ($23) is still there.  Maybe bums are the last honest people left.
+	Michael is up and rubbing his eyes.
+	"Take those contacts out one or these days or your going to go blind," I warn.
+	"I am blind.  Where are we?"
+	"In that alley still."
+	"oh yeah, hey you passed out, I kept trying to wake you up man that bum was one wacky cat."  Michael unconsciously imitating the slang of the cool old ponytailed Jazz musician who runs and open mike night at this little coffee shop in LA.  Michael and I used to go there me with guitar and him singing, we’d slaughter Bruce Springsteen song and the guy would just say "you cats are pretty cool -I can dig you."  I loved that guy.
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+I talk to bums.  I smile at there stories and listen in reverence to the quiet theories of conspiracy.  Why not who else to talk to in these most disheartening of times.  The manic glow of thought that echoes hollowly from our collective lips is little more than the endless glow of faceless faces radiating a cheap phosphorescent light streaming stupidly by on the streets.  What have you to say to me what have I to say to you?  Bums are crazy not one has ever made any attempt to shed any sort of sanity into my life.  I talk to bums.  I give them money for food for cigarettes for alcohol to numb the stupidity of their lives.  If I were rich I would by everyone a bottle of wild turkey and hand them out on the corner of 6th and Broadway.  Here take off your mask admit the insanity of our lives.  Face it square on, look into its eyes, grab it by the throat and choke the life right out of it until you are numb and your hands relax from your own throat.  I hate my generation.  sickened swine what have you to say to me?  Same as I to you not a goddamned thing.
+	I tried to do that, to choke the marrow out of life or some other ridiculous sophomoric whine that passes for art.  Now I talk to bums.  The more I rant in aimless circles the more they listen.  They have nowhere to go no one to believe in.   Who would you believe in if no one believed in you?  Bums don’t lie.  They tell stories that never happened they bow their heads to priest whose god disowned them, but they don;t lie.  We lie.  The ones with the warm houses ,the comfortable chairs, the endless sewer of easy loves and voluptuous non existence, that I wouldn’t trade for one instant of truth or enlightenment.  We lie. To ourselves to the empty communitiless society we have created.  What we wouldn’t give for true vulgarity in our lives.  Not the false hopeless vulgarities we have dreamed up -pornography, narcotics, state supported war.  But real vulgarity live stripped back to the essential to the marrow of existence.  To have to forage for our own food for one mere night, to find shelter for ourselves and our families, to love life as the precious dirty scuffed diamond in the rough.  To sink your hands into the dry desert sand clawing for a God who doesn’t hear with the sun beating endlessly on your naked back ,your fetal heart.
+	I talk to bums because they seem not amazed at the contradictions of life.  They know the hideous lie of monogamy and the false happiness in sorrow.  They are not loyal to state to man not even to each other I have no doubt they would rob me blind if they could and I respect them for it.  Better bitter honesty than the stinking filth of the man who marries one woman and disowns four others in the process.  We bought this lie this one mate, one country, one planet in the face of a 250 billion other galaxies. we are the ones the only ones.  We are at least probably the only ones who have the audacity to believe we are the only ones.  Would the mule deer grazing in land locked Colorado deny the existence of whales in an ocean it has never seen?  I have asked many, but in there silence I can only assume they do.  After all if we found life outside out planet would we remain calm and un moved and go about our business as we always had.  Would our beliefs hold up in the face of such a test?  would our religions crumble, our faith in the “order of the universe” be irrevocably shaken?  Ask the mothers whose sons and daughter have been struck down on our streets about the “order of the universe”  God may not play dice with the universe, but physics don’t control it either
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+Sitting at a table in upstate New York-
+	And the Galaxy girl walks down the street, boyfriend in tow, brown stomach seductively bare, midriff shirt.  They're meeting friends later at the gate hanging ten feet high down town.  She and her shirt with GALAXY GIRL written in glittering silver, would like to get drunk, high on little golden yellow pills, and float in the ecstasy of swirling music.  Who wouldn't?
+	Three marines drive smiling and pointed in squirish red truck (marines de reguir) desperately hoping for some sweet young girl to cross the street coming back from the beach.  Stoplights are a woman’s worst nightmare.  Catcalls. Warbles, like sex crazed crows float up the street.  Victim.  Hoping for a smile of a acknowledgement to insincere flattery.  Them squirming in their truck.  Hey baby... Marines cruising for cunt.  Any cunt will do
+	And the aging club girl with bright cherry lips painted extra red by the contrast in her black leather jacket eyeing me.  She sits slouched in a chair as if resigned that she will never make it back to New York.  CEBE JEBES THE ALIGATOR LOUNGE.  Those were the good days.  Now its just slouched days in slouched chairs cigarette aimed skyward dreaming of darkness and the wild seductive wails of guitar (what was that blonde guys name?) the rhythmic pounding of the beat forcing its way into your chest, the throb, the guttural appeal of all thing taboo and enticing.
+	The surfer and his girl stroll by, her breasts spilling out of the too small top, losing its Herculean battle to save the world from nudity.  They wander into the cafe’ for snacks, drinks, to gorge the thirst induced by the haughtless sun now carving the end of its tyrannical arc.  They order designer water and leave.
+	The tired shopkeeper is out smoking her obscenely thin cigarettes again (excuse me is there any tobacco in those?).  She smokes constantly pausing only to give a tired answer to the same tourists she has to stare at day after day.  An endless reminder that they not her are the ones enjoying life.  Too many of them day after day year after year look look looking never buying.  THE LEATHER CONNECTION doesn’t do a lot of business on hot spring days.  Nor is it the kinky sort of fetish shop you might hope for.  Not even any leather in the windows.  She moves her lips mumbling incoherences intelligible only to herself.  She’s probably thinking like I am that she shouldn’t have married that conceited machoistic slob, that cigar smoking house tyrant who will be demanding dinner the moment she walks in the door.  She lights another cigarette.  Get some thicker smokes, they’ll last longer I want to say.  But I can tell she’s not the type to take unsolicited advise.
+	The sharp eyed Asian hawk sitting behind me closes her purse, pen safely secured inside.  She licks stamps and affixes them to postcards.  Notes for those at home.  “Jenny: New York is great -warm sunny.  I’m having a great time.  Remind me to tell you about this guy Bill I met the other day.  Take care of yourself.  Say hi to Tom for me.  Love....”
+	Families wander by looking for a nice place to eat.  The neon signs offer Mexican Italian Greek food, “but we need a children's menu.”  “Tommy’s only nine, he can’t eat a whole meal himself.”   “Do you think they could split a dinner, I’m not very hungry myself?” “You brought the credit card right?” “No, but I’ve still got some cash left over from breakfast this morning.  “Wasn’t that a charming little place?” “What was it called?”  “Lets go there again before we leave.”
+	And the girls the beautiful girls yes they keep going by, but I ignore them all I can ever think of them is what color lace covers there sweet impressionable pussies...
+	The locals, the non-travelers, the doomed-forever-to-live-in-one-placers stream by in shinny cars coming home from work in THE BIG CITY.  Their flimsy soda can Japanese cars that look as if a good size bird could with good aim crush the plastic colored roofs.  Remember when Kerouac and his crazy friends roamed the highways remember when cars were made of steel? Me either.  The locals drive with windows up and frowns turned down.  “Did I remember to e-mail that memo to Tony at the office in Chicago?  I wonder what sort of crap Diane cooked for dinner tonight?  She is the worst cook.  What happened to that tri-tip on Friday?  I wouldn’t have known what is was if I hadn’t bought it myself.   Dave and Linda smiled and said it was delicious the lying bastards. don’t encourage her she might actually believe she can cook.  Dave probably just wants to sleep with her.  That whore.  I wonder if she’s fooling around behind my back?  She never wants to have sex anymore.  Its always the same routine.  Me still dripping from a shower her reading some book I crawl onto of her . ‘Not tonight honey I’m to tired.’  I wait till she’s fast a sleep and sneak down to the kitchen reach behind the fridge and pull out the nudie magazines off quietly to the bathroom.  I wonder what Diane would look like in tight leather probably fat. She still hasn’t lost all the wait from the pregnancy.  God its been what like eighteen months Justin’s starting to walk for christsakes.  The light is green, fucking traffic.”  The typical suburbian woes.
+	Fog is settling in from the hills meeting up with banks rolling in from the sea, threatening the star’s view, tiny windows of the gods peeping in watching our silly games in continued amusement.  (“they keep doing it every night”)   Reminding me of San Francisco, the golden gate after sundown glowing like it were Apollos chariot itself.  Proudly beckoning the traveler with tale of endless wanderlust -out here the final frontier come swim discover secrets hidden from mankind...Come the sharks are hungry.  The mashing of teeth and bone the tearing of flesh.  Being ripped to sheds in the jaws of nature that is a glorious death.
+	A bitter couple take a seat behind me. “out here in the great outdoors the largest smoking section in America.”  Amen brother.  Places out of reach of the spreading TYRANTS OF HEALTH.  Would you like extra grease on that steak?  Why, yes please.  Breakfast in Memphis, eggs pancakes toast slices of orange parsley, juice and a happy go lucky waiter offering free Sprite?  Why, yes please and keep it coming.  Michael could I borrow you lighter? Certainly sir.  Cigarettes coffee and more open road that's what I need.   Bad coffee, bad roads full of chuckholes and entire lanes wiped out in flood, and of course really good cigarettes, that's what I really need -enough of this damn city.
+	But it the girls the girls the girls.  Sweet tight little asses hidden under Levis soft pillowly breasts rounding out tight white black blue silver t-shirts, arms cut short and stomachs exposed by some ingenious designer who truly understands life.  Belly buttons sunken gently with the hint of what sweet candy lies below wrapped in red green white black lace, curly auburn hairs, not brown, never true blond, but in between --auburn.  In between indeed.
+	And the men at the bench across the way cackle and pop with laughter pointing and gesticulating as if begging for some passerby to take interest and join in their conversation.  The dizzying roar of a departing bus temporarily drowns them out.    That was seven moons ago and any return is several moons hence.  I am here, California. The Queen Bitch. No more humid smiles.
+	The milk of human kindness.  The smiles of a five year old with grandmother eyes.  Don’t look at me it is to late for me, save yourself.
+	Brave is the soul who dare to parallel park in the clanging honking impatient drone of six o'clock traffic.  They have other destinations, other places they want to be unlucky soul giving in and going away.  Only to return moments later and steal stealthily into that same spot!  The triumph of the human spirit is reduced to finding good parking.  And she exits to the roar of cheers, friends waiting on the balcony above me.  Greek.  Ladies night out at the Aegean Cafe’.  Park the husbands on the couch, insert beer, and leave.  Ladies night out.
+	The eastern couple hesitates on the steps below he Indian she Asian.  Such a wonderfully raceless baby they could have.  We need a worldwide orgy to end racial differences.  End racism, fuck a foreigner!  And of course end culture, diversity and everything interesting about people.
+	I would not fuck you in Thailand/ I would not fuck you in a plane over Japan.  One of Dr. Suess’ lesser known couplets.  Brain candy.  Soul fodder.
+	Three big beefcake men approach in white t-shirts, dripping fake tans.  Score!  Find a cunt jack off in.  Find us all one.  Dewy eyed art school girls who want nothing to do with the beefcakes’ piercing horny lecherous stares, they want coffee cigarettes and conversation.  And maybe, just maybe some weird vampire sex with blood sucking and candle wax dripping, burning nipples.  But you wouldn’t know any better than I. Such eroticisms sparkle and fade.  Sparkle and fade.
+	A limo.  Movie stars?  Sparkle and fade.  A beautiful Spanish style villa to return to after a night on the town, bring the press along we’ll write it all up for the morning papers.  We’ll waltz under the comet’s tail, our bare feet shuffling in the sand falling between naked toes making the sound of a a rainstick, its seeds forever trapped in a cactus skull, only too quiet to hear.
+	Four sweet college girls pause and seeming ask no one “‘didn’t this use to be called Fahrenheit 451?’  Sure I reply.  They study me uncertain.  It cooled off I guess.  Poor smiles for a poor attempt at humor.  ‘What are you writing?’  (The blond too.) A bunckofworthlesscrap no one will ever read.  ‘Can I try?’  (Shit.)  My writings pretty bad.
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+	I woke up this morning in a sleeping bag with no where left to run.  We are in Wyhoming.  Again.  It's still the twentieth century and not much else appears to have changed.  Al is licking my face and appears to want food.  That dog is eating me out of House and home.  House being a battered sixty-nine Ford Pickup and home having disappeared several months ago.
+
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+As it turned out it was a good day to ask.  I was going through one of my increasingly frequent fazes of moping.  What Dr. Fredrick called depression, but he didn’t understand people very well, on account of his being a psychiatrist and all.  I cut him slack though because he did provide for the occasionally insightful discussions.  I think it was boredom that held me in its jaws, not chemical depression.  I was going through a cliche period, I was pondering the meaning of life.  
+	I have nothing that could be termed a skill so as my friends and neighbors began to get more and more involved in jobs and families, I spent more and more time in my room staring at ominously blank sheets of paper sticking out of my antique, but fully functional Underwood typewriter.  Lacking anything better to say, all I ever typed was I am bored.  Forty of fifty sheets of paper were neatly pinned on the wall above my desk reading just that.  I was just arriving at the conclusion that perhaps it was the city and its claustrophobic patches of grey sky wedged angularly between skyscrapers that was getting me down.  I was contemplating moving to France when a friend pointed out that the sun rarely shone in Paris either.  I have lived in this city for five years and have yet to run across anyone who can explain why this place never sees the sun. A half an hours drive in any direction will generally produce sunshine, but the city itself seems to have been built in the world’s only perpetual fog bank.
+	In lieu of any logical explanation I have conceived my own; the weather is out to bore me into depression.  Dr. Fredrick’s eyes lit up when I mentioned this theory to him, and he immediately asked if I ever heard voices.  I told him yes, but generally only on the cordless phone.  I told him that the company had said that if wanted to up grade to digital the noises would go a way.  Dr. Fredrick’s smile widened for a moment and vanish along with his grandiose idea that perhaps I was a paranoid schizophrenic.  Dr. Fredrick’s mission, and hence my reason for visiting him, was to study the psyche of the artist and try to prove that artistry was perhaps a chemical imbalance in the brain which led to increased creative urges.  He a big grant from some fancy university back east and paid me to be one of his test subjects.  Unable to hold down a job, lack of motivation or sheer laziness its your call, I needed easy money so I had answered his ad and apparently did a good job of convincing him that I was a writer.  The fact that I had never really sat down and written anything of substance didn’t seem to bother him.  “Its not so much the act of writing, but the heartfelt need to write that interests me,” he used to say.  I usually just nodded and let him inject me with some chemical that let his scanners see what parts of my brain were active and which weren’t.  The five hundred dollars I received every Friday cinched the idea for me.
+	I never mentioned it to him, but I had already exorcized my right to self diagnosis and in my educated opinion I was chronically afflict with the disorder of humanity, that is to say that I was human and subject to the usual symptoms of emotional turmoil and occasional serious ups and downs of life.  A condition which I concluded was both terminal and incurable.
+
+	This morning started like any other, I struggled to get out of bed before noon and after I finished typing my usual rendition of I am Bored and pinned it next to the others, I headed out for some fresh if foggy air and a cup of coffee.  That's what you do if your an artist I learned you frequent coffee shops with a pen and sketch pad order a cup of coffee, sit preferably in a dark corner table and put on airs of deep thought and cosmic contemplation.  So it was with a sense of heavy obligation that a swung open the door at Jittery Joe's and strolled over to my table in the dark corner opposite the front door.  I deposited my pen and sketch pad and strolled to the coffee bar trying my best to appear distracted and preoccupied with my very own “big idea.”
+	Supposedly I was researching a book which was to be my masterpiece, I wanted to storm on to the scene as the triumphant and brilliant new writer who would issue in a new area in modern fiction.  The mundane reality was a little bit different.  I was facinateed at the time, with aboriginal world views and the native minds connection with the earth.  I had gotten so far as the ominous one hundred page mark when my puplisher told me in an exited voice that this was exactly the book the were looking for to break into the burgening new age genre.  I set the phone down and ran into the other roon scooped up my manuscript and flushed the entire contents down the toilet.  My masterpiece work of genius was beginning to look like a lucrative career ghost writing for Penthouse Letters.
+	But, as I settle back into the plush highbacked chair that I am forever dragging from one end of joes to the other, whatwas mainly on my mind was hwo to get to Utah.  My publisher had kindly arranged some time ago for me to sit in with some members of the hopi tribe on a dream quest or something of that nature.  Not wanting to miss such an opportunity I had yet to tell my publisher about the toilet flushing insident, so I was left without a ride to Utah.  He was supposed to give me his car, but since that would involve my giving up what I had written I was at present, screwed.
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+	Wake up and walk down never having satopped.  Beginnings are always violent; the universe sxploded from a single point, achild is pushed out of a whole that is normally tight around my cock.  Violence is the natural state of beginnings.  Without violence there is sterilty a barren wasteland.  Test tube babies sickening smell of death waiting like a vulture, to ooze out of the scientists lab.  The good Dr. B having a bowl of weavils for breakfast sucking them up out of a 1920's huca smoke seeping out the floorboards of the room 
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+	Denver is a clicking noise, a perfect symphany of flying fingers, words and shoes.  The collision of bodies results in equal and opposite repultion into free form voids of their own peruvian designs, fre form abstracts of temples and vines, jungle book black cats.  The mayan caper recast north of the equator.  But as is started to say it was a clicking noise… It came in with wheels slowing west of the main station and it continued in the cab ride to mikes house as I sat mexmerized by the meter, and it finally collided when I opened the door to his house and I saw Dean typing on a laptop on the couch.  I said Mike, I should have said Mike and Halley which is whole different sort of beast.
+Mike and Halley had come about because of me, at least that was how it looked when you poked around the edges of their relationship.  The official story was that Halley’s job had led them Denver, but I wasn’t buying.  Mike and I went back a long time ago to a galaxy far far away.  Actually it was closer to Spaceballs that Star Wars… right down to the trailer.  Mike and I had both dropped out of college and being broke as hell working coffeeshops we could only afford a one-room trailer.  There was never any money or food other than noodles.  The one thing we had tons of though were friends, friends from high school, friends from college, friends from work, friends friends friends and they were there every fucking night like band of chimpanzees throwing there own feces about and giggling and whooping with laughter.  We were all just finding drugs.  We were late bloomers.  I got out of that trailer atrocity by sheer force of will; well that and the luck that my parents hadn’t done anything with my own room.  Mike’s parents already had a home office and they weren’t keen on getting him back.  They had vaccinated themselves with furniture, a cruel reality that I only point out because it helps explain Mike.  Mike was forced by circumstance to escape via Halley, love was only one side of the coin, the side that Halley saw, but in Denver I saw something colder, something more reptile-olike creeping behind his eyes —necessity.  Love and necessity colliding with all the fanfare of a plane wreck.
+	Denver was a crash landing, a bust in grandest old western sense of the word.  I remember three things rising up out of the rollicking sautéed cacophony; they float in my recollection like enormous turds. There was the windowless tomb of stone blocks that constituted a house inhabited by five people in two bedrooms in which Dean developed a Heroin habit, Betty drowned in despair and Mike and Halley fought great crusades for the dominance of their sexes. The cinderblock walls sustained all their momentum for seven months.  Mike and Halley fell out of love, Dean fell in, Betty climbed over love, and I watched totally unable to act; I was paralyzed and could do nothing for myself or them.  It was bliss while it lasted.  I watched Dean until he faded into love and heroin becoming too thin to see, then I watched Mike and Halley dissolve into Mike, and Halley, and then finally out of self-pity Dean inadvertently propelled Betty and I out with him on an arcing trajectory that landed me in New Orleans, Betty back in Las Vegas, and Dean in Washington D.C.   Throughout it all the television reigned.  Betty and I were stationed like zombis before the master god of all creation and its blue aura.  Dean was one with the place; he existed by the skin of his teeth, I have little or no recognition of him while we were there, he was either shooting up or talking to Amanda on the internet or both.  Otherwise he did not really exist.  Dean did that from time to time, became invisible and disappeared only to resurface again at the oddest moment possible.  Most of all what sticks out was the sound of it all.  The mad clicking that brought me into Denver was always in background like the sound of time itself walking about in the rooms, banging pots, cooking rice in the kitchen, arguing with itself in the bathroom, throwing shoes at Mike as he runs out of the bedroom. 
+Dean is typing, it’s a furious noise, he is pounding the keys nodding his head to the sounds from his headphones.  He has drowned out his own fingers, doesn’t realize the force with which he is pounding the keys, mad telegraphs spitting out like lizard tongues firing themselves out into electrostatic love notes wired and flung off to Maryland where another pair of fingers responds…. the thing itself it flying back and forth maddening!
+	And the outside world is no better, what filters in on the TV is reflected back all around us, cold insensitive innocuous suburban delight… detachment.  We lived in a decidedly residential area of Denver, a cityvoid that occurs in every big American city where an arbitrary line is drawn around some houses, a couple of suburban strip-mall shopping-centers, and gas stations and it is given a purposefully pedestrian name like Irvine or Turtle Rock… the streets of Douglas Copeland's nightmares. The perpetual warm blue glow of television sets emanated from the windows of vinyl sided endura-homes —guaranteed to last a lifetime or your money back!   The television a great luminous third eye watching the affair with the indifference of god.  Walking around in the evenings I felt the pride of it’s inventor.  Every house was glowing quiet blue light the streets bathed in its iridescence, cobalt streets, sapphire lawns, purple skies, everything lit from within blue, blue noise humming softly… in the background blue people wandered, silhouettes dancing in front of kitchen windows and shadows lurking in open garages.  The blue is grating irritating, gets under your skin like the flesh eating virus boils spring up and burst revealing slick blue oil and puss.  They slide under the arm; you can see them moving just below the skin.  But in background faint at first but growing in decibels is the maddening chant of the newsman and the Maytag man and all the talking heads disembodied and floating in the sky singing choruses.  It’s all in timing! The process must be subtle and slow, but steady until the critical mass is reached then summon them like zombies to their own deaths in the gamma ovens… the mad scientist paces about suburban streets in a kind of furious strut.  Every thing is planned; everything reflects precision.
+	Around the cave we lived in even the trees were well manicured as if the force the random act of god even into simplistic conformity, but not with menacing intent… only so that it will match the lawn and the wife’s nails all neatly polished like jewels.   I used to work in a town like this, for a couple of days anyway, just long enough to collect such gems as the story of the woman who abandoned her dog on the beach one day because its spots clashed with her new interior design ideas. Or the man who smothered his baby because his wife was paying more attention to the child then his dick.  Precious people we all aspire to be and yet you and I somehow we will be different isn’t that right?  Somehow it will not get to us, all these trapping we can see through it now and we will see through it then; it never occurred to the monsters either that you don’t have eyes in the back if your head.
+You and I though, we can’t afford to do that we must work real hard and get where the rich people are.  Funny logic.  Fuzzy math.  Keep it I’m outta here me the old man said sitting on his rocker, a Kansas porch, hot summer day, cats, an orgone box, a southerner, and glass of clear liquid refilled constantly.  Keep it, I’m outta here me.  So long. And there is a witch stirring her cauldron; stir in a few European brains, some Irish brawns, a twinkle of pigs’ feet to sniff out the hidden truffles and simmer for two hundred years until the whole cesspool turns into a soufflé.
+Outside is America.  The sound is deafening.  It comes in waves of music, horns, engines, electricity, spinning warbles of neon light echoing asphalt dreams of sanity.  Vibrations given off by the turn of espresso handles, the pull of yogurt machines, the spinning of laundry mats, the chopping of the Chinese cook’s knife atop the trash can, chunks of chicken fat and bone accumulating on the floor; all of it whirls in a hurricane melee reverberating about through the dry air of the plains.  Crisp air that offers no resistance to the pealing clamor, it just carries it about silent as a tomb offering no comment on the meaning of it all.  Standing air listens like a woman in orgasm to the totality of nothingness like wood hewn by sandpaper until smooth contrasted against the sanding sound of ocean waves, rivers feed by rain, driftwood and manicured wood lying side by side.  And running your hand over each to notice the artificial feel of the polished hard wood and the prickling organic sensuality of the rough hewn driftwood tossed like a cork, a bottle, a note, all of them riding over seas of imagination and somehow in the landlocked spirit of place Denver sounds like cancer.  The insidious beat of death.  Tribal drums still heralding the rising moon, wood blocks clanging about in alleys, homeless people rattling shopping carts up one street and down another the mad mad mad sound of science.
+Sound I am told by Dean is nothing more than pressure waves being interpreted by my ears.  “Horseshit” I mutter and then there is Mike ducking and the sound of Halley yelling, her voice wailing in anguish over something he had done, but we don’t know what it is we don’t know if it is that bad or if she is insane.  Betty and I serve the madness in silence, in the background Chandler is broken up over Joey moving out and that mousy guy that’s always ‘the other guy’ in movies is moving in, homoerotic jokes are sticking to vellum walls like flies.
+	The shoe hits the wall above the couch and tumbles down between Betty and I, she looks at it, I look at it, we look at each other, we look at Mike (he is crying), and we look at the television it is moving on trying to sell me deodorant.  On the table is a bong.  Betty rouses herself and packs a bowl.  Halley is crying and Mike is holding her, but she is pulling away from him.  I can’t help finding her sexy, her legs are vulnerable, succulent, but I think of last night when I accidentally walked in on them having sex.  The only bathroom has a doorway through the closet that opens into their bedroom, and as I was digging around for a condom I looked in the mirror and saw Mike’s bare ass bouncing enthusiastically off the bed, presumably pounding his cock into her.  It made me laugh.  Laughter followed by waves of nausea born on seas of alcohol and girl named Jen and then Mike’s ass bouncing furiously… wham!, right into the toilet, into the floor, into walls, the roof the place reeked of laughter, mine, Deans, Betty’s, the studio audience, the children of war celebrating peace.  And now I can’t laugh anymore, but Halley is still looking good, her ass is stretched tight in the mirror behind her, it murmurs sex in spite of the shrill of her voice and the sobs that wrack her body; they feel like they are sucking all the air right out of the room.  I look at Betty to make sure she has not imploded, but it is too late she is hacking and coughing smoke, a bit of spit flies out of her mouth and she tries to stop it, to regain some composure it all makes me laugh which earns me the finger.  I take a big lazy hit.
+	 Halley’s sobs quiet to weeping; she is one with the floor now, her head grazing stupidly against Mike’s knees, he is standing indifferently, they look like the cover of European vacation, a horrible twisted picture of Chevy Chase as a superhero with his family at his feet and Mike looks every bit as ridiculous as Chevy Chase.  He has a defiance to his posture that looks wholly artificial and it occurs to me that he ought to be the one on the ground, he ought to be begging, not to Halley, but begging god to give him his humility back.  
+Peace talks continued in Kosovo today with both parties saying that progress was made, but meanwhile fighting continues in the country side where sporadic violence and sharp shooting snipers continue to take there toll on the moral and hope of the people who live here….
+And then there is silence, an editing fuck up at the news station, the television is silent, and Halley is not weeping and I hear the air rushing out of my lungs with a asthmatic hiss as I exhale the bonghit.  Mike is breathing hard, Betty is holding her breath and suddenly from the other room the tapping stops and a drunken, stoned Dean comes walking through the kitchen.  He stops in the frame of the doorway slightly hunched, holding a beer and squinting his eyes…. “What?”
+Little phantoms of the house, strange shadows that lurk in the corners without regard for the science of light… they moved in dreary circles, little red blocks all stacked in the living room and the angels sing… how many would die for you?/I’m not talkin’ ‘bout those that get high with you…  Over and over scenes of confusion, jumbled words, jumbled phrases, Deans finger flying and the little green men in the shadows that have no regard for the science of light and they sing…. Did you lock into a pattern you couldn't see through?  You can no longer trust the metaphor because you saw it coming in focus and you realized it's something from your childhood —endless tapes loping across eons.  And you see the game for what it was —something cold-blooded, reptile, slinking across the room.  You know the menu is not the meal and you have your metaphors and language bounded in all its unique epochal glory and you see through the epochs, but you can't shake the fear.  You know that change is inevitable; you know what you want, you say what you want, and you build the metaphor until it casts its shadow into time.  You think you know the end of it and still your sitting on the curb, hungry, apathetic, waiting for the sewer water to splash and wake from the nightmare of history.  You're thinking this isn't me, this can't be me.  
+There is peace in between the news of Kosovo and Halley’s mournful sobs and Betty sucking down another hit of pot and Dean returning from the bathroom pausing again like a half cocked gun squinting, observing and leaving again.  The sound of finger tapping reaches us before he is seated, but now the cartoon man wants me to buy his paper towels and you are wondering… what is it that we are wondering?  
+Everyone walks with unshakable self confidence, but not slow enough to remember that they are walking and when they laugh they pretend to be unafraid.  This isn't you.  This isn’t me.
+
+
+	Its two nights later, the war is over, peace reigns, rich people’s financial interests are secured, Friends’ reruns have come and gone with dinner and Halley is cuddled up on Mike’s lap.  She is serene and beautiful tonight because she fucked Dean in bathroom at her work this afternoon.  For once there is no typing, the television is on still… commercials.  The sound of typing is still hanging in the air translated by the TV as if the noise itself was a force that could pick and choose its manifestation.  Mike is happy because he thinks that he is the one making Halley happy and he goes right back for more like one of those rats pulling the lever to get its dosage of nicotine in the studies that Philip Morris wakes up sweating to in the middle of the night.  And Halley is making out with Mike now; Mike is not wearing any pants.  Halley seems intent on fucking Mike right there in the chair in front of us.  I think what would happen if I lobbed the hand grenade into the silence… so Halley how was Dean this afternoon?  I hear you fucked him on the sink counter of women’s restroom… that didn’t even work for Tom Cruise in Top Gun at that club… what did Dean do to get you to do that…? I just ask so I can get some pointers you know…?
+	But I don’t.  Obviously.  If I had a gun I might have.  Dean would have forgiven me in a few weeks, Halley I could do without and Mike already lived with the fantasized notion that Halley fucked everyone when his back was turned.  Hell he probably thought I was fucking her, and I probably would have if I thought Halley would have if any of it.  If we had any sense at all we would have probably all just fucked each other like blow up toys, like the lecherous little weasels we were, but we didn’t Dean, Betty and I just watched while they dry fucked in the chair, but when Mikes little half-chubbed alcohol-soaked wiener rose up like a miniaturized Cobra from under Halley's mini skirt I had had enough.  Dean and I started laughing and Mike reached down and tried to tuck it back under but the thing had a mind of its own and before I knew what I was doing I turned the video camera one and aimed it at them.  Dean, Betty and I sneaked out while they went out of it.  I left the camera running.  
+	In the bar the talking head from CNN is telling us how the people are safe and the world is somehow better and nothing has changed here because the fingers are the thing that hold it all together and they keep at it every night.  And I think of the governors and tyrants of the world celebrating just like they did when the war started I imagine and the man behind the counter wants to know what I want and the girl in the booth wants to know why I haven’t noticed her yet and everything is just wonderful.  Being around Mike has us all spinning loops and watching our backs until we find ourselves at the end of night all twisted up and tangled in the ephemeral confusion of nothingness trying to stand on the legs of somethingness. It all swirls together with the past, with Mexico City with San Francisco and Ed’s loft and the bathroom floor, the cabby squealing about fried chicken, the woman on the arch is mixing with Voodoo, gringos and the Quantum Uncertainty principle. Oh you mean this can really happen?  Or am I just thinking that it’s happening?  Or is it happening because I think its happening?  Or am I thinking that it is really happening and I'm just dreaming?  Am I going to wake up one day and not remember this dream?   Fuzzy logic dogs chasing each other around on a 1987 street in a Mexico City neighborhood. And the Spanish soldier selling chiclettes say no good no bueno, pictures worth not even half a thousand words.  Wouldn't give you ten words, worthless gringo words don’t mean shit. no good no bueno, not worth the blood their written in. The blood of all peoples not yours, not your shoes, by god keep your slave labor camps a closed-mouthed secret.   Gotta keep that in house must remain forever sealed in baby pissshitguts.  No that's not true. No comment. No need for comment, the preceding has been since proved to be untrue, cut to shots of smart bombs. Couldn’t get fifty words for those now gringo -over exposure- nobody buying.   Same old stinking shit.  No Good. No Bueno.  Gringo go home in thousand languages in a million words, why don’t you crawl back in your cave get your tail so far between your legs it goes half way up your ass?  Lead me to the holy spigot and we’ll show you the bidet of death, constructed by gringos, for gringos, to flush out gringos, to show them all what you do behind closed doors.  Can’t close them all —we have our technicians as well and they’re getting to be better than yours. We got the money rolling in —even offered you the picture words but you don’t want them. No Good.   Can’t use those, too strong.  No fair, crying boy heads home for cave to lick his dirty balls clean.
+	The girl in booth has her arm over my shoulder she is stroking my hair but the little street urchin with the chiclettes is at the table; he can’t be shut up, hawking wares for death, little powders potions and peppers hanging from his arms, but the CNNhead says all is well, justice is served.  The television is close curcuit captioned for the hearing impaired, the little boy is adament no captions only pictures for the blind.  Rustling of paper behind boardroom walls sends him into fits…. I gotta picture for you I on vacation in your country go to hear senator’s speak but all door are closed, all sealed.  So i gotta fiber optic and feed it in from the roof show all senators mad with sexual lust and blood thirsty, clamoring for war and stealing souls and bodies and driving them off wherever they see fit….  The CNNhead is protesting this outburst… get off of my lllaaaawwwwnnnnn!!!  But the boy will not be silenced there are thousands of them now a chorus of little brown boys singing, chanting like Benetine Monks…All that you consider to be a accident was carefully orchestrated for your benefit by a benevolent cocksucking god from the twenty-third dimension to just plain old irritate the fuck out of you like a bad rectal itch.  Stupid gringo got no cure for the ass itch i show you some pictures, yes very dirty, little girls you like?  But the girl in the booth has a name, a face we will not hurt her, she will be the last innocent and my tongue slides in her mouth, hand up her skirt she is wet the last innocent.  Her breath is short it comes in rasps I hear it against my ear.  The boys are chanting to the beat of drums… I got pictures for you gringo… pictures you hear?  Her breath.  The commander in chief of the NATO forces in Europe is fucking small refugee boy in the ass, the boy cries for his mother the general is laughing, your mother’s down the hall boy, she’s busy with the president of France right now.  But maybe later you’d like to lick his come off her dead face…  Ban those words tear them right out snip snip.  Can’t say that, its disgusting.  War is a snuff film for the rich.  The CNNhead is confering, the girl is breathing the boys are chanting.  “We gotta step up the bombing chief the public’s losing innarest in us” screams the chief of staff running in circles jerking off and slapping his ass until it turns a bright purple and with all seriousness General Jesse Helms pauses to reflect:  I remember a time when life was good no one got in our way, why in Europe under Patton i musta raped twenty thirty little boys and a handful of nuns too. He smiles lost in memory...but God hath given us these trying times....  Yes it is bit hard to get cunt these days isn’t it, mumbles the chief of state as he strokes his wife’s cock....Yes dear start a war, get me some cute refugee boys, i so love snapping their necks when I'm coming, she growls affectionately.  That's it gentlemen were going to war!  The president stands and ejaculates on a map of the world KOSOVO it is he says as his thick oatmeal consistency sperm all but covers the former republic of Yugoslavia.
+	You like?  You like, no?  Too bad.  You can’t have those words, too strong.  I get power, you give me power, I steal power from you, to expensive to buy it.  I get power and you get pictures and maybe I tell you how to cure rectal itch? Eh? Eh? Eh?  She comes and lights a cigarette.  The man behind the counter turns off the TV and we leave.  Her name was Maya.
+
+By the time we got back the camera was on its side, the tripod was broken and they were screaming at each other
+	“Fucking slut….”
+	“You’re an asshole…!”
+	“Fuck you!  I love you!”
+	“You don’t know what love is!  You’re a little child!”
+	“You’re cold bitch!  Don’t you have any feeling in that dried hard little cuntheart of yours!?”
+	“Do not call me a cunt!
+	“I didn’t call you a cunt!  I said you have a fucking hard little fucking CUNTHEART!!!!
+	“Fuck you!  You wouldn’t know what to do with cunt anyway!”
+At that point a little air shot out of my chest involuntarily, I knew what was coming.  There was the sound of skin, a sickly slapping, stinging horribly thin kind of sound, the unmistakable sound of hatred and self doubt bring itself into realtime like an airborne virus.  Then silence.  Dean and I sit passing joint on Betty’s bed, listening through the wall.
+	“I’m sorry……… I didn’t mean to hit you!”
+	“Then how the fuck did you HIT ME!  How can you not mean to hit someone?  There is no such thing as ACCIDENTALLY hitting someone, that doesn’t happen… nooneaccidentally hits anyone…youmeant to hitme…(sobs)… you FUCKING PRICK! (Sounds of crashing, light bulbs pop and the light streaming under the door disappears)”
+	“Oh that’s FUCKING great!  You stupid bitch!” (Now there is a dull thud followed by a low moan and Dean and I look at each other.  We are too fucked up for this….)
+	By the time we turn on the kitchen light they are wrestling at the door and before we can get across the room Mike throws Halley out the front door wearing only a thin nightgown.  Its February in Denver, Colorado and they are in hysterics.  Tears are streaming down Mike’s face and whether they are from the marijuana, the alcohol, the pain and anguish of heartbreak or the red welt atop his forehead it is still February in Denver and he is still in hysterics and he stands there trying to manage a thin strained smile as he collapses against the door.  Dean and I are frozen.
+	“She fuck some guy.”
+	I try not to move or show any signs.
+	“The BITCH FUCKED SOME OTHER GUY!” he yells at the door but there is no answer.  “You hear me you dumb bitch! I hope you fucking freeze to death.  I hope his cock keeps you warm out there!  I hope you know where he lives!  I hope you get there before you lose any fingers or toes… you FUCKING CUNT!  Jesus Christ….”  He is weeping on the floor with his hands over his face I try to move him and he punches wildly but accurately hitting me in the jaw.  Out of anger I kick him and he makes no protest.  I shove him aside and go out to look for Halley.  She didn’t go far.  She is sitting on the neighbor’s couch the neighbors are up wearing bathrobes, rubbing her back and rocking her on the couch.  She is shaking like a leaf.
+	“What’s wrong with him Sil?  Why is he doing this?  I am good to him aren’t I?  I shouldn’t be putting up with this, this is bullshit, I can’t keep doing this…. (head in her hands)  What the fuck is wrong with him?  What wrong with you, with all of you? (Tears are running down her face)  There is this thing in you that can’t let go, can’t admit that you’re wrong… all of you, your so damn sure that your little feelings and your little emotions have to be so goddamn right that you think you can just pull them down like shades over the whole fucking world! (yelling up at me, wild eyes)  Every emotion, every thought, every fucking little thing can be broken down and analyzed and dismissed with some cynical diatribe that you think is so witty and fucking funny… goddamn all of you. (lunging towards me and hitting my chest, near screaming hysterics) You make me sick… I make me sick for letting myself be involved with him…. (collapsing onto me) I outta fucking be able to do better than this if this is love… this… this… fucking little hyper universe that you guys live in.... (pulling her self up and off of me) This is not love… I don’t always know what I am doing… I don’t always know what I am feeling OKAY!  FUCK!  (arms raised in exasperation) Don’t you ever, doesn’t he ever, just have moment of absolute confusion where he wants to do something completely irrational not out of love even just because its there and it can be done and.... and fuck… I don’t know why I fucked him…….(staring at the ground, pacing) It had just been so long since there was any passion you know, Mike and I are an old couple this shit happens, it doesn’t mean anything, right? …and I know Mike has fucked around, I know he fucked around in Europe, but he won’t admit it that’s the thing that makes me so fucking mad is he won’t admit it… and why?  Why?  Because if he admitted that then he’d have to face up to the fact that I am as weak as he is… whereas now he can call me a slut and make himself out to be better, that’s all I am to him this thing against which he can measure himself, this thing… this superwoman which I am supposed to be to him… this …fuck!  (arms up exasperated)  Do you know what this is doing to me?  I am losing my mind… I’m not going to go nuts over him… I knew I should have run away right after we made love for the first time… I should have just run, because now I’m here and he’s throwing me out the door in my fucking night gown… in my FUCKING NIGHTGOWN!!!” 
+And then she collapsed or rather doubled over in sobs.  I turned around and went back to see if Mike had calmed down.  He and Dean were smoking a cigarette on the couch.  Betty was in the chair dispensing wisdom that sounded like it would have solved all his problems, but Mike is a man and men can’t hear a word that women are saying, just like women can’t hear a word that men are saying and whole so-called battle of the sexes could be stopped just like Capt. Cook didn’t have to die on that island if only we had a goddamn interpreter that could translate the two languages and solve the riddle.  Translate the emotion and feeling into the logic and predictable precision and then back out into the chaotic no-man’s-land of feeling again.  Some guru, some pygmy, some monk, some alien that can add it all up and give us some kind of answer, that’s all we really want.
+And the newscaster is talking about chemical warfare and he says that chemicals are weapons of mass destruction, but they are not, they are very selective and Mike turns the channel and there is a leopard or an ocelot tearing away the flesh of wildebeest and then the image changes to an ad for a moisturizing soap that will make us all look ten years younger and there is girl who looks ten years younger and her head is moving her lips are moving, but her voice is hollow and detached she comes out the side of the television and echoes falsely about the room and then I turn off the TV.  And Mike starts in.
+	“Fuck man what am doing? (tugs at his hair with one hand and rolls the phone absently in the other hand, the whole movement seems false.)  What did you do?  Did you do this?  I mean with Leah, she was you first love… and now look at you… you’re fine, you haven’t talked to her in years… what did you do?  How did you fill this hole that I feel growing in me…. (looking at me pleading for some answer)  Do you just harden yourself?… she thinks I’m hardened because I pushed her out the door, but that wasn’t the hard part of me that was the raw nerve endings of pain that was me trying to find love….or fight love… (looking for the answer as if it might be on the ceiling) that was my love that pushed her out the door… the cold hard part of me is the part that will go over there in a couple of hours and talk to her… (reflective self-analyzed pose of mock security) the hard part of me is the part that will make love to her while the love in me fades, gets up and leaves the room….  The horrible thing about losing love isn’t that it makes you hard it’s that you realize or you start to realize that love can be lost…. (serene face of philosopher dispensing wisdom) That’s what is tearing me up right now, the reality I am beginning to see is that there is no sacredness to love like they want you to believe… whoever they are…. (momentarily side tracked by a novel thought)  But that’s not the point… the point is that once you realize that love can be lost, once you know that this can happen… its doomed to happen again….  You will never again be able to look at someone and to see a relationship that doesn’t end… I know now that for every beginning there is an ending already written….  (with disgust) Like that goddamn book you think you’re writing… the end’s already there isn’t it?  I bet that was the first thing that you thought of… (sobbing, despair again)  Oh god!  How the fuck do you get out of this… how do you find hope again… and even if you do what do you do when it is dashed?  How many times can you do this?  Is there a limitation to the number of times you can have your heart broken…? (serene face of philosopher dispensing wisdom)  Is it like one of those Lithium batteries where it never recharges all the way again and its starts looping back until there is nothing and then right when you think you have it… oh I underst…WHAM!  And then it’s gone, you’re gone, the thing is gone… (silence in which feeling flashes across his face like a forgotten memory)  Jesus what is she doing over there does she really hate me?  She really hates me now doesn’t she?  Fuck and the horrible thing is that somewhere deep down I wanted her to fuck that guy whoever he is… it doesn’t matter… god I want a whole gang of giant cocked black guys to gang fuck her through eternity if that’s what it takes, but I want to feel something… I’m not feeling anything anymore, the only time I feel anything is when I hurt her…  then I feel hate.  I mean I feel her hating me, but when she’s not hating me I don’t feel anything… I don’t feel loved…”  
+And he broke down into pure honest crying.  Dean and I looked at each other and then at the VCR clock, it was ten till two and we both had the same thought.  Run.
+
+
+
+
+
+Months rolled by and I have dim images of fall colors and an unsettling chill to the air.  The mountains colored like firestorms and then the snow, lots of it, too cold to go outside.  I took a job at a paper writing the horoscopes and occasionally I broke down and delivered pizza with Dean.  Halley and Mike were at each other all the time.  The television no longer mentioned Kosovo and there was a new game show sweeping the nation where you answered a series of stupid questions and got a million bucks.  It was in the same vein as the Idiots Guide series… the steady decline of intelligence perfectly laid out like military campaign.  Can’t figure out how to tie your shoes?  Get the Idiot’s Guide to tying you shoes.  I was waiting for the only useful title… the Idiots Guide to suicide… I wrote a letter to the publisher, but got no reply.  And there was Regis Philman presiding over the burning hills and the freezing snow gleefully like a weatherman issuing a hurricane warning he smiled over it all.  Great floating teeth that hung in the nightmares of f. Scott Fitzgerald’s.  Signs of the apocalypse.  This is hardly the first collective suicide.  It's all part of history, the endless tumults, hills and glades and all the while we look at the crimson leaves and think that fall is in the air.  But the spacemen never showed and the Nikes and the black suits with spaghetti ties were all in vain because the CD is skipping and we’re all stuck on endless repeat.  
+The fingers kept flying and the months fell away with them.  I hear them from a distance now like the sound of an approaching marching band or a clock that hasn’t chimed yet.  Sometimes I would wake up at dawn and hear the fingers.  Marching marching marching.  Dean as a tireless soldier of seduction….  Mike on the other hand remained a tireless soldier of reductionist emotional rationalism, which is what we named his peculiar nit-picked version of life.  His idea of a worldview was crumbs, the confetti after the parade has passed.  Christ all the way.  Quick get us a tree, somebody make two boards… hurry before he loses the courage and does it himself.  Christ was on a suicide trip, that much we know now he’d have gone with or without the Romans… how else do you end a story like that?
+By March it was getting so bad that Dean and I used to just sit and smoke and listen to them for entertainment —familiarity breeds contempt....  We tuned them in and out of our own conversation the way television comes and goes.  Betty would pass out on the bed and we would sit with out backs to the wall and just listen for hours.  We had running bets on who would go insane first Mike or Halley?  As time when on we both switched our bets to lie on ourselves.  One morning we had to leave at nine because they were throwing things and we just wanted to sleep, but it’s hard to sleep in the midst of reckless friendly fire.  I remember that morning because I was awoken from a nap by a lamp hitting my head.  The couch was no longer safe.  I kicked Dean and we darted out.  We tried sleeping in his car but it was a no go so we wound up getting coffee and after that we went for a drive to get a feel for Denver.  We wound up downtown since we just kind of aimed for tallest buildings or at least that’s how it seemed but Dean might have know what he was doing… I wouldn’t put it past him to have been buying down there for sometime, but I ignored his heroin use.  If you ignore something long enough eventually it just goes away.
+It is finally warm enough to take off the jackets.  We sit on the steps of an old warehouse loading bay and listen to drone of afternoon.  Listen for the returning Spring, which creeps in like a virgin newlywed glimpsing her first erect penis.  And the thing is jerking with anticipation and the virgin is meek, but something is stirring some hunger that can never be satisfied starts to gnaw at the hidden parts of her mind, of her stomach, of her cunt.  Spring is coming amid the fantastical ruins of downtown Denver, anywhere.  It’s a disquieting sight, a testament to the durability if not of buildings than the certainty of mankind that he out always to have more of them.  The macabre feeling of mobile decay struck me as we drove out of the sparkling sterile business hub of the new downtown where cars run with silent hums, exhausts hits the air clean without additives, fat free business men and women scurry, rat feet scrapping the ceiling at night and the cars are bigger, they sound like squirrels scampering up trees.  Push cart coffee salesmen in sharp uniforms chat with professional desk sitters over bagels and reduced fat cream cheese and the heart attack penthouse office fat men in suits collect like windblown lead trash in front of the roach coach.  We can see them, hear them, smell them from down here, two blocks south where all is not well.  Brick steps pad silent under our feet and crumbled bits of mortar from the buildings settles with the rustling of the air, little whirlpools, miniature tornadoes that circle the vast open parking lot that once was a truck loading zone.  Everything is in various states of disarray, here and there a tree sprouting out a window.  A chiming laughter of the gods whose frail leaves still quake like the virgin.  You may build with your precious creations of pressed gravel, but we, we are here always perpetuating a grand cycle of which you are only an upstart movement an attempt to catalogue, and what did you get for it?  You get fantastic ruins, testaments to your own malleability, silly creatures struggling to leave a mark in competition against the eons of geology and botany. Water stained brick has a romance that the Nouevvo downtown can not match it has a weathered face to it that is gained only with the infinite passing of time like an old man with wrinkled wizened face sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of roadside store in Louisiana.  Even material so simple as brick will outlast you and I, our own permanence is in the stories we create, whether living them out, dreaming them aloud, or writing them down, we beat nature on one account, we can record the past and bring it into the future even if it never actually happened.  Sheet metal roofing that collapsed inward to the lofts that it sheltered is now stick out at awkward angles through broken industrial windows and a giant piece hangs precariously over a second story doorway, threatening to give up and fall clanging down the stairs to the ground where Dean and I are sitting.  We walked about in the industrial ruin taking a few pictures and sipping on now cold coffee.  I was wandering about in the ruins the way tourists of room head out to Pompeii with a sense that here is a monument to times past.  Times I never knew, times that remain locked in my own phantasmal imagination where errand boys skipped about street delivering messages from the factory to the office uptown.  Merchants pushing carts sold pomegranates, oranges, and onions to welfare mothers in the great depression.  The launch pad for a thousand tragedies —it could be Denver or anywhere.
+	Ed lives in a part of LA that looks remarkably similar to this, an unholy contract between artist renovated lofts and slowly dying industrial shipping companies, metal recycling facilities, and giant distribution warehouses.  All things move in circles and so after the first settlements leave in come the companies bulldozing blocks of shabby tenement buildings to put up cement factories, iron workings, and canning plants.  The residents retreat in the face of endless employment the deep consciousness of the working man knows to keep ahead of drudgery, but then the factories run out and the economy shifts to some new fresh means of creation.  The buildings are abandoned in favor of new warehouses outside of town; the industrial complex collapses and leaves a twenty-year void with its passing.  Twenty years give or take of rotting fermenting nature slowly eking its way back onto the scene until the streets relinquish themselves to the ceaseless torrents of rain and snow in the winter and the broiling summer heat until they are broken like spirited horses that once walked over them, they begin to crack and then patches of grass come up out of the soil beneath, followed by weeds and shrubs.  Nature is heliotropic, always moving up toward the sun, whereas man is constantly being knocked back to the substrata of his origins the crumbling of the old to give rise to the new.  The new screams, the new anguish the new drama the newborn slapped on the ass by the god of it all.
+
+	“What do you want from me?  I fucking try so hard to love you… even when you throw me out the door, and you throw me out the door, but then you want me back and then you tell me to go again....  WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT?
+	“I want you…  I want… I don’t fucking know what I want why are you always harping on what I want why can’t we just live and exist and be… like Sil and Dean and Betty and every other fucking person on this planet…  why can’t we just be happy?  Why do we have to have these issues… why do we have to have these things to work on?  What are these things what the fuck is going on around here?  When did this start?”
+	“What do you mean?  What are you talk”
+	WHAT DO MEAN ‘WHAT DO I MEAN?  You know what I mean, this all of this… look at us…”
+	“Why are you bringing Dean and Sill into this?  Why do you have to live up to some manly ideal that you think they embody?  (Dean cracked an eyebrow at me)  I got new for you they don’t embody shit!  The two of them would be living in goddamn dumpster if we weren’t putting them up!”
+	“Why does this have to be about my friends?  Why is it a problem I asked you if it was alright for them to crash here and now you say its not?”
+	“It has nothing to do with them….  Its you that I’m talking about.  You say we used to be happy we used to not be like this… we used to ‘just live’ as you put it.  Well do the fucking math Michael when did this start?  When they showed up!  And I’m not blaming anything on them, I like them both and Betty too, fuck I like them more than I like you sometimes, but its you.  Its what showed up in you that wasn’t here before, this fucking over analyzation shit that you didn’t use to have…”
+	Police said the suspect was dressed in business suit and may be armed do you have time to cook a meal every night in the midst of balancing… So this guy comes up to me… guaranteed to last a lifetime… 
+	“What the fuck are you talking about?”
+	“This indecision this fucking shit”
+	“My indecision?  (Derisive laughter)  My fucking indecision?  And who pray tell FUCKED SOMEBODY else!  Who is indecisive?  It’s not me I know exactly what I want… I want to be with you, but you won’t let me just be… you question my every fucking move, want to know my every thought, every feeling, don’t you ever not have a feeling?  Isn’t it ever just a blank page of white with little blue lines… little fucking blue lines and not word not a fucking thought in sight… do you ever get that… or is it just constant fucking emotional fucking input from the far reaches of the earth and heavens all pouring though your precision little hear that occasionally seems to feel that it need some other guys DICK!”
+“Yes Michael we all fucking go a bit nuts every now and then I am as clueless as you are and someone in the midst of this insanity I think that I see and feel and what I see and feel is you, but you won’t let me in you won’t let yourself be hurt and I can’t figure out if its because your scared or because you just don’t fucking care about me like I’m just some sort of ornamental drama that you have been pursuing over the last two fucking years because it happened to interest you and now, now that some bigger fucking part of the drama that you think you are… now that its here I just get shoved to the side cast off like so much luggage….  Fuck me! Fuck you!  I don’t know if I was some whim, some thing you wanted to try on in the dressing room and then when you thought it was out of style you can just hang it back up on the rack.  No id don’t know anything about anything and neither do you but that doesn’t mean anything, none of it means anything….”
+	“No that not what you mean, everything means something, it may not make any difference, but goddamn it all means something, who you fuck who you eat dinner with what time you get up, what kind of fucking bombs they drop on everyone, the jails, the murders, it all fucking means something, all of this, everything that is happening it all means something.  Maybe none of it matters but it all means something goddamn it!  (There is silence in which we here Mike heaving for air and then) “I just don’t know what it is, I just need some time to figure out what the hell I am what I am doing, what this life is, were all fucking try to figure it out… I don’t fucking know what I want okay, I can’t give you some fucking pat little answer that’s going to explain exactly how I feel.  Some days I want to be with you and some days you drive me up the fucking walls….”
+	Researchers have concluded that including a glass of wine with your regular meal may actually increase your life span… but Jim we can’t just leave them here… We’re tiny were toony we’re all a little loony… the initial results indicate HIV… we will be appealing your case… Mr. president the girl from Arkansas is on line to… did you or did you not engage...?… the white house denies… tide gets your colors looking bright… guaranteed to last a life time… I like to buy a vowel… what is the Serengeti?… that is my final answer…
+“Oh great!  Fucking great now I drive you up the walls!”
+	“Why the fuck do focus in on the negative, see that’s what I’m talking about I say that some days I want to be with you and some days I don’t and what do we have to get into the days I don’t this must be explained, there is a reason for this, this is what needs to be fixed….  Has it ever occurred to you that I must just want to be alone some days, has it ever occurred to you that I can love you without liking you every now and then?
+	“You are sick fucking man Michael, I am going to Ally’s to spent the night.  I can’t sleep next to you, ugh I can’t be near you…”
+	And the door slammed.
+Betty sleeps, Social Distortion plays in the background and Mike is a flood of meaningless gibberish goes internal and bounces endlessly about in the echo chamber…. Michael was cold calculated psychology distilled out of textbooks through all the vital organs of his body until it fills up his soul with formaldehyde and preserves him eternally, preventing any growth; everything is preserved like jams for the future.  He collapsed on to the couch with shrug and I see him standing in on the bridge from now to forever and trying to figure out why he can’t get to tomorrow.  He needs to have the bridge blown out from under him, otherwise there will be no growth, just canned life, evaporated stale milk.  He is a root bound tree in desperate need of transplanting.  He is a leech, it seems so unreal to me that I might have once lived with him, liked him even as a friend.  Michael’s insidiousness extends far deeper now than it did back then or at least back then it was never played out in front of me so I didn’t notice it as much, but now I see it overflowing like a boiling kettle.  He has lost all traces of humor and runs about madly chasing after this invisible spirit that he thinks will somehow enlighten him, give his life the meaning, the purpose, the joy that it lacks.  I remember once years ago an incident that now seems more revealing then it did at the time.  I got up and went to take a leak around noon.  There was a woman I didn’t know sitting on the toilet chewing on her fingernails, her head bent down and emitting peculiar sniffling sounds; I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying.  I should have turned around and gone right back to bed but I didn’t because instead of jealousy I am afflicted with pity —incurable.  I do it not for them but for me because I can’t bring myself not to, I have no intention of helping I just don’t have reason to do otherwise.  So I asked her if she was all right.  Yes fine, she said between what I now took to be sobs.  “Fine, is there anything I can get you?”  A coat hanger….  She smiled weakly and I just started laughing.  Laughter that swallowed her up and digested her image sitting there on the toilet hunched over her twat, sniffling like a wounded cornered animal —the perfect specimen of humanity.  “You must be a friend of Michael’s?”  Yes she was what did Michael do with the creature?  He keeps her around because she has constant drama that she dumps on his fragile little middle class heartstrings and it gives him something to do.  Something that can be solved that’s all he wants from life, a problem that can be solved something to which he can point and say see it is all better now….  He has no use for whole people, just the ragged torn edges of the pages… preferably dripping fresh blood, new wounds to cauterize and in the process open old ones… poke at the soft scar tissue… induce hemorrhages… leech the life out….
+Michael is an only child like myself, but he is of a different breed rather than independent of self-serving like most (myself included), Michael is like frail wounded animal huddled into corner cowering before the world.  What he is cowering from or about I can only assume to be his own personal, self-created demons and to get relief from them, to stand up straight, facing the world and lock arms with it to struggle out life… or some other Hemingwayesque metaphor… he assumes the burdens of others.  In great leaders who have already faced up their own demons such a facility would be revered, but in one who can only act on the behalf of others and never for himself it is repulsive, even comical in its stupidity.
+He wants to go out and have a drink, but really he doesn’t he wants to keep fighting he should keep fighting, but he should fight with himself beat his own face to a pulp.  This is America we beat each other; like the Marquis he stands bleeding and asking if wasn’t good for us…?
+(clutching a glass)  “She’s fucking nuts you know that only reason I can’t leave her is her body, sex is this thing… this… force that swarms over me and I’m hating her but its pulling at me and no matter how much we scream and even when I hit her that night I am still seeing her tits heave and the way her ass looks when she’s crouched over and the other night she was crying leaning against the door jam and I was standing over her blind with hate… I looked down and she wasn’t wearing any underwear and there is the cunt staring at me, this furry little thing that is the source of all the problems in my life and just stared at it, it enveloped me swallowed me up.  What is that warm stick squishy thing that I want?  Or maybe (trying to enlist support of dementia through body language, leans in conspiratorially) may be the trouble is everything around the cunt… that’s the real mystery what I need is lust, just pure cunt with no feeling warm and sticky.”
+“Yes Michael I think you would be better off with a blow up doll.”  Dean is rakish tonight, he is already gone, his body remains to propel the dream further.  Mike is menacing tonight too.  I can here the masticating of hatred being chewed… mulled over… teeth grinding in his sleep…
+“You think so?  Ya fuck you!  You guys don’t understand with Halley its all about the sex, beyond the sex we don’t get along at all.  I can stand over and kick her teeth in if I thought that her cunt would stay warm.  Damn that hairy fucking little cunt.  She’s too sexy.  I get swallowed up.”
+Mike was running on and on and I was getting swallowed up and I saw Halley's cunt between her legs I see an aborted fetus hanging out of it bloody and covered in afterbirth with umbilical cord still attached, and cord is there just dangling out of the cunt and I see Mike with scissors trying to cut it and Halley is screaming trying to stop him.  The doctor takes the fetus and throws it in the incinerator; the furnace flares and is silent as a slaughterhouse.  Halley lies on the table spread eagle, naked and Mike circles her holding blunt object tubular and made out of the words that describe it.  It is black and plugged into the wall.  Dean and Mike are yelling through me, words pass like water though a screen and there is mike in room with the cattle prod standing over Halley and a symphony strikes up.  Marching bands.. fingers tapping… tapping… violins… rhythm of kettle drums… and his arm rises. .  He is floating, watching as choked up gasoline-napalm sores sear off his tongue and lick up his body in flames.  The air is hot and thick like the worst humidity and the scorching of the flesh sizzles in my nostrils and I just watch.  Hell is for voyeurs, the control addicts that like to watch.  You just have to ride it out and hope that the cynicism doesn't burn you up right up with them or you find yourself in the liquid fire ripping out your own eyes and sawing off your tongue to run away.  Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy....  A little red light comes on signaling that the cattle prod is fully charged.  In front of him is Halley, beautiful with short black hair like ravens.  She is lying naked with her legs were splayed wide and restrained with leather straps and buckles, her arms are restrained above her head.  He smiles weakly at her.  Hand the symphony reaches fever pitch, the clash of horns and strings and drums and Mike is looking into her eyes watching the pupils dilate.  And it fell, his arm fell, the cattle prod fell; and her body went rigid and she shot up off the table as if suddenly turned into a stiff board.  He keeps his eyes locked on her as she collapse back onto the table.  He sees something flash through them and he feels a tremor in his guts, his muscles spasm involuntarily. Big uncontrollable sobs wracked his whole body and he falls on his knees and proceeds to curl up in little ball on the floor.  He lies like that for a while until the sobs work themselves out the violence fall silent and only a lone lunatic flute floats over the scene.  Halley gets up and begins to undress him, starting by unbuttoning his shirt.  When she undoes his belt she reaches down and rather gently holds his rigid cock as she eases the pants down over it.  She stands embracing him strongly with her arms around his neck pulling herself up until her cunt lips part and she slides down on his cock.  Mike is fucking her but she can’t feel it.  She can’t feel anything and then the strings return crescendo builds…. She spreads his legs and restrains them along with his arms.  She strokes his cock hard again and teases him by biting his nipples.  All at once her eyes go black and she thrusts the cattle prod into his balls…  Mike is blown up off the table by some kind of wind.  He doesn't even feel his come splash of his face as the electricity causes an involuntary muscle spasm that makes it arc out of his cock in unnaturally thick spurts.  He lands back on the table his voice is a violin, an inhuman screeching kind of wail.  
+ “What the fuck you know…. What the fuck do you have that lets you glide through this existence like some strange cloud a vapor that is there and you can see it but it doesn’t hurt you?  How do you have to turn things over and around and rearrange them so that you can see it in a bright light?  Don’t you ver get tired of laughing that smug glib little smirk?”  Things are not well at this table, the glasses have accumulated and the pent aggressions are knocking them over.
+“Hey watch it Michael, you can insult Sil all you want but don’t bring me into your quaint little semantic psychoanalyzed universe where you little puny mind thinks it understands me….”  Dean leans in toward me and around at Mike.  I turn my back and while trying not to laugh I harangue the little fucker in hopes that maybe he will listen, but the trouble with me is that I didn’t care, I wanted to make a point, but I knew it was already lost, I could just as easily have stood by while Dean beat him to a pulp.  I talked to shut out the symphony the close off the images of torture playing on an endless film loop flickering through the eons.  I talked to put an end to Denver, to bury the ugly future in the overflowing sewer of the past, not to thwart violence.  So when Dean forced the issue I didn’t do anything to stop it….
+“You know what you stupid little fuck, I don’t need your hospitality I don’t need your food, and certainly don’t need your advise seeing that while financially I may be fucked I am at least fucked and can fuck while you are nothing but a confused mediocre little spoiled piece of shit that can’t do much beyond leave his girlfriend in a half fucked state of longing.  That why she called me one day and invited me to lunch one day.”
+And then there was an absolute motionless silence for a full five or six seconds.  And Mike leaped over me and things went the way things go.  
+Dean beat the crap out of him.  We went home gathered up our bags and hit the road in Dean’s car.  In Kansas Dean turned right on my assurances that Mark Pledger would welcome us with open arms.
+
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+	It turned out that Dean and Betty were in Denver too.  We all crashed with Mike and Halley.  Mike and Halley had come about because of me at least that was how it looked when you poked around the edges of their relationship.  The official story was that Halley’s job had led them Denver, but I wasn’t buying.  Mike and I were ancient friends (though not as ancient as Clay Mike did know him) we went back a long time ago to a galaxy far far away.  Actually it was closer to Spaceballs that Star Wars… right down to the trailer.  Mike and I had both dropped out of college and being broke as hell working coffeeshops we could only afford a one-room trailer.  There was never any money or food other than noodles.  The one thing we had tons of though were friends, friends from high school, friends from college, friends from work, friends friends friends and they were there every fucking night like band of chimpanzees throwing there own feces about and giggling and whooping with laughter.  We were all just finding drugs.  We were late bloomers.  I got out of that trailer atrocity by sheer force of will; well that and the luck that my parents hadn’t done anything with my own room.  Mike’s parents already had a home office and they weren’t keen on getting him back.  They had vaccinated themselves with furniture, a cruel reality that I only point out because it helps explain Mike.  Mike was forced by circumstance to escape via Halley, love was only one side of the coin, the side that Halley saw, but in Denver I saw something colder, something more reptile like creeping behind his eyes —necessity.  Love and necessity colliding with all the fanfare of a plane wreck.
+	Denver was a crash landing for all of us, a bust in grandest old western sense of the word.  I remember three things rising up out of the rollicking sautéed cacophony; they float in my recollection like enormous turds. There was the windowless tomb of stone blocks that constituted a house inhabited by five people in two bedrooms in which Dean developed a Heroin habit, Betty drowned in despair and Mike and Halley fought great crusades for the dominance of their sexes. The cinderblock walls sustained all their momentum for seven months.  Mike and Halley fell out of love, Dean fell in, Betty climbed over love, and I watched totally unable to act; I was paralyzed and could do nothing for myself or them.  It was bliss while it lasted.  I watched Dean until he faded into love and heroin becoming too thin to see, then I watched Mike and Halley dissolve into Mike, and Halley, and then finally out of self-pity Dean inadvertently propelled Betty and I out with him on an arcing trajectory that landed me in New Orleans, Betty back in Las Vegas, and Dean in Washington D.C.   Throughout it all the television reigned.  Betty and I were stationed like zombis before the master god of all creation and its blue aura.  Dean was one with the place; he existed by the skin of his teeth, I have little or no recognition of him while we were there, he was either shooting up or talking to Amanda on the internet or both.  Otherwise he did not really exist.  Dean did that from time to time, became invisible and disappeared only to resurface again at the oddest moment possible.  Most of all what sticks out was the sound of it all.  A mad kind of humming that was always in background like the sound of time itself walking about in the rooms, banging pots, cooking rice in the kitchen, arguing with itself in the bathroom, throwing shoes at Mike as he runs out of the bedroom. 
+Dean is typing, it’s a furious noise, he is pounding the keys nodding his head to the sounds from his headphones.  He has drowned out his own fingers, doesn’t realize the force with which he is pounding the keys, mad telegraphs spitting out like lizard tongues firing themselves out into electrostatic love notes wired and flung off to Maryland where another pair of fingers responds…. the thing itself it flying back and forth maddening!
+	And the outside world is no better, what filters in on the TV is reflected back all around us, cold insensitive innocuous suburban delight… detachment.  We lived in a decidedly residential area of Denver, a cityvoid that occurs in every big American city where an arbitrary line is drawn around some houses, a couple of suburban strip-mall shopping-centers, and gas stations and it is given a purposefully pedestrian name like Irvine or Turtle Rock… the streets of Douglas Copeland's nightmares. The perpetual warm blue glow of television sets emanated from the windows of vinyl sided endura-homes —guaranteed to last a lifetime or your money back!   The television a great luminous third eye watching the affair with the indifference of god.  Walking around in the evenings I felt the pride of it’s inventor.  Every house was glowing quiet blue light the streets bathed in its iridescence, cobalt streets, sapphire lawns, purple skies, everything lit from within blue, blue noise humming softly… in the background blue people wandered, silhouettes dancing in front of kitchen windows and shadows lurking in open garages.  The blue is grating irritating, gets under your skin like the flesh eating virus boils spring up and burst revealing slick blue oil and puss.  They slide under the arm; you can see them moving just below the skin.  But in background faint at first but growing in decibels is the maddening chant of the newsman and the Maytag man and all the talking heads disembodied and floating in the sky singing choruses.  It’s all in timing! The process must be subtle and slow, but steady until the critical mass is reached then summon them like zombies to their own deaths in the gamma ovens… the mad scientist paces about suburban streets in a kind of furious strut.  Every thing is planned; everything reflects precision.
+	Around the cave we lived in even the trees were well manicured as if the force the random act of god even into simplistic conformity, but not with menacing intent… only so that it will match the lawn and the wife’s nails all neatly polished like jewels.   I used to work in a town like this, for a couple of days anyway, just long enough to collect such gems as the story of the woman who abandoned her dog on the beach one day because its spots clashed with her new interior design ideas. Or the man who smothered his baby because his wife was paying more attention to the child then his dick.  Precious people we all aspire to be and yet you and I somehow we will be different isn’t that right?  Somehow it will not get to us, all these trapping we can see through it now and we will see through it then; it never occurred to the monsters either that you don’t have eyes in the back if your head.
+You and I though, we can’t afford to do that we must work real hard and get where the rich people are.  Funny logic.  Fuzzy math.  Keep it I’m outta here me the old man said sitting on his rocker, a Kansas porch, hot summer day, cats, an orgone box, a southerner, and glass of clear liquid refilled constantly.  Keep it, I’m outta here me.  So long. And there is a witch stirring her cauldron; stir in a few European brains, some Irish brawns, a twinkle of pigs’ feet to sniff out the hidden truffles and simmer for two hundred years until the whole cesspool turns into a soufflé.
+Outside is America.  The sound is deafening.  It comes in waves of music, horns, engines, electricity, spinning warbles of neon light echoing asphalt dreams of sanity.  Vibrations given off by the turn of espresso handles, the pull of yogurt machines, the spinning of laundry mats, the chopping of the Chinese cook’s knife atop the trash can, chunks of chicken fat and bone accumulating on the floor; all of it whirls in a hurricane melee reverberating about through the dry air of the plains.  Crisp air that offers no resistance to the pealing clamor, it just carries it about silent as a tomb offering no comment on the meaning of it all.  Standing air listens like a woman in orgasm to the totality of nothingness like wood hewn by sandpaper until smooth contrasted against the sanding sound of ocean waves, rivers feed by rain, driftwood and manicured wood lying side by side.  And running your hand over each to notice the artificial feel of the polished hard wood and the prickling organic sensuality of the rough hewn driftwood tossed like a cork, a bottle, a note, all of them riding over seas of imagination and somehow in the landlocked spirit of place Denver sounds like cancer.  The insidious beat of death.  Tribal drums still heralding the rising moon, wood blocks clanging about in alleys, homeless people rattling shopping carts up one street and down another the mad mad mad sound of science.
+Sound I am told by Dean is nothing more than pressure waves being interpreted by my ears.  “Horseshit” I mutter and then there is Mike ducking and the sound of Halley yelling, her voice wailing in anguish over something he had done, but we don’t know what it is we don’t know if it is that bad or if she is insane.  Betty and I serve the madness in silence, in the background Chandler is broken up over Joey moving out and that mousy guy that’s always ‘the other guy’ in movies is moving in, homoerotic jokes are sticking to vellum walls like flies.
+	The shoe hits the wall above the couch and tumbles down between Betty and I, she looks at it, I look at it, we look at each other, we look at Mike (he is crying), and we look at the television it is moving on trying to sell me deodorant.  On the table is a bong.  Betty rouses herself and packs a bowl.  Halley is crying and Mike is holding her, but she is pulling away from him.  I can’t help finding her sexy, her legs are vulnerable, succulent, but I think of last night when I accidentally walked in on them having sex.  The only bathroom has a doorway through the closet that opens into their bedroom, and as I was digging around for a condom I looked in the mirror and saw Mike’s bare ass bouncing enthusiastically off the bed, presumably pounding his cock into her.  It made me laugh.  Laughter followed by waves of nausea born on seas of alcohol and girl named Jen and then Mike’s ass bouncing furiously… wham!, right into the toilet, into the floor, into walls, the roof the place reeked of laughter, mine, Deans, Betty’s, the studio audience, the children of war celebrating peace.  And now I can’t laugh anymore, but Halley is still looking good, her ass is stretched tight in the mirror behind her, it murmurs sex in spite of the shrill of her voice and the sobs that wrack her body; they feel like they are sucking all the air right out of the room.  I look at Betty to make sure she has not imploded, but it is too late she is hacking and coughing smoke, a bit of spit flies out of her mouth and she tries to stop it, to regain some composure it makes me laugh which earns me the finger, and the bong.  I take a big lazy hit.
+	 Halley’s sobs quiet to weeping; she is one with the floor now, her head grazing stupidly against Mike’s knees, he is standing indifferently, they look like the cover of European vacation, a horrible twisted picture of Chevy Chase as a superhero with his family at his feet and Mike looks every bit as ridiculous as Chevy Chase.  He has a defiance to his posture that looks wholly artificial and it occurs to me that he ought to be the one on the ground, he ought to be begging, not to Halley, but begging god to give him his humility back.  
+Peace talks continued in Kosovo today with both parties saying that progress was made, but meanwhile fighting continues in the country side where sporadic violence and sharp shooting snipers continue to take there toll on the moral and hope of the people who live here….
+And then there is silence, an editing fuck up at the news station, the television is silent, and Halley is not weeping and I hear the air rushing out of my lungs with a asthmatic hiss as I exhale the bonghit.  Mike is breathing hard, Betty is holding her breath and suddenly from the other room the tapping stops and a drunken, stoned Dean comes walking through the kitchen.  He stops in the frame of the doorway slightly hunched, holding a beer and squinting his eyes…. “What?”
+Little phantoms of the house, strange shadows that lurk in the corners without regard for the science of light… they moved in dreary circles, little red blocks all stacked in the living room and the angels sing… how many would die for you?/I’m not talkin’ ‘bout those that get high with you…  Over and over scenes of confusion, jumbled words, jumbled phrases, Deans finger flying and the little green men in the shadows that have no regard for the science of light and they sing…. Did you lock into a pattern you couldn't see through?  You can no longer trust the metaphor because you saw it coming in focus and you realized it's something from your childhood —endless tapes loping across eons.  And you see the game for what it was —something cold-blooded, reptile, slinking across the room.  You know the menu is not the meal and you have your metaphors and language bounded in all its unique epochal glory and you see through the epochs, but you can't shake the fear.  You know that change is inevitable; you know what you want, you say what you want, and you build the metaphor until it casts its shadow into time.  You think you know the end of it and still your sitting on the curb, hungry, apathetic, waiting for the sewer water to splash and wake from the nightmare of history.  You're thinking this isn't me, this can't be me.  
+There is peace in between the news of Kosovo and Halley’s mournful sobs and Betty sucking down another hit of pot and Dean returning from the bathroom pausing again like a half cocked gun squinting, observing and leaving again.  The sound of finger tapping reaches us before he is seated, but now the cartoon man wants me to buy his paper towels and you are wondering… what is it that we are wondering?  
+Everyone walks with unshakable self confidence, but not slow enough to remember that they are walking and when they laugh they pretend to be unafraid.  This isn't you.  This isn’t me.
+
+
+	Its two nights later, the war is over, peace reigns, rich people’s financial interests are secured, Friends’ reruns have come and gone with dinner and Halley is cuddled up on Mike’s lap.  She is serene and beautiful tonight because she fucked Dean in bathroom at her work this afternoon.  For once there is no typing, the television is on still… commercials.  The sound of typing is still hanging in the air translated by the TV as if the noise itself was a force that could pick and choose its manifestation.  Mike is happy because he thinks that he is the one making Halley happy and he goes right back for more like one of those rats pulling the lever to get its dosage of nicotine in the studies that Philip Morris wakes up sweating to in the middle of the night.  And Halley is making out with Mike now; Mike is not wearing any pants.  Halley seems intent on fucking Mike right there in the chair in front of us.  I think what would happen if I lobbed the hand grenade into the silence… so Halley how was Dean this afternoon?  I hear you fucked him on the sink counter of women’s restroom… that didn’t even work for Tom Cruise in Top Gun at that club… what did Dean do to get you to do that…? I just ask so I can get some pointers you know…?
+	But I don’t.  Obviously.  If I had a gun I might have.  Dean would have forgiven me in a few weeks, Halley I could do without and Mike already lived with the fantasized notion that Halley fucked everyone when his back was turned.  Hell he probably thought I was fucking her, and I probably would have if I thought Halley would have if any of it.  If we had any sense at all we would have probably all just fucked each other like blow up toys, like the lecherous little weasels we were, but we didn’t Dean, Betty and I just watched while they dry fucked in the chair, but when Mikes little half-chubbed alcohol-soaked wiener rose up like a miniaturized Cobra from under Halley's mini skirt I had had enough.  Dean and I started laughing and Mike reached down and tried to tuck it back under but the thing had a mind of its own and before I knew what I was doing I turned the video camera one and aimed it at them.  Dean, Betty and I sneaked out while they went out of it.  I left the camera running.  
+	In the bar the talking head from CNN is telling us how the people are safe and the world is somehow better and nothing has changed here because the fingers are the thing that hold it all together and they keep at it every night.  And I think of the governors and tyrants of the world celebrating just like they did when the war started I imagine and the man behind the counter wants to know what I want and the girl in the booth wants to know why I haven’t noticed her yet and everything is just wonderful.  Being around Mike has us all spinning loops and watching our backs until we find ourselves at the end of night all twisted up and tangled in the ephemeral confusion of nothingness trying to stand on the legs of somethingness. It all swirls together with the past, with Mexico City with San Francisco and Ed’s loft and the bathroom floor, the cabby squealing about fried chicken, the woman on the arch is mixing with Voodoo, gringos and the Quantum Uncertainty principle. Oh you mean this can really happen?  Or am I just thinking that it’s happening?  Or is it happening because I think its happening?  Or am I thinking that it is really happening and I'm just dreaming?  Am I going to wake up one day and not remember this dream?   Fuzzy logic dogs chasing each other around on a 1987 street in a Mexico City neighborhood. And the Spanish soldier selling chiclettes say no good no bueno, pictures worth not even half a thousand words.  Wouldn't give you ten words, worthless gringo words don’t mean shit. no good no bueno, not worth the blood their written in. The blood of all peoples not yours, not your shoes, by god keep your slave labor camps a closed-mouthed secret.   Gotta keep that in house must remain forever sealed in baby pissshitguts.  No that's not true. No comment. No need for comment, the preceding has been since proved to be untrue, cut to shots of smart bombs. Couldn’t get fifty words for those now gringo -over exposure- nobody buying.   Same old stinking shit.  No Good. No Bueno.  Gringo go home in thousand languages in a million words, why don’t you crawl back in your cave get your tail so far between your legs it goes half way up your ass?  Lead me to the holy spigot and we’ll show you the bidet of death, constructed by gringos, for gringos, to flush out gringos, to show them all what you do behind closed doors.  Can’t close them all —we have our technicians as well and they’re getting to be better than yours. We got the money rolling in —even offered you the picture words but you don’t want them. No Good.   Can’t use those, too strong.  No fair, crying boy heads home for cave to lick his dirty balls clean.
+	The girl in booth has her arm over my shoulder she is stroking my hair but the little street urchin with the chiclettes is at the table; he can’t be shut up, hawking wares for death, little powders potions and peppers hanging from his arms, but the CNNhead says all is well, justice is served.  The television is close curcuit captioned for the hearing impaired, the little boy is adament no captions only pictures for the blind.  Rustling of paper behind boardroom walls sends him into fits…. I gotta picture for you I on vacation in your country go to hear senator’s speak but all door are closed, all sealed.  So i gotta fiber optic and feed it in from the roof show all senators mad with sexual lust and blood thirsty, clamoring for war and stealing souls and bodies and driving them off wherever they see fit….  The CNNhead is protesting this outburst… get off of my lllaaaawwwwnnnnn!!!  But the boy will not be silenced there are thousands of them now a chorus of little brown boys singing, chanting like Benetine Monks…All that you consider to be a accident was carefully orchestrated for your benefit by a benevolent cocksucking god from the twenty-third dimension to just plain old irritate the fuck out of you like a bad rectal itch.  Stupid gringo got no cure for the ass itch i show you some pictures, yes very dirty, little girls you like?  But the girl in the booth has a name, a face we will not hurt her, she will be the last innocent and my tongue slides in her mouth, hand up her skirt she is wet the last innocent.  Her breath is short it comes in rasps I hear it against my ear.  The boys are chanting to the beat of drums… I got pictures for you gringo… pictures you hear?  Her breath.  The commander in chief of the NATO forces in Europe is fucking small refugee boy in the ass, the boy cries for his mother the general is laughing, your mother’s down the hall boy, she’s busy with the president of France right now.  But maybe later you’d like to lick his come off her dead face…  Ban those words tear them right out snip snip.  Can’t say that, its disgusting.  War is a snuff film for the rich.  The CNNhead is confering, the girl is breathing the boys are chanting.  “We gotta step up the bombing chief the public’s losing innarest in us” screams the chief of staff running in circles jerking off and slapping his ass until it turns a bright purple and with all seriousness General Jesse Helms pauses to reflect:  I remember a time when life was good no one got in our way, why in Europe under Patton i musta raped twenty thirty little boys and a handful of nuns too. He smiles lost in memory...but God hath given us these trying times....  Yes it is bit hard to get cunt these days isn’t it, mumbles the chief of state as he strokes his wife’s cock....Yes dear start a war, get me some cute refugee boys, i so love snapping their necks when I'm coming, she growls affectionately.  That's it gentlemen were going to war!  The president stands and ejaculates on a map of the world KOSOVO it is he says as his thick oatmeal consistency sperm all but covers the former republic of Yugoslavia.
+	You like?  You like, no?  Too bad.  You can’t have those words, too strong.  I get power, you give me power, I steal power from you, to expensive to buy it.  I get power and you get pictures and maybe I tell you how to cure rectal itch? Eh? Eh? Eh?  She comes and lights a cigarette.  The man behind the counter turns off the TV and we leave.  Her name was Maya.
+
+By the time we got back the camera was on its side, the tripod was broken and they were screaming at each other
+	“Fucking slut….”
+	“You’re an asshole…!”
+	“Fuck you!  I love you!”
+	“You don’t know what love is!  You’re a little child!”
+	“You’re cold bitch!  Don’t you have any feeling in that dried hard little cuntheart of yours!?”
+	“Do not call me a cunt!
+	“I didn’t call you a cunt!  I said you have a fucking hard little fucking CUNTHEART!!!!
+	“Fuck you!  You wouldn’t know what to do with cunt anyway!”
+At that point a little air shot out of my chest involuntarily, I knew what was coming.  There was the sound of skin, a sickly slapping, stinging horribly thin kind of sound, the unmistakable sound of hatred and self doubt bring itself into realtime like an airborne virus.  Then silence.  Dean and I sit passing joint on Betty’s bed, listening through the wall.
+	“I’m sorry……… I didn’t mean to hit you!”
+	“Then how the fuck did you HIT ME!  How can you not mean to hit someone?  There is no such thing as ACCIDENTALLY hitting someone, that doesn’t happen… nooneaccidentally hits anyone…youmeant to hitme…(sobs)… you FUCKING PRICK! (Sounds of crashing, light bulbs pop and the light streaming under the door disappears)”
+	“Oh that’s FUCKING great!  You stupid bitch!” (Now there is a dull thud followed by a low moan and Dean and I look at each other.  We are too fucked up for this….)
+	By the time we turn on the kitchen light they are wrestling at the door and before we can get across the room Mike throws Halley out the front door wearing only a thin nightgown.  Its February in Denver, Colorado and they are in hysterics.  Tears are streaming down Mike’s face and whether they are from the marijuana, the alcohol, the pain and anguish of heartbreak or the red welt atop his forehead it is still February in Denver and he is still in hysterics and he stands there trying to manage a thin strained smile as he collapses against the door.  Dean and I are frozen.
+	“She fuck some guy.”
+	I try not to move or show any signs.
+	“The BITCH FUCKED SOME OTHER GUY!” he yells at the door but there is no answer.  “You hear me you dumb bitch! I hope you fucking freeze to death.  I hope his cock keeps you warm out there!  I hope you know where he lives!  I hope you get there before you lose any fingers or toes… you FUCKING CUNT!  Jesus Christ….”  He is weeping on the floor with his hands over his face I try to move him and he punches wildly but accurately hitting me in the jaw.  Out of anger I kick him and he makes no protest.  I shove him aside and go out to look for Halley.  She didn’t go far.  She is sitting on the neighbor’s couch the neighbors are up wearing bathrobes, rubbing her back and rocking her on the couch.  She is shaking like a leaf.
+	“What’s wrong with him Sil?  Why is he doing this?  I am good to him aren’t I?  I shouldn’t be putting up with this, this is bullshit, I can’t keep doing this…. (head in her hands)  What the fuck is wrong with him?  What wrong with you, with all of you? (Tears are running down her face)  There is this thing in you that can’t let go, can’t admit that you’re wrong… all of you, your so damn sure that your little feelings and your little emotions have to be so goddamn right that you think you can just pull them down like shades over the whole fucking world! (yelling up at me, wild eyes)  Every emotion, every thought, every fucking little thing can be broken down and analyzed and dismissed with some cynical diatribe that you think is so witty and fucking funny… goddamn all of you. (lunging towards me and hitting my chest, near screaming hysterics) You make me sick… I make me sick for letting myself be involved with him…. (collapsing onto me) I outta fucking be able to do better than this if this is love… this… this… fucking little hyper universe that you guys live in.... (pulling her self up and off of me) This is not love… I don’t always know what I am doing… I don’t always know what I am feeling OKAY!  FUCK!  (arms raised in exasperation) Don’t you ever, doesn’t he ever, just have moment of absolute confusion where he wants to do something completely irrational not out of love even just because its there and it can be done and.... and fuck… I don’t know why I fucked him…….(staring at the ground, pacing) It had just been so long since there was any passion you know, Mike and I are an old couple this shit happens, it doesn’t mean anything, right? …and I know Mike has fucked around, I know he fucked around in Europe, but he won’t admit it that’s the thing that makes me so fucking mad is he won’t admit it… and why?  Why?  Because if he admitted that then he’d have to face up to the fact that I am as weak as he is… whereas now he can call me a slut and make himself out to be better, that’s all I am to him this thing against which he can measure himself, this thing… this superwoman which I am supposed to be to him… this …fuck!  (arms up exasperated)  Do you know what this is doing to me?  I am losing my mind… I’m not going to go nuts over him… I knew I should have run away right after we made love for the first time… I should have just run, because now I’m here and he’s throwing me out the door in my fucking night gown… in my FUCKING NIGHTGOWN!!!” 
+And then she collapsed or rather doubled over in sobs.  I turned around and went back to see if Mike had calmed down.  He and Dean were smoking a cigarette on the couch.  Betty was in the chair dispensing wisdom that sounded like it would have solved all his problems, but Mike is a man and men can’t hear a word that women are saying, just like women can’t hear a word that men are saying and whole so-called battle of the sexes could be stopped just like Capt. Cook didn’t have to die on that island if only we had a goddamn interpreter that could translate the two languages and solve the riddle.  Translate the emotion and feeling into the logic and predictable precision and then back out into the chaotic no-man’s-land of feeling again.  Some guru, some pygmy, some monk, some alien that can add it all up and give us some kind of answer, that’s all we really want.
+And the newscaster is talking about chemical warfare and he says that chemicals are weapons of mass destruction, but they are not, they are very selective and Mike turns the channel and there is a leopard or an ocelot tearing away the flesh of wildebeest and then the image changes to an ad for a moisturizing soap that will make us all look ten years younger and there is girl who looks ten years younger and her head is moving her lips are moving, but her voice is hollow and detached she comes out the side of the television and echoes falsely about the room and then I turn off the TV.  And Mike starts in.
+	“Fuck man what am doing? (tugs at his hair with one hand and rolls the phone absently in the other hand, the whole movement seems false.)  What did you do?  Did you do this?  I mean with Leah, she was you first love… and now look at you… you’re fine, you haven’t talked to her in years… what did you do?  How did you fill this hole that I feel growing in me…. (looking at me pleading for some answer)  Do you just harden yourself?… she thinks I’m hardened because I pushed her out the door, but that wasn’t the hard part of me that was the raw nerve endings of pain that was me trying to find love….or fight love… (looking for the answer as if it might be on the ceiling) that was my love that pushed her out the door… the cold hard part of me is the part that will go over there in a couple of hours and talk to her… (reflective self-analyzed pose of mock security) the hard part of me is the part that will make love to her while the love in me fades, gets up and leaves the room….  The horrible thing about losing love isn’t that it makes you hard it’s that you realize or you start to realize that love can be lost…. (serene face of philosopher dispensing wisdom) That’s what is tearing me up right now, the reality I am beginning to see is that there is no sacredness to love like they want you to believe… whoever they are…. (momentarily side tracked by a novel thought)  But that’s not the point… the point is that once you realize that love can be lost, once you know that this can happen… its doomed to happen again….  You will never again be able to look at someone and to see a relationship that doesn’t end… I know now that for every beginning there is an ending already written….  (with disgust) Like that goddamn book you think you’re writing… the end’s already there isn’t it?  I bet that was the first thing that you thought of… (sobbing, despair again)  Oh god!  How the fuck do you get out of this… how do you find hope again… and even if you do what do you do when it is dashed?  How many times can you do this?  Is there a limitation to the number of times you can have your heart broken…? (serene face of philosopher dispensing wisdom)  Is it like one of those Lithium batteries where it never recharges all the way again and its starts looping back until there is nothing and then right when you think you have it… oh I underst…WHAM!  And then it’s gone, you’re gone, the thing is gone… (silence in which feeling flashes across his face like a forgotten memory)  Jesus what is she doing over there does she really hate me?  She really hates me now doesn’t she?  Fuck and the horrible thing is that somewhere deep down I wanted her to fuck that guy whoever he is… it doesn’t matter… god I want a whole gang of giant cocked black guys to gang fuck her through eternity if that’s what it takes, but I want to feel something… I’m not feeling anything anymore, the only time I feel anything is when I hurt her…  then I feel hate.  I mean I feel her hating me, but when she’s not hating me I don’t feel anything… I don’t feel loved…”  
+And he broke down into pure honest crying.  Dean and I looked at each other and then at the VCR clock, it was ten till two and we both had the same thought.  Run.
+
+
+
+
+
+Months rolled by and I have dim images of fall colors and an unsettling chill to the air.  The mountains colored like firestorms and then the snow, lots of it, too cold to go outside.  I took a job at a paper writing the horoscopes and occasionally I broke down and delivered pizza with Dean.  Halley and Mike were at each other all the time.  The television no longer mentioned Kosovo and there was a new game show sweeping the nation where you answered a series of stupid questions and got a million bucks.  It was in the same vein as the Idiots Guide series… the steady decline of intelligence perfectly laid out like military campaign.  Can’t figure out how to tie your shoes?  Get the Idiot’s Guide to tying you shoes.  I was waiting for the only useful title… the Idiots Guide to suicide… I wrote a letter to the publisher, but got no reply.  And there was Regis Philman presiding over the burning hills and the freezing snow gleefully like a weatherman issuing a hurricane warning he smiled over it all.  Great floating teeth that hung in the nightmares of f. Scott Fitzgerald’s.  Signs of the apocalypse.  This is hardly the first collective suicide.  It's all part of history, the endless tumults, hills and glades and all the while we look at the crimson leaves and think that fall is in the air.  But the spacemen never showed and the Nikes and the black suits with spaghetti ties were all in vain because the CD is skipping and we’re all stuck on endless repeat.  
+The fingers kept flying and the months fell away with them.  I hear them from a distance now like the sound of an approaching marching band or a clock that hasn’t chimed yet.  Sometimes I would wake up at dawn and hear the fingers.  Marching marching marching.  Dean as a tireless soldier of seduction….  Mike on the other hand remained a tireless soldier of reductionist emotional rationalism, which is what we named his peculiar nit-picked version of life.  His idea of a worldview was crumbs, the confetti after the parade has passed.  Christ all the way.  Quick get us a tree, somebody make two boards… hurry before he loses the courage and does it himself.  Christ was on a suicide trip, that much we know now he’d have gone with or without the Romans… how else do you end a story like that?
+By March it was getting so bad that Dean and I used to just sit and smoke and listen to them for entertainment —familiarity breeds contempt....  We tuned them in and out of our own conversation the way television comes and goes.  Betty would pass out on the bed and we would sit with out backs to the wall and just listen for hours.  We had running bets on who would go insane first Mike or Halley?  As time when on we both switched our bets to lie on ourselves.  One morning we had to leave at nine because they were throwing things and we just wanted to sleep, but it’s hard to sleep in the midst of reckless friendly fire.  I remember that morning because I was awoken from a nap by a lamp hitting my head.  The couch was no longer safe.  I kicked Dean and we darted out.  We tried sleeping in his car but it was a no go so we wound up getting coffee and after that we went for a drive to get a feel for Denver.  We wound up downtown since we just kind of aimed for tallest buildings or at least that’s how it seemed but Dean might have know what he was doing… I wouldn’t put it past him to have been buying down there for sometime, but I ignored his heroin use.  If you ignore something long enough eventually it just goes away.
+It is finally warm enough to take off the jackets.  We sit on the steps of an old warehouse loading bay and listen to drone of afternoon.  Listen for the returning Spring, which creeps in like a virgin newlywed glimpsing her first erect penis.  And the thing is jerking with anticipation and the virgin is meek, but something is stirring some hunger that can never be satisfied starts to gnaw at the hidden parts of her mind, of her stomach, of her cunt.  Spring is coming amid the fantastical ruins of downtown Denver, anywhere.  It’s a disquieting sight, a testament to the durability if not of buildings than the certainty of mankind that he out always to have more of them.  The macabre feeling of mobile decay struck me as we drove out of the sparkling sterile business hub of the new downtown where cars run with silent hums, exhausts hits the air clean without additives, fat free business men and women scurry, rat feet scrapping the ceiling at night and the cars are bigger, they sound like squirrels scampering up trees.  Push cart coffee salesmen in sharp uniforms chat with professional desk sitters over bagels and reduced fat cream cheese and the heart attack penthouse office fat men in suits collect like windblown lead trash in front of the roach coach.  We can see them, hear them, smell them from down here, two blocks south where all is not well.  Brick steps pad silent under our feet and crumbled bits of mortar from the buildings settles with the rustling of the air, little whirlpools, miniature tornadoes that circle the vast open parking lot that once was a truck loading zone.  Everything is in various states of disarray, here and there a tree sprouting out a window.  A chiming laughter of the gods whose frail leaves still quake like the virgin.  You may build with your precious creations of pressed gravel, but we, we are here always perpetuating a grand cycle of which you are only an upstart movement an attempt to catalogue, and what did you get for it?  You get fantastic ruins, testaments to your own malleability, silly creatures struggling to leave a mark in competition against the eons of geology and botany. Water stained brick has a romance that the Nouevvo downtown can not match it has a weathered face to it that is gained only with the infinite passing of time like an old man with wrinkled wizened face sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of roadside store in Louisiana.  Even material so simple as brick will outlast you and I, our own permanence is in the stories we create, whether living them out, dreaming them aloud, or writing them down, we beat nature on one account, we can record the past and bring it into the future even if it never actually happened.  Sheet metal roofing that collapsed inward to the lofts that it sheltered is now stick out at awkward angles through broken industrial windows and a giant piece hangs precariously over a second story doorway, threatening to give up and fall clanging down the stairs to the ground where Dean and I are sitting.  We walked about in the industrial ruin taking a few pictures and sipping on now cold coffee.  I was wandering about in the ruins the way tourists of room head out to Pompeii with a sense that here is a monument to times past.  Times I never knew, times that remain locked in my own phantasmal imagination where errand boys skipped about street delivering messages from the factory to the office uptown.  Merchants pushing carts sold pomegranates, oranges, and onions to welfare mothers in the great depression.  The launch pad for a thousand tragedies —it could be Denver or anywhere.
+	Ed lives in a part of LA that looks remarkably similar to this, an unholy contract between artist renovated lofts and slowly dying industrial shipping companies, metal recycling facilities, and giant distribution warehouses.  All things move in circles and so after the first settlements leave in come the companies bulldozing blocks of shabby tenement buildings to put up cement factories, iron workings, and canning plants.  The residents retreat in the face of endless employment the deep consciousness of the working man knows to keep ahead of drudgery, but then the factories run out and the economy shifts to some new fresh means of creation.  The buildings are abandoned in favor of new warehouses outside of town; the industrial complex collapses and leaves a twenty-year void with its passing.  Twenty years give or take of rotting fermenting nature slowly eking its way back onto the scene until the streets relinquish themselves to the ceaseless torrents of rain and snow in the winter and the broiling summer heat until they are broken like spirited horses that once walked over them, they begin to crack and then patches of grass come up out of the soil beneath, followed by weeds and shrubs.  Nature is heliotropic, always moving up toward the sun, whereas man is constantly being knocked back to the substrata of his origins the crumbling of the old to give rise to the new.  The new screams, the new anguish the new drama the newborn slapped on the ass by the god of it all.
+
+	“What do you want from me?  I fucking try so hard to love you… even when you throw me out the door, and you throw me out the door, but then you want me back and then you tell me to go again....  WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT?
+	“I want you…  I want… I don’t fucking know what I want why are you always harping on what I want why can’t we just live and exist and be… like Sil and Dean and Betty and every other fucking person on this planet…  why can’t we just be happy?  Why do we have to have these issues… why do we have to have these things to work on?  What are these things what the fuck is going on around here?  When did this start?”
+	“What do you mean?  What are you talk”
+	WHAT DO MEAN ‘WHAT DO I MEAN?  You know what I mean, this all of this… look at us…”
+	“Why are you bringing Dean and Sill into this?  Why do you have to live up to some manly ideal that you think they embody?  (Dean cracked an eyebrow at me)  I got new for you they don’t embody shit!  The two of them would be living in goddamn dumpster if we weren’t putting them up!”
+	“Why does this have to be about my friends?  Why is it a problem I asked you if it was alright for them to crash here and now you say its not?”
+	“It has nothing to do with them….  Its you that I’m talking about.  You say we used to be happy we used to not be like this… we used to ‘just live’ as you put it.  Well do the fucking math Michael when did this start?  When they showed up!  And I’m not blaming anything on them, I like them both and Betty too, fuck I like them more than I like you sometimes, but its you.  Its what showed up in you that wasn’t here before, this fucking over analyzation shit that you didn’t use to have…”
+	Police said the suspect was dressed in business suit and may be armed do you have time to cook a meal every night in the midst of balancing… So this guy comes up to me… guaranteed to last a lifetime… 
+	“What the fuck are you talking about?”
+	“This indecision this fucking shit”
+	“My indecision?  (Derisive laughter)  My fucking indecision?  And who pray tell FUCKED SOMEBODY else!  Who is indecisive?  It’s not me I know exactly what I want… I want to be with you, but you won’t let me just be… you question my every fucking move, want to know my every thought, every feeling, don’t you ever not have a feeling?  Isn’t it ever just a blank page of white with little blue lines… little fucking blue lines and not word not a fucking thought in sight… do you ever get that… or is it just constant fucking emotional fucking input from the far reaches of the earth and heavens all pouring though your precision little hear that occasionally seems to feel that it need some other guys DICK!”
+“Yes Michael we all fucking go a bit nuts every now and then I am as clueless as you are and someone in the midst of this insanity I think that I see and feel and what I see and feel is you, but you won’t let me in you won’t let yourself be hurt and I can’t figure out if its because your scared or because you just don’t fucking care about me like I’m just some sort of ornamental drama that you have been pursuing over the last two fucking years because it happened to interest you and now, now that some bigger fucking part of the drama that you think you are… now that its here I just get shoved to the side cast off like so much luggage….  Fuck me! Fuck you!  I don’t know if I was some whim, some thing you wanted to try on in the dressing room and then when you thought it was out of style you can just hang it back up on the rack.  No id don’t know anything about anything and neither do you but that doesn’t mean anything, none of it means anything….”
+	“No that not what you mean, everything means something, it may not make any difference, but goddamn it all means something, who you fuck who you eat dinner with what time you get up, what kind of fucking bombs they drop on everyone, the jails, the murders, it all fucking means something, all of this, everything that is happening it all means something.  Maybe none of it matters but it all means something goddamn it!  (There is silence in which we here Mike heaving for air and then) “I just don’t know what it is, I just need some time to figure out what the hell I am what I am doing, what this life is, were all fucking try to figure it out… I don’t fucking know what I want okay, I can’t give you some fucking pat little answer that’s going to explain exactly how I feel.  Some days I want to be with you and some days you drive me up the fucking walls….”
+	Researchers have concluded that including a glass of wine with your regular meal may actually increase your life span… but Jim we can’t just leave them here… We’re tiny were toony we’re all a little loony… the initial results indicate HIV… we will be appealing your case… Mr. president the girl from Arkansas is on line to… did you or did you not engage...?… the white house denies… tide gets your colors looking bright… guaranteed to last a life time… I like to buy a vowel… what is the Serengeti?… that is my final answer…
+“Oh great!  Fucking great now I drive you up the walls!”
+	“Why the fuck do focus in on the negative, see that’s what I’m talking about I say that some days I want to be with you and some days I don’t and what do we have to get into the days I don’t this must be explained, there is a reason for this, this is what needs to be fixed….  Has it ever occurred to you that I must just want to be alone some days, has it ever occurred to you that I can love you without liking you every now and then?
+	“You are sick fucking man Michael, I am going to Ally’s to spent the night.  I can’t sleep next to you, ugh I can’t be near you…”
+	And the door slammed.
+Betty sleeps, Social Distortion plays in the background and Mike is a flood of meaningless gibberish goes internal and bounces endlessly about in the echo chamber…. Michael was cold calculated psychology distilled out of textbooks through all the vital organs of his body until it fills up his soul with formaldehyde and preserves him eternally, preventing any growth; everything is preserved like jams for the future.  He collapsed on to the couch with shrug and I see him standing in on the bridge from now to forever and trying to figure out why he can’t get to tomorrow.  He needs to have the bridge blown out from under him, otherwise there will be no growth, just canned life, evaporated stale milk.  He is a root bound tree in desperate need of transplanting.  He is a leech, it seems so unreal to me that I might have once lived with him, liked him even as a friend.  Michael’s insidiousness extends far deeper now than it did back then or at least back then it was never played out in front of me so I didn’t notice it as much, but now I see it overflowing like a boiling kettle.  He has lost all traces of humor and runs about madly chasing after this invisible spirit that he thinks will somehow enlighten him, give his life the meaning, the purpose, the joy that it lacks.  I remember once years ago an incident that now seems more revealing then it did at the time.  I got up and went to take a leak around noon.  There was a woman I didn’t know sitting on the toilet chewing on her fingernails, her head bent down and emitting peculiar sniffling sounds; I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying.  I should have turned around and gone right back to bed but I didn’t because instead of jealousy I am afflicted with pity —incurable.  I do it not for them but for me because I can’t bring myself not to, I have no intention of helping I just don’t have reason to do otherwise.  So I asked her if she was all right.  Yes fine, she said between what I now took to be sobs.  “Fine, is there anything I can get you?”  A coat hanger….  She smiled weakly and I just started laughing.  Laughter that swallowed her up and digested her image sitting there on the toilet hunched over her twat, sniffling like a wounded cornered animal —the perfect specimen of humanity.  “You must be a friend of Michael’s?”  Yes she was what did Michael do with the creature?  He keeps her around because she has constant drama that she dumps on his fragile little middle class heartstrings and it gives him something to do.  Something that can be solved that’s all he wants from life, a problem that can be solved something to which he can point and say see it is all better now….  He has no use for whole people, just the ragged torn edges of the pages… preferably dripping fresh blood, new wounds to cauterize and in the process open old ones… poke at the soft scar tissue… induce hemorrhages… leech the life out….
+Michael is an only child like myself, but he is of a different breed rather than independent of self-serving like most (myself included), Michael is like frail wounded animal huddled into corner cowering before the world.  What he is cowering from or about I can only assume to be his own personal, self-created demons and to get relief from them, to stand up straight, facing the world and lock arms with it to struggle out life… or some other Hemingwayesque metaphor… he assumes the burdens of others.  In great leaders who have already faced up their own demons such a facility would be revered, but in one who can only act on the behalf of others and never for himself it is repulsive, even comical in its stupidity.
+He wants to go out and have a drink, but really he doesn’t he wants to keep fighting he should keep fighting, but he should fight with himself beat his own face to a pulp.  This is America we beat each other; like the Marquis he stands bleeding and asking if wasn’t good for us…?
+(clutching a glass)  “She’s fucking nuts you know that only reason I can’t leave her is her body, sex is this thing… this… force that swarms over me and I’m hating her but its pulling at me and no matter how much we scream and even when I hit her that night I am still seeing her tits heave and the way her ass looks when she’s crouched over and the other night she was crying leaning against the door jam and I was standing over her blind with hate… I looked down and she wasn’t wearing any underwear and there is the cunt staring at me, this furry little thing that is the source of all the problems in my life and just stared at it, it enveloped me swallowed me up.  What is that warm stick squishy thing that I want?  Or maybe (trying to enlist support of dementia through body language, leans in conspiratorially) may be the trouble is everything around the cunt… that’s the real mystery what I need is lust, just pure cunt with no feeling warm and sticky.”
+“Yes Michael I think you would be better off with a blow up doll.”  Dean is rakish tonight, he is already gone, his body remains to propel the dream further.  Mike is menacing tonight too.  I can here the masticating of hatred being chewed… mulled over… teeth grinding in his sleep…
+“You think so?  Ya fuck you!  You guys don’t understand with Halley its all about the sex, beyond the sex we don’t get along at all.  I can stand over and kick her teeth in if I thought that her cunt would stay warm.  Damn that hairy fucking little cunt.  She’s too sexy.  I get swallowed up.”
+Mike was running on and on and I was getting swallowed up and I saw Halley's cunt between her legs I see an aborted fetus hanging out of it bloody and covered in afterbirth with umbilical cord still attached, and cord is there just dangling out of the cunt and I see Mike with scissors trying to cut it and Halley is screaming trying to stop him.  The doctor takes the fetus and throws it in the incinerator; the furnace flares and is silent as a slaughterhouse.  Halley lies on the table spread eagle, naked and Mike circles her holding blunt object tubular and made out of the words that describe it.  It is black and plugged into the wall.  Dean and Mike are yelling through me, words pass like water though a screen and there is mike in room with the cattle prod standing over Halley and a symphony strikes up.  Marching bands.. fingers tapping… tapping… violins… rhythm of kettle drums… and his arm rises. .  He is floating, watching as choked up gasoline-napalm sores sear off his tongue and lick up his body in flames.  The air is hot and thick like the worst humidity and the scorching of the flesh sizzles in my nostrils and I just watch.  Hell is for voyeurs, the control addicts that like to watch.  You just have to ride it out and hope that the cynicism doesn't burn you up right up with them or you find yourself in the liquid fire ripping out your own eyes and sawing off your tongue to run away.  Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy....  A little red light comes on signaling that the cattle prod is fully charged.  In front of him is Halley, beautiful with short black hair like ravens.  She is lying naked with her legs were splayed wide and restrained with leather straps and buckles, her arms are restrained above her head.  He smiles weakly at her.  Hand the symphony reaches fever pitch, the clash of horns and strings and drums and Mike is looking into her eyes watching the pupils dilate.  And it fell, his arm fell, the cattle prod fell; and her body went rigid and she shot up off the table as if suddenly turned into a stiff board.  He keeps his eyes locked on her as she collapse back onto the table.  He sees something flash through them and he feels a tremor in his guts, his muscles spasm involuntarily. Big uncontrollable sobs wracked his whole body and he falls on his knees and proceeds to curl up in little ball on the floor.  He lies like that for a while until the sobs work themselves out the violence fall silent and only a lone lunatic flute floats over the scene.  Halley gets up and begins to undress him, starting by unbuttoning his shirt.  When she undoes his belt she reaches down and rather gently holds his rigid cock as she eases the pants down over it.  She stands embracing him strongly with her arms around his neck pulling herself up until her cunt lips part and she slides down on his cock.  Mike is fucking her but she can’t feel it.  She can’t feel anything and then the strings return crescendo builds…. She spreads his legs and restrains them along with his arms.  She strokes his cock hard again and teases him by biting his nipples.  All at once her eyes go black and she thrusts the cattle prod into his balls…  Mike is blown up off the table by some kind of wind.  He doesn't even feel his come splash of his face as the electricity causes an involuntary muscle spasm that makes it arc out of his cock in unnaturally thick spurts.  He lands back on the table his voice is a violin, an inhuman screeching kind of wail.  
+ “What the fuck you know…. What the fuck do you have that lets you glide through this existence like some strange cloud a vapor that is there and you can see it but it doesn’t hurt you?  How do you have to turn things over and around and rearrange them so that you can see it in a bright light?  Don’t you ver get tired of laughing that smug glib little smirk?”  Things are not well at this table, the glasses have accumulated and the pent aggressions are knocking them over.
+“Hey watch it Michael, you can insult Sil all you want but don’t bring me into your quaint little semantic psychoanalyzed universe where you little puny mind thinks it understands me….”  Dean leans in toward me and around at Mike.  I turn my back and while trying not to laugh I harangue the little fucker in hopes that maybe he will listen, but the trouble with me is that I didn’t care, I wanted to make a point, but I knew it was already lost, I could just as easily have stood by while Dean beat him to a pulp.  I talked to shut out the symphony the close off the images of torture playing on an endless film loop flickering through the eons.  I talked to put an end to Denver, to bury the ugly future in the overflowing sewer of the past, not to thwart violence.  So when Dean forced the issue I didn’t do anything to stop it….
+“You know what you stupid little fuck, I don’t need your hospitality I don’t need your food, and certainly don’t need your advise seeing that while financially I may be fucked I am at least fucked and can fuck while you are nothing but a confused mediocre little spoiled piece of shit that can’t do much beyond leave his girlfriend in a half fucked state of longing.  That why she called me one day and invited me to lunch one day.”
+And then there was an absolute motionless silence for a full five or six seconds.  And Mike leaped over me and things went the way things go.  
+Dean beat the crap out of him.  We went home gathered up our bags and hit the road in Dean’s car.  In Kansas Dean turned right on my assurances that Mark Pledger would welcome us with open arms.
+
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+Things are looking up for me here in LA I have migrated from Andy’s closet to Dean’s dining room; he never uses it as he never really dines, if I renamed it the drinking room he would kick me out on the street and be in it every night.  Dean has a place about an hour south of Los Angeles proper and then my good friend Ed has a place smack dab in the middle of LA so if I want the city I can have it and I can escape it again when it gets old.  The real strangeness started about a week ago when Betty, Dean’s sister, showed up.  Her husband has just shipped off to Japan for a year and she is morbidly depressed about it moping about the house all day like a slug, oozing existence but absent of all life.  Betty is especially monstrous in the morning and I try to slip out before she gets up, luckily she sleeps a lot so I can usually make it out around noon without having to face her and then when I come back in the evening she is awake and more or less harmless, but I fear her before ten AM.
+As I say she brought the strangeness, or maybe she just drew it out and reflected the strangeness back so I could see it again, whatever the case it is here like an epidemic of the plague.  Not long after she arrived we dragged her up to Ed’s we felt it was our duty to entertain her and get her mind off the missing husband.  I tend to drink far to much when I am at Ed’s, drinks role down my throat like wild horses rampaging through my hands with a life and will of their own, and so it came to be that I broke Ed’s cutting board, door, chair and took to lighting his floor on fire one night.  It was round Christmas that much is certain because I woke up under a toppled Christmas Tree; I blame the whole affair on Ed. He should have known better than to give me a whole bottle of scotch all to myself. Of all the people in my life who’s homes I have wrought destruction and chaos upon Ed was he least deserving.
+Ed is perhaps the gentlest of all the maniacs that I associate with, he had an almost feminine kind of glow about him that comes across like light through a stained glass window —in odd chaotic fragments of color.  There are for instance the little things like the way he is sure to have fresh towels and clean blankets for us when we arrive.  He cooks little pizzas and sometimes pastas, the mornings after he is libel to be up brewing coffee and frying eggs, Ed had always been the perfect host.
+Other shimmies of light come through in his art, his paintings (the best of which he insists on hanging sideways), his photographs and mostly his endless curiosity.  He stalks through the conversations like a man eager to learn something eager to be shown something new.  Ed craves novelty and doesn’t yet know how to find it; he finds it in Dean and I.  He cultivates our company like one takes care of pets with the utmost love and concern asking only to be entertained in return.  Ed knows that his lot in life is not to burn cities with ideas, scorch the earth with paint and revolutionize the modern aesthetic or whatever painters are up to these days.  Ed is destined to paint quietly with the patience and understanding of a true saint.  Ed of Ark I call him in letters.
+But back to the destruction….  
+It must have been a Thursday, because Dean and Betty left for LA on a Friday, that much I know for sure.  I got up early, around six, and went to serve my time for being a citizen of the United States —jury duty.  It was my first time in a courthouse and I was certainly not to used to that hour of the morning; much like I assumed it was horrid —a half day of exposure to the radiation dangers of white middle class suburban values.  I was bored.  My inner child was beginning to putrefy in the stale smokeless air of the waiting rooms, I felt like sheets of burnt skin must be slowly slipping off my face I felt grotesque and obvious, like I stuck out as the most-likely-to be back of the other side of the room.
+I had hoped perhaps to have a fellow juror to slide off with into a broom closet, but there were no attractive jurors, nor did I catch any broom closets.  The nuts and bolts of democracy were frigid and even asexual.  The halls of justice sported the sophisticated airs of wood veneer and fake marble floors whose undistinguished patterns inhabited a no-man’s-land between linoleum and whatever is just a bit nicer than linoleum.  The architecture was studiously formal in a painful way that only psychiatrists, number theorists, and judges find appealing.  Courts are strange places; they have a sense of doom about them.  You’re accused from the moment you walk in the door regardless of why you might be there; the tribunals of architecture condemn your very presence.  Walking in those doors I got the sense of dread that the great cathedrals of medieval Europe must have inspired in the serf peasants.  The state is the new dominant religion and the court is a place of worship; you don’t just go to jury duty, you serve jury duty; you serve the state and the state has some things they want you to know.  
+They bring juries into the court room to remind even the law abiding citizens of what will happen should they decide to stray out of the neat little square boxes that hold the officially accepted rules about what is permitted and what is not.  It reeks of textbook Freudian repression.  They even put you in a “jury box” either with a straight-faced synchronicity that tapers over into irony or to make sure that the burden of life sinks into your wee little cellular glob.  I’m still unsure if everyone there really believed the crap they feed you in those jury notices about your civic duty or if they were like me, offended at the very concept, but intimidated by the bottom sentence which used the words… failure to comply will result in criminal penalties… The government talks like an abusive spouse —it needs you so that it will have someone around to walk all over and beat the crap out of.  You wouldn’t want the government to get its feelings hurt when no one turns up for the public spankings now would you?  Without you whom the hell would they spank?  The whole show was ludicrous; no one wanted to be there, it was only under the threat of jail that most of us had shoed up there.  Mostly people talked amongst themselves waited irritably, hoping to avoid an OJ trial, bitching about time lost at work or conversely reading and enjoying a break from work.  A few of us, smokers all, congregated outside and swapped stories about our lives, a couple of them looked like me —guilty, as if this was only an observational run through. 
+I could have been doing a thousand things all of them infinitely more interesting than sitting on the patio of a jury call room smoking and listening to stories from a trucker about life on the road.  I kept hoping for that one sexy young juror to come strolling outside but she didn’t.  I’m from LA true, but I just can’t surrender my optimism….  It was a morning steeped in boredom.  I read a book and listened here and there to catch snippets of someone’s life randomly dropping out of the sky like seagull shit in the desert.
+Make the courtroom fun?  That had seemingly never occurred to anyone.  Why not turn it into a burlesque show with a little skin, some singers, and few dirty jokes between trials?  It would be huge.  You could even charge a few bucks at the door and the average citizen would finally have reason to participate in government.  Instead of jails a dominatrix judge could administer spankings and trade her gavel for a paddle.  And of course the stenographer would have to turn into a photographer, which would open up the whole print aspect of the courts —the monthly newsletter for patrons.  From there as word spread it would become a full fledged magazine with centerfolds, feature interviews and reviews of crimes…. But the stunted pedophilic minds in power will hear of no such thing…entirely unacceptable….why it makes a mockery of the justice system… I will not hear of it!!!  
+Libel to give one a coronary the way it is now.  The whole morning left me feeling strangely violated; some faceless uncontrollable monster had sequestered four hours of my life away from me.  I wanted to sue the judge for making me get up at six in the morning a trauma which doubtless took years off my life in stress and mental anguish, but I let it go… no paddles, no burlesque, no photographer, no show… what’s the point?
+They released me at noon.  I spent the remainder of the day wandering around the beach looking a tide pools and picking up little snails and trying to organize them into juries and try a starfish for sloth, but nothing cooperated the way humans do so I gave up and read a book on the steps to the beach.  I stayed almost until sunset when I caught the last bus into Laguna Beach and had dinner a restaurant where my friend Matt works.
+When I got home I was full and content, wanting only to stretch myself with a short walk and then go to bed, but Dean was at manic pace, it is imperative that we go to Ed’s tonight he must wake up in the city tomorrow he can not take the suburbs anymore….
+“If I see one more rich cunt in a BMW sitting at a green light talking on her cell phone to Erik the Viking workout coach that she is meeting to fuck before going home to her idiotic husband who has spent the day licking his boss’s ass for pocket change, I am going to kill.  This entire fucking town ought to be a toxic waste dump; I was thinking Sil, about that plan I had to take over the world and make Kansas a prison colony… I am relocating the colony here just like that terrible movie that was out a few years ago what was it called?”
+Dean is in a frenzy of blind hatred, the kind of frenzy which all the dead must surrender to occasionally and what’s more he is beginning to get me in a frenzy as well, he feeds off that… “The worst thing is that there is no fucking reason whatsoever for me to be here I hate my job I hate the people rent is too damn expensive and there’s never anything to do but get drunk or high.  The monotony of it is numbing it tears away my flesh….” He looked around exasperated as if we were going to somehow come to his aide but then he just started pacing in silence for bit.  All the sudden he said he was going to Ed’s house right then if we cared to join him.  I went for it and so we drove up there and on the way Dean told a curious story about a Muslim.
+“I was sitting on a bench smoking and reading as usual, and this guy sat next to me.  He works in the mailroom, always says hello, real happy chap, friendly as fuck, in a genuine way.  I suspected he was Muslim, but I had never talked to him.  So he sits down and asks me what I’m reading...I hate that question.  Last week someone stopped me in the hall and asked what Naked Lunch was about..."um.... a guy living in tangier...." week before that I was reading Junky....not sure if anyone is paying attention or doing any math over there could be only a matter of time…  Anyway... I try to get across that Western Lands is Burroughs going through death and meditating on the afterlife myths et cetera while he was nearing the Great Divide himself.  This guy starts laying down some thick rap about Islam, and I was mesmerized.  Their stories are fucking INTENSE.  He laid down this Angel of Death gig that was a definite keeper.  I closed my book and was genuinely enthralled.  Not by what he was saying but by him.  He’s one of those people who, regardless of what they are spouting, give off this haze of education, and inner peace, and wisdom.  Maybe I’m working with numbers too much and my brain is melting.  I keep "waking up" at work.  Wondering where I am and how I got there.  Not unlike realizing that you're dancing on a table because you've had to much Bombay, and politely excusing yourself to the boy's room.  I get stuck in trance like internalization periods that last for hours, sometimes days, and then I snap back into this reality.  
+The freeway roared in the vacuum of silence that Dean left hanging there, as if it were a painting and he were steeping back to admire it for bit, check to make sure it hung straight and true.
+“I had a fucked dream the other night.  Sis and mom and I were living in Texas again, where I grew up and I was walking barefoot outside.  I walked through a stagnant pool of water to avoid a vicious barking dog.  When I got to the house, I lit a cigarette and tied up for a shot.  I saw my skin move.  REALLY move.  I thought I was hallucinating, and it started moving all over.  The stagnant water had some sort of microscopic parasite in it—like a tapeworm with a leech body.  It had seeped through my pours and reproduced and grown.  I ran around the house freaking out, my skin moving in little bumpy wave-like black ripples.  I could feel them crawling under the epidermis.  I stopped suddenly and had an epiphany.  I began kneading my flesh, corralling the parasites to my extremities and forcing them out through the skin.  My skin was shredding like latex paper mache`, and blood burst from the ribbons of flesh, covering my arms and face.  When I had finally gotten the last one out, and crushed it in my hand, I lay back knowing I was in agonizing pain, but only feeling the smooth balance of shock soothing my nervous system, fooling it into feeling okay.  I felt tired, and realized I was bleeding to death.  I didn’t fight, I just slipped away.”
+Ed apparently had been expecting us as the door was unlocked and there was a note explained that he had run to the store to get beer.  On top of the fridge we found a bottle of scotch bearing my name and bottle of Gin bearing Dean’s, we were well on our way through them before Ed got back. By the time he showed up with the beer it was nearly midnight and things were getting fuzzy.  
+I can hear Ed and Dean talking about the implications of time travel.  I keep slipping into near coma in which I start to turn their dialogue into the inner workings of my own mind.  I am living in a terrible Dostoevskyian land of cross-examination and self-doubt.  Although I know they are not talking about me or even too me I can hear the across the room and I keep thinking that they are.  Th world feels heavy and I sit down in front of the sideways painting and contemplate the endless thick erotic paint that loops and curls its way about the canvas propelling the eye with it inertia, allowing itself to be converted by the viewer into latent energy.  You walk away from it feeling refreshed rejuvenated except that I can’t walk away from it anymore I am too drunk with scotch and the very intoxication of the paint itself; I lie down complete staring up at it floating about in the oily oceans of pigment, vermilion waves crest with whitecaps on a sea of lavender.  The waves grow larger as I move, rippling away from me and then I start to sink as if in quicksand.  I begin to shuffle my arms and feet but that only sinks me deeper and I remember that in quicksand one must remain perfectly still.  I lie perfectly still and feel myself slowly slip down into the oil depths, out to the tattered edges of consciousness the ragged glories of existence and individuality bow before the divine circumstances of the universe and all is lost amid a swirling see of alcohol, pigment, dream, hallucination and reality muddled in the roaring deep baritones of Beethoven, Ed’s painting, Van Gogh’s ear, Burrough’s pinky all gathering up in the comic dust to form a cherubic symphony wailing incessantly across the crepuscule of darkness.
+ When I woke up I was still wearing my pants and had somehow or other been dropped face down on the couch.  My head hurt before I moved not good sign.  As I sit up I am gradually aware that I don’t have a hang over.  In fact I am still drunk which cheers me slightly and give me the courage to look around.  Ed is already brewing coffee, he is standing if front of the sink absently scratching his ass, staring into space and looking for all the world like roman gladiator after the battle.  Its then that he notices me and shakes his head.  
+It turned out that I had not passed out I had blacked out, a first for me.  It was unsettling to realize that someone other than the me that is usually me had been me.  Who was this other me?  Where did he come from and what did he want?  Why did he break things and set them on fire?  Was it even a he?  Perhaps it was a she?  The true disappointment is that I didn’t get to meet him.  From what Dean and Ed piece together for me I probably wouldn’t have liked the guy, but it would nevertheless have been nice to meet him since he was hijacking my body.
+It took me two days to fully regain myself, in the interim the weirdness grew, I lounged about all day watching television with Betty; we could both hear it the rumbling of a distant and future overture.  Friday rolled around and they went back up to Ed’s but I stayed behind; I was still feeling sheepish about my behavior and I thought it would be good to do a little recording, to take some time off of life.  I had decide that I would not change a word of what I wrote, I would record the life as it unfolded with entirely too much honesty —record things exactly as they were.  I was trying to write what all my mentors had left out of their books; I was going to fill in the gaps in the cannon of literature.  It is all going to be laid bare for the world, the ideas will become real through seeing and doing, not through the telling…  the word would be flesh as was recommended by another writer.  I sat down Friday night after they had left for LA and I wrote furiously through the night and all the next day, I was Jack Kerouac on a bender, drunk with words they flowed out in rhythm with the river that is life, they cascaded over the boulders of my fingers and tumble underground into keyboard and finally flooding the deltas of white space that the computer had decreed would now serve as my ocean.  I had been writing for almost twenty-four hours solid when the phone rang and the whole perilous structure collapsed in on itself and I looked at the clock.
+.  It was quarter of twelve and I was pretty sure that nothing good would come from answering the phone at that hour.  I stared at it until the machine picked it up.
+“Hello? Sil are you there?”  There was a silence on the other end for a moment and then came a more thoughtful, lonely drawn-out sounding voice, “well if you get this message call me tonight, my roommates are gone and I feel king of unsafe…(there was a pause) I was wondering if you would come over and stay with me… if not at least call.  Okay?  Goodbye.”
+I sat for moment staring at the pattern of plaster on the wall wondering what my will would do with me.  The voice was Amy, my ex-wife whom I had waked out on six months prior.  I stared at the wall and tried to figure out how she could possibly have known that I was here, I smelled the evil artistry of Dean who in moments weakness might have squealed my whereabouts to Hillarie his own little nightmare who would have been sent by Amy to find me.  Women are insidious little creatures and I could see Dean sitting on the edge of his bed with Hillarie on her knees, his cock in her hand… Dean tell me where he is or I’m leaving.  Oh well I’d have done the same.
+Besides all that was irrelevant.  Why not give the ex a good poke?  One last poke and then I’m gone, through with whole sordid affair.  And what a clever little girl, wanting protection, so Amy she would never have had the courage to admit that she wanted a good fuck and nothing more, with Amy there was always something more, more more more.  I knew that she wasn’t lying, the apartment above her had been burglarized the last I was there.  The poor woman had ended up in the ghetto after I split.  I would be little more than psychological comfort.  She wanted me there for reasons well above and beyond her safety —she wanted sex.  She wanted sex because a) she was horny or b) it was the only substitute she could thing of for the emotional hole I had torn in her heart. 
+I was a bit of a loss, but not entirely surprised.  I was feeling free and floating in the effervescent vapors of my new freedom and now here was the old, the familiar, like sliding a foot into the comfort of a well worn boot…  But was it a good idea?  I called her back and in her voice I caught it the indeterminable mystery that had always gotten me and always could from the beginning to the end.  The alpha and the omega—the only thing that ever drew me to anyone —the mystical enigma of the unknown.  The familiarity of anything makes it pedestrian and undesirable to me whether it is a place, a person or an emotion.  It was on this point that I realized that Dean too bore the mark, bore a mark; I never told him how profound his words were to me when I read them but it was he who put it best: familiarity breeds contempt.
+It was the contempt for the familiar that had driven me from Amy; it was never anything to do with her, but try as I might I could never sell her on that point.  Whatever it is I can change… those words of desperation that we use when we are in danger of losing our tenuous grasp on the world are the very ones that seal our fate and guarantee that we lose hold.  When things are mysterious they remain perpetual wellsprings from which I draw all my hopes dreams and fantasies, but the closer in to actual thing I get, the longer I stay in one place, the more familiar I am with a friend the more intimate I am with a lover the less mysterious they become.  Without the mystery I have nothing from which to draw, my existence is not unlike that of the vampire, but unlike the vampire my victims do not die.  I shatter their worlds and they come crawling right back again for more.  I felt sickened by myself, by the fact that I could recognize such a thing, but feel powerless to stop it; worse still was the dawning realization that I didn’t care to stop it, I had no reason to stop it.  My brain squirmed looking for a way out constantly and when Amy gave me one the wheels were already turning.  Like a man trying to fly I felt the words in my head, but what if it doesn’t work and I fell like a rock.  Doubt kills.
+I ended up at Amy’s house twenty minutes later; I tried briefly to resist to see how serious she was and when she offered to come over and pick me so I wouldn’t have to walk I knew there was only one way to go about this.  I walked over so as to not be stuck there and also to give myself time to get right down into the sands and dig a little hole, take a closer look at the fragments of my passing even as they were going by.  What propelled me was something other than what I think of as me, something I no longer considered myself; I was merely along for the ride.  I began to see this temporal me with increasing clarity it seemed to have crawled up from inside and it hung on to edges of reality leaving me to wander in dream and observe form a distance all the beauty that surrounds the dreamer.
+ Amy was in a shiny satin dress that clung to her lithe frame; it was green and made her eyes glow the deep luster of emerald stones.  Her hair was a little bit longer and she had it pulled up behind her head to give unrequited views of the curve of her shoulder as it snaked its way up to her neck.  Her nipples poked out of the thin green material and her lips curled playfully as I walked in the door.  
+I accepted a beer and we talked for a while, she told me of a few dates she had been on, how worthless men were in general, asked how I was how was I enjoying myself, did I have any plans?  It was preliminary nonsense to an inevitability of habit, probably mutual fear as much as need, it was to be a construction fuck, the best sex of your life even as the walls are being built up again.  For me the walls would never go up, they never do, I could walk into her house ten years from now and feel as familiar with her as I did at the height of our relationship, but for her they went back up.  She needed to know that she was the only one before she let the guard down and I had hurt her so up they went, slowly at first day by day, week by passing week she moved farther and farther away from me.  I know longer try to fight that emotion, let her go don’t question her is my new mantra.  Amy thought I was cold and callous for being able to break her heart, but she didn’t understand that I did suffer, I suffered far more, I had nowhere to place the blame, I broke my own heart as well.  I had done it before and I was destined to do it again.  She had moved through all the stages of depression that you find in the first chapters of grief psychology.
+First there was anger; my nose took the brunt of that off her closed fist.  Then silence, my favorite stage —denial.  And her we were in surrender where the inevitable is accepted but not yet acted out, and of course there was one yet to come —acceptance.  In surrender you give up on the ghost and live on autopilot, from the rear window of the plane you can see the tragedy and the comedy, and the tragedy in the comedy and occasionally even the comedy in the tragedy.  The rear door opens and from that artificial altitude you can see the surface of convoluted emotion smoothed flat with distance.  We were, for that night, up there together standing on the back of the plane just looking down and admiring the view.  How we got there and where we were going was irrelevant, it was all about the view.  I knew she would call again tomorrow and that would not be good, but for now…
+What a view!  She stopped talking and leaned into gently kiss my lips; she started to pull away, but could not the tantalizing attraction of the unknown came over us both, would it be the same?  That was the mystery which created the inclination keep our lips pressed together, softly at first until the craving appetite of carnality parted them with hunger and by the time our tongues met we were sealed in our fate.  She straddled me on the couch and my hands explored her sphinx-like body as though it were a newfound treasure.  My fingers tugged gently at her nipples and pulled the back of her head, pushing my tongue farther around her mouth.  The tugging became pinching and her hands fumbled at my belt in a frenzy until she had firm hold of my hard cock and she stroked it gently at first and then just held it in a vise grip as my own trailed down her legs and hiked up her dress.  Her legs parted and I twisted my arm to get a finger in her cunt.  She was gushing; I rubbed her smooth hairless cunt, probing my fingers in to the knuckles; it wrapped them up like a closing sea anemone. 
+I pulled the dress off over her head and pushed her up onto the couch as I slid onto the floor.  She squatted and moaned as I went to work on her cunt.  The taste was familiar and called up memories as only taste and smell can.  Infinite desires that spanned far beyond this lifetime into some timeless place where the expression of desire is infinite and perfectly tied to everybody all at once in an ecclesiastic orgasm.  Her cum was dripping of my chin and she pulled me up under her again by tugging my hair.  She licked her cum from my chin as I fingered her some more, she began to gasp into me ear and I felt her cunt contract on my fingers.  She had never come just from my hand before; it empowered me and made my cock rigid as a cement light post.  In one move I impaled her on it, she pushed me back against the couch and began to —what better word than ride?  I lay there with a sense of relaxed enjoyment born out of the certainty that I would not cum until I was ready.
+I wanted to feel every thrust, to feel those warm stretching walls of cunt gripping like a vise, I knew I never would again and I savored it.  I kissed her breasts as they bounced delectably in front of my lips.  I trailed her juices down to her asshole and reached my hand around her to her ass and slid into her puckered hole.  She lifted herself slightly and leaned her head down dragging her lips breathily across my cheek until she bit at my lips and her tongue snaked into my mouth.  I held my hand still and kissed her letting her grind as she raised and lowered herself up and down slowly building momentum.
+She rode me through two orgasms after which I lifted her up and threw her over the arm of the couch.  I slipped it into her with ease and began to fuck her with that intensity where you momentarily forget whether you are trying to please or destroy the cunt.  Her cunt milked at my cock until in was near bursting.  I watched the swing of her ample breasts as her body thrust back to meet me.
+“Don't cum...!…I want to feel it in my ass”
+This was a new idea, not one I was all the keen on, but she looked back at me with a expression of lust so primeval and inhuman that I could see her no longer as the wounded animal that lashed out two weeks ago and more like the whole person that knew what she wanted and was going to get it however she pleased.  I pulled out and tongued her asshole teasing her to moans and making her beg.  Amy loved that cheesy sex talk in the ears…Fuck me harder! had evolved over the years until I was breathing stories of group orgies and gang fucks with stadium crowds full of dicks and cunts swarming over the flesh like inflamed fire ant hills, searing every raw nerve with sex burn.  Amy would cum a kind of intensity that startled and scared me almost as much as it turned me on.  I told her about watching her with other men, other women, forcing her to watch, rapes scenes where I passed her like meat on a platter to a group of friends, slavery where she led me on a leash.  Everything I could ever dream up just made her cum harder and harder the more far-fetched it got.  Sometimes I felt like I was an abstract fantasy that was given bodily form to enhance what could otherwise have been a masturbation session.  As my cock choked its way slowly into her tight ass I asked her who she had been fucking in my absence and she recounted (maybe she made it up, who knows?) the night previous when she had sucked off a girl in the toilet stall of nightclub restroom and then let her boyfriend jerk off and cum on her tits. In the heat of sex stuff like that usually does the trick and I filled her ass with the biggest squirt I had ever felt leave the tip of my prick.  I kept pounding into her fascinated by the intimate squishing sounds of my cum oozing and dribbling out of her ass.
+I collapsed into a chair panting, but my mind was reeled about the room.  I was exhausted but had never felt so alive, my only thought was to escape her and get out into the streets into the pulse of life, to go and go and go and never look back, but Amy rolled over and begged me to make her come again.  I rolled her over and dove into her cunt trying to morph my tongue into an electric eel. 
+ Later we lay for a while in silence and smoked a cigarette.  She kissed me and fell asleep with her head on my chest.  Around four I gently slipped out from under her and left.  I smoked a cigarette walking home and stopped a lot to luxuriate in the good fortune that seems to follow me around.  I was living in a kaleidoscope of realities that swirled with all the vibrancy and color of my youth, but it was alive now, here, in this moment, fairly bursting out of my chest.  At home I devoured left over Thai food and fell into a deep coma like sleep.  I dreamed a radio broadcast of unknown origins pilling down the universes own information superhighway at a genetic tilt, coming across the galaxy without static pure unadulterated reception of signal and through it all the fragment of ash kept falling, fragments of history written on burnt paper and cast about in a hurricane of now.  Fragments of falling ash. Fragments of ash falling.  White washed ceilings hanging so ominous....  Hallucination of bubble-headed figures crawling like the Michelin Man across an indescribable mountain of tires.  Motels Motels Motels Whiskey Bourbon.  Tow truck non-ordinary state of reality precludes a state of reality that something is real.  Point at the autistic manwomanchild  Autistic man pointing at you laughing unable to fathom how your brain functions and quite self-righteously you cling to its definitions.  Must delineate between abnormality and those of us who UNDERSTAND.... The Human Virus breeding like rats unconsciously conscious and aware of our disorganization. Gas Station Cold Fusion dreams of the Anarchist are breeding in the minds of the oilmen who don’t want to loose their stranglehold of reality.  Fragments of Ash falling, the continual settling of dust weighing down humanity and the French Maid masturbates discreetly in the next room.  You need her to keep the dust off your mortal coil spring.  Rebirth mythology.  Mythology of reality.  We must distinguish between what will be defined as sane and what shall be referred to as insanity.  Kevlar definitions constructed to make a better shampoo seem like a logical item on which to squander your paperbacked slavery bills.  After all these years Tide still gets your socks whiter Its a wonder that they aren’t transparent by now...that your brain retarded in its development that evolution had not anticipated the advent of the opposable thumb the unopposable domination of the thumb leading to and insect superiority of mating rituals stolen from a textbook on damselflies darning needles sewing shut your lips, mind atrophy. Weber's White Race Enriched for Superiority Scorched earth campaigns raining Ash. Shit from the sky.  Tax man came for your baby in exchange for unpaid balance.  You understand.  Nothing Personal Just doing our job.  Same as the next guy.  From Auzwich on down the line.  Didn’t make the rules.  Sorry. We perfected them.  There are no innocents in a world of free will.  You don’t have to survive at the expense of others.  You could die with puncture wounds in your hands and others would create a new mythology strange irony would find another with holes in his hands unwilling to accept cockroach mentalities.  You want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman but he lives on in quiet cafes centralsouthamerica not so free not all the communists have been shot yet Your mistook misunderstood missed the lesson in the situation that unfolded  Dr. of dialectic excuses you want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman Hitler killed everybody's body only taking orders you understand just doing my job from Independence on down the line. It was a sad money grubbing hunter gather up his children and thank his gods they are his and he their god behold I have come to tell you that everything you know is wrong stop doing your job it is not yours see Hitler in your mind you want him dead but he's not he lives on buried under restraint in everyone's mind.  Only taking orders you understand.  Didn’t have a CHOICE.  Got a family to feed. Radio crackle.  Pop.  Hiss. Silence.  End transmission.
+
+
+
+Somewhere in the background of all these goings on there was Betty.  I did not know her save that she was Dean’s sister, had married a Marine who was overseas, and seemed for all practical purposes to be settled into what most of the country would call a normal healthy existence.  Her only problem so far as I could tell was that she had exposed herself to Dean and I.  When they came back from Ed’s Sunday evening I was feeling muted, as if I did not exist at all, but was merely a spectral figure watching over the chaos and insanity of this tiny little rock spinning about a nearly equally tiny burning rock.  I had attained the kind of Zen State that I had always wanted.  I observed everything just as it was without subjecting it to my own opinions, beliefs and feeble desires.
+I watched Dean and Betty come home.  I watched them smoke a joint and drink some beers.  I watched swirling patterns of conversation float about the room as radiant butterflies.  I chased them in silence.  And then somewhere in midst of conversation about the sheer futility and meaninglessness of everything I snapped out of it and floated back down to my body, my life and my animal desires.  It was the same sort of detachment that had led me out of LA up to San Francisco and then back only now instead of happening in dreams with strange men leading the way, it was happening while I was awake.  Indeed for the first time I was awake, aware.  Despite the fact that I had not slept all weekend (or perhaps because of it) I felt more refreshed and alive than ever.
+I talked Dean and Betty into going with me for a nightcap.  We drove down to a local tavern that Dean and I were known at in, the golden days of youth we had passed many a night there.   Bruno, our favorite bartender who greeted you like Odysseus returning every time you walked through the door, was working.  Bruno had the most awe inspiring memory I have ever witnessed, which he combined with a fantastic power to ‘exaggerate’ as he called it (lie as the rest of us called it), to create an atmosphere an Italian family reunion.  Everyone always felt welcome and loved when Bruno was working, no matter how pathetic their lives might have been during the day they were all on the same level even playing field when Bruno was around.  He should have been a cult leader or spiritual adviser, but this is the twenty-first century and there are no spiritual advisers there are bartenders.
+Tonight he is in rare form:
+“Dean! Sil!” He fairly jumped over the bar.  “How have you been?” 
+“Since last weekend?”  Dean has the same arrogant self-mocking sense of humor that I do.  “You know… ‘nother week, ‘nother check and we come here to spend it!”
+“That’s why I love you guys; did I ever tell you that?  I love you guys!”  He grabbed us by the shoulders and shook us with all his Italian might.  He leaned back over the bar and took off his shirt.  “Watch this…”
+The bar had this pole in the middle of it, but the ceiling was too low to actually stand on the bar so Bruno jumped up and kind of crouched his back down so that his already enormous gut looked even bigger.  “Hey ladies!”  He hovered over two girls sitting at the bar and began to pole dance to the music from the jukebox.  Catcalls from the locals drown out whatever the girls were trying to say and several patrons ran up to stuff money in Bruno’s pants.  He hammed it up flipping his hair and shimmying his enormous Santa belly around the pole.  His pants were falling down to plumber level and I knew we weren’t getting beer any time soon.  Dean and I joined Betty in the corner booth by the door.  Cached safely with my back to the wall I settled into watch the familiar show.
+Bruno was now running up and down the bar flexing his muscles; he had stuffed enormous wrenches, screw drivers, and other tools of the plumbers’ trade into his belt loop and down his pants.  He squatted in front of a forty-year-old businesswoman and shoved his three exposed inches of ass crack in her face and circle-swooshed it around like a Vegas showgirl.  She roared with laughter and tucked a five spot into his crack.  He took off down the bar to clean up on the drunken thirty-something’s that had never seen such “hilarious antics.”  Bruno was a one of kind; he was the only person I know that could dance so badly, stick pretzels into his gums like fangs, pull his pants down like a plumber and make money while he was at it.  
+I deeply admired him for that.  It wasn’t something you see everyday, but eventually the act got old (drunks have a short attention span) and Bruno came over to the table to see what we wanted.
+ “Gentlemen,” He screwed up his expression to a face of mock seriousness, “what flavor will you be having this evening?”
+“Guinness,” came out of Dean and I in unison.  An Irishman would have wept, but Bruno, being Italian only smiled.  He went off to pour and I tried in vain to explain what had happened to me while Dean and Betty were at Ed’s house.  But there were no words, that was the overwhelming thing that pulled me around and around as a wrestled with the feelings and emotions.  Somewhere near the edges of what is here and now and what is always and forever there comes in the grips of eternity a feeling so exhilarating and blinding that it transcends all language all communication.  In trying to explain myself I only felt more and more that what I knew was mine alone and could never be shared.  In celebrating myself I had lost myself something I never would have expected I kept remembering odd phrases of mystics and cryptic jokes that no one understood except the jokesters themselves.  I thought a lot about Andy Kaufman and for the first time felt that I had some sense of what he was doing; or Beckett or Joyce or countless others that had hitherto seemed only deranged lunatics babbling in rhythm and rhyme.
+Dean and Betty listened intently but I felt sure that I was inarticulate and confused when inside I was bursting with clarity.  In my reverie of several hours previous I had experience extreme chest pains; I felt as if life itself whatever it might be god… dog… you name it… was pouring right through me like Shaterack Meshak and abandego I stood and in the fire and was untouched and yet there was nothing that could be said to describe it.  Just when I felt on the brink of madness and isolation Dean interrupted me with a story of William Burrough’s the last old man of the mountain.
+“That sounds a lot like the western lands… the sort of middle ground between life and death to which mystics and all character of that sort are always propelled….  The western lands where everything is unwritten, unwritable even, quite a treacherous place I would imagine.  You ought to read the Tibetan Book of Dead, see if that rings your bell a bit….”
+“Ya?  See the supremely frustrating thing is that I feel like I saw a cure for all that ails us… all the worlds problems were solved from where I was… beyond good and evil, but not philosophically; vitally… damn I’m at a loss for words again….  But I will tell you one thing I can’t stay here anymore… I appreciate you putting me up and all, but I have to keep moving what is going through my head is taking over my life, it is the supreme and indeed the only important thing that has ever happened to me.  It keeps saying move move move; sitting still is going to drive me mad.  Even writing it out on paper, writing a book is futile for this is something entirely separate this art that had to be lived to understand it….”  And once again I grew drunk with out liquor swirling the clouds of inception circling with Hesse’s eagle and the swooping brown pelicans of literature, pouches heavy with something new, something fresh which must be shat from on high to land with a dull splatter that covers the earth with a new freshness a new fecundity from which new life could spring, new wells could be draw, new myths created, new words invented new dreams, new ideas, new art forms that would blend seamlessly with old, taking there place in the long infinite line of creation
+I had worked myself into a bit of a frenzy by now and I could see that it was catching, little gears and wheels of machinery were turning in Dean’s eyes.  Betty too seemed infected by the virus of sanity; the diseased atrophied limbs of lives were beginning to amputate themselves, to fall off useless as the leper’s tongue.  We were on the verge of a virtual appendectomy.  I gave up and lapsed into silence surrendering all dreams and fate to wind, to the room, to Dean, to anyone who might have taught me anything, I grew sponge-like with anticipation.  At this point Bruno delivered another round and now with a little rich Irish nectar to coat my throat I really laid into it.  It all came spilling out in an avalanche that swept down and plowed me over until I was beside myself.
+“What we ought to do my friend is to light out for the territories.  We ought to do those things that living people —I mean people that are alive and eager to go about the business of living — do.  They sure as fuck don’t hang around here I spent all weekend watching the scurrying rats running from hole to hole and I just about can’t take it anymore.  I am bursting I am alive, am that one little thistle that turns green after the rain on an abandoned lot.  And you, look at you, what the fuck is wrong with you?  You know better than to go showing up at some job every day like it matters in the grand scheme of things.  We are monkeys and yet all we do is mimic the rat on the wheel or the ceaseless activity of the worker ant to serve a queen what?  What we ought to be, what we ought to be concerned with is something real something of value that extends beyond this barren womb this business capital of humanity.  Even the landscape is mostly boring and drab except by the coast.  What is the rest of this place mediocre rolling hills that are brown from lack of rain three quarters of the year.  The whole place is so sterile there aren’t even any animals running amuck.  This place these people all of them are beyond hope and even if they weren’t you and I are hardly the savior types we look our for ourselves and those that come to us… we don’t go looking for help it comes to us don’t you see?  Its coming to us it’s drawing us away from here away away away!  We will be embarking on a radical change and no matter if we should end up destitute selling children in the back alleys of Rumanian because no matter what might possible happen it will at least not be this.  This is nothing this is a static oasis on the edge of desolate gasoline holocaust.”
+I was not surprised that Dean was up for such an alteration, but I must confess I was surprised at Betty’s willingness to but herself in league with such rapscallions as Dean and I.  Betty reasoned that she had nothing to lose, but that was only half of it she wanted to do something different as much or maybe more than us.  I was exuding enough enthusiasm to power a small city and the Guinness was the only thing keeping me in line I watched it spread around the table first to Dean who began to launch a thousand thoughts much as I had done silently in the pool.  We talked of Europe and South America with such enthusiasm that listeners would have been shocked to hear that neither of us had ever been there.  We walked the dusty camel choked streets of Morocco and took the Marrakech express across the desert and then ported ourselves to the coast and caught freighters back to Brazil to sail up the Amazon. We had splendid adventures and our table was bursting with a bubbling exuberance that lit up the bar like a rocket ship.  Soon the place was packed and we were hemmed in to the table by a wall of drinkers willing to stand for the privilege.  I sat up on the back of the booth and had a look around.  Dean used the break in conversation to leap up on the table and yell for more beer.  As heads turned to see the face of the roaring noise that took the bartender away from their own precious little drinks Dean found himself with an audience.
+“Come on Bruno!  You know tomorrow is meaningless to now!  We’re here, right now and we have to live here right fucking now!  I’m not going to work tomorrow because it’s never going to be tomorrow and I don’t want the things I have to pay for today.  Every moment of everyday is only one thing —now.  What the fuck are you people looking at?  If I could be anywhere doing anything why would I be here?  Do you realize the odds stacked against me?  Against you? The sheer probability of any of this ever occurring, let alone occurring like this, in this exact fashion, at this exact time, in this exact bar?  But here we are… what can you say beyond that?  You’re going to pass out tonight and happily assume in the seething cesspool of your unconscious that you will wake up again tomorrow, but the odds are equally against you…”
+At this point in his ranting Dean wandered off into Quantum physics, Astrology and Chaos math.  Most of the drunks were lost before that and the ones that weren’t raised their glasses and got lost rather quickly, but Dean had tapped into something and soon we had new friends.
+Cristof, who turned out to be from Rumania, and Charles who could have been from anywhere outside the general atmosphere of earth, bought us round after round of expensive whiskey.  Cristof said Dean’s speech was, as he put it, “the only intelligent thing I’ve ever heard an American say.”
+Soon there were girls and the world took on a kaleidoscope quality.  Time passed as a jerky black and white slideshow, moments were projected onto a screen and just as I was scrutinizing them they were gone replaced by another that seemed out of order.  The world got jumbled rather quickly as if my proverbial house of cards was sort of collapsing rather harmlessly about me.  I was kissing and pawing roughly at a girl from Arizona.  She fairly dragged me with her hand on my collar into the women’s restroom where I threw her against the floral print walls, lifted her skirt and slipped it in roughly and drunkenly.  She moaned heavy in my ear but I was beyond caring about her, she was merely a vessel through which I was vainly trying to propel myself into the full stream of life, the raging river….  I came hard seeing stars and then left it slide out, tore off the condom threw it in the toilet and ducked out the back door with lipstick still smeared on my face. Betty drove home.
+
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+The first week I did nothing but work.  Dean’s job was peculiar in that he wrote things before they happened.  That is for every concert he reviewed we each wrote a review ahead of time, one good and the other bad with all sorts of adjective cut out and scattered through text.  Then we would go to the show or the movie or whatever it happened to be that he was reviewing and about halfway through, when we felt like we had the gist of it we left.  Getting the gist of it actually consisted of deciding what more people wanted to hear, it frightened me somewhat to notice that reviewers generally put no thought into the actual art or music or whatever.  Everything is in terms of numbers.  Are this bands numbers going up or down?  Is this exhibit fresh and new with the brightest most of the moment people or is it that washed up nobodies that were huge stars in the past?  If the numbers are rising good review, unless of course you're working for an alternative magazine in which case the rising numbers mean bad review —sell out talk.  If the numbers are falling it can go to ways one the artist or art is washed up and past tense or it is the artist staying true to his roots and allowing the culture to pass him by.  These were the things Dean and I dealt with on a daily basis.  In the end none of it really mattered and if you were a performer, an actor, a musician, or a writer or a director there was always one camp set up to support you and another to ridicule you.  In some way the two functioned to keep the whole thing and perhaps even the person or art being reviewed in a weird violent balance like a tight rope walker at the circus.  Occasionally if one of us were irritated we would shoot the tightrope walker for fun without even bothering to find out what they were doing.  We spent an entire afternoon slaughtering Infinite Jest though neither of us had read more than twenty pages.  Too much tennis.  No one care about tennis.  But we praised the Thin Red Line because it was written and directed by Terence Malik and we like his name.  Such are whims which journalists bounce around in.  Then they asked us to go to a concert for the latest boy band.  I quit outright and Dean caught a cold.  With a couple of days off we decide to head up the Ed’s place in LA
+I tend to drink far to much when I am at Ed’s, drinks role down my throat like wild horses rampaging through my hands with a life and will of their own, and so it came to be that I broke Ed’s cutting board, door, chair and took to lighting his floor on fire one night.  It was round Christmas that much is certain because I woke up under a toppled Christmas Tree; I blame the whole affair on Ed. He should have known better than to give me a whole bottle of scotch all to myself. Of all the people in my life who’s homes I have wrought destruction and chaos upon Ed was the least deserving.
+Ed is perhaps the gentlest of all the maniacs that I associate with, he had an almost feminine kind of glow about him that comes across like light through a stained glass window —in odd chaotic fragments of color.  There are for instance the little things like the way he is sure to have fresh towels and clean blankets for us when we arrive.  He cooks little pizzas and sometimes pastas, the mornings after he is libel to be up brewing coffee and frying eggs, Ed had always been the perfect host.
+Other shimmies of light come through in his art, his paintings (the best of which he insists on hanging sideways), his photographs and mostly his endless curiosity.  He stalks through the conversations like a man eager to learn something eager to be shown something new.  Ed craves novelty and doesn’t yet know how to find it; he finds it in Dean and I.  He cultivates our company like one takes care of pets with the utmost love and concern asking only to be entertained in return.  Ed knows that his lot in life is not to burn cities with ideas, scorch the earth with paint and revolutionize the modern aesthetic or whatever painters are up to these days.  Ed is destined to paint quietly with the patience and understanding of a true saint.  Ed of Ark I call him in letters.
+But back to the destruction….  
+It must have been a Thursday, because we left for LA on a Friday, that much I know for sure.  I got up early, around six, and went to serve my time for being a citizen of the United States —jury duty.  It was my first time in a courthouse and I was certainly not to used to that hour of the morning; much like I assumed it was horrid —a half day of exposure to the radiation dangers of white middle class suburban values.  I was bored.  My inner child was beginning to putrefy in the stale smokeless air of the waiting rooms, I felt like sheets of burnt skin must be slowly slipping off my face I felt grotesque and obvious, like I stuck out as the most-likely-to be back of the other side of the room.
+I had hoped perhaps to have a fellow juror to slide off with into a broom closet, but there were no attractive jurors, nor did I catch any broom closets.  The nuts and bolts of democracy were frigid and even asexual.  The halls of justice sported the sophisticated airs of wood veneer and fake marble floors whose undistinguished patterns inhabited a no-man’s-land between linoleum and whatever is just a bit nicer than linoleum.  The architecture was studiously formal in a painful way that only psychiatrists, number theorists, and judges find appealing.  Courts are strange places; they have a sense of doom about them.  You’re accused from the moment you walk in the door regardless of why you might be there; the tribunals of architecture condemn your very presence.  Walking in those doors I got the sense of dread that the great cathedrals of medieval Europe must have inspired in the serf peasants.  The state is the new dominant religion and the court is a place of worship; you don’t just go to jury duty, you serve jury duty; you serve the state and the state has some things they want you to know.  
+They bring juries into the court room to remind even the law abiding citizens of what will happen should they decide to stray out of the neat little square boxes that hold the officially accepted rules about what is permitted and what is not.  It reeks of textbook Freudian repression.  They even put you in a “jury box” either with a straight-faced synchronicity that tapers over into irony or to make sure that the burden of life sinks into your wee little cellular glob.  I’m still unsure if everyone there really believed the crap they feed you in those jury notices about your civic duty or if they were like me, offended at the very concept, but intimidated by the bottom sentence which used the words… failure to comply will result in criminal penalties… The government talks like an abusive spouse —it needs you so that it will have someone around to walk all over and beat the crap out of.  You wouldn’t want the government to get its feelings hurt when no one turns up for the public spankings now would you?  Without you whom the hell would they spank?  The whole show was ludicrous; no one wanted to be there, it was only under the threat of jail that most of us had shoed up there.  Mostly people talked amongst themselves waited irritably, hoping to avoid an OJ trial, bitching about time lost at work or conversely reading and enjoying a break from work.  A few of us, smokers all, congregated outside and swapped stories about our lives, a couple of them looked like me —guilty, as if this was only an observational run through. 
+I could have been doing a thousand things all of them infinitely more interesting than sitting on the patio of a jury call room smoking and listening to stories from a trucker about life on the road.  I kept hoping for that one sexy young juror to come strolling outside but she didn’t.  I’m from LA true, but I just can’t surrender my optimism….  It was a morning steeped in boredom.  I read a book and listened here and there to catch snippets of someone’s life randomly dropping out of the sky like seagull shit in the desert.
+Make the courtroom fun?  That had seemingly never occurred to anyone.  Why not turn it into a burlesque show with a little skin, some singers, and few dirty jokes between trials?  It would be huge.  You could even charge a few bucks at the door and the average citizen would finally have reason to participate in government.  Instead of jails a dominatrix judge could administer spankings and trade her gavel for a paddle.  And of course the stenographer would have to turn into a photographer, which would open up the whole print aspect of the courts —the monthly newsletter for patrons.  From there as word spread it would become a full-fledged magazine with centerfolds, feature interviews and reviews of crimes…. But the stunted pedophilic minds in power will hear of no such thing…entirely unacceptable….why it makes a mockery of the justice system… I will not hear of it!!!  
+Libel to give one a coronary the way it is now.  The whole morning left me feeling strangely violated; some faceless uncontrollable monster had sequestered four hours of my life away from me.  I wanted to sue the judge for making me get up at six in the morning a trauma which doubtless took years off my life in stress and mental anguish, but I let it go… no paddles, no burlesque, no photographer, no show… what’s the point?
+They released me at noon.  I spent the remainder of the day wandering around the beach looking a tide pools and picking up little snails and trying to organize them into juries and try a starfish for sloth, but nothing cooperated the way humans do so I gave up and read a book on the steps to the beach.  I stayed almost until sunset when I caught the last bus into Laguna Beach and had dinner a restaurant where my friend Matt works.
+When I got home I was full and content, wanting only to stretch myself with a short walk and then go to bed, but Dean was at manic pace, it is imperative that we go to Ed’s tonight he must wake up in the city tomorrow he can not take the suburbs anymore….
+“If I see one more rich cunt in a BMW sitting at a green light talking on her cell phone to Erik the Viking workout coach that she is meeting to fuck before going home to her idiotic husband who has spent the day licking his boss’s ass for pocket change, I am going to kill.  This entire fucking town ought to be a toxic waste dump; I was thinking Sil, about that plan I had to take over the world and make Kansas a prison colony… I am relocating the colony here just like that terrible movie that was out a few years ago what was it called?”
+Dean is in a frenzy of blind hatred, the kind of frenzy which all the dead must surrender to occasionally and what’s more he is beginning to get me in a frenzy as well, he feeds off that… “The worst thing is that there is no fucking reason whatsoever for me to be here I hate my job I hate the people rent is too damn expensive and there’s never anything to do but get drunk or high.  The monotony of it is numbing it tears away my flesh….” He looked around exasperated as if we were going to somehow come to his aide but then he just started pacing in silence for bit.  All the sudden he said he was going to Ed’s house right then if I cared to join him.  I went for it and so we drove up there and on the way Dean told a curious story about a Muslim.
+“I was sitting on a bench smoking and reading as usual, and this guy sat next to me.  He works in the mailroom, always says hello, real happy chap, friendly as fuck, in a genuine way.  I suspected he was Muslim, but I had never talked to him.  So he sits down and asks me what I’m reading...I hate that question.  Last week someone stopped me in the hall and asked what Naked Lunch was about..."um.... a guy living in tangier...." week before that I was reading Junky....not sure if anyone is paying attention or doing any math over there could be only a matter of time…  Anyway... I try to get across that Western Lands is Burroughs going through death and meditating on the afterlife myths et cetera while he was nearing the Great Divide himself.  This guy starts laying down some thick rap about Islam, and I was mesmerized.  Their stories are fucking INTENSE.  He laid down this Angel of Death gig that was a definite keeper.  I closed my book and was genuinely enthralled.  Not by what he was saying but by him.  He’s one of those people who, regardless of what they are spouting, give off this haze of education, and inner peace, and wisdom.  Maybe I’m working with numbers too much and my brain is melting.  I keep "waking up" at work.  Wondering where I am and how I got there.  Not unlike realizing that you're dancing on a table because you've had to much Bombay, and politely excusing yourself to the boy's room.  I get stuck in trance like internalization periods that last for hours, sometimes days, and then I snap back into this reality.”
+The freeway roared in the vacuum of silence that Dean left hanging there, as if it were a painting and he was stepping back to admire it for bit, check to make sure it hung straight and true.
+“I had a fucked dream the other night.  Sis and mom and I were living in Texas again, where I grew up and I was walking barefoot outside.  I walked through a stagnant pool of water to avoid a vicious barking dog.  When I got to the house, I lit a cigarette and tied up for a shot.  I saw my skin move.  REALLY move.  I thought I was hallucinating, and it started moving all over.  The stagnant water had some sort of microscopic parasite in it—like a tapeworm with a leech body.  It had seeped through my pours and reproduced and grown.  I ran around the house freaking out, my skin moving in little bumpy wave-like black ripples.  I could feel them crawling under the epidermis.  I stopped suddenly and had an epiphany.  I began kneading my flesh, corralling the parasites to my extremities and forcing them out through the skin.  My skin was shredding like latex paper mache`, and blood burst from the ribbons of flesh, covering my arms and face.  When I had finally gotten the last one out, and crushed it in my hand, I lay back knowing I was in agonizing pain, but only feeling the smooth balance of shock soothing my nervous system, fooling it into feeling okay.  I felt tired, and realized I was bleeding to death.  I didn’t fight, I just slipped away.”
+
+
+Ed apparently had been expecting us as the door was unlocked and there was a note explained that he had run to the store to get beer.  On top of the fridge we found a bottle of scotch bearing my name and bottle of Gin bearing Dean’s, we were well on our way through them before Ed got back. By the time he showed up with the beer it was nearly midnight and things were getting fuzzy.  
+I can hear Ed and Dean talking about the implications of time travel.  I keep slipping into near coma in which I start to turn their dialogue into the inner workings of my own mind.  I am living in a terrible Dostoevskyian land of cross-examination and self-doubt.  Although I know they are not talking about me or even too me I can hear the across the room and I keep thinking that they are.  Th world feels heavy and I sit down in front of the sideways painting and contemplate the endless thick erotic paint that loops and curls its way about the canvas propelling the eye with it inertia, allowing itself to be converted by the viewer into latent energy.  You walk away from it feeling refreshed rejuvenated except that I can’t walk away from it anymore I am too drunk with scotch and the very intoxication of the paint itself; I lie down complete staring up at it floating about in the oily oceans of pigment, vermilion waves crest with whitecaps on a sea of lavender.  The waves grow larger as I move, rippling away from me and then I start to sink as if in quicksand.  I begin to shuffle my arms and feet but that only sank me deeper and I remember that in quicksand one must remain perfectly still.  I lie perfectly still and feel myself slowly slip down into the oil depths, out to the tattered edges of consciousness the ragged glories of existence and individuality bow before the divine circumstances of the universe and all is lost amid a swirling see of alcohol, pigment, dream, hallucination and reality muddled in the roaring deep baritones of Beethoven, Ed’s painting, Van Gogh’s ear, Burroughs' pinky all gathering up in the comic dust to form a cherubic symphony wailing incessantly across the crepuscule of darkness.
+ When I woke up I was still wearing my pants and had somehow or other been dropped face down on the couch.  My head hurt before I moved not good sign.  As I sit up I am gradually aware that I don’t have a hang over.  In fact I am still drunk which cheers me slightly and give me the courage to look around.  Ed is already brewing coffee, he is standing if front of the sink absently scratching his ass, staring into space and looking for all the world like roman gladiator after the battle.  Its then that he notices me and shakes his head.  
+It turned out that I had not passed out I had blacked out, a first for me.  It was unsettling to realize that someone other than the me that is usually me had been me.  Who was this other me?  Where did he come from and what did he want?  Why did he break things and set them on fire?  Was it even a he?  Perhaps it was a she?  The true disappointment is that I didn’t get to meet him.  From what Dean and Ed piece together for me I probably wouldn’t have liked the guy, but it would nevertheless have been nice to meet him since he was hijacking my body.
+It took me two days to fully regain myself, in the interim the weirdness grew, I lounged about all day watching television with Betty; we could both hear it the rumbling of a distant and future overture.  Friday rolled around and they went back up to Ed’s but I stayed behind; I was still feeling sheepish about my behavior and I thought it would be good to do a little recording, to take some time off of life.  I had decide that I would not change a word of what I wrote, I would record the life as it unfolded with entirely too much honesty —record things exactly as they were.  I was trying to write what all my mentors had left out of their books; I was going to fill in the gaps in the cannon of literature.  It is all going to be laid bare for the world, the ideas will become real through seeing and doing, not through the telling…  the word would be flesh as was recommended by another writer.  I sat down Friday night after they had left for LA and I wrote furiously through the night and all the next day, I was Jack Kerouac on a bender, drunk with words they flowed out in rhythm with the river that is life, they cascaded over the boulders of my fingers and tumble underground into keyboard and finally flooding the deltas of white space that the computer had decreed would now serve as my ocean.  I had been writing for almost twenty-four hours solid when the phone rang and the whole perilous structure collapsed in on itself and I looked at the clock.
+.  It was quarter of twelve and I was pretty sure that nothing good would come from answering the phone at that hour.  I stared at it until the machine picked it up.
+“Hello? Sil are you there?”  There was a silence on the other end for a moment and then came a more thoughtful, lonely drawn-out sounding voice, “well if you get this message call me tonight, my roommates are gone and I feel king of unsafe…(there was a pause) I was wondering if you would come over and stay with me… if not at least call.  Okay?  Goodbye.”
+I sat for moment staring at the pattern of plaster on the wall wondering what my will would do with me.  The voice was Amy, my ex-wife whom I had waked out on six months prior.  I stared at the wall and tried to figure out how she could possibly have known that I was here, I smelled the evil artistry of Dean who in moments weakness might have squealed my whereabouts to Hillarie his own little nightmare who would have been sent by Amy to find me.  Women are insidious little creatures and I could see Dean sitting on the edge of his bed with Hillarie on her knees, his cock in her hand… Dean tell me where he is or I’m leaving.  Oh well I’d have done the same.
+Besides all that was irrelevant.  Why not give the ex a good poke?  One last poke and then I’m gone, through with whole sordid affair.  And what a clever little girl, wanting protection, so Amy… she would never have had the courage to admit that she wanted a good fuck and nothing more, with Amy there was always something more, more more more. Not that she was outright lying; the apartment above her had been burglarized the last I was there.  The poor woman had ended up in the barrio after I split.  I would be little more than psychological comfort, both she and I knew that I would be out the window before the door was half open.  She wanted me there for reasons well above and beyond her safety —she wanted sex.  She wanted sex because a) she was horny or b) it was the only substitute she could thing of for the emotional hole I had torn in her heart. 
+I was at a bit of a loss, but not entirely surprised.  I was feeling free and floating in the effervescent vapors of my new freedom and now here was the old, the familiar, like sliding a foot into the comfort of a well worn boot…  But was it a good idea?  I called her back and in her voice I caught it the indeterminable mystery that had always gotten me and always could from the beginning to the end.  The alpha and the omega—the only thing that ever drew me to anyone —the mystical enigma of the unknown.  The familiarity of anything makes it pedestrian and undesirable to me whether it is a place, a person or an emotion.  It was on this point that I realized that Dean too bore the mark, bore a mark; I never told him how profound his words were to me when I read them but it was he who put it best: familiarity breeds contempt.
+It was the contempt for the familiar that had driven me from Amy; it was never anything to do with her, but try as I might I could never sell her on that point.  Whatever it is I can change… those words of desperation that we use when we are in danger of losing our tenuous grasp on the world are the very ones that seal our fate and guarantee that we lose hold.  When things are mysterious they remain perpetual wellsprings from which to draw all hope, dream and fantasy, but the closer in to actual thing I get, the longer I stay in one place, the more familiar I am with a friend the more intimate I am with a lover the less mysterious they become.  Without the mystery I have nothing from which to draw, my existence is not unlike that of the vampire, but unlike the vampire my victims do not die.  I shatter their worlds and they come crawling right back again for more.  I felt sickened by myself, by the fact that I could recognize such a thing, but feel powerless to stop it; worse still was the dawning realization that I didn’t care to stop it, I had no reason to stop it.  My brain squirmed looking for a way out constantly and when Amy gave me one the wheels were already turning.  Like a man trying to fly I felt the words in my head, but what if it doesn’t work and I fell like a rock.  Doubt kills.
+I ended up at Amy’s house twenty minutes later; I tried briefly to resist to see how serious she was and when she offered to come over and pick me so I wouldn’t have to walk I knew there was only one way to go about this.  I walked over so as to not be stuck there and also to give myself time to get right down into the sands and dig a little hole, take a closer look at the fragments of my passing even as they were going by.  What propelled me was something other than what I think of as me, something I no longer considered myself; I was merely along for the ride.  I began to see this temporal me with increasing clarity it seemed to have crawled up from inside and it hung on to edges of reality leaving me to wander in dream and observe form a distance all the beauty that surrounds the dreamer.
+ Amy was in a shiny satin dress that clung to her lithe frame; it was green and made her eyes glow the deep luster of emerald stones.  Her hair was a little bit longer and she had it pulled up behind her head to give unrequited views of the curve of her shoulder as it snaked its way up to her neck.  Her nipples poked out of the thin green material and her lips curled playfully as I walked in the door.  
+I accepted a glass of wine and took a seat on the couch.  It was a Chilean wine, a pinot, light and sweet.  We talked for a while, she told me of a few dates she had been on, how worthless men were in general, asked how I was how was I enjoying myself, did I have any plans?  It was preliminary nonsense to an inevitability of habit, probably mutual fear as much as need, it was to be a construction fuck, the best sex of your life even as the walls are being built up again.  For me the walls would never go up, they never do, I could walk into her house ten years from now and feel as familiar with her as I did at the height of our relationship, but for her they went back up.  She needed to know that she was the only one before she let the guard down and I had hurt her so up they went, slowly at first day by day, week by passing week she moved farther and farther away from me.  I know longer try to fight that emotion, let her go don’t question her is my new mantra.  Amy thought I was cold and callous for being able to break her heart, but she didn’t understand that I did suffer, I suffered far more, I had nowhere to place the blame, I broke my own heart as well.  I had done it before and I was destined to do it again.  She had moved through all the stages of depression that you find in the first chapters of grief psychology.
+First there was anger; my nose took the brunt of that off her closed fist.  Then silence, my favorite stage —denial.  And her we were in surrender where the inevitable is accepted but not yet acted out, and of course there was one yet to come —acceptance.  In surrender you give up on the ghost and live on autopilot, from the rear window of the plane you can see the tragedy and the comedy, and the tragedy in the comedy and occasionally even the comedy in the tragedy.  The rear door opens and from that artificial altitude you can see the surface of convoluted emotion smoothed flat with distance.  We were, for that night, up there together standing on the back of the plane just looking down and admiring the view.  How we got there and where we were going was irrelevant, it was all about the view.  I knew she would call again tomorrow and that would not be good, but for now…
+What a view!  She stopped talking and leaned into gently kiss my lips; she started to pull away, but could not the tantalizing attraction of the unknown came over us both, would it be the same?  That was the mystery which created the inclination keep our lips pressed together, softly at first until the craving appetite of carnality parted them with hunger and by the time our tongues met we were sealed in our fate.  She straddled me on the couch and my hands explored her sphinx-like body as though it were a newfound treasure.  My fingers tugged gently at her nipples and pulled the back of her head, pushing my tongue farther around her mouth.  The tugging became pinching and her hands fumbled at my belt in a frenzy until she had firm hold of my hard cock and she stroked it gently at first and then just held it in a vise grip as my own trailed down her legs and hiked up her dress.  Her legs parted and I twisted my arm to get a finger in her cunt.  She was gushing; I rubbed her smooth hairless cunt, probing my fingers in to the knuckles; it wrapped them up like a closing sea anemone. 
+I pulled the dress off over her head and pushed her up onto the couch as I slid onto the floor.  She squatted and moaned as I went to work on her cunt.  The taste was familiar and called up memories as only taste and smell can.  Infinite desires that spanned far beyond this lifetime into some timeless place where the expression of desire is infinite and perfectly tied to everybody all at once in an ecclesiastic orgasm.  Her cum was dripping of my chin and she pulled me up under her again by tugging my hair.  She licked her cum from my chin as I fingered her some more, she began to gasp into me ear and I felt her cunt contract on my fingers.  She had never come just from my hand before; it empowered me and made my cock rigid as a cement light post.  In one move I impaled her on it, she pushed me back against the couch and began to —what better word than ride?  I lay there with a sense of relaxed enjoyment born out of the certainty that I would not cum until I was ready.
+I wanted to feel every thrust, to feel those warm stretching walls of cunt gripping like a vise, I knew I never would again and I savored it.  I kissed her breasts as they bounced delectably in front of my lips.  I trailed her juices down to her asshole and reached my hand around her to her ass and slid into her puckered hole.  She lifted herself slightly and leaned her head down dragging her lips breathily across my cheek until she bit at my lips and her tongue snaked into my mouth.  I held my hand still and kissed her letting her grind as she raised and lowered herself up and down slowly building momentum.
+She rode me through two orgasms after which I lifted her up and threw her over the arm of the couch.  I slipped it into her with ease and began to fuck her with that intensity where you momentarily forget whether you are trying to please or destroy the cunt.  Her cunt milked at my cock until in was near bursting.  I watched the swing of her ample breasts as her body thrust back to meet me.
+“Don't cum...!…I want to feel it in my ass”
+This was a new idea, not one I was all the keen on, but she looked back at me with a expression of lust so primeval and inhuman that I could see her no longer as the wounded animal that lashed out two weeks ago and more like the whole person that knew what she wanted and was going to get it however she pleased.  I pulled out and tongued her asshole teasing her to moans and making her beg.  She got up and ran to the bathroom, returning with jar of Vaseline.  She lay down on her stomach and smeared Vaseline on her ass, working it in with her fingers.
+“Ughuuuuuhhuhuhhhhh… you know you want my ass….  I was masturbating the other day and I started fucking myself in the ass with that dildo you gave me [I couldn’t just leave her you understand] and I’ve been wanting to feel your cock ever since.”  She smiled slyly at me.
+The veins in my cock were bulging like I had never seen them before.  I climbed on top of her and slowly, gently as I could ease myself into her ass while she spread her cheeks.  I watched her face wince at first and then relax.  Soon I had a good rhythm going and Amy came again twitching violently and screaming.  I exploded in her ass and collapsed onto her back.  After a while I propped myself up and pushed at her asshole; I was fascinated by the squishing sounds of my cum oozing and dribbling out of her ass and the way it refused to mix with Vaseline.
+I collapsed into a chair panting, but my mind was reeled about the room.  I was exhausted but had never felt so alive, my only thought was to escape her and get out into the streets into the pulse of life, to go and go and go and never look back, but Amy rolled over and begged me to make her come again.  I rolled her over and dove into her cunt trying to morph my tongue into an electric eel. 
+ Later we lay for a while in silence and smoked a cigarette.  I was fucked out, but I couldn’t help commenting on the candles.  The place was lit up like a Catholic Church, a voodoo ceremony; candles on the coffee table, the end table, the wall, even some hanging from the ceiling suspended in gnarled balls of wire that Amy had bent and twisted for the purpose.  
+“Why is it that in movies when ever white people start to have sex candles appear and everything gets soft lighting and feels like a hallmark greeting card?”
+She laughed.  “Was I trying to hard?”
+“Absolutely.”
+“Well thanks for humoring me….”  She got up and more cum slipped out her ass and landed on the floor.  “Oh my god! Elsa will kill me if we stain this carpet,” and she ran off to get a towel and clean herself up.  I heard running water and her yelling form the bathroom, “Jesus you haven’t gotten laid in a while…. There's a ton of cum up my ass.”  
+“Fuck You!”  But it was true.  After a minute I walked in, “let me know what it feels like next time you take a shit.”  She was sitting on the toilet wiping the Vaseline off, cum was dribbling slowing into the toilet.  I went into the kitchen to clean myself.  I had the water running and I was studying my cock intently noticing that it was darker in tone after sex than before sex, but it didn’t wash off so I knew it wasn’t shit.   I chalked it up to blood circulation.  As I was turning it around and twisting it in knots Elsa, Amy’s roommate walked in the kitchen behind me.  Apparently she had been here the whole time in her room.  I naturally assumed that she had been gone otherwise Amy wouldn’t have fucked me in the living room, but as I turned off the sink and went to grab the dishtowel I saw her.  Her face had a wide-eyed look of wonder and I froze like a deer.  We stood there staring at each other in absolute silence for a full minute and then Amy came charging around the corner with a wineglass in each hand and nearly sent Elsa flying.  They both yelped and screamed and then Amy started laughing uncontrollably rolling on the floor still holding the glasses up off the ground.  It was so ridiculous that I had to laugh in spite of myself.  The last time I had been over, Amy had tried to get me to seduce Elsa with her.  I forget why we never went through with it that night, but I do know that this was not exactly how we had planned it.  The absurdity of it made me burst out laughing; Amy and I were rolling on the floor and Elsa just stood there in shock for a while.  And then non-plused as a kitten she strode over grabbed the wine and a glass and poured it and walked off to her bedroom.  Amy and I looked at each other thinking perhaps she was genuinely offended.
+“Great, now you freaked her out…”  Amy knocked on her bedroom door softly and then slipped inside.  I hunted through their refrigerator looking for something to eat.  I found an apple and hunk of Gouda cheese, which I took out to the patio, along with the bottle of wine and a glass.  The patio was small and choked full of plants.  Most of them were mine or had been mine before I split for San Francisco; it seemed like ages ago that Amy and I had split up and we weren’t even divorced yet.  The ivy was wilting she had it in direct sunlight; I fondled the brittle leaves.  The flowering plants were doing much better, the snapdragons were getting so tall they could be seen from the other side of the fence.  They were slender explosions of red and purple jutting out of the moss lined baskets I had built.  I sat on the couch and lit a cigarette.  I had to admit that this patio was better than our other one and for some reason that irked me.  There were more plants more candles; it was more….  I gave up.  I thought I heard the sound of running water and I figured that someone was in the shower.  It seemed fairly obvious to me that we were all going to have sex at some point; it hung in the air like stale smoke.  It was inevitable.  I propped my feet up on the table and sat back to enjoy.  I left the details of the scenario to Amy; it was after all her house.  I was a guest, little more than a friendly cock at this point.  I heard a murmuring sound and looked up, there was Amy dripping wet standing in the frame of the sliding door, “would you like to join us in the shower?”
+“Sure.”  This is where the trouble starts I thought to myself, but I went anyway and there was Elsa standing under the warm water.  She was shorter than Amy and thinner, her breasts were bigger though and she had shiny black hair that clung to her neck in strands.  I got in and Amy followed, Amy and I kissed for a while and then she pulled away and pushed me toward Elsa who kissed me hesitantly at first and then as if giving in to something unseen she reached both arms around my neck and tried to chew my lips off.   Then the girls kissed and fondled each other softly while I stood under the water.
+“Stop hogging the water come here…” Amy pulled me over to them and the three of us kissed at the same time as best we could, but by then the water was running cold and we got out to dry off.  I wrapped a towel around my waist and went back to the kitchen to see about more food.  Once I start eating late at night its hard to stop, this time I set about to make a fruit shake out of frozen packaged peaches and blueberries.  Elsa came in to see what I was up to, she was wearing only a silk bathrobe and looked at my coyly.
+“Would you like to dance?”  She walked over casually and took the towel off my waits.  I was already hard and she just stood there for a moment fondling my prick.
+Elsa turned up the stereo and went outside onto the patio dragging me by the cock.  The fenced enclosure was small but we didn’t really dance we just kind of turned to the soft tones of a mysterious violin.  It warped out the screen and wrapped our arms lazily about as we explored each other’s bodies.  She pulled me into her smashing her breasts against my chest, grinding her pubic hair into mine and nibbling at my neck.  I circled around sliding a finger down the crack of her ass and stroking her cunt from behind.  Amy came outside and sat on the couch and lit a cigarette.  She exhaled and smiled at me.  She twisted her mouth up into a sly grin and spread her legs and began stroking her cunt and watching us.  Every time my back was to her Elsa would fondle my ass, then she went to my cock.  She seemed to be testing Amy to see how far she could go.  My cock was ridged again by now and stabbing her in the stomach.  She reached down and pointed it under her, rubbing it across her cunt and mashing at her clitoris.  Without a word she dropped on her knees and popped it in her mouth.  I was standing sideways to Amy and I saw that she was fucking her pussy with two fingers and gently patting her clit with her other hand while staring intently at Elsa’s head bobbing up and down on my cock.  I reached down and stroked Elsa’s head, gently pushing my cock further into her mouth.
+“Ya, fuck her in the mouth,” Amy purred and Elsa’s murmurs tickled at the hair on my balls.  I was feeling a bit too good and eased out of her mouth.
+“Why don’t you two dance for a minute?  I need a cigarette.”  I sat down on the couch and lit one.  They never even really danced.  Amy walked up and Elsa fairly seized her head and started tearing at her lips.  Amy pulled herself away.
+“You want me bad don’t you?”
+“Yessss….”
+She pushed her down to her knees and lifted one leg over her shoulder bearing her cunt down on her face.  I had sat on that same couch a million times when we were married and never had a cigarette tasted so good.  An incongruous thought came to me as I leaned forward for the ashtray, why hadn’t we done this more often?  In fact why didn’t everyone do this more often?  Surely this was better than watching television?  It was definitely better than talking.  It occurred to me that this felt natural, that in fact every thing I had ever done that was looked down upon or judged to be morally reprehensible felt natural.  I was a natural sinner; I was even good at it I realized.  This was my calling.  I would be a professional sinner; I would apply to the pope for a position in his majesty’s satanic army.  I would stand up and be the ting toward which all catholic hatred could be directed and then I would go the presidents of all the countries of the earth and I would give them the very image of debauchery and self-slaughter until all hatred was focused on me. Then I figured I would fuck it out.  Fuck until it was all dispersed and there was finally peace on earth.  Debauchery will cure everything I thought.  It was a novel approach.
+I leaned back and glanced around; the place was a jungle.  Plants in pots on the walls on the table, and even in metal stands on either side of the couch.  I stared laughing because it was just like the candles.  Amy came over leading Elsa by the hand.  When I laughed she bent over and reached between her legs spreading her swollen red cunt lips and wiggling her ass at me.  I pulled her down on me and entered her as she wiggled about on my cock.
+Elsa stood next to us on the couch and I stroked her fur with one hand while pinching Amy’s nipple with the other.  Elsa was moaning low and she started to move around until she was in front of us half straddling the coffee table.  I leaned Amy to the side and pressed my tongue into Elsa’s cunt.  Pulled back savoring the taste of her cunt.  It was bittersweet, more like wine to Amy’s nectarine fruit flavor.  Amy’s was better, but Elsa’s was foreign.  There was something about Amy’s cunt and the way it tasted that made the back of my throat salivate.  She was wiggling on my fingers and now I felt Amy’s hand furrowing through her bush.  I moved my away to allow her to continue and I began to slowly lift Amy up and down on my cock.  Amy leaned back onto of me so that I was pressed up against the couch.  Everywhere I put my hand there were tits and nipples and hungry mouths laughing and biting playfully at my finger.  Then Amy began to rub at her clit and occasionally my balls kissing Elsa frantically and then she came.  She went off like a bomb tensing and jerking as if invisible forces kicked her.  She used to scare me when she came jerking and thrashing about like that.  She hung on the Elsa’s lip and never stopped fingering her.  
+“I need to be fucked,” she moaned to Amy. Amy nodded and stood up.
+Elsa straddled me facing me and Amy fed my cock into her cunt, coated her fingers in juice and then stepped back and licked them clean.  Elsa wasted no time and fucked me like a hellion, digging her nails in and snarling at me.  I pounded upwards to meet her frantic rhythm.  He cunt was long and hotter than Amy’s; I could feel my balls slapping up and down out of control.
+“You like that don’t you?  You like getting fucked hard don’t you.”  Amy pulled Elsa’s hair and snarled at her ear.  Elsa grabbed widely at Amy and came with little muffled cries; I could feel her cunt tightening in silken spasms.  By now Amy was worked up and again and I still hadn’t cum so we moved back into the living room and they spread out a bedspread and some pillows.
+“Let’s do something together,” I suggested and they went about arranging themselves in a sixty-nine position.  After some debate with myself I decided I wanted to cum in Elsa. I maneuvered myself behind her on my knees straddling Amy’s head.  Amy licked at Elsa’s clit and my balls and I rammed her in deep slow strokes while she leaned over and ate Amy out.  After a minute Elsa announced that she was cumming and I actually felt the juice pouring out of her cunt down my balls and onto Amy’s face.  Amy must have seen my balls tighten because she grabbed me buy the base of the cock and pushed Elsa forward off of me.  She sat up and urged me to lean back.  I did and the two of them went to work on me.  Amy kissed me for while; her face was covered in Elsa’s cream and was more of a cunt than a mouth.  Elsa was licking my balls, which by now were on the verge of pain, if I didn’t cum soon I was worried that I might never be able to cum again.  Amy leaned into my ear and whispered, “I want you to cum on her face, on both our face’s.”  And she went down with Elsa and began sucking on me.  The licked and sucked and nibbled and kissed each other with my cock between there lips.  Finally I came.  I came so hard I got tunnel vision and arched my back off the ground.  I stayed like that forever it seemed.  It felt natural, I wasn’t even aware I had arched off the ground until my leg threatened to cramp and I collapsed down.  I lifted my head in time to see them licking my cum off each other’s face’s giggling like schoolgirls.
+We all lay around completely fucked out.  We had some more wine, and some cigarettes.  I laid them both out on the couch and inspected the differences between their cunts.  Amy’s cunt had thick lips that sealed it up like a sea anemone while Elsa’s was wider with little lips that stuck out like flaps.  They were same little flaps of skin that stuck apart with her cum and gave a slutty well-fucked honest look to her cunt.  I told her it was beautiful.  Amy leaned over to look at her with me and it wasn’t long before we were both eating her out and she came again and then she watched exhausted, as Amy bounced up and down on my cock until she came.
+Around four we all climbed into Amy’s bed and I lay between them feigning sleep.  Jut after I heard the familiar breathing of Amy in deep sleep, Elsa grabbed at my cock and whispered that she wanted me to fuck her again nice and slowly from behind.  I tried to protest.  I was tired, but my cock was hard in no time and she feed it into her cunt.  It was still wet from earlier.  We swayed gently fucking for a long time and then I heard her gasping she came again and rolled her head around to face me.
+“Oh cum in me, please cum in me I wanna feel it squirting…”  
+I pulled out of her cunt and nudged at her ass.
+“Oh yes fuck my ass… oh my god…ouch…uuugh....yes… god…” And somewhere in the middle I came.
+We lay in silence for a while and then out of nowhere Else blurted out in whispers and gasps, “oh god that was amazing!  I saw stars and right then you came and I felt stars shooting into my ass…I want you to fuck me again sometime… just you… “  She stopped and stroked my face, “you will won’t you?  How about tomorrow?  Amy will be gone, “god I must fuck you again…”
+“Yes yes, okay we will fuck again.”  I started giggling she was so adamant about it.  She rolled over and I lay on my back staring at the ceiling.  Elsa kissed me and fell asleep with her head on my chest. The clock read 6:23 and I still wasn’t asleep. They were both purring softly and had been for some time.  I was bursting with energy and honesty; I felt expansive, like I was floating, orbiting the moon. I had been lying there for a while just staring at the rough plaster ceiling, it’s texture seemed to resemble the surface of the moon.  I lay there a minute more orbiting the lunar surface and then gently without waking her, I eased myself out from under Elsa and climbed over Amy.  I went in the living room and got dressed.  The house smelled warm and organic.  The windows were fogged over and condensation was forming on them.  The sun was not yet up but the sky was already glowing a soft pale blue color.  I went in and kissed both of them.  I slipped out and locked the door behind me  
+I smoked a cigarette walking towards Dean’s house, but a donut shop seduced me and I sat in the silent morning air outside eating a blueberry filled donut covered in powdered sugar and dripping filling.  It stands out as a pregnant moment stopped a lot to luxuriate in the good fortune that seems to follow me around.  I was living in a kaleidoscope of realities that swirled with all the vibrancy and color of my youth, but it was alive now, here, in this moment, fairly bursting out of my chest.  I collapsed on the couch that doubled as my bed and fell into a deep coma like sleep.  
+I dreamed a radio broadcast of unknown origins pilling down the universes own information superhighway at a genetic tilt, coming across the galaxy without static pure unadulterated reception of signal and through it all the fragment of ash kept falling, fragments of history written on burnt paper and cast about in a hurricane of now.  Fragments of falling ash. Fragments of ash falling.  White washed ceilings hanging so ominous....  Hallucination of bubble-headed figures crawling like the Michelin Man across an indescribable mountain of tires.  Motels Motels Motels Whiskey Bourbon.  Tow truck non-ordinary state of reality precludes a state of reality that something is real.  Point at the autistic manwomanchild  Autistic man pointing at you laughing unable to fathom how your brain functions and quite self-righteously you cling to its definitions.  Must delineate between abnormality and those of us who UNDERSTAND.... The Human Virus breeding like rats unconsciously conscious and aware of our disorganization. Gas Station Cold Fusion dreams of the Anarchist are breeding in the minds of the oilmen who don’t want to loose their stranglehold of reality.  Fragments of Ash falling, the continual settling of dust weighing down humanity and the French Maid masturbates discreetly in the next room.  You need her to keep the dust off your mortal coil spring.  Rebirth mythology.  Mythology of reality.  We must distinguish between what will be defined as sane and what shall be referred to as insanity.  Kevlar definitions constructed to make a better shampoo seem like a logical item on which to squander your paperbacked slavery bills.  After all these years Tide still gets your socks whiter Its a wonder that they aren’t transparent by now...that your brain retarded in its development that evolution had not anticipated the advent of the opposable thumb the unopposable domination of the thumb leading to and insect superiority of mating rituals stolen from a textbook on damselflies darning needles sewing shut your lips, mind atrophy. Weber's White Race Enriched for Superiority Scorched earth campaigns raining Ash. Shit from the sky.  Tax man came for your baby in exchange for unpaid balance.  You understand.  Nothing Personal Just doing our job.  Same as the next guy.  From Auzwich on down the line.  Didn’t make the rules.  Sorry. We perfected them.  There are no innocents in a world of free will.  You don’t have to survive at the expense of others.  You could die with puncture wounds in your hands and others would create a new mythology strange irony would find another with holes in his hands unwilling to accept cockroach mentalities.  You want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman but he lives on in quiet cafes centralsouthamerica not so free not all the communists have been shot yet Your mistook misunderstood missed the lesson in the situation that unfolded  Dr. of dialectic excuses you want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman Hitler killed everybody's body only taking orders you understand just doing my job from Independence on down the line. It was a sad money grubbing hunter gather up his children and thank his gods they are his and he their god behold I have come to tell you that everything you know is wrong stop doing your job it is not yours see Hitler in your mind you want him dead but he's not he lives on buried under restraint in everyone's mind.  Only taking orders you understand.  Didn’t have a CHOICE.  Got a family to feed. Radio crackle.  Pop.  Hiss. Silence.  End transmission.
+
+
+
+I didn’t wake up until five in the evening.  I was just sitting up and lighting a cigarette when Dean burst through the door laughing.
+“Jesus, what happened to you,” Dean let his bag fall to the floor and stared at me with a questioning look.
+“I don’t really know… I think I went over to Amy’s and fucked her and her roommate for a really long time, but I might have dreamed it.  Dean walked over threw my bedding off the couch and sat down.  Then he sniffed and then he leaned in and sniffed at my face.
+“No my friend I think that whatever you think you remember most definitely happened.”  He laughed and lit a cigarette.  “Go take a shower man we’re going to the Knight to have a drink, I got some news for you and I want to hear all about your weekend….”  In the shower I tried to snap the trance state I had awoken in but even the water failed to cut through.  I felt like a was stoned, but I hadn’t smoked anything.
+I was feeling muted, as if I did not exist at all, but was merely a spectral figure watching over the chaos and insanity of this tiny little rock spinning about a nearly equally tiny burning rock.  I observed everything just as it was without subjecting it to my own opinions, beliefs and feeble desires.  It followed me to the car and all the way to the Little Knight.  In the parking lot I got out and saw two lithe girls stumbling drunkenly toward their car; something about them captured me and I stared at them intently.  The one that seemed to be more sober looked over and smiled, “Hi, don’t worry I’m sober…”
+“I’m not!”  Gurgled her friend who hiccuped and laughed stumbling and lurching forward.  They booth giggled insanely and tried to unlock there car.  I went inside with Dean and we ducked into the restroom.  I stood over the bathroom sink examining myself in the mirror splashing a little water on my face. 
+It came like lightning bolt that you never see you only hear the rippling crash of thunder; I was alive.  It was that simple.  There was no other thing that mattered at all. .  I snapped out of it and floated back down to my body, my life and my animal desires. I sighed and Dean came out of the stall and scrutinized my reflection in the mirror
+“Are you okay man?  You’re not on anything are you?”
+“No no, I feel fine now; come on I’ll tell you all about it.”
+Bruno, our favorite bartender was working. Bruno had the most awe inspiring memory I have ever witnessed.  He greeted you like Odysseus returning every time you walked through the door.  He also had a remarkable power to ‘exaggerate’ as he called it (lie as the rest of us called it); he exaggerated everything, the very air that surrounded him.  He looked more than anything, like Homer Simpson, but her claimed to be Italian, which was at least substantiated by his full name Anthony Luigi Bruno.  The Little Knight was a hole in the wall, tucked between a dry cleaners and a driveway, but it had heart, it had an enormous carnivore heart that spun around like lions and roared with lights, alcohol soaked floors and cigarette smoke.  Bruno brought out the atmosphere an Italian family reunion.  Everyone always felt welcome and loved when Bruno was working, no matter how pathetic their lives might have been during the day they were all on the same level playing field when Bruno was around.  He should have been a cult leader or spiritual adviser, but this is the twenty-first century and there are no spiritual advisers there are bartenders.
+“Dean! Sil!” He fairly jumped over the bar.  “How have you been?” 
+“Since last weekend?”  Dean has the same arrogant self-mocking sense of humor that I do.  “You know… ‘nother week, ‘nother check and we come here to spend it!”
+“That’s why I love you guys; did I ever tell you that?  I love you guys!”  He grabbed us by the shoulders and shook us with all his Italian might.  He leaned back over the bar and took off his shirt exposing his most telling homer Simpson trait —his enormous belly.  “Watch this…”
+The Knight had this pole in the middle of it, but the ceiling was too low to actually stand on the bar so Bruno jumped up and kind of crouched his back down so that his already enormous gut looked even bigger.  “Hey ladies!”  He hovered over two girls sitting at the bar and began to pole dance to the music from the jukebox.  Catcalls from the locals drown out whatever the girls were trying to say and several patrons ran up to stuff money in Bruno’s pants.  He hammed it up flipping his hair and shimmying his enormous Santa belly around the pole.  His pants were falling down to plumber level and I knew we weren’t getting beer any time soon.  Dean and I joined Betty in the corner booth by the door.  Cached safely with my back to the wall I settled into watch the familiar show.
+Bruno was now running up and down the bar flexing his muscles; he had stuffed enormous wrenches, screw drivers, and other tools of the plumbers’ trade into his belt loop and down his pants.  He squatted in front of a forty-year-old businesswoman and shoved his three exposed inches of ass crack in her face and circle-swooshed it around like a Vegas showgirl.  She roared with laughter and tucked a five spot into his crack.  He took off down the bar to clean up on the drunken thirty-something’s that had never seen such “hilarious antics.”  Bruno was a one of kind; he was the only person I know that could dance so badly, stick pretzels into his gums like fangs, pull his pants down like a plumber and make money while he was at it.  
+I deeply admired him for that.  It wasn’t something you see everyday, but eventually the act got old (drunks have a short attention span) and Bruno came over to the table to see what we wanted.
+ “Gentlemen,” He screwed up his expression to a face of mock seriousness, “what flavor will you be having this evening?”  He stood there waiting, stripped to the waste pants slung low halfway down his ass with two bread stick fangs hanging out of his mouth.
+“Guinness,” came out of Dean and I in unison.  An Irishman would have wept, but Bruno, being Italian only smiled and the bread sticks fell to the floor.  He frowned and Dean and I burst out laughing.  He went off to pour and I tried in vain to explain what had happened to me while Dean was gone.  But there were no words, that was the overwhelming thing that pulled me around and around as I wrestled with it; there was of course the story the physical account you might say but there was no way to wrap up the emotional/mental account, the underlying thing that I was trying to reach out and give to them remained mysteriously buried under the heavy noise of concrete silence.  Somewhere near the edges of what is here and now and what is always and forever there comes in the grips of eternity a feeling so exhilarating and blinding that it transcends all language all communication. 
+Dean listened intently but I felt sure that I was inarticulate and confused when inside I was bursting with clarity.  In my reverie I experience extreme chest pains; I felt as if life itself whatever it might be god… dog… you name it… was pouring right through me like Shaterack Meshak and abandego.  I stood in the fire and was untouched and yet there was nothing that could be said to describe it.  Just when I felt on the brink of madness and isolation Dean interrupted me with a story of William Burroughs, the last ‘old man of the mountain.’
+“That sounds a lot like The Western Lands… the sort of middle ground between life and death to which mystics and all character of that sort are always propelled….  The western lands where everything is unwritten, unwritable even, quite a treacherous place I would imagine.  You ought to read the Tibetan Book of Dead, see if that rings your bell a bit….”
+“Ya?  See the supremely frustrating thing is that I feel like I saw a cure for all that ails us… all the worlds problems were solved from where I was… beyond good and evil, but not philosophically; vitally… damn I’m at a loss for words again….  But I will tell you one thing; I can’t stay here anymore… I appreciate you putting me up and all, but I have to keep moving… what is going through my head is taking over my life, it is the supreme and indeed the only important thing that has ever happened to me.  It keeps saying move move move; sitting still is going to drive me mad.  Even writing it out on paper, writing a book is futile… this is something entirely separate… this is art that has to be lived to understand it….”  And once again I grew drunk without liquor, swirling the clouds of inception circling with Hesse’s eagle and the swooping brown pelicans of literature, pouches heavy with something new, something fresh which must be shat from on high to land with a dull splatter that covers the earth with a new freshness a new fecundity from which new life could spring, new wells could be draw, new myths created, new words invented new dreams, new ideas, new art forms that would blend seamlessly with old, taking there place in the long infinite line of creation
+Dean smiled at me.  “Its funny you should mention that…” 
+But I ignored him, I had worked myself into a frenzy and I got drunk on the words, on the bear, on the ideas.  “What we ought to do my friend is to light out for the territories.  We ought to do those things that living people —I mean people that are alive and eager to go about the business of living — do.  They sure as fuck don’t hang around here I spent all weekend watching the scurrying rats running from hole to hole and I just about can’t take it anymore.  I am bursting I am alive, I am that one little thistle that turns green after the rain on an abandoned lot.  And you, look at you, what the fuck is wrong with you?  You know better than to go showing up at some job every day —like it matters in the grand scheme of things!  We are monkeys and yet all we do is mimic the rat on the wheel or the ceaseless activity of the worker ant… to serve a queen?  What we ought to be; what we ought to be concerned with is something real… something of value that extends beyond this barren womb… this business capital of humanity.  Even the landscape is mostly boring and drab —except by the coast.  What is the rest of this place?  Mediocre rolling hills that are brown from lack of rain three quarters of the year….  The whole place is so sterile there aren’t even any animals running amuck….  This place —these people—all of them— are beyond hope and even if they weren’t you and I are hardly the savior type…. we look out for ourselves and those that come to us… we don’t go looking for help it comes to us don’t you see?  Its coming to us it’s drawing us away from here away away away!  We will be embarking on a radical change and no matter if we should end up destitute selling children in the back alleys of Rumanian because no matter what might possible happen it will at least not be this.  This is nothing this is a static oasis on the edge of desolate gasoline holocaust.”
+I was exuding enough enthusiasm to power a small city and the Guinness was the only thing keeping me in line. I watched it spread around the table first to Dean who began to launch a thousand thoughts much as I had done silently in the pool.  We talked of Europe and South America with such enthusiasm that listeners would have been shocked to hear that neither of us had ever been there.  We walked the dusty camel choked streets of Morocco and took the Marrakech express across the desert and then ported ourselves to the coast and caught freighters back to Brazil to sail up the Amazon. We had splendid adventures and our table was bursting with a bubbling exuberance that lit up the bar like a rocket ship.  Soon the place was packed and we were hemmed in to the table by a wall of drinkers willing to stand for the privilege.  I sat up on the back of the booth and had a look around.  Dean used the break in conversation to leap up on the table and yell for more beer.  As heads turned to see the face of the roaring noise that took the bartender away from their own precious little drinks Dean found himself with an audience.
+“Come on Bruno!  You know tomorrow is meaningless to now!  We’re here, right now and we have to live here right fucking now!  I’m not going to work tomorrow because it’s never going to be tomorrow and I don’t want the things I have to pay for today.  Every moment of everyday is only one thing —now.  What the fuck are you people looking at?  If I could be anywhere doing anything why would I be here?  Do you realize the odds stacked against me?  Against you? The sheer probability of any of this ever occurring, let alone occurring like this, in this exact fashion, at this exact time, in this exact bar?  But here we are… what can you say beyond that?  You’re going to pass out tonight and happily assume in the seething cesspool of your unconscious that you will wake up again tomorrow, but the odds are equally against you…”
+At this point in his ranting Dean wandered off into Quantum physics, Astrology and Chaos math.  Most of the drunks were lost before that and the ones that weren’t raised their glasses and got lost rather quickly, but Dean had tapped into something and soon we had new friends.
+Cristof, who turned out to be from Rumania, and Charles who could have been from anywhere outside the general atmosphere of earth, bought us round after round of expensive whiskey.  Cristof said Dean’s speech was, as he put it, “the only intelligent thing I’ve ever heard an American say.”
+Soon there were girls and the world took on a kaleidoscope quality.  Time passed as a jerky black and white slideshow, moments were projected onto a screen and just as I was scrutinizing them they were gone replaced by another that seemed out of order.  The world got jumbled rather quickly as if my proverbial house of cards was sort of collapsing rather harmlessly about me.  I was kissing and pawing roughly at a girl from Arizona.  She fairly dragged me with her hand on my collar into the women’s restroom where I threw her against the floral print walls, lifted her skirt and slipped it in roughly and drunkenly.  She moaned heavy in my ear but I was beyond caring about her, she was merely a vessel through which I was vainly trying to propel myself into the full stream of life, the raging river….  I came hard seeing stars and then left it slide out, tore off the condom threw it in the toilet and ducked out the back door with lipstick still smeared on my face.
+Dean drove home and it was in the car that he turned around said, “by the way, I forgot to mention this back at the bar… we kept getting sidetracked… hey did you fuck that girl back there?”
+“Yes,” I slurred, “but what ere you going to tell me?”
+“Oh, I’m moving to Vegas day after tomorrow… you want to come?  We can stay with my mom for a while, 'til something cheap comes up….”
+I was too drunk to fully comprehend what he had said.  All I heard was Vegas and mom, I fell asleep convinced that we were going to Vegas to visit there mom sometimes soon.  
+
+The next day I woke up and Dean was packing up his room.  He had the entire thing down to a box of books, a suitcase of clothes and trash bag of miscellania.
+“So what’s the story again?  We’re moving to Vegas I take it?”
+“Ya,” Dean set his things by the door and lit a cigarette.  “You still up for it?”
+“The question is more ‘is your mom up for me?’”
+“You know Rachel; she loves rounding up the strays and setting them on the path to righteousness…”  We laughed. And I figured what the hell.  
+“You already packed up?  That couldn’t have taken more than five minutes what the hell’d you do if for at eleven in the morning on your day off?”
+“I have less than twenty four hours to seduce Kim, finally give into Kala, and then fuck the shit out of Monique and finish it off with Corey because she doesn’t care if I’m fucked out… she’d fuck my lifeless corpse I think.”
+“Yes she probably would.”  I felt bad for Corey though because while she wasn’t in love with him she did care about him in that strange concerned abstract way that only women can care.  It may not bother her that he fucked everything he could get his hands on, but I think it did bother her that to think that he thought of her more as a fuck than a friend.  “They got any friends you can set me up with?”
+“There is this one girl… Jen… friend of Monique's… she’s been wanting to get in with me…maybe Monique too… anyway she’d go for you.  You can have her…she’s got great tits, but I can’t talk to her long enough to get her naked.”
+“Give her a call…”
+Dean went off to try and seduce Kim over lunch, but he called and told Monique that he and I were coming over and that Jen should join us all.  With a few hours to myself I figured to go see a movie and get some breakfast.  I wandered down to the coffeehouse where all the hipster art kids hang out.  The place was a refurbished storage cellar with yellow-gray walls and a scattering of benches and tables.  It was windowless and stale like most of the people it held captive.  I tried to get a plant to grow down here a few years ago before but it didn't work; I forgot about heliotropism-nothing grows in darkness.  A botany student who watched me try in vain to keep the poor ivy plant alive explained it to me in graphic detail; he was condescending like a scientists.  Everything needs sunlight in one way or another.  The kids that hung out in the cellar were bleached souls, burned by magic.  Burned by money, by law, by a culture designed to seductively lull them into a sleep state of pacified stupidity where they could be exploited as a labor source of the robber barons of Washington.  I don't think most of them were aware of that though which gave me comfort because knowledge is paralyzing and without it maybe a few of them would stumble blindly out of the cave and into the sunlight.
+	I got a cup and sat in the corner for while smoking a cigarette and watching a genetic reproduction of Ginsberg scrutinize the art on the walls.  I wished I had on three-piece suit or a football jersey so we could have played beat generation dress-up, but I didn’t and he would never have seen the humor in it anyway. I contented myself to a cup of rich dark coffee and apiece oil saturated and extra gooey coffeecake.  It was wonderful but I needed more.  I approached the Ginsberg guy cold and laid it on him about selling my art to support myself hoping to his a sympathetic nerve that led to mommy and daddy’s money.  He made we tell him all about what it was that I did and I thrust some tattered napkins under his nose and pulled them away before he could get too much into the meaning of the scribbles I talked circles around him once I realized that all it would take would be for him to feel inferior.  Charity is always an inferiority complex —here you take this you need it more than I do… if I thought he had earned the money I might have felt bad, but i still would have taken it, and I did. Leaving with his five spot I went to get a sandwich at the donut shop on Newport Boulevard.  It was an enormous sandwich coated in sweet vinegar and oil, dripping mayonnaise the constancy of slightly thinned-paint off the long strands of lettuce and delicately coated wafer-thin turkey breast that curled up and seemed to leap down my throat.  I washed the whole operation down with a glass of ice water.  When you're hungry the whole world is edible.  And the minute I had the stomach taken care of I lapsed back into reverie trying to piece together why it was that I was going to Vegas.  The main thing seemed to be that Dean was going.  I thought I ought to pay a visit to the folks since they still thought I was married and just working in San Fran for a while.  They were suitably alarmed when I laid it out honestly but I did with the firm conviction of one who knows he is right, but not why.  For now I said I was winging it and nothing more.  They gave me a hundred when left said to eat with it.  They were always worried that I lived by not eating, but the reality was closer to my grandfather who was fond of saying after a meal so we eat… we eat again… we may not do much, but boy can we eat….
+	Dean was pacing by the time I walked up the steps.  "Come on Sil I’m trying to do you a favor here pass one you’re way and you have the gall to be late?”  I told him I didn’t give a shit one way or the other, that he should have gone without me, but he wouldn’t hear of it, he was one some Herculean mission and had to have a guide for this little part of the test.  He wasn’t just fucking these girls he was lining out some Greek sized life for a day.  He had succeeded with both of the ones that morning; Kim had been to drunk for much but when he finally gave it Kala she was wildcat.  We got to Monique’s house in time for dinner, but there was no talk of food; in fact there was really no talk at all.  We walked in on them sitting watching television and then snap off went the TV Monique jumped up and grabbed Dean by the hand dragging him to the bedroom.  The door slammed behind them and was left still standing in the entryway front door open behind me, staring at Jen.  Jen was medium height with dark hair and huge tits.  She smiled at me and I closed the door.  After a few line of talk she reached calmly into my pants and pulled out my cock.  She sucked and licked and bit at it until I was hard and then she stood up tore off her shirt and pants and sat on my lap.  I mauled at her nipples for while squeezing her breasts in my hand.  They were giant and weighty, things that demanded proper handling they sloshed in my hands.
+	She pulled my shirt over my head and then pushed me back and pulled off my pants.  I was expecting her to crawl up on top of me, most women go straight to the top when there’s no emotion around, but Jen didn’t she climbed on the couch doggie style and said, “hurry and fuck me… I have to go soon.”
+	It was an odd way to put it.  I felt like I was mounting a dead horse in bad western porno, it was a job at that point, a duty that I had been asked to serve.  But of course once I had it in I forgot all about her and she forgot about me and the situation was no longer there.  We were just fucking.  We went at it like animals and suddenly I understood why she wanted it that way.  I could feel the heat of her cunt but I couldn’t see her face, it was less like we were fucking than we were masturbating together.  My hands were on her hips pumping her back and forth; I could feel the leaden texture of her skin.  My hips moved like pistons, cold mechanical.  My own body was strange foreign as if it were, a shell containing something much messier, more out of control; she rolled around on my cock so that she was tits up with her legs over my shoulders and I rammed her like that for a good while before she exhibited unusual hand gestures and undulations that I took to be an orgasm.  And then the automaton turned off and my prick came alive again.  Her tits were rolling in great ellipses as I pounded into her with abandon, I reached down and teased her clit with my finger until she came again and pulled out and shot a load on her chest.  She lay there for a bit and I got up to clean myself off.  When I came back she was gone which relieved me somewhat.  I went outside and lit a cigarette.  It was a warm night.  One of the rare humid times when LA feels tropical, the kind of night when I enjoyed going down to the ocean and walking along the shore trying to see Hawaii.  The glow of the sun had not yet disappeared entirely, but already the eastern sky was twinkling with stars.  When I took a drag I could smell Jen on my fingers.  I licked them to see what she tasted like.  Electric. It mixed well with cigarette smoke.
+
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+I didn’t wake up until we were past Barstow.  I woke outside of LA, outside of everything, outside of myself.  I awoke in a sinister little car on a ride through the wild forlorn California Desert; the only reason I woke up at all was the heat.  It turned the pleasantness of my dream into a nightmare which I had to escape by waking up.  I dreamed I was an emperor in a foreign land, a mystical Tibetan type of land where I sat in a palace of unrivalled spender and riches; I dreamed you were there, Orisis.  Luxurious tapestries covered the walls and gold trimmed divans were arranged about the room so that you might receive visitors.  I was trying to raise an army of thinkers to combat the problems of mankind; I had sent out messengers and courtesans to attract like-minded rulers to the palace.  Word came back by means of an old telegraph machine, which sat on a cherry wood table in the corner.  Next to it was an old high back throne such as one would find in Versailles, you sat in it searching, just like you Orisis, always scouring the world to put me back together.  I wanted to wander about the palace and explore but every time I walked out of the room I would hear the telegraph machine and rush back to it, only to find that it was more negative response.   I knew that you would never bother with the machine, if news was to be received it would be through me, you had given up entirely.  Inexplicably, as it often happens in dreams, I found myself sailing in a glider over the tree dotted hills of northern Mexico.  I was admiring the peaceful silence of gliding to and fro on thermals when I suddenly became aware of the unbearable heat of the cockpit, better drop down a bit I thought to myself, but as I eased the stick forward I lost control of the plane entirely and dropped like a rock toward the waiting rocky hills.  In my descent I saw and felt what John Denver must have seen and felt when he plunged to his death off the coast of Santa Cruz.  Within the dream I was musing over his actual death in an abstract way and then bang!, I hit the ground.  I don’t know if I died, I couldn’t remember but I might as well have; waking up in the cramped confines of a glib Japanese car is a small relief from death itself.  I sat sweating profusely with my forehead bumping gently against the windowpane, trying to reconstruct the details of my imaginary palace and quixotic dream quest.  In reality as it is called I was going somewhere else, Las Vegas to be precise.
+Air conditioning is no match for the desert phoebus, it only brings the nightmare into sharper focus, a palpable tease to remind you that somewhere it is not hot at all; even now as I sat there some Llama herdsman in Andes was warming his frostbitten toes by a roaring fire.  Oh to be cold…  The scorching sun made it too hot to go back to sleep.  Dean was driving and Betty was still passed out in the back seat.  It must have been around ten in the morning; I didn’t move to look at the clock on the dashboard, it didn’t really matter, one thing about travel —time has no meaning.  There is only in the car and out of the car a sort of two-dimensional life.  I’m not accustomed to functioning at the ungodly hours referred to by most as ‘morning’ and I wasn’t about to start now, here in the middle of nowhere.  I hadn’t gone to bed until about six this same morning; I rested my eyes for a while longer and recounted the events in blackness.  
+There was a dim recollection of breakfast at Tiffany’s (or was it Denny’s?), pancakes and eggs with a side of bacon all tasteless and uneventful; a goodbye to some lingering friends, Carey, Dean and Betty’s father Mr. Dean; then conk! I was gone off in a Tibetan dream palace.  I escaped the boredom of driving east out of LA, thank god.  The drive out through the ‘inland empire’ as it’s called is a grand tour of hell (actually I would take the straight up inferno of hell served in a flaming glass before I would go of my own free will to the Inland empire).  I missed the wrenching smell of the stockyards in Upland and the bucktoothed gas station attendants of Barstow, a crying shame to be sure.  The stockyards especially amaze me; that the smell of a cow’s ass can somehow penetrated the near perfect Freudian-sterile seal of the modern automobile seems likely to remain, along with the Kennedy assassination and the pyramids, one of the true mysteries of the earth.
+Just east of Barstow there is a sign that boldly states “Greensboro NC 1297 m;” I opened my eyes again in the shadow of that unpleasant knowledge, cracked my view of the world just in time to learn that the reconstructive dentistry capital of the world was a mere 1297 miles away.  I wanted to let out a Homer Simpson “Woohoo!” but it was too hot for any unnecessary activity.  I sat up, opened my eyes, stretched as best I could and wiped the drool off my cheek.  I looked over and saw the pain on Dean’s face that only a drive through the California desert in the middle of August with a hangover can give you.  God it was hot.  And I was right it was not even eleven, which meant that the temperature was bound to climb at least another ten degrees before we got to Vegas.
+Dean had volunteered to drive the whole way to Vegas (he always was charitable when he was drunk) and naturally Betty and I had thought that a lovely idea.  He looked like he was in the throws of deep regret and cursing his own self-cast fortune, which for Dean is standard operating procedure.  There isn’t a whole lot to look at out here in the desert, at least not a whole lot that you can see from the window of a Toyota Corolla.  Of course that doesn’t mean there is nothing to see, its just that racing along in as enlarged soda can at ninety miles an hour limits your view of the world.  The cramping stylings of a cheap Japanese car was hindering our view, or maybe not so much the car but the speed of it.  We humans can move what!  I mean real speed, airplanes, space rockets, trains; we can run like no other animal and with no personal effort whatsoever.  Speed doesn’t allow for minutiae, even a mere gloss of the passing scenery is too much for the human eye at ninety miles an hour.  The creosote and hohoba plants that dot its hills and serpentine sand dunes are the only relief the eye gets from the endless endless nothing.  You don’t get details with speed, but its still the best way to travel —like comet we could crash into Vegas in a couple of hours, burn down the town and then go rocketing off again.
+The car contained only the barest of essentials; Dean and I had thrown a few pants and shirts in a suitcase each and then I had a small courier bag with notepads, pens and a handful of books.  A garment bag held two suits each because a stranger in a strange land ought to look his best we reasoned. Betty, being a woman, had the largest suitcase that occupied the majority of the trunk, but otherwise the interior of the car was uncluttered with the trappings of humanity.  Music had been carefully selected for its road worth qualities, a healthy mix of raucous punk rock to keep us awake and soothing melodic pieces designed to lull the mind and drown the endless droning of the wheels.  I insisted on bring Beethoven’s Ninth for nighttime drives.  The upshot of our circumstances was the we traveled light, secretly though we kept it to ourselves, Dean and I mutually figured on having to lug most of it by foot at some point when the already suspect nature of the Toyota gave out entirely and finally surrendered its fate to the junkyard.  We had all left behind an enormous pile of furnishings and creature comforts which for my part I hoped to never lay eyes on again, but our friends had assured us they would see that it all got into storage should any of us return someday and want it.
+	Happenstance carried me again I surrendered my own fate to that of the car, of the road, of the random complexities of life pure life with no entrapments, encumbrances, or dovetailed catches to hang me up.  We have thrown ourselves to the wind to let the scattering process begin; the first day out and I was feeling as expansively free as the landscape, floating on the thermals of fortuitous caesura.  Sheer chance drew me here and left me staring out the car window into nothingness, the pedigreed nothingness of freedom.  The desert was a void from my window; it had the deceptive appearance of emptiness not unlike the silent inky surface of the ocean, which is not empty but teeming with life.  The desert was once a sea floor, but the life wouldn't have it, the water rolled back to greener pastures.  The desert is the void left by water and filled up with castoff bric-a-brac from the mountain regions.  To the north glittery jewel peaks, the southern most tip of the White Mountains —snow.  Its making my mouth water, I point it out to Dean which seems to snap him out of some trance state and he agreed to pull over so we can stand on top of his car and look at them through the binoculars.  I imagined the cool streams, the whole painted backdrop from the set of Bambi coated in snow.  Our enthusiasm lasted about thirty seconds and then we started to realize that in fact the air conditioning is helping and that without it we are forced to suck hot dry air like clamping your lips to an exhaust pipe.
+	Besides I knew the White Mountains didn’t look like a snow covered Bambi set; I’ve been there and they’re just as hot as the desert this time of year.  I jumped down and we headed back out on the road.  I lit a cigarette.  Life was going bang!   The epi-endo-genetic bang that finally turns on the radio, like when the old crystal quarts set gets cranked next to the digital signal, cold and clear you can taste it, metallic vibrations of noise it slam into your gut.  Sock you like a plutonium fuzz blast.
+The sun burned through the open window and the dry hot air sucked itself greedily down into my lungs so that the heat had the peculiar effect of feeling like it radiated out from within rather than coming from that detached burning globe that was nearing it’s apex.  I felt like I might spontaneously combust just like those “rare” cases you hear about on That’s Incredible. I thought of saying I had heard —give a man a match and he can build a fire to warm himself through the night, but set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.  True what!  
+I stirred finally and Dean looked over at me.  “How ya doin’?” he asked.
+“Wonderful, except for the heat or course.”
+“Ya that’s why I was willing to drive… so I didn’t have to sit in the sun…”  he smiled mischievously.  I knew there had to be some hidden insidiousness behind his offer…
+“Ah, so you knew?”
+He glanced at me with superiority, “come on now, I’m a professional.”
+With the air conditioner on high and the fortuitous curve of the freeway I found myself becoming more comfortable.  Heat radiates out from within.  I found that if you keep that in mind you can cope with it, you just have to fan it out —blow the vents so to speak—burn it off at the right pace— with the right amount of water, cigarettes, ice-cold beer, and snack food.   Eventually I came to find my mind relaxed and floating on the surface of a glassy pond.  Gentle ripples between drags of the cigarette tuned my ears to the desert frequency.
+Like the teeming depths of the ocean that once covered it there is an infinite web of natural and supernatural life out there.  My father is a desert rat, so I am no stranger to the bristling spike infested country of California.  When I was younger we used to make trips out here in the blistering heat and roaring silence to go hiking and camping; the sort of thing that most fathers didn’t do I found out later, but I had a good time on those trips.  My father dragged me from one end of the desert to the other, up the 395 to Hisperia and down the 316 all the way across the Mexican border at Tecate.  I learned a million tiny nuggets of knowledge to tidy my mind over through life’s boring stretches like riding about in a car.  I can assure you that there is an unknown universe of life thriving out there in the sand and heat, a harsh unforgiving universe as the cliché would have it, but it is also a delicately beautiful latticework teeming with life. Complex and fragile ecosystems evolved over millennia of cooperation and mutually assured survival instincts are woven through the barren rock and sand washes.  In the afternoons during a summer thunderstorm if you sit in the shade of a palo verde tree and watch the edges of a dry riverbed you can catch a glimpse of that universe.  Lizards and snakes frolic and birds seem to rejoice at the smell of rain.  (Lest you actually do this it is worth stating that you ought not to dally too long as that peaceful scene can be turned into a fifty mile an hour river of mud and rock that will jump out of nowhere and kill you before you have time to realize that you are going to die— I personally hope one day to die with such peace, but in case you aren’t ready don’t say I didn’t warn you).  There are enormous anthills that look not unlike flying over Manhattan at midday.  The desert works on a smaller scale, it is only for those with infinite patience, if you live in the desert you don’t want to have a lot to do.  That’s why there are ghost towns from here clear up to the base of the Sierra Nevada, towns where people didn’t have anything to do.  There was no reason per se to go to such towns and without reason they died.  I went out to the famous Calico ghost town once; a collection of blue-gray wood shacks, collapsing roofs, broken out windows and ceaseless wind blowing dust in every crevice.  But there were loads of people milling about in the summer heat, trying to keep the dust out of their teeth and see what a ghost town is.  There are no ghosts in the traditional sense at least not any that I could see, but there were ghosts of ideas, of lives, and hopes and dreams.  What must the inhabitants of thought living here in the wind blown back alley of nowhere?  Was this entire town little more than a broken wagon wheel that changed a life?  Or did someone plan this one out; did some one think this was a good idea?  My friend Mike and I drank icy Coca-Cola in the shade and debated those and other questions. We watched the pasty bloated souls called Tourist Americanus and tried to decide what they would be isolated here instead of thriving in their air-conditioned Lysoled suburbs.
+Dean’s stereo is just audible above the roar of our cracked windows and when I strain I can hear Morphine playing.  She had black hair like ravens crawling down her neck…  I quoted that line once as an example of the band’s genius and the man to whom I was speaking said ‘actually that’s basic literary imagery metaphor 101…’  I felt bad for him, but I didn’t reply.  Its in the way it floats off the tongue, its in the way one simple image can carry you all the way to a seedy bar in Paris France, it’s the way it slides out of the lung and fits so smoothly in between the base and the drums.  It can take you anywhere you want, but only if you want to go.  If you want to hear cliches then I assure you, you will hear them everywhere you go. Have fun.  Stay clear of me.
+Take the subtlest of frequency modulations and dig until you find the pulsar of life; blasting straight through the chest and then stroking on soft cushions to sooth you down.  In and out.  Draws you from one world to the next, an electro- static charge, like a song played off an old Castagraf recorder.
+	You move the body electric in pulsation, with receptors that crawl — feeling warmth of the spine they head the back of the brain.  The surge is ecstatic... drives me right on over into the next dimension -model -metaphor -you get the picture.  You might have even hung it on your wall when you where younger, and hungrier —hunger drives the hierarchy and it’s there, even when your stomach is full... it hit raw exposed nerve endings with the high voltage throb of life that’s hard wired into our brains...in there like a virus you might say.  Lust for what?  It’s all gone from now.  Ebb and flow, the surges come in waves.   
+I gotta run to make diving in smooth... feels in slow motion... you hang in the air for a timeless moment and then hit the water like a torpedo, the waves slip out from around the impact and form a circular blueprint...  The pond turns in the throws of a tempest, frothing with uninterrupted motion.  The animal body is an alternating current, suspended in perfect fluidity like the ecstatic dances of the trance-shamans carried slip-slow up into the magic of the beyond.  Echoes abound like a caged sun gone supernova... atomizes and reforms as the cool wave hits the skin.  Smooth blue skin.
+	I remember three —maybe four— days ago smoking filterless cigarettes listening to the voices trailing in from the mezzanine, a masterpiece composition of harmonized waves, sound —the trigger behind the motion.  Dancing eyes so ravenous, spiral with giddiness, threw out the tired old man mind.  Bring it back down... bring it back down cause I never quite got it the first time.
+Lost in images, swirling words, sounds, smells miraculous warmth on the crawling embers of flesh.... The black on the starry night... Van Gogh and his goddamn ear always creeping in at the edges.  Diggin' fast and furious: tunnelers.  Roots and the little blooms—the moment—the purity—the wavelength transitions in simplicity—burned like hydrochloric acid onto the memory film.  Scar tissue that languishes eternally.
+
+
+
+
+We are staying with Rachel, here in Vegas, things are amuck amuck as the man said.  First there is Rachel.   Rachel is a cool-mom.  In every collection of friends I have ever wandered into there is inevitably one whose mother is the cool-mom.  Cool-moms are the ones that harbor the strays, know what clit piercing is and don’t mind the excesses of youth because they never forgot their own.  Johnson through and through the cool-mom is and Rachel was the one in our circle.  She was the one who didn’t mind wayward children crashing on the floor, junkies trying to kick locked in the bedroom and only god knew how many poor lost girls Dean had dragged home and put up in her house for a month or two, sometimes more.  Through it all she was understanding and usually supportive of all human creatures.  The cool-mom never judges or casts out someone because a simple disagreement or difference in beliefs.  Rachel was every bit the part, she was a matronly woman heavy set and swaggering full of spice and fire spitting gusto, she could out drink Betty.  Right now her life has taken a turn though, the cool-mom has had the bedrock foundation of the desert blown out from under her and for the first time in my life I feel old, old and weary the whole lot of us are slowly decaying in the heat, but the ambrosial smell of decay is good for us, like a hot brand on your ass, it might scar, but it’ll wake you up.
+Then there is Rachel’s boyfriend Bob. Bob on the other hand is a redneck; the backwoods stripe ran through and through. Bob was the sort of alright guy that you realize isn’t alright after talking to him for twenty minutes.  These types tended to hang around the Little Knight during the early hours of the evening where it seemed they were wrapping up a hard day of hard drinking.  Mysteriously they always seemed to be loaded with cash.  Most of the ones I had talked to were in some sort of construction related business and they were always trying to get “youngsters” like myself to give them or sell them or just get them pot.  Bob had actually taken this cliché one step further and asked Dean and I to go up to Alaska, where he supposedly had a cabin, and grow Maui-wowi for him.  Almost anybody else and I would have jumped at the chance, but the thought of getting into a small plane with that man at the controls made my blood turn to ice.  I thought about it every time I see him.  I see his false eyes glittering like pyrite in the alaskan mountains and I see our carcasses lying half eaten by the fire and Bob just sitting there smiling that absurd smile….
+True to the cliche Bob worked in construction (although he never seemed to actually work), drank hard and probably beat the crap out of Rachel —if not physically then emotionally.  I pretended to watch television while carefully watching the two of them.  From what I had seen of the man his mind consisted solely of illegible notes, beer stains and racist jokes.  He possessed the outdated practical knowledge of one that works with his hands and knows how to downshift the mind into neutral in order to get things accomplished.  There is nothing wrong with that per se but Bob seemed to have left his mind in neutral a little too long, maybe flooded the engine or something; maybe he was just dumber than a bag of rocks right out of the womb.  There was something intangible in the air about him and all the others I have met like him, something sinister and vague in its intent; he is a bad man my grandmother would have said and I have had my fill of bad men for this lifetime.  I avoid him like the plague.
+Lately I have been spending all my time in the Double Down with Dean.  Day’s pass like strolls through airpot loungues, arival and departure times listed in gambling winnings and losses, interims of waiting, waiting for the cards to come around waiting for a friendly drunk to throw a chip our way, waiting for the call girls to give in to the only thing money can’t buy… tenderness. typically we roll out of bed as the sun is setting and duck out before Bob comes home from work or the bar or wherever he whiles his time away.  The Double Down is all the way on the other side of town so we don’t get there until eight o’clock.  The sun has just set when we walked through the door tonight.  We weave through the human menagerie and get drinks at the bar.  In the back is a separate room a quieter one where you can have drinks with a date or a whore and talk before heading down the street to the hotel that rent by the hour where you can knock back for a few rounds and still some back for a nightcap because its Las Vegas and you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want and know one seems to care.  This is the apex of modern ideals, Las Vegas.  It’s the glitter capital of the world, the sky, the buildings, the streets all glitter, refracting light through the hollow core.
+Las Vegas, is what happened when the fleshy ooze of humanity confronted the barbed souls of the barrel cactus, the spiny leaves of the Palo Verde tree, and all the otherworldly creatures of the desert.  The first step in renovating what must have appeared as hell to early settlers was air-conditioned.  Before air conditioning, not even the thrill of gambling would have made people come to Las Vegas in the summertime.  But cool it down a bit and you can decorate hell up nice; some casinos, some brothels, curtains in the windows, now things are looking up. 
+Th puritains preachers of the four headed beast abstinance are the only humans that don’t like Vegas.  In order to dislike Vegas you have to really dislike yourself.  Any rudimentary logic, at least male logic, would dictate that a state where prostitution and gambling are legal and free alcohol is constantly being served is closer to heaven than hell.  But these are unfortunate and trying times that we live in, they have wrought the heavy hand of the moral majority and its cronies all the way across the nation to squelch any fun you thought you might be able to have.  The contradiction of the matter is ridiculous, but the uptight religious right seem to miss the irony entirely.  Indeed I think that the American west is humanities final hope for salvation from the hideous forces of repression and the sad truth of the matter is that we are losing.  It’s later in the game than you think —possibly we already lost.  Our country’s history reads like cartoon strip of a small innocent child running from an overbearing stepmother; first it was England then New England; the poor child is tired and sat down to rest here in Las Vegas.  Las Vegas used to be the grand ball of the country, but then the overbearing bitch of ‘prurient interests” showed up.  The old casinos are being torn down and whorehouses are driven out of business every passing day and the mob has been beaten back to the landfills and over safer money laundering operations.  Now instead of quasi-burlesque shows there are silly men in tights parading wholesomely around with white tigers amid a pyrotechnics background of high wire acts.  Who the fuck wants to see tigers?  We came to buy some whores and drink until we can’t see straight.  To live more or less the way god intended —happy. 
+This evening I am sitting on a bench in the mezzanenie of the Double Down which is a casino/bar/night club/breeding ground for nefariousness; I am waiting for Dean who is chatting up a beautiful girl at the back of the bar who may or may not be a whore.  It is Dean’s quest to find out and if the answer be yes then how much?  In the meantime I am watching the cheapskate old ladies with blue hair clutch at their plastic cups slowly emptying them of quarters, which they drop mechanically into the slots.  What goes through you mind when you do that all day long?  Do you still have a mind, is anything happening in there?  Perhaps this was there form of meditation, different but maybe the same idea as driving.  They assume a purely mechanical nature in order to let their minds wander about, to frolic through lost memories of youth and life when it still meant something.  More likely there was nothing going on upstairs I decide.  It is nearly nine now and the sun is but a slice of irridecent orange peel slinking behind the glittery casinos of the strip skyline, but the heat is still hanging on even in the shadows.  Off in the distance I can just see the tips of the high rise casinos where the rich gamble in private rooms waited on by topless cocktail girls and through the walls they listen to the thriving sounds of tourists dropping coins and laying down bills to line the velvet pockets which hold their Cuban cigars.  The wheels are turning twenty four hours a day seven days a week for eternity.  The velvet gets nicer every year and the girls prettier and the tourists dumber and fatter always wanting more! New! Bigger!  By god!, screams the frustrated real estate Tycoon in horror. What the hell is going on here?!  He stands up from the table in alarm, zombie eyes are peering vacantly through one way windows, what do they want?  Well sir, says the nervous pimple employee who was sent in with a message, they want more...  He speaks in a whisper unsure of whether to be more afraid of the Boss or the Mob.  We gave them a pirate ship, recreated the pyramids, and the canals of Venice, what more do you people want from us?!  I just can’t take it anymore, first it was the galls stones then kidney stones, two bi-pass surgeries (the second one a triple!) are you trying to kill me?!  And off in the distance the throngs gather about and begin to chant as if spellbound by the ancient techniques trance revivals: We want more!  We want new!  The volume increases as the numbers grow from all over the world masses gather beneath the alter and chant…We want shiny!  We want clean!  The very enslaved that the bosses has so sneered at and exploited were now subtly fighting back with incessant dreams, the perfect slave became the uncontrollable master…We want to be fitter!  We want to be happier!  The Boss scratches his head and thinks for while, eyeing the faces in the mirror staring at him though they can not see him… alright kid, here’s what were going to do, you go out and tell them that I am currently drawing up plans to build a half size replica of the Eiffel tower, the hotel next to it is going to be immense, the restaurant will be in the middle with a clear view up ninety stories to sky.  Tell them that I have plans for a tower to extend up five stories and I plan to fill it with wine bottles with will be delivered to their tables by a girl on a mechanical trapeze swing that can be raise and lowered as need to fetch their wine.  Tell them the expensive stuff is going to be at the top, those cheap bastards’ll be order screw top crap that the waiters can get, but as long as somebody buys the good stuff they all get to see the show.  The Boss is positively beaming now, inspiration has hit he is on to something.  He shoos the kid outside and through the waitress’s out after him.  He locks the door and starts sketching….
+Bordem.  I wander over seeing that Dean is seated now and obviously not headed anywhere for a while; I join them in booth.  Dean introduces me to Chloe who just as I had feared is gorgeous and a whore, I can see it in her eyes.  The way she watches Dean while he talks, she is thinking that yes he will pay, but even if he didn’t she would enjoy it just the same, he has a tenderness in the dies of eyes, little flickers that light the whore imagination.  She’s right, but its only half the story —her half.  The room has the stale smell of too many smokers and not enough air filters built up over decades of excess and dapravity.  I imagine the are walls a sickly yellow color coterized with smoke and splattered with sloshed beer, but its too dark to tell for sure.  The is a sensual symphony gurgling and lurching through each minute with the ceaseless effort of the little engine that could. Cartoon character faces fill up chairs and resemble like the creatures that pop out of the walls at the Tiki room in Disneyland.  Repulsive faces that seemed devoid of all humanity —zombies with coins.  The frail frame of an elderly woman at a slot machine never so much as murmured as she dropped quarters in the machine; her arm moved from the handle to her plastic bucket full of change as if it were part of the machine rather than a warm body. Double Down became a swirl of lights, sex and drugs, the human effort to fulfill needs.
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+I watched with fascinated detachment as Chloe sucked on Dean's cock like something in a B movie.  She looked like she was pretty good and I said as much to Dean.  I think he found it all little too weird to have someone watching him while he got a blowjob and he made no response, which might, I guess, be the ultimate testament to quality.  She however seemed turned on by the idea of a spectator and she kept looking over at me with Dean's cock halfway down her throat.
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+Chapter four falling in with the hippies and the trip across the mountains into colorado  Character sketch of natasha and Zak plus Clay.
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+Chapter five in neworleans using walks through the sity to tell the story of coming across the planes and lay the foundations of Dean and amanda thus giving th impetus for us to go to DC and then draw out Ashley who leads me to new york… we meet in a coffeeshop in DC where she is visiting Bill and then we go to bed and disappear to new york here through in the grand musings of life and lead up unit Dean shows up and we go to canada which allows for the critique of america to come to head and then ends with me back in new orleans and then to athens GA where the book clothes out into nothingness that is not an ending just as there is no beginning.
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+Transcribed from tapes: the terminal disease clerk took orders by the turnstile, finding the story in the story and logging in the disease workers all night long.  At five in the morning he got off and headed to a tavern as the sun was coming up.  Direct confrontation with the terminal virus word is a bit confusing to those who are not properly prepared.  poor fuckers never had a chance; the technical sergeant takes off his helmet and slams it on the table the near moronic mumbling of discontent.  Waging war is semantically impossible without overtones of homosexuality.  Heavy handed, the second wave fell in line with the technical sergeant at the lead.  The thing you have to watch out for are the warblers —the distractions coming in at the sides, sound is their most effective weapon, primordial hangover he called it drunkenly raising a glass.  And some of you may think this suspect, but take my advice sound's where it all started.  In the beginning was the word and the word spoke.  The sergeant stoops and cups his hands to light a cigarette.  Then there is sex or not enough of it, both is equally dangerous —biology is not something to scoff at.  sexuality is the best cover an agent can ever use.  Rockets come searing in overhead ripping flesh and scoffing at the notion of eternity, out here you don't have time to talk, the thoughts are things, they are no longer words...keep your radios tuned boys its getting ugly.  Another rocket sears in severed limbs fly out the explosion and olive drab body parts litter the scene. 
+	Watch out for the bloody words, sharp words that hang in the air like knives and when uttered returned to slit the throat of their speaker and if every word you have spoken returned to act upon yourself would you survive the experience?   Me no way I'm outta here.  Situation getting sticky, humid like vaporous blood hanging on in the air.  Still acrid smell of urine and small children playing in a asphalt playground ringed on all sides by immense brick walls with basketball hoops hung half way up each of the sides.     Realize that that which we are taught from childhood to distrust is in fact a pawn of something far more immense and much much more dangerous.  The governments and nations of the world are incidental pawns of there own control systems and then beyond them there are even more and so on like looking two mirrors facing each other and going on to infinity.  The monster of power is faceless there is no one person or group that controls everything they are all parts of a immense and multi-headed monster that is constantly biting itself and attacking it own heads until some day it will destroy itself.  The end of time leaves space and word alone together
+	we're taking heavy fire!  The sergeant calls for back up, the captain says love one another and cryptically hangs up the phone. The Spanish soldier selling chiclettes say no good no bueno, pictures worth not even half a thousand words.  Wouldn't give you ten words, worthless gringo words don’t mean shit. no good no bueno, not worth the blood their written in. The blood of all peoples not yours, not your shoes, by god keep your slave labor camps a closed-mouthed secret.   Gotta keep that in house, dis-credit all news agencies by routinely feeding them false information.  News doesn’t happen events happen, and the department of television information broadcasting inc. a subdivision of indoctrination inc. decides what gets out and what remains forever sealed in baby pissshitguts.  No that's not true. No comment. No need for comment, the preceding has been since proved to be untrue, cut to shots of smart bombs. Couldn’t get fifty words for those now gringo -over exposure- nobody buying.   Same old stinking shit.  No Good. No Bueno.
+	Gringo go home in thousand languages in a million words, why don’t you crawl back in your cave get your tail so far between your legs it goes half way up your ass?  Lead me to the holy spigot and we’ll show you the bidet of death, constructed by gringos, for gringos, to flush out gringos, to show them all what you do behind closed doors.  Can’t close them all —we have our technicians as well and they’re getting to be better than yours. We got the money rolling in —even offered you the picture words but you don’t want them. No Good.   Can’t use those, too strong.  No fair, crying boy heads home for cave to lick his dirty balls clean.
+	I gotta picture for you I on vacation in your country go to hear senator’s speak but all door are closed, all sealed.  So i gotta fiber optic and feed it in from the roof show all senators mad with sexual lust and blood thirsty, clamoring for war and stealing souls and bodies and driving them off wherever they see fit.
+	The technician is retro actively of course —the papers said the man was mentally ill.  ‘my cod!’ screamed a church lady in the front row, ‘satan has garbled the lords message, this isn’t what he meant for you to hear, no it was not all like that, there was to be understanding.’ she is parading her old cunt bones whining at the justices —tissue conducts signals, animals communicate through the use of visual, acoustic , chemical, tactile and electrical signals.  Our laboratory is an abundant and well preserved feed back loop to understand and interpret Eusocial behavior. negative feedback inhibition to make you shiver Gringo.  Make you shiver good.
+	Repetition unsuccessful.  The radiologist was called in to examine the patient —blisters and burns indicate high probability of skin mutation, what would you say Dr. Waiben?   Crested and on the nod? Diminutively, yes definitely.
+	Information potential exists —its an unsettling thought, dependency —and what happens when things start to think? How do you draw the lines then?
+	HOW THE PLAGUE BEGAN:
+ 	The wish to preserve -not worth saving what already is- in this scenario.  The word,  the loss of body situated at the origins of recorded sound -the temporal metaphysical and esthetic possibilities.
+	<insert sounds of truck on dirt road>  
+	Old man yelling.  Get off of my laaawwwnnn!   Sits down to oil his gun some more and then half turns in his chair to face the camera and says "i haven't left the porch since i got this CDRom PEOPLE version 3.0.   Updated and expanded human potential at your fingertips.  Its the only thing i need —got no use for the stinking gringos anymore—  camera pans out and down revealing a yard strewn with shotgun-blasted bodies of young children.  We see wife, face half torn off, crawling towards a pistol <shotgun blast stage left> her head disappears entirely.   Old man: "human potential, the new CDRom makes wives unnecessary." cue logo: on sale now at a sanatorium near you....
+	I'm going to finally send you the orgy papers this time  -been fixing to get 'round to that for some time"  <heavy southern drawl>  don't think he's the type to do it though but i been wrong once or twice a'fore.    Don't want people showing up on my lawn though that's never good.  get off of my lllaaaawwwwnnnnn! <shotgun blast again, distant screaming sounds of deaths final agonies eeking out blood gurgling windpipes> Fucking Gringos! Go home in a thousand languages!
+	  Experience as much of the human potential as possible, retain the container and forward the frog to the fun sun freaks of eastern Tibet —all is well with alkaline, and acidity is on the skids with death rooted out leaving only chicken shit shoveled scrapped and scraped like lemon lime Gatorade poured from a fuck buck of love.  Stop talking to yourself —listen to the virus talk to you.  All that you consider to be a accident was carefully orchestrated for your benefit by a benevolent cocksucking god from the twenty-third dimension to just plain old irritate the fuck out of you like a bad rectal itch.  Stupid gringo got no cure for the ass itch i show you some pictures, yes very dirty, little girls you like??????
+	<<<<<commander in chief of the NATO forces in Europe is fucking small refugee boy in the ass, the boy cries for his mother the general is laughing, your mother’s down the hall boy ,she’s busy with the president of France right now.  But maybe later you’d like to lick his come off her dead face.  Ban those words tear them right out snip snip.  Can’t say that, its disgusting.  War is a snuff film for the rich.  <<<<We gotta step up the bombing chief the public’s losing innarest in us screams the chief of staff running in circles jerking off and slapping his ass until it turns a bright purple and with all seriousness General Jesse Helms pauses to reflect:  I remember a time when life was good no one got in our way, why in Europe under Patton i musta raped twenty thirty little boys and a handful of nuns too. He smiles lost in memory...
+	But God hath given us these trying times....
+	Yes it is bit hard to get cunt these days isn’t it, mumbles the chief of state as he strokes his wife’s cock....Yes dear start a war, get me some cute refugee boys, i so love snapping their necks when I'm coming, she growls affectionately.
+	That's it gentlemen were going to war!  The president stands and ejaculates on a map of the world KOSOVO it is he says as his thick oatmeal consistency sperm all but covers the former republic of Yugoslavia.
+	You like?  You like, no?  Too bad.  You can’t have those words, too strong.  I get power, you give me power, I steal power from you, to expensive to buy it.  I get power and you get pictures and maybe I tell you how to cure rectal itch? Eh? Eh? Eh?
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+In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh by a cacophonous blast out of heaven's pearly cum-stained ass creating the father, the son, and the holy spigot which lies in a secluded garden on the cliffs overlooking the Sargasso sea.  The spigot is buried in a volcano designed by Czech ostriches in the eleventh hour of creation to drain all human excrement off the continent of Europe and into the Sargasso sea all lumpy with turd so thick Jesus "conny" Christ in drag is walking along to the amazement of the gullible, floating gently from turd to turd.  The piss blood of a million cunts and cocks line the shores giving the whole place a radioactive iridescent red glow not to mention a awful stench.  Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo are standing on the bluffs watching the spectacle and scanning with hawk eyes for sweet tight asses in which they can stab their hungry cocks.  The father caught the son sitting in the middle of the garden sucking on an apple and he became enraged and hog tied the boy and penetrated every orifice in his body with a peeled and sculpted cucumber cock; the boy was left a whimpering, quivering lump of fleshy jello from which spawned humankind.
+	The piss gut rotting flesh smell, air taunt necked and jerking at the nose, the captain's eyes role back into his head as is guts are blasted out his ass by a giggling man headed tape worm of extraordinary wit who was prone to quoting Joyce and Bugs Bunny in the same sentence in a way that reminded listeners of Buster Keaton in some strange drugstore hurricane kind of a way.  The skatolic odor was rich and the worm refused to bath.  Owing to the peculiar nature of its origin the soldiers did not disturb the worm preferring instead to watch the captain writhe in agony pulling his legs back behind his ear to attempt to lick the matted blood soaked pubic hair over the torn orangish flesh that hung in ribbons over a large hole that had once been a simple anus.  The upshot of it all was that the worm ate less rations than the captain so the men were basically satisfied with the arrangement and they followed the worm wiggling through the jungle as it did impersonations of Fred Astaire...
+	Blasted rot gut con-artist with ten huge molars running across the front of his mouth in a clump owing to his mother's industrial accident with the cunt acid from the hyperdrill, drilled right on through back to china.  The asshole couldn't even close the damn thing and the lower mandible just kind of hung there like a tire swing.  
+	The giggling Hyenas are dressed in black and high on amphetamines looking to turn you inside out.
+	Tongue-tied porn queens scream obscenities at passersby "I'll suck your dick until your eyeballs pop out your ass..."
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+Every diner has its own subtle quality which distinguishes it from all the nearly identical establishments of its kind, this particular joint had enormous lazy houseflies crawling up the wall behind me which set it off in League with other infamous places I have eaten such as Ben’s Broasted Chicken an establishment that I had been to years ago.  I was headed up to the Tahoe area by way of the back road, 395, a rickety operation that shoots you straight up the length of california always keeping the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada just to the left.  About three quarters of the way to Tahoe you pass through the blink-and-you-miss-it town of Bishop where among other things there is a roadside dive called Ben’s which serves Broasted chicken and corn on the cob for two dollars a plate.  There were no other options no menu no choices no confusion, no arguing with the cook just broasted chicken and corn.  I remember going in primarily because I wanted to know just what one did to a chicken to make it broasted.  After that all I remember is the enormous lazy flies that crawled up the column next to my table.  I still can’t recollect exactly what the chicken tasted or even looked like, the corn sticks out as being over cooked and mushy and of course the flies were lazy and didn’t move when you swatted them which led me to believe that in fact they were never swatted at.  Indeed Ben’s was probably a kind of legend in fly circles, one to another word passed down the line and traveled all through the Eastern Desert of california, if you were a fly Ben’s was the place to be.  I asked to meet the infamous Ben proprietor and presumably the genius behind the broasting, but unfortunately he was out of town.  Instead the cook gave us a tour of the kitchen and that only served to make my experience at Ben’s a singular one.  I was passing through Bishop several years after that and I tried to locate Ben’s Broasted Chicken so that Amy could share the wonder of broasted chicken with me, but the place was gone, no building nothing, even some locals in town acted like they had no idea what I was talking about.  One old woman gave us that peculiar look that small town people always give to city folk as if to say you have no business poking around here asking questions, but I kept at her until she confessed that Ben’s was something she had never heard of, and what's more she informed us that she had lived in Bishop her whole life.  I started to wonder if maybe I had hallucinated the whole thing and Amy, who was in love with my eccentricities as much as my banality, I am certain though that here was the definitive proof she had always wanted to know for sure that I was totally nuts.  We snacked on bread from Shatz’s Bakery and drove up to Mammoth with me recounting the same story of Ben’s Broasted chicken that I had laid on her before Bishop, doubtlessly boring her to sleep which was just as well because my mind was pre occupied with broasted chicken not the inner depths of the female soul which was what Amy seemed to want to talk about all the time.
+	I recanted the story of Ben’s to Dean over double cheeseburgers.  I still don’t let little things like fat lazy flies bother me, who ever heard of a fly that ate anything more than crumbs?  They were doing no harm and the burgers were dripping greasy and quite yummy, as Amy would have said if she had been there.  Every time I get to thinking about or talking about Ben’s Broasted Chicken strange things begin to happen, first the place disappears and then to reach across a span of maybe five years Ben’s came crashing into the present and my mouth dropped open full of half chewed cheese burger when who should come strolling in the door of this diner, but Clay Napier the very man who had been with me on that virgin trip to the land of broasted chicken.  Actually the weirdness factor way have been slightly over played on my part as I did know that Clay was in Colorado somewhere, but it’s a big state and then even in Denver how many diners how many nights what are the odds?  All of this can in someway be accounted for by the initial mystery that set it all in motion… what is broasted chicken?  I no longer care (I also have made it a point never to consult a cookbook) I prefer the mystery to which broasted chicken has attended, at least for me.
+	Clay Napier was an ancient friend, not in a chronological sense but in the sense that we would always be friends regardless of the time between meetings we never had more then twenty or so awkward moments of catching up and then things fell naturally into place as if we had been together everyday for years.  I waited until the waitress had seated him and then casually sauntered up while he was reading the menu and sat down across the booth from him.  I cleared my throat and as I did so and he put down the menu to see who was disturbing him.  I watched in slow motion as his face went from blank irritation to recognition, and then surprise.  We smiled at each other for a moment and then nonplussed, as if it were perfectly natural that we should come upon each other five years and two states away from our last meeting, Clay slid out of the booth and we embraced for moment before the volume of words began to flow forth.
+	“My god what are you doing here?” 
+	“I was going to ask you the very same question —I thought you were up in the mountains or was it in flagstaff?”
+	“Ya I was in Flagstaff until I graduated, now I’m actually living up in Boulder, but my girlfriend lives down here… she’s working right now so I was catching a late dinner… why are you in Denver last thing I heard you had gone back to school or something to that effect…?!”
+	I racked my brain; where would he have gotten such foolish ideas?  Who was behind this?  “Uh, no I haven’t gotten around to that yet, who told you that one?”
+	“I forget maybe Robert.”  Robert K Statmore an upright human being if there ever was one, it had been years since I had even thought of Bob, except when I went camping and realized with a fresh new sense of shame that I still had the tent I borrowed one weekend almost four years ago.
+	“How is Bob?”
+	“Dunno, haven’t talked to any of those guys in a couple of years, I been out here doing odd jobs, I was working for a mining firm doing archeological impact studies, you know making sure they weren’t trampling on our people.”  Our people was an old and very elaborate joke that had developed over the years, a sort of half joke actually as Clay and I were serious about some of it.  Our people were the native American’s whose blood ran through both our bodies, in Clay it was the Cherokee, and in mine it was (I think) Ogalala, but either way it wasn’t much, not even enough to claim it for scholarship purposes.  The both of us were middle European mutts, half breeds, the results of some horny individuals who had no qualms about fucking across international boundaries, but the point of “our people” was not so much about us, it was a continuous good natured way to needle the third point in our boyhood triangle of friendship.  That third point was named Jim Stout and was proudly and definitely Irish.  When we all got drunk conversation used to end up with Jim threatening to give us small pox blankets and us half-heartedly trying to scalp him while he slept.  It’s funny now looking back how teenagers can turn genocide and torture into a source of humor and competition.  We were a lot smarter back then.  I smiled at Clay’s comment and was lost for moment in a nostalgic reflection over my boyhood.  I saw Clay as I will always see him when he’s not around, he’s sitting in that diner smiling that old half crooked curve, and to this day his nasal voice echoes about in my ears whenever I think of him.  He had slow manner of speech where you leaned in close so as not to miss a word.  He often didn’t say much just shrugged or gave you a look, but the words that did fall out were carefully measured like a recipe and to miss one of them would ruin the flavor of what he was trying to say.  And then there were The Looks, you have to know someone for a while before you can communicate with them on a subverbal level with just looks, but with Clay that time was double the norm.  He had looks, which he held out in silence that could mean more than complex and overly verbose sentence.  When he was feeling thoughtful and didn’t have an opinion he would stroke his chin with a bemused expression which only over time did I realize was not in fact an ironic mockery of Allen Ginsburg, but really the genuine article of inner reflection being measure out and stirred up.  I have always thought in the time since Clay and I were fast boyhood friends that I would have liked to smoke pot with him.  I remember the first time I got high I thought what wonderful qualities this little plant would bring out in my friend Clay, but he was gone by then, off in Arizona going to school and continuing down the boisterous outdoor life that we had all lead during high school.  Nearly every weekend we headed out to Joshua Tree the local rock climbing hang out and Clay had patiently taught Jim and I how to climb until one day we were both better than him.  Or at least to be fair that’s how I remember it.  Every summer we had made glorious excursions through the Sierra Nevada, backpacking over the palisades, Mineral King, Sequoia, Yosemite and other mountains with names that I have surrendered to inaccessible regions of memory.  We all came from adventurous sort of families.
+Jim was the first to go his separate way, he ended up at brown University for four years and then Clay went to NAU and I went, well I went here.  And then there and now back here.  Crisscrossing paths occasionally with each of them making plans for trips we knew we would never go on.  The last time I saw Jim, he had met me for a drink at the Little Knight and Tony had presided over our hour and a half meeting like a surgeon trying to revive the dead.  I hadn’t seen Jim since and I didn’t know where he was and apparently neither did Clay.
+	“What are you doing tonight you want to come get a drink?”
+	“Ya I’m with a friend of mine,” I motioned to Dean the he should come over, he didn’t know Clay and I hadn’t really said anything when he walked in I just dropped my story and walked over to a strangers table, for all Dean knew I was making arms deals with the CIA.  I introduce them and Dean went back to our both retrieved our burgers and we all sat down to dinner.  “We were over a Tangz, but the gay scene got old so we ducked out… his sister and her friend are still there, but we left them the keys anyway.  You got a ride?”
+	He did and that settled it.  The three of us took off to a club/bar where Clay’s girlfriend Anna was working, on the way I filled Clay in on five years as best a could (he had heard stories it seemed —good to know that people talk about you when you’re not around).  I left out a few things that I wanted to tell him, but as I said Clay and I are ancient and until I knew where he was at now I had no reason, based on the old Clay to think the one driving now would care about.  I left out my gnosticism and the year or so that I spent trying to meet god.  Not that I was embarrassed about that stuff, nor ashamed, but rather that they were between me and the handful of people that were aware of what was going on, to go beyond that circle would cost them their flavor, the unique character of insanity that marked them.  It turned out that Clay had done about half of the things we always suspected he would do, like college, the master degree, the outdoorsy life, the move to Colorado… but there were things that I never would have thought to hear that Clay was doing.  Back in the day, in fact how I met Clay was through the church youth group, and as I say we were both indoctrinated with the Presbyterian God, but to be honest I was mainly there because there were really cute girls (if I had know then what I know now I would have been down the street at the Mormon tabernacle).  I grew out of religion around seventeen when I read a book on brainwashing and realized that even if all this malarkey they were feeding us was true, I knew nothing of it other than what I had been told.  The same tactics are used by the US military, Indian gurus, Charlie Manson and nearly every other belief centered organization in the world.  I got very angry with myself for being duped by these charlatan tricks that seemingly anyone could have employed by reading a textbook on conditioning psychology.  I was smarter than that I realized, but unfortunately all my friends were not seeing my insights and what's more they seemed genuinely concerned about me for thinking such things.  Subtle reminders were dropped hear and there over a dinner or later after we graduated, a beer, things that had the subtle subtext that good religious people can convey through even the most mundane conversation.  At least that’s what I thought at the time and I embarked on this quest to convert them all to my new religion, to undermine the system from within.  I gave them books, got them to smoke pot (well Jim anyway) got them to have some sex, in fact Dean and I even dragged Jim to meet a porn star once at some strip club, but then end up backing out when we learned that their was no alcohol allowed.  I was the propaganda of hedonism.  I always thought that Clay would come round, would wake up as I naively referred to my reactionary religion, but I was wrong.  In fact Clay was quitting his job in a month to go back to California and work at the summer camp that we went to in high school.
+	Now since then I had as I said carried hedonism as far (actually a little further) as it would go and there waiting for me at the end was God and this time he wasn’t wearing the gilded robes of human flesh he was much more of a supernatural being than anything I had ever read has prepared me for and he was much subtler in its existence than I had assumed.  He hated Presbyterians and hedonists with equal fervor.  He looked like Hitler in Drag and had a nasty habit of sniffing opium tinctures at the most improbable of moments.  He was related directly to the incident with the little gnomes on ether that were mentioned earlier and how do you relate that to anyone else?  I hadn’t the foggiest and I realized that I was cut off, limited as much as freed by experience because I was so painfully aware of the limitations of being human I was limited.  I was limited to trying to understand Clay when I should have been knowing.  This thought ran like a subtle subtext through the conversation.  Dean took over for me and started telling Clay about people, parties and things that I new Clay wouldn’t relate to, but I let him because I could see Clay shifting in his seat and having to realize that the other half exists and that was exactly what I had been trying to do.  I tried every trick in the book back in my more clever days and I had forgotten about the one thing that doesn’t get into psychology textbooks: people.  The best evidence for god is man, always has been always will be, any two bit strand of sporific DNA floating through the universe could have made the rest, but man now there is an odd one.  Where did this thing come from and what the hell is wrong with it?  Who would have made such a thing?  I hold that what made us had a hell of a sense of humor and not much else going on upstairs.
+	When I snapped out of it they were talking about books.  Dean was lamenting the recent demise of William S Burroughs and Clay was arguing that Burroughs was too obscure in his style to ever be the creative genius that people thought him to be.  This I decide would be great time to go the bathroom and I excused myself; there is nothing Dean can talk about with the insane fever of dementia quite like William Burroughs.  I had watched Dean discover and then devour William Burroughs the way some people get over imported chocolates.  He savored each knew book with a delicacy that I reserved for other authors, I recognized immediately that whatever his merits or faults he had at least reached Dean and Dean was a tough nut to crack, I could never do it.  He had lent me some books and then wham in I went to the world of the totally bizarre.  Burroughs tunneled himself into my brain like cancer and ate it all up, then is found another and moved on to devour that author consuming that men and women who wrote as intrinsically part of what they were saying.  I have always read that way being more interest in the whole scope of authors life rather than moving from book to book the way some people do.  Whether it was Robert Wilson or Tom Clancy it was always the same way.
+	When I came back from the bathroom I could tell that things had gone awry which was just as well because I didn’t really want to talk philosophies I wanted to speed things up.  I went up the bar and asked the bartender to point out Anna for me.  He did and I knew that things between me and Clay would never be the same again.  She was an absolute work of art with delicate pale skin like a Grecian urn and a face with high cheekbones that just kind hung amid a mass of perfect blond ringlets.  She could have been a model, but she wasn’t she was Clay’s girlfriend and I was smitten.  I have notorious bad habit of sweeping my friends girlfriend out from their arms and into my own consequently my friends don’t usually call for while when they meet someone.  I was awash in cynicism from my earlier musings and I figured if Clay and I were destined to part then I might as well do it with a bang.  I went up and introduced myself.  Anna “had a smile that swerved, a smile that curved, a smile that swerved all over the road.”  If ever there was a girl that Mark Sandman described with those lines it was Anna.  She had a body that hugged the road like BMW and she laughed with the honest mirth that comes only those who know.  I struggled over that sentence for some time trying to put it without sounding like mystic, but the simple truth is if you don’t know what I mean by that then don’t worry you don’t know and if you don’t know you’ll never learn.
+	Anna talked like a little demurring French pastry and once shy and bold with the dancing musical quality that seems to emanate mainly in the voices of women I find attractive and no one else.  When you’re in the presence of a magical voice such as that all you want to do is listen, any other distraction becomes an immediate irritation and all you want is to stop it and get back the sweet music.  Thus by the time a came back to the table with Anna I was already in the mood to do whatever she wanted whenever and wherever she wanted to do it (of course, and therein lies the rub, ten minutes from now it was very possible I would be smitten to another water nymph). 	
+	Clay looked visibly disturbed that I had gotten to Anna before he introduced us and being aware of my past he was already uncomfortable with the idea.  The song was right is you want to be happy for the rest of your life you got to get yourself an ugly wife or in this case girlfriend, because if you’re dating the most beautiful girl in the room you have to continually maintain your Alpha Male presence or the other will swoop in and feed on your weakness.  Women who find that statement offensive have never been the most beautiful girl in the room and the rest of them are evil because they know what power they have and they use it.  Anna was the center of attention at out little table and she new it and she liked it from what I could tell because she announced before long that she was going to see if she could get off early and we were all to come with her to an exclusive party for some ban that none of use had ever heard of.  But like I said whatever, whenever wherever and I could tell Dean was not going to put up a fight.  She left and Clay wisely used this time to go to the restroom as it was not a good idea to leave the girl with the other dogs.
+Dean and I talked it over and decided that we would each do our best to keep the other from sleeping with Anna, but in our quixotic logic we both agreed that the best way to do this was to each keep the other from the crime by committing it ourselves.  We could have subtitled our logic with the slogan keep others out of trouble by getting yourself into it first or as one other put it, how I found the goddess and what I did to her then” to which I would only add and how she loved it.  As they say good lovers are not born they’re made, like Mafioso bosses its all in the luck of the draw, but once you learn you will never look at life the same again.  You will understand from experience.  The question we were debating when Clay returned was whether or not good a Christian could possibly be capable of satisfying the goddess.  We were in the neighborhood of a no when we had to seamlessly shift gears and make Clay believe that we were not talking about his girlfriend the minute he left the table, but of course he knew wouldn’t you?
+	I managed to suck down one more gin and tonic before the forces of control let Anna loose upon us and we all headed off in her car to this after-hours party that was supposedly in the swanky downtown area that Dean and I had been touring earlier.  When we got there it turned out to be in the bar of a rather posh high rise hotel.  The entire area was blocked off, but a couple of words between the security guards and Anna and we were all whisked in with nod here and there.  Now only was it indeed a part for some band, but this musical flavor of the month had some rather famous friends.  And suddenly Clay’s nightmare deepened because now he didn’t have to worry about Dean or I; there was new competition like Johnny Depp who was sitting by himself in the corner of the bar.  Nor were Dean and I necessarily smitten on Anna anymore when there were an abundance of women that we would have recognized if we bothered to keep up on the fashion industry.  Being from LA Dean, Clay and I were not overly impressed with celebrities anymore, you only run into a couple and then you start to realize that your own friends are infinitely more interesting.  But one thing about celebrity parties that I never get tired of is the free food and booze and the wonderful abundance of substance abuse.  How do you know if you live in LA?  You can’t remember if cocaine is illegal or not.  We made a beeline for the bar and left Clay with Anna who we figured was after all his problem not ours.  We watched the vultures feeding as the celebrities divided and conquered among the groupies, admirers and hangers on.  Its really hard to compete with a guy that’s internationally recognized as a sex symbol so we contented ourselves with the company of a guy who we thought might be the lead singer of the Black Crowes and who might have just been another emaciated scraggly haired kid that looked like the lead singer of the Black Crowes.  In either case we chatted sporadically over the course of a half-hour or so before he offered us a joint.  We graciously accepted and got up thinking we were to follow him outside when he lit it right there in the middle of the bar and with a minimum of discretion passed it to Dean who shrugged and smoked it.
+“Be careful,” the dark locks leaned in closer as if to impart some clandestine knowledge, “this shits pretty hard core.”
+	I laughed in his face but managed to make it look like I was only coughing.  Dean shook his hand and said thanks man don’t worry its cool or some other such dopehead lingo.  From the minute the smoke hit my lungs it was very obvious that something more powerful than what I was used to was at work here.  My toes got tingly and my hands heavy.  Maybe thirty seconds after I inhaled I was catapulted into another universe that bore absolutely no resemblance to the one before it.  Dean’s face went ashen and I thought thank god because I was going to need company on this one.
+	Ten minutes later I found myself discussing the literary merits of Dorothy Allison with Winona Ryder and her brother who I thought was her boyfriend.  What I said I have no idea but I did later make it a point to read bastard out of Carolina and I was some disappointed when Winona Ryder was not in the movie.  She seemed like she genuinely wanted to play that role and in my chaotic state I sensed that she would.  Not everything that comes to you one drugs is brilliant not is all of it ‘just the drug.’  No matter what the prejudice the drug warriors have against chemicals the important thing that they ignore is that the chemicals are interacting with the human mind.  Something happens when you smoke pot that not only feels good but also over time changes the entire way in which your brain processes information whether or not that is good thing is an individual judgement call.  At this particular point that alternative brain function felt that it would only be just and fitting for Winona Ryder to play the lead in a movie version of Bastard out of Carolina.
+	Dean I soon noticed was actually talking the Johnny Depp.  They seemed quite engrossed in conversation and I slid my way out from Winona and her brother and tried to cross the room without running, but I was so paranoid that I inadvertently missed the fact that Anna was calling my name behind me.  Her voice blended in with the cacophonous swirl of background noise that surged and breathed in my ears as if it were a living thing.
+	Thus when she grabbed me from behind I almost punched her in the face I was so shocked.  And I was way to out of it to try to cover up it up; she fairly jumped back from me and then let out a little yelp such that everyone in the room turned there heads.  This was my worst nightmare.  In my gamble to cross the crowded room this was the scenario that was too far fetched to actually happen so I disregarded it and sure enough I was frozen like a deer in the headlights, caught before a roomful of glaring eyes.  Anna came to my rescue and gentle grabbed me by the waist and led me off into the hallway where Clay was waiting.  They were leaving it turned out and if we were to have a ride home now was the time.  I mumbled something about good to see you nice to meet you and ducked back into the party.  This time I successfully navigated the room, but Depp had left and Dean was huddled in the corner looking a bit too much like cornered wounded animal.
+	I dropped in next to him and shook him a bit.
+	“How are you doing?”
+	“I don’t know what that shit was, but I would really like some more.”
+	“Ya.” I scanned the room for the scraggly haired kid but didn’t see him.  It was pushing two in the morning, but the bar shoed no signs of caring and it wasn’t long before a waitress brought us more drinks.  The staff seemed to be the most star struck people in the bar, they all walked about half gawking and half averting their eyes they way people do around so called celebrities.  I’ve always treated celebrities with the subtle scorn that lonely men reserve for hookers, a caustic indifference held out on a stick of sarcasm and belittlement.  I figured that if I were famous that would be more interesting then simple worship.  We watched the room in silence for the better part of an hour.  Dean told me later that he saw them all completely naked and thought that so much time had passed the place had turned into an orgy.  I was musing over what life would be like if the struggle to survive were eliminated.  Dangerous fantasies because you realize that whatever hardships might accompany having lots of money there was always the freedom to do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted.  That most rich and famous people do not take advantage of that fact and work themselves to bones making more and more movies or albums as the case may be is the singular most depressing thing about them.  At a quarter to three last call went out and low and behold Black Crowes guy slid seemingly out of nowhere into the both and offered up the remainder of the joint.
+	“You guys are holding up okay, the last time I shared this shit this girl freaked out and thought it was laced with something and tried to beat me up.”
+	“I hate it when that happens.”  Dean took the rather small remnants of a joint and inhaled deeply.  “My ex-wife tried to beat me up the first time I did mushrooms.  I was really out of it and she came home all pissed off about something and she had never done mushrooms so she had no idea where I was and he started yelling at me on the stairs.  I just kind of stood there and looked at her totally unable to comprehend what she was saying then she pushed me down the stairs and kicked me.  Then my sister through her out of the house.”
+Both Crowes and I were laughing by the time Dean finished his little yarn.  Crowes seemed impressed more that Dean had been married than anything else or maybe that was all of the story that he actually heard seeing how most of the joint had disappeared without us participating. 
+“What was that like man, I mean being married.”
+“Well I don’t really know we were only married two months when that happened I decided after that it was better if we went our separate ways.”
+	“Ya but what was it like to stand at the alter and look at that person and think ya I want to spend the rest of my life with this person.  I mean what does that feel like?”  He put a particular emphasis on fee as if this would someone affect Dean’s response.
+Dean sat for moment in silence staring at his hands.  “I don’t know, uh I never really had that go through my head.  It was just a kind of little thing that got out of control.  She asked me once after knowing her for like three weeks if I wanted to get married and I said sure because I thought she was joking and then next thing I knew she was dress shopping with my mom.  It just happened so fast I didn’t have time to stop it.”
+	This seemed to have a profound impact on Crowes and he withdrew slightly in what I thought was a kind of meditative slouch.  Dean and I exchanged a look after a few minutes and then with still no response we shook the kid.
+	Still nothing.  Hmmmm.
+	“You want to get something for last call?”
+	“Ya that would probably be good.”  I got up and went to the bar.  I got three drinks and set one in front of Crowes who appeared to have settled off into a comfortable coma.
+	“Oh hey, Clay and Anna left.”  I delivered the news as though it were no big deal and then saying it aloud I realized the gravity of the situation.  We were fucked up out of our minds surrounded by people we didn’t know with no way out
+	“Oh really!  How the fuck did that happen?”
+“Uh well they wanted to go I didn’t and you were talking to Johnny Depp so I just kind of ditched them.”
+	“How exactly were you planning on getting home?”
+	“I didn’t really think that far in advance…”
+	“Ya I can see that.”
+	An idea nacently sprang forth in both our minds.  I slide around the booth and prodded at Crowes a few time to make sure he was out for good and then I dug through his pockets to find his valet card.  He didn’t have one so we figured he must have come in one of the limousines we had seen on our way in.  Between the two of us we dragged him out of the booth and with an arm over each shoulder we carried him outside.  It was then as we staggered to keep him from falling over that I noticed another joint in his breast pocket.  I ferreted it away while Dean tried to enlist the help of the valets in locating our ride.  In a few minutes an affable Tom Waites looking character pulled up in a black limousine and offered to drive us all home.  We took him up on it and the three of us kind of pitched Crowe through the door.  The driver, whose name was Jake Anderson, kept the divider window down and I did my best to guide him to marks house.  I had him tuning about in a haphazard way that my autopilot intuition told me would end us up at Marks house.  If you had drawn out our course on a map it would have looked like a staircase and we would have been falling down it like paraplegics thrown from their wheelchairs.
+Eventually I managed to find the house but I felt bad because I had made the guy drive around for the better part of half and hour so I offered him the joint with a warning that it would probably be better not to smoke it and drive.  He thanked me and asked if we wanted to cruise for while and smoke it with him.  Dean ran inside and got Mark and Betty and we all took off to ride around Denver.  Jake took us up the freeway toward Boulder and we pulled over atop a hill.  We sat there for the rest of the night slowly smoking the joint in ten-minute spurts.  Any longer and we were all so high that we forgot about the joint and it went out.  Around six the sun rose over the eastern Colorado plain.  It was a magnificent fiery red and orange spectacle.  Jake told us stories about driving around the rich and famous, my favorite was the time he had driven Axl Rose’s legendary dolphin decaled limo from Hollywood out to palm Springs for the sole purpose of having a taco at some Mexican place that he really wanted to eat at.  Apparently although he didn’t say it outright Jake had driven somebody our here all the way from LA for this concert which if we were to believe him was a political bigwig event that everybody who was anybody was at.  There were more parties at other hotels that we had missed out on.  Jake assured us that they were more of the dame with the didactic tone of the kings lap dog —always superior and never actually participating.  Still he was awfully nice and as the night wore on he seemed to want to join our cross-country journey.  Several times the conversation seemed headed toward a pregnant pause where if we wanted to we could have invited him along.  We didn’t.
+We did however take him to breakfast at a roadside diner that he suggested.  After a hearty meal of eggs and bacon I was ready to call it a night and pass out.  Jake dropped us off at the house around eight and I went to sleep assuming as I always do that I would wake up sober again the next morning.  I didn’t and neither did anyone else.  It was well past ten o’clock at night before any of us felt normal again.  We spent the day sleeping it off or stumbling about the house in a mesmerized trance.  To this day no other drug has fucked me up as completely or for as long as that stuff that Crowe gave us.  He claimed it wasn’t laced with anything and he identified it only as Hawaiian Redhair a potent strain to be sure, but not that potent.  Maybe it was the altitude, maybe it was us.  Quein Sabe. 
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+“You are my angel/come from way above/to bring me love….”
+I didn’t wake up until we were past Barstow.  I awoke outside of LA, outside of Barstow, outside of civilization, outside of intention, outside of desire, outside of myself.  I awoke in a sinister little car on a ride through the wild forlorn California Desert; the only reason I woke up at all was the heat.  It turned the pleasantness of my dream into a nightmare that I had to escape by waking up.  I dreamed I was an emperor in a foreign land, a mystical Tibetan type of land where I sat in a palace of unrivalled spender and riches; I dreamed you were there, Orisis.  Luxurious tapestries covered the walls and gold trimmed divans were arranged about the room so that you might receive visitors.  I was trying to raise an army of thinkers to combat the problems of mankind; I had sent out messengers and courtesans to attract like-minded rulers to the palace.  Word came back by means of an old telegraph machine, which sat on a cherry wood table in the corner.  Next to it was an old high back throne such as one would find in Versailles, you sat in it searching, just like you Orisis, always scouring the world to put me back together.  I wanted to wander about the palace and explore but every time I walked out of the room I would hear the telegraph machine and rush back to it, only to find that it was more negative response.   I knew that you would never bother with the machine, if news was to be received it would be through me, you had given up entirely.  Inexplicably, as it often happens in dreams, I found myself sailing in a glider over the tree dotted hills of northern Mexico.  I was admiring the peaceful silence of gliding to and fro on thermals when I suddenly became aware of the unbearable heat of the cockpit, better drop down a bit I thought to myself, but as I eased the stick forward I lost control of the plane entirely and dropped like a rock toward the waiting rocky hills.  In my descent I saw and felt what John Denver must have seen and felt when he plunged to his death off the coast of Santa Cruz.  Within the dream I was musing over his actual death in an abstract way and then bang!, I hit the ground.  I don’t know if I died, I couldn’t remember but I might as well have; waking up in the cramped confines of a glib Japanese car is a small relief from death itself.  I sat sweating profusely with my forehead bumping gently against the windowpane, trying to reconstruct the details of my imaginary palace and quixotic dream quest.  In reality as it is called I was going somewhere else, Las Vegas to be precise.
+Air conditioning is no match for the desert phoebus, it only brings the nightmare into sharper focus, a palpable tease to remind you that somewhere it is not hot at all; even now as I sat there some Llama herdsman in Andes was warming his frostbitten toes by a roaring fire.  Oh to be cold…  The scorching sun made it too hot to go back to sleep.  Dean was driving and Betty was still passed out in the back seat.  It must have been around ten in the morning; I didn’t move to look at the clock on the dashboard, it didn’t really matter, one thing about travel —time has no meaning.  There is only in the car and out of the car a sort of two-dimensional life.  I’m not accustomed to functioning at the ungodly hours referred to by most as ‘morning’ and I wasn’t about to start now, here in the middle of nowhere.  I hadn’t gone to bed until about six this same morning; I rested my eyes for a while longer and recounted the events in blackness.  
+There was a dim recollection of breakfast at Tiffany’s (or was it Denny’s?), pancakes and eggs with a side of bacon all tasteless and uneventful; a goodbye to some lingering friends, Carey, Dean and Betty’s father Mr. Dean; then conk! I was gone off in a Tibetan dream palace.  I escaped the boredom of driving east out of LA, thank god.  The drive out through the ‘inland empire’ as it’s called is a grand tour of hell (actually I would take the straight up inferno of hell served in a flaming glass before I would go of my own free will to the Inland empire).  I missed the wrenching smell of the stockyards in Upland and the bucktoothed gas station attendants of Barstow, a crying shame to be sure.  The stockyards especially amaze me; that the smell of a cow’s ass can somehow penetrated the near perfect Freudian-sterile seal of the modern automobile seems likely to remain, along with the Kennedy assassination and the pyramids, one of the true mysteries of the earth.
+Just east of Barstow there is a sign that boldly states “Greensboro NC 1297 m;” I opened my eyes again in the shadow of that unpleasant knowledge, cracked my view of the world just in time to learn that the reconstructive dentistry capital of the world was a mere 1297 miles away.  I wanted to let out a Homer Simpson “Woohoo!” but it was too hot for any unnecessary activity.  I sat up, opened my eyes, stretched as best I could and wiped the drool off my cheek.  I looked over and saw the pain on Dean’s face that only a drive through the California desert in the middle of August with a hangover can give you.  God it was hot.  And I was right it was not even eleven, which meant that the temperature was bound to climb at least another ten degrees before we got to Vegas.
+Dean had volunteered to drive the whole way to Vegas (he always was charitable when he was drunk) and naturally Betty and I had thought that a lovely idea.  He looked like he was in the throws of deep regret and cursing his own self-cast fortune, which for Dean is standard operating procedure.  There isn’t a whole lot to look at out here in the desert, at least not a whole lot that you can see from the window of a Toyota Corolla.  Of course that doesn’t mean there is nothing to see, its just that racing along in as enlarged soda can at ninety miles an hour limits your view of the world.  The cramping stylings of a cheap Japanese car was hindering our view, or maybe not so much the car but the speed of it.  We humans can move what!  I mean real speed, airplanes, space rockets, trains; we can run like no other animal and with no personal effort whatsoever.  Speed doesn’t allow for minutiae, even a mere gloss of the passing scenery is too much for the human eye at ninety miles an hour.  The creosote and hohoba plants that dot its hills and serpentine sand dunes are the only relief the eye gets from the endless endless nothing.  You don’t get details with speed, but its still the best way to travel —like comet we could crash into Vegas in a couple of hours, burn down the town and then go rocketing off again.
+The car contained only the barest of essentials; Dean and I had thrown a few pants and shirts in a suitcase each and then I had a small courier bag with notepads, pens and a handful of books.  A garment bag held two suits each because a stranger in a strange land ought to look his best we reasoned. Betty, being a woman, had the largest suitcase that occupied the majority of the trunk, but otherwise the interior of the car was uncluttered with the trappings of humanity.  Music had been carefully selected for its road worth qualities, a healthy mix of raucous punk rock to keep us awake and soothing melodic pieces designed to lull the mind and drown the endless droning of the wheels.  I insisted on bring Beethoven’s Ninth for nighttime drives.  The upshot of our circumstances was the we traveled light, secretly though we kept it to ourselves, Dean and I mutually figured on having to lug most of it by foot at some point when the already suspect nature of the Toyota gave out entirely and finally surrendered its fate to the junkyard.  We had all left behind an enormous pile of furnishings and creature comforts which for my part I hoped to never lay eyes on again, but our friends had assured us they would see that it all got into storage should any of us return someday and want it.  Bastards.  The idea was to go and keep going, but it didn’t quite work out that way.
+	Happenstance carried me again I surrendered my own fate to that of the car, of the road, of the random complexities of life pure life with no entrapments, encumbrances, or dovetailed catches to hang me up.  We have thrown ourselves to the wind to let the scattering process begin; the first day out and I was feeling as expansively free as the landscape, floating on the thermals of fortuitous caesura.  Sheer chance drew me here and left me staring out the car window into nothingness, the pedigreed nothingness of freedom.  The desert was a void from my window; it had the deceptive appearance of emptiness not unlike the silent inky surface of the ocean, which is not empty but teeming with life.  The desert was once a sea floor, but the life wouldn't have it, the water rolled back to greener pastures.  The desert is the void left by water and filled up with castoff bric-a-brac from the mountain regions.  To the north glittery jewel peaks, the southern most tip of the White Mountains —snow.  Its making my mouth water, I point it out to Dean which seems to snap him out of some trance state and he agreed to pull over so we can stand on top of his car and look at them through the binoculars.  I imagined the cool streams, the whole painted backdrop from the set of Bambi coated in snow.  Our enthusiasm lasted about thirty seconds and then we started to realize that in fact the air conditioning is helping and that without it we are forced to suck hot dry air like clamping your lips to an exhaust pipe.
+	Besides I knew the White Mountains didn’t look like a snow covered Bambi set; I’ve been there and they’re just as hot as the desert this time of year.  I jumped down and we headed back out on the road.  I lit a cigarette.  Life was going bang!   The epi-endo-genetic bang that finally turns on the radio, like when the old crystal quarts set gets cranked next to the digital signal, cold and clear you can taste it, metallic vibrations of noise it slam into your gut.  Sock you like a plutonium fuzz blast.
+The sun burned through the open window and the dry hot air sucked itself greedily down into my lungs so that the heat had the peculiar effect of feeling like it radiated out from within rather than coming from that detached burning globe that was nearing it’s apex.  I felt like I might spontaneously combust just like those “rare” cases you hear about on That’s Incredible. I thought of saying I had heard —give a man a match and he can build a fire to warm himself through the night, but set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.  True what!  
+I stirred finally and Dean looked over at me.  “How ya doin’?” he asked.
+“Wonderful, except for the heat or course.”
+“Ya that’s why I was willing to drive… so I didn’t have to sit in the sun…” he smiled mischievously.  I knew there had to be some hidden insidiousness behind his offer…
+“Ah, so you knew?”
+He glanced at me with superiority, “come on now, I’m a professional.”
+With the air conditioner on high and the fortuitous curve of the freeway I found myself becoming more comfortable.  Heat radiates out from within.  I found that if you keep that in mind you can cope with it, you just have to fan it out —blow the vents so to speak—burn it off at the right pace— with the right amount of water, cigarettes, ice-cold beer, and snack food.   Eventually I came to find my mind relaxed and floating on the surface of a glassy pond.  Gentle ripples between drags of the cigarette tuned my ears to the desert frequency.
+Like the teeming depths of the ocean that once covered it there is an infinite web of natural and supernatural life out there.  My father is a desert rat, so I am no stranger to the bristling spike infested country of California.  When I was younger we used to make trips out here in the blistering heat and roaring silence to go hiking and camping; the sort of thing that most fathers didn’t do I found out later, but I had a good time on those trips.  My father dragged me from one end of the desert to the other, up the 395 to Hisperia and down the 316 all the way across the Mexican border at Tecate.  I learned a million tiny nuggets of knowledge to tidy my mind over through life’s boring stretches like riding about in a car.  I can assure you that there is an unknown universe of life thriving out there in the sand and heat, a harsh unforgiving universe as the cliché would have it, but it is also a delicately beautiful latticework teeming with life. Complex and fragile ecosystems evolved over millennia of cooperation and mutually assured survival instincts are woven through the barren rock and sand washes.  In the afternoons during a summer thunderstorm if you sit in the shade of a Palo Verde tree and watch the edges of a dry riverbed you can catch a glimpse of that universe.  Lizards and snakes frolic and birds seem to rejoice at the smell of rain.  (Lest you actually do this it is worth stating that you ought not to dally too long as that peaceful scene can be turned into a fifty mile an hour river of mud and rock that will jump out of nowhere and kill you before you have time to realize that you are going to die— I personally hope one day to die with such peace, but in case you aren’t ready don’t say I didn’t warn you).  There are enormous anthills that look not unlike flying over Manhattan at midday.  The desert works on a smaller scale, it is only for those with infinite patience, if you live in the desert you don’t want to have a lot to do.  That’s why there are ghost towns from here clear up to the base of the Sierra Nevada, towns where people didn’t have anything to do.  There was no reason per se to go to such towns and without reason they died.  I went out to the famous Calico ghost town once; a collection of blue-gray wood shacks, collapsing roofs, broken out windows and ceaseless wind blowing dust in every crevice.  But there were loads of people milling about in the summer heat, trying to keep the dust out of their teeth and see what a ghost town is.  There are no ghosts in the traditional sense at least not any that I could see, but there were ghosts of ideas, of lives, and hopes and dreams.  What must the inhabitants of thought living here in the wind blown back alley of nowhere?  Was this entire town little more than a broken wagon wheel that changed a life?  Or did someone plan this one out; did some one think this was a good idea?  My friend Mike and I drank icy Coca-Cola in the shade and debated those and other questions. We watched the pasty bloated souls called Tourist Americanus and tried to decide what they would be isolated here instead of thriving in their air-conditioned lysoled suburbs.
+Dean’s stereo is just audible above the roar of our cracked windows and when I strain I can hear Morphine playing.  She had black hair like ravens crawling down her neck…  I quoted that line once as an example of the band’s genius and the man to whom I was speaking said ‘actually that’s basic literary imagery metaphor 101…’ I felt bad for him, but I didn’t reply.  Its in the way it floats off the tongue, its in the way one simple image can carry you all the way to a seedy bar in Paris France, it’s the way it slides out of the lung and fits so smoothly in between the base and the drums.  It can take you anywhere you want, but only if you want to go.  If you want to hear cliches then I assure you, you will hear them everywhere you go. Have fun.  Stay clear of me.
+Take the subtlest of frequency modulations and dig until you find the pulsar of life; blasting straight through the chest and then stroking on soft cushions to sooth you down.  In and out.  Draws you from one world to the next, an electro- static charge, like a song played off an old Castagraf recorder.
+	You move the body electric in pulsation, with receptors that crawl — feeling warmth of the spine they head the back of the brain.  The surge is ecstatic... drives me right on over into the next dimension -model -metaphor -you get the picture.  You might have even hung it on your wall when you where younger, and hungrier —hunger drives the hierarchy and it’s there, even when your stomach is full... it hit raw exposed nerve endings with the high voltage throb of life that’s hard wired into our brains...in there like a virus you might say.  Lust for what?  It’s all gone from now.  Ebb and flow, the surges come in waves.   
+I gotta run to make diving in smooth... feels in slow motion... you hang in the air for a timeless moment and then hit the water like a torpedo, the waves slip out from around the impact and form a circular blueprint...  The pond turns in the throws of a tempest, frothing with uninterrupted motion.  The animal body is an alternating current, suspended in perfect fluidity like the ecstatic dances of the trance-shamans carried slip-slow up into the magic of the beyond.  Echoes abound like a caged sun gone supernova... atomizes and reforms as the cool wave hits the skin.  Smooth blue skin.
+	I remember three —maybe four— days ago smoking filterless cigarettes listening to the voices trailing in from the mezzanine, a masterpiece composition of harmonized waves, sound —the trigger behind the motion.  Dancing eyes so ravenous, spiral with giddiness, threw out the tired old man mind.  Bring it back down... bring it back down cause I never quite got it the first time.
+Lost in images, swirling words, sounds, smells miraculous warmth on the crawling embers of flesh.... The black on the starry night... Van Gogh and his goddamn ear always creeping in at the edges.  Diggin' fast and furious: tunnelers.  Roots and the little blooms—the moment—the purity—the wavelength transitions in simplicity—burned like hydrochloric acid onto the memory film.  Scar tissue that languishes eternally.
+
+
+
+
+We are staying with Rachel, here in Vegas; things are amuck amuck as the man said.  First there is Rachel.   Rachel is a cool-mom.  In every collection of friends I have ever wandered into there is inevitably one whose mother is the cool-mom.  Cool-moms are the ones that harbor the strays, know what clit piercing is and don’t mind the excesses of youth because they never forgot their own.  Johnson through and through the cool-mom is and Rachel was the one in our circle.  She was the one who didn’t mind wayward children crashing on the floor, junkies trying to kick locked in the bedroom and only god knew how many poor lost girls Dean had dragged home and put up in her house for a month or two, sometimes more.  Through it all she was understanding and usually supportive of all human creatures.  The cool-mom never judges or casts out someone because a simple disagreement or difference in beliefs.  Rachel was every bit the part, she was a matronly woman heavy set and swaggering full of spice and fire spitting gusto, she could out drink Betty.  Right now her life has taken a turn though, the cool-mom has had the bedrock foundation of the desert blown out from under her and for the first time in my life I feel old, old and weary the whole lot of us are slowly decaying in the heat, but the ambrosial smell of decay is good for us, like a hot brand on your ass, it might scar, but it’ll wake you up.
+Then there is Rachel’s boyfriend Bob. Bob on the other hand is a redneck; the backwoods stripe ran through and through. Bob was the sort of all right guy that you realize isn’t alright after talking to him for twenty minutes.  These types tended to hang around the Little Knight during the early hours of the evening where it seemed they were wrapping up a hard day of hard drinking.  Mysteriously they always seemed to be loaded with cash.  Most of the ones I had talked to were in some sort of construction related business and they were always trying to get “youngsters” like myself to give them or sell them or just get them pot.  Bob had actually taken this cliché one step further and asked Dean and I to go up to Alaska, where he supposedly had a cabin, and grow Maui-wowi for him.  Almost anybody else and I would have jumped at the chance, but the thought of getting into a small plane with that man at the controls made my blood turn to ice.  I thought about it every time I see him.  I see his false eyes glittering like pyrite in the Alaskan mountains and I see our carcasses lying half eaten by the fire and Bob just sitting there smiling that absurd smile….
+True to the cliche Bob worked in construction (although he never seemed to actually work), drank hard and probably beat the crap out of Rachel —if not physically then emotionally.  I pretended to watch television while carefully watching the two of them.  From what I had seen of the man his mind consisted solely of illegible notes, beer stains and racist jokes.  He possessed the outdated practical knowledge of one that works with his hands and knew how to downshift the mind into neutral in order to get things accomplished.  There is nothing wrong with that per se but Bob seemed to have left his mind in neutral a little too long, maybe flooded the engine or something; maybe he was just dumber than a bag of rocks right out of the womb.  There was something intangible in the air about him and all the others I have met like him, something sinister and vague in its intent; he is a bad man my grandmother would have said and I have had my fill of bad men for this lifetime. 
+I avoid him like the plague, but its difficult to avoid someone when you live with them.  Bob was a constant nuisance, he was always knocking on the door to Dean’s room where I was also staying for the time being and after a while he realized that we weren’t always asleep so he took it upon himself to barge in and offer us ‘a cold one.’  Now that doesn’t sound like such a bad man, but the problem lay in the fact that a cold one was rarely anything better than Pabst blue ribbon and he never just had one.  He would perch there on the end of Dean’s bed with his bog construction boot on my pillow; it was his unsubtle way of reminding me that I was not welcome in his book.  He would sit there and out of the blue launch into his troubles; work was working him to hard, alcohol was no longer solving all his problems (ya think? Dean and I would say), and worst of all was when he told a story.  Bob had no sense of timing or point to his stories, they were uninteresting, delivered in a chaotic disjointed way that made no sense and they never had a point or an end they just kind of tapered off or led to a completely separate story with no relation to the one preceding it.  My favorite were the ones that went… “I went down to the strip last night….”  The middle parts changed according to the night but the end result was always the same, bob sitting somewhere too drunk to know where and trying to remember if a taxi was on its way or if he just thought it was on its way.  Then there was the tapered ending in which he tried to remember where he lived and his voice would train off and he might say something like “did you ever meet my sister Bonnie?”  Or what’s the score anybody know what the score to the game is?”  Dean and I never even knew what game he was referring to let alone what the score was.  The score was that Bob drove us out of the house to saner pastures where no one bothered us. 
+Dean had a nice little racket writing for the Vegas Gazette which was owned by one of his schoolmate’s father or something like that.  He wrote inane little articles about the various society happenings of Las Vegas it was inane, but it came with perks such as the pretentious parties we had to attend; Dean as the writer and me as the photographer.  We were the press.  Or at least we were supposed to be, but we spent more time at the open bars than we did interviewing and photographing people. 
+
+
+
+Lately I have been spending all my time in the Double Down with Dean.  Day’s pass like strolls through airport lounges, arrival and departure times listed in gambling winnings and losses, the interim’s are spent waiting, waiting for the cards to come around waiting for a friendly drunk to throw a chip our way, waiting for the call girls to give in to the only thing money can’t buy… tenderness. Typically we roll out of bed as the sun is setting and duck out before Bob comes home from work or the bar or wherever he whiles his time away.  The Double Down is all the way on the other side of town so we don’t get there until eight o’clock.  The sun has just set when we walked through the door tonight.  We weave through the human menagerie and get drinks at the bar.  In the back is a separate room a quieter one where you can have drinks with a date or a whore and talk before heading down the street to the hotel that rent by the hour where you can knock back for a few rounds and still some back for a nightcap because its Las Vegas and you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want and know one seems to care.  This is the apex of modern ideals, Las Vegas.  It’s the glitter capital of the world, the sky, the buildings, and the streets all glitter, refracting light through the hollow core.
+Las Vegas, is what happened when the fleshy ooze of humanity confronted the barbed souls of the barrel cactus, the spiny leaves of the Palo Verde tree, and all the otherworldly creatures of the desert.  The first step in renovating what must have appeared as hell to early settlers was air-conditioned.  Before air conditioning, not even the thrill of gambling would have made people come to Las Vegas in the summertime.  But cool it down a bit and you can decorate hell up nice; some casinos, some brothels, curtains in the windows, now things are looking up. 
+Th puritan preachers of the four-headed beast abstinence are the only humans that don’t like Vegas, but they don’t like anything except God so that should come as no surprise.  These are unfortunate and trying times that we live in, they have wrought the heavy hand of the Moral Minority and its cronies all the way across the nation to squelch any fun you thought you might be able to have.  I only bring this up because another old casino was razed this afternoon, another shoddy rundown beautiful den of corruption and vice.  What will replace it will no doubt sparkle and have a romper room for kids to play in while there conservative sort of middle class sort of middle of the road sort of white family fantasy parents gamble and “cut loose.”  The very same people that vote republican and unconsciously model their morals after Alex P Keaton.  They may not be religious but they are damn sure they no what is right and wrong —gambling and drink is right; whores and drugs is wrong.  Therein they support the further degradation of the human animal that has been propagated by the Moral Minority for what seems like eternity. The American west was humanity’s final hope for salvation from the hideous forces of belief and repression, but its lost, all is lost… you know the story… odd isn’t it that the land of liberty has more citizens in prison than any other country on earth?  Our country’s history reads like cartoon strip of a small innocent child running from an overbearing stepmother; first it was England then New England; the poor child is tired and sat down to rest here in Las Vegas.  Las Vegas used to be the grand ball of the country, but then the overbearing bitch of ‘prurient interests” showed up.  The old casinos are being torn down and whorehouses are driven out of business every passing day and the mob has been beaten back to the landfills and over safer money laundering operations.  Now instead of quasi-burlesque shows there are silly men in tights parading wholesomely around with white tigers amid a pyrotechnics background of high wire acts.  Who the fuck wants to see tigers, even if they are white?  We came to buy some whores and drink until we can’t see straight.  To live more or less the way god intended —happy. 
+This evening I am sitting on a bench in the mezzanine of the Double Down which is a casino/bar/night club/breeding ground for nefariousness; I am waiting for Dean who is chatting up a beautiful girl at the back of the bar who may or may not be a whore.  It is Dean’s quest to find out and if the answer be yes then how much?  In the meantime I am watching the cheapskate old ladies with blue hair clutch at their plastic cups slowly emptying them of quarters, which they drop mechanically into the slots.  What goes through you mind when you do that all day long?  Do you still have a mind, is anything happening in there?  Perhaps this was there form of meditation, different but maybe the same idea as driving.  They assume a purely mechanical nature in order to let their minds wander about, to frolic through lost memories of youth and life when it still meant something.  More likely there was nothing going on upstairs I decide.  It is nearly nine now and the sun is but a slice of iridescent orange peel slinking behind the glittery casinos of the strip skyline, but the heat is still hanging on even in the shadows.  Off in the distance I can just see the tips of the high rise casinos where the rich gamble in private rooms waited on by topless cocktail girls and through the walls they listen to the thriving sounds of tourists dropping coins and laying down bills to line the velvet pockets which hold their Cuban cigars.  The wheels are turning twenty four hours a day seven days a week for eternity.  The velvet gets nicer every year and the girls prettier and the tourists dumber and fatter always wanting more! New! Bigger!  By god!, screams the frustrated real estate Tycoon in horror. What the hell is going on here?!  He stands up from the table in alarm, zombie eyes are peering vacantly through one way windows, what do they want?  Well sir, says the nervous pimple employee who was sent in with a message, they want more...  He speaks in a whisper unsure of whether to be more afraid of the Boss or the Mob.  We gave them a pirate ship, recreated the pyramids, and the canals of Venice, what more do you people want from us?!  I just can’t take it anymore, first it was the galls stones then kidney stones, two bi-pass surgeries (the second one a triple!) are you trying to kill me?!  And off in the distance the throngs gather about and begin to chant as if spellbound by the ancient techniques trance revivals: We want more!  We want new!  The volume increases as the numbers grow from all over the world masses gather beneath the alter and chant…We want shiny!  We want clean!  The very enslaved that the bosses has so sneered at and exploited were now subtly fighting back with incessant dreams, the perfect slave became the uncontrollable master…We want to be fitter!  We want to be happier!  The Boss scratches his head and thinks for while, eyeing the faces in the mirror staring at him though they can not see him… alright kid, here’s what were going to do, you go out and tell them that I am currently drawing up plans to build a half size replica of the Eiffel tower, the hotel next to it is going to be immense, the restaurant will be in the middle with a clear view up ninety stories to sky.  Tell them that I have plans for a tower to extend up five stories and I plan to fill it with wine bottles with will be delivered to their tables by a girl on a mechanical trapeze swing that can be raise and lowered as need to fetch their wine.  Tell them the expensive stuff is going to be at the top, those cheap bastards’ll be order screw top crap that the waiters can get, but as long as somebody buys the good stuff they all get to see the show.  The Boss is positively beaming now, inspiration has hit he is on to something.  He shoos the kid outside and through the waitress’s out after him.  He locks the door and starts sketching….
+Boredom.  I wander over seeing that Dean is seated now and obviously not headed anywhere for a while; I join them in booth.  Dean introduces me to Chloe who just as I had feared is gorgeous and a whore; I can see it in her eyes.  The way she watches Dean while he talks, she is thinking that yes he will pay, but even if he didn’t she would enjoy it just the same, he has a tenderness in the dies of eyes, little flickers that light the whore imagination.  She’s right, but it’s only half the story —her half.  The room has the stale smell of too many smokers and not enough air filters built up over decades of excess and depravity.  I imagine the are walls a sickly yellow color cauterized with smoke and splattered with sloshed beer, but its too dark to tell for sure.  There is a sensual symphony gurgling and lurching through each minute with the ceaseless effort of the little engine that could. Cartoon character faces fill up chairs and resemble like the creatures that pop out of the walls at the Tiki room in Disneyland.  Repulsive faces that seemed devoid of all humanity —zombies with coins.  The frail frame of an elderly woman at a slot machine never so much as murmured as she dropped quarters in the machine; her arm moved from the handle to her plastic bucket full of change as if it were part of the machine rather than a warm body. Double Down became a swirl of lights, sex and drugs, the human effort to fulfill needs.
+They want to eat.  New needs, hierarchies, sex after food.  Leaving there is whirlpool of words like white and dark chocolate swirled together atop a brownie of callous confusion.  Words can not hurt me… but have you heard the words?  Watch out for the bloody words, sharp words that hang in the air like knives and when uttered returned to slit the throat of their speaker and if every word you have spoken returned to act upon yourself would you survive the experience?   Me no way I'm outta here.  Situation getting sticky, humid like vaporous blood hanging on in the air.  Still acrid smell of urine and small children playing in a asphalt playground ringed on all sides by immense brick walls with basketball hoops hung half way up each of the sides.     Outside is America; a cop lights a whore’s cigarette near the corner.  I laugh realizing that that which we are taught from childhood to distrust is in fact a pawn of something far more immense and much much more dangerous.  The governments and nations of the world are incidental pawns of there own control systems and then beyond them there are even more and so on like looking two mirrors facing each other and going on to infinity.  The monster of power is faceless there is no one person or group that controls everything they are all parts of a immense and multi-headed monster that is constantly biting itself and attacking it own heads until some day it will destroy itself.  The end of time leaves space and word alone together.  Information potential exists —it’s an unsettling thought, dependency —and what happens when things start to think? How do you draw the lines then?  Where does the word go?  In the beginning to be sure… but what about at the end….  In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh by a cacophonous blast out of heaven's pearly cum-stained ass creating the father, the son, and the holy spigot which lies in a secluded garden on the cliffs overlooking the Sargasso sea.  The spigot is buried in a volcano designed by Czech ostriches in the eleventh hour of creation to drain all human excrement off the continent of Europe and into the Sargasso sea all lumpy with turd so thick Jesus "conny" Christ in drag is walking along to the amazement of the gullible, floating gently from turd to turd.  The piss blood of a million cunts and cocks line the shores giving the whole place a radioactive iridescent red glow not to mention an awful stench.  Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo are standing on the bluffs watching the spectacle and scanning with hawk eyes for sweet tight asses in which they can stab their hungry cocks.  The father caught the son sitting in the middle of the garden sucking on an apple and he became enraged and hog tied the boy and penetrated every orifice in his body with a peeled and sculpted cucumber cock; the boy was left a whimpering, quivering lump of fleshy jello from which spawned humankind…?  Outside is Las Vegas.  Everywhere the neon glows; the giggling Hyenas tourists are dressed in black and high on somatic stasis —looking to turn you inside out. Tongue-tied whores scream obscenities at passersby "I'll suck your dick until your eyeballs pop out your ass..."
+
+
+Chloe knows a diner, just a short drive… drunkenly Dean careens side streets and alleys while Chloe and I discuss the finer points of her profession.  The oldest profession in the world fascinates me and I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to get the inside dope.
+“For the most part I fuck who I want… I have my regulars… guys that come into town every month or two for recreation….”
+She takes a drag off her cigarette and whips her nose; it’s a gesture of annoyance.  I know that she doesn’t want to talk about work, but I press on because I have to, I have no shame, no bloody words reach me.
+“Most of them are married, nice guys… I don’t work the streets… that’s where it’s dangerous… I used to work at a brothel but everyone treats you like a whore when you work in brothel.  I got tired of it and when I left it turned out I was popular…” she laughed a hearty little chuckle.  “So I just got a pager and now I go to them instead of them coming to me….  But why do you want to know all this stuff?”
+Sharp words bloody words.  “Uh I don’t know… isn’t that what you do when you talk to strangers.... Ask them about there work?”  She laughs.
+“I guess its just that when your job is sex most people tend to not ask… its impolite maybe I don’t know. I wasn’t trying to stop you I was just curious… so what do you guys do?”
+“Umm… drink?  Nothing I guess.”
+“Hmm how do you afford it?”
+“A carefully constructed world of lowered expectations….”  Dean speaks.
+“Hmm.  But you have goals?  You don’t seem like the types that would just hang around, you know barflies or are you on some kind Bukowski trip.”
+Entirely inaccurate synopsis; I must defend us, but what is there to say?  What is there to do?  “Well I actually haven’t read any Bukowski, but yes I guess you could say that… I mean this is Vegas what the hell is there to do?  ‘We’re writers’ sounds stupid because neither of us had actually published anything.  I mean I guess it depends…”
+“No I don’t think it does.  You don’t have to published to be a writer, just like you don’t have to charge money to be a whore.”
+And there the conversation reached a philosophical point that required further thought on all our parts, but the diner appeared and we parked and it was lost for the time being.  Dean went in to get a table and Chloe and I finished out cigarettes in silence.  I was marveling at the edifice of the place.  I am a connoisseur of diners.  Every diner has its own subtle quality which distinguishes it from all the nearly identical establishments of its kind; in order to qualify as a true diner the outside must be painted white and in a state of decay.  This place fit the bill admirably; it looked like the last coat of paint probably still had lead in it, which would put it pre 1980 at least.  Lead is what produces those strange patterned of flaking that leaves the look of weathered desert rock on stucco walls.  Dean leaned out and yelled at us, “we can smoke inside you morons….”  Inside it still lived up to the diner images; hard formica counters rose out of cold concrete floors scuffed from the worn heels of trucker boots treading season after season across the threshold and into the red glow just to rest wearied eyes. It calling up visions of lost highways long gone past; dredged out images blurred together; passing seasons traced out in the arks of headlights carved through concrete.  We sat down in a booth by the side window. Dean went to go spin a few tracks on the jukebox; Chloe looked even more ravishing sitting in the red vinyl cushions her hair was auburn and looked best in the state of confused disarray she wore it.  I fell in love with her the way every man falls in love with whores, a totally false way in the eyes of the cynical world and a totally real way in the eyes of the endlessly recreating universe.  Music floated across the room burying the concrete
+highway traces of noise, the freeway semi trailers flinging themselves through the night headlights dragging the past into the future and we sat, Chloe and I, here, now.
+I was at piece by the time Dean came back; lazy houseflies crawled up the wall behind him and Chloe which set the diner off in league with other infamous places I have eaten such as Ben’s Broasted Chicken.  I was headed up to the Tahoe area by way of the back road, 395, a rickety operation that shoots you straight up the length of california always keeping the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada just to the left.  About three quarters of the way to Tahoe you pass through the blink-and-you-miss-it town of Bishop where among other things there is a roadside dive called Ben’s which serves Broasted chicken and corn on the cob for two dollars a plate.  There were no other options no menu no choices no confusion, no arguing with the cook just broasted chicken and corn.  I remember going in primarily because I wanted to know just what one did to a chicken to make it broasted.  After that all I remember is the enormous lazy flies that crawled up the column next to my table.  I still can’t recollect exactly what the chicken tasted or even looked like, the corn sticks out as being over cooked and mushy and of course the flies were lazy and didn’t move when you swatted them which led me to believe that in fact they were never swatted at.  Indeed Ben’s was probably a kind of legend in fly circles, one to another word passed down the line and traveled all through the Eastern Desert of california, if you were a fly Ben’s was the place to be.  I asked to meet the infamous Ben proprietor and presumably the genius behind the broasting, but unfortunately he was out of town.  Instead the cook gave us a tour of the kitchen and that only served to make my experience at Ben’s a singular one.  I was passing through Bishop several years after that and I tried to locate Ben’s Broasted Chicken so that Amy could share the wonder of broasted chicken with me, but the place was gone, no building nothing, even some locals in town acted like they had no idea what I was talking about.  One old woman gave us that peculiar look that small town people always give to city folk as if to say you have no business poking around here asking questions, but I kept at her until she confessed that Ben’s was something she had never heard of, and what's more she informed us that she had lived in Bishop her whole life.  I started to wonder if maybe I had hallucinated the whole thing and Amy, who was in love with my eccentricities as much as my banality, I am certain though that here was the definitive proof she had always wanted to know for sure that I was totally nuts.  We snacked on bread from Shatz’s Bakery and drove up to Mammoth with me recounting the same story of Ben’s Broasted chicken that I had laid on her before Bishop, doubtlessly boring her to sleep.
+	I recanted the story of Ben’s to Dean and Chloe over double cheeseburgers.  I still don’t let little things like fat lazy flies bother me, who ever heard of a fly that ate anything more than crumbs?  They were doing no harm and the burgers were dripping greasy and quite yummy, as Amy would have said if she had been there.  Every time I get to thinking about or talking about Ben’s Broasted Chicken strange things begin to happen, first the place disappears and then to reach across a span of maybe five years Ben’s came crashing into the present and my mouth dropped open full of half chewed cheese burger when who should come strolling in the door of this diner, but Clay Napier the very man who had been with me on that virgin trip to the land of broasted chicken.  Actually the weirdness factor way have been slightly over played on my part as I did know that Clay was in Flagstaff and often went to Vegas for the weekends, but it’s a big city and then even in Vegas how many diners?  How many nights?  What are the odds?  All of this can in someway be accounted for by the initial mystery that set it all in motion… what is broasted chicken?  I no longer care (I also have made it a point never to consult a cookbook) I prefer the mystery to which broasted chicken has attended, at least for me.
+	I watched Clay for moment without him seeing me.  Clay Napier was an ancient friend, not in a chronological sense but in the sense that we would always be friends regardless of the time between meetings we never had more then twenty or so awkward moments of catching up and then things fell naturally into place as if we had been together everyday for years.  I waited until the waitress had seated him and then casually sauntered up while he was reading the menu and sat down across the booth from him.  I cleared my throat and as I did so and he put down the menu to see who was disturbing him.  I watched in slow motion as his face went from blank irritation to recognition, and then surprise.  We smiled at each other for a moment and then nonplussed, as if it were perfectly natural that we should come upon each other five years and two states away from our last meeting, Clay slid out of the booth and we embraced for moment before the volume of words began to flow forth.
+	“My god what are you doing here?” 
+	“I was going to ask you the very same question —I thought you were up in the mountains or was it in flagstaff?”
+	“Ya I was in Flagstaff until I graduated, now I’m actually living in Wrightwood, but my girlfriend lives down here… she’s working right now so I was catching a late dinner… why are you in Vegas?  Last thing I heard you had gone back to school or something to that effect…?!”
+	I racked my brain.  Where would he have gotten such foolish ideas?  Who was behind this?  “Uh, no I haven’t gotten around to that yet, who told you that one?”
+	“I forget maybe Robert.”  Robert K Statmore an upright human being if there ever was one, it had been years since I had even thought of Bob, except when I went camping and realized with a fresh new sense of shame that I still had the tent I borrowed one weekend almost four years ago.  Which, it dawned on me now was one of the many things I had given away by leaving LA.
+	“How is Bob?”
+	“Dunno, haven’t talked to any of those guys in a couple of years, I been out here doing odd jobs, I was working for a mining firm doing archeological impact studies, you know making sure they weren’t trampling on our people.”  Clay and I both laughed.
+Our people was an old and very elaborate joke that had developed over the years, a sort of half joke actually as Clay and I were serious about some of it.  Our people were the native American’s whose blood ran through both our bodies, in Clay it was the Cherokee, and in mine it was (I think) Ogalala, but either way it wasn’t much, not even enough to claim it for scholarship purposes.  The both of us were middle European mutts, half breeds, the results of some horny individuals who had no qualms about fucking across international boundaries, but the point of “our people” was not so much about us, it was a continuous good natured way to needle the third point in our boyhood triangle of friendship.  That third point was named Jim Stout and was proudly and definitely Irish.  When we all got drunk conversation used to end up with Jim threatening to give us small pox blankets and us half-heartedly trying to scalp him while he slept.  It’s funny now looking back how teenagers can turn genocide and torture into a source of humor and competition.  We were a lot smarter back then.  I smiled at Clay’s comment and was lost for moment in a nostalgic reflection over my boyhood.  I saw Clay as I will always see him when he’s not around, he’s sitting in that diner smiling that old half crooked curve, and to this day his nasal voice echoes about in my ears whenever I think of him.  He had slow manner of speech where you leaned in close so as not to miss a word.  He often didn’t say much just shrugged or gave you a look, but the words that did fall out were carefully measured like a recipe and to miss one of them would ruin the flavor of what he was trying to say.  And then there were The Looks, you have to know someone for a while before you can communicate with them on a subverbal level with just looks, but with Clay that time was double the norm.  He had looks, which he held out in silence that could mean more than complex and overly verbose sentence.  When he was feeling thoughtful and didn’t have an opinion he would stroke his chin with a bemused expression which only over time did I realize was not in fact an ironic mockery of Allen Ginsburg, but really the genuine article of inner reflection being measure out and stirred up.  
+Clay had left LA years ago living in Arizona going to school and continuing down the boisterous outdoor life that we had all lead during high school.  Nearly every weekend we headed out to Joshua Tree the local rock climbing hang out and Clay had patiently taught Jim and I how to climb until one day we were both better than him.  Or at least to be fair that’s how I remember it.  Every summer we had made glorious excursions through the Sierra Nevada, backpacking over the palisades, Mineral King, Sequoia, Yosemite and other mountains with names that I have surrendered to inaccessible regions of memory.  We all came from adventurous sort of families.
+Jim was the first to go his separate way, he ended up at brown University for four years and then Clay went to NAU and I went, well I went here.  And then there and now back here.  Now we just crisscrossed paths occasionally with each of us making plans for trips we knew we would never go on.  The last time I saw Jim, he had met me for a drink at the Little Knight and Tony had presided over our hour and a half meeting like a surgeon trying to revive the dead.  I hadn’t seen Jim since and I didn’t know where he was and apparently neither did Clay.
+	“What are you doing tonight you want to come get a drink?”
+	“Ya I’m with some friends of mine,” I motioned to Dean and Chloe that they should come over.  Dean didn’t know Clay and I hadn’t really said anything when he walked in I just dropped my story and walked over to a strangers table, for all Dean knew I was making arms deals with the CIA.  I introduce them and Dean went back to our booth, retrieved our burgers and we all sat down to dinner.  I introduced Chloe, but she had turned suddenly quiet and I wasn’t interested in her anymore.  She and Dean fell into a conversation separate from Clay and I.  I wasn’t sure but I thought that they were discussing sex and money in that nonplussed way that only a whore can do… so much for a handjob, so much of a blowjob, so much for what ever you want….  Clay was telling me about Anna, his girlfriend and asking what had become of my marriage.  I was sober by the end of the burger and I had a sudden urge to run.  Run away from everyone and everything that had ever been familiar to me and start over by reinventing my personality.  It occurred to me that my initial nostalgia was misplaced, that Clay and I would not always be friends, that I was not who I used to be, that one day Dean would be a stranger as well.  I was feeling quite lonely and wholesome when I came to.  
+	“A rave?  Hey Sil!  Are you listening to me?”  Dean was staring at me as if I was ill.
+	“What?”
+	“A rave.  Chloe knows where a desert rave is… you up for it?”
+	I glanced at Clay and he nodded “just gotta go pick up my girlfriend.”  Damn.  I wanted them all to disappear; I wanted a director to yell cut, to take a break from this strange role I found myself cast into.  “Uh ya sure… you drive and I’ll be there.”
+The four of us took off to a club/bar where Clay’s girlfriend Anna was working, on the way I filled Clay in on five years as best a could (he had heard stories it seemed —good to know that people talk about you when you’re not around).  I left out a few things that I wanted to tell him, but as I said Clay and I are ancient and until I knew where he was at now I had no reason, based on the old Clay to think the one now would care about.  And Clay filled me in because I didn’t hear stories or if I did I never remembered them anyway.  It turned out that Clay had done about half of the things we always suspected he would do, like college, the master degree, the outdoorsy life, the impending move to Colorado… but there were things that I never would have thought to hear that Clay was doing.  
+Back in the day, in fact how I met Clay was through the church youth group, and as I say we were both indoctrinated with the Presbyterian God, but to be honest I was mainly there because there were really cute girls (if I had know then what I know now I would have been down the street at the Mormon tabernacle).  I grew out of religion around seventeen when I read a book on brainwashing and realized that even if all this malarkey they were feeding us was true, I knew nothing of it other than what I had been told.  The same tactics are used by the US military, Indian gurus, Charlie Manson and nearly every other belief centered organization in the world.  I got very angry with myself for being duped by these charlatan tricks that seemingly anyone could have employed by reading a textbook on conditioning psychology.  I was smarter than that I realized, but unfortunately all my friends were not seeing my insights and what's more they seemed genuinely concerned about me for thinking such things.  Subtle reminders were dropped here and there over a dinner or later after we graduated, a beer, things that had the subtle subtext that good religious people can convey through even the most mundane conversation.  At least that’s what I thought at the time and I embarked on this quest to convert them all to my new religion, to undermine the system from within.  I gave them books, got them to smoke pot (well Jim anyway) got them to have some sex, in fact Dean and I even dragged Jim to meet a porn star once at some strip club, but then end up backing out when we learned that their was no alcohol allowed.  I was the propaganda of hedonism.  I always thought that Clay would come round, would wake up as I naively referred to my reactionary religion, but I was wrong.  In fact Clay working at the Christian summer camp that we went to in high school.
+	I got lost in myself again as he talked.  As I said carried hedonism as far (actually a little further) as it would go and there waiting for me at the end was God and this time he wasn’t wearing the gilded robes of human flesh he was much more of a supernatural being than anything I had ever read has prepared me for and he was much subtler in its existence than I had assumed.  He hated Presbyterians and hedonists with equal fervor.  He looked like Hitler in Drag and had a nasty habit of sniffing opium tinctures at the most improbable of moments.  He was related directly to the incident with the little gnomes on ether that were mentioned earlier and how do you relate that to anyone else?  I hadn’t the foggiest and I realized that I was cut off, limited as much as freed by experience because I was so painfully aware of the limitations of being human I was limited.  I was limited to trying to understand Clay when I should have been knowing.  This thought ran like a subtle subtext through the conversation.  Dean took over for me and started telling Clay about people, parties and things that I knew Clay wouldn’t relate to, but I let him because I could see Clay shifting in his seat and having to realize that the other half exists and that was exactly what I had been trying to do.  I tried every trick in the book back in my more clever days and I had forgotten about the one thing that doesn’t get into psychology textbooks: people.  The best evidence for god is man, always has been always will be, any two bit strand of sporific DNA floating through the universe could have made the rest, but man —now there is an odd one.  Where did this thing come from and what the hell is wrong with it?  Who would have made such a thing?  I hold that what made us had a hell of a sense of humor and not much else going on upstairs.
+	When I snapped out of it they were talking about books.  Dean was lamenting the recent demise of William S Burroughs and Clay was arguing that Burroughs was too obscure in his style to ever be the creative genius that people thought him to be.  This I decide would be great time to go the bathroom and I excused myself; there is nothing Dean can talk about with the insane fever of dementia quite like William Burroughs.  I had watched Dean discover and then devour William Burroughs the way some people get over imported chocolates.  He savored each knew book with a delicacy that I reserved for other authors, I recognized immediately that whatever his merits or faults he had at least reached Dean and Dean was a tough nut to crack.  I could never do it.  He had lent me some books and then wham! in I went to the world of the totally bizarre.  Burroughs tunneled himself into my brain like cancer and ate it all up, then I found another and moved on to devour that author consuming that men and women who wrote as intrinsically part of what they were saying.  I have always read that way —being more interest in the whole scope of author’s life rather than moving from book to book the way some people do.  Whether it was Robert Wilson or Tom Clancy it was always the same way, total consumption and digestion followed by a big healthy brown shit.
+	When I came back from the bathroom I could tell that things had gone awry which was just as well because I didn’t really want to talk philosophies I wanted to speed things up.  I went up the bar and asked the bartender to point out Anna for me.  He did and I knew that things between me and Clay would never be the same again.  She was an absolute work of art with delicate pale skin like a Grecian urn and a face with high cheekbones that just kind hung amid a mass of perfect blond ringlets.  She could have been a model, but she wasn’t, she was Clay’s girlfriend and I was smitten.  I have notorious bad habit of sweeping my friends girlfriend out from their arms and into my own consequently my friends don’t usually call for while when they meet someone.  I was awash in cynicism from my earlier musings and I figured if Clay and I were destined to part then I might as well do it with a bang.  I went up and introduced myself.  Anna “had a smile that swerved, a smile that curved, a smile that swerved all over the road.”  If ever there was a girl that Mark Sandman described with those lines it was Anna.  She had a body that hugged the road like BMW and she laughed with the honest mirth that comes only those who know.  I struggled over that sentence for some time trying to put it without sounding like mystic, but the simple truth is if you don’t know what I mean by that then don’t worry you don’t know and if you don’t know you’ll never learn.
+	Anna talked like a little demurring French pastry at once shy and bold with the dancing musical quality that seems to emanate mainly in the voices of women I find attractive and no one else.  When you’re in the presence of a magical voice such as that all you want to do is listen, any other distraction becomes an immediate irritation and all you want is to stop it and get back the sweet music.  Thus by the time a came back to the table with Anna I was already in the mood to do whatever she wanted whenever and wherever she wanted to do it (of course, and therein lies the rub, ten minutes from now it was very possible I would be smitten to another water nymph). 	
+	Clay looked visibly disturbed that I had gotten to Anna before he introduced us and being aware of my past he was already uncomfortable with the idea.  The song was right is you want to be happy for the rest of your life you got to get yourself an ugly wife or in this case girlfriend, because if you’re dating the most beautiful girl in the room you have to continually maintain your Alpha Male presence or the others will swoop in and feed on your weakness.  Women who find that statement offensive have never been the most beautiful girl in the room and the rest of them are evil because they know what power they have and they use it.  Anna was the center of attention at out little table and she knew it and she liked it from what I could tell because she announced before long that she was going to see if she could get off early and go with us to the rave.  
+But like I said whatever, whenever wherever and I could tell Dean was not going to put up a fight.  She left and Clay wisely used this time to go to the restroom, as it was not a good idea to leave the girl with the other dogs.  Dean and I talked it over and decided that we would each do our best to keep the other from sleeping with Anna, but in our quixotic logic we both agreed that the best way to do this was to each keep the other from the crime by committing it ourselves.  Chloe said we were deranged.  We could have subtitled our logic with the slogan keep others out of trouble by getting yourself into it first or as one other put it, “how I found the goddess and what I did to her then” to which I would only add “and how she loved it.”  As they say good lovers are not born they’re made, like Mafioso bosses its all in the luck of the draw, but once you learn you will never look at life the same again.  You will understand from experience.  The question we were debating when Clay returned was whether or not good a Christian could possibly be capable of satisfying the goddess.  We were in the neighborhood of a no when we had to seamlessly shift gears and make Clay believe that we were not talking about his girlfriend the minute he left the table, but of course he knew —wouldn’t you?
+	I managed to suck down one more gin and tonic before the forces of control let Anna loose upon us and we all headed off in her car to this rave.  Chloe and Dean were already groping at each other in the car and Clay and Anna seemed to be having a bit of a spat in the front seat; I watched Anna’s face in the reflection of the side rearview mirror.  She had a elegant sort of beauty that was all in the sharp line of her jaw and the way her chin met with the smooth luster of her neck; she felt to city born and refined to be with Clay.  She wore a thin spaghetti strapped tank top shirt that made no effort to hide the silky black straps of her bra and a long flowing shiny skirt that danced across her ravishing legs when she walked.  We were all walking and had been for some time the rave was in a campground outside of Vegas; to add to the irony of the evening the campground was a place called Red Rocks which during the day was a popular rock climbing spot, one that I had last visited with Clay.  We talked about that as we walked toward the sound of pulsing techno beats and the smells of perfume and marijuana.  Dean, Chloe and Anna walked in silence.
+	The rave was set up in a barren sandy expanse that served as a dance floor and was ringed with canvas tents serving alcohol and herbal ecstasy.  It looked like a Bedouin settlement around an oasis in the desert.  The largest tent was elaborately decorated to play up the North African vibe the walls were covered in Moroccan tapestries and the floor was scattered with pillows and people.  The only light was from old oil lanterns that hung in the back corner.  It cost ten bucks to get into the tent.  Dean and I paid and the girls dragged Clay off to dance.  Dean and I were more interested in getting drinks and whatever else might be lurking like cockroaches in the pillows.  The tent was enormous and looked like it had been borrowed from the circus.  In the rave culture of Las Vegas this was the grandest of all raves and one of the only that bothered to get permits and whatever else it takes to be able to dance legally in the desert.  On the way in we passed limousines and Rolls Royce’s; this was not an underground affair.  To the side of the tent, backlit by purple Christmas lights was the makeshift bar, actually a few tables pushed together and manned by a blond haired kid who never stopped bobbing his head to the beat.  Dean and I secured drinks and found a space back in the darkened corner to relax and be anonymous.
+	We were half way through our drinks before I noticed Crowes.  Not more than ten feet from us was  a guy who we thought might be the lead singer of the Black Crowes and who might have just been another emaciated scraggly haired kid that looked like the lead singer of the Black Crowes.  In either case he crawled over to us with what appeared to be a great amount of effort and sat cross-legged facing us without uttering a word.  Dean greeted him coldly and then we chatted sporadically over the course of a half-hour or so before he offered us a joint.  We graciously accepted and Dean got up thinking we were to follow him outside but Crowes lit it right there in the middle of the tent and with a minimum of discretion passed it to Dean who shrugged and smoked it.
+“Be careful,” the dark locks leaned in closer as if to impart some clandestine knowledge, “this shits pretty hard core.”
+	I laughed in his face but managed to make it look like I was only coughing.  Dean shook his hand and said thanks man don’t worry its cool or some other such dopehead lingo.  But from the minute the smoke hit my lungs it was very obvious that something more powerful than what I was used to was at work here.  My toes got tingly and my hands heavy.  Maybe thirty seconds after I inhaled I was catapulted into another universe that bore absolutely no resemblance to the one before it.  Dean’s face went ashen and I thought thank god because I was going to need company on this one.
+	“You guys are holding up okay, the last time I shared this shit this girl freaked out and thought it was laced with something and tried to beat me up.”
+	“I hate it when that happens.”  Dean took the rather small remnants of a joint and inhaled deeply.  “My ex-wife tried to beat me up the first time I did mushrooms.  I was really out of it and she came home all pissed off about something and she had never done mushrooms so she had no idea where I was and he started yelling at me on the stairs.  I just kind of stood there and looked at her totally unable to comprehend what she was saying then she pushed me down the stairs and kicked me.  Then my sister through her out of the house.”
+Both Crowes and I were laughing by the time Dean finished his little yarn.  Crowes seemed impressed more that Dean had been married than anything else had or maybe that was the entire story that he actually heard seeing how most of the joint had disappeared without us participating. 
+“What was that like man, I mean being married.”
+“Well I don’t really know we were only married two months when that happened I decided after that it was better if we went our separate ways.”
+	“Ya but what was it like to stand at the alter and look at that person and think ya I want to spend the rest of my life with this person.  I mean what does that feel like?”  He put a particular emphasis on fee as if this would someone affect Dean’s response.
+Dean sat for moment in silence staring at his hands.  “I don’t know, uh I never really had that go through my head.  It was just a kind of little thing that got out of control.  She asked me once after knowing her for like three weeks if I wanted to get married and I said sure because I thought she was joking and then next thing I knew she was dress shopping with my mom.  It just happened so fast I didn’t have time to stop it.”
+	This seemed to have a profound impact on Crowes and he withdrew slightly in what I thought was a kind of meditative slouch.  Dean and I exchanged a look after a few minutes and then with still no response we shook the kid.
+	Still nothing.  Hmmmm.
+	“You want to get something from the bar?”
+	“Ya that would probably be good.”  I got up and went to the bar tent.  I got three drinks and set one in front of Crowes who appeared to have settled off into a comfortable coma
+	Eventually Clay and girls find us; they are tired from dancing and welcome Crowes’ offering except for Clay who didn’t smoke pot.  I thought maybe we should warn them, but I was already lost seeing not a tent but an underground bar in France.  I am underground.  Anna’s face blurs into Nina’s, into Amy’s into a thousand different hybrids of herself like a shape-shifting shaman.  I smile at her and she smiles back. Step aside and let the man go through.  I feel like a featherweight-lead-train, muscles detached from their control centers, inoperable.  My mind floats far out of the monkey body and glides in effortless circles, endlessly, a buzzard soaring on thermals and returning only to rest.  And resting only with the throb of the music that drags us up and down over sand dunes and through thick stands of palms to water.  Dean and Chloe go off to dance.  Clay is gone too though I had not noticed it.  I am lying on my back in a delicious see of cloth, sound and touch.
+“How are you doing?”  Anna attempts to drill through the ice.
+	“Just lovely how are you?”
+	(laughing)  “Lovely I guess… So how long have you known Clay?”
+	“I dunno a decade or so, maybe more… it all runs together… how long have you two been dating?”
+	“Six months.”
+	Dead-end.  Conversations that are substituting for sex are never any fun, nor are they easy to maintain— its best to get the sex out of the way before you start talking.  Anna came to the rescue.
+	“Would you like to dance?”
+	“We could do that….”
+	“I’m a little stoned to go outside… why don’t we dance right here?”
+	I propped up on my elbows and stared right into her eyes searching for some hint of double entendre but she only stared back like a somnambulist.  But she kept getting closer and closer and closer like a slow motion film of the casino collapsing and then we kissed.  Her lips were warm and soft; they were full pouting lips and then they left.  I opened my eyes slowly.  Crowes walked by laughed and dropped a bag beside us.  Inside was a gooey gray substance known to most as opium.  Anna and I fumbled around through Chloe’s purse and found a pipe, which we filled with the roach and heaped on a healthy amount of opium.
+		The taste of opium is sweet like Nag Champa incense; it perfumes your lungs and wraps them it its warm hand, a delicious felling and then I exhaled it into her mouth.  This is not Clay’s girlfriend nor do petty questions of loyalty or moral clouds of right and wrong concern me; this is simply life and it is beautiful.  All the opium dreams I have ever had come back in desert windstorms, monsoons of the coast of Mandalay and this is no longer Nevada this is everywhere and the music is undulating in time with her body dancing lightly swaying on her knees hovering over my chest. It was a house beat the kind of palpitating serpentine rhythm that you can not help but move to; over in corner a young boy no more than eighteen is standing with his back to the wall watching, a non participant I am thinking and then I notice that he too is swaying almost imperceptible to the music, the virus of movement.  His movement is both awkward and unconscious, but it has a naturalness to it that belies the sense that he is insecure, I am watching him, but in my own perhaps distracted way I too am awkward and in my distraction honesty has taken the reigns… my hands roam her body.  I look up suddenly with what must be a face of horror as I realize that I am groping at Anna’s flesh, but her head is thrown back and she seems not to care so I continue my explorations.  Her stomach is soft, tightly stretched skin like a drum, a jimbe with her breasts like two percussive bongos, her nipples are hard and feel like raisins sunk into the sink.  And the music switches beats, this one exhaustive, tribal, jungle pulsation’s in juxtaposition to the Hindu décor it attacks like a jaguar tearing at me.  I am exhausted.  My head collapses back between and pillows and with the last bit of reason, last bit of will I pull her up and over my face.  Her dress envelopes me in a sea of darkness and smell her musty and sweet like pungent orange blossoms sprinkled over seas of future dreams.  The music sways in time with her body and all sense of place and time vanish.  There are only temporal dreams lived out in paint in slick tempura of desiring swimming under her dress.  I blow softly onto her cunt through the barrier of satin; as my eyes adjust to darkness a damp circle of humid desire becomes visible and tactile in its stickiness.  Her juices flow freely and she moans softly over the music; she shifts slightly and her hand reaches down caressing my face and pulling her panties to the side.  It leaves and she sinks down on me until her cunt covers my mouth and breathing through my nose I begin to worm my tongue up in her.  Slowly probing and then when the flow of juices is too much I lift her ass in my hands forming a stool out of my hands and painting her clit with slow glazing strokes.  I am lost for what seems eternity, not thinking about Anna, or the rave or any of it, but simply becoming cunt.  Shape shifting as the shaman can I feel it from the inside coming out in waves pulsing waves so different than my own orgasms, waves that very in size and strength, waves that crest and break and other that I let roll by undisturbed.  There is no tsunami, no end point, no differentiation no beginning no ending only fleeting twinkles of a glittering amaranthine orgasm.  I am drawn back by her stillness and the sharp pain of her nails digging into arms.
+	She rolls off me and lies down beside me kissing and licking her come off my face.  She is smiling, but does not speak.  Minutes pass like hours.  Clay returns and they go off to dance, as she leaves her hand moves behind her motioning at me to follow but I don’t yet.  I lay there with out moving just feeling tangential mix of sex and opium.  Sex.  The feel of her nipple rubbing coarsely against mine the softness of mashed sweating breasts stuck to my skin, kissing, chasing her tongue around her mouth….  There is a reason writers are afraid of sex and hate trying to write it, they don't have words for it.  They think its something that is happening, a thing that exists apart from us, but it is not.  It is in us —we are sex.  Sex is seeping from our pores and we hate it, we deny it.  I want to celebrate it; I want to have a mad passionate orgy with the entire world.  I want men I want Women I want plants I want animals, all life in one orgiastic embrace like Kali and Vishnu; mouths locked on mouths, on breasts, on cocks, on cunts, cocks in cunts, in asses, between breasts, tongues licking necks, licking nipples, licking asses, fingers probing flesh, FLESH FLEsh FLesh searing and popping with electrostatic sexual energy.  No words for it.
+	Dean and Chloe return.  They found the opium and pack themselves a bowl.  Anna seemed slightly embarrassed and excused herself to look for Clay.  Dean Chloe and I are lying like pictures out of the room of some Chinese Laundry joint; blank faceless bodies reveling in the glory of our own nervous systems and in the elastic beauty of each other.  
+Chloe roles on her side facing me and kisses me.  She tastes it.  I put my finger to her lips and she smiles.  “Hey Dean… Sil saved you the trouble….”
+	Dean sits up “You fucked her?!”  
+	“Not exactly”  Chloe kisses me again this time plunging her tongue down my throat and then grabs Dean and kisses him.
+	“Oh I see.  Wow that’s really odd… that right there I mean… you ate Anna… Chloe kisses you… and then me… so I taste Anna… I’m not sure how I feel about that… should that gross me out?”
+	Chloe laughs, “why would it gross you out, because it originated in Sil’s mouth?  But it didn’t… what is with you men?  You all want to be with two women and yet you can’t even stand to be hard around each other….” 
+	It’s not that….”
+	“Yes it is, trust me if there is one thing I know it’s the sex habits of men.  I can’t tell you how many guys freak out at the thought that I might have just had a cock other than theirs in me… it makes no sense at because that’s what I do, but even if I wasn’t it still wouldn’t make any sense.  What is so revolting about men?  What is so revolting about cocks?  If you ask me I don’t think any of our hang up are from women….  Its men that can’t stand the sight of themselves.
+	“It’s not that….”  Dean is at a loss for words.
+	“What do you mean its not that?  What is it then?  I mean if your so comfortable with you body why didn’t you want to fuck me in the middle of all those people?  What is your hang up then?”
+	Dean is silent.  I feel the need to defend him, but I can’t the girl is right.  
+“Down at the bottom of all the strange America hang ups about sex lies the sad truth that men are not comfortable in their own skins.  Maybe a hand full here and there....  Freud would say its penis envy or a modified version of it that deals with size, but its more than that.  Men have inherited genetic memory or past life memory or something handed across more than cultural boundaries that carries with it guilt. I have no idea why, but it’s there you can hear it in between that words when men talk about sex.  There is a different language employed by men.  Men always talk about sex in terms of women or a woman… like ‘we had sex’ or ‘she was sexy’ or whatever, but there is no talk of the self —everything sexual is transferred to the woman.  She is the one that made him cum, she is the one that bent over, and she is bearer of all things wanton...  Men dream of a wanton sexual woman, but they don’t want to be a wanton sexual person themselves.  Everything that is desire is always ‘aroused’ that’s why they come to me because I am wanton or at least that’s how they see it.  I don’t exist for them and that is the most wanton thing you seem to be able to imagine this abstract fantasy girl that is everything all rolled into one and doesn’t have to be dissected and pulled apart… just put the money on the dresser when you leave….”
+“Does that bother you?”  Dean lights a cigarette and props up on his elbows.  He raises his eyebrows at me when he notices that I have been fondling Chloe while she talked. 
+“No it doesn’t bother me… but it doesn’t turn me on either….  I mean men like to think that whores don’t feel anything, like because money is involved we suddenly can’t experience pleasure of something, but that’s a load of shit….  If anything I have had better sex since I have been doing this… some of the guys I fuck are gorgeous, I would be intimidated to talk to them in a bar… but most of them still seem to think that being a whore is an odious task… that I must be faking because I couldn’t possible cum if money is involved….  Like this one guy who likes me to masturbate while he watches and then he’ll start masturbating too sitting in this chair.  (her eyes close)  at first it kind of crewed me out but then I started getting really turned on by it and he was telling me what to do and how fast and it was weird like I was masturbating, but he was in control… that turned me on big time, but he will not believe that.  He still tells me that I can fake an orgasm better that anyone… but the thing is that usually I’m not faking it….  I mean I don’t want to get into it... its probably boring but….”
+“No I’d be interested to know what strange things you have done… what’s the weirdest thing somebody has asked you to do?”  I am intrigued.
+“The weirdest?  Wow um, probably the guy that wanted me to rape his wife, but refused to do that… the weirdest thing I have done….” Chloe’s face seemed refracted; split apart as if she were tapping some memory far removed from now, from this self.  I wanted to attribute that to some reflex of her profession, some need to detach, but it seemed untrue in her case.  Chloe had that relaxed ease of one who can change personality at will not simply out of necessity, but on whim, anything arbitrary that might have set her thinking. She was far too intelligent to do anything she didn’t want to do, at least to do it for money.  “I guess the weirdest was this guy who liked me to take a shit in front of him.  He had this warehouse/loft thing downtown and there was nothing in it except for a little bar on wheels that he kept against the wall by the door.  The elevator opened right into the place which always reminds me of the forts my brother used to build in his room… he would stack pillows up so the when you opened the door and went inside you were automatically in the fort.  But anyway this guy would send a limo for me and then I would go up to the loft in a French maid getup completely with the little feather duster and I would clean the place while he sat in the chair and watched.  He would get furious if I acknowledged his presence… the place was clean to begin with so would just kind of wander around and bend over here and there and pretend that I was doing something.  And then after about ten minutes of that I would get a silver platter from behind the bar and lay it in the middle of floor in front of his chair and take a shit on it.  Then I left.”
+Dean shook his head, “what did he do with it?”
+“I have no idea; I don’t really want to know, but he paid me a thousand dollars to do it once a week for about six months and then he just disappeared.  Probably found someone new… I dunno one day I was all dressed up waiting for the limo and it just never showed.”  Throughout her story Chloe had her back to me and I was absently stoking her ass at first and then I moved in on her cunt, it was warm and soon wet and I was fingering her without reserve by the end of it.  She still did nothing to acknowledge it.  Dean told a story about his ex wife who had been stripper for some time.
+“She did some er extra curricular stuff, but it used to bother me for some reason.  There was this one guy though that liked her to come over… same kind of set up she showed up in a French maid outfit and made him a sandwich, it was even on a silver platter if I remember right… then she served it to him and she set in on his lap and straddled him and pissed on the sandwich.  Then she left.  What a weird fucking thing to want….  I mean most fantasies I have heard I could if not relate to at least understand, but that one is just lost on me….”
+“It used to be lost on me too until I realized that it had nothing to do with me or with sex or anything, I think it was a way of touching some part of him that was sealed off in memory, something too painful to access everyday and he needed that intimacy to remind him….”
+“But what’s intimate about watching someone take shit?”
+“Well think about it Dean… I mean how many people have you seen taking a shit?”
+“Not many.”
+“Exactly, so if you saw me doing it it would likely remind you of someone you knew well, well enough to watch them going to the bathroom.  At least that’s what I think… who knows though maybe there is some Freudian explanation… maybe they were hung up in the anal stage….”  Silence drifts on reflection of the idea.  
+“Do you enjoy sex outside of work?”  I had to know does making sex your job make sex into work?”
+“Sil, what kind of question is that?  Of course I enjoy sex even when I’m not getting paid… I mean its sex… just because you make money at it doesn’t mean you don’t have fun when you're not… am I making sense?”
+“Sort of.  I think the opium might be crossing a few wires.”  I smiled at her and she lay back down.  The three of us stared at the top of the tent.  
+Chloe started off talking again slowly at first.  “The thing about me is that I have been exposed to some rather extreme forms of sex in my professional life and I keep trying to drag what I like out of them into my personal life, but it freaks men out.  They can’t handle women who know what they want.  I scared the living shit out of my last boyfriend.  We had been dating about two months, having sort of vanilla sex, you know missionary, me on top, doggy, run of the mill stuff, so I thought maybe I should expose him to something more…. (laughing fits over took her and she paused for a minute)  I’ll never forget the look on his face when I walked into the room wearing skin tight rubber boots that go all the way up my legs… I had on nipple clamps I was holding a dog collar and a chain.  I told him ‘get on your knees and lick my asshole.’  He wouldn’t do it, he left me standing there... he just took off and I never talked to him again….”
+“That’s a travesty….”  Dean clearly would have stayed.  So would I.
+“Ya men are good at dishing out perversion and degrading you but most can't take it when it’s your perversion and you degrading them.  That is why I prefer bisexual women, women who know that sex is everywhere inside you….”
+“How long have you been bi?”  Lesbian chic fascinates me, one day it just became perfectly acceptable for women to have sex with each other.  Not that there is anything wrong with that, it just seemed to have happened one day.  Odd.
+“I’ve been sexual since I was born that’s that thing I don’t like about saying I’m bi, it like one day I woke up and liked women?  No it doesn’t work like that… sex is this thing inside us that has to come out.  Some people let more of it out than others that’s all….  I think sex with women is more exciting, and easier than sex with men.  I know women's bodies; they are my own body.  By the nature of things having sex with women is more like masturbating, there is no coming to terms with the other.  There is no Other.  And women are adventurous than with men.”
+I was about to ask if she had a girlfriend when out of nowhere Chloe grabbed my arm and pulled my fingers out of her cunt with such ferocity that I thought I had offended her; she didn’t even look at me.  Then I saw Anna and Clay approaching and I understood.  
+They were leaving; Anna looked disappointed, but I didn’t trust my instincts just then.  It was around four and Clay had to drive back to Wrightwood.  We all walked back to his car and headed for the diner.  The ride was in an awkward silence.  By the time we reached Dean’s car I was on the brink of madness from the silence from the unquenched longing and more than anything from the wan of opium.  I hugged Clay and then Anna automatically like they were statues.  And then they were gone.
+I had a forlorn look on my face to which Dean made a point of saying, “poor Sil.  That’ll teach you to let’em cum first.”
+“Oh and you did any different?”  Chloe raised an eyebrow at him.
+Dean shrugged and replied, “I must have done something right you’re still here….”
+“You are both morons of the highest degree… luckily for you I took the liberty of taking care of you… you seemed like you needed it….  Come on we need to go get a room at the kldjlkj hotel….”
+“A room?  What for?”
+“Because that’s where Anna is meeting us after she gets rid of that Clay guy… what was with him anyway?”
+“I dunno he’s an old friend… not his scene I don’t think….”
+“Well come on I need to smoke some more of this opium.”
+
+
+The room was small, two double beds crammed in between a closet and a window, the mattresses sagged and looked like they had been fucked to extinction.  I called down to the lobby and ordered extra sheets which we laid over the bedspreads and only then did Dean feel comfortable enough to lie down on the bed.  Chloe was on him in seconds and I was left to sit and wait.  Waiting as I have said before is something I gave up on so I decided to go for a walk.  We were on the outskirts of Las Vegas the budget travelers’ paradise where the rooms are cheaper than the cover charge at the clubs downtown.  The area was artificial from the get go, no thought had been put into it, no planning councils, no zoning arguments, it wasn’t even within the city limits.  Outside the familiar dry desert heat washed over me like a napalm bath.  It was acrid air; it stunk with the worthlessness of lower middle class mediocrity, not rich, not poor, not anything at all —stale.  The moon was just disappearing behind the White Mountains somewhere off near the horizon with its glow being the only thing visible from this side of the overpass.  I walked up the embankment and watched cars on the freeway screaming past.  The rush of the wind as the semis passed at ninety was strong enough to lean into.  Lighting a cigarette proved impossible so I headed back.  When I turned around I saw them.  Or I saw it, which was a freight train at near crawl as it came around the bend and headed east out of Vegas.  I was transfixed for moment and then a passing semi sent a blast of air and dust that sent me down the embankment and back to the hotel.  
+Anna bless her heart was not there when I got back.  There was only Chloe sitting in bed smoking a cigarette.  It seemed natural that she should be doing so and sat down next to her and smoked a cigarette too, neither of us spoke.  About half way through mine, she crushed hers out and still without saying a word unzipped my pants and fished out my still flaccid prick.  She pulled the covers over her head and I felt her warm mouth on my stomach.  Her hands worked at my belt and she pulled down my pants and I kicked them off unto the floor, then she swallowed my cock whole.  Or at least that’s what it felt like.  I relaxed and smoked.
+
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+	I am staying in Andy’s closet.  It’s a walk-in, big enough for a futon pad and the rent is cheap —free.  The rest of the rooms in the house were full before I got here.  Andy lives in the master bedroom, which is really not much larger than my closet; down the hall on the left is Sarah, the art student/waitress who engages me daily in great feminist debates; on the right is Kobyoshi, a strange frail lad from Thailand with a mind that far outstretches the meager sphere that his body implies.  This morning Kobyoshi informed me that he is quitting his position as a research assistant at a nuclear fission lab to pursue a career in ballet.  Fine.  Perhaps I ought to get a job in a fission lab, there are several around here, but I won’t.  It’s a cheery little household.  We’re all just waiting, biding our time; we’re all dead to the world.
+	Outside is America land of the free wage slaves, my corner for now is San Francisco.  Not a bad corner of the nuthouse as things go, it seems endlessly expansive, solid city all the way down to Palo Alto through Silicon Valley and all the rest of the deranged suburbs that I only know about from reading the papers.  I stick more toward the center of things, the city, the teeming thriving pulse of the city; at least here there is a distraction from banality and some outside drama by which to measure the immensity of my own failure.  My economic failure, my failure to be assimilated, my refusal to die, my own obituary that is written in blood on the streets I wander.  Once your dead the world takes on a spectacular detached glory that I heap over my rotting bones like a warm Indian bearskin.
+The telephone rings and shortly after Andy informs me that we are to meet Brent for lunch downtown at Café Claude.  Café Claude is an authentic little French bistro that the three of us like because it reminds us of better days, days we haven’t had yet, days we aren’t going to have.  In America there is only one way to be happy and that is to have a lot of money.  All other things are looked on with scorn and derision he who is not working to better his financial lot is a blight upon the national character.  A disease that must cured.  I am the biggest blight of them all having never held a job for more than year; at least Andy works at a bar which is a kind of halfway house into which he was thrust until he could be assimilated and digested by something bigger, something corporate, something with real teeth that can hold him for a lifetime.  I doubt it will ever happen; Andy is too good a man to ever fall for such a downright ridiculous con.  For the time being he cuts me in on his tips and we survive.  He also steals a lot of liquor from his work so that we never want for drunkenness.  I am constantly drunk, but rarely on liquor, I am drunk because I see everything around me with absolute clarity, I have two selves one which walks and the other which records and it is the other that concerns me now.  
+Andy is the last living being I know (except for Dean who is doing a stint with a girl in LA) we share the drunken enthusiasm of those without hope, and without hope there is no despair everything proceeds in splendor and glory one is left free to contemplate the details and minutia. Nighttime we regroup ourselves into his room and regale the days, I talk of buttons found in gutters and Andy talks wild futureyarns.  He comes home stumbling having usually polished a bottle while closing and usually brings some flimsy woman with him under vague pretenses of incongruous behavior.  Andy is a delirium his fever-struck eyes are always one step ahead of you, its dizzying to keep up, drives me mad keeps me up at nights long after he has peacefully lapsed into a coma and a girl I don’t know is asking for a ride home or cab fare or directions to the subway.  His latest plan calls for Costa Rica, something about casinos and rich American bitches, as he calls them.
+	It’s cold outside still, morning is undercooked; I can feel the raw drafts that leak under Andy’s window.  They come in waves wafting in and sinking down to the hardwood floors, swirling about propelled like a drunken countess’s foul smelling fart.  They seek me out, countesses, farts and drafts they find me lying here wrapped in my pathetic collection of blankets.  Ah it has found a way under the door!  It creeps in and wraps me up in dank odorless fecundity leaving me in a clamshell. I take another drag off my cigarette and crush it out in the ceramic bowl by my head; no doubt later when we walk up the hill to the BART station it will be roasting —always hot or cold no in between.  Andy asks what I think of the girl he had last night, he forgets that I was asleep before he got home. 
+“I mean she was no supermodel I realize that but did you see that kind of vacant peaceful stare in her eyes?  I was on top of her just staring at her eyes they were like obelisks —Arabic mosques…. Did you not that twinge of religiosity about her?  I think she was from Kansas, something weird about those people… so flat… so much sky they always have an air of wonder that hangs in their eyes….  Have you seen my jacket the one with fur lining?”
+	Andy is right over my head looking around the other side of the closet for his jacket.  He’s hopping about trying not to step on me, rattling on about his new girl.  She is going to come into his work again tonight, but that is not so good he informs me, it will blow his chances with “the randoms” as he calls them.
+	“It’s a Friday see and I didn’t think about that when she said she was coming in.  Fridays you don’t want anyone hanging around because all the cunts that only come out on weekends are there and they’re only there to get a little.  They’re a special kind those girls that work hard all week they go a little bit farther in there spare time… Do you remember that one a couple of weeks ago, Michelle I think her name was… turns out she had the herps so I went and got tested before work last night… hey,”  He stops looking for his jacket and stares down at me he has a wistful look on his face, but his head is upside down and reminds me a potatohead toy with a pasted on goatee and slightly askew lips, eyes that look out of order and crazy, glinting.  He ponders my face for minute and continues on earnestly now "you wouldn’t want to go with me to the clinic would you?  I mean its one of those things I know it doesn’t kill you or anything, and I don’t have any symptoms… I went mostly to make sure that she wouldn’t accuse me of giving it to her… you know how women get on things like that these days, but still would you mind?  I’d rather have someone there if it does turn out bad for me….
+	“Sure Andy, let me take a shower.”  I am mildly touched that he is dragging me into the sordid affairs of his life, that he thinks so highly of me, but they are nevertheless his own sordid affairs and frankly I want nothing to do with them, but he promises to buy me lunch if I accompany him.  The shower is weak and barely wets your hair, but it’s hot and it washes off the sticky dampness of morning.  By the time I get out my skin is pink and flushed, my reflection in the mirror reminds me of a newborn.  
+In the BART station Andy tries to convince me that we should attend a private party for the wrapping of Coppola’s new film On The Road.  “I know you don’t like the book or any of that, but there will be beautiful women, actresses and hangers on, it like a Hollywood type of thing only right here in the city.”  He tells me about the girl that invited him and somewhere lets it slip that the Daily Grill is catering the affair.  Food! Now that’s worth any amount of hell, I would trudge across stygian mountains of insipid shallowness, fly low over enemy territory, flak batteries firing pointless banal conversations if only there be a sandwich at the end of the line.  It is wonderful thing to go to bed with a full belly.  Last night Andy didn’t come home until three in the morning, I fell asleep with my arms clenched against my stomach to stop the gnawing pain.  
+It’s almost noon when we hit the street at Embarcadero.  Downtown has an cold electrical buzz to it, a peculiar conglomeration of sounds that phase-cancel each other and bounce around in the echo chamber of buildings to create a hoarse faintly bucolic noise.  It rattles your teeth if you focus on it.  The combination of a millions of computers humming, ovens cooking, stoves frying, refrigerators opening, cars starting, neon open signs lighting up, and all the other cryptic roaring noises from fires of the good life assail me like the smog in Mexico City.
+I remember as a kid wanting to live here; I thought it was the greatest city in the world.  It might be, but I want to check the rest of world before I settle on that opinion.  I had been in Los Angeles minding my own business, eeking out a pathetic little existence full of long term goals, plans, marriage even and then one day I woke up in the middle of the night and there was a strange man beside the bed.  He extended his hand and I took it.  We floated up out of the room over the entire earth and looked down at the overflowing anthills of man, it looked like the view from the top of the empire state building.  The entire country was in a state of rabble; the people moved through ruins like the retreating Napoleonic Army leaving Alba.  Everywhere the lines were falling back, but it was not real war it was a ghost war, there was no enemy, nothing to run from only hunger, the wretched hunger of the human belly which forced us all the shoulder up and trade time in for tickets and ticket for money and money for food and all the grand dreams, the Horatio Alger myths were nothing more than a bankrupt game of miserly old men smoking cigars and trying to fill there own bellies.  And everywhere the retreat continued, men racing in shadows hiding from everything from everyone who might steal their bread their wine their wives.  The squirmed like little bugs fearing heal boot of the old men who were themselves only slightly bigger and therefore more grotesque bugs.  The scene could have come from Dante but it didn’t it came from life itself, life without art, life needed art, something to hang on the walls something to read at night before bed, something… anything to stave off and hold the truth at bay, the ugly truth of sewer rat’s retreat.  There was no art in life, it was not of life it was separate and detached it had no purpose.  I saw my own retreat a steady shameful slink from one shadow to another until that night when the strange man thrust me forth into the light, into the realization that all life was without hope.  Hope was a product of the human imagination not human life, life itself held out nothing, asked nothing and gave nothing.  Hitherto I had been waiting.  Waiting for something to happen, but now I saw clearly that nothing was ever going to happen, nothing had ever happened and all of history was but the meandering account of sad little creatures burrowing there way through the earth searching for death.  The waiting had driven me mad, I had clutched onto any straw of hope that came my way and they had all turned to dust in my hands.  The lilies of the field do not want for clothing said Christ why then did he wear a robe?  All imitations of life are false to it, all reflections cast back by art or art under any other name are only broken dreams, hope dashed on the rocks of failure careening like a pirate ship with no port to call home.  And then as the man faded out and I found myself hovering over the sewage mess of the earth I saw little fires burning, outposts in the western lands, retreat camps where those who had given up the ghostly illusion of hope were congregating.  I drifted down out of the clouds and settled myself near a camp where I could observe and record.  
+The next day I got up out of bed after my wife had left for work and I packed up my things, what I couldn’t carry I gave away and I headed for Dean’s place where I new I could exist in relative peace.  Two weeks later Andy sequestered me off Dean’s couch and said I would be much happier in San Francisco.  He said the artificial plastic palm tree paradise of LA was making me myopic, I remember because I had to look up myopic in the dictionary.  Andy always had a kind of word-for-the-day thing going on lately it had been mellifluent, which Minop said was akin to relaxed or mellow.  I didn’t feel myopic in LA, but I had consigned my fate to the wind and Andy was the first to blow through, so I came here to San Francisco.  For now I am content in this damp cramped world of fog.  I’m not leaving until I solve the riddle of the fog, where does it come from (Brent told me there is a potato field up north by Stinson Beach where you can supposedly see it forming).  Why is it here?  What is it trying to tell me with its plodding ceaseless monotony?  Why is it robbing us of our summer sunshine everyday around four o’clock?  Why does it retreat again around noon?  What are we to make of this four hour gap of sunshine?
+Brent is waiting for us outside Café Claude, nervously smoking cigarettes and looking for all the world more like spectral ghost of machinery than a human being.  He looks worse every time we see him, the better his life gets the worse he looks.  Today he announces, opening the door as he says it, that he just landed a new ad campaign that’s going to earn him three thousand a week.  Two thousand of which will go to support that massive heroin addiction he maintains and another nine hundred of which will pay rent on his swanky downtown loft that he insists of keeping.  Brent would rather starve than live in the slum joints up the hill; his way of staying afloat in the all-consuming ocean of heroin is to elevate addiction to a form of art.  He shoots with an old metal syringe won’t do it with a common ‘junky pick’ as he calls plastic syringes.  He keeps it neatly in a hand carved cedarwood box on the coffee table.  He ties off with a leather strap that he claims was tanned by an old Indian expressively for the purpose.  When he shoots up its like watching a magician going through well rehearsed but cryptic methods, the spoon is real silver, the water distilled and filtered, the arm band tight and then bang in it goes, and the needle is always removed and carefully placed back in the cedarwood box before he allows himself to nod off.
+But then once he comes round again all is cut loose and he turns to a manic clawing about the room scrapping his fingernails down the rough edges of ideas, he has an enthusiasm and energy such as I have never seen in another junky.  He paints like he shoots, everything is methodically laid out and then without warning the frenzy begins, he leaps about in front of the canvas chaotically stabbing out with a passion borne more of frustration than inspiration.  It’s the passion of one who strives for something and no longer knows why.  Brent is the sergeant giving orders who can’t help wondering why it is that he has to take the hill.  For Brent everything is suspect, life is a paranoid adventure where everyone moves their heads on cake turners, swiveling and scheming for each others mutual demise without know why, without having motivation for anything other than sheer existence.  His only recourse is the ritual that is the only thing over which he can assert any control and he does it in such a way that gives him total control and then he steps back from himself and lets go.
+The drinks are hardly on the table when Brent launches into how, despite his recent successes as the art director for an advertising firm, everything is more or less going to hell in a hand basket.  I for the most part agree with him, but for wholly different reasons.  Under his haranguing critics of his life the lunch brews like an oceanic storm; he only invites us in order to have an audience for his misery just like a priest has nothing without a congregation.  The tempest starts slowing, small lapping boat wakes at first, bread, wine, a plate of cheese, I try not to woof it down because I am not accustomed to rich foods.  Richness Brent claims is merely ritualized discontent….  Then breakers roll into the jetty, seared ahi salad with warm honey mustard sauce, delicately arranged on white plates with fresh ground pepper.  The walls swim in light floating textures of wine and palpated with bread soaked in balsamic vinegar and oil.  The other patrons begin to veer and swerve about, their food passes by rousing a selfish hunger, dessert carts cloud up the sky and signal the coming danger, and then finally the tsunami.  A beautiful girl named Holly serves us Terrine of Sole and Salmon in three different colors, fish arranged like impressionist art with all the delicacy of the Louve only to be shoveled brutally into hungry mouths with the blunted points of a fork.  Skewering money, chewing up delicacy and putting it back where it belongs in the churning stomach of slime and guts.  Holly is lascivious and I see her bent over a table begging for it, wanting the flesh, the warmth, the wild freedom of penetration.  The restaurant turns to a saturnalia and patrons falls into unadulterated orgies of stinking flesh smeared with sweat and cum; they regress into hair covered hunchbacks slobbering and drooling, crawling all over each other with snarling lust, all the hidden stresses of their lives turn them backward, relics of DNA that reek of perfumes, jewels, and other masks to cover the organic septic tank of their origins.  By the end of the meal I am in pain again clutching my stomach and loosing my belt, the richness of the food swells on contemplation and we float, whisked by vaporous entrails back out into the street.  That’s the way it’s always been starvation followed by gluttony; I wouldn’t have it any other way. 
+Because Brent bought lunch I talk Andy into buying us all a cup of coffee.  We catch a cab to north beach because Brent refuses to use public transportation —another method of rising out of the cesspool, the crème of the junky crop.
+“I’m gonna check into a clinic as soon as I get this job finished because I’m tired of struggling to get junk when I should be enjoying my life.  You know this is the first time I’ve left the house in three days?  I’ve been working so much I just don’t have time to get out anymore.  If I do go out its only over to Oakland to get some shit and then straight back, I’m sick of it, sick to death, but you can’t just quit you know… or at least I can’t.  I need to be forced off the shit, weaned slowly…”
+“You serious?”  Andy retains great faith in Brent; I retain great faith in heroin.
+“Ya.  And I know I’ve said it before but this time I mean it I gotta get off of this roller coaster and do something with my life.”
+I laugh in his face, I just couldn’t help it, but he ignores me and continues on.  “I want to travel see the world, see my painting hang in a gallery; I went to an opening about a week and half ago and it was terrible.  Fucking terrible!  Lacquered checks that was one of the pieces, just lacquered ordinary bank checks!  What the fuck is that about?”
+Brent is convinced that he only needs to find the right person to represent him, give him money or at the very least just believe in him because he doesn’t believe in himself he never has from what I can gather.  He is always putting the final touches on the perfect piece, but we can’t see it, we can’t see it until it is exactly as he wants it, as if the thing had no life beyond what he was capable of vesting it with, and indeed for that very reason his painting don’t have any life beyond him.  No one ever saw these paintings and I for one didn’t really think they existed anywhere but in Brent's own head.  They weren’t even paintings anymore they were representations of his entire enormous bloated cosmology distilled into crystalline existence by the very force of his own will.  Brent should have been a priest, he was better suited for a life where nothing can ever possibly be experienced, where hope keeps you outside life, everything is constantly elsewhere, unreachable, only to be shouted at and begged for.  He was a cur dog lapping at the crumbs fate had dealt him when all the while everything he ever wanted was sitting right on the other side of the door.  It was torturous to listen too and I fairly bounded out of the cab when it stopped.  I slipped out like a neutrino unaffected by the gravity of the black hole.
+We stop in at La Boheme, THE place for an artist to be seen in San Francisco.  We went there because the place makes us laugh or it makes Brent laugh, it makes me think of Celine’s comment: “I piss on all from a great height.”  Inside is like a trough urinal at a baseball stadium, people sit at booths and stand by tables peeing out their mouths.  The neo-bohemian set is pissing all over themselves today with extravagant warm streams of urine out of one and into the mouth of another where the recipient will swill it around for a day maybe two and then when you come back they will be pissing the same thing into the mouth of another.  I order a cup of coffee and head outside letting Andy pick up the tab.  Walking to the door I can hear the streams of piss splashing, great Niagara’s cascading from the mouths of privilege, children of tomorrowland who mortgage the future for a bit of today.  Children who can’t stop pissing out inane theories and ideas, principles and mottoes, quoting dead authors like their words where written solely for them to drink down.  Drink rich and deep and then piss it out like a bulimic myna bird mimicking everything it hears, the voice is hollow detached, devoid of feeling.  I find a corner table and wait.
+Wait.  Wait.  Waiting for the sun, the moon and the stars to keep shining, waiting for Brent to kick junk, waiting for the bohemian children to be flash pasteurize in the blinding white light of creation.  Waiting for the world to curdle like sour milk, buttermilk, sweet and sour.  Waiting for nothing and everything to join forces in celestial alchemy and produce —something.  Waiting for the world to escape the nightmare of history.  Waiting for James Joyce to come waltzing down the street with great crowd of children gathering behind him.  Bugs Bunny, Maldorf, Harvey Milk, and Anwar Sadat sit at the head of great float bespeckled with roses and bearing a banner that reads: Come As You Are.  Forget life; forget everything only come as you are.  When there is no hope there is no despair, there is only now, no plans, no future, just now.  And that seemed utterly more valuable than the despair of misguided hope.  Despair exists only for those who are unhappy in the moment those who live future bound or those that choke to death on the weighted words of the past.  Waiting.  No more waiting, everything is herenow.
+  Andy and Brent round the corner and head toward the table, Nina the French girl I am in love with hangs on Brent’s arm.  Her head curls back in slow rippling laughter with the jerkiness of stop-motion film, her emerald eyes dance in sunshine when there is none, she breaths different air than the rest of us.  She is done waiting. She is missing nothing. She belongs to a hidden race of seekers, of living people dead to the world, those who take the body and eat.  The rest of them do not know what she knows; they are looking still like some forgotten, wayward evolutionary glitches lying in languid rooms of far off dream cities —Paris, Prague, Peking, Peoria, or St Petersburg.  She is dancing in a netherworld dream with Joyce and the rest, ripe like a pomegranate bursting forth pure cleansing light that washes over all of us.  Cleansing the urine out of our minds, the poisons from our bodies until all is love.  Because all is love and it only takes Nina to show it.  Love should never have been a verb, it is object of love, the noun, that initiates its action, that mysterious thing that is not an action at all but a moment, a fleeting feeling that draws us out of ourselves, beyond this world and the next.  It is not Nina it is me, everything is radiating out of me….  The Eucharist of flesh will lead the way out of the valley of the shadow of death to borrow from the ancients, and we will lie beside the oracle as Van Winkle beside his river and together we dream eternal.  No more waiting we are here to go… Nina… Sky…. Dizzying leaf patterns chaotically thrown up by Maples, Oaks, Birch…. An Italian family with a stroller…. Circling swooping gulls… the dull hum of the city… inorganic and intoxicating… without human passion it becomes all too metallic and dull… shimmering like a mirage in the heat of existence… Nina… Nina….
+
+
+Later after Brent leaves Andy draws me aside and asks if I am still going with him to the clinic.  I had forgotten entirely, we have to get rid of Nina; we make false excuses and head off in opposite directions and rendezvous on the other side of the block, all of which was Andy’s clever plan for giving Nina the slip.  He’s in love with her too.  Everyone is in love with Nina.  It so happens that we meet in front of the American Express Travel Agency; we are both temporarily frozen by the lush photograph of New York from the sky that hangs in the window.  The tag below it reads: only 399 roundtrip.  Neither of us had much more than the necessary monies to survive travel is out of the question.  Travel in the twentieth century is left solely for the rich; even hitchhiking is portrayed as a nightmare likely to end only in death; the rich have something and they want it kept to themselves.  Not that I blame them.
+“Damn it man if I don’t have the herps lets head down to LA for the weekend, Kobyoshi got enough money to buy gas and my bus is running quite well.  I bet you could talk him into going to see his family and then we’ll tag along…look up Dean and Ed?  See what’s changed down there?”
+“Absolutely nothing I would imagine…”
+“Alright then lets go somewhere, anywhere, lets just get out of the damn city for while… doesn’t it bear down on you?  Man I think I’m going to go mad sometimes when I look up and I can only see a tiny little sliver of sky.  I get claustrophobic in these buildings, with all these damn people scurrying about like ants.”  He pauses because we’re walking uphill and out of breath.  “The thing is you have to have money to travel, you have to have leisure time, you have to get up and catch flights at hours of the day that I don’t see, you have to do all these things and then you go somewhere for like a week and then home again back to the grind.  Only its worse then because you have to pay for all the money you spent while you were on vacation, and then to top it all off the whole time you’re there wherever you go… it doesn’t really matter… every time you see a clock it reminds you that you have to leave.  Do you get that?  Man when I see a clock when I’m on vacation I get furious I remember throwing one out the window when I was in Mexico, it’s like they put ‘em there to make sure you won’t stay, to remind you that this is there paradise and you can enjoy it for a time but then… you gotta go gringo!
+“Of course if I do have the herpes I’m going to get monumentally depressed and jump out the window tomorrow night….”
+“Isn’t it hard for a man to get herpes?”
+“How the hell should I know, I mean they told us all that in health class I think, but when you’re seventeen you don’t listen to that crap that’s what happens to adults, its not going to happen to us you know?  Shit even if it did I wouldn’t have believed it back then, I mean here we are trying to discover this wonderful sweaty world of sex and they march right in the door and tell us its going to kill us?  That shit used to piss my off, just one more way of still reinforcing those old Christian ideas about sex being dirty.  And then I have to sleep with the people who did listen and they have all these terrible neurotic beliefs about love and sex and they can’t understand how I might possibly want to just fuck because it feels good and I don’t need much motivation beyond that… how do you do it man you always seem to sleep with these wonderful liberated women that actually enjoy sex… you’re always getting the kinky ones, I envy you on that….  I might get laid more, but you’re record speaks of quality, real quality not drunken bravado or pointless casual sex.  Laura and I were talking about that the other day… I think she’d like to get a piece of you I think she’s tired of hearing the moaning and wondering what you do to provoke it.  You should give her a lay she’s practically dying for it.”
+We were at the door of the free clinic on Hyde.  It was quite a scene all the effeminate fags from the Castro district decked out in loud colors, a riot of magentas, oranges, sapphires, rainbows of happy homos getting free condoms marching out the door with the badge of I Get Laid plastered on there foreheads accompanied by the sublime look on their faces that only a horny male can radiate.  I waited outside observing the gay community while Andy went in and got his results.  Gays are like the Jews relegated to history's ghettos they have found themselves in the dungheaps of humanity and carefully painstakingly rearranged the dung to form beautiful living communities.  Fragile rickety alliances one borne by blood the other by sexual preference, both very odd ways to bring people together, but they did and both cultures had the ghetto sensibilities and lust for life that is lacking in the stuffed belly’s of there oppressors.  A gay man, no matter how high on the social ladder is still first and foremost a gay man.  Assuming of course he is open about it and very few are, but nevertheless you will find that those in positions of power that are gay tend to put that up first.  I pity the first gay male president; his lot will be a rough one, along with the first woman, the first black, the first Hispanic.  In America if you aren’t a straight white male you are a freak from the get go, the whole thing is set up, even the ones who aren’t persecuting you want to know about “your people” or what its like to be gay or black, are you friends gay?  Are your friends black?  The Jews have been here for long enough that the daft ignorant Martha’s vineyard morons who run things have about figured them out, its not tres chic to be Jewish anymore, sorry.  But just about anything else and especially lesbians, from the scene around LA you would think that the vast majority of the population had just realized that lesbians existed.  As the bottom feeders of the past begin to leave the pond and gain the notice of the so-called mainstream they are greeted on one side by hatred and on the other by incredulous fascination, either way you turn you are no longer human, you’re lesbian, you’re black, you’re Mexican, you’re gay, you’re fat, you’re a vegesexual, and then if we can wrap our feeble minded idiocy around that…. then in a hundred years or so we just might remember that you are first and foremost a human.  Welcome to land of the dead or should I say those who have died to the world?
+Nietzsche talked and wrote a lot about the dead, the inhuman, the new philosophers he called them.  A strange breed this those that turned there back on the so-called human values and proudly declared themselves in human.  He believed that as time went on more and more would turn there backs and let the false pretense of the world die its horrid stinking death, and he was right, but he didn’t take into account the mutual growth of humanity.  Humanity this loose leafed term through which all the pages of history are turned like that dream of idiots, humanity sprints through time in a straight line, the arrow launched by cupid that hit the apple in eve’s hand and sent it whirling to the far reaches of the galaxy.  Beside, running parallel, but on a different set of track, the track of individuals, run the stream engines of Nietzsche's beliefs.  All these artist of the future to which he spoke are dead to the world.  The world won’t give them so much as a hasty acknowledgement, the world is still trying to figure out why some people like boys and some like girls, the world can not look itself in the mirror it slinks like a shamefaced soldier who ran from the battle to the comfort of his own dead mothers bosom.  The world rots on top of the dead god’s cunt.  Head stuck to the primordial womb like imbeciles or children that suck their thumbs.   Look at all the pretty things, lovely things, look at what we have built, look at what we can do!  Look at all the pretty pictures; hear the pretty stories and sleep tight at night!  Never never dare to question the underlying fundamentals shake up your field if you must but leave the essential framework of shithouse alone.  And yet we crawl down here in the basement where you pay us no mind and slowly like industrious beavers we gnaw at the wood frame of the house the monkeys built, the house that world trembles in fear of us and we will bring it crashing down one day, the beavers, the termites, the wood fungi, the decay always wins in the end.  Children of the true warmth know that, they watch it, they live it, first they eat themselves out and then they turn their back and die sinking out of sight, but they are not gone, no they are here.
+
+It turned out that Andy didn’t have the herps but he did have a gall bladder infection, which came a surprise to both him and me, as neither of us knew we had a gall bladder.  We had heard of them, but never had to actually realize we had one, and I thankfully still didn’t.  Andy was right Laura did want me to give her a lay. She had set her sights on me and made me her knew goal.  I felt awkward at the house and began to only come home late at night.  In the mornings I wandered down to the university area and had coffee and listened to the poor witless school children drivel about test and papers and things that had to be done.  It made me feel better about my life.  To listen to them you would think that the entire world is one series of deadlines to be met and knowledge to be regurgitated, even the ones who had passion only had passion for the ideas, they had no passion for the act of living, they were bending life to fit the ideals.  Why it never occurred to them to bend the ideals to fit the life is beyond me, but then from where I sit looking back I do occasionally see myself at times back when I was waiting for something to happen back when it thought that the world “happened.
+After coffee at the café I head over to Starbucks and wait around for a cute girl to pull up and then, positioning myself casually just outside the door, I wait until they come out and ask for ride downtown, if they happened to be head that way, if not I sometimes just went wherever they were willing to take me.  Sometimes I spent the day with one of them, but more often I spent the day trying to find a ride back to the city, occasionally barring all other methods I would call Andy and have him pick me up.  Once I made him drive all the way the Stintson Beach to get me during rush-hour traffic, but he never complained.  
+There were those days though when Laura got me before I had a chance to escape.  She tried so hard and without ever coming right out and saying it either, maybe she was too scared that I would have said no, but she never just asked.  It would always start with a casual question, what was I doing?  Did I have plans? Would I like to go for walk? Would I like to have a beer and watch a movie in her room?  Of course I never had plans and when I ran out of excuses I would end up in her room watching movies or listening to records and drinking beer or gin; she would feign interest in whatever I said and I feigned interest in what she said, we developed a wonderful sense of conversation where one of us would tell a story with the appropriate prompts so that the other would have a chance to say his lines.  It was an elaborate daytime drama played out in her room, the conversations were never between two people they were lines read off a script that life had handed us.  Sometimes I almost lost my will and gave in, give her a lay I figured let her have some, but I knew my heart wasn’t in it and when your hearts not in sex is mechanical and disgusting.  To have lust there has to be heart, wild robust hearts full of consumption like feasting leopards tearing at the raw meat with fury, but if I had gone ahead she would have turned leopard and I would have been eaten alive in my boredom.  Not that she wasn’t attractive, she was beautiful, but she just didn’t have any life to her.
+With Laura everything was an example of something she had read, there was no green life, it was buried under the words of the past before it ever had a chance to come out and shine, it stretched in the early morning and then bam!, a ton of bricks fell on its head.  It had all been done and said before according to Laura; I would hardly start a sentence and she would tell me I was paraphrasing someone whose name I had never heard.  She was most fond of discussing philosophy because Andy had told her that I used to study it.  I had the conversation down to where I only listened for my cues, the interim’s I spent musing over her figure trying to appreciate the subtleties of it, the nuances that only a lover is supposed to know.  She wanted me in the flesh but it liked her in my mind, a character I never could have sketched.  A creature so bizarre I wouldn’t have believed it if it were a dream.  Her words tore out and ripped the room to shreds, but I sat silently meditating on the core of existence, the body, the body electric he sang… 
+“Who is you favorite philosopher,” she would ask.  How is one to answer such a question?  My favorites were the ones I disagreed with the most which always led to arguments between us, with her accusing me of philosophical treason for calling Nietzsche (her favorite) a bore.  He was so I thought then, quite a bore always moping about the miserable condition of mankind which is all good and well, but what of the inherent beauty what of the passion what of the celebration?  The majority of Americans may be clinically insane, but down there in the cesspool of life lies the forgotten individual and the individual can do remarkable things with him or herself even in the midst of a mad world.  Nietzsche was blinded by the numbers, couldn’t see the tree for the forest as it were.  Or I would say Whitman and she would correct me saying he was a poet, not philosopher and I would say poetry is the true philosophy and then she would launch like a rocket into the space of her own carefully constructed latticework of belief.
+“Poets serve different ends they reach for the gut, the emotions, the philosopher applies cool reasoning and evaluates with out judgement.  Poets are too hot headed to be philosophers….  A philosopher sees things as they are, even if that is only as they are to him, it is still the way they are… or they way they see it, they reorder the world.  That’s what I am trying to get at, poets observe the world and philosophers reorder it.”
+At times like that I wanted to strangle her for my own sanity, but legally all I could do was defend the Leaves of Grass.  “Poets reorder the world just as much as the next man, that’s all we do in fact we reorder the world to suit whatever it is that we happen to believe.  We only see what we want to see, because that is all we can see.  If you believe that blades of grass are nothing more than cellulose and water than that is all you will see when you look at grass.  But if you shut your ridiculous preconceived notions off for a minute and lie down on the grass then you might for just one instant start to see the world from the grasses point of view and you will notice that grass does not philosophize, it just is.”
+That particular day I was in a bad mood and things ended with me refusing to discuss anything further until she read Science and Sanity.  I loaned that precious tome to her though I already knew she wouldn’t get much past the second introduction.  I led the horse to water let her drink for herself.  I never expected her to actually read it.  I gave up on philosophy for the simple reason that it failed to accurately resonate the world of existence.  For me the chaotic registers of the poets and novelists captured the illusive passion of reality far better in the garbled code of metaphor and warm blankets of experience they wrapped existence in a picture of song, a symphony of anarchy that matched the one I saw when I walked down the street.  The world of the philosopher is like Laura’s world, its cold confusing and you never get what you want and even though you know that you can’t get it you keep trying all the same playing out the uneventful script that is the martyr’s.
+One day I kissed her to see what she would do, if she would act on restraint or try to take me like she wanted to, if she had I would have let her for the simple reason that at least then she might be alive for just one second.  I would have liked her to rape me, to show some life to her, but there was nothing, she hung on my lips romantically like the stale ideas that hung on them when she talked, there was nothing but romance and empty meaninglessness in her. I figured at least the kiss had sealed it and I knew if ever I was down on my luck she would take me in and that was far better than love or passion for a man in my circumstances.
+
+I have taken to wandering the neighborhood again, playing word association games with myself trying to see how much of my childhood I can remember.  I can never get back beyond the memory of walking down a trail in a forest somewhere.  I am singing a song as I walk, singing a song with my mother and father.  We are hiking down a mountain somewhere.  But I can’t see the forest; I can’t hear the song or see my parents.  I just have the fuzzy out lines of it, I called my mother one evening and she said that I must have been around four or five which only served to further depress me, I hate that some people can remember as far back as their crib while for me even kindergarten is a stretch. 
+Coit Tower is beautiful at night, a proud phallic overlook for city teeming with sex.  San Francisco is the only city in America where you actually run across lover in alleys, exhibitionists in front of glass windows on the hill tops and discreet blowjobs in movie theatres, fitting then that it should have a giant concrete cock of light looking over it.  The trip across town from Andy’s place off Ashbury, through the mission district and little Italy to Coit is like a sociological tour.  The Mission District has many of the landmark houses that you have seen of San Francisco, the fronts are colorful and happy, but is artificial and only looks colorful and happy in postcards.  In reality they are at the catacombs of the city, the doldrums south of the equator.  They are home to the middle class city dweller an aging variety of Consumerus Americanus, usually grouped with the yuppies but wrongly so.  These peculiar neighborhoods are the breeding ground of the suburbs.  These are in fact why there are suburbs.  The Mission is set back from downtown and is a primarily residential neighborhood steeped in the lukewarm water of mediocrity.  It is here that librarians, office managers, public officials and otherwise uneventful people arise from, and it is here that the whole suburban utopia of better newer shinier gadgets was born.  Here the old gadgets stick out and show the datedness of their species, they were overrun, can no longer keep up, the ones trampled down on the battlefield of progress, they did not win, they failed even to retreat, they lie where they fall waiting for stretcher bearers to carry them off to the morgue.  They have cellular when they should have digital, they had beta when they should have waited for VHS, and they got the eighttrack player installed in their car about a month before the advent of the cassette.  This post war generation turns around in profound confusion, they are assaulted on all sides by constant change, they have felt out of control ever since the first greaser put a comb in his pocket and took one of their wives behind the college stadium and showed her what sex should be like.  The wanted to discover the world and instead they built suburbs because it seemed to be the thing to do.
+I feel at home amongst such failures, we share the common wounds of the dead, though theirs were not fatal, they are as good as dead the world turned its back on them and they wander about like zombies, preoccupied with the future, but to cautious to gamble on it.  They are always going somewhere, doing something when all the while a little voice is driving them mad whispering sweet perfumed fables in their ear like: it is all nothing….  They never say hi or wave like gays do further down in Castro, they don’t try to hustle you like the Hispanics and blacks downtown, there are in fact no homeless in this neighborhood, better to lie in a rat infested dumpster downtown than to lie here.  Makes you nervous, a neighborhood where people won’t sleep on the streets, whether its for fear of the cops or the thugs makes no difference they’re both in the same league.  The denizens of the Mission District all walk with there eyes glued to the ground if they are alone or glued to the person they are with, the world slips by unnoticed by them, they are creatures of habit, serial killers never plague them, they are too easy.  
+Like this guy… he is right here everyday like clockwork, like me in fact, but his routine is so old and I am such a recent addition that I don’t register, he never turns his head.  I stop and block his path and he goes absently around the back of his car up the driveway as though I was invisible.  I begin to feel curiously invisible, a bit separated from the tactile world, unsettled and hyperaware I continue up the steps that lead to Coit tower, I feel as if I am teetering on the razor edge of awareness.  About half way up I hear the muted grunting of what sounds like a television set playing pornography.  I snap my head to the side and listen because sex sounds move at a frequency to which I am acicular, they moves in waves like any other, but sex has another more primordial quality, just beyond the edge of conscious hearing. It makes you turn your head involuntarily, like a traffic accident or a machine gun at the family reunion in Kansas.
+I follow the sound climbing up the hill instead of using the path, about half way from where I left the steps to the top I turn around and see a couple fucking doggie style in there couch in plain view of all the world, except that all the world is hidden by trees.  I light a cigarette and watch them go at with wild animal abandon, not like most rich women I have been with who are so disinclined toward any sort of dirtiness be it on the linens or during sex.  These two have taken Woody Allen to heart, sex is only dirty when you do it right.  She comes before I am halfway through my cigarette and sits down on the couch to suck him off.  It comes as electrostatic charge this feeling of peeking into the lives others, of watching them harmlessly, but yet they would likely have jumped up had they seen me, so strange that we like to hide the most personal of human expressions and yet will kill and degrade each other in the streets before live television crews.  It all stems from not showing any cock in R-rated films, but that’s not important right now.  Right now her warm mouth is drawing him out and I am leaving, not wanting to see the end of the show, preferring to leave it eternally occurring in memory like a loop of film flapping in an empty theatre….
+Memories shrouded in gauze and muslin, filters that are colored and toned by what I brought to them when they happened… mixing like oil and water with what I bring to them now.  Take for instance Mexico City: I remember Mexico City in hazy brown discolored way, but it’s not the smog, it’s the nature of memory —the nature of my memory.  The images overlay each other like a photomontage.  I see it in moving pictures: cut to a shot of the subway, sad brown faces and I want to know why they aren't on vacation like me… lay on top of it an image of pyramid excavation digging up and trying to solve the Mayan Caper.  Years ago you would. Understand she was standing right next to me and then...Warm sweet smelling cab and my father says “hey, look a Kentucky fried Chicken” and sure enough I see one.  Americana right in the middle of foreign chaos it threw me into a different world, a sudden realization that life is not ordered like the clockwork metaphors I learned in grade school.  It became in that instant a chaotic kaleidoscope of astonishment and splendor … the shock of fried chicken.
+Everything became focused up into the sun; it burned in fantastical visions that existed only for me, leaving me alone and for a long time afraid.  Not fear in the sense that you feel threatened, it is much worse, not conscious, it just lingers in the back of the mind occasionally eliciting a paralysis that would haunt me for a while and then fade again in the face of day to day activities.  
+It’s a fear that leaves you like a woman I saw once stone still and shell shocked, stuck right in the middle of this enormous arch in Canyonlands National Park, Utah.  She just stood there unable to move, feeling the digging hooks of unbridled terror burning into her brain and creating an endless and spellbinding feedback loop that forbids you to move.  It anchors your mind right back in the primate body because you feel it and yet rips you right out of the very fabric of collective reality and propels you into strange land where there is no you.  I watched her sit there unable to help herself, doubtless staring at the two thousand-foot drop off on both sides of her and the meager four foot wide sandstone arch that was holding her there.  She was suspended in mid air, seeing herself for the first time the way we are: naked cold and deathly afraid.
+	But the cab driver just laughed and said, “here in Mexico City there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat, Kentucky Fried Dog, But definitely no Kentucky Fried Chicken.”  He smiled this crooked smile revealing gold caps and over moist gum structure that was so large it seemed to be slowly crawling right down over his teeth.  He then sternly advised in all seriousness against eating there, of course I wouldn't have anyway; he merely gave me a rational reason for that.  And all this was years before I would ever get to India to learn that, first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is... 
+I realize my legs are moving as fast as the random associations of the mind and I am in North Beach again without even realizing that that was where I was headed.  I slow a bit and notice the damp cold, a glance at the sky reveals the story —gray again—nighttime fog in the middle of April.  
+Weather everywhere is getting more severe, mudslides, floods, droughts, tornadoes.  It’s as if something really big were building up to vent on us.  The Ancients placed great stock in weather and saw storms as harbingers that something was wrong within the tribe. Many of them associated the outside as intimately connected to the inside of the tribe. Educated people (historically that reads white) first scoffed at such notions, but now two thousand years of theories later we have elaborate sciences which are beginning to prove the simple wisdom that tribal people know just from observing life
+Jostling through the crowds of Jackson street brings back tapeloops of Boston —Harvard square—fall—the Charles River slips by without a sound, the streets corral throngs of people— onlookers drunk beyond comprehension of what they were there to look at— they stumble out of bars and lurch through doorways like grenades rolled out on the street.  Inside the Radcliffe boathouse a reserve of surplus energy is released in muscular spasms that pulse in orgasm.  Her breasts pool salt onto my tongue.  Her flesh is hard and metallurgic turning brittle under my hands, the life is slowing slipping out of her, out of the sewers of life up celestial heights of orgasm, among the eagles, the screaming eagles, the German philosophers sitting like a nineteen ten bankers awaiting the thief.  The tape is endless, looping across eons, cultures, genetic hardwired associations to the galaxies, interstellar abbreviations of life.  Cool hard water distilled in my mouth and then she falls from my arms like a limp rag and I am cast down a tube a tunnel endlessly falling, clattering of the walls building speed, a vacuum with no terminal velocity I want to reach out for limbs for human hands to catch me….  I scream and there is no sound save the rush of air passing my ears and finally I settle in the twinkling light still shining from above and I relax to the falling sensation no longer concerned surrendered eternity forever to remain here now and then the light goes dim… the taxi’s in times square… Truman Capote… An auburn haired girl I liked in seventh grade… tumbling of great vistas into nothingness into all timelessness….
+
+
+It was inevitable that Dean would come for me, we always rendezvous at some point and then we set off for a while and bounced apart again, things had been that way for as long as I can remember.  Things had taken a turn for the worse.  Andy was leaving for Costa Rica to work on a cruise ship.  Apparently the late night talks had not been all smoke screen as took them, to make matter worse I could have a hob myself, but raising the air fare seemed impossible.  In a vain effort I started panhandling downtown and serving cocktails one night a week at club 36 where he worked, but money was hardly rolling in, and when it did it left just as fast.  The panhandling I enjoyed, it reminded me that people weren’t such horrible creatures after all, when you beg you are forced to look for Emerson’s little spark of divinity in everyone.
+Sometimes panhandling was just something to do while you were reading; a way of making some money for the age old magic of deciphering words into images, into thoughts, into life.  I would get up before dawn and catch the first train downtown.  Around five the flow picked up, traders, analysts, number theorists, restroom attendants, secretaries, janitors, the streets were thriving in the still murky dawn.  In an hour, in New York City the grand number game would pitch off on another day of “trading.”  What they are trading and why was totally lost on me, but I liked to watch them go about it.  By six I would have in the neighborhood of ten dollars, sometimes more sometimes less, but when the bell sounded six the number of people on street declined. 
+	I was reading Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising, a wildly fascinating tour through quantum physics, modern psychology, and ancient shamanic ecstasy.  I had never encountered a mind that could so formidably wrangle about entire worldviews with such succinct explanations and clarity of language, always with a sense of humor too.  Irish authors are geniuses at working that quirky clever humor of theirs into the most unlikely of places; I thought of Joyce, Wilde, McKenna, even Beckett is hilarious to see on stage.  Its actually more fun to watch the audience watch the play; you understand Beckett’s logic much better from observing it in action than from him telling it to you, but he is there like a ringleader assembling the drugged lions so that you can safely walk amongst them.  Beckett saw the emptiness of the game and stood in the middle of the court slowly, inanely bouncing the ball to see if anyone would notice.
+	The Irish seem to know best how to write and how to drink, how to live you might say if you had my view of things.  Of course it doesn’t do anything for you in this country.  In America if you want to succeed you have to suck seed, the seed of fat cat bosses, lawyers, politicians, Hollywood stars, washing machine salesmen, sitcoms, the latest way to get your socks whiter, the newest car, the biggest television… plenty of buying, consuming and swallowing of the preverbal seed around here.  Precious little living though, a melting pot was never where one ought to have looked for the distinctive flair that marks man as alive.  In becoming individualists we lost ourselves; all that’s going on in American thought is newer and cleverer way of differentiating between the individuals, creating categories.   A carrot here, cabbage there, and celery, beans, beets, broth, turnips, potatoes, and freeze-dried madmen to spice the grand stew.  Everybody fits in a category, everybody can be marketed to on somehow or other.  Ordering chaos and turning the stew into pureed banality might be the only thing we ever accomplish before the whole shit-house country turns into a police state.  It was demoralizing to be American, you were either a human or citizen and the two remained separated as violently and far more successfully than church and state.
+	And what of the separation of church and state?  It sounds good in the ear but by the time it hits the brain its curdling like old milk.  It didn’t turn out quite the way it was supposed to, instead of separating them we just threw away the church and made the State into god.  Maybe it was inevitable and we were merely the ones to do it, we had needed a new god for a long time when this country came to fruition—might as well give the state a try.  Someone once said that the defining characteristic of Americans is that they will try everything wrong before they get themselves around to doing what they knew was right in the first place.  Who better to head that racket than the State?  Who better to make god?  We’re heading the right direction maybe, god’s face is coming into view more and more and more people I meet are ready to wake up from the nightmare of history as Joyce put it.  The history of god is no different: first he was everywhere, then he was in an animal, then he was in a building, then he was in some guy, now he’s in all our heads… can’t the man just sit still for a few centuries?  No, God’s on the run doesn’t want to be found because he doesn’t think he’ll be liked when we find him.  Same reason we off ourselves, every human action are a tiny suicide until we give up the ghost.
+	The conquest of death will be the end of science and then we’ll have flushed god out, left him nowhere to hide.  In the mean time… alms for the poor?
+	And maybe another quarter drops from a passerby and jingles as it lands in my cup.  I have learned not to look up; they don’t want you to.  Non-confrontational begging is the wave of the future; it’s the atheist’s way of tithing.  They never look at you, just drop some change in the cup as they pass never even break their stride.  I had decided long ago that these busy nessmen and women were all raised in some flat monotonous religion like Presbyterianism, sheltered from god by money but still open to manipulation via guilt.    I was guilt, a reminder, the dogshit that made them remember they were dogs too.  They made it quite obvious that giving was an odious task, one they would just as soon not do, but something compelled them nonetheless.  Some mysterious lingering Presbyterian guilt, or perhaps it was a calculated attempt to cover their doubts, just in case there was a god of judgement they needed a few legal briefs in their corner, someone they could subpoena as a character witness before St Peter, as they tried to grovel and argue their way into heaven.  Ah heaven!  The good life!  Wouldn’t it be great if we could still live in fairytales… perhaps I gave them a bit of childhood fairytale back, reminded them that at least they had things….  The rich need the poor that way, it gives them some comfort to know that there are less fortunate, makes them feel like they have gotten somewhere in their fervent march to the top of the national muck heap.  
+What they liked even more was to support street musicians and comic performers, the modern court jesters playing in the palace of the Everyman.  The streets, the city lights, this was the group palace for the middle and upper class; high above it behind the thousands of mysterious glass stories those with real power and real money moved about in hushed whispers, prowling in the shadows and watching the show from above.  It was Celine who said near the end of his life when someone asked him what he thought of the human race (an odd question to put to someone, but then Celine was an odd man), “I spit on you all from a great height” was the old boy’s reply.  “I spit on you reaching great height” I would have said; I like it down here at the bottom in the trenchant, pitched battle for survival.  The people were of a better character, more aware of the things that money can’t buy, namely anything of value.  Wait till they start bottling the air my Dad used to say well Dad they have, in Mexico City —they sell it right there on the street corner.  The swan song of the earth will be sung by asthmatics and the trumpets of the end days will be blown by lungs measuring out bottled air.  Bottling the air!  Things are fine, really!  No more wars, no more uprisings, no more taxes... no more anything save the eerie hum of the refrigerator cascading about the silence of your house late at night.  Hmmmmmmmmmm Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.  It crawls cockroach-like over your face while you sleep, it perches on your forehead and listens to your heart beat —admires the cacophonous organic simplicity of human sleep.  
+I was out of town when Dean arrived, an old girlfriend, Leah Wright had seen me begging downtown and taken pity on me; she insisted on putting me up for a vacation.  She was married and I could tell that her husband didn’t like me, but he thought I was funny and didn’t mind to much that I stay with them.  They were both appalled to learn that I lived in a closet.  He loved the I’m still in the closet joke of it, laughed like the honest farmboy that he was.  After leaving her I lost track of Leah for a while; she went and married a Canadian farmboy who used to play hockey and now plays golf and he talked a lot about being a sports newscaster.  It was a different life than what I had in the city, they were in the rather ritzy suburbs of Marin, a nice house tucked back in the near forest of the hills.  It was the suburbs to be sure, but a suburb that was not artificially planted which made it livable even attractive sometimes.  They ate three square meals a day and went work like the good little citizens that they were.  I sat around all day smoking cigarette and typing in their garage because neither of them could stand smoking.  After a week or so I started to run dry of ideas.  I took to hoeing out a patch of land to plant them some tomato plants and it was as I was in fact planting the seeds that I saw Andy and Dean pull up.
+I felt slightly ridiculous standing their looking at them, I had temporarily slipped into a mild dementia over the tomatoes, I was obsessing over the universe in great detail and then they got out of the bus.  Dean looked ridiculous himself getting out of Andy’s VW bus in his customary suit and tie, it was an incongruous image and I couldn’t help laughing.  Andy just stood on the running board and yelled over the car.
+“Come on lets go!”
+It was simple enough, I ran inside grabbed my bag and my laptop and threw them in the back of the bus.  I ran back into the house and pilfered about for a bit looking for some stowed cash, I hit the jackpot in the middle of Leah’s g-string underwear, almost two hundred dollars.  I grabbed it and scribbled an IOU to take its place, as an afterthought I held one of the g-strings up to my nose, it had the unmistakable odor of Tide.  Nothing fecund in that house I realized, all the surfaces were clean to hide the smell of rot that permeated their flesh.  I shuddered and ran out the door, I dove in and we headed off.
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+	I am staying in Andy’s closet.  It’s a walk-in, big enough for a futon pad and the rent is cheap —free.  The rest of the rooms in the house were full before I got here.  Andy lives in the master bedroom, which is really not much larger than my closet; down the hall on the left is Sarah, the art student/waitress who engages me daily in great feminist debates; on the right is Kobyoshi, a strange frail lad from Thailand with a mind that far outstretches the meager sphere that his body implies.  This morning Kobyoshi informed me that he is quitting his position as a research assistant at a nuclear fission lab to pursue a career in ballet.  Fine.  Perhaps I ought to get a job in a fission lab, there are several around here, but I won’t.  It’s a cheery little household.  We’re all just waiting, biding our time; we’re all dead to the world.
+	Outside is America land of the free wage slaves, my corner for now is San Francisco.  Not a bad corner of the nuthouse as things go, it seems endlessly expansive, solid city all the way down to Palo Alto through Silicon Valley and all the rest of the deranged suburbs that I only know about from reading the papers.  I stick more toward the center of things, the city, the teeming thriving pulse of the city; at least here there is a distraction from banality and some outside drama by which to measure the immensity of my own failure.  My economic failure, my failure to be assimilated, my refusal to die, my own obituary that is written in blood on the streets I wander.  Once your dead the world takes on a spectacular detached glory that I heap over my rotting bones like a warm Indian bearskin.
+The telephone rings and shortly after Andy informs me that we are to meet Brent for lunch downtown at Café Claude.  Café Claude is an authentic little French bistro that the three of us like because it reminds us of better days, days we haven’t had yet, days we aren’t going to have.  In America there is only one way to be happy and that is to have a lot of money.  All other things are looked on with scorn and derision he who is not working to better his financial lot is a blight upon the national character.  A disease that must cured.  I am the biggest blight of them all having never held a job for more than year; at least Andy works at a bar which is a kind of halfway house into which he was thrust until he could be assimilated and digested by something bigger, something corporate, something with real teeth that can hold him for a lifetime.  I doubt it will ever happen; Andy is too good a man to ever fall for such a downright ridiculous con.  For the time being he cuts me in on his tips and we survive.  He also steals a lot of liquor from his work so that we never want for drunkenness.  I am constantly drunk, but rarely on liquor, I am drunk because I see everything around me with absolute clarity, I have two selves one which walks and the other which records and it is the other that concerns me now.  
+Andy is the last living being I know, excepting Dean who is still down in Los Angeles fettering away at a newspaper job that he hates and which, if he is not careful, will kill him.  For now, right here, Andy is the only one alive; we share the drunken enthusiasm of those without hope, and without hope there is no despair everything proceeds in splendor and glory one is left free to contemplate the details and minutia. Nighttime we regroup ourselves into his room and regale the days, I talk of buttons found in gutters and Andy talks wild futureyarns.  He comes home stumbling having usually polished a bottle while closing and usually brings some flimsy woman with him under vague pretenses of incongruous behavior.  Andy is a delirium his fever-struck eyes are always one step ahead of you, its dizzying to keep up, drives me mad keeps me up at nights long after he has peacefully lapsed into a coma and a girl I don’t know is asking for a ride home or cab fare or directions to the subway.  His latest plan calls for Costa Rica, something about casinos and rich American bitches, as he calls them.
+	It’s cold outside still, morning is undercooked; I can feel the raw drafts that leak under Andy’s window.  They come in waves wafting in and sinking down to the hardwood floors, swirling about propelled like a drunken countess’s foul smelling fart.  They seek me out, countesses, farts and drafts they find me lying here wrapped in my pathetic collection of blankets.  Ah it has found a way under the door!  It creeps in and wraps me up in dank odorless fecundity leaving me in a clamshell. I take another drag off my cigarette and crush it out in the ceramic bowl by my head; no doubt later when we walk up the hill to the BART station it will be roasting —always hot or cold no in between.  Andy asks what I think of the girl he had last night, he forgets that I was asleep before he got home. 
+“I mean she was no supermodel I realize that but did you see that kind of vacant peaceful stare in her eyes?  I was on top of her just staring at her eyes they were like obelisks —Arabic mosques…. Did you not that twinge of religiosity about her?  I think she was from Kansas, something weird about those people… so flat… so much sky they always have an air of wonder that hangs in their eyes….  Have you seen my jacket the one with fur lining?”
+	Andy is right over my head looking around the other side of the closet for his jacket.  He’s hopping about trying not to step on me, rattling on about his new girl.  She is going to come into his work again tonight, but that is not so good he informs me, it will blow his chances with “the randoms” as he calls them.
+	“It’s a Friday see and I didn’t think about that when she said she was coming in.  Fridays you don’t want anyone hanging around because all the cunts that only come out on weekends are there and they’re only there to get a little.  They’re a special kind those girls that work hard all week they go a little bit farther in there spare time… Do you remember that one a couple of weeks ago, Michelle I think her name was… turns out she had the herps so I went and got tested before work last night… hey,”  He stops looking for his jacket and stares down at me he has a wistful look on his face, but his head is upside down and reminds me a potatohead toy with a pasted on goatee and slightly askew lips, eyes that look out of order and crazy, glinting.  He ponders my face for minute and continues on earnestly now "you wouldn’t want to go with me to the clinic would you?  I mean its one of those things I know it doesn’t kill you or anything, and I don’t have any symptoms… I went mostly to make sure that she wouldn’t accuse me of giving it to her… you know how women get on things like that these days, but still would you mind?  I’d rather have someone there if it does turn out bad for me….
+	“Sure Andy, let me take a shower.”  I am mildly touched that he is dragging me into the sordid affairs of his life, that he thinks so highly of me, but they are nevertheless his own sordid affairs and frankly I want nothing to do with them, but he promises to buy me lunch if I accompany him.  The shower is weak and barely wets your hair, but it’s hot and it washes off the sticky dampness of morning.  By the time I get out my skin is pink and flushed, my reflection in the mirror reminds me of a newborn.  
+In the BART station Andy tries to convince me that we should attend a private party for the wrapping of Coppola’s new film On The Road.  “I know you don’t like the book or any of that, but there will be beautiful women, actresses and hangers on, it like a Hollywood type of thing only right here in the city.”  He tells me about the girl that invited him and somewhere lets it slip that the Daily Grill is catering the affair.  Food! Now that’s worth any amount of hell, I would trudge across stygian mountains of insipid shallowness, fly low over enemy territory, flak batteries firing pointless banal conversations if only there be a sandwich at the end of the line.  It is wonderful thing to go to bed with a full belly.  Last night Andy didn’t come home until three in the morning, I fell asleep with my arms clenched against my stomach to stop the gnawing pain.  
+It’s almost noon when we hit the street at Embarcadero.  Downtown has an cold electrical buzz to it, a peculiar conglomeration of sounds that phase-cancel each other and bounce around in the echo chamber of buildings to create a hoarse faintly bucolic noise.  It rattles your teeth if you focus on it.  The combination of a millions of computers humming, ovens cooking, stoves frying, refrigerators opening, cars starting, neon open signs lighting up, and all the other cryptic roaring noises from fires of the good life assail me like the smog in Mexico City.
+I remember as a kid wanting to live here; I thought it was the greatest city in the world.  It might be, but I want to check the rest of world before I settle on that opinion.  I had been in Los Angeles minding my own business, eeking out a pathetic little existence full of long term goals, plans, marriage even and then one day I woke up in the middle of the night and there was a strange man beside the bed.  He extended his hand and I took it.  We floated up out of the room over the entire earth and looked down at the overflowing anthills of man, it looked like the view from the top of the empire state building.  The entire country was in a state of rabble; the people moved through ruins like the retreating Napoleonic Army leaving Alba.  Everywhere the lines were falling back, but it was not real war it was a ghost war, there was no enemy, nothing to run from only hunger, the wretched hunger of the human belly which forced us all the shoulder up and trade time in for tickets and ticket for money and money for food and all the grand dreams, the Horatio Alger myths were nothing more than a bankrupt game of miserly old men smoking cigars and trying to fill there own bellies.  And everywhere the retreat continued, men racing in shadows hiding from everything from everyone who might steal their bread their wine their wives.  The squirmed like little bugs fearing heal boot of the old men who were themselves only slightly bigger and therefore more grotesque bugs.  The scene could have come from Dante but it didn’t it came from life itself, life without art, life needed art, something to hang on the walls something to read at night before bed, something… anything to stave off and hold the truth at bay, the ugly truth of sewer rat’s retreat.  There was no art in life, it was not of life it was separate and detached it had no purpose.  I saw my own retreat a steady shameful slink from one shadow to another until that night when the strange man thrust me forth into the light, into the realization that all life was without hope.  Hope was a product of the human imagination not human life, life itself held out nothing, asked nothing and gave nothing.  Hitherto I had been waiting.  Waiting for something to happen, but now I saw clearly that nothing was ever going to happen, nothing had ever happened and all of history was but the meandering account of sad little creatures burrowing there way through the earth searching for death.  The waiting had driven me mad, I had clutched onto any straw of hope that came my way and they had all turned to dust in my hands.  The lilies of the field do not want for clothing said Christ why then did he wear a robe?  All imitations of life are false to it, all reflections cast back by art or art under any other name are only broken dreams, hope dashed on the rocks of failure careening like a pirate ship with no port to call home.  And then as the man faded out and I found myself hovering over the sewage mess of the earth I saw little fires burning, outposts in the western lands, retreat camps where those who had given up the ghostly illusion of hope were congregating.  I drifted down out of the clouds and settled myself near a camp where I could observe and record.  
+The next day I got up out of bed after my wife had left for work and I packed up my things, what I couldn’t carry I gave away and I headed for Dean’s place where I new I could exist in relative peace.  Two weeks later Andy sequestered me off Dean’s couch and said I would be much happier in San Francisco.  He said the artificial plastic palm tree paradise of LA was making me myopic, I remember because I had to look up myopic in the dictionary.  Andy always had a kind of word-for-the-day thing going on lately it had been mellifluent, which Minop said was akin to relaxed or mellow.  I didn’t feel myopic in LA, but I had consigned my fate to the wind and Andy was the first to blow through, so I came here to San Francisco.  For now I am content in this damp cramped world of fog.  I’m not leaving until I solve the riddle of the fog, where does it come from (Brent told me there is a potato field up north by Stinson Beach where you can supposedly see it forming).  Why is it here?  What is it trying to tell me with its plodding ceaseless monotony?  Why is it robbing us of our summer sunshine everyday around four o’clock?  Why does it retreat again around noon?  What are we to make of this four hour gap of sunshine?
+Brent is waiting for us outside Café Claude, nervously smoking cigarettes and looking for all the world more like spectral ghost of machinery than a human being.  He looks worse every time we see him, the better his life gets the worse he looks.  Today he announces, opening the door as he says it, that he just landed a new ad campaign that’s going to earn him three thousand a week.  Two thousand of which will go to support that massive heroin addiction he maintains and another nine hundred of which will pay rent on his swanky downtown loft that he insists of keeping.  Brent would rather starve than live in the slum joints up the hill; his way of staying afloat in the all-consuming ocean of heroin is to elevate addiction to a form of art.  He shoots with an old metal syringe won’t do it with a common ‘junky pick’ as he calls plastic syringes.  He keeps it neatly in a hand carved cedarwood box on the coffee table.  He ties off with a leather strap that he claims was tanned by an old Indian expressively for the purpose.  When he shoots up its like watching a magician going through well rehearsed but cryptic methods, the spoon is real silver, the water distilled and filtered, the arm band tight and then bang in it goes, and the needle is always removed and carefully placed back in the cedarwood box before he allows himself to nod off.
+But then once he comes round again all is cut loose and he turns to a manic clawing about the room scrapping his fingernails down the rough edges of ideas, he has an enthusiasm and energy such as I have never seen in another junky.  He paints like he shoots, everything is methodically laid out and then without warning the frenzy begins, he leaps about in front of the canvas chaotically stabbing out with a passion borne more of frustration than inspiration.  It’s the passion of one who strives for something and no longer knows why.  Brent is the sergeant giving orders who can’t help wondering why it is that he has to take the hill.  For Brent everything is suspect, life is a paranoid adventure where everyone moves their heads on cake turners, swiveling and scheming for each others mutual demise without know why, without having motivation for anything other than sheer existence.  His only recourse is the ritual that is the only thing over which he can assert any control and he does it in such a way that gives him total control and then he steps back from himself and lets go.
+The drinks are hardly on the table when Brent launches into how, despite his recent successes as the art director for an advertising firm, everything is more or less going to hell in a hand basket.  I for the most part agree with him, but for wholly different reasons.  Under his haranguing critics of his life the lunch brews like an oceanic storm; he only invites us in order to have an audience for his misery just like a priest has nothing without a congregation.  The tempest starts slowing, small lapping boat wakes at first, bread, wine, a plate of cheese, I try not to woof it down because I am not accustomed to rich foods.  Richness Brent claims is merely ritualized discontent….  Then breakers roll into the jetty, seared ahi salad with warm honey mustard sauce, delicately arranged on white plates with fresh ground pepper.  The walls swim in light floating textures of wine and palpated with bread soaked in balsamic vinegar and oil.  The other patrons begin to veer and swerve about, their food passes by rousing a selfish hunger, dessert carts cloud up the sky and signal the coming danger, and then finally the tsunami.  A beautiful girl named Holly serves us Terrine of Sole and Salmon in three different colors, fish arranged like impressionist art with all the delicacy of the Louve only to be shoveled brutally into hungry mouths with the blunted points of a fork.  Skewering money, chewing up delicacy and putting it back where it belongs in the churning stomach of slime and guts.  Holly is lascivious and I see her bent over a table begging for it, wanting the flesh, the warmth, the wild freedom of penetration.  The restaurant turns to a saturnalia and patrons falls into unadulterated orgies of stinking flesh smeared with sweat and cum; they regress into hair covered hunchbacks slobbering and drooling, crawling all over each other with snarling lust, all the hidden stresses of their lives turn them backward, relics of DNA that reek of perfumes, jewels, and other masks to cover the organic septic tank of their origins.  By the end of the meal I am in pain again clutching my stomach and loosing my belt, the richness of the food swells on contemplation and we float, whisked by vaporous entrails back out into the street.  That’s the way it’s always been starvation followed by gluttony; I wouldn’t have it any other way. 
+Because Brent bought lunch I talk Andy into buying us all a cup of coffee.  We catch a cab to north beach because Brent refuses to use public transportation —another method of rising out of the cesspool, the crème of the junky crop.
+“I’m gonna check into a clinic as soon as I get this job finished because I’m tired of struggling to get junk when I should be enjoying my life.  You know this is the first time I’ve left the house in three days?  I’ve been working so much I just don’t have time to get out anymore.  If I do go out its only over to Oakland to get some shit and then straight back, I’m sick of it, sick to death, but you can’t just quit you know… or at least I can’t.  I need to be forced off the shit, weaned slowly…”
+“You serious?”  Andy retains great faith in Brent; I retain great faith in heroin.
+“Ya.  And I know I’ve said it before but this time I mean it I gotta get off of this roller coaster and do something with my life.”
+I laugh in his face, I just couldn’t help it, but he ignores me and continues on.  “I want to travel see the world, see my painting hang in a gallery; I went to an opening about a week and half ago and it was terrible.  Fucking terrible!  Lacquered checks that was one of the pieces, just lacquered ordinary bank checks!  What the fuck is that about?”
+Brent is convinced that he only needs to find the right person to represent him, give him money or at the very least just believe in him because he doesn’t believe in himself he never has from what I can gather.  He is always putting the final touches on the perfect piece, but we can’t see it, we can’t see it until it is exactly as he wants it, as if the thing had no life beyond what he was capable of vesting it with, and indeed for that very reason his painting don’t have any life beyond him.  No one ever saw these paintings and I for one didn’t really think they existed anywhere but in Brent's own head.  They weren’t even paintings anymore they were representations of his entire enormous bloated cosmology distilled into crystalline existence by the very force of his own will.  Brent should have been a priest, he was better suited for a life where nothing can ever possibly be experienced, where hope keeps you outside life, everything is constantly elsewhere, unreachable, only to be shouted at and begged for.  He was a cur dog lapping at the crumbs fate had dealt him when all the while everything he ever wanted was sitting right on the other side of the door.  It was torturous to listen too and I fairly bounded out of the cab when it stopped.  I slipped out like a neutrino unaffected by the gravity of the black hole.
+We stop in at La Boheme, THE place for an artist to be seen in San Francisco.  We went there because the place makes us laugh or it make Brent laugh, it makes me think of Celine’s comment: “I piss on all from a great height.”  Inside is like a trough urinal at a baseball stadium, people sit at booths and stand by tables peeing out their mouths.  The neo-bohemian set is pissing all over themselves today with extravagant warm streams of urine out of one and into the mouth of another where the recipient will swill it around for a day maybe two and then when you come back they will be pissing the same thing into the mouth of another.  I order a cup of coffee and head outside letting Andy pick up the tab.  Walking to the door I can hear the streams of piss splashing, great Niagara’s cascading from the mouths of privilege, children of tomorrowland who mortgage the future for a bit of today.  Children who can’t stop pissing out inane theories and ideas, principles and mottoes, quoting dead authors like their words where written solely for them to drink down.  Drink rich and deep and then piss it out like a bulimic myna bird mimicking everything it hears, the voice is hollow detached, devoid of feeling.  I find a corner table and wait.
+Wait.  Wait.  Waiting for the sun, the moon and the stars to keep shining, waiting for Brent to kick junk, waiting for the bohemian children to be flash pasteurize in the blinding white light of creation.  Waiting for the world to curdle like sour milk, buttermilk, sweet and sour.  Waiting for nothing and everything to join forces in celestial alchemy and produce —something.  Waiting for the world to escape the nightmare of history.  Waiting for James Joyce to come waltzing down the street with great crowd of children gathering behind him.  Bugs Bunny, Maldorf, Harvey Milk, and Anwar Sadat sit at the head of great float bespeckled with roses and bearing a banner that reads: Come As You Are.  Forget life; forget everything only come as you are.  When there is no hope there is no despair, there is only now, no plans, no future, just now.  And that seemed utterly more valuable than the despair of misguided hope.  Despair exists only for those who are unhappy in the moment those who live future bound or those that choke to death on the weighted words of the past.  Waiting.  No more waiting, everything is herenow.
+  Andy and Brent round the corner and head toward the table, Faith the French girl I am in love with hangs on Brent’s arm.  Her head curls back in slow rippling laughter with the jerkiness of stop-motion film, her emerald eyes dance in sunshine when there is none, she breaths different air than the rest of us.  She is done waiting. She is missing nothing. She belongs to a hidden race of seekers, of living people dead to the world, those who take the body and eat.  The rest of them do not know what she knows; they are looking still like some forgotten, wayward evolutionary glitches lying in languid rooms of far off dream cities —Paris, Prague, Peking, Peoria, or St Petersburg.  She is dancing in a netherworld dream with Joyce and the rest, ripe like a pomegranate bursting forth pure cleansing light that washes over all of us.  Cleansing the urine out of our minds, the poisons from our bodies until all is love.  Because all is love and it only takes Faith to show it.  Love should never have been a verb, it is object of love, the noun, that initiates its action, that mysterious thing that is not an action at all but a moment, a fleeting feeling that draws us out of ourselves, beyond this world and the next.  It is not Faith it is me, everything is radiating out of me….  The Eucharist of flesh will lead the way out of the valley of the shadow of death to borrow from the ancients, and we will lie beside the oracle as Van Winkle beside his river and together we dream eternal.  No more waiting we are here to go… Faith… Sky…. Dizzying leaf patterns chaotically thrown up by Maples, Oaks, Birch…. An Italian family with a stroller…. Circling swooping gulls… the dull hum of the city… inorganic and intoxicating… without human passion it becomes all too metallic and dull… shimmering like a mirage in the heat of existence… Faith… Faith….
+
+
+Later after Brent leaves Andy draws me aside and asks if I am still going with him to the clinic.  I had forgotten entirely, we have to get rid of Faith; we make false excuses and head off in opposite directions and rendezvous on the other side of the block, all of which was Andy’s clever plan for giving Faith the slip.  He’s in love with her too.  Everyone is in love with Faith.  It so happens that we meet in front of the American Express Travel Agency; the lush photograph of New York from the sky that hangs in the window temporarily freezes us both.  The tag below it reads: only 399 roundtrip.  Neither of us had much more than the necessary monies to survive travel is out of the question.  Travel in the twentieth century is left solely for the rich; even hitchhiking is portrayed as a nightmare likely to end only in death; the rich have something and they want it kept to themselves.  Not that I blame them.
+“Damn it man if I don’t have the herps lets head down to LA for the weekend, Kobyoshi got enough money to buy gas and my bus is running quite well.  I bet you could talk him into going to see his family and then we’ll tag along…look up Dean and Ed?  See what’s changed down there?”
+“Absolutely nothing I would imagine…”
+“Alright then lets go somewhere, anywhere, lets just get out of the damn city for while… doesn’t it bear down on you?  Man I think I’m going to go mad sometimes when I look up and I can only see a tiny little sliver of sky.  I get claustrophobic in these buildings, with all these damn people scurrying about like ants.”  He pauses because we’re walking uphill and out of breath.  “The thing is you have to have money to travel, you have to have leisure time, you have to get up and catch flights at hours of the day that I don’t see, you have to do all these things and then you go somewhere for like a week and then home again back to the grind.  Only its worse then because you have to pay for all the money you spent while you were on vacation, and then to top it all off the whole time you’re there wherever you go… it doesn’t really matter… every time you see a clock it reminds you that you have to leave.  Do you get that?  Man when I see a clock when I’m on vacation I get furious I remember throwing one out the window when I was in Mexico, it’s like they put ‘em there to make sure you won’t stay, to remind you that this is there paradise and you can enjoy it for a time but then… you gotta go gringo!
+“Of course if I do have the herpes I’m going to get monumentally depressed and jump out the window tomorrow night….”
+“Isn’t it hard for a man to get herpes?”
+“How the hell should I know, I mean they told us all that in health class I think, but when you’re seventeen you don’t listen to that crap that’s what happens to adults, its not going to happen to us you know?  Shit even if it did I wouldn’t have believed it back then, I mean here we are trying to discover this wonderful sweaty world of sex and they march right in the door and tell us its going to kill us?  That shit used to piss my off, just one more way of still reinforcing those old Christian ideas about sex being dirty.  And then I have to sleep with the people who did listen and they have all these terrible neurotic beliefs about love and sex and they can’t understand how I might possibly want to just fuck because it feels good and I don’t need much motivation beyond that… how do you do it man you always seem to sleep with these wonderful liberated women that actually enjoy sex… you’re always getting the kinky ones, I envy you on that….  I might get laid more, but you’re record speaks of quality, real quality not drunken bravado or pointless casual sex.  Laura and I were talking about that the other day… I think she’d like to get a piece of you I think she’s tired of hearing the moaning and wondering what you do to provoke it.  You should give her a lay she’s practically dying for it.”
+We were at the door of the free clinic on Hyde.  It was quite a scene all the effeminate fags from the Castro district decked out in loud colors, a riot of magentas, oranges, sapphires, rainbows of happy homos getting free condoms marching out the door with the badge of I Get Laid plastered on there foreheads accompanied by the sublime look on their faces that only a horny male can radiate.  I waited outside observing the gay community while Andy went in and got his results.  Gays are like the Jews relegated to history's ghettos they have found themselves in the dungheaps of humanity and carefully painstakingly rearranged the dung to form beautiful living communities.  Fragile rickety alliances one borne by blood the other by sexual preference, both very odd ways to bring people together, but they did and both cultures had the ghetto sensibilities and lust for life that is lacking in the stuffed belly’s of there oppressors.  A gay man, no matter how high on the social ladder is still first and foremost a gay man.  Assuming of course he is open about it and very few are, but nevertheless you will find that those in positions of power that are gay tend to put that up first.  I pity the first gay male president; his lot will be a rough one, along with the first woman, the first black, the first Hispanic.  In America if you aren’t a straight white male you are a freak from the get go, the whole thing is set up, even the ones who aren’t persecuting you want to know about “your people” or what its like to be gay or black, are you friends gay?  Are your friends black?  The Jews have been here for long enough that the daft ignorant Martha’s vineyard morons who run things have about figured them out, its not tres chic to be Jewish anymore, sorry.  But just about anything else and especially lesbians, from the scene around LA you would think that the vast majority of the population had just realized that lesbians existed.  As the bottom feeders of the past begin to leave the pond and gain the notice of the so-called mainstream they are greeted on one side by hatred and on the other by incredulous fascination, either way you turn you are no longer human, you’re lesbian, you’re black, you’re Mexican, you’re gay, you’re fat, you’re a vegesexual, and then if we can wrap our feeble minded idiocy around that…. Then in a hundred years or so we just might remember that you are first and foremost a human.  Welcome to land of the dead or should I say those who have died to the world?
+Nietzsche talked and wrote a lot about the dead, the inhuman, the new philosophers he called them.  A strange breed this those that turned there back on the so-called human values and proudly declared themselves in human.  He believed that as time went on more and more would turn there backs and let the false pretense of the world die its horrid stinking death, and he was right, but he didn’t take into account the mutual growth of humanity.  Humanity this loose leafed term through which all the pages of history are turned like that dream of idiots, humanity sprints through time in a straight line, the arrow launched by cupid that hit the apple in eve’s hand and sent it whirling to the far reaches of the galaxy.  Beside, running parallel, but on a different set of track, the track of individuals, run the stream engines of Nietzsche's beliefs.  All these artist of the future to which he spoke are dead to the world.  The world won’t give them so much as a hasty acknowledgement, the world is still trying to figure out why some people like boys and some like girls, the world can not look itself in the mirror it slinks like a shamefaced soldier who ran from the battle to the comfort of his own dead mothers bosom.  The world rots on top of the dead god’s cunt.  Head stuck to the primordial womb like imbeciles or children that suck their thumbs.   Look at all the pretty things, lovely things, look at what we have built, look at what we can do!  Look at all the pretty pictures; hear the pretty stories and sleep tight at night!  Never never dare to question the underlying fundamentals shake up your field if you must but leave the essential framework of shithouse alone.  And yet we crawl down here in the basement where you pay us no mind and slowly like industrious beavers we gnaw at the wood frame of the house the monkeys built, the house that world trembles in fear of us and we will bring it crashing down one day, the beavers, the termites, the wood fungi, the decay always wins in the end.  Children of the true warmth know that, they watch it, they live it, first they eat themselves out and then they turn their back and die sinking out of sight, but they are not gone, no they are here.
+
+Faith dropped inonus around seven wanting to take e to dinner.  I was more than happy to ditch the on The Road party; I always hated Kerouac’s Jock/Buddhist inanity and I definitely didn’t care to hang out with bloated egos dedicated to recreating that inanity.  Faith was wearing tight black leather pants and a thin strapped sleeveless shirt that barely contained her breasts.  I would have followed her gladly right aross the Styx, but she only wanted Italian food and patio seating so we went to ldkjadlkj and sat under the soft glow of heat lamps.  It was an eerie little patio, the heat lamps burned the pea soup fog off so that the air was damp, but clear about twenty feet up and then dissolved into a misty whiteness that acted as a kind of raised outdoor ceiling.  Bread and salad arrived without a word from either of us —a mark of great restaurant.  When food is served without being requested there is a hint of what lies at your finger tips, it whets the appitie andopens up a world of edible delights that seems more mysterious and inviting than the simple words of the menu.  It wasn’t just bread either, it was flatbread fried and delicately coated in fine strips of lox with sprinkles of capers and sprigs of parsley.  Nina insisted on a bottle of cabarnet before anything else.  I studied her face as she prattled on about the various wines her then boyfriend had introduced to her.  She had a nose for wine, Faith, she hardly needed her boyfriends help, in fact it was Faith that had gotten me on the endless wine kick that made me in terrible standing with the average red blooded beer drinking males that I tend to have as friends.  I remember the first night I met Nina or remet Nina or something.  Actually the first night I met her she was do to leave in the morning for Paris so little happened, I forgot all about her while she was gone and then one night she showed up again.  It turned out she had been back for some time and was seeing a clothing designer who lived somewhere in a loft downtown.  We sat at the bar and drank for a while and then she hatched this crazy plan to get back at the designer boyfriend… we ended up breaking into his loft and stealing two bottles of Merlot, kfjlkdj private reserve (I know this because Faith made the bottles into candle holders…); we then drove back across town to Golden Gate Park where we sat in moonlight and looked at the twinkling lights of Sausilito.  There was a little kissing, maybe even some groping but it has faded into memory and now as she prattled about Cabrenate and Merlot and Pinots and  whatnot all the kissing and groping is definitely gone and there is only this strange lovable girl Faith, that is more beautiful than anyone I have ever gone to bed with, buti have no desire to go to bed with her.  It sets me in a weird mood to spend time with Faith.  She makes me question my value system and what I want… that is to say that I want her and yet I don’t want her and this leaves a sort of tension in the air that makes everything prickily and more alive than when I am with most others.  That’s why I love her.
+“What are you going to do with yourself Sil?”  She has that look of concern in her eyes, it a look that says far more than the question itself.  Faith knows me well enough to know that I can take care of myself, but she likes to know that plans before everyone else.
+“dunno, no plan yet…”
+“At least you left that awful ogre…” she laughs.  Amy hated Faith.  Women always hate women that they know are more attractive than themselves.  Faith had quietly waited in wings while Amy ran her course and now that she was gone Faith could finally gloat.  It was a healthy gloat; afterall she knew well enough that it wasn’t going to last.  “I told you… you run off with these girls and don’t talk to me for practically years… but you always come back to me.”  Her face lit up with a kind of pride.  “that’s why we don’t have sex… I love you too much to let you go getting possessive and jealous and whatever it is that you men turn into when you stick your little things into us….”  She laughed again.
+“We could always give it a shot… you know maybe test the theory…?”
+“No.” She popped a stray caper in her mouth and smiled sarcastically.
+“Okay.  But I still think we could have some great sex….”
+“I don’t doubt that, but I don’t need great sex as much as I need great friends.  Besides,”  she cracked that mischievious smile again, “your cock doesn’t have dual speed settings and a clit massager….”
+“You don’t know that for sure….”
+“Uh huh… call it an educated guess… what do you think of the wine”
+The wine, the wine, my dear Faith I am not thinking of the wine….  But now that you mention it its heavy and sweet, an ambrosial wine.  Quite good.
+“Yes the wine… its good…”
+“Stop it… I am wearing clothes you know…
+“Yes it’s a true tragedy…”
+“Sil you’re starting to annoy me… haven’t you had any sex lately?”
+“Ya friend of Andy’s… she wasn’t very good though.”
+“What do you mean?”
+“I don’t know… somepeople have an enthusiasm for sex and others don’t you know?  Well she didn’t”
+“too bad.”
+“ya”
+Dinner swings through; Linguini with clams, more bread, more wine, more wine more wine.
+“So you love this guy or what?”
+“um it’s a bit early to decide something like that… hey can I ask you a question?”
+“Sure.”
+“Have you ever not been able to get a hard on?”
+“Umm, well that’s depends how you define things… there have been times wheniwas so drunk I had the good sense not to try having sex….”
+“No I mean not drunk or anything… you just couldn’t get it up….”
+“Faith I’m only twenty seven… ask me again in twenty years… why?”
+“I dunno the other night we were fooling around and I tried to go down on him and it wouldn’t get hard… I mean I didn’t want to have sex or anything, I just wanted to go down on him.  I don’t know if its me?  Am I doing something wrong?”
+“I wouldn’t know obviously… um how old is this guy?”
+“thirty eight.”
+“Oh shit.  God please let me be able to get it up…  I wonder about that sometimes though.  I mean I hear these sorts of stories or read the in magazines and such, but it’s a problem I can’t relate to… yet.  It must be weird I mean if you were to just whisper a few words in my ear I could fuck you right here on this table… they tell me that I am well past my sexual peak, but I don’t see it.  I think it mainly happens to menwhose wives get fat, whose jobs are stressful you know factors I don’t have in my life….”
+“But what if its me?”
+“ya so?  What do you do when you’re down there?”
+“Uh I don’t know the usual I guess…”
+“The usual what the fuck is the usual?  Is that like where you walk into the bedroom and he says I’ll have the usual?”
+(laughing) “no you know I lick and nibble and suck and I don’t know….”
+“the secret is all in the hands.”
+“The hands?”
+“Yes the right combination of hands and mouth and saliva, saliva is key… you have to be messy about it.  Theres a little licking a little sucking then the hands… and don’t forget we have balls… woment seem to forget that we have balls.  Give em a lick or two… real gentle there though otherwise it hurts….  Jesus I’m turning myself on.”
+“I do all that stuff… that’s the usual…”
+“then its him… maybehe had an off night….”
+After dinner we walked around Sasalito for a while and Faith decided that we had to go into a paint your own pottery store and, well, paint some pottery.  I chose a giant ashtray and swabbed it dully in mottled gray paint.  Faith went in for a rice bowl and was adorning it with fairly intricate patterns of astrological symbols and such.
+“I got a tarot reading the other day… the woman told me all about my realtionship with Garret; it was kind of creepy she was pretty accurate….  She also said I would get a roll in a film soon and the next day my friend brian called and wants me to do his student film….”
+“You really believe all that shit don’t you?”
+“I am a very religious person, you know that.’
+“Ya I know, its just refreshing, I forgot about it.  Everyone I know is so cynical about things like that, we’ve all chased down the mystery for so long its not a mystery anymore.  Its good the hear someonespeak with a little Faith in their voice.  No pun no offense.’
+“None taken.  But thank you.”
+“It was telling Andy the other day that I think intelligence has become synonamous with cynical… some sort of legacy of Frued and Neitchze.  It might be that all these new fangled explanations of the world, like psychology or science in general are easier to understand than something that requires faith, but they loose something… you know?  I think to be completely convinced of something, even if you find yourself indisbelieve years later, is one of life supreme joys.  I love to fall.  Love to be taken in…it doesn’t matter if it’s the latest theory of physics or the ornate world of new girlfriend.. the thing is never that important it’s the feeling I get from falling in completely and being emersed and saturated with belief.  Fantastic.”
+“I know.  That’s why I didn’t get mad at you for ignoring me for two years.. when you were with Amy, I knew that you didn’t love her you loved the idea of her… I knew you would be back someday.”  She smiled at me.  It was a smile of supreme happiness of one who was falling… it was beautiful to look at, floated there in the air, not teeth not gums not flesh and blood, but some understanding of the universe that came from the fall.  The fall of man.  The redemption of being human.  I painted a whale on the bottom of the ashtry as an after thought.  
+Walking home we debated whether or not modelling made one stupid and whether or not Johnny Depp and Uma Thermin could produce the ultimate manifestation of DNA or whther the forces of nature would intervien and create a moster.  And of course the tradgedy inherent in the fact that we would never get to know.  Faith kissed me at her steps and went inside.  I sat down to smoke a cigarette, but her new beau pulled up so I slipped off.  I didn’t want him to get any wrong ideas about the situation.  As I left I tried to through a little sexual energy his way, maybe send it across invisible wires that run between all of us.  Walking home on the deserted nighttime streets I wondered why I had stopped going for my walks.  I made a mental decision to start them up again.  Andy was gone when I got back, but I didn’t care.  I stayed up for while smoking under the cover of inky still darkness watching the blue grey rings of smoke drift about in the still air.
+
+
+It turned out that Andy didn’t have the herps but he did have a gall bladder infection, which came as a surprise to both him and me, as neither of us knew we had a gall bladder.  We had heard of them, but never had to actually realize we had one, and I thankfully still didn’t.  Andy was right Laura did want me to give her a lay. She had set her sights on me and made me her knew goal.  I felt awkward at the house and began to only come home late at night.  In the mornings I wandered down to the university area and had coffee and listened to the poor witless school children drivel about test and papers and things that had to be done.  It made me feel better about my life.  To listen to them you would think that the entire world is one series of deadlines to be met and knowledge to be regurgitated, even the ones who had passion only had passion for the ideas, they had no passion for the act of living, they were bending life to fit the ideals.  Why it never occurred to them to bend the ideals to fit the life is beyond me, but then from where I sit looking back I do occasionally see myself at times back when I was waiting for something to happen back when it thought that the world “happened.
+After coffee at the café I head over to Starbucks and wait around for a cute girl to pull up and then, positioning myself casually just outside the door, I wait until they come out and ask for ride downtown, if they happened to be head that way, if not I sometimes just went wherever they were willing to take me.  Sometimes I spent the day with one of them, but more often I spent the day trying to find a ride back to the city, occasionally barring all other methods I would call Andy and have him pick me up.  Once I made him drive all the way the Stintson Beach to get me during rush-hour traffic, but he never complained.  
+There were those days though when Laura got me before I had a chance to escape.  She tried so hard and without ever coming right out and saying it either, maybe she was too scared that I would have said no, but she never just asked.  It would always start with a casual question, what was I doing?  Did I have plans? Would I like to go for walk? Would I like to have a beer and watch a movie in her room?  Of course I never had plans and when I ran out of excuses I would end up in her room watching movies or listening to records and drinking beer or gin; she would feign interest in whatever I said and I feigned interest in what she said, we developed a wonderful sense of conversation where one of us would tell a story with the appropriate prompts so that the other would have a chance to say his lines.  It was an elaborate daytime drama played out in her room, the conversations were never between two people they were lines read off a script that life had handed us.  Sometimes I almost lost my will and gave in, give her a lay I figured let her have some, but I knew my heart wasn’t in it and when your hearts not in sex is mechanical and disgusting.  To have lust there has to be heart, wild robust hearts full of consumption like feasting leopards tearing at the raw meat with fury, but if I had gone ahead she would have turned leopard and I would have been eaten alive in my boredom.  Not that she wasn’t attractive, she was beautiful, but she just didn’t have any life to her.
+With Laura everything was an example of something she had read, there was no green life, it was buried under the words of the past before it ever had a chance to come out and shine, it stretched in the early morning and then bam!, a ton of bricks fell on its head.  It had all been done and said before according to Laura; I would hardly start a sentence and she would tell me I was paraphrasing someone whose name I had never heard.  She was most fond of discussing philosophy because Andy had told her that I used to study it.  I had the conversation down to where I only listened for my cues, the interim’s I spent musing over her figure trying to appreciate the subtleties of it, the nuances that only a lover is supposed to know.  She wanted me in the flesh but it liked her in my mind, a character I never could have sketched.  A creature so bizarre I wouldn’t have believed it if it were a dream.  Her words tore out and ripped the room to shreds, but I sat silently meditating on the core of existence, the body, the body electric he sang… 
+“Who is you favorite philosopher,” she would ask.  How is one to answer such a question?  My favorites were the ones I disagreed with the most which always led to arguments between us, with her accusing me of philosophical treason for calling Nietzsche (her favorite) a bore.  He was so I thought then, quite a bore always moping about the miserable condition of mankind which is all good and well, but what of the inherent beauty what of the passion what of the celebration?  The majority of Americans may be clinically insane, but down there in the cesspool of life lies the forgotten individual and the individual can do remarkable things with him or herself even in the midst of a mad world.  Nietzsche was blinded by the numbers, couldn’t see the tree for the forest as it were.  Or I would say Whitman and she would correct me saying he was a poet, not philosopher and I would say poetry is the true philosophy and then she would launch like a rocket into the space of her own carefully constructed latticework of belief.
+“Poets serve different ends they reach for the gut, the emotions, the philosopher applies cool reasoning and evaluates with out judgement.  Poets are too hot headed to be philosophers….  A philosopher sees things as they are, even if that is only as they are to him, it is still the way they are… or they way they see it, they reorder the world.  That’s what I am trying to get at, poets observe the world and philosophers reorder it.”
+At times like that I wanted to strangle her for my own sanity, but legally all I could do was defend the Leaves of Grass.  “Poets reorder the world just as much as the next man, that’s all we do in fact we reorder the world to suit whatever it is that we happen to believe.  We only see what we want to see, because that is all we can see.  If you believe that blades of grass are nothing more than cellulose and water than that is all you will see when you look at grass.  But if you shut your ridiculous preconceived notions off for a minute and lie down on the grass then you might for just one instant start to see the world from the grasses point of view and you will notice that grass does not philosophize, it just is.”
+That particular day I was in a bad mood and things ended with me refusing to discuss anything further until she read Science and Sanity.  I loaned that precious tome to her though I already knew she wouldn’t get much past the second introduction.  I led the horse to water let her drink for herself.  I never expected her to actually read it.  I gave up on philosophy for the simple reason that it failed to accurately resonate the world of existence.  For me the chaotic registers of the poets and novelists captured the illusive passion of reality far better in the garbled code of metaphor and warm blankets of experience they wrapped existence in a picture of song, a symphony of anarchy that matched the one I saw when I walked down the street.  The world of the philosopher is like Laura’s world, its cold confusing and you never get what you want and even though you know that you can’t get it you keep trying all the same playing out the uneventful script that is the martyr’s.
+One day I kissed her to see what she would do, if she would act on restraint or try to take me like she wanted to, if she had I would have let her for the simple reason that at least then she might be alive for just one second.  I would have liked her to rape me, to show some life to her, but there was nothing, she hung on my lips romantically like the stale ideas that hung on them when she talked, there was nothing but romance and empty meaninglessness in her. I figured at least the kiss had sealed it and I knew if ever I was down on my luck she would take me in and that was far better than love or passion for a man in my circumstances.
+
+I have taken to wandering the neighborhood again, playing word association games with myself trying to see how much of my childhood I can remember.  I can never get back beyond the memory of walking down a trail in a forest somewhere.  I am singing a song as I walk, singing a song with my mother and father.  We are hiking down a mountain somewhere.  But I can’t see the forest; I can’t hear the song or see my parents.  I just have the fuzzy out lines of it, I called my mother one evening and she said that I must have been around four or five which only served to further depress me, I hate that some people can remember as far back as their crib while for me even kindergarten is a stretch. 
+Coit Tower is beautiful at night, a proud phallic overlook for city teeming with sex.  San Francisco is the only city in America where you actually run across lover in alleys, exhibitionists in front of glass windows on the hill tops and discreet blowjobs in movie theatres, fitting then that it should have a giant concrete cock of light looking over it.  The trip across town from Andy’s place off Ashbury, through the mission district and little Italy to Coit is like a sociological tour.  The Mission District has many of the landmark houses that you have seen of San Francisco, the fronts are colorful and happy, but is artificial and only looks colorful and happy in postcards.  In reality they are at the catacombs of the city, the doldrums south of the equator.  They are home to the middle class city dweller an aging variety of Consumerus Americanus, usually grouped with the yuppies but wrongly so.  These peculiar neighborhoods are the breeding ground of the suburbs.  These are in fact why there are suburbs.  The Mission is set back from downtown and is a primarily residential neighborhood steeped in the lukewarm water of mediocrity.  It is here that librarians, office managers, public officials and otherwise uneventful people arise from, and it is here that the whole suburban utopia of better newer shinier gadgets was born.  Here the old gadgets stick out and show the datedness of their species, they were overrun, can no longer keep up, the ones trampled down on the battlefield of progress, they did not win, they failed even to retreat, they lie where they fall waiting for stretcher bearers to carry them off to the morgue.  They have cellular when they should have digital, they had beta when they should have waited for VHS, and they got the eighttrack player installed in their car about a month before the advent of the cassette.  This post war generation turns around in profound confusion, they are assaulted on all sides by constant change, they have felt out of control ever since the first greaser put a comb in his pocket and took one of their wives behind the college stadium and showed her what sex should be like.  The wanted to discover the world and instead they built suburbs because it seemed to be the thing to do.
+I feel at home amongst such failures, we share the common wounds of the dead, though theirs were not fatal, they are as good as dead the world turned its back on them and they wander about like zombies, preoccupied with the future, but to cautious to gamble on it.  They are always going somewhere, doing something when all the while a little voice is driving them mad whispering sweet perfumed fables in their ear like: it is all nothing….  They never say hi or wave like gays do further down in Castro, they don’t try to hustle you like the Hispanics and blacks downtown, there are in fact no homeless in this neighborhood, better to lie in a rat infested dumpster downtown than to lie here.  Makes you nervous, a neighborhood where people won’t sleep on the streets, whether its for fear of the cops or the thugs makes no difference they’re both in the same league.  The denizens of the Mission District all walk with there eyes glued to the ground if they are alone or glued to the person they are with, the world slips by unnoticed by them, they are creatures of habit, serial killers never plague them, they are too easy.  
+Like this guy… he is right here everyday like clockwork, like me in fact, but his routine is so old and I am such a recent addition that I don’t register, he never turns his head.  I stop and block his path and he goes absently around the back of his car up the driveway as though I was invisible.  I begin to feel curiously invisible, a bit separated from the tactile world, unsettled and hyperaware I continue up the steps that lead to Coit tower, I feel as if I am teetering on the razor edge of awareness.  About half way up I hear the muted grunting of what sounds like a television set playing pornography.  I snap my head to the side and listen because sex sounds move at a frequency to which I am acicular, they moves in waves like any other, but sex has another more primordial quality, just beyond the edge of conscious hearing. It makes you turn your head involuntarily, like a traffic accident or a machine gun at the family reunion in Kansas.
+I follow the sound climbing up the hill instead of using the path, about half way from where I left the steps to the top I turn around and see a couple fucking doggie style in there couch in plain view of all the world, except that all the world is hidden by trees.  I light a cigarette and watch them go at with wild animal abandon, not like most rich women I have been with who are so disinclined toward any sort of dirtiness be it on the linens or during sex.  These two have taken Woody Allen to heart; sex is only dirty when you do it right.  She comes before I am halfway through my cigarette and sits down on the couch to suck him off.  It comes as electrostatic charge this feeling of peeking into the lives others, of watching them harmlessly, but yet they would likely have jumped up had they seen me, so strange that we like to hide the most personal of human expressions and yet will kill and degrade each other in the streets before live television crews.  It all stems from not showing any cock in R-rated films, but that’s not important right now.  Right now her warm mouth is drawing him out and I am leaving, not wanting to see the end of the show, preferring to leave it eternally occurring in memory like a loop of film flapping in an empty theatre….
+Memories shrouded in gauze and muslin, filters that are colored and toned by what I brought to them when they happened… mixing like oil and water with what I bring to them now.  Take for instance Mexico City: I remember Mexico City in hazy brown discolored way, but it’s not the smog, it’s the nature of memory —the nature of my memory.  The images overlay each other like a photomontage.  I see it in moving pictures: cut to a shot of the subway, sad brown faces and I want to know why they aren't on vacation like me… lay on top of it an image of pyramid excavation digging up and trying to solve the Mayan Caper.  Years ago you would. Understand she was standing right next to me and then...Warm sweet smelling cab and my father says “hey, look a Kentucky fried Chicken” and sure enough I see one.  Americana right in the middle of foreign chaos it threw me into a different world, a sudden realization that life is not ordered like the clockwork metaphors I learned in grade school.  It became in that instant a chaotic kaleidoscope of astonishment and splendor … the shock of fried chicken.
+Everything became focused up into the sun; it burned in fantastical visions that existed only for me, leaving me alone and for a long time afraid.  Not fear in the sense that you feel threatened, it is much worse, not conscious, it just lingers in the back of the mind occasionally eliciting a paralysis that would haunt me for a while and then fade again in the face of day to day activities.  
+It’s a fear that leaves you like a woman I saw once stone still and shell shocked, stuck right in the middle of this enormous arch in Canyonlands National Park, Utah.  She just stood there unable to move, feeling the digging hooks of unbridled terror burning into her brain and creating an endless and spellbinding feedback loop that forbids you to move.  It anchors your mind right back in the primate body because you feel it and yet rips you right out of the very fabric of collective reality and propels you into strange land where there is no you.  I watched her sit there unable to help herself, doubtless staring at the two thousand-foot drop off on both sides of her and the meager four foot wide sandstone arch that was holding her there.  She was suspended in mid air, seeing herself for the first time the way we are: naked cold and deathly afraid.
+	But the cab driver just laughed and said, “here in Mexico City there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat, Kentucky Fried Dog, But definitely no Kentucky Fried Chicken.”  He smiled this crooked smile revealing gold caps and over moist gum structure that was so large it seemed to be slowly crawling right down over his teeth.  He then sternly advised in all seriousness against eating there, of course I wouldn't have anyway; he merely gave me a rational reason for that.  And all this was years before I would ever get to India to learn that, first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is... 
+I realize my legs are moving as fast as the random associations of the mind and I am in North Beach again without even realizing that that was where I was headed.  I slow a bit and notice the damp cold, a glance at the sky reveals the story —gray again—nighttime fog in the middle of April.  
+Weather everywhere is getting more severe, mudslides, floods, droughts, tornadoes.  It’s as if something really big were building up to vent on us.  The Ancients placed great stock in weather and saw storms as harbingers that something was wrong within the tribe. Many of them associated the outside as intimately connected to the inside of the tribe. Educated people (historically that reads white) first scoffed at such notions, but now two thousand years of theories later we have elaborate sciences which are beginning to prove the simple wisdom that tribal people know just from observing life
+Jostling through the crowds of Jackson street brings back tapeloops of Boston —Harvard square—fall—the Charles River slips by without a sound, the streets corral throngs of people— onlookers drunk beyond comprehension of what they were there to look at— they stumble out of bars and lurch through doorways like grenades rolled out on the street.  Inside the Radcliffe boathouse a reserve of surplus energy is released in muscular spasms that pulse in orgasm.  Her breasts pool salt onto my tongue.  Her flesh is hard and metallurgic turning brittle under my hands, the life is slowing slipping out of her, out of the sewers of life up celestial heights of orgasm, among the eagles, the screaming eagles, the German philosophers sitting like a nineteen ten bankers awaiting the thief.  The tape is endless, looping across eons, cultures, genetic hardwired associations to the galaxies, interstellar abbreviations of life.  Cool hard water distilled in my mouth and then she falls from my arms like a limp rag and I am cast down a tube a tunnel endlessly falling, clattering of the walls building speed, a vacuum with no terminal velocity I want to reach out for limbs for human hands to catch me….  I scream and there is no sound save the rush of air passing my ears and finally I settle in the twinkling light still shining from above and I relax to the falling sensation no longer concerned surrendered eternity forever to remain here now and then the light goes dim… the taxi’s in times square… Truman Capote… An auburn haired girl I liked in seventh grade… tumbling of great vistas into nothingness into all timelessness….
+
+
+It was inevitable that Dean would come for me, we always rendezvous at some point and then we set off for a while and bounced apart again, things had been that way for as long as I can remember.  Things had taken a turn for the worse.  Andy was leaving for Costa Rica to work on a cruise ship.  Apparently the late night talks had not been all smoke screen as took them, to make matter worse I could have a hob myself, but raising the air fare seemed impossible.  In a vain effort I started panhandling downtown and serving cocktails one night a week at club 36 where he worked, but money was hardly rolling in, and when it did it left just as fast.  The panhandling I enjoyed, it reminded me that people weren’t such horrible creatures after all, when you beg you are forced to look for Emerson’s little spark of divinity in everyone.
+Sometimes panhandling was just something to do while you were reading; a way of making some money for the age old magic of deciphering words into images, into thoughts, into life.  I would get up before dawn and catch the first train downtown.  Around five the flow picked up, traders, analysts, number theorists, restroom attendants, secretaries, janitors, the streets were thriving in the still murky dawn.  In an hour, in New York City the grand number game would pitch off on another day of “trading.”  What they are trading and why was totally lost on me, but I liked to watch them go about it.  By six I would have in the neighborhood of ten dollars, sometimes more sometimes less, but when the bell sounded six the number of people on street declined. 
+	I was reading Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising, a wildly fascinating tour through quantum physics, modern psychology, and ancient shamanic ecstasy.  I had never encountered a mind that could so formidably wrangle about entire worldviews with such succinct explanations and clarity of language, always with a sense of humor too.  Irish authors are geniuses at working that quirky clever humor of theirs into the most unlikely of places; I thought of Joyce, Wilde, McKenna, even Beckett is hilarious to see on stage.  Its actually more fun to watch the audience watch the play; you understand Beckett’s logic much better from observing it in action than from him telling it to you, but he is there like a ringleader assembling the drugged lions so that you can safely walk amongst them.  Beckett saw the emptiness of the game and stood in the middle of the court slowly, inanely bouncing the ball to see if anyone would notice.
+	The Irish seem to know best how to write and how to drink, how to live you might say if you had my view of things.  Of course it doesn’t do anything for you in this country.  In America if you want to succeed you have to suck seed, the seed of fat cat bosses, lawyers, politicians, Hollywood stars, washing machine salesmen, sitcoms, the latest way to get your socks whiter, the newest car, the biggest television… plenty of buying, consuming and swallowing of the preverbal seed around here.  Precious little living though, a melting pot was never where one ought to have looked for the distinctive flair that marks man as alive.  In becoming individualists we lost ourselves; all that’s going on in American thought is newer and cleverer way of differentiating between the individuals, creating categories.   A carrot here, cabbage there, and celery, beans, beets, broth, turnips, potatoes, and freeze-dried madmen to spice the grand stew.  Everybody fits in a category, everybody can be marketed to on somehow or other.  Ordering chaos and turning the stew into pureed banality might be the only thing we ever accomplish before the whole shit-house country turns into a police state.  It was demoralizing to be American, you were either a human or citizen and the two remained separated as violently and far more successfully than church and state.
+	And what of the separation of church and state?  It sounds good in the ear but by the time it hits the brain its curdling like old milk.  It didn’t turn out quite the way it was supposed to, instead of separating them we just threw away the church and made the State into god.  Maybe it was inevitable and we were merely the ones to do it, we had needed a new god for a long time when this country came to fruition—might as well give the state a try.  Someone once said that the defining characteristic of Americans is that they will try everything wrong before they get themselves around to doing what they knew was right in the first place.  Who better to head that racket than the State?  Who better to make god?  We’re heading the right direction maybe, god’s face is coming into view more and more and more people I meet are ready to wake up from the nightmare of history as Joyce put it.  The history of god is no different: first he was everywhere, then he was in an animal, then he was in a building, then he was in some guy, now he’s in all our heads… can’t the man just sit still for a few centuries?  No, God’s on the run doesn’t want to be found because he doesn’t think he’ll be liked when we find him.  Same reason we off ourselves, every human action are a tiny suicide until we give up the ghost.
+	The conquest of death will be the end of science and then we’ll have flushed god out, left him nowhere to hide.  In the mean time… alms for the poor?
+	And maybe another quarter drops from a passerby and jingles as it lands in my cup.  I have learned not to look up; they don’t want you to.  Non-confrontational begging is the wave of the future; it’s the atheist’s way of tithing.  They never look at you, just drop some change in the cup as they pass never even break their stride.  I had decided long ago that these busy nessmen and women were all raised in some flat monotonous religion like Presbyterianism, sheltered from god by money but still open to manipulation via guilt.    I was guilt, a reminder, and the dogshit that made them remember they were dogs too.  They made it quite obvious that giving was an odious task, one they would just as soon not do, but something compelled them nonetheless.  Some mysterious lingering Presbyterian guilt, or perhaps it was a calculated attempt to cover their doubts, just in case there was a god of judgement they needed a few legal briefs in their corner, someone they could subpoena as a character witness before St Peter, as they tried to grovel and argue their way into heaven.  Ah heaven!  The good life!  Wouldn’t it be great if we could still live in fairytales… perhaps I gave them a bit of childhood fairytale back, reminded them that at least they had things….  The rich need the poor that way, it gives them some comfort to know that there are less fortunate, makes them feel like they have gotten somewhere in their fervent march to the top of the national muck heap.  
+What they liked even more was to support street musicians and comic performers, the modern court jesters playing in the palace of the Everyman.  The streets, the city lights, this was the group palace for the middle and upper class; high above it behind the thousands of mysterious glass stories those with real power and real money moved about in hushed whispers, prowling in the shadows and watching the show from above.  It was Celine who said near the end of his life when someone asked him what he thought of the human race (an odd question to put to someone, but then Celine was an odd man), “I spit on you all from a great height” was the old boy’s reply.  “I spit on you reaching great height” I would have said; I like it down here at the bottom in the trenchant, pitched battle for survival.  The people were of a better character, more aware of the things that money can’t buy, namely anything of value.  Wait till they start bottling the air my Dad used to say well Dad they have, in Mexico City —they sell it right there on the street corner.  The swan song of the earth will be sung by asthmatics and the trumpets of the end days will be blown by lungs measuring out bottled air.  Bottling the air!  Things are fine, really!  No more wars, no more uprisings, no more taxes... no more anything save the eerie hum of the refrigerator cascading about the silence of your house late at night.  Hmmmmmmmmmm Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.  It crawls cockroach-like over your face while you sleep, it perches on your forehead and listens to your heart beat —admires the cacophonous organic simplicity of human sleep.  
+I was out of town when Dean arrived, an old girlfriend, Leah Wright had seen me begging downtown and taken pity on me; she insisted on putting me up for a vacation.  She was married and I could tell that her husband didn’t like me, but he thought I was funny and didn’t mind too much that I stay with them.  They were both appalled to learn that I lived in a closet.  He loved the I’m still in the closet joke of it, laughed like the honest farmboy that he was.  After leaving her I lost track of Leah for a while; she went and married a Canadian farmboy who used to play hockey and now plays golf and he talked a lot about being a sports newscaster.  It was a different life than what I had in the city, they were in the rather ritzy suburbs of Marin, a nice house tucked back in the near forest of the hills.  It was the suburbs to be sure, but a suburb that was not artificially planted which made it livable even attractive sometimes.  They ate three square meals a day and went work like the good little citizens that they were.  I sat around all day smoking cigarette and typing in their garage because neither of them could stand smoking.  After a week or so I started to run dry of ideas.  I took to hoeing out a patch of land to plant them some tomato plants and it was as I was in fact planting the seeds that I saw Andy and Dean pull up.
+I felt slightly ridiculous standing their looking at them, I had temporarily slipped into a mild dementia over the tomatoes, I was obsessing over the universe in great detail and then they got out of the bus.  Dean looked ridiculous himself getting out of Andy’s VW bus in his customary suit and tie, it was an incongruous image and I couldn’t help laughing.  Andy just stood on the running board and yelled over the car.
+“Come on lets go!”
+It was simple enough, I ran inside grabbed my bag and my laptop and threw them in the back of the bus.  I ran back into the house and pilfered about for a bit looking for some stowed cash, I hit the jackpot in the middle of Leah’s g-string underwear, almost two hundred dollars.  I grabbed it and scribbled an IOU to take its place, as an afterthought I held one of the g-strings up to my nose, it had the unmistakable odor of Tide.  Nothing fecund in that house I realized, all the surfaces were clean to hide the smell of rot that permeated their flesh.  I shuddered and ran out the door, I dove in and we headed off.
+	On the way into the city Andy got to telling Dean about his bar job and Dean was all gung-ho for it. Dean collected women the way some people collect art once he had them they never really left.  He was telling Andy and I about his latest one Monique the strangest girl he’d ever fucked.  He said she was dumb as nails and she didn’t even like him she just wanted to fuck.  He said it was what he always wanted in a woman, but it was not a good as he thought it would be.  Even she got to be a burden her said, “if its not love they want then its sex whatever it is the point is that they have got to have it all the time, it doesn’t matter what it is women must control it.  I think its natural result of patriarchal society or maybe just human nature — you want what you can never really have….”
+	Crossing the bridge we got stuck in traffic and Dean took the opportunity to get out of his car and get a new cartoon of cigarettes.  Andy and I were catching up on details, but then we realized that Dean had been gone for a few minutes and the car in front of ours had moved forward.  I got out to find Dean and he came running up through me the keys and got into a car with some girl I had never seen before. 
+About three hours after we got to Andy’s Dean came over and the three of us headed to the kfjla bar.  I wasn’t really of the mind to go there, but Dean insisted and I just found myself going along with the will of others.  The sky bar is a swanky joint all decked out in purple lights with silent cocktail waitresses that never write anything down or say any acknowledgement or recognition and then mysteriously show up with drinks and then later the bill.  The inside was done up in the stylings of a seventy’s porno set in the nineties —if you follow that.  That sort of peculiar intangible decorating term art deco, which used to mean Miami Vice and now means feng shui.  
+	We sat down in the corner and drinks appeared to Andy’s sign language gestures.  Dean still hadn’t made any mention of the bridge girl and I was ready to drop the thought forever when he sets down his drink and launches into a story.
+	“Alright now the bridge thing, that was a forced experiment on my part a psychology experiment to see if I could meet someone on a bridge in traffic and go home and have dinner and then sex with them than I had decided that I would quit the newspaper and just slowly weave about the country burning down towns and whole cities behind me, but still being myself with out any worry of bills, rent, food all of it gone.  The thing is though I didn’t figure I would be able to do it; in fact I didn’t really do it some other guy did it and I watched.  It was a very surreal afternoon.  She had two kids man that was weird, made me miss my daughter…”  He stared off into space of brief sniped moment and then exhaled smoke.  “I don’t know… I sort of had a deal with myself here… and now I’m not entirely sure I’m ready for what I thought would remain an abstract idea.  I dunno fuck it why not?  Why not make people my job?  Can I earn their trust and tell them what they want to hear with such grace as for them to offer me food?  Or money? Or their bodies?’
+	Dean routinely subjects himself to these little psychology self-experiments in his quest to understand.  He put considerable effort into it; he never when to college and I think that the experiments were what he used for his own little private college where he was the only teacher and only student.  
+	“See Sil the thing is I came up to see how you were and now I realized that I was the one who needed some help.  Shit man you were staying with Leah!  My god how many years ago was that?  And her husband too.  He he well done.”
+	I was sleeping in their garage; it wasn’t like there was anything going on with her; I really did just need to get out of the city for a while and write.  I was going bonkers though… I mean I felt fine now, but I was planting vegetables, but I figured if Dean saw it that way then who am I to correct him.  Things teetered along like they would have any night any where and then something strange happened that had never happened to me before.  After we had been there about an hour a guy bought a round of drinks for the house, which at this point must have been sixty people and certainly cost a pretty penny, but it happens every now and again.  We got our free drinks and settled down again when the music was cut and guy jumped up on a barstool.  He asked if everyone had their drink and then announced that he was closing the door and making the place into a private party.  At that point people groaned and started yelling but he silenced them simply by raising his hand.  He said he had bought us the drinks so that we could drink with him and from right now on all of us were guests at his party now patrons in his bar.  He said that he had just asked his girlfriend to marry him and that she had said yes and he was very happy and wanted us to share in his happiness.  He said that he wanted us to toast his new and he pulled her up onto the table next to him and we all clapped and he said that he had met her three years ago in this very bar and that she was the most important thing in his life now.  He said that people always told him that you don’t meet someone in bars and he said that he was here to say that they were wrong and that whereever your heart leads you, you will find happiness.  Or words to that effect.  He carried on like that for almost ten minutes and then finally he sat back down and the music went on again, but everything was different now and people were talking across tables and they were moving across the room and strangers could be seen shaking hands all around us.  Some sort of flood gate had been opened by the man; even I felt better though I was not looking for happiness I felt better know that someone who was had succeeded in the endeavor.
+	Suddenly instead of a bar the place gained some intimacy, it was a private party and we were all invited, we were alone together so to speak.  Dean said that it reminded him of how he pictured an Italian wedding, like the one in Deerhunter and enormous party that could go on for days if it wanted to.  He was right the place had an air of electricity to it as if now that there was a reason to be happy it could spread and affect all of us even though it really meant nothing to any of us.  Same sort of thing the evangelists have always been doing from Christ on down to a Baptist revival in the rural south.  What the man did was conquer that last human demon and he did it with simple heartfelt honesty and generosity.  He succeeded in making all of us together, all of us suddenly human and frail, but not alone in our humanity, not alone in our frailty.  The thing about modern Americans is that we like to think we are the big kind hearted freedom loving people of our mythology deep down we all believe that the world need our help with its problems and we all believe that we can solve them.  There is no human event happening on the earth that we can not improve with our very presence and yet behind that when you strip away the mythology and look at the cold hard truth you see that we are mucking it all up.  We are killing people to set them free and we ourselves are not free.  We are not the happy go lucky people we think we are.  We all carry this private despair around with us that wiggles around under our skin when we sleep at night.  Just like we are destroying the world we are destroying ourselves and yet all it takes to rectify the situation is one man in a bar with a bottle of happiness.  We came undone the little creatures under our skin popped out and ran away unable to live in the boiling cauldron of happiness.  They were forced extinct by the change in environment, like the dinosaurs unable to adapt they died.
+	In their place came an air of enthusiasm a sense of shared adventure that was hitherto not present.  The movement of bodies about seemed to stir it up in the air and soon it was fever pitched.  Couples were dancing in the isles between tables, in corners shadows could be seen groping at each other and men clapped each other on the back while women cuckold in circles.  Everywhere stories spun out, true ones, false ones, exaggerated ones, downplayed one, stories that rang out and were delightful no matter what they said.  None of us were actually aware of what we were daying we just knew that it felt good to talk felt good to pour out our innards to strangers.  Commiseration and celebration wrapped each other up like packages and dropped down the chimney from the grip of an invisible hand with red sleeve.
+	Five girls at the booth next to us can over and introduced themselves and soon we were all squished in together and talking like old friends.  They were mostly from the university across the bay.  Graduate students getting their MA’s in philosophy and heavy stuff, but we all tossed it about like it was cotton candy.  We were at the circus and no matter if Plato or Nietzsche were on the ferriswheel because it was still a carnival and everything is welcome at a carnival.  Thing kept up well past two when the alcohol stopped flowing.  No one waned to leave we all felt like it would fall apart if we left the room.  Finally around three large groups started to head off to various impromptu parties and we went with the girls back over to Berkeley where they had an enormous old house that they all lived in or at least most of them did.  By that time we were all a little sketchy on the details of the situation.  On the subway we all careened back and forth into each other with the way of the train.  I was sitting forward in the car away from the main group with my arm around a girl who had said she was an art theorist.  We had talked art theory in detail at the bar but now in wan of it all we just made out.  We were deep into a tongue battle when catcalls and whistles were heard from the other end of the car.  Everyone gathered around to watch us and we gave him or her a show.  It seemed like the right thing to do at that moment some way of pulling everybody in together simultaneously intimate and yet encompassing all.  We finally broke it off to breathe and there was a round of applause.  Some one from the train had joined into the party; he and his friend were swept up by us, and they came all the way back to house.
+	Around four we finally fell asleep; I don’t think anyone had sex that night though there was plenty of groping and exploring going on.  I passed out with my head between the girl’s legs.  Around nine Dean kicked me and I opened my eyes to see him and Andy all dressed and ready to go.  
+	“Come on man lets get some breakfast and go for a drive”
+	I got up and put my shirt back on.  We went down Telegraph and all had huge omelets at ldjflkdjfl.  Afterward we worked our way back to Andy’s stopping off for a drink at an Irish pub and some chocolate from Geridelli.  It was early in the morning on a Thursday and no one was in Gerridelli square.  It was pleasant; everything glowed.  After another beer at Andy’s Dean talked me into coming and staying with him for a while.  He needed some help at the newspaper and offered free rent and some money.  I went for it on the condition that we drive down the long way, on highway one and stop off a few places, make of day of it.  He agreed and we blew out of town around eleven.  We had lunch in downtown Santa Cruz and went swimming at the nude beach just north of there.  It was a beautiful June day on the coast.  Seagulls circled low over the kelp beds and the sun was bright and warm without being hot.  We ate sandwiches in silence with the voracious hunger of the hungover souls.  Breakfast seemed like years ago.
+From Santa Cruz down to Nepenthe we talked at length about Dean’ plan to prostitute himself which he had turned around so many times in his head that he no longer saw it as that.  At most he was willing to concede that it was opportunistic, but didn’t see any real harm in it.  I assured him that it was indeed harmful and would only tie him down to those that he was indebted to.  I know Dean and I knew that he was not that mercenary; even if he had convinced himself that he was it would have faded eventually leaving him high and dry.  I consented to working at the newspaper for a while to cheer him up.  In Nepenthe we had dinner and walked along the bluffs watching the sea otters out in the kelp beds.  The sunset was typical California beautiful, gilded light that slowly worked its way through the color spectrum from the first rays of orange then to fiery red and finally gentle purple hues that gave way to the blue green cover of darkness.  Just south of Big Sur we cut over to the 101.  
+I’m not sure how we got on the subject, but we were soon talking about Rick.  To say he was a friend would have been hyperbole, to say he was an enemy wouldn’t be accurate either.  Rick was just kind of there.  And then one day he wasn’t.  He was one of those people that just kind of shows up without warning, without rhyme or reason, but he was there.  He became the butt of most of our jokes; the biggest and best of which was supplied by his own so-called girlfriend.  Her name was never worth committing to memory, but I do remember that night at the bar when she let it slip that Rick had a misshapen penis.  Actually she didn’t just let it slip; she seemed to get a perverse little pleasure out of telling us that.
+ “Rick probably wore tighty-whiteys until he was seventeen.”  Dean had no respect for Rick; I couldn’t blame him.  Rick was nice enough, but there was something about his ignorant spoiled approach to the world that had grown increasingly repulsive over the years.  
+	I started laughing, “actually he still wears them now.”
+	“Are you serious?  Did he ever have a girlfriend?”
+	“Not since I knew him, not until her anyway.”
+	“So that’s why he puts up with her…”
+	“whadya mean?”
+	“I’m sorry she’s just foul… I mean Rick’s not a bad looking guy.”
+	“He’s kind of goofy though.”
+	“Ya.  I guess, but she’s gross, have you seen her face?”  It was a regretible reality that Rick must have faced every night when he climbed in bed.  She was hideous.  I used to wonder what he said to himself in the mirror when he confronted the fact that this was not the ideal woman that will be on the cover of magazines… probably he was consoled by the fact that she was willing to put out.  With Rick’s rudementary grasp of the sexual act she was probably the best thing that could have happened to him because she was very likely the only person willing to show him the ropes.
+	“Which way do you think it curves?”  
+	“You know its thoughts like that that I wish weren’t forced into my brain.  I have this thing where if you say it I see it and there I am now its right there, his cock is in my brain, you put the guy’s cock in my brain….. I would guess its to the left.”
+	“Really I was thinking right, you know cause of the tighty-whiteys…”	
+	“No well I don’t know maybe but most guys hang to the left.  In my experience”
+	“I know, but I’m assuming he was a freak of nature all the way around you know?”
+	“I can see your point, but I mean have you ever met a righty?  I mean I suppose there are righties out there but I believe they are the minority.  I’m not sure why I believe that; I think I read it somewhere.”
+	“What do you read?”  Dean was sitting up wide eyed.
+	“Oh you know The Lefty Times, it the official journal of the Lefty Alliance, a loosely organized federation of men dedicated to service of Lefty Cause.”
+	“The left Nut Cause?”
+	“Ya we take stands of issues that are important to the lefty voters and represent their interests in Congress.  We’re actually going to have a table at Woodstock this year and MTV is putting out spot on right after total request live.”
+	Dean picked it up too and soonwe had constructed our own plans for world domination based somehow on the fact that if your cock hangs to the right there is something fundamentally wrong with you.  I reeled it out like a politician or political consultant —a door to door whore in another universe.  We switched it up after conquest, we instituted a new means of government, instead of voting for politicians they were forced to go door to door and perform for voters.  Whatever sexually act the voter desired they had to go through with to get the vote.  Then the voters picked their favorite and who became THE MOST EXAULTED COCKSUCKER as we renamed the office of president.  It fell apart there and Dean went back to sleep.
+	I was left alone in this universe where ideas rule and sex is relegated to fulfilling basic mammalian urges.  Here and there a handful experiment a little with tantra and Kundalina techniques.  A desiple of reich and a fan of de Sade lurk around the edges of brains that lurk around the edges of bodies, but for the most part its hidden amongst ten maybe twenty friends and confdants to whom we dare share the “intimate” details of our sex lives.  The thought depressed me and by the time I got to Dean’s apartment I was morbid.  I flopped on the couch and fell asleep without word.  Dream it off someone once told me; so I did.
+
+
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+	 I tried to sneak out of the stockyards in flagstaff, but rent-a-cop caught me.  I worked my way out of it eventually, but that says nothing about right now.  I am right now.  Right now night feels torn apart by the clutching, broken-china voice of the wheels grinding uphill wailing the ancient Indian woman’s song.  Song of what I am not sure, she speaks, they speak a different language something more primal, more guttural and I can not understand what they mean, but I feel it rattling its way up through my dangling feet, feel it in the vibration of the boxcar floor as it rattles and lurches across the uneven tracks.  My head lists involuntarily, pulled downward by the inescapable gravity of the desert.  Utah is laid bare in moonlight, harsh and forlornly beautiful it lulls the mind, spreads out ones thoughts like the dotted Juniper trees, creosote bushes, and gnarled twisted trunks of the mosquite; vast open tracks of sand and rock inhabit the empty spaces like waves of light in space, they exist but only as a vacuum as a reminder of emptiness.  The moon is full tonight reflecting its pale solar continace across the land in imitation daylight, the mosquite lowlands are beginning to be usurped by once more by grasslands and Junipers of the high desert.
+This train is slow, a plodding freighter loaded with something that is apparently in no great rush to get anywhere, it’s a better ride than the first on I hopped… that one was fast, blinding fast and I suffered from velocity sickness which is my name for the strange restless queasy feeling I had the entire time I was in that car.  This train is slow lazy and I managed to befriend the brakeman; I am not hiding anymore I am not slinking about in the shadows.  I am stretched out on a flatbed; an open car that the brakeman says will be filled with logs at some point through the Rockies.  I haven’t decided yet if I will go that far, in the mean time, because we have to stop a lot for faster trains to pass, the brakeman will wait for me to get coffee and food provided I bring him some which I do without hesitation, I even buy it for him despite his protests.  His name is Joe and originally he was supposed to drive me from the railyard in Flagstaff down to the sheriff’s station where I was to be book on several counts of trespassing, vagrancy (a fancy name for existence, which sadly is illegal in most places), and several others I am not sure of, but I talked him out of it.  We reached a more amicable solution, one of mutual aid; I wanted to ride the rails and Joe wanted someone to talk to on his lonely ride from here to Denver.  So today I sat up with him in the engine room where the whirling lights and strange computer guidance systems dragged us out of the pine forests of Flagstaff and across the windswept high country where for more than five hours we did not see a tree or any shrub save the endless seas of grass dancing like senoritas at the town fiesta.
+Joe hails from the lexicon of true Americanism —individuality.  He is a rustic grisly type of man, the kind that inhabit the backwater towns of the west, ornery you might say, but he is not ornery he is simply inhuman like me.  Which is to say that humanity or ‘syphilization,’ as one misanthropic author referred to it, has no hold on Joe, false modesty, false politeness and false pretense have been shed here like dry useless lizard skin.  Joe hails from somewhere older, livelier and healthier his ancestors are the men who lived beside ponds and didn’t write books, who hold court with the mysteries of the universe and don’t attend church, who know what life has taught them and who have there own ideas about morality, reality and humanity.  Joe represents a rare breed one that should have flourished on this continent, but as in the case with a seed that never gets water, their lot is small and dwindling.
+Joe could well be me in thirty years, he looks about sixty maybe younger but the years he has walked through have taken their toll.  He has a salt and pepper scruff beard and piercing blue eyes; he told me about the war by which I think he meant the second world war; he hates Steven Spielberg, says it wasn’t like that movie at all; he has a wife in Moab and two daughters both married and living back east.  His stories are endless and my patience is too so we drifted, undulating with the sway of the train, his words came out in growling whispers just loud enough to here over the noise of the wheels and the engine, but without yelling or even appearing to raise his voice.  He talked with rhythm of the train, we went around a bend and Joe went in on the beach at Normandy, we started uphill and Joe moved out west after the war, we went through a tunnel and Joe fell silent mid sentence.  That kind of creeped me out, but when we emerged back into the blinding midday sun he started into his courtship and marriage without missing a beat and I learned that for Joe, when you are underground it is best not to talk.
+Lying on my back trying to piece his life together I get lost, lost in the stars.  The moon is to my back but in front down near the horizen the stars are visible, scant few tonight but they are there; the invisble the inky blackness that is between them is the pure white void of space.  It is the void, the spaces in between them, the vast open empty tracks of sky, the darkness that is the platinum setting into which little diamonds, rubies, amethysts, and emeralds are laid… it is there that life exists in between the arbitrary line of reality and phantsmal yawning mouth of imagination.  Look at the stones, the setting, the band, but none of it is so beautiful as the empty space between her finger in which all life hides.  The space that allows it to pass through your hair, to fit your fingers, to stroke your chest, kneed your back and for the space and the space alone you should be grateful.  Grateful that there is emptiness for without there would be nothing.  I am grateful for you, I am grateful to all the spaces in between so that you can ignore them so that you can continue to fill them with jealousy, with fear, without understanding, but do not be afraid everything is okay….
+The night sky was thrown into being by the great god badger who in an effort to steal it from the last world accidentally pulled to hard and it went soaring up over his head where it stuck to the ceiling of life.  No Hopi mythology there, just my educated opinion, just how it looks from here...  But I am not thinking about the sky right now I am just looking at it; I am thinking about the Indian town back on the reservation where I bought us dinner. I bought cornmeal cakes and beans from a wizened old Navaho woman who inhabited an abode hut that glowed orange in the setting sun.  The store was closed but the woman approached me asked if I wanted to buy dinner, I did and she took me to her hut; in the middle there was a fire and a pot of food on it along with too smudge faced Indian girls maybe four or five years old.  They watched me intently in silence with enormous liquid brown eyes that seemed irrigated with understanding far beyond the physical age of their bodies.  As the old woman wrapped the corn cakes and beans in foil I got lost in a strange hobbit-like land where the true secrets of the universe were about to be revealed as beans and corn bread seen through the eyes of a child, it was a pregnant moment.  Then she brought me to by insisting that I take one of her chocolate Jesus statues for desert.  I thought about a Tom Waits’ song, about a minister I knew once who wouldn’t allow his parishioners to sell donuts at church and about the good Jesus himself; what must he think if he really was the son of god and really is watching, what must he think of being molded in wax, filled with chocolate and wrapped in colored foil? 
+I thought that Joe, being a Mormon by conversion might be offended, he struck me as a serious guy when it came to religion, but he just laughed and laughed said “what will they think of next?” or words to the effect and he devoured Christ’s chocolate body.  Finally I thought as I watched Joe eat, someone is enjoying the body of Christ.  And even now I think, in arrogantly retelling history, that if Christ was indeed the son of god he will come down here tonight in fire and brimstone and he will extend a hand out to the two men, the only two men who ever took of his body and ate with lust, with vigor with the true enjoyment of being alive, for if there is one thing undeniable out here it is that we are alive. We may not being doing anything, we may be talking or staring at the passing scenery through the dirty cockpit window or we may be climbing on the roof of a boxcar, but whatever we are doing we fundamentally alive.  I say this because there is no reason for humans to exist out here at all.  We lack the specialization of desert evolution, we are not covered with barbs and spikes, we do not have thick skin which can hold water seemingly indefinitely, we are pulpy fragile creatures we ought to be dead, but somehow we are not and we are more alive because of it, we are aware.  We are here by an act of will —our own.  It takes an act of will to realize that you are alive that is my revelation for tonight.
+I light a cigarette and throw back the sleeping bag, it is September and the night is cool, I throw on my jacket and walk to edge of the car and let my feet dangle off the side.  We are doing about forty I would guess, fast enough to do some serious damage if I fall, but slow enough to study individual plants as they pass by at about ten yards away.  I have never been to Coney island, but for me this is an amusement park the landscape itself is so alien as to remain forever fascinating.  It illuminates a part of my personality that is as esoteric as this desert.  We are picking up speed and heading downhill into the canyon country.  I know this because Joe showed me the maps, pointed out scenic spots when I ought to sleep and when I ought to be awake and amazed, but I like it all.  Sometimes the less scenic things are the more beautiful they become, that quite ineffable sense of beauty which require the careful turning of the eye to detect; such as a trash strew alley that you find yourself staring at after waking up in a gutter behind a bar in SoHo.  Or the way the smog lifts slightly almost imperceptibly off the mountains surrounding Mexico City everyday around seven o’clock.
+Or the way this juniper tree is sitting alone clinging to the side of the canyon wall able to exist in the slightest most overlooked fissure surrounded by a monolith of compressed sandstone which yields nothing, there is only the one tree here.  That this tree could be able to survive is miraculous, but in end explainable, what is not explainable is me, that I should be here, that is should be right here on this train, at this moment, staring at this tree is truly miraculous.  I was not scattered to the wind with thousands of my fellow seeds, I did not lodge in a crevasse, I was not carried by wind, I did not get just the right amount of sunlight and water.  I was planned from the beginning, I nice addition to a nice couple who were themselves nice additions to an already nice town that was part of nice and highly advanced civilization almost at the end of its second thousand years of existence.  All my life is orchestrated by something, pushed and pulled about by forces which can be explained with, goddesses, DNA, evolution, badgers, crows, old women, trister poets, visionary superbeings of alpha centary, but the end conclusion by all humanity it seems is that something is controlling things.  There is no freedom for me, no wind to carry me, no water or soil to nourish and no light by which I can grow.  There is no visible thing gravity that pulls on me, there is nothing tangible about DNA, I live in betseen all mythology sandwiched like a chucalwalla in a sandstone crevasse.  I have learned infinite things, made them finite, knowable.  I have built great castles, great monuments, great societies, great people and torn them all down again to start over.  I have lived a thousand lonely huddled nights from bearskin to tapateries to the silk sheets of Manhattan nights; I have climbed every mountain peak slide down the cree and talus slopes of meeting with pharoahs, Voudans, with moses and god; I have held a billion women lovingly in my arms and give birth to a trillion children through all historyies wombs from Sarah to Satan all filled themselves with my nurishments. but I still do not know who I am or why I am here.  I am Everyone and I am driving myself mad.
+
+
+
+Today at dawn this is the most beautiful place on earth.  I get up not having slept much, not that that is out of the ordinary these days, balancing myself and reorienting to the sense of movement that has not left my head for almost 36 hours now, I stretch and yawn greedily like an insomniac does.  The sky is green yet, not long till dawn by when I must be in the engine compartment because today the tracks run beside US highway 60 and I can not be seen.  I am secret, I must be hard to find.  My precarious journey over four boxcars to the engine is rewarded with the smell of frying bacon, eggs, coffee and biscuits.  Joe smiles his craggy grin, in the electric lights his teeth are yellowed and stained with coffee and cigarettes, but rather than being grotesque the seem only to add character.
+“I was just going to blow the whistle to let you know that breakfast is served.”  He hands me a cup of coffee.  “Beautiful night wasn’t it?”  Joe seems to now sleep at all.
+“Yes it was,” I mumble as I try to sip the coffee, but it is still too hot.
+“Here….” He hands me a plate full of greasy bacon and eggs with two biscuits perched precariously on either side.  “Let's eat on the roof, we’re not by the road yet.”  The way he says road gets me, his voice has a hatred in it, a bitterness towards this thing the road.  We go up on the roof and eat in silence.  All around us the sky is a color show.  The green begins to fade, replaced by the first crimson rays reflected on the bottoms of the wind carved clouds.  The first direct rays of the sun find me chewing on the last piece of bacon, I close my eyes and we welcome each other across the ninety three million-mile void.
+I open to a squint and turn around, behind us lies the akdjflkd, endless grass and somewhere in the middle the kdjlkadkj; to the north there is the escalanted wilderness, the green river and the largest uninhabited area in north America; to the south and east there is the maze, Canyonlands and Natural bridges National parks, the confluence of the green and Colorado rivers, and somewhere a tiny speck of a town called Moab where we will be putting in for two days to load rock and other assorted things.
+“Quartz and sand mostly, which we’ll be dumping in Denver, but whatever the case I wanted to invite you to my house to have a home cooked meal with my wife and I.  She’s a real looker and great cook too.”  He laughs and nudges me in the ribs.  “She was a beauty queen in high school, she was miss Hoboken and might have been Miss America if she hadn’t decided to give the whole thing up and go to college… course I’m glad she did ‘cause that’s where I got her….”
+I hem and haw non commitally thanking him for the offer, but not agreeing to it just yet.  I head back down to do the dishes and then I splash cold water on my face in the tiny bathroom and study my face in the cracked tarnished little mirror.  Things look good; a little haggard here and there, weathered a bit by the years perhaps, but still young still enthusiastic.  I spot a gray hair sprouting out of my closely cropped scalp, but the skin is still soft and smooth; I need a shave, but that is of no concern out here.  Back on the roof I smoke a cigarette while Joe calls into the Moab station.  After a while he yells up to tell me that the yard will be empty when we arrive, today is Sunday he informs me, and this is Mormon country —nothing happens on Sunday.
+“You know a lot of my friends were pretty hard on me for converting and they was downright pissed when we got hitched in the Tabernacle, but I tell ya… Mormons may have some strange ideas and beliefs but on the whole they are some of the best people I’ve ever met.  Sure it’s a little ridiculous there bible and all what with zebra’s running around here —imagine that! Zebras here!— and I don’t think the ol Mr. Young really carried those gold tablets under his arm, and why god called himself Moroni I have no idea….  But in spite of all that ridiculousness which really is no more ridiculous than the Catholic’s eating wafers of gods body or the Jew’s giving things up for no real reason at all once or twice a year… it all ridiculous when you think about it objectively.  But what I have noticed having a Mormon wife and a lot of Mormon friends is that they build real communities… they are good people at a level that is very basic and seemingly below the more refined religions….  Your average Catholic will walk by the poor bum on the street and give him a nickel or a quarter, but your average Mormon will invite the man to their home for a meal and offer them a shower and of course a little counselling on the true church of God, but when a man’s belly is full and his hair clean he can listen to that sort of nonsense.  I don’t believe a word of it, but I took the vow because it made my wife happy and I would do anything to see that woman smiling….”
+Joe smiled at me and said that I could stay on the roof of the engine so long as he was down below, that way anyone watching would think that I was him.  So I sat up there letting the wind hit me in the face, sunning myself across Utah, land of Mormons —for now.  One day I suspect the Tabernacal will fall, the religion will dwindle and disappear like every other civilization, but for now they reign over god’s last piece of land.  And what a land this is here.  The tracks have climbed back out of the canyon country and we are on the mesa tops cruising at thirty five toward the Big Switch as Joe called it.  The Big Switch is apparently the only non computerized part of the journey where Joe will have to stop the train and get out and actually throw the heavy iron handle to switch us over to the track that heads down to Moab.  Once he drives the train past it he has to stop again and walk back and switch it again so that the next train can pass on by.  It remains manual because most trains do not stop in Moab anymore, most of them pick up a few cars that have been driven up or just don’t even slow at all.
+	It was Dean who pointed out the curve in the tracks behind his mother apartment complex, which he really only did for one reason —so that I could catch a train.  I had never ridden on a train be it hoping a boxcar or buying a ticket.  I didn’t have enough for the ticket that much was certain and I knew that there were some lingering stiff vagrancy laws and such penalties as to keep people from riding for free, but I had never been on a train.  The chief reason that I had never been on a train though was that I had never been near a train.  Never lived near a station or had a track pass through the neighborhood.  As child the best part about going to my grandmother’s house was that in the course of the hour long drive we crossed a train track and occasionally we would even get there just as a train was passing.  Something about them always got to me, the way they roared along, not fast, but roaring a primal movement that harkens back to more primitive days.  You could see the past in them when travel was something worth doing.  Airplanes had power and thrill, but trains have something bigger something all together more massive about them, they do not roar they lumber and lurch they are more human than the smooth sterility of the car or the powerful speed of the plane
+I stare off at the distant looming La Salle Mountians where first frosts are melting in the morning sun, Dean my old friend who set all this in motion, whose life existed as a catalyist for my own just as mine existed as a catalyst for his; so it is with brothers be they of blood or not.  When I think of Dean I think of him as he was a year ago when we touched down in Paris, his hair jet black and greased back in a fashion that was at once greaser and not, he looked as if he were completely at ease in his own skin.  We both had on suits, not expensive once like we wanted, but ones that we handed down or bought at thrist stores, we were highly incongruous with the international image of what an American ought to be.  Or I think of a photograph I took at the Little Knight so many years ago or was that only months?	Dean is in the a pinstriped suit, carefully greased hairline pure black and illuminating his face framing it in the luminesnce of empty space, the eyes are laughing, but the lips barely curl, womething intangible is lurking under the skin and bones.  Another from the same night caught Dean unawares as he leaned against the wall and watched the crowd.  His arm is blurred lifting the everpresent cigarette to his lips and all around his swirling women’s hair and exited arm waving men fade into a faceless blur, in the middle there is Dean, standing still like the hummingbird.
+Dean is right now probably just getting off the internet where he was undoubtedly chatting with bilixa66 the girl whom he is in love with, but tries to deny it.  Right now his weary bones are preparing for rest and I am gliding along through Elysian fields.  So it goes.  Everyone everywhere is doing something different than me right now, I know this because I am alone.  I am playing mental solitare then infinite game which doesn’t pay anymind to rulles like time or space.  Time is an inconsequential and inconvenian human invention which the traveler learns to disregard and ignore.  There are two games going on one is the time game in which all society and interaction with humanity, ones culture, ones beliefs, once hopes and goals all thing bounded by time, in the other game there is the infinte self which has no time no dreams, no humanity, no space no thing.  It is the seemless interaction of the two that create what we formally call the ego, the self, the thing that is perceivable, identifiable, and recognizable.  One can see or be seen depending on which game you want to play.  The train is slowing, the turn off to Moab is nearing, from the Big Switch it is only about half an hour down into the canyon carved long ago by the green river.  I am wandering back to my flatbed to gather up my things and hide out in the cabin of the engine; I am thinking about how to ditch Joe without offending him, I need to get off the train andout into the desert, Everything is falling away like great sheets of burn skin sliding off the greasy shiny red flesh that lies beneath the surface.  That was how it went this morning.
+
+
+
+It was four in the afternoon when I said goodbye to Joe and headed off down Moab’s main drag toward the mountaineering shop to see about a ride up into canyonlands.  I left it open with Joe so that if the urge struck to go back to the train into denver I could, but I was intent only on getting to Canyonlands for now.  One thing at a time, evverything one at a time, nothing in pieces everything all at once fell to pieces.  I got a ride from two hippies rock climbers clad in the fashion of the earth first and other environemtnal activitists who share aside from a love of the wilderness apparently the same love of Kakhi’s, Tevas, Tofu and flat tasteless foodstuffs that originate in the same facotires that make oreos.  Funny folks the country culture these days, like ldemocrats and republicans they are differential from there enemies primarily by custom and fashion.  The radical tree camping, pottery making, hemp weaving, Dave Foreman worshipping, mushroom eating, toms of maine consuming hippie-enviromental-social consciousness raising-guitar playing radical of the outback is no different than the BMW driving, Starbucks drinking, software writing, technology worshipping, juice drinking, spa loving, health club hopping, slandes wearing dog walking, family rasing white picket fence building, church attending drug abstaining yuppie eviel consumer destroying the world capitalist pig set that the so-called radical crowd hates with such superior disdaim.  One uses Tom’s of Maine and the other crest, beyond that they are the same.  My hippie climber friends bought trail mix and candles at the super market while I opted for steak, beans and potatos with a bag of chemically enhanced brickets that would light from my cigarette butt.  Its all a matter of taste.  I requested paper bags and rolled them up so they wouldn’t abandon me for not being one of there own.  I rode in the back of there bus which turned the hourlong drive from Moab to the Est entrance of Canyonlands into a three hour long crawl.  As we switchbacked up the canyon walls to the top of the Mesa country Dave and Tom grilled me on my beliefs, they were both college student on a semester long vacation so I could forgive them for still being tangeled up in ideas but it wore on me after a while.  They were astonished that I did not vote, that I never had, but was not disillusioned with the political system, I just don’t give shit one way or the other.
+“Man if you don’t vote you give up your say in what goes on in the world man, come on how are we going to change things if everybody has that attitude?  Why are you going to be giving up your power to change things man?  Some people would die for a chance to vote…?”
+Its better those people go right a head and die I am think but aloud I try to formulate something less offensive to their tender idealist hearts.  “Perhaps Tom I don’t want to change anything… perhaps I coulld if a itried, but what if I don’t want too?”
+I figured to let them do the talking and they did all the way across the grasslands right on into the campground, I learned the Toms of Maine was better because it was natural, Teva was better because it did not use child slave labor and that one acre of farmland can support a faimly of ten with vegetables of two hamburgers worth of cow if it is grazed.  I don’t personally give a shit either way.  Is fast as I could I said my thanks to the Dave and Tom and wandered down the road to an open campsite where I proceeded to build a fire in the light of the fading sun with its crimson glow licking across the thunderheads to my back.  It was the still about eighty degrees and I was sweating in the heat of the fire, but I wanted a steak.  I was staring at the sizzling fat dripping from the enormous side of beef I had bought thinking of a woman I had never seen staring at a well in the French countryside.  I felt an effluence of enthusiasm; the taproot broke through dry soil and was swamped by underground water.  The sizzled meat melted down to the flavor of sweet salt, the mixture of spices and blood.  My plate was stained a greasy pink Moroccan-color with each carving slice of the knife and the potato swam about in the bloody grease tailing is own gooey mixture of butter and pulverized potato flesh like a tanker ship leaking crude oil in the pristine sanctity of the ocean.
+I was fucking famished.  With the tired wise-consumer guru advise I had endured all the way up the mountain made the dripping animal fat like a tonic elixer cleansing my artieries of stale plache of idealism realism. Nothing is ever seems so real as fiction.  The world I exist in is finite, bounded and ruled by certain inescapable laws, here a house, there a job, and everywhere by the transient people and events that make up so called life.  Existence takes place in the world of not I’s, the mysterious other, but that is not where I do my living. Nor does any one else.  We live in the spaces in between the temporal world, the infinitude of the imagination, next to which our terrestrial existence looks flat and tasteless as a junkyard tire cracked and torn in the sun.  In these moments where the internal merges flawlessly with the external I go roaring back through memories of childhood, of selves that I was truly, but am no longer today, through all the marauding personalities which have governed this thing called I.  Pregnant moments are these, usually catching me unawares and throwing down a track of thought I had not expected; moments when the light of the sun breaks through the sullen clouds of an afternoon thunderstorm and hits the steeple of an old church just as you come up over a crest in the road.  It smacks you in the face when you perceive something in a moment that you know is not tangibly present and yet it is real, the fluid transmission of emotion that can be tasted on the back of your tongue as well as felt beaming into your chest.  The hurricane of the unconscious whirls up to the surface for moment, the imagination leaks into the real world.  You catch it when she stirs at night and tosses her hair so that so that it falls across you face with the delicate odor of peach blossoms and perfume mixed with the earthiness of her organic body, fecund and warm.  You hear it when the crescendo of thundering drums climbs up out of the ninth symphony and lodges in the back of your brain sending chills down your spine.  Some interaction of the personal with the infinite, a stabbing at perfection transcends the ordinary moment.  Every one of us has moments of transformation when we feel if only for a mere second, that something larger than the present is in the room, the sky or the music.  The world gives birth before our eyes and takes us spinning down reveries and private waterslides of imagination through the twisting spiral corkscrew of imagination.  How long must ancient man have wondered where do these thoughts come from?  What am I to do with them?
+Looking backwards with clever red sunglasses I could trace the history for you; the first thing the human species got out of these encounters was a loose clumsy word: spirituality.  One day caveman Thak felt with authority that there was something beyond the simple organic, fertile, pussing matter of his body, there must be a realm august to this temporal one.  Thak ruminated over this for time and finally invented language in order to describe how he felt to other prehensile monkeys.  With language Thak separated us from the entire animal kingdom.  Not by virtue of communication, for any one who has ever observed even the simplest of animals knows that they communicate, but rather what Thak gave us was a means of creating memories —severing us from time.  Out of memory came dissention as other monkeys did not buy into Thak’s explanations and as time moved on and more voices from more and more places were heard and the general became divided and localized.  Those that believed one explanation tended to associate with only those that agreed with them, they had their  “gods” and they were the only gods, the contrarians on the other side of the proverbial river lacked THE TRUTH.  Not much changed from then until now, there are more gods and even less comprehension of the godliness, but other than that we still behave in much the same manner as our ancient ancestors, some would same we have actually gotten worse not better.
+And all of this reasoning has not in anyway helped us to understand that initial question —where are thoughts coming from?  All the philosophizing rants of all the arrogant monkeys can not answer the simplest of questions: who am I ?  Where is this vitality teeming from?  What is emotion? What the hell is really going on down here? Why?  Why can one person be moved to tears by a quartet and another put to sleep?
+Much of the wonder and amazement that greeted our forebear’s is lost for us.  We have explained it away, dissected, mapped, catalogued, and miniaturized it.  Unable to comprehend the universe we carefully construct a replication that can be understood and ignore all the rest saying in essence that anything not comprehensible to the human mind does not exist.  But it does and she knows what I am thinking before I say it and the light continues to pour through the clouds onto steeples, rocky pinnacles and the back porch of an antique house in the south where I am forced once more to stand face to face with the unknowable.  Miniaturization is for small minds I say.  Science is the culprit here they wrecked the whole show shrank it down and claimed to understand how it all worked.  I hope they all choke on those miniaturized hors' dorve corns or get mauled by a tiny, shrunken Doberman pincer.  It would give them back the humility they have tried to shed.
+For a long time this miniature world was all I could see and it threw me into a depression every time it crossed my mind, but I studied it with great enthusiasm because I was looking for way out of it.  The more I looked at all the evidence the farther I felt from the truth.  The truth is that sometimes the light is magic and being able to explain why it has the tones and hues, how the electrons spin, says nothing about the experience of it.  What good is knowing without feeling?  Those moments when I am confronted with the essential mysteries of my life and perhaps even yours, all of ours, all life, are not something that can be taken apart.  I can not break it down, understand the smaller bits individually and then hope they add up to the same thing I started with. 
+If we stop taking apart things for a minute and just breathe in slowly one breath at a time it will flood the hatches and bouyantly draw us up to the surface of things.  It is time we stopped this nonsense of science and floated our way back up to the surface of the pond.  Time to start over, to assimilate rather than dissect, to feel rather than know, to live rather than abstract….
+But back to our brief history of LOVE…
+Unfortunately by the time you and I got on the scene it resembled uncooked spaghetti, thin strands of information imparted over the years, scattered clumsily about the kitchen, there is no pot, no water, nothing to cook it with just dry hard idea that crunches when you bite into it and sticks between your teeth long after.  We externalized the internal, brought all out, the good with the bad, so that we could take it apart and understand it.  We live amid the rubble of Decarte and the mechanized universe.  We dissect, we want answers, but we ask questions that can’t be answered by the narrow methods of research that are considered valid.  Joseph Kellar ought to be our patron saint, to preside over every convening moment to remind us that we are looking for our tail while it is in our mouths, right below our noses where we can’t see it… we can taste it though and it drives us with even greater fury, mouths watering and ravenous fangs dripping the saliva of untold desire.  But we want to see it with these eyes, these imperfect eyes that we know are not even used for seeing.  We want answers to appear, to be made real.  We want Christ to appear, we want spacemen to appear, we want something to appear, but we are not by god going to accept anything that we haven’t had tested up and down with all the rigorous insanity of a mathematician trying to write out equations for her emotions.  
+What is science doing if not that?  Making the world better?  For whom?  Scientsists?  I don’t want to live in a Cartesian nightmare where history is mechanically plodding along with the cold calculated precision of a steam engine.  No many people do, consciously speaking and so came religions, sects, and politics… but none of that comes close to pulling the sense of wonder that science threw out the window.  None of it brings back the endless nature of grainy experience.  Have become more enthralled with the human created side of life and in doing so sacrafized the intertwining of the individual with the universal.  We have found a distraction which eases the anxiety that unanswered questions provoked in us —our selves.  Don’t think the church/state/priest/politician/scientist/special action committee on the overexertion of gray matter will take care of it for you.  We wrote a lullaby called god and put ourselves to sleep. Until today we find ourselves at a crossroads in human evolution.
+As we come to understand the ineffable world around us in increasingly greater minutia, we are reaching the end of the external line.  We can measure and measure search and search the world for new discoveries in a world that we once thought was infinite and impossible to wrap our minds around we are in danger of knowing the limits of knowing.
+	The scientific community has been the first to realize that such a day is coming and true to the morbid and yet curious nature of scientists the future is being drawn with great caution and precision.  And yet if one were to delve into the that world with the skepticism of a mystic looking at a computer code one would eventually notice that the experience of science is really not much different in that of the eastern philosophers of millennia past.
+	It is very popular these days to write books about the connections between the physics of indeterminacy and the constant contradictions of the Tao Te Ching.  (One of the best is actually called the Tao of Physics.)   And what has this endless search given us?
+	Nothing.  Nothing more than a system of belief, which in the end says that no system, can describe anything that is outside of the system.  What that fancy phrase means to anyone who is not absolutely enthralled by making things a lot more complicated than they need to be, is that we don’t anything about anything and we never will.
+But Lao-Tzu already said that: The farther you go the less you know.  So what’s the big deal?  What has the “cutting edge of science to report back?  That it can’t describe anything that can’t be measured.  You can’t measure the emotion that light hitting a church steeple evokes, you can’t measure they way you feel propped up in bed watching the sleeping form of the one you love.  You can’t measure them because they are encoded in you, they are uniquely yours and there is no way to translate them to others.
+	Science’s end will be when it achieves what art has been doing for most of recorded history —trying to give the uniqueness of experience a form which allows it to transcend the individual and share it.  Science is but a new language and nothing more.
+Perhaps with virtual reality we will one day be able to exactly encode everything that another has experienced and feed it all into our own nervous system, but the response will still be different.  In order for emotions to be communicated everyone would have to have the exact same history, exact same thoughts, and exact same experience felt be all at once.  Even supposing the absurdity of this to be possible what would be gained?
+	Fuck science; fuck it along with religion, society and culture, fuck them all because they say nothing other than what any two year old could tell you is obvious.  It is obvious because we have all felt it.  All the records of how we felt pall in the face of the question of what?  What is it that sends the chill down our spines, the warmth out of our heart or the goosebumped hair up on our arms? 
+	No one knows and I think that it would be safe bet to assume that as long as we all have different brains we never will.  The technology fanatics will burn themselves up the same way the drug gurus of the sixties did, they will fall prey to the one thing that makes them human —ego.  It killed the belief in god, it killed the belief in the cultural reformers and it will always kill any attempt to transcend because it is the point at which belief originates.
+	Only an egocentric monkey would dream of being able to understand the orbit of the planets let alone they vastness of all existence.  Only a very confused and disoriented creature would throw himself into a corner and examine every little microscopic piece of dirt without first discovering what a monkey was.
+Herman Hess once said that the only job of man was to find the road that led back to himself.  But we being the tragic creatures we are doomed forever to a life lived in melodrama and confusion, seldom do such things.  Seldom do we celebrate love or transcendence.  At our best we celebrate the by-products such as art of music.  At our worst we record those who were farthest from themselves, the emperors kings and queens, generals, bishops, monks, people who led the most perverted and hideous of lives.
+	Very few lovers rattling around in the tomes of recorded history.  Oh to be sure there were lots of them, but we haven’t paid too much attention to them, or to what they knew.  We have created a cult of worship to our egos to the things that we think are so unique about ourselves at the inescapable expense of the things which we have in common.
+	Its built into our culture and if we Americans seem particularly arrogant to the rest of the world it is only because we house the temples in which the worship of the ego if held.  We play host to humanity’s darkest hour, an experiment that has fallen off track and yet it is so ingrained in our minds that it forms an unbroken circle which steadily contracts into smaller and smaller rings the closer we come to the zero hour.
+	We will do anything to draw the attention away from ourselves and as Freud hinted and Reich out right said we do it by manifesting our fear into the real world.  The only things that happen are ones that someone wants to happen.  The problem is that none of us really know for sure what we want.  The subconscious mind is in the act of creating… always and forever…. It is creating even the conscious mind.  Everything that you think you are is dream that some other part of your brain is having; to explain this we had to invent something called chaos which says that you are, in mathmatical terms living in an endless noisy feedback loop called non-causality and non causality is merely causality that is too complicated to trace, but there is a cause nonetheless.
+	Their will always be a cause without it the world could not exist, without a beginning then there can be know end and we all know there is an end, an end to ourselves and from all appearances an end to the whole damn show.  The end has in fact already happened because time like everything in the universe is something that someone wanted to exist.
+	Where does this terrible looping logic take us?  Right back where we started.  It’s a loop remember —really nothing to marvel at.  You can travel the whole distance or just stay where you are and let it come back around.  In the end even those are no different.  So here we are again, perhaps there it is another person next to me in bed when I watch them sleep, perhaps it is a techno song that sends the chills down my spine, and perhaps the next time the sun breaks through the clouds it will be illuminating a mountain instead of a church.	
+	At the end of the line the breakdown of the word I realized there was no hope for communication to take place I was too isolated in experience to hope to relate it to anyone other than myself.  I was not close enough to anyone so close was I to god. It is not near the bottom in the sewers of cities that humanities hope lies but out here in the great heights, closer to god and only then to we seem so much alike.  Only next to god are all the political games that divide men stripped away out here you arrive naked and proud.  Only then do you see every man as your ally every woman your love, only scorched clean of the petty differences of race, creed, color of skin do we draw together huddled in fear of insanity which we ourselves have wrought upon each other.  No hope for a cure is on earth, no hope save death.  No cure but death and then Quien Sabe?
+With the bleakness of snow and the blanketed certainty of disillusionment I cast off all doubts.   I was ready.  Ready for what I did not know —a thousand faces before the day is half over passing like the jerky photomontages of Man Ray.  Each pair of eyes radiant unto itself delicately in the corners of a stray glance I caught the recognition of understanding though only tragedy brings them any closer.  Forged and smelt in the dry heat of rock furnaces here the charnel ovens brew alchemal liquid souls and fuse combinations of liquor and lips, souls to the experiment of which we are all part.
+	The medieval alchemists searched in the stone, the modern physicist searches the heavens, and perhaps the future shaman will try to fuse man with machine.  All have missed the most obvious of truths with the dedication to illusion that had carried the Catholic Church on its back for so long.  We want ourselves to so make or form each other into the god that we were fashioned after that we forget that such is already true.  The wisdoms of heaven are in the DNA strand yes, but what are we to do with them?  Copper may be turned to steel, but what are we to do with it?  Everything may be taken apart and put back together differently, but what will have changed?
+	She waited by a fountain in a park just outside of Paris where I have never been.  I watched her sit silently for hours staring at nothing or so it looked to me her eyes were fixed on the pump handle of the well.  She sat motionless and never without the quite smile of a woman in rapture, a woman in the private mysterious world of orgasm.  I see it on the face of the ones I have loved in that indeterminable second after where everything is.
+	Which brings you right back to the steak, but now there was a woman or there was the sheading of a woman, an inescapable need to be at once masculine and feminine, cunt and cock, both sides of the coin as it were, but tonight the blood of the cow is burning away the feminine scorching it like so many glowing crimson embers that glow and warm, but which fade in the spectacular face of flame.  Meat sizzling over a campfire gets rid of girlfriends and wives, gets rid of lots of entrapments, like a cure for the plague.  It’s a proven fact.  
+With the final rays of sun went the final heat; as the gentle coolness of night settled in the humidity of the rain began to evaporate and the desert returned to it’s dry self again.  Eating the salty and sweet steak with a baked potato and a pot of baked beans I wandered off on a walk.  At first it was just my mind bouncing lightly among the juniper trees that were behind my campsite, but then when the food was gone, my body grabbed me a beer and a pack of cigarettes and carried me down to the edge of the canyon.  I sat with my legs dangling off a rock that was perched on the rim and extended out into space.  All around me there was nothing but air and under me only a brief moment of rock and then more timelessness we called air.
+	We call it air.  But it used to be called ether, before that it was liquid, now it’s mostly dirt in some places.  Here it is air.  
+I thought about Dante, about God, about steak and about women.  It was beautiful just to be alive and to able to think.  I thought about that for along time.  There came an utter silence in which I watched myself think in the way that you might listen to another talk.  It detached but remained aware that it must return back and live with those thoughts that it could only then recognize.  It was a spiraling double helix of a logic that corkscrewed all about my mind drilling little holes hear and there opening wine thoughts and pouring glasses for the self that continues to stream in the door.  It was to watch a feast of thoughts or personalities come together for one sort time and dine like old friends.  A reunion to catch-up on where each had been what had happened and what they had done.  It turned to a smorgasbord of philosophy and love and there was endless debate, dissention and rising voices.  A circus dine roared around the room slap happy train car attendants moved about taking ticket and slapping the men in the faces for not having the right change.
+And then the wave crested at cacophony and confusion and broke leaving only silence in the room.  Silence that carried on its back a poignant nostalgia for the past and a calm understanding of the future.  I touched for a moment the void that Buddha preached, the nothingness into which you must cast yourself if you wish to understand.  Riddles that seemed ridiculous to me before where solved with simplest of maneuvers truth gleamed with the caustic light of florescent light posts on an asphalt road.  In the blinking blank look of the deer just before impact is the look of understanding the look of recognition that it is all nothing.  No thing.  What do I want out of this life?  Nothing.  Nothing at all.
+I understood with sharp focus the difference between understanding how something works and understand what it is.   I came to see that even the void of understanding was not the end but only a means to something else which would also be yet another means until the final thought was had and the conversation between self and the other ceases forever and weds them together.   
+And the two shall be joined as one.  I have acted that out with others; I have joined souls with several men and women in my life but I had never had the sensation of meeting myself on that plane until that moment.  A net was cast over the side of the ship and the wheel turned starboard to trawl a giant net through the waters of the past which played out in slide show fashion, a game show in which I had to meet myself
+	Endless images of my own arrogance played themselves onto the back of my closed eyelids like a cinema of embarrassment and I went to myself, as stranger might go, out of pity, to reach down a hand and help myself up.  All love flowed through me and made everything hyperreal and tactile as if thoughts were the rock and the trees and the silence was the minds way of answering the endless question of the universe.   The transitory nature of my own existence was illuminated and I was washed with feeling of warm and celebration of the embarrassment and I felt the sheer hilarious joy of my own folly fall along side the folly of all those I have ever know and ever will know, a giant heaping ball of laughter.  Coiled up tight like yarn and batted about by the kitten of the universe the ball dances nightly behind the moon, all our selves playing as children endlessly.  A cat.  A cat in the hat.  The trick top hat.
+	As the moon rose up from the east I watched in silence as my life unfolded behind my eyes I watched memories I had no conscious knowledge of the way a father watches his sun playing in the yard.  They started off recent memories of Amy, of Dean, of Ed, of moments shared with each and then it kept racing backward to college classes, high school girlfriends, playground friends….  Until I went back in utero to a point of no consciousness at all and then other stories unfolded as if out of some kind of genetic memory.  I saw the light of the fifteen-century break through the night hitting church spires and scorching the brass coffers of foreign temples.  Wild and uncharted regions played out scenes from Arabian Nights with silken tapestries women’s arms entwined with gold bands; and then sagas of Templars, all the wisdom seekers of the fertile crescent and the girl in France by the well came up near the end like a phantom as if to introduce herself but only disappeared again into a background of Egyptian palaces and the fragrance of silk and spices from the orient.  There was a warm glow of light in the room that slowly as the eyes adjusted revealed itself as a temple of splendors.  The walls were adorned with rugs and woven tapestries in designs that acted out the living myths of the sun gods.  The floor was blanketed in pillows and a sweet incense smoke floated in wafts of Jasmine and myrrh; in the center of the room slightly elevated on steps was an alter upon which a beautiful and naked goddess lay, a statue, an answer, a testament to any question that you might ask.  She was a goddess and in her silence I swam the thalassic of sorrow and joy in placid caressing waters that even now three years later come back with absolute lucidity as if I were returning to the vision at will just by writing it again.
+	And then the moment itself swelled beyond its proportions and burst leaving me only in awe of it, but dancing on to new lines, new tap roots burrowing intensity turned up by the alchemal union of soul and steak, god and potato, desert and breast, me and my self.  The minute I became conscious of the fact that I was having a thought all sense of it was lost.  I saw in this the futility of my own quest to know.  I saw the source of my unhappiness that I could not live here now but only came looking and in being so overwhelmed with consciousness of myself I lost myself.  Everything was laid unequivocally bare to the opulent austerity of the truth the contradiction when contradiction finally fades and all things are true and not true all at the same moment.  A place indescribable, incommunicable precisely because it exists below the refinement of words.  It is too raw to be said or explained it must be devoured with the intensity of an animal ripping at its prey
+	I felt it for what seemed like an eternity.  I remember coming back to fire in dazed kind of trance like state that held me like a loved one returned from a long voyage at see.  My spine trembled and doubt slowly crept in.  What if this stops?  I want to feel this always to live in this mindscape whole world be damned and with these thoughts so went the vision.
+	I awoke feeling an eternal peace settled into my chest and the words of Terence McKenna came to my mind.  “If you have seen the end you take your place in the drama and you live without anxiety.”  I don’t know what he meant by those words what space he went to what he felt, but they mean something to me.  They mean something as if I myself had said them.  I did not see an end or anything so literal as that at best I can saw that I felt everything as it really was beautiful and unbounded and I felt the release of anxiety that he attempts to approximate with words.
+	I made breakfast in the morning heat.  The desert was waking up and it wouldn’t be long before I could have cooked the eggs right on the rocks.  I drank the last beer to wash down the eggs and I asked around the campground for a ride back into Moab finally at the last sight right by the entrance I found a young couple who let me ride in the camper shell of their truck crouched between my gear and theirs, it was a long bumpy ride into Moab, but I didn’t have to suffer lectures on political duties.  Instead I thought about Joe, he was expecting me at the yard around five which gave me a hour to kill in Moab.  The bulk of the hour I spent trying to figure out why some people meet someone and they share there live and other meet people they share there ideas.  I like to think that my life is an idea and every idea a life, but then again I have a fondness for wordplay, deceit, double entandre. delibrete acting and outright lying when it comes to talking to strangers.  I just try to stay one step ahead of my brain as if I were writing myself into existence all the time. 
+
+
+
+At the end of the street there was a group of surly looking Indians who were probably surly
+about the fact that this is Utah and beer is 3.2 which makes it awfully hard to get drunk.  I could probably have got a ride with them, it’s a common custom among the people of third world nations to help each other and the Hopi are certainly a third world nation.  I toyed with the idea of trying to stay with them, but the winds blew the other way and they left before I could finish my cigarette.  I decided to go back to the train.  In the middle of my reverie when the reflections of my life played out I was quite moved by the portrait of Mark Pledger I decided to visit him in New Orleans.  There is naturally no reason for hurry so I might as well take the slowest mode of travel.  If there had been a river I would’ve strapped together some sticks and headed off.
+But there was no river running that direction so I called the number Joe had given me when we parted and crossed my fingers.  Sure enough I heard Joe yelling “who is it?” Before his wife even said hello.  I explained myself hoping that perhaps a story had preceded me and then she handed the phone to Joe who just said “where you at?”
+That how it goes with some people they take care of the important stuff first.  Joe was there in ten minutes and in another ten we were at “the homestead” as Joe referred to it.  It was About five miles outside of Moab near the entrance to a box canyon, a nice house that had an added onto appears such that it sprawled about with rooms attached to the sides of what had once been a simple miners shack.  The bulk of it was adobe —use what’s on hand. Joe told me it was built by a prospector during the Uranium rush of the fifties the man, so went Joe’s story had come out west trying to strike it rich and was then double crossed by his partner and lost his wife, his son and eventually his own life to the greedy partner.
+“You can imagine the times… everybody was hungry for uranium and cash, but the truth of the matter was that the government had all the good claims and the majority of what was left never got anymore rich.  The best way to get rich in Moab back then was to swindle the newcomers.  The guy that built this place was from Michigan —easy pickin’s….  Anyway some other guy meets him in the bar… the west is full of these stories, but this one ended up with everybody dead except the cheating wife and she wanted to clear out of town afterwards… it just so happened that we arrived at the right time… I bought this place for three hundred bucks and as it turns out I have claim to that whole canyon you see up there….”
+He gestured to the rock walls that towered over our heads and then kicked at the gravel in the driveway.  Cottonwood trees dropped behind the house and I guessed that there must have been a tributary stream running behind the place.  It was beautiful spread, we stood by the truck in silence for a minute or two just staring at the tops of the cliffs watching the setting sun climb up them.  Finally Joe suggested I “meet the little woman” and have some dinner.  Jean was every bit the Mormon matriarch, she greeted me with a smile and hug and made me feel like one of the family, but there was an element of mischief about her something mysterious and wise that danced in the corner of her eyes.  After introductions and such we sat down to big home cooked spread of ham, mashed sweet potatoes, collared greens, fresh rolls, and corn on the cob; throughout the meal the smell of cherry pie drifting in from the kitchen.  The meal was spent in near silence all of us eating it should have been awkward but it wasn’t.  With the food in ruins Joe pushed back his chair and lit a cigarette which I am pretty sure is against Mormon policy, but his wife said nothing.  Then the stories started rolling out and Joe turned our two day trip across Arizona into an odyssey of Olympic proportions we were all laughing and then Joe shocked me by getting up and going over by the stereo where after rummaging for a while he returned with a joint and lit it up and passed it to his wife.  The image of this fifty-year-old Mormon woman toking a joint as if it were ancient habit threw me out of myself and before I knew it we were all rolling in our chairs clutching out stomachs in fits of laughter.  She had a high pitched rippling laughter a free honest curl to it that seemed impossible for the Mormons to have allowed. When we settled down and silence overtook us I ventured to ask what the Mormon religion thought of dope smoking.
+God it seems does not care about what Mormons do with the plants he has bequeathed upon the earth, “besides,” she said, “once you understand what it is telling you, you realize that it is the right thing to do.”
+I agreed with her and I am quite familiar with Marijuana and what it has to say, but as I pointed out the argument against it makes sense if your goal is to maintain the status quo.  It undermines any desire for consumption or working hard to get somewhere all of which are infinitely necessary in our little American nightmare… marijuana says ‘enjoy yourself and don’t worry….  This little stoned thought struck a nerve in Jean and she launched into a political diatribe.  
+“That’s the trouble with all these laws they were written by people who don’t know what marijuana is saying because they have never smoked it.  And I don’t mean smoked it every now and then I mean smoked it every moment of everyday to see what the world would be like if it were part of our diet….”  She dragged off a cigarette and eyed me suspiciously for moment before continuing.  “I’m a Mormon, this is hardly the first thing that I have believed that has been contrary to the government and I’ll tell you when I lost the church was when they said god had changed his mind on the issue of polygamy.  I still believe in god and I still believe in love, but I don’t believe in governments or churches.  I am listening I am aware I am in control of my life and I can make decisions for myself.  Government is obsolete we no longer need someone to tell us what to do in order to assure the survival of the species, as individuals we know this, but at the collective level we are still acting out old games.  Some people think its that not enough people know how to take care of themselves and that is the myth that gets perpetuated by the machinery of government.  But stop for a minute and think.  What does the government do for you on a daily basis that is beneficial to your quality of life?  How is it helping you?  Stoplights come to mind and then after that a big blank space where you try and search for something else and you think to yourself what does the government do again?  Exactly.
+“I’m sorry I rant when I get high, I didn’t mean to bring up taxes and the government and stupid things that don’t matter… you must think I’m a lunatic Ted Kazinyski follower or something out here in the middle of nowhere and lecturing you on the evils of government….”
+“Not at all.”  I assured her that I couldn’t care less about the government for the very reason she had stated.  No one does when you really get down to it.  The chief function of the government is to give you a topic of conversation with stranger whether in bars or subways or in a house in the middle of Utah.  It’s a linguistic litmus test for the compatibility of the future.  It’s a dead dog on a long car drive, it gives you something to say that does not reveal anything about you a way of rotating the air by venting words and spinning to the sound of each others voice, a verbal ballet that circled us about the room waltzing entourne.
+Joe and his wife talked like giant friendly clowns billowing stories and cackling at nothing the way people do when they have been married for twenty years and are still in love.  It was bit odd to watch; I couldn’t shake visions of symphonies and the jerky movement of violin bows jerking about mixed with the slower warble of cellos.  There laughter sang and I was dragged into living room for a family tour… children in goofy clothes, grandchildren in baby baskets, great hordes standing in front of Niagara Falls, the Washington Monument, Delicate Arch, lakes, rivers, mountains, Joe holding up a trout, Jean at the rim of the grand canyon it all swirled and danced before my eyes.   Then came the cherry pie made more delicious by chemically induced longing, sweeter, redder, and flakier… Marijuana could be an advertisers greatest tool if only we let ourselves go.  And then Vavaldi, the four seasons suite tearing the walls apart, then the Ninth, then Rockmonanoff and on and on until Jean dropped off to bed and Joe and I fell into silence moved in waves by the churning hip thrusting glory of Elvis’s 1972 karate kicking, orchestra backed concert in Madison Square Gardens
+“So you want to go on to Denver I take it?”
+“Yes I do… from there I think I’m going to take the bus down to new Orleans and look up a friend I haven’t seen in a few years….”
+“New Orleans… I’ve never been there.”
+“It’s a different world… a foreign country right here in America….”
+I told him a bit about it tried to cast the spell of the place in the room.  There were railings around the windows and gas lamps in the corner and we both had accents by the end of it, but later when I was alone in my room staring about the ceiling with its little glow in the dark constellations, I couldn’t help but think the I really didn’t know New Orleans at all, I was only there a week, I had the merest gloss.  I wanted to know the city to crawl under its insidious belly and render it swallowed, digested and crapped out my ass in great putrid heap of shit…. 
+I slept fitfully under the moonless starscape ceiling dreaming of a stale, smoky bar's liquor-stained floors and a headless horseman riding like Icarius out of the fiery sun-gilded gates of hell.  The headless horseman swerved and bore down on the I that is you with menacing intent, jolting the dream element awake and into a sleepnonsleep trance on the isthmus of reality.  The horseman dismounted and walks in to the bar.  He caught us all unawares, I was bewildered and in my heavy-lidded gaze saw a man with no head standing just inside the mosquito netting that covers the tropical doorway.  The bar is on the corner of dusty street in a barrio of Lima, the patrons are frozen in time nothing moves save the horseman reaching behind the counter and filling his glass with whiskey; he sat on the stool next to me and turned so he was facing me.  I turned my stool toward him somewhat surprised that I could move, in light of my freedom I turned full circle surveying the statues arranged at the tables, not a breath stirs, no wind, we are in a vacuum.  Turning my attention back to the headless man I stared at the empty space where his head ought to have been but wasn’t; I searched for something on him which I could address myself to ought since there is no face by which I can gain his attention… closer inspection revealed a pair of blinking eyes peering at me from where the necktie should have been.  A hand slipped out from the waist and motioned for me to rise. I climbed clumsily off of my barstool and followed him out into the middle of the jungle night.   The headless horseman motioned for me to sit on a fallen tree and pulled out a long stick of cinnamon, he lit it and inhaled through a buttonhole in his chest.  I sat down on the log opposite him and staring eye-level at the cinnamonette and I began to appreciate the sheer size of the horseman and realized that even without his head he was beautiful.
+	Time passes by in jerky motions not unlike the first motion pictures uneven and without regard for continuity.  Maybe moments maybe hours maybe at the same time, an old man with a sickly gray beard and a ridiculous suit is sitting where the horseman had been.  One hand is out of sight down his pants and the other wags a long finger at you and he begins to jerk his cock screaming i want you i want YOU i WANT YOU!  
+There were opulent scenes passing by as if played on blue screens real but not. I saw great Persian empires laid out, expanding and retracting, moving across time in slow molasses-like motions.  Cities where the sun stood still in the sky and monstrous creations of the mind, horrifying and seductive at the same time.  Like ancient Tibetan art there was no distinction between the province of the mind and the province of the body.  Women swam in south china seas of ambient warmth moving in playful erotic motions, cresting like dolphins.  Creatures of all forms walked streets of near ancient origin, cobblestones and whitewashed buildings with European wrought iron balconies.  Tapestries hung out from the window beckon the passersby to climb up into untold pleasures of body and mind.  The scene was overwhelming and indescribable; beautiful and horrifying in a way that held horror and beauty to be ultimately different reactions to the same observed phenomena.
+I woke up with unshakable thought that the only thing better than solitude is society.  The other game was looking like a hot roulette wheel from the steel illusions of self-certainty.  I mean of course the society of friends or even a friend….  By breakfast I was in a chatty mood and wanted to stay and talk to Jean for a while, but Joe insisted that we had to moving before noon.  I thanked Jean and said goodbye to her at the railyard.  I went for a quick swim in the Green River while Joe signed out for the train and went through his checklist of the computer guidance systems.  The water was cool and yes green, so green I couldn’t see past my dick; I started wondering about leeches and quickly got out.  Sunning myself on a rock I noticed that my belly button was itching and burning slightly, I sat up and discovered a tick burrowed into my skin, swollen fat with my blood.  The parasitic little bastard was stealing my lifeblood.  Try as I might I could not get him loose, I held a cigarette as close as I could stand for as long as I could stand but he refused to let go.  Finally I just tore him out ripping a chunk of flesh off with him.  I dug around for a while with a knife making sure that I had got the head.  Damn little bastard better not have given me Lyme Disease I thought as I popped his fat blood laden belly between my fingers.  The purpose of the tick is like government entirely unclear to me, but the tick did serve as a healthy reminder that I too am organic, subject to disease and vermin, something you forget when you have lived the vast majority of your life in the confines of the Lysoled suburban dreamland.
+I heard the groan of the engine moving and Joe’s voice yelling over it, I threw my shirt back on and ran over to the nearest flat car and we were off.  I hung back on the car alone munching some cheese and fruit that I bought at the store in Moab and consuming the better part of bottle of wine.  Wine is the only alcohol legal in Utah that can actually get you drunk.
+It was five in the evening by the time we got back to the big switch where we once again headed east and by then I was good and drunk.  Drunk enough that walking on a moving train seemed like thoroughly stupid idea so I just lay on my back all even and stared at the sky.  Somewhere in the midst of my looping jagged butterfly thoughts I hit upon a memory of having read that a thousand years ago Venus was visible with naked eye in the day time.  It got me to thinking why it wasn’t now… which got me to thinking about selective attention.  There is a myrid of information assaulting our sense ever moment ninety nine percent of which we do not see, that is it is not seable being that it is beyond the visual spectrum everything from radio to ultraviolet or nuclear radiation is dombarding us and we ignore it because we have never need to know about it to survive, but what I was thinking about was beyond mere survival.  The human brain is the most powerful information processor in the known universe and yet it is unable to see venus and at one point it could.  Indeed people in some cultures still can.  It has nothing whatsoever to do with a decline in visual skills but ratherit has to do with need.  Two thousand years ago your brain needed to be able to see venus and there it was clearly visible in the middle of the day.  Chances are that anyone able to see Venus would not however be able to drive a car on the freeway.  Such a skill requires intense amounts of complex organization of brain signals and body responses and yet we do it automatically without having to think at all.  But we do no see venus in the day time.  It got me to thinking about cultural brainwashing.  Cultural brainwashing is theprocess by which the indivdual is integrated into his or her society and world that surounds them; it is the fancy way of explaining why you do not see venus and with the self reflexive glory of its inescapablity it is a product of my brainwashing.  Only in westernized nations with notions like science and psychiatry do you find people talking about cultural brainwashing.  Those people who noticed it like to think they have escaped it, that they have transcended it, but they haven’t they are indeed the most brainwashed among us.  Just as you only find Zombi’s in Haiti and you only find death at end of a pointed bone Aborigonal Australia so you only find cultural brainwashing among westerners.  You can not escape brainwashing without losing all context of who you as an individual are; worldwide the most common method of transcending oneself is psychoactive compounds whether it be peyote, ayahuasca, hashish, or aminita Muscarathe common element is brain alteration.  Only when we are in this or other brain changing states can one escape one’s self and through that ones culture.  These brain alterations are also possible with LSD.  
+The thing that wanted to say to Jean when she was talking about the govenent was that they know what she knows even better than most of us who feel oppresed by them.  They know how useless and futile there positions are because thy have to defend them on a daily basis.  Increasingly the politician and reformer is shown to be in the game only for personal gain and the common cry of the people is that everyone is corrupt, but this is not true.  More and more “leaders” are greedily enhancing their own lot at the expensive of others for a very good reason… they know the end is near we no longer need them and they no it, like squirrils cacheing nuts or polar bears retaining extra fat for the winter they are storing up for the lean times ahead.  They also sensed that if the general public was to get ahold of LSD or anything like it their time would come to an end a whole lot sooner so they have kept it away for now, but it will never really go away.  It was not the acid dropping hippies that worried them they were never going to get far they smelled which make a bad impression on anyone in almost any culture; no what they feared were the men in suits the men from their own ranks who were touting the benefits of LSD.  Men that the public at large looked up to artists, actors, psychiatists, chemists, anthropolgists, celebrites, even politicians, men like Tim Leary, Cary Grant, John Lilly, Harvey Milk; men with influence.
+In every culture there is a shaman figure sometimes it’s a weird guy in the hut down the roade who talks to himself as walks about and sometimes it’s the weird guy in thirtyith floor office of a Manhattan highrise who walks around talking to himself.  When the psychologists and psychiatrists got a hold of LSD the threat to the then reigning shamans, the politicians, was real and they got rid of it.  There was no conspiracy that put Tim Leary in prison for a twenty five year term for possession of marijuana, it was a calculated move to shut him up and certainly he knew it.  He did what any reasonable man would do, he shut up.  He stopped talking about LSD and chemical methods of emacipation from the self and started talking about the one other thing that seems to work… meditation and yogaic excersizes.
+It’s 1999 right now and try as I might I can’t do Yoga on a moving train.  Nor do I have any LSD which means that I am fucked, trapped here in this culturally brainwashed condition and unable to see Venus.  Venus —godess of Love.  Makes you wonder. 
+The air is nipping at my arms like darning needles and faint traces of our breath is visible in the glow of the gas lantern.  Jow and I ware roasting marshmellows on a coleman latern in the back of a box car.  It almost works.  Right now though as night finds us creeping through the mountains a warm marshmellow is exactly what we need to plug the worm holes.  The worms are eating us alive, Joe and I.  They’re eating you too whereever you are whenever you are.  They tell you that worms invade your body afterdeath and they go to great lengths to keep them out of the coffin with formaldahyde and by draining the blood out of your body, but the worms are there already, they have been eating us up all along.  They pierce like invisible bullets fired at birth across aphrodites enteral dancing forever and piercing Apollo’s languishing nowflesh rotten to the core eat up and leaking like sieves we stuff ourselves with air injected sugar balls to stop the vaporous bleeding.  The marshmellows do the trick tonigh hold it all intact no leaking of vaporous lifeblood al is well.  I stretch out the sleeping bag on the floor of the box car and joe heads toward the engine compartment with the lantern.  I am alone in the dark, with the holes, the leaking, the LSD, the cultural brainwashing, Zombis, shamans, Tim Leary and a small spider that I named steve after a fish I had along time ago.  Everything is okay.  We are moving east, slowly.
+
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+Transcribed from tapes: the terminal disease clerk took orders by the turnstile, finding the story in the story and logging in the disease workers all night long.  At five in the morning he got off and headed to a tavern as the sun was coming up.  Direct confrontation with the terminal virus word is a bit confusing to those who are not properly prepared.  poor fuckers never had a chance; the technical sergeant takes off his helmet and slams it on the table the near moronic mumbling of discontent.  Waging war is semantically impossible without overtones of homosexuality.  Heavy handed, the second wave fell in line with the technical sergeant at the lead.  The thing you have to watch out for are the warblers —the distractions coming in at the sides, sound is their most effective weapon, primordial hangover he called it drunkenly raising a glass.  And some of you may think this suspect, but take my advice sound's where it all started.  In the beginning was the word and the word spoke.  The sergeant stoops and cups his hands to light a cigarette.  Then there is sex or not enough of it, both is equally dangerous —biology is not something to scoff at.  sexuality is the best cover an agent can ever use.  Rockets come searing in overhead ripping flesh and scoffing at the notion of eternity, out here you don't have time to talk, the thoughts are things, they are no longer words...keep your radios tuned boys its getting ugly.  Another rocket sears in severed limbs fly out the explosion and olive drab body parts litter the scene. 
+	Watch out for the bloody words, sharp words that hang in the air like knives and when uttered returned to slit the throat of their speaker and if every word you have spoken returned to act upon yourself would you survive the experience?   Me no way I'm outta here.  Situation getting sticky, humid like vaporous blood hanging on in the air.  Still acrid smell of urine and small children playing in a asphalt playground ringed on all sides by immense brick walls with basketball hoops hung half way up each of the sides.     Realize that that which we are taught from childhood to distrust is in fact a pawn of something far more immense and much much more dangerous.  The governments and nations of the world are incidental pawns of there own control systems and then beyond them there are even more and so on like looking two mirrors facing each other and going on to infinity.  The monster of power is faceless there is no one person or group that controls everything they are all parts of a immense and multi-headed monster that is constantly biting itself and attacking it own heads until some day it will destroy itself.  The end of time leaves space and word alone together
+	we're taking heavy fire!  The sergeant calls for back up, the captain says love one another and cryptically hangs up the phone. The Spanish soldier selling chiclettes say no good no bueno, pictures worth not even half a thousand words.  Wouldn't give you ten words, worthless gringo words don’t mean shit. no good no bueno, not worth the blood their written in. The blood of all peoples not yours, not your shoes, by god keep your slave labor camps a closed-mouthed secret.   Gotta keep that in house, dis-credit all news agencies by routinely feeding them false information.  News doesn’t happen events happen, and the department of television information broadcasting inc. a subdivision of indoctrination inc. decides what gets out and what remains forever sealed in baby pissshitguts.  No that's not true. No comment. No need for comment, the preceding has been since proved to be untrue, cut to shots of smart bombs. Couldn’t get fifty words for those now gringo -over exposure- nobody buying.   Same old stinking shit.  No Good. No Bueno.
+	Gringo go home in thousand languages in a million words, why don’t you crawl back in your cave get your tail so far between your legs it goes half way up your ass?  Lead me to the holy spigot and we’ll show you the bidet of death, constructed by gringos, for gringos, to flush out gringos, to show them all what you do behind closed doors.  Can’t close them all —we have our technicians as well and they’re getting to be better than yours. We got the money rolling in —even offered you the picture words but you don’t want them. No Good.   Can’t use those, too strong.  No fair, crying boy heads home for cave to lick his dirty balls clean.
+	I gotta picture for you I on vacation in your country go to hear senator’s speak but all door are closed, all sealed.  So i gotta fiber optic and feed it in from the roof show all senators mad with sexual lust and blood thirsty, clamoring for war and stealing souls and bodies and driving them off wherever they see fit.
+	The technician is retro actively of course —the papers said the man was mentally ill.  ‘my cod!’ screamed a church lady in the front row, ‘satan has garbled the lords message, this isn’t what he meant for you to hear, no it was not all like that, there was to be understanding.’ she is parading her old cunt bones whining at the justices —tissue conducts signals, animals communicate through the use of visual, acoustic , chemical, tactile and electrical signals.  Our laboratory is an abundant and well preserved feed back loop to understand and interpret Eusocial behavior. negative feedback inhibition to make you shiver Gringo.  Make you shiver good.
+	Repetition unsuccessful.  The radiologist was called in to examine the patient —blisters and burns indicate high probability of skin mutation, what would you say Dr. Waiben?   Crested and on the nod? Diminutively, yes definitely.
+	Information potential exists —its an unsettling thought, dependency —and what happens when things start to think? How do you draw the lines then?
+	HOW THE PLAGUE BEGAN:
+ 	The wish to preserve -not worth saving what already is- in this scenario.  The word,  the loss of body situated at the origins of recorded sound -the temporal metaphysical and esthetic possibilities.
+	<insert sounds of truck on dirt road>  
+	Old man yelling.  Get off of my laaawwwnnn!   Sits down to oil his gun some more and then half turns in his chair to face the camera and says "i haven't left the porch since i got this CDRom PEOPLE version 3.0.   Updated and expanded human potential at your fingertips.  Its the only thing i need —got no use for the stinking gringos anymore—  camera pans out and down revealing a yard strewn with shotgun-blasted bodies of young children.  We see wife, face half torn off, crawling towards a pistol <shotgun blast stage left> her head disappears entirely.   Old man: "human potential, the new CDRom makes wives unnecessary." cue logo: on sale now at a sanatorium near you....
+	I'm going to finally send you the orgy papers this time  -been fixing to get 'round to that for some time"  <heavy southern drawl>  don't think he's the type to do it though but i been wrong once or twice a'fore.    Don't want people showing up on my lawn though that's never good.  get off of my lllaaaawwwwnnnnn! <shotgun blast again, distant screaming sounds of deaths final agonies eeking out blood gurgling windpipes> Fucking Gringos! Go home in a thousand languages!
+	  Experience as much of the human potential as possible, retain the container and forward the frog to the fun sun freaks of eastern Tibet —all is well with alkaline, and acidity is on the skids with death rooted out leaving only chicken shit shoveled scrapped and scraped like lemon lime Gatorade poured from a fuck buck of love.  Stop talking to yourself —listen to the virus talk to you.  All that you consider to be a accident was carefully orchestrated for your benefit by a benevolent cocksucking god from the twenty-third dimension to just plain old irritate the fuck out of you like a bad rectal itch.  Stupid gringo got no cure for the ass itch i show you some pictures, yes very dirty, little girls you like??????
+	<<<<<commander in chief of the NATO forces in Europe is fucking small refugee boy in the ass, the boy cries for his mother the general is laughing, your mother’s down the hall boy ,she’s busy with the president of France right now.  But maybe later you’d like to lick his come off her dead face.  Ban those words tear them right out snip snip.  Can’t say that, its disgusting.  War is a snuff film for the rich.  <<<<We gotta step up the bombing chief the public’s losing innarest in us screams the chief of staff running in circles jerking off and slapping his ass until it turns a bright purple and with all seriousness General Jesse Helms pauses to reflect:  I remember a time when life was good no one got in our way, why in Europe under Patton i musta raped twenty thirty little boys and a handful of nuns too. He smiles lost in memory...
+	But God hath given us these trying times....
+	Yes it is bit hard to get cunt these days isn’t it, mumbles the chief of state as he strokes his wife’s cock....Yes dear start a war, get me some cute refugee boys, i so love snapping their necks when I'm coming, she growls affectionately.
+	That's it gentlemen were going to war!  The president stands and ejaculates on a map of the world KOSOVO it is he says as his thick oatmeal consistency sperm all but covers the former republic of Yugoslavia.
+	You like?  You like, no?  Too bad.  You can’t have those words, too strong.  I get power, you give me power, I steal power from you, to expensive to buy it.  I get power and you get pictures and maybe I tell you how to cure rectal itch? Eh? Eh? Eh?
+
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+In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh by a cacophonous blast out of heaven's pearly cum-stained ass creating the father, the son, and the holy spigot which lies in a secluded garden on the cliffs overlooking the Sargasso sea.  The spigot is buried in a volcano designed by Czech ostriches in the eleventh hour of creation to drain all human excrement off the continent of Europe and into the Sargasso sea all lumpy with turd so thick Jesus "conny" Christ in drag is walking along to the amazement of the gullible, floating gently from turd to turd.  The piss blood of a million cunts and cocks line the shores giving the whole place a radioactive iridescent red glow not to mention a awful stench.  Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo are standing on the bluffs watching the spectacle and scanning with hawk eyes for sweet tight asses in which they can stab their hungry cocks.  The father caught the son sitting in the middle of the garden sucking on an apple and he became enraged and hog tied the boy and penetrated every orifice in his body with a peeled and sculpted cucumber cock; the boy was left a whimpering, quivering lump of fleshy jello from which spawned humankind.
+	The piss gut rotting flesh smell, air taunt necked and jerking at the nose, the captain's eyes role back into his head as is guts are blasted out his ass by a giggling man headed tape worm of extraordinary wit who was prone to quoting Joyce and Bugs Bunny in the same sentence in a way that reminded listeners of Buster Keaton in some strange drugstore hurricane kind of a way.  The skatolic odor was rich and the worm refused to bath.  Owing to the peculiar nature of its origin the soldiers did not disturb the worm preferring instead to watch the captain writhe in agony pulling his legs back behind his ear to attempt to lick the matted blood soaked pubic hair over the torn orangish flesh that hung in ribbons over a large hole that had once been a simple anus.  The upshot of it all was that the worm ate less rations than the captain so the men were basically satisfied with the arrangement and they followed the worm wiggling through the jungle as it did impersonations of Fred Astaire...
+	Blasted rot gut con-artist with ten huge molars running across the front of his mouth in a clump owing to his mother's industrial accident with the cunt acid from the hyperdrill, drilled right on through back to china.  The asshole couldn't even close the damn thing and the lower mandible just kind of hung there like a tire swing.  
+	The giggling Hyenas are dressed in black and high on amphetamines looking to turn you inside out.
+	Tongue-tied porn queens scream obscenities at passersby "I'll suck your dick until your eyeballs pop out your ass..."
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+Every diner has its own subtle quality which distinguishes it from all the nearly identical establishments of its kind, this particular joint had enormous lazy houseflies crawling up the wall behind me which set it off in League with other infamous places I have eaten such as Ben’s Broasted Chicken an establishment that I had been to years ago.  I was headed up to the Tahoe area by way of the back road, 395, a rickety operation that shoots you straight up the length of california always keeping the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada just to the left.  About three quarters of the way to Tahoe you pass through the blink-and-you-miss-it town of Bishop where among other things there is a roadside dive called Ben’s which serves Broasted chicken and corn on the cob for two dollars a plate.  There were no other options no menu no choices no confusion, no arguing with the cook just broasted chicken and corn.  I remember going in primarily because I wanted to know just what one did to a chicken to make it broasted.  After that all I remember is the enormous lazy flies that crawled up the column next to my table.  I still can’t recollect exactly what the chicken tasted or even looked like, the corn sticks out as being over cooked and mushy and of course the flies were lazy and didn’t move when you swatted them which led me to believe that in fact they were never swatted at.  Indeed Ben’s was probably a kind of legend in fly circles, one to another word passed down the line and traveled all through the Eastern Desert of california, if you were a fly Ben’s was the place to be.  I asked to meet the infamous Ben proprietor and presumably the genius behind the broasting, but unfortunately he was out of town.  Instead the cook gave us a tour of the kitchen and that only served to make my experience at Ben’s a singular one.  I was passing through Bishop several years after that and I tried to locate Ben’s Broasted Chicken so that Amy could share the wonder of broasted chicken with me, but the place was gone, no building nothing, even some locals in town acted like they had no idea what I was talking about.  One old woman gave us that peculiar look that small town people always give to city folk as if to say you have no business poking around here asking questions, but I kept at her until she confessed that Ben’s was something she had never heard of, and what's more she informed us that she had lived in Bishop her whole life.  I started to wonder if maybe I had hallucinated the whole thing and Amy, who was in love with my eccentricities as much as my banality, I am certain though that here was the definitive proof she had always wanted to know for sure that I was totally nuts.  We snacked on bread from Shatz’s Bakery and drove up to Mammoth with me recounting the same story of Ben’s Broasted chicken that I had laid on her before Bishop, doubtlessly boring her to sleep which was just as well because my mind was pre occupied with broasted chicken not the inner depths of the female soul which was what Amy seemed to want to talk about all the time.
+	I recanted the story of Ben’s to Dean over double cheeseburgers.  I still don’t let little things like fat lazy flies bother me, who ever heard of a fly that ate anything more than crumbs?  They were doing no harm and the burgers were dripping greasy and quite yummy, as Amy would have said if she had been there.  Every time I get to thinking about or talking about Ben’s Broasted Chicken strange things begin to happen, first the place disappears and then to reach across a span of maybe five years Ben’s came crashing into the present and my mouth dropped open full of half chewed cheese burger when who should come strolling in the door of this diner, but Clay Napier the very man who had been with me on that virgin trip to the land of broasted chicken.  Actually the weirdness factor way have been slightly over played on my part as I did know that Clay was in Colorado somewhere, but it’s a big state and then even in Denver how many diners how many nights what are the odds?  All of this can in someway be accounted for by the initial mystery that set it all in motion… what is broasted chicken?  I no longer care (I also have made it a point never to consult a cookbook) I prefer the mystery to which broasted chicken has attended, at least for me.
+	Clay Napier was an ancient friend, not in a chronological sense but in the sense that we would always be friends regardless of the time between meetings we never had more then twenty or so awkward moments of catching up and then things fell naturally into place as if we had been together everyday for years.  I waited until the waitress had seated him and then casually sauntered up while he was reading the menu and sat down across the booth from him.  I cleared my throat and as I did so and he put down the menu to see who was disturbing him.  I watched in slow motion as his face went from blank irritation to recognition, and then surprise.  We smiled at each other for a moment and then nonplussed, as if it were perfectly natural that we should come upon each other five years and two states away from our last meeting, Clay slid out of the booth and we embraced for moment before the volume of words began to flow forth.
+	“My god what are you doing here?” 
+	“I was going to ask you the very same question —I thought you were up in the mountains or was it in flagstaff?”
+	“Ya I was in Flagstaff until I graduated, now I’m actually living up in Boulder, but my girlfriend lives down here… she’s working right now so I was catching a late dinner… why are you in Denver last thing I heard you had gone back to school or something to that effect…?!”
+	I racked my brain; where would he have gotten such foolish ideas?  Who was behind this?  “Uh, no I haven’t gotten around to that yet, who told you that one?”
+	“I forget maybe Robert.”  Robert K Statmore an upright human being if there ever was one, it had been years since I had even thought of Bob, except when I went camping and realized with a fresh new sense of shame that I still had the tent I borrowed one weekend almost four years ago.
+	“How is Bob?”
+	“Dunno, haven’t talked to any of those guys in a couple of years, I been out here doing odd jobs, I was working for a mining firm doing archeological impact studies, you know making sure they weren’t trampling on our people.”  Our people was an old and very elaborate joke that had developed over the years, a sort of half joke actually as Clay and I were serious about some of it.  Our people were the native American’s whose blood ran through both our bodies, in Clay it was the Cherokee, and in mine it was (I think) Ogalala, but either way it wasn’t much, not even enough to claim it for scholarship purposes.  The both of us were middle European mutts, half breeds, the results of some horny individuals who had no qualms about fucking across international boundaries, but the point of “our people” was not so much about us, it was a continuous good natured way to needle the third point in our boyhood triangle of friendship.  That third point was named Jim Stout and was proudly and definitely Irish.  When we all got drunk conversation used to end up with Jim threatening to give us small pox blankets and us half-heartedly trying to scalp him while he slept.  It’s funny now looking back how teenagers can turn genocide and torture into a source of humor and competition.  We were a lot smarter back then.  I smiled at Clay’s comment and was lost for moment in a nostalgic reflection over my boyhood.  I saw Clay as I will always see him when he’s not around, he’s sitting in that diner smiling that old half crooked curve, and to this day his nasal voice echoes about in my ears whenever I think of him.  He had slow manner of speech where you leaned in close so as not to miss a word.  He often didn’t say much just shrugged or gave you a look, but the words that did fall out were carefully measured like a recipe and to miss one of them would ruin the flavor of what he was trying to say.  And then there were The Looks, you have to know someone for a while before you can communicate with them on a subverbal level with just looks, but with Clay that time was double the norm.  He had looks, which he held out in silence that could mean more than complex and overly verbose sentence.  When he was feeling thoughtful and didn’t have an opinion he would stroke his chin with a bemused expression which only over time did I realize was not in fact an ironic mockery of Allen Ginsburg, but really the genuine article of inner reflection being measure out and stirred up.  I have always thought in the time since Clay and I were fast boyhood friends that I would have liked to smoke pot with him.  I remember the first time I got high I thought what wonderful qualities this little plant would bring out in my friend Clay, but he was gone by then, off in Arizona going to school and continuing down the boisterous outdoor life that we had all lead during high school.  Nearly every weekend we headed out to Joshua Tree the local rock climbing hang out and Clay had patiently taught Jim and I how to climb until one day we were both better than him.  Or at least to be fair that’s how I remember it.  Every summer we had made glorious excursions through the Sierra Nevada, backpacking over the palisades, Mineral King, Sequoia, Yosemite and other mountains with names that I have surrendered to inaccessible regions of memory.  We all came from adventurous sort of families.
+Jim was the first to go his separate way, he ended up at brown University for four years and then Clay went to NAU and I went, well I went here.  And then there and now back here.  Crisscrossing paths occasionally with each of them making plans for trips we knew we would never go on.  The last time I saw Jim, he had met me for a drink at the Little Knight and Tony had presided over our hour and a half meeting like a surgeon trying to revive the dead.  I hadn’t seen Jim since and I didn’t know where he was and apparently neither did Clay.
+	“What are you doing tonight you want to come get a drink?”
+	“Ya I’m with a friend of mine,” I motioned to Dean the he should come over, he didn’t know Clay and I hadn’t really said anything when he walked in I just dropped my story and walked over to a strangers table, for all Dean knew I was making arms deals with the CIA.  I introduce them and Dean went back to our both retrieved our burgers and we all sat down to dinner.  “We were over a Tangz, but the gay scene got old so we ducked out… his sister and her friend are still there, but we left them the keys anyway.  You got a ride?”
+	He did and that settled it.  The three of us took off to a club/bar where Clay’s girlfriend Anna was working, on the way I filled Clay in on five years as best a could (he had heard stories it seemed —good to know that people talk about you when you’re not around).  I left out a few things that I wanted to tell him, but as I said Clay and I are ancient and until I knew where he was at now I had no reason, based on the old Clay to think the one driving now would care about.  I left out my gnosticism and the year or so that I spent trying to meet god.  Not that I was embarrassed about that stuff, nor ashamed, but rather that they were between me and the handful of people that were aware of what was going on, to go beyond that circle would cost them their flavor, the unique character of insanity that marked them.  It turned out that Clay had done about half of the things we always suspected he would do, like college, the master degree, the outdoorsy life, the move to Colorado… but there were things that I never would have thought to hear that Clay was doing.  Back in the day, in fact how I met Clay was through the church youth group, and as I say we were both indoctrinated with the Presbyterian God, but to be honest I was mainly there because there were really cute girls (if I had know then what I know now I would have been down the street at the Mormon tabernacle).  I grew out of religion around seventeen when I read a book on brainwashing and realized that even if all this malarkey they were feeding us was true, I knew nothing of it other than what I had been told.  The same tactics are used by the US military, Indian gurus, Charlie Manson and nearly every other belief centered organization in the world.  I got very angry with myself for being duped by these charlatan tricks that seemingly anyone could have employed by reading a textbook on conditioning psychology.  I was smarter than that I realized, but unfortunately all my friends were not seeing my insights and what's more they seemed genuinely concerned about me for thinking such things.  Subtle reminders were dropped hear and there over a dinner or later after we graduated, a beer, things that had the subtle subtext that good religious people can convey through even the most mundane conversation.  At least that’s what I thought at the time and I embarked on this quest to convert them all to my new religion, to undermine the system from within.  I gave them books, got them to smoke pot (well Jim anyway) got them to have some sex, in fact Dean and I even dragged Jim to meet a porn star once at some strip club, but then end up backing out when we learned that their was no alcohol allowed.  I was the propaganda of hedonism.  I always thought that Clay would come round, would wake up as I naively referred to my reactionary religion, but I was wrong.  In fact Clay was quitting his job in a month to go back to California and work at the summer camp that we went to in high school.
+	Now since then I had as I said carried hedonism as far (actually a little further) as it would go and there waiting for me at the end was God and this time he wasn’t wearing the gilded robes of human flesh he was much more of a supernatural being than anything I had ever read has prepared me for and he was much subtler in its existence than I had assumed.  He hated Presbyterians and hedonists with equal fervor.  He looked like Hitler in Drag and had a nasty habit of sniffing opium tinctures at the most improbable of moments.  He was related directly to the incident with the little gnomes on ether that were mentioned earlier and how do you relate that to anyone else?  I hadn’t the foggiest and I realized that I was cut off, limited as much as freed by experience because I was so painfully aware of the limitations of being human I was limited.  I was limited to trying to understand Clay when I should have been knowing.  This thought ran like a subtle subtext through the conversation.  Dean took over for me and started telling Clay about people, parties and things that I new Clay wouldn’t relate to, but I let him because I could see Clay shifting in his seat and having to realize that the other half exists and that was exactly what I had been trying to do.  I tried every trick in the book back in my more clever days and I had forgotten about the one thing that doesn’t get into psychology textbooks: people.  The best evidence for god is man, always has been always will be, any two bit strand of sporific DNA floating through the universe could have made the rest, but man now there is an odd one.  Where did this thing come from and what the hell is wrong with it?  Who would have made such a thing?  I hold that what made us had a hell of a sense of humor and not much else going on upstairs.
+	When I snapped out of it they were talking about books.  Dean was lamenting the recent demise of William S Burroughs and Clay was arguing that Burroughs was too obscure in his style to ever be the creative genius that people thought him to be.  This I decide would be great time to go the bathroom and I excused myself; there is nothing Dean can talk about with the insane fever of dementia quite like William Burroughs.  I had watched Dean discover and then devour William Burroughs the way some people get over imported chocolates.  He savored each knew book with a delicacy that I reserved for other authors, I recognized immediately that whatever his merits or faults he had at least reached Dean and Dean was a tough nut to crack, I could never do it.  He had lent me some books and then wham in I went to the world of the totally bizarre.  Burroughs tunneled himself into my brain like cancer and ate it all up, then is found another and moved on to devour that author consuming that men and women who wrote as intrinsically part of what they were saying.  I have always read that way being more interest in the whole scope of authors life rather than moving from book to book the way some people do.  Whether it was Robert Wilson or Tom Clancy it was always the same way.
+	When I came back from the bathroom I could tell that things had gone awry which was just as well because I didn’t really want to talk philosophies I wanted to speed things up.  I went up the bar and asked the bartender to point out Anna for me.  He did and I knew that things between me and Clay would never be the same again.  She was an absolute work of art with delicate pale skin like a Grecian urn and a face with high cheekbones that just kind hung amid a mass of perfect blond ringlets.  She could have been a model, but she wasn’t she was Clay’s girlfriend and I was smitten.  I have notorious bad habit of sweeping my friends girlfriend out from their arms and into my own consequently my friends don’t usually call for while when they meet someone.  I was awash in cynicism from my earlier musings and I figured if Clay and I were destined to part then I might as well do it with a bang.  I went up and introduced myself.  Anna “had a smile that swerved, a smile that curved, a smile that swerved all over the road.”  If ever there was a girl that Mark Sandman described with those lines it was Anna.  She had a body that hugged the road like BMW and she laughed with the honest mirth that comes only those who know.  I struggled over that sentence for some time trying to put it without sounding like mystic, but the simple truth is if you don’t know what I mean by that then don’t worry you don’t know and if you don’t know you’ll never learn.
+	Anna talked like a little demurring French pastry and once shy and bold with the dancing musical quality that seems to emanate mainly in the voices of women I find attractive and no one else.  When you’re in the presence of a magical voice such as that all you want to do is listen, any other distraction becomes an immediate irritation and all you want is to stop it and get back the sweet music.  Thus by the time a came back to the table with Anna I was already in the mood to do whatever she wanted whenever and wherever she wanted to do it (of course, and therein lies the rub, ten minutes from now it was very possible I would be smitten to another water nymph). 	
+	Clay looked visibly disturbed that I had gotten to Anna before he introduced us and being aware of my past he was already uncomfortable with the idea.  The song was right is you want to be happy for the rest of your life you got to get yourself an ugly wife or in this case girlfriend, because if you’re dating the most beautiful girl in the room you have to continually maintain your Alpha Male presence or the other will swoop in and feed on your weakness.  Women who find that statement offensive have never been the most beautiful girl in the room and the rest of them are evil because they know what power they have and they use it.  Anna was the center of attention at out little table and she new it and she liked it from what I could tell because she announced before long that she was going to see if she could get off early and we were all to come with her to an exclusive party for some ban that none of use had ever heard of.  But like I said whatever, whenever wherever and I could tell Dean was not going to put up a fight.  She left and Clay wisely used this time to go to the restroom as it was not a good idea to leave the girl with the other dogs.
+Dean and I talked it over and decided that we would each do our best to keep the other from sleeping with Anna, but in our quixotic logic we both agreed that the best way to do this was to each keep the other from the crime by committing it ourselves.  We could have subtitled our logic with the slogan keep others out of trouble by getting yourself into it first or as one other put it, how I found the goddess and what I did to her then” to which I would only add and how she loved it.  As they say good lovers are not born they’re made, like Mafioso bosses its all in the luck of the draw, but once you learn you will never look at life the same again.  You will understand from experience.  The question we were debating when Clay returned was whether or not good a Christian could possibly be capable of satisfying the goddess.  We were in the neighborhood of a no when we had to seamlessly shift gears and make Clay believe that we were not talking about his girlfriend the minute he left the table, but of course he knew wouldn’t you?
+	I managed to suck down one more gin and tonic before the forces of control let Anna loose upon us and we all headed off in her car to this after-hours party that was supposedly in the swanky downtown area that Dean and I had been touring earlier.  When we got there it turned out to be in the bar of a rather posh high rise hotel.  The entire area was blocked off, but a couple of words between the security guards and Anna and we were all whisked in with nod here and there.  Now only was it indeed a part for some band, but this musical flavor of the month had some rather famous friends.  And suddenly Clay’s nightmare deepened because now he didn’t have to worry about Dean or I; there was new competition like Johnny Depp who was sitting by himself in the corner of the bar.  Nor were Dean and I necessarily smitten on Anna anymore when there were an abundance of women that we would have recognized if we bothered to keep up on the fashion industry.  Being from LA Dean, Clay and I were not overly impressed with celebrities anymore, you only run into a couple and then you start to realize that your own friends are infinitely more interesting.  But one thing about celebrity parties that I never get tired of is the free food and booze and the wonderful abundance of substance abuse.  How do you know if you live in LA?  You can’t remember if cocaine is illegal or not.  We made a beeline for the bar and left Clay with Anna who we figured was after all his problem not ours.  We watched the vultures feeding as the celebrities divided and conquered among the groupies, admirers and hangers on.  Its really hard to compete with a guy that’s internationally recognized as a sex symbol so we contented ourselves with the company of a guy who we thought might be the lead singer of the Black Crowes and who might have just been another emaciated scraggly haired kid that looked like the lead singer of the Black Crowes.  In either case we chatted sporadically over the course of a half-hour or so before he offered us a joint.  We graciously accepted and got up thinking we were to follow him outside when he lit it right there in the middle of the bar and with a minimum of discretion passed it to Dean who shrugged and smoked it.
+“Be careful,” the dark locks leaned in closer as if to impart some clandestine knowledge, “this shits pretty hard core.”
+	I laughed in his face but managed to make it look like I was only coughing.  Dean shook his hand and said thanks man don’t worry its cool or some other such dopehead lingo.  From the minute the smoke hit my lungs it was very obvious that something more powerful than what I was used to was at work here.  My toes got tingly and my hands heavy.  Maybe thirty seconds after I inhaled I was catapulted into another universe that bore absolutely no resemblance to the one before it.  Dean’s face went ashen and I thought thank god because I was going to need company on this one.
+	Ten minutes later I found myself discussing the literary merits of Dorothy Allison with Winona Ryder and her brother who I thought was her boyfriend.  What I said I have no idea but I did later make it a point to read bastard out of Carolina and I was some disappointed when Winona Ryder was not in the movie.  She seemed like she genuinely wanted to play that role and in my chaotic state I sensed that she would.  Not everything that comes to you one drugs is brilliant not is all of it ‘just the drug.’  No matter what the prejudice the drug warriors have against chemicals the important thing that they ignore is that the chemicals are interacting with the human mind.  Something happens when you smoke pot that not only feels good but also over time changes the entire way in which your brain processes information whether or not that is good thing is an individual judgement call.  At this particular point that alternative brain function felt that it would only be just and fitting for Winona Ryder to play the lead in a movie version of Bastard out of Carolina.
+	Dean I soon noticed was actually talking the Johnny Depp.  They seemed quite engrossed in conversation and I slid my way out from Winona and her brother and tried to cross the room without running, but I was so paranoid that I inadvertently missed the fact that Anna was calling my name behind me.  Her voice blended in with the cacophonous swirl of background noise that surged and breathed in my ears as if it were a living thing.
+	Thus when she grabbed me from behind I almost punched her in the face I was so shocked.  And I was way to out of it to try to cover up it up; she fairly jumped back from me and then let out a little yelp such that everyone in the room turned there heads.  This was my worst nightmare.  In my gamble to cross the crowded room this was the scenario that was too far fetched to actually happen so I disregarded it and sure enough I was frozen like a deer in the headlights, caught before a roomful of glaring eyes.  Anna came to my rescue and gentle grabbed me by the waist and led me off into the hallway where Clay was waiting.  They were leaving it turned out and if we were to have a ride home now was the time.  I mumbled something about good to see you nice to meet you and ducked back into the party.  This time I successfully navigated the room, but Depp had left and Dean was huddled in the corner looking a bit too much like cornered wounded animal.
+	I dropped in next to him and shook him a bit.
+	“How are you doing?”
+	“I don’t know what that shit was, but I would really like some more.”
+	“Ya.” I scanned the room for the scraggly haired kid but didn’t see him.  It was pushing two in the morning, but the bar shoed no signs of caring and it wasn’t long before a waitress brought us more drinks.  The staff seemed to be the most star struck people in the bar, they all walked about half gawking and half averting their eyes they way people do around so called celebrities.  I’ve always treated celebrities with the subtle scorn that lonely men reserve for hookers, a caustic indifference held out on a stick of sarcasm and belittlement.  I figured that if I were famous that would be more interesting then simple worship.  We watched the room in silence for the better part of an hour.  Dean told me later that he saw them all completely naked and thought that so much time had passed the place had turned into an orgy.  I was musing over what life would be like if the struggle to survive were eliminated.  Dangerous fantasies because you realize that whatever hardships might accompany having lots of money there was always the freedom to do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted.  That most rich and famous people do not take advantage of that fact and work themselves to bones making more and more movies or albums as the case may be is the singular most depressing thing about them.  At a quarter to three last call went out and low and behold Black Crowes guy slid seemingly out of nowhere into the both and offered up the remainder of the joint.
+	“You guys are holding up okay, the last time I shared this shit this girl freaked out and thought it was laced with something and tried to beat me up.”
+	“I hate it when that happens.”  Dean took the rather small remnants of a joint and inhaled deeply.  “My ex-wife tried to beat me up the first time I did mushrooms.  I was really out of it and she came home all pissed off about something and she had never done mushrooms so she had no idea where I was and he started yelling at me on the stairs.  I just kind of stood there and looked at her totally unable to comprehend what she was saying then she pushed me down the stairs and kicked me.  Then my sister through her out of the house.”
+Both Crowes and I were laughing by the time Dean finished his little yarn.  Crowes seemed impressed more that Dean had been married than anything else or maybe that was all of the story that he actually heard seeing how most of the joint had disappeared without us participating. 
+“What was that like man, I mean being married.”
+“Well I don’t really know we were only married two months when that happened I decided after that it was better if we went our separate ways.”
+	“Ya but what was it like to stand at the alter and look at that person and think ya I want to spend the rest of my life with this person.  I mean what does that feel like?”  He put a particular emphasis on fee as if this would someone affect Dean’s response.
+Dean sat for moment in silence staring at his hands.  “I don’t know, uh I never really had that go through my head.  It was just a kind of little thing that got out of control.  She asked me once after knowing her for like three weeks if I wanted to get married and I said sure because I thought she was joking and then next thing I knew she was dress shopping with my mom.  It just happened so fast I didn’t have time to stop it.”
+	This seemed to have a profound impact on Crowes and he withdrew slightly in what I thought was a kind of meditative slouch.  Dean and I exchanged a look after a few minutes and then with still no response we shook the kid.
+	Still nothing.  Hmmmm.
+	“You want to get something for last call?”
+	“Ya that would probably be good.”  I got up and went to the bar.  I got three drinks and set one in front of Crowes who appeared to have settled off into a comfortable coma.
+	“Oh hey, Clay and Anna left.”  I delivered the news as though it were no big deal and then saying it aloud I realized the gravity of the situation.  We were fucked up out of our minds surrounded by people we didn’t know with no way out
+	“Oh really!  How the fuck did that happen?”
+“Uh well they wanted to go I didn’t and you were talking to Johnny Depp so I just kind of ditched them.”
+	“How exactly were you planning on getting home?”
+	“I didn’t really think that far in advance…”
+	“Ya I can see that.”
+	An idea nacently sprang forth in both our minds.  I slide around the booth and prodded at Crowes a few time to make sure he was out for good and then I dug through his pockets to find his valet card.  He didn’t have one so we figured he must have come in one of the limousines we had seen on our way in.  Between the two of us we dragged him out of the booth and with an arm over each shoulder we carried him outside.  It was then as we staggered to keep him from falling over that I noticed another joint in his breast pocket.  I ferreted it away while Dean tried to enlist the help of the valets in locating our ride.  In a few minutes an affable Tom Waites looking character pulled up in a black limousine and offered to drive us all home.  We took him up on it and the three of us kind of pitched Crowe through the door.  The driver, whose name was Jake Anderson, kept the divider window down and I did my best to guide him to marks house.  I had him tuning about in a haphazard way that my autopilot intuition told me would end us up at Marks house.  If you had drawn out our course on a map it would have looked like a staircase and we would have been falling down it like paraplegics thrown from their wheelchairs.
+Eventually I managed to find the house but I felt bad because I had made the guy drive around for the better part of half and hour so I offered him the joint with a warning that it would probably be better not to smoke it and drive.  He thanked me and asked if we wanted to cruise for while and smoke it with him.  Dean ran inside and got Mark and Betty and we all took off to ride around Denver.  Jake took us up the freeway toward Boulder and we pulled over atop a hill.  We sat there for the rest of the night slowly smoking the joint in ten-minute spurts.  Any longer and we were all so high that we forgot about the joint and it went out.  Around six the sun rose over the eastern Colorado plain.  It was a magnificent fiery red and orange spectacle.  Jake told us stories about driving around the rich and famous, my favorite was the time he had driven Axl Rose’s legendary dolphin decaled limo from Hollywood out to palm Springs for the sole purpose of having a taco at some Mexican place that he really wanted to eat at.  Apparently although he didn’t say it outright Jake had driven somebody our here all the way from LA for this concert which if we were to believe him was a political bigwig event that everybody who was anybody was at.  There were more parties at other hotels that we had missed out on.  Jake assured us that they were more of the dame with the didactic tone of the kings lap dog —always superior and never actually participating.  Still he was awfully nice and as the night wore on he seemed to want to join our cross-country journey.  Several times the conversation seemed headed toward a pregnant pause where if we wanted to we could have invited him along.  We didn’t.
+We did however take him to breakfast at a roadside diner that he suggested.  After a hearty meal of eggs and bacon I was ready to call it a night and pass out.  Jake dropped us off at the house around eight and I went to sleep assuming as I always do that I would wake up sober again the next morning.  I didn’t and neither did anyone else.  It was well past ten o’clock at night before any of us felt normal again.  We spent the day sleeping it off or stumbling about the house in a mesmerized trance.  To this day no other drug has fucked me up as completely or for as long as that stuff that Crowe gave us.  He claimed it wasn’t laced with anything and he identified it only as Hawaiian Redhair a potent strain to be sure, but not that potent.  Maybe it was the altitude, maybe it was us.  Quein Sabe. 
+
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+	“I’m here to go…!  I am ready damnit!  Lets get the fuck out of here!
+	Andy is shouting at the talking head on the television screen who just reminded us that this is the space age.  Andy has (wittingly or not) just echoed words written more than thirty years ago; I think something is wrong.  I have always thought something is wrong.  The entire potential of so called reality so outweighs the aajjjjjflk as to make the whole damn circus show seem as worthless as a used tampon, but in spite of that pessimism that lurks behind every thought, if you take Andy’s enthusiasm and mine and combine them you have something bigger you have created the only thing that has ever gotten anyone anywhere, the only energy that the mind feeds on is hope.  I hope that I can see space, I hope that I can set foot everywhere at least once, I hope that I can reach out to my fellow humans in love, I hope that I can suck down all the wine of Europe, I hope that I can eat something latter tonight because I have eaten nothing all day long.  I am man.  that is all I know for sure, I have no future, there is nothing behind me, I am.  I’ll leave it at that because I don’t know for sure that I am a man or a woman or a child or a walrus. Lets go.
+	“Let’s go to dinner.”
+	“Yes.”
+	“don’t worry Sil, I’ll take care of ya, I don’t mind I got money right now and there’s nothing I’d rather do than use it to keep you around a while longer… well maybe I might get rid of you later and go see if I can get a little cunt, but you got your writing to do anyhow….  Whutter u writing these days?  More of that peculiar science-magic-realism stuff like you showed me last night? “
+	“No.  Actually I’m just writing down everything that happens to me.”  And not change a damn word of it either I am thinking.  If the story isn’t working than I’ll change myself, but not the words, the words must lie as they fall.  They aren’t coming from me there coming through me and I finally understand that.  The book will be one narrow slice from the book of man, my slice of man, the reckless, passionate, obscene, perverted, boisterous, obtuse human slice.  I am no longer thinking of who will read it or even what it is about I am thinking only that it has become me, that all of it carries me on its back because I could not move without it, because I am happy to stay inert, because I want only to record that which I have seen and those whom I have known.  No apologies given.  
+	
+Morning.  Cold.  Blanket.  Cigarette.  
+I am staying in Andy’s closet.  The rest of the rooms in the house are full.  Andy lives in the master bedroom, which is really not much larger than the closet; down the hall on the left, in what used to be a sun room (back in the day when people had sun rooms) is Sara, who uses her masters degree in philosophy to wait tables in spiritual peace.  Off the bathroom is Kobyoshi, the last true holy man.  The first day I met him I knew it would be years before I could say anything true about him, if ever.  He is a strange frail lad from Thailand with a mind that far outstretches the meager sphere that his body implies; last night Kobyoshi informed me that he is quitting his position as a research assistant at a nuclear fission lab to pursue a career in ballet.  Fine.  It’s a cheery little household.  None of us are really doing anything.  Outside a purple asylum of fog is retreating across the bay, dragging it’s feet and sulking all the way back to a potato patch near Stinson beach where its said to originate from.  Inside the ringing telephone is a signal of something to do.
+It’s cold still, morning is undercooked.  I can feel the raw drafts that leak through the crack in Andy’s window.  They come in waves wafting in and sinking down to the hardwood floors, swirling about, propelled like a drunken countess’s foul smelling fart.  They seek me out, countesses, farts, drafts; they find me wherever I go.  It creeps in and wraps me up in a dank smoky clamshell. I take another drag off my cigarette and crush it out in the ceramic bowl by my head.  Lying back on the pillow I stare up at the frayed pant cuffs and the hastily tucked shirts that would probably be in better shape if we just threw them on the floor.  I can hear Andy saying yes to something and I hear the phrase “ya I’ll get him up.”
+
+The phone will be Brent; he will want to meet us for breakfast; he knows it’s my favorite meal and he makes it a point to buy me one once or twice a week.  He gets upset if I don’t show because for some reason he is convinced that I am the only one who understands him.  I don’t understand him at all, but I love breakfast; eggs, waffles, bacon, pancakes, fruit platters, home fries, lox on bagels, ham, grits, huevos rancheros, bloody mary’s, mimosas, orange juice, french toast, cereal, count chocula, lucky charms, mangos, papayas, omelets… that’s all I need to understand Brent.  I eat and listen, which in these thin hollow days passes for understanding.
+Andy works at the 23 Bar on the top floor of the building real swanky joint.  He get in about five or six in the morning and he is up again now at nine.  He seems inhuman at times.  There are times when I think he is genius and times when I think he is fool, in either case he is loud and alive.
+Andy is going to dupe them he has told me a thousand times.  It always ends in Costa Rica.  Jungle laced beaches and vermilion palms, coconut milk for lunch in the ocean breezes, warm tropical breezes that blow in from the spice islands, Mandalay; maddening lush nations of hyperspacial teleological reality.  Everything ends in Costa Rica where all time stops and we just stare with absolute certainty on cresting white caps of ocean surf peeling orange in the twilight and burning like outpost camps on the final frontier.  Costa Rica —where we wake up from the nightmare of everything that isn’t, spliced clamshell blades glistening in the chirping twilight of cricket dreams—Costa Rica.
+The door opens and I am besieged by a crazy bearded man with spinning clown eyes attached to the ends of stalks.  Breakfast is served. Andy is the last living human among us and he is only here for a limited time —like various fast food specials, but more nourishing.   Andy is the only one alive; he holds the drunken enthusiasm of those without hope.  To be without hope means that there is no despairing, hope and despair are the same thing at different points in time —they exist only in tomorrowland.  Without Hope everything proceeds in splendor and glory, one is left free to contemplate the details and minutia.
+“So what did you think of Charlize?”
+“Is that the one you were with last night?”
+“Ya ya, come on man get up,” Andy kicks half hearted at my ribs and steps into the closet.  “I mean she was no supermodel I realize that, but did you see that kind of vacant peaceful stare in her eyes?  I was on top of her and I just got lost staring at her eyes; they were like obelisks —arabic mosques… temples or something —like you’re always running on about.  Did you notice that twinge of religiosity about her?  I think she was from Kansas, something weird about those people… so flat… so much sky… they always have an air of wonder that hangs in their eyes….  Have you seen my jacket?  The one with fur lining?”
+	Andy is right over my head looking around the other side of the closet for his jacket.  He’s hopping about trying not to step on me, rattling on about Charlize.  She is going to come into his work again tonight, but that is not so good he informs me, it will blow his chances with the randomness that guides his sexual appetite.  
+	“It’s a Friday see and I didn’t think about that when she said she was coming in.  Fridays you don’t want anyone hanging around because all the cunts that only come out on weekends are there and they’re only there to get a little.  They’d rather it be with the bartender in the backroom… saves them the trouble of going anywhere.  They’re a special kind those girls that work hard all week they go a little bit farther in there spare time… Of course see maybe its good she’s coming in because I really do like her and this way I won’t go off chasing something pointless…..  Do you remember that one a couple of weeks ago; Michelle I think her name was…?  Turns out she had the herps —Ya how do like that, she calls me up and says she tested positive so I went and got tested before work last night… hey,”  He stops looking for his jacket and stares down at me.  He has a wistful look on his face, but his head is upside down and reminds me a potatohead toy with a pasted on goatee and slightly askew lips; eyes that look out of order, screwed up and glinting earnestly at me.  He has a T-shirt wrapped around his head like a turban; "you wouldn’t want to go with me to the clinic would you?  I mean its one of those things… I know it doesn’t kill you or anything, and I don’t have any symptoms… I went mostly to make sure that she wouldn’t accuse me of giving it to her… you know how women get on things like that these days, but still would you mind?  I’d rather have someone there if it does turn out bad for me….”
+	“Sure Andy, we’ll go after breakfast.”  I am mildly touched that he is dragging me into the sordid affairs of his life, that he thinks so highly of me, but they are nevertheless his own sordid affairs.  The shower is weak and barely wets your hair, but it’s hot and it washes off the sticky dampness of morning.  By the time I get out my skin is pink and flushed, aboriginal corpse flesh.  
+
+It just warming up as we climb the hill to the BART station.  We walk up backwards so we can look off at the bay and watch the transformation near the top where for a moment we are above standing in a sea of cloud warmed by the crystal light of morning.  The houses lining the street have window eyes that watch us and doors that yawn at the street.  I nearly trip on the same can of beer that Andy tripped on yesterday, this time I kick it out in the middle of the street.  We’re dizzy and getting vertigo from walking backwards, a freebie Andy calls it.  Charlize is on his brain this morning, he hasn’t stopped talking about her yet.  It a barrage of words and phrases and questions and twirls of logic and flight of fancy and then descending into the station the roar of the train drowns him out, but he never stops.  He has caught some sort of virus, some sort of mad soul disease that has to get itself out in words, in panic because if he stops it might all disappear.  “I know you don’t like the book or any of that, but there will be beautiful women, actresses and hangers on, it like a Hollywood type of thing only right here in the city.  It’ll be fun man Charlize can bring a friend for you if you want, man you should see this girls friends… its catered and everything, open bar, you can smoke on the rooftop and look out at the whole city, its worth it just for that”   
+Food! Now that’s worth any amount of hell, I would trudge across stygian mountains of insipid shallowness, fly low over enemy territory, flak batteries firing pointless banal conversations if only there be a sandwich at the end of the line.  It is wonderful thing to go to bed with a full belly.  Last night I fell asleep with my arms clenched against my stomach to stop the gnawing pain. 
+I went upside down six month ago and in the time since I have distilled myself down to the core of existence; the primal urges, which turned out to be food, drink and sex.  On top of that I plan to liberally heap some ideas and live them out too until I am living sex and living food and living ideas with the guttural hunger of the malnourished bloated belly of the victims of famine, victims of loss, of hunger, of pain, of cold gnawing lunacy clasping ice fingers around the Aqualung hearts of modern man.  
+And now a view too, I started to get curious to the point of asking what it was, but we jostled our way through the gates and joined the crowd.  It’s just after ten when we climb the stairs to Embarcadero Street.  Downtown San Francisco has a cold electrical buzz to it, a peculiar conglomeration of sounds that phase-cancel each other and bounce around in the echo chamber of buildings to create a hoarse faintly bucolic noise.  It rattles your teeth if you focus on it —the combination of a millions of computers humming, ovens cooking, stoves frying, refrigerators opening, cars starting, neon open signs lighting up, and all the other cryptic roaring noises from fires of the human den.  It assails you like the smog in Mexico City or the ocean of cabs in New York.  Too many window-eyes in downtown peering in on you, you lose track of whose watching who or what.
+I remember as a kid wanting to live here; I thought it was the greatest city in the world.  Last night I decided that it’s like any other city in the world.  Last night I decided to stop trying to write a book and instead to live one and in doing so shove all existence back up its own ass and set it off, a deafening roar, burning words blasting the whole thing to shreds.  I decided to bring back Rabelias via the interstellar radio channel of the word behind which all is chaos and unintelligible gibberish, the rattling mouths of saints would fall open aghast and men would tear there succulent eyes from their sockets and feed on them, devouring the insanity that had created.  There would be great golden orgies in the ancient temples of Atlantis and the fires at Almont would re-light after centuries of pitch black silence and out of the warm glow would come the hum of the word.  I will set it all down with the Castagraf, not change a word of it because to blow creation it will have to rough hewn and wind blown like the world it will destroy and create and destroy again.  Rabelias will drink imported beer and belch a million ideas to every one of mine and still hold still for one moment or we will seize upon you we will give in to the voices that besiege us to tear out the eyes and live forever in caves.  But yes Rabelias will be there and he will smoke cigarettes with the angels as golden goblets of blood are served to the practitioners of the ancient faiths.…
+So I decided not to write a book; I decided to write an abomination, all the false propositions held up by the teetering insanity of slander, bias, joy, awareness, idea, thought, faith, death and love can not contain one single shred of life.  Words are only the beginning.  Words make things, this is not a book this is a creation of things.  I am working backward to catch one single moment unawares and hold it up to light and admire its reflection.  To pull out of it the timelessness of eternal nows and stop the shivering voice of collective humanity groping pathetically in darkness.  The entire country is in a state of rabble; the people moved through ruins like the retreating Napoleonic Army leaving Waterloo.  Everywhere the lines are falling back, but it is not real war it’s a ghost war, there is no enemy, nothing to run from, only hunger, the wretched hunger of the human belly which forces us all to shoulder up and trade time in for tickets and ticket for money and money for food… and all the grand dreams, the Horatio Alger myths are nothing more than a bankrupt game of miserly old men smoking cigars and trying to fill there own bellies.  And everywhere the retreat continues, men racing in shadows hiding from everything from everyone who might steal their bread their wine their wives.  They squirm like little bugs fearing heal boot of the old men who are themselves only slightly bigger and therefore more grotesque bugs.  The scene could have come from Dante but it didn’t it came from life itself.  I used to wait for it to change, for the orders to come in to halt the retreat, but one day I got tired of waiting and so I stopped.  I stopped hoping things would be better tomorrow and realized that it didn’t matter one way or another.  Rabelias did his smug ‘now you know’ lip curl that everyone hated him for, but life itself holds out nothing, asks nothing and gives nothing.  Hitherto I had been waiting.  Waiting for something to happen, but now I saw clearly that nothing was ever going to happen, nothing had ever happened and all of history was but the meandering account of sad little creatures burrowing there way through the earth searching for death.  The waiting had driven me mad, I had clutched onto any straw of hope that came my way and they had all turned to dust in my hands.  All imitations of life are false to it, all reflections cast back by art or art under any other name are only broken dreams, hope dashed on the rocks of failure careening like a pirate ship with no port to call home.  And then as it faded out I found myself hovering over the sewage mess of the earth I saw little fires burning, outposts in the western lands, retreat camps where those who had given up the ghostly illusion of hope were congregating.  I drifted down out of the clouds and settled myself near a camp where I could observe and record.  
+
+Brent is waiting for us outside Café Claude, nervously smoking cigarettes and looking more like spectral ghost of machinery than a human being.  He looks worse every time we see him, yet every time we see him he is doing better and better.  The better his life gets the worse his body gets; today I can’t smell him, I can’t smell anything around him, he has sucked smell out of the room into a mysterious cavern.    His hands have started shaking with excitement.  His eyes glow piss yellow.  His voice is pureed smooth with cool collectivity.  Today he announces, opening the door as he says it, that he just landed a new ad campaign that’s going to earn him three thousand a week.  
+Nine hundred of that is addicted to heroin, an additional two thousand will go to pay rent on his swanky downtown loft that he insists of keeping.  Brent would rather starve than live in the slum joints up the hill; his way of staying afloat in the all-consuming ocean of heroin is to elevate addiction to a form of art.  He shoots with an old metal syringe won’t do it with a common ‘junky pick’ as he calls plastic syringes.  He keeps it neatly in a cedarwood box with a hand carved mandala on the front.  He ties off with a leather strap that he claims was tanned by an old Indian expressively for the purpose.  When he shoots up its like watching a magician going through well rehearsed but cryptic methods, the spoon is real silver, the water distilled and filtered, the arm band tight and then bang, in it goes, and the needle is always removed and carefully placed back in the cedarwood box before he allows himself to nod off.
+But then once he comes round again all is cut loose and he turns to a manic clawing about the room scrapping his fingernails down the rough edges of ideas, he has an enthusiasm and energy such as I have never seen in another junky.  He paints like he shoots, everything is methodically laid out and then without warning the frenzy begins, he leaps about in front of the canvas chaotically stabbing out with a passion borne more of frustration than inspiration.  It’s the passion of one who strives for something and no longer knows why.  Brent is the sergeant giving orders who can’t understand why it is that he has to take the hill.  For Brent everything is suspect, life is a paranoid adventure where everyone moves their heads on cake turners, swiveling and scheming for each others mutual demise without know why, without having motivation for anything other than sheer existence.  His only recourse is the ritual it’s the only thing over which he can assert any control and he does it in such a way that gives him total control and then he steps back from himself and lets go.  He claims he wasn’t raised Catholic.
+The drinks are hardly on the table when Brent launches into how, despite his recent successes as the art director for an advertising firm, everything is more or less going to hell in a hand basket.  I for the most part agree with him, but for wholly different reasons. Brent only invites us in order to have an audience for his misery, meanwhile breakfast brews like an oceanic storm.  The tempest starts slowing, small lapping boat wakes at first, orange juice, a plate of fruit and cheese, I try not to woof it down because I am not accustomed to rich foods —richness, Brent claims, is merely ritualized discontent.  Breakers roll into the jetty brings basil and tomato stuffed crepes oozing jack cheese.  The walls swim in light, floating textures of papaya and palpate with sleek smooth fruit flesh.  The other patrons begin to veer and swerve about, their food passes by rousing a selfish hunger, dessert carts cloud up the sky and signal the coming danger, and then finally the tsunami.  A beautiful girl named Holly serves me french toast dusted with sugar and swimming in syrup.  On a separate plate she dishes out scrambled eggs with dark crispy strips of bacon; a feast fit for kings and yet it is only me so I decide that I am king.  I decree that all should eat and all shall eat with gusto and fever like hungry animals snarling in the blood soaked guts of sweat and sex; the animal appetites so long in slumber shall be woken afresh to stretch there muscles and devour the world in a single gulp, skewering art, chewing up delicacy and putting it back where it belongs in the churning stomach of slime and guts.  I decree that Holly is lascivious and shall be rewarded for wanting the flesh, the warmth.  The restaurant turns to a saturnalia and patrons falls into unadulterated orgies of stinking flesh smeared with sweat and cum; they regress into hair covered hunchbacks slobbering and drooling, crawling all over each other with snarling lust, all the hidden stresses of their lives turn them backward, relics of DNA that reek of perfumes, jewels, and other masks to cover the organic septic tank of their origins.  By the end of the meal I am in pain again clutching my stomach and loosing my belt, the richness of the food swells on contemplation and we float, whisked by vaporous entrails back out into the street.  
+Because Brent bought breakfast I talk Andy into buying us a cup of coffee.  We catch a cab to North Beach because Brent refuses to use public transportation —another method of rising out of the cesspool, the crème of the junky crop.
+“I’m gonna check into a clinic as soon as I get this job finished because I’m tired of struggling to get junk when I should be enjoying my life.  You know this is the first time I’ve left the house in three days?   If I do go out its only over to Oakland to get some shit and then straight back, I’m sick of it, sick to death, but you can’t just quit you know… or at least I can’t.  I need to be forced off the shit, weaned slowly…”
+“You serious?”  Andy retains great faith in Brent; I retain great faith in heroin.
+“Ya.  And I know I’ve said it before but this time I mean it, I gotta get off of this roller coaster and do something with my life.”
+I laugh in his face, I just couldn’t help it, but he ignores me and continues on.  “I want to travel see the world, see my painting hang in a gallery; I went to an opening about a week and half ago and it was terrible.  Fucking terrible!  Lacquered checks that was one of the pieces, just lacquered ordinary bank checks!  What the fuck is that about?”
+Brent has given me this very same spiel about quitting several times before.  He has heroin and painting tied to the same hitching post of intervention.  He is convinced that he only needs to find the right person to represent him, give him money or at the very least just believe in him and he will sell paintings or quit heroin or fly to the fucking moon if that strikes his fancy.  He needs this mythological character to help him because he doesn’t believe in himself and he never has from what I can gather.  He is always putting the final touches on the perfect piece, but it’s never done, we can’t see it until it is exactly as he wants it, as if the thing had no life beyond what he was capable of vesting it with, and indeed for that very reason his painting don’t have any life beyond him.  Some of them are very good, but he won’t let them out of his sight.  They aren’t even paintings anymore they were representations of his entire enormous bloated cosmology distilled into crystalline existence by mysterious forces of his own will.  Brent should have been a priest, he was better suited for a life where nothing can ever possibly be experienced, where hope keeps you outside life, everything is constantly elsewhere, unreachable, only to be shouted at and begged for.  He was a cur dog lapping at the crumbs fate had dealt him when all the while everything he ever wanted was sitting right on the other side of the door.  It was torturous to listen to; the minute the cab stopped I slipped out like a neutrino.
+We stop in at La Boheme, THE place for an artist to be seen in San Francisco.  Brent loves the place because it's full of college students that look up to him and give him the feeling of having an audience, having a group of disciples.  The kids are still all right, and years after the Who weighed in the appraisal, but they talk too much.  They are drunk on their own voices and they don’t have anything to say yet, they haven’t lived yet to know one thing from the next they only dance like hopped up caffeine chipmunks or deranged marsupials lifting their hind legs to mark intellectual territories.  In the corner back against the way is Satre and depression, up by the window looking out on the tables that line the sidewalk are the poets of divine light sucking up every lyric word of Ginsberg and Yeats; the only ones I can stand are the ones that work behind the counter and know the value of human kindness.  Little groups divided and conquered before they knew there was a war going on; La Boheme is a trough urinal at a baseball stadium, people sit at booths and stand by tables peeing out their mouths.  The neo-bohemian set is pissing all over themselves with extravagant warm streams of urine out of one and into the mouth of another where the recipient will swill it around for a day, maybe two, and then piss the same thing into the mouth of another.  Recycling at its finest, but I only hate it because I outgrew it.  There was a time when I pissed with the best of them, but now I just order a cup of coffee and head outside where the tourists sit.  Walking to the door I smile at the sound of piss splashing, great Niagara’s cascading from the mouths of privilege, children of tomorrowland who mortgage the future for a bit of today.  Children who can’t stop pissing out inane theories and ideas, principles and mottoes, quoting dead authors like their words where written solely for them to drink down.  Drink rich and deep and then piss it out like a bulimic myna bird mimicking everything it hears, the voice is hollow detached, devoid of feeling.  I find a corner table and wait for nothing.  The kids are all right.
+Out in the fields… the sun, the moon and the stars to keep shining, Brent will kick junk, the bohemian children will be flash pasteurize in the blinding white light of creation.  The world will curdle like sour milk, buttermilk, sweet and sour strange beautiful new fungus will grow a slick slime on top of the curdle.  Nothing and everything will join forces in celestial alchemy and produce —something.  The world will escape the nightmare of history.   James Joyce will come waltzing down the street with great crowd of children gathering behind him.  Bugs Bunny, Rabelias, Harvey Milk, and Anwar Sadat will be sitting at the head of great float, bespeckled with roses and bearing a banner that reads: Come As You Are.  Forget life; forget everything only come as you are.  When there is no hope there is no despair, there is only now, no plans, no future, just now.  And that is utterly more valuable than the despair of misguided hope.  Despair exists only for those who are unhappy in the moment, those who live future bound or those that choke to death on the weighted words of the past.  
+  Andy and Brent swing through the door bearing enormous cups of coffee and Faith, one of girls that works mornings at La Boheme and whom I am in love with.  Her head curls back in slow rippling laughter with the jerkiness of stop-motion film, her nuclear blue eyes dance in sunshine when there is none, she breaths different air than the rest of us.  She is missing nothing. She belongs to a hidden race of seekers, of living people dead to the world, those who take the body and eat.  The rest of us do not know what she knows; we are looking still like some forgotten, wayward evolutionary glitches lying in languid rooms of far off dream cities —Paris, Prague, Peking, Peoria, or St Petersburg.  She is dancing in a netherworld dream with Joyce and the rest, ripe like a pomegranate, bursting forth pure cleansing light that washes over us, cleansing the urine out of our minds, the poisons from our bodies until all is love.  Because all is love and it only takes Faith to show it.  Love should never have been a verb, it is object of love, the noun, that initiates its action, that mysterious thing that is not an action at all but a moment, a fleeting feeling that draws us out of ourselves, beyond this world and the next.  It is not Faith at all, it is me, everything is radiating out of me….  The Eucharist of flesh will lead the way out of the valley of the shadow of death to borrow from the ancients, and we will lie beside the oracle as Van Winkle beside his river and together we dream eternal.  No more waiting, we are here to go… Faith… Sky…. Dizzying leaf patterns chaotically thrown up by Maples, Oaks, Birch…. An Italian family with a stroller…. Circling swooping gulls… the dull hum of the city… inorganic and intoxicating… without human passion it becomes all too metallic and dull… shimmering like a mirage in the heat of existence… Faith… breasts heaving with laughter… Faith… hair dancing on the strings of the ninth….
+
+Later, after Brent leaves, Andy draws me aside and asks if I am still going with him to the clinic.  I had forgotten entirely, we have to get rid of Faith; we make false excuses and head off in opposite directions and rendezvous on the other side of the block, all of which was Andy’s clever plan for giving Faith the slip.  He’s in love with her too.  Everyone is in love with Faith.  It so happens that we meet in front of the American Express Travel Agency; the lush photograph of New York from the sky that hangs in the window temporarily freezes us both.  The tag below it reads: only 399 roundtrip!  
+“Damn it man if I don’t have the herps lets head down to LA for the weekend, Kobyoshi’s got enough money to buy gas and my bus is running quite well.  I bet you could talk him into going to see his family and then we’ll tag along…look up Dean and Ed?  See what’s changed down there?”
+“Absolutely nothing I would imagine…”
+“Alright then lets go somewhere, anywhere, lets just get out of the damn city for while… doesn’t it bear down on you?  Man I think I’m going to go mad sometimes when I look up and I can only see a tiny little sliver of sky.  I get claustrophobic in these buildings, with all these damn people scurrying about like ants.”  He pauses because we’re walking uphill and out of breath.  “The thing is you have to have money to travel, you have to have leisure time, you have to get up and catch flights at hours of the day that I don’t see… you have to do all these things and then you go somewhere for like a week and then to top it all off the whole time you’re there wherever you go… it doesn’t really matter… every time you see a clock it reminds you that you have to leave.  Do you get that?  Man when I see a clock when I’m on vacation I get furious I remember throwing one out the window when I was in Mexico, it’s like they put ‘em there to make sure you won’t stay, to remind you that this is there paradise and you can enjoy it for a time but then… you gotta go gringo!  Then home again back to the grind, only its worse then because you know that everything you loved about your vacation is still there going on the same as always without you being able to enjoy it.”  We stare in silence at the picture of New York.  “Of course if I do have the herpes I’m going to get monumentally depressed and jump out the window tomorrow night….”
+“Isn’t it hard for a man to get herpes?”
+“How the hell should I know, I mean they told us all that in health class I think, but when you’re seventeen you don’t listen to that crap —that’s what happens to adults, its not going to happen to us you know?  Shit even if it did I wouldn’t have believed it back then, I mean here we are trying to discover this wonderful sweaty world of sex and they march right in the door and tell us its going to kill us?  That shit used to piss me off, just one more way of still reinforcing the old Christian idea that sex is dirty.  And then I have to sleep with the people who did listen and they have all these terrible neurotic beliefs about love and sex and they can’t understand how I might possibly want to just fuck because it feels good and I don’t need much motivation beyond that… how do you do it man you always seem to sleep with these wonderful liberated women that actually enjoy sex… you’re always getting the kinky ones, I envy you on that….  I might get laid more, but you’re record speaks of quality, real quality not drunken bravado or pointless casual sex.  Sara and I were talking about that the other day… I think she’d like to get a piece of you; I think she’s tired of hearing the moaning and wondering what you do to provoke it.  You should give her a lay man, she’s practically dying for it.”
+We were at the door of the free clinic on Hyde.  It was quite a scene —all the effeminate fags from the Castro district decked out in loud colors, a riot of magentas, oranges, sapphires, rainbows of happy homos getting free condoms marching out the door with a badge of -I Get Laid-plastered on there foreheads and accompanied by the sublime look that only the face of a horny male can radiate.  I waited outside observing the gay community while Andy went in and got his results.  Gays are like the Jews, they have been relegated to history's ghettos. They have found themselves in the dungheaps of humanity and carefully painstakingly rearranged the dung to form beautiful living communities.  Fragile rickety alliances, one borne of blood the other of sexual preference, and both cultures have the ghetto sensibilities and lust for life that is lacking in the stuffed bellies of their oppressors.  I wonder how long it will be before we have a gay president?  I wonder if we have already had one and didn’t know it?  I pity the first openly gay president; his lot will be a rough one, along with the first woman, the first black, the first Hispanic.  In America if you aren’t a straight white male you are a freak from the get go, the whole thing is set up, even the ones who aren’t persecuting you want to know about “your people” or what its like to be gay or black… are your friends gay?  Are your friends black?  The Jews have been here for long enough that the daft ignorant Martha’s vineyard set that seems to be running things have about figured them out  —its not tres chic to be Jewish anymore, sorry.  But just about anything else… especially lesbians.  From the scene around LA you would think that the vast majority of the population had just realized that lesbians existed.  As the new creations, the cultural left turns begin to leave the pond and gain the notice of the so-called mainstream they are greeted on one side by hatred and on the other by incredulous fascination.  Either way you turn you are no longer human, you’re lesbian, you’re black, you’re Mexican, you’re gay, you’re fat, you’re a vegesexual, and then if we can wrap our feeble minded idiocy around that…. Then in a hundred years or so we just might remember that you are first and foremost a human.  Its enough to make one want to die or crawl back into the uterus and go for a second take… only a trial run you see… never realized we were on trial….
+Nietzsche talked and wrote a lot about the dead, the inhuman, the new philosophers he called them.  A strange breed this those that turned there back on the so-called human values and proudly declared themselves in human.  He believed that as time went on more and more would turn there backs and let the false pretense of the world die its horrid stinking death, and he was right, but he didn’t take into account the mutual growth of humanity.  Humanity this loose leafed term through which all the pages of history are turned like that dream of idiots, humanity sprints through time in a straight line, the arrow launched by cupid that hit the apple in eve’s hand and sent it whirling to the far reaches of the galaxy.  Beside, running parallel, but on a different set of track, the track of individuals, run the stream engines of Nietzsche's beliefs.  All these artist of the future to which he spoke are dead to the world.  The world won’t give them so much as a hasty acknowledgement, the world is still trying to figure out why some people like boys and some like girls, the world can not look itself in the mirror it slinks like a shamefaced soldier who ran from the battle to the comfort of his own dead mothers bosom.  The world rots on top of the dead god’s cunt.  Head stuck to the primordial womb like imbeciles or children that suck their thumbs.   Look at all the pretty things, lovely things, look at what we have built, look at what we can do!  Look at all the pretty pictures; hear the pretty stories and sleep tight at night!  Never never dare to question the underlying fundamentals shake up your field if you must but leave the essential framework of shithouse alone.  And yet every real change, every real improvement to the lot of the uncommon common man has come from the mind of the marginalized minority; we crawl down here in the basement where you pay us no mind and slowly like industrious beavers we gnaw at the wood frame of the house the monkeys built.  The house that world trembles in fear of us and we will bring it crashing down one day, the beavers, the termites, the wood fungi, the decay always wins in the end.  Children of the true warmth know that, they watch it, they live it, first they eat themselves out and then they turn their back and sinking out of sight, but they are not gone, no they are here —invisible.
+
+Andy did not have the herps.  Faith came by the house around seven to take me to dinner.  I was more than happy to ditch Andy’s party which it turned out was a wrap party for Francis Coppola’s new film On The Road.  I always hated Kerouac’s Jock/Buddhist inanity and I definitely didn’t care to hang out with bloated egos dedicated to recreating that inanity.  Faith was wearing tight black leather pants and a thin strapped sleeveless shirt that barely contained her breasts.  I would have followed her gladly right across the Styx, but she only wanted Italian food and patio seating so we went to Luna and sat under the soft glow of heat lamps.  It was an eerie little patio; the heat lamps burned the pea soup fog off so that the air was damp, but clear.  About twenty feet up it dissolved into a misty whiteness that acted as a kind of raised outdoor ceiling.  Bread and salad arrived without a word from either of us —the mark of great restaurant.  When food is served without being requested there is a hint of what lies at your finger tips, it whets the appetite and opens up a world of edible delights that seems more enigmatic and inviting than the simple words of the menu.  It wasn’t just bread either, it was flatbread fried and delicately coated with fine strips of lox and sprinkled with capers and sprigs of parsley.  Nina insisted on a bottle of cabernet before anything else.  I studied her face as she prattled on about the various wines her then boyfriend had introduced to her.  She had a nose for wine, Faith, she hardly needed her boyfriends help, in fact it was Faith that had gotten me on the endless wine kick that left me in terrible standing with the average red-blooded, beer drinking males that I tend to have as friends.  I remember the first night I met Faith or re-met her, since really I have known her forever.  The first night I met her was in a bar down the street from my old place in LA; she was leaving for Paris the next morning —I have a history of meeting people just in time for them to disappear, but Faith didn’t disappear she came back and we became good friends. One night she showed up again, same bar, different night.  It turned out she had been back for some time and was seeing a clothing designer who lived somewhere in a loft downtown, he was coming she wanted me to meet him.  But then he stood her up and Faith started to stew.  We sat at the bar and drank for a while and then she hatched this crazy plan to get back at the designer boyfriend… we ended up breaking into his loft and stealing two bottles of Merlot, Louis Felipe Edwards private reserve. We drove down the coast and up a hill overlooking the ocean where we sat in moonlight and looked at the twinkling lights of Laguna Beach.  There was a little kissing maybe even some groping but it has faded into memory.  I introduced her to Andy and they too became the best of friends so much so that when she found out we were all in San Francisco she came up herself.  And now as she prattled about Cabernet and Merlot and Pinots and whatnot all the kissing and groping is definitely gone and there is only this strange lovable girl Faith, that is more beautiful than anyone I have ever gone to bed with, but I have no desire to go to bed with her.  It sets me in a weird mood to spend time with Faith.  She makes me question my value system and what I want… that is to say that I want her and yet I don’t want her and this leaves a sort of tension in the air that makes everything prickly and more alive than when I am with most others.  That’s why I love her.
+“What are you going to do with yourself Sil?”  She has that look of concern in her eyes, it a look that says far more than the question itself.  Faith knows me well enough to know that I can take care of myself, but she likes to know my plans.
+“Dunno, no plan yet…”
+“At least you left that awful ogre…” she laughs.  She is referring to my ex-wife, Amy.  It was only six months ago but already I have trouble remembering her face.  Amy hated Faith.  Women always hate women that they know are more attractive than them, so I stopped seeing Faith, but Faith had quietly waited in wings while Amy ran her course and now that she was gone Faith could finally gloat.  It was a healthy gloat,  “I told you… you run off with these girls and don’t talk to me for practically years… but you always come back to me.”  Her face lit up with a kind of pride.  “That’s why we don’t have sex… I love you too much to let you go getting possessive and jealous and whatever it is that you men turn into when you stick your little things into us….”  She laughed again.
+“We could always give it a shot… you know maybe test the theory…?”
+“No.” She popped a stray caper in her mouth and smiled sarcastically.
+“Okay.  But I still think we could have some great sex….”
+“I don’t doubt that, but I don’t need great sex as much as I need great friends.  Besides,”  she cracked that mischievous smile again; “your cock doesn’t have dual speed settings and a clit massager….”
+“You don’t know that for sure….”
+“Uh huh… call it an educated guess… what do you think of the wine”
+“Yes the wine… its good…”
+“Stop it… I am wearing clothes you know…
+“Yes it’s a true tragedy…”
+“Sil you’re starting to annoy me… haven’t you had any sex lately?”
+“Ya friend of Andy’s… she wasn’t very good though.”
+“What do you mean?”
+“I don’t know… some people have an enthusiasm for sex and others don’t you know?  Well she didn’t”
+“Too bad.”
+“Ya”
+Dinner swings through, Linguini with clams, more bread, more wine, and more wine more wine.  Faith won’t stop talking about this new guy, though I never caught his name.  It doesn’t bother me though I am swimming in wine, dark crimson waves, coasting down to the tough where I lean my chair back and slouch into a comfortable relaxed position.  The sea splendor lies at my feet, the candles, the little crystal salt and pepper shakers; the lupines in the rusted water can vase on the rock patio wall.  Everything is exactly as it should be, Faith’s voice is a canary flitting gaily from branch to branch every thing unfolds with a peculiar splendor that comes from a kind of hyperawareness as if time itself slowed down to let us catch a glimpse of the timeless point toward which we strive.  It would not surprise me if Faith took off her clothing and lay back on the table for me to ravish and ravish it I would with preternatural desires frog-leaping off the spring boards of clamshells which are circled on her naked smooth stomach.
+Instead Faith orders another bottle of wine; “Can I ask you a question?”
+“Sure.”
+“Umm well this might sound kind of weird but I need some help here….  Have you ever not been able to, you know, get a boner?”
+The way she said boner made me laugh, such a strange way of putting it, a bone in my prick, a skeletal pile driver, “A boner huh?”
+“Well, whatever a hard on, you know what I mean.”
+“He he he, yes I do, as a matter of fact… nevermind…  Umm, well that’s depends how you define things….  There have been times when I was so drunk I had the good sense not to try having sex….”
+“No I mean not drunk or anything… you just couldn’t get it up….”
+“Faith I’m only twenty seven… ask me again in twenty years… why?”
+“I dunno the other night we were fooling around and I tried to go down on him and it wouldn’t get hard… I mean I didn’t want to have sex or anything, I just wanted to go down on him.  I don’t know if it’s me?  Or it’s just something that happens sometimes to guys.  Am I doing something wrong?”
+“I wouldn’t know obviously… um how old is this guy?”
+“Thirty eight.”
+“Oh shit.  God please let me be able to get it up…  That’s gotta be nightmare…   I mean what if it just stopped working one day?  I wonder about that sometimes.  I mean I hear these sorts of stories or read about them in magazines and such, but it’s a problem I can’t relate to… yet.  It must be weird I mean if you were to just whisper a few words in my ear I could fuck you right here on this table… they tell me that I am well past my sexual peak, but I don’t see it.  I think it mainly happens to men whose wives get fat, whose jobs are stressful you know factors I don’t have in my life….”
+“But what if it’s me?”
+“Ya so?  What do you do when you’re down there?”
+“Uh I don’t know the usual I guess…”
+“The usual what the fuck is the usual?  Does he just march up and say ‘I’ll have the usual?’”
+(Laughing) “No…. you know I lick …and nibble …and suck and… I don’t know….”
+“The secret is all in the hands.”
+“The hands?”
+“Yes the right combination of hands and mouth and saliva, saliva is key… you have to be messy about it.  There's a little licking a little sucking then the hands… and don’t forget we have balls… women seem to forget that we have balls.  Give em a lick or two… real gentle there though otherwise it hurts….  Jesus I’m turning myself on.”
+“I do all that stuff… that’s the usual isn’t it, I mean I’ve seen a few pornos and girls are always talking about that shit…”
+“Right, well, then its him… maybe he had an off night….”
+After dinner we caught a cab over to Sausalito and walked around for a while.  For some reason Faith got it into her head that we had to go into a paint your own pottery store and, well, paint some pottery.  Some sort of artifact to remind us of this moment.  She was very into that sort of thing, always saving wine bottles, picking up rocks at the beach, chopsticks from Chinese food we shared during the black out two months ago.  It wouldn’t surprise me if she saved condoms from her ex boyfriends.  We went to Color Me Mine because Ed’s father owns it.  I chose a giant ashtray and swabbed it dully in mottled gray paint.  Faith went in for a rice bowl and was adorning it with fairly intricate patterns of astrological symbols and such.
+“I got a tarot reading the other day… the woman told me all about my relationship with Garret; it was kind of creepy… she was pretty accurate.  She also said I would get a role in a film soon and the next day my friend Brian called and wants me to do his student film….”
+“You think all that happened because of the astrologer?”
+“I am a very religious person, you know that.’
+“Ya I know, its just refreshing, I forgot about it.  Everyone I know is so cynical about things like that, we’ve all chased down the mystery for so long its not a mystery anymore.  Its good the hear someone speak with a little Faith in their voice.  No pun there." 
+“None taken.  But thank you.”
+“It was telling Andy the other day that I think intelligence has become synonymous with cynical… some sort of legacy of Freud and Nietschze.  It might be that all these new fangled explanations of the world, like psychology or science in general are easier to understand than something that requires faith, but they loose something… you know?  I think to be completely convinced of something —even if you find yourself in disbelief years later— is one of life supreme joys.  I love to fall.  Love to be taken in…it doesn’t matter if it’s the latest theory of physics or the ornate world of new girlfriend... the thing is never that important it’s the feeling I get from falling in completely and being immersed and saturated with belief.  Fantastic!”
+“I know.  That’s why I didn’t get mad at you for ignoring me for two years... when you were with Amy, I knew that you didn’t love her you loved the idea of her… I knew you would be back someday.”  She smiled at me.  It was a smile of supreme happiness of one who was falling… it was beautiful to look at, floated there in the air, not teeth not gums not flesh and blood, but some understanding of the universe that came from the fall.  The fall of man.  The redemption of being human.  I painted a whale on the bottom of the ashtray as an after thought.  
+Walking home we debated whether or not modeling made one stupid and whether or not Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie would produce the ultimate manifestation of DNA or whether the forces of nature would intervene and create a monster.  And of course the tragedy inherent in the fact that we would never get to know.  Faith kissed me at her steps and went inside.  I sat down to smoke a cigarette, but her new beau pulled up so I slipped off.  I didn’t want him to get any wrong ideas about the situation.  As I left I tried to throw a little sexual energy his way, to maybe send it across invisible wires that run between all of us.  I stayed up for while smoking under the cover of inky still darkness watching the blue gray rings of smoke drift about in the still air.
+
+
+
+
+2
+The hard working faceless men assemble morning to perfection.  The work feverishly all night long hauling in raw materials from the future and set about building now.  Now they are hard at work on now they are hard at work on now they are hard at work on.  Strange Loop.  A new manicure of rain adorns the streets and houses everything is freshly washed.  Brent doesn’t call for breakfast anymore, he is in jail.  This morning, before he went to go see him, Andy told me to be on edge, be aware he said… Sara is getting tired of teasing, she want to know if she can cash in her chips he says…  make me into some sort of sexual servant
+Sara is standing in front of the bay window that looks out from the kitchen onto the patch of yard behind the house.  She is wearing a purple satin robe with ochre trim, her leg is propped up on a chair and she sways with the stereo, with Mile’s screaming horn.  Her flesh is milky white against the dark robe and, as she turns back around toward me, the light catches the vee of her legs and frames it in purple majesty.  I can see momentarily through the robe, the finest silhouette in which hides the delicate forest of gnarled hair sparkling purple light right in my eye.  She walks back to the stove and scraps at the eggs; she swings her ass to the music, but only for my benefit.  Do not worry Sara.  I have decided that I must have you, but it must be the right moment.  Be on edge; be aware!  I am letting you grow inside me Sara I am incubating you for a little while longer so that when you hatch it will be like stepping into a cage with lions, no club, no gun, only fear and throbbing.
+She looks nubile standing at the stove, one hand on the frying pan, the other scratching absently at her thigh.  She is naked unaware.  She turns around with the skillet and gently piles over-cooked eggs onto my plate.  Smiling at me, “what?” she says.  Nothing Sara, nothing at all.  I am eating you while you sit there and smile.  I am watching you watch me.  I am seeing what you see.  I feeling your own touch against your own skin when you masturbate in the afternoons.  When you think that I am hard at work on this book.  When I sit at the machine I can hear you stirring awake.  I can see you smile to yourself as you stroke your cunt slow and soft.  The rain swept wind that comes in the window and circles your room is watching you too.  We are both watching you, we are both running our hands over your body as you pull, tweak and tug at your clit.  We are the warmth of your cunt, the slick coating of desire that you rinse off in the shower.  
+There is daytime drama playing out in this house.  Kobyoshi deserted us for New York, but he told me I was welcome whenever I wanted.  I smiled and took his room.  I have been working hard at the book that is not a book; it is bloated with telegraphs from faraway lands.  I sit in my room all day receiving and dispatching cryptic telegrams.  A monumental structure begins to take shape.  I have nearly constructed the sponge that will absorb everything, the sponge that will erase the world and scrub it free of vermin and lice.  Soon San Francisco will be gone it will be absorbed into infinity and the three of us will stand on the skeletal shores of napalm seas and light our cigarettes with simmering coals that line the charcoal beach.
+Andy and Sara both work nights and sleep all day so I have peace and quiet in which to work, but I hear Sara moaning every afternoon about three and then I know to wrap up whatever I am doing because that new drama that is Sara and me will begin again.  Andy mostly just watches; he is happily dating Charlize and for the first time in his life seems to have lost interest in pointless numerical sex, the sex of notches.  I gave Charlize a copy of 100 days of Sodom behind his back and told her that Andy wanted to explore domination and submission but didn’t have the courage to bring it up for fear she would leave him.  He hasn’t said anything, but I notice that he never takes off his shirt in front of us anymore.
+Every afternoon the three of us crack a bottle of wine and sit in the kitchen, eat breakfast, drink and talk.  Sara is like me; everything anyone says only reminds her of something she has read.  She makes me glad that I was able to drop out of college before I got in as deep as she did.  There is no green sapling life in her, it’s buried under the words of the past before it ever has a chance to come out and live in the sun. She will get herself out of it eventually, the branches break through in the end for most everyone; her obsession with getting me in bed is already making her cheeks glow a little.  As much as she hates her overly analytical self she is an artist with it.  Her words tear out and rip the room to shreds.
+“Why do you think differently when you drink?  And more importantly how do we know that what comes out when you’re drunk isn’t the real you?  And if it is then why aren’t we drunk all the time?” she would ask.  How is one to answer such a question?  It rhetorical of course, she knows Andy and I aren’t going to respond, its just a launch pad and then off she goes, rocketing into the space of her own carefully constructed latticework of belief. It’s a strange little world she wants to build; everything is constantly subject to the harshest of criticisms and the most obsessive of critiques.  She could talk for hours if we didn’t add our two cents worth of nonsense designed to quite things down a bit, to bring her down for minute or two.  Sometimes she will catch herself and stop; she will smile and apologize as if she had offended someone unseen by carrying on.  It was terrible to listen to sometimes, but I loved it, it was fascinating to watch.  The wine and the fact that she was too brilliant to match wits with and get out alive quaffed any criticisms I might have had.  I gave up on philosophy for the simple reason that it failed to accurately resonate with the world of existence.  For me the chaotic registers of the poets and novelists captured the illusive passion of reality far better in the garbled code of metaphor and analytic insights of the philosopher.  I would write her silently while she talked; her body spoke its own language when she was lost out there in the ephemeral universe of ideas and words.  Sara awakened in me some crude and primordial translator that read body language as if it were words.  I learned how to interact with her by responding to various unspoken body movements and discovered to my amazement that it is easy to convey information without opening your mouth.  Sara Sara come down I would sing… come down from your heights… the body is electric… come down… 
+man leaning on fence…terra cotta… firma…smell of perfume… egg and bacon grease on her hands… floral shampoo lingering in the hair… a leg shifts… the card house crumbles…sing humans… Sara come down….
+ 
+As I started to say, this morning everything is freshly constructed and virgin.  I leave Sara to incubate for a while longer and go for a walk. One of my oldest memories is of walking down a trail in a forest somewhere.  I am singing a song as I walk, but I am not really walking, I am on my dad’s shoulders and I am singing a song with him and my mother.  We are hiking down a mountain somewhere, but I can’t see the forest; I can’t hear the song or see my parents.  I just have the fuzzy outlines of it all.  The song is right there on the edge of the memory, it has been all morning, but I can’t bring it in and hold it for long enough to catch it.
+Not having anywhere particular to go, I head for the one thing that is visible everywhere on this side of town —Coit Tower.  Coit Tower is a beautiful spot, from the proud phallic heights I can see all of the city teeming with people, food, desire, dreams, music, sex.  San Francisco is full of sex.  It marches down the street in great parades, it sneaks into the back stalls of bar bathrooms, it tugs at its clothes in alleys, it gives discreet blowjobs in movie theatres; fitting then that it should have a giant concrete cock looking over it.  
+The trip across town from Ashbury where the house is through the mission district, across Little Italy and up Coit Hill is a sociological tour.  The Mission District has many of the landmark houses that you have seen of San Francisco, the fronts are colorful and happy, but is artificial and only looks colorful and happy in postcards.  In reality they are at the catacombs of the city, the doldrums south of the equator.  They are home to the middle class city dweller, an aging variety of Consumerus Americanus, usually grouped with the yuppies but wrongly so.  These peculiar neighborhoods are the breeding ground of the suburbs.  These are in fact why there are suburbs.  The Mission is set back from downtown and is a primarily residential neighborhood steeped in the lukewarm water of mediocrity.  It is here that librarians, office managers, public officials and otherwise uneventful people arise from, and it is here that the whole suburban utopia of better newer shinier gadgets was born.  But this is the first wave, here the old gadgets stick out and show the datedness of their owners.  Here you can tell a residents age by the color and type material that covers their windows.  The first wave is reaching their fifties, they were overrun, can no longer keep up, they were the ones trampled down on the battlefield of progress, they did not win, they failed even to retreat, they lie where they fall waiting for stretcher bearers to carry them off to the morgue.  They have cellular when they should have digital, they had beta when they should have waited for VHS, and they got the eighttrack player installed in their car about a month before the advent of the cassette.  This post war generation turns around in profound confusion, they are assaulted on all sides by constant change, they have felt out of control ever since the first greaser put a comb in his pocket and took one of their wives behind the college stadium and showed her what sex should be like.  The wanted to discover the world and instead they discovered the world of gadgets.  Now they wander about like zombies, preoccupied with the future, but too cautious to gamble on it; their children are gone, there is no laughter in their houses anymore.  They are always going somewhere, doing something when all the while a little voice is driving them mad whispering sweet perfumed fables in their ear like: it is all nothing….  They never say hi or wave like gays do further down in Castro, they don’t try to hustle you like the Hispanics and blacks downtown.  There are no homeless people in this neighborhood, better to lie in a rat infested dumpster downtown than to lie here.  Makes you nervous, a neighborhood where people won’t sleep on the streets, whether its for fear of the cops or the thugs makes no difference they’re both in the same league.  The denizens of the Mission District all walk with there eyes glued to the ground if they are alone or glued to the person they are with, the world slips by unnoticed by them, they are creatures of habit, serial killers never plague them, they are too easy.  
+Little Italy by contrast is bursting with life and hidden treasures.  Shop fronts are still in the neighborhood instead of relegated to a separate block.  There is the common bond of blood flowing in the streets, the area is shrinking but it needs to.  It needs to regroup itself because it was in danger of becoming just more suburbia.  Suburbia is isolation; here everything is thrown together in a big messy smelly, beautiful shit sty.  The streets are littered and the children play with garbage, but it has vitality, even the trash is used.  Here people smile at me, nod, even say hello.  Many of them are recent immigrants transplanted from Italy and many from new York where Little Italy is all but gone, overrun as is happening here, by Chinatown.  Down here the world is still moving and changing, what is now covered in green white and red may next year be adorned with dragons and Chinese scripts.  Nothing is certain and you see it in the faces of the people, they are aware, alive because they have to be, because if they lull themselves they will be over run.  But they are not paranoid they are acceptant of their fate, they are in fact consigned to it, its part of there culture to be overrun and yet still find ways to carry on.  Europe has overrun and survived itself more times the we will ever likely get, it has added extra chromosomes to the souls of its people, they have a resilient spirit that pulls up beauty even in the midst of death.
+I continue up the side of Coit Hill into the million dollar homes that have views all the way out to the Golden Gate Bridge and the Pacific Ocean.  Here are the successes of consumerism, commercial artists, computer experts, actors, old money houses, not the super elite, but elite anyway.  This is the neighborhood of forbidden pleasures, behind drawn curtains there is sex and drugs, cocaine and beautiful women, scholars of the occult, witches, politicians, starlets, limousines.  At the end of the street I start up the steps that lead to Coit tower.  Here and there are little cottage homes tucked in the corners where artists and shop owners still live an unfettered existence.  About half way up I stop to admire a Japanese garden of carefully manicured bonsai trees, there is a bubbling fountain at the far end.  It has a peaceful midday stillness to it.  I turn around to head up again, but I stop and listen.  I hear the muted grunting of what sounds like a television set playing pornography.  I snap my head to the side and listen because sex sounds move at a frequency to which I am hyperaware, it moves in waves like any other, but sex has another more primordial quality, just beyond the edge of conscious hearing. It makes you turn your head involuntarily, like a traffic accident or a machine gun at the family reunion in Kansas.
+I follow the sound climbing up the hill instead of using the path, about half way from where I left the steps to the top, I turn around and see a couple fucking doggie style in there couch in plain view of all the world, except that all the world is hidden by trees.  I light a cigarette and watch them go at with wild animal abandon.  She is not like most rich women I have been with whom are so disinclined toward any sort of dirtiness be it on the linens or during sex.  These two have taken Woody Allen to heart; sex is only dirty when you do it right.  She comes before I am halfway through my cigarette and sits down on the couch to suck him off.  It comes as electrostatic charge this feeling of peeking into the lives others, of watching them harmlessly.  Her warm mouth is drawing him out and I am leaving, not wanting to see the end of the show, preferring to leave it eternally occurring in memory like a loop of film flapping in an empty theatre.
+Memories shrouded in gauze and muslin, filters that color and toned the past with palate of the present.  Mexico City: I remember Mexico City in hazy brown discolored way, but it’s not the smog, it’s the nature of memory —the nature of my memory.  The images overlay each other like a photomontage.  I see it in moving pictures: cut to a shot of the subway, sad brown faces … lay on top of it an image of pyramid excavation digging up and trying to solve the Mayan Caper… years ago you would understand… she was standing right next to me and then...a warm sweet smelling cab and my father says “hey, look a Kentucky fried Chicken.” It though me out in the middle of foreign chaos; it threw me into a different world, in that instant a chaotic kaleidoscope of astonishment and splendor … the shock of fried chicken.  Everything became focused up into the sun; it burned in fantastical visions that existed only for me, leaving me alone and for a long time afraid.  Not fear in the sense that you feel threatened, it is much worse, not conscious, it just lingers in the back of the mind occasionally eliciting a paralysis that would haunt me for a while and then fade again in the face of day to day activities.  
+It’s a fear that leaves you like a woman I saw once stone still and shell shocked, stuck right in the middle of this enormous arch in Canyonlands National Park, Utah.  She just stood there unable to move, feeling the digging hooks of unbridled terror burning into her brain and creating an endless and spellbinding feedback loop that forbids you to move.  It anchors your mind right back in the primate body because you feel it and yet rips you right out of the very fabric of collective reality and propels you into strange land where there is no you.  I watched her sit there unable to help herself, doubtless staring at the two thousand-foot drop off on both sides of her and the meager four foot wide sandstone arch that was holding her there.  She was suspended in mid air, seeing herself for the first time the way we are: naked cold and deathly afraid.
+	But the cab driver just laughed and said, “here in Mexico City there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat, Kentucky Fried Dog, But definitely no Kentucky Fried Chicken.”  He smiled this crooked smile revealing gold caps and over moist gum structure that was so large it seemed to be slowly crawling right down over his teeth.  He then sternly advised in all seriousness against eating there. 
+I crush out the cigarette and decide to head downtown and catch the subway rather than walk all the way back.  Its already dark and a lazy nighttime storm is drifting in from the ocean.  Jostling through the crowds of Jackson street brings back tapeloops of Boston —Harvard square—fall—the Charles River slips by without a sound, the streets corral throngs of people— onlookers drunk beyond comprehension of what they were there to look at— they stumble out of bars and lurch through doorways like grenades rolled out on the street.  Inside the Radcliffe boathouse a reserve of surplus energy is released in muscular spasms that pulse in orgasm.  Her breasts pool salt onto my tongue.  Her flesh is hard and metallurgic turning brittle under my hands, the life is slowing slipping out of her, out of the sewers of life up celestial heights of orgasm, among the eagles, the screaming eagles, the German philosophers sitting like a nineteen ten bankers awaiting the thief.  The tape is endless, looping across eons, cultures, genetic hardwired associations to the galaxies, interstellar abbreviations of life.  Cool hard water distilled in my mouth and then she falls from my arms like a limp rag and I am cast down a tube a tunnel endlessly falling, clattering of the walls building speed, a vacuum with no terminal velocity I want to reach out for limbs for human hands to catch me….  I scream and there is no sound save the rush of air passing my ears and finally I settle in the twinkling light still shining from above and I relax to the falling sensation no longer concerned surrendered eternity forever to remain here now and then the light goes dim… the taxi’s in times square… Truman Capote… An auburn haired girl I liked in seventh grade… tumbling off great vistas.
+
+
+I ran out of money some time ago and I have been spending most of the days wandering around trying to make friends and bum a meal or two. I was downtown panhandling and then trying to talk my way into free meal with a girl from the 23 Club, Sabrina.  She was beautiful and I hated asking her for anything.  I stared out the window into space when a familiar blur walked through my field of vision.  She was thinner, had straight blond hair rather than curly red, and she had been in the sun too much, but she was definitely my high school love.  You never forget the first, you never get another like that and Audrey was the one.  At least for while and then I met another, the one and even then only until I met the next the one.  I watched her for a minute, looked back across the table at Sabrina, Andy’s waitress friend, her lips were moist, and I bolted.  I ran out the door and chased Audrey up the steps.  I slowed for a minute to watch her, I caught her at the door and spun her around and kissed her and jumped back.  She screamed.  And then we had lunch.  She told me about her job, she was swimming with brine, she had gotten married.  I fought back all my urges to follow her to the bathroom….  She quizzed me on my job, uh don’t have one, where are you staying? Andy Driesen’s closet.  Oh my god.  What? You live in a closet?  Ya kind of ironic huh?  San Francisco too?  Did you finish school?  Nope.  Are you going back? Nope.  So what are you doing with yourself?  Are you still writing a book?  Still?  No. 
+As I ate I ran my eyes around her, over her down her and I tried to go right through, but that takes proximity and I was far far away.  When I knew her Audrey was a teenager, swarming and slightly naïve, her family made fun of her because she thought islands floated… until she was thirteen.  She had her own internal rhythm that produced its own sort of logic, but from the looks of things she had learned the truth about it all.  Islands are pushed up from the sea Audrey, but I always liked your vision better than reality, reality being as it is… flexible.  But I could tell from her questions that I had bent a little more, a little farther than Audrey, but we always knew that’s how it would be.  “We had a good time didn’t we?”
+For one strange timeless moment crossing the Golden Gate Bridge when she said that and then stared into my eyes I dropped through the rabbit whole and went back to wonderland.  Orisis was there, he was in the car, the third part, where ever two or more are gathered in my name… which is what is never…  There was this sycamore tree in the back of their yard, Audrey’s bedroom was on the second floor and in the afternoons on the weekdays, before her parents came home from work we used to lie naked and I would stare up out her window at the orange glow and those leaves, the way those gentle spiked leaves moved like fluttering octopus arms clawing at the sky.  I remembered lying there remembering… that I would be here now.  I remember the brown wood slated patio cover and the debris of dead leaves that gathered on it and blew all over the yard in windstorms of fall.  I remember the curtain blowing in the hot dry afternoon in August.  We had just come back from the beach; we arrived ahead of her family and went at it before they came home.  And I silence you shall hear every thing, and the wind blew, the hot dry Santa Ana wind coming down out of the desert and pushing the salt breezes far out to sea.  We dried up and chapped.  Cracked and bled.  
+Her father was quite a man too.  Probably as much responsible for my current world as she was.  He was a minister, but I never held it against him that sort of thing can happen to the best of us.  Like so many in the neighborhood of my youth I was sent off the church at a young age.  The church was undergoing renovations so I spent a good portion of my time there ditching Sunday school class and running through the debris and catacombs of the construction site.  It was heaven for fifth grader…. Eventually the dark underground tunnels became cinderblock hallways with red velvet carpeting and contained things like choir rehearsal rooms or storage closets for chairs and bibles.  Heaven was remodeled into gaudy ugly hell.  But by the time the new chapel was done and the once mysterious tunnels were reduced to a bad parody of the pentagon I was in Jr. high and I had a new interest in church —girls.  If all it took to get the girls was a little praying, singing some goofy songs and enduring the mindless chattering of uninspired thirty-something yuppies on a do-good trip (ministers they called themselves), then so be it.  By high school we were all more anxious to get off in the woods at summer camp than we were in any strange white-haired old man and his inane set of rules. God and his rules sounded as stupid then as they do today.  As for philosophies on life you could read them in the library if you really wanted to know what some dead guys thought about life.  I was a strange child and for some reason I did want to know so I read them, but they meant nothing to me.  My only enjoyment out of them was the response their names got at church on Sunday’s.  Say “Nietzsche” or “Leary” to the ministers and you were in bigger trouble than playing Judas Priest in your room at summer camp.  Nietzsche worked them into more a frenzied state then the Bible ever did and of course that only served to make me more curious.  In a contrarian way the church educated me.
+By the end of high school I had my first real girlfriend —Audrey. We met at church camp; she was from a church nearby and had come up to the mountain camp the same week I did.  I met her because she was dating my best friend, but that is a whole other narrative.  It lasted until I dropped out of college and moved away. 
+  All too predictably I had fallen for a preacher’s daughter. Yes…the rebellious boy seduces the preacher’s daughter and leads her into a life of sin, it wasn’t until later that I felt robbed, like I had been living out a tired cultural myth, suburban legend, but contrary to the way the story usually runs, her father liked me.  Her father, Steven, was a different sort of man than the ministers at my church; Steven made me realize that there is a difference between ministers and saints.  In my experience ministers were more like lawyers, intermediaries between you and god; they argued god’s case and you decided for yourself —gotta have faith my boy!  This coming from men who had obviously never given a thought to much more than their paycheck and the eventual reward of a shining happy afterlife.  Their nasal whining and paunch cheeks reeked of comfort and boredom; they were as lifeless as the chalk dust that floated down from the black board where they listed the things we were not to do.  Ministers are somnambulists stumbling dully and quietly through life doing the bidding of words written two thousand years ago, their souls were putrid like rotten milk, coagulated like dried blood and mummified while still alive.
+Steven was nothing of the sort; he had the title of minister, but he wasn’t one, he was a saint.  Steven glowed like a sunset when he spoke of god.  He had enthusiasm for life and wanted to live drunkenly serenely aware.  Steven was alive; there was enthusiasm coursing though his veins leaking out when he spoke, it was mist in air that held stillness and serenity like the spray beneath a waterfall.  He had the sensibilities of a man with an inquisitive and alert mind —an aware mind.  A mind that that was aware of the ambiguities and subtleties of life, a mind that did not insist on taking a rigid, brittle grid of belief and forcing it to fit over a convoluted serpentine existence.  
+Steven never spoke of god as an anthropomorphic figurehead with a long index finger extended toward the earth, he spoke of god as ‘the other.’  “The part of life, which we cannot understand, is god, ” he said. God the unnamable one writer called it; god of chaos, of the burnished virile thing called life —now that is something a twenty-year-old with a sex drive can relate to. And Stevenell didn’t just quote the Bible, he could move from the Dhammapada to Tolstoy, to Emerson, to Job, and back around through Nietzsche, Kirkagaard, Lewis, Joyce…. Steven was a scholar in the oldest, most living sense of the word, but he didn’t just talk philosophies he sang them, great hymns dropped out of his mouth like transmorphing deities bathed in iridescence (to borrow Terence’s imagery). He lived and breathed a rhythm full of vitality, understanding, and above all else —openness.  He had all the markings of a saint… that is, one who knows god. 
+Steven and I only actually had a couple of conversation on the subject of life, but I always watched and listened when he was around because you learn far more that way than to just ask questions and get answers. I was an inquisitive youth and spent much of my time in the world of books, but not just any books; I read the ones that you weren’t supposed to read, heretical texts, pornographic treatises, transcendental meditations, books that called into question not just God or values but the very nature of the universe and struggle to understand the human experience.  By the time my senior prom rolled around I was done with the trite simplistic world of Christianity. Part of it was due to a book I read on brainwashing, which made me, realized that even if all this malarkey they were feeding me was true, I knew nothing of it other than what I had been told.  The US military, Indian gurus, Charlie Manson, and nearly every other belief centered organization in the world use the same tactics.  I got very angry with myself for being duped by these charlatan tricks that seemingly anyone could have employed by reading a textbook on conditioning psychology.  I mentioned that to Steven once and he mentioned a strange system of belief that he alternately called transcendentalism and gnosis.  Steven inadvertently sent down a path that led here, to the steps, to the very diner I sit in waiting for Dean.  He introduced me to the convoluted world of the unknown.  There are two types of things, those known and those unknown (to paraphrase); once I got a taste of the unknown I lost all interest in the known.
+Steven never had any answers, only more questions.  Had I read Emerson?  Whitman?  Steven defined gnosis as direct personal confrontation with god or the unnamable or the Logos or subconscious or whatever you wanted to call it.  The important thing was not what you named it but rather what you got from it —your interaction, the way you lived.  This philosophy, unlike most I had heard, held that the self —the individual— already had the answers to all your questions… it was only a matter of confronting them.  He dropped some names I knew as the so-called transcendentalists who had occupied a scant afternoon in my senior English class.
+I remember standing uncomfortably in the doorway while Mrs. Williams read in her nightgown and Steven dug through his desk drawers looking for this tape. I remember him ranting on in that slightly wild-eyed fashion of his about how brilliant Terence McKenna was; “he has a clarity to his mind that is just unbelievable.  It’s in the very way he speaks his voice carries you off into your imagination…” Steven paused to stare into space for a moment.  “And then you start to hear what he is saying… and it’s this incredible message of hope and inspiration.  You see he is mainly interest in brain transformation and exploring altered state of consciousness….” The poetics of his praise sticks out in contrast to the discomfort I felt at invading their personal space.  Eventually he found the tape and handed it to me; he smiled and said for me to listen to it for a few days and then give it back.  
+Then he closed the door and went to bed.  I remember driving home down the 405 listening to a magical leprechaun voice warbling excitedly and then rhythmically as if drumming; it would rise to a crescendo, a flourish and then back to the gentle elf that seemed in control of the whole thing.  It was better than most music I had heard.  That was Steven.  That was Audrey.  This was once just a thought in an architect’s head.  Suspension wires, wink and smile.
+And then Audrey smiled and we pulled off the bridge and then nothing more was said, but she went too, I could see it in her eyes, we use that phrase a lot and most of the time we don’t even know what we mean by it, but it happens.  She had insisted on putting me up at her house, so I could write she said.  She failed to realize that in order to write you have to be able to live, but I figured free food was nothing to scoff at.  I went along for the ride.  Audrey had gone and married a Canadian farmboy who used to play hockey and now plays golf and he talked a lot about being a sports newscaster.  It was a different life than what I had in the city, they were in the rather ritzy suburbs of Marin, a nice house tucked back in the near forest of the hills.  It was the suburbs to be sure, but a suburb that was not artificially planted which made it livable even attractive sometimes.  They ate three square meals a day and went work like the good little citizens that they were.  I sat around all day smoking cigarette and typing in their garage because neither of them could stand smoking.  It was a blissful week of insanity, I invited Andy out for dinner one night, he and Audrey knew each other and I thought it would be fun, but Andy and I together proved not to be compatible.  
+That night on the way back into the city Andy told me there was a letter from Dean.  When we got home we opened it and I read it out loud to him.  It was more the ranting of a madman than a letter proper.  Dean was in the throws of an existentialist dilemma, he had no enthusiasm left in him.  He was coming up he said for a little R and R, to take his mind off it.  He was arriving at the Oakland station in six hours and expected us to meet him at the all night diner on Telegraph and Broadway.  He sounded like he had finally lost his marbles completely living alone in LA.  We got up the next morning and talked it over on the way across the bay.  Andy figured he had met someone; I put five on genuine insanity. 
+Dean shows up at the corner of telegraph and Broadway, two o’clock, just like he said he would.  He is wearing his trademark pin striped suit and slightly goofy fedora.  I appreciated what he was trying do, but a man can’t where a fedora until he’s over thirty —it just doesn’t work.  His hair is greased back like it’s 1956 and he is slightly ahead of his time.  Enemy of the people.  We did a round of hugs and dove in the car.  None of us had any desire to be in Berkeley, it was just a landmark we all knew.  Dean had never been to San Fran so we take him in on the Oakland and then through town, over the Golden Gate and back.  In the car Andy starts telling Dean the same story he told me on the subway ride this morning: he is going to Costa Rica.  He’s got job all lined up working on a cruise ship, free room and board two weeks a month, the rest he spends in hotels, which are cheap he says.  He does the same thing to Dean, he wants the two of us to head down and look him up, but what he fails to realize is that for us to get there we would have to walk.
+And now to make it more of a build up, Andy is dragging out Costa Rica, the jungles, and the smell of napalm.  Finally I couldn’t take it.  “Shut up Andy, we’re not going to Costa Rica, have a good time, send a postcard, now the real question is what the hell is wrong with Dean here that he should send a letter quoting Sartre….”  I clapped him on the shoulder, “So what’s her name?”
+“No it’s not that….”
+“Pay up….”  Andy gives me the five bucks we wagered.
+“What was your call Sil?”  Dean smiled as the money changed hands.
+“Genuine, certifiable insanity.”
+“I don’t know about that…. Don’t you ever just sit around a wonder what the fucking point is?  I mean from a strictly clinical point of view we know that none of this is really here… so why it here?  I don’t know I get in these moods, I’ll wake up at work and realize that I am work and I don’t even remember getting there….  Its like I have some robot driving my body around.  See and that started to bother or at least it got me thinking… I started to wonder what other robots were lurking around.  I started doing these self-experiments; you know weird shit just to see what people would do.  Every morning I let one cockroach go in the copy editors office and then I’d leave.  Two weeks later he got them to spend four thousand dollars getting the whole building fumigated.  So I did other stuff, you know went door to door preaching the word of god, just to see how people reacted… then I started thinking shit I could use this to get laid a lot more and see what the life of the cold hearted average bastard American male is like.  It was simple I just acted like one and sure enough I got laid.  I don’t mean just one or two on the weekends.  I had them coming at me like flies and then I started to freak out and I got paranoid that they would figure out the game and get pissed you know… I mean they weren’t the brightest girls in the world you understand, they weren’t the type of girls that would think my method acting was funny, they were the type that will smash the windows of your house and boil your cat.
+“You don’t have a cat.”
+“That’s not the point… the point is that I sort of lost track of myself, I mean I found that when I just got up the nuts to be whatever the fuck I wanted to be that day… I could.  So if that’s true than what are we?  See now that’s one of those questions that you’re not supposed to be able to answer right?  If you figure out that then you have sold your soul to the devil right?”
+He stops suddenly and car is silent for moment.  Andy had started to take the five bucks back, but he stopped and pushed my hand away.  Dean has done these sorts of things before, he reminds me of Dr. Lilly who argued that one shouldn’t do anything to his patients that he hadn’t done or wouldn't do to himself, except that Dean didn’t have patients, he just had himself.  But taking acting off of the movie screen and putting it in real life was a bit extreme even for Dean.  I couldn’t think of anything to say.  Andy cocked his head sideways for a minute and then blurted out, “Ya man, everyone knows that.”
+“Ya but no one takes advantage of it.”
+“That’s cause they have other things they would rather do.  I mean you like to do that, so it’s not like that is the secret to life, its just the secret to your life, personally it sounds like hell to me.”
+It sounded like hell to me too, but Dean gets obsessive about things.  I actually did figure this stemmed from a new love, but I knew Dean wouldn’t cop to it yet, it was early in the game....  Dean has this strange addiction to women, he only goes to bed with ones he doesn’t like because every time he goes to bed with one he does like he is devoured by this all consuming burning passion that eats him alive.  For those of us that have know him for a long time now it’s easy to see coming.  The philosophical smoke screen of mercenary behavior is the first clue that something is rumbling just beyond the event horizon.  By the time we came back across the bridge after stopping for a cigarette at the scenic outlook, we were all ready for a drink.  Andy had Dean all riled up over the promise of free drinks and beautiful waitresses at the Sky Bar.  I tried to talk him out of it, but Andy insisted, he said it would be a night to remember.  He knew something we didn’t.
+
+It’s just past nine when the elevator doors open into the obnoxiously bright lobby of the Sky Bar.  Andy greets the doormen and we are ushered inside.  It was only the third time I had been there; the place was overwhelming in my opinion, like a strange blue parallel universe.  All the walls are covered with shimmery hanging strips of blue foil, back lit with blue light and rustled with fans that blow out the ceiling and give the walls the appearance of movement.  The booths are along the back wall and covered in faux white fur and lit with black lights so that when you laugh your teeth glow.  It was demented, insane, beautiful and frightening.   The ceiling is laced with blue icicle Christmas light and the whole room is one giant swarming sea of female flesh, you have to swim to get to the bar, undulating eels and serpentine cocktail waitresses.  Andy swore up and down that they were not for sale, but I refused to believe him.  There were just too many of them; beautiful women are not herd animals, they travel alone or with a pack of males.  If you ever see to many in one place something is up, something polymorphously perverse is going on.  Lecherousness was in the architecture, the place was a harem den in spirit if not practice, sitting there I got the feeling I was on the set of porno circa 1977 with no expense spared.  The last days of disco…  a peculiar intangible decorating term —art deco— which used to mean Miami Vice and now means feng shui.  
+	We grab a seat in the corner booth and Andy gestures to a waitress.  Drinks appeared.  Things teetered along like they would have any night anywhere and then something strange happened that had never happened to me before.  After we had been there about an hour Sara showed up.  She was with a group of girls from the university and they all crowded into the booth with us.  Conversations swirled around overlapped ideas, volume, and meaning.  Dean hunkered down with a short dark haired girl; they got lost in a conversation about time travel and sleep.  I listened to the morphing voices clatter about the table, snippets of conversation darted in my ears from five different directions and then one singled itself out.  It was a booming loud voice of a man and it came from the vicinity of the bar; it was overwhelming and spoke with authority and conviction.  Th music stopped and the place fell silent.  The man jumped up on a rickety table just adjacent the main bar and offered up a round of drinks for the house.  By now the bar held well over a hundred people and a round would certainly cost a pretty penny, but it happens every now and again. Without the music the magical sound of conversation died and everyone sort of milled about as if lost or waiting, waiting for something more, the entire place was incomplete, you would feel it in the air.  The pregnancy lasted until everyone who wanted a drink had one and then the man started in.  He asked if everyone had their drink and then announced that he was the owner of the joint and he was closing the door and making the place into a private party.  At that point people groaned and started yelling but he silenced them simply by raising his hand.  He said he had bought us the drinks so that we could drink with him; all of us were guests at his party now.  He said that he had just asked his girlfriend to marry him and that she had said yes and he was very happy and wanted us to share in his happiness.  He said that he wanted us to toast his new and he pulled her up onto the table next to him and we all clapped and he said that he had met her three years ago in this very bar and that she was the most important thing in his life now.  He said that people always told him that you don’t meet ‘ that someone special’ in bars and that had built the Sky Bar to prove them wrong.  He said that he had found exactly what he was looking for and he had found it by following his heart.  He said that wherever your heart leads you, you will find happiness.    
+It was quite a speech.  What amazed me was the silence that he achieved, its no easy feat to shut up a hundred drunken revelers, he might have owned the building but he sold them with his heart.  He carried on like that for almost ten minutes and then finally he sat back down and the music went on again, but everything was different; people were talking across tables and they were moving across the room and strangers could be seen shaking hands all around us.  The man had opened some sort of floodgate; even Dean said he felt better.  It felt better know that someone had succeeded in making sense out of the world, that he had created his life and looked around at it and said this good, I will rest now… rest?  Drink!  Drunken debauchery is the highest form of worship.  Someone had turned the mysterious other, the beloved unknown, into the known and we all wanted to celebrate that.
+	Suddenly instead of a bar the place gained some intimacy, it was a private party and we were all invited, we were alone together so to speak, much like being trapped in burning airplane, we all had something in common suddenly.  Dean said that it reminded him of how he pictured an Italian wedding like the one in Deerhunter an enormous party that could go on for days if it wanted to.  He was right, the place had an air of electricity to it as if now that there was a reason to be happy it could spread and affect all of us even though it really meant nothing to any of us.  Same sort of thing the evangelists have always been doing from Christ on down to a Baptist revival in the rural south.  What the man did was conquer that last human demon and he did it with simple heartfelt honesty and generosity.  He succeeded in making all of us together, all of us suddenly human and frail, but not alone in our humanity, not alone in our frailty.  It was a rare moment in modern American, a moment of unity.
+For a time we were no longer isolated from each other, the cold scientific belief in the individual as an isolated universe was conquered and all the mythology of the tribe, the community came into the room with a flourish, borne on the wings of alcohol no doubt, but wedded to something bigger, something that perhaps without the alcohol would still have been there.  We were drunk, but not of spirits, we were drunk on the words of a man in love.  For a moment all the private despair around with us that wiggles around under our skin when we sleep at night, disappeared.  We came undone the little creatures under our skin popped out and ran away unable to live in the boiling cauldron of happiness.  They were forced extinct by the change in environment, like the dinosaurs, unable to adapt to joy, sorrow dies.
+	In its place came an air of enthusiasm a sense of shared adventure that was hitherto not present.  The movement of bodies about seemed to stir it up in the air and soon it was fever pitched.  Couples were dancing in the isles between tables, in corners shadows could be seen groping at each other and men clapped each other on the back while women cuckold in circles.  Everywhere stories spun out, true ones, false ones, exaggerated ones, downplayed one, stories that rang out and were delightful no matter what they said.  None of us were actually aware of what we were saying we just knew that it felt good to talk felt good to pour out our innards to strangers.  Commiseration and celebration wrapped each other up like packages and dropped down the chimney from the grip of an invisible hand with red sleeve.
+	Even Sara and her graduate student friends who were all getting their MA’s in philosophy and generally had seemed quite cynical, were lifted up and tossed about like cotton cAndy.  We were at the circus and no matter if Plato or Plutarch were on the ferriswheel because it was still a carnival and everything is welcome at a carnival.  
+Things kept up well past two when the alcohol stopped flowing.  No one waned to leave, we all felt like it would fall apart if we left the room.  Finally around three, large groups started to head off to various impromptu parties; we went with the girls back over to Berkeley where they had an enormous old house that they all lived in or at least most of them did.  By that time we were all a little sketchy on the details of the situation.  On the subway we all careened back and forth into each other with the sway of the train. Sara pushed me down into a bench and climbed on top of me.  We were deep into a tongue battle when catcalls and whistles were heard from the other end of the car.  Everyone gathered around to watch us and we gave them a show.  It seemed like the right thing to do at that moment some way of pulling everybody in together simultaneously intimate and yet encompassing all.  We finally broke it off to breathe and there was a round of applause.  Some one from the train had joined into the party; we swept up him and his friend, and they came all the way back to house.  There was music and dancing and Andy climbed up on the roof with their dog and tried to get him to howl at the moon, but he was too domesticated to understand the meaning of it all.  Dean and a girl named Monique disappeared into the back room and then others drifted off until it was only Sara and I on the couch.  She kissed me for while and then without much warning passed out.  I tucked her in with a blanket I found in the hall and went up on the roof with Andy.  He was standing up there staring at the sky with his mouth open and a cigarette in his hand.  Neither of us said a word for while.
+“You gonna go down to LA with Dean?”
+“Ya I guess… Sara’s said she’s going to get two of those girls and take over the lease and I don’t really want to stick around for that… trouble that one….”
+“Ya you better watch out, I think she’s in love with you.”  He stopped and stared at me for a minute.  “You know Sil, you ought to get out of this country.  You don’t exactly fit in with Americans… you’re different, you don’t give a fuck….”
+“Neither do you… neither does Dean.”
+“Ya I know that’s why I’m leaving and you and Dean ought to too… I mean whether you get down to see me or not doesn’t really matter… you just ought to get out.  Forget loose ends for get all that you think you have to do and just go.  Just go and keep going because you’re the only one of us that has half a chance of making it.”
+“What do you mean?”
+“Look man where do you see me I five years?  I’ll tell you where I see myself, I see myself being well off, with a family that I love and job that’s decent, I see myself shifting gears, I can smell it coming, its involuntary and you have no idea what I’m talking about do you?  You can’t fathom me doing any of that can you?  No you can’t and I used to not believe you when you said you were going to take over the world and all that sort of nonsense… and I still don’t, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot and I realized that you are going to do something, something big.  Maybe its that book, maybe its taking over the world….  People respect you and people will follow you, people are impressed by you… I don’t know man, I thought about it the other night when we were at Audrey’s house.  I thought about back in high school how everyone followed you and I around and thought we were so crazy or whatever dumb shit they were thinking and I realized that while I was the nutball full of antics; you were the one they looked up to. And I have no idea why I am saying this… probably because you’ll be leaving and who knows when I’ll have another chance.  Whatever, I said my piece… I’m drunk as fuck, I gotta pass out before things start spinning.”  And he walked down the stairs and went inside.
+
+	
+
+“Come on man lets get some breakfast and go for a drive.”  I woke Dean up at nine.
+	He got up out of bed without waking the girl and put his clothes back on.  He brushed the hair back from her eyes and we stared at her sleeping face.  Her skin was young and smooth.  She stirred and smiled.  We left. 
+We went down Telegraph and all had huge omelets at the all night diner.  Afterward we worked our way back to Andy’s stopping off for a drink at an Irish pub and some chocolate from Ghirardelli Square.  It was early in the morning on a Thursday and no one was around the Ghirardelli area.  It was pleasant; everything glowed.  Back at the house I threw my clothes in trash bag, backed up my manuscripts and laptop, and we headed out.  Dean needed some help at the newspaper and offered me a place to stay. 
+We took the 101 south through the dry brown grassy hills of Palo Alto and Silicon Valley where the high tech industry has grown like a cancer on the land.  From there we cut down across the coastal range.  It cooled down and pine trees replaced barren hills.  From the final crest in the road all the way down into Santa Cruz the view o the ocean was magnificent.  It was one of those clear warm days that make California what it is; a wild crazy kind of energy is in that air.  It’s the vast sea that brings it in, air that has traveled ten thousand miles of churning ocean to deliver itself fresh to our noses.  We had lunch in downtown Santa Cruz and went swimming at the beach just north of there.  Seagulls circled low over the kelp beds and the sun was bright and warm without being hot.
+From Santa Cruz down to Nepenthe Dean explained his mind experiments to me again in more detail.  He still said nothing about anyone other than himself.  
+“Have you written anything of interest lately?”
+“You mean anything other than for the newspaper?” 
+“Ya”
+“No.”
+ In Nepenthe we had dinner and walked along the bluffs watching the sea otters out in the kelp beds.  The sunset was beautiful, gilded light that slowly worked its way through the color spectrum from the first rays of orange then to fiery red and finally gentle purple hues that gave way to the blue green cover of darkness.  Just south of Monterey we cut back over to the 101.  
+“Hey. Guess who I ran into last week?”
+“Who?”
+“Rick.  Remember Rick?”
+To say Rick was a friend would have been hyperbole; to say he was an enemy wouldn’t be accurate either.  Rick was just there.  And then one day he wasn’t.  He was one of those people that just kind of shows up without warning, without rhyme or reason, but he was there.  He became the butt of most of our jokes; the biggest and best of which was supplied by his own so-called girlfriend.  Her name was never worth committing to memory, but I do remember that night at the bar when she let it slip that Rick had a misshapen penis.  Actually she didn’t just let it slip; she seemed to get a perverse little pleasure out of telling us that.
+“Ya once you know something like that there is no way of making it go away; you just can’t look at them that same —ever.”
+“It was weird, we had a drink and he told me all about his business plans and how he’s going back to school and whatnot… and the whole time I just kept picturing it.  This is that best part though… when I was leaving he went to take a piss and so I’m standing there at the urinal next to him and… well don’t take this the wrong way, but I wanted to see it you know… maybe she lied and there’s nothing wrong with it at all… so I glance over and by god I tell you it was crooked even though it wasn’t hard.”  Dean burst out laughing.  Dean had no respect for Rick; I couldn’t blame him.  Rick was nice enough, but there was something about his ignorant spoiled approach to the world that had grown increasingly repulsive over the years.  
+	I started laughing too, “that has got to suck, I mean what can you do?  Of all the things….”
+	“Well, if I were in his spot I would at least stop wearing those tighty whities, I mean come on?  That certainly isn’t going to help things you know?”
+	“Are you serious?  He wears briefs?  God I hate briefs.  Is he still with her?”
+	“No, and he was hitting on everything in sight, it was embarrassing.  But I guess nothing at all would be an improvement on that woman…. She was one ugly girl.” Dean mused.
+We lapsed into a silence that only an ugly woman could inspire.  And it wasn’t that she was all that unattractive, she was, but you compound that with the fact that she fucked Rick’s cockeyed penis and told all his friends about it… you came up with an image that would silence the most gregarious of poets....
+	“Which way do you think it curves?”  Dean and I have one common trait, when we find something truly horrifying we have to follow it through to the end.
+	“You know its thoughts like that that I wish weren’t forced into my brain.  I have this thing where if you say it I see it and there I am now its right there, his cock is in my brain, you put the guy’s cock in my brain… I would guess it’s to the left.”
+	“Really I was thinking right, you know cause of the tighty-whiteys…”	
+	“No well I don’t know maybe but most guys hang to the left.  In my experience”
+	“I know, but I’m assuming he was a freak of nature all the way around you know?”
+	“I can see your point, but I mean have you ever met a righty?  I mean I suppose there are righty's out there but I believe they are the minority.  I’m not sure why I believe that; I think I read it somewhere.”
+	“What do you read?”  Dean was sitting up wide-eyed.
+	“Oh you know The Lefty Times, it the official journal of the Lefty Alliance, a loosely organized federation of men dedicated to service of Lefty Cause.”
+	“The left Nut Cause?”
+	“Ya we take stands of issues that are important to the lefty voters and represent their interests in Congress.  We’re actually going to have a table at Woodstock this year and MTV is putting out spot on right after total request live.”
+	Dean picked it up too and soon we had constructed our own plans for world domination based somehow on the fact that if your cock hangs to the right there is something fundamentally wrong with you.  I reeled it out like a politician or political consultant —a door to door whore in another universe.  We switched it up after conquest, we instituted a new means of government, instead of voting for politicians they were forced to go door to door and perform for voters.  Whatever sexually act the voter desired they had to go through with to get the vote.  Then the voters picked their favorite and who became THE MOST EXAULTED COCKSUCKER as we renamed the office of president.  It fell apart there and Dean went back to sleep.
+	I drove all the way in from Santa Barbara alone.  It gave me time to settle internal accounts and ready myself for LA.  I had an ex wife that was sure to get wind of me, but there were also some friends of mine still hanging around.  I had no plans to stay.  I just needed to finish a few things and then I would be on my way.  At Dean’s place I flopped on the couch and fell asleep.  It was a long dreamless void.
+
+
+3
+
+The first week I did nothing but work.  It was strange work.  The lifestyle editor employed us as contributing freelancers, which was the paper’s clever way of screwing us out of medical insurance.  Mostly we reviewed concerts, movies, occasionally art openings or museums, sometimes we even went to them.  Dean had set things up so that we were opposite reviews right next to each other on the page.  That way whether one of us took one view or the other, it didn’t matter because we put in the same details and it sounded like we were really there.  The details were lifted from the press releases or magazine articles we had read.  It wasn’t plagiarism per se since the details were in the movie and we were no more stealing them than the first reviewer, but it did walk in some interesting gray areas.  It was easy work, but it was still work.  
+In the world of reviews there are only two possible positions to take. One it was bad and two it was good.  With the details in hand we would write them out weeks before the thing happened and never have to go.  We had an expense allowance that provided us with dinner every time we had to go somewhere so usually we just ran up a bar tab at whatever restaurant was nearby and then split.  Sometimes when we could find nothing better to do we actually went to the things.  We would go to the show or the movie or whatever it happened to be that we were reviewing and about halfway through, when we felt like we had the gist of it we left.  Getting the gist of it actually consisted of deciding what more people wanted to hear, it frightened me somewhat to notice that reviewers generally put no thought into the actual art or music or whatever.  Everything is in terms of numbers.  Are this bands numbers going up or down?  Is this exhibit fresh and new with the brightest most of the moment people or is it the washed up nobodies that were huge stars in the past?  If the numbers are rising good review, unless of course you're writing for something with an alternative target audience in which case the rising numbers mean bad review —sell out talk.  If the numbers are falling it can go two ways, one the artist or art is washed up and past tense or two it is the artist staying true to his roots and allowing the culture to pass him by.  In the end none of it really mattered and if you were a performer, an actor, a musician, or a writer or a director there was always one camp set up to support you and another to ridicule you.  In some way the two functioned to keep the whole thing and perhaps even the person or art being reviewed in a weird violent balance like a tight rope walker at the circus.  Occasionally if one of us were irritated we would shoot the tightrope walker for fun without even bothering to find out what they were doing.  We spent an entire afternoon slaughtering Infinite Jest though neither of us had read more than twenty pages.  Too much tennis.  No one cares about tennis.  But we praised the Thin Red Line because it was written and directed by Terence Malik and we liked his last movie.  
+Such are whims which journalists bounce around in, it was fun for while, but then it started to depress me.  Day in and day out we got letters from pissed off readers and occasionally even ones saying how right we were, but the point was that we got letters and that depressed me.  We did nothing and yet we did something, we thought for other people and that’s a responsiblity no one should have, it weighs on you like a heavy sedative until you start to really believe that what you’re saying is right and matters when really it is only a matter of taste all the way around that board.
+The editor was a nice enough guy, he never said much, he saw our gig for what it was and didn’t care.  He took the respectable position, so long as we had edited copy in his hands at the appointed moment everything beyond that was none of his affair.  It could have gone on forever I suppose, the money allowed me to save and help Dean with rent, but one day I woke up and felt like going to breakfast instead of work.  By the time I got to work it was after eleven and the editor was pissed with my review of the latest boy band concert, it was actually canceled so he ran a review of a show that didn’t happen.  He was yelling up and down pacing his office.  I felt bad for him.  I had been smart enough to use a fake name in the byline; the editors had no such escape route.  He stormed on and on and then he turned and stared out the window. I got up quietly and tip toed out of the office.  Dean decided to catch a cold and he went home with me.  It was going to be a three-day weekend for Dean and a perpetual one for me.  With a couple of days off we decide to head up the Ed’s place in LA.  
+Ed is perhaps the gentlest of all the maniacs that I associate with, he had an almost feminine kind of glow about him that comes across like light through a stained glass window —in odd chaotic fragments of color.  There are for instance the little things like the way he is sure to have fresh towels and clean blankets for us when we arrive.  He cooks little pizzas and sometimes pastas, the mornings after he is libel to be up brewing coffee and frying eggs, Ed had always been the perfect host.
+Other shimmies of light come through in his art, his paintings (the best of which he insists on hanging sideways), his photographs and mostly his endless curiosity.  He stalks through the conversations like a man eager to learn something eager to be shown something new.  Ed craves novelty and doesn’t yet know how to find it; he finds it in Dean and I.  He cultivates our company like one takes care of pets with the utmost love and concern asking only to be entertained in return.  Ed knows that his lot in life is not to burn cities with ideas, scorch the earth with paint and revolutionize the modern aesthetic or whatever painters are up to these days.  Ed is destined to paint quietly with the patience and understanding of a true saint.  Ed of Ark I call him in letters.
+I tend to drink far to much when I am at Ed’s, drinks role down my throat like wild horses rampaging through my hands with a life and will of their own, and so it came to be that I broke Ed’s cutting board, door, chair and took to lighting his floor on fire one night.  It was round Christmas that much is certain because I woke up under a toppled Christmas Tree; I blame the whole affair on Ed. He should have known better than to give me a whole bottle of scotch all to myself.
+It started Thursday.  I got up early, around six, and went to serve my time for being a citizen of the United States —jury duty.  It was my first time in a courthouse and I was certainly not to used to that hour of the morning; much like I assumed it was horrid —a half day of exposure to the radiation dangers of white middle class suburban values.  I was bored.  My inner child was beginning to putrefy in the stale smokeless air of the waiting rooms, I felt like sheets of burnt skin must be slowly slipping off my face I felt grotesque and obvious, like I stuck out as the most-likely-to-be-back —on the other side of the room.
+I had hoped perhaps to have a fellow juror to slide off with into a broom closet, but there were no attractive jurors, nor did I catch any broom closets.  The nuts and bolts of democracy were frigidly asexual.  The halls of justice sported the sophisticated airs of wood veneer and fake marble floors whose undistinguished patterns inhabited a no-man’s-land between linoleum and whatever is just a bit nicer than linoleum.  The architecture was studiously formal in a painful way that only psychiatrists, number theorists, and judges find appealing.  Courts are strange places; they have a sense of doom about them.  You’re accused from the moment you walk in the door regardless of why you might be there; the tribunals of architecture condemn your very presence.  Walking in those doors I got the sense of dread that the great cathedrals of medieval Europe must have inspired in the serf peasants.  The state is the new dominant religion and the court is a place of worship; you don’t just go to jury duty, you serve jury duty; you serve the state and the state has some things they want you to know.  
+They bring juries into the court room to remind even the law abiding citizens of what will happen should they decide to stray out of the neat little square boxes that hold the officially accepted rules about what is permitted and what is not.  It reeks of textbook Freudian repression.  They even put you in a “jury box” either with a straight-faced synchronicity that tapers over into irony or to make sure that the burden of life sinks into your wee little cellular glob.  I’m still unsure if everyone there really believed the crap they feed you in those jury notices about your civic duty or if they were like me, offended at the very concept, but intimidated by the bottom sentence which used the words… failure to comply will result in criminal penalties…. The government talks like an abusive spouse —it needs you so that it will have someone around to walk all over and beat the crap out of.  You wouldn’t want the government to get its feelings hurt when no one turns up for the public spankings now would you?  Without you whom the hell would they spank?  The whole show was ludicrous; no one wanted to be there, it was only under the threat of jail that we showed up at all.  Mostly people talked amongst themselves waited irritably, hoping to avoid an OJ trial, bitching about time lost at work or conversely reading and enjoying a break from work.  A few of us, smokers all, congregated outside and swapped stories about our lives, a couple of them looked like me —guilty, as if this was only an observational walk through. 
+I could have been doing a thousand things all of them infinitely more interesting than sitting on the patio of a jury call room smoking and listening to stories from a trucker about life on the road.  I kept hoping for that one sexy young juror to come strolling outside but she didn’t.  I’m from LA true, but I just can’t surrender my optimism….  It was a morning steeped in boredom.  I read a book and listened here and there to catch snippets of someone’s life randomly dropping out of the sky like seagull shit in the desert.
+Make the courtroom fun?  That had seemingly never occurred to anyone.  Why not turn it into a burlesque show with a little skin, some singers, and few dirty jokes between trials?  It would be huge.  You could even charge a few bucks at the door and the average citizen would finally have reason to participate in government.  Instead of jails a dominatrix judge could administer spankings and trade her gavel for a paddle.  And of course the stenographer would have to turn into a photographer, which would open up the whole print aspect of the courts —the monthly newsletter for patrons.  From there, as word spread, it would become a full-fledged magazine with centerfolds, feature interviews and reviews of crimes…. But the stunted pedophilic minds in power will hear of no such thing…entirely unacceptable….why it makes a mockery of the justice system… I will not hear of it!!!  
+Libel to give one a coronary the way it is now.  The whole morning left me feeling strangely violated; some faceless uncontrollable monster had sequestered four hours of my life away from me.  I wanted to sue the judge for making me get up at six in the morning, a trauma which doubtless took years off my life in stress and mental anguish, but I let it go… no paddles, no burlesque, no photographer, no show… what’s the point?
+They released me at noon.  I spent the remainder of the day wandering around the beach looking a tide pools and picking up little snails and trying to organize them into juries and try a starfish for sloth, but nothing cooperated the way humans do so I gave up and read a book on the steps to the beach.  I stayed almost until sunset when I caught the last bus into Laguna Beach and had dinner a restaurant where my friend Matt works.
+When I got home I was full and content, wanting only to stretch myself with a short walk and then go to bed, but Dean was at manic pace, it is imperative that we go to Ed’s tonight he must wake up in the city tomorrow he can not take the suburbs anymore….
+“If I see one more rich cunt in a BMW sitting at a green light talking on her cell phone to Erik the Viking workout coach that she is meeting to fuck before going home to her idiotic husband who has spent the day licking his boss’s ass for pocket change, I am going to kill.  This entire fucking town ought to be a toxic waste dump; I was thinking Sil, about that plan I had to take over the world and make Kansas a prison colony… I am relocating the colony here just like that terrible movie that was out a few years ago what was it called?”
+Dean is in a frenzy of blind hatred, the kind of frenzy which all the dead must surrender to occasionally and what’s more he is beginning to get me in a frenzy as well, he feeds off that… “The worst thing is that there is no fucking reason whatsoever for me to be here I hate my job, I hate the people, rent is too damn expensive and there’s never anything to do but get drunk or stoned.  The monotony of it is numbing, it tears away my flesh….” He looked around exasperated as if something were going to somehow come to his aide but then he just started pacing in silence for bit.  All the sudden he said he was going to Ed’s house right then if I cared to join him.  I went for it and so we drove up there and on the way Dean told a curious story about a Muslim.
+“I was sitting on a bench smoking and reading as usual, and this guy sat next to me.  He works in the mailroom, always says hello, real happy chap, friendly as fuck, in a genuine way.  I suspected he was Muslim, but I had never talked to him.  So he sits down and asks me what I’m reading...I hate that question.  Last week someone stopped me in the hall and asked what Naked Lunch was about...’um.... a guy living in tangier’.... week before that I was reading Junky....not sure if anyone is paying attention or doing any math over there could be only a matter of time…  Anyway... I try to get across that Western Lands is Burroughs going through death and meditating on the afterlife myths et cetera while he was nearing the Great Divide himself.  This guy starts laying down some thick rap about Islam, and I was mesmerized.  Their stories are fucking INTENSE.  He laid down this Angel of Death gig that was a definite keeper.  I closed my book and was genuinely enthralled.  Not by what he was saying but by him.  He’s one of those people who, regardless of what they are spouting, give off this haze of education, and inner peace, and wisdom.”
+The freeway roared in the vacuum of silence that Dean left hanging there, as if it were a painting and he was stepping back to admire it for bit, check to make sure it hung straight and true.
+“I had a fucked dream the other night.  Sis and mom and I were living in Texas again, where I grew up and I was walking barefoot outside.  I walked through a stagnant pool of water to avoid a vicious barking dog.  When I got to the house, I lit a cigarette and tied up for a shot.  I saw my skin move.  REALLY move.  I thought I was hallucinating, and it started moving all over.  The stagnant water had some sort of microscopic parasite in it—like a tapeworm with a leech body.  It had seeped through my pours and reproduced and grown.  I ran around the house freaking out, my skin moving in little bumpy wave-like black ripples.  I could feel them crawling under the epidermis.  I stopped suddenly and had an epiphany.  I began kneading my flesh, corralling the parasites to my extremities and forcing them out through the skin.  My skin was shredding like latex paper mache`, and blood burst from the ribbons of flesh, covering my arms and face.  When I had finally gotten the last one out, and crushed it in my hand, I lay back knowing I was in agonizing pain, but only feeling the smooth balance of shock soothing my nervous system, fooling it into feeling okay.  I felt tired, and realized I was bleeding to death.  I didn’t fight, I just slipped away.”
+
+
+Ed had apparently been expecting us as the door is unlocked and there’s a note explained that he is at the store getting beer.  On top of the fridge we find a bottle of scotch bearing my name and bottle of Gin bearing Dean’s, we are well on our way through them before Ed gets back. By the time he shows up with the beer it’s nearly midnight and things are getting fuzzy.  
+I can hear Ed and Dean talking about the implications of time travel.  I keep slipping into near coma in which I start to turn their dialogue into the inner workings of my own mind.  I am living in a terrible Dostoevskyian land of cross-examination and self-doubt.  Although I know they are not talking about me or even too me I can hear the across the room and I keep thinking that they are.  The world feels heavy and I sit down in front of the sideways painting and contemplate the endless thick erotic paint that loops and curls its way about the canvas propelling the eye with it inertia, allowing itself to be converted by the viewer into latent energy.  You walk away from it feeling refreshed rejuvenated except that I can’t walk away from it anymore I am too drunk with scotch and the very intoxication of the paint itself; I lie down complete staring up at it floating about in the oily oceans of pigment, vermilion waves crest with whitecaps on a sea of lavender.  The waves grow larger as I move, rippling away from me and then I start to sink as if in quicksand.  I begin to shuffle my arms and feet but that only sank me deeper and I remember that in quicksand one must remain perfectly still.  I lie perfectly still and feel myself slowly slip down into the oil depths, out to the tattered edges of consciousness the ragged glories of existence and individuality bow before the divine circumstances of the universe and all is lost amid a swirling see of alcohol, pigment, dream, hallucination and reality muddled in the roaring deep baritones of Beethoven, Ed’s painting, Van Gogh’s ear, Burroughs' pinky all gathering up in the comic dust to form a cherubic symphony wailing incessantly across the crepuscule of darkness.
+ When I wake up I am wearing pants and had somehow or other spent the night in a Christmas tree.  My head hurts before I move, not good sign.  As I sit up I am gradually aware that I don’t have a hangover.  In fact I am still drunk which cheers me slightly and give me the courage to look around.  Ed is already brewing coffee, he is standing if front of the sink absently scratching his ass, staring into space and looking for all the world like roman gladiator after the battle.  It’s then that he notices me and shakes his head.  
+It turns out that I did not passed out, I blacked out, a first for me.  It was unsettling to realize that someone other than the me that is usually me had been me.  Who was this other me?  Where did he come from and what did he want?  Why did he break things and set them on fire?  Was it even a he?  Perhaps it was a she?  The true disappointment is that I didn’t get to meet him.  From what Dean and Ed piece together for me I probably wouldn’t have liked the guy, but it would nevertheless have been nice to meet him since he was hijacking my body.
+It took me two days to fully regain myself, in the interim the weirdness grew; I lounged about all day watching television with Betty.  She is Dean’s sister, she moved in last week.  We could both hear it the rumbling of a distant and future overture.  Friday rolled around, Dean and Betty headed up to Ed’s again, but I stayed behind.  I was still feeling sheepish about my behavior and I thought it would be good to do a little recording, to take some time off of life. 
+I started writing. I had decide that I would not change a word of what I wrote, I would record the life as it unfolded with entirely too much honesty —record things exactly as they were.  I was trying to write what all my mentors had left out of their books; I was going to fill in the gaps in the cannon of literature.  It is all going to be laid bare for the world, the ideas will become real through seeing and doing, not through the telling…  the word would be flesh as was recommended by another writer.  I sat down Friday night after they had left for LA and I wrote furiously through the night and all the next day, I was Jack Kerouac on a bender, drunk with words they flowed out in rhythm with the river that is life, they cascaded over the boulders of my fingers and tumble underground into keyboard and finally flooding the deltas of white space that the computer had decreed would now serve as my ocean.  I had been writing for almost twenty-four hours solid when the phone rang and the whole perilous structure collapsed in on itself and I looked at the clock.
+It was quarter of twelve and I was pretty sure that nothing good would come from answering the phone at that hour.  I stared at it until the machine picked it up.
+“Hello? Sil are you there?”  There was a silence on the other end for a moment and then came a more thoughtful, lonely drawn-out sounding voice, “well if you get this message call me tonight, my roommates are gone and I feel king of unsafe…(there was a pause) I was wondering if you would come over and stay with me… if not at least call.  Okay?  Goodbye.”
+I sat for moment staring at the pattern of plaster on the wall wondering what my will would do with me.  The voice was Amy, my ex-wife whom I had waked out on six months prior.  I stared at the wall and tried to figure out how she could possibly have known that I was here, I smelled the evil artistry of Dean who in moments weakness might have squealed my whereabouts to Hillarie (his own little nightmare) who would have been sent by Amy to find me.  Women are insidious little creatures and I could see Dean sitting on the edge of his bed with Hillarie on her knees, his cock in her hand… "Dean, tell me where he is or I’m leaving."  Oh well I’d have done the same.
+Besides all that was irrelevant.  Why not give the ex a good poke?  One last poke and then I’m gone, through with whole sordid affair.  And what a clever little girl, wanting protection, so Amy… she would never have had the courage to admit that she wanted a good fuck and nothing more, with Amy there was always something more, more more more. Not that she was outright lying; the apartment above her had been burglarized the last I was there.  The poor woman had ended up in the barrio after I split.  I would be little more than psychological comfort, both she and I knew that I would be out the window before anyone could get through the front door. I was at a bit of a loss, but not entirely surprised.  I was feeling free and floating in the effervescent vapors of my new freedom and now here was the old, the familiar, like sliding a foot into the comfort of a well worn boot….  I called her back and in her voice I caught it the indeterminable mystery that had always gotten me and always could from the beginning to the end.  The alpha and the omega—the only thing that ever drew me to anyone —the mystical enigma of the unknown.  The familiarity of anything makes it pedestrian and undesirable to me whether it is a place, a person or an emotion.  It was on this point that I realized that Dean too bore the mark, bore a mark; I never told him how profound his words were to me when I read them but it was he who put it best: familiarity breeds contempt.
+It was the contempt for the familiar that had driven me from Amy; it was never anything to do with her, but try as I might I could never sell her on that point.  Whatever it is I can change… those words of desperation that we use when we are in danger of losing our tenuous grasp on the world are the very ones that seal our fate and guarantee that we lose hold.  When things are mysterious they remain perpetual wellsprings from which to draw all hope, dream and fantasy, but the closer in to actual thing I get, the longer I stay in one place, the more familiar I am with a friend the more intimate I am with a lover the less mysterious they become.  Without the mystery I have nothing from which to draw, my existence is not unlike that of the vampire, but unlike the vampire my victims do not die.  I shatter their worlds and they come crawling right back again for more.  I felt sickened by myself, by the fact that I could recognize such a thing, but feel powerless to stop it; worse still was the dawning realization that I didn’t care to stop it, I had no reason to stop it.  My brain squirmed looking for a way out constantly and when Amy gave me one the wheels were already turning.  
+You’re a bedtime story Amy, the kind that wet nurses read to princes and princesses in fairy tales, a story within a story.  It was all there on the surface.  Amy you’re standing on the edge of moonlit road wearing a nightgown of embroidered lacy, thin strands of moonlight twitch in your hair.  You are the night, I hope you’re waiting for me.
+I ended up at Amy’s house twenty minutes later; I tried briefly to resist to see how serious she was and when she offered to come over and pick me so I wouldn’t have to walk I knew there was only one way to go about this.  I walked over so as to not be stuck there and also to give myself time to get right down into the sands and dig a little hole, take a closer look at the fragments of my passing even as they were going by.  What propelled me was something other than what I think of as me, something I no longer considered myself; I was merely along for the ride.  I began to see this temporal me with increasing clarity it seemed to have crawled up from inside and it hung on to edges of reality leaving me to wander in dream and observe form a distance all the beauty that surrounds the dreamer.
+ Amy was in a shiny satin dress that clung to her lithe frame; it was green and made her eyes glow the deep luster of emerald stones.  Her hair was a little bit longer and she had it pulled up behind her head to give unrequited views of the curve of her shoulder as it snaked its way up to her neck.  Her nipples poked out of the thin green material and her lips curled playfully as I walked in the door.  
+I accepted a glass of wine and took a seat on the couch.  It was a Chilean wine, a pinot, light and sweet.  We talked for a while, she told me of a few dates she had been on, how worthless men were in general, asked how I was how was I enjoying myself, did I have any plans?
+ Amy thought I was cold and callous for being able to break her heart, but she didn’t understand that I did suffer, I suffered far more, I had nowhere to place the blame, I broke my own heart as well.  I had done it before and I was destined to do it again.  She had moved through all the stages of depression that you find in the first chapters of grief psychology.
+First there was anger; my nose took the brunt of that off her closed fist.  Then silence, my favorite stage —denial.  And her we were in surrender, where the inevitable is accepted but not yet acted out, and of course there was one yet to come —acceptance.  In surrender you give up on the ghost and live on autopilot, from the rear window of the plane you can see the tragedy and the comedy, the tragedy in the comedy and occasionally even the comedy in the tragedy.  The rear door opens and from that artificial altitude you can see the surface of convoluted emotion smoothed flat with distance.  We were, for that night, up there together standing on the back of the plane just looking down and admiring the view.  How we got there and where we were going was irrelevant, it was all about the view.  I knew she would call again tomorrow and that would not be good, but for now…
+What a view!  She stopped talking and leaned into gently kiss my lips; she started to pull away, but could not, the tantalizing attraction of the unknown came over us both, would it be the same?  That was the mystery which created the inclination, keep our lips pressed together, softly at first until the craving appetite parted them with hunger and our tongues met.  She straddled me on the couch and my hands explored her sphinx-like body as though it were a newfound treasure.  My fingers tugged gently at her nipples and pulled the back of her head, pushing my tongue farther around her mouth.  The tugging became pinching and her hands fumbled at my belt in a frenzy until she had firm hold of my cock and she stroked it gently at first and then just held it in a vise grip as my own trailed down her legs and hiked up her dress.  Her legs parted and I twisted my arm to get a finger in her cunt.  She was gushing; I stroked her cunt and probed my fingers gently in until they were up to the knuckles; it wrapped them up like a closing sea anemone. 
+I pulled the dress off over her head and pushed her up onto the couch.  I slid onto the floor.  She squatted and moaned as I went to work on her cunt.  The taste was familiar and called up memories as only taste and smell can.  Infinite desires that spanned far beyond this lifetime into some timeless place where the expression of desire is infinite and perfectly tied to everybody all at once in an ecclesiastic orgasm.  Her cum was dripping of my chin and she pulled me up under her again by tugging my hair.  She licked her cum from my chin as I fingered her some more, she began to gasp into me ear and I felt her cunt contract on my fingers.  She had never come just from my hand before; it empowered me and made my cock rigid as a cement light post.  I guided her down on it, she pushed me back against the couch and began to fuck me.  I lay there with a sense of relaxed enjoyment born out of the certainty that I would not cum until I was ready.
+I wanted to feel every thrust, to feel those warm stretching walls of cunt gripping like a vise, I knew I never would again and I savored it.  I kissed her breasts as they bounced delectably in front of my lips.  I trailed her juices down to her asshole and reached my hand around her to her ass and slid into her puckered hole.  She lifted herself slightly and leaned her head down dragging her lips breathily across my cheek until she bit at my lips and her tongue snaked into my mouth.  I held my hand still and kissed her letting her grind as she raised and lowered herself up and down slowly building momentum.
+She rode me through two orgasms after which I lifted her up and threw her over the arm of the couch.  I slipped it into her with ease and began to fuck her with that intensity where you momentarily forget whether you are trying to stimulate or destroy.  Her cunt milked at my cock until in was near bursting.  I watched the swing of her ample breasts as her body thrust back to meet me.
+“Don't cum...!…I want to feel it in my ass”
+This was a new idea, not one I was all that keen on, but she looked back at me with a expression of lust so primeval and inhuman that I knew what she wanted and that she was going to get it however she pleased.  I pulled out and tongued her asshole teasing her to moans and making her beg.  She got up and ran to the bathroom, returning with jar of Vaseline.  She lay down on her stomach and smeared Vaseline on her ass, working it in with her fingers.
+“Ughuuuuuhhuhuhhhhh… you know you want my ass….  I was masturbating the other day and I started fucking myself in the ass with that dildo you gave me [I couldn’t just leave her you understand] and I’ve been wanting to feel your cock ever since.”  She smiled slyly at me.
+The veins in my cock were bulging like I had never seen them before.  I climbed on top of her and slowly, gently as I could ease myself into her ass while she spread her cheeks.  I watched her face wince at first and then relax.  Soon I had a good rhythm going and Amy came again twitching violently and screaming.  I exploded in her ass and collapsed onto her back.  After a while I propped myself up and pushed at her asshole; I was fascinated by the squishing sounds of my cum oozing and dribbling out of her ass and the way it refused to mix with Vaseline.
+I collapsed into a chair panting, but my mind was reeled about the room.  I was exhausted but had never felt so alive, my only thought was to escape her and get out into the streets into the pulse of life, to go and go and go and never look back, but Amy rolled over and begged me to make her come again.  I rolled her over and dove into her cunt trying to morph my tongue into an electric eel. 
+ Later we lay for a while in silence and smoked a cigarette.  I was fucked out, but I couldn’t help commenting on the candles.  The place was lit up like a Catholic Church, a voodoo ceremony; candles on the coffee table, the end table, the wall, even some hanging from the ceiling suspended in gnarled balls of wire that Amy had bent and twisted for the purpose.  
+“Why is it that whenever we have sex candles appear and everything gets soft lighting and feels like a hallmark greeting card?”
+She laughed.  “Was I trying to hard?”
+“Absolutely.”
+“Well thanks for humoring me….”  She got up and more cum slipped out her ass and landed on the floor.  “Oh my god! Elsa will kill me if we stain this carpet,” and she ran off to get a towel and clean herself up.  I heard running water and her yelling form the bathroom, “Jesus you haven’t gotten laid in a while…. There's a ton of cum up my ass.”  
+After a minute I walked in, “let me know what it feels like next time you take a shit.”  She was sitting on the toilet wiping the Vaseline off, cum was dribbling slowing into the toilet.  I went into the kitchen to clean myself.  I had the water running and I was studying my cock intently noticing that it was darker in tone after sex than before sex, but it didn’t wash off so I knew it wasn’t shit.   I chalked it up to blood circulation.  As I was turning it around and twisting it in knots Elsa, Amy’s roommate walked in the kitchen behind me.  Apparently she had been here the whole time in her room.  I naturally assumed that she had been gone otherwise Amy wouldn’t have fucked me in the living room, but as I turned off the sink and went to grab the dishtowel I saw her.  Her face had a wide-eyed look of wonder and I froze like a deer.  We stood there staring at each other in absolute silence for a full minute and then Amy came charging around the corner with a wineglass in each hand and sent Elsa sprawling on the floor.  They both yelped and screamed and then Amy started laughing uncontrollably rolling on the floor still holding the glasses up off the ground.  It was so ridiculous that I had to laugh in spite of myself.  The last time I had been over, Amy had tried to get me to seduce Elsa with her.  I forget why we never went through with it that night, but I do know that this was not exactly how we had planned it.  The absurdity of it made me burst out laughing; Amy and I were rolling on the floor and Elsa just stood there in shock for a while.  And then non-plused as a kitten she strode over grabbed the wine and a glass and poured it and walked off to her bedroom.  Amy and I looked at each other thinking perhaps she was genuinely offended.
+“Great, now you freaked her out…”  Amy knocked on her bedroom door softly and then slipped inside.  I hunted through their refrigerator looking for something to eat.  I found an apple and hunk of Gouda cheese, which I took out to the patio, along with the bottle of wine and a glass.  The patio was small and choked full of plants.  Most of them were mine or had been mine before I split for San Francisco; it seemed like ages ago that Amy and I had split up and we weren’t even divorced yet.  The ivy was wilting; she had it in direct sunlight.  I fondled the brittle leaves.  The flowering plants were doing much better, the snapdragons were getting so tall they could be seen from the other side of the fence.  They were slender explosions of red and purple jutting out of the moss lined baskets I had built.  I sat on the couch and lit a cigarette.  I had to admit that this patio was better than our other one and for some reason that irked me.  There were more plants more candles; it was more….  I gave up.  I thought I heard the sound of running water and I figured that someone was in the shower.  It seemed fairly obvious to me that we were all going to have sex at some point; it hung in the air like stale smoke.  It was inevitable.  I propped my feet up on the table and sat back to enjoy.  I left the details of the scenario to Amy; it was after all her house.  I was a guest, little more than a friendly cock at this point.  I heard a murmuring sound and looked up, there was Amy dripping wet standing in the frame of the sliding door, “would you like to join us in the shower?”
+“Sure.”  This is where the trouble starts I thought to myself, but I went anyway and there was Elsa standing under the warm water.  She was shorter than Amy and thinner, her breasts were bigger though and she had shiny black hair that clung to her neck in strands.  I got in and Amy followed, Amy and I kissed for a while and then she pulled away and pushed me toward Elsa who kissed me hesitantly at first and then as if giving in to something unseen she reached both arms around my neck and tried to chew my lips off.   Then the girls kissed and fondled each other softly while I stood under the water.
+“Stop hogging the water come here…” Amy pulled me over to them and the three of us kissed at the same time as best we could, but by then the water was running cold and we got out to dry off.  I wrapped a towel around my waist and went back to the kitchen to see about more food.  Once I start eating late at night its hard to stop, this time I set about to make a fruit shake out of frozen packaged peaches and blueberries.  Elsa came in to see what I was up to, she was wearing only a silk bathrobe and looked at my coyly.
+“Would you like to dance?”  She walked over casually and took the towel off my waist.  I was already half hard and she just stood there for a moment fondling my prick.
+Elsa turned up the stereo and went outside onto the patio dragging me by the cock.  The fenced enclosure was small but we didn’t really dance we just kind of turned to the soft tones of a mysterious violin.  It warped out the screen and wrapped our arms lazily about as we explored each other’s bodies.  She pulled me into her smashing her breasts against my chest, grinding her pubic hair into mine and nibbling at my neck.  I circled around sliding a finger down the crack of her ass and stroking her cunt from behind.  Amy came outside and sat on the couch and lit a cigarette.  She exhaled and smiled at me.  She twisted her mouth up into a sly grin and spread her legs and began stroking her cunt and watching us.  Every time my back was to her Elsa would fondle my ass, then she went to my cock.  She seemed to be testing Amy to see how far she could go.  My cock was ridged again by now and stabbing her in the stomach.  She reached down and pointed it under her, rubbing it along her cunt and rolling it over her clit.  Without a word she dropped on her knees and popped it in her mouth.  I was standing sideways to Amy and I saw that she was fucking her pussy with two fingers and gently patting her clit with her other hand while staring intently at Elsa’s head bobbing up and down on my cock.  I reached down and stroked Elsa’s head, gently pushing my cock further into her mouth.
+“Ya, fuck her in the mouth,” Amy purred and Elsa’s murmured tickled at the hair on my balls.  I was feeling a bit too good and eased out of her mouth.
+“Why don’t you two dance for a minute?  I need a cigarette.”  I sat down on the couch and lit one.  They never even danced.  Amy walked up and Elsa fairly seized her head and started tearing at her lips.  Amy pulled herself away.
+“You want me bad don’t you?”
+“Yessss….”
+She pushed her down to her knees and lifted one leg over her shoulder bearing her cunt down on her face.  I had sat on that same couch a million times when we were married and never had a cigarette tasted so good.  An incongruous thought came to me as I leaned forward for the ashtray, why hadn’t we done this more often?  In fact why didn’t everyone do this more often?  I leaned back and glanced around; the place was a jungle.  Plants in pots on the walls on the table, and even in metal stands on either side of the couch.  I stared laughing because it was just like the candles.  Amy came over leading Elsa by the hand.  When I laughed she bent over and reached between her legs spreading her swollen red cunt lips and wiggling her ass at me.  I pulled her down on me and entered her as she wiggled about on my cock.
+Elsa stood next to us on the couch and I stroked her fur with one hand while fondling Amy’s breast with the other.  Elsa was moaning low and she started to move around until she was in front of us half straddling the coffee table.  I leaned Amy to the side and pressed my tongue into Elsa’s cunt.  Pulled back savoring the taste of her cunt.  It was bittersweet, more like wine to Amy’s nectarine fruit flavor.  Amy’s was better, but Elsa’s was foreign.  There was something about Amy’s cunt and the way it tasted that made the back of my throat salivate.  She was wiggling on my fingers and now I felt Amy’s hand furrowing through her bush.  I moved my hand away to allow her to continue and I began to slowly lift Amy up and down on my cock.  Amy leaned back onto of me so that I was pressed up against the couch.  Everywhere I put my hand there were tits and nipples and hungry mouths laughing and biting playfully at my finger.  Then Amy began to rub at her clit and occasionally my balls kissing Elsa frantically and then she came.  She went off like a bomb tensing and jerking as if invisible forces kicked her.  She used to scare me when she came jerking and thrashing about like that.  She hung on the Elsa’s lip and never stopped fingering her.  
+“I need to be fucked,” she moaned to Amy. Amy nodded and stood up.
+Elsa straddled me facing me and Amy fed my cock into her cunt, coated her fingers in juice and then stepped back and licked them clean.  Elsa wasted no time and fucked me like a hellion, digging her nails in and snarling at me.  I pounded upwards to meet her frantic rhythm.  He cunt was long and hotter than Amy’s; I could feel my balls slapping up and down out of control.
+“You like that don’t you?  You like getting fucked hard don’t you.”  Amy pulled Elsa’s hair and snarled at her ear.  Elsa grabbed widely at Amy and came with little muffled cries; I could feel her cunt tightening in silken spasms.  By now Amy was worked up and again and I still hadn’t cum so we moved back into the living room and they spread out a bedspread and some pillows.
+“Let’s do something together,” I suggested and they went about arranging themselves in a sixty-nine position.  After some debate with myself I decided I wanted to cum in Elsa. I maneuvered myself behind her on my knees straddling Amy’s head.  Amy licked at Elsa’s clit and my balls and I rammed her in deep slow strokes while she leaned over and ate Amy out.  After a minute Elsa announced that she was cumming and I actually felt the juice pouring out of her cunt down my balls and onto Amy’s face.  Amy must have seen my balls tighten because she grabbed me buy the base of the cock and pushed Elsa forward off of me.  She sat up and urged me to lean back.  I did and the two of them went to work on me.  Amy kissed me for while; her face was covered in Elsa’s cream and was more of a cunt than a mouth.  Elsa was licking my balls, which by now were on the verge of pain, if I didn’t cum soon I was worried that I might never be able to cum again.  Amy leaned into my ear and whispered, “I want you to cum on her face, on both our face’s.”  And she went down with Elsa and began sucking on me.  The licked and sucked and nibbled and kissed each other with my cock between there lips.  Finally I came.  I came so hard I got tunnel vision and arched my back off the ground.  I stayed like that forever it seemed.  It felt natural, I wasn’t even aware I had arched off the ground until my leg threatened to cramp and I collapsed down.  I lifted my head in time to see them licking my cum off each other’s face’s giggling like schoolgirls.
+We all lay around completely fucked out.  We had some more wine, and some cigarettes.  I laid them both out on the couch and inspected the differences between their cunts.  Amy’s cunt had thick lips that sealed it up like a sea anemone while Elsa’s was wider with little lips that stuck out like flaps.  They were same little flaps of skin that stuck apart with her cum and gave a slutty well-fucked honest look to her cunt.  I told her it was beautiful.  Amy leaned over to look at her with me and it wasn’t long before we were both eating her out and she came again and then she watched exhausted, as Amy bounced up and down on my cock until she came.
+Around four we all climbed into Amy’s bed and I lay between them feigning sleep.  Jut after I heard the familiar breathing of Amy in deep sleep, Elsa grabbed at my cock and whispered that she wanted me to fuck her again nice and slowly from behind.  I tried to protest.  I was tired, but my cock was hard in no time and she feed it into her cunt.  It was still wet from earlier.  We swayed gently fucking for a long time and then I heard her gasping she came again and rolled her head around to face me.
+“Oh cum in me, please cum in me I wanna feel it squirting…”  
+I pulled out of her cunt and nudged at her ass.
+“Oh yes fuck my ass… oh my god…ouch…uuugh....yes… god…” And somewhere in the middle I came.
+We lay in silence for a while and then out of nowhere Else blurted out in whispers and gasps, “oh god that was amazing!  I saw stars and right then you came and I felt stars shooting into my ass…I want you to fuck me again sometime… just you… “  She stopped and stroked my face, “you will won’t you?  How about tomorrow?  Amy will be gone… god I must fuck you again…”
+“Yes yes, okay we will fuck again.”  I started giggling.  She was so adamant about it.  She rolled over and I lay on my back staring at the ceiling.  Elsa kissed me and fell asleep with her head on my chest. The clock read 6:23 and I still wasn’t asleep. They were both purring softly and had been for some time.  I was bursting with energy and honesty; I felt expansive, like I was floating, orbiting the moon. I had been lying there for a while just staring at the rough plaster ceiling, it’s texture seemed to resemble the surface of the moon.  I lay there a minute more orbiting the lunar surface and then gently without waking her, I eased myself out from under Elsa and climbed over Amy.  I went in the living room and got dressed.  The house smelled warm and organic.  The windows were fogged over and condensation was forming on them.  The sun was not yet up but the sky was already glowing a soft pale blue color.  I went in and kissed both of them.  I slipped out and locked the door behind me  
+I smoked a cigarette walking towards Dean’s house, but a donut shop seduced me and I sat in the silent morning air outside eating a blueberry filled donut covered in powdered sugar and dripping filling.  I was living in a kaleidoscope of realities that swirled with all the vibrancy and color of my youth, but it was alive now, here, in this moment, fairly bursting out of my chest.  I collapsed on the couch that doubled as my bed and fell into a deep coma like sleep.  
+I dreamed a radio broadcast of unknown origins pulling down the multiverse’s own information superhighway at a genetic tilt, coming across the galaxy without static, pure unadulterated reception of signal and through it all the fragment of ash kept falling, fragments of history written on burnt paper and cast about in a hurricane of now.  Fragments of falling ash. Fragments of ash falling.  White washed ceilings hanging so ominous....  Hallucination of bubble-headed figures crawling like the Michelin Man across an indescribable mountain of tires.  Motels Motels Motels Whiskey Bourbon.  Tow truck non-ordinary state of reality precludes a state of reality —that something is real.  Point at the autistic manwomanchild.  Autistic man pointing at you, laughing, unable to fathom how your brain functions and quite self-righteously you cling to its definitions.  Must delineate between abnormality and those of us who UNDERSTAND.... The Human Virus breeding like rats unconsciously conscious and aware of our disorganization. Gas Station Cold Fusion dreams of the Anarchist are breeding in the minds of the oilmen who don’t want to loose their stranglehold of reality.  Fragments of Ash falling, the continual settling of dust weighing down humanity and the French Maid masturbates discreetly in the next room.  You need her to keep the dust off your mortal coil spring.  Rebirth mythology.  Mythology of reality.  We must distinguish between what will be defined as sane and what shall be referred to as insanity.  Kevlar definitions constructed to make a better shampoo seem like a logical item on which to squander your paperbacked slavery bills.  After all these years Tide still gets your socks whiter.  Its a wonder …that they aren’t transparent by now ...that your brain retarded in its development …that evolution had not anticipated the advent of the opposable thumb …the unopposable domination of the thumb leading to and insect superiority of mating rituals stolen from a textbook on damselflies …darning needles, sewing shut your lips, mind atrophy. Weber's White Race Enriched for Superiority Scorched earth campaigns raining Ash. Shit from the sky.  Tax man came for your baby in exchange for unpaid balance.  You understand.  Nothing Personal just doing our job.  Same as the next guy.  From Auzwich on down the line.  Didn’t make the rules. Perfected them.  There are no innocents in a world of free will.  You don’t have to survive at the expense of others.  You could die with puncture wounds in your hands and others would create a new mythology strange irony would find another with holes in his hands unwilling to accept cockroach mentalities.  You want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman but he lives on in quiet cafes centralsouthamerica not so free, not all the communists have been shot yet.  You mistook misunderstood missed the lesson in the situation that unfolded  Dr. of dialectic excuses you want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman, Hitler killed everybody's body the poetess said… only taking orders you understand, just doing my job from Independence on down the line. It was a sad money grubbing hunter gather up his children and thank his gods they are his and he their god behold I have come to tell you that everything you know is wrong stop doing your job it is not yours see Hitler in your mind you want him dead but he's not he lives on buried under restraint in everyone's mind.  Only taking orders you understand.  Didn’t have a CHOICE.  Got a family to feed. Radio crackle.  Pop.  Hiss. Silence.  End transmission.
+
+
+
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+4
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+
+Deconstruct, reassemble and manufacture….  Information superhighway economy crashed the other day I paid it nevermind.  If you are going to loose your mind do it with grand style, do it with eloquence, do it over the most grandiose of phenomenon —the path of a water droplet down rain slick window panes, the curvature at the bottom of the female breast, the eccentricities of the LSD spider web experiments.  Go west young man!  So advised Horatio and a thousand other ephemeral goblins of the human spirit who had not the courage to add, because everything here is all fucked up.  I was born west.  As far west as you can get without going east, which only serves to illuminate the point —that there is no west, no east.  Go shoot yourself young man, because you are fucked!  Straight up and down fucked.  The whore snuck out the bathroom window with your wad of cash fucked.  What say you to the youth?  Do you give them promise and dreams?  No you give them battlefields on which their fathers’ bodies lie, kitchens in which there mothers’ souls bake in the heat of hell’s ovens, and offices in which their own souls may one day putrefy.  Hard work! you preach.  Hard work! There is nothing hard about your work, only theirs.  Anyone can destroy a planet, a race, a species; you proved that with ease, you passed the test with flying colors.  You stand back on the edge of charred plains surveying, why yes Jim, it worked….  Supposing it hadn’t?  You would have found another way, you are very serious and studious about your havoc.  Dean is writing you a letter, whomever you may be, be you governments, be you lawmakers, be you law enforcers, be you corporate heads, be you the almighty goddevil himself, Dean is writing you a letter.  He arrived home this evening bursting with laughter because he saw you naked in the shower.  The water was hot and your skin was flush with words, he read them at a mighty distance, unscrambled all the riddles and mysteries that you think you have sealed so safely behind boardroom doors.  You did not catch him, you will not, you can not, he does not exist to you any more.  He exists in what is to come, what architecture has yet to embody, where paint has not yet been put, where chains are made of human limbs, where words can not follow, he is walking there tonight.  He is bursting with energy; it flows inward so that he glows like a backlit screen at a silhouette puppet show.  Imagination has cut itself loose from him and he is free to dream what can not be dreamed.  His syntax is broken and useless in such a world; he can not yet bring it back for us.  I have gone with him to provide moral support.  I have been here before, I have been everywhere before and every time I return everything is different.  The cat is an orange tabby in this one, the sidewalk below is cracked and the sliding door behind us is closed.  The porch is cool in the January air of Costa Mesa, California.  We were born west in the toxic waste of modern dreams.  We are not going to go east, nor north, nor south, we are going up.  We are sky bound.  Ed is painting in the middle of the room behind us.  On the table between us there are two drinks.  One, gin and tonic, is Dean’s and the other, scotch and soda, is mine.
+And I too am in a kind of place tonight, having recently stumbled out of the air conditioned nightmare of Decartes mechanical swiss watch house of ideas and fallen into the warm fertile earth that is alive, has intelligence and is trying to say something articulate over the droning insanity of the human voice, the human machine, the adding machine, the washing machine, the bleach that stole the pigment from your soul….  The unhealthy texture of pale skin crawls about on the floor, you see it there beside your own will to live in the mechanical relativistic house of chaotic dreams.  I didn’t wake up until five in the evening.  I was just sitting up and lighting a cigarette when Dean burst through the door laughing.
+I tried in vain to explain what had happened to me while Dean was gone, but once I got beyond saying I had sex with Amy and Elsa, it all seemed pointless.  Dean poured the drinks and Ed set up his easel and canvas right there in front of the television.  He took white paint and wrote on the screen: DEAD.  Dean dragged me outside and we sat together on the porch, “I want to take the universe apart tonight Sil,” He started.  “I managed it last night for while with Ed, we were soaring, but there are no words, that was the overwhelming thing that pulled me around and around as I wrestled with it; there is of course a story, the physical account you might say, but there is no way to wrap up the emotional/mental account, the underlying thing that I was trying to reach out to, it remains mysteriously buried under the heavy noise of silence.  Somewhere near the edges of what is here and now and what is always and forever there comes, in the grips of eternity, a feeling so exhilarating and blinding that it transcends all language all communication.  I felt as if life itself… whatever it might be god… dog… you name it… was pouring right through me… like Shaterack Meshak and Abandego….  I stood in the fire and was untouched and yet there was nothing that could be said to describe it.  See, the supremely frustrating thing is that I feel like I saw a cure for all that ails us… all the world’s problems were solved from where I was… beyond good and evil, but not philosophically… really, vitally… damn I’m at a loss for words even now…. what is going through my head is taking over my life, it is the supreme and indeed the only important thing that has ever happened to me.  It keeps saying move move move; sitting still is going to drive me mad.  Even writing it out on paper, writing a book is futile… this is something entirely separate… this is art that has to be lived to understand it….”  Dean is swirling the clouds of inception circling with Hesse’s eagle and the swooping brown pelicans of literature, pouches heavy with something new, something fresh which must be shat from on high to land with a dull splatter that covers the earth with a new freshness, a new fecundity from which new life will spring, new wells will be drawn upon, new myths created, new words invented, new dreams, new ideas, new art forms  and they will blend seamlessly with old, taking its place in the long infinite line of creation.  “What we ought to do my friend is to light out for the territories.  We ought to do those things that living people —I mean people that are alive and eager to go about the business of living — do.  They sure as fuck don’t hang around here I spent all weekend watching the scurrying rats running from hole to hole and I just about can’t take it anymore.  I am bursting I am alive, I am that one little thistle that turns green after the rain on an abandoned lot.  And you, look at you, what the fuck is wrong with you?  You know better than to go showing up at some job every day —like it matters in the grand scheme of things!  We are monkeys and yet all we do is mimic the rat on the wheel or the ceaseless activity of the worker ant… to serve a queen?  What we ought to be; what we ought to be concerned with is something real… something of value that extends beyond this barren womb… this business capital of humanity.  Even the landscape is mostly boring and drab —except by the coast.  What is the rest of this place?  Mediocre rolling hills that are brown from lack of rain three quarters of the year….  The whole place is so sterile there aren’t even any animals running amuck….”
+Yes Dean, this place —these people—all of them— are beyond hope and even if they weren’t you and I are hardly the savior type…. we look out for ourselves and those that are near us, but we don’t go looking for help, it comes to us —don’t you see?  Its coming to us right now, it came to you last night, it came to me one night almost a year ago, it’s drawing us away from here away away away!  We will embark on something so beautiful… and no matter if we should end up destitute selling children in the back alleys of Rumanian because no matter what might possible happen it will at least not be this.  This is nothing this is a static oasis on the edge of desolate gasoline holocaust.  It will start here though in torn desolate, used up fabric of reality.  It will start in ugliness and squalor it will dredge up every avarice and horror man had ever know, it will start right here….
+Inside I was exuding enough enthusiasm to power a small city and the scotch was the only thing keeping me in line.  We talked of Europe and South America with such enthusiasm that listeners would have been shocked to hear that neither of us had ever been there.  We walked the dusty camel choked streets of Morocco and took the Marrakech express across the desert and then ported ourselves to the coast and caught freighters back to Brazil to sail up the Amazon. We had splendid adventures and our table was bursting with a bubbling exuberance that lit up the porch like a rocket ship.  
+You have the flavor.  The taste, the smell, the texture of… what is happening here can not be found in the simplistic quadradimensional world of ordinary being.  It is not here.  You can stop hunting it.  There is nothing to understand, there is nothing to know, it is all the arbitrary inventions of scientists and artists constructed for your amusement.  You know your philosophers, you know your painters, you know your ancient and heretical texts, but you do not know what it is to feel the living breathing pulse of the universe beaming through your chest.  You do not want to know.  Dean did not want to know.  I did not want to know, but we do, and we are no longer afraid.  Fear is felt and manufactured by a complicated chemical response system that deals with new information.  Just turn it off —like you turn off all your machines, turn it off like the flick of switch— you built the damn thing you figure out how to get out of it.  See your shrink, see your counselor, see your favorite dead author, see you favorite dead philosophers, check the newspaper, ask a politician, ask the pope, ask the scientist who manipulated anthrax for the purpose of subduing the population.  Have a drink and smoke joint, sit on your porch and don’t worry about it.  Its there whether you see it or not, that’s why were not sending anymore telegrams.  Here to go!  It was reference to the space age, to the collective desire of the human being to travel where no others have gone, into the vast empty reach of space, as the nova voiceover always puts it.  This night I hold up before you as a kind of proof dementia.  The twentieth century disillusioned, paranoid space cadets called children are two Americas now, it is no longer, as William Burroughs said… the space age.  The space age is over.  The second coming came and left without you dear reader… well no of course not you, but everyone else…. 
+
+
+
+The next day I woke up and Dean was packing up his room.  He had the entire thing down to a box of books, a suitcase of clothes and trash bag of miscellania.
+“So what’s the story again?  We’re going to Vegas I take it?”
+“Ya,” Dean set his things by the door and lit a cigarette.  “You still up for it?”
+“The question is more ‘is your mom up for me?’”
+“You know Rachel; she loves rounding up the strays and setting them on the path to righteousness…”  We laughed. And I figured what the hell.  
+“You already packed up?  That couldn’t have taken more than five minutes what the hell’d you do if for at eleven in the morning on your day off?”
+“I have less than twenty four hours to seduce Kim, finally give into Kala, and then fuck the shit out of Monique and finish it off with Corey because she doesn’t care if I’m fucked out… she’d fuck my lifeless corpse I think.”
+“Yes she probably would.”  I felt bad for Corey though because while she wasn’t in love with him she did care about him in that strange concerned abstract way that only women can care.  It may not bother her that he fucked everything he could get his hands on, but I think it did bother her that to think that he thought of her more as a fuck than a friend.  “They got any friends you can set me up with?”
+“There is this one girl… Jen… friend of Monique's… she’s been wanting to get in with me…maybe Monique too… anyway she’d go for you.  You can have her…she’s got great tits, but I can’t talk to her long enough to get her naked.”
+“Give her a call…”
+Dean went off to try and seduce Kim over lunch, but he called and told Monique that he and I were coming over and that Jen should join us all.  With a few hours to myself I figured to go see a movie and get some breakfast.  I wandered down to the coffeehouse where all the hipster art kids hang out.  The place was a refurbished storage cellar with yellow-gray walls and a scattering of benches and tables.  It was windowless and stale like most of the people it held captive.  I tried to get a plant to grow down here a few years ago before but it didn't work; I forgot about heliotropism-nothing grows in darkness.  A botany student who watched me try in vain to keep the poor ivy plant alive explained it to me in graphic detail; he was condescending like a scientists.  Everything needs sunlight in one way or another.  The kids that hung out in the cellar were bleached souls, burned by magic.  Burned by money, by law, by a culture designed to seductively lull them into a sleep state of pacified stupidity where they could be exploited as a labor source of the robber barons of Washington.  I don't think most of them were aware of that though which gave me comfort because knowledge is paralyzing and without it maybe a few of them would stumble blindly out of the cave and into the sunlight.
+	I got a cup and sat in the corner for while smoking a cigarette and watching a genetic reproduction of Ginsberg scrutinize the art on the walls.  I wished I had on three-piece suit or a football jersey so we could have played beat generation dress-up, but I didn’t and he would never have seen the humor in it anyway. I contented myself to a cup of rich dark coffee and apiece oil saturated and extra gooey coffeecake.  It was wonderful but I needed more.  I approached the Ginsberg guy cold and laid it on him about selling my art to support myself hoping to his a sympathetic nerve that led to mommy and daddy’s money.  He made we tell him all about what it was that I did and I thrust some tattered napkins under his nose and pulled them away before he could get too much into the meaning of the scribbles I talked circles around him once I realized that all it would take would be for him to feel inferior.  Charity is always an inferiority complex —here you take this you need it more than I do… if I thought he had earned the money I might have felt bad, but i still would have taken it, and I did. Leaving with his five spot I went to get a sandwich at the donut shop on Newport Boulevard.  It was an enormous sandwich coated in sweet vinegar and oil, dripping mayonnaise the constancy of slightly thinned-paint off the long strands of lettuce and delicately coated wafer-thin turkey breast that curled up and seemed to leap down my throat.  I washed the whole operation down with a glass of ice water.  When you're hungry the whole world is edible.  And the minute I had the stomach taken care of I lapsed back into reverie trying to piece together why it was that I was going to Vegas.  The main thing seemed to be that Dean was going.  I thought I ought to pay a visit to the folks since they still thought I was married and just working in San Fran for a while.  They were suitably alarmed when I laid it out honestly but I did with the firm conviction of one who knows he is right, but not why.  For now I said I was winging it and nothing more.  They gave me a hundred when left said to eat with it.  They were always worried that I lived by not eating, but the reality was closer to my grandfather who was fond of saying after a meal so we eat… we eat again… we may not do much, but boy can we eat….
+	Dean was pacing by the time I walked up the steps.  "Come on Sil I’m trying to do you a favor here pass one you’re way and you have the gall to be late?”  I told him I didn’t give a shit one way or the other, that he should have gone without me, but he wouldn’t hear of it, he was one some Herculean mission and had to have a guide for this little part of the test.  He wasn’t just fucking these girls he was lining out some Greek sized life for a day.  He had succeeded with both of the ones that morning; Kim had been to drunk for much but when he finally gave it Kala she was wildcat.  We got to Monique’s house in time for dinner, but there was no talk of food; in fact there was really no talk at all.  We walked in on them sitting watching television and then snap off went the TV Monique jumped up and grabbed Dean by the hand dragging him to the bedroom.  The door slammed behind them and was left still standing in the entryway front door open behind me, staring at Jen.  Jen was medium height with dark hair and huge tits.  She smiled at me and I closed the door.  After a few line of talk she reached calmly into my pants and pulled out my cock.  She sucked and licked and bit at it until I was hard and then she stood up tore off her shirt and pants and sat on my lap.  I mauled at her nipples for while squeezing her breasts in my hand.  They were giant and weighty, things that demanded proper handling they sloshed in my hands.
+	She pulled my shirt over my head and then pushed me back and pulled off my pants.  I was expecting her to crawl up on top of me, most women go straight to the top when there’s no emotion around, but Jen didn’t she climbed on the couch doggie style and said, “hurry and fuck me… I have to go soon.”
+	It was an odd way to put it.  I felt like I was mounting a dead horse in bad western porno, it was a job at that point, a duty that I had been asked to serve.  But of course once I had it in I forgot all about her and she forgot about me and the situation was no longer there.  We were just fucking.  We went at it like animals and suddenly I understood why she wanted it that way.  I could feel the heat of her cunt but I couldn’t see her face, it was less like we were fucking than we were masturbating together.  My hands were on her hips pumping her back and forth; I could feel the leaden texture of her skin.  My hips moved like pistons, cold mechanical.  My own body was strange foreign as if it were, a shell containing something much messier, more out of control; she rolled around on my cock so that she was tits up with her legs over my shoulders and I rammed her like that for a good while before she exhibited unusual hand gestures and undulations that I took to be an orgasm.  And then the automaton turned off and my prick came alive again.  Her tits were rolling in great ellipses as I pounded into her with abandon, I reached down and teased her clit with my finger until she came again and pulled out and shot a load on her chest.  She lay there for a bit and I got up to clean myself off.  When I came back she was gone which relieved me somewhat.  I went outside and lit a cigarette.  It was a warm night.  One of the rare humid times when LA feels tropical, the kind of night when I enjoyed going down to the ocean and walking along the shore trying to see Hawaii.  The glow of the sun had not yet disappeared entirely, but already the eastern sky was twinkling with stars.  When I took a drag I could smell Jen on my fingers.  I licked them to see what she tasted like.  Electric. It mixed well with cigarette smoke.
+
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+4
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+
+“You are my angel/come from way above/to bring me love….”
+I didn’t wake up until we were past Barstow.  I awoke outside of LA, outside of Barstow, outside of civilization, outside of intention, outside of desire, outside of myself.  I awoke in a sinister little car on a ride through the wild forlorn California Desert; the only reason I woke up at all was the heat.  It turned the pleasantness of my dream into a nightmare that I had to escape by waking up.  I dreamed I was an emperor in a foreign land, a mystical Tibetan type of land where I sat in a palace of unrivalled spender and riches; I dreamed you were there, Orisis.  Luxurious tapestries covered the walls and gold trimmed divans were arranged about the room so that you might receive visitors.  I was trying to raise an army of thinkers to combat the problems of mankind; I had sent out messengers and courtesans to attract like-minded rulers to the palace.  Word came back by means of an old telegraph machine, which sat on a cherry wood table in the corner.  Next to it was an old high back throne such as one would find in Versailles, you sat in it searching, just like you Orisis, always scouring the world to put me back together.  I wanted to wander about the palace and explore but every time I walked out of the room I would hear the telegraph machine and rush back to it, only to find that it was more negative response.   I knew that you would never bother with the machine, if news was to be received it would be through me, you had given up entirely.  Inexplicably, as it often happens in dreams, I found myself sailing in a glider over the tree dotted hills of northern Mexico.  I was admiring the peaceful silence of gliding to and fro on thermals when I suddenly became aware of the unbearable heat of the cockpit, better drop down a bit I thought to myself, but as I eased the stick forward I lost control of the plane entirely and dropped like a rock toward the waiting rocky hills.  In my descent I saw and felt what John Denver must have seen and felt when he plunged to his death off the coast of Santa Cruz.  Within the dream I was musing over his actual death in an abstract way and then bang!, I hit the ground.  I don’t know if I died, I couldn’t remember but I might as well have; waking up in the cramped confines of a glib Japanese car is a small relief from death itself.  I sat sweating profusely with my forehead bumping gently against the windowpane, trying to reconstruct the details of my imaginary palace and quixotic dream quest.  In reality as it is called I was going somewhere else, Las Vegas to be precise.
+Air conditioning is no match for the desert phoebus, it only brings the nightmare into sharper focus, a palpable tease to remind you that somewhere it is not hot at all; even now as I sat there some Llama herdsman in Andes was warming his frostbitten toes by a roaring fire.  Oh to be cold…  The scorching sun made it too hot to go back to sleep.  Dean was driving and Betty was still passed out in the back seat.  It must have been around ten in the morning; I didn’t move to look at the clock on the dashboard, it didn’t really matter, one thing about travel —time has no meaning.  There is only in the car and out of the car a sort of two-dimensional life.  I’m not accustomed to functioning at the ungodly hours referred to by most as ‘morning’ and I wasn’t about to start now, here in the middle of nowhere.  I hadn’t gone to bed until about six this same morning; I rested my eyes for a while longer and recounted the events in blackness.  
+There was a dim recollection of breakfast at Tiffany’s (or was it Denny’s?), pancakes and eggs with a side of bacon all tasteless and uneventful; a goodbye to some lingering friends, Carey, Dean and Betty’s father Mr. Dean; then conk! I was gone off in a Tibetan dream palace.  I escaped the boredom of driving east out of LA, thank god.  The drive out through the ‘inland empire’ as it’s called is a grand tour of hell (actually I would take the straight up inferno of hell served in a flaming glass before I would go of my own free will to the Inland empire).  I missed the wrenching smell of the stockyards in Upland and the bucktoothed gas station attendants of Barstow, a crying shame to be sure.  The stockyards especially amaze me; that the smell of a cow’s ass can somehow penetrated the near perfect Freudian-sterile seal of the modern automobile seems likely to remain, along with the Kennedy assassination and the pyramids, one of the true mysteries of the earth.
+Just east of Barstow there is a sign that boldly states “Greensboro NC 1297 m;” I opened my eyes again in the shadow of that unpleasant knowledge, cracked my view of the world just in time to learn that the reconstructive dentistry capital of the world was a mere 1297 miles away.  I wanted to let out a Homer Simpson “Woohoo!” but it was too hot for any unnecessary activity.  I sat up, opened my eyes, stretched as best I could and wiped the drool off my cheek.  I looked over and saw the pain on Dean’s face that only a drive through the California desert in the middle of August with a hangover can give you.  God it was hot.  And I was right it was not even eleven, which meant that the temperature was bound to climb at least another ten degrees before we got to Vegas.
+Dean had volunteered to drive the whole way to Vegas (he always was charitable when he was drunk) and naturally Betty and I had thought that a lovely idea.  He looked like he was in the throws of deep regret and cursing his own self-cast fortune, which for Dean is standard operating procedure.  There isn’t a whole lot to look at out here in the desert, at least not a whole lot that you can see from the window of a Toyota Corolla.  Of course that doesn’t mean there is nothing to see, its just that racing along in as enlarged soda can at ninety miles an hour limits your view of the world.  The cramping stylings of a cheap Japanese car was hindering our view, or maybe not so much the car but the speed of it.  We humans can move what!  I mean real speed, airplanes, space rockets, trains; we can run like no other animal and with no personal effort whatsoever.  Speed doesn’t allow for minutiae, even a mere gloss of the passing scenery is too much for the human eye at ninety miles an hour.  The creosote and hohoba plants that dot its hills and serpentine sand dunes are the only relief the eye gets from the endless endless nothing.  You don’t get details with speed, but its still the best way to travel —like comet we could crash into Vegas in a couple of hours, burn down the town and then go rocketing off again.
+The car contained only the barest of essentials; Dean and I had thrown a few pants and shirts in a suitcase each and then I had a small courier bag with notepads, pens and a handful of books.  A garment bag held two suits each because a stranger in a strange land ought to look his best we reasoned. Betty, being a woman, had the largest suitcase that occupied the majority of the trunk, but otherwise the interior of the car was uncluttered with the trappings of humanity.  Music had been carefully selected for its road worth qualities, a healthy mix of raucous punk rock to keep us awake and soothing melodic pieces designed to lull the mind and drown the endless droning of the wheels.  I insisted on bring Beethoven’s Ninth for nighttime drives.  The upshot of our circumstances was the we traveled light, secretly though we kept it to ourselves, Dean and I mutually figured on having to lug most of it by foot at some point when the already suspect nature of the Toyota gave out entirely and finally surrendered its fate to the junkyard.  We had all left behind an enormous pile of furnishings and creature comforts which for my part I hoped to never lay eyes on again, but our friends had assured us they would see that it all got into storage should any of us return someday and want it.  Bastards.  The idea was to go and keep going, but it didn’t quite work out that way.
+	Happenstance carried me again I surrendered my own fate to that of the car, of the road, of the random complexities of life pure life with no entrapments, encumbrances, or dovetailed catches to hang me up.  We have thrown ourselves to the wind to let the scattering process begin; the first day out and I was feeling as expansively free as the landscape, floating on the thermals of fortuitous caesura.  Sheer chance drew me here and left me staring out the car window into nothingness, the pedigreed nothingness of freedom.  The desert was a void from my window; it had the deceptive appearance of emptiness not unlike the silent inky surface of the ocean, which is not empty but teeming with life.  The desert was once a sea floor, but the life wouldn't have it, the water rolled back to greener pastures.  The desert is the void left by water and filled up with castoff bric-a-brac from the mountain regions.  To the north glittery jewel peaks, the southern most tip of the White Mountains —snow.  Its making my mouth water, I point it out to Dean which seems to snap him out of some trance state and he agreed to pull over so we can stand on top of his car and look at them through the binoculars.  I imagined the cool streams, the whole painted backdrop from the set of Bambi coated in snow.  Our enthusiasm lasted about thirty seconds and then we started to realize that in fact the air conditioning is helping and that without it we are forced to suck hot dry air like clamping your lips to an exhaust pipe.
+	Besides I knew the White Mountains didn’t look like a snow covered Bambi set; I’ve been there and they’re just as hot as the desert this time of year.  I jumped down and we headed back out on the road.  I lit a cigarette.  Life was going bang!   The epi-endo-genetic bang that finally turns on the radio, like when the old crystal quarts set gets cranked next to the digital signal, cold and clear you can taste it, metallic vibrations of noise it slam into your gut.  Sock you like a plutonium fuzz blast.
+The sun burned through the open window and the dry hot air sucked itself greedily down into my lungs so that the heat had the peculiar effect of feeling like it radiated out from within rather than coming from that detached burning globe that was nearing it’s apex.  I felt like I might spontaneously combust just like those “rare” cases you hear about on That’s Incredible. I thought of saying I had heard —give a man a match and he can build a fire to warm himself through the night, but set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.  True what!  
+I stirred finally and Dean looked over at me.  “How ya doin’?” he asked.
+“Wonderful, except for the heat or course.”
+“Ya that’s why I was willing to drive… so I didn’t have to sit in the sun…” he smiled mischievously.  I knew there had to be some hidden insidiousness behind his offer…
+“Ah, so you knew?”
+He glanced at me with superiority, “come on now, I’m a professional.”
+With the air conditioner on high and the fortuitous curve of the freeway I found myself becoming more comfortable.  Heat radiates out from within.  I found that if you keep that in mind you can cope with it, you just have to fan it out —blow the vents so to speak—burn it off at the right pace— with the right amount of water, cigarettes, ice-cold beer, and snack food.   Eventually I came to find my mind relaxed and floating on the surface of a glassy pond.  Gentle ripples between drags of the cigarette tuned my ears to the desert frequency.
+Like the teeming depths of the ocean that once covered it there is an infinite web of natural and supernatural life out there.  My father is a desert rat, so I am no stranger to the bristling spike infested country of California.  When I was younger we used to make trips out here in the blistering heat and roaring silence to go hiking and camping; the sort of thing that most fathers didn’t do I found out later, but I had a good time on those trips.  My father dragged me from one end of the desert to the other, up the 395 to Hisperia and down the 316 all the way across the Mexican border at Tecate.  I learned a million tiny nuggets of knowledge to tidy my mind over through life’s boring stretches like riding about in a car.  I can assure you that there is an unknown universe of life thriving out there in the sand and heat, a harsh unforgiving universe as the cliché would have it, but it is also a delicately beautiful latticework teeming with life. Complex and fragile ecosystems evolved over millennia of cooperation and mutually assured survival instincts are woven through the barren rock and sand washes.  In the afternoons during a summer thunderstorm if you sit in the shade of a Palo Verde tree and watch the edges of a dry riverbed you can catch a glimpse of that universe.  Lizards and snakes frolic and birds seem to rejoice at the smell of rain.  (Lest you actually do this it is worth stating that you ought not to dally too long as that peaceful scene can be turned into a fifty mile an hour river of mud and rock that will jump out of nowhere and kill you before you have time to realize that you are going to die— I personally hope one day to die with such peace, but in case you aren’t ready don’t say I didn’t warn you).  There are enormous anthills that look not unlike flying over Manhattan at midday.  The desert works on a smaller scale, it is only for those with infinite patience, if you live in the desert you don’t want to have a lot to do.  That’s why there are ghost towns from here clear up to the base of the Sierra Nevada, towns where people didn’t have anything to do.  There was no reason per se to go to such towns and without reason they died.  I went out to the famous Calico ghost town once; a collection of blue-gray wood shacks, collapsing roofs, broken out windows and ceaseless wind blowing dust in every crevice.  But there were loads of people milling about in the summer heat, trying to keep the dust out of their teeth and see what a ghost town is.  There are no ghosts in the traditional sense at least not any that I could see, but there were ghosts of ideas, of lives, and hopes and dreams.  What must the inhabitants of thought living here in the wind blown back alley of nowhere?  Was this entire town little more than a broken wagon wheel that changed a life?  Or did someone plan this one out; did some one think this was a good idea?  My friend Mike and I drank icy Coca-Cola in the shade and debated those and other questions. We watched the pasty bloated souls called Tourist Americanus and tried to decide what they would be isolated here instead of thriving in their air-conditioned lysoled suburbs.
+Dean’s stereo is just audible above the roar of our cracked windows and when I strain I can hear Morphine playing.  She had black hair like ravens crawling down her neck…  I quoted that line once as an example of the band’s genius and the man to whom I was speaking said ‘actually that’s basic literary imagery metaphor 101…’ I felt bad for him, but I didn’t reply.  Its in the way it floats off the tongue, its in the way one simple image can carry you all the way to a seedy bar in Paris France, it’s the way it slides out of the lung and fits so smoothly in between the base and the drums.  It can take you anywhere you want, but only if you want to go.  If you want to hear cliches then I assure you, you will hear them everywhere you go. Have fun.  Stay clear of me.
+Take the subtlest of frequency modulations and dig until you find the pulsar of life; blasting straight through the chest and then stroking on soft cushions to sooth you down.  In and out.  Draws you from one world to the next, an electro- static charge, like a song played off an old Castagraf recorder.
+	You move the body electric in pulsation, with receptors that crawl — feeling warmth of the spine they head the back of the brain.  The surge is ecstatic... drives me right on over into the next dimension -model -metaphor -you get the picture.  You might have even hung it on your wall when you where younger, and hungrier —hunger drives the hierarchy and it’s there, even when your stomach is full... it hit raw exposed nerve endings with the high voltage throb of life that’s hard wired into our brains...in there like a virus you might say.  Lust for what?  It’s all gone from now.  Ebb and flow, the surges come in waves.   
+I gotta run to make diving in smooth... feels in slow motion... you hang in the air for a timeless moment and then hit the water like a torpedo, the waves slip out from around the impact and form a circular blueprint...  The pond turns in the throws of a tempest, frothing with uninterrupted motion.  The animal body is an alternating current, suspended in perfect fluidity like the ecstatic dances of the trance-shamans carried slip-slow up into the magic of the beyond.  Echoes abound like a caged sun gone supernova... atomizes and reforms as the cool wave hits the skin.  Smooth blue skin.
+	I remember three —maybe four— days ago smoking filterless cigarettes listening to the voices trailing in from the mezzanine, a masterpiece composition of harmonized waves, sound —the trigger behind the motion.  Dancing eyes so ravenous, spiral with giddiness, threw out the tired old man mind.  Bring it back down... bring it back down cause I never quite got it the first time.
+Lost in images, swirling words, sounds, smells miraculous warmth on the crawling embers of flesh.... The black on the starry night... Van Gogh and his goddamn ear always creeping in at the edges.  Diggin' fast and furious: tunnelers.  Roots and the little blooms—the moment—the purity—the wavelength transitions in simplicity—burned like hydrochloric acid onto the memory film.  Scar tissue that languishes eternally.
+
+
+
+
+We are staying with Rachel, here in Vegas; things are amuck amuck as the man said.  First there is Rachel.   Rachel is a cool-mom.  In every collection of friends I have ever wandered into there is inevitably one whose mother is the cool-mom.  Cool-moms are the ones that harbor the strays, know what clit piercing is and don’t mind the excesses of youth because they never forgot their own.  Johnson through and through the cool-mom is and Rachel was the one in our circle.  She was the one who didn’t mind wayward children crashing on the floor, junkies trying to kick locked in the bedroom and only god knew how many poor lost girls Dean had dragged home and put up in her house for a month or two, sometimes more.  Through it all she was understanding and usually supportive of all human creatures.  The cool-mom never judges or casts out someone because a simple disagreement or difference in beliefs.  Rachel was every bit the part, she was a matronly woman heavy set and swaggering full of spice and fire spitting gusto, she could out drink Betty.  Right now her life has taken a turn though, the cool-mom has had the bedrock foundation of the desert blown out from under her and for the first time in my life I feel old, old and weary the whole lot of us are slowly decaying in the heat, but the ambrosial smell of decay is good for us, like a hot brand on your ass, it might scar, but it’ll wake you up.
+Then there is Rachel’s boyfriend Bob. Bob on the other hand is a redneck; the backwoods stripe ran through and through. Bob was the sort of all right guy that you realize isn’t alright after talking to him for twenty minutes.  These types tended to hang around the Little Knight during the early hours of the evening where it seemed they were wrapping up a hard day of hard drinking.  Mysteriously they always seemed to be loaded with cash.  Most of the ones I had talked to were in some sort of construction related business and they were always trying to get “youngsters” like myself to give them or sell them or just get them pot.  Bob had actually taken this cliché one step further and asked Dean and I to go up to Alaska, where he supposedly had a cabin, and grow Maui-wowi for him.  Almost anybody else and I would have jumped at the chance, but the thought of getting into a small plane with that man at the controls made my blood turn to ice.  I thought about it every time I see him.  I see his false eyes glittering like pyrite in the Alaskan mountains and I see our carcasses lying half eaten by the fire and Bob just sitting there smiling that absurd smile….
+True to the cliche Bob worked in construction (although he never seemed to actually work), drank hard and probably beat the crap out of Rachel —if not physically then emotionally.  I pretended to watch television while carefully watching the two of them.  From what I had seen of the man his mind consisted solely of illegible notes, beer stains and racist jokes.  He possessed the outdated practical knowledge of one that works with his hands and knew how to downshift the mind into neutral in order to get things accomplished.  There is nothing wrong with that per se but Bob seemed to have left his mind in neutral a little too long, maybe flooded the engine or something; maybe he was just dumber than a bag of rocks right out of the womb.  There was something intangible in the air about him and all the others I have met like him, something sinister and vague in its intent; he is a bad man my grandmother would have said and I have had my fill of bad men for this lifetime. 
+I avoid him like the plague, but its difficult to avoid someone when you live with them.  Bob was a constant nuisance, he was always knocking on the door to Dean’s room where I was also staying for the time being and after a while he realized that we weren’t always asleep so he took it upon himself to barge in and offer us ‘a cold one.’  Now that doesn’t sound like such a bad man, but the problem lay in the fact that a cold one was rarely anything better than Pabst blue ribbon and he never just had one.  He would perch there on the end of Dean’s bed with his bog construction boot on my pillow; it was his unsubtle way of reminding me that I was not welcome in his book.  He would sit there and out of the blue launch into his troubles; work was working him to hard, alcohol was no longer solving all his problems (ya think? Dean and I would say), and worst of all was when he told a story.  Bob had no sense of timing or point to his stories, they were uninteresting, delivered in a chaotic disjointed way that made no sense and they never had a point or an end they just kind of tapered off or led to a completely separate story with no relation to the one preceding it.  My favorite were the ones that went… “I went down to the strip last night….”  The middle parts changed according to the night but the end result was always the same, bob sitting somewhere too drunk to know where and trying to remember if a taxi was on its way or if he just thought it was on its way.  Then there was the tapered ending in which he tried to remember where he lived and his voice would train off and he might say something like “did you ever meet my sister Bonnie?”  Or what’s the score anybody know what the score to the game is?”  Dean and I never even knew what game he was referring to let alone what the score was.  The score was that Bob drove us out of the house to saner pastures where no one bothered us. 
+Dean had a nice little racket writing for the Vegas Gazette which was owned by one of his schoolmate’s father or something like that.  He wrote inane little articles about the various society happenings of Las Vegas it was inane, but it came with perks such as the pretentious parties we had to attend; Dean as the writer and me as the photographer.  We were the press.  Or at least we were supposed to be, but we spent more time at the open bars than we did interviewing and photographing people. 
+
+
+
+Lately I have been spending all my time in the Double Down with Dean.  Day’s pass like strolls through airport lounges, arrival and departure times listed in gambling winnings and losses, the interim’s are spent waiting, waiting for the cards to come around waiting for a friendly drunk to throw a chip our way, waiting for the call girls to give in to the only thing money can’t buy… tenderness. Typically we roll out of bed as the sun is setting and duck out before Bob comes home from work or the bar or wherever he whiles his time away.  The Double Down is all the way on the other side of town so we don’t get there until eight o’clock.  The sun has just set when we walked through the door tonight.  We weave through the human menagerie and get drinks at the bar.  In the back is a separate room a quieter one where you can have drinks with a date or a whore and talk before heading down the street to the hotel that rent by the hour where you can knock back for a few rounds and still some back for a nightcap because its Las Vegas and you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want and know one seems to care.  This is the apex of modern ideals, Las Vegas.  It’s the glitter capital of the world, the sky, the buildings, and the streets all glitter, refracting light through the hollow core.
+Las Vegas, is what happened when the fleshy ooze of humanity confronted the barbed souls of the barrel cactus, the spiny leaves of the Palo Verde tree, and all the otherworldly creatures of the desert.  The first step in renovating what must have appeared as hell to early settlers was air-conditioned.  Before air conditioning, not even the thrill of gambling would have made people come to Las Vegas in the summertime.  But cool it down a bit and you can decorate hell up nice; some casinos, some brothels, curtains in the windows, now things are looking up. 
+Th puritan preachers of the four-headed beast abstinence are the only humans that don’t like Vegas, but they don’t like anything except God so that should come as no surprise.  These are unfortunate and trying times that we live in, they have wrought the heavy hand of the Moral Minority and its cronies all the way across the nation to squelch any fun you thought you might be able to have.  I only bring this up because another old casino was razed this afternoon, another shoddy rundown beautiful den of corruption and vice.  What will replace it will no doubt sparkle and have a romper room for kids to play in while there conservative sort of middle class sort of middle of the road sort of white family fantasy parents gamble and “cut loose.”  The very same people that vote republican and unconsciously model their morals after Alex P Keaton.  They may not be religious but they are damn sure they no what is right and wrong —gambling and drink is right; whores and drugs is wrong.  Therein they support the further degradation of the human animal that has been propagated by the Moral Minority for what seems like eternity. The American west was humanity’s final hope for salvation from the hideous forces of belief and repression, but its lost, all is lost… you know the story… odd isn’t it that the land of liberty has more citizens in prison than any other country on earth?  Our country’s history reads like cartoon strip of a small innocent child running from an overbearing stepmother; first it was England then New England; the poor child is tired and sat down to rest here in Las Vegas.  Las Vegas used to be the grand ball of the country, but then the overbearing bitch of ‘prurient interests” showed up.  The old casinos are being torn down and whorehouses are driven out of business every passing day and the mob has been beaten back to the landfills and over safer money laundering operations.  Now instead of quasi-burlesque shows there are silly men in tights parading wholesomely around with white tigers amid a pyrotechnics background of high wire acts.  Who the fuck wants to see tigers, even if they are white?  We came to buy some whores and drink until we can’t see straight.  To live more or less the way god intended —happy. 
+This evening I am sitting on a bench in the mezzanine of the Double Down which is a casino/bar/night club/breeding ground for nefariousness; I am waiting for Dean who is chatting up a beautiful girl at the back of the bar who may or may not be a whore.  It is Dean’s quest to find out and if the answer be yes then how much?  In the meantime I am watching the cheapskate old ladies with blue hair clutch at their plastic cups slowly emptying them of quarters, which they drop mechanically into the slots.  What goes through you mind when you do that all day long?  Do you still have a mind, is anything happening in there?  Perhaps this was there form of meditation, different but maybe the same idea as driving.  They assume a purely mechanical nature in order to let their minds wander about, to frolic through lost memories of youth and life when it still meant something.  More likely there was nothing going on upstairs I decide.  It is nearly nine now and the sun is but a slice of iridescent orange peel slinking behind the glittery casinos of the strip skyline, but the heat is still hanging on even in the shadows.  Off in the distance I can just see the tips of the high rise casinos where the rich gamble in private rooms waited on by topless cocktail girls and through the walls they listen to the thriving sounds of tourists dropping coins and laying down bills to line the velvet pockets which hold their Cuban cigars.  The wheels are turning twenty four hours a day seven days a week for eternity.  The velvet gets nicer every year and the girls prettier and the tourists dumber and fatter always wanting more! New! Bigger!  By god!, screams the frustrated real estate Tycoon in horror. What the hell is going on here?!  He stands up from the table in alarm, zombie eyes are peering vacantly through one way windows, what do they want?  Well sir, says the nervous pimple employee who was sent in with a message, they want more...  He speaks in a whisper unsure of whether to be more afraid of the Boss or the Mob.  We gave them a pirate ship, recreated the pyramids, and the canals of Venice, what more do you people want from us?!  I just can’t take it anymore, first it was the galls stones then kidney stones, two bi-pass surgeries (the second one a triple!) are you trying to kill me?!  And off in the distance the throngs gather about and begin to chant as if spellbound by the ancient techniques trance revivals: We want more!  We want new!  The volume increases as the numbers grow from all over the world masses gather beneath the alter and chant…We want shiny!  We want clean!  The very enslaved that the bosses has so sneered at and exploited were now subtly fighting back with incessant dreams, the perfect slave became the uncontrollable master…We want to be fitter!  We want to be happier!  The Boss scratches his head and thinks for while, eyeing the faces in the mirror staring at him though they can not see him… alright kid, here’s what were going to do, you go out and tell them that I am currently drawing up plans to build a half size replica of the Eiffel tower, the hotel next to it is going to be immense, the restaurant will be in the middle with a clear view up ninety stories to sky.  Tell them that I have plans for a tower to extend up five stories and I plan to fill it with wine bottles with will be delivered to their tables by a girl on a mechanical trapeze swing that can be raise and lowered as need to fetch their wine.  Tell them the expensive stuff is going to be at the top, those cheap bastards’ll be order screw top crap that the waiters can get, but as long as somebody buys the good stuff they all get to see the show.  The Boss is positively beaming now, inspiration has hit he is on to something.  He shoos the kid outside and through the waitress’s out after him.  He locks the door and starts sketching….
+Boredom.  I wander over seeing that Dean is seated now and obviously not headed anywhere for a while; I join them in booth.  Dean introduces me to Chloe who just as I had feared is gorgeous and a whore; I can see it in her eyes.  The way she watches Dean while he talks, she is thinking that yes he will pay, but even if he didn’t she would enjoy it just the same, he has a tenderness in the dies of eyes, little flickers that light the whore imagination.  She’s right, but it’s only half the story —her half.  The room has the stale smell of too many smokers and not enough air filters built up over decades of excess and depravity.  I imagine the are walls a sickly yellow color cauterized with smoke and splattered with sloshed beer, but its too dark to tell for sure.  There is a sensual symphony gurgling and lurching through each minute with the ceaseless effort of the little engine that could. Cartoon character faces fill up chairs and resemble like the creatures that pop out of the walls at the Tiki room in Disneyland.  Repulsive faces that seemed devoid of all humanity —zombies with coins.  The frail frame of an elderly woman at a slot machine never so much as murmured as she dropped quarters in the machine; her arm moved from the handle to her plastic bucket full of change as if it were part of the machine rather than a warm body. Double Down became a swirl of lights, sex and drugs, the human effort to fulfill needs.
+They want to eat.  New needs, hierarchies, sex after food.  Leaving there is whirlpool of words like white and dark chocolate swirled together atop a brownie of callous confusion.  Words can not hurt me… but have you heard the words?  Watch out for the bloody words, sharp words that hang in the air like knives and when uttered returned to slit the throat of their speaker and if every word you have spoken returned to act upon yourself would you survive the experience?   Me no way I'm outta here.  Situation getting sticky, humid like vaporous blood hanging on in the air.  Still acrid smell of urine and small children playing in a asphalt playground ringed on all sides by immense brick walls with basketball hoops hung half way up each of the sides.     Outside is America; a cop lights a whore’s cigarette near the corner.  I laugh realizing that that which we are taught from childhood to distrust is in fact a pawn of something far more immense and much much more dangerous.  The governments and nations of the world are incidental pawns of there own control systems and then beyond them there are even more and so on like looking two mirrors facing each other and going on to infinity.  The monster of power is faceless there is no one person or group that controls everything they are all parts of a immense and multi-headed monster that is constantly biting itself and attacking it own heads until some day it will destroy itself.  The end of time leaves space and word alone together.  Information potential exists —it’s an unsettling thought, dependency —and what happens when things start to think? How do you draw the lines then?  Where does the word go?  In the beginning to be sure… but what about at the end….  In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh by a cacophonous blast out of heaven's pearly cum-stained ass creating the father, the son, and the holy spigot which lies in a secluded garden on the cliffs overlooking the Sargasso sea.  The spigot is buried in a volcano designed by Czech ostriches in the eleventh hour of creation to drain all human excrement off the continent of Europe and into the Sargasso sea all lumpy with turd so thick Jesus "conny" Christ in drag is walking along to the amazement of the gullible, floating gently from turd to turd.  The piss blood of a million cunts and cocks line the shores giving the whole place a radioactive iridescent red glow not to mention an awful stench.  Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo are standing on the bluffs watching the spectacle and scanning with hawk eyes for sweet tight asses in which they can stab their hungry cocks.  The father caught the son sitting in the middle of the garden sucking on an apple and he became enraged and hog tied the boy and penetrated every orifice in his body with a peeled and sculpted cucumber cock; the boy was left a whimpering, quivering lump of fleshy jello from which spawned humankind…?  Outside is Las Vegas.  Everywhere the neon glows; the giggling Hyenas tourists are dressed in black and high on somatic stasis —looking to turn you inside out. Tongue-tied whores scream obscenities at passersby "I'll suck your dick until your eyeballs pop out your ass..."
+
+
+Chloe knows a diner, just a short drive… drunkenly Dean careens side streets and alleys while Chloe and I discuss the finer points of her profession.  The oldest profession in the world fascinates me and I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to get the inside dope.
+“For the most part I fuck who I want… I have my regulars… guys that come into town every month or two for recreation….”
+She takes a drag off her cigarette and whips her nose; it’s a gesture of annoyance.  I know that she doesn’t want to talk about work, but I press on because I have to, I have no shame, no bloody words reach me.
+“Most of them are married, nice guys… I don’t work the streets… that’s where it’s dangerous… I used to work at a brothel but everyone treats you like a whore when you work in brothel.  I got tired of it and when I left it turned out I was popular…” she laughed a hearty little chuckle.  “So I just got a pager and now I go to them instead of them coming to me….  But why do you want to know all this stuff?”
+Sharp words bloody words.  “Uh I don’t know… isn’t that what you do when you talk to strangers.... Ask them about there work?”  She laughs.
+“I guess its just that when your job is sex most people tend to not ask… its impolite maybe I don’t know. I wasn’t trying to stop you I was just curious… so what do you guys do?”
+“Umm… drink?  Nothing I guess.”
+“Hmm how do you afford it?”
+“A carefully constructed world of lowered expectations….”  Dean speaks.
+“Hmm.  But you have goals?  You don’t seem like the types that would just hang around, you know barflies or are you on some kind Bukowski trip.”
+Entirely inaccurate synopsis; I must defend us, but what is there to say?  What is there to do?  “Well I actually haven’t read any Bukowski, but yes I guess you could say that… I mean this is Vegas what the hell is there to do?  ‘We’re writers’ sounds stupid because neither of us had actually published anything.  I mean I guess it depends…”
+“No I don’t think it does.  You don’t have to published to be a writer, just like you don’t have to charge money to be a whore.”
+And there the conversation reached a philosophical point that required further thought on all our parts, but the diner appeared and we parked and it was lost for the time being.  Dean went in to get a table and Chloe and I finished out cigarettes in silence.  I was marveling at the edifice of the place.  I am a connoisseur of diners.  Every diner has its own subtle quality which distinguishes it from all the nearly identical establishments of its kind; in order to qualify as a true diner the outside must be painted white and in a state of decay.  This place fit the bill admirably; it looked like the last coat of paint probably still had lead in it, which would put it pre 1980 at least.  Lead is what produces those strange patterned of flaking that leaves the look of weathered desert rock on stucco walls.  Dean leaned out and yelled at us, “we can smoke inside you morons….”  Inside it still lived up to the diner images; hard formica counters rose out of cold concrete floors scuffed from the worn heels of trucker boots treading season after season across the threshold and into the red glow just to rest wearied eyes. It calling up visions of lost highways long gone past; dredged out images blurred together; passing seasons traced out in the arks of headlights carved through concrete.  We sat down in a booth by the side window. Dean went to go spin a few tracks on the jukebox; Chloe looked even more ravishing sitting in the red vinyl cushions her hair was auburn and looked best in the state of confused disarray she wore it.  I fell in love with her the way every man falls in love with whores, a totally false way in the eyes of the cynical world and a totally real way in the eyes of the endlessly recreating universe.  Music floated across the room burying the concrete
+highway traces of noise, the freeway semi trailers flinging themselves through the night headlights dragging the past into the future and we sat, Chloe and I, here, now.
+I was at piece by the time Dean came back; lazy houseflies crawled up the wall behind him and Chloe which set the diner off in league with other infamous places I have eaten such as Ben’s Broasted Chicken.  I was headed up to the Tahoe area by way of the back road, 395, a rickety operation that shoots you straight up the length of california always keeping the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada just to the left.  About three quarters of the way to Tahoe you pass through the blink-and-you-miss-it town of Bishop where among other things there is a roadside dive called Ben’s which serves Broasted chicken and corn on the cob for two dollars a plate.  There were no other options no menu no choices no confusion, no arguing with the cook just broasted chicken and corn.  I remember going in primarily because I wanted to know just what one did to a chicken to make it broasted.  After that all I remember is the enormous lazy flies that crawled up the column next to my table.  I still can’t recollect exactly what the chicken tasted or even looked like, the corn sticks out as being over cooked and mushy and of course the flies were lazy and didn’t move when you swatted them which led me to believe that in fact they were never swatted at.  Indeed Ben’s was probably a kind of legend in fly circles, one to another word passed down the line and traveled all through the Eastern Desert of california, if you were a fly Ben’s was the place to be.  I asked to meet the infamous Ben proprietor and presumably the genius behind the broasting, but unfortunately he was out of town.  Instead the cook gave us a tour of the kitchen and that only served to make my experience at Ben’s a singular one.  I was passing through Bishop several years after that and I tried to locate Ben’s Broasted Chicken so that Amy could share the wonder of broasted chicken with me, but the place was gone, no building nothing, even some locals in town acted like they had no idea what I was talking about.  One old woman gave us that peculiar look that small town people always give to city folk as if to say you have no business poking around here asking questions, but I kept at her until she confessed that Ben’s was something she had never heard of, and what's more she informed us that she had lived in Bishop her whole life.  I started to wonder if maybe I had hallucinated the whole thing and Amy, who was in love with my eccentricities as much as my banality, I am certain though that here was the definitive proof she had always wanted to know for sure that I was totally nuts.  We snacked on bread from Shatz’s Bakery and drove up to Mammoth with me recounting the same story of Ben’s Broasted chicken that I had laid on her before Bishop, doubtlessly boring her to sleep.
+	I recanted the story of Ben’s to Dean and Chloe over double cheeseburgers.  I still don’t let little things like fat lazy flies bother me, who ever heard of a fly that ate anything more than crumbs?  They were doing no harm and the burgers were dripping greasy and quite yummy, as Amy would have said if she had been there.  Every time I get to thinking about or talking about Ben’s Broasted Chicken strange things begin to happen, first the place disappears and then to reach across a span of maybe five years Ben’s came crashing into the present and my mouth dropped open full of half chewed cheese burger when who should come strolling in the door of this diner, but Clay Napier the very man who had been with me on that virgin trip to the land of broasted chicken.  Actually the weirdness factor way have been slightly over played on my part as I did know that Clay was in Flagstaff and often went to Vegas for the weekends, but it’s a big city and then even in Vegas how many diners?  How many nights?  What are the odds?  All of this can in someway be accounted for by the initial mystery that set it all in motion… what is broasted chicken?  I no longer care (I also have made it a point never to consult a cookbook) I prefer the mystery to which broasted chicken has attended, at least for me.
+	I watched Clay for moment without him seeing me.  Clay Napier was an ancient friend, not in a chronological sense but in the sense that we would always be friends regardless of the time between meetings we never had more then twenty or so awkward moments of catching up and then things fell naturally into place as if we had been together everyday for years.  I waited until the waitress had seated him and then casually sauntered up while he was reading the menu and sat down across the booth from him.  I cleared my throat and as I did so and he put down the menu to see who was disturbing him.  I watched in slow motion as his face went from blank irritation to recognition, and then surprise.  We smiled at each other for a moment and then nonplussed, as if it were perfectly natural that we should come upon each other five years and two states away from our last meeting, Clay slid out of the booth and we embraced for moment before the volume of words began to flow forth.
+	“My god what are you doing here?” 
+	“I was going to ask you the very same question —I thought you were up in the mountains or was it in flagstaff?”
+	“Ya I was in Flagstaff until I graduated, now I’m actually living in Wrightwood, but my girlfriend lives down here… she’s working right now so I was catching a late dinner… why are you in Vegas?  Last thing I heard you had gone back to school or something to that effect…?!”
+	I racked my brain.  Where would he have gotten such foolish ideas?  Who was behind this?  “Uh, no I haven’t gotten around to that yet, who told you that one?”
+	“I forget maybe Robert.”  Robert K Statmore an upright human being if there ever was one, it had been years since I had even thought of Bob, except when I went camping and realized with a fresh new sense of shame that I still had the tent I borrowed one weekend almost four years ago.  Which, it dawned on me now was one of the many things I had given away by leaving LA.
+	“How is Bob?”
+	“Dunno, haven’t talked to any of those guys in a couple of years, I been out here doing odd jobs, I was working for a mining firm doing archeological impact studies, you know making sure they weren’t trampling on our people.”  Clay and I both laughed.
+Our people was an old and very elaborate joke that had developed over the years, a sort of half joke actually as Clay and I were serious about some of it.  Our people were the native American’s whose blood ran through both our bodies, in Clay it was the Cherokee, and in mine it was (I think) Ogalala, but either way it wasn’t much, not even enough to claim it for scholarship purposes.  The both of us were middle European mutts, half breeds, the results of some horny individuals who had no qualms about fucking across international boundaries, but the point of “our people” was not so much about us, it was a continuous good natured way to needle the third point in our boyhood triangle of friendship.  That third point was named Jim Stout and was proudly and definitely Irish.  When we all got drunk conversation used to end up with Jim threatening to give us small pox blankets and us half-heartedly trying to scalp him while he slept.  It’s funny now looking back how teenagers can turn genocide and torture into a source of humor and competition.  We were a lot smarter back then.  I smiled at Clay’s comment and was lost for moment in a nostalgic reflection over my boyhood.  I saw Clay as I will always see him when he’s not around, he’s sitting in that diner smiling that old half crooked curve, and to this day his nasal voice echoes about in my ears whenever I think of him.  He had slow manner of speech where you leaned in close so as not to miss a word.  He often didn’t say much just shrugged or gave you a look, but the words that did fall out were carefully measured like a recipe and to miss one of them would ruin the flavor of what he was trying to say.  And then there were The Looks, you have to know someone for a while before you can communicate with them on a subverbal level with just looks, but with Clay that time was double the norm.  He had looks, which he held out in silence that could mean more than complex and overly verbose sentence.  When he was feeling thoughtful and didn’t have an opinion he would stroke his chin with a bemused expression which only over time did I realize was not in fact an ironic mockery of Allen Ginsburg, but really the genuine article of inner reflection being measure out and stirred up.  
+Clay had left LA years ago living in Arizona going to school and continuing down the boisterous outdoor life that we had all lead during high school.  Nearly every weekend we headed out to Joshua Tree the local rock climbing hang out and Clay had patiently taught Jim and I how to climb until one day we were both better than him.  Or at least to be fair that’s how I remember it.  Every summer we had made glorious excursions through the Sierra Nevada, backpacking over the palisades, Mineral King, Sequoia, Yosemite and other mountains with names that I have surrendered to inaccessible regions of memory.  We all came from adventurous sort of families.
+Jim was the first to go his separate way, he ended up at brown University for four years and then Clay went to NAU and I went, well I went here.  And then there and now back here.  Now we just crisscrossed paths occasionally with each of us making plans for trips we knew we would never go on.  The last time I saw Jim, he had met me for a drink at the Little Knight and Tony had presided over our hour and a half meeting like a surgeon trying to revive the dead.  I hadn’t seen Jim since and I didn’t know where he was and apparently neither did Clay.
+	“What are you doing tonight you want to come get a drink?”
+	“Ya I’m with some friends of mine,” I motioned to Dean and Chloe that they should come over.  Dean didn’t know Clay and I hadn’t really said anything when he walked in I just dropped my story and walked over to a strangers table, for all Dean knew I was making arms deals with the CIA.  I introduce them and Dean went back to our booth, retrieved our burgers and we all sat down to dinner.  I introduced Chloe, but she had turned suddenly quiet and I wasn’t interested in her anymore.  She and Dean fell into a conversation separate from Clay and I.  I wasn’t sure but I thought that they were discussing sex and money in that nonplussed way that only a whore can do… so much for a handjob, so much of a blowjob, so much for what ever you want….  Clay was telling me about Anna, his girlfriend and asking what had become of my marriage.  I was sober by the end of the burger and I had a sudden urge to run.  Run away from everyone and everything that had ever been familiar to me and start over by reinventing my personality.  It occurred to me that my initial nostalgia was misplaced, that Clay and I would not always be friends, that I was not who I used to be, that one day Dean would be a stranger as well.  I was feeling quite lonely and wholesome when I came to.  
+	“A rave?  Hey Sil!  Are you listening to me?”  Dean was staring at me as if I was ill.
+	“What?”
+	“A rave.  Chloe knows where a desert rave is… you up for it?”
+	I glanced at Clay and he nodded “just gotta go pick up my girlfriend.”  Damn.  I wanted them all to disappear; I wanted a director to yell cut, to take a break from this strange role I found myself cast into.  “Uh ya sure… you drive and I’ll be there.”
+The four of us took off to a club/bar where Clay’s girlfriend Anna was working, on the way I filled Clay in on five years as best a could (he had heard stories it seemed —good to know that people talk about you when you’re not around).  I left out a few things that I wanted to tell him, but as I said Clay and I are ancient and until I knew where he was at now I had no reason, based on the old Clay to think the one now would care about.  And Clay filled me in because I didn’t hear stories or if I did I never remembered them anyway.  It turned out that Clay had done about half of the things we always suspected he would do, like college, the master degree, the outdoorsy life, the impending move to Colorado… but there were things that I never would have thought to hear that Clay was doing.  
+Back in the day, in fact how I met Clay was through the church youth group, and as I say we were both indoctrinated with the Presbyterian God, but to be honest I was mainly there because there were really cute girls (if I had know then what I know now I would have been down the street at the Mormon tabernacle).  I grew out of religion around seventeen when I read a book on brainwashing and realized that even if all this malarkey they were feeding us was true, I knew nothing of it other than what I had been told.  The same tactics are used by the US military, Indian gurus, Charlie Manson and nearly every other belief centered organization in the world.  I got very angry with myself for being duped by these charlatan tricks that seemingly anyone could have employed by reading a textbook on conditioning psychology.  I was smarter than that I realized, but unfortunately all my friends were not seeing my insights and what's more they seemed genuinely concerned about me for thinking such things.  Subtle reminders were dropped here and there over a dinner or later after we graduated, a beer, things that had the subtle subtext that good religious people can convey through even the most mundane conversation.  At least that’s what I thought at the time and I embarked on this quest to convert them all to my new religion, to undermine the system from within.  I gave them books, got them to smoke pot (well Jim anyway) got them to have some sex, in fact Dean and I even dragged Jim to meet a porn star once at some strip club, but then end up backing out when we learned that their was no alcohol allowed.  I was the propaganda of hedonism.  I always thought that Clay would come round, would wake up as I naively referred to my reactionary religion, but I was wrong.  In fact Clay working at the Christian summer camp that we went to in high school.
+	I got lost in myself again as he talked.  As I said carried hedonism as far (actually a little further) as it would go and there waiting for me at the end was God and this time he wasn’t wearing the gilded robes of human flesh he was much more of a supernatural being than anything I had ever read has prepared me for and he was much subtler in its existence than I had assumed.  He hated Presbyterians and hedonists with equal fervor.  He looked like Hitler in Drag and had a nasty habit of sniffing opium tinctures at the most improbable of moments.  He was related directly to the incident with the little gnomes on ether that were mentioned earlier and how do you relate that to anyone else?  I hadn’t the foggiest and I realized that I was cut off, limited as much as freed by experience because I was so painfully aware of the limitations of being human I was limited.  I was limited to trying to understand Clay when I should have been knowing.  This thought ran like a subtle subtext through the conversation.  Dean took over for me and started telling Clay about people, parties and things that I knew Clay wouldn’t relate to, but I let him because I could see Clay shifting in his seat and having to realize that the other half exists and that was exactly what I had been trying to do.  I tried every trick in the book back in my more clever days and I had forgotten about the one thing that doesn’t get into psychology textbooks: people.  The best evidence for god is man, always has been always will be, any two bit strand of sporific DNA floating through the universe could have made the rest, but man —now there is an odd one.  Where did this thing come from and what the hell is wrong with it?  Who would have made such a thing?  I hold that what made us had a hell of a sense of humor and not much else going on upstairs.
+	When I snapped out of it they were talking about books.  Dean was lamenting the recent demise of William S Burroughs and Clay was arguing that Burroughs was too obscure in his style to ever be the creative genius that people thought him to be.  This I decide would be great time to go the bathroom and I excused myself; there is nothing Dean can talk about with the insane fever of dementia quite like William Burroughs.  I had watched Dean discover and then devour William Burroughs the way some people get over imported chocolates.  He savored each knew book with a delicacy that I reserved for other authors, I recognized immediately that whatever his merits or faults he had at least reached Dean and Dean was a tough nut to crack.  I could never do it.  He had lent me some books and then wham! in I went to the world of the totally bizarre.  Burroughs tunneled himself into my brain like cancer and ate it all up, then I found another and moved on to devour that author consuming that men and women who wrote as intrinsically part of what they were saying.  I have always read that way —being more interest in the whole scope of author’s life rather than moving from book to book the way some people do.  Whether it was Robert Wilson or Tom Clancy it was always the same way, total consumption and digestion followed by a big healthy brown shit.
+	When I came back from the bathroom I could tell that things had gone awry which was just as well because I didn’t really want to talk philosophies I wanted to speed things up.  I went up the bar and asked the bartender to point out Anna for me.  He did and I knew that things between me and Clay would never be the same again.  She was an absolute work of art with delicate pale skin like a Grecian urn and a face with high cheekbones that just kind hung amid a mass of perfect blond ringlets.  She could have been a model, but she wasn’t, she was Clay’s girlfriend and I was smitten.  I have notorious bad habit of sweeping my friends girlfriend out from their arms and into my own consequently my friends don’t usually call for while when they meet someone.  I was awash in cynicism from my earlier musings and I figured if Clay and I were destined to part then I might as well do it with a bang.  I went up and introduced myself.  Anna “had a smile that swerved, a smile that curved, a smile that swerved all over the road.”  If ever there was a girl that Mark Sandman described with those lines it was Anna.  She had a body that hugged the road like BMW and she laughed with the honest mirth that comes only those who know.  I struggled over that sentence for some time trying to put it without sounding like mystic, but the simple truth is if you don’t know what I mean by that then don’t worry you don’t know and if you don’t know you’ll never learn.
+	Anna talked like a little demurring French pastry at once shy and bold with the dancing musical quality that seems to emanate mainly in the voices of women I find attractive and no one else.  When you’re in the presence of a magical voice such as that all you want to do is listen, any other distraction becomes an immediate irritation and all you want is to stop it and get back the sweet music.  Thus by the time a came back to the table with Anna I was already in the mood to do whatever she wanted whenever and wherever she wanted to do it (of course, and therein lies the rub, ten minutes from now it was very possible I would be smitten to another water nymph). 	
+	Clay looked visibly disturbed that I had gotten to Anna before he introduced us and being aware of my past he was already uncomfortable with the idea.  The song was right is you want to be happy for the rest of your life you got to get yourself an ugly wife or in this case girlfriend, because if you’re dating the most beautiful girl in the room you have to continually maintain your Alpha Male presence or the others will swoop in and feed on your weakness.  Women who find that statement offensive have never been the most beautiful girl in the room and the rest of them are evil because they know what power they have and they use it.  Anna was the center of attention at out little table and she knew it and she liked it from what I could tell because she announced before long that she was going to see if she could get off early and go with us to the rave.  
+But like I said whatever, whenever wherever and I could tell Dean was not going to put up a fight.  She left and Clay wisely used this time to go to the restroom, as it was not a good idea to leave the girl with the other dogs.  Dean and I talked it over and decided that we would each do our best to keep the other from sleeping with Anna, but in our quixotic logic we both agreed that the best way to do this was to each keep the other from the crime by committing it ourselves.  Chloe said we were deranged.  We could have subtitled our logic with the slogan keep others out of trouble by getting yourself into it first or as one other put it, “how I found the goddess and what I did to her then” to which I would only add “and how she loved it.”  As they say good lovers are not born they’re made, like Mafioso bosses its all in the luck of the draw, but once you learn you will never look at life the same again.  You will understand from experience.  The question we were debating when Clay returned was whether or not good a Christian could possibly be capable of satisfying the goddess.  We were in the neighborhood of a no when we had to seamlessly shift gears and make Clay believe that we were not talking about his girlfriend the minute he left the table, but of course he knew —wouldn’t you?
+	I managed to suck down one more gin and tonic before the forces of control let Anna loose upon us and we all headed off in her car to this rave.  Chloe and Dean were already groping at each other in the car and Clay and Anna seemed to be having a bit of a spat in the front seat; I watched Anna’s face in the reflection of the side rearview mirror.  She had a elegant sort of beauty that was all in the sharp line of her jaw and the way her chin met with the smooth luster of her neck; she felt to city born and refined to be with Clay.  She wore a thin spaghetti strapped tank top shirt that made no effort to hide the silky black straps of her bra and a long flowing shiny skirt that danced across her ravishing legs when she walked.  We were all walking and had been for some time the rave was in a campground outside of Vegas; to add to the irony of the evening the campground was a place called Red Rocks which during the day was a popular rock climbing spot, one that I had last visited with Clay.  We talked about that as we walked toward the sound of pulsing techno beats and the smells of perfume and marijuana.  Dean, Chloe and Anna walked in silence.
+	The rave was set up in a barren sandy expanse that served as a dance floor and was ringed with canvas tents serving alcohol and herbal ecstasy.  It looked like a Bedouin settlement around an oasis in the desert.  The largest tent was elaborately decorated to play up the North African vibe the walls were covered in Moroccan tapestries and the floor was scattered with pillows and people.  The only light was from old oil lanterns that hung in the back corner.  It cost ten bucks to get into the tent.  Dean and I paid and the girls dragged Clay off to dance.  Dean and I were more interested in getting drinks and whatever else might be lurking like cockroaches in the pillows.  The tent was enormous and looked like it had been borrowed from the circus.  In the rave culture of Las Vegas this was the grandest of all raves and one of the only that bothered to get permits and whatever else it takes to be able to dance legally in the desert.  On the way in we passed limousines and Rolls Royce’s; this was not an underground affair.  To the side of the tent, backlit by purple Christmas lights was the makeshift bar, actually a few tables pushed together and manned by a blond haired kid who never stopped bobbing his head to the beat.  Dean and I secured drinks and found a space back in the darkened corner to relax and be anonymous.
+	We were half way through our drinks before I noticed Crowes.  Not more than ten feet from us was  a guy who we thought might be the lead singer of the Black Crowes and who might have just been another emaciated scraggly haired kid that looked like the lead singer of the Black Crowes.  In either case he crawled over to us with what appeared to be a great amount of effort and sat cross-legged facing us without uttering a word.  Dean greeted him coldly and then we chatted sporadically over the course of a half-hour or so before he offered us a joint.  We graciously accepted and Dean got up thinking we were to follow him outside but Crowes lit it right there in the middle of the tent and with a minimum of discretion passed it to Dean who shrugged and smoked it.
+“Be careful,” the dark locks leaned in closer as if to impart some clandestine knowledge, “this shits pretty hard core.”
+	I laughed in his face but managed to make it look like I was only coughing.  Dean shook his hand and said thanks man don’t worry its cool or some other such dopehead lingo.  But from the minute the smoke hit my lungs it was very obvious that something more powerful than what I was used to was at work here.  My toes got tingly and my hands heavy.  Maybe thirty seconds after I inhaled I was catapulted into another universe that bore absolutely no resemblance to the one before it.  Dean’s face went ashen and I thought thank god because I was going to need company on this one.
+	“You guys are holding up okay, the last time I shared this shit this girl freaked out and thought it was laced with something and tried to beat me up.”
+	“I hate it when that happens.”  Dean took the rather small remnants of a joint and inhaled deeply.  “My ex-wife tried to beat me up the first time I did mushrooms.  I was really out of it and she came home all pissed off about something and she had never done mushrooms so she had no idea where I was and he started yelling at me on the stairs.  I just kind of stood there and looked at her totally unable to comprehend what she was saying then she pushed me down the stairs and kicked me.  Then my sister through her out of the house.”
+Both Crowes and I were laughing by the time Dean finished his little yarn.  Crowes seemed impressed more that Dean had been married than anything else had or maybe that was the entire story that he actually heard seeing how most of the joint had disappeared without us participating. 
+“What was that like man, I mean being married.”
+“Well I don’t really know we were only married two months when that happened I decided after that it was better if we went our separate ways.”
+	“Ya but what was it like to stand at the alter and look at that person and think ya I want to spend the rest of my life with this person.  I mean what does that feel like?”  He put a particular emphasis on fee as if this would someone affect Dean’s response.
+Dean sat for moment in silence staring at his hands.  “I don’t know, uh I never really had that go through my head.  It was just a kind of little thing that got out of control.  She asked me once after knowing her for like three weeks if I wanted to get married and I said sure because I thought she was joking and then next thing I knew she was dress shopping with my mom.  It just happened so fast I didn’t have time to stop it.”
+	This seemed to have a profound impact on Crowes and he withdrew slightly in what I thought was a kind of meditative slouch.  Dean and I exchanged a look after a few minutes and then with still no response we shook the kid.
+	Still nothing.  Hmmmm.
+	“You want to get something from the bar?”
+	“Ya that would probably be good.”  I got up and went to the bar tent.  I got three drinks and set one in front of Crowes who appeared to have settled off into a comfortable coma
+	Eventually Clay and girls find us; they are tired from dancing and welcome Crowes’ offering except for Clay who didn’t smoke pot.  I thought maybe we should warn them, but I was already lost seeing not a tent but an underground bar in France.  I am underground.  Anna’s face blurs into Nina’s, into Amy’s into a thousand different hybrids of herself like a shape-shifting shaman.  I smile at her and she smiles back. Step aside and let the man go through.  I feel like a featherweight-lead-train, muscles detached from their control centers, inoperable.  My mind floats far out of the monkey body and glides in effortless circles, endlessly, a buzzard soaring on thermals and returning only to rest.  And resting only with the throb of the music that drags us up and down over sand dunes and through thick stands of palms to water.  Dean and Chloe go off to dance.  Clay is gone too though I had not noticed it.  I am lying on my back in a delicious see of cloth, sound and touch.
+“How are you doing?”  Anna attempts to drill through the ice.
+	“Just lovely how are you?”
+	(laughing)  “Lovely I guess… So how long have you known Clay?”
+	“I dunno a decade or so, maybe more… it all runs together… how long have you two been dating?”
+	“Six months.”
+	Dead-end.  Conversations that are substituting for sex are never any fun, nor are they easy to maintain— its best to get the sex out of the way before you start talking.  Anna came to the rescue.
+	“Would you like to dance?”
+	“We could do that….”
+	“I’m a little stoned to go outside… why don’t we dance right here?”
+	I propped up on my elbows and stared right into her eyes searching for some hint of double entendre but she only stared back like a somnambulist.  But she kept getting closer and closer and closer like a slow motion film of the casino collapsing and then we kissed.  Her lips were warm and soft; they were full pouting lips and then they left.  I opened my eyes slowly.  Crowes walked by laughed and dropped a bag beside us.  Inside was a gooey gray substance known to most as opium.  Anna and I fumbled around through Chloe’s purse and found a pipe, which we filled with the roach and heaped on a healthy amount of opium.
+		The taste of opium is sweet like Nag Champa incense; it perfumes your lungs and wraps them it its warm hand, a delicious felling and then I exhaled it into her mouth.  This is not Clay’s girlfriend nor do petty questions of loyalty or moral clouds of right and wrong concern me; this is simply life and it is beautiful.  All the opium dreams I have ever had come back in desert windstorms, monsoons of the coast of Mandalay and this is no longer Nevada this is everywhere and the music is undulating in time with her body dancing lightly swaying on her knees hovering over my chest. It was a house beat the kind of palpitating serpentine rhythm that you can not help but move to; over in corner a young boy no more than eighteen is standing with his back to the wall watching, a non participant I am thinking and then I notice that he too is swaying almost imperceptible to the music, the virus of movement.  His movement is both awkward and unconscious, but it has a naturalness to it that belies the sense that he is insecure, I am watching him, but in my own perhaps distracted way I too am awkward and in my distraction honesty has taken the reigns… my hands roam her body.  I look up suddenly with what must be a face of horror as I realize that I am groping at Anna’s flesh, but her head is thrown back and she seems not to care so I continue my explorations.  Her stomach is soft, tightly stretched skin like a drum, a jimbe with her breasts like two percussive bongos, her nipples are hard and feel like raisins sunk into the sink.  And the music switches beats, this one exhaustive, tribal, jungle pulsation’s in juxtaposition to the Hindu décor it attacks like a jaguar tearing at me.  I am exhausted.  My head collapses back between and pillows and with the last bit of reason, last bit of will I pull her up and over my face.  Her dress envelopes me in a sea of darkness and smell her musty and sweet like pungent orange blossoms sprinkled over seas of future dreams.  The music sways in time with her body and all sense of place and time vanish.  There are only temporal dreams lived out in paint in slick tempura of desiring swimming under her dress.  I blow softly onto her cunt through the barrier of satin; as my eyes adjust to darkness a damp circle of humid desire becomes visible and tactile in its stickiness.  Her juices flow freely and she moans softly over the music; she shifts slightly and her hand reaches down caressing my face and pulling her panties to the side.  It leaves and she sinks down on me until her cunt covers my mouth and breathing through my nose I begin to worm my tongue up in her.  Slowly probing and then when the flow of juices is too much I lift her ass in my hands forming a stool out of my hands and painting her clit with slow glazing strokes.  I am lost for what seems eternity, not thinking about Anna, or the rave or any of it, but simply becoming cunt.  Shape shifting as the shaman can I feel it from the inside coming out in waves pulsing waves so different than my own orgasms, waves that very in size and strength, waves that crest and break and other that I let roll by undisturbed.  There is no tsunami, no end point, no differentiation no beginning no ending only fleeting twinkles of a glittering amaranthine orgasm.  I am drawn back by her stillness and the sharp pain of her nails digging into arms.
+	She rolls off me and lies down beside me kissing and licking her come off my face.  She is smiling, but does not speak.  Minutes pass like hours.  Clay returns and they go off to dance, as she leaves her hand moves behind her motioning at me to follow but I don’t yet.  I lay there with out moving just feeling tangential mix of sex and opium.  Sex.  The feel of her nipple rubbing coarsely against mine the softness of mashed sweating breasts stuck to my skin, kissing, chasing her tongue around her mouth….  There is a reason writers are afraid of sex and hate trying to write it, they don't have words for it.  They think its something that is happening, a thing that exists apart from us, but it is not.  It is in us —we are sex.  Sex is seeping from our pores and we hate it, we deny it.  I want to celebrate it; I want to have a mad passionate orgy with the entire world.  I want men I want Women I want plants I want animals, all life in one orgiastic embrace like Kali and Vishnu; mouths locked on mouths, on breasts, on cocks, on cunts, cocks in cunts, in asses, between breasts, tongues licking necks, licking nipples, licking asses, fingers probing flesh, FLESH FLEsh FLesh searing and popping with electrostatic sexual energy.  No words for it.
+	Dean and Chloe return.  They found the opium and pack themselves a bowl.  Anna seemed slightly embarrassed and excused herself to look for Clay.  Dean Chloe and I are lying like pictures out of the room of some Chinese Laundry joint; blank faceless bodies reveling in the glory of our own nervous systems and in the elastic beauty of each other.  
+Chloe roles on her side facing me and kisses me.  She tastes it.  I put my finger to her lips and she smiles.  “Hey Dean… Sil saved you the trouble….”
+	Dean sits up “You fucked her?!”  
+	“Not exactly”  Chloe kisses me again this time plunging her tongue down my throat and then grabs Dean and kisses him.
+	“Oh I see.  Wow that’s really odd… that right there I mean… you ate Anna… Chloe kisses you… and then me… so I taste Anna… I’m not sure how I feel about that… should that gross me out?”
+	Chloe laughs, “why would it gross you out, because it originated in Sil’s mouth?  But it didn’t… what is with you men?  You all want to be with two women and yet you can’t even stand to be hard around each other….” 
+	It’s not that….”
+	“Yes it is, trust me if there is one thing I know it’s the sex habits of men.  I can’t tell you how many guys freak out at the thought that I might have just had a cock other than theirs in me… it makes no sense at because that’s what I do, but even if I wasn’t it still wouldn’t make any sense.  What is so revolting about men?  What is so revolting about cocks?  If you ask me I don’t think any of our hang up are from women….  Its men that can’t stand the sight of themselves.
+	“It’s not that….”  Dean is at a loss for words.
+	“What do you mean its not that?  What is it then?  I mean if your so comfortable with you body why didn’t you want to fuck me in the middle of all those people?  What is your hang up then?”
+	Dean is silent.  I feel the need to defend him, but I can’t the girl is right.  
+“Down at the bottom of all the strange America hang ups about sex lies the sad truth that men are not comfortable in their own skins.  Maybe a hand full here and there....  Freud would say its penis envy or a modified version of it that deals with size, but its more than that.  Men have inherited genetic memory or past life memory or something handed across more than cultural boundaries that carries with it guilt. I have no idea why, but it’s there you can hear it in between that words when men talk about sex.  There is a different language employed by men.  Men always talk about sex in terms of women or a woman… like ‘we had sex’ or ‘she was sexy’ or whatever, but there is no talk of the self —everything sexual is transferred to the woman.  She is the one that made him cum, she is the one that bent over, and she is bearer of all things wanton...  Men dream of a wanton sexual woman, but they don’t want to be a wanton sexual person themselves.  Everything that is desire is always ‘aroused’ that’s why they come to me because I am wanton or at least that’s how they see it.  I don’t exist for them and that is the most wanton thing you seem to be able to imagine this abstract fantasy girl that is everything all rolled into one and doesn’t have to be dissected and pulled apart… just put the money on the dresser when you leave….”
+“Does that bother you?”  Dean lights a cigarette and props up on his elbows.  He raises his eyebrows at me when he notices that I have been fondling Chloe while she talked. 
+“No it doesn’t bother me… but it doesn’t turn me on either….  I mean men like to think that whores don’t feel anything, like because money is involved we suddenly can’t experience pleasure of something, but that’s a load of shit….  If anything I have had better sex since I have been doing this… some of the guys I fuck are gorgeous, I would be intimidated to talk to them in a bar… but most of them still seem to think that being a whore is an odious task… that I must be faking because I couldn’t possible cum if money is involved….  Like this one guy who likes me to masturbate while he watches and then he’ll start masturbating too sitting in this chair.  (her eyes close)  at first it kind of crewed me out but then I started getting really turned on by it and he was telling me what to do and how fast and it was weird like I was masturbating, but he was in control… that turned me on big time, but he will not believe that.  He still tells me that I can fake an orgasm better that anyone… but the thing is that usually I’m not faking it….  I mean I don’t want to get into it... its probably boring but….”
+“No I’d be interested to know what strange things you have done… what’s the weirdest thing somebody has asked you to do?”  I am intrigued.
+“The weirdest?  Wow um, probably the guy that wanted me to rape his wife, but refused to do that… the weirdest thing I have done….” Chloe’s face seemed refracted; split apart as if she were tapping some memory far removed from now, from this self.  I wanted to attribute that to some reflex of her profession, some need to detach, but it seemed untrue in her case.  Chloe had that relaxed ease of one who can change personality at will not simply out of necessity, but on whim, anything arbitrary that might have set her thinking. She was far too intelligent to do anything she didn’t want to do, at least to do it for money.  “I guess the weirdest was this guy who liked me to take a shit in front of him.  He had this warehouse/loft thing downtown and there was nothing in it except for a little bar on wheels that he kept against the wall by the door.  The elevator opened right into the place which always reminds me of the forts my brother used to build in his room… he would stack pillows up so the when you opened the door and went inside you were automatically in the fort.  But anyway this guy would send a limo for me and then I would go up to the loft in a French maid getup completely with the little feather duster and I would clean the place while he sat in the chair and watched.  He would get furious if I acknowledged his presence… the place was clean to begin with so would just kind of wander around and bend over here and there and pretend that I was doing something.  And then after about ten minutes of that I would get a silver platter from behind the bar and lay it in the middle of floor in front of his chair and take a shit on it.  Then I left.”
+Dean shook his head, “what did he do with it?”
+“I have no idea; I don’t really want to know, but he paid me a thousand dollars to do it once a week for about six months and then he just disappeared.  Probably found someone new… I dunno one day I was all dressed up waiting for the limo and it just never showed.”  Throughout her story Chloe had her back to me and I was absently stoking her ass at first and then I moved in on her cunt, it was warm and soon wet and I was fingering her without reserve by the end of it.  She still did nothing to acknowledge it.  Dean told a story about his ex wife who had been stripper for some time.
+“She did some er extra curricular stuff, but it used to bother me for some reason.  There was this one guy though that liked her to come over… same kind of set up she showed up in a French maid outfit and made him a sandwich, it was even on a silver platter if I remember right… then she served it to him and she set in on his lap and straddled him and pissed on the sandwich.  Then she left.  What a weird fucking thing to want….  I mean most fantasies I have heard I could if not relate to at least understand, but that one is just lost on me….”
+“It used to be lost on me too until I realized that it had nothing to do with me or with sex or anything, I think it was a way of touching some part of him that was sealed off in memory, something too painful to access everyday and he needed that intimacy to remind him….”
+“But what’s intimate about watching someone take shit?”
+“Well think about it Dean… I mean how many people have you seen taking a shit?”
+“Not many.”
+“Exactly, so if you saw me doing it it would likely remind you of someone you knew well, well enough to watch them going to the bathroom.  At least that’s what I think… who knows though maybe there is some Freudian explanation… maybe they were hung up in the anal stage….”  Silence drifts on reflection of the idea.  
+“Do you enjoy sex outside of work?”  I had to know does making sex your job make sex into work?”
+“Sil, what kind of question is that?  Of course I enjoy sex even when I’m not getting paid… I mean its sex… just because you make money at it doesn’t mean you don’t have fun when you're not… am I making sense?”
+“Sort of.  I think the opium might be crossing a few wires.”  I smiled at her and she lay back down.  The three of us stared at the top of the tent.  
+Chloe started off talking again slowly at first.  “The thing about me is that I have been exposed to some rather extreme forms of sex in my professional life and I keep trying to drag what I like out of them into my personal life, but it freaks men out.  They can’t handle women who know what they want.  I scared the living shit out of my last boyfriend.  We had been dating about two months, having sort of vanilla sex, you know missionary, me on top, doggy, run of the mill stuff, so I thought maybe I should expose him to something more…. (laughing fits over took her and she paused for a minute)  I’ll never forget the look on his face when I walked into the room wearing skin tight rubber boots that go all the way up my legs… I had on nipple clamps I was holding a dog collar and a chain.  I told him ‘get on your knees and lick my asshole.’  He wouldn’t do it, he left me standing there... he just took off and I never talked to him again….”
+“That’s a travesty….”  Dean clearly would have stayed.  So would I.
+“Ya men are good at dishing out perversion and degrading you but most can't take it when it’s your perversion and you degrading them.  That is why I prefer bisexual women, women who know that sex is everywhere inside you….”
+“How long have you been bi?”  Lesbian chic fascinates me, one day it just became perfectly acceptable for women to have sex with each other.  Not that there is anything wrong with that, it just seemed to have happened one day.  Odd.
+“I’ve been sexual since I was born that’s that thing I don’t like about saying I’m bi, it like one day I woke up and liked women?  No it doesn’t work like that… sex is this thing inside us that has to come out.  Some people let more of it out than others that’s all….  I think sex with women is more exciting, and easier than sex with men.  I know women's bodies; they are my own body.  By the nature of things having sex with women is more like masturbating, there is no coming to terms with the other.  There is no Other.  And women are adventurous than with men.”
+I was about to ask if she had a girlfriend when out of nowhere Chloe grabbed my arm and pulled my fingers out of her cunt with such ferocity that I thought I had offended her; she didn’t even look at me.  Then I saw Anna and Clay approaching and I understood.  
+They were leaving; Anna looked disappointed, but I didn’t trust my instincts just then.  It was around four and Clay had to drive back to Wrightwood.  We all walked back to his car and headed for the diner.  The ride was in an awkward silence.  By the time we reached Dean’s car I was on the brink of madness from the silence from the unquenched longing and more than anything from the wan of opium.  I hugged Clay and then Anna automatically like they were statues.  And then they were gone.
+I had a forlorn look on my face to which Dean made a point of saying, “poor Sil.  That’ll teach you to let’em cum first.”
+“Oh and you did any different?”  Chloe raised an eyebrow at him.
+Dean shrugged and replied, “I must have done something right you’re still here….”
+“You are both morons of the highest degree… luckily for you I took the liberty of taking care of you… you seemed like you needed it….  Come on we need to go get a room at the kldjlkj hotel….”
+“A room?  What for?”
+“Because that’s where Anna is meeting us after she gets rid of that Clay guy… what was with him anyway?”
+“I dunno he’s an old friend… not his scene I don’t think….”
+“Well come on I need to smoke some more of this opium.”
+
+
+The room was small, two double beds crammed in between a closet and a window, the mattresses sagged and looked like they had been fucked to extinction.  I called down to the lobby and ordered extra sheets which we laid over the bedspreads and only then did Dean feel comfortable enough to lie down on the bed.  Chloe was on him in seconds and I was left to sit and wait.  Waiting as I have said before is something I gave up on so I decided to go for a walk.  We were on the outskirts of Las Vegas the budget travelers’ paradise where the rooms are cheaper than the cover charge at the clubs downtown.  The area was artificial from the get go, no thought had been put into it, no planning councils, no zoning arguments, it wasn’t even within the city limits.  Outside the familiar dry desert heat washed over me like a napalm bath.  It was acrid air; it stunk with the worthlessness of lower middle class mediocrity, not rich, not poor, not anything at all —stale.  The moon was just disappearing behind the White Mountains somewhere off near the horizon with its glow being the only thing visible from this side of the overpass.  I walked up the embankment and watched cars on the freeway screaming past.  The rush of the wind as the semis passed at ninety was strong enough to lean into.  Lighting a cigarette proved impossible so I headed back.  When I turned around I saw them.  Or I saw it, which was a freight train at near crawl as it came around the bend and headed east out of Vegas.  I was transfixed for moment and then a passing semi sent a blast of air and dust that sent me down the embankment and back to the hotel.  
+Anna bless her heart was not there when I got back.  There was only Chloe sitting in bed smoking a cigarette.  It seemed natural that she should be doing so and sat down next to her and smoked a cigarette too, neither of us spoke.  About half way through mine, she crushed hers out and still without saying a word unzipped my pants and fished out my still flaccid prick.  She pulled the covers over her head and I felt her warm mouth on my stomach.  Her hands worked at my belt and she pulled down my pants and I kicked them off unto the floor, then she swallowed my cock whole.  Or at least that’s what it felt like.  I relaxed and smoked.
+
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+5
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+
+	 I tried to sneak out of the stockyards in Cedar Rapids, but a rent-a-cop caught me.  I worked my way out of it eventually, but that says nothing about right now.  I am right now.  Right now night feels torn apart by the clutching, broken-china voice of the wheels grinding uphill wailing the ancient Indian woman’s song.  Song of what I am not sure, she speaks, they speak a different language something more primal, more guttural and I can not understand what they mean, but I feel it rattling its way up through my dangling feet, feel it in the vibration of the boxcar floor as it rattles and lurches across the uneven tracks.  My head lists involuntarily, pulled downward by the inescapable gravity of the desert.  Utah is laid bare in moonlight, harsh and forlornly beautiful it lulls the mind, spreads out ones thoughts like the dotted Juniper trees, creosote bushes, and gnarled twisted trunks of the mosquite; vast open tracks of sand and rock inhabit the empty spaces like waves of light in space, they exist but only as a vacuum as a reminder of emptiness.  The moon is full tonight reflecting its pale solar continace across the land in imitation daylight, the mosquite lowlands are beginning to be usurped by once more by grasslands and Junipers of the high desert.
+This train is slow, a plodding freighter loaded with something that is apparently in no great rush to get anywhere, it’s a better ride than the first on I hopped… that one was fast, blinding fast and I suffered from velocity sickness which is my name for the strange restless queasy feeling I had the entire time I was in that car.  This train is slow lazy and I managed to befriend the brakeman; I am not hiding anymore I am not slinking about in the shadows.  I am stretched out on a flatbed; an open car that the brakeman says will be filled with logs at some point through the Rockies.  I haven’t decided yet if I will go that far, in the mean time, because we have to stop a lot for faster trains to pass, the brakeman will wait for me to get coffee and food provided I bring him some which I do without hesitation, I even buy it for him despite his protests.  His name is Joe and originally he was supposed to drive me from the railyard in Cedar Rapids down to the sheriff’s station where I was to be book on several counts of trespassing, vagrancy (a fancy name for existence, which sadly is illegal in most places), and several others I am not sure of, but I talked him out of it.  We reached a more amicable solution, one of mutual aid; I wanted to ride the rails and Joe wanted someone to talk to on his lonely ride from here to Denver.  So today I sat up with him in the engine room where the whirling lights and strange computer guidance systems dragged us out of the pine forests of Cedar Rapids and across the windswept high country where for more than five hours we did not see a tree or any shrub save the endless seas of grass dancing like senoritas at the town fiesta.
+Joe
+Joe hails from the lexicon of true Americanism —individuality.  He is a rustic grisly type of man, the kind that inhabit the backwater towns of the west, ornery you might say, but he is not ornery he is simply inhuman like me.  Which is to say that humanity or ‘syphilization,’ as one misanthropic author referred to it, has no hold on Joe, false modesty, false politeness and false pretense have been shed here like dry useless lizard skin.  Joe hails from somewhere older, livelier and healthier his ancestors are the men who lived beside ponds and didn’t write books, who hold court with the mysteries of the universe and don’t attend church, who know what life has taught them and who have there own ideas about morality, reality and humanity.  Joe represents a rare breed one that should have flourished on this continent, but as in the case with a seed that never gets water, their lot is small and dwindling.
+Joe could well be me in thirty years, he looks about sixty maybe younger but the years he has walked through have taken their toll.  He has a salt and pepper scruff beard and piercing blue eyes; he told me about the war by which I think he meant the second world war; he hates Steven Spielberg, says it wasn’t like that movie at all; he has a wife in Moab and two daughters both married and living back east.  His stories are endless and my patience is too so we drifted, undulating with the sway of the train, his words came out in growling whispers just loud enough to here over the noise of the wheels and the engine, but without yelling or even appearing to raise his voice.  He talked with the rhythm of the train, we went around a bend and Joe went in on the beach at Normandy, we started uphill and Joe moved out west after the war, we went through a tunnel and Joe fell silent mid sentence.  That kind of creeped me out, but when we emerged back into the blinding midday sun he started into his courtship and marriage without missing a beat and I learned that for Joe, when you are underground it is best not to talk.
+Lying on my back trying to piece his life together I get lost, lost in the stars.  The moon is to my back but in front down near the horizon the stars are visible, scant few tonight but they are there; the invisible the inky blackness that is between them is the pure white void of space.  It is the void, the spaces in between them, the vast open empty tracks of sky, the darkness that is the platinum setting into which little diamonds, rubies, amethysts, and emeralds are laid… it is there that life exists in between the arbitrary line of reality and phantasmal yawning mouth of imagination.  Look at the stones, the setting, the band, but none of it is so beautiful as the empty space between her finger in which all life hides.  The space that allows it to pass through your hair, to fit your fingers, to stroke your chest, kneed your back and for the space and the space alone you should be grateful.  Grateful that there is emptiness for without there would be nothing.  I am grateful for you, I am grateful to all the spaces in between so that you can ignore them so that you can continue to fill them with jealousy, with fear, without understanding, but do not be afraid everything is okay….
+The night sky was thrown into being by the great god badger who in an effort to steal it from the last world accidentally pulled to hard and it went soaring up over his head where it stuck to the ceiling of life.  No Hopi mythology there, just my educated opinion, just how it looks from here...  But I am not thinking about the sky right now I am just looking at it; I am thinking about the Indian town back on the reservation where I bought us dinner. I bought cornmeal cakes and beans from a wizened old Navaho woman who inhabited an abode hut that glowed orange in the setting sun.  The store was closed but the woman approached me asked if I wanted to buy dinner, I did and she took me to her hut; in the middle there was a fire and a pot of food on it along with too smudge faced Indian girls maybe four or five years old.  They watched me intently in silence with enormous liquid brown eyes that seemed irrigated with understanding far beyond the physical age of their bodies.  As the old woman wrapped the corn cakes and beans in foil I got lost in a strange hobbit-like land where the true secrets of the universe were about to be revealed as beans and corn bread seen through the eyes of a child, it was a pregnant moment.  Then she brought me to by insisting that I take one of her chocolate Jesus statues for desert.  I thought about a Tom Waits’ song, about a minister I knew once who wouldn’t allow his parishioners to sell donuts at church and about the good Jesus himself; what must he think if he really was the son of god and really is watching, what must he think of being molded in wax, filled with chocolate and wrapped in colored foil? 
+I thought that Joe, being a Mormon by conversion might be offended, he struck me as a serious guy when it came to religion, but he just laughed and laughed said “what will they think of next?” or words to the effect and he devoured Christ’s chocolate body.  Finally I thought as I watched Joe eat, someone is enjoying the body of Christ.  And even now I think, in arrogantly retelling history, that if Christ was indeed the son of god he will come down here tonight in fire and brimstone and he will extend a hand out to the two men, the only two men who ever took of his body and ate with lust, with vigor with the true enjoyment of being alive, for if there is one thing undeniable out here it is that we are alive. We may not being doing anything, we may be talking or staring at the passing scenery through the dirty cockpit window or we may be climbing on the roof of a boxcar, but whatever we are doing we fundamentally alive.  I say this because there is no reason for humans to exist out here at all.  We lack the specialization of desert evolution, we are not covered with barbs and spikes, we do not have thick skin which can hold water seemingly indefinitely, we are pulpy fragile creatures we ought to be dead, but somehow we are not and we are more alive because of it, we are aware.  We are here by an act of will —our own.  It takes an act of will to realize that you are alive that is my revelation for tonight.
+I light a cigarette and throw back the sleeping bag, it is September and the night is cool, I throw on my jacket and walk to edge of the car and let my feet dangle off the side.  We are doing about forty I would guess, fast enough to do some serious damage if I fall, but slow enough to study individual plants as they pass by at about ten yards away.  I have never been to Coney Island, but for me this is an amusement park the landscape itself is so alien as to remain forever fascinating.  It illuminates a part of my personality that is as esoteric as this desert.  We are picking up speed and heading downhill into the canyon country.  I know this because Joe showed me the maps, pointed out scenic spots when I ought to sleep and when I ought to be awake and amazed, but I like it all.  Sometimes the less scenic things are the more beautiful they become, that quite ineffable sense of beauty which require the careful turning of the eye to detect; such as a trash strew alley that you find yourself staring at after waking up in a gutter behind a bar in SoHo.  Or the way the smog lifts slightly almost imperceptibly off the mountains surrounding Mexico City everyday around seven o’clock.
+Or the way this juniper tree is sitting alone clinging to the side of the canyon wall able to exist in the slightest most overlooked fissure surrounded by a monolith of compressed sandstone which yields nothing, there is only the one tree here.  That this tree could be able to survive is miraculous, but in end explainable, what is not explainable is me, that I should be here, that is should be right here on this train, at this moment, staring at this tree is truly miraculous.  I was not scattered to the wind with thousands of my fellow seeds, I did not lodge in a crevasse, I was not carried by wind, I did not get just the right amount of sunlight and water.  I was planned from the beginning, I nice addition to a nice couple who were themselves nice additions to an already nice town that was part of nice and highly advanced civilization almost at the end of its second thousand years of existence.  All my life is orchestrated by something, pushed and pulled about by forces which can be explained with, goddesses, DNA, evolution, badgers, crows, old women, trickster poets, visionary superbeings of alpha centaur, but the end conclusion by all humanity it seems is that something is controlling things.  There is no freedom for me, no wind to carry me, no water or soil to nourish and no light by which I can grow.  There is no visible thing gravity that pulls on me, there is nothing tangible about DNA, I live in between all mythology sandwiched like a chucalwalla in a sandstone crevasse.  I have learned infinite things, made them finite, knowable.  I have built great castles, great monuments, great societies, great people and torn them all down again to start over.  I have lived a thousand lonely huddled nights from bearskin to tapestries to the silk sheets of Manhattan nights; I have climbed every mountain peak slide down the scree and talus slopes of meeting with pharaohs, Voudans, with Moses and god; I have held a billion women lovingly in my arms and give birth to a trillion children through all history's wombs from Sarah to Satan all filled themselves with my nourishment. But I still do not know who I am or why I am here.  I am Everyone and I am driving myself mad.
+
+
+
+Today at dawn this is the most beautiful place on earth.  I get up not having slept much, not that that is out of the ordinary these days, balancing myself and reorienting to the sense of movement that has not left my head for almost 36 hours now, I stretch and yawn greedily like an insomniac does.  The sky is green yet, not long till dawn by when I must be in the engine compartment because today the tracks run beside US highway 60 and I can not be seen.  I am secret; I must be hard to find.  My precarious journey over four boxcars to the engine is rewarded with the smell of frying bacon, eggs, coffee and biscuits.  Joe smiles his craggy grin, in the electric lights his teeth are yellowed and stained with coffee and cigarettes, but rather than being grotesque the seem only to add character.
+“I was just going to blow the whistle to let you know that breakfast is served.”  He hands me a cup of coffee.  “Beautiful night wasn’t it?”  Joe seems to now sleep at all.
+“Yes it was,” I mumble as I try to sip the coffee, but it is still too hot.
+“Here….” He hands me a plate full of greasy bacon and eggs with two biscuits perched precariously on either side.  “Let's eat on the roof, we’re not by the road yet.”  The way he says road gets me, his voice has a hatred in it, a bitterness towards this thing the road.  We go up on the roof and eat in silence.  All around us the sky is a color show.  The green begins to fade, replaced by the first crimson rays reflected on the bottoms of the wind carved clouds.  The first direct rays of the sun find me chewing on the last piece of bacon, I close my eyes and we welcome each other across the ninety three million-mile void.
+I open to a squint and turn around, behind us lies the akdjflkd, endless grass and somewhere in the middle the kdjlkadkj; to the north there is the escalanted wilderness, the green river and the largest uninhabited area in north America; to the south and east there is the maze, Canyonlands and Natural bridges National parks, the confluence of the green and Colorado rivers, and somewhere a tiny speck of a town called Moab where we will be putting in for two days to load rock and other assorted things.
+“Quartz and sand mostly, which we’ll be dumping in Denver, but whatever the case I wanted to invite you to my house to have a home cooked meal with my wife and I.  She’s a real looker and great cook too.”  He laughs and nudges me in the ribs.  “She was a beauty queen in high school, she was miss Hoboken and might have been Miss America if she hadn’t decided to give the whole thing up and go to college… course I’m glad she did ‘cause that’s where I got her….”
+I hem and haw non commitally thanking him for the offer, but not agreeing to it just yet.  I head back down to do the dishes and then I splash cold water on my face in the tiny bathroom and study my face in the cracked tarnished little mirror.  Things look good; a little haggard here and there, weathered a bit by the years perhaps, but still young still enthusiastic.  I spot a gray hair sprouting out of my closely cropped scalp, but the skin is still soft and smooth; I need a shave, but that is of no concern out here.  Back on the roof I smoke a cigarette while Joe calls into the Moab station.  After a while he yells up to tell me that the yard will be empty when we arrive, today is Sunday he informs me, and this is Mormon country —nothing happens on Sunday.
+“You know a lot of my friends were pretty hard on me for converting and they was downright pissed when we got hitched in the Tabernacle, but I tell ya… Mormons may have some strange ideas and beliefs but on the whole they are some of the best people I’ve ever met.  Sure it’s a little ridiculous there bible and all what with zebra’s running around here —imagine that! Zebras here!— and I don’t think the ol Mr. Young really carried those gold tablets under his arm, and why god called himself Moroni I have no idea….  But in spite of all that ridiculousness which really is no more ridiculous than the Catholic’s eating wafers of gods body or the Jew’s giving things up for no real reason at all once or twice a year… it all ridiculous when you think about it objectively.  But what I have noticed having a Mormon wife and a lot of Mormon friends is that they build real communities… they are good people at a level that is very basic and seemingly below the more refined religions….  Your average Catholic will walk by the poor bum on the street and give him a nickel or a quarter, but your average Mormon will invite the man to their home for a meal and offer them a shower and of course a little counselling on the true church of God, but when a man’s belly is full and his hair clean he can listen to that sort of nonsense.  I don’t believe a word of it, but I took the vow because it made my wife happy and I would do anything to see that woman smiling….”
+Joe smiled at me and said that I could stay on the roof of the engine so long as he was down below, that way anyone watching would think that I was him.  So I sat up there letting the wind hit me in the face, sunning myself across Utah, land of Mormons —for now.  One day I suspect the Tabernacal will fall, the religion will dwindle and disappear like every other civilization, but for now they reign over god’s last piece of land.  And what a land this is here.  The tracks have climbed back out of the canyon country and we are on the mesa tops cruising at thirty five toward the Big Switch as Joe called it.  The Big Switch is apparently the only non computerized part of the journey where Joe will have to stop the train and get out and actually throw the heavy iron handle to switch us over to the track that heads down to Moab.  Once he drives the train past it he has to stop again and walk back and switch it again so that the next train can pass on by.  It remains manual because most trains do not stop in Moab anymore, most of them pick up a few cars that have been driven up or just don’t even slow at all.
+	It was Dean who pointed out the curve in the tracks behind his mother apartment complex, which he really only did for one reason —so that I could catch a train.  I had never ridden on a train be it hoping a boxcar or buying a ticket.  I didn’t have enough for the ticket that much was certain and I knew that there were some lingering stiff vagrancy laws and such penalties as to keep people from riding for free, but I had never been on a train.  The chief reason that I had never been on a train though was that I had never been near a train.  Never lived near a station or had a track pass through the neighborhood.  As child the best part about going to my grandmother’s house was that in the course of the hour long drive we crossed a train track and occasionally we would even get there just as a train was passing.  Something about them always got to me, the way they roared along, not fast, but roaring a primal movement that harkens back to more primitive days.  You could see the past in them when travel was something worth doing.  Airplanes had power and thrill, but trains have something bigger something all together more massive about them, they do not roar they lumber and lurch they are more human than the smooth sterility of the car or the powerful speed of the plane
+I stare off at the distant looming La Salle Mountians where first frosts are melting in the morning sun, Dean my old friend who set all this in motion, whose life existed as a catalyist for my own just as mine existed as a catalyst for his; so it is with brothers be they of blood or not.  When I think of Dean I think of him as he was a year ago when we touched down in Paris, his hair jet black and greased back in a fashion that was at once greaser and not, he looked as if he were completely at ease in his own skin.  We both had on suits, not expensive once like we wanted, but ones that we handed down or bought at thrist stores, we were highly incongruous with the international image of what an American ought to be.  Or I think of a photograph I took at the Little Knight so many years ago or was that only months?	Dean is in the a pinstriped suit, carefully greased hairline pure black and illuminating his face framing it in the luminesnce of empty space, the eyes are laughing, but the lips barely curl, womething intangible is lurking under the skin and bones.  Another from the same night caught Dean unawares as he leaned against the wall and watched the crowd.  His arm is blurred lifting the everpresent cigarette to his lips and all around his swirling women’s hair and exited arm waving men fade into a faceless blur, in the middle there is Dean, standing still like the hummingbird.
+Dean is right now probably just getting off the internet where he was undoubtedly chatting with bilixa66 the girl whom he is in love with, but tries to deny it.  Right now his weary bones are preparing for rest and I am gliding along through Elysian fields.  So it goes.  Everyone everywhere is doing something different than me right now, I know this because I am alone.  I am playing mental solitare then infinite game which doesn’t pay anymind to rulles like time or space.  Time is an inconsequential and inconvenian human invention which the traveler learns to disregard and ignore.  There are two games going on one is the time game in which all society and interaction with humanity, ones culture, ones beliefs, once hopes and goals all thing bounded by time, in the other game there is the infinte self which has no time no dreams, no humanity, no space no thing.  It is the seemless interaction of the two that create what we formally call the ego, the self, the thing that is perceivable, identifiable, and recognizable.  One can see or be seen depending on which game you want to play.  The train is slowing, the turn off to Moab is nearing, from the Big Switch it is only about half an hour down into the canyon carved long ago by the green river.  I am wandering back to my flatbed to gather up my things and hide out in the cabin of the engine; I am thinking about how to ditch Joe without offending him, I need to get off the train andout into the desert, Everything is falling away like great sheets of burn skin sliding off the greasy shiny red flesh that lies beneath the surface.  That was how it went this morning.
+
+
+
+It was four in the afternoon when I said goodbye to Joe and headed off down Moab’s main drag toward the mountaineering shop to see about a ride up into canyonlands.  I left it open with Joe so that if the urge struck to go back to the train into denver I could, but I was intent only on getting to Canyonlands for now.  One thing at a time, evverything one at a time, nothing in pieces everything all at once fell to pieces.  I got a ride from two hippies rock climbers clad in the fashion of the earth first and other environemtnal activitists who share aside from a love of the wilderness apparently the same love of Kakhi’s, Tevas, Tofu and flat tasteless foodstuffs that originate in the same facotires that make oreos.  Funny folks the country culture these days, like ldemocrats and republicans they are differential from there enemies primarily by custom and fashion.  The radical tree camping, pottery making, hemp weaving, Dave Foreman worshipping, mushroom eating, toms of maine consuming hippie-enviromental-social consciousness raising-guitar playing radical of the outback is no different than the BMW driving, Starbucks drinking, software writing, technology worshipping, juice drinking, spa loving, health club hopping, slandes wearing dog walking, family rasing white picket fence building, church attending drug abstaining yuppie eviel consumer destroying the world capitalist pig set that the so-called radical crowd hates with such superior disdaim.  One uses Tom’s of Maine and the other crest, beyond that they are the same.  My hippie climber friends bought trail mix and candles at the super market while I opted for steak, beans and potatos with a bag of chemically enhanced brickets that would light from my cigarette butt.  Its all a matter of taste.  I requested paper bags and rolled them up so they wouldn’t abandon me for not being one of there own.  I rode in the back of there bus which turned the hourlong drive from Moab to the Est entrance of Canyonlands into a three hour long crawl.  As we switchbacked up the canyon walls to the top of the Mesa country Dave and Tom grilled me on my beliefs, they were both college student on a semester long vacation so I could forgive them for still being tangeled up in ideas but it wore on me after a while.  They were astonished that I did not vote, that I never had, but was not disillusioned with the political system, I just don’t give shit one way or the other.
+“Man if you don’t vote you give up your say in what goes on in the world man, come on how are we going to change things if everybody has that attitude?  Why are you going to be giving up your power to change things man?  Some people would die for a chance to vote…?”
+Its better those people go right a head and die I am think but aloud I try to formulate something less offensive to their tender idealist hearts.  “Perhaps Tom I don’t want to change anything… perhaps I coulld if a itried, but what if I don’t want too?”
+I figured to let them do the talking and they did all the way across the grasslands right on into the campground, I learned the Toms of Maine was better because it was natural, Teva was better because it did not use child slave labor and that one acre of farmland can support a faimly of ten with vegetables of two hamburgers worth of cow if it is grazed.  I don’t personally give a shit either way.  Is fast as I could I said my thanks to the Dave and Tom and wandered down the road to an open campsite where I proceeded to build a fire in the light of the fading sun with its crimson glow licking across the thunderheads to my back.  It was the still about eighty degrees and I was sweating in the heat of the fire, but I wanted a steak.  I was staring at the sizzling fat dripping from the enormous side of beef I had bought thinking of a woman I had never seen staring at a well in the French countryside.  I felt an effluence of enthusiasm; the taproot broke through dry soil and was swamped by underground water.  The sizzled meat melted down to the flavor of sweet salt, the mixture of spices and blood.  My plate was stained a greasy pink Moroccan-color with each carving slice of the knife and the potato swam about in the bloody grease tailing is own gooey mixture of butter and pulverized potato flesh like a tanker ship leaking crude oil in the pristine sanctity of the ocean.
+I was fucking famished.  With the tired wise-consumer guru advise I had endured all the way up the mountain made the dripping animal fat like a tonic elixer cleansing my artieries of stale plache of idealism realism. Nothing is ever seems so real as fiction.  The world I exist in is finite, bounded and ruled by certain inescapable laws, here a house, there a job, and everywhere by the transient people and events that make up so called life.  Existence takes place in the world of not I’s, the mysterious other, but that is not where I do my living. Nor does any one else.  We live in the spaces in between the temporal world, the infinitude of the imagination, next to which our terrestrial existence looks flat and tasteless as a junkyard tire cracked and torn in the sun.  In these moments where the internal merges flawlessly with the external I go roaring back through memories of childhood, of selves that I was truly, but am no longer today, through all the marauding personalities which have governed this thing called I.  Pregnant moments are these, usually catching me unawares and throwing down a track of thought I had not expected; moments when the light of the sun breaks through the sullen clouds of an afternoon thunderstorm and hits the steeple of an old church just as you come up over a crest in the road.  It smacks you in the face when you perceive something in a moment that you know is not tangibly present and yet it is real, the fluid transmission of emotion that can be tasted on the back of your tongue as well as felt beaming into your chest.  The hurricane of the unconscious whirls up to the surface for moment, the imagination leaks into the real world.  You catch it when she stirs at night and tosses her hair so that so that it falls across you face with the delicate odor of peach blossoms and perfume mixed with the earthiness of her organic body, fecund and warm.  You hear it when the crescendo of thundering drums climbs up out of the ninth symphony and lodges in the back of your brain sending chills down your spine.  Some interaction of the personal with the infinite, a stabbing at perfection transcends the ordinary moment.  Every one of us has moments of transformation when we feel if only for a mere second, that something larger than the present is in the room, the sky or the music.  The world gives birth before our eyes and takes us spinning down reveries and private waterslides of imagination through the twisting spiral corkscrew of imagination.  How long must ancient man have wondered where do these thoughts come from?  What am I to do with them?
+Looking backwards with clever red sunglasses I could trace the history for you; the first thing the human species got out of these encounters was a loose clumsy word: spirituality.  One day caveman Thak felt with authority that there was something beyond the simple organic, fertile, pussing matter of his body, there must be a realm august to this temporal one.  Thak ruminated over this for time and finally invented language in order to describe how he felt to other prehensile monkeys.  With language Thak separated us from the entire animal kingdom.  Not by virtue of communication, for any one who has ever observed even the simplest of animals knows that they communicate, but rather what Thak gave us was a means of creating memories —severing us from time.  Out of memory came dissention as other monkeys did not buy into Thak’s explanations and as time moved on and more voices from more and more places were heard and the general became divided and localized.  Those that believed one explanation tended to associate with only those that agreed with them, they had their  “gods” and they were the only gods, the contrarians on the other side of the proverbial river lacked THE TRUTH.  Not much changed from then until now, there are more gods and even less comprehension of the godliness, but other than that we still behave in much the same manner as our ancient ancestors, some would same we have actually gotten worse not better.
+And all of this reasoning has not in anyway helped us to understand that initial question —where are thoughts coming from?  All the philosophizing rants of all the arrogant monkeys can not answer the simplest of questions: who am I ?  Where is this vitality teeming from?  What is emotion? What the hell is really going on down here? Why?  Why can one person be moved to tears by a quartet and another put to sleep?
+Much of the wonder and amazement that greeted our forebear’s is lost for us.  We have explained it away, dissected, mapped, catalogued, and miniaturized it.  Unable to comprehend the universe we carefully construct a replication that can be understood and ignore all the rest saying in essence that anything not comprehensible to the human mind does not exist.  But it does and she knows what I am thinking before I say it and the light continues to pour through the clouds onto steeples, rocky pinnacles and the back porch of an antique house in the south where I am forced once more to stand face to face with the unknowable.  Miniaturization is for small minds I say.  Science is the culprit here they wrecked the whole show shrank it down and claimed to understand how it all worked.  I hope they all choke on those miniaturized hors' dorve corns or get mauled by a tiny, shrunken Doberman pincer.  It would give them back the humility they have tried to shed.
+For a long time this miniature world was all I could see and it threw me into a depression every time it crossed my mind, but I studied it with great enthusiasm because I was looking for way out of it.  The more I looked at all the evidence the farther I felt from the truth.  The truth is that sometimes the light is magic and being able to explain why it has the tones and hues, how the electrons spin, says nothing about the experience of it.  What good is knowing without feeling?  Those moments when I am confronted with the essential mysteries of my life and perhaps even yours, all of ours, all life, are not something that can be taken apart.  I can not break it down, understand the smaller bits individually and then hope they add up to the same thing I started with. 
+If we stop taking apart things for a minute and just breathe in slowly one breath at a time it will flood the hatches and bouyantly draw us up to the surface of things.  It is time we stopped this nonsense of science and floated our way back up to the surface of the pond.  Time to start over, to assimilate rather than dissect, to feel rather than know, to live rather than abstract….
+But back to our brief history of LOVE…
+Unfortunately by the time you and I got on the scene it resembled uncooked spaghetti, thin strands of information imparted over the years, scattered clumsily about the kitchen, there is no pot, no water, nothing to cook it with just dry hard idea that crunches when you bite into it and sticks between your teeth long after.  We externalized the internal, brought all out, the good with the bad, so that we could take it apart and understand it.  We live amid the rubble of Decarte and the mechanized universe.  We dissect, we want answers, but we ask questions that can’t be answered by the narrow methods of research that are considered valid.  Joseph Kellar ought to be our patron saint, to preside over every convening moment to remind us that we are looking for our tail while it is in our mouths, right below our noses where we can’t see it… we can taste it though and it drives us with even greater fury, mouths watering and ravenous fangs dripping the saliva of untold desire.  But we want to see it with these eyes, these imperfect eyes that we know are not even used for seeing.  We want answers to appear, to be made real.  We want Christ to appear, we want spacemen to appear, we want something to appear, but we are not by god going to accept anything that we haven’t had tested up and down with all the rigorous insanity of a mathematician trying to write out equations for her emotions.  
+What is science doing if not that?  Making the world better?  For whom?  Scientsists?  I don’t want to live in a Cartesian nightmare where history is mechanically plodding along with the cold calculated precision of a steam engine.  No many people do, consciously speaking and so came religions, sects, and politics… but none of that comes close to pulling the sense of wonder that science threw out the window.  None of it brings back the endless nature of grainy experience.  Have become more enthralled with the human created side of life and in doing so sacrafized the intertwining of the individual with the universal.  We have found a distraction which eases the anxiety that unanswered questions provoked in us —our selves.  Don’t think the church/state/priest/politician/scientist/special action committee on the overexertion of gray matter will take care of it for you.  We wrote a lullaby called god and put ourselves to sleep. Until today we find ourselves at a crossroads in human evolution.
+As we come to understand the ineffable world around us in increasingly greater minutia, we are reaching the end of the external line.  We can measure and measure search and search the world for new discoveries in a world that we once thought was infinite and impossible to wrap our minds around we are in danger of knowing the limits of knowing.
+	The scientific community has been the first to realize that such a day is coming and true to the morbid and yet curious nature of scientists the future is being drawn with great caution and precision.  And yet if one were to delve into the that world with the skepticism of a mystic looking at a computer code one would eventually notice that the experience of science is really not much different in that of the eastern philosophers of millennia past.
+	It is very popular these days to write books about the connections between the physics of indeterminacy and the constant contradictions of the Tao Te Ching.  (One of the best is actually called the Tao of Physics.)   And what has this endless search given us?
+	Nothing.  Nothing more than a system of belief, which in the end says that no system, can describe anything that is outside of the system.  What that fancy phrase means to anyone who is not absolutely enthralled by making things a lot more complicated than they need to be, is that we don’t anything about anything and we never will.
+But Lao-Tzu already said that: The farther you go the less you know.  So what’s the big deal?  What has the “cutting edge of science to report back?  That it can’t describe anything that can’t be measured.  You can’t measure the emotion that light hitting a church steeple evokes, you can’t measure they way you feel propped up in bed watching the sleeping form of the one you love.  You can’t measure them because they are encoded in you, they are uniquely yours and there is no way to translate them to others.
+	Science’s end will be when it achieves what art has been doing for most of recorded history —trying to give the uniqueness of experience a form which allows it to transcend the individual and share it.  Science is but a new language and nothing more.
+Perhaps with virtual reality we will one day be able to exactly encode everything that another has experienced and feed it all into our own nervous system, but the response will still be different.  In order for emotions to be communicated everyone would have to have the exact same history, exact same thoughts, and exact same experience felt be all at once.  Even supposing the absurdity of this to be possible what would be gained?
+	Fuck science; fuck it along with religion, society and culture, fuck them all because they say nothing other than what any two year old could tell you is obvious.  It is obvious because we have all felt it.  All the records of how we felt pall in the face of the question of what?  What is it that sends the chill down our spines, the warmth out of our heart or the goosebumped hair up on our arms? 
+	No one knows and I think that it would be safe bet to assume that as long as we all have different brains we never will.  The technology fanatics will burn themselves up the same way the drug gurus of the sixties did, they will fall prey to the one thing that makes them human —ego.  It killed the belief in god, it killed the belief in the cultural reformers and it will always kill any attempt to transcend because it is the point at which belief originates.
+	Only an egocentric monkey would dream of being able to understand the orbit of the planets let alone they vastness of all existence.  Only a very confused and disoriented creature would throw himself into a corner and examine every little microscopic piece of dirt without first discovering what a monkey was.
+Herman Hess once said that the only job of man was to find the road that led back to himself.  But we being the tragic creatures we are doomed forever to a life lived in melodrama and confusion, seldom do such things.  Seldom do we celebrate love or transcendence.  At our best we celebrate the by-products such as art of music.  At our worst we record those who were farthest from themselves, the emperors kings and queens, generals, bishops, monks, people who led the most perverted and hideous of lives.
+	Very few lovers rattling around in the tomes of recorded history.  Oh to be sure there were lots of them, but we haven’t paid too much attention to them, or to what they knew.  We have created a cult of worship to our egos to the things that we think are so unique about ourselves at the inescapable expense of the things which we have in common.
+	Its built into our culture and if we Americans seem particularly arrogant to the rest of the world it is only because we house the temples in which the worship of the ego if held.  We play host to humanity’s darkest hour, an experiment that has fallen off track and yet it is so ingrained in our minds that it forms an unbroken circle which steadily contracts into smaller and smaller rings the closer we come to the zero hour.
+	We will do anything to draw the attention away from ourselves and as Freud hinted and Reich out right said we do it by manifesting our fear into the real world.  The only things that happen are ones that someone wants to happen.  The problem is that none of us really know for sure what we want.  The subconscious mind is in the act of creating… always and forever…. It is creating even the conscious mind.  Everything that you think you are is dream that some other part of your brain is having; to explain this we had to invent something called chaos which says that you are, in mathmatical terms living in an endless noisy feedback loop called non-causality and non causality is merely causality that is too complicated to trace, but there is a cause nonetheless.
+	Their will always be a cause without it the world could not exist, without a beginning then there can be know end and we all know there is an end, an end to ourselves and from all appearances an end to the whole damn show.  The end has in fact already happened because time like everything in the universe is something that someone wanted to exist.
+	Where does this terrible looping logic take us?  Right back where we started.  It’s a loop remember —really nothing to marvel at.  You can travel the whole distance or just stay where you are and let it come back around.  In the end even those are no different.  So here we are again, perhaps there it is another person next to me in bed when I watch them sleep, perhaps it is a techno song that sends the chills down my spine, and perhaps the next time the sun breaks through the clouds it will be illuminating a mountain instead of a church.	
+	At the end of the line the breakdown of the word I realized there was no hope for communication to take place I was too isolated in experience to hope to relate it to anyone other than myself.  I was not close enough to anyone so close was I to god. It is not near the bottom in the sewers of cities that humanities hope lies but out here in the great heights, closer to god and only then to we seem so much alike.  Only next to god are all the political games that divide men stripped away out here you arrive naked and proud.  Only then do you see every man as your ally every woman your love, only scorched clean of the petty differences of race, creed, color of skin do we draw together huddled in fear of insanity which we ourselves have wrought upon each other.  No hope for a cure is on earth, no hope save death.  No cure but death and then Quien Sabe?
+With the bleakness of snow and the blanketed certainty of disillusionment I cast off all doubts.   I was ready.  Ready for what I did not know —a thousand faces before the day is half over passing like the jerky photomontages of Man Ray.  Each pair of eyes radiant unto itself delicately in the corners of a stray glance I caught the recognition of understanding though only tragedy brings them any closer.  Forged and smelt in the dry heat of rock furnaces here the charnel ovens brew alchemal liquid souls and fuse combinations of liquor and lips, souls to the experiment of which we are all part.
+	The medieval alchemists searched in the stone, the modern physicist searches the heavens, and perhaps the future shaman will try to fuse man with machine.  All have missed the most obvious of truths with the dedication to illusion that had carried the Catholic Church on its back for so long.  We want ourselves to so make or form each other into the god that we were fashioned after that we forget that such is already true.  The wisdoms of heaven are in the DNA strand yes, but what are we to do with them?  Copper may be turned to steel, but what are we to do with it?  Everything may be taken apart and put back together differently, but what will have changed?
+	She waited by a fountain in a park just outside of Paris where I have never been.  I watched her sit silently for hours staring at nothing or so it looked to me her eyes were fixed on the pump handle of the well.  She sat motionless and never without the quite smile of a woman in rapture, a woman in the private mysterious world of orgasm.  I see it on the face of the ones I have loved in that indeterminable second after where everything is.
+	Which brings you right back to the steak, but now there was a woman or there was the sheading of a woman, an inescapable need to be at once masculine and feminine, cunt and cock, both sides of the coin as it were, but tonight the blood of the cow is burning away the feminine scorching it like so many glowing crimson embers that glow and warm, but which fade in the spectacular face of flame.  Meat sizzling over a campfire gets rid of girlfriends and wives, gets rid of lots of entrapments, like a cure for the plague.  It’s a proven fact.  
+With the final rays of sun went the final heat; as the gentle coolness of night settled in the humidity of the rain began to evaporate and the desert returned to it’s dry self again.  Eating the salty and sweet steak with a baked potato and a pot of baked beans I wandered off on a walk.  At first it was just my mind bouncing lightly among the juniper trees that were behind my campsite, but then when the food was gone, my body grabbed me a beer and a pack of cigarettes and carried me down to the edge of the canyon.  I sat with my legs dangling off a rock that was perched on the rim and extended out into space.  All around me there was nothing but air and under me only a brief moment of rock and then more timelessness we called air.
+	We call it air.  But it used to be called ether, before that it was liquid, now it’s mostly dirt in some places.  Here it is air.  
+I thought about Dante, about God, about steak and about women.  It was beautiful just to be alive and to able to think.  I thought about that for along time.  There came an utter silence in which I watched myself think in the way that you might listen to another talk.  It detached but remained aware that it must return back and live with those thoughts that it could only then recognize.  It was a spiraling double helix of a logic that corkscrewed all about my mind drilling little holes hear and there opening wine thoughts and pouring glasses for the self that continues to stream in the door.  It was to watch a feast of thoughts or personalities come together for one sort time and dine like old friends.  A reunion to catch-up on where each had been what had happened and what they had done.  It turned to a smorgasbord of philosophy and love and there was endless debate, dissention and rising voices.  A circus dine roared around the room slap happy train car attendants moved about taking ticket and slapping the men in the faces for not having the right change.
+And then the wave crested at cacophony and confusion and broke leaving only silence in the room.  Silence that carried on its back a poignant nostalgia for the past and a calm understanding of the future.  I touched for a moment the void that Buddha preached, the nothingness into which you must cast yourself if you wish to understand.  Riddles that seemed ridiculous to me before where solved with simplest of maneuvers truth gleamed with the caustic light of florescent light posts on an asphalt road.  In the blinking blank look of the deer just before impact is the look of understanding the look of recognition that it is all nothing.  No thing.  What do I want out of this life?  Nothing.  Nothing at all.
+I understood with sharp focus the difference between understanding how something works and understand what it is.   I came to see that even the void of understanding was not the end but only a means to something else which would also be yet another means until the final thought was had and the conversation between self and the other ceases forever and weds them together.   
+And the two shall be joined as one.  I have acted that out with others; I have joined souls with several men and women in my life but I had never had the sensation of meeting myself on that plane until that moment.  A net was cast over the side of the ship and the wheel turned starboard to trawl a giant net through the waters of the past which played out in slide show fashion, a game show in which I had to meet myself
+	Endless images of my own arrogance played themselves onto the back of my closed eyelids like a cinema of embarrassment and I went to myself, as stranger might go, out of pity, to reach down a hand and help myself up.  All love flowed through me and made everything hyperreal and tactile as if thoughts were the rock and the trees and the silence was the minds way of answering the endless question of the universe.   The transitory nature of my own existence was illuminated and I was washed with feeling of warm and celebration of the embarrassment and I felt the sheer hilarious joy of my own folly fall along side the folly of all those I have ever know and ever will know, a giant heaping ball of laughter.  Coiled up tight like yarn and batted about by the kitten of the universe the ball dances nightly behind the moon, all our selves playing as children endlessly.  A cat.  A cat in the hat.  The trick top hat.
+	As the moon rose up from the east I watched in silence as my life unfolded behind my eyes I watched memories I had no conscious knowledge of the way a father watches his sun playing in the yard.  They started off recent memories of Amy, of Dean, of Ed, of moments shared with each and then it kept racing backward to college classes, high school girlfriends, playground friends….  Until I went back in utero to a point of no consciousness at all and then other stories unfolded as if out of some kind of genetic memory.  I saw the light of the fifteen-century break through the night hitting church spires and scorching the brass coffers of foreign temples.  Wild and uncharted regions played out scenes from Arabian Nights with silken tapestries women’s arms entwined with gold bands; and then sagas of Templars, all the wisdom seekers of the fertile crescent and the girl in France by the well came up near the end like a phantom as if to introduce herself but only disappeared again into a background of Egyptian palaces and the fragrance of silk and spices from the orient.  There was a warm glow of light in the room that slowly as the eyes adjusted revealed itself as a temple of splendors.  The walls were adorned with rugs and woven tapestries in designs that acted out the living myths of the sun gods.  The floor was blanketed in pillows and a sweet incense smoke floated in wafts of Jasmine and myrrh; in the center of the room slightly elevated on steps was an alter upon which a beautiful and naked goddess lay, a statue, an answer, a testament to any question that you might ask.  She was a goddess and in her silence I swam the thalassic of sorrow and joy in placid caressing waters that even now three years later come back with absolute lucidity as if I were returning to the vision at will just by writing it again.
+	And then the moment itself swelled beyond its proportions and burst leaving me only in awe of it, but dancing on to new lines, new tap roots burrowing intensity turned up by the alchemal union of soul and steak, god and potato, desert and breast, me and my self.  The minute I became conscious of the fact that I was having a thought all sense of it was lost.  I saw in this the futility of my own quest to know.  I saw the source of my unhappiness that I could not live here now but only came looking and in being so overwhelmed with consciousness of myself I lost myself.  Everything was laid unequivocally bare to the opulent austerity of the truth the contradiction when contradiction finally fades and all things are true and not true all at the same moment.  A place indescribable, incommunicable precisely because it exists below the refinement of words.  It is too raw to be said or explained it must be devoured with the intensity of an animal ripping at its prey
+	I felt it for what seemed like an eternity.  I remember coming back to fire in dazed kind of trance like state that held me like a loved one returned from a long voyage at see.  My spine trembled and doubt slowly crept in.  What if this stops?  I want to feel this always to live in this mindscape whole world be damned and with these thoughts so went the vision.
+	I awoke feeling an eternal peace settled into my chest and the words of Terence McKenna came to my mind.  “If you have seen the end you take your place in the drama and you live without anxiety.”  I don’t know what he meant by those words what space he went to what he felt, but they mean something to me.  They mean something as if I myself had said them.  I did not see an end or anything so literal as that at best I can saw that I felt everything as it really was beautiful and unbounded and I felt the release of anxiety that he attempts to approximate with words.
+	I made breakfast in the morning heat.  The desert was waking up and it wouldn’t be long before I could have cooked the eggs right on the rocks.  I drank the last beer to wash down the eggs and I asked around the campground for a ride back into Moab finally at the last sight right by the entrance I found a young couple who let me ride in the camper shell of their truck crouched between my gear and theirs, it was a long bumpy ride into Moab, but I didn’t have to suffer lectures on political duties.  Instead I thought about Joe, he was expecting me at the yard around five which gave me a hour to kill in Moab.  The bulk of the hour I spent trying to figure out why some people meet someone and they share there live and other meet people they share there ideas.  I like to think that my life is an idea and every idea a life, but then again I have a fondness for wordplay, deceit, double entandre. delibrete acting and outright lying when it comes to talking to strangers.  I just try to stay one step ahead of my brain as if I were writing myself into existence all the time. 
+
+
+
+At the end of the street there was a group of surly looking Indians who were probably surly
+about the fact that this is Utah and beer is 3.2 which makes it awfully hard to get drunk.  I could probably have got a ride with them, it’s a common custom among the people of third world nations to help each other and the Hopi are certainly a third world nation.  I toyed with the idea of trying to stay with them, but the winds blew the other way and they left before I could finish my cigarette.  I decided to go back to the train.  In the middle of my reverie when the reflections of my life played out I was quite moved by the portrait of Mark Pledger I decided to visit him in New Orleans.  There is naturally no reason for hurry so I might as well take the slowest mode of travel.  If there had been a river I would’ve strapped together some sticks and headed off.
+But there was no river running that direction so I called the number Joe had given me when we parted and crossed my fingers.  Sure enough I heard Joe yelling “who is it?” Before his wife even said hello.  I explained myself hoping that perhaps a story had preceded me and then she handed the phone to Joe who just said “where you at?”
+That how it goes with some people they take care of the important stuff first.  Joe was there in ten minutes and in another ten we were at “the homestead” as Joe referred to it.  It was About five miles outside of Moab near the entrance to a box canyon, a nice house that had an added onto appears such that it sprawled about with rooms attached to the sides of what had once been a simple miners shack.  The bulk of it was adobe —use what’s on hand. Joe told me it was built by a prospector during the Uranium rush of the fifties the man, so went Joe’s story had come out west trying to strike it rich and was then double crossed by his partner and lost his wife, his son and eventually his own life to the greedy partner.
+“You can imagine the times… everybody was hungry for uranium and cash, but the truth of the matter was that the government had all the good claims and the majority of what was left never got anymore rich.  The best way to get rich in Moab back then was to swindle the newcomers.  The guy that built this place was from Michigan —easy pickin’s….  Anyway some other guy meets him in the bar… the west is full of these stories, but this one ended up with everybody dead except the cheating wife and she wanted to clear out of town afterwards… it just so happened that we arrived at the right time… I bought this place for three hundred bucks and as it turns out I have claim to that whole canyon you see up there….”
+He gestured to the rock walls that towered over our heads and then kicked at the gravel in the driveway.  Cottonwood trees dropped behind the house and I guessed that there must have been a tributary stream running behind the place.  It was beautiful spread, we stood by the truck in silence for a minute or two just staring at the tops of the cliffs watching the setting sun climb up them.  Finally Joe suggested I “meet the little woman” and have some dinner.  Jean was every bit the Mormon matriarch, she greeted me with a smile and hug and made me feel like one of the family, but there was an element of mischief about her something mysterious and wise that danced in the corner of her eyes.  After introductions and such we sat down to big home cooked spread of ham, mashed sweet potatoes, collared greens, fresh rolls, and corn on the cob; throughout the meal the smell of cherry pie drifting in from the kitchen.  The meal was spent in near silence all of us eating it should have been awkward but it wasn’t.  With the food in ruins Joe pushed back his chair and lit a cigarette which I am pretty sure is against Mormon policy, but his wife said nothing.  Then the stories started rolling out and Joe turned our two day trip across Arizona into an odyssey of Olympic proportions we were all laughing and then Joe shocked me by getting up and going over by the stereo where after rummaging for a while he returned with a joint and lit it up and passed it to his wife.  The image of this fifty-year-old Mormon woman toking a joint as if it were ancient habit threw me out of myself and before I knew it we were all rolling in our chairs clutching out stomachs in fits of laughter.  She had a high pitched rippling laughter a free honest curl to it that seemed impossible for the Mormons to have allowed. When we settled down and silence overtook us I ventured to ask what the Mormon religion thought of dope smoking.
+God it seems does not care about what Mormons do with the plants he has bequeathed upon the earth, “besides,” she said, “once you understand what it is telling you, you realize that it is the right thing to do.”
+I agreed with her and I am quite familiar with Marijuana and what it has to say, but as I pointed out the argument against it makes sense if your goal is to maintain the status quo.  It undermines any desire for consumption or working hard to get somewhere all of which are infinitely necessary in our little American nightmare… marijuana says ‘enjoy yourself and don’t worry….  This little stoned thought struck a nerve in Jean and she launched into a political diatribe.  
+“That’s the trouble with all these laws they were written by people who don’t know what marijuana is saying because they have never smoked it.  And I don’t mean smoked it every now and then I mean smoked it every moment of everyday to see what the world would be like if it were part of our diet….”  She dragged off a cigarette and eyed me suspiciously for moment before continuing.  “I’m a Mormon, this is hardly the first thing that I have believed that has been contrary to the government and I’ll tell you when I lost the church was when they said god had changed his mind on the issue of polygamy.  I still believe in god and I still believe in love, but I don’t believe in governments or churches.  I am listening I am aware I am in control of my life and I can make decisions for myself.  Government is obsolete we no longer need someone to tell us what to do in order to assure the survival of the species, as individuals we know this, but at the collective level we are still acting out old games.  Some people think its that not enough people know how to take care of themselves and that is the myth that gets perpetuated by the machinery of government.  But stop for a minute and think.  What does the government do for you on a daily basis that is beneficial to your quality of life?  How is it helping you?  Stoplights come to mind and then after that a big blank space where you try and search for something else and you think to yourself what does the government do again?  Exactly.
+“I’m sorry I rant when I get high, I didn’t mean to bring up taxes and the government and stupid things that don’t matter… you must think I’m a lunatic Ted Kazinyski follower or something out here in the middle of nowhere and lecturing you on the evils of government….”
+“Not at all.”  I assured her that I couldn’t care less about the government for the very reason she had stated.  No one does when you really get down to it.  The chief function of the government is to give you a topic of conversation with stranger whether in bars or subways or in a house in the middle of Utah.  It’s a linguistic litmus test for the compatibility of the future.  It’s a dead dog on a long car drive, it gives you something to say that does not reveal anything about you a way of rotating the air by venting words and spinning to the sound of each others voice, a verbal ballet that circled us about the room waltzing entourne.
+Joe and his wife talked like giant friendly clowns billowing stories and cackling at nothing the way people do when they have been married for twenty years and are still in love.  It was bit odd to watch; I couldn’t shake visions of symphonies and the jerky movement of violin bows jerking about mixed with the slower warble of cellos.  There laughter sang and I was dragged into living room for a family tour… children in goofy clothes, grandchildren in baby baskets, great hordes standing in front of Niagara Falls, the Washington Monument, Delicate Arch, lakes, rivers, mountains, Joe holding up a trout, Jean at the rim of the grand canyon it all swirled and danced before my eyes.   Then came the cherry pie made more delicious by chemically induced longing, sweeter, redder, and flakier… Marijuana could be an advertisers greatest tool if only we let ourselves go.  And then Vavaldi, the four seasons suite tearing the walls apart, then the Ninth, then Rockmonanoff and on and on until Jean dropped off to bed and Joe and I fell into silence moved in waves by the churning hip thrusting glory of Elvis’s 1972 karate kicking, orchestra backed concert in Madison Square Gardens
+“So you want to go on to Denver I take it?”
+“Yes I do… from there I think I’m going to take the bus down to new Orleans and look up a friend I haven’t seen in a few years….”
+“New Orleans… I’ve never been there.”
+“It’s a different world… a foreign country right here in America….”
+I told him a bit about it tried to cast the spell of the place in the room.  There were railings around the windows and gas lamps in the corner and we both had accents by the end of it, but later when I was alone in my room staring about the ceiling with its little glow in the dark constellations, I couldn’t help but think the I really didn’t know New Orleans at all, I was only there a week, I had the merest gloss.  I wanted to know the city to crawl under its insidious belly and render it swallowed, digested and crapped out my ass in great putrid heap of shit…. 
+I slept fitfully under the moonless starscape ceiling dreaming of a stale, smoky bar's liquor-stained floors and a headless horseman riding like Icarius out of the fiery sun-gilded gates of hell.  The headless horseman swerved and bore down on the I that is you with menacing intent, jolting the dream element awake and into a sleepnonsleep trance on the isthmus of reality.  The horseman dismounted and walks in to the bar.  He caught us all unawares, I was bewildered and in my heavy-lidded gaze saw a man with no head standing just inside the mosquito netting that covers the tropical doorway.  The bar is on the corner of dusty street in a barrio of Lima, the patrons are frozen in time nothing moves save the horseman reaching behind the counter and filling his glass with whiskey; he sat on the stool next to me and turned so he was facing me.  I turned my stool toward him somewhat surprised that I could move, in light of my freedom I turned full circle surveying the statues arranged at the tables, not a breath stirs, no wind, we are in a vacuum.  Turning my attention back to the headless man I stared at the empty space where his head ought to have been but wasn’t; I searched for something on him which I could address myself to ought since there is no face by which I can gain his attention… closer inspection revealed a pair of blinking eyes peering at me from where the necktie should have been.  A hand slipped out from the waist and motioned for me to rise. I climbed clumsily off of my barstool and followed him out into the middle of the jungle night.   The headless horseman motioned for me to sit on a fallen tree and pulled out a long stick of cinnamon, he lit it and inhaled through a buttonhole in his chest.  I sat down on the log opposite him and staring eye-level at the cinnamonette and I began to appreciate the sheer size of the horseman and realized that even without his head he was beautiful.
+	Time passes by in jerky motions not unlike the first motion pictures uneven and without regard for continuity.  Maybe moments maybe hours maybe at the same time, an old man with a sickly gray beard and a ridiculous suit is sitting where the horseman had been.  One hand is out of sight down his pants and the other wags a long finger at you and he begins to jerk his cock screaming i want you i want YOU i WANT YOU!  
+There were opulent scenes passing by as if played on blue screens real but not. I saw great Persian empires laid out, expanding and retracting, moving across time in slow molasses-like motions.  Cities where the sun stood still in the sky and monstrous creations of the mind, horrifying and seductive at the same time.  Like ancient Tibetan art there was no distinction between the province of the mind and the province of the body.  Women swam in south china seas of ambient warmth moving in playful erotic motions, cresting like dolphins.  Creatures of all forms walked streets of near ancient origin, cobblestones and whitewashed buildings with European wrought iron balconies.  Tapestries hung out from the window beckon the passersby to climb up into untold pleasures of body and mind.  The scene was overwhelming and indescribable; beautiful and horrifying in a way that held horror and beauty to be ultimately different reactions to the same observed phenomena.
+I woke up with unshakable thought that the only thing better than solitude is society.  The other game was looking like a hot roulette wheel from the steel illusions of self-certainty.  I mean of course the society of friends or even a friend….  By breakfast I was in a chatty mood and wanted to stay and talk to Jean for a while, but Joe insisted that we had to moving before noon.  I thanked Jean and said goodbye to her at the railyard.  I went for a quick swim in the Green River while Joe signed out for the train and went through his checklist of the computer guidance systems.  The water was cool and yes green, so green I couldn’t see past my dick; I started wondering about leeches and quickly got out.  Sunning myself on a rock I noticed that my belly button was itching and burning slightly, I sat up and discovered a tick burrowed into my skin, swollen fat with my blood.  The parasitic little bastard was stealing my lifeblood.  Try as I might I could not get him loose, I held a cigarette as close as I could stand for as long as I could stand but he refused to let go.  Finally I just tore him out ripping a chunk of flesh off with him.  I dug around for a while with a knife making sure that I had got the head.  Damn little bastard better not have given me Lyme Disease I thought as I popped his fat blood laden belly between my fingers.  The purpose of the tick is like government entirely unclear to me, but the tick did serve as a healthy reminder that I too am organic, subject to disease and vermin, something you forget when you have lived the vast majority of your life in the confines of the Lysoled suburban dreamland.
+I heard the groan of the engine moving and Joe’s voice yelling over it, I threw my shirt back on and ran over to the nearest flat car and we were off.  I hung back on the car alone munching some cheese and fruit that I bought at the store in Moab and consuming the better part of bottle of wine.  Wine is the only alcohol legal in Utah that can actually get you drunk.
+It was five in the evening by the time we got back to the big switch where we once again headed east and by then I was good and drunk.  Drunk enough that walking on a moving train seemed like thoroughly stupid idea so I just lay on my back all even and stared at the sky.  Somewhere in the midst of my looping jagged butterfly thoughts I hit upon a memory of having read that a thousand years ago Venus was visible with naked eye in the day time.  It got me to thinking why it wasn’t now… which got me to thinking about selective attention.  There is a myrid of information assaulting our sense ever moment ninety nine percent of which we do not see, that is it is not seable being that it is beyond the visual spectrum everything from radio to ultraviolet or nuclear radiation is dombarding us and we ignore it because we have never need to know about it to survive, but what I was thinking about was beyond mere survival.  The human brain is the most powerful information processor in the known universe and yet it is unable to see venus and at one point it could.  Indeed people in some cultures still can.  It has nothing whatsoever to do with a decline in visual skills but ratherit has to do with need.  Two thousand years ago your brain needed to be able to see venus and there it was clearly visible in the middle of the day.  Chances are that anyone able to see Venus would not however be able to drive a car on the freeway.  Such a skill requires intense amounts of complex organization of brain signals and body responses and yet we do it automatically without having to think at all.  But we do no see venus in the day time.  It got me to thinking about cultural brainwashing.  Cultural brainwashing is theprocess by which the indivdual is integrated into his or her society and world that surounds them; it is the fancy way of explaining why you do not see venus and with the self reflexive glory of its inescapablity it is a product of my brainwashing.  Only in westernized nations with notions like science and psychiatry do you find people talking about cultural brainwashing.  Those people who noticed it like to think they have escaped it, that they have transcended it, but they haven’t they are indeed the most brainwashed among us.  Just as you only find Zombi’s in Haiti and you only find death at end of a pointed bone Aborigonal Australia so you only find cultural brainwashing among westerners.  You can not escape brainwashing without losing all context of who you as an individual are; worldwide the most common method of transcending oneself is psychoactive compounds whether it be peyote, ayahuasca, hashish, or aminita Muscarathe common element is brain alteration.  Only when we are in this or other brain changing states can one escape one’s self and through that ones culture.  These brain alterations are also possible with LSD.  
+The thing that wanted to say to Jean when she was talking about the govenent was that they know what she knows even better than most of us who feel oppresed by them.  They know how useless and futile there positions are because thy have to defend them on a daily basis.  Increasingly the politician and reformer is shown to be in the game only for personal gain and the common cry of the people is that everyone is corrupt, but this is not true.  More and more “leaders” are greedily enhancing their own lot at the expensive of others for a very good reason… they know the end is near we no longer need them and they no it, like squirrils cacheing nuts or polar bears retaining extra fat for the winter they are storing up for the lean times ahead.  They also sensed that if the general public was to get ahold of LSD or anything like it their time would come to an end a whole lot sooner so they have kept it away for now, but it will never really go away.  It was not the acid dropping hippies that worried them they were never going to get far they smelled which make a bad impression on anyone in almost any culture; no what they feared were the men in suits the men from their own ranks who were touting the benefits of LSD.  Men that the public at large looked up to artists, actors, psychiatists, chemists, anthropolgists, celebrites, even politicians, men like Tim Leary, Cary Grant, John Lilly, Harvey Milk; men with influence.
+In every culture there is a shaman figure sometimes it’s a weird guy in the hut down the roade who talks to himself as walks about and sometimes it’s the weird guy in thirtyith floor office of a Manhattan highrise who walks around talking to himself.  When the psychologists and psychiatrists got a hold of LSD the threat to the then reigning shamans, the politicians, was real and they got rid of it.  There was no conspiracy that put Tim Leary in prison for a twenty five year term for possession of marijuana, it was a calculated move to shut him up and certainly he knew it.  He did what any reasonable man would do, he shut up.  He stopped talking about LSD and chemical methods of emacipation from the self and started talking about the one other thing that seems to work… meditation and yogaic excersizes.
+It’s 1999 right now and try as I might I can’t do Yoga on a moving train.  Nor do I have any LSD which means that I am fucked, trapped here in this culturally brainwashed condition and unable to see Venus.  Venus —godess of Love.  Makes you wonder. 
+The air is nipping at my arms like darning needles and faint traces of our breath is visible in the glow of the gas lantern.  Jow and I ware roasting marshmellows on a coleman latern in the back of a box car.  It almost works.  Right now though as night finds us creeping through the mountains a warm marshmellow is exactly what we need to plug the worm holes.  The worms are eating us alive, Joe and I.  They’re eating you too whereever you are whenever you are.  They tell you that worms invade your body afterdeath and they go to great lengths to keep them out of the coffin with formaldahyde and by draining the blood out of your body, but the worms are there already, they have been eating us up all along.  They pierce like invisible bullets fired at birth across aphrodites enteral dancing forever and piercing Apollo’s languishing nowflesh rotten to the core eat up and leaking like sieves we stuff ourselves with air injected sugar balls to stop the vaporous bleeding.  The marshmellows do the trick tonigh hold it all intact no leaking of vaporous lifeblood al is well.  I stretch out the sleeping bag on the floor of the box car and joe heads toward the engine compartment with the lantern.  I am alone in the dark, with the holes, the leaking, the LSD, the cultural brainwashing, Zombis, shamans, Tim Leary and a small spider that I named steve after a fish I had along time ago.  Everything is okay.  We are moving east, slowly.
+
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+	Denver is a clicking noise, a perfect symphany of flying fingers, words and shoes.  The collision of bodies results in equal and opposite repultion into free form voids of their own peruvian designs, fre form abstracts of temples and vines, jungle book black cats.  The mayan caper recast north of the equator.  But as is started to say it was a clicking noise… It came in with wheels slowing west of the main station and it continued in the cab ride to mikes house as I sat mexmerized by the meter, and it finally collided when I opened the door to his house and I saw Dean typing on a laptop on the couch.  I said Mike, I should have said Mike and Halley which is whole different sort of beast.
+Mike and Halley had come about because of me, at least that was how it looked when you poked around the edges of their relationship.  The official story was that Halley’s job had led them Denver, but I wasn’t buying.  Mike and I went back a long time ago to a galaxy far far away.  Actually it was closer to Spaceballs that Star Wars… right down to the trailer.  Mike and I had both dropped out of college and being broke as hell working coffeeshops we could only afford a one-room trailer.  There was never any money or food other than noodles.  The one thing we had tons of though were friends, friends from high school, friends from college, friends from work, friends friends friends and they were there every fucking night like band of chimpanzees throwing there own feces about and giggling and whooping with laughter.  We were all just finding drugs.  We were late bloomers.  I got out of that trailer atrocity by sheer force of will; well that and the luck that my parents hadn’t done anything with my own room.  Mike’s parents already had a home office and they weren’t keen on getting him back.  They had vaccinated themselves with furniture, a cruel reality that I only point out because it helps explain Mike.  Mike was forced by circumstance to escape via Halley, love was only one side of the coin, the side that Halley saw, but in Denver I saw something colder, something more reptile-olike creeping behind his eyes —necessity.  Love and necessity colliding with all the fanfare of a plane wreck.
+	Denver was a crash landing, a bust in grandest old western sense of the word.  I remember three things rising up out of the rollicking sautéed cacophony; they float in my recollection like enormous turds. There was the windowless tomb of stone blocks that constituted a house inhabited by five people in two bedrooms in which Dean developed a Heroin habit, Betty drowned in despair and Mike and Halley fought great crusades for the dominance of their sexes. The cinderblock walls sustained all their momentum for seven months.  Mike and Halley fell out of love, Dean fell in, Betty climbed over love, and I watched totally unable to act; I was paralyzed and could do nothing for myself or them.  It was bliss while it lasted.  I watched Dean until he faded into love and heroin becoming too thin to see, then I watched Mike and Halley dissolve into Mike, and Halley, and then finally out of self-pity Dean inadvertently propelled Betty and I out with him on an arcing trajectory that landed me in New Orleans, Betty back in Las Vegas, and Dean in Washington D.C.   Throughout it all the television reigned.  Betty and I were stationed like zombis before the master god of all creation and its blue aura.  Dean was one with the place; he existed by the skin of his teeth, I have little or no recognition of him while we were there, he was either shooting up or talking to Amanda on the internet or both.  Otherwise he did not really exist.  Dean did that from time to time, became invisible and disappeared only to resurface again at the oddest moment possible.  Most of all what sticks out was the sound of it all.  The mad clicking that brought me into Denver was always in background like the sound of time itself walking about in the rooms, banging pots, cooking rice in the kitchen, arguing with itself in the bathroom, throwing shoes at Mike as he runs out of the bedroom. 
+Dean is typing, it’s a furious noise, he is pounding the keys nodding his head to the sounds from his headphones.  He has drowned out his own fingers, doesn’t realize the force with which he is pounding the keys, mad telegraphs spitting out like lizard tongues firing themselves out into electrostatic love notes wired and flung off to Maryland where another pair of fingers responds…. the thing itself it flying back and forth maddening!
+	And the outside world is no better, what filters in on the TV is reflected back all around us, cold insensitive innocuous suburban delight… detachment.  We lived in a decidedly residential area of Denver, a cityvoid that occurs in every big American city where an arbitrary line is drawn around some houses, a couple of suburban strip-mall shopping-centers, and gas stations and it is given a purposefully pedestrian name like Irvine or Turtle Rock… the streets of Douglas Copeland's nightmares. The perpetual warm blue glow of television sets emanated from the windows of vinyl sided endura-homes —guaranteed to last a lifetime or your money back!   The television a great luminous third eye watching the affair with the indifference of god.  Walking around in the evenings I felt the pride of it’s inventor.  Every house was glowing quiet blue light the streets bathed in its iridescence, cobalt streets, sapphire lawns, purple skies, everything lit from within blue, blue noise humming softly… in the background blue people wandered, silhouettes dancing in front of kitchen windows and shadows lurking in open garages.  The blue is grating irritating, gets under your skin like the flesh eating virus boils spring up and burst revealing slick blue oil and puss.  They slide under the arm; you can see them moving just below the skin.  But in background faint at first but growing in decibels is the maddening chant of the newsman and the Maytag man and all the talking heads disembodied and floating in the sky singing choruses.  It’s all in timing! The process must be subtle and slow, but steady until the critical mass is reached then summon them like zombies to their own deaths in the gamma ovens… the mad scientist paces about suburban streets in a kind of furious strut.  Every thing is planned; everything reflects precision.
+	Around the cave we lived in even the trees were well manicured as if the force the random act of god even into simplistic conformity, but not with menacing intent… only so that it will match the lawn and the wife’s nails all neatly polished like jewels.   I used to work in a town like this, for a couple of days anyway, just long enough to collect such gems as the story of the woman who abandoned her dog on the beach one day because its spots clashed with her new interior design ideas. Or the man who smothered his baby because his wife was paying more attention to the child then his dick.  Precious people we all aspire to be and yet you and I somehow we will be different isn’t that right?  Somehow it will not get to us, all these trapping we can see through it now and we will see through it then; it never occurred to the monsters either that you don’t have eyes in the back if your head.
+You and I though, we can’t afford to do that we must work real hard and get where the rich people are.  Funny logic.  Fuzzy math.  Keep it I’m outta here me the old man said sitting on his rocker, a Kansas porch, hot summer day, cats, an orgone box, a southerner, and glass of clear liquid refilled constantly.  Keep it, I’m outta here me.  So long. And there is a witch stirring her cauldron; stir in a few European brains, some Irish brawns, a twinkle of pigs’ feet to sniff out the hidden truffles and simmer for two hundred years until the whole cesspool turns into a soufflé.
+Outside is America.  The sound is deafening.  It comes in waves of music, horns, engines, electricity, spinning warbles of neon light echoing asphalt dreams of sanity.  Vibrations given off by the turn of espresso handles, the pull of yogurt machines, the spinning of laundry mats, the chopping of the Chinese cook’s knife atop the trash can, chunks of chicken fat and bone accumulating on the floor; all of it whirls in a hurricane melee reverberating about through the dry air of the plains.  Crisp air that offers no resistance to the pealing clamor, it just carries it about silent as a tomb offering no comment on the meaning of it all.  Standing air listens like a woman in orgasm to the totality of nothingness like wood hewn by sandpaper until smooth contrasted against the sanding sound of ocean waves, rivers feed by rain, driftwood and manicured wood lying side by side.  And running your hand over each to notice the artificial feel of the polished hard wood and the prickling organic sensuality of the rough hewn driftwood tossed like a cork, a bottle, a note, all of them riding over seas of imagination and somehow in the landlocked spirit of place Denver sounds like cancer.  The insidious beat of death.  Tribal drums still heralding the rising moon, wood blocks clanging about in alleys, homeless people rattling shopping carts up one street and down another the mad mad mad sound of science.
+Sound I am told by Dean is nothing more than pressure waves being interpreted by my ears.  “Horseshit” I mutter and then there is Mike ducking and the sound of Halley yelling, her voice wailing in anguish over something he had done, but we don’t know what it is we don’t know if it is that bad or if she is insane.  Betty and I serve the madness in silence, in the background Chandler is broken up over Joey moving out and that mousy guy that’s always ‘the other guy’ in movies is moving in, homoerotic jokes are sticking to vellum walls like flies.
+	The shoe hits the wall above the couch and tumbles down between Betty and I, she looks at it, I look at it, we look at each other, we look at Mike (he is crying), and we look at the television it is moving on trying to sell me deodorant.  On the table is a bong.  Betty rouses herself and packs a bowl.  Halley is crying and Mike is holding her, but she is pulling away from him.  I can’t help finding her sexy, her legs are vulnerable, succulent, but I think of last night when I accidentally walked in on them having sex.  The only bathroom has a doorway through the closet that opens into their bedroom, and as I was digging around for a condom I looked in the mirror and saw Mike’s bare ass bouncing enthusiastically off the bed, presumably pounding his cock into her.  It made me laugh.  Laughter followed by waves of nausea born on seas of alcohol and girl named Jen and then Mike’s ass bouncing furiously… wham!, right into the toilet, into the floor, into walls, the roof the place reeked of laughter, mine, Deans, Betty’s, the studio audience, the children of war celebrating peace.  And now I can’t laugh anymore, but Halley is still looking good, her ass is stretched tight in the mirror behind her, it murmurs sex in spite of the shrill of her voice and the sobs that wrack her body; they feel like they are sucking all the air right out of the room.  I look at Betty to make sure she has not imploded, but it is too late she is hacking and coughing smoke, a bit of spit flies out of her mouth and she tries to stop it, to regain some composure it all makes me laugh which earns me the finger.  I take a big lazy hit.
+	 Halley’s sobs quiet to weeping; she is one with the floor now, her head grazing stupidly against Mike’s knees, he is standing indifferently, they look like the cover of European vacation, a horrible twisted picture of Chevy Chase as a superhero with his family at his feet and Mike looks every bit as ridiculous as Chevy Chase.  He has a defiance to his posture that looks wholly artificial and it occurs to me that he ought to be the one on the ground, he ought to be begging, not to Halley, but begging god to give him his humility back.  
+Peace talks continued in Kosovo today with both parties saying that progress was made, but meanwhile fighting continues in the country side where sporadic violence and sharp shooting snipers continue to take there toll on the moral and hope of the people who live here….
+And then there is silence, an editing fuck up at the news station, the television is silent, and Halley is not weeping and I hear the air rushing out of my lungs with a asthmatic hiss as I exhale the bonghit.  Mike is breathing hard, Betty is holding her breath and suddenly from the other room the tapping stops and a drunken, stoned Dean comes walking through the kitchen.  He stops in the frame of the doorway slightly hunched, holding a beer and squinting his eyes…. “What?”
+Little phantoms of the house, strange shadows that lurk in the corners without regard for the science of light… they moved in dreary circles, little red blocks all stacked in the living room and the angels sing… how many would die for you?/I’m not talkin’ ‘bout those that get high with you…  Over and over scenes of confusion, jumbled words, jumbled phrases, Deans finger flying and the little green men in the shadows that have no regard for the science of light and they sing…. Did you lock into a pattern you couldn't see through?  You can no longer trust the metaphor because you saw it coming in focus and you realized it's something from your childhood —endless tapes loping across eons.  And you see the game for what it was —something cold-blooded, reptile, slinking across the room.  You know the menu is not the meal and you have your metaphors and language bounded in all its unique epochal glory and you see through the epochs, but you can't shake the fear.  You know that change is inevitable; you know what you want, you say what you want, and you build the metaphor until it casts its shadow into time.  You think you know the end of it and still your sitting on the curb, hungry, apathetic, waiting for the sewer water to splash and wake from the nightmare of history.  You're thinking this isn't me, this can't be me.  
+There is peace in between the news of Kosovo and Halley’s mournful sobs and Betty sucking down another hit of pot and Dean returning from the bathroom pausing again like a half cocked gun squinting, observing and leaving again.  The sound of finger tapping reaches us before he is seated, but now the cartoon man wants me to buy his paper towels and you are wondering… what is it that we are wondering?  
+Everyone walks with unshakable self confidence, but not slow enough to remember that they are walking and when they laugh they pretend to be unafraid.  This isn't you.  This isn’t me.
+
+
+	Its two nights later, the war is over, peace reigns, rich people’s financial interests are secured, Friends’ reruns have come and gone with dinner and Halley is cuddled up on Mike’s lap.  She is serene and beautiful tonight because she fucked Dean in bathroom at her work this afternoon.  For once there is no typing, the television is on still… commercials.  The sound of typing is still hanging in the air translated by the TV as if the noise itself was a force that could pick and choose its manifestation.  Mike is happy because he thinks that he is the one making Halley happy and he goes right back for more like one of those rats pulling the lever to get its dosage of nicotine in the studies that Philip Morris wakes up sweating to in the middle of the night.  And Halley is making out with Mike now; Mike is not wearing any pants.  Halley seems intent on fucking Mike right there in the chair in front of us.  I think what would happen if I lobbed the hand grenade into the silence… so Halley how was Dean this afternoon?  I hear you fucked him on the sink counter of women’s restroom… that didn’t even work for Tom Cruise in Top Gun at that club… what did Dean do to get you to do that…? I just ask so I can get some pointers you know…?
+	But I don’t.  Obviously.  If I had a gun I might have.  Dean would have forgiven me in a few weeks, Halley I could do without and Mike already lived with the fantasized notion that Halley fucked everyone when his back was turned.  Hell he probably thought I was fucking her, and I probably would have if I thought Halley would have if any of it.  If we had any sense at all we would have probably all just fucked each other like blow up toys, like the lecherous little weasels we were, but we didn’t Dean, Betty and I just watched while they dry fucked in the chair, but when Mikes little half-chubbed alcohol-soaked wiener rose up like a miniaturized Cobra from under Halley's mini skirt I had had enough.  Dean and I started laughing and Mike reached down and tried to tuck it back under but the thing had a mind of its own and before I knew what I was doing I turned the video camera one and aimed it at them.  Dean, Betty and I sneaked out while they went out of it.  I left the camera running.  
+	In the bar the talking head from CNN is telling us how the people are safe and the world is somehow better and nothing has changed here because the fingers are the thing that hold it all together and they keep at it every night.  And I think of the governors and tyrants of the world celebrating just like they did when the war started I imagine and the man behind the counter wants to know what I want and the girl in the booth wants to know why I haven’t noticed her yet and everything is just wonderful.  Being around Mike has us all spinning loops and watching our backs until we find ourselves at the end of night all twisted up and tangled in the ephemeral confusion of nothingness trying to stand on the legs of somethingness. It all swirls together with the past, with Mexico City with San Francisco and Ed’s loft and the bathroom floor, the cabby squealing about fried chicken, the woman on the arch is mixing with Voodoo, gringos and the Quantum Uncertainty principle. Oh you mean this can really happen?  Or am I just thinking that it’s happening?  Or is it happening because I think its happening?  Or am I thinking that it is really happening and I'm just dreaming?  Am I going to wake up one day and not remember this dream?   Fuzzy logic dogs chasing each other around on a 1987 street in a Mexico City neighborhood. And the Spanish soldier selling chiclettes say no good no bueno, pictures worth not even half a thousand words.  Wouldn't give you ten words, worthless gringo words don’t mean shit. no good no bueno, not worth the blood their written in. The blood of all peoples not yours, not your shoes, by god keep your slave labor camps a closed-mouthed secret.   Gotta keep that in house must remain forever sealed in baby pissshitguts.  No that's not true. No comment. No need for comment, the preceding has been since proved to be untrue, cut to shots of smart bombs. Couldn’t get fifty words for those now gringo -over exposure- nobody buying.   Same old stinking shit.  No Good. No Bueno.  Gringo go home in thousand languages in a million words, why don’t you crawl back in your cave get your tail so far between your legs it goes half way up your ass?  Lead me to the holy spigot and we’ll show you the bidet of death, constructed by gringos, for gringos, to flush out gringos, to show them all what you do behind closed doors.  Can’t close them all —we have our technicians as well and they’re getting to be better than yours. We got the money rolling in —even offered you the picture words but you don’t want them. No Good.   Can’t use those, too strong.  No fair, crying boy heads home for cave to lick his dirty balls clean.
+	The girl in booth has her arm over my shoulder she is stroking my hair but the little street urchin with the chiclettes is at the table; he can’t be shut up, hawking wares for death, little powders potions and peppers hanging from his arms, but the CNNhead says all is well, justice is served.  The television is close curcuit captioned for the hearing impaired, the little boy is adament no captions only pictures for the blind.  Rustling of paper behind boardroom walls sends him into fits…. I gotta picture for you I on vacation in your country go to hear senator’s speak but all door are closed, all sealed.  So i gotta fiber optic and feed it in from the roof show all senators mad with sexual lust and blood thirsty, clamoring for war and stealing souls and bodies and driving them off wherever they see fit….  The CNNhead is protesting this outburst… get off of my lllaaaawwwwnnnnn!!!  But the boy will not be silenced there are thousands of them now a chorus of little brown boys singing, chanting like Benetine Monks…All that you consider to be a accident was carefully orchestrated for your benefit by a benevolent cocksucking god from the twenty-third dimension to just plain old irritate the fuck out of you like a bad rectal itch.  Stupid gringo got no cure for the ass itch i show you some pictures, yes very dirty, little girls you like?  But the girl in the booth has a name, a face we will not hurt her, she will be the last innocent and my tongue slides in her mouth, hand up her skirt she is wet the last innocent.  Her breath is short it comes in rasps I hear it against my ear.  The boys are chanting to the beat of drums… I got pictures for you gringo… pictures you hear?  Her breath.  The commander in chief of the NATO forces in Europe is fucking small refugee boy in the ass, the boy cries for his mother the general is laughing, your mother’s down the hall boy, she’s busy with the president of France right now.  But maybe later you’d like to lick his come off her dead face…  Ban those words tear them right out snip snip.  Can’t say that, its disgusting.  War is a snuff film for the rich.  The CNNhead is confering, the girl is breathing the boys are chanting.  “We gotta step up the bombing chief the public’s losing innarest in us” screams the chief of staff running in circles jerking off and slapping his ass until it turns a bright purple and with all seriousness General Jesse Helms pauses to reflect:  I remember a time when life was good no one got in our way, why in Europe under Patton i musta raped twenty thirty little boys and a handful of nuns too. He smiles lost in memory...but God hath given us these trying times....  Yes it is bit hard to get cunt these days isn’t it, mumbles the chief of state as he strokes his wife’s cock....Yes dear start a war, get me some cute refugee boys, i so love snapping their necks when I'm coming, she growls affectionately.  That's it gentlemen were going to war!  The president stands and ejaculates on a map of the world KOSOVO it is he says as his thick oatmeal consistency sperm all but covers the former republic of Yugoslavia.
+	You like?  You like, no?  Too bad.  You can’t have those words, too strong.  I get power, you give me power, I steal power from you, to expensive to buy it.  I get power and you get pictures and maybe I tell you how to cure rectal itch? Eh? Eh? Eh?  She comes and lights a cigarette.  The man behind the counter turns off the TV and we leave.  Her name was Maya.
+
+By the time we got back the camera was on its side, the tripod was broken and they were screaming at each other
+	“Fucking slut….”
+	“You’re an asshole…!”
+	“Fuck you!  I love you!”
+	“You don’t know what love is!  You’re a little child!”
+	“You’re cold bitch!  Don’t you have any feeling in that dried hard little cuntheart of yours!?”
+	“Do not call me a cunt!
+	“I didn’t call you a cunt!  I said you have a fucking hard little fucking CUNTHEART!!!!
+	“Fuck you!  You wouldn’t know what to do with cunt anyway!”
+At that point a little air shot out of my chest involuntarily, I knew what was coming.  There was the sound of skin, a sickly slapping, stinging horribly thin kind of sound, the unmistakable sound of hatred and self doubt bring itself into realtime like an airborne virus.  Then silence.  Dean and I sit passing joint on Betty’s bed, listening through the wall.
+	“I’m sorry……… I didn’t mean to hit you!”
+	“Then how the fuck did you HIT ME!  How can you not mean to hit someone?  There is no such thing as ACCIDENTALLY hitting someone, that doesn’t happen… nooneaccidentally hits anyone…youmeant to hitme…(sobs)… you FUCKING PRICK! (Sounds of crashing, light bulbs pop and the light streaming under the door disappears)”
+	“Oh that’s FUCKING great!  You stupid bitch!” (Now there is a dull thud followed by a low moan and Dean and I look at each other.  We are too fucked up for this….)
+	By the time we turn on the kitchen light they are wrestling at the door and before we can get across the room Mike throws Halley out the front door wearing only a thin nightgown.  Its February in Denver, Colorado and they are in hysterics.  Tears are streaming down Mike’s face and whether they are from the marijuana, the alcohol, the pain and anguish of heartbreak or the red welt atop his forehead it is still February in Denver and he is still in hysterics and he stands there trying to manage a thin strained smile as he collapses against the door.  Dean and I are frozen.
+	“She fuck some guy.”
+	I try not to move or show any signs.
+	“The BITCH FUCKED SOME OTHER GUY!” he yells at the door but there is no answer.  “You hear me you dumb bitch! I hope you fucking freeze to death.  I hope his cock keeps you warm out there!  I hope you know where he lives!  I hope you get there before you lose any fingers or toes… you FUCKING CUNT!  Jesus Christ….”  He is weeping on the floor with his hands over his face I try to move him and he punches wildly but accurately hitting me in the jaw.  Out of anger I kick him and he makes no protest.  I shove him aside and go out to look for Halley.  She didn’t go far.  She is sitting on the neighbor’s couch the neighbors are up wearing bathrobes, rubbing her back and rocking her on the couch.  She is shaking like a leaf.
+	“What’s wrong with him Sil?  Why is he doing this?  I am good to him aren’t I?  I shouldn’t be putting up with this, this is bullshit, I can’t keep doing this…. (head in her hands)  What the fuck is wrong with him?  What wrong with you, with all of you? (Tears are running down her face)  There is this thing in you that can’t let go, can’t admit that you’re wrong… all of you, your so damn sure that your little feelings and your little emotions have to be so goddamn right that you think you can just pull them down like shades over the whole fucking world! (yelling up at me, wild eyes)  Every emotion, every thought, every fucking little thing can be broken down and analyzed and dismissed with some cynical diatribe that you think is so witty and fucking funny… goddamn all of you. (lunging towards me and hitting my chest, near screaming hysterics) You make me sick… I make me sick for letting myself be involved with him…. (collapsing onto me) I outta fucking be able to do better than this if this is love… this… this… fucking little hyper universe that you guys live in.... (pulling her self up and off of me) This is not love… I don’t always know what I am doing… I don’t always know what I am feeling OKAY!  FUCK!  (arms raised in exasperation) Don’t you ever, doesn’t he ever, just have moment of absolute confusion where he wants to do something completely irrational not out of love even just because its there and it can be done and.... and fuck… I don’t know why I fucked him…….(staring at the ground, pacing) It had just been so long since there was any passion you know, Mike and I are an old couple this shit happens, it doesn’t mean anything, right? …and I know Mike has fucked around, I know he fucked around in Europe, but he won’t admit it that’s the thing that makes me so fucking mad is he won’t admit it… and why?  Why?  Because if he admitted that then he’d have to face up to the fact that I am as weak as he is… whereas now he can call me a slut and make himself out to be better, that’s all I am to him this thing against which he can measure himself, this thing… this superwoman which I am supposed to be to him… this …fuck!  (arms up exasperated)  Do you know what this is doing to me?  I am losing my mind… I’m not going to go nuts over him… I knew I should have run away right after we made love for the first time… I should have just run, because now I’m here and he’s throwing me out the door in my fucking night gown… in my FUCKING NIGHTGOWN!!!” 
+And then she collapsed or rather doubled over in sobs.  I turned around and went back to see if Mike had calmed down.  He and Dean were smoking a cigarette on the couch.  Betty was in the chair dispensing wisdom that sounded like it would have solved all his problems, but Mike is a man and men can’t hear a word that women are saying, just like women can’t hear a word that men are saying and whole so-called battle of the sexes could be stopped just like Capt. Cook didn’t have to die on that island if only we had a goddamn interpreter that could translate the two languages and solve the riddle.  Translate the emotion and feeling into the logic and predictable precision and then back out into the chaotic no-man’s-land of feeling again.  Some guru, some pygmy, some monk, some alien that can add it all up and give us some kind of answer, that’s all we really want.
+And the newscaster is talking about chemical warfare and he says that chemicals are weapons of mass destruction, but they are not, they are very selective and Mike turns the channel and there is a leopard or an ocelot tearing away the flesh of wildebeest and then the image changes to an ad for a moisturizing soap that will make us all look ten years younger and there is girl who looks ten years younger and her head is moving her lips are moving, but her voice is hollow and detached she comes out the side of the television and echoes falsely about the room and then I turn off the TV.  And Mike starts in.
+	“Fuck man what am doing? (tugs at his hair with one hand and rolls the phone absently in the other hand, the whole movement seems false.)  What did you do?  Did you do this?  I mean with Leah, she was you first love… and now look at you… you’re fine, you haven’t talked to her in years… what did you do?  How did you fill this hole that I feel growing in me…. (looking at me pleading for some answer)  Do you just harden yourself?… she thinks I’m hardened because I pushed her out the door, but that wasn’t the hard part of me that was the raw nerve endings of pain that was me trying to find love….or fight love… (looking for the answer as if it might be on the ceiling) that was my love that pushed her out the door… the cold hard part of me is the part that will go over there in a couple of hours and talk to her… (reflective self-analyzed pose of mock security) the hard part of me is the part that will make love to her while the love in me fades, gets up and leaves the room….  The horrible thing about losing love isn’t that it makes you hard it’s that you realize or you start to realize that love can be lost…. (serene face of philosopher dispensing wisdom) That’s what is tearing me up right now, the reality I am beginning to see is that there is no sacredness to love like they want you to believe… whoever they are…. (momentarily side tracked by a novel thought)  But that’s not the point… the point is that once you realize that love can be lost, once you know that this can happen… its doomed to happen again….  You will never again be able to look at someone and to see a relationship that doesn’t end… I know now that for every beginning there is an ending already written….  (with disgust) Like that goddamn book you think you’re writing… the end’s already there isn’t it?  I bet that was the first thing that you thought of… (sobbing, despair again)  Oh god!  How the fuck do you get out of this… how do you find hope again… and even if you do what do you do when it is dashed?  How many times can you do this?  Is there a limitation to the number of times you can have your heart broken…? (serene face of philosopher dispensing wisdom)  Is it like one of those Lithium batteries where it never recharges all the way again and its starts looping back until there is nothing and then right when you think you have it… oh I underst…WHAM!  And then it’s gone, you’re gone, the thing is gone… (silence in which feeling flashes across his face like a forgotten memory)  Jesus what is she doing over there does she really hate me?  She really hates me now doesn’t she?  Fuck and the horrible thing is that somewhere deep down I wanted her to fuck that guy whoever he is… it doesn’t matter… god I want a whole gang of giant cocked black guys to gang fuck her through eternity if that’s what it takes, but I want to feel something… I’m not feeling anything anymore, the only time I feel anything is when I hurt her…  then I feel hate.  I mean I feel her hating me, but when she’s not hating me I don’t feel anything… I don’t feel loved…”  
+And he broke down into pure honest crying.  Dean and I looked at each other and then at the VCR clock, it was ten till two and we both had the same thought.  Run.
+
+
+
+
+
+Months rolled by and I have dim images of fall colors and an unsettling chill to the air.  The mountains colored like firestorms and then the snow, lots of it, too cold to go outside.  I took a job at a paper writing the horoscopes and occasionally I broke down and delivered pizza with Dean.  Halley and Mike were at each other all the time.  The television no longer mentioned Kosovo and there was a new game show sweeping the nation where you answered a series of stupid questions and got a million bucks.  It was in the same vein as the Idiots Guide series… the steady decline of intelligence perfectly laid out like military campaign.  Can’t figure out how to tie your shoes?  Get the Idiot’s Guide to tying you shoes.  I was waiting for the only useful title… the Idiots Guide to suicide… I wrote a letter to the publisher, but got no reply.  And there was Regis Philman presiding over the burning hills and the freezing snow gleefully like a weatherman issuing a hurricane warning he smiled over it all.  Great floating teeth that hung in the nightmares of f. Scott Fitzgerald’s.  Signs of the apocalypse.  This is hardly the first collective suicide.  It's all part of history, the endless tumults, hills and glades and all the while we look at the crimson leaves and think that fall is in the air.  But the spacemen never showed and the Nikes and the black suits with spaghetti ties were all in vain because the CD is skipping and we’re all stuck on endless repeat.  
+The fingers kept flying and the months fell away with them.  I hear them from a distance now like the sound of an approaching marching band or a clock that hasn’t chimed yet.  Sometimes I would wake up at dawn and hear the fingers.  Marching marching marching.  Dean as a tireless soldier of seduction….  Mike on the other hand remained a tireless soldier of reductionist emotional rationalism, which is what we named his peculiar nit-picked version of life.  His idea of a worldview was crumbs, the confetti after the parade has passed.  Christ all the way.  Quick get us a tree, somebody make two boards… hurry before he loses the courage and does it himself.  Christ was on a suicide trip, that much we know now he’d have gone with or without the Romans… how else do you end a story like that?
+By March it was getting so bad that Dean and I used to just sit and smoke and listen to them for entertainment —familiarity breeds contempt....  We tuned them in and out of our own conversation the way television comes and goes.  Betty would pass out on the bed and we would sit with out backs to the wall and just listen for hours.  We had running bets on who would go insane first Mike or Halley?  As time when on we both switched our bets to lie on ourselves.  One morning we had to leave at nine because they were throwing things and we just wanted to sleep, but it’s hard to sleep in the midst of reckless friendly fire.  I remember that morning because I was awoken from a nap by a lamp hitting my head.  The couch was no longer safe.  I kicked Dean and we darted out.  We tried sleeping in his car but it was a no go so we wound up getting coffee and after that we went for a drive to get a feel for Denver.  We wound up downtown since we just kind of aimed for tallest buildings or at least that’s how it seemed but Dean might have know what he was doing… I wouldn’t put it past him to have been buying down there for sometime, but I ignored his heroin use.  If you ignore something long enough eventually it just goes away.
+It is finally warm enough to take off the jackets.  We sit on the steps of an old warehouse loading bay and listen to drone of afternoon.  Listen for the returning Spring, which creeps in like a virgin newlywed glimpsing her first erect penis.  And the thing is jerking with anticipation and the virgin is meek, but something is stirring some hunger that can never be satisfied starts to gnaw at the hidden parts of her mind, of her stomach, of her cunt.  Spring is coming amid the fantastical ruins of downtown Denver, anywhere.  It’s a disquieting sight, a testament to the durability if not of buildings than the certainty of mankind that he out always to have more of them.  The macabre feeling of mobile decay struck me as we drove out of the sparkling sterile business hub of the new downtown where cars run with silent hums, exhausts hits the air clean without additives, fat free business men and women scurry, rat feet scrapping the ceiling at night and the cars are bigger, they sound like squirrels scampering up trees.  Push cart coffee salesmen in sharp uniforms chat with professional desk sitters over bagels and reduced fat cream cheese and the heart attack penthouse office fat men in suits collect like windblown lead trash in front of the roach coach.  We can see them, hear them, smell them from down here, two blocks south where all is not well.  Brick steps pad silent under our feet and crumbled bits of mortar from the buildings settles with the rustling of the air, little whirlpools, miniature tornadoes that circle the vast open parking lot that once was a truck loading zone.  Everything is in various states of disarray, here and there a tree sprouting out a window.  A chiming laughter of the gods whose frail leaves still quake like the virgin.  You may build with your precious creations of pressed gravel, but we, we are here always perpetuating a grand cycle of which you are only an upstart movement an attempt to catalogue, and what did you get for it?  You get fantastic ruins, testaments to your own malleability, silly creatures struggling to leave a mark in competition against the eons of geology and botany. Water stained brick has a romance that the Nouevvo downtown can not match it has a weathered face to it that is gained only with the infinite passing of time like an old man with wrinkled wizened face sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of roadside store in Louisiana.  Even material so simple as brick will outlast you and I, our own permanence is in the stories we create, whether living them out, dreaming them aloud, or writing them down, we beat nature on one account, we can record the past and bring it into the future even if it never actually happened.  Sheet metal roofing that collapsed inward to the lofts that it sheltered is now stick out at awkward angles through broken industrial windows and a giant piece hangs precariously over a second story doorway, threatening to give up and fall clanging down the stairs to the ground where Dean and I are sitting.  We walked about in the industrial ruin taking a few pictures and sipping on now cold coffee.  I was wandering about in the ruins the way tourists of room head out to Pompeii with a sense that here is a monument to times past.  Times I never knew, times that remain locked in my own phantasmal imagination where errand boys skipped about street delivering messages from the factory to the office uptown.  Merchants pushing carts sold pomegranates, oranges, and onions to welfare mothers in the great depression.  The launch pad for a thousand tragedies —it could be Denver or anywhere.
+	Ed lives in a part of LA that looks remarkably similar to this, an unholy contract between artist renovated lofts and slowly dying industrial shipping companies, metal recycling facilities, and giant distribution warehouses.  All things move in circles and so after the first settlements leave in come the companies bulldozing blocks of shabby tenement buildings to put up cement factories, iron workings, and canning plants.  The residents retreat in the face of endless employment the deep consciousness of the working man knows to keep ahead of drudgery, but then the factories run out and the economy shifts to some new fresh means of creation.  The buildings are abandoned in favor of new warehouses outside of town; the industrial complex collapses and leaves a twenty-year void with its passing.  Twenty years give or take of rotting fermenting nature slowly eking its way back onto the scene until the streets relinquish themselves to the ceaseless torrents of rain and snow in the winter and the broiling summer heat until they are broken like spirited horses that once walked over them, they begin to crack and then patches of grass come up out of the soil beneath, followed by weeds and shrubs.  Nature is heliotropic, always moving up toward the sun, whereas man is constantly being knocked back to the substrata of his origins the crumbling of the old to give rise to the new.  The new screams, the new anguish the new drama the newborn slapped on the ass by the god of it all.
+
+	“What do you want from me?  I fucking try so hard to love you… even when you throw me out the door, and you throw me out the door, but then you want me back and then you tell me to go again....  WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT?
+	“I want you…  I want… I don’t fucking know what I want why are you always harping on what I want why can’t we just live and exist and be… like Sil and Dean and Betty and every other fucking person on this planet…  why can’t we just be happy?  Why do we have to have these issues… why do we have to have these things to work on?  What are these things what the fuck is going on around here?  When did this start?”
+	“What do you mean?  What are you talk”
+	WHAT DO MEAN ‘WHAT DO I MEAN?  You know what I mean, this all of this… look at us…”
+	“Why are you bringing Dean and Sill into this?  Why do you have to live up to some manly ideal that you think they embody?  (Dean cracked an eyebrow at me)  I got new for you they don’t embody shit!  The two of them would be living in goddamn dumpster if we weren’t putting them up!”
+	“Why does this have to be about my friends?  Why is it a problem I asked you if it was alright for them to crash here and now you say its not?”
+	“It has nothing to do with them….  Its you that I’m talking about.  You say we used to be happy we used to not be like this… we used to ‘just live’ as you put it.  Well do the fucking math Michael when did this start?  When they showed up!  And I’m not blaming anything on them, I like them both and Betty too, fuck I like them more than I like you sometimes, but its you.  Its what showed up in you that wasn’t here before, this fucking over analyzation shit that you didn’t use to have…”
+	Police said the suspect was dressed in business suit and may be armed do you have time to cook a meal every night in the midst of balancing… So this guy comes up to me… guaranteed to last a lifetime… 
+	“What the fuck are you talking about?”
+	“This indecision this fucking shit”
+	“My indecision?  (Derisive laughter)  My fucking indecision?  And who pray tell FUCKED SOMEBODY else!  Who is indecisive?  It’s not me I know exactly what I want… I want to be with you, but you won’t let me just be… you question my every fucking move, want to know my every thought, every feeling, don’t you ever not have a feeling?  Isn’t it ever just a blank page of white with little blue lines… little fucking blue lines and not word not a fucking thought in sight… do you ever get that… or is it just constant fucking emotional fucking input from the far reaches of the earth and heavens all pouring though your precision little hear that occasionally seems to feel that it need some other guys DICK!”
+“Yes Michael we all fucking go a bit nuts every now and then I am as clueless as you are and someone in the midst of this insanity I think that I see and feel and what I see and feel is you, but you won’t let me in you won’t let yourself be hurt and I can’t figure out if its because your scared or because you just don’t fucking care about me like I’m just some sort of ornamental drama that you have been pursuing over the last two fucking years because it happened to interest you and now, now that some bigger fucking part of the drama that you think you are… now that its here I just get shoved to the side cast off like so much luggage….  Fuck me! Fuck you!  I don’t know if I was some whim, some thing you wanted to try on in the dressing room and then when you thought it was out of style you can just hang it back up on the rack.  No id don’t know anything about anything and neither do you but that doesn’t mean anything, none of it means anything….”
+	“No that not what you mean, everything means something, it may not make any difference, but goddamn it all means something, who you fuck who you eat dinner with what time you get up, what kind of fucking bombs they drop on everyone, the jails, the murders, it all fucking means something, all of this, everything that is happening it all means something.  Maybe none of it matters but it all means something goddamn it!  (There is silence in which we here Mike heaving for air and then) “I just don’t know what it is, I just need some time to figure out what the hell I am what I am doing, what this life is, were all fucking try to figure it out… I don’t fucking know what I want okay, I can’t give you some fucking pat little answer that’s going to explain exactly how I feel.  Some days I want to be with you and some days you drive me up the fucking walls….”
+	Researchers have concluded that including a glass of wine with your regular meal may actually increase your life span… but Jim we can’t just leave them here… We’re tiny were toony we’re all a little loony… the initial results indicate HIV… we will be appealing your case… Mr. president the girl from Arkansas is on line to… did you or did you not engage...?… the white house denies… tide gets your colors looking bright… guaranteed to last a life time… I like to buy a vowel… what is the Serengeti?… that is my final answer…
+“Oh great!  Fucking great now I drive you up the walls!”
+	“Why the fuck do focus in on the negative, see that’s what I’m talking about I say that some days I want to be with you and some days I don’t and what do we have to get into the days I don’t this must be explained, there is a reason for this, this is what needs to be fixed….  Has it ever occurred to you that I must just want to be alone some days, has it ever occurred to you that I can love you without liking you every now and then?
+	“You are sick fucking man Michael, I am going to Ally’s to spent the night.  I can’t sleep next to you, ugh I can’t be near you…”
+	And the door slammed.
+Betty sleeps, Social Distortion plays in the background and Mike is a flood of meaningless gibberish goes internal and bounces endlessly about in the echo chamber…. Michael was cold calculated psychology distilled out of textbooks through all the vital organs of his body until it fills up his soul with formaldehyde and preserves him eternally, preventing any growth; everything is preserved like jams for the future.  He collapsed on to the couch with shrug and I see him standing in on the bridge from now to forever and trying to figure out why he can’t get to tomorrow.  He needs to have the bridge blown out from under him, otherwise there will be no growth, just canned life, evaporated stale milk.  He is a root bound tree in desperate need of transplanting.  He is a leech, it seems so unreal to me that I might have once lived with him, liked him even as a friend.  Michael’s insidiousness extends far deeper now than it did back then or at least back then it was never played out in front of me so I didn’t notice it as much, but now I see it overflowing like a boiling kettle.  He has lost all traces of humor and runs about madly chasing after this invisible spirit that he thinks will somehow enlighten him, give his life the meaning, the purpose, the joy that it lacks.  I remember once years ago an incident that now seems more revealing then it did at the time.  I got up and went to take a leak around noon.  There was a woman I didn’t know sitting on the toilet chewing on her fingernails, her head bent down and emitting peculiar sniffling sounds; I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying.  I should have turned around and gone right back to bed but I didn’t because instead of jealousy I am afflicted with pity —incurable.  I do it not for them but for me because I can’t bring myself not to, I have no intention of helping I just don’t have reason to do otherwise.  So I asked her if she was all right.  Yes fine, she said between what I now took to be sobs.  “Fine, is there anything I can get you?”  A coat hanger….  She smiled weakly and I just started laughing.  Laughter that swallowed her up and digested her image sitting there on the toilet hunched over her twat, sniffling like a wounded cornered animal —the perfect specimen of humanity.  “You must be a friend of Michael’s?”  Yes she was what did Michael do with the creature?  He keeps her around because she has constant drama that she dumps on his fragile little middle class heartstrings and it gives him something to do.  Something that can be solved that’s all he wants from life, a problem that can be solved something to which he can point and say see it is all better now….  He has no use for whole people, just the ragged torn edges of the pages… preferably dripping fresh blood, new wounds to cauterize and in the process open old ones… poke at the soft scar tissue… induce hemorrhages… leech the life out….
+Michael is an only child like myself, but he is of a different breed rather than independent of self-serving like most (myself included), Michael is like frail wounded animal huddled into corner cowering before the world.  What he is cowering from or about I can only assume to be his own personal, self-created demons and to get relief from them, to stand up straight, facing the world and lock arms with it to struggle out life… or some other Hemingwayesque metaphor… he assumes the burdens of others.  In great leaders who have already faced up their own demons such a facility would be revered, but in one who can only act on the behalf of others and never for himself it is repulsive, even comical in its stupidity.
+He wants to go out and have a drink, but really he doesn’t he wants to keep fighting he should keep fighting, but he should fight with himself beat his own face to a pulp.  This is America we beat each other; like the Marquis he stands bleeding and asking if wasn’t good for us…?
+(clutching a glass)  “She’s fucking nuts you know that only reason I can’t leave her is her body, sex is this thing… this… force that swarms over me and I’m hating her but its pulling at me and no matter how much we scream and even when I hit her that night I am still seeing her tits heave and the way her ass looks when she’s crouched over and the other night she was crying leaning against the door jam and I was standing over her blind with hate… I looked down and she wasn’t wearing any underwear and there is the cunt staring at me, this furry little thing that is the source of all the problems in my life and just stared at it, it enveloped me swallowed me up.  What is that warm stick squishy thing that I want?  Or maybe (trying to enlist support of dementia through body language, leans in conspiratorially) may be the trouble is everything around the cunt… that’s the real mystery what I need is lust, just pure cunt with no feeling warm and sticky.”
+“Yes Michael I think you would be better off with a blow up doll.”  Dean is rakish tonight, he is already gone, his body remains to propel the dream further.  Mike is menacing tonight too.  I can here the masticating of hatred being chewed… mulled over… teeth grinding in his sleep…
+“You think so?  Ya fuck you!  You guys don’t understand with Halley its all about the sex, beyond the sex we don’t get along at all.  I can stand over and kick her teeth in if I thought that her cunt would stay warm.  Damn that hairy fucking little cunt.  She’s too sexy.  I get swallowed up.”
+Mike was running on and on and I was getting swallowed up and I saw Halley's cunt between her legs I see an aborted fetus hanging out of it bloody and covered in afterbirth with umbilical cord still attached, and cord is there just dangling out of the cunt and I see Mike with scissors trying to cut it and Halley is screaming trying to stop him.  The doctor takes the fetus and throws it in the incinerator; the furnace flares and is silent as a slaughterhouse.  Halley lies on the table spread eagle, naked and Mike circles her holding blunt object tubular and made out of the words that describe it.  It is black and plugged into the wall.  Dean and Mike are yelling through me, words pass like water though a screen and there is mike in room with the cattle prod standing over Halley and a symphony strikes up.  Marching bands.. fingers tapping… tapping… violins… rhythm of kettle drums… and his arm rises. .  He is floating, watching as choked up gasoline-napalm sores sear off his tongue and lick up his body in flames.  The air is hot and thick like the worst humidity and the scorching of the flesh sizzles in my nostrils and I just watch.  Hell is for voyeurs, the control addicts that like to watch.  You just have to ride it out and hope that the cynicism doesn't burn you up right up with them or you find yourself in the liquid fire ripping out your own eyes and sawing off your tongue to run away.  Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy....  A little red light comes on signaling that the cattle prod is fully charged.  In front of him is Halley, beautiful with short black hair like ravens.  She is lying naked with her legs were splayed wide and restrained with leather straps and buckles, her arms are restrained above her head.  He smiles weakly at her.  Hand the symphony reaches fever pitch, the clash of horns and strings and drums and Mike is looking into her eyes watching the pupils dilate.  And it fell, his arm fell, the cattle prod fell; and her body went rigid and she shot up off the table as if suddenly turned into a stiff board.  He keeps his eyes locked on her as she collapse back onto the table.  He sees something flash through them and he feels a tremor in his guts, his muscles spasm involuntarily. Big uncontrollable sobs wracked his whole body and he falls on his knees and proceeds to curl up in little ball on the floor.  He lies like that for a while until the sobs work themselves out the violence fall silent and only a lone lunatic flute floats over the scene.  Halley gets up and begins to undress him, starting by unbuttoning his shirt.  When she undoes his belt she reaches down and rather gently holds his rigid cock as she eases the pants down over it.  She stands embracing him strongly with her arms around his neck pulling herself up until her cunt lips part and she slides down on his cock.  Mike is fucking her but she can’t feel it.  She can’t feel anything and then the strings return crescendo builds…. She spreads his legs and restrains them along with his arms.  She strokes his cock hard again and teases him by biting his nipples.  All at once her eyes go black and she thrusts the cattle prod into his balls…  Mike is blown up off the table by some kind of wind.  He doesn't even feel his come splash of his face as the electricity causes an involuntary muscle spasm that makes it arc out of his cock in unnaturally thick spurts.  He lands back on the table his voice is a violin, an inhuman screeching kind of wail.  
+ “What the fuck you know…. What the fuck do you have that lets you glide through this existence like some strange cloud a vapor that is there and you can see it but it doesn’t hurt you?  How do you have to turn things over and around and rearrange them so that you can see it in a bright light?  Don’t you ver get tired of laughing that smug glib little smirk?”  Things are not well at this table, the glasses have accumulated and the pent aggressions are knocking them over.
+“Hey watch it Michael, you can insult Sil all you want but don’t bring me into your quaint little semantic psychoanalyzed universe where you little puny mind thinks it understands me….”  Dean leans in toward me and around at Mike.  I turn my back and while trying not to laugh I harangue the little fucker in hopes that maybe he will listen, but the trouble with me is that I didn’t care, I wanted to make a point, but I knew it was already lost, I could just as easily have stood by while Dean beat him to a pulp.  I talked to shut out the symphony the close off the images of torture playing on an endless film loop flickering through the eons.  I talked to put an end to Denver, to bury the ugly future in the overflowing sewer of the past, not to thwart violence.  So when Dean forced the issue I didn’t do anything to stop it….
+“You know what you stupid little fuck, I don’t need your hospitality I don’t need your food, and certainly don’t need your advise seeing that while financially I may be fucked I am at least fucked and can fuck while you are nothing but a confused mediocre little spoiled piece of shit that can’t do much beyond leave his girlfriend in a half fucked state of longing.  That why she called me one day and invited me to lunch one day.”
+And then there was an absolute motionless silence for a full five or six seconds.  And Mike leaped over me and things went the way things go.  
+Dean beat the crap out of him.  We went home gathered up our bags and hit the road in Dean’s car.  In Kansas Dean turned right on my assurances that Mark Pledger would welcome us with open arms.
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+
+
+You need the random violence, you need the super bowl, you need the microwave dinners, you need a drug that makes you dream, you need the cast iron kettle, you need the coupons from the Sunday paper.  You need the salt water, you need the mountain air, you need a bicycle, you need sturdy shoes, you need a washing machine, you need freedom, but car insurance will do.  You need air fresheners in you car, you need a faster computer, you need a genetically engineered future food from the twenty third cosmic outrage of viral man.  You need a tampon, you need to shave your legs, you need to work out more, you need a new house, you need pickled pigs feet, you need zinc, you need to be saved from yourself, you need to stop smoking, life is precious.  You need dinner company, you need a conversation, you need a street address, you need new friends, you need a good scotch, you need a tailored suit, you need sex.  
+You’ve been living underground eating from a can running away from what you don't understand —love.  It moves you out of bed in the morning, it moves you out the door, it gives you courage in moments of weakness and it attacks you in shop windows, in quiet evening picnics you walk under Alder trees in the warm of autumn... it scratches at the door like a lost cat, it begs at the table like forlorn hound, it pulls your shirt tails like a child…. 
+	Tonight the air is a harem dancer bejeweled in sequins and dripping opium honey from her succulent breasts.  She slides slippery wet through eternal gardens of night orchids, between baskets of pomegranates, and under heavy limbs of peach trees; she hands out mosquitoes at a roadside elixir show, the queen bee, the minstrel’s daughter, she is dancing in ancient barns of rotten timber spinning us slowly, seductively down Louisiana.  
+Dean is asleep; I am at the wheel.
+	The wheel turns memory… some years ago… I passed through this area once before… chasing the Mississippi from St Louis down into New Orleans.  I stopped for gas just over the Louisiana border, the station ended up being some distance from the interstate and I never made it back —not ‘til Baton Rouge.  I have always had a healthy disdain for thoroughfares and the rest of time I was in the south I avoided them whenever possible.  I wandered down the back roads of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia where it is possible to loose ones’ grasp of reality as quickly and severely as with anything the good doctor might have given you in prison.  Time has stood still in the south, absolutely motionless since nineteen ten in some places.  I ran across areas where everything seemed just as I would have imagined it in the quiet calm of America before the first world war.  The paved two lane roads that weave through Louisiana were laid under order of the Works Project in the thirties and from the looks of it they have never been tended to since. Red clay gapes open mouthed from the embankments like a carp.  A soft muddy red-brown, the color of shit after a steady diet of freeze dried astronaut food, it never dries even in the summer heat.  And the air itself is palpable.  It comes through the window at forty five miles an hour but even when it moves past you there is something motionless about it.  You move through it, it never stirs. Everything in the south is permeated with that motionless veneer that makes it glow like the soft red light of a whorehouse Algiers LS, 1934.  It was hell of a land from a hell of time; I never could put my finger on it.  It was a menagerie of the hundred years previous and it lodged in me like the pond did for Thoreau or the Utah desert for Abbey. The south bounded about resonating for months hopping around like a Mexican jumping bean and lingering like the eternal fart that got the whole showing going.  
+Somewhere along the way in the time since I left I had forgotten about it this mind expanding drug that goes in my memory by the unassuming and FDA approved name of The South —like The Edge or The Metropolitan Opera, but infinitely less tangible.  And now is Dean asleep in the passenger seat and the warm summer night air is hitting me in the face and I am remembering quite vividly that that first trip, it is folding into the present so that I am driving through all Louisiana, all time and all space. Again I have ditched the interstate and am picking my way through the backroads heading down the ones that feel like they lead to New Orleans, sometime Dean will wake up and be rather upset at our lack of progress; I will laugh.  I do that a lot in the south, laughing.  I hang my arm lazily out the window and let the wind blow it where it wants.  Something about it is cathartic, post orgasmic.  It leads my mind back through tumbling libraries of monolith memories, the spanish moss dripping from swamp cypress, sagging porches, the sticky oil of the skin drawn out into the something that is not sweat and not grease— something new, something unknown is coming to the surface here.
+The first day out of Denver I remember nothing save a speeding ticket in some flat desolate farm country which might have been Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Ontario, Siberia, the Gobi desert or anywhere.  I slept mostly, leaving Dean and Betty to drive the wastelands.  I do remember something about an airport and three hours ago I noticed Betty was gone, I believe the two are connected, but its fuzzy.  Fuzzy.  The world was fuzzy all the way through the plains; the world looked like it does in the censored television images —fuzzing out nipples, buttocks, and the faces of the guilty.  But now at three thirty in the morning it has become crystalline; I am aware.  
+Everywhere there is foliage, enormous live oaks, magnolias still white in bloom, cypress trees, bamboo, dense thickets of woody vines so tangled that the light of the moon can no longer see through them.  The road seems overly artificial snaking its way through the groves of trees, around old houses, and it’s elevated unnaturally as it tears across swamps, always swamps.  The edges are lined with the cypress and then clinging to the dryer land are the live oak and then the canopy envelopes and we glide along; I leaned my head out the window like a dog to feel the gentle heavy rush of humid air and to watch the gentle sway of the dripping Spanish moss.  There is no way to capture it but from below, it is the dancing bush on fire hanging from the branches of the oaks and cypress —the peach fuzz of the great mothercunt.  
+Here and there I pass an ancient downtown of false storefronts. It is impossible to tell if their inhabitants are asleep or if it was deserted long ago in favor of the strip mall development over by the freeway.  People go where the food is; it’s a universal migration.  Got get ourselves to water, to where the food is.  Fifty thousand years, eight hundred generations —six hundred and fifty thousand of them in caves, wombs, incubators, hydroponicly fed emotion and beauty from underground wellsprings.
+It is nearly fall, September 14th if I am not mistaken.
+And we’re rollin we’re rollin we’re rollin we’re rollin we’re rollin we’re rollin we’re rollin we’re rollin.  Rubber dust holds the impending tragedy of fall in the air behind me, I can feel it look in over my shoulder, offering backseat driving tips whispered softly in my ear like a barroom parrot hissing the mimic of the voice-box smoker ordering another scotch on the rockssssss.  Fall is the most tragic of seasons —midnight blue and bruised purple shadows crawling across the scarlet chill of orange leaves in the evening.  A piano lines bounces trance melodies of bittersweet celebration and the normally abject world of man seems dressed in medieval splendor a —I am sharpened to a heightened awareness.  The skin has started shedding off the bottoms of my feet again. It happens every year just prior to fall; I molt.  Some people perk up from their slouched lives and look around at the coming of spring, for me it happens in fall.  The change of the leaves, the reprieve from summer heat… the melancholy air of fall always pulls me out of the flow of the rest of the year and causes me to shed the old skin.  Literally it seems.  And underneath are the older hardened callused pads that tread antediluvian paths.
+The warm night air is electric, it wraps you up in a blanket of itself and the only thing to do is enjoy. I leer jealously at the empty porches passing me by.  My porch is moving and not as relaxing perhaps, but it is a porch nevertheless.  It is right here in the middle of the street, not tucked away in back of some cubic structure called a house, but out here in front of god and distance thunderheads collecting off in the gulf coast —far on the horizon.  
+I remember flashes of faces, without names, without places; they could be friends, could be a book or magazine, a movie, an image produced by words, they all spread out across the night, flocks of swans, gaggles of geese, an endless thundering of wings and thought bobbing on the turbulent surfaces of sanity.  Bobbing aimlessly to place, to name, to arrange, to rearrange, and the cicada songs catch my ear.  They are beautiful, echoing about in rich azure tones, beep baritone guttural vices punctuated by chirping crickets —sirens tempting from the rocks. Even at fifty miles an hour the roar of cicadas melting with other insects is symphonic, but its true melody lingers just beyond the audible horizon.  The sound washes over the car, cleansing it and leaving only lighthearted little echoes.  The songs are before to Christ, before Pan, before Demeter, before to all the words, the ideas, before the virus.  They are a reminder that no matter how you define it life is fun, all that is really required of you is that you become aware of that, that you know joy and sorrow and love and pain as all one indivisible and unspeakably thin reality.  You do not need technology or science or religion or drugs or pompous ceremony; you need nothing save awareness.  
+Down the road the labeling clinic is undergoing massive overhauls to the system, the server is down, no further information can be handled right now… we will get to this later…this can wait!   And the men white lab coats are singing glory glory hallelujah around a glowing metallurgic alter.  The hospital sirens are wailing as they round the corner… all the men’s’ faces fade into the road, beaten, bruised and lacking any humor.  Their daughter watch from distant buttes as they are spattered in blood, endless endless blood, rivers of blood running down the chopping block as the butcher frantically dices ever smaller… roasts, into filets, into steaks, into shish-a-bobs, into hors d’oeuvres, into mashed paste, pate, and finally only watery blood, running off the block and out into the street gathering speed as it moves over hills, lifted up, pooling in the great valleys and lapping at the butte shores as the women dance naked around bonfires….  Geysers of blood sprout from a ground that can no longer contain itself; blood banks employees hang hoses into the street and collect a year’s worth before they drown in it.  Towns and cities are swallowed whole, the bloods oozes down from the north, from the land of the bleached-skin cave dwellers, trickling over the Mediterranean drowning the Elysian dream and then the Nile runs red.  Africa is laid waste and the oceans swell and wash down over Canada and American.  A tidal waves of blood a thousand feet high and moving 200 miles an hour fueled by the energy of the comet called now that lands in the midst of riparian blood world and blows it all back out into space, powders all life into a fine dust that settles over everything, over the mountains and valleys and oceans, and the remaining rivers of blood until what is left is absorbed into the heart core of history leaving behind fresh cool water that pools and settles into the Mississippi delta.  It surges down into Lake Pontchartain where it slows to gentle meander out into the sea and all life is saturated with pure spring waters and bears itself up as an offering —the fresh unmade world.  Chaotically stagnant and fecund with life, teeming with shiny brown bodies glistening from the humidity from the endless sweat that pours off their body’s and so they go about.  Time is a record of blood moving over the earth
+But what are we to make of this travesty this spectacle of human lives plundered and destroyed by robber barons, by men called kings, by vampires called Popes?  It is soaked into the ground; it permeates the air of Europe and the United States with spectral genetic memories of atrocity and death.  We have records elaborate and detailed records of the dead and many of our brightest minds are obsessed with this problem this thing called oppression they run hugging the nearest Buddha marching down the road embracing foreign cultures in blinded headlong attempt to avoid their own heritage.  I remember early in my own guilty childhood running across the Rev Steven T Murray a man for whom the western guilt complex loomed large and figured across his face.  He had a wild face, the sort of face that could get itself thrown out of seminary school for heresy and he paraded it around with a constant beatific smile set in ruddy skin and balanced by spectacles.  Above all the guilt and baggage that lurked in his Anglo Saxon DNA was something shining, something not transcendent but enlarged as if the wrinkles of gray matter had extended their folds a bit farther out.  Steve was hunting through the east when I knew him, looking to Buddhism, Hinduism, meditation, yoga... anything that might extend that circle farther.  I am indebted to him for expanding my own circle for my knowledge of east, but none of that helped either of us.  The stink remains in our genes; the blood of our ancestors leads not to temples, but slaughterhouses, gallows and charnel ovens.  Walk through it with grace and dignity Steve, see it all just as it was and keep going, do not ignore but do not dwell either because farther back before the cattle before the crops there is something else.  Something wilder even than what is dreamed by those that seek to repress these memories of drunken orgies and cloven hoofed Gods who sought only to give pleasure.
+You don’t even need the ceremonies to hear the distant memory of laughter peeling across the savanna, memories drawn on cave walls before the cave was home, when it was a museum.  You don’t even need to go to Africa to hear it.  I heard it once in California high in the Sierra Nevada.  Steve was there perhaps he heard it too, but if he did he kept quiet like me, never mentioned it to anyone else on the trip, nor to anyone when I returned.  I heard it clearly enough to not need validation.  It’s a distinct memory, that first time I ever spent a night outside the sheltered walls of civilization, miles from the nearest road, not a trapping of man in sight, only a painted purple sky the glow of the long gone sun bouncing off unseen plateaus reflected back as broad lavender brush strokes on the clouds.  The alpen glow was just fading off the peaks on the other side of the lake from where I was sitting.  
+My friends and fellow travelers are just down this small rise behind me they are eating quesadillas and drinking icy water from the stream the runs through camp.  I remember the sense of utter calm I felt relaxing against that rock and just watching the world unfold.  I was famished but I couldn’t stop watching the light.  It faded through the whole spectrum turning green and then the dark cold purple of night.  I was absolutely silent and did not move for a long time.  I remember quiet clearly the thoughts that passed through my head at the time.  I was sitting there reflecting on a moment two weeks earlier when I had Steve what we were going to do about water.  I knew that we were going to be camping next to a lake, but what I wanted to know was whether or not water filters were being provided or if I should buy one of my own.  He looked at me with that trickster grin and said "don’t worry about it, we’re going to bring freeze dried water."  Well now all I heard was don’t worry about it and so I stopped listening there and when he looked at me and I only nodded and said okay, he was forced to crack a smile and ask me if I had heard him.  I said that I had and that was fine.  He burst out laughing and then it clicked that there could be no such thing as freeze dried water.  I remember it was like a lightning bolt that blasted me right out of my body and I heard the whole conversation over again from a third person point of view and then I understood suddenly that I hadn’t actually listened to anything more than what I wanted to hear.  It was a sort of Joycian epiphany for me. I think that Steve laughed not so much at his stupid joke but because he saw me wake up for a minute, and sitting there against the rock watching the sky and filled with a sense of sharpened peace I wondered if I had in fact not been listening to anyone or even anything except myself for my entire life.  The sky was screaming, crying like a lonely woman, but rising in volume above that was a different sound, a cerulean sound.  It was the sound of the beating drum, of the dancing men, women and children naked and baffled but living through it with divine grace and respect borne out of wonder and lacking fear — a primordial grassland celebration in the pre-fear epoch of man.  A calm settled over me and I floated down to enjoy my own fried quesadilla and drink a belly full of clear icy mountain water.
+I caught that same sense of heightened calm driving through Louisiana the first time and I was feeling it again now; every time it was the unmistakable feeling that I had been subtly roused from a long and indistinct but alarming dream.  Waking up in the sudden and yet not jarring way as one does after a long sound well earned sleep and then there is the fresh new day to be greeted and danced through.  Why the South triggers that feeling for me remains a mystery, maybe something about the profound sense of otherness that it retains in this increasingly homogeneous world of ours.  Maybe is the humidity, maybe it’s the magnetic pull of the earth, maybe it’s the ghosts floating out from the swamps and forests in the relative cool of the evening, perhaps it the electric charges brought in by the afternoon thunder showers, maybe it’s the food, maybe it’s the people.  Maybe it’s all of those things thrown in a gumbo and slow roasted over a wood fire to perfection.  Whatever it is it remains buried at the level Korzybski so unpoetically called the non-elementalistic level.  It is my world and if I could put it precisely into words you would, by reading them, actually become me.  Perhaps such powerful sweeps of magic are possible —perhaps you are me.  Still some things are better left unsaid, there are those things which lie too far beyond the bounds of collective experience to ever firmly plant your finger on, things too tangled up in intimacy and individual experience to capture on the broad scale, it is enough simply to be aware of them, they are themselves the tangible expressions of something we do not fully understand.  To feel them running through you is to know them, if only for that fleeting moment and never at such times does it occur to me to speak, to speak would burst the moment, instead I smile involuntarily.  It is only later after the feeling has passed through that I am even aware that I have been smiling.   
+I stop for gas at the only all night station I have seen thus far.  The attendant is woken from his nap by the clang of the station bell; he shifts slightly to take my money and promptly falls back asleep.  I start the pump and go for a walk.  In the window of the Ace Appliance store with it’s faded worn paint falling off the brick innards in giant sheets like lizard skin shedding, like the bottoms of my feet; in the window I saw myself for the first time in days.  I stepped back and admired the structure as I lit a cigarette.  Old advertisements hang at crazy maddening angles, sheets of torn paper long since illegible, but adverts no doubt, black eyed peas, crawfish, Cajun spicing, habanero sauce, faded and whitewashed by years in the sun, but the windows are shiny clear.  I see televisions, radios, automobiles, washing machines, drying machines, refrigerators, freezers, ovens, microwave ovens, convection ovens, alarm clocks, computers, headphones, home furnishings, bicycles, video games, tennis shoes, laser disc players, DVD players, record players, compact disc players, cordless telephones, wireless phones, digital phones, cellular phones, two way radios, short wave radios, car stereos, home stereos, and every accessory you can conceive of and millions more you couldn't.  Gadgets for the mutilation of genitals, clamps, douches, toilets, condoms, meat grinders, books, pornography, nakeed girls you like no?  In the aisle there is little boy selling Chiclets on the streets of Mexico City.  Advise from his father given like a department head to the agent in the field, bide your time, wait and when you strike make sure to blow the whole bridge bring it all crashing down on your head.  
+It crashed when my eyes screwed completely out of their sockets and I focused back on my own reflection.  There was the thing called me, called Sil, called human, called living, called now.  I lost myself in the reflection until I could not longer distinguish what side of the reflection I was really on.  It suddenly seemed not at all real, more like a virtual apparition I could have been any face, any century; a peasant in rags, Hassan at Almont, a soldier in a trench, a mother in birth, a genetic telegram ape man reflected across ten million eons of the birthing contracting universe.  I felt less myself than ever.  I felt myself dissolving into the very fabric of existence, I was dancing through a long night of endless coursing energy that was not here and not now at all but everywhere always and I no more a man no more anything, but everything.  
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+I am upstairs constructing a vaudoux doll when Scratch yells that dinner is ready.  When most of my friends announce dinner it is because they need money to pay for the pizza, I do not seem to fall into circles of those who love food as much as I do, but Scratch is the exception.  In fact Scratch one-ups me, for he is professional chef at Arnaud's, a swanky coat required joint downtown.  I haven’t stopped eating since we got here two days ago.  Tonight it is a French meal something that Scratch is thinking of doing at the restaurant to celebrate the French heritage of New Orleans which according to the John who shared a swig of whiskey with me on the steps of a coffeeshop in the French Quarter this morning is actually more Spanish influence….  For the sake of the tourists that flock to Arnaud's Scratch is sticking to the standard French Vibes.  Tonight it is Magret de Canard baies de Cassis, which Scratch informs me is long for duck in currant sauce, but its not alone, ducks never travel alone they move in flocks across the table bringing pommes de Terre Mousseline and artichauts braises farcis a la barigoule.  Potatoes and artichokes roughly, with a French Merlot, chocolate truffles for desert and then coffee and large hand-rolled blunts.  Scratch augments his chef income by growing and selling cannabis that he generously hands out every night after dinner.  We don’t share them either, Scratch rolls everyone there own blunt and we sit down on the wrap around couch in the living room and puff away on them as if they were after dinner cigars.  I made this observation one night and Scratch just kind of laughed to himself and then two days later he started drinking cognac with them.  Perfect… perfect.
+	This alone made Dean stick around and ought to explain why I am in New Orleans as opposed to anywhere else in the damnedable ugliness of America.  Scratch is well read, he spent a year in traction for a skydiving accident; we have endless pointless discussions about books, conversations that exist primarily as testing grounds for our own theories, conversations that drift aimlessly through the heavens, all of us knowing full well the sheer and utter hopelessness of ever changing anything.
+I met Scratch through Mike originally, way back when he and I were sharing the one room trailer of infamy.  They worked together at the YMCA.  Mike was a swimming instructor/lifeguard (although mainly he sat in the office and smoked cigarettes with me) and Scratch was a personal trainer/fitness guru.  The first time Scratch told me he was a fitness coach I burst out laughing because the deadpan sincerity of his voice was the give away that he was kidding, but he wasn’t.  Despite the fact that he had been crippled in a skydiving accident and hadn’t really worked out in the last five or six years (excepting physical therapy) he had a degree in sports medicine and he was in fact guiding many people to healthier lives.  He was almost twice our age, but he and mike were the only obtuse elements at the Y so they gravitated to each other as naturally has hydrogen and oxygen make water.  
+It was of course Mike who had set in motion the reunion of Scratch and I, he mentioned once over some beers in Denver that Scratch was in New Orleans.  He apparently had dumped the fitness gig and gone back to his pre-thump occupation —five star chef.  The story stands out over the din of Denver as a kind of eject button that Mike had provided by which I could escape the nightmare world of his personal paranoid idiosyncratic reality.
+“Free the dogs!  Chain the humans!”  Eject! Scratch’s battle cry rang through the muddy thought waters of the heavy afternoon heat like a tricycle crashing on a preschool playground.  He was teetering on the edge of the couch knees pointed in either direction and holding up his arms.  His wizened eyes balance in his hand and are surround by a face, but it is not a face that can be clearly seen at first glance it retreats over the next ridge every time you approach like a heat mirage leading you out on the scorching desert sand.  Scratch wipes his face repeatedly and then sighs or words to that affect.  Yes I remember meeting Scratch.  
+Scratch was a self inflicted nickname, but sometimes you have to do that to avoid something much worse coming your way, dodge it with a preemptive strike.  Harm reduction the Pentagon calls it.  So it was Scratch; I figured it was for the way he would often itch at his head when he was trying to find the words… or the way his hands would wipe over his face when he sat back on couch, it was like he was making sure he still had skin.  Scratch was fortyish though I couldn’t say high or low, or side to side for that matter; he was a relic from the now infamous trailer residence in sunny Costa Mesa.  Scratch sat on the orange couch, a brutal abomination of furniture that boldly languished in the corner waiting for victims.  It sucked old scratch in like a tractor beam; mike and I were wise to it by then, but new ones got sucked in.  And so it happened that I came to know all the extraordinary people I do know —too many nights unable to escape it clutches.
+“Free the dogs! Chain the humans!”  Those were the first words he ever said; he just laid them out like tomatoes or hush puppies on an ottoman.  It wasn’t until he sighed heavily shrugging his shoulders and palming his hand across his face that I understood.  Everything you need is right there, but I am fresh out of calculators so let me lay it all out for you.  Scratch did have a real name; he just never bothered to use it.  After that day on the couch when Scratch sat for five maybe six hours and talked and drank beer and smoked cigarettes.  He came back.  And he kept coming back.  One day when he didn’t come back Mike and I were forced to go find him and ended up never leaving his place.  While I only lived with Scratch for a month he has always welcomed me when I needed a place to crash.
+	Tonight Scratch is telling what I call the ‘thump story’ which is his account of the time his parachute didn’t function properly.  I’m to full to talk its all I can do to sit up straight.  Sitting up straight is something you have to do around Scratch otherwise you have to endure a lecture on the benefits of correct posture.  But Scratch is rolling the thump story out of the hanger for Dean’s benefit.  They know each other from LA but Dean knows him mainly as the guy you get pot from and with Scratch that’s just the beginning.
+	“It opened fine actually just like it was supposed to at first… everything was great.  I was supposed to land in this guy’s backyard.  They were giving me a party because Debra Winger had just hired me as her personal chef… and so I’m supposed to come down into the backyard for the big whoopla right?  Well about a hundred feet off the landing I start to drift and I try to correct it but something in the way I moved and the way the wind was blowing… one in a million kind of thing… one of those variables that you don’t get to control…. Anyway ya… basically the ‘chute twisted and the gust caught me about twenty feet off the ground and threw me into the roof extension….  It was one of those metal roofs, like a barn kind of thing where it hangs over a bit and the tops of my feet hit it square on at about forty miles an hour.  It cut almost all the way through to the Achilles tendon, smashed the joint and the whole bit; understand of course that I don’t actually have any memory of this….  It’s just what people have told me, people who were there…. They’re not sure if that’s what did the knee too or if the knee was from the truck I landed on, because after I got dragged free of the roof I blew over the house and fell two stories through the front windshield of a pick up truck.
+“And that is why I don’t walk quite right.  And I’ll tell you, I don’t remember it happening but to hear Dave tell it, it sends chills down my spine, he saw the whole thing, he was the one that got me out of the truck and rode to the hospital with me… it just sounds so funny to me you know?  There’s times when it think I might have made the whole thing up… like I never did cater films, never lived in Hollywood, never went sky diving, never knew Debra, never did any of it… I’ve just been here the whole time and I just made this stuff up to impress you guys…. I mean there’s really no way for you to know… for all you know I could have had polio or something as a child… of course there is the scar so I guess I’d have to get more creative than polio… plus I think polio was cured by the time I was born… or is polio cured?  I don’t really know… you don’t hear about it much anymore…”
+	Dean and Scratch drift into a conversation about all the horrible diseases that are known to man, but I am thinking about Scratch.  Scratch has always been in the shadows of my life popping in sparingly like a seasoning, but still during those times I often felt myself in the presence of a true saint, a Buddhist that never knew Buddhism, a sharp contrast to most Buddhists… occasionally I used to think Scratch might be the Buddha himself.  He had this tranquil quality about him, maybe it was the coma he had been in for a couple of months after the accident, maybe it was twists and turns of his life, of which I knew only a handful, maybe it was the way his shaved balding head bobbed a bit while he limped about the house, maybe it was me, but I always came away from his presence wanting to be a better person, wanting less and less, in fact at the end —nothing at all.  Scratch lived a kind of Zen in which there was life and it was led, but there was this other thing, this separate energy that was dedicated to expressing itself, it came through in his food, it was like a work of art; it came through in his endless ranting about the sorry state of American Health; it came through in the way he moved, slowly deliberately and without ever wasting an ounce of energy that didn’t need to be expended.  Everything in him seemed to be in harmony, in proportion with itself as if the crookedness of his physical stature had corrected that of his soul….
+Sometimes I wonder though what the difference is between one disease and another,” Scratch is turning philosophical. “You know what I mean?  Were all terminally ill from birth… we’re going to die at some point, does it really matter when or how?  I just don’t really care anymore…how can you care about a thing like death?  What are you going to do about it?  Nothing.  You are waiting here to die, that’s why I like to serve fatty meals because I look out in the dining room and I see these people that look dead.  They’re so fat and clean and yet they stink, the smell of molds and internal decay comes off them like a dead possum rotting on the street. It makes me sick to my stomach watching them eat, they don’t even eat they shovel it like little pigs lining up at a trough… I like to think of myself as a kind Kevorkian mercy killer… I am just speeding up the process… you can see it in there eyes kill me please!… empty shells… waiting… waiting… dessert...? Ya I thought so….  They want it all….”
+We lapse into silence, I am think about the old idiom that conversation moves in measurable waves, about seven seconds of silence on the average.  Those numbers were for sober people whose minds function mainly as a self imposed veil which keeps the silence of eternity at bay so that they can hold down a job to afford rent and the mortgage and the BMW and the kid in private school and the housekeeper and the gardener and the cell phone and the ground phone and the and the and the….  Seven seconds is not enough for those in the cannabis universe there is and endless supply of novel thoughts from which to choose sometimes it’s hard to get them out because you want to get out everything all at once.  Language doesn’t work like that though, unless you’re speaking in tongues… but we’re not so the silence hangs while we contemplate the nature of… still empty silence in which to mind walk.  
+A girl knocks at the door.  The girl is Dean’s doing.  The girls are almost always Dean’s doing.  The curious thing about Dean, which I have observed over the years, is that when he falls for a girl he doesn’t just fall for her, he falls for every girl.  Dean is in love Woman; he just shifts his focus from one to another.  Shifts it a little quicker than they tend to be ready for….  Right now he’s in love with Sara who is knocking on the kitchen door, but tomorrow he will likely be back in love with Amanda and let us not forget the stripper downtown who calls herself Serendipity.  Sara looks like she’s trying to look like Betty Page, but doesn’t actually know who Betty Page was.  The pale skin, the dark bangs, they’re all there but something is missing, there is nothing driving it.  She’s an inflatable doll —almost real, life-like.  Dean just sort of dragged her back to the house one night and she decided to keep coming around.  She is nice, thoroughly infatuated with Dean, indifferent to Scratch and a little bitchy to me.  But the salient thing about Dean and I, perhaps the reason we remain friends is that our love interests have never overlapped.  Women that like him hate me and women that like me hate him and both of us love and hate all of them in end.  
+However Sara was a burden to the beat.  That is to say that Scratch’s house had a sort of rhythm to it that she didn’t hear had no response to or chose to ignore.  It was one of those shotgun houses for which New Orleans and the south in general is sometimes noted, but Scratch’s was a modified shotgun, in a true shotgun there is no hallway.  To get from one end of the house to the other one must pass through every room.  No hallways or antechambers or any sort of division whatsoever —communal living.  Whoever had owned this place before Scratch must have walked in on his masturbating daughter one to many times, or perhaps the kids walked in on the parents puffing away a big fatty, whatever the case someone added a hall passage as an extension of the left hand side of the house.  Didn’t put much effort into it either, the skeleton of two by four ribs had never been covered with dry wall and the cracks between the outside panels let in a healthy amount of spiders.  We treated it like outside and consequently the bedroom doors were always locked.  The architect behind the tunnel as Scratch called it had also added a rickety second story in the back overlooking the alley and the courtyard of the mansion behind it.  It was accessed from the outside up stairs.  Scratch had set me up in the second story so that I would have some peace and quiet to write.  That a lot of spiders, liberal helpings of cockroaches and black and white cat that acted as if it came with the place.  
+Dean was happy on the couch, but in truth he spent most of his time on Scratch’s computer humming out the love letters, sex stories or whatever it is that he and April talked about until six in the morning central standard time.  Dean remains secretive about that affair; it was only today that I heard him use her name, which of course doesn’t mean he hadn’t said it a thousand times before….
+The front door opens into the living room which is the biggest room, half of it is occupied by a wrap-a-round six seater couch with pop-up lazy-boy style footrests on either end, and across from it in the dark corner opposite the picture window is the computer desk where Dean lives.  The door to the left of the couch leads to the kitchen through which I pass on my way outside to the stairs and on the right is the door that leads to Scratch’s room and then in the far back bolted and accessible only to Scratch is the grow room.  Scratch went so far as to bolt a K mart pressboard bookshelf to it.  A tattered copy of Journey to the end of Night guards the doorknob.  In actuality Scratch can’t open it by himself, he turns the knob and pulls while someone else pushes up on the bookshelf enabling it to clear the floor.  The growroom is temperature controlled and subdivided so that plants can pass through various growing stages requiring less and less light as they approach maturity —all in one closed area.  Most everyone knows its there, but out of respect no one ever mentions it in conversation.
+As I was saying the house has a kind of rhythm to it.  There is never moment when someone is not home, which is only partly coincidence.  Should there be a fire or related disaster the last thing Scratch wants is someone breaking down the door with an ax.  At least not unit the growroom is disposed of.  But it just so happens that Scratch is the early riser up and cooking eggs and bacon at eight in the morning to the delight of Dean who is generally still awake from the night before.  He has breakfast, shoots the shit with Scratch and goes to bed for the day.  I generally try to make lunch and turn in around four when all the alcohol has generally been consumed and there is nowhere to replenish the supply.  Dean gets up for dinner and Scratch sends us out to buy that night’s supply of scotch, sherry, beer and wine all coordinated with whatever he is cooking.  Scratch turns in as soon as he get home from the restaurant usually around midnight.  It has a rhythm a life to it. Sara is a monkey wrench; she upsets the balance, sleeps on the couch at night when Dean and I are trying to talk.  When she does stay up she is usually too drunk or high or some combination thereof to add anything other than misery to the air.  And there was plenty of that before she arrived.  Her sole chance of staying in my good graces and Scratch’s as well depends on her friends.  So far she has not produced.  Scratch told me this afternoon that he had a talk with Dean that morning… get me laid or the girl goes were his words.  I assure him that Dean would take care of it, but now watching them hustle off to my room for a little roll in the hay (or spider webs as the case may be) I am not so sure about it.
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+We have only been here two weeks but already it feels like years.  Scratch’s growroom means we never want for relaxation tools.  This morning the repo men came and took away Dean’s car for lack of interest on his part.  We are stranded in New Orleans now, but worse things have happened.  Now Dean doesn’t have to wonder when they will come for him.  Nor does he have to make car payments anymore —not that he ever did.  If we were good citizens merrily building credit we would be horrified by our situation, but luckily we aren’t.  We made the best of it; Dean even gave the repo men a couple of beers and they knocked off work for a while to drink them with us.  I didn’t care because it wasn’t my car; Dean didn’t care because caring would do nothing for the absent Corolla, because there is nothing that he can do except let go and sail right on down the river.  I don’t care because I never have cared, the apathy is its own reason, it's own alpha and omega.  So we are Huck Finning it this afternoon in my room stretched out on the recently laid carpet and staring at the ceiling fan as it tries and fails to cool the room.  
+“How long do you think Scratch is going to put up with us?”
+“Dunno I know he’s not keen on that Sara girl… but outside of that I think we can stay another week or two before we smell like dead fish….”
+“Friends and fish….”
+“Yup.  How many days is it until they smell?”
+“It depends on your friends and your fish I suppose.”  
+“Hey, what are you going to do without the car?”
+“Well see that’s why I was asking because Amanda has offered to send me some money to get a plane ticket and I should probably take her up on it if I want to get out of here, but part of me isn’t ready to do that yet.  I mean not that New Orleans holds anything great for me, but I know I’m not ready to be tied down in DC yet,” Dean cracked a smile.  “Well I’m ready to be tied down physically but not figuratively speaking.”
+“How do you know she’ll do that to you…?”
+“Which part?  No… I don’t.  Its just a hunch, I mean its not my first trip around the block you know… I have started to notice and become aware of certain patterns in my life that are not necessarily healthy, but even though I can see them I can’t stop them yet.  I’m working on that; that’s why I need to stay here a little while longer… so I can figure this thing out.  I’m getting closer.”
+“Well I don’t think Scratch will mind… just stay out of his way you know… do him a few favors… dishes, shit like that, he’ll be cool with it.  If worst comes to worst I don’t think he’d mind us staying up here for a couple of hundred a month.”
+“You know… I was thinking about it this morning… I haven’t worked… I mean worked a real job… forget the pizza place… in about six months.  And I’m happier than I’ve ever been.  I mean true, I spend most of my waking hours in pursuit of food and alcohol, but it has led me places that I would have never gotten had a actually done the standard work-for-a-living thing….”
+“Ya I know I’ve managed it for a year and half now… okay I cheated a little in Denver and cash advanced a credit card, but other than that…  It makes you wonder why you ever worked in the first place… I mean what did I get from working that I am missing now?  I look around and I expect to see things that I miss… things that I want… but there aren’t any.  The only drawback is that you have to keep moving even when you’re somewhere you might want to stay….”
+“Not really though, I mean if you wanted to stay in New Orleans you could always get a job and hang around….”
+“Ya I think I’m going to half to get a job to get out of New Orleans… in which case I may be here a while.”
+“Well ya know if Amanda changes her mind and you need a roommate up here let me know….”
+“Ya if we got rid of the bed and just used hammocks or something of that nature there would probably be enough room for the both or us….”
+“I dunno about hammocks man that’d be a little too Gilligan's Island for me… I can’t be Skipper to your Gilligan and I don’t even want to picture your Gilligan to my Skipper…”
+“Riiiiiiiiiggggggghhhhhhhhht…..?”  Dean gets these ideas sometimes when he’s stoned and there is just no accounting for where he’ll go with them.  It makes him fun to talk to, but sometimes you find yourself stuck on a deserted tropical island when all you wanted was a three-hour cruise.  His ends cross over into his means or his means cross his ends or the ends are the means are the ends if there were any means, but it doesn’t mean a thing.  Right?  No thing.
+“Well I think I’m gonna head down to the French Quarter… Sara and some of her friends invited me to go watch this Blues band that’s playing at Checkpoint Charlie’s off Esplanade… supposed to be really good… you innarested?”
+“Ya I might meet you there later… I wanna get some dinner before Scratch goes to work, but I don’t even know if he’s working for sure so maybe if he doesn’t I’ll drag him down there.”
+Dean leaves.  I keep staring at the fan wishing it would do its job, but know how nice it feels not to have a job to do.  Knowing that in the end the only job any of us ought to have is ourselves.  To drive the little bodies around in pursuit of awareness and ecstasy, and it can be a tough job this one, tough on the body and soul to sail this ocean of sewer through the air-conditioned claustrophobic American night.  So cold when it should be heating.  So vast when it is all right in front of us all along.  So nonexistent when seen from a distance…  Only cognac and French wine, Irish beer dark as night, gin crystal clear twinkling like stars… so infinite in existence so huge… yet in the midst of it one star… one planet… on content… one country… one city… just like another…. One soul… just like another… one… nothing just like all the others, but with no more Corolla to worry over.  Simple.
+
+When I went down to the main part of the house to get some food Scratch’s informed me that we need to talk but we were interrupted by his friend Jason who dropped by the house for a little meal.  I was relieved because I thought maybe Scratch was going to kick us out, but whatever it was he dropped it the minute Jason walked in the door.  Scratch’s friends were always dropping in around dinner hoping that he was tinkering about in the kitchen and maybe had some new morsel for which they would guinea pig themselves.  Jason was a nice, somewhat quiet, graduate student at Tulane University.  I would have said thirties maybe forties but it’s hard to tell with Scratch’s friends.  Jason was young in spirit but terribly old in his mind, he was stooped mentally buried under the weight of all that knowledge he had to keep in his brain for grad school, not to mention all the stuff he still remembered from his undergraduate degree.  He was a philosophy nut too, which made for a heavy load.
+Tonight Jason’s only contribution is a bottle of chartreuse for which he was richly rewarded with the truffle cake Scratch had whipped up for desert.  We hit the sherry though because cake and chartreuse seemed wrong to them and as for me I wouldn’t know chartreuse from indigo.  Scratch and I had already put away shrimp scampi; we had our feet up on the table and soon the bullshit was shooting around the room from the squirt gun mouths of the comfortably stuffed.  Jason was hungry.  In between voracious bites of truffle cake he started firing off about the nature of God and universe (a frequent topic among Scratch’s friends).  Jason was rattling on about what he called pop philosophy, which from what I gathered is any philosophy of life that uneducated folks like you and I come up with, philosophies that lack the anal language fixation common among the professionals.  Scratch had an analogy about rock, rocks and poprocks to neatly explain the differences between say you and Plato, but the distinguishing thing about pop philosophy is that no one believes themselves capable of deciphering the nature of man as well as Plato so by adding the word pop they have a failsafe, a way to avoid embarrassment if proved wrong.  Jason seemed to believe that we are relying on our own beliefs more and more or at least we are willing to “mainstream”  “borderline” beliefs.  My head was in a tizzy by the time he came around to what I then gathered was his original intention, a movie he had seen that set his own head in a tizzy.
+Jason was quite enamored with the worldwide conspiracy of power idea wherein certain high up, enlightened (read wealthy) individuals are living lives of extraordinary decadence at the expense of and always scheming against shmucks like you and I.  He delivered his rap via the Matrix, which he had seen earlier in the day.  I hadn’t seen the movie, but it sounded like a cheap effects- driven rip off of Buddhism to me, but Jason assured me I would love it, “there is one line that I know you’ll dig,” he said.  One character, a machine apparently, says to a human that we, presumably the human race, are the anomalies in the natural world and the only thing that behaves quite like mankind is a virus.  Or words to that effect.
+Why would I love that one I wondered?  Perhaps it was the cover of my notebook stenciled with William Burroughs epithet “language is a virus,” but it hardly follows that I would enjoy being compared to a virus.  Besides that is only the top of the notebook at the bottom is the Firesign Theatre quote everything you know is wrong which eliminates any confusion about anything else, all of which what seemed lost on Jason.  
+Jason was an earnest man, a scholar even, but he lacked what all scholars’ lack —diversity.  Every thing had to relate to philosophy even the packaging on dinner mints.  He knew so much about so little that he was cut off and isolated from everyone but his colleagues; he saw Scratch and I as kindred spirits I guess, but what he failed to realize is that neither Scratch nor I were concerned with world views philosophies or any other fancy term for such a thing.  Scratch didn’t care because he was Buddha and he didn’t need to care and I didn’t care because abstract philosophies are just that abstract and detached from anything that might be real.  I have a deep interest in the subject of life but I require that my models of the universe be true to both what I know and what I don’t know.  Jason seemed hell-bent on getting me to agree with this idea that we humans are despicable creatures and ought to be put out of our misery, but I wasn’t buying.
+“What about love?”
+“What about it? What is it?
+“Well I don’t know for sure myself, but I can do a little logical reductionism for you, Goethe said ‘Existence is God,’ and Jesus of Nazareth said ‘God is Love,’ so I figure existence itself is love.  But I don’t believe that because a German and a Jew happened to have said it, I believe it because when I lie in bed at night with beautiful woman asleep on my chest I feel existence and it feels like love. I believe it because when I walk the streets around here I can smell it blowing through the air; out west in the desert I found that I could taste love in the sizzle of a steak….”
+“Oh come what are you man some kind of romantic poet?”
+“Yes.”
+“But that’s a bunch of crap you’re way too intelligent to be buying into that tired old ‘stop and smell the roses,’ always a smile on your face, life is wonderful, I’m singing in the rain kind of sappy kind of…”
+“Too intelligent?  What does that mean?  How do you know I’m intelligent Jason?”
+“Because I’ve read what you wrote in that little book over there and I’ve listened to you talk a few times and I can just tell.  The intelligent can always distinguish one another across a crowded room….”
+“Ah is that it?”
+“Is what it?”
+“The crowded room… love... distinguishes us to each other…”
+“Whoa hey wait a second….”
+“No you wait!”  Now I was pissed at him.  “Let me tell you Mr. overeducated-sneering-at-the-world- intellectual-waste of human existence what you ought to do is go and fall madly in love with woman surrender everything in your life to her, have children with her and then lose her and then you can come back and tell me how intelligent I am, but until you actually have something other than parrot-speak memories of dead men who wrote of love but didn’t clarify it enough to break through your bitterness….”  And I sputtered out.  He was taken aback.  Shocked even.  I tried to apologize and Scratch poured more Sherry, but the damage was done; I had struck a nerve.  Perry was right in a strange way, sex is violence.  Or more properly as Reich said in so many more words, lack of sex leads to violence.
+Not that I harbored any feelings of violence toward Jason on the contrary I felt immense pity for him because his life seemed so cold and unforgiving I was trying, I guess, to wake him up but I didn’t; I only pushed his buttons and got him angry.  Jason would wake up someday and I think I am right… it will be woman who does the job… it usually is.  It certainly won’t be that Holy Grail of the indestructible philosophy that he’s chasing after right now.  It will be a girl with dark hair and fire in her eyes and first she will chew him up, then she will swallow and then she will regurgitate him back to the world as innocent as a newborn.  He had not lived, he was not even alive, he needed to get out of school and cast himself on the siren shores, maybe travel would be his thing.  Maybe a sunrise on the island of Crete with the dark haired girl… maybe a tour through the slums of Calcutta… maybe a ride on the outside of bullet riddled bus through the violent streets of Moscow… there’s something out there for every one, one thing that can not be ignored.  Something will wake him from his dreamy slumber, and then he will be able to use all the vast amounts of knowledge that he has crammed into his gray matter.  But it won’t be me to do the job, I’m no good at the savior biz and neither was Jason any good at the life biz.  In the mean time he will forgive me and come back next week to have another talk about a book of some sort or a movie or where ever he can find an intricate conspiracy to extrapolating into a giant skyscraper of bitterness pushed around by man forever complaining about the size of his task.  Conspiracies…..  Or were they philosophies? 
+The tragedy of the current and endlessly desperate world situation is that for the most of the wildly skeptical cynical Americans the difference between a philosophy and a conspiracy is nil.  Modernism in all its forms reeks of two things —apathy and suspicion— but as I listened to Jason launching himself off into that neverland of the graduate student where everything is abstract and intangible I knew there was no talking him out of it.  Maybe it was the professors he looked up to so much, maybe it was the sixties and all the disillusionment that followed them….  The sixties when mankind stood on the precipice of something unfathomable, something radical, and then pulled back much to the relief and/or disappointment of those who watched it happened.  We didn’t jump, we didn’t go that’s the only thing I can say about the sixties; the most concrete and to me depressing thing about the era I missed by half a decade is Jason.  Not Jason, but the paranoid untrusting nature of these new beliefs.  Where’s the fun in that?
+To bring him back round the rational ground where he was much more comfortable and agreeable I through him a bone, perhaps to cheer him up, perhaps to cheer myself up, it was my point that humans may be like a virus but they are not viruses.  It’s that sort of “semantic nitpicking” as Amy once called it that I have found irritates the hell out of people.  Why?  I have not the slightest idea.  I happen to believe that it is very important that if you and I are to communicate that we all first understand what that means.  So much of the world’s problems stem from the inability to communicate effectively.  I had just watched it in microscopic detail at Mike and Halley’s place in Denver and now here was Jason again reminding me that most of use have no idea what we are saying.  Not that we are dumb or even confused, but rather that language and how it functions is not taught to most of us.  We attempt to put into words things that are not at the same level as words… its all in the relationships of the words the good count would say… parallel words, diagonal words, tangential words, Euclidean words, Einsteinian words, all just words, but when you start to put them together images form, emotions well up, anger and passion are aroused all by what?  Letters arranged in sequence?  It made my head spin and in that moment Jason became no longer words no longer even human he was reduced to irritating static, white noise, his face was television snow and the voice crackled like an old crystal radio between channels.  That sent me to think about Burroughs again, thinking about the stories I have heard that he used to write with three radios on all tuned to static so that the waves of each overlapped, converged and actually created words that were not there.  If language is a virus Burroughs was its greatest junky… I wandered off.  Jason and Scratch talked in the background of my thoughts.  Scratch was bored of Jason that I could tell without thinking about it.  
+A virus!  How monumentally depressing to think of oneself in such a light!  How do you get out of bed in the morning when you think you’re a virus, a plague… better yet why?  Why not end it all right now?  It reminded me that this is an insecure world in constant state of indecision and confusion.  I decided to go for walk, stretch the legs and chew the cud as they used to say in more agrarian times when people knew what cuds are.  I lipped the name of the blues club to Scratch as I was leaving, trying to hint that Jason wasn’t welcome, but that Scratch should come if he wanted.
+The night was a wildfire, a cracker eaten in bed.  A virus!  The notion is seemed funny the minute I hit the street.   I doubt very seriously if any virus conceives of itself as such.  To Ebola the human body is raw material inspiring the greatest creativity, that in its re-sculpting it destroys the individual is of as little concern to Ebola as the empty canvas’s blank nature is to the human artist.  I started to see little Ebola’s decked out in turtlenecks and berets debating each other on whether or not it was wrong to restructure the body… restructure!  It’s not restructuring! Its murder!  Why not a symbiotic relationship with the creatures?  Why not improve them?!  Why not build to create instead of destroying to create!?  You! You weepy eyed communist!  You BACTERIA!  All right that’s it!!! 
+They scuffled in my head all the way down into the French quarter.  It was a quiet night on Bourbon, a few swarms of homeless or nearly homeless teenagers drifting here and there in the shadows trying to make a touch for some sort of alcohol.  The punk rock syndicate Dean calls them.  They have a separate reality in every city.  I’m a romantic sap about that sort of thing.  I always wanted to be homeless and sit on the steps with a woman I love and humbly ask the world for some spare change.  I just haven’t met the right girl yet.  I bought a bottle for a couple that happened to be sitting on the steps of the liquor store when I decided I needed cigarettes.  I didn’t have any intention of doing that when I went in, but as I waited in line I noticed incongruously located next to an extensive collection of pornos (Butt Fucking Whores?  I wonder what that’s about?), a bookrack full of New Orleans local heroes, Faulkner, Williams, Anne Rice and some others I hadn’t heard of, local poets mostly.  When I got to the counter I was still flipping through As I Lay Dying and I thought what they hell… a bottle of good whiskey, a copy of As I Lay Dying and some cigarettes… that about does a twenty and I had a few of those I didn’t need.  I wrapped the bottle in a paper bag and went outside and sat down next to them.  
+“Hey buddy you got any change?”  
+“Nope.  But I got a bottle of whiskey and book for ya.”  I cracked it and took a swig of fire.  I passed the bottle to him and opened As I lay Dying to the first page.  I tore out the introduction and handed the book to the doe eyed girl.  “Have a good night.”  I walked off in the direction of Esplanade. I heard a startled voice saying thanks mister behind me.  Get drunk I silently encouraged, get drunk on words, on spirits and on you and I walked away leaving them with a few hours entertainment. 
+I found Checkpoint Charlie’s easily enough.  If Dean was in one of those moods where you need to have some drinks, smoke too many cigarettes and shoot pool he had gone to the right place.  I swung in the door at quarter past ten and there he was all in the thick of it with Sara and two of her friends, I went back outside and called Scratch from a payphone.  Come down he got you a girl….  I felt like a pimp.
+The women were talking Dean in circles while he shot a game of pool.  I went to the bar and got a Guinness.  I sat down for moment at the bar and was promptly set upon by a man who spoke something so mumbling and thick with Cajun ancestry fueled by hard liquor that all I heard was “therinsomefouatin benhavehrd goddamn suckafishafool scratum hars?”
+I nodded, smiled and tried to suck down my beer in one cool gulp that coated my still burning throat.  The place was New Orleans no doubt about it, that strange mixture of music, Cajun architecture, and an overly polite bartendress that called me sugar.  The crowd was mostly locals complete with some redneck swamp people that would be punching each other out later on in the night.  I finished the beer ordered another and headed to the back to see what sort of trouble Dean was stirring up.  When I was about half way across the room the band returned from their set break and began to kick out the blues or maybe stomp would be stronger, but no, once the gravel voice hit the microphone behind me the blues were getting tore up from here to Pluto and I had no choice but to turn around and watch.  The band was the most phenomenal group of musicians I had ever stumbled across, every note was bent against the grain of the next so that they all trembled and wailed up on top of each other and the piano chased the whole sweeping melody back into the pocket and then they shot off again.  Dean threw his arm around me and leaned in close to my ear.
+“Un-fucking-believeable aren’t they?”
+I nodded and the drums launched into a solo that crawled all around the room beating its fists on the walls and leaving child footprints on the ceiling.  It’s all upside down, banging out rhythm and melody together, as inseparable parts of a whole that only the creator can hear.  It was mind-boggling; it went swoosh splatter rat-a-tat tat boom blam a ram…. I would have gotten lost in the music for good if I hadn’t seen the girl that came up and handed Dean the pool stick.  I turned around with him and followed them over to the table.  Over the gargle of the saxophone I caught her name—Gia.  There was also Sara and Delilah, but I paid them nevermind.  Gia was the thing. She looked like a sultry Italian pastry.  Her brow was heavy and Ceselian, it made me think of Frida Kahlo; her hips swung wide and she played them like backbeat rollicking around the table dancing, laughing, and shooting pool.  When she leaned in to take a shot her shirt hung down and revealed milky breasts like rolling Tuscany hills, she caught my glance, looked down her shirt and then back up at me smiling defiantly.
+“See anything you like?”  Her voice was melodious and sarcastic.
+“Everywhere.” I retorted.  She scratched on the eightball with a grimace.
+“Well then why don’t you rack a game and we’ll see what you can do?”
+I laughed.  I dropped a couple of quarters in the slot.  She broke and went on a run that didn’t end until she had only one ball left.  I took the stick from her outstretched hand and missed my first shot.
+“Well you suck at pool…” She laughed.  “But you’re cute so you can play another.”
+“Uh huh.”  I racked them again and this time she didn’t drop anything and she scowled.  “That rack was terrible”
+“So was the last one… you did all right with that.”  
+Dean came over to watch.  “Now Gia you have to watch out of this one, he’ll shark you when you’re not paying attention.”
+“Ha! I already beat… what’s your name?”
+“Sil”
+“Right .  So Sil,” She slithered in front of me, “why don’t we make a wager on this one?  Say maybe twenty bucks?”
+“I don’t have twenty bucks…”
+Dean frowned at me.  “Whatya mean you just…”
+“Spent it.”  I cut him off
+“On what?”
+“Underage drinking education…”
+“Huh?”
+“I bought a book for these kids, something to go with their whiskey….”
+“Jackass.”
+Gia listened with a bored expression on her face. “Okay Robin Hood, why don’t we wager something non-monetary?”
+“Sexual favors?”  I had to try.
+“Uh no.  How about just favors…  How about if I win you have to do whatever I say for twenty minutes?”
+“And if I win?”
+She smiled mischievously, “I’ll give you my underwear.”
+“You mean panties?” Dean said it with touch of sarcastic dandy in his voice.
+“Ya panties…underwear whatever…”
+“No Gia, see there’s a big difference… underwear is what guys and ugly girls wear… lovely young ladies such as yourself where panties,” Dean smiled at her.
+“Okay I’ll give you my panties (roll of the eye, flitter of the lash) …right here in the middle of the bar…”
+“Alright it’s a bet.”  I wasn’t sure exactly what use I would have for women’s underwear, panties, pasties, drawers, knickers, or snatch covers by any other name, but it did make a good healthy fuck that much closer and I needed one of those.  “My shot eh?”
+“Yep” (leering, challenging grin)
+I just smiled and took a shot.  It dropped and so did the next five I aimed at.  The eightball however refused to cooperate.  Gia was a little disgruntled and flustered, she missed her shot and I dropped the eightball in the corner.  I smiled at her and held out my hand.
+She rolled her body around so that her back was pressed tight against my stomach and pulled my neck down and whispered in my ear.  “I’m not wearing any…” And she walked away.
+I let her go without protest and Dean racked a new game.  We played doubles him and Delilah against Sara and me.  Sara didn’t like me one bit and we lost badly, but we all got drunk with Guinness, with the blues, the pool game, with laughter, and innocence.  Clarence, the singer, tore off on rant, extolling everyone to loooooove and kicked into an old Lightnin’ Hopkins song about a black Cadillac; Gia came back and sat on the other side of the table and stared at me smiling.  Just then Scratch came strolling in and then the wildfire really got going.  The clink of shot glasses raised in celebration of nothing, the clatter of them slammed down on the table, the burning beauty of good whiskey hitting the back of my throat; it all skips merry metallic through the night.  The pinging of the pool balls and the thump and clatter as they bounce off felt walls and find their way into the pockets… it mixes with voices, laughter, lewdness strung out on a line with six fish to single hook.  The fisher king rose from the back of the room and Gia said, “Its last call!”
+“Damn!”  Dean ran for the bar.  
+Scratch curled his lip and screwed up his face.  “Jesus,” he called after him, “It not like there isn’t a ton more back at the house.”  He paused a beat and then added, “You are coming over aren’t you girls?”
+Naturally.  Everyone is going everywhere and we are all running rampant and expansive by the time we hit the street.  The lights cover the streets in prismatic splendor.  Scratch drove down so all six of us pile in a 1972 Mercedes —shit brown and dancing upside down around the chandelier.
+Gia leaned out the window and flashed her tits at a group of high school hoodlums smoking cigarettes on the corner.  They whistled and yelled come back here baby.”
+“Sorry… She yelled, “you wouldn’t know what to do with me if you had me.”  Scratch laid it on the gas and we torn around the corner.  I was rubbing on Gia’s nipple and she leaned her head back drunkenly mumbling “you’re gonna know what to do with me right?”
+“Don’t worry about a thing.”  I noticed as we pulled off that one of the kids was sitting on a fire hydrant away from the others reading a book.
+
+
+It was well after two when we got back to the house and Scratch produced the bottle of chartreuse.  By the time Morphine hit the stereo we were in full swing again.  Delilah danced with Scratch or tried since his dancing is a bit limited by his injuries.  Gia pulled me into her waist and swayed her hips grinding gently into me with the undulations of the bass and saxophone dancing through the air.  Everything was colored in gaslamp light and arranged like cobblestone streets I got lost in Gia’s emerald eyes, lost in wonder, sheer wonder at the idea that this might be the very reason all four of us ever came into existence, that this one moment of abandonment to wine, music and the mysterious permeating rhythm of the universe.  It’s everywhere… in her eyes, in the way the books are arranged on the shelf behind the sofa, in Scratch’s hobbled dance, in Delilah’s bouncing auburn curls, in the sway of Gia’s waving raven hair, in the beat of the drum in the pulse of energy that carried us from one end of the living room to the other.  Dean is tapping it out with his feet sitting on the couch but leaning forward and lifting up Sara’s skirt like he was checking the ripeness of produce.
+Eventually I passed Gia off to Scratch, flopped on the couch and poured myself a glass of red wine.  As I was doing so I glanced out the window and somewhere on the blurry edge of the reflected inside and what I could see by the light outside, reality merged and I saw a man standing on the edge of small lakeside dock such as one sees in New England.  He was looking up at the sky or out across the lake I could not tell but I could see his suit was tattered and his back hunched as if he were rather old.  He took a deep breath, sighed and then the image was gone as suddenly as it had appeared.  I thought of children’s rhyme just yesterday there was man on the stair who wasn’t there/ he was there again today….  Gia lay down across me and turned her head in so that he breath was warm on my stomach, she looked up at me with he liquid glass eyes and smiled a tilted drunken smile.  I returned with one of my own, but I was looking at her breasts, they were rising out of her dress.  
+“Just so you know, I don’t go to bed with everyone I meet….”
+“Never would have thought that….”
+“Ya sure… all men think that a woman who lets herself get picked up in a bar is a slut.”
+“That’s not true…” Dean piped up from the other end of the couch.  “Women are no different than men, we all need sex….”
+“Ya no shit.”  Sara spoke up for the first time.  “I hate it that I’m supposed to act all coy and demure when in reality sometimes you just need some dick and you really don’t care where it comes from so long as its not there when you wake up.  I mean I want to fall in love and be swept off my feet too, but not tonight….”
+Dean got up and pulled Sara off the couch with him, they danced slowly for a minute, kissing and then his hands groped at her ass and they veered off into the a dark corner away from the couch where they fell into a chair and all over each other.  Scratch was less subtle he flung himself on the cushion next to me and Delilah pounced on him snaking her hand down his pants.  Gia rolled over and began to blow through my pants; warm air flowed around my cock and it grew hard.  Gia bit and nibbled at it while I tried to dodge her by flexing my muscles and making it jump.  She laughed and broke the silence that had settled over the room.
+“I have heard that Sil is hard to have sex with because he spends most of the time laughing,” Scratch snickered at me.
+“Ya?  I like to laugh… but I think I can make him stop if I want to…”
+“Oh you think that now…” Dean called from across the room.
+There is something hilarious about the grunting animal reality of sex, but I wasn’t in the mood for Scratch and Dean’s silly reindeer games so I scooped Gia up and carried her into Scratch’s bedroom and locked the door.  I laid her on the bed as best I could but the last foot or so was more gravity’s work than mine.  She yelped and I dove on her. In the crook of her neck I caught the smell of Jasmine or Frankincense or Myrrh, a pungent odor of beauty that wafts about through this world all the time —you catch it in the fall air, intangible but just barely, it hangs on the edge of recognition, the edge of the known and unknowable.  She made up for that.  She was all there and then some.  And then she kissed me.  There was the taste of hot cigarette smoke on her tongue; I caught it greedily the way plants grow to the sun, drawn by the familiar.  She tasted like orange blossoms or smelled like them or felt like them, powdered sprinkled orange blossoms.  They were in her eyes the smell came out of her eyes and then she opened them stared at me for a while hanging on the edge of my lips.  There was no word, no sound; no connection at all just lips resting together, sticky, warm honey kiss.  There was a riot of color that streaked by my eye, with all the fanfare of the flags at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.  She rose up in black leather pants out of a sea Jasmine, Sunflowers, Scarlet Sage, Rocket Larkspur, Lupines, Butterfly Weed; there were riots of color, indigo and vermilion, violet, lavender and softer tones too, pastels and baby's breathe.  I felt delirious and rolled over onto my back.  Gia climbed a stride me. The black leather of her pants ground against my cock.  We kissed ferociously and tore at each others clothes and then she grabbed a handful of my hair and held my head while half biting on my ear and half whispering the words you are not going to fuck me…  the world stood still and roared for a millisecond and then fell as her lips bit at my neck and she clenched her thighs around my leg and ground her cunt against me.  I could feel the heat on my leg and the pant of her breathe in my ear.  I grabbed her hair and pulled her neck back so that she gasped and I started to fuck her with words.  This was no Amy and this was no cheesy attempt to put zing back in an otherwise dull sex life; these were raw, skinned, de-boned words of lust not fiction at all but happening in.  I told her what I felt.  I felt the warmth of her cunt I felt how badly it need to be fucked; I became cunt and talked her right up to the edge and then stopped and tried to pulled away whispering what made you think I wanted to fuck you?   But as I tried to pull away her legs tightened again and she fucked my leg until she came.
+	She relented and I sat up on the edge of the bed with my cock straining against my pants.  She reached behind her, grabbed a pack of cigarettes, pulled one out and lit it.  She smoked between gasps; her hands were shaking a little.  She looked at me and started laughing, giggling mirth that eased any lingering tension out through the glass and left us in the warm fecund waters of silence.  She took another drag and I just watched her, too exhaust to move.  She was beautiful to a fault, but she had an earthy ethereal mixture to her skin that made her seem at once detached and warm.  He lips pursed teasingly around the filter of her cigarette and she regarded me with raised eyebrow.  Her eyebrows arced off brown eyes and her black hair was tussled atop her head, she looked disheveled and out of order the way everyone looks after coming.  Raw and beautiful.  And then she looked me straight in the eye and said, “I am going to give you the best blowjob you have ever had….  Right after I finish this cigarette.”
+	Not with your clothes on I thought to myself.  I undid her belt and she wiggled herself out of her pants and underwear.  I pulled her down so she was lying prone and spread her legs.  I got down and inspected her cunt.  It wasn’t dolled up or trimmed, it was an honest slit.  I poked in a finger and wiggled it a bit to hear her moan.  I smiled at her.  She rolled her eyes faking boredom and took another drag.  I started in eating at that honest slit; the hair around her cunt was soft not like most I have felt, like it had been conditioned.  She smelled husky but with something light on the end of it —lilacs maybe.  She tasted thick like heavy rich syrup.  It wasn’t long before she was bucking her hips and fucking at my face.  She was hoarsely growling out commands and then she came again.
+It was my turn to light a smoke.  I sat on the end of the bed digging through my pockets for a lighter.  Gia came over and took a drag.  Everything was happening in slow motion… her legs half arced out behind her and she leaned over at me looking at me from under her forehead, eyes clouded with something I could not yet feel, something trance like, drugged passion. She swayed there for a few seconds teasingly and the she started rubbing my already stiff cock through my pants and murmuring to herself.  She picked at my belt like a bird peeling the husk from a coconut and then in one gruff movement she fished out my cock and squeezed it gently with the tips of her fingers.  Her lips pressed together and she leaned her head against it with eyes closed.  It was then that I heard the bass fading in and the sharp tap of a snare drum, my head collapsed back like a nod from heroin and I felt her tongue circling the swollen head of my cock.  I rolled around to look down at her.  She looked up at my movement and smiled with her mouth open and her tongue teasing the underside of my cock.  Still looking at me she engulfed me in her mouth and tussled her head slightly sending tremors down the base of my spine and uncomfortably settling them in my ass.  She seemed to sense this and used her hand to massage my balls and slowly, wetly started slurping up and down.  Her free hand she wrapped lightly in front of her mouth and alternated between her hand and her mouth and just when I felt it start to build deep in the base of my cock, all the way back down inside my body she stopped, stood up and climbed up on me so that her cunt was in my face and her head returned to its work below.  I stared absently at the cum that clung to short-cropped hair they glistened with moisture.  I worked my tongue up her and for a moment lost track of what she was doing and then like blinding flash my cock came back to me full force with waves of pleasure that pealed up my body and work themselves out through my tongue and back into her body.  A strange loop of energy circled through us out of the humidity, out of the heat, out of the jungle, out of her cunt into my mouth and out my cock into her mouth... endlessly.  A loop of something that tightened and squeezed at us constricting itself slowly into concentric circles until the loop became a dot and we came at the same time flowing cum in each others mouths.  It is one thing to cum together with a woman when you are fucking, that happens with some frequency. But I had never cum at the same time during oral sex.  As I lapped at her flooding cunt I became aware of the need to breath and her leg's gentle collapsed onto my shoulder and she slowly rose up with her arms on my knees and swishing her wet cunt against my bare chest.  She turned around and we kissed, I could taste my cum and her mouth and she licked across my lips to taste her own.  She curled up in my lap and we lay motionless and silent for sometime. 
+	“I need water… you want some.”  
+“Ya I might sleep for second…”  Her eyelids looked heavy, she smiled at me sleepily.  “Will you fuck me later?  I mean with your cock?  I need to feel your cock.”
+“Of course.  Sleep a second, I’m going to get some water.”  I headed out to the kitchen and found Dean and Scratch sitting on the couch talking softly in candlelight.  They smiled at me.
+“Doing alright?”  I realized I was naked, but I didn’t care.  I grabbed a pack of cigs off the table and sat down to light one.
+“So Sil… I was just telling Dean here that I have job opportunity for the two of you… or just Dean if you don’t want to….”
+“Lay it on me.”
+“Well okay now this guy I sell to sometimes at the restaurant, one of the dishwashers, he has a cousin up in Brooklyn who wants to buy my entire harvest in one fall swoop which makes me quite a bit of money and saves a lot of hassle.  That’s where you come in… you drive it up there and I will cut you guys in on a thousand each, plus gas money….”
+“What about a car?”
+“This is the best part…” whispered Dean, laughing softly.
+Scratch chuckled to and then said with exaggerated severity, “There will be 1959 Cadillac at your disposal.  Of course there is going to be ten pounds of marijuana in it so you might want to drive it like a Yugo, but anyway you drive it up there, call me and I will confirm that I have received the money and then you tell me where it’s parked and you’re done.  I’ll wire you the money.”
+I was already feeling the rush of the air and floating ride of a caddy.  I saw it convertible and black.  I didn’t say anything for a moment.  I looked at Dean and I could see that he was going to do it with or without me, he was probably secretly hoping I wouldn’t.  We could kiss our lives goodbye if we got caught….  Ten pounds would land us in prison and it didn’t really matter how long we got…we’d be dead the first day.  But that thought only lasted a second and it was quickly replaced by an image of Gia’s naked body spread sleepily across the bed.  I said yes and stumbled on to the kitchen.  I grabbed a glass and turned on the water, but I set the glass on the counter and leaned against the sink just staring at the water running down the drain.  I must have stared at it for quite sometime because Dean came in and poured himself a glass and then turned it off.
+“You okay man?”
+I started laughing, great peels of laughter that were uncontrollable, his words had burst some sort of dam that had been holding it back; I slumped against the cabinet and kept laughing and laughing, deep rolls of laughter that started somewhere below the gut and wouldn’t stop.  Dean shook his head at me and walked back to the living room.  I heard the flick of his lighter and I stopped laughing.  I collected myself, got another glass and filled it to the top.  I went back and crawled in bed with Gia.
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+The bus takes a left and heads up North Rampart Street.  This is by far the worst neighborhood in New Orleans.  The buildings themselves look violent, the shattered windows the abandoned factories are black eyes on the face of beaten man slinking home unnoticed through the shadows.  There is only on place that most drivers will stop down here, in front of the superdome and even then it is only if someone rings that bell.  For the most part the bus roars right through as if the driver were trying to keep something from getting in it, although what that something is no one can tell me.  This place, area, ghetto, is reputed to be the worst in America.
+	Today the streets are empty.  Its Sunday afternoon, September, the perfect time to be in New Orleans, not too crowded, not too hot, just about broasted to perfection.  The streets are modeled I guess after France, but I wouldn’t know as I have never been to France except on grand mental sojourns.  Still this is how I picture Parisian streets, the trademark metal railings woven with hyacinth and framing narrow balconies.  The ride from Scratch’s house, which is just north of the garden district, not in the midst of Anne Rice’s finery, but more toward the French Quarter, the edge of the acceptable part of town, takes about twenty minutes by bus. From here I head up through the French Quarter for an afternoon walk, but it is the trolley ride that really sets my mind in motion, it passes through as I said the worst of the worst, but it is a lesson in American history, not the usual textbook fare either, no here is real history where you can see the casualties of human folly first hand.
+The south actually has history in the common sense of the word, that is they have been invaded, and usually when people talk about history it is in reference to war or more so the ravages of war.  Most Americans not living in the south tend to view the Civil War much like the revolutionary war, so much ancient history, when in reality it is only four maybe five generations removed.  I try to bear that in mind on the trolley.  These people and these neighborhoods have seen if not with their own eyes than through the eyes of their relatives, the horrors of war, slavery, riot, crime, violence and all the other jewels of history.
+The architecture is old, ancient for America, but not preserved or taken care of as in the nicer neighborhoods.  I take the bus because the people are savages so I am told.  From the paper, and the gossip of the town this here is only one step above Beirut, but it doesn’t look it.  The Cuban man selling roses out of a bucket for a dollar a longstem does not strike me as a cut throat murderer or drug running thug, he strikes me as non white, which as I have said earlier is unacceptable in this country.  To be sure we have no slaves anymore in the physical sense, but equality is lacking, separation not equality was the route chosen by our forefathers.  Or perhaps they did not choose it at all, perhaps no one is to blame, perhaps we are all guilty of the same thing, whites, blacks, Jews, Muslims, Europeans, Cubans Arabs, the whole rabble lot of humanity guilty as Mussolini. 
+The architecture is European; everything in fact is closer to Europe than the rest of America, and by Europe I mean the southern parts.  There is of course the French influence in houses of the French Quarter, but there is also the Italian, the Portuguese, and the hybrids, the Cuban, the Haitian, the Mexican.  New Orleans is the least American of all American cities I have lived in and yet it still has that stale death stink of America about it.  Perhaps it is actually in the soil and leeches itself into DNA over time; this explains why New Englanders are the worst of the lot, but fails to account for the Native American tribes that seem unaffected.  Perhaps they had a genetic immunity that the Europeans lacked.
+But today is as I said a beautiful day and I am not in a hurry to get through the French quarter, usually until I have crossed over into the very north side the gay district in walk with my head down at tope speed weaving in and out of the throngs of tourists and head straight for the Elysian Fields.  I always walk down to Elysian Fields, my favorite street by the simple virtue of name and at the end of it on the Lake Pontchartain there is a little bench of rock and wood which overlooks and the lake.  I stop here and make notes about what I see walking, little furious scribbles while watching the afternoon thunderstorms roll across the water.  Its about five miles there and back so I have the entire afternoon occupied.
+Today Lakeshore drive is devoid of traffic, it feel a bit like I would imagine it if one survived a nuclear holocaust —serene, welcoming, dancing, empty. 
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+	 Night feels torn apart by the clutching, broken-china voice of the wheels grinding uphill wailing the ancient Indian woman’s song.  Song of what I am not sure, she speaks, they speak a different language something more primal, more guttural and I can not understand what they mean, but I feel it rattling its way up through my dangling feet, feel it in the vibration of the boxcar floor as it rattles and lurches across the uneven tracks.  My head lists involuntarily, pulled downward by the inescapable gravity of the desert.  Utah is laid bare in moonlight, harsh and forlornly beautiful it lulls the mind, spreads out ones thoughts like the dotted Juniper trees, creosote bushes, and gnarled twisted trunks of the mosquite; vast open tracks of sand and rock inhabit the empty spaces like waves of light in space, they exist but only as a vacuum as a reminder of emptiness.  The moon is full tonight reflecting its pale solar continace across the land in imitation daylight, the mosquite lowlands are beginning to be usurped by once more by grasslands and Junipers of the high desert.
+This train is slow, a plodding freighter loaded with something that is apparently in no great rush to get anywhere, it’s a better ride than the first on I hopped… that one was fast, blinding fast and I suffered from velocity sickness which is my name for the strange restless queasy feeling I had the entire time I was in that car.  This train is slow lazy and I managed to befriend the brakeman; I am not hiding anymore I am not slinking about in the shadows.  I am stretched out on a flatbed; an open car that the brakeman says will be filled with logs at some point through the Rockies.  I haven’t decided yet if I will go that far, in the mean time, because we have to stop a lot for faster trains to pass, the brakeman will wait for me to get coffee and food provided I bring him some which I do without hesitation, I even buy it for him despite his protests.  His name is Joe and originally he was supposed to drive me from the railyard in Flagstaff down to the sheriff’s station where I was to be book on several counts of trespassing, vagrancy (a fancy name for existence, which sadly is illegal in most places), and several others I am not sure of, but I talked him out of it.  We reached a more amicable solution, one of mutual aid; I wanted to ride the rails and Joe wanted someone to talk to on his lonely ride from here to Denver.  So today I sat up with him in the engine room where the whirling lights and strange computer guidance systems dragged us out of the pine forests of Flagstaff and across the windswept high country where for more than five hours we did not see a tree or any shrub save the endless seas of grass dancing like senoritas at the town fiesta.
+Joe hails from the lexicon of true Americanism —individuality.  He is a rustic grisly type of man, the kind that inhabit the backwater towns of the west, ornery you might say, but he is not ornery he is simply inhuman like me.  Which is to say that humanity or ‘syphilization,’ as one misanthropic author referred to it, has no hold on Joe, false modesty, false politeness and false pretense have been shed here like dry useless lizard skin.  Joe hails from somewhere older, livelier and healthier his ancestors are the men who lived beside ponds and didn’t write books, who hold court with the mysteries of the universe and don’t attend church, who know what life has taught them and who have there own ideas about morality, reality and humanity.  Joe represents a rare breed one that should have flourished on this continent, but as in the case with a seed that never gets water, their lot is small and dwindling.
+Joe could well be me in thirty years, he looks about sixty maybe younger but the years he has walked through have taken their toll.  He has a salt and pepper scruff beard and piercing blue eyes; he told me about the war by which I think he meant the second world war; he hates Steven Spielberg, says it wasn’t like that movie at all; he has a wife in Moab and two daughters both married and living back east.  His stories are endless and my patience is too so we drifted, undulating with the sway of the train, his words came out in growling whispers just loud enough to here over the noise of the wheels and the engine, but without yelling or even appearing to raise his voice.  He talked with rhythm of the train, we went around a bend and Joe went in on the beach at Normandy, we started uphill and Joe moved out west after the war, we went through a tunnel and Joe fell silent mid sentence.  That kind of creeped me out, but when we emerged back into the blinding midday sun he started into his courtship and marriage without missing a beat and I learned that for Joe, when you are underground it is best not to talk.
+Lying on my back trying to piece his life together I get lost, lost in the stars.  The moon is to my back but in front down near the horizen the stars are visible, scant few tonight but they are there; the invisble the inky blackness that is between them is the pure white void of space.  It is the void, the spaces in between them, the vast open empty tracks of sky, the darkness that is the platinum setting into which little diamonds, rubies, amethysts, and emeralds are laid… it is there that life exists in between the arbitrary line of reality and phantsmal yawning mouth of imagination.  Look at the stones, the setting, the band, but none of it is so beautiful as the empty space between her finger in which all life hides.  The space that allows it to pass through your hair, to fit your fingers, to stroke your chest, kneed your back and for the space and the space alone you should be grateful.  Grateful that there is emptiness for without there would be nothing.  I am grateful for you, I am grateful to all the spaces in between so that you can ignore them so that you can continue to fill them with jealousy, with fear, without understanding, but do not be afraid everything is okay….
+The night sky was thrown into being by the great god badger who in an effort to steal it from the last world accidentally pulled to hard and it went soaring up over his head where it stuck to the ceiling of life.  No Hopi mythology there, just my educated opinion, just how it looks from here...  But I am not thinking about the sky right now I am just looking at it; I am thinking about the Indian town back on the reservation where I bought us dinner. I bought cornmeal cakes and beans from a wizened old Navaho woman who inhabited an abode hut that glowed orange in the setting sun.  The store was closed but the woman approached me asked if I wanted to buy dinner, I did and she took me to her hut; in the middle there was a fire and a pot of food on it along with too smudge faced Indian girls maybe four or five years old.  They watched me intently in silence with enormous liquid brown eyes that seemed irrigated with understanding far beyond the physical age of their bodies.  As the old woman wrapped the corn cakes and beans in foil I got lost in a strange hobbit-like land where the true secrets of the universe were about to be revealed as beans and corn bread seen through the eyes of a child, it was a pregnant moment.  Then she brought me to by insisting that I take one of her chocolate Jesus statues for desert.  I thought about a Tom Waits’ song, about a minister I knew once who wouldn’t allow his parishioners to sell donuts at church and about the good Jesus himself; what must he think if he really was the son of god and really is watching, what must he think of being molded in wax, filled with chocolate and wrapped in colored foil? 
+I thought that Joe, being a Mormon by conversion might be offended, he struck me as a serious guy when it came to religion, but he just laughed and laughed said “what will they think of next?” or words to the effect and he devoured Christ’s chocolate body.  Finally I thought as I watched Joe eat, someone is enjoying the body of Christ.  And even now I think, in arrogantly retelling history, that if Christ was indeed the son of god he will come down here tonight in fire and brimstone and he will extend a hand out to the two men, the only two men who ever took of his body and ate with lust, with vigor with the true enjoyment of being alive, for if there is one thing undeniable out here it is that we are alive. We may not being doing anything, we may be talking or staring at the passing scenery through the dirty cockpit window or we may be climbing on the roof of a boxcar, but whatever we are doing we fundamentally alive.  I say this because there is no reason for humans to exist out here at all.  We lack the specialization of desert evolution, we are not covered with barbs and spikes, we do not have thick skin which can hold water seemingly indefinitely, we are pulpy fragile creatures we ought to be dead, but somehow we are not and we are more alive because of it, we are aware.  We are here by an act of will —our own.  It takes an act of will to realize that you are alive that is my revelation for tonight.
+I light a cigarette and throw back the sleeping bag, it is September and the night is cool, I throw on my jacket and walk to edge of the car and let my feet dangle off the side.  We are doing about forty I would guess, fast enough to do some serious damage if I fall, but slow enough to study individual plants as they pass by at about ten yards away.  I have never been to Coney island, but for me this is an amusement park the landscape itself is so alien as to remain forever fascinating.  It illuminates a part of my personality that is as esoteric as this desert.  We are picking up speed and heading downhill into the canyon country.  I know this because Joe showed me the maps, pointed out scenic spots when I ought to sleep and when I ought to be awake and amazed, but I like it all.  Sometimes the less scenic things are the more beautiful they become, that quite ineffable sense of beauty which require the careful turning of the eye to detect; such as a trash strew alley that you find yourself staring at after waking up in a gutter behind a bar in SoHo.  Or the way the smog lifts slightly almost imperceptibly off the mountains surrounding Mexico City everyday around seven o’clock.
+Or the way this juniper tree is sitting alone clinging to the side of the canyon wall able to exist in the slightest most overlooked fissure surrounded by a monolith of compressed sandstone which yields nothing, there is only the one tree here.  That this tree could be able to survive is miraculous, but in end explainable, what is not explainable is me, that I should be here, that is should be right here on this train, at this moment, staring at this tree is truly miraculous.  I was not scattered to the wind with thousands of my fellow seeds, I did not lodge in a crevasse, I was not carried by wind, I did not get just the right amount of sunlight and water.  I was planned from the beginning, I nice addition to a nice couple who were themselves nice additions to an already nice town that was part of nice and highly advanced civilization almost at the end of its second thousand years of existence.  All my life is orchestrated by something, pushed and pulled about by forces which can be explained with, goddesses, DNA, evolution, badgers, crows, old women, trister poets, visionary superbeings of alpha centary, but the end conclusion by all humanity it seems is that something is controlling things.  There is no freedom for me, no wind to carry me, no water or soil to nourish and no light by which I can grow.  There is no visible thing gravity that pulls on me, there is nothing tangible about DNA, I live in betseen all mythology sandwiched like a chucalwalla in a sandstone crevasse.  I have learned infinite things, made them finite, knowable.  I have built great castles, great monuments, great societies, great people and torn them all down again to start over.  I have lived a thousand lonely huddled nights from bearskin to tapateries to the silk sheets of Manhattan nights; I have climbed every mountain peak slide down the cree and talus slopes of meeting with pharoahs, Voudans, with moses and god; I have held a billion women lovingly in my arms and give birth to a trillion children through all historyies wombs from Sarah to Satan all filled themselves with my nurishments. but I still do not know who I am or why I am here.  I am Everyone and I am driving myself mad.
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+Today at dawn this is the most beautiful place on earth.  I get up not having slept much, not that that is out of the ordinary these days, balancing myself and reorienting to the sense of movement that has not left my head for almost 36 hours now, I stretch and yawn greedily like an insomniac does.  The sky is green yet, not long till dawn by when I must be in the engine compartment because today the tracks run beside US highway 60 and I can not be seen.  I am secret, I must be hard to find.  My precarious journey over four boxcars to the engine is rewarded with the smell of frying bacon, eggs, coffee and biscuits.  Joe smiles his craggy grin, in the electric lights his teeth are yellowed and stained with coffee and cigarettes, but rather than being grotesque the seem only to add character.
+“I was just going to blow the whistle to let you know that breakfast is served.”  He hands me a cup of coffee.  “Beautiful night wasn’t it?”  Joe seems to now sleep at all.
+“Yes it was,” I mumble as I try to sip the coffee, but it is still too hot.
+“Here….” He hands me a plate full of greasy bacon and eggs with two biscuits perched precariously on either side.  “Let's eat on the roof, we’re not by the road yet.”  The way he says road gets me, his voice has a hatred in it, a bitterness towards this thing the road.  We go up on the roof and eat in silence.  All around us the sky is a color show.  The green begins to fade, replaced by the first crimson rays reflected on the bottoms of the wind carved clouds.  The first direct rays of the sun find me chewing on the last piece of bacon, I close my eyes and we welcome each other across the ninety three million-mile void.
+I open to a squint and turn around, behind us lies the akdjflkd, endless grass and somewhere in the middle the kdjlkadkj; to the north there is the escalanted wilderness, the green river and the largest uninhabited area in north America; to the south and east there is the maze, Canyonlands and Natural bridges National parks, the confluence of the green and Colorado rivers, and somewhere a tiny speck of a town called Moab where we will be putting in for two days to load rock and other assorted things.
+“Quartz and sand mostly, which we’ll be dumping in Denver, but whatever the case I wanted to invite you to my house to have a home cooked meal with my wife and I.  She’s a real looker and great cook too.”  He laughs and nudges me in the ribs.  “She was a beauty queen in high school, she was miss Hoboken and might have been Miss America if she hadn’t decided to give the whole thing up and go to college… course I’m glad she did ‘cause that’s where I got her….”
+I hem and haw non commitally thanking him for the offer, but not agreeing to it just yet.  I head back down to do the dishes and then I splash cold water on my face in the tiny bathroom and study my face in the cracked tarnished little mirror.  Things look good; a little haggard here and there, weathered a bit by the years perhaps, but still young still enthusiastic.  I spot a gray hair sprouting out of my closely cropped scalp, but the skin is still soft and smooth; I need a shave, but that is of no concern out here.  Back on the roof I smoke a cigarette while Joe calls into the Moab station.  After a while he yells up to tell me that the yard will be empty when we arrive, today is Sunday he informs me, and this is Mormon country —nothing happens on Sunday.
+“You know a lot of my friends were pretty hard on me for converting and they was downright pissed when we got hitched in the Tabernacle, but I tell ya… Mormons may have some strange ideas and beliefs but on the whole they are some of the best people I’ve ever met.  Sure it’s a little ridiculous there bible and all what with zebra’s running around here —imagine that! Zebras here!— and I don’t think the ol Mr. Young really carried those gold tablets under his arm, and why god called himself Moroni I have no idea….  But in spite of all that ridiculousness which really is no more ridiculous than the Catholic’s eating wafers of gods body or the Jew’s giving things up for no real reason at all once or twice a year… it all ridiculous when you think about it objectively.  But what I have noticed having a Mormon wife and a lot of Mormon friends is that they build real communities… they are good people at a level that is very basic and seemingly below the more refined religions….  Your average Catholic will walk by the poor bum on the street and give him a nickel or a quarter, but your average Mormon will invite the man to their home for a meal and offer them a shower and of course a little counselling on the true church of God, but when a man’s belly is full and his hair clean he can listen to that sort of nonsense.  I don’t believe a word of it, but I took the vow because it made my wife happy and I would do anything to see that woman smiling….”
+Joe smiled at me and said that I could stay on the roof of the engine so long as he was down below, that way anyone watching would think that I was him.  So I sat up there letting the wind hit me in the face, sunning myself across Utah, land of Mormons —for now.  One day I suspect the Tabernacal will fall, the religion will dwindle and disappear like every other civilization, but for now they reign over god’s last piece of land.  And what a land this is here.  The tracks have climbed back out of the canyon country and we are on the mesa tops cruising at thirty five toward the Big Switch as Joe called it.  The Big Switch is apparently the only non computerized part of the journey where Joe will have to stop the train and get out and actually throw the heavy iron handle to switch us over to the track that heads down to Moab.  Once he drives the train past it he has to stop again and walk back and switch it again so that the next train can pass on by.  It remains manual because most trains do not stop in Moab anymore, most of them pick up a few cars that have been driven up or just don’t even slow at all.
+	It was Dean who pointed out the curve in the tracks behind his mother apartment complex, which he really only did for one reason —so that I could catch a train.  I had never ridden on a train be it hoping a boxcar or buying a ticket.  I didn’t have enough for the ticket that much was certain and I knew that there were some lingering stiff vagrancy laws and such penalties as to keep people from riding for free, but I had never been on a train.  The chief reason that I had never been on a train though was that I had never been near a train.  Never lived near a station or had a track pass through the neighborhood.  As child the best part about going to my grandmother’s house was that in the course of the hour long drive we crossed a train track and occasionally we would even get there just as a train was passing.  Something about them always got to me, the way they roared along, not fast, but roaring a primal movement that harkens back to more primitive days.  You could see the past in them when travel was something worth doing.  Airplanes had power and thrill, but trains have something bigger something all together more massive about them, they do not roar they lumber and lurch they are more human than the smooth sterility of the car or the powerful speed of the plane
+I stare off at the distant looming La Salle Mountians where first frosts are melting in the morning sun, Dean my old friend who set all this in motion, whose life existed as a catalyist for my own just as mine existed as a catalyst for his; so it is with brothers be they of blood or not.  When I think of Dean I think of him as he was a year ago when we touched down in Paris, his hair jet black and greased back in a fashion that was at once greaser and not, he looked as if he were completely at ease in his own skin.  We both had on suits, not expensive once like we wanted, but ones that we handed down or bought at thrist stores, we were highly incongruous with the international image of what an American ought to be.  Or I think of a photograph I took at the Little Knight so many years ago or was that only months?	Dean is in the a pinstriped suit, carefully greased hairline pure black and illuminating his face framing it in the luminesnce of empty space, the eyes are laughing, but the lips barely curl, womething intangible is lurking under the skin and bones.  Another from the same night caught Dean unawares as he leaned against the wall and watched the crowd.  His arm is blurred lifting the everpresent cigarette to his lips and all around his swirling women’s hair and exited arm waving men fade into a faceless blur, in the middle there is Dean, standing still like the hummingbird.
+Dean is right now probably just getting off the internet where he was undoubtedly chatting with bilixa66 the girl whom he is in love with, but tries to deny it.  Right now his weary bones are preparing for rest and I am gliding along through Elysian fields.  So it goes.  Everyone everywhere is doing something different than me right now, I know this because I am alone.  I am playing mental solitare then infinite game which doesn’t pay anymind to rulles like time or space.  Time is an inconsequential and inconvenian human invention which the traveler learns to disregard and ignore.  There are two games going on one is the time game in which all society and interaction with humanity, ones culture, ones beliefs, once hopes and goals all thing bounded by time, in the other game there is the infinte self which has no time no dreams, no humanity, no space no thing.  It is the seemless interaction of the two that create what we formally call the ego, the self, the thing that is perceivable, identifiable, and recognizable.  One can see or be seen depending on which game you want to play.  The train is slowing, the turn off to Moab is nearing, from the Big Switch it is only about half an hour down into the canyon carved long ago by the green river.  I am wandering back to my flatbed to gather up my things and hide out in the cabin of the engine; I am thinking about how to ditch Joe without offending him, I need to get off the train andout into the desert, Everything is falling away like great sheets of burn skin sliding off the greasy shiny red flesh that lies beneath the surface.  That was how it went this morning.
+
+
+
+It was four in the afternoon when I said goodbye to Joe and headed off down Moab’s main drag toward the mountaineering shop to see about a ride up into canyonlands.  I left it open with Joe so that if the urge struck to go back to the train into denver I could, but I was intent only on getting to Canyonlands for now.  One thing at a time, evverything one at a time, nothing in pieces everything all at once fell to pieces.  I got a ride from two hippies rock climbers clad in the fashion of the earth first and other environemtnal activitists who share aside from a love of the wilderness apparently the same love of Kakhi’s, Tevas, Tofu and flat tasteless foodstuffs that originate in the same facotires that make oreos.  Funny folks the country culture these days, like ldemocrats and republicans they are differential from there enemies primarily by custom and fashion.  The radical tree camping, pottery making, hemp weaving, Dave Foreman worshipping, mushroom eating, toms of maine consuming hippie-enviromental-social consciousness raising-guitar playing radical of the outback is no different than the BMW driving, Starbucks drinking, software writing, technology worshipping, juice drinking, spa loving, health club hopping, slandes wearing dog walking, family rasing white picket fence building, church attending drug abstaining yuppie eviel consumer destroying the world capitalist pig set that the so-called radical crowd hates with such superior disdaim.  One uses Tom’s of Maine and the other crest, beyond that they are the same.  My hippie climber friends bought trail mix and candles at the super market while I opted for steak, beans and potatos with a bag of chemically enhanced brickets that would light from my cigarette butt.  Its all a matter of taste.  I requested paper bags and rolled them up so they wouldn’t abandon me for not being one of there own.  I rode in the back of there bus which turned the hourlong drive from Moab to the Est entrance of Canyonlands into a three hour long crawl.  As we switchbacked up the canyon walls to the top of the Mesa country Dave and Tom grilled me on my beliefs, they were both college student on a semester long vacation so I could forgive them for still being tangeled up in ideas but it wore on me after a while.  They were astonished that I did not vote, that I never had, but was not disillusioned with the political system, I just don’t give shit one way or the other.
+“Man if you don’t vote you give up your say in what goes on in the world man, come on how are we going to change things if everybody has that attitude?  Why are you going to be giving up your power to change things man?  Some people would die for a chance to vote…?”
+Its better those people go right a head and die I am think but aloud I try to formulate something less offensive to their tender idealist hearts.  “Perhaps Tom I don’t want to change anything… perhaps I coulld if a itried, but what if I don’t want too?”
+I figured to let them do the talking and they did all the way across the grasslands right on into the campground, I learned the Toms of Maine was better because it was natural, Teva was better because it did not use child slave labor and that one acre of farmland can support a faimly of ten with vegetables of two hamburgers worth of cow if it is grazed.  I don’t personally give a shit either way.  Is fast as I could I said my thanks to the Dave and Tom and wandered down the road to an open campsite where I proceeded to build a fire in the light of the fading sun with its crimson glow licking across the thunderheads to my back.  It was the still about eighty degrees and I was sweating in the heat of the fire, but I wanted a steak.  I was staring at the sizzling fat dripping from the enormous side of beef I had bought thinking of a woman I had never seen staring at a well in the French countryside.  I felt an effluence of enthusiasm; the taproot broke through dry soil and was swamped by underground water.  The sizzled meat melted down to the flavor of sweet salt, the mixture of spices and blood.  My plate was stained a greasy pink Moroccan-color with each carving slice of the knife and the potato swam about in the bloody grease tailing is own gooey mixture of butter and pulverized potato flesh like a tanker ship leaking crude oil in the pristine sanctity of the ocean.
+I was fucking famished.  With the tired wise-consumer guru advise I had endured all the way up the mountain made the dripping animal fat like a tonic elixer cleansing my artieries of stale plache of idealism realism. Nothing is ever seems so real as fiction.  The world I exist in is finite, bounded and ruled by certain inescapable laws, here a house, there a job, and everywhere by the transient people and events that make up so called life.  Existence takes place in the world of not I’s, the mysterious other, but that is not where I do my living. Nor does any one else.  We live in the spaces in between the temporal world, the infinitude of the imagination, next to which our terrestrial existence looks flat and tasteless as a junkyard tire cracked and torn in the sun.  In these moments where the internal merges flawlessly with the external I go roaring back through memories of childhood, of selves that I was truly, but am no longer today, through all the marauding personalities which have governed this thing called I.  Pregnant moments are these, usually catching me unawares and throwing down a track of thought I had not expected; moments when the light of the sun breaks through the sullen clouds of an afternoon thunderstorm and hits the steeple of an old church just as you come up over a crest in the road.  It smacks you in the face when you perceive something in a moment that you know is not tangibly present and yet it is real, the fluid transmission of emotion that can be tasted on the back of your tongue as well as felt beaming into your chest.  The hurricane of the unconscious whirls up to the surface for moment, the imagination leaks into the real world.  You catch it when she stirs at night and tosses her hair so that so that it falls across you face with the delicate odor of peach blossoms and perfume mixed with the earthiness of her organic body, fecund and warm.  You hear it when the crescendo of thundering drums climbs up out of the ninth symphony and lodges in the back of your brain sending chills down your spine.  Some interaction of the personal with the infinite, a stabbing at perfection transcends the ordinary moment.  Every one of us has moments of transformation when we feel if only for a mere second, that something larger than the present is in the room, the sky or the music.  The world gives birth before our eyes and takes us spinning down reveries and private waterslides of imagination through the twisting spiral corkscrew of imagination.  How long must ancient man have wondered where do these thoughts come from?  What am I to do with them?
+Looking backwards with clever red sunglasses I could trace the history for you; the first thing the human species got out of these encounters was a loose clumsy word: spirituality.  One day caveman Thak felt with authority that there was something beyond the simple organic, fertile, pussing matter of his body, there must be a realm august to this temporal one.  Thak ruminated over this for time and finally invented language in order to describe how he felt to other prehensile monkeys.  With language Thak separated us from the entire animal kingdom.  Not by virtue of communication, for any one who has ever observed even the simplest of animals knows that they communicate, but rather what Thak gave us was a means of creating memories —severing us from time.  Out of memory came dissention as other monkeys did not buy into Thak’s explanations and as time moved on and more voices from more and more places were heard and the general became divided and localized.  Those that believed one explanation tended to associate with only those that agreed with them, they had their  “gods” and they were the only gods, the contrarians on the other side of the proverbial river lacked THE TRUTH.  Not much changed from then until now, there are more gods and even less comprehension of the godliness, but other than that we still behave in much the same manner as our ancient ancestors, some would same we have actually gotten worse not better.
+And all of this reasoning has not in anyway helped us to understand that initial question —where are thoughts coming from?  All the philosophizing rants of all the arrogant monkeys can not answer the simplest of questions: who am I ?  Where is this vitality teeming from?  What is emotion? What the hell is really going on down here? Why?  Why can one person be moved to tears by a quartet and another put to sleep?
+Much of the wonder and amazement that greeted our forebear’s is lost for us.  We have explained it away, dissected, mapped, catalogued, and miniaturized it.  Unable to comprehend the universe we carefully construct a replication that can be understood and ignore all the rest saying in essence that anything not comprehensible to the human mind does not exist.  But it does and she knows what I am thinking before I say it and the light continues to pour through the clouds onto steeples, rocky pinnacles and the back porch of an antique house in the south where I am forced once more to stand face to face with the unknowable.  Miniaturization is for small minds I say.  Science is the culprit here they wrecked the whole show shrank it down and claimed to understand how it all worked.  I hope they all choke on those miniaturized hors' dorve corns or get mauled by a tiny, shrunken Doberman pincer.  It would give them back the humility they have tried to shed.
+For a long time this miniature world was all I could see and it threw me into a depression every time it crossed my mind, but I studied it with great enthusiasm because I was looking for way out of it.  The more I looked at all the evidence the farther I felt from the truth.  The truth is that sometimes the light is magic and being able to explain why it has the tones and hues, how the electrons spin, says nothing about the experience of it.  What good is knowing without feeling?  Those moments when I am confronted with the essential mysteries of my life and perhaps even yours, all of ours, all life, are not something that can be taken apart.  I can not break it down, understand the smaller bits individually and then hope they add up to the same thing I started with. 
+If we stop taking apart things for a minute and just breathe in slowly one breath at a time it will flood the hatches and bouyantly draw us up to the surface of things.  It is time we stopped this nonsense of science and floated our way back up to the surface of the pond.  Time to start over, to assimilate rather than dissect, to feel rather than know, to live rather than abstract….
+But back to our brief history of LOVE…
+Unfortunately by the time you and I got on the scene it resembled uncooked spaghetti, thin strands of information imparted over the years, scattered clumsily about the kitchen, there is no pot, no water, nothing to cook it with just dry hard idea that crunches when you bite into it and sticks between your teeth long after.  We externalized the internal, brought all out, the good with the bad, so that we could take it apart and understand it.  We live amid the rubble of Decarte and the mechanized universe.  We dissect, we want answers, but we ask questions that can’t be answered by the narrow methods of research that are considered valid.  Joseph Kellar ought to be our patron saint, to preside over every convening moment to remind us that we are looking for our tail while it is in our mouths, right below our noses where we can’t see it… we can taste it though and it drives us with even greater fury, mouths watering and ravenous fangs dripping the saliva of untold desire.  But we want to see it with these eyes, these imperfect eyes that we know are not even used for seeing.  We want answers to appear, to be made real.  We want Christ to appear, we want spacemen to appear, we want something to appear, but we are not by god going to accept anything that we haven’t had tested up and down with all the rigorous insanity of a mathematician trying to write out equations for her emotions.  
+What is science doing if not that?  Making the world better?  For whom?  Scientsists?  I don’t want to live in a Cartesian nightmare where history is mechanically plodding along with the cold calculated precision of a steam engine.  No many people do, consciously speaking and so came religions, sects, and politics… but none of that comes close to pulling the sense of wonder that science threw out the window.  None of it brings back the endless nature of grainy experience.  Have become more enthralled with the human created side of life and in doing so sacrafized the intertwining of the individual with the universal.  We have found a distraction which eases the anxiety that unanswered questions provoked in us —our selves.  Don’t think the church/state/priest/politician/scientist/special action committee on the overexertion of gray matter will take care of it for you.  We wrote a lullaby called god and put ourselves to sleep. Until today we find ourselves at a crossroads in human evolution.
+As we come to understand the ineffable world around us in increasingly greater minutia, we are reaching the end of the external line.  We can measure and measure search and search the world for new discoveries in a world that we once thought was infinite and impossible to wrap our minds around we are in danger of knowing the limits of knowing.
+	The scientific community has been the first to realize that such a day is coming and true to the morbid and yet curious nature of scientists the future is being drawn with great caution and precision.  And yet if one were to delve into the that world with the skepticism of a mystic looking at a computer code one would eventually notice that the experience of science is really not much different in that of the eastern philosophers of millennia past.
+	It is very popular these days to write books about the connections between the physics of indeterminacy and the constant contradictions of the Tao Te Ching.  (One of the best is actually called the Tao of Physics.)   And what has this endless search given us?
+	Nothing.  Nothing more than a system of belief, which in the end says that no system, can describe anything that is outside of the system.  What that fancy phrase means to anyone who is not absolutely enthralled by making things a lot more complicated than they need to be, is that we don’t anything about anything and we never will.
+But Lao-Tzu already said that: The farther you go the less you know.  So what’s the big deal?  What has the “cutting edge of science to report back?  That it can’t describe anything that can’t be measured.  You can’t measure the emotion that light hitting a church steeple evokes, you can’t measure they way you feel propped up in bed watching the sleeping form of the one you love.  You can’t measure them because they are encoded in you, they are uniquely yours and there is no way to translate them to others.
+	Science’s end will be when it achieves what art has been doing for most of recorded history —trying to give the uniqueness of experience a form which allows it to transcend the individual and share it.  Science is but a new language and nothing more.
+Perhaps with virtual reality we will one day be able to exactly encode everything that another has experienced and feed it all into our own nervous system, but the response will still be different.  In order for emotions to be communicated everyone would have to have the exact same history, exact same thoughts, and exact same experience felt be all at once.  Even supposing the absurdity of this to be possible what would be gained?
+	Fuck science; fuck it along with religion, society and culture, fuck them all because they say nothing other than what any two year old could tell you is obvious.  It is obvious because we have all felt it.  All the records of how we felt pall in the face of the question of what?  What is it that sends the chill down our spines, the warmth out of our heart or the goosebumped hair up on our arms? 
+	No one knows and I think that it would be safe bet to assume that as long as we all have different brains we never will.  The technology fanatics will burn themselves up the same way the drug gurus of the sixties did, they will fall prey to the one thing that makes them human —ego.  It killed the belief in god, it killed the belief in the cultural reformers and it will always kill any attempt to transcend because it is the point at which belief originates.
+	Only an egocentric monkey would dream of being able to understand the orbit of the planets let alone they vastness of all existence.  Only a very confused and disoriented creature would throw himself into a corner and examine every little microscopic piece of dirt without first discovering what a monkey was.
+Herman Hess once said that the only job of man was to find the road that led back to himself.  But we being the tragic creatures we are doomed forever to a life lived in melodrama and confusion, seldom do such things.  Seldom do we celebrate love or transcendence.  At our best we celebrate the by-products such as art of music.  At our worst we record those who were farthest from themselves, the emperors kings and queens, generals, bishops, monks, people who led the most perverted and hideous of lives.
+	Very few lovers rattling around in the tomes of recorded history.  Oh to be sure there were lots of them, but we haven’t paid too much attention to them, or to what they knew.  We have created a cult of worship to our egos to the things that we think are so unique about ourselves at the inescapable expense of the things which we have in common.
+	Its built into our culture and if we Americans seem particularly arrogant to the rest of the world it is only because we house the temples in which the worship of the ego if held.  We play host to humanity’s darkest hour, an experiment that has fallen off track and yet it is so ingrained in our minds that it forms an unbroken circle which steadily contracts into smaller and smaller rings the closer we come to the zero hour.
+	We will do anything to draw the attention away from ourselves and as Freud hinted and Reich out right said we do it by manifesting our fear into the real world.  The only things that happen are ones that someone wants to happen.  The problem is that none of us really know for sure what we want.  The subconscious mind is in the act of creating… always and forever…. It is creating even the conscious mind.  Everything that you think you are is dream that some other part of your brain is having; to explain this we had to invent something called chaos which says that you are, in mathmatical terms living in an endless noisy feedback loop called non-causality and non causality is merely causality that is too complicated to trace, but there is a cause nonetheless.
+	Their will always be a cause without it the world could not exist, without a beginning then there can be know end and we all know there is an end, an end to ourselves and from all appearances an end to the whole damn show.  The end has in fact already happened because time like everything in the universe is something that someone wanted to exist.
+	Where does this terrible looping logic take us?  Right back where we started.  It’s a loop remember —really nothing to marvel at.  You can travel the whole distance or just stay where you are and let it come back around.  In the end even those are no different.  So here we are again, perhaps there it is another person next to me in bed when I watch them sleep, perhaps it is a techno song that sends the chills down my spine, and perhaps the next time the sun breaks through the clouds it will be illuminating a mountain instead of a church.	
+	At the end of the line the breakdown of the word I realized there was no hope for communication to take place I was too isolated in experience to hope to relate it to anyone other than myself.  I was not close enough to anyone so close was I to god. It is not near the bottom in the sewers of cities that humanities hope lies but out here in the great heights, closer to god and only then to we seem so much alike.  Only next to god are all the political games that divide men stripped away out here you arrive naked and proud.  Only then do you see every man as your ally every woman your love, only scorched clean of the petty differences of race, creed, color of skin do we draw together huddled in fear of insanity which we ourselves have wrought upon each other.  No hope for a cure is on earth, no hope save death.  No cure but death and then Quien Sabe?
+With the bleakness of snow and the blanketed certainty of disillusionment I cast off all doubts.   I was ready.  Ready for what I did not know —a thousand faces before the day is half over passing like the jerky photomontages of Man Ray.  Each pair of eyes radiant unto itself delicately in the corners of a stray glance I caught the recognition of understanding though only tragedy brings them any closer.  Forged and smelt in the dry heat of rock furnaces here the charnel ovens brew alchemal liquid souls and fuse combinations of liquor and lips, souls to the experiment of which we are all part.
+	The medieval alchemists searched in the stone, the modern physicist searches the heavens, and perhaps the future shaman will try to fuse man with machine.  All have missed the most obvious of truths with the dedication to illusion that had carried the Catholic Church on its back for so long.  We want ourselves to so make or form each other into the god that we were fashioned after that we forget that such is already true.  The wisdoms of heaven are in the DNA strand yes, but what are we to do with them?  Copper may be turned to steel, but what are we to do with it?  Everything may be taken apart and put back together differently, but what will have changed?
+	She waited by a fountain in a park just outside of Paris where I have never been.  I watched her sit silently for hours staring at nothing or so it looked to me her eyes were fixed on the pump handle of the well.  She sat motionless and never without the quite smile of a woman in rapture, a woman in the private mysterious world of orgasm.  I see it on the face of the ones I have loved in that indeterminable second after where everything is.
+	Which brings you right back to the steak, but now there was a woman or there was the sheading of a woman, an inescapable need to be at once masculine and feminine, cunt and cock, both sides of the coin as it were, but tonight the blood of the cow is burning away the feminine scorching it like so many glowing crimson embers that glow and warm, but which fade in the spectacular face of flame.  Meat sizzling over a campfire gets rid of girlfriends and wives, gets rid of lots of entrapments, like a cure for the plague.  It’s a proven fact.  
+With the final rays of sun went the final heat; as the gentle coolness of night settled in the humidity of the rain began to evaporate and the desert returned to it’s dry self again.  Eating the salty and sweet steak with a baked potato and a pot of baked beans I wandered off on a walk.  At first it was just my mind bouncing lightly among the juniper trees that were behind my campsite, but then when the food was gone, my body grabbed me a beer and a pack of cigarettes and carried me down to the edge of the canyon.  I sat with my legs dangling off a rock that was perched on the rim and extended out into space.  All around me there was nothing but air and under me only a brief moment of rock and then more timelessness we called air.
+	We call it air.  But it used to be called ether, before that it was liquid, now it’s mostly dirt in some places.  Here it is air.  
+I thought about Dante, about God, about steak and about women.  It was beautiful just to be alive and to able to think.  I thought about that for along time.  There came an utter silence in which I watched myself think in the way that you might listen to another talk.  It detached but remained aware that it must return back and live with those thoughts that it could only then recognize.  It was a spiraling double helix of a logic that corkscrewed all about my mind drilling little holes hear and there opening wine thoughts and pouring glasses for the self that continues to stream in the door.  It was to watch a feast of thoughts or personalities come together for one sort time and dine like old friends.  A reunion to catch-up on where each had been what had happened and what they had done.  It turned to a smorgasbord of philosophy and love and there was endless debate, dissention and rising voices.  A circus dine roared around the room slap happy train car attendants moved about taking ticket and slapping the men in the faces for not having the right change.
+And then the wave crested at cacophony and confusion and broke leaving only silence in the room.  Silence that carried on its back a poignant nostalgia for the past and a calm understanding of the future.  I touched for a moment the void that Buddha preached, the nothingness into which you must cast yourself if you wish to understand.  Riddles that seemed ridiculous to me before where solved with simplest of maneuvers truth gleamed with the caustic light of florescent light posts on an asphalt road.  In the blinking blank look of the deer just before impact is the look of understanding the look of recognition that it is all nothing.  No thing.  What do I want out of this life?  Nothing.  Nothing at all.
+I understood with sharp focus the difference between understanding how something works and understand what it is.   I came to see that even the void of understanding was not the end but only a means to something else which would also be yet another means until the final thought was had and the conversation between self and the other ceases forever and weds them together.   
+And the two shall be joined as one.  I have acted that out with others; I have joined souls with several men and women in my life but I had never had the sensation of meeting myself on that plane until that moment.  A net was cast over the side of the ship and the wheel turned starboard to trawl a giant net through the waters of the past which played out in slide show fashion, a game show in which I had to meet myself
+	Endless images of my own arrogance played themselves onto the back of my closed eyelids like a cinema of embarrassment and I went to myself, as stranger might go, out of pity, to reach down a hand and help myself up.  All love flowed through me and made everything hyperreal and tactile as if thoughts were the rock and the trees and the silence was the minds way of answering the endless question of the universe.   The transitory nature of my own existence was illuminated and I was washed with feeling of warm and celebration of the embarrassment and I felt the sheer hilarious joy of my own folly fall along side the folly of all those I have ever know and ever will know, a giant heaping ball of laughter.  Coiled up tight like yarn and batted about by the kitten of the universe the ball dances nightly behind the moon, all our selves playing as children endlessly.  A cat.  A cat in the hat.  The trick top hat.
+	As the moon rose up from the east I watched in silence as my life unfolded behind my eyes I watched memories I had no conscious knowledge of the way a father watches his sun playing in the yard.  They started off recent memories of Amy, of Dean, of Ed, of moments shared with each and then it kept racing backward to college classes, high school girlfriends, playground friends….  Until I went back in utero to a point of no consciousness at all and then other stories unfolded as if out of some kind of genetic memory.  I saw the light of the fifteen-century break through the night hitting church spires and scorching the brass coffers of foreign temples.  Wild and uncharted regions played out scenes from Arabian Nights with silken tapestries women’s arms entwined with gold bands; and then sagas of Templars, all the wisdom seekers of the fertile crescent and the girl in France by the well came up near the end like a phantom as if to introduce herself but only disappeared again into a background of Egyptian palaces and the fragrance of silk and spices from the orient.  There was a warm glow of light in the room that slowly as the eyes adjusted revealed itself as a temple of splendors.  The walls were adorned with rugs and woven tapestries in designs that acted out the living myths of the sun gods.  The floor was blanketed in pillows and a sweet incense smoke floated in wafts of Jasmine and myrrh; in the center of the room slightly elevated on steps was an alter upon which a beautiful and naked goddess lay, a statue, an answer, a testament to any question that you might ask.  She was a goddess and in her silence I swam the thalassic of sorrow and joy in placid caressing waters that even now three years later come back with absolute lucidity as if I were returning to the vision at will just by writing it again.
+	And then the moment itself swelled beyond its proportions and burst leaving me only in awe of it, but dancing on to new lines, new tap roots burrowing intensity turned up by the alchemal union of soul and steak, god and potato, desert and breast, me and my self.  The minute I became conscious of the fact that I was having a thought all sense of it was lost.  I saw in this the futility of my own quest to know.  I saw the source of my unhappiness that I could not live here now but only came looking and in being so overwhelmed with consciousness of myself I lost myself.  Everything was laid unequivocally bare to the opulent austerity of the truth the contradiction when contradiction finally fades and all things are true and not true all at the same moment.  A place indescribable, incommunicable precisely because it exists below the refinement of words.  It is too raw to be said or explained it must be devoured with the intensity of an animal ripping at its prey
+	I felt it for what seemed like an eternity.  I remember coming back to fire in dazed kind of trance like state that held me like a loved one returned from a long voyage at see.  My spine trembled and doubt slowly crept in.  What if this stops?  I want to feel this always to live in this mindscape whole world be damned and with these thoughts so went the vision.
+	I awoke feeling an eternal peace settled into my chest and the words of Terence McKenna came to my mind.  “If you have seen the end you take your place in the drama and you live without anxiety.”  I don’t know what he meant by those words what space he went to what he felt, but they mean something to me.  They mean something as if I myself had said them.  I did not see an end or anything so literal as that at best I can saw that I felt everything as it really was beautiful and unbounded and I felt the release of anxiety that he attempts to approximate with words.
+	I made breakfast in the morning heat.  The desert was waking up and it wouldn’t be long before I could have cooked the eggs right on the rocks.  I drank the last beer to wash down the eggs and I asked around the campground for a ride back into Moab finally at the last sight right by the entrance I found a young couple who let me ride in the camper shell of their truck crouched between my gear and theirs, it was a long bumpy ride into Moab, but I didn’t have to suffer lectures on political duties.  Instead I thought about Joe, he was expecting me at the yard around five which gave me a hour to kill in Moab.  The bulk of the hour I spent trying to figure out why some people meet someone and they share there live and other meet people they share there ideas.  I like to think that my life is an idea and every idea a life, but then again I have a fondness for wordplay, deceit, double entandre. delibrete acting and outright lying when it comes to talking to strangers.  I just try to stay one step ahead of my brain as if I were writing myself into existence all the time.  My life changes as fluidly as the writer traces his pen. 
diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/notes from a lounge trial.txt b/veryold/very old writings/notes from a lounge trial.txt
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+	The characters in the following are real; they are not paid actors. They have agreed to waive their legal rights to settle their case here in the Reader’s Court.
+
+The Lounge is a poorly lit affair with black upholstery trimmed in dark mohangy, thick wooden double doors seal out the light of day and only to wall lamps behind the bar illuminate the scene. Two women stand in the entryway adjusting their eyes to darkness. Eventually they head over to the bar and pull out two stools. April is in her late forties, red hair and thick skin that has weathered more than it’s share of troubles. She is attractive but pales next to the girl with her who is likely still a teenager and possibly an aspiring model or actress, either way she looks the part. In her mind words like ‘why’ keep running over and over on a loop. The defense attorney is tending bar and the judge is an old woman with a voicebox sitting in the corner both croaking for more gin and tonic. Around the corner in the back room there are four enormous cockroaches playing pool in the dark and talking in unintelligible chirps and squeaks.
+They have been over this same ground several times, it is beginning to irritate her, no she checks herself, not beginning to, it is irritating her. She tries to force him out of her mind. 
+The defense objects but is overruled.
+	“Gimlet martini please, and could you use fresh limes? Thank you.” She sets her bag on the stool next to her, takes out her phone lays it on the bar and turns to look at April. The girl is not the type to have a drink at eleven in the morning on your average day, but today is not your average day. No today is trial day, it didn’t start out that way but then he called an announced he was leaving. She had hung up the phone in tears and said aloud that she needed a drink. April said she knew a place.
+April orders a scotch. 
+	In the grand jury hearing of late night sorrow the charges brought against the defense included emotional abandonment, weakness, lack of love and acting crazy. The girls contention is that the defendant, after two years of long distance relationship suddenly picked up and moved a thousand miles to be with her and then promptly got depressed and has decided to leave. The charge of crazy has been amended to inconsistent behavior. Earlier the girl’s lover had introduced a motion for dismissal on the grounds of temporary insanity, but much to the surprise of this reporter, the motion was denied. 
+	“It’s a bad sign when you have to have a drink before you can deal with the person you’re supposed to love, isn’t it?” 
+	“Uhm, yes dear, actually it’s a sign you already ignored some bad signs.” April takes a belt of scotch and sighs heavily.
+	“But I love him… at least I love who I thought he was, but ever since he moved to the city and got depressed it like I don’t even know him… now I feel like every time I think of him there is this burden on my shoulders… he’s become something I have to deal with…” The girls voice alternates between confusion and bitterness.
+	“You say he’s having a nervous breakdown?” April swirls the scotch in her highball glass watching the syrup trickle back down the sides.
+	“He says he’s having a nervous breakdown, I don’t know… I try to sympathize with him because I’ve been there; I had a nervous breakdown several years ago and couldn’t get out of bed for a month, but I got over it. I dealt with it and I moved on. I don’t know if I can stand by and watch him go through that, it hurts too much and it’s not where I am in life right now. Is that cruel? Am I being insensitive?”
+	“Darling you have to watch out for yourself, you have to do what you have to do. I can’t tell you what that is and neither can he.”
+	The defense objects to this inane abstraction on the grounds that always living solely for yourself leaves you bitter and alone. While being your own person is necessary and healthy so is being emotionally supportive to those around you.
+	Motion is overruled. Let’s hear this out.
+	“He doesn’t try to tell me what to do. At least not in any authoritarian kind of way, but he can be terribly passive aggressive at times, like the other night when you and I were out late and I didn’t have chance to call? I got home around midnight and he came down to let me in because we don’t have a buzzer… is there a hug at the door? A kiss? An 'I missed you'? No, but there’s a whole lot of pissed off and where the hell were you?
+	“Oh honey that’s nothing you need to come home to after a twelve hour day…” April shakes her head with a superiority that the defense objects to.
+	Sustained. April will limit herself to the story without resorting to unwarrented haughtiness.
+	“But wait it gets worse. When we get upstairs he tells me ‘he can see,’ he says, ‘that I don’t have time for him’ and he is ‘obviously not a priority’ in my life. And then its right back to the same old shit… he’s sorry, he’s depressed, its not me, he doesn’t know why he just is, he doesn’t know what to do, the city is getting to him, he thinks he should be going…”
+	“Sounds like you need to spend some time apart.”
+	“Well I guess we are if he’s going back down to his place in North Carolina tomorrow.”
+	The Judge asks if the prosecution has considered going with him.
+	“I have a life here, I like it here I’m not going to just pick up and leave for him. I enjoy my life, stressful and hectic though it may be, I believe in what I’m doing and I want to get this company off the ground.”
+	“Good I’m glad you’re happy here.” April smiles at her.
+	“Hold on a minute, I didn’t say I was happy”
+“Okay well I’m glad you like what we’re doing because its only going to get better. And easier. Once we get a space and get settled in things will be much easier. One would like to hope that a year from now we could be working about half as much and have things running smoothly enough that the income would be the same.”
+“My father always said the first year of business is the hardest. Speaking of which I’d like you to meet him, I think the two of you would hit it off.”
+The Judge reminds the prosecution that there is a trial in progress.
+The girls cell phone vibrates and skates across the bar bumping against her martini glass and careening toward the floor. She grabs it at the last second.
+“Its him. He’s going to want to know how to get here, hold on a second… Yes? Hi hon, okay take the F to 14th street come out on the northwest corner and walk to 11th… okay well whatever corner you come out on head downtown, against traffic on 6th and the lounge is between 11th and 10th. Okay we’ll see you in a bit. Yes she’s here. Honey don’t start. Okay I’ll see you in a bit.” She hangs up shaking her head. “He doesn’t even know his way around the city yet and he already hates it.” She is silent for a while and then says, “I want him to be here with me more than anything, but not if he’s miserable, not if he doesn’t want to.”
+The defense would like to introduce exhibit A which is a diagram of my clients previous affairs showing the reasoning behind his decision to leave them and the differences between that and the current situation under review. As you can see in the past my client has no longer had feeling for his partner and done the right thing in terminating the relationship. We further submit that while the defendant loves the prosecution very much he is not emotionally prepared for life in the city. Having recently been living in a small rural town the culture shock combined dissatisfaction with his employment and being unaccustomed to the dark, cold depression of winter my client feels it best if he leave and return at a later date. The defense would like to further point out that as the prosecution has already testified there had been no attempt on her part to meet my client half way. He picked up and left his entire life for her and now that he is asking for a little time to get himself in order the prosecution shows no understanding of his needs.
+Exhibit accepted please proceed.
+“I want him to do whatever he needs to do just like I need to do what I need to do, but I can’t go back to this long distance thing. I can’t keep living for the times we’re together and putting my life on hold the rest of the time. It makes me miserable. I don’t want to be miserable anymore than he does.” The girl takes a gentle sip of her gimlet.
+“Isn’t it supposed to be for better or for worse…” April for once has something intelligent to say.
+“Ya well we’re not married. Neither one of us believes in that sort of thing. I want him to be happy and I want to do what makes me happy and when he leaves of course I’ll cry, it will hurt more than anything in the world and I’ll have to seal off my heart if I’m going to carry on, but if this is what he needs to do then so be it. I just want him to be happy and he is clearly not happy here right now.”
+“So what are you two going to do?” April asks and then in the next breath orders another scotch.
+“What do you mean? I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m going to go on with my life.”
+“Well if he leaves are you going to see other people? I know this guy, I can give you the number, if you just want some sex—I mean good sex—let me know he’s very nice and…
+‘April this isn’t about sex.” The girl looks askance with indignation.
+“Everything is about sex.”
+“Maybe for you.”
+Judge holds April in contempt of court fining her two years off her life. Please light the cigarette…
+“That’s not an issue for me, if I met someone I found interesting I would tell him and he would understand, but that’s not where I’m at right now. The issue is him getting himself together and figuring out what makes him happy because it’s obviously going to take more than just being with me.”
+“I take it he’s not going to work for us anymore?”
+"No it's not his cup of tea. He said to tell you he’s sorry.”
+“He’s sorry? To hell with that I took him on because you recommended him and he’s just going to walk out on that now? He’s sorry. You’re damn right he’s sorry and he’s going to be a lot sorrier when I get done with him.”
+“April please…”
+“No this is none of your affair…”
+The defense would like to at this time submit a list of names of people that April has screwed over in business deals in the past detailing the obligations she has walked out on and people who considered her a friend, but she screwed over for personal gain. The two semis containing the documents are parked out back. The defense would like to further ask why, if April’s name is so tainted that she has to use a different one now, is she suddenly indignant toward my client for doing the very thing that she herself has made a career out of doing?
+“This is outrageous, I will not sit here and be lecture by some backwoods hick half my age. I am a grown woman, I am good at what I do; I have had the misfortune of working with a number of psychopaths in my life and have had to do what the situation necessitated… this is outrageous.”
+The defense rests against April. You may step down.
+“Hold on now if your client wants to continue to have a relationship with the girl and I work with her there will be interaction between your client and myself. Anything he does or says to me will only push her farther away from him.”
+The defense recognizes this situation and thus humbly proffers his greatest apologies and returns all monies received as a good faith measure of his intentions. The ball is in your court April.
+The girl looks at her exasperated, “all right April I can’t deal with this right now, lets just drop it. You and I get along, we’re the ones that have to and for now we’ll leave it at that.”
+Objection your honor the prosecution is trying to stack the deck against my client. 
+Overruled. The prosecution has already expressed her desire to ‘do what she needs to do’ and in this situation I see her point. The defense will bring nothing further against April.
+Damn bitch.
+Excuse me?
+Nothing your honor.
+“I feel bad for giving him the job. I didn’t really want to, but he insisted, he told me he would come up if I could get him work and when I mentioned the design job he said he wanted to do it. He was really excited about it at first, but then he didn’t feel comfortable with it, he felt like he wasn’t any good at it. That’s fine but I wish he wasn’t just picking up and walking out on it. He’s just going to get in his car and drive away…”
+“Maybe you did too much. Didn’t you say that no one could make anyone else happy? Maybe you shouldn’t have done anything?” April has already plowed through her second scotch and spins her glass on the bar waiting for a refill.
+“But then he wouldn’t have come up at all. He asked me to… he begged me to and I asked him over and over, ‘are you sure this is what you want?’ He said yes he said he just wanted to be with me, he said that was all that mattered. Now he’s leaving… I guess I’m not all that mattered—so how am I supposed to feel?’
+The girl pushes her drink away and puts her head in her hands crying. 
+The prosecution rests.
+The Judge retires to her chamber and returns as the girl dries her eyes and orders another drink. The enormous cockroaches slip out unnoticed.
+On the charge of emotional abandonment I find the defendant guilty. On the charge of inconsistent behavior and emotional weakness in the face of adversity I find the defendant guilty. On the charge of lack of love I find the defendant not guilty.
+The defense appeals the decision. 
+Motion is denied. Please advise your client to move on with his life and put this behind him.
+Case dismissed.
+
+Outside in the harsh glare of January sun your faithful reporter will attempt to get a statement from both sides. Miss? Excuse me, Miss? Now the Judge found in your favor on two counts how do you feel about that. 
+“I can’t talk about it, I can’t deal with it right now I’m in too much pain. I think I’m going to have to send my heart on vacation. Excuse me.’
+And there you have it folks. Now here comes the defense attorney. Sir your client was not present for the proceedings why is that?
+My client is an emotional wreck and needs to get his life together.
+And the charges he was found guilt on?
+My client takes full responsibility for his actions and harbors no bitterness toward the prosecution. He would like a second chance but as you heard our motion was denied so my client will move on with his life. Just like you or I, but know this, he looks straight into the camera, nothing in life is easy, people make mistakes and my client deserves the same forgiveness that all of us deserve.
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+I am lying back supported by pillows on a small couch in the back corner of an underground bar.  It is near dawn, in Paris, 1999, I am listening to the radio and staring at walls not yet written by Celine, Miller, and all the dead poets.  There is peace back here in corner where I watch all time pass tranquily by with a freedom indigenous to those who are familiar with the ancient art of noncompliance.  Static chirps of French corporate radio interrupt my musings on art’s finer abstracts.  
+Step aside and let the man go through.  I feel like a featherweight-lead-train, heavy from hash, muscles detached from their control centers, inoperable, trying to struggle out the words for another espresso to wake the gray cells that hang like storm clouds on the edge of my brain.  But my mind floats far out of the monkey body and glides in effortless circles, endlessly, a buzzard soaring on thermals and returning only to rest.  
+I am watching Nina who in her lovable French fashion is totally ignoring me.  Such a sweet girl Nina, my cherub cheeked waitress —she puts up with me long after closing time.  I dream she loves me but I know she merely wants to go home; she certainly doesn't need me here.  I tried to sleep with her once, but her heart wasn't in it.  As a kind off consolation prize she lets me stay late until she is done closing up.
+	Every night I used to slouch my way here for my fix of caffeine and hash, it's a full time job, shoveling coal in the engine —a tired Cartesian metaphor for a duality that is a not duality at all.  Every comparison of two is wrong which is why metaphors and poetry are much closer to the truth of immediate experience than psychology and economics. The mindbody always knows more than either one on it's own.  In a roundabout way I came to know my body by spending too much time in my mind, so much time that the body became automatic and atrophied, and my mind tumbled down off the great vistas.  I learned that there is no body and no mind only mindbody, where one goes so must the other.
+Outside is Paris, in the rain it can be dark and ugly, a city of dreams gone wrong, but it can also be place to hole up take refuge and walk the mindbody through strange and wonderful loops.  Parisians, like New Yorkers, reflect the kind of omniscience of those cities —the experience of them gets lost in words.  It has to be felt, it has to be lived; in that way I start to get the taste of it, that sweet aromatic quality that radiates from a beautiful woman when she catches the eye is here in Paris every bit as real flesh.  Concrete flesh. 
+	Strange French lounge music tumbles in from the French corporate station; it descends from speakers hanging behind the bar, rolling across the room.  French music is an ancient reminder of an inadequacy that has been building up since the last ice age.  Music ripped the fur from the ape body and made up man/woman, gave the creature a sense of wonder and beauty that demanded self-inspection.  Why? Art thou not a self-reflexive monkey?  Back in America we have much dead static signal to occupy the mind, here in Europe, at least for me, the questions of ancient origin retain the primal importance that has been buried so well by the trappings and excrement of Politics, Economy, and Morality. Europe has outgrown such infantile human obsessions; Parisians seem to care only for the herenow.  In a roundabout logic this is why they have better coffee—they have time, as I do, to care about coffee. 
+Lest anyone have a different experience bear in mind that this is but a subjective opinion, a slanted impression like saying a puddle of water reflecting red light has the same appeal as a Picasso.  In America too one can find such places where the primacy of existence has sidestepped the concerns of individual ego and learned to live in the gutters, in the alleys, and in mud puddles of western desert roads.  It can be found anywhere by anyone who is looking for it.  This is why junkies understand better the nature of economy than stock market analysts in sickly air-conditioned rooms, because they need to.  So it is with philosophy, reason, and morality, if you need them they are there if you don’t then they fade into the eyes of beautiful women, the swirl of espresso, the thick rings of hash smoke, or the cubist reflections on an oily puddle of rainwater. 
+This is my nightmare at the end of the century and like some forgotten, wayward evolutionary glitch lying in languid rooms of far off dream cities —Paris, Prague, Peking, Peoria, or St Petersburg— if I stop for instant I might miss something.  That something haunts the empty spaces of my sleep keeps me balanced on thin wires.  I prefer to live herenow and if I must die then I will do it later. There at the final moment you will start to get the real digs. I could worry about a thousand inventions of the primate mind, about the politics of Alpha Primates, about the logic and reason of the rational scientists, about the moral rights and wrongs of thousand man-made gods, but why?
+Beliefs ebb and flow through history and there has been enough chattering insanity of theory upon theory and religion upon religion to explain it all down to the minutest detail.  I wanted to learn it all to make sense of it but somehow for some reason I woke up one day trying to eat the menu, forgetting altogether that it is not really the meal.  I am weary of the acrid taste of paper corroding my mouth, these days I prefer to notice the delicate wisp of hair that hangs off Nina’s ear as she wipes clean the finely polished mahogany tables. Or to watch the curious flickers of shadows from the candle that is the only light in my back corner; to marvel at the designs of the silken pillows supporting my head; to admire the wonderfully chaotic patterns of cigarette smoke that mysteriously dissolve into thin air. I don’t want to know how or why I just want to watch.  For me Paris brings home the guttural realities that are right herenow, whether they are inventions of my mind or another’s has no consequence on their existence.
+ Nowadays, reclined on Persian pillows and swimming in sweet perfumed hash dreams, I do not come here often.  I am due to leave tonight in fact and I am spending this last night with Nina to say goodbye and thank her for her kindness.  Nina with her drooping doe eyes lies down next to me and rests her cheek against mine, tearing me from the wandering peace of inner reflections.  She smiles and whispers, “all done,” her French accent tickling my ear.  We lie like that for a few moments and then with some effort draw ourselves off the couch and up the stairs. Outside on the street I am blinded by the morning sun finally breaking it’s way through the sullen clouds; I light a cigarette and do the same for Nina, we both draw deeply and say our final good-byes.  She heads up rue de Seine; and I strike out for a wandering sort of day, the hash makes me energized and in the mood for a last day of sauntering.
+The streets of Paris, for those that have never had the good fortune to walk them, seem to have been built by someone with a sense of humor; someone who sat back and asked themselves: what would travel be like if we made it deliberately difficult instead of deliberately easy?  The answer is here somewhere in the meandering alleys, bridges, tunnels, and streets that seem designed to get one lost, confused, and disoriented.  Only in such a state do you begin to discover the real Paris. Or to keep the Quantum Psychologists happy, only in such a state will you begin to discover my Paris.  But of course not even then will you find the Paris I see, it is too colored by my own private experiences and intrinsically locked in the patterns of memories that links rivers and buildings from other human outposts.  You have your own filtered lenses through which you color your own worlds beautiful or ugly in their own right.
+My own memories may have filters on them that were shaded and toned by what I brought to them when they happened mixed like oil and water with what I bring to them now.  Take for instance Mexico City: I remember Mexico City in hazy brown discolored way, but it’s not the smog, it’s the nature of memory —the nature of my memory.  The images overlay each other like a photomontage.  I see it in moving pictures: cut to a shot of the subway, sad brown faces and I want to know why they aren't on vacation like me… lay on top of it an image of pyramid excavation digging up and trying to solve the Mayan Caper.  Years ago you would. Understand she was standing right next to me and then...Warm sweet smelling cab and my father says “hey, look a Kentucky fried Chicken” and sure enough I see one.  Americana right in the middle of foreign chaos it threw me into a different world, a sudden realization that life is not ordered like the clockwork metaphors I learned in grade school.  It became in that instant a chaotic kaleidoscope of astonishment and splendor tied forever to an obscure memory of fried chicken.
+I've had quite a time ever since then trying to pick up the pieces of a world that exists in only my subjective phantasmal experience.  I focused up into the sun, and it burned in fantastical visions that existed only for me, leaving me alone and for a long time afraid.  Not fear in the sense that you feel threatened, it is much worse, not conscious, it just lingers in the back of the mind occasionally eliciting a paralysis that would haunt me for a while and then fade again in the face of day to day activities.  
+It’s a fear that leaves you like a woman I saw once stone still and shell shocked, stuck right in the middle of this enormous arch in Canyonlands National Park, Utah.  She just stood there unable to move, feeling the digging hooks of unbridled terror burning into her brain and creating an endless and spellbinding feedback loop that forbids you to move.  It anchors your mind right back in the primate body because you feel it and yet rips you right out of the very fabric of collective reality and propels you into strange land where there is no you.  I watched her sit there unable to help herself, doubtless staring at the two thousand-foot drop off on both sides of her and the meager four foot wide sandstone arch that was holding her there.  She was suspended in mid air, seeing herself for the first time the way we are: naked cold and deathly afraid.
+	But the cab driver just laughed and said, “here in Mexico City there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat, Kentucky Fried Dog, But definitely no Kentucky Fried Chicken.”  He smiled this crooked smile revealing gold caps and over moist gum structure that was so large it seemed to be slowly crawling right down over his teeth.  He then sternly advised in all seriousness against eating there, of course I wouldn't have anyway; he merely gave me a rational reason for that.  And all this was years before I would ever get to India to learn that, first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.
+	But alas I did not have my Mexico City cabby advise to help that woman frozen there on the Arch, in fact I went all the way to the end of the trail (funny I don't remember were it went) and came back and she was still there, frozen for time.  Occasionally I wonder if maybe it would have help to walk by here real quietly and whisper...don't worry there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat or Kentucky Fried Dog, but certainly no Kentucky Fried Chicken.  
+I realize my legs are moving as fast as the random associations of the mind and I am at the Seine without even realizing that that was where I was headed.  I slow a bit and notice the cold again, a glance at the sky reveals the story —gray again—afternoon clouds—another storm.  The winters seem to be getting worse every year, this last storm tore apart Versailles made a mockery of French architecture from what I saw on the headlines.  In fact it seems that weather everywhere is getting more severe, mudslides, floods, droughts, tornadoes.  It’s as if something really big were building up to vent on us.  The Ancients placed great stock in weather and saw storms as harbingers that something was wrong within the tribe. Many of them associated the outside as intimately connected to the inside of the tribe. Educated people (historically that reads white) first scoffed at such notions, but now two thousand years of theories later we have elaborate sciences which are beginning to prove the Gaian Mind hypothesis.  In the end it seems that while the causality may not be as direct as the Shaman once thought; nevertheless all systems of life are interconnected and indeed weather getting worse might be a sign that something else is out of whack.  The question for the philosophers and thinkers is, what?   
+I pause in the middle of a bridge overlooking the Seine.  The bark of the trees which line the streets on either side of the quay are wet from the snow last night —it has already melted in the comparative warmth of the day.  I smoke a cigarette to consider this idea of interconnectedness.  
+Smoking is very bad for you I am told, but I enjoy it nonetheless, I have decided that I smoke because there is something wrong with me.  It’s just that I consider smoking the symptom not the disease itself —in my mind that causes me to enjoy smoking and is equally bad for my mental health.  Until I solve the mind riddle it is no good to try and force the body to do something it doesn’t want to do.  The weather might well be our cigarette the question is what is it on our collective mind that needs fixing? I get up shivering from inactivity and pace the banks watching the river pull at the ice that is slowly beginning to take it over. I wonder if it ever does; I’ve never spent the whole winter in Paris I have no idea if it can freeze solid or not.
+Staring at the Seine brings back tapeloops of Boston -Harvard square- fall; the Charles River slips by without a sound, the streets corral throngs of people— onlookers drunk beyond comprehension of what they were there to look at— they stumble out of bars and lurch through doorways like grenades rolled out on the street.  Inside the Radcliffe boathouse a reserve of surplus energy is released in muscular spasms that pulse in orgasm.  Her breasts pool salt onto my tongue.  And in walks Truman Copote, he looks it over for a minute and then, having taken stock of the affair, proceeds to hand me the rosette stone of Knowledge.  He lit a cigarette, took the stone back, and walked out the boathouse doors.  I taste salt in my mouth every time I call up the memory —endless tape, looping across eons.  
+Icy waters remind me of what the man said —you see the game for what it was —something cold-blooded, reptile, slinking across the room. You think you know the end of it and still you’re sitting on the curb hungry, apathetic, waiting for the gutter water to splash and wake you from the nightmare of history.  You're thinking this isn't me, this can't be me….  
+	Everyone walks with unshakable self-confidence, but not slow enough to remember that they are walking and when they laugh they pretend to be unafraid.  Usually I only realize that I am walking when I trip and stumble and am suddenly reminded that I am walking.  
+I find myself in front a café and remember that I am hungry, cold and tired of walking.  I go in and make my way to the back; it’s an older café the kind Doisneau was always taking pictures of, the kind that belongs to an older Paris, a Paris I don’t know.  The walls look as if they were once whitewashed, but over the years the yellow stain of nicotine has rendered them the color of sun-faded newspapers.  This is a busy café off Rue F Sauton near Notre Dame and it has the hustle and bustle of nothingness that is Paris —millions of people making noise and scurrying about doing, from what I can tell, absolutely nothing.  I order coffee and pastries for a late lunch and sit back smoking with my eyes closed bathed in the swirling sounds of French conversation. I don’t speak much French, enough to order what I want and get directions that I don’t understand. I rely on broken English and the kindness of Parisians most of the time. 
+Like all Americans I am too lazy or arrogant or something to learn much of the language, which is part of the reason they hate us so much.  Of course I understand, after all I am an American and I generally see Americans as primitive beasts, so I can imagine how hideously grotesque we must be to the rest of the world.  I would likely see us as junkyard dogs hoarding the freshest land on the planet and snarling insolently at the global neighborhood behind the façade is only confusion and misunderstanding. When I engage strangers in cafés or on the street I learned to fake a decent Australian accent and pass off the lapses as a result of ‘ beean too long from the riff, mate!”
+One thing I deeply wish the French would reconsider is their pastries, if I had the money I would fly to new York now get a jelly-filled donut and come back for the coffee, but I don’t so I munch on the crusty hard bread and try to pretend the jelly is filling.  Lighting a cigarette I wonder if I'm lost again.  I wonder if I made some horrible mistake?  I wonder if I should have been baptized?  As if being born was a sin?  What kind of pessimist life is that?  Welcome to hell, I guess.  If you want to live in hell be my guest, but no baptism here, I want you to be naked always; I want you to be wild like a gnarled bristlecone pine tree high in the White Mountains.  They have been up there for centuries —living near immortality.  
+I watch a beautiful French girl sitting in front by the door with a motorcycle helmet on her table.  She is wearing a black leather jacket and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes in long measured drags which she exhales in thick rings of smoke that hint at the presence of hash in the tobacco.  She taps her thumb idly on the table as if waiting for someone.  Her hair has the matted look of helmet-head, but the free windblown ends drape over her shoulders and dissolve into the black of her jacket like ravens hopping on the inky black ice of city streets.  She has the mannerisms of a bird, flitting between her cigarette and the espresso, constantly looking out the window behind her.  
+I try to follow her eyes and in trying I am reminded that seeing is far more involved than the lens of the eye. What we see is as dependent on our state of mind as the scene that is before us.  Walking in I was hungry and wanted to eat in peace; I never saw this girl, but now that I am full and relaxed I “see” her —subject becomes subjective.  It makes you wonder what is real and what is not real.  If you study that subject for any length of time you realize that nothing is real, at least in the sense that what you perceive as real is wholly limited to you as an individual.  There is no collective reality; there is no mountain.  But there is.  
+It makes me laugh to notice that a man off to the side near the bar is also staring at the girl by the door, in fact he is going a step further in his observation, he is taking her picture with an enormous cumbersome looking camera.  It’s a large format camera; one of the ones that takes sheets of film which must be changed after each picture; it’s a camera for those with patience.  He must have just taken a picture because he is removing the film and just as he is loading another he catches me staring at him; he smiles and I smile back.  He says something in French that I can’t catch and then, seeing my puzzled look, makes smoking gestures with his hands and points to his camera. I guess he wants my picture so I nod and look away trying not to pose and trying not to look like I am trying not to pose.  I never quite know what to do when cameras a pointed at me, so I act natural (as if that meant something) and smoke a touch more dramatically.  After a while I glance back and he smiles and waves I think I hear a “merci” float over the other voices and I call back “s’il vous plait”
+Other afternoon cafes all distant and cloudy hang on a recall-line to dry like that black and white photograph —maybe Stieglitz, maybe Wesson, maybe Man Ray.  I remember a New York photograph.  Same Dark bruised clouds hanging low on bloody red brick world and yet even in the middle of Manhattan ivy is growing two stories up the wall and blows in the wind making the buildings appear fluid and serpentine.  I recollect sitting outside the café Dante one nearly identical day, although slightly warmer it was still too cold to be outside, but there I am sitting watching the college kids of the East Village smile absently at each other still snug in surrogate wombs.  I was watching one couple in particular they sat a table down from me and I listened to their conversation for a while. It was the last thing I remember about the United States.
+They were both attractive he was probably six three or four with a water polo player’s body, all chest and no legs but no one looks at men’s legs so he could pass for attractive.  I never saw his face but you can imagine it framed by lightly gelled hair that was combed straight back and one of those overly square jaws that probably comes from excessive inbreeding way back in patriarchal old England.  She was beautiful with shiny perfectly straight hair —could have been a Pantene model.  Her eyes were flawless blue diamonds, so clear I avoided them and her skin was ivory smooth and fit her features with a smug certitude that made me wonder if DNA has an ego and occasionally likes to strut its successes.
+That was what I saw at first glance but as they spoke their personalities came into view and their appearance changed until they took on the sickly blanched look of East Coast money, infused with age, death and decay.  Now money is a heavy hand; heavy when you got it, heavier when you don't and these two seemed to have a lot judging by the designer leather jackets and the well groom hair and I could tell from their hands that they hand never held jobs.  Naturally I envied them because I was starving and had only the money for a coffee.  Then I hated them because it's as easy to hate as it is to do anything else.  They ignored me and I hated them even more for it, feeling myself pass through their brains as irrelevant, another domesticated primate sitting at a table, then in New York and now in Paris.  It is also easy to ignore them and hide behind intellectual superiority, experiential superiority, but just as easy for them to hide behind religion, morals, laws, customs, ceremonies, prejudices, and most fatally —truth. Ignore is the root of ignorance and that afternoon I was ready to partake of the great waters of I-don’t-give-a-shit.
+And I did indeed ignore them for the better part of an hour until I over heard her bemoaning the boredom that comes from being rich and having nothing to do.  It was then that I started to want to kill them, but even as the rage built I was struck by another less hostile feeling —pity.  In the end I forgave them, not because their lives were hard in ways different from yours and mine; no I forgave them because they were stupid.  I knew then as I still know now that stupidity is self imposed and I feel sorry for all the strange creatures that spend their youth building mental prisons and then after a set period of learning (sixteen years generally) climb inside their own prisons and throw away the key.  The only thing that makes anyone stupid is the refusal to be free.  Intelligence is not the accumulation of useless trivia in stale universities nor is it the constant theorizing of the abstract intellectuals who know a thousand problems and no solutions.  Intelligence is the ability to adapt the ability to know when to move and when to sit still.  Freedom is a matter of will.  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.  I read that as weighted on the wilt, not the do.  Of course it’s a matter of opinion.
+I wanted to write a letter to these two, to the whole world that created them, to all the stale beliefs of a thousand man-made gods who have poisoned and imprisoned human life with the banal constructs of right/wrong, true/false, black/white, to destroy people —monogamy, monotony, and pagemeny.   A letter they would hear it in their dreamscapes; one that would seep into them like a virus and start to duplicate itself cell by cell until it broke them down, pulled out their stubborn beliefs and washed them in the veritable light of hope.  And they would be able to see their pain and suffering for what it was —a prison built by themselves.  Perhaps they will see it in the white light of nova ovens. Hassan Sabbah the old man of the mountain is at the metaphoric doorstep to take back your ugliness and show it to all the universe until it is gone in the nothingness, the void of no thought…
+But I learned from that cabby in Mexico City you can’t force your reality on people, you can give them the tools —tell them a thousand stories— but if they want to be unhappy they will always find a way.  That is my working definition of stupidity. Intelligence is the will to live; to live is to love.  In this café I don’t see the French equivalent of that college couple; I don’t know why, I don’t care why so long as they are not here.  I came here because the world was speeding up and I needed time to think about that, to figure out how to fit myself into it.  I feel that there are others out their like me I have read books and talked to people around the world who are done with the human game, done with restrictions, self imposed limitations, and death.  We don’t need these things anymore.  I also have read enough to know that people have said these sorts of ideas before in the 1960’s and all the sad dinosaurs of human thought believe that failure will be my end as well.  But perhaps the sixties were for a reason; perhaps we learned something.  Perhaps there is something still going on underground —outside of Time and Newsweek and the rest of the sad primate report sheets.
+ Perhaps we are working in secret; we no longer advertise and compete, we are biding our time, waiting.  Waiting in cafes, underground bars, rave clubs, movie houses, punk bands, and small gatherings; waiting in New York, Paris, Mexico City, Peking, Tokyo, Moscow and a thousand other cities you will never know.  Perhaps we have new metaphors and new tools; perhaps we have a whole new language.  Perhaps those walls of belief you are pounding your head against aren’t really there.
+
+I finished my smoke and headed out the door to catch a taxi.  I have a meeting with a friend in Prague —we’re starting a revolution.  From the cab I watched Notre Dame through the rear window until it disappeared around a corner and I turned and stared ahead momentarily blinded by the headlights of oncoming cars.  First there is Paris, then there is no Paris.  Then there is.
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+	
+	Just out of St. George the rain starts.  Desert thunderstorms rolling eastward in flight of the waning sun.  I came up over a rise in the highway and saw the golden enchanted light of that photographers describe so technically as: magical light.  The hand of god was streaming down from the heavens just as it did two thousand years ago for anyone traveling on donkey to see.  I was drifting from heaven to hell pulled insidiously by a thousand details of life and the one true simplicity that they could not longer cloud over.  It was a timeless moment in which I was not the one moving at seventy five miles an hour through the Utah desert, yet I was watching it unfold before me.  Time rolled out in front of the clouds and I floated in the swirling paint of sand, rock sky and air, dragged, pulled forward by thirst and held back by history.
+Henry turned off the main highway not long after that and drove thirty or so miles into the small town of Moab Utah.  Moab is a speck of dust of the forehead of the desert and little more than a hiccup in the road, but it suited my needs.  I bought a steak, some charcoal, potatoes, eggs and beans, along with beer and cigarettes.  I met some hippies headed into the campgrounds and I bummed a ride off them.  I threw my stuff in the back of their beat up truck and jumped in after it, sharing the space with an overly friendly black lab.  We headed back the same way I had come in with Henry, but this time turned off onto a dirt road and after a few minutes I saw a small sign that read now leaving Canyonlands National Park North.
+From there the road began a thirty-mile climb up the side of the canyon wall east of Moab.  The road was so windy as to limit the size of vehicle that can get up, it clung to the canyon until the top when it crested over and tore right across the desert floor to the edge of another canyon.  From here it was a short drive back up to the campground which was perched like an eagles nest about five hundred yards from the edge of the first drop off. 
+	The Utah Canyon country is like a layered cake it gently slopes off then drops five hundred feet suddenly and then tapers off again for half a mile and then drops again and so on all the way down to the invisible bottom.  Somewhere far below and ahead of where I stood was the confluence of the green and Colorado rivers, the hands that gave the canyons this signature over the geological eons.  Eons which saw the passage of many different types of men with many different beliefs.  Silence has reigned king for far longer than the transitory mind of man could even wrap itself around.
+	I came here because I knew it was here.  No other reason than that, I knew it was here and I needed to see it again
+	I walked in on a party in progress and had to once again face the harsh realities that happen when you have to go in public.  There were conversations and the swirling sound of introductions around me but I didn’t catch any names there was Dean and There was Betty of that much I was certain and for the time being that was the only problem I was occupied with, but then I noticed that they were all staring at me.  How long had I been sitting there silently?  Was their suspisian arroused?  What sort of madness was really at work here?  Was this the twitching of a depraved mind torn up by pills that felt like horse tranquilizer dosages or was this simply where I say my name?  I took a quick scan of their faces and gambled.
+	“Oh, um I’m Sil….” Back to the comforts of silence.  But no I had gauged it right with the paranoia there was Dean looking at me like a shrink bearing down on a stubborn patient intent on finding the source of his madness.
+	I started laughing.  I just couldn’t hold up any longer I looked at the unknown eyes blinking in confusion and then say Betty’s face starting to light up with understanding.
+	“So what did you find?”  They were on to me.  Damn.
+	“What oh it’s just been a long day never hitchhiked before you know…”
+	“Uh huh.  So what did you bring us?”  Damn. Damn! Bearing down like hawk eyeing its prey, this wasn’t fair they didn’t understand where I was, what sort of strange hell I was in, the air felt like pressure bearing down into me crushing me with gravity.  Ought to unload on them get them out here and see what to make of them.  I gave three pills each to Dean and Betty and two each for the other two girls whose names I finally caught as Sabrina and Natalie.  But I was not terribly interested in them for the time being.  Dean and Betty told me about the drive; the ticket Dean had almost gotten just before the mountains and the crazy old woman in the trailer at the gas station that stopped at in some mountain town whose name no one knows anyway.  I listen half-heartedly; I knew there was no hope for retaining anything of substance, but I caught enough so that I would be able to piece it together later in a more comprehensive state of mind.  I watched the pills sweep up on them and the stories slowed and drifted off into silence without ever being resumed.  The other two girls were silent the whole time, looking for all appearances like they were bored out of their thick dizzy skulls, doubtless they had already had to sit through these escapades earlier.
+Dean and betty registered themselves in the hotel of silence and the room took on the uneasy air that rooms get when strangers must share silence.   About forty five minutes into the experience the girls looked on the verge of cracking up, silence is not something that many people can endure for too long, there isn’t a lot of time for rehearsal in this world.  Something is always taking place some commotion from the street, the television, the radio, families, neighbors, noise always noise with which to occupy the mind, but it this room there was nothing, only the occasional gutteral creaks of leather when someone shifted in their seat emmiting a sound a bit like a fart.  Betty broke the leaden air with an “excuse you,”  after one of those noises and this gave Sabrina the opportunity to speak, a go ahead signal from us… yes?  She had decided she had to get home.  I knew that was not a good idea; I thought about mentioning the true force of what the pills were about to do.  I thought of mentioning that from my rudimentary medical knowledge I had discerned from the bottle (and a couple of others which I recognized as used in the treatment of epilepsy), was that the woman had seizures and that this pill was designed to shut down the brain when she felt one coming on.  (I knew it would payoff to read Grey's Anatomy).  I thought of all this and I wanted to explain it all but I couldn’t get it out right away and then she was gone.  Natalie leaned back in the door and sneered some comment to Betty about her having some interesting friends and then disappeared like a cockroach scurrying from the light.
+	“Who is that woman?”  I asked to the now silent room.
+	Betty started laughing and rolled forward holding her face in her hands, “I don’t know, I just don’t know….”
+	Dean filled in the blanks in her story by explaining that they were other friends of Mark’s and that he was at work for the rest of the night.  I looked at them and thought of trying to tell them about what I had done, but I knew that they would pass out on me before I got to the good stuff and likely would never believe it anyway.  Its good to have skeptical friends; it keeps you honest there is an understanding that before belief must come scrutiny with out scrutiny you tend to forget what it was you were doing in the first place.  Did anything really happen at all?  With the right combination of skeptics and hallucinogens you could probably solve all the worlds problem in about half a day, but we tend to believe that such people are raving paranoid lunatics that Ronald Reagan let out of the loony bins when he cut public funding for the mentally ill.  It’s a fine line a very fine line.
+	They dove into coma-like state like the champion drug abusers that they were.  Some people do drugs and then attempt to maintain their cool and act as if they were sober.  These people are deeply confused and must wrestle their way through the most horrid of nightmares when they sleep at night.  When I take drugs and I will say the same for Dean and Betty I like float out of my body and am not really too much concerned anymore with what anyone might think of me for it.  This is the bridge that the politics of drugs can never hope to bridge.  Yes the drug user tends to be apathetic and not a good little godling of Consumption because he is too fucked up to care about such things.  But from the drug users point of view the same is equally true about the lawmaker or drug war soldier; they are so fucked up on a drug called power that they must step into the life of everyone and ram their beliefs down my throat with plunger like a redcoat loading a cannon a few hundred years ago.  It creates a catch twenty two for both parties and the end result will always be one side saying good and the other saying bad and the thing in question could be as important as freedom of choice or as sing-song as potato and potaato.  Good potato bad potato still you have a potato.  Have a potato backed/have one sliced and fried/have a potato for breakfast/have one for lunch/ eat your goddamn potato or blow your fucking head off and send your corpse to a necrophiliac convention at the hotel Dumont in downtown Chicago….
+	I was sore from lying in the truck all day and couldn’t sit still.  After they passed out I went and took a shower and changed clothes.  I tried stretching my joints for a while in the living room but it didn’t help and I headed out for a walk with the vague hope that I might find something to do	I got back to the house after about two hours of wandering, it was just getting a real good pine pitch black somewhere, but in this neighborhood there was only a caustic glow of flood lamps through on asphalt.  Dean and Betty were just getting up and getting handle on things when I got back.  The original plan had been to go out with mark and the two girls when he got off but that evaporated in the face of pills.  I ended up sleeping in a walk-in closet off the bedroom where Dean had been staying.  It was a peaceful sleep, a quiet prelude to chaos.
+
+	The silence of sleep was stolen from me at about ten the next morning by a raging warthog of a woman that I had paid not attention to the night before.  It was Natalie making the racket as I discovered descending the stairs.  Dean was up sitting at the kitchen table with a haggard look on his face that made me glad I had taken the pills earlier and was now free of their effects.  I felt bright and triumphant, I was in a celebratory mood.  I scavenged about for the makings of coffee and finding some I set about brewing up a pot.
+	“Those pills were like a sledgehammer…”
+	“Ya I know, but I had to ride all the way over the Rockies in the back of a pickup with three people’s camping gear and it was driving me nuts so I went a head and took em.  Next thing I knew I was in boulder; I stole the pills and ran off to trade some hippies that’s how I got here.”
+	Dean listened with a cocked head as if to suggest that he was not actually going to buy any such story, but it was the only one I had to sell at the moment, so he accepted it.  We were fierce creatures to behold, Dean and I, if yus happened to run across us before noon it was very likely that you were not going to get in on our good side.  For one thing I see no need to exist before noon, nothing of any significance ever happens in the morning and generally speaking I don’t go to bed until after the sun has risen anyway.  I like my eggs scrambles with loads of bacon on the side and some sort of bread-like substance slathered in butter, but most of all I like it served right when I get up —around one or two.
+	“So whats mark like?”  Dean shrugged and that was all the answer I needed it said he was an alright guy, he had his head in the right place but rarely had to use it, it said he was a johnson and wouldn’t interfere in your life unless you asked him too  Johnsons are a rare breed and one of the best things about them is that you don’t have to know them personally to know them above and beyond the personal, they are folks who can communicate more in silence than most can with a half hour deluge of verbose discriptions and life-long histories.  
+	He’s Betty’s friend you know?  I’m just a spectator… I mean he’s a nice guy, but I figure its very likely I will never see him again so why bother getting to know him?  He seems to feel the same way.  Besides he worked all day yesterday and I passed out before he even got home last night so… ya well there you go.”
+	“Yes there you go…”  We both drifted off into private universes of thought, staring blankly at the coffeemakers monotonous and pathetically slow drip.  I was thinking about Johnson’s, wandering if my definitions were the same as William Burroughs from whom Dean and I has stole the term.  It was a colloquialism and if you recycle language from the past those in the present have no idea what you are talking about, which is a good thing is you constantly find yourself surrounded by strangers with only one or two people who really know you.  It was a silent mysterious language that Dean and I shared; we had spent enough idle evenings doing nothing and mixd them with enough ferrocious adventures to know each others thought as well as our own.  Not that we tended to have the same thoughts which a lot of people who came int contact with us assumed.  Actually Dean and I disagreed on just about everything, but we were both able to see things from the others point of view without having to constantly prove ourselves right.  He believed what he believed and I had my beliefs and we may have shared and compared, contrasted and built upon each others thoughts, but in no way were we the same.
+	I was turning this around in the feeble gray cells trying to wakethem up when I heard Dean groan.
+	“Fuck she’s back…”
+	“Who?”
+	“Natalie.”
+	“Who’s Natalie?”
+	“The beast.”
+	It was then that the beastial creature ricketed into thekitchen like a teetering wounded warthog.  Of course I only see it that way in hindsight at the time there was merely a deep sense of spiritual torture rising up in me, I immediately took her to be the source of the foul locus plague character that fell upon the kitchen with her precense.  Looking back I see only a warthog, there is no other word for her; she was one of those unique people that is ugly inside out and through and through. 
+Just as there are those people that upon meeting I am immediately sure I will be friends with forever, so to are there those people whose immpression of death is so strong that I know I will go to my grave living in fear of there existance.  Not a fear of them per se, but a fear of there personality, that some twist of fate might turn me into a Natalie.  She was one of those people whom nature itself must have been ashamed of, to have created such a vacumm of life and to allow it to continue to spread like a pestulence over the land, it makes the argument against a centient god stronger with every passing day.
+ Natalie was about thirty pounds over weight making her inhabit that no mans land between big boned and good old fashioned fat; it was a land in which wayward creatures that should have been beautiful find them selves, dragged by an unpleasant personality to the doldrums of food.  Nobody really like Natalie as I was to learn from Mark, he detested her but was so amused by her that he never protested anything she did.  The woman was like a bulldozer mooing down everything in its path.  
+	The first words out of her mouth were “who the fuck are you?”
+	There is no space for kindness in the heart of the grotesque they can not afford it; so great is their silent grudge against the world they must constantly reassure themselves that they are on absolute edge, guarded on all sides against a possible attack, an attack which would devastated whatever is left of there chopped liver looking egos.  It is a defense mechanism of a wounded animal to start every interaction with a hostile tone, the milk of human kindness flows only from the udders of self love without that it ferments into hatred and manifests itself through out the body in ugliness and hostility.
+	“I am Sil.”  Simplicity is always the best bet in the face of inbred opposition.
+	“You must be the third one, I think we met last night but you look kind of forgettable, I must have overlooked you”
+	“Yes you must have.”  I’ve always been curious what it is that makes one like Natalie, perhaps it was her parents, perhaps cruel classmates, perhaps its hardwired genetically, but whatever the sourse may be it is never the ones they take it out on.  We the innocent always bear the brunt of the assault against the guilty.
+	“Well how about some coffee?”  It was the demanding tone that got to me, as if I were too assumed that I would have no chance of understanding the clever insults that she dropped like smelly little turds leaking out her loose and defective sphincter, if nothing else you could probably follow their trail through the forest and find her if she ever got lost.  Except that I doubt very much anyone would look for herif she did get lost.
+	“The coffee is not ready yet.”
+	“Well what good are you?”
+	“None to you”
+	It was early in the morning I hadn’t had anything to drink yet and I was not about to match wits with something that I hoped would just go away.  I love a cutting sarcastic argument because I usually win them, but I didn’t have the energy for it this morning and I figured that it was not worth one iota of stress to put this woman in her place.  Besides it was not my house, not my coffee, not my friend, and not my responsibility to make everyone into a nice person.  I had a responsibility to myself; I looked at Dean for a minute as if to say what is this thing?, I looked at hr as she tunneled about in the refridgerator seeking refuge.
+	“I tell you what, you make me kind of queasy and I think coffee on top of that would be a bad idea so why don’t you help yourself to the whole damn pot and I will leave you in peace to enjoy your heartfelt superiorty over the world and wonder why it is that I don’t like you even though I don’t know you… try thinking about…. No, actually I think you should just keep it simple this morning… just trying thinking or better yet try feeling.”
+	I was out the door before I even finished and Dean was right behind me.  We hopped in the trusty toyota and headed off in search of a more serene cup of coffee. We found what we were looking for at circle K on the corner where the clerk did not feel it necessary to ridicule us while we filled our cups which was really all you can ask for in this world..
diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/4.txt b/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/4.txt
new file mode 100644
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+++ b/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/4.txt
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+	It was well past noon by the time we made to back to mark’s house and Betty was sitting on the porch waiting for us.  Most of the houses in the are were your standard eighties tract housing fare, but the street Mark lived on was older probably from the fifties when things were looking rosy and we still got along with each other.  Or at least that’s the impression the architecture of the period gives off, there were no fences on the street and all but a few of the houses had porches.  I could almost picture the old Buick wagons or huge tail-finned Oldsmobile’s lumbering into the one-lane driveways —the kind that were really no more than two narrow stripes of concrete separated by grass— as the husbands came home for a lunch break.  The way Betty was roosting in the shadows gave one the impression that she was the neighborhood gossip sitting on the porch all day observing the comings and goings of the neighborhood.  Perhaps scandalous ministers stopping by a widows house to deliver the good news or a nice boy turned urchin riding home on his bike kicking over trash cans to the disgust of the hardworking fathers that have to clean them up.  Those porch-sitting women would have been remarkable writers if anyone had given them a pen and paper or even a typewriter.  Dean and I used to debate endlessly the fact that it was very likely that many of the best books ever written were read only by their authors, which is what happens when the world of art is forced to subsist within the world of commerce.
+	Apparently in our absence the world of Betty had collided with the world of Natalie and according to Mark who came outside at the sound of Dean’s car, the results were spectacular.  Betty is a big girl and I would not personally want to go needlessly provoking her wrath, but Natalie couldn’t do anything else, it was the nature of her personality and Betty dealt with her swiftly and effectively —She threw her out a screen door.  Betty picked her up and gave her the bum’s rush sending Natalie right through the screen door and down the steps into the driveway.  I deeply wished I could have seen such a spectacular episode of justice, but we had done what Dean and I do best —avoided confrontation.
+The subtle art of non-interference, as the I Ching calls it, is a process by which you train yourself not to partake in the foolish social bickering of tribal monkeys.  That is to say that yes, there is a part of me that would have loved to throw Natalie out a plate-glass window and then jump up and down on her lacerated body until it resembled the gooey mess of pulp that congeals at the bottom of juicer, but to do so (or to do the less violent equivalent with words) would have had every bit as much reciprocal effect on me.  The stress which the human body must endure to work itself up into such a fit of rage is too much effort (in my humble opinion) for a result that is inevitably doomed to failure.  No one ever really learned anything by being bum rushed through a screen door, fun though it might be to serve up a little probity every now and then.
+	This account was my first impression of Mark and it only served to illustrate Dean’s descriptions and highlight the fact that he was effeminately gay which I already knew, but it was nonetheless always a treat to witness when one is usually surrounded by all forms of blatant heterosexual dominance.  Its nice to hear a lisp after spending time in Utah where the only people with lisps usually have a host of other physical handicaps to go along with them.  Gay communities are just that —communities— and they primarily exist within the liberal confines of big cites where they can enjoy, if not a political tour de force, than at least better treatment without the open hostility of hicks.  Of course that isn’t to say that there is no open hostility, just that it is less and more infrequent.
+	I flopped myself into an old rocking chair with soft pillows and a gentle, natural rhythm to it and Dean went inside to take a shower.  Betty was in an exuberant mood from having done something about the Natalie situation and she wanted to go out.  Mark also was talking about a club he wanted to go to; I was all for it, its good to be hit on by gay men every now and then, nice to be the hunted rather than the hunter for a night.  It would massage my ego to be hit on by gay man for the simple reason that any living brute can get a girl, but you have to be above average attractive before a gay man with waste his time on something as potentially volatile as a straight man in a gay bar surrounded by fag hags.  At least that’s what my friend Zach used to tell me and he was the closest I ever came to wanting to be gay myself, I never had sex, never even kissed him, but there was an unspoken tension in the relationship that we both had a healthy respect for.  Amy was horribly threatened by him which amuse the fuck out of me because she was herself bisexual and there is nothing funnier than the irony of hypocrisy.
+	I was lost in my own reflections glaring on the windshield like car headlights streaking through the night when I heard my name.
+	“Hello, anybody home…Sil I was asking you a question?”
+	“Right.  What was the question?”
+	“Right.”  Betty laughed at me; “I was wanting to know if you and Dean wanted to go to Tangz with us?”
+	“Us?”
+	“Ya well at least Mark and I, maybe Sabrina…”
+	I curled my lip at the mention of Sabrina,  “is it absolutely necessary that she be included?”
+	Now Mark was laughing at me, “she’s really nice when she’s not around Natalie, in fact that’s the only reason I tolerate Natalie is so I can hang out with Sabrina.”
+	“Alright whatever… what’s Tangz?  Isn’t that that stuff astronauts drink?”
+	“No that would be tang.”
+	“Right.”
+	Mark obviously didn’t find this routine funny so I dropped it and he launched into a description of the Tangz, which I ignored for the most part, but when he mentioned dollar beers before eight I suggested we leave immediately so I could get good and liquored for five bucks and then spend the rest of the time trying to maintain myself.
+We weren’t hardly inside the door when the first lavascious gay boy was all over Dean and I; we smiled played his games and let him buy us drinks; when we had what we wanted we turned our backs and ignored him.  I learned all this from having female friends and no I don’t think it’s heartless and mercenary.  The man wanted to buy us drinks insisted on it with all the fervor of one who believes that something is going to be exchanged; far be it for me to rain on his little parade. (Contrary to what some men assume this is not a business venture, you do not get anything in return for buying someone a drink.  If that’s your strategy stick to catholic bars where the guilt quotient runs high, because in any other establishment your making a gamble and if you happen to encounter me or may friends it’s a gamble that you will loose).	
+	Not that the buck fifty he spent would have broken us; no things were still riding along well with all three of us flushed out with money, but like everything else we all knew that was bound to change so we tried as best we could to live it up while we could.  Its tricky business the whole money thing, sometimes its there and sometimes its not, unfortunately I have yet to master what it takes to track when its around, where it comes from, how long it’ll be here and when its going to leave… to do that you’d have to care.  And I don’t care.
+	What I was caring about at that particular moment was a blond at the far end of the bar, as a girl in a gay man’s club she stood out like a sore thumb, but she had yet to turn around and look in our direction.  I watched her laughing with her friends who seemed consist of three guys one of whom was in uniform; I was tying to decide if all three were gay or if one was her boyfriend.  It was an act of desperation or maybe of boredom.  Betty and Mark were dancing on the big ballroom floor that occupied the majority of the joint while Dean and I sulked away free drinks in the corner booth of the mezzanine area that constituted the only seating outside of the bar,  There isn’t a whole lot for a straight man to do in a gay bar, but change I reasoned is always good.  Now and then a lisping stranger would approach sometimes trying to be casual, sometimes outright soliciting sex, and try to entice us somewhere or other that we had never heard of.  Needless to say it was not long before the blond turned around and reveled the inconsistency of the gods which bestow some with bodies and others with faces reflecting all their glory, but seldom both in the same lustrous package.  She had the body part down and I was in love with her until she turned around.  Be careful what you wish for they say….  
+	Dean and I were ready for a change of scene, but Betty would hear nothing of the sort.  In fact she merely mocked us for not being able to have good time.  She detailed our own enthusiasms back to us which we had so eloquently arranged several night before and then with that cutting edge that women always have at the ready she sliced and diced us until I started to have believe her that I was indeed the biggest hypocrite on the planet.  At least, I reasoned, I’m good at something.  Undaunted Dean gave Mark the keys to his car and suggested that her and I set out on foot together; Mark told us about another bar up the street which was a singles hang out and apparently the most notorious place in Denver to pick up a good case of the happies —er—herpes, but we wrote that off as a gay mythmaking in the same way the some hetros are won’t pee in a gay bar of fear of contracting “the AIDS” as my friend Jeff used to refer to the Human Imunodeficency Virus, which contrary to popular belief does not always lead to the AIDS.  Dean and I were out the door in a flesh with a rough sketch of where we were headed, but it wasn’t more than a block before we got sidetracked completely off course and found ourselves in a diner booth waiting on hamburgers and swilling cheap beer.	
+
+
+
+
+Drifting lightly over fields of heather through Picasso conversations and dipping over the ridge in full regalia we sailed on to New Orleans.  It was only a blanket sky that stole us through and across Kansas where the soft velvet covers of night is the only way the see.  Kansas was built and designed for darkness, one look at it in the daytime and you know that.  I had my looks a ten when I was dragged at gunpoint by my mother to family reunion in Kansas, it’s flat, it’s hot and it two tone brown and green.  It’s a Cliff note of cyberspace where God just threw down a pile of two by fours called it a house and moved on.  The people are etch-a-sketch nightmares crafted by drunken cartoonist in the back lot of Hollywood cartoon porn set.  
+We did it at night on our backs staring out Dean’s moon roof, the road was straight flat and didn’t require much driver input beyond the sympathetic nervous system.  At night Kansas is a prose poem embryonic sleeping like the grass and birds and whatever else inhabits the blank Formica-like ground.  
+I loved it drifted through endless hazes of abstraction drawn out across continents of thought where I where I wandered through Parisian streets looking for a bit of bread and coffee.  Whorehouses and cafes drifted across the night sky and the passing glare of headlights bounced from the road to the roof of the car and for moment we saw our reflection and then the great looping butterfly conversations began.
+“Did you ever read that piece I sent to you on the vitropy thing you read?”
+“The one with Einstein as con artist ‘buying time for the universe’?”
+“Ya do you remember the other theory that was in it?  The one where I was arguing that in light of Steven Hawking theory nothing can ever be true for more than the time in which you can observe it be true…”
+“How do you know then if you are observing it at the instant it happens unless you are being observed as well?
+“Huh.  Well I don’t know if that would really be answerable, it like saying if a tree falls in the woods…”
+Ya so the answer is no.
+“How do you mean?”
+“I mean it’s in the language.  ‘If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there does it make noise?’, well yes and no I guess because it depends on how you define noise…is noise only what is audible to humans or is noise the movement of air regardless of whether it hits a human ear drum?  In the first case the answer is no the second case the answer is yes and in neither case does it have any bearing whatsoever on anything that we might ever hope to find interesting enough to write down and try to communicate to other people.”
+“You guys talk about the oddest things.”  Betty didn’t say much in Kansas, she was having a kind of culture shock experience coming out of a stable happy marriage into a seething pit of relentlessly narcissistic and self obsessed vipers.  Dean and I could talk about anything we could find arguments and discussions in the simplest and most mundane of points.  We would pick them up like mice and role them around in the dirt until they were ten times our size and the whole thing collapsed under its own weight and we ended up laughing ourselves quiet until we found another one.  We would have been happy to lie on our back and watch the clouds all day so long as we had all the comfort issues of food and the like taken care of and a healthy supply of heroin was running on drip IV and never ran out for all eternity.  But the circumstances of the planet at this stage did not allow for such and idyllic life so we stop up ideas, words, schemes, plans, the unteathered nothingness of thought, and occasionally heroin.
+Dean was my skeptic.  He tended to not believe anything while I believed everything.  We could both shift our polarities around in a dizzying fashion that left observers disoriented and unsure of who exactly we were.  We tended to lapse into that person universe whenever we were bored and Kansas at night provided as much bored as you need to drop down into the fertile crescent of you brain the unconsciousness and drag up Paris where you walked about looking for a girl named Nina and tragic river to watch it all from afar.  Dean tended to anchor things some what for Betty because she was his sister and he felt some need to keep her in touch with reality, his stories had an urgency to them and subtle homer Simpson take on life more bemusement than amusement.  Where as I talked the way Terence Malik made films, in riddles and allegories only we understand.  Some people found it interesting and other arrogant.  The one who thought it arrogant usual slept with me, wanted to be around me constantly and ended up ruining my life; the rest became my friends.  Dean and I never held our arrogance against each other but secretly we both knew we were right and wrong all the time, which was a horribly efficient way of seeing everything from as many angles as possible at all times.  Verbal and emotional esotericness tends to lead to physical chaos.
+But it tends to accelerate things as well.
diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/Sil Waiben Kell Tucker.txt b/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/Sil Waiben Kell Tucker.txt
new file mode 100644
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@@ -0,0 +1,144 @@
+in the beginning 
+was the word	
+	Sil Hawkard always wanted to be rich, filthy fucking rich, because rich people lie around in opium filled rooms and snap there fingers for food and sex and drugs and what else is there in life really?  Fortunately for Sil he was filthy fucking rich and lying around in his own little palace in Mandalay exploring the outer perimeters of sanity by the ingestion of galvanized petroleum vapors.  He was an oil man, though he didn’t start that way. 
+	He sucks on the thin plastic tube, lighting the huca with a bic lighter bearing the insignia of a crucified christ with crown of thorns.  Sil looks at the christ's crown and thinks to himself  -this was not an oil man.  
+	Petroleum it was generally believed was made into smokable drug by the arab's who looking for some potential use for the waste products given off in the refinement process, but this was not strictly true.  In fact petroleum was a rather inaccurate name for what Sil and a good percentage of the world was smoking these days.  It was rather a carbon based opiate smoke made by trapping the opiates in a petroleum vapor and then condencing the vapor into a liquid which was inturn boiled through alcohol and left behind a sticky oil candy goo (hense the name) which would burn for hours slowly releasing it densly packed opiates. It turned ugly grey dirt heroin into the finest high imaginable.
+	Sil hits the huca again and feels his face going numb his head slumps down until his chin is nearly on his chest, he snaps his fingers twice.  Two Arab boys appear and began to dance crooked, spinning patterns devised over centuries of hypnotic oppression which the cockroaches of skid row motels had only recently begun to learn.  Oppression is a drug, it acts equally, though differently, on the oppressed and the oppressor alike.  
+	All things must remain at equilibrium or fall into decay, this is a law of physics, and it is true of all systems mathematical --however if one considers spiritual and emotional systems one must take into account negative entropy.
+	The crooked dance is hypnotic to watch and all consuming to perform.  In India they teach it to snakes, and in the sewers of America cockroaches feasting on the 
+radioactive waste have begun to learn it on their own.  Like terrible creatures from a Kafkian nightmare they sit quitely underground, as we go about our lives, learning the dance passing it on to their children and teaching them how to use it as an evolutionary tool --for all systems are also trying to succeed one another.  One day a properly evolved cockroach will crawl out of a sewer drain just as the head of state is stepping to the podium to address the nation.   He will devour the president raw as the live camera crews feed man's downfall to a nation of viewers even as it happens.  The blood soaked cameramen will never stop filming and the cockroach will scurry to the podium, strain himself to an upright position and address the nation...Behold I am.  He will dance and spin and all will be entranced.   Women will castrate men and men will bludgeon themselves to death with pickaxes until they are suitable for cockroach consumption and life will continue on much as it always has. 
+	The system is independent of its elements, humans are not necessary, cockroaches would uphold the system just as well.  Sil Hawkard’s mind is racing, horrible conspiracies are leaping at him from the walls like ostriches gone mad, heads palpating and seeking some soft cerebellum to penetrate.  The initial paranoia of the petroleum smoke is fading away and Sil falls into a profound haze of self absorption.   The boys continued to dance trance-like as the numbers explode at the edges of his vision.
+
+And the word was with god
+	Sil's story is a rather long and convoluted one and subject to enhancement on his own part, but this much is true:  At the age of twenty one Sil Hawkard discovered that while he vaguely enjoyed torturing the professors at Columbia university, most people in the United State are squares, and Sil, already an avowed anarchist was weary of the materialists whom he felt lacked the imagination and understand to really get it --so to speak.  So he dropped out for a semester and bummed his way around the united states.  In the middle of the Utah desert one night in July he ingested a rather large quantity of 
+psilosilum in the form of mushrooms.  His fascination with with mind manipulation did not began with drugs though, it began much earlier in a high school biology class where he realized the simple truth that the brain is a continuously changing chemical reaction.  Thus if one wanted to escape the pattern of chemical reactions typical of human thought, one ought to change the chemistry of the brain itself.  Sil's mushroom experience was typical of innerspace voyages except for one thing, he became convince that ostriches held the secret to the universe and it was this discovery that led him to Africa.	
+	Sil arrived in africa in nineteen ninety three to find a talking ostrich; instead he found cryptotechnology --or it found him if you work from a Jungian perspective.  He arrived in Angola aboard The Decator a british cargo ship bringing in weapons to fund a counter insurgancy movement to a government disinformation lope which the west was hoping would topple the rather lax dis informationg disinformation system in power --a government that welcomed technological refugees with open arms.  Angola had become a haven for code writers who were not willing to dumb themselves down to the technology standards of the united States and its allies.  Sil was a code breaker so to speak.  He wasn't interested in simple bianary code breaking and writing he was interested in finding the rest of the characters which would form the semantic code to language, but the technology for undertaking such an endevor was in Angola .  He asked around for all of two days when he wsa approached to take a package back to the United States in exchange for ten thousand dollars and a plane ticket anywhere in the world.  Naturally at the end of his funds and having no chance at a grant, he accepted.  Two months later, after deliverying a package to a man named William in Rhode Island, he he made his way Tunisia where an ostrich ahd told him to find a man named Cary Downs.  downs was an excintric billionary obcessed with the occult and interstellar transmission of pure energy.  In this spacetime point most people thought he owned an oil empire, but really it was the floating cities of geodasic domes attached to he oil derricks that people talked about. But Sil didn't know anything about the oil he just wanted a job at Downs' bar in the floating citystate, and the rent free 
+fully adjustable two bedroom geodasic dome that had been offer to him over a casual phone call from New York.  
+	 Sil, like the rest of you, desperately wanted to understand what the hell was going on  and one meeting Downs in person and looking into his eyes he saw for in instant that he (right or wrong) believed that he knew what the hell was going on.  Downs wa of medium hieght and had a rather slight build with a slinky way of walking across a room that most people were immediately put at ease by, Sil on the otherhand stiffened at the sight of him realized that if knowledge is power than this man is far more powerful than most peopl realize.  After a short introduction a hashish pipe was produce and the two relaxed and spoke at length.
+	There are some thing you should understand before you decide you want to stay here, he began.  "This structure is a living labritory and there is no hiearchical structure that dictates what you should do.  You are free.  You may do or not do anything you wish, but you may not tell others what they can and can't do no matter how much you find them annoying backward or incomprehensible.  You will find that even the most "ignorant" mindsets become quite enlightening in this environment.  There is a rather large library at your disposal and a full functioning gourmet restuarant.  You do not need currancy to get anything you want here, but you do need excellant signal reception and frequency adaptors in order to keep from losing your your semantic grasp on spacetime while you're capapulted into spacetimemind."  Downs lit the huca and passed the tube back to Sil, "in order to expand the potential of the human brain I built this city and I have tried the gather all the possible maps of the human brain together into one place and see what they had to gain from each other.  To se what happens, " Downs paused and smiled at Sil, and I like you which is not trrue of everyone here."
+	Sil moved in to a dome apartment furnish in luxurious tapastries and artifacts that ranged from cuniform texts to what appeared to be scrools of tibetian text.  There was a couch of warm dark orange velvet and piles of pillows with scene from the tibet book of 
+the dead and the Kama Sutra.  The mixture of oriental and occidental gave the room a circular feeling which was reinforced by the spereical walls and roof.  Sils head felt heavy and he laid down in the pile pillows and felt the room spin drunkenly.  Don't worry the spinning will fade, your brain is conditioned to judgeperspective on three dimension planes.  Taking away the planer walls it is used to causes distress and disorientation, but it will eventually go away as your brain maps out the new system and eventually you will forget that you live in a circle. 
+	Cary Downs floatilla as he liked to call it consisted of seventy two people ranging from ethnobotists to a fundamentalist Babtist preacher.  All the floatillas food was grown in to large green houses or caught in the waters around it meat was flown in every week by helicopter although only a few people ate it as meat was generally considered by the scientists as an inefficiant means of nurishing the human body, but one of them named Waiben had successfully argued that the body was but one part of the human existance and the appetite and random whims of taste should not be ignored in some asetic quest.  There was also a bar and smoking lounge which was Sil's contribution to the system --as the residents refered to it.  It was a closed system (save the imported meat and alcohol).  Three additional green houses grew THC enhanced marajuana of a strain called alamant which was processed into hash and given out in bulk to the inhabitants also grown was peyote plants, close to twenty varienies of hallucinogenic mushrooms, poppies, coco plants, tabacco plants and several other mind altering herbs and medicines that Sil had never heard of.  
+	The walls gave Sil the impression that the room was colapsing back in on itself, the disorientation and the intensity of hash rendered Sil immobile three days which Cary assured him was normal he suggested that Sil not restrain himself on the drugs, but of course to realize their potential incapatabilities after all he said everything you ever wanted is here  no one is judging you and no one is threatening you so you'd be fool not to let go 
+for once in your life then we'll initiate you into our program .  So Sil spent close to three months playing with the nuero circuitry of his brain.
+
+
+	Sil found himself in a spacetime point called Tucker.  Discipline is an agent's greatest virtue, thinks Agent Tucker to himself as he draws a long and satisfying hit off the oxygen tube.  Behind him Doris Day and her Waxing Loquacious Lesbians play a sultry 60's motown number on a dimly lit stage, and the general atmosphere of the bar takes on a surreal quality.  A good bar is one where the possibilities remain endless regardless of the irrefutable realities.  Agent Tucker is well aware of the realities, but his mind is only now beginning to sense the infinite set of possibilities that comes with every new reality.  For instance when considering the overall picture of life and its universal quotient of suffering it is hard to feel pity for one’s own self.  There is not nearly enough pity in Tucker to cover even his immediate family.  He has no self pity, he considers self pity to be a symptom mental illness because it requires the ego to be divided into pitier and pitied.  He likes his ego together as one in harmony he is quite proud of this justification and it helps to ease his innate sense of self pity and focus his mind on work.  His work is the great work as a the masters would have called it.  He is a Agent of the State.  The State is not to be confused with the government as many of you would assume.  On the contrary the government is but an instrument of the State, the State is a separate entity whose ultimate identity is unknown even to Tucker; he is but an agent of it charged with ceasing the drug trade.  He has for months now been stalking the elusive Sil Hawkard, a man whose identity is also unknown to him, he realizes that Hawkard could well be in this very room right now planning Tucker's demise, the thought sends a cold shiver of fear down his spine and he cringes thinking again like a manta: discipline is an agent’s greatest virtue.  Agent Tucker takes another hit of the oxygen and notices the numbers exploding at the edges of his vision.  Exploding numbers are the smoker's worst fear.  Suddenly seized by the idea that 
+Hawkard may be present, Agent Tucker nervously fingers his pistol and glances furtively around the bar.  He notes, but passes over one Sil Hawkard quietly sitting at the other end of the bar with a soda water in front of him.  Sil is also caressing his own gun and contemplating the effectiveness of the copeater he has tied in a van outside.  He watches as Agent Tucker gets up and moves toward the door Sil can see the fear in his eyes he knows that weakness has set into Tucker’s mind.  Sil reaches into his pocket and pushes the intercom button on a two way radio, he is thinking about a Keat's poem he hasn't seen since high school.  
+	So old the place was, I remember none
+	The like upon the earth: what I had seen
+	Of grey cathedrals, buttressed walls, rent towers,
+	The superannuations of sunk realms,
+	Or nature's rocks toiled hard in waves and winds,
+	Seemed but the faulture of decrepit things 
+	To that eternal doomed monument.
+	Outside in the back of the van, one of the Arab boys unchains the copeater and lets it out the back door.  Agent Tucker is opening the door to his own car with a sense of relief when he feels hot breath on his neck and a dull ache at the base of his spine, but this is fleeting and an instant later the copeater is sucking the remnants of flesh from a spinal chord, being careful not to damage the raw nerves as his masters taught him.
+	Hawkard is still inside the bar sipping quitely on his soda water, his phone rings, he pulls it out of his jacket and puts it to his ear...
+	"The Agent Tucker problem has been solved and the shipment will go through as planned."
+	"Thank you William, your services are invaluable to me, and I will wire the money first thing in the morning." Sil is smiling to himself visualizing the final horror as death met Agent Tucker.  Sil replaces the phone on its receiver and lights a cigarette. 
+	At another point in the fabric of reality Sil  felt a primordial yearning to devour raw flesh and roll in a room of naked women.You are at a club wearing skin tight black vinyl pants and a black tank top with no bra, your nipples are hard and everyone can see them through your shirt.  Your dancing with a black haired girl also wearing tight black clothing, sitting at the back watching from a distance.  Your pussy clenches and sends tremors through your body every time the girl brushes against your skin, she teases you dragging her finger along your arm, and as the music stops she grabs you by the hand and leads you two a booth where two of her friends are waiting.  
+	Sil hates cops....I fucking hate 'em.  I hate 'em. I hate 'em. I hate 'em.  I want to kill them all in a violent sea of time-released explosive donuts that when eaten mix with the stomach acids and explode in violent blueberrystrawberrylemon filled death.  Die pig die.  Imagine it, a million sworn upholders of THE LAW dead in an instant.  Think of the society we could have.  Think of the freedom, think of the beauty.  The sweet satisfaction of tearing down all the rotting pig gut filled doughnut shops in the nation.  No more sweaty palms.  "License and registration please."  Fuck you, never again.  Never again.  kill every cop you see --a populist revolt.  We don't need all these damn laws, the people are okay --we know how to look after ourselves.  The laws are the ones that fucked everything up the first place.  And who hurts the most people in this here little world?  The State.   A cattle car streaming over the tracks of life, slick with the blood of the people.  The train can't go up the hill because the tracks are too slippery with my guts your guts our guts.  Cut off by THE LAW, our heads impaled on the ends of the its tentacle-like arms as they strangling the last hold outs of resistance into pacified stupidity.  
+	The anger subsides as his mind rationalizes that at least one more is dead.  Sil found himself dialling a number he didn't know picks up the phone --the other end never rings instead a voice says: "hello?"
+	"May I speak to Captain Clark please?"
+	"I'm sorry he's not in.  May I take a message?"
+	"No. No message."  Sil hangs up the phone.  He walks to the back of the bar and flops his body onto the luxurious red velvet couch and is swept by an overwhelming sensation of peace; his mind begin to expand, and he feels the desire for more consciousness --the death of us all, Sil thinks idly to himself as he lights a pipe under the table and discreetly sucks in a deep inhalation of opium hash mixture.  The sticky sweet smoke that fills his lungs brings forth tape loops and strange loops of staitc future memories.  Teisting and turning there way through the circuitry until  Anarchy is the only answer to all questions which begin with why?  whY?  wHY? WHY?  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law --future memories of books he hasn't read.  In distant memory filtering strands of DNA locked deep in Sil's cerebral cortex a vibration begins, infinitely small at first but building slowly into his medulla and finally spring forth into the part of the brain referred to as consciousness.  The cameras rolled even as the lights were dimming.
+"BRING THE PRISONER FORWARD"
+	Unrolling a weighty and sterile looking scroll of antiseptically white paper a voice whose origin is masked by the size of the paper itself reads:
+	After making reviews of the past actions, thoughts, and attributed sentiments, it is the judgement of this committee, and therefore the judgment of the government it represents, that due to a general lack of ability to perceive the options open to the work potential of the drone in question in simple terms of an x or not-x negativism which would be most helpful in these situations and would consequently decrease expenditures and lower taxes for other individuals living in said dualism and therefore we hereby decree that all metaprogramming undertaken by the individual without the consent and simultaneous approval of this committee and the government it represents to be criminal in intent, hostile in action, and punishable by prison and/or death upon conception.  Thank you.  You may go.
+	Sil Hawkard finds himself dragged from the tribunal, hands tied in front of him and legs trailing uselessly behind.  His guards use his head to open the heavy wooden door and 
+then they dump him unceremoniously onto the filthy street where a group of children are playing.  A monkey runs by, tugging its penis with one hand and slapping its bright red ass with the other .
+	Eventually the transmission deemed irrelevant given overwhelming incoming signal that sweeps across all frequencies, visual, audio, chemical, and physical.  There are five senses, sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, and only four signal sources; both smell and taste are chemical reactions with tissue that are then turned into different chemical reactions in the brain.   Sil tried at first to kill the reception entirely, but this proved a bit to radical of a step so he worked in phases first chemical manipulations of brainwaves --what the simians referred to as drugs Downs used to say.
+  	Teletype for corsica the agent sent in for returns,  Home office denied request for reinforcements, all communication to be ceased henceforth.  Piss in the riddle thought the old man wheeling his chair back out to the porch, he picked up a mason jar of corn whiskey and laid the shotgun across his lap.
+	The languid afternoon floated in and up the beach from the Atlantic bringing photomontages of Mandalay and the Dutch East Indies spice trade boats, far off places he had heard of only as words and imagined smells.  Up the beach from the house were the beginnings of the rocky South Carolina shoreline teeming with crabs, sponges, sea anemones, and circle swooping gulls feeding on sand crabs exposed in the fluctuating waves.  It was low tide, in fact it was always low tide or at least it seemed that way to the old man.  He was partly right, the tide was lower than it had been a year before when a man by the name of Dr. Waiben began overseeing construction of a nuclear power plant buried two miles under ground to hide its heat signature for pesky government satellites. The plant whose only entrance was from the sea, was Cary Downs research facility but right now that is but future memory fighting for space at a coordinate that won't have it.
+	Sil is in New orleans renting an attic in the french quarter following a strict regiment to kick the opium habit he developed at FREEDOM Inc.  The best cure downs had said is 
+to get a job in INDOCTRINATION Inc., where you will be forced to confront the ugly stupity of life.  
+	
+	The old man stood up on the porch and paced back and forth waiting...you understand the seriousness of the matter... obviously we would not expect an ordinary agent to do such a thing...your expertise in these fields...well frankly it's unparalleled..there is no other...These orders are coming straight from the top...your cooperation is non-negotiable...
+
+
+...to be an abstraction does not 
+mean that an entity is nothing. 
+--A. N. Whitehead	
+	
+	Two years earlier: Dr. Waiben, pathologist for IND Inc., surveys a long horrifically clean hallway whose smoothness is interrupted only occasionally by the presence of polished sliver knobs indicating doorways.  There are no observation windows or any other windows within the rooms.  This is the housing quarter for the derelicts of society: prostitutes, schizophrenics, lobotomy patients, drug pushers, anarchists, communists, AIDS victims, the aberrations that society never needed nor found a use for, end up here, under the care of Dr. Waiben, pathologist for IND Inc.  The good doctor has, for twenty odd years, been the caretaker of the derelicts, charged with restoring to them a level of functionality deemed necessary by society.  He is the man who puts the cogs back into the wheel.    
+	Waiben is an expert in mind manipulation through the use of psychoactive chemicals like Ayahuasca which he has recently fed to one whore whom the state had deemed a "revolutionary" for her accidental participation in an protest against the seizure of private property. Her constant screaming had disturbed the other doctors, but Waiben 
+found them soothing in the same erotic kind of way that a soft candle lit room made him desperately want to masturbate.  Regardless, he hated departmental friction so he was treating her with his standard dosage of twenty dried kuri-coo caps blended into a protein shake.  The girl was a fighter and she knew she didn't want the shake; he had been forced to strap her down on a table and put a low voltage cattle prod in her cunt, and even then she had held out for eighteen seconds -it was a record for the floor.
+	He watched her on a TV monitor from the station at the end of the hall.  She alternated between foaming a bloody spit out of her mouth while her eyes bulged menacingly, to sitting apparently quite peacefully on the edge of the toilet seat.  Her vital stats were typical for the dosage he had given her.  He watched with the detached apathy of those who have seen the degradation of life for twenty odd years and never thought to bat an eye toward suffering.  He panned the room camera around and noted blood and little clumps of flesh lying on the floor near the bed, he zoomed in and momentary renewed his interests as he realized that she had been picking the burnt flesh out of her cunt.  His stomach turned, not at the idea of her suffering, but at the idea that she would leave it lying about on the floor like a common animal wallowing in its own shit.  He sighed and picked up a bic lighter with a picture of Uncle Sam on it, the typical picture was warped due to the surface curvature of the lighter giving Old Sam a peculiar evil bent that Waiben admired; he lit it and held it at the base of the opium pipe, taking a deep and satisfying drag.  
+	Opium was a recent habit for Waiben, he typically avoided addictive substances out of the repulsion he felt toward people who were dependant on anything.  But with opiates he found a peaceful state of mind that he felt might make a person more susceptible to mind control.  However, in experimenting with the drug he had accidentally developed a habit.  	Doctor Waiben's habit did not go unnoticed by others in his department however, and as he was already unpopular for his rather unconventional methods and ideas, it wasn't long before a doctor by the name of Kellinger reported him to the state.  In the tumultuous time that was the present the good doctor was asked to resign, but did not instead he called 
+a press conference which was sadly rather ill attended, he proceeded to get up in front of the local new cameras and launch into an anti-government rant.  he was promptly arrested for "divulging state secrets and brought to trial before a hastily put together tribunal of senators and judges.
+	One person who did happen to catch the broadcast was Sil Hawkard who was in a New Orleans attic when he heard a voice from on the television drift up to his room...the united states government is by its own legal definitions, insane and therefor incapable of being held accountable for its decisions....
+	Sil bolted upright in his bed and ran down stares in time to catch the name Waiben before the camera cut out.  Two days later Sil was arrested and thrown in prison in the cell next to Waiben.  Because Sil was not a United States citizen he was merely given a lecture and thrown bodily out of the building bringing future memories to head. He made a deal with Waiben before he left, come to New Orleans and meet with me to discuss nuero research and I will get you out....
+	Doctor Waiben was something of an anomaly among scientists, he enjoyed being proved wrong because it saved him the trouble of having to prove anything right.  Waiben was one of the unique individuals of this century that understood that when you open one door its real value is not what is behind it but whether or not there are any more doors that revel themselves to the researcher.  He did not suffer from what Robert Wilson calls the New Inquisition.  This term is a catch phrase for those that try to make a belief system stand up with scientific legs, when in fact science is a tool or method of research, it is amoral.  Science does not believe anything because it is not a thing, it is a language.  I quote from Wilhelm Reich in Hell: There is also argument by Logic.  This can sometimes be combined with scientific experiments and if the two mesh we have a "fit" of theory with fact and scientists are delighted.  Pure Argument by Logic, however does not require this experimental back up and only demands that the conclusions by reached by the game-rules 
+of an abstract symbol system. In our hypothetical case, some witness might inform congress: 
+All mome raths need to be distimmed; 
+All frammisgoshes are mome raths; therefore;
+all frammisgoshes need to be distimmed 
+	
+	This so-called transitive property has led scientists into the same dead end alley of faith that religion finds itself in, I have faith in science the mad man rants on silver screens... 
+	transcribed from tapes: the terminal disease clerk took orders by the turnstile, finding the story in the story and logging in the disease workers all night long.  At five in the morning he got off  and  headed to a tavern as the sun was coming up.  Direct confrontation with the terminal virus word is a bit confusing to those who are not properly prepared.  poor fuckers never had a chance, the technical sergeant takes off his helmet and slams it on the table the near moronic mumblings of discontent.  Waging war is semantically impossible without overtones of homosexuality.  Heavy handed, the second wave fell in line with the technical sergeant at the lead.  The thing you have to watch out for are the warblers --the distractions coming in at the sides, sound is their most effective weapon, primordial hangover he called it drunkenly raising the glass.  And some of you may think this suspect but take my advise sounds where it all started.  In the beginning was the word and the word spoke.  The sergeant stoops and cups his hands to light a cigarette.  Then there is sex or not enough of it, both are equally dangerous --biology is not something to scoff at.  sexuality is the best cover an agent can ever use.  Rockets come searing in overhead ripping flesh and scoffing at the notion of eternity, out here you don't have time to talk, the thoughts are things, they are no longer words...keep your radios tuned boys its getting ugly.  Another rocket sears in severed limbs fly out the explosion and olive drab body parts litter the scene. Watch out for the bloody words, sharp words that 
+hang in the air like knives and when uttered returned to slit the throat of their speaker and if every word you have spoken returned to act upon yourself would you survive the experience?   Me no way i’m outta here.  Situation getting sticky, humid like vaporous blood hanging on in the air.  Still acrid smell of urine and small children playing in a asphalt playground ringed on all sides by immense brick walls with basket ball hoops hung half way up each of the sides.     Realize that that which we are taught from childhood to distrust is in fact a pawn of something far more immense and much much more dangerous.  The governments and nations of the world are incidental pawns the real powers control them and then beyond them there are even more and so on like looking two mirrors facing each other and going on to infinity.  The monster of power is faceless there is no one person or group that controls everything they are all parts of a immense and multi-headed monster that is constantly biting itself and attacking it own heads until some day it will destroy itself.  The end of time leaves space and word alone together
+	we're taking heavy fire!  The sergeant calls for back up, the captain says love one another and cryptically hangs up the phone. The Spanish soldier selling chicletts say no good no bueno, pictures worth not even half a thousand words.  Wouldn’ give you ten words, worthless gringo words don’t mean shit. no good no bueno, not worth the blood their written in. The blood of all peoples not yours, not your shoes, by god keep your slave labor camps a closed-mouthed secret.   Gotta keep that in house, dis-credit all new agencies by routinely feeding them false information.  News doesn’t happen events happen, and the department of television information broadcasting inc. a subdivision of indoctrination inc. decides what gets out and what remains forever sealed in baby pissshitguts.  No that's not true. No comment. No need for comment, the preceding has been since proved to be untrue, cut to shots of smart bombs. Couldn’t get fifty words for those now gringo -over exposure- nobody buying.   Same old stinking shit.  No Good. No Bueno.
+	Gringo go home in thousand languages in a million words, why don’t you crawl back in your cave get your tail so far between your legs it goes half way up your ass?  Lead 
+me to the holy spigot and we’ll show you the bidet of death, constructed by gringos, for gringos, to flush out gringos, to show them all what you do behind closed doors.  Can’t close them all --we have our technicians as well and they’re getting to be better than yours. We got the money rolling in --even offered you the picture words but you don’t want them. No Good.   Can’t use those, too strong.  No fair, crying boy heads home for cave to lick his dirty balls clean.
+	I gotta picture for you I on vacation in your country go to hear senator’s speak but all door are closed, all sealed.  So i gotta fiber optic and feed it in from the roof show all senators mad with sexual lust and blood thirsty, clamoring for war and stealing souls and bodies and driving them off wherever they see fit.
+	The technician is retro actively of course --the papers said the man was mentally ill.  ‘my cod!’ screamed a church lady in the front row, ‘satan has garbled the lords message, this isn’t what he meant for you to hear, no it was not all like that, there was to be understanding.’ she is parading her old cunt bones whining at the justices --tissue conducts signals, animals communicate through the use of visual, acoustic , chemical, tactile and electrical signals.  Our laboratory is an abundant and well preserved feed back loop to understand and interpret Eusocial behavior. negative feedback inhibition to make you shiver Gringo.  Make you shiver good.
+	Repetition unsuccessful.  The radiologist was called in to examine the patient --blisters and burns indicate high probability of skin mutation, what would you say Dr. Waiben?   Crested and on the nod? Diminutively yes definitely.
+	Information potential exists --its an unsettling thought, dependency --and what happens when things start to think? How do you draw the lines then.
+	HOW THE PLAGUE BEGAN:
+	The wish to preserve -not worth saving what already is- in this scenario.  The word,  the loss of body situated at the origins of recorded sound -the temporal metaphysical and esthetic possibilities.
+	<insert sounds of truck on dirt road>  
+	Old man yelling.  Get off of my laaawwwnnn!   Sits down to oil his gun some more and then half turns in his chair to face the camera and says "i haven't left the porch since i got this CDRom PEOPLE version 3.0.   Updated and expanded human potential at your fingertips.  Its the only thing i need --got no use for the stinking gringos anymore--  camera pans out and down revealing a yard strewn with shotgunblasted bodies of young children.  We see wife, face half torn off, crawling towards a pistol <shotgun blast stage left> her head disappears entirely.   Old man: "human potential, the new CDrom makes wives unnecessary." cue logo: on sale now at a sanatorium near you....
+	I'm going to finally send you the orgy papers this time  -been fixing to get 'round to that for some time"  <heavy southern drawl>  don't think he's the type to do it though but i been wrong once or twice a'fore.    Don't want people showing up on my lawn though that's never good.  get off of my lllaaaawwwwnnnnn! <shotgun blast again, distant screaming sounds of deaths final agonies eeking out blood gurgling windpipes> Fucking Gringos! Go home in a thousand languages!
+	  Experience as much of the human potential as possible retain the container and forward the frog to the fun sun freaks of eastern Tibet all is well with alkaline, and acidity is on the skids with death rooted out leaving only chicken shit shovelled scrapped and scraped like lemon lime gatorade poured from a fuck buck of love.  Stop talking to yourself --listen to the virus talk to you.  All that you consider to be a accident was carefully orchestrated for your benefit by a benevolent cocksucking god from the twenty-third dimension to just plain old irritate the fuck out of you like a bad rectal itch.  Stupid gringo got no cure for the ass itch i show you some pictures, yes very dirty, little girls you like??????
+	<<<<<commander in chief of the NATO forces in Europe is fucking small refugee boy in the ass, the boy cries for his mother the general is laughing, your mother’s down the hall boy ,she’s busy with the president of France right now.  But maybe later you’d like to 
+lick his come off her dead face.  Ban those words tear them right out snip snip.  Can’t say that, its disgusting.  War is a snuff film for the rich.  <<<<We gotta step up the bombing chief the public’s losing innarest in us screams the chief of staff running in circles jerking off and slapping his ass until it turns a bright purple and with all seriousness General Jesse Helms pauses to reflect:  I remember a time when life was good no one got in our way, why in Europe under Patton i musta raped twenty thirty little boys and a handful of nuns too. He smiles lost in memory...
+	But God hath given us these trying times....
+	Yes it is bit hard to get cunt these days isn’t it, mumbles the chief of state as he strokes his wife’s cock....Yes dear start a war, get me some cute refugee boys, i so love snapping their necks when i’m coming, she growls affectionately.
+	That's it gentlemen were going to war!  The president stands and ejaculates on a map of the world KOSOVO it is he says as his thick oatmeal consistency sperm all but covers the former republic of Yugoslavia.
+	You like?  You like, no?  Too bad.  You can’t have those words, too strong.  I get power, you give me power, I steal power from you, to expensive to buy it.  I get power and you get pictures and maybe I tell you how to cure rectal itch? Eh? Eh? Eh?
+
+
+	Experiements with the death ray tape and image guns began with William Burroughs in the nineteen fifties, but was sidetracked by the advent of digital technology.  The newer is not necessarily the better though folks smoetimes they just have different uses --like the image gun that shot...In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh by a cacophonous blast out of heaven's pearly cum-stained ass creating the father, the son, and the holy spigot which lies  in a secluded garden on the cliffs overlooking the Sargasso sea.  The spigot is buried in a volcano designed by Czech ostriches in the eleventh hour of creation to drain all human excrement off the continent of Europe and into 
+the Sargasso sea all lumpy with turd so thick Jesus "conny" Christ in drag is walking along to the amazement of the gullible, floating gently from turd to turd.  The piss blood of a million cunts and cocks line the shores giving the whole place a radioactive iridescent red glow not to mention a awful stench.  Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo are standing on the bluffs watching the spectacle and scanning with hawk eyes for sweet tight asses in which they can stab their hungry cocks.  The father caught the son sitting in the middle of the garden sucking on an apple and he became enraged and hog tied the boy and penetrated every orifice in his body with a peeled and sculpted cucumber cock; the boy was left a whimpering quivering lump of fleshy jello from which spawned humankind.
+	The piss gut rotting flesh smell, air taunt necked and jerking at the nose, the captain's eyes role back into his head as is guts are blasted out his ass by a giggling man headed tape worm of extraordinary wit who was prone to quoting Joyce and Bugs Bunny in the same sentence in a way that reminded listeners of Buster Keaton in some strange drugstore hurricane kind of a way.  The skatolic odor was rich and the worm refused to bath.  Owing to the peculiar nature of its origin the soldiers did not disturb the worm preferring instead to watch the captain writhe in agony pulling his legs back behind his ear to attempt to lick the matted blood soaked pubic hair over the the torn orangish flesh that hung in ribbons over a large hole that had once been a simple anus.  The upshot of it all was that the worm ate less rations than the captain so the men were basically satisfied with the arrangement and they followed the worm wiggling through the jungle as it did impersonations of Fred Astaire...
+	Blasted rot gut con-artist with ten huge molars running across the front of his mouth in a clump owing to his mother's industrial accident with the cunt acid from the chink's hyperdrill.  Drilled right on through back to china, the asshole couldn't even close the damn thing and the lower mandible just kind of hung there like a tire swing.  Maya spits in his face in disgust and revulsion you don't have enough money for me to kiss you there isn't enough money on the planet...
+	The giggling Hyenas are dressed in black and high on amphetamines looking to turn you inside out.
+	Tongue-tied porn queens scream obscenities at passersby "I'll suck your dick until your eyeballs pop out your ass..."
+	Steady...wait til you see the whites of their eyes...Blown newspapers and advert scrapes cover the bottom three feet of a brick wall like sardines neatly packed in a kipper snack tin from a 1983 supermarket shelf....Horatio Alger's sodomizing menage-a-toi with the Maytag Man and Uncle Sam has led us to train station on the SpaceTime line where freedom is an irrelevant inconvenience of language that is slowly being fazed out of history.  Language is a virus. The i that is You speaks, I speak and the vibrations of air we create controls our every move.  Science gives rise to Magic in the form of powerful papers that tell who what why and how you are to be.  You can't march down to city hall to protest without a permit filed ahead of time with the city clerk.  You can't drive an automobile without the Proper Papers.  You can't leave the country without PAPERS, you can't perform honest labor without PAPERS.  You can't buy or grow certain pharmaceuticals at all, nor can you pursue the happiness of your choice unless it falls into one category.  Consumption.  We are all free to consume, which when you think about it, is the only freedom we really need in a CONSUMER SOCIETY.  Televisions, radios, automobiles, washing machines, drying machines, refrigerators, freezers, ovens, microwave ovens,  convection ovens, alarm clocks, computers, headphones, home furnishings, bicycles, video games, tennis shoes, laser disc players, DVD players, record players, compact disc players, cordless telephones, wireless phones, digital phones, cellular phones, two way radios, short wave radios, car stereos, home stereos, and every accessory you can conceive of and millions more you couldn't.  We have all the entertainment and modern conveniences in the world in our home each assessable at our fingertips when ever you chose.  Which is a good thing because the minute you step out of your house some OFFICAL OF THE STATE is going to want to see some goddamn-
+papers-on-the-double-what-the-hell-are-you-doing-here-cough-up-the-fee-place-your-hands-behind-your-head-you-have-the-right-to-remain-silent-lie-down-and-spread-your-legs-and-shut-the-fuck-up-right-fucking-now sir!
+	Uncle Sam came on the ground and left without a trace.  Horatio and Maytag were emotionally tormented for years until there eventual deaths through ritualistic dismemberment.
+	And I don't have any papers standing on a cement sidewalk slab starring at the FREEDOM OF AMERICA locked inside a now closed appliance store.  The Ace Appliance Store to be precise.  I feel suddenly nervous like they know what I am thinking.  They know that I am thinking.  
+	-He's not smiling. Oh no, not yet, we're working on it though.-
+	We the people we govern you the other people have decided for reasons which are beyond the scope of this broadcast and may well be beyond the scope of your comprehension entirely that all freedoms which you previously thought you had but never in reality did possess are summarily denied from this point forward.  Please report to the nearest biomedical programing center by the fourth of May where a new human program biounity 3.6 will be installed into your seratonin and allow for future dopemine programing without the need for physical intervention please go about your lives as you always have all those not present for the reprogramming procedures by the fourth of May will be consider fugitives of the state and will be dealt with in the harshest manner allowed by law and endorsed by the entertainment loving public...
+	
+
+	Naturally Waiben wanted out of jail and was perfectly willing to meet with his former cellmate who had struck up most unusual conversations with him and who had a habit of mumbling incoherently when asked what it was that he did.
+
+
+
+.
+	
+There is no governor 
+anywhere -R.A.W.
+
+	Sil stood at the window watching the sea leavel water lapping at the top third of it he toyed seeming mindlessly with the leavel that raised and lowered the dome and thought about Euchrists oral sex and the confusion of living a multi-ordinal quantum reality on a planet of third wave nuerocirciut apes.  It wasn't that he looked down on people as a mass like most assumed nor that he felt some condescending sense of pity which motivates the religious savior type apes rather that simply that it would be easier for him if everyone understood a few things about quantum reality and non local universes.  Pluratity.  Unfortunately scientists and its worth noting that only a scant few of that sub population spoke the language of mathematics.  It was equally troubling to Sil that no one spoke sanskrit or any of the languages that are really beautiful to the ear.  He took a deep hit of the black alamant hash cigerette and headed to his typewriter wondering what it would be like to live in reality tunnel where everything is not fiction.  where things actually happen far off like spice trade boats chinese junkets pulling into Siapan out of south sea storms.  Opulent opium pictographs of women spread delicate violent flesh orgies across the room, scenes from Arabian Knights He wrote a letter to the governments of the world:
+
+Boards Sydicates and Cartels of the earth:
+A general Theory of Anarchy, welcome to MINDFUCK:
+	You will undoubtable, upon hearing the term anarchy associate it with the popular mythology of a chaos-like state where murderers run naked through the street fucking helpless women inhaling blizards of cock and raving acid heads doing unspeakable things to your grandmother.  Images conjured I suspect out of Frued's catalogue of chaos images  
+This apocalyptic vision is inherently politically based, but i understand that your imprints are such because you are politicians.  however political anarchy is an oxymoron Anarchy of the Senses is what I speak of.  In this vision your grandmother is you cellular memories no more static movie flicking black and white you are not you --semantic breakdown is inevitable why wait for death?
+	Anarchy, like life itself is infinitly more complicated than simple political gaming, left wing right wing, the whole concept of a bianary system is meanigless.  The problem with the west in general is that it makes dicotomies out of what is really just a grey cloudy lump of shit which is wrong  What i mean by that statement is that nothing is reducible to being either/or, belief itself is multidemensional and it is right.  You feel the joke creeping in youself --at the edge of sleep different voices start to think for themselves maintainng an iron grip on reality creates tension and energy loss semantic breakdown at death.  That is to say that to hold a beleif is to filter information through an infinitely complex system and into the brain where the information is organized further and through electro-chemical response conditioning, an opinion or patterned is formed.  When the brain is again confronted with a similiar question the response path of the original is duplicated.  
+	Doesn't ever strike you that this is not life.  This is robotics.  In light of something that is infinitely complex many philosophers, politicians and other freaks of nature have chosen to assume a starting point from which it can be safely assumed that everyone is at least in agreement of basic "facts."  But as mathmatics show, these facts are subjective at best and non-existant for all practical purposes.  The Image is not the thing it is a representation of the thing by the individual.  There is no objective stance.  Everything is in our heads, everthing that occurs around us occurs in our grey matter which is to say that everything is an internal experience of the individual rather than an external event happening to the individual.   Thus the anarchists starting point is similtaniously everywhere and nowhere much like the timespace experience itself.  At  this point you can decide what is real and what is not.  The punchline ducks and dodges.
+	This does not mean that fairies exist and men can walk through walls and everything coming into the bus is real at all rather that it can be real, because what is real is only a generalized hallucination. See what you want to see be who you want to be.  If it doesn't matter why not be what makes you happy healthy and mindful of your self rather than butting into the business of everyone else?  Laws are the result of psychosis.  Only the mentally unbalanced would impose a limitation upon itself.  You enjoy this metaphor when it matches up the moral code generally accepted as in the case of athletics and developement of the body, the decay worchippers, but when it is applied to everything it suddenly creates distress and psychosis.  Psychosis is characterized by delusions and disorientation which you again like as a definition when it is appied to those whose lives are incomperhensible to you, the "insane,."  You deem it to be appropriate then--for instance people holding non-bianary processing patterns (loonies, bums, the elderly)-- in this you are comforatble, but if the definition is expanded to include everything this causes the delusional to see that everything is delutional.  this in turn leads to semantic confusion --if nothing is real then what matters?  What is matter?  A forth dimensional manifestation of energy?  What are we? A forth deminsional manifestation of energy. 
+	You hope that we are with you, you believe that we are with you, but you feel the incomprehension creeping in at the sides, you really can't believe it, but you feel it.  You know we are not with you and you think that we are against you because this is the Alpha Male imprint, you're getting paranoid trying so hard to make us paranoid when it really isn't that easy; and you're frightened that one day you will look up trying to see a spaceship, but its something from your childhood and you're thinking you want see forever but you don't know what it means.  You think you'll find it in the DNA strands, all the built in mechanisms --the punchline isn't what it seems, I'm sounding like an idiot and I no longer care.
+	Anarchy is not a threat to political institutions, life is a threat to political institutions.  Why punish behavior that is differential from your own?  You're trying it you're finding 
+that you like it.  If you want to stop people from buying cars, stop building roads.  If you want people to stop commiting crime stop building prisons.  If you want people to stop starving to death stop making them work.  If you want people to stop working tell them that their are vast sources of energy capable of sustaining them and tell them that these sources can be tapped in space.  Tell them the coca-cola thing burroughs was always nagging you about.  Tell them what you did.  Tell them the game, because it is nearly up the semantic game has been played out and they can see it smell it touch it and taste it.  They fanacize about it in Utopian novels and movies; they fret over it too because they don't know if you've been there first, they don't know if its safe.  But eventually they're going to come over anyway.  And you know as well as i do that control is as pointless as the rest of it in the end because oddly --the poets were always right.  We are only human, meaning that when we are beyond that in thought the game playing falls apart --some see demoneds some see little green men, and you know what those signs mean.  the end is near.  The bucket is coming down the well.  And once you are in it none of the concerns of the water have meaning.  
+	I, as some many before me only wish to thank you  without  you i never would have been forced to think beyond spacetime, and into spacetimemind.  I, also like many before do hearby, with a bow, resign.
+
+Sincerely, 
+SpaceTimeMind coordinate: Sil Hawkard
+
+
+
+	Most, including the president, who recieved the letter thought it the suicide note of a man whom records showed had always led a quiet and unobtrusive life in south Hampton 
+Massuchusets.  One of the few would might have understood it was Dr.Waiben, but he never got a copy.
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+++ b/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/THE BOOK.odt
diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/THE BOOK.txt b/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/THE BOOK.txt
new file mode 100644
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@@ -0,0 +1,781 @@
+	Happenstance carried you here sitting out on a red rock mesa top forgetting each sunset as quickly as it passed.  Staring out into nothingness the purest complete nothingness outside of ocean, in fact this was once a sea floor, even the fish wouldn't have it.  But sitting on the porch of run down wood shack that passed as a house and rented for the paltry price of twenty five dollars a month.  Actually that's what there paying me, twenty five a month to sit here and write reports; let go of all contact and take notes for somebody else's script, I never would have written myself into a role this melodramatic for a million bucks recks like Hollywood cheese.  I keep think that one day I'm going to wake up and find out that I really am just a collection of ideas that if fact at the bottom of the search for everything we're going to find nothing...  The Tao Te Ching says that the smallest thing is in the biggest and vice verse, it seems to me then that since we already know that "everything" is actually made up of  indescribably tiny "nothings" called electrons that it is only a matter of time before the big stuff, God, god, philosophy, science all the big stuff is going to turn out to be founded on nothing.
+	I first had this realization years ago and I decided to take on the big job myself I set out to find the unknown and find some way, however thin, to make it known.  I wrote a book on what I found and met the interesting folks at the AIC and then I was here, like you just sitting on the porch of a shitstye in the unbearable afternoon heat —southeastern Utah in August.  All I do is wait for the mercy of the thunder clouds which manage to bring the temperature down to the high nineties, of course the trade off is in the humidity.  I write reports, though not many anymore, for the AIC.  Actually the bulk of this book will likely be filed away somewhere back in D.C. which is really just as well I guess, should it ever be needed at least someone can find what they're looking for.  I'm just not looking for it anymore.  But its a long way from here to there and I have to give some background.
+	In the beginning was the word and the word was with God.  Like most Sunday school children, I have no actual memory of hearing those words or at least I paid no attention to the idea of them.  Not until years later, but lately I've been thinking that it might have been there the whole time from the beginning.  Anyway at one point that little sentence was threatening to take control of my life and I met Sil and the rest of the people at AIC and found out rather to my embarrassment that I was not the novelty I thought I was, rather I was endanger of becoming left behind with the women in children so to speak.  And somehow the whole time I think I was trying to solve a riddle that had been subtly implanted near birth and which wormed its way out to consciousness just before the turn of the millennium. 
+
+
+
+	
+
+In the beginning 
+there was the word	
+	
+
+
+<<<<<<<<<begin transmission ghf8672y ﾵ		ﾤﾤ	ﾤxZDFß∂ƒ©˙¥®´∑¨^øøπππ“π“∫∫~∫∫Ω≈ç√∫~µ≤≥÷1243ﾵ	ﾧ
+	œ∑´®†¥¨^øπ“´®†¨¨¥ø^¨^ø¨^¡¡¡£™¢∞§¶¶•ªºº––åß∂ƒ©©©©©©˙∆©˙∆∆˚¬˚¬…æ¬
+æΩ≈ç≈√∫~µ≤≥÷‑­«« `	¡™£¢∞§¶•ªº–≠123235ﾵﾧ	  
+tyiyiu
+ƒ¥†∆†^˙˚∆^¥¥†∆˙ƒ˙©©∆˙˙˙˙ƒƒƒ©©©©©©©©∞§§¶•ª•ªª§∞§∞¢£¢£∞¶§¶∞¶§∞¶§∞¶§§¥†ƒ©∆˙©ƒ∆¥ƒ∂˙©√µ∆~√©ƒ≈߃∂≈Ω˙©∆˙熃∂ߥ®ƒ√˚∆©¨¥†ƒ∂	
+
+,
+
+/,68487654321>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
+Fragments of Ash falling.  
+White washed ceilings hanging so ominous  
+Hallucination of bubble-headed figures 
+crawling like the Michelin Man 
+across an indescribable mountain of tires 
+Motels Motels Motels 
+Whiskey Bourbon.  
+Tow truck 
+non-ordinary state of reality 
+precludes a state of reality 
+that something is real  Point at 
+the autistic manwomanchild  
+Autistic man pointing at you 
+laughing unable to fathom how your brain 
+functions and quite self righteously 
+you you cling to its definitions.  
+Must delineate between abnormality 
+and those of us who Understand 
+The Human Virus breeding 
+like rats unconsciously conscious and aware
+of our disorganization.
+Gas Station Cold Fusion dreams
+of the Anarchist are breeding
+in the minds of the oil men
+who don’t want to
+loose their stranglehold of reality.
+Fragments of Ash falling
+the continual settling of dust
+weighing down humanity and the 
+French Maid masturbates discreetly in 
+the next room.  You need her 
+to keep the dust off your mortal
+coil spring.
+Rebirth mythology.
+Mythology of reality.  We must
+distinguish between what will be defined as 
+sane and what shall be referred to 
+as insanity.  Kevlar definitions
+constructed to make a better shampoo
+seem like a logical item on which
+to squander your paperbacked slavery bills.
+After all these years Tide still
+gets your socks whiter 
+Its a wonder 
+that they aren’t transparent by now.
+that your brain retarded 
+in its development
+that evolution had not 
+anticipated the advent
+of the opposable thumb the unopposable
+domination of the thumb leading
+to and insect superiority of mating
+rituals stolen from a textbook
+on damselflies darning needles
+sewing shut your lips, mind atrophy.
+Weber's White Race Enriched for Superiority
+Scorched earth campaigns raining Ash.
+Shit from the sky.  Tax man came
+for your baby in exchange for unpaid balance.  
+You understand.  Nothing Personal 
+Just doing our job.  Same as the
+next guy.  From Auzwich on down the 
+line.  Didn’t make the rules.  Sorry.
+We perfected them.
+There are no innocents in a world of
+free will.  You don’t have to survive
+at the expense of others.  You could
+die with puncture wounds in your hands
+and others would create a new mythology
+strange irony would find another with holes 
+in his hands unwilling to accept
+cockroach mentalities.
+You want to beLIEve Hitler 
+was a madman but he lives on in quiet
+cafes centralsouthamerica not so free 
+not all the communists have been shot yet
+Your mistook misunderstood missed 
+the lesson in the situation that unfolded 
+Dr. of dialectic excuses you want 
+to beLIEve Hitler was a madman 
+Hitler killed everybody's body 
+only taking orders you understand 
+just doing my job from Independence 
+on down the line. 
+It was a sad money grubbing hunter 
+gather up his children and thank 
+his gods they are his and he their god 
+behold I have come to tell you that 
+everything you know is wrong 
+stop doing you job its not yours 
+see Hitler in your mind you want him dead 
+but he's not he liveson
+buried under restraint in everyones mind.
+Only taking orders you understand.  Didn’t have 
+a CHOICE.  Got a family to feed.
+radio crackle.  pop.  hiss.
+silence.
+<<<<<<<<<<<END TRANSMISSION>>>>>>>>>
+	
+	The first thing you notice on entering the quarter is the radioactive stench of rotting death.  It hangs in the air like rotten pasteries in a Parisian Bistro thrown out in the alley and neglected by even the hungriest of terrified bums lurking in dark corners.  The smell hits you like a sledge hammer, but it has something blood curdling familiar about it, it is the smell of death.  the smell of your death.  You can get in without dying, but you smell it lurking around the corner and you feel it closing in on you.  Death is a thick smell, a reminder that the body is temporal and hangs by a thred, a thread lible to snap without a moment's notice.  
+	The tibetians said that demons prey on those near the gates of the after world, those who don't know where they are, the ones that came in on a bus wreck or an earthquake, the ones that never had a chance to realize what was going on, but that's not strickly true, at least the demons part.  Demons is a bit overboard, they're the true flesh pioneers, the ones who refuse to let go of the uniquely human games, the politics, the barter system, the Madison Avenue rewrite department, the beggardly filth flesh markets.  It's not that they aren't deadly —they certainly are if you're not careful— but they are highly predictable because just about everyone coming across the bay has played the demon games before and unless death was a total shocker you recognize the game and push on; down deeper into the regions where the tenament settlements are and then into The Village.  
+	The tenament settlements are a lot like one would imagine the early American colonial settlements.  sickly white creatures constantly scared of everything.  the slightest rustle in the evening breeze and they're running for the gun cupboard.  hair trigger finger  they got too so its best to mind your own business and head straight through so as not to raise any suspicions.  And for god's sake don't let them draw you into conversation or you'll start seeing things and end up stone paranoid or worse: a rational materialist.
+	The Village is a little hill in the center of town where the biologic requirements are meaningless and things can get dicey if you're not paying close attention.  This is a second rate guidebook built off personal and anticdotal stories, there is a map in the back, like the tibetian map i suggest you bear it in mind, it might come in handy that day when the whole world comes down in a storm of atomic virus heat and the skin finally gets scorched right off.  Welcome the end of history.
+	
+	
+Book one: set and setting
+
+
+
+	Sil Hawkard always wanted to be.  Which differentiated him from the bulk of the people alive on the third planet who wanted to be something.  This semantic anomaly was epidemic in Usinc, but Sil had managed to never catch 'the virus" as they said in the circles of the cured.  he himself enjoyed freedom and if your trying to be something you can never be free.  you're locked into the constraints of the role you wanted to play.  In Sil's estimation it was more fun to switch roles at the drop of a hat.  He enjoyed such musings when he was lying around in his floating home off the coast of Mandalay.   Mandalay is in the South Pacific Seas three hundred miles Northeast of Australia and over two thousand miles from the farthest outpost of the Usinc empire.  Originally settled by rich expatriot Usincer's whose money came from dubious endevors, Mandalay evolved over the years into a Freeport city-state with no government and swift and highly effective way of dealing with the only crime —murder.  Mandalay was warm in September and every afternoon the storms would roll in the thunderheads and rain wouldn't fall so much as materialize right out of the air.  Life went on in the rain with the exception of clothes as few people wore them around Mandalay; that was one of side effects of the Freeport's origins in sensual based anarchy which -like the word istelf- began with a letter... 
+	Sil is sitting much like he does every afternoon, on a bambo chair smoking petroleum.  Petroleum was in fact ultimately one of the things that had led Sil here, but actually petroleum was an inaccurate street name for what Sil was smoking.  It was rather a carbon based opiate smoke made by trapping the opiates in a petroleum vapor and then condensing the vapor into a liquid which was in turn mixed with pure hash oil and boiled through alcohol leaving behind a sticky, oily, candy-goo hence the name. The black substance was roughly the consistancy of petroleum jelly and it would burn (with flames like tiki torch) for hours slowly releasing together the THC and the densely packed opiates.  The flames would die down over time as the jelly itself turned into a glowing coal, the heat from which release more of the psychoactive chemicals than any other method of ingestion.  The process was remarkable in that it didn't matter how good of a starting point drug you had because you could always cook in more —it turned ugly grey heroin and dirty mexican pot into the finest high imaginable.  Needless to say the product was um  profitable so long as one avoided the normal channels of distribution, it was this rather shaky profession that had led Sil to escape the Usinc empire.
+	Sil hits the huca again and feels his face going numb his head slumps down until his chin is nearly on his chest, he snaps his fingers twice.  Two Arab dancers appear and began to dance crooked, spinning patterns mastered over centuries of hypnotic oppression (the cockroaches of skid row motels are only now beginning to learn) which gave it power in its freedom, more power than things born free.  Oppression is a drug; it acts equally, though differently, on the oppressed and the oppressor alike —the oppressed gain a more acute vision of the things in life that can not be controlled.  What makes the oppressor stronger in the common fabric of reality only pushes the oppressed into areas outside of the common fabric of reality until eventually the oppressed simply leave.
+	The crooked dance is hypnotic to watch and all consuming to perform.  In India they teach it to snakes, and in the sewers of Usinc cockroaches feasting on the radioactive waste have begun to learn it on their own.  Like terrible creatures from a Kafkian nightmare they sit quietly underground, as we go about our lives, learning the dance passing it on to their children and teaching them how to use it as an evolutionary tool.  One day a properly evolved cockroach will crawl out of a sewer drain just as the head of state is stepping to the podium to address the nation...   He will devour the president raw as the live camera crews feed man's downfall to a nation of viewers even as it happens.  The blood soaked cameramen will never stop filming and the cockroach will scurry to the podium, strain himself to an upright position and address the nation...Behold I am.  He will dance and spin and all will be entranced.   Women will castrate men and men will bludgeon themselves to death with pickaxes until they are suitable for cockroach consumption and life will continue on much as it always has. The system is independent of its elements, humans are not necessary, cockroaches would uphold the system just as well.  Unless of course the atomicnovavirus gets loose.  Sil falls into a profound haze of self-absorption.   The boys continued to dance trance-like as the numbers explode at the edges of his vision.
+	Sil's story is a rather long and convoluted one and subject to enhancement on his own part, because that was one of Mandalay's charms, no one cared about who you used to be, but who you are.  Sil had not made the mistake of trying to hold power over others, rather he used it to make himself more powerful.
+	At the age of twenty one Sil Hawkard discovered that while he vaguely enjoyed torturing the professors at Columbia university, most people in the Usinc are squares, and Sil, already an avowed anarchist was weary of the materialists whom he felt lacked the imagination and understand to really get the it —so to speak.  So he dropped out for a semester and bummed his way around what was then called the United States.  In the middle of the Utah desert one night in July he ingested a rather large quantity of psylicilim in the form of mushrooms.  He met someone, but that is not important just yet.  The quantum reality convergence that Sil felt during the experience was rather hard to forget and it prompted him to extend his drop out faze for a few more years.  One other rather peculiar thing happened to Sil on the mushrooms.  A bouncing humanoid of early homo erectus origins told him that the rosette stone of the word was in safe hands with the ostriches.
+
+
+	It like your going bang! the epi-endo-genetic bang that finally turns on the radio, like when the old crystal quarts set gets cranked next to the digital signal, cold and clear you can taste it metallic, vibrations of noise it slam your gut.  Sock you like a plutonium fuzz blast, but there's something to be said for bringing it down slow too.  frequency modulation is the pulsar of life, blasting straight through the chest and then stroking on soft cushions to sooth you down.  In and out.  draws you from one world to the next.  electro- static charge, like the pulsation of an old castagraf recorder.
+	You move the body electric in pulsations with receptors that crawl — warmth of the spine and into the back of the brain where it hit so hard.  The surge is ecstatic... drive you right on over into the next dimension -model -metaphor -you get the picture.  You might have even hung it on your wall when you where younger, and hungrier —hunger drives the hierarchy and its there, even when your stomach is full... hits you raw like the electric pulse of life got hard wired into your brain... its all gone from now.  ebb and flow,  Surges come in waves.   I gotta run to make diving in smooth... feels in slow motion... you hit the water like a torpedo and the waves slip out in a circular ark... eyes smart from the unbroken motion.  Body electric but suspended in perfect fluidity like the ecstatic dances of the trance shamans carried slip-slow up into the magic of the beyond.  Echos abound like a caged sun gone supernova... atomizes and reforms as the cool wave hits the skin.  smooth blue skin.
+	smoking filterless cigarettes listening to the voices trailing in from the mezzanine, a masterpiece composition of harmonized waves, sound —the trigger behind the motion.  dancing eyes so hungry spiral with giddiness, threw out the tired old man mind.  Bring it back down... bring it back down cause you never quite got it the first time.
+	Lost in a blur of images, swirling words, sounds, smells, miraculous warmth on the crawling embers of flesh; digging keep digging.  we're all such great tunnelers mining out the beautiful and now i see the ugly creeping in around the edges.... the black on the starry night... Van Gogh and his goddamn ear always creeping in at the edges.  Diggin' fast and furious:  tunnelers.  roots and the little blooms... the moment -the purity -the wavelength transitions in simplicity, burned like hydrochloric acid onto the memory film.  scar tissue that don't go away.  
+	I lose you, no?  Maybe you like the chiclettes real cheap mister i get deal from the factory, they rewind the tape and sell it to me cheap.  I just passin along the savings to you you know eh?  Me like you lots.  hug you if i could.  you want chiclettes mister?  One dollar buys whole box...eh?...no?
+
+And the word was with god
+
+	Sil arrived in Africa in nineteen ninety-three to find a talking ostrich; instead he found cryptotechnology —or it found him if you work from a Jungian perspective.  He arrived in Angola aboard The Decatur a British cargo ship bringing in weapons to fund a counter insurgency movement to a government disinformation loop which the west was hoping would topple the rather lax disinformation system in power —a government that welcomed technological refugees with open arms.  Angola had become a haven for code writers who were not willing to dumb themselves down to the technology standards of the United States and its allies.  Sil was a code breaker so to speak.  He wasn't interested in simple binary code breaking and writing as in computer languages he was interested in finding the rest of the characters which would form the semantic code to language, but the technology for undertaking such an endeavor was in Angola.  In fact many things that don't fly with the governments of the west were readily available in Angola.  Sil asked around for all of two days when he found someone who need a package delivered to the United States in exchange for ten thousand dollars and a plane ticket anywhere in the world.  
+	Naturally at the end of his funds and having no chance at a research grant, he accepted.  Two months later he made his way to Tunisia where he finally found the ostrich who in turn told him to seek a man named Cary Downs.  Downs was an eccentric billionaire obsessed with the occult and interstellar transmission of pure information; Sil was told that he had been looking for someone in Sil's area of expertise  In this spacetime point most people thought Cary Downs owned an oil empire, but really it was a floating anarchist city made up of Bucky Fuller's geodesic domes which had been attached just under water to the pilings of the oil derricks. But Sil didn't know anything about the oil he just wanted a job at Downs' floating city-state, and the rent-free fully adjustable two-bedroom geodesic dome that had been offer to him over a casual phone call from New York.  
+	 Sil, like the rest of you, desperately wanted to understand what the hell was going on , and as most people realize in some vague sense —no one knows what the hell is really going on.  There are nevertheless those who believe that they do know and are willing to destroy anyone who dares to invade their sacred planes of understanding.  Most of them at this time were concentrated in the United States where they made good and sure to track what everyone was doing and saying and thinking and feeling.  They have devised extremely elaborate game-playing circuits with uniquely complex languages like legalese and mathematics and only those who speak them can acquire power and get stuff, and they have created strange loop disinformation systems to keep the knowledge from spreading.  They say that such information is classified and can only be know by them; they say you don't understand the big picture, the interests of the nation, for our collective safety, to protect those still living —so that they can hide from their crimes against human souls the scorched atomic earth it's getting used up like a gutter whore and they are going to leave you here and head into space and you are going to try to stop them which is exactly what they need you to do.  
+	Fortunately within the disinformation loops the power mongers themselves are bound up and must work inside the verbal fences of currency and truth and the "American Way."  They had even created an elaborate mythology to support the system wherein the truth is always shown as lying in the hands of the few, and the many are stuck to live out normal lives while they themselves are extraordinary and important.  The History fiction principle is not widely understood outside of the control elite loops —those who named themselves famous.  The trap is that if knowledge is not widespread then its power slides into atrophy, ie. No entropy means atrophy.
+	It wasn't that Sil wanted to illuminate the world or anything he knew that was a fiction as well; he merely wanted to left in peace and he would accord others the same respect.  On meeting Downs in person and looking into his eyes he saw the recognition of these ideas, he saw someone who had decoded the gaming and was ready to move on.  He saw a man to whom power and wealth were as irrelevant as Nobel Peace prizes.  Downs was of medium height and had a rather slight build; most people thought he was in his forties but he was much older.  He had away of walking across a room with an effortless grace which most people were immediately put at ease by.  Sil thought it was rather too deliberate, but he merely noted it and kept suspicion at bay.  He kept telling himself this is a man who gan get what you need and will let you do what you want, don't fuck this up.  After a short introduction a hashish pipe was produce and the two relaxed and spoke at length.
+	"There is some thing you should understand before you decide you want to stay here," Downs had a formality and thoughtfulness to his speech that gave off the impression that every word was vitally important.  "This structure is a living laboratory and there is no hierarchical structure that dictates what you should do.  You are free.  You may do or not do anything you wish, but you may not tell others what they can and can't do, no matter how much you find them annoying, backward or incomprehensible.  You will find that even the most ignorant," his tone condescended the word, "mindsets become quite enlightening in this environment.  There is a rather large library at your disposal and gourmet chefs will prepare most anything you want.  You do not need currency to get anything you want here, but you do need excellent signal reception and frequency adapters in order to keep from losing your semantic grasp on spacetime while you're catapulted into spacetimemind."  Downs lit the hash cigarette, smiled and passed it to Sil, "in order to expand the potential of the human brain I built this city and I have tried the gather all the possible maps of the human experience together into one place and see what they had to gain from each other.  just because it might prove interesting, " Downs paused and stared his unobtrusive but penetrating gaze at Sil, "and I like you, which is not true of everyone here."
+	
+	Sil moved in to a dome apartment furnish in luxurious tapestries and artifacts that ranged from cuneiform texts to what appeared to be scrolls of Tibetan text.  There was a couch of warm dark orange velvet and piles of pillows with scenes from the Tibet Book of the Dead and the Kama Sutra.  The mixture of oriental and occidental gave the room a circular feeling, which was reinforced by the spherical walls and roof.  Sil's head felt heavy and he laid down in the pile pillows and felt the room spin drunkenly.  Don't worry the spinning will fade, your brain is conditioned to judge perspective on three dimension planes.  Taking away the planer walls it is used too causes distress and disorientation, but it will eventually go away as your brain maps out the new system and eventually you will forget that you live in a circle. 
+	Cary Downs' flotilla as he liked to call it consisted of seventy-two people, ranging from ethnobotanists to a fundamentalist Baptist preacher.  All the flotilla's food was grown in to large greenhouses or caught in the waters around it; meat was flown in every week by helicopter although only a few people ate it as meat was generally considered by the scientists as an inefficient means of nourishing the human body.  It had been proposed by one of them named William that the body was but one part of the human existence and the appetite and random whims of taste should not be ignored in some ascetic quest that blinded us in sterile Orwellian future-nightmares as he had put it.  There was also a bar and smoking lounge, which was Sil's contribution to the system —as the residents referred to it.  It was a closed system (save the imported meat and alcohol).  Three additional greenhouses grew THC enhanced marijuana of a strain called alamont which was processed into hash and given out in bulk to the inhabitants.  Also grown were peyote plants, poppies, coca plants, tobacco plants, close to twenty varieties of hallucinogenic mushrooms including the Kuri-coo, and several other mind altering herbs and medicines that Sil had never heard of.  
+	The inward curvature of the walls gave Sil the impression that his room was collapsing back in on itself, the disorientation of circular walls and the intensity of hash rendered Sil immobile for three days —which Cary assured him was perfectly normal.  He further suggested that Sil not restrain himself on the drugs, but realize their potential incompatibilities after all he said everything you ever wanted is here no one is judging you and no one is threatening you so you'd be fool not to let go for once in your life then we'll initiate you into our program .  So Sil spent close to three months, usually alone (although he sometimes experimented with the exotically beautiful tantric sex guides), playing with the nuero chemical circuitry of his brain.  He learned to focus himself out of his body and down to a single point within or without the the spacetime boundaries.  This gave him a fantastic amount of power, and it made him an agent in a polydimensional universe instead of limiting him to only one at a time.  It was here that he found The Quarter.
+
+EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG
+EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS RIGHT
+EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS A MAYBE
+EVERTHING YOU KNOW IS MEANINGLESS
+-from A Game-Circuit Guidebook by Maya Stevens
+	
+	One quiet afternoon Sil found himself in a spacetime point that called itself Tucker.  Discipline is an agent's greatest virtue, it was thinking when Sil dropped in.  It was in a bar and behind it Doris Day and her Waxing Loquacious Lesbians were playing a sultry 60's motown number on a dimly lit stage, and the general atmosphere of the bar had a surreal quality.  The walls seemed to breath as if threatening to go ahead and speak.  bars are excellent places for observing the least attractive maps of humanity the best you can hope for is one where the possibilities remain endless regardless of the irrefutable realities.  Tucker seemed well aware of the realities, but it's mind was only now beginning to sense the infinite set of possibilities that comes with every new reality.  Occasionally it became aware that  other voices seemed to be talking in his head, other people getting in his head through warped words, written words, sometimes they told him things he believed as evil and other times they made him mindlessly hum product jingles from the seventies.  This self knowledge was the only reason Sil hung around quietly listening to this man's mind.  But Tucker did not seem to have self-pity, he considered self-pity to be a symptom mental illness because it requires the ego to be divided into pitier and pitied.  He liked his ego together as one in harmony he seemed quite proud of this justification and it helped to ease his innate sense of anxiety at the idea that thoughts not originating from his own mind could work their way in regardless.  
+	Tucker is an Agent of the State.  Sil almost fell backward in his chair.  The State is not to be confused with the government as many of you would assume.  On the contrary the government is but an instrument of the State, the State is a separate entity whose ultimate identity seemed unknown even to Tucker.   Sil was no longer being passive, he grilled in on Tucker's storage banks looking for a name, and moves around in his skin he hears the word Waiben.  The chill and the cringe are not his own they were Sil's and he learned the first rule of any closed system:  Just because you aren't paranoid doesn't mean they aren't watching you. 
+	The TuckerSil coordinate thinks of butting in on a conversation to give two men a piece of his mind, but Sil steered him toward the attractive blond to his right who Sil figured would be more interesting and could lead to sex, but  after a few failed attempts he overhears the cruel whisper that guy is bugging me, you want to go over to a booth?	 Half shocked half hurt the Tucker gets up to leave; standing at the urinal on his way out he is shocked to find a poem scrawled on the wall
+	So old the place was, I remember none
+	The like upon the earth: what I had seen
+	Of grey cathedrals, buttressed walls, rent towers,
+	The superannuations of sunk realms,
+	Or nature's rocks toiled hard in waves and winds,
+	Seemed but the faulture of decrepit things 
+	To that eternal doomed monument.
+What a very curious bar he thinks to himself getting into his car.  Sil jumped put leaving tucker to his thoughts; those people must be intellectuals he thinks morosely I never understand what everyone is talking about.  I am stupid he is thinking as he drives away, at least the voices are gone.  
+	
+	Sil is smiling to himself and lighting a cigarette.  At another point in the fabric of reality Sil is feeling a primordial yearning to devour raw flesh and roll in a room of naked women. You are at a club wearing skintight black vinyl pants and a black tank top with no bra, your nipples are hard and everyone can see them through your shirt.  You're dancing with a black haired girl also wearing tight black clothing, sitting at the back watching from a distance.  Your pussy clenches and sends tremors through your body every time the girl brushes against your skin, she teases you dragging her finger along your arm, and as the music stops she grabs you by the hand and leads you two a corner booth where two more women are locked in delicious animal fire; locked naked and sitting upright they grind pussies together, shuddering mouth to mouth, breast to breast legs entwined....
+	
+	Sil along with the rest of the residents in the police state he used to call home, hates cops....I fucking hate 'em.  I hate 'em. I hate 'em. I hate 'em.  I want to kill them all in a violent sea of time-released explosive donuts that when eaten mix with the stomach acids and explode in violent blueberrystrawberrylemon filled death he fanaticizes. Die pig die.  Imagine it, a million sworn upholders of THE LAW dead in an instant.  Think of the society we could have.  Think of the freedom, think of the beauty.  The sweet satisfaction of tearing down all the rotting pig gut filled doughnut shops in the nation.  No more sweaty palms.  "License and registration please."  Fuck you, never again.  Never again.  kill every cop you see —a populist revolt.  We don't need all these damn laws, the people are okay —we know how to look after ourselves.  The laws are the ones that fucked everything up the first place.  And who hurts the most people in this here little world?  The State.   A cattle car streaming over the tracks of life, slick with the blood of the people.  The train can't go up the hill because the tracks are too slippery with my guts your guts our guts.  Cut off by THE LAW, our heads impaled on the ends of the its tentacle-like arms as they strangling the last hold outs of resistance into pacified stupidity.  
+	The anger subsided and Sil found himself dialing a number he didn't know he picks up the phone —the other end never rings, instead a voice says: "hello?"
+	"May I speak to Captain Clark please?"
+	"I'm sorry he's not in.  May I take a message?"
+	"No. No message."  Sil hangs up the phone.  He walks to the back of the room and flops his body onto the luxurious pillows and is swept by an overwhelming sensation of peace; his mind begin to expand, and he feels the desire for more consciousness —the death of us all, Sil thinks idly to himself as he lights a pipe and sucks in a deep inhalation of opium and hash.  The sticky sweet smoke that fills his lungs brings forth tape loops and strange loops of static memories.  Twisting and turning their way through the circuitry until: Anarchy is the only answer to all questions which begin with why?  whY?  wHY? WHY?  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law —future memories of books he hasn't read yet.  In distant memory filtering strands of DNA locked deep in Sil's cerebral cortex a vibration begins, infinitely small at first but building slowly into his medulla and finally spring forth into the part of the brain referred to as consciousness.  The cameras rolled even as the lights were dimming.
+"BRING THE PRISONER FORWARD"
+	Unrolling a weighty and sterile looking scroll of antiseptically white paper a voice whose origin is masked by the size of the paper itself reads:
+	After making reviews of the past actions, thoughts, and attributed sentiments, it is the judgement of this committee, and therefore the judgment of the government it represents, that due to a general lack of ability to perceive the options open to the work potential of the drone in question in simple terms of an x or not-x negativism which would be most helpful in these situations and would consequently decrease expenditures and lower taxes for other individuals living in said dualism and therefore we hereby decree that all metaprogramming undertaken by the individual without the consent and simultaneous approval of this committee and the government it represents to be criminal in intent, hostile in action, and punishable by prison and/or death upon conception.  Thank you.  You may go.
+	Sil Hawkard finds himself dragged from the tribunal; hands tied in front of him and legs trailing uselessly behind.  His guards use his head to open the heavy wooden door and then they dump him unceremoniously onto the filthy street where a group of children are playing.  A monkey runs by, tugging its penis with one hand and slapping its bright red ass with the other.
+	
+   	
+	Teletype for Corsica the agent sent in for returns,  Home office denied request for reinforcements, all communication to be ceased henceforth.  Piss in the riddle thought the old man wheeling his chair back out to the porch, he picked up a Mason jar of corn whiskey and laid the shotgun across his lap.
+	The languid afternoon floated in and up the beach from the Atlantic bringing photomontages of Mandalay and the Dutch East Indies spice trade boats, far off places he had heard of only as words and imagined smells.  Up the beach from the house were the beginnings of the rocky South Carolina shoreline teeming with crabs, sponges, sea anemones, and circle swooping gulls feeding on sand crabs exposed in the fluctuating waves.  It was low tide, in fact it was always low tide or at least it seemed that way to the old man.  
+	He was partly right, the tide was lower than it had been a year before when a man by the name of Dr. Waiben began overseeing construction of a nuclear power plant buried two miles under ground to hide its heat signature for pesky government satellites. The plant, whose only entrance was from the sea, was Waiben's new research facility but right now that is but future memory fighting for space at a coordinate that won't have it.
+	
+	Sil is in New Orleans renting an attic in the French quarter following a strict regiment to kick the opium habit he developed at FREEDOM Inc.  The best cure Downs had said is to get a job in INDOCTRINATION Inc., where you will be forced to confront the ugly stupidity of life.  
+	
+	The old man stood up on the porch and paced back and forth waiting...you understand the seriousness of the matter... obviously we would not expect an ordinary agent to do such a thing...your expertise in these fields...well frankly it's unparalleled..there is no other...These orders are coming straight from the top...your cooperation is non-negotiable...
+
+
+...to be an abstraction does not 
+mean that an entity is nothing. 
+—A. N. Whitehead	
+	
+	Two years earlier: Dr. Waiben, pathologist for Usinc., surveys a long horrifically clean hallway whose smoothness is interrupted only occasionally by the presence of polished sliver knobs indicating doorways.  There are no observation windows or any other windows within the rooms.  This is the housing quarter for the derelicts of society: prostitutes, schizophrenics, lobotomy patients, drug pushers, anarchists, communists, AIDS victims, the aberrations that society never needed nor found a use for, end up here, under the care of Dr. Waiben, pathologist for IND Inc.  The good doctor has, for twenty odd years, been the caretaker of the derelicts, charged with restoring to them a level of functionality deemed necessary by society.  He is the man who puts the cogs back into the wheel.  
+	He was also one of three doctors in Usinc that had been approved by the government to do LSD and Ibogaine research of human subjects.  this was the public record of what he was doing and indeed it was his little pet project having cured himself of an alcoholic tendency with Ibogaine he genuinely wanted to help others with what he considered a miracle drug.  But like most people he did not have just one personality
+	Waiben was not an ordinary doctor as in white coat sort of psychologist, he came from a different school of thought that said in order to treat someone's mind you must be willing to live through it.  As a consequence of this belief system Dr. Waiben found himself frequently passed over and ignored for promotion because his unorthodox approach to the human mind was extreme.  Waiben was not afraid to induce seizures with light triggers, or to spend two weeks straight on LSD trying to see what the world might look like to a schizophrenic, and perhaps most potentially embarrassing to Usinc politicos was his recent foray into fetishism and sadomasochistic sex.  It just doesn't sound good for sheep to find out that congress is funding someone who ties people and whips them because both parties genuinely enjoy it.  The mass of the populace did not have sex like this because they we're afraid of it, afraid that the could be twisted and they certain;y weren't keen on their hard earned money being spent of such projects.   The irony of it was that Ibogaine would have been perfectly acceptable if anyone knew about his other project.   	His forays into fetishism, quietly published in circles of like minded individuals  had raised a few control junky eyebrows and perked up a handful of ears at the top level of government in Usinc where it was generally accepted that what people didn't want to know about themselves might be handy thing to know if you were trying to dominate them.  The studies these people had Waiben doing took place elsewhere, in a facility that did not even have a name.  Waiben was engaged in a further extension of the old MK ULTRA project of the CIA, only by now even the CIA didn't know if they were really doing it or not.  People from the private sector like Cary were the only ones aware of what was going on.  
+	Certain "expendable persons" as the jargon of government labeled them were donated to Waiben for research purposes.  Minds that be reasoned that if some people got off on pain others might get further if you combined fear and pain.  	 
+	Waiben had agreed to such a monstrous thing because he desperately wanted to know that the hell was really going on and he realized that torture and the old traditions of ritual slaughter was one of the only areas of the human experience that no one was willing to study.  No one was willing to give up their humanity in order to try to figure out what it means to have humanity, like addiction the costs seemed to high.  Waiben coped with this by creating a cold calculated side of himself that was able to abstract itself and reason and do things to other people that were unpleasant to say the least.  This new and colder side of the doctor was a materialist sort of personality that reasoned there is little moral difference between experimenting on a rat and experimenting on a human.  The rat had its rights violated on the premise that there were millions more where that came from, well quite frankly the same is true of humans.  Its not a pretty line of logic and most people prefer not to think about it.  Waiben admired the irony of it, PETA would have approved, and more importantly there was little difference between what he did during the day —he tortured people who did not want to be tortured, and at night he tortured people who want to be tortured.  The overlap made him appear alternately as a sadistic monster and a normal well adjusted psychiatrist with a hobby —depending on who you were and what time it was.  
+	However as time went on it became clear to him that mixing fear and sex did not have much of a result.  Fear overwhelmed and subjugated arousal.  In fact fear seemed to do that to everything.  But he kept on because he wasn't sure if he would be allowed to stop, after all if they were letting him do this to people what would stop them from doing it to him someday? He was having the inner stirring of fear himself.  For instance this fine sunny afternoon in May they wanted him to administer electro-shock treatment to a "prostitute" whom the state had deemed an expendable —personsona non grata.  Waiben figured that she was probably not prostitute and was probably merely someone with out any one to miss them if they disappeared.  He was well aware that the government was actively engaged in experimenting on its citizens, but he tried not to care.  
+	He was sitting in his office watching her on a closed circuit television system thinking that she was the most attractive prostitute he had ever seen.  Most of the subjects he got were just plain ugly and led ugly lives like the man he had tortured to death yesterday was a convicted child molester, Waiben didn't have problem torturing someone like that, or the skin head girl from last week who finally realized the error of beliefs, but sadly passed on without a chance to mend her ways.  Looking at the prostitute now he sudden felt something scientists are trained not to feel —emotions. The materialist was beaten and bruised by the Mystic who argued suddenly with a force he did not usually have.  Dead end, his mystic kept yelling, DEAD fucking END.  He thought about the things he would really prefer to do to her after he got off work, in an environment where where she was free to enjoy transcendence.  The mystic was a clever little fellow and argued that since the research had seemed to show that sex energy does not mix well with fear energy it made since to pursue the opposite logic.  Sex with love energy.  
+	It hit him with all the enlightening force of genuine discovery.  Sex is as far as science has ever bothered to go, after sex it all gets very muddled complicated and confusion.  Its here that emotions exist and from there it gets even worse leading to world where nothing seems to behave as it should.  That was of course the thing that now made Waiben want to go.  He sat in absolute silence for a while trying to wrap his brain around a theory that the mystic was fast spinning like a mental tornado sweeping across his cerebrum.  The wind started with the thought that there might possibly be some corollary between the way quantum mechanics breaks down close to the beginning to the universe and the way that personality behavior breaks down around genuine human emotions.  Why are they trying to measure subjective experiences with tools and language designed to be objective.  What we need here is a new approach a new model and a new language to describe it....
+	And suddenly it died.  One of the disagreeable aspects of having a mind that never sits still is that it loses track of one thought rather easily  and jumps to next without warning, i think i lost my choo-choo some might say....  For instance in his reverie Waiben had forgotten about the task at hand and suddenly realized that with the new tunnel of reality creeping in around him he could no longer carry out the torture with the abstract detachment we once had.  i cant do this anymore without feeling it the mystic declared categorically, but at the same time the materialist new the consequences of not doing it might be fatal.  The words buzzed through his head and started a little audio feedback loop a bit like putting a guitar too close to and amplifier.  The result was a mild pressure in the right side of his head that he thought was actually producing muscle twitches, he tried to feel it with his hand to verify the experience, but the movement broke the spell.  
+	He stood suddenly steeling himself for the task at hand and marched with ominous dread down the horrifically long and sterile hallway toward the unmarked door at the other end.  He stood outside, leaning against the door and waited as the cattle prod charged to the standard dosage of ten thousand low amplitude volts.  he saw the thing lying there like a virus so innocently waiting for something to turn it evil.  In that moment he felt the screams of all the lost burned up souls at the edge of the bay.  he felt himself floating by and only watching as they choked up gasoline-napalm sores that seared off their tongues and licked up the bodies in flames.  this is played out to show you that you can not do everything, suffering is built into the system and no religious excuses are going to justify it for you, you have to feel it.  The air is hot and thick like the worst humidity and the scorching of the flesh sizzles in your nostrils and you just watch.  Hell is for voyeurs, the control addicts that like to watch.  You just have to ride it out and hope that the cynicism doesn't burn you up right up with them or you find yourself in the liquid fire ripping out your own eyes and sawing off your tongue to run away.  Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy....
+	A little red light came on signalling that the cattle prod was fully charged.  Waiben bent down a picked it up, he held it there for a minute to feel the cold metal length.  the phallic irony of it was not lost on him.  He pushed a button and the door to swung open with a faint hiss.  he stepped into an antiseptically clean room that was maintained at 96˚ which replicated the natural body temperature for the average human.  In front of him was the girl.  She was indeed very beautiful with short black hair which looked like it had been in tight micro-curls at one point.  Now it was a dishevelled mess.  She was lying naked with her legs were splayed wide and restrained with leather straps and buckles, her arms were restrained above her head.  He smiles weakly at her, and said you know I wish we could have met under different circumstances....
+	He looks into her eyes watching the pupils dilate and touches the cattle prod to the delicate smoothness of her leg, he ran it up until it was nestled against her shaven mound and pressed the switch.  Her body went rigid and she shot up off the table as if suddenly turned into a stiff board.  He kept his eyes locked on her as she collapse back onto the table.  he saw something flash through them and he felt a tremor in his guts, his muscles spasmed involuntarily.  You don't have to do this...please don't do this...  He stopped and put the cattle prod down there was something missing in this situation, whe doesn't have fear.  He could tell it in her eyes their was an absence of the primal desire to live.  He was overwhelmed and as gently as he could he pulled the duct tape off of her mouth.
+	She was crying, but she smiled at him "that really really fucking hurts," she whispered.
+	Waiben could not help laughing though he felt monstrous under the circumstances.  he abruptly stopped and started crying.  Big uncontrollable sobs that wracked his whole body and he fell on his knees and proceeded to curl up in little ball on the floor.  he lay like that for a while until the sobs worked themselves out and then he was motionless on the floor.  After a few minutes he heard her horse voice asking him if he was done.  He collected himself and stood, but he could not bring himself to look her in the eyes.  Could you possibly undo these restraints then?
+	Waiben was disoriented, but he was pretty sure the girls mouth had not moved.  "Of course," he undid them, but he picked up the cattle prod as he did and moved away from her.  She sat up on the table and stared at him without speaking.  The gaze was piercing and he shifted uncomfortably as her eyes continued to bore down on him.  
+	Finally she spoke, "I'm going to get you out of here, but before i do you're going to have to learn what you are."
+	The absurdity of the statement did not bother him he simply said okay.
+	She stepped up to him and began to undress him, starting by unbuttoning his shirt.  When she undid his belt she reached down and rather gently held his rigid cock as she eased the pants down over it.  She stood embracing him strongly with her arms around his neck and pulled herself up until her pussy parted and she slid down on his cock.  Waiben remained rigid like a board, but he closed his eyes and she kissed his lips.  "do you want to fuck me ?"
+	The shear absurdity of the situation came rushing up in Waiben's face and he realized that he did not want to fuck her.
+	"You don't do you," she whispered into his ear.  "you want to get on the table don't you...you want to feel it, don't you."
+	Waiben found himself nodding and she led him over and laid him down.  She spread his legs and restrained them along with his arms.  She stroked his cock hard again and teased him by biting his nipples.  All at once her eyes went black and she thrust the cattle prod into his balls and flipped the switch.  
+	Waiben's body felt to him as if it had been blow up off the table by some kind of wind.  he didn't even feel his come splash of his face as the electricity caused an involuntary muscle spasm that made it arc out of his cock in unnaturally thick spurts.  He landed back on the table and heard his voice make an inhuman screeching kind of wail.  He felt the pain coming in like standing in front of subway tunnel and watching the headlight drawing toward you with the full horror of knowing that you can not move out of the way.  It hit him like a train and knocked him unconscious.
+	He awoke with a cramp in his neck.  He opened his eyes and saw that he was in a cinder block room with two windows up near the ceiling.  He was not accustomed to waking in strange spaces he felt a sense of panic and leaped up off the cold concrete floor and threw his hands on the doorknob with all the desperation of already knowing that it wasn't going to turn.  He began to cry again, cursing himself for letting go of control.  He felt something hot at his toes and he awoke again to the confusion of being on a wooden ship that was in flames.  In fact he noticed that his foot was on fire and he jumped up and beat it against his leg and then with his hand until it went out.  the deck was rocking violently now and he was thrown bodily across it into a doorway that opened with the force of his impact and sent him tumbling down three or four stairs.  his hair was on fire and he beat is hands in frenzy feeling the smell of panic mixed up in the smoke, a primordial fear of fire seized him and as the ship rocked back the other direction he and went flying back out the door.  He skidded across the deck feeling splinters stab into his chest, stomach, and balls.
+	Dr Waiben awoke again in the room with the girl.  By now he was so confused as to not know if he was dreaming or dead or alive and everything was really happening.  The girl was standing over him whispering, "it really doesn't matter, treat it all as if it were real and treat all of it as if it were a dream and most importantly treat all of it as if it were meaningless in the end.
+	She unstrapped the restraints and Dr. Waiben felt her lifting him like a sack of potatoes which she slung over her shoulder and threw open the door.  He watched the ground for a while occasionally lifting his head to see if anyone was following them.  They emerged into sunshine and he suddenly became aware that they were both naked. It occurred to him that they were anything but sly right now but even as he tried to lift his head she lowered his feet down and laid him against the side of a car.  He saw stars as the blood rushed out of his head and a door opened and she gently pushed him inside the car and jumped in after him. 
+	
+
+	About a year before he had been approached by the unnamed man to work on the MK-ULTRA project Dr. Waiben had considered himself a rational materialist quite sure that he knew better than the mass of people what the hell was going on.  Some people found him arrogant, but most agreed that he was one the fast track to a successful career in government psychiatry.  One day on vacation in New York city Waiben was sitting on a subway watching a very attractive woman read the paper when an older gentleman in a three piece pin striped suit sat down next to him.  They were the only ones in the car and Waiben didn't understand why he had to sit right next to him.  He was about to move away when the man said rather loudly and seemingly to no one in particular, "She's a real beauty isn't she?"
+	Waiben had heard stories of weirdness being common among New York's subways, but he had yet to see it.  "Excuse me?" 
+	"That woman right their," he gestured at her and she appeared to not have heard him, "she's a real beauty, isn't she?"
+	Waiben looked at her and blushed, but she ignored him, "yes she is." he agreed. 
+	"She's not really there," the man said matter-of-factly.
+	Waiben looked at him for a moment and watched him smile.  He turned back and the woman was indeed not there.  He was startled and jumped up out of his seat trying to see where she was.  The train was still moving and the doors to either car at opposite sides remained shut.  He was seized by panic and turned back to the man, "that the fuck?"
+	"Yes what the fuck?" the man kept smiling.  Waiben felt dizzy and had to balance himself against a pole.  "Would you like a pancake?"  The man reached into his bag and pulled out a pancake.
+	"No, no what the hell is going on here?  Who are you?"
+	Take a pancake otherwise you won't believe me, take two, eat one now and save it for later."  Waiben was beyond himself and accepted the two pancakes one of which he slid in his pocket and one of which he ate.  He felt himself become very tired and it alarmed him, but by the time he realized he had been drugged it was to late.  who are you?" he managed to ask before he lost consciousness.  He was out before he could hear the man say "you."
+	He awoke to the familiar surrounding of his hotel room, but without being able to remember getting there.  He sat up realizing it had all been a dream, but he reached in his pocket and there was that damn pancake.  Waiben felt everything caving in.  He stood up to take a shower and stepped on a book or something that was book-like, inhabiting that nether region of publishing between a fat pamphlet and a skinny book.  Picking it up he saw the title was Pissing on Gravities Rainbow, it was written by someone named Sil Hawkard, there was no publisher and it appeared to have been hand bound.  The first page said if you're reading this you you have just experienced psychic dissidence and you are confused because your personal model of reality no longer fits everything you have experienced.  You have questions....
+
+	Dr Waiben read the book seven times that night and was not at all what most people would have called enlightened.  The book challenged every basic belief that a rational existence is based on and Waiben found himself suddenly unsure if anything existed and more importantly he realized that he could really not tell if he was alive at all.  This created a level of uncertainty that paved the way for enlightenment and over the months leading up to the cattle prod incident he found himself reading names like Reich, Kinsey, Leary, Korbinsky and others.  He was seized by the enthusiasm that comes with genuine discoveries and Waiben thought he might be able to bring the whole world along with him.  The Tim Leary Syndrome they call it in the trade.  So he started trying to get his colleagues interested; dropping names like Wilhelm Reich, Timothy Leary, Albert Kinsey, Alfred Korzynski.  Science has the same form of black balling that Hollywood mustered up and showed to the world, and all three of these names were on the list of STUFF NO ONE TALKS ABOUT ANYMORE.  
+	These men and many others working with them and apart from them had found a part of human nature that the rest of human nature was not willing to deal with.  they challenged the basic assumptions about life that all of cooperative society is based on.  Between them they were opening the three cardinal "no no's" of western civilization: sex, death and reality.  they were an disliked group of people to say the least.  to make matters worst Waiben kept trying to push toward the mathematical theory of quantum inseparability arguing that nobody want to talk about these three seemingly unrelated issues because at some level we are all aware that they are linked.  Such thoughts do not keep the mass of people up late at night, and things that the masses don't know they don't have may as well not exist.  Waiben coined the phrase "genetic repression" to describe the phenomena and he attempted to have it published in the New England Journal of Medicine as an argument linking the cultural response to Wilhelm reich (his imprisonment and burning of his research) with Dr Waiben's own experiences in fetich clubs.  
+	it was bold and beautiful theory that argued that everyone is insane.  But it is not the sixties anymore and people are sick and fucking tired of trying to learn the universe; Waiben's paper was not printed and was returned to him with a handwritten note citing "ridiculous references, no scientific validation, and a total lack cohesiveness" as reasons for it rejection.  Waiben was deeply hurt for a while until he realized that sick people do not see themselves as sick, until the illness effects their lives in some way that can not be ignored.  Scientists are sick.  they suffer from what Reich loosely termed "the emotional plague," by which he seems to have meant that empirical evidence is not the only way to answer a question.  Science is so certain that it has the answer that it refuses to allow itself to be doubted.  It has to rig the game, limit the questions and spend years making sure the evidence at hand will fit the accepted model of the universe.  Its a lot like the Catholic Church during the Spanish Inquisition, so much so in fact that Robert Anton Wilson calls this disease The New Inquisition.   From Wilhelm Reich in Hell: There is also argument by Logic.  This can sometimes be combined with scientific experiments and if the two mesh we have a "fit" of theory with fact and scientists are delighted.  Pure Argument by Logic however does not require this experimental back up and only demands that the conclusions by reached by the game-rules of an abstract symbol system. In our hypothetical case, some witness might inform congress: 
+All mome raths need to be distimmed; 
+All frammisgoshes are mome raths; therefore;
+all frammisgoshes need to be distimmed 
+	The new inquisition thinks that Science is has that damnedable old thing that the Catholic Church once thought only it had:  THE TRUTH.  With THE TRUTH on your side you don't need to fear; anything challenging you is inherently wrong because you are quite certain that you have THE ONLY TRUTH.   Multi-model reality is not an option granted by the Inquisitors.  And the Inquisitors get mighty damn pissed when one of their priests goes astray and they will do some mighty bad things to them if they catch them.
+	Waiben new that by getting in the car he was trusting his life to someone other than himself and he knew that someone could very well be an agent of the Inquisitors.  fortunately for his rampant paranoia he didn't have time to argue about the situation.
+		
+	Transcribed from tapes: the terminal disease clerk took orders by the turnstile, finding the story in the story and logging in the disease workers all night long.  At five in the morning he got off and headed to a tavern as the sun was coming up.  Direct confrontation with the terminal virus word is a bit confusing to those who are not properly prepared.  poor fuckers never had a chance; the technical sergeant takes off his helmet and slams it on the table the near moronic mumbling of discontent.  Waging war is semantically impossible without overtones of homosexuality.  Heavy handed, the second wave fell in line with the technical sergeant at the lead.  The thing you have to watch out for are the warblers —the distractions coming in at the sides, sound is their most effective weapon, primordial hangover he called it drunkenly raising a glass.  And some of you may think this suspect, but take my advice sound's where it all started.  In the beginning was the word and the word spoke.  The sergeant stoops and cups his hands to light a cigarette.  Then there is sex or not enough of it, both is equally dangerous —biology is not something to scoff at.  sexuality is the best cover an agent can ever use.  Rockets come searing in overhead ripping flesh and scoffing at the notion of eternity, out here you don't have time to talk, the thoughts are things, they are no longer words...keep your radios tuned boys its getting ugly.  Another rocket sears in severed limbs fly out the explosion and olive drab body parts litter the scene. 
+	Watch out for the bloody words, sharp words that hang in the air like knives and when uttered returned to slit the throat of their speaker and if every word you have spoken returned to act upon yourself would you survive the experience?   Me no way I'm outta here.  Situation getting sticky, humid like vaporous blood hanging on in the air.  Still acrid smell of urine and small children playing in a asphalt playground ringed on all sides by immense brick walls with basketball hoops hung half way up each of the sides.     Realize that that which we are taught from childhood to distrust is in fact a pawn of something far more immense and much much more dangerous.  The governments and nations of the world are incidental pawns of there own control systems and then beyond them there are even more and so on like looking two mirrors facing each other and going on to infinity.  The monster of power is faceless there is no one person or group that controls everything they are all parts of a immense and multi-headed monster that is constantly biting itself and attacking it own heads until some day it will destroy itself.  The end of time leaves space and word alone together
+	we're taking heavy fire!  The sergeant calls for back up, the captain says love one another and cryptically hangs up the phone. The Spanish soldier selling chiclettes say no good no bueno, pictures worth not even half a thousand words.  Wouldn't give you ten words, worthless gringo words don’t mean shit. no good no bueno, not worth the blood their written in. The blood of all peoples not yours, not your shoes, by god keep your slave labor camps a closed-mouthed secret.   Gotta keep that in house, dis-credit all news agencies by routinely feeding them false information.  News doesn’t happen events happen, and the department of television information broadcasting inc. a subdivision of indoctrination inc. decides what gets out and what remains forever sealed in baby pissshitguts.  No that's not true. No comment. No need for comment, the preceding has been since proved to be untrue, cut to shots of smart bombs. Couldn’t get fifty words for those now gringo -over exposure- nobody buying.   Same old stinking shit.  No Good. No Bueno.
+	Gringo go home in thousand languages in a million words, why don’t you crawl back in your cave get your tail so far between your legs it goes half way up your ass?  Lead me to the holy spigot and we’ll show you the bidet of death, constructed by gringos, for gringos, to flush out gringos, to show them all what you do behind closed doors.  Can’t close them all —we have our technicians as well and they’re getting to be better than yours. We got the money rolling in —even offered you the picture words but you don’t want them. No Good.   Can’t use those, too strong.  No fair, crying boy heads home for cave to lick his dirty balls clean.
+	I gotta picture for you I on vacation in your country go to hear senator’s speak but all door are closed, all sealed.  So i gotta fiber optic and feed it in from the roof show all senators mad with sexual lust and blood thirsty, clamoring for war and stealing souls and bodies and driving them off wherever they see fit.
+	The technician is retro actively of course —the papers said the man was mentally ill.  ‘my cod!’ screamed a church lady in the front row, ‘satan has garbled the lords message, this isn’t what he meant for you to hear, no it was not all like that, there was to be understanding.’ she is parading her old cunt bones whining at the justices —tissue conducts signals, animals communicate through the use of visual, acoustic , chemical, tactile and electrical signals.  Our laboratory is an abundant and well preserved feed back loop to understand and interpret Eusocial behavior. negative feedback inhibition to make you shiver Gringo.  Make you shiver good.
+	Repetition unsuccessful.  The radiologist was called in to examine the patient —blisters and burns indicate high probability of skin mutation, what would you say Dr. Waiben?   Crested and on the nod? Diminutively, yes definitely.
+	Information potential exists —its an unsettling thought, dependency —and what happens when things start to think? How do you draw the lines then?
+	HOW THE PLAGUE BEGAN:
+ 	The wish to preserve -not worth saving what already is- in this scenario.  The word,  the loss of body situated at the origins of recorded sound -the temporal metaphysical and esthetic possibilities.
+	<insert sounds of truck on dirt road>  
+	Old man yelling.  Get off of my laaawwwnnn!   Sits down to oil his gun some more and then half turns in his chair to face the camera and says "i haven't left the porch since i got this CDRom PEOPLE version 3.0.   Updated and expanded human potential at your fingertips.  Its the only thing i need —got no use for the stinking gringos anymore—  camera pans out and down revealing a yard strewn with shotgun-blasted bodies of young children.  We see wife, face half torn off, crawling towards a pistol <shotgun blast stage left> her head disappears entirely.   Old man: "human potential, the new CDRom makes wives unnecessary." cue logo: on sale now at a sanatorium near you....
+	I'm going to finally send you the orgy papers this time  -been fixing to get 'round to that for some time"  <heavy southern drawl>  don't think he's the type to do it though but i been wrong once or twice a'fore.    Don't want people showing up on my lawn though that's never good.  get off of my lllaaaawwwwnnnnn! <shotgun blast again, distant screaming sounds of deaths final agonies eeking out blood gurgling windpipes> Fucking Gringos! Go home in a thousand languages!
+	  Experience as much of the human potential as possible, retain the container and forward the frog to the fun sun freaks of eastern Tibet —all is well with alkaline, and acidity is on the skids with death rooted out leaving only chicken shit shoveled scrapped and scraped like lemon lime Gatorade poured from a fuck buck of love.  Stop talking to yourself —listen to the virus talk to you.  All that you consider to be a accident was carefully orchestrated for your benefit by a benevolent cocksucking god from the twenty-third dimension to just plain old irritate the fuck out of you like a bad rectal itch.  Stupid gringo got no cure for the ass itch i show you some pictures, yes very dirty, little girls you like??????
+	<<<<<commander in chief of the NATO forces in Europe is fucking small refugee boy in the ass, the boy cries for his mother the general is laughing, your mother’s down the hall boy ,she’s busy with the president of France right now.  But maybe later you’d like to lick his come off her dead face.  Ban those words tear them right out snip snip.  Can’t say that, its disgusting.  War is a snuff film for the rich.  <<<<We gotta step up the bombing chief the public’s losing innarest in us screams the chief of staff running in circles jerking off and slapping his ass until it turns a bright purple and with all seriousness General Jesse Helms pauses to reflect:  I remember a time when life was good no one got in our way, why in Europe under Patton i musta raped twenty thirty little boys and a handful of nuns too. He smiles lost in memory...
+	But God hath given us these trying times....
+	Yes it is bit hard to get cunt these days isn’t it, mumbles the chief of state as he strokes his wife’s cock....Yes dear start a war, get me some cute refugee boys, i so love snapping their necks when I'm coming, she growls affectionately.
+	That's it gentlemen were going to war!  The president stands and ejaculates on a map of the world KOSOVO it is he says as his thick oatmeal consistency sperm all but covers the former republic of Yugoslavia.
+	You like?  You like, no?  Too bad.  You can’t have those words, too strong.  I get power, you give me power, I steal power from you, to expensive to buy it.  I get power and you get pictures and maybe I tell you how to cure rectal itch? Eh? Eh? Eh?
+
+Perfection is attained not 
+when there is no longer anything to add, 
+but when there is no 
+longer anything to take away
+-Antoine de Saint Exupery
+	Experiments with the death ray tape and image guns began with William Burroughs in the nineteen fifties, but was sidetracked by the advent of digital technology.  The newer is not necessarily the better though folks sometimes they just have different uses —like the image gun that shot...In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh by a cacophonous blast out of heaven's pearly cum-stained ass creating the father, the son, and the holy spigot which lies in a secluded garden on the cliffs overlooking the Sargasso sea.  The spigot is buried in a volcano designed by Czech ostriches in the eleventh hour of creation to drain all human excrement off the continent of Europe and into the Sargasso sea all lumpy with turd so thick Jesus "conny" Christ in drag is walking along to the amazement of the gullible, floating gently from turd to turd.  The piss blood of a million cunts and cocks line the shores giving the whole place a radioactive iridescent red glow not to mention a awful stench.  Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo are standing on the bluffs watching the spectacle and scanning with hawk eyes for sweet tight asses in which they can stab their hungry cocks.  The father caught the son sitting in the middle of the garden sucking on an apple and he became enraged and hog tied the boy and penetrated every orifice in his body with a peeled and sculpted cucumber cock; the boy was left a whimpering, quivering lump of fleshy jello from which spawned humankind.
+	The piss gut rotting flesh smell, air taunt necked and jerking at the nose, the captain's eyes role back into his head as is guts are blasted out his ass by a giggling man headed tape worm of extraordinary wit who was prone to quoting Joyce and Bugs Bunny in the same sentence in a way that reminded listeners of Buster Keaton in some strange drugstore hurricane kind of a way.  The skatolic odor was rich and the worm refused to bath.  Owing to the peculiar nature of its origin the soldiers did not disturb the worm preferring instead to watch the captain writhe in agony pulling his legs back behind his ear to attempt to lick the matted blood soaked pubic hair over the torn orangish flesh that hung in ribbons over a large hole that had once been a simple anus.  The upshot of it all was that the worm ate less rations than the captain so the men were basically satisfied with the arrangement and they followed the worm wiggling through the jungle as it did impersonations of Fred Astaire...
+	Blasted rot gut con-artist with ten huge molars running across the front of his mouth in a clump owing to his mother's industrial accident with the cunt acid from the hyperdrill, drilled right on through back to china.  The asshole couldn't even close the damn thing and the lower mandible just kind of hung there like a tire swing.  
+	The giggling Hyenas are dressed in black and high on amphetamines looking to turn you inside out.
+	Tongue-tied porn queens scream obscenities at passersby "I'll suck your dick until your eyeballs pop out your ass..."
+	Steady...wait til you see the whites of their eyes...Blown newspapers and advert scrapes cover the bottom three feet of a brick wall like sardines neatly packed in a kipper snack tin from a 1983 supermarket shelf....Horatio Alger's sodomizing menage-a-toi with the Maytag Man and Uncle Sam has led us to train station on the SpaceTime line where freedom is an irrelevant inconvenience of language that is slowly being fazed out of history.  The i that is You speaks, I speak and the vibrations of air we create controls our every move.  Science gives rise to Magic in the form of powerful papers that tell who what why and how you are to be.  There are things which you can describe and things which you are not allowed to describe.  And thought trickles like blood, out and on to the page bring things that can be done and things that can not be done.  The word controls the game, those who write it are irrelevant the minute they put it on paper, it controls them you me the things we see the things we think, if the word isn't there first there is no reference if there is no reference there is no thing.  How do you know a unicorn exists?  simple it does.  You can find them in stores, in books, in words on papers that tell you what it is, therefore it exists.
+	Uncle Sam came on the ground and left without a trace.  Horatio and Maytag were emotionally tormented for years until their eventual deaths through ritualistic dismemberment.	
+We the people we govern you the other people have decided for reasons which are beyond the scope of this broadcast and may well be beyond the scope of your comprehension entirely that all freedoms which you previously thought you had but never in reality did possess are summarily denied from this point forward.  Please report to the nearest biomedical programming center by the fourth of May where a new human program bio-unity 3.6 will be installed into your seratonin and allow for future dopemine programming without the need for physical intervention please go about your lives as you always have all those not present for the reprogramming procedures by the fourth of May will be consider fugitives of the state and will be dealt with in the harshest manner allowed by law and endorsed by the entertainment loving public...
+	
+
+	Jail is bad and naturally Waiben wanted out, so he was perfectly willing to meet with his former cellmate, if that was all it would take. Besides Sil had drawn him in to interesting and most unusual conversations about the edges of science and how close they were to the fringes of magic and shamanistic traditions and methods.  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magick ...he kept saying.  He seemed intent on getting some sort of confirmation and reassurance from Waiben, but Sil struck Waiben as extremely well read and without the usual pretensions of one who is in as deep as he appeared to be.  Beside the ideas they discussed, Waiben senses some mystery in Sil's nonchalant attitude toward jail, you only have that attitude if you know you aren't going to be in for long.  He mentioned that his employer had some friends who could get Waiben out, but refused further probing.
+	Waiben's hope for some sort of mystery surrounding Sil were further heightened  in New Orleans by Sil's refusal to name his employer, he would just lapse back on a well developed habit of mumbling incoherently and abruptly changing the subject usually to something about the merits of anarchy.  Waiben wanted to hear the words i am rich and i will pay you large sums of money to work for me to do pure research untainted by political agenda and what not.  Waiben realized he was beginning to sound like some scientific utopianist and mentally slapped himself in the face.  
+	Waiben studied Sil's face in the last rays of New Orleans sun noticing the wild sparkle that seemed the jump out of his eyes when his mind began to race and Waiben could barely keep up with the blast of ideas.  But they were not incoherent rants he watched the wheels turning, half wondering whether he had actually thought this up ahead of time or if he really just talked as fast as the words formed in his head and assembled the ideas as he went.  Sil appeared to be around twenty five perhaps a bit older, but his head was a jungle of hair the crawled all over his glasses and eyes obscuring them entirely at time such that he reminded the doctor of the hairy talking thingy from the Adams family.
+	Still Waiben was happy to be talking to someone who was as least way beyond the game circuit and seemed to possess at least a spotty grasp of particles, superstring theory and quantum inseparably.  He seemed especially obsessed with frequencies and radio transmission which intrigued Waiben as his own experiments with orgone energy had seemed to be pointing in that direction.  Sil was a ferocious smoker Waiben noticed —such a ridiculous drug habit he thought somewhat indifferently.  
+	"What?  I'm sorry my mind was wandering."  Waiben felt momentarily awkward, but Sil seemed not to care.
+	"No. I'm sorry. I've never done this before."  Actually such was not strictly true.  Sil had carried on Cary's tradition of recruitment before he even had something to recruit them for.  For a time when sill had tested the opiate waters, he had accidentally stumbled upon a certain state of mind which taught the individual certain neurologically self evident  truths, but it came with a heavy dependence.  The thing about heroin that never came across in the translation between junkie and non-junky was that heroin as a trip has some very interesting things to say about the nature of reality.  Most people tended to miss that when contemplating the price of addiction.  But addiction can be overcome Sil realized and for a time he had travelled in heroin circles preaching the gospel of Ibogaine, a drug that's specific neurological interaction made it seem as perhaps a way out.  Sil reached this conclusion by becoming a heroin addict first and then seeing if he could get out.  Or perhaps he just liked to leap into the darkness and hope that there would prove to be a way out.  Addiction is a powerful motivator for naturally lazy people.  But in time he came to realize why the government would want a sedated dependant class of citizens, in fact junkies were the ideal model citizen from governments perspective —they don't care about anything except when they can get more junk.  It was a Burroughsian nightmare, and it freaked Sil out to watch it happening.  Most people thought he was paranoid and dismissed him without looking closely enough to see if there was anything worth being paranoid about.  Are you paranoid about your soul?  No too happy to assume the party line of Materialist Consumer?  When you increase the stakes of the game the game isn't a game anymore, this is why people loved conspiracies and CIA tales of intrigue, it kept the stakes limited to what could happen before death.  Nobody liked to entertain the possibility that these "games might carry on over the edge and into the valley of the shadow of death.  Wasn't that what the Sunday school book with the silly pictures said.  What do you think were doing here? Get off of my lawn....
+ 	"Done what?" Waiben's words were measured carefully against the swirling tornado sweeping across his cerebrum.
+	"Recruited anyone." 
+	"Recruited for what?" asked Waiben feeling the squeeze of reality tunnel uncertainty.
+	"Perhaps invited is a better word.  There is somewhere I'd like you to go with me."  Sil smiled vaguely at him.  He thought about a night he had spent standing in the rain trying to decide if he had died in an auto wreck two months before and everything he had been living was his minds projection into the future.  He thought about his naked horror when he realized that ultimately there was no way of really being sure about anything.  Any wild whim of imagination that blew into his mind might very well be true or at least it had just as good a chance of being real.  He remembered the nakedness and the rain more than anything.
+	
+	Several hours later as the heat dissipates slowly back inland to the swamps and the ocean breeze brings in the gulf night, Waiben is thinking about Voodoo, Gringos and the Quantum Uncertainty principle.  Waiben was beginning to fell the squeeze of uncertainty that comes with a true anarchy of senses.  Oh you mean this can really happen?  Or am I just thinking that its happening?  Or is it happening because i think its happening?  Or am I thinking that it is really happening and I'm just dreaming?  Am I going to wake up one day and not remember this dream?   Fuzzy logic dogs chasing each other around on a 1965 street in a East Chicago neighborhood.   
+	Sil could be some fundamentalist nutcase trying to lead him out of the country and to his death.  Religious nuts hated science more than science nuts hated religion and learning the languages of each in order to pass one's self off as a scientist or a baptist wasn't that difficult.
+	He sat up in bed reread the letter Sil had given him...With practice you can teach yourself to receive peoples signals or thoughts; what we want you to figure out is how to create a sub-audio broadcast that can actually be controlled and directed like an ordinary radio signal.  Is telepathy an interpersonal form of radio?  If it is how could it be controlled focussed and sent and received? What is true for one system (radio) should be relatively the same in another (telepathy) if only the signal amplitude is being changed.  The problem I see is that even subtle changes in input can cause radical oscillations in output, we need you to chase those butterflies for us, we do not have the time to do the nuts and bolts things are moving to quickly these days and we've been forced to contract some of out programs. I will give you the details and a project summary tomorrow when I pick you up at nine please be ready to travel.  Waiben thought about it for a while and fell asleep to a tunnel where television was the ultimate telepathic control signal broadcast onto an unwitting population and designed to create subtle and undetectable mind control.  It was a fitful sleep.
+
+	Sixty years earlier in a different coordinate point Dr. Waiben is inventing Color Television.  It was the basis of his realization that mind control was possible, it was merely a question of finding the right tools and methods of applying the tools.  He had stumbled on to the idea of television as a form of mind control about the time the first color sets were being worked around in the not yet official jet propulsion lab in California.  He was just by coincidence (if you believe in such nonsensical notions) studying the orgone theories of Doctor Wilhelm Reich at the time.  
+	Even in the nineteen thirties Reich’s theories were revolutionary to Waiben and he felt he had found someone besides himself and Korzybsky who truly understood the implications of Einstein's relativity —years before the Firesign Theater would say it, Waiben realized that everything he knew was wrong.  It liberated him from the confines of Aristotelian thought which seems to imply that everything true is a continually unfolding and building upon that which came before it.  The world had been turned on its ear and very few people seemed to notice.
+	The sentence that leaped out of Reich’s notes as Waiben stared hypnotically at the bluish glow of the first color television set was one that warned prolonged exposure to the bluish radiation of bion energy has had negative physical ramifications such as headaches, red swollen eyes, and the feeling that one had been staring at the sun for too long....   The synapse fired and Waiben began experimenting with blue light emissions to find out if they had any connection to orgone energy
+	In the end he found that blue wavelength radiation with prolonged exposure irritates the eyes and actually appeared to drain orgone energy out of the individual presumably by neutralizing the signal and allowing it to pass through the individual with out interacting.  On an oriental map one might say that television depleted an individuals chi.  This, reasoned Waiben, would make people tired from watching television.  At the same time television would give a preset image map (moving pictures they called them) with stories that engaged the mind making it difficult to break away from the energy depleter.  It was more addictive then heroin and because it was legally sanctioned and actively encouraged by every positive reinforcement society had to offer no one ever considered that it was a "drug."  The mass of people were taught that drugs were old herbs and mischief from humanities checkered past.  The idea of new drugs was not an idea that got a lot of publicity in the forties.  
+	A sedated and apathetic culture with a very high threshold for persecution thus raised its ugly head.  Waiben never mentioned his findings to anyone and merely offered to help in the perfecting of the television signal —always quietly insisting that blue light was the easiest method of signal transmission      	
+	In a dreamstate Waiben drove though the suburbs around nine o'clock and watched the eerie blue glow coming from the hundreds of thousands of houses he had addicted.  
+	He saw television as a virus...like a virus it was benign until the right switch  from the host triggered the release of the disease.  Like a virus it was passed from one generation to the next, and like a virus its spread was exponentially related to the human population growth ie. more people = more infected people.  The greatest side effect of television though was quite unintended by Waiben, it had radically reoriented the global mindset from isolated consumption into total slavery to consumption and fashion.  Thus Waiben learned that the fastest and most effect way of controlling a large population was to make it genuinely believe that it own enslavers were in fact its heros, its gods, thus eliminating or at the very least co-opting naysayers by making them part and parcel of the disease.  
+	As TV became more widespread even its detractors had to use the very channels of oppression as their only outlet for resistance.  Much like controlling any signal path,  insurrectionists and radicals were diverted by capacitors (“the media”)  and squelched by resistors (“the police”).   Thus the people remained happy and content with their oppression and no one was able to convince them to give up the convenience of slavery for the hardships of freedom.  Would you?
+	It wasn't enough though; true mind control would leave the victim unable to disobey the signal or ideally, unaware that he or she were even being controlled —like Christ reborn, Waiben thinks of the old con artist sitting laughing from con artist heaven. 
+	sub-audio messages are below the threshold of human hearing, but not that of comprehension.  It is the noise of someone thinking.  Listening in is just a matter of having the right receptors, psychics and clairvoyants had been doing it as circus tricks for centuries.   “Think of it as inter-cellular radio” he told his colleagues who mostly ignored his fanatical rantings.   universal breakdown short circuited the word and left you here naked and cold.
+
+familiarity breeds contempt
+-William Brandon 
+from the Origin of Consciousness
+
+
+	The next morning, true to his word Sil picked Waiben up in a limousine and they seemed by Waiben's limited knowledge of geography, to be heading toward the airport.  Sil smoked as they drove and his sunglasses combined with the black leather interior of the limousine made him appear like a typical millionaire, which only served to put Waiben that more at ease with an idea he was unsure about at least he seems to have the money....   Sil though seemed determined to make him nervous and, throwing his cigarette out the window, reached into his jacket and pulled out something that looked like a handrolled cigarette.  He spoke rapidly, but with some eerie form of ordained authority...Normally i would never do this to someone, but time is speeding up and I can't bring you in properly.  It is important that you know a few things...one is that what you perceive as reality  is a horribly sheltered view of what is really going on in this here universe, and two, these little aliens (he handed Waiben a rolled cigarette) are going to show you the rest of it.  If we had the time i would prove these points to you by showing you authoritative studies and what not, but that's really just a Bavarian Fire Drill anyway so rather than take the time to show you that for yourself I'm just telling you.  Now smoke the DMT and close your eyes, everything you know is wrong anyway....
+*                      *                         *                        *                          *                           *	
+Everything after that was different.
+*                      *                         *                        *                          *                           *
+	Two hours later on an airplane that Waiben only dimly remembered boarding, Sil could tell that Waiben was suffering Space Time Mind confusion.  Sil left Waiben in the main compartment of the jet and disappeared with a wavering walk into the back of the plane, Waiben could hear him talking to what he assumed was the cockpit crew giving flight instructions.  The plane was not unlike most government planes it had couches instead of seats and revealed to one how much room there really is on the inside on an airplane.  This particular plane had a few things that Waiben doubted were government planes —an assortment of medical tools that were stored in glass cabinet near the front of the cabin and beside each of the black leather couches were a permanently attached hucas which, Waiben noticed by bumping one, were flexible at the base so as not to spill their contents during flight.  The cabin also contained an impressive collection of computer hardware and curiously near the door marked COCKPIT, on a small desk was an antique typewriter with the word Underwood inscribed on the face.  The walls of the jet were covered with tapestries and pillows with scenes from the Tibetan Book of The Dead and the Kama Sutra lay haphazardly in the corner the mixture of oriental and occidental gave the room a circular feeling, which was reinforced by the cylindrical walls and roof.
+	Actually Sil had been talking to Cary and suddenly the door to Waiben's back flung open and Sil and another man came struggling through it, laughing and carrying a giant mirror full of cocaine.  “So you found our coordinate eh?” said the man in the three piece suit (Cary always dressed the occasion) laughing and pointed at Waiben.
+	“Yes I did.”  said Waiben staring at the coke.  
+	“Oh, pardon me how rude, would you like some cocaine, I fear this is all we have left, but help yourself.”  Cary thrust a silver trade into Waiben's lap.  There was an almost grapefruit sized pile of cocaine in the middle of it.  It was more cocaine than Waiben had ever seen.  He had so lost his bearings with reality that no further stimulation of his brain seemed necessary, “no thanks," he said handing the rather heavy platter back to Cary.
+	“No thanks you don’t want any or no thanks you want it but you aren’t about to do on a  jet with two people you don’t know?”
+	Waiben suddenly felt threatening hairs on the back of his neck rise, “Second” he said staring defiantly in Cary's eyes.
+	“Lay off him Cary he's already trying to live at least six tunnels at once, you know how disorienting it is at first” Sil flopped down on a couch and began to load a huca with hashish, he looked at Waiben and said rather abstractly, "just remember, if it doesn't make you laugh it probably isn't real...."   His voice trailed off into mumblings Waiben did not catch.
+	
+	“Just so you know Doctor, if we were going to hurt you, we would have pushed you out of the plane as soon as we were over water, so relax and do some drugs, we’ll tell you what we need you for later, right now you need us, you got the need we got the drugs so lighten up eh?”  Downs had decided that since the doctor was already in a tunnel of weirdness and confusion that he might be reoriented by Cary's cankerous old southern man routine. Cary imagined his performances to be somewhat akin to hanging out with William S. Burroughs as he appears in Naked Lunch.
+	Waiben just sat somewhat reluctantly on the couch next to Sil who without looking handed him the end of the surgical tubing and when Waiben put it to his lips Sil lit the huca.  Waiben noticed just before the hash hit him that the lighter had a picture of christ with a crown of thorns on it.  This realization man him chuckle and wonder if Sil had seen his or perhaps it was his or perhaps every gas station in America has them.
+	"Uh oh he's gonna get the giggles," Downs said laughing himself, "here do some coke to speed up the signal processing, it frees the word."
+	"The word?"  Waiben lowered his nose to the powdered sugar-like line.  He smiled to himself and snorted a heroic amount of cocaine into his nose.  Unfortunately he failed to take into account the fact that he was pressurized to an altitude of fourteen thousand feet and his only previous experience of it had been at sea level.  Sil reached over and stuck a tube in front of his open mouth and he sucked almost involuntarily.  The smoke was not hash, it was more DMT.  The last thought Waiben remembered having was: "oh wow, this is going to be very interesting...."
+	broadband signal strength test market for better higher climbable mountains:”:”:”::”:”:”:”:”:”:”>>>>>>>>>wicked evil sentiments have been exercised and all words and virus contained>>>>>>government works like this more or less:>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> transmission broadcast’s proposals for your demise. incomplete and ill planned. the joint chiefs of staff would be happy to coordinate efforts for a small fee. Step into the circular electric room walls dance with pulsating warbled beams of light.  The general is a continually shifting and transforming creature that alternates between waving a pointer, panging a podium and crooning a Frank Sinatra voice "it was a very good year/ for small town girls...."Do pictures have a language?  static. message garbled. transmission lost.
+	
+	Waiben surveys his hotel room with its view overlooking the Buenos Aries airport he stares at their plane off to the right of the terminal just barely visible from where he is.  Well so this is South America. Huh.  The room is mid-grade not nice, but so far free of roaches which when flying over the city on their approach seemed quite an unlikely possibility.  Waiben lies down on the bed, lights a cigarette, and turns on the television.  Spanish broadcast MTV.  He rolls on his side reaching into his bag and extracting a vial of DMT, do whatever you want tonight they had said just be sober by six in the morning.  He pours the white powder into a glass pipe feeling a bit like a crack whore the taste is reminiscent of cock, that soothing human injecting quality...the world game stopped the truth game stopped and finally in less than thirty seconds the Waiben game stopped what happened after that is a matter of some speculation, but he was pretty sure that he hadn't really talked to an ostrich that explained to him the future and his role in something called Freeport.	Sil and Cary were in the next room listening to Waiben on a short wave system they had set up prior to giving Waiben a key.  
+	"He's going to see them I know it," Sil found himself saying.
+	"I don't understand why you think this doctor is so useful, I already have scientists that are further along in his field that he is."  Downs didn't like Waiben he sensed something familiar about him as if everything he was capable of he had already done once before with disastrous results and Downs had spent enough time messing with the fabric of reality to know that his brain knew a lot more than it would let him see all at once.  A sufi story came back to him...a man walks into a store and says to the shop keeper have you seen me before? The shopkeeper says no and the man says then how do you know it is me?
+	Sil is insistent on Waiben's necessity and even when Cary raises the control game issues Sil does not back down, "that's why I gave him the hallucinogens because it rids you of the ego, he doesn't know who he is right now, he thinks he invented color television.  Relax."   Sil smoked a little DMT himself and tuned his shortwave radio to static.  This helped to establish in his mind a kind of rhythm and seemed to link the drug to the static, if only in his mind.  Pictures are a language he is thinking.
+
+
+
+I do not believe that the world 
+is made of quarks or electromagnetic waves, 
+or stars, or planets, or any of these things.
+I believe the world is made of language.
+-Terence McKenna
+
+	Madison Avenue is a faceless row of buildings filled with thousands of advertising agents, it is an entity in Abstraction.  Abstraction is the legal basis for the sanctity of the state, and it is a wholly binary system.  Its language is binary coding form the conceptual level down to vast systems of information stored in computer cuneiform.  It was to put it mildly the last place one would look for spiritual insight.  But Sil Hawkard was not bounded by the archetypal mythologies of his culture.  In any age and any culture the shaman is the the oddball who is separate from the cultural images of the human experience.  The non-shaman citizen is in constant conflict between expectation of habit and the nagging guilt of novelty or rather the lack of novelty.  The shaman is merely one who has allowed the self to take over the citizen in such a way that behavior and even brainwave patterns are altered.  And it is for this reason that the shaman is exiled to the edge of the village, because tampering with the fabric of consensus reality is dangerous to its continued existence never call anything up that you can not put back down.  
+	The most common method of achieving such a feat over the years has been chemical mind manipulation.  Sil's fascination with mind manipulation did not began with drugs though, it began much earlier in a high school biology class where he realized the simple truth that the brain is a continuously changing chemical reaction.  The nuero circuitry of the brain is like the inner workings of a computer, of course it is infinitely more complex, but the computer is still a useful metaphor.  Eventually through his use of drugs he came to realize that even chemical maps are in fact a rather poor guide to what the hell is really going on.  If you see something you have never seen before, you want to tell about it you want to talk about it you want to describe it.  You are tempted to say it resembled a woman but was nothing like a woman.  The first thing you need to move on from the temporal reality that most people cling to is a new language.  
+	It was this reason that had led Sil to Madison avenue because even if their goals were slightly less benign than Sil's own they nevertheless possessed a wealth of data on manipulations of language.  They had managed to create a universe in which people were convinced they needed everything they didn't have.  This was a powerful tool of magic and while Sil wasn't entirely sure if they were even aware of what they were doing they were undeniably doing it.  Manipulating language is one of the shaman's starting tools, kind of a chip flint arrow in the bigger picture, but technology builds on itself —if you can't chip an arrow head you can't split an atom.  So he arranged to have one hundred televisions brought to Buenos Aries and tuned to different stations in all kinds of languages and he began the immense task of taping, editing, and splicing Madison Avenue's commercial language.  
+	It was for this reason Sil wanted to bring Waiben to Buenos Aries and now as Waiben sat in the chair staring around the room at the overwhelming sensory input potential of one hundred televisions in one room he felt overwhelmed and not up to the task.  He had at his disposal a team of over two hundred electronics experts, but he had the annoy task of looking for something without knowing what it was.  Downs and Hawkard had left him a copious amount of DMT, mushrooms, peyote, cocaine, and hashish to help him along.  Sil recommended hash and cocaine together as the best decoding agent for the Madison magicians as he had taken to calling them.  His proposal came after a week of drugs and sex which Waiben had enjoyed and felt for the first time really truly free and alive.  Sex is as good as the body gets Downs had said, but now he had years worth of work staring him in the face.  I know you want to find the face behind the mask behind the face behind the mask behind the face behind the mask... Sil had chanted as he left.  The most curious event of the week was the time when Sil had been teaching Waiben how to use mantras and hash as tools in meditation.  Waiben realized after selecting a mantra from an astrology book in Downs' apartment, that Sil was chanting I can't believe its not butter, I can't believe its not butter I can't believe its not butter....  
+	Sil and Downs returned to the oil derrick city while the good doctor spent the better part of the day in an oxygen pure environment subjecting himself the recuperative acupuncture therapy on his muscles which were stimulated one by one with needle pricks while an orgone generator hummed steadily in the corner.  The pre-programmed alpha waves stimulated his body's brain functions that were healing in nature and as the experiment went on, electrographs of brain activity mapped the centers stimulated and was compared with the frequency emitted until each frequency had its effects defined and clearly mapped.  In another room one of his researchers was having similar electro- stimulation through flicker television screens recorded and the alpha waves would be compared to Waiben's and others.
+	  Chemical stimulation of the brain acts at different frequencies than orgone so Waiben entered into a tunnel of reality where the healer believed that orgone would rejuvenate the body and help it recover from the destructive side effects of the drugs.  Simultaneously doing research and healing appealed to the self centered side of Waiben.  Waiben was not a regular user of drugs and thus prone to over-enthusiasm from the get go —Downs had cautioned him about the difference between want and need and how thin and blurry the line could get.     No one said the doors to the chapel perilous wouldn't be guarded.  Addiction is the first to rear its ugly head the word is obliterated by the need.  need is driven by re -action rather than action.  The first rule of anarchy is to never react.  Re-action is a non event, it doesn't exist in reality and its futility is readily apparent to anyone who ceases to do it. The human brain is taught to feel a certain sensation and because evolution was soooo effective the brain learns to adjust to fit the new reality —making it real.  Thus it reacts to the stimuli by negating its effects and like the man in the floppy hat said it never got weird enough for me.
+	avoiding addiction is no easy task —you're up against over ten thousand years of terrestrial survival instincts; shedding them is the damnedest thing like the Kimono dragons continually picking at the dead flesh that refuses to leave the beast that it was once a part of.  Waiben felt up to the task on many levels, but he had made a mental note to not have any opiates around because after all a man has to know his limitations.     
+
+
+
+
+reality is a narrow 
+definition of existence 
+-Sil Hawkard from The Rubber Octopus
+ 
+
+
+one year and six thousand miles northeast Sil sits in his room of Tunisia smoking hash and reading a letter from the doctor that said:
+
+observations on the Madison Avenue language/image institution:
+	The rigid censorship guidelines for language that may or may not be used by broadcast media is the first thing that one notices when evaluating the Madison language manipulation.  What you don't hear is more obvious than what you do hear.  This arbitrary crystalline definition between what is accepted as language and what is peripheral gives added power to the absent words given there selective nature.  The power is largely meaningless but the precision of its delineation tends to suggest that those making the choices do indeed have power.  At this point there power is largely exercised in the form of fines although who continue to push usually fade out of the picture. The restriction of language, even of a few simple words like sexually oriented words, gives the controller power over the sender who is dependant on the controllers approval prior to broadcast.  The censorship itself is not so strong as to limit image rather disrupt the free flow of ideas without raising the suspicions of the majority who, it is important to remember can ultimately disrupt the delicate balance.
+	image control of broadcast media is much more sexually oriented than language.  they don't let them them see sex in realtime, they let them see violence in realtime, but never ever the actual sex act.  It is endlessly mentioned and alluded to but never shown.  This seems to create a message of sex being more powerful than death, which in the ordinary magical arts is not necessarily true.  The lack of sex images is complicated.  By depriving them of biotic need creates a tension and stress and without equilibrium, power can never be achieved.  But it also creates a subculture, those who enjoy the nudity so much that they are willing to go out and buy it on the free market.  This can never be stopped, therefore it is best to marginalize this subculture through city zoning laws and force them into the “bad parts” of town.  By moving them to the side they become ineffectual during rebellion because the dominate culture knows that no matter how bad the current situation may be they sure as hell don’t want some “porn watching trash monger” in charge.  
+	The human consciousness is latent with sexuality.  Not hetero or homo, but simply sexuality, however in wordimage track television it is almost exclusively heterosexual mythology —conditioning the brain into a binary system of either/or hetero/homo, one disrupts the normal circuitry of the brain creating mono memes (see footnote).1  Mono memes lead to repression and non-symmetrical personality types.  Signal processing in these brain patterns is much more open to autosuggestion —research continues in this field.
+	3.Language manipulation:  When attempting autosuggestion it is worth bearing in mind the KISS principle of which I believe Madison Avenue is acutely aware.  The so-called “sound bite” is simple and enables you to plant marginalizing catch phrases in the mind of general public It also leaves room to constantly create and update the marginalization.  In addition, by providing easy to recall words and phrases that simplify and therefore make meaningless complicated patterns and repetitions you create a tendency to narrow brainwave activities.  Examples: Nigger, Nazi, Lesbo bitch, rock’n’roll, just a junky, anything with monger at the end of it, etc.  It is also worth noting that Madison employs what shamans and priests have known for centuries the rhythm of the words is as important as the meaning which is why jingles were so popular for so long.  Repeated exposure, however, creates an irritability so I think there would have to be ceremonial in quality; as in a concert, but thus far the government news broadcasts have not employed such a technique (perhaps it is too obvious)
+	I could not (through the nature of the medium) tell if any sort of orgone generator type of energy was being used, but such a device requires a symbol transfer system which in my opinion has not been toyed with yet although I believe that it might be with further research.  I also plan to look more into the blue light synchronicity between Orgone and the neutral background of television.  One of the technicians here has a tunnel in which the connection is real and the destruction of Reich's research a typical sloppy government cover-up to conceal what they were doing...you get the idea.  It is a tunnel that I have yet to explore.  
+
+personal notes:  television (and here i mean all television because all television is advertising) seems to be primarily a means of defining language and image.  It presents polarities so often and with such a remarkable sense of irony (unintended?) that it seems to be telling us what the limits are.  "The news" often plays the most violent stories back to back with the most heartwarming ones, obstinately to not depress the viewer but it has rather the opposite effect of creating a constant tension in the viewer causing one have an inevitable sense of doom in every situation of pleasure.  This helps to instill a sense of control over behavior, however this is not something that can be clinically evaluated it is just instinct.  Ordinarily I would disregard the rather direct nature of the causality, but because especially America in some very real sense allows its fabric of reality to be held together by television I think that some sort of synchronic behavior patterns could be instilled through the airwaves.  The Question of intelligent origins I still have no opinion on —I think that the fastest way to determine such a direct causality would be to deliberately try it and judge the results.  Thank you for your continued support and be advised that I am returning to the united states under the name Chase Hollister.
+
+	New Orleans: the bus is gone leaving a surly crowd of Mexicans behind coming to work in restaurants they can’t afford to eat in.  Down the street tourists buy overpriced and ugly looking wood carvings because the sign on the shop says Voodoo and they want funky stuff so their relatives back home will find them more authentic —as if reality were not a fabric tearing down the middle.  Sil Hawkard is sitting at his favorite stateside tavern waiting for the arrival of Dr. Waiben whom he is beginning to suspect may in fact be turning out as Downs had said —be careful what you wish for.  Waiben was making Sil wait and Sil new it, Waiben was letting him know that one can not escape the control circuit if one is going to attempt to live in the fabric.  Of course Sil knew he would have a well thought out and logical excuse, not to would have been Sil's style; he knew the game circuit and he knew the games and he never bothered to play.  Sil was excited by the prospect of what he might be getting in terms of research from Waiben, but he was also logically paranoid and knew human behavior so he developed the possibility that Waiben might be giving him a strange loop of disinformation.  As a precaution Downs had insisted he take entourage who were now spread around New Orleans waiting for his signal and amusing themselves at the same time. 
+	Sil saw Waiben outside as he rounded the corner and Sil ducked into the restroom—two paranoids meeting is always a contest of wills and never simple.  First the feelers—Waiben headed straight into the bathroom and started to pee in the urinal, Sil stepped noiselessly out of the stall next to him and gently eased a gun behind his ear, “Doctor Livingston I presume?”
+	Waiben was visibly shaken, but tried his best to hide it, he smiled “Sil your paranoia is unfounded, occasionally troubling, but always amusing.  Sil paused for a moment unsure if Waiben’s lips had even moved. 
+	"Don’t pull telepathy games with me Waiben, it's irritating.  Half the time all i get is gibberish, just save it until you know what your doing, okay?”  His tone was deliberately condescending and he said it with out moving his lips and looking straight into Waiben's eyes
+	“That wasn’t telepathy is was sub vocal speech, but okay we’ll just talk, can i get you a drink?”  Waiben looked a touch surprised, but Sil couldn't tell if it was genuine.
+
+	Dr Waiben had arrived in New Orleans after a short lecture stop in Los Angeles, California where he had experimented with speaking in tongues.  The central nervous system is much like a radio antenna and Waiben was obsessed with finding a powerful enough signal to reach everyone at once.  The tongues method appeared, from the LA experiment anyway, to be strong enough only if you knew how to pick it up.  Much like his experiments with television, it required the listener to make a conscious effort to tune it in, which meant that it could be tuned out just as easily.
+	SpaceTime events collide.  Words bounce out uncontrollably and with no respect whatsoever for the recognized conventions of English grammar and proper method of coherent speech.  Pick up your marshmallows and walk  -Christ is drunk and babbling in the streets of Bethlehem, Mohammed heaves him over his shoulder and carries him to a remote cave in the Gobi desert where they make sweet love under the waning stars of eternity like Calvin Klein and Gorgio Armani before the great clothing wars of the late 1990's.
+	
+	Sil sits down with Waiben and starts to tell a story, but thinks better of it and simply studies Waiben's face for a minute.  "Cary has a brain tumor and he is going to die within a month."  he said suddenly.  "Everything is being turned over to me on the condition that I withdraw all support and contact from you and your research facility, but I have not agreed to it yet.  I came here to ask you if the rumors are true."  
+	For the first time Waiben genuinely felt spacetimemind curving and he saw Sil Hawkard fade and crumble as if he had actually been made up of millions of tiny  ants.  
+	The assistant beside him watches horrified as the virus pushes in bubbling crispy blisters against the outer skin of the boy's cock.  The cock begins to move as if independent of the boy, it twists and turns in ways that one would not expect a cock to be able to move.  It seems propelled about by the force of the popping skin blisters.  The skin is searing and the acrid smell of burnt flesh permeates the air,  a faint trail of delicate whispy smoke emits from the top like effervescent semen.  His cock continues to dance about as if possessed by a viral cobra, the skin is disfigured and slides off in sheets that look like red black strips of chicken skin. The blisters are popped like a burnt hot dog, the vein on the underside splits open and oozes out a hideous trail of ochre liquid that snags in the boys pubic hair and trickles down his ass.  
+	The virus begins to organize itself into more complex structures as though it were leaping up the evolutionary ladder right before the good Doctor's eyes.  The boy screams in pain and terror as the blisters begin to form on his  chest.  
+	"By God i think its going to his brain, its ten minutes old and its evolved from a virus to a sentient creature capable of locating the vital organs of its host and destroying it.  Waiben is momentarily shocked, the assistant retreats to the observation room for fear its growth rate might be too exponential and drags Waiben by the arm.  Behind the antiseptically clean glass they continue to observe the beast as it burrows through the boys body, and then suddenly it stops and the monitoring devise on the boy falls silent.  It dies with the host, how tragically effective, thought Waiben.  
+	"What we need to do is tamper with its genes so that it doesn't die with the host  -a virus that evolves in to a completely independent creature in an evolutionary span of two or three minutes..."  Waiben's assistant Dr Kellinger's mind is racing ten ton truck-like around the viscus fluids of his skull and two years away a phone is already ringing.
+	"Did you hear that?" Waiben asks suspiciously as his spacetime point begins to warp forward.
+	Kellinger stops mid sentence. "Hear what?"
+	"The phone, I thought I hear the phone?"
+	"Are you okay?
+	"Yes, why?"
+	"You're the one who had the phones down hear removed two weeks ago because you said they were distracting you from this project and now you're still hearing them ring?  You might want to lay off the cocaine for a little while Doctor."
+	"It not habit forming."
+	"All elements of mind control are habit forming —you of all people ought to know that."
+	Fragments of ash are falling.  Government radio broadcasts interrupt still air to create wavelengths...my god thinks Waiben its working on me He grabs a cattle prod and heads out of the room.
+	Somewhere a man shoot a monkey and blows off its balls.   The monkey laughs obnoxiously as the cells reconstruct themselves and a new set of balls rapidly grows in place of the old ones, he advances menacingly on the man who now realizes his error and begins to flee.  	Always subjugate reality. 
+
+	Waiben burst out laughing and took an exaggerated sip of scotch, "you're the one who tried so hard to get me to believe that nothing is true...are you afraid to live your own reality?"
+	Sil stared at Waiben for a bit and got up silently and walked to the bathroom again he smoked DMT and sat on the toilet seat and braced himself.  Fragments of Ash falling.  White washed ceilings hanging so ominous  Hallucination of bubble-headed figures crawling like the Mitchelin Man across an indescribable mountain of tires 
+Motels Motels Motels Whiskey Bourbon.  Tow truck non-ordinary state of reality precludes a state of reality that something is real  Point at the autistic manwomanchild  Autistic man pointing at you laughing unable to fathom how your brain functions and quite self righteously you you cling to its definitions.  Must delineate between abnormality and those of us who Understand The Human Virus breeding like rats unconsciously conscious and aware of our disorganization. Gas Station Cold Fusion dreams of the Anarchist are breeding in the minds of the oil men who don’t want to loose their stranglehold of reality.Fragments of Ash falling the continual settling of dust weighing down humanity and the French Maid masturbates discreetly in the next room.  You need her to keep the dust off your mortal coil spring.Rebirth mythology.Mythology of reality.  We must distinguish between what will be defined as sane and what shall be referred to as insanity.  Kevlar definitions constructed to make a better shampoo seem like a logical item on which to squander your paperbacked slavery bills.After all these years Tide still
+gets your socks whiter Its a wonder that they aren’t transparent by now.that your brain retarded in its development that evolution had not anticipated the advent of the opposable thumb the unopposable domination of the thumb leading to and insect superiority of mating rituals stolen from a textbook on damselflies darning needles sewing shut your lips, mind atrophy. Weber's White Race Enriched for Superiority Scorched earth campaigns raining Ash. Shit from the sky.  Tax man came for your baby in exchange for unpaid balance.  You understand.  Nothing Personal Just doing our job.  Same as the next guy.  From Auzwich on down the line.  Didn’t make the rules.  Sorry. We perfected them.There are no innocents in a world of free will.  You don’t have to survive at the expense of others.  You could die with puncture wounds in your hands and others would create a new mythology strange irony would find another with holes in his hands unwilling to accept cockroach mentalities.You want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman but he lives on in quiet cafes centralsouthamerica not so free not all the communists have been shot yet Your mistook misunderstood missed the lesson in the situation that unfolded  Dr. of dialectic excuses you want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman Hitler killed everybody's body only taking orders you understand just doing my job from Independence on down the line. It was a sad money grubbing hunter gather up his children and thank his gods they are his and he their god behold I have come to tell you that everything you know is wrong stop doing your job it is not yours see Hitler in your mind you want him dead but he's not he lives on buried under restraint in everyone's mind.Only taking orders you understand.  Didn’t have a CHOICE.  Got a family to feed. radio crackle.  pop.  hiss. silence.
+	
+	“Alright, so what are you going to do?” Waiben asked as he came back.
+	"I will not sell you out to the State like Cary wants me to do, but you will never see me again." Sil walked out of the bar and got in a waiting car.
+
+	Anything everything like a hurricane blowing bits of ash in from mountainous eruptions.  Sil is sitting at a table, coat turned collar up and looking like a grainy photograph, harsh contrasts under a sterile florescent bulbs, mad-smoking a half lit cigarette.  Old Cary Downs is inside, diffidence hangs like a fern in the corner to liven the place up and remind freshly wed virgins that drinking the seed is a gift of God.  God who rots like a gaslamp whore waiting to get back what life owed him.  Sil lays down the napkin he was blowing his nose in and gets up to leave.  
+	Sil remembers a peculiar buzzing sound rang near the edge of his ears, a sound not unlike what a bear must hear with its head stuck inside a hollow log with  hornets nest buzzing at the other end and echoing up the length.  The sound began to organize itself at first into random pulses and thumps until a pattern emerged and Sil saw the rhythmic pounding of African drummers crouched by the fire and Aztec dancers whirled like calavera dolls blowing in the wind swept rafters of a Mexican village and far off, back in the shadows a thousand villagers chanted a harsh wilderness voice that carried up into his consciousness and spoke: 
+	Behold we are ants.  Tonight we appear to you as  a headless horseman suit driven by a midget who smokes cinnamon sticks and who before this is over will likely find sexually desirable in the same way those lechers looked at Snow White when she would bend over the stove.  Only Kiki can save you, but that is irrelevant for now.  As we said we are ants and our purpose is singular.  Attachment is a pattern and in runs through you.  Beware of the singularity of Time and consult often the wisdom of the last carrier pigeon.  She waits like a pregnant woman ready to burst forth with impenetrable mysteries.  Might well be the key to the universe handed by a pervertial passageway of dreams.
+	Cary died two days later and Sil flew to an island he had only recently found on the map.  An island where sad tropic storms made one want to just sit on the porch in a bambo chair and stare at nothing for hours.  Sil was sad about Cary, but primarily he suddenly felt the full weight of his own life on his shoulders —everyone in Tunisia was waiting to see what he would do.  He had taken the manufacturing codes for the production of the hashish and marijuana using carbon as a carrier and sold it for seven million dollars which he then parlayed into the stocks of the companies using a false corporation and funnelled the money into an e-cash account in the Caribbean.  Sil was financially poised to build an international empire and without word he left the derrick taking cary's jet and most of his information research code machinery.  As far as anyone on the rig knew he just disappeared they heard odd stories like one that an old man had approached him on the beach and converted him to Christianity.  One person did show up at the rig in Tunisia though: the doctor will see you now.
+
+	The encroaching millennia had several side effects which most people in the state had not anticipated, every society has its periodic upheavals and tumult but every society is different in what the upheaval is about.  No one expected the fucking in the streets routine to really happen, but it did or at least it had for a while —it was dying off now some of the old purist religious types where beginning to crawl out of their bomb shelters to realize that the world had indeed gone mad just not violently mad.  Instead sex evolved.  It made sense to Waiben, after all the continuation of the species was more or less assured by DNA, why not have some fun, Waiben had developed a perverse sense of humor in Buenos Aries. and had begun investigating ways of deliberately controlling the mind.  scenes from the laboratory play on tape loops in the new Smithsonian.  Do what ever you want just make sure he's in pain the whole time.  I want his brain to remain in shock and agony for as long as it can before it turns itself  off completely. Waiben was working on a theory of ego destruction —what happens to the mind if there is no ego?   So far his experiment with television had been a disaster the only thing resembling a result was one freakish accident in which a Wichita cop, after 189 hours of uninterrupted signal, had blasted his own eyeballs out of his head and sent a strange grey ooze that had once been a brain flying across the room plastering on the wall like abstract art .  Then the unexplainable part his assistants puzzled over: projectile vomit squirted unrecognizable organ goo onto the television screen, when they wiped the ooze off the screen the television had short circuited itself and was spitting out random numbers for ten minutes or so and then at the bottom it scrolled out slowly and deliberately drwaibenlovesyou.
+	As a half joke half experiment (founded one Sil's premise if it isn't funny it probably won't work) Waiben had begun buying up control of broadcasting stations around the world and in writing his own autosuggestion programs that everyone should get naked when the zeros came.  It worked. Old friends who hadn't met in years would run down the street toward each other and instead of just hugging, they would fuck.  At first it had been a bit odd, but as more of the herd joined in it became more acceptable.  It did lead to many people who sort of slunk around in the shadows desperately trying to avoid running into a third grade teacher named Mrs. Fendleskin or other, who chased them nightly in their dreams.  She was archetypical three hundred pounds overweight and yet somehow able to keep up with him chasing after him screaming you were such a bright boy.  Think of all I did for you, come give Mrs. Fendleskin a little fuck!  Invariably people woke up drenched in sweat and nervously double checking their underwear for dried cum.  That's the problem with unlocking the unconscious, its libido often runs directly contrary to that of the conscious.  Time and Space are illusions created to fill a void, the one crack religion didn't quite reach —the gap between us.
+	Broadcast directives:  Dr. Livingston i presume with your melting walls and Anne Clarke, saturated drug-induced sixties peace movement. Have you any idea what silliness peace inspires?  We don’t need peace on earth we need to get the fuck off of earth; the space ship planet home evolution mythology is tired and worn.  The cunt earth mother mythology is weary-eyed and thoroughly sick of our presence.  Where is it writ that homo sapiens ought to remain forever a terrestrial stupid creature fighting over gold and oil and dooming itself to species-cide?  Have you no sense of the inevitable; conceiving only of that which you know is possible?  Is your terrestrial stupidity a symptom of the oxygen saturated environment that spawned you?  Get rid of addiction, get rid of heroin, get rid of oxygen. Evolve.  Survival of the fittest —you hear these words and think only of brawn and strength and lions ripping zebras to shreds.  Fools! all of you.  Survival depends on thought and intelligence we step of the food chain dilemma  thousands of year ago, now its time to step off the planet all together we no longer need it.  
+	Bless your lucky soul that you were born in the day and age when cessation of planetary constraints is possible.   Don’t give me your morals, your religions, your beliefs —you can’t even justify your existence without them.  Something can not be the source and justification of the source even the cave man Thak standing next to the first wheel must have seen the stupidity in these circular arguments. <sound of a woman whining Thak! Thak! get in here and take out the garbage>>><<<hear Thak's internal wheels turning conceiving of gunpowder shotgun blasted cunts to high hell!>>>>>  Have we passed the zero hour?  Were we all sad eyed asleep at the wheel worried about our individual emotional experiences and missing the collective consciousness required to assemble a planetary brain collective capable of solving the hard realities of prevention.  Prevention of leaving.  Don’t go you may die.  Don’t stay you will die.  No we were not sad eyed asleep, you were sad eyed asleep and missed the boat but we know.  
+	Assemble in the presence of god and know that i am peace. i am iam iam and i know why.  Sorry can’t tell i am enjoying my intellectual, emotional and physical superiority because i have kicked the carbon death loop and caught the virus and decoded it for you, but I'm holding out on you waiting until you can grasp the fundamentals.  Einstein died almost fifty years ago and you are still fifty years behind him.  Let go of Newton let go of Aristotle and embrace a reality that is forever “plural and mutable,” realize that belief is a misconception, a temporary insanity which leads the human mind to mistakenly assume that it is capable of processing all signals.  Like a radio you can only be tuned to one station at a time some of you might manage two or three at best —there are billions of signals incoming at all times.   Some are visual, some are auditory, some are beyond normal comprehension, and some like neutrinos are so small they can pass through the molecular spaces in your body.   So by default you can not receive all the information and without all information all belief is stupid foolish games of semantics and power.
+	
+	Boards and syndicates of the earth did not take kindly to Dr. Waiben's reprogramming of the human computer and an all out cultural war started in 2001 with Waiben attempting to superimpose his own indoctrination over that of the Ind. INC mind control game,  or as he had renamed it: the U. S. A., Unconditioned & Systematic Autosuggestion state.  The boards fought with conventional weapons and propaganda; Waiben used nonviolence (which endeared him to the people) and nanotechnology.  This last piece of technology forced the boards and syndicates to move ahead with their time table and institute operation TOTAL CONTROL.
+	>>>>>>>>these are trying times my fellow countrymen with a heavy hand ahem heart it was that i signed into law the seizure of private property and confiscation of all land into the hands of state>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<we caution you against overreaction as these measures are necessary and temporary so all resistance will be dealt with in the interest of time and efficiency,,,,,,,,,,>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<Your will be receiving a vaccination pill sent out to all persons using the IRS databanks to select names you are instructed to take the pill and remain indoors until the virus alert sirens have blown for a second time.  <<<<<<we appreciate your understanding and trust that you will realize that this is time where it is decided whether democracies will work in the post modern future>>>>we believe that we will send a message to the dictators of the world that democracy is inevitable and necessary to preserve the way of life we hold dear>>>>>>we will take your cooperation and compliance as a show of faith in the leaders you have elected to make decisions for you>>>>>>>>
+	Waiben knew that the so called vaccination pill contained a nanochip encoded with in a neutral virus which in humans found its way into the brain where it remained without harming the host, accept that this one had its own computer circuitry etched onto its molecular structure which would cause it to mutate and release a chemical agent that caused the chemical makeup of the host brain to switch and tune, so to speak, down to a longer alpha wavelength.  At this wavelength the human brain processes at lower signal reception and in behavioral science experiments it had showed a tendency to be more open to auto-suggestion.  No stumbling over lines, the computer chip in you brain has precision craftsmanship unequalled in its uncompromising quality.  No expense has been spared in the programming of your life.  And then there is me I am special screams your useless ego.
+	Crumple up the word and throw it into the sewer drain hope that someday a big bloated alligator will choke to death on words.
+
+
+		
+
+the legend of the toothless woman chased down the street with giant plastic candy cane saying you're gonna like it in your ass!!!!!!
+
+	      
+	
+	So the board goes apeshit right off the bat, they got this whole thing brewing in the Mediterranean —insurrection, that's why i work alone —trust nobody in the carbon death loop —burn you right up for sure.  Work alone, should be the number one rule, never shoulda gone to Waiben in the first place.
+	Anyway the board’s got a problem down in the Med —sensitive area you know lost word truths hanging around <they think> You know —the Egyptians, Cleopatra and her goddamn cats (I hate ‘em I hate ‘em I hate ‘em), the Roman gods— so they say to Waiben write it all up make it realunreel it all back so we know how to play it.
+	You familiar with the fictionhistory principle right?  Well, so Waiben writes the whole thing up and sticks it right at the beginning thinking they’ll miss it —they’re ugly and they’re scared, but they’re not blind.
+	So the best update I can give you is that Chicago got the Neutron bomb <just buildings and viruses now> Europe's in civil war and “ethnic strife” <always has been stupid fucking cave dwellers> New York’s a shit hole on account of the Antarctic ice shelf heating up and dropping off <swallowed the whole goddamn city mosta L.A. too>  Geiger counter at ten thousand feet told me to stay away from China <goddamn mess it is, which really isn’t good on account of the battle plans coming outta Tibet, only decent maps you can find these days> so I hightailed it here to see you.
+	The Old Man smiled and lit a cigarette looking thing that smelled of hash and cow shit <powdered mushroom brew from the brujo con artist at a time like this?>
+	“There is no future and no past Sil, you know that” —the three dollar principle.
+	Cary hands the twiggy cigarette looking smoke to Sil who takes a hit and watches the old man pick his nose aggressively.  Sil starts to laugh, but controls himself.  The Old Man pulls an earwig the size of a human thumb out of his nose and puts it in his mouth.  He grabs the cigarette and takes another drag, he leans forward and kisses Sil blowing smoke into his lungs and the earwig down his throat.  Sil tries to gag, and recoils in horror.
+	“That’ll keep the flesh eaters offa ya,” The Old Man drawls, “Whatever Waiben wrote sure as hell did make them mad, and the smoke will take your mind of the time coordinates, you’re gonna need all your energy focusing on the other three circuits —I'm going to see the ostriches....”
+
+	
+
+
+like to live in reality tunnel where everything is not fiction.  where things actually happen far off like spice trade boats Chinese junkets pulling into Siapan out of south sea storms.  Opulent opium pictographs of women spread delicate violent flesh orgies across the room, scenes from Arabian Knights He wrote a letter to the governments of the world:
+
+
+A general Theory of Anarchy or more simply MINDFUCK
+	Most people when they hear the term anarchy associate it with the popular mythology of a chaos-like state with no government where murderers run naked through the street fucking helpless women and doing blizzards of drugs.  This apocalyptic vision is childish at best.  I do not propose to herein give a true or accurate version of anarchy or how it would work in the current sociological setting.  Indeed the central message I hope to convey is that political anarchy is the least of my concerns.  I only know what is in my head.  If yours is different then you are wrong.  At least from my point of view.
+	Anarchy, like life itself is infinitely more complicated than simple political gaming, left wing right wing, the whole concept of a binary system is illogical.  The problem with the west in general is that it makes dichotomies out of what is really just a grey cloudy lump of shit, so to speak.  What i mean by that statement is that nothing is reducible to being either/or, belief itself is multidimensional.  That is to say that to hold a belief is to filter information through an infinitely complex system and into the brain where the information is organized further and through electro-chemical response conditioning, an opinion or patterned is formed.  When the brain is again confronted with a similar question the response path of the original is duplicated.  
+	Doesn't ever strike you that this is not life.  This is robotic.  In light of something that is infinitely complex many philosophers, politicians and other freaks of nature have chosen to assume a starting point from which it can be safely assumed that everyone is at least in agreement of basic "facts."  But as mathematics show, these facts are subjective at best and nonexistent for all practical purposes.  Everything is in our heads, everything that occurs around us occurs in our grey matter which is to say that everything is an internal experience of the individual rather than an external event happening to the individual.   Thus the anarchists starting point is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere much like the timespace experience itself.  At  this point you can decide what is real and what is not.
+	This does not mean that fairies exist and men can walk through walls and everything coming into the bus is real at all rather that it can be real, because what most call real is only a generalized hallucination.  See what you want to see be who you want to be.  If it doesn't matter why not be what makes you happy healthy and mindful of your self rather than butting into the business of everyone else.  Laws are the result of psychosis.  Only the mentally unbalanced would impose a limitation upon itself.  You enjoy this metaphor when it matches up the moral code generally accepted, but when it is applied to everything it suddenly creates distress and psychosis.  Psychosis is characterized by delusions and disorientation which you again like as a definition when it is applied to those areas of life in which you deem it to be appropriate —for instance people holding non-binary processing patterns (loonies, bums, the elderly)— in this you are comfortable, but if the definition is expanded to include everything this causes the delusional to see that everything is delusional.  this in turn leads to semantic confusion —if nothing is real then what matters?  What is matter?  A forth dimensional manifestation of energy?  What are we? A forth dimensional manifestation of energy.  
+	Anarchy is not a threat to political institutions, life is a threat to political institutions.  Why punish behavior that is differential from your own?  try it you might like it.  If you want to stop people from buying cars, stop building roads.  if you want people to stop committing crime stop building prisons.  If you want people to stop starving to death stop making them work.  If you want people to stop working tell them that their are vast sources of energy capable of sustaining them and tell them that these sourses can be tapped in space.  Tell them the coca cola thing Burroughs was always nagging you about.  Tell them what you did.  Tell them the game, because it is nearly up the semantic game has been played out and they can see it smell it touch it and taste it.  They fantasize about it in Utopian novels and movies they fret over it too because they don't know if you've been there first, they don't know if its safe.  But eventually they're going to come over anyway.  And you know as well as i do that control is as pointless as the rest of it in the end because oddly the poets were always right.  We are only human, meaning that when we are beyond that in thought the game playing falls apart —some see demons some see little green men, and you know what those signs mean.  the end is near.  The bucket is coming down the well.  And once you are in it none of the concerns of the water have meaning.  
+	I, as some many before me only wish to thank you for your trauma because without it i never would have been forced to think beyond spacetime, and into spacetimemind.  I, also like many before, do hereby with a bow, resign.
+
+Sincerely, 
+SpaceTimeMind coordinate: Sil Hawkard
+
+
+
+	Most, including the president, who received the letter thought it the suicide note of a man whom records showed had always led a quiet and unobtrusive life.  One of the few would might have understood it was Dr.Waiben, but he never got a copy.
+
+
+
+A ford Econoline blasts headlight beams through a cold Tennessee mist.  Clouded sky obscured like Man Ray.  Inside Maya is sucking oxygen and sipping Ayahuasca tea, one hand steadies the wheel —this is it, back to the big sky's, the west ,the desert the last places to hide.  Enough of this goddamn smooched together states claustrophobic monosyllabic citizenry.  Ignore the people they're only a temporary inconvenience of sanity.  	Well Well Well cigarette time don't go no where kids and remember crack is good because...<chorus of children chanting> ...it raises money for the CIA to conduct covert operations against foreign nationals that would otherwise lead meaningless and happy lives...that's right now sit tight whilst Mr. Robertson gets a fix.
+	She wires herself into the payphone at the back of the station and quickly sends a message it William on the west coast.....all is well in high spirits. will see you two days hence. will be last transmission.  in Jasper.
+And i don’t mean freedom in the abstract American idealism sort of a way, i mean an Anarchy of the senses, the obliteration of logic and “common” sense, there’s enough of that garbage around that's why its common, what we need what i need is uncommon sense.  Anarchy of sense.  Most people when they hear the term anarchy associate it with the popular mythology of a chaos-like state with no government where murderers run naked through the street fucking helpless women and doing blizzards of drugs.  This apocalyptic vision is childish at best.  I do not propose to herein give a true or accurate version of anarchy or how it would work in the current sociological setting.  Indeed the central message I hope to convey is that political anarchy is the least of my concerns.  I only know what is in my head.  If yours is different then you are wrong.  At least from my point of view.
+	Anarchy, like life itself is infinitely more complicated than simple political gaming, left wing right wing, the whole concept of a binary system is illogical.  The problem with the west in general is that it makes dichotomies out of what is really just a grey cloudy lump of shit, so to speak.  What i mean by that statement is that nothing is reducible to being either/or, belief itself is multi-dimensional.  That is to say that to hold a belief is to filter information through an infinitely complex system and into the brain where the information is organized further and through electro-chemical responses, an opinion is formed.  In light of something that is infinitely complex many philosophers, politicians and other freaks of nature have chosen to assume a starting point from which it can be safely assumed that everyone is at least in agreement of basic "facts."  But as cutting edge physics and chaos mathematics show, these facts are subjective at best and nonexistent for all practical purposes.  Everything is in our heads, everything that occurs around us occurs in our grey matter which is to say that everything is an internal experience of the individual rather than an external event happening to the individual and as poet Bernard Wolfe put it.  
+
+	Maya’s journal became her life, her drug, the thing that took over.  Everyone has a thing that takes over completely —Children, jobs, heroin, art, photographs, anything that feels like genius.  		
+
+	Maya sat in silence for a moment contemplating a life of crime potentially running from people who would torture her or worse with no ultimate objective.  She ran it over again and weight it against the thought of eventually returning to college and meeting some guy and getting married and pregnant, and fat.  “Please Chloe, get me out of the boredom of my life, physical torture is no worse then psychological torture and I’ve got enough of that already.”
+	“Alright lets go home, I’ll call William and see if he needs anything.”
+
+
+I used to go out after work to drink a beer.  But i don't anymore.  But i likely will again.  I likely will do everything i have already done all over again in slowmotion three year cycles like a film loop.  This makes me feel safe.  Safety makes me want to vomit on fat ladies that take up a whole bench seat on the subways up in San Francisco.   When i was twenty two I rolled on a new film when I am twenty five I rolled a new film when I am Twenty eight I will roll a new film.  This makes me feel safe.  Safety makes me think of national geographic pictures where brown skinned natives wrap worm heads on sticks and slowly twist the stick to pull the worm from under their skin with out ripping it in half and leaving its disease riddled body under their skin.71
+	Nowhere anywhere as fast as they could run leaping timespace life elfin nightmarish flashes of light. I think I saw the end as a post script obituary for the living.  Its not going to be any better I can tell you that much —Dr. Waiben removed his shoes and sat back on the chair smoking a petroleum cigarette.
+	menes memories and magnetism
+	"	On the way to visit the ostriches I had the peculiar sensation of running down a long tunnel of green black liquid in which little hairy creatures were urging me to speak I could not speak and I felt a panic at the urgency with which they were prodding me to speak. I had the distinct feeling that If I did not speak I would cease to inhabit four dimensional spacetime, and I was struck by the overwhelming feeling that without words I would experience what those around me would have called death.   I now simply regard it as a loss of language, we are in fact much like a computer monitor, the hard drive will continue to receive information even if those on the outside can not tell what is being done with the information received.  language creates the pictures and graphics that we call i or you or her or whatever.
+
+Is anyone paying any attention here?  You expect me in your little scene and if I don't pay up you'll eliminate me?  Who made up these fucking rules?  This sucks I want my money back or I'm outta here.  The old man gets up off the porch and stumbles drunkenly back into the house getting his shot gun from off the kitchen table where he was cleaning it earlier in the day.  He retrieves it and flops back in rocking chair.  A yuppie couple jogging on a Saturday morning are the first to go...
+
+	
+	
+You want to go out Friday 
+and you want to go forever.
+                     -Michael Stipe
+
+	It never has mattered has it?  You only invent what you want to know and so why does it always end in failure?  Did you lock into a pattern you couldn't see through?  You can no longer trust the metaphor because you saw it coming in focus and you realized it's something from your childhood —endless tapes loping across eons.  And you see the game for what it was —something cold-blooded, reptile, slinking across the room.  You know the menu is not the meal and you have your metaphors and language bounded in all its unique epochal glory and you see through the epoches, but you can't shake the fear.  You know that change is inevitable; you know what you want, you say what you want, and you build the metaphor until it casts its shadow into time.  You think you know the end of it and still your sitting on the curb, hungry, apathetic, waiting for the sewer water to splash and wake from the nightmare of history.  You're thinking this isn't me, this can't be me.  
+	Everyone walks with unshakable self confidence, but not slow enough to remember that they are walking and when they laugh they pretend to be unafraid.  You only realize you're walking when you trip and are forced to remember that you are walking —going backwards to get a reference point.  You know its a terrible to stumble about when the maps are all laid out on the table in their glory.  You know the end but you really can't believe it and the shock of ending will throw your rhythm off its track.  This isn't you.  If you know it doesn't matter, then it doesn't matter.  Remember not to be frightened because they can not take <the word> <the image> <the vibration> of your hyperspacial shadow cast across time —and a poor reflection i would judge.  Be what you are.  You are whatever you want to play.  Too long in the game circuit, cut the wires pull the plug you will feel better.  You will be.  Always. 
+	Maya Stevens was sitting at her desk in nineteen ninety nine quietly unaware of anyone named Waiben or Hawkard.  She was making the fateful decision to turn her back on history, the nightmare was coming into focus.  Cultural evolution took over after biological evolution had ceased and cultural evolution gave way to a multidimensional realization of ecstasy, though Maya didn't have that vocabulary to describe it that way.  She merely felt that life was too short to spend it doing anything but exploring, she was unable to function as a member of society because she lived too much in amazement that any of life was actually happening.  Her value system had been turned inside out by the wordimagevibration of ecstasy.  She knew what she wanted —to be.  This is her story.
+
+
+Consciousness is the feelings of the contrast 
+of theory, as mere theory, with fact, as mere fact.  
+This contrast holds whether or not the theory be correct
+					-A. N. Whitehead
+
+Transcribed from intercellular radio:  Half an hour later over Mexican food and she said my name is...beady eyed half faced men in a diner cut out eyes and fucking rotting corpses to overcome insecurities handed out at birth —afterbirth is death thrown in a biohazard container and trucked off to a point on a continuum I've never seen.
+	She glides and is not.  Day 4: sounds of light and transmorphing Indian deities gives way to vampire children gnashing teeth and gnawing off the toes of the dead.  Sound becomes rhythm and gives way to light and objects manifested out of try temporal vacuum air.  Get out your accumulators— Egyptians, Tibetans.  Kundalini guides prey on the new arrivals in death as in life, no different.  "Best try to buck up boys" the sergeant bellows "since none of you paid a rats ass worth of attention in basic..."
+	funeral dirges still ringing in their ears the cast of corpse memories not yet faded.  i went downtown to see the firelight fountains and all the pretty hippies in costumes from centuries ago.  Pull me under pull me over take off my shoes.
+	She was feeling quite distressed and wanted to get undressed —naked not nude— she doesn't know the difference and i don't care enough to tell her.  Some things you can't do —enlighten others—fuck yourself in the ass—.  Jumping around too much these days?  Perhaps a synaptic workout is in order; something to make the goo go?  The Mexican boy selling—hey mister you wanna but some chiclettes?  One doolaar buy one box, lotsa gum —eh? no?  
+	Cambodian prostitute with HIV contorts to accommodate the small, mutilated and misshapen penis of wealthy Usinc busy ness man.  Inc had all the magic sown up in paperback bills weighing down the servile.  she opens her mouth and closes her eyes, come splashes across her face like elastic and gooey silly string.  He slaps her face and punches her, mashing come and blood —the rampant spread of dis ease—he leaves without paying and she feels luck to be alive, but doesn't know why.  And the poets cry li la la li lalali or some such nonsense, blowing winds rustling trees, photomantages of boredom turned to alcohol like the infinite mysteries —just starting to ferment.  If you can bake a cake you can build a bomb, you could split an atom  —won't you please keep that thing away from me?  oh won't you please keep that thing away from me.  Keep that frying pan away from me.
+
+	Maya took the trip many years after Sil, but no ostrich appeared, little flighted birds hovered about her window sill and bardos of Tibetan death held out.  Skinny cold fingers like withering men, like <horus sirus oriosis> and all the other dying gods who laid the framework for the christ con.  
+	Little birds that said we shit and we piss and we masturbate and we don't give a good goddamn about much else.  An emu drifted out of a bellowing purple sheet that hung on a clothesline two stories below Maya's window.  He looked up at her and said 'beware the the creature, the parasite holding you down, call you it the eye that is looking for me?'
+	do what i am doing he said and promptly made a fibrous ball of light that twisted and turned and hovered in the air as if it were made of the very sound that had described it into being.  God said "let there be light" or sounds to that effect.  Maya saw great Persian empires laid out, expanding and retracting, moving across time in slow molasses-like motions.  Cities where the sun stood still in the sky and monstrous creations of the mind, horrifying and seductive at the same time.  Like ancient Tibetan art there was no distinction between the province of the mind and the province of the body.  Women swam in south china seas of ambient warmth moving in playful erotic motions, cresting like dolphins.  Creatures of all forms walked streets of near ancient origin, cobblestones and whitewashed buildings with European wrought iron balconies.  Tapestries hung out from the window beckon the passersby to climb up into untold pleasures of body and mind.  The scene was overwhelming and undescribable; beautiful and horrifying in a way that held horror and beauty to be ultimately different reactions to same observed phenomena.
+	Like most people who have experimented with consciousness expansion Maya's initial voyage into hyperspace left her feeling elated and reborn, with all of life's secrets tucked neatly in her mind behind her beautiful eyes.  But like most people she lacked the vocabulary to make these places real in fourth dimensional planes.  Large parts of what she confronted lay dominate in her mind because she was unable to face them.  As a result her "enlightenment" was short lived and in the weeks that followed all the old patterns and programs of her life, both the conscious and the unconscious, reasserted themselves until two months later she felt her life was indeed just as shitty as it had been before she had drifted out into the bardos.  This fact caused her much anxiety.  Maya was (like all of us) trying to figure out what the hell is really going on down here.  Innerspace had been her holy Grail if i can get inside deep deep deep inside it will all make sense, but the inside is far more tricky twisting and ever elusive than the outside.  going into the quarter alone is a touchy proposition, you tend to end up with one foot here and one there and you come out stone paranoid and schizophrenic.  Best to have somebody with you to help navigate this side of things while you're on the endside.  Maya enjoyed the risk at first, mainly because she had no idea what she was dealing with, but she quickly came to realize that going it alone is doubly difficult and rewarding at the same time.  But if you get there alone you inevitably want to bring everyone back with you.  (See archives, records under Leary, Timothy)
+	One day Maya was looking for innerspace maps at the book store when she ran across the name of a man who had written many books on the subject of 'what the hell is going on down here?'  Aleister Crowley claimed to have a map and method for getting to places in the innerspacial world that Maya had difficulty believing really existed.  She had been there, but up until now she was able to run programs in her mind that said that everything could be a delusion, a creation of her own mind.  Crowley described the same phenomena and experiences that Maya had feltseenknown, his imagery was different bounded in his own spacetime experience, but neverthless Maya could feel in the spaces between the words that Crowley had been somewhere like where she had been.  Maya was hooked and began to study his methods of Magick focusing on departure techniques; she soon found herself capable of reaching the subway station under the quarter, although she didn't yet know about the quarter or even where she was.  She merely had sensations and saw things that seemed to behave as if she were in some sort of intergalactic train station waiting on an outbound line.  She didn't know how to get on the subway yet.
+	Crowley gave Maya that ability to simultaneously absorb these experiences with all her existence, and remain detached from them at the same time.  He preached that nothing is true or untrue, but that one should be open at all times to be able to accept temporarily anything as true or untrue.  If you are skeptical of the process you learn nothing, you must embrace the process and remain skeptical of the results.  There are merely different MAPS OF THE UNIVERSE, some of them are more and less interesting than others, the point is to learn as many of possible before you start choosing between them.
+	In the present Maya existed as a member of the genus homo species sapien.  She lived in Usinc.  Usinc had its a wide variety of maps existing in it but one overwhelmed the rest and was often unconsciously dictated by the Alpha Mans of her tribe.  The dominate map in USinc as far as Maya could determine was what one of the Sapiens, Noma Chomsky, called the Star System.  This map (or tunnel reality, or set of beliefs) holds that most people are really stupid,  or more eloquently in Chomsky's words: "...people would like to think that there's somebody up there who know's what he's doing.  since we don't participate, we don't control and we don't even think about questions of vital importance, we hope somebody is paying attention who has some competence.  Lets hope the ship has a captain, in other words since were not taking part in what's going on...  It is an important feature of (this) ideological system to impose on people the feeling that they really are incompetent to deal with these complex and important issues: they'd better leave it to the captain.  One devise (for programming people to feel incompetent) is the star system, an array of figures who are often media creations or creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control our lives..."  
+	This sort of map serves to divide people in two groups; those who are on the mapped described in detail and have nothing to worry about and those who are fucked and just get to listen and watch the map as one might listen and watch a talking bird.  They tended to listen to what they called the TELALINGUS, a blunt box-like object with voices and images being projected outward into their consciousness.  In older times people who heard voices coming out of the walls were called crazy, but in Usinc they were called consumers.  The screen of the Telalingus created myths and metaphors by which they could make some sense of the world.   Maya did not like these people they made her feel icky and she avoided them at any cost.
+	In Usinc most people believed this system is in fact THE WAY THINGS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN, but such is not the case.  The dominate Usinc map was a rather new and untested prototype reality which increasingly did not measure up to even the most basic parts of consensus reality.  There is another school of thought, a door that Crowley threw open, a metaphoric door to a metaphoric place called Gnosis.  Gnosis holds that the only way to learn is to experience to confront the unknown directly to experience the sensations without having to make an apriori judgement about there validity.  This map allows for a greater variety to life and makes it infinitely more fun and adventurous than listening to voices in a box.  Maya went back to the innerspacial experience with a new sense of what the hell was really going on.  She entered into belief tunnels and researched brain metabolism and learned what happened with tryptamines and how the beta-carbaloids bonded with her synapses and what harmines and harmalines were.  Then she went to the mystical maps from the eastern parts of the world and compared and contrasted ecstasy with satori and other states of consciousness outlines in Tibetan and and other eastern MAPS OF THE UNIVERSE.  Maya was learning that in the innerspacial world there is no consensus reality you created your own and learned how to manipulate it to your own satisfaction and desires.  This put her at odds with the dominate Usinc belief system of the day which labeled this behavior delusional. and found it threatening, she began to get paranoid.  One foot in one foot out.  She lacked the proper equipment to get all the way in.    
+	There are two things wrong with the label delusional: first in order to have something be delusional you must first have something that is non-delusional.  There is nothing that exists apart from ourselves this was something that a particularly revered Usincer named Einstein had been trying to say for almost a hundred years.  He asserted rather bluntly that without us there to observe it the world only exists in potential or delusionally.  It was rumored that later in life he regretted saying this.  The second problem is the people who label certain things delusional and others non-delusional.  A long time ago when the ancestors of Usinc arrived on the land they brought with them this map; the natives who greeted called them they-who-have-stick-up-there-ass-and-are-no-fun which has a much nicer ring that scientist or doctor or priest which is what most USincer's called them.  The natives used to chuckle about it and ridicule the size of their shrivelled white penises behind their backs which irritated the Usincer's so they gave them small pox and killed them all.  Elimination was a standard threat defense system in Usinc and was still practised in modern times.
+	The sense of direct confrontation and followed by personal  understanding (limited though it was) gave Maya the emotional fortitude and strength to travel further and further down  mysterious roads in pursuit of the truth or whatever.  It might also have driven her quite batty and killed her depending on what map you the reader are bringing along.
+	The Crowley doctrine of not having beliefs also provided Maya way to experience things without terror, for the conquest of fear is an absolute necessity when one approaches the fringes of what is known and not yet known.  Out in the Quarter fear is rampant, but without fear one is free to have myriad of experiences that are not available to those with fear, objective subjectivity Maya called it.  For instance just because one is presented with the sights of mass slaughter and carnage and every evil satanic thing ever recorded by man one is not bound to be afraid of these things because one is not bound to the system which labelled them evil in the first place.  If that doesn't follow think of it this way:  we have genetic memories encoded in or DNA (in twenty years science may well find the actual gene that has Dante's satanic visions stored in it), but in the mean time if you should accidentally dreg the hideous severed, bloody, snarling head of Lucifer up out of our genetic memory banks you can make him go away.  You just internalize the event and label it endogenetic which doesn't sound nearly as frightening as a seven headed monster spitting fire, gnashing its teeth, slashing up your record collection and generally making a mess of the living room.  Of course if their actually is a seven headed fire-breathing beast from hell in your living room then you really do have a problem and you might wonder if your losing your mind.  But ultimately even that is no comfort because if you've lost your mind you have to wonder who has it and why are they putting multi-headed-fire-breathing-demons in your goddamn living room?
+	Maya had fun with gnosis and managed to avoid seven headed satanists in her living room for the time being, but she did quickly find that she could no longer keep up with the pace of her mind.  The racing mind is a difficult thing to stop, you find thoughts at every corner and you can't seem to find room for new ones to modify the old ones and your mind tends to enter a static loop.  You'd have better luck stopping a train then stopping a train of thoughts.  The best thing to do is to take time to fully absorb and understand each journey before taking another, otherwise knowledge becomes static and starts to feedback.  
+	Maya had discovered that knowledge has an exponential rate of accumulation and soon she found she knew so much about so much that she came to the inevitable conclusion that information has timebounded saturation points.  She started to have to rely on artificial means of meditation and breathing exercises to get herself to sleep.  	
+	This may sound like a nightmare of some sort, but actually it is quite a skill to have, it like finding the on/off switch to the human brain.  This gives one an extreme felling of detached vivaciousness, like you can walk through walls if you wanted to and eventually you decide you can actually walk through walls you just don't know how.  Hassan i Sabbah will be driving the bus for the remainder of the tour you may direct any further questions to him...
+	"The British biologist, Richard Dawkins has coined the expression meme to designate a signal traveling in human space-time and carrying information (or mis-information).  In Dawkins view, just as biological evolution depends on the circulation of genes, sociological evolution depends on the migratory habits of memes." —from Wilhelm Reich in Hell, by Robert Anton Wilson.  Memes like genes can only be in one brain at any given time, the trick is to learn how to leave the individual sense of mind and find the point at which consciousness is pure essence with itself.  Out there one is not bounded by the standard saturation points.  Too many menes in "your brain" leads to a danger that it will all be static and meaningless chatter.  If you want to decode the static that builds up in your brain you have to graph it on a time scale.  Maya graphed the static in a journal.
+
+
+life is far to grave of a 
+matter to be taken seriously
+-Oscar Wilde	
+	
+	William S. Burroughs once said that language is a virus,  most Usincer's thought this was cute and humored the old man.  But when you stop and think about it language does act very much like a virus.  It is passed from old to young, it mutates according to the host, and it is fatal —when you stop talking you are dead.  If we are to humor this cute notion further we might eventually want to cure ourselves of this worldwide epidemic.  Memes may well be the genetic key.  Why do we need information?  Why do we need to be alive?  If we are to suppose that the viral pattern of language is consistent with other virus patterns then it's transmission and ability to replicate itself must have a genetic code which it uses to trigger reproduction and the consequent mutation of the host cell structure.  What is the DNA of language?
+	This theory rests on the supposition that ideas come before words ie the typical theory of language development: we speak because we have something to say.  Suppose we speak to create the things we want to see....  Shit or get of the pot the old man screams.
+	
+Static System Sampler: 
+
+	Sex and violence, she smiled that's what these people need —sex and violence.  She feels the rage building.  Writing is transmission it is the creation of alternative realities, the first step in creating a new world is to write it down. 
+	The tired shopkeeper is out smoking her obscenely thin cigarettes leaning out the front door ducking the afternoon sun.  She smokes constantly pausing only to give a tired answer to the same tourists she has to stare at day after day.  An endless reminder that they, not her, are the ones enjoying life.  Too many of them day after day year after year look look looking never buying.  The Leather Connection doesn’t do a lot of business on warm spring days —who puts a leather shop on the beach front.  Nor is it the kinky sort of fetish shop you might hope for.  Not even any leather in the windows.  She moves her lips mumbling incoherences intelligible only to herself.   She lights another cigarette.  A rabid dog paces back and forth across the doorway as if protecting it from unseen horror.	
+	The sharp eyed Asian hawk sitting behind me at another table closes her purse, pen safely secured inside.  She licks stamps and affixes them to postcards.  Notes for those at home.  “Jenny: LA is great -warm sunny.  I’m having a great time.  Remind me to tell you about this guy Bill I met the other day.  Take care of yourself.  Say hi to Tom for me.  Love....”
+	Families wander down the hill looking for a nice place to eat.  The neon signs offer Mexican Italian Greek food, “but we need a children's menu.”  “Tommy’s only nine, he can’t eat a whole meal himself.”   “Do you think they could split a dinner, I’m not very hungry myself?” “You brought the credit card right?” “No, but I’ve still got some cash left over from breakfast this morning.  “Wasn’t that a charming little place?” “What was it called?”  “Lets go there again before we leave.”
+	The locals, the non-travelers, the doomed-forever-to-live-in-one-placers stream by in shinny cars coming home from work in THE BIG CITY.  Their flimsy soda can Japanese cars that look as if a good size bird could, with decent aim, crush the plastic colored roofs.   The locals drive with windows up and frowns turned down.  “Did I remember to e-mail that memo to Tony at the office in Chicago?  I wonder what sort of crap Diane cooked for dinner tonight?  She is the worst cook.  What happened to that tri-tip on Friday?  I wouldn’t have known what is was if I hadn’t bought it myself.   Dave and Linda smiled and said it was delicious the lying bastards. don’t encourage her she might actually believe she can cook.  Dave probably just wants to sleep with her.  That whore.  I wonder if she’s fooling around behind my back?  She never wants to have sex anymore.  Its always the same routine.  Me still dripping from a shower her reading some book I crawl onto of her . ‘Not tonight honey I’m to tired.’  I wait till she’s fast a sleep and sneak down to the kitchen reach behind the fridge and pull out the nudie magazines and —off quietly to the bathroom.  I wonder what Diane would look like in tight leather, probably fat. She still hasn’t lost all the wait from the pregnancy.  God its been what like eighteen months Justin’s starting to walk for christsakes.  The light is green, fucking traffic.”  
+	The static of ordinary life is horrendous and boring this brief sample was brought to you to remind you that not everyone, perhaps not even you, leads an interesting life. Was that you i heard saying that someone else said that the newscaster said that the stockbrokers think that the CEO's are going to rig the oil market and drive us into recession?  ...hope the captain knows, cause us tech sergeant are just barely able to gather enough memes to pull ya through the day and get into the missionary position with a half limp cock and let the lov'in let the lov'in come back to me.  Swing your hips and let it all get lose.  No really.  put the book down and swing 'em.  Uncle Sabbah likes to see the little girls and boys shakin' de hips.
+	
+	Fog is settling in from the hills meeting up with banks rolling in from the sea, threatening the star’s view, tiny windows of the gods peeping in watching our silly games in continued amusement.  They keep doing it every night   Reminding me of San Francisco, the golden gate after sundown glowing like it were Apollos chariot itself.  Proudly beckoning the traveler with tale of endless wanderlust -out here the final frontier come swim discover secrets hidden from mankind...Come the sharks are hungry.  The mashing of teeth and bone, the tearing of flesh.  	
+	I would not fuck you in Thailand/ I would not fuck you in a plane over Japan.  One of Dr. Suess’ lesser known couplets.  
+	 The sun is setting and several miles out at sea a trident nuclear submarine is preforming manoeuvres in preparation for a war that most people don't believe will really happen.  I like to pretend the submarine doesn't exist,  I like to think that no one has ever really refined and mutated the Anthrax virus to make it deadlier and that no one ever dared to split atoms, but they did and it leaves me feeling hungry and tired. 
+	I find myself surrounded on all sides.  Everyone these days is completely obsessed with Being Bizarre.  So much so that nothing really is Bizarre anymore.  Yuppies ride Harleys and frequent bondage parlors on the weekends while pulling in double incomes of 150K during the week scurrying from house to latte to work to the onceaweekmatrimonialassfucking.  
+	You want Bizarre?   Circus freaks castrating themselves on the street corners and pimps shooting heroin in their balls while screaming whores accost their long dead mothers in hotel rooms a cockroach won’t set foot in?  Lawyers sitting on the roof, television antenna protruding from their limbs as policemen ritualistically torture themselves gouging out their own eyeballs to avoid the scene below?  You think that is normal?  You think it sounds better when you call it Urban Life?  You're all nuts.
+
+
+Star System Sampler:	
+	
+	"Are you making this shit up? Or has it really been found by anthropologists?"
+	"As if that lends it some sort of credibility?  Their PhD's mean they can't possibly be wrong or maybe deliberately lying ?"
+	"Are you that paranoid?"
+	"That's not paranoia, you always assume that wrong means bad.  I am just saying it is really every bit as possible as the usual tunnel that says science is true."
+	Maya is lying on the couch rainy-day-ranting in the formica sunshine about the chemical similarities between DMT and human seratonin.  DMT is in fact so recognizable to the human brain that it passes the through the blood/brain barrier in a matter of seconds. it is her theory that Seratonin was originally DMT and as the terrestrial ape moved out of the trees into caves and cities the chemical structure of the substance was altered, perhaps by diet perhaps by culture or perhaps deliberately by secret sect conspiring against humanity.  	She doesn't necessarily believe it, but she has fun tormenting her next door neighbor Pete with theories she knows are beyond what he has decided is real.  People who refuse to admit for even one moment that "reality" and "fantasy" might at some point merge miss out on so many wonderful ideas.  Maya loved to point out the ridiculous and far removed ideas that most people overlook as possibilties.  She liked to remind everyone that we could be living in a great novel six billion pages long or our entire universe might be an intricate and complex dream some alien entity is having.  Maya liked brain twists and loops that led directly into unsolvable paradoxes which, in her mind, always pointed out the stupidity of trying to use language to build things.
+	"unicorns don't exist right?
+	"right."
+	"Then how do you know what they look like?"
+	"They're the imagined creations of an artist."
+	"How do you know that?  How do you know they didn't used to exist and they just don't now?  How do you know that they aren't actually called dodo's?"
+	"Because somebody would have...i don't know... what are you getting at....?" 
+	"The thing is, is that for any set of equations there is an infinite possibility of solutions; I'm not trying to say this is the right solution, I'm just trying to point out that it is one of the possibilities.  And I can't understand why you dismiss it solely on the basis that it sounds ridiculous."  She smiled at Pete's bewilderment, the way an adult likes to smile its superiority at a child, but Maya knew that superiority is fleeting and ever relative.  
+	She kissed Pete on the cheek, chiefly because she liked to watch him turn red and he shifted in his chair trying to hide his hard on while she pretended to be oblivious and went into the bedroom to change clothes.
+	"I guess its time for me to go huh?" he called from the other room.
+	"I guess so," she called back thinking time is not an object, its inside you.	
+
+
+In the cosmic computer are all repetitions, 
+all tape loops necessary to keep the cosmos going; 
+the noise, sight, sounds, feelings, rhythms are obvious and full.
+-John C Lilly, M.D. from The Center of the Cyclone
+	
+	Sleeping fitfully under a moonless sky dreaming of a stale, smoky bar's liquor-stained floors and a headless horsemen riding like Icarius out of the fiery sun-gilded gates of hell.  The headless horseman swerves and bears down on the I that is you with menacing intent, jolting the dream element awake and into a sleepnonsleep trance on the isthmus of reality.  The horseman dismounts and walks in to the bar.  
+	I was bewildered and in my heavy-lidded gaze saw a man with no head standing just inside the mosquito netting that covers the tropical doorway.  Closer inspection revealed a pair of blinking eyes peering at me from where the neck tie should have been.  A hand slipped out from the waist and motioned for me to rise. I climbed clumsily off of my barstool and followed him out into the middle of the jungle night.   The headless horseman motioned for me to sit on a fallen tree and pulled out a long stick of cinnamon, he lit it and inhaled through a button hole in his chest.  I sat down on the log opposite him and staring eye-level at the cinnamonette and I began to appreciate the sheer size of the horseman and realized that even without his head, the horseman was taller than me...
+	Time passes by in jerky motions not unlike the first motion pictures; uneven and without regard for continuity.  Maybe moments maybe hours maybe at the same time, an old man with a sickly grey beard and a ridiculous suit is sitting where the horseman had been.  One hand is out of sight down his pants and the other wags a long finger at you and he begins to jerk his cock screaming i want you i want YOU i WANT YOU!  Eventually you slouched over against a wall and sleep.  
+	
+	Cary was looking at Maya through eyes that seemed galaxies away, "you didn't say whether or not you enjoyed it."
+	"It was horrifying and beautiful at the same time."
+	"Did you feel fear or joy?"
+	"At times i drifted into spaces that started me on a fear program and then a voice or some unspoken thought would say 'don't be afraid.'  Fear is judging i kept thinking and i was trying to hold out on judgements until after the experience.  But i did have an overwhelming feeling of sadness as i started coming down and i saw the whole tree of humanity... i was descending through it and i felt as if i could have chosen an infinite variety of bodies...experiences...and then i found the Maya one and instantly i was back and that was that..."
+	You went into what the Sufi's would call the cosmic control center only you just touched the edge of it...or you went in and you repressed the memories of the horror...that happens to sometimes..."
+	"So now what?"  Maya felt genuinely lost.  She wanted to go back up out into deep deep inner space, but she knew she didn't really even understand what had happened yet.  She didn't tell Cary that she had repeated the train station imagery or that a headlight had been boring down on her and that the sound had overwhelmed her and blown her back down.  I saw the train again she kept thinking, why do i keep seeing a train?
+	"Well i have to go back down to costa Rica and take care of some business at my research lab, but here is my email address," he handed her a slip of paper.  "That code at the end makes sure to forward it to my cell phone so i will get it as soon as you send it."  He stood as if to leave and Maya jumped up with him.
+	"Okay ya I'll write you...i have a lot more questions..."
+	"Well I'm not sure if i have any answers, but I'll do what i can for you."  He kissed her hand and closed the door as she left.  
+	And so it came that Maya found herself fully committed to the task of figuring out what the hell was going on down here.  The Star Map of Materialism was discarded completely from Maya's life and she begin slowly but surely to slink into the corners and fringes of society, she entered onto the Usinc list of potential threats and though she was unaware of it she was marked for elimination.  Cary met with her when his schedule allowed for it and they corresponded by email when he was out of town.  Frustratingly he never gave her answers instead he asked questions she hadn't reached yet.  Cary knew what it was like to be eliminated and he cautioned her against talking to anyone about these sorts of things.  
+	The Taoists say those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.  Most Usincers familiar with this philosophy found it irritating and believed that things indescribable don't exist.  And how they humored him when he said language is a virus. Maya began to see the emotional plague.  The self limiting and self fulfilled negative programs that the majority of her fellow sapiens exhibited became horrifying and Maya alternately found herself swinging like a pendulum between the poles and love and hate.  At times she felt a tremendous force radiating out from her chest trying to embrace the entire world and bath it in LOVE,  At other times the repulsion for all things human drove her into isolation where she would sit meditating and using psychoactivating devises to leave her body to exit the game, role-playing circuit that is "reality."  As the game circuit and its contractions became more and more painfully obvious Maya found herself drifting out of her body quiet involuntarily, right in the middle of conversations.  The things that most Usincer's talked about rarely amounted to much more then meaningless chatter and Maya could feel and had to internalize the death imagery, the negative body images, the label obsessions that comes from lost dreams, lack of love, and leaves only hollow shells to bundle up confusion and static.  Drifting out of the body without warning was quite disconcerting, but it forced her to feel people and use this to know them rather than words.  It was a step into another dimension.  At first it only happened when she was stoned, but gradually she learned that certain thoughts and breathe techniques could produce the effect while "sober."
+	Sober was an obsession for most Usincers, they believed that despite the fact that they ate mind altering chemicals all day long (usually caffeine in the form of coffee or methamphetamines in the form of diet pills) that they were actually in a state of mind that was sober or natural.  Maya was constantly seized by desires to show people their biocomputers their souls whatever metaphor was necessary to give them back control over their lives.  But Cary's advise held her in check and she avoided trying to show or teach anyone anything.  You have to want to know something before you can learn it.  She learned from the mistakes of Leary and the rest of the early western explorers.  
+Pointing out to people the sheer futility of trying to stop someone from exploring the unknown regions of the mind was ridiculous, and it also meant risking identifying oneself as a "drug user." This term was used to relegate mind exploration and its necessary tools into a peripheral segment of society that irritated and generally frightened most Usincers.  Over the centuries people with ideas that are unpopular have noticed that people in the past with unusual ideas about life and its potentials tended to meet rather untimely and painful deaths. So the observant ones learned to shut the fuck up, or write in code like Da Vinci or Crowley.  Great myths are spawned, the Knights of Templar, the Illuminati, the Masons, Taoists, the Assassins, the Sufis; history is riddled with mysteries.  
+	Plans were underway at the upper levels of the Alpha Male dominators to get some more small pox blankets to these unwanted citizens.  Plans had in fact been underway for some time, but since the serious students of innerspace had learned centuries before how to survive under adverse conditions it was difficult to figure out who need to be eliminated.  Slowly and carefully Cary was admitting Maya into the ranks of those networks which exist in the peripherals of organized primate societies.  He took her underground.  
+	Most Usincers remained oblivious to the underground.  It was something they heard of but assumed did not really exist.  In fact Most Usincers had no idea that they were  the most electronically advanced biocomputer in the known universe; consequently they wasted much time in imitating the behavior of other less electronically sophisticated animals.  The Alpha Male orientation of the political system was little different than any primate group.  A select group, after fighting amongst themselves for the approval of the rest of the tribe, set themselves up somewhere they called HEADQUARTERS and from here they ruled over the rest of the primate masses.  This allowed the masses to relax from worry about decisions and beliefs and ideas.  The Alpha Males supplied these things for them.  They felt the Alpha Males did a good job of it most of the time.  But this began to change and the Alpha Males began to feel threatened by the socio-cultural changes that were taking place so they reacted defensively like any cornered primate —they became paranoid.  This paranoid psychosis manifested itself in the form of small pox blankets which by now had been improved.  There were now Anthrax blankets, Leprosy-Anthrax blankets, atomic blankets, HIV blankets, and the Alpha males continued to invest more and more of the resources of Usinc, and indeed the whole world, into developing new lethal blankets.
+	It wasn't long before one of them suggested that they out to test the blankets just to make sure they work you see.  The first subpopulace to be identified were the "drug users."  Infected needles were distributed, secret police raided and seized property, and in time strip searches on public streets became common.  This angered many Usincers even those who were not "drug-users" but they did not speak up because they would be labeled drug sympathizers which was only slightly less irritating to the Alpha Males than actual "drug-users."  In short they knew they would be given blankets too.  Usinc was fast becoming a rather shitty place to live.  
+	It was about this time that the first glimpses of the boiling of the Usinc political caldron began to manifest themselves; riots broke out in Detroit, Chicago and Atlanta, and the entire infrastructure of communication was threatening to take away the Alpha Male domination.  The Alpha Males silenced these protests with blankets, but then labor strikes broke out all over the country followed by advent of technology that deeply threatened the Star System.  Communications technology was taking vast arrays of previously rare and complicated information and making it available to the masses of primates.  The people banded together and decided that the Alpha Males had to go, but the Alpha Males were ahead of them again.  They had already found that outright violence was unpopular within the tribe (although perfectly acceptable against those in other tribes).  They began to study those things that irritated them and they learned that silence and secrecy are far more effective than noisy riot-type events.  They used paper magic stolen from the great magicians of the past.  
+	Cary had decoded the paper magic and learned to move through it without it touching him.  He learned how to use it against the Alpha Males and this made him very very threatening to them.  He quickly learned to be very very quiet and resourceful.  Maya didn't have access to the resources that Cary did so he told her what he could without putting her life in danger.  He told her about the Alpha Males and how to explore innerspace without raising there interests.  He taught her how to walk without being noticed and how to use their paper magic against them.  He told her that any hunting pack will inevitably develop a complex system of signals to communicate with during an attack.  He told her the most important signal would be a riot in  New York City which would cause the population to ask the Alpha Males to use the blankets on them.  Usinc was full of deeply confused primates.  He told her that when such an event occurred the best bet would be to head to somewhere on the planet that the Alpha Males did not care about.  He gave her a list of such places and told her that when the time came he would help her get to one of them.  He did not tell her that they were all places he controlled and that very very few people on the planet knew about them.  He also did not tell her that some of these places did not actually exist in the consensus timespace coordinate. 
+	Maya found the whole thing adventurous and exciting like a spy novel, she kept it in the back of her mind, where, like most of the citizens of Usinc it fought with another voice in the back of her head that kept saying its never going to get that bad, it never going to happen...
+	
+	
+
+	In the meantime she stayed in Long Beach and kept up her research into inner space, occasionally using Ayahuasca, but primarily concentration on Psylosilum Cubensis which was the most commonly available a particularly psybocilum concentrated species of mushroom that was along with LSD 25, MDMA and a host of other hallucinatory drugs, officially declared a schedule one deadly drug by the government of Usinc way back in 1965.  No government investigation or tests were ever performed on psylocilum it just got lumped with the rest of the psychedelic drugs of the nineteen sixties and deemed inappropriate for human consumption.  
+	Chemically altering your own brain processing structure is hardly a new idea, people have been taking strange drugs and eating different plants throughout history.  But it also important to notice that these people have also been persecuted by almost every Alpha Male government and syndicate since the beginning of time.  It has its genesis in the Christian story which THE CHURCH has so cleverly glossed over for centuries.  
+	Christ was a gnostic; he claimed a direct communication with god, and while Maya did not believe in the consensus definition of god, she understood that there was something out there and that Christ more than likely had seen it and what happened to him?  He got nailed to a goddamn tree.  That has got to fucking hurt.  You go about minding your own business and one day you confront a world that is an entirely separate reality from your own, and you like it, it gives you a feeling of ecstasy, you want to share it with others.  At first they think you are insane, weird or overly imaginative at best, but you keep trying and trying and trying to tell them that there is a better way, you do some amazing things with the knowledge you have and they realize you might not be kidding and this makes them nervous so they tell the Alpha Males.  We fear.  And the Alpha Males use their paper magic on you.  They write things into LAW and they make you ILLEGAL.  They claim that this then gives them the right to stop you.  You are amused by their unwillingness to try what you speak of, but you keep telling them ...it can be better than this...and you know this.  One day they get desperate and they nail you to a cross.  Through the physical pain you finally gain what you were lacking the power to transcend the body, you find death before they did and you leave, but they never understand.  And you are dead to them.  
+	
+
+
+	There are worms in the soul of the materialist and they are eating from the inside out, logic and the belief that things which can be replicated through objective experimentation are the only things which can possible be true, is not wrong, but rather a very limited way of viewing life.  Why is science so reluctant to investigate phenomena like UFOs, demon possession, chemical induced brain change, telekinesis, psychic communication, telepathy, witchcraft, Auras, Orgone energies, Gaian sentience, collective unconscious, and the rest of the fringes?  Simply because its own self limiting philosophies have consciously chosen to ignore them.  If it were proven true that telepathy is possible would it invalidate all of biology?  No why then is science afraid of this possibility and fight so violently against it and those that are willing to investigate it are labeled frauds and charlatans?  Because it would force science to admit its shortcomings and the Alpha Males would have to give up the powerful personality egos which are the only programs that their biocomputers are capable of running.  
+	The irony of the star system is that those who go farthest out of the limbs get the greatest respect as humans (Gandi, Einstein, Galilieo, Bucky Fuller, Tim Leary et al) but their ideas are never taken seriously and when they are finally proved right it is only with the greatest of begrudgement that science and governments will admit what they secretly fear:  that consensus reality is not a good map of what the hell is really going on down here.
+	The worms are eating from the inside out and the decay is not easy to see unless you look from the inside and crack the elaborate schematics of secret societies.  Science is perhaps the most elaborate and widespread secret society to ever grace the face of the earth.  It has gone so far as to develop an complex and untranslatable language unique to each of its subdivisions —any hunting pack will develop very sophisticated and complex signals with which to communicate during the hunt.  The complexity of science is so great that even within the heads of the beast can not understand each other.  Biologists pay no attention to physicists and physicist can't understand chaos theorists, chaos theorists sneer down their horned rimmed glasses at botanists and none of them take psychologists seriously.
+	The for instances:  Sigmund Freud in his investigation of the human mind predicated that one day psychology would be but another field of biology, that is that most psychosis has some definite interaction with physical biology.  In other words if you tend to suffer from delusions of grandeur it might well be because you chest muscles are in a constant state of hypertension or something to that effect.  Enter Wilhelm Reich, at first Reich merely takes Freud one step further, outlining a better method of psychotherapy that focuses on how the patient behaves rather than what he says.  Reich recognizes that most people give away more of the unconscious in behaviors and habits than in conscious thought-out speech and ideas.  Slowly psychology accepts this and he publishes Character Armor, there are of course those who refuse to accept it but in twenty years they receded from majority to minority.  Then Reich turns to the question of biological causes of mental psychosis and he is drowned out in a cry of protest, biology is unwilling to accept or even experiment with his Orgone energy.  While biologists happily admit they have next to know idea how the brain works they are damn sure that this is not within the realm of possibilities.  
+	Reich is arrested by order of the American Medical Association and imprisoned for the remainder of his life.  His research is hauled out of his office and labs and burned in the New York City incinerator.  Reich thought as a scientist that he was immune to such primitive charges as heresy or the like.  He is wrong and pays an exacting toll for his mistake.  In an ironic twist sixty years later Bell's Theorem seems to bare out that at least there is a chance his hypotheses could be correct and to ad another spoonful of irony, they major American Medical Association endorsed method of treating seriously mental illness is biologically based chemicals, which we call drugs.
+	Another for instance:  Bells theorem (that familiar bell curve on which you were graded) seems to suggest that points on opposite side of the familiar curve could in fact be behaving in the exact same way.  For instance if you were to take to molecule on opposite side of the universe and look at their behaviors they would in fact appear to be the very same thing.  A whole branch of physics has sprung up to study this idea they call it non-local energy transfer.  However despite the fact that any farmer in Iowa could easily see the implications of this theory that if two things can be doing the same thing at the same time then two people could reasonable be expected to be thinking the same things at the same time, the physicist will not investigate telepathy and the like.  why?  His own map of the universe says that it is at least possible why not look into it, it seems like an interesting and certainly revolutionary idea?  Because he or she knows that this is not how life is.  Self limiting prophesies are always fulfilled.  If you know something is true or not true then it is true or not true for you.  There is no objective reality.  Sorry kids there just isn't.  Einstein told everyone that eighty years ago, but unfortunately he wrote (like Crowley and da Vinci and the rest) in a very clever code called physics and the star system holds that you could not possibly understand physics.  
+	Let me destroy that myth for a moment.  Its simple, relativity says that the measurements made at any given point (you being a point in this case, belittling i know but work with me here).  At any given point what is seen by the observer is only accurate at that point.  In other words what you see and experience is uniquely your own perspective and is not true for any one else.  We all know this as common sense, but sadly few understand it.  This means that we are all uniquely alone and separate from each other —incapable of ever seeing the world through someone else's eyes —so long as we remain bounded to the spacetime point we call our "self."  Transcending this point of observations suspends the laws of physics as we know them and throws us out of the time bounded Quantum Universe into the Multiversial Flow that mystics have been babbling incoherently about for centuries.  The Tao Te Ching is not enigmatic it just doesn't operate on the same logic and rational that we do.  Transcending the self is not hard you can do it on a daily basis; the human brain has known this unconsciously for thousands of years and developed something called empathy which allows us to try to see the world through another persons eyes.   If you go further you forget that there are people and non-people there only is.
+	
+	The Star map consists of litanies of hierarchical structures at the tops of which reside experts who hand out information that travels down the ladder and is collectively agreed on by those in the lower rungs to be true.  Thus only a select few of the people presumably know what the hell was actually going on.  This leads to holding beliefs and is very detrimental to the mass of the population, tending to produce psychosis which tends to manifest in the Nabisco sponsored M&M&M Monotheism Monogamy Monotony.  Polly gets a cracker.  Peoget.  Its been written up, described dis affected, looped and fed back so many times the signal is garbled into meaningless static.
+	Usinc primates were a curious group.  Maya liked to watch them and felt at times like an alien anthropologist sent to study this unique, bizarre species.
+	
+
+We're all Fucked
+-Sil Hawkard from Pissing on Gravities Rainbow
+	
+		
+	Of course there were some good things about Usinc primates, some of them were goddamn sexy.  The males of the species tended to believe that if they put their cocks in you this then gave them control over you.  Maya found this irritating and consequently spent most of her sexual energy on women who tended to be less controlling and more open to multiple partners.  
+	For some time though Maya's inner space exploration had taken over her sex drive.  She spent three months in near isolation save her contact with her neighbors.  During this time she travelled into spaces very foreign and exciting.  She learned how to gain control over what experts in the field called the biocomputer or the soft machine.  The human brain is the most sophisticated thing in the known universe; it is capable of processing data at a rate that so far exceeds everything else as to make it seem unique.  But it is not unique at all, computers operate on a very similar principle of electrical impulses to move and interpret data.  Instead of synapses and ganglia they use resisters and capacitors.  If we reverse the analogy and view the brain as a much advanced computer questions present themselves, questions like what programs are running?  Who is the meta-programmer in charge of loading and running the programs that the people use?  Can you seize conscious control away from the meta-programmer and program your brain yourself?  Maya found that she was not in control of many of the programs that her brain ran, some being run on a daily basis.  Her three months in isolation was an attempt to catalog the programs stored in her hard drive.  She got quite good at leaving her body and she had the experience of communicating with entities that do not occupy physical realms.  One afternoon one of these entities addressed her directly and questioned why she wanted to be alone.  No one in here is alone.  To be alone is to no longer exist in a relative universe.  
+	Maya gradually came realize that you can not remain in static isolation without necessarily limiting the number of reality tunnels available for exploration.  This is why people who never leave their hometowns tend to believe that their lives are the way THINGS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN.  Stasis leads to static which leads to confusion and eventual psychosis like emotional attachments to things.  This psychosis eventually leads one to become the memetic duplicate of the parent program.  Primate Bio-Computers get anxious when they start to feel like they are becoming their parents they have a "mid-life crisis."  This is because the nuero-circuitry on the soft machine is not designed to run pattern lopes, we are the only self programmable computers in the known universe and you're worrying what color curtains you should have in your window, what style of clothing is more popular among the rich and famous, how you can accumulate and store as many scraps of papermagicmoney as possible?  
+	The more you travel the more you know is the ultimate extension of this logic.  Mathematically: Stasis=static=boredom=fear=death.   As the Sufis used to say before they got co-opted by the Hippies Uplifting Humans (HUH? for short) don't put anything over your head, it could fall and hurt you.  Maybe they had to much ether in the temple or maybe you're just taking it all too seriously.  
+	The more "other people's shoes" you can fit into the more perceptions you will have on what the hell is going on down here.  The more perspectives you get, the less you care which one is right, and you stop taking any of it seriously.  But that doesn't mean you aren't serious about it.  Achieving states of ecstasy feels really fucking good otherwise why would you bother?  It seemed curious to Maya that religion had chosen to portray enlightenment as this serene eternal peace on a mountain top kind of image.  A good ad company selling ecstasy wouldn't get clients with an ad campaign like that.  Its worse than some late night hack job: Do you feel bored? restless?  Try the new godatic ecstasy pill! feel the energy of the entire universe pulsing through your body!  order today, supplies limited, only three easy payments 19.95.... 
+	Ecstasy is takes many forms, sex, chemicals, food, smells, tactile sensations of skin on skin.   There are no limits in the province of the mind save what you put on it.  You don't have to live in one place mentally or physically so why would you want to?  She hit upon the idea of living in a reality tunnel without a home base without a steady income and surviving on a daily basis rather than a monthly one, or a yearly one making decisions on the basis of a lifetime's worth of time makes it very hard to act.  Be here now the Buddhists say.  One of the easiest ways to get into the now is to force the body to have to constantly adapt to new surroundings.  Cats always land on their feet because they start running before they hit the ground.  
+	Listening to Cary and reading the emails he sent her from the far corners of the earth tell made Maya realized constantly moving altered your consciousness.   Cary came by one day with an eightball of  cocaine and said I thought you might need this.  She was in New York City forty-two hours later after a three our nap in Denver, Colorado. 
+	Maya arrived already in an altered state of consciousness, she had run out of coke in Kentucky and kept herself awake by taking massive dosses of caffeine and occasionally slashing her arm.  She found that eventually after thirty or so hours it is harder to fall asleep then it is to remain awake.  Her eyeballs ached and her hands were callused from gripping the steering wheel of the trusty ford econoline van which despite having 238,654 miles on it was still the most reliable vehicle she had ever seen.  Although as she took off all her clothes and drove through the stifling Kansas heat she wondered if maybe Cary would have given her a BMW or something if she had asked him.  I need to be rich she thought.  
+	She went to her friend April's house and called her from the front porch on a cell phone that Cary had loaned her.  Halfway through the catching up she walked in the door.  It made Maya smile and seemed to shock the shit appropriately out of April who was getting head from another girl while she talked and who nearly leaped up to the ceiling when Maya burst in the door.
+
+Snapshots:
+
+223 slipping in splish splash boom band boom and it was in Arizona when i noticed.  Creosote bushes Juniper trees growing up through brown grass and dry red earth sky painted black and blue Culumous clouds held off in the distance and dirt splatters the windshield rolling rolling on rolling on what i need is.
+	disappointment click clack tree wheels tuffs of white cotton mixed in with the rumble of thunderheads and i had a line on and there was a sign jelly roll.  Cigarette ash and the rain was holding off.  Headed east headed east ping pong sing song.  Desert air alone.  Never had much time to talk about money, when i need a hammer i use it the rest of the time i leave it in the garage.  Not much you can say about a hammer.  It works.
+	I like your diction ohhh baby i loooove you diction.  contemplate chemicals as a means of communication, if all you got is language all you got it four dimensions up-down, left-right, back-forward and what time is it.  Bodeey is communication, sex is communication, chemicals are communication, images are communication, words too.  My mind your mind ITS mind.  i want to dream in eight sided polydimensional technicolor.  
+	Corky voice over: New Mexico is dark few lights here and there, but they don't seem to have a sun.  Ya its dark.  theres some stars there's the dig dipper looking bigger and dippery then ever, looks more like a spatula to me but whom am i to say.
+	Southern man voice over:  and there some rocks over thar by the Indian gaaaming facilities. and there's a big blinkin,' one a 'em radio towers i reckon
+	Homer: uuuuh look. truck. mmmm donuts.
+	Glow on the horizon could it be?!      waiting for alien abduction mind fading.
+	You don't think we are Indians?  Look at all these teepees we are....Indians.
+`	The first genuine signs of an altered sate of consciousness:  inability to distinguish between movement and sitting still.  Time becomes plural bendable mutable and simultaneously objective and subjective.  Bending time affects space the ability to look into the distance behind the eyelids disappears and the world feels right on top of you, flattened out like a blanket over your head.  then a feeling of dizziness and disorientation of visual field inability to judge distance.  followed by flawed depth perception difficulty in walking and a feeling of separation of mind and body.  The body will remain intact but the mind goes into something akin to active sleep.  You are asleep without being asleep.  The body seems to function on a light dark binary pattern regardless of whether or not the mind is there with it.
+	the final unanswered question of humanity:  where do thoughts come from?  The brain?  how does a gooey cellular substance flush with electrical charges and billions of strung together molecules formulate complex abstract ideas about things that don't exist?  I feel like a lucky strike, i think I'm toasted.
+	Once when i was five i had an imaginary friend named Steve.  We got along great until one day he tried to steal my blanket and i kicked him out of a moving car.  that was the end of Steve.
+
+	Maya no intention of spending much time in New York City but she got slightly side-tracked by brown liquor, green marijuana and an eerie sense of syncronicity that seemed to scream out follow me.  Her friend April had a friend who had a friend.... that had invited her to the annual naked party that the rebellious hippie type students threw every year at NYU to somehow prove that they were cooler than anyone else.  Maya was amused by hippish college students and thought it was inane, but she also knew they tended to be in possession of chemicals that Maya was lacking.  And they never even realize that drugs are not phase, they're a way of life that so threatens humanity that they have come to be the cardinal sin. 
+	The naked party was a nationally known event held in an enormous old Victorian house three stories high wedged back off an alley in the East Village Mall.   As you might imagine everyone at the party was naked, and as you might expect they were all severely inebriated.   Maya danced around the rooms looking for some sort of powerful mind altering drug, she spied a wretchedly foul looking hippie boy who seemed like he was having a more innarestin' time than the rest of the people and cornered him to get an eighth of Psybilsilm Cubensis at the  reason price of two minute of kissing and brief grope during which time Maya ate the mushrooms and escaped from further advances.  The alcohol rumbled with the addition of stale fungus and suddenly she felt dizzy and a lot drunker then she had the moment before.  Maya stumbled toward the bathroom to rid her body of the alcohol pollutants wondering if the mushrooms would act like peyote and be stronger after you through up.  She opened the door too drunk to care if it was occupied and burst in to catch William, a slight man of about twenty five with a thin but muscular body,  gently fucking a girl doggy style.  Maya's world was beginning to become less and less vertical, but she caught the girls beautiful face in the mirror, perfectly framed by long angelic golden ringlets of hair that Maya’s eyes followed down to her sweat glistened nipples and heaving breasts.  William was leaning toward the sink to do a line of cocaine, at that instant Maya was too drunk to be taken aback, she simply squeezed in and closed the door behind her and threw up in the toilet for a minute.  After several gut wrenching heaves she tried to get up and sit down to pee, but the world was refusing to hold itself up and the toilet seat leapt up at her resulting in a fairly loud noise that made the girl turn her head and shimmy slightly looking back at her.
+	“you look like you could use a pick up, give her some coke William.”  She smiled at Maya .   William pulled his cock out of the girl but lost his balance turning around and accidentally slapped his cock against Maya's cheek
+	“Oh my god!    I’m sorry!     oh wow, did that just happen?”  It was by far the most immediate and personal introduction to anyone she had ever had.  The girl just laughed. 
+	“Usually I date someone for a while before I let them slap my face with their dick.” Maya had found that  sarcasm was funniest in the midst of insanity.
+	 The girl laughed again, she bent down and licked Maya’s cheek, “Just getting my cum off your face,” she whispered in Maya’s ear.  Maya did a line and felt much better and then another and then another and another until she felt downright spectacular.  Then the girl grabbed her by the hand and led her out of the bathroom and down the hall into a room that was empty and smelled of the delightfully sweet aroma of Opium.
+	“You have Opium,” she murmured as the girl pulled her into bed.
+	“Yes I do."  She pulled Maya down onto the bed.  "My name is Chloe and that was William, and that's enough talk,” she lit and huca and passed the hose to Maya.	
+	Picture: A blurry collage of images short circuited by imperfection and redeemed by the great opportunities of flesh and smokey tongues.  Maya liked men and women, and was not, like most of the other bipedal apes of Usinc, afraid of having sex with her own image.  Bisexuality exists potential for everyone, but only a handful realize the seductive pleasure of a body so close to the I.  In fact Maya was far more selective of the men she slept with then women, but William, Chloe's boyfriend, was a sleek muscular yummy as one of Maya friends used to say, so she didn't complain when he climbed in bed too.  Others at the party came and went but the three paid them no mind.  Maya was lost in a world that for a moment offered the opportunity to let the music and the swirl of opium lights carry her into a sexual trance that welled up in her feet and travelled deliciously up her spine until it erupted in a whole body orgasm.  
+	There was an odd moment  after the orgasm when  Maya had returned to the dance floor for a moment and then decided she wanted more and went back to the room only to catch William getting dressed and looking like he was going to leave. "Where are you going?"
+	"My friend needs some stuff."  William eyed her suspiciously.
+	"At three in morning?"  Maya furrowed her brow and held back from asking prying questions like who or why.  "addict?" She asked.
+	"He pays me very well so that i won't have a problem catering to his whims."  William pulled on his boots and got up to go, "Chloe's still in the bedroom you should let her take care of you..." He kissed Maya on the cheek and headed for the door.  Maya watched him go and then walked back to the bedroom.
+	"Where the hell did William just run off to?" She asked closing the door behind her.
+	"Our friend Cary needed some things that William and I got for him."
+	"Cary?"
+
+
+
+Why aren't you gay?
+-Sil Hawkard from Pissing on Gravities Rainbow
+
+	The poetics of Allen carry long over and over into the the Quarter like Voodoo music and you know that they are with you and all will be solved when you are recognized.  You hope that all you have come to believe is true and you want to know if we're all lost in the confusion and you want to think the smoke is clearing and surgeon will be stitching up the lacerations and you're licking up the blood.  And every one seems to walk so confident and proud like they know so well what they are doing and you cutting into fear and they don't seem to notice.  You're feeling like an idiot because it is so easy for them to walk proud and unafraid and you no longer care you want to see yourself smiling in a nineteen twenty's black and white photograph yellowed over the years and you want to know if you've been stuck in this station for to long you want to know if you've been down this line before.  No one seems to understand why you're saying what you're saying and the lesbians don't understand men and the fags hate women and the heteros hate everyone and everyone is so dead dead dead afraid of sex.  Why would you refuse an open mouth on your cock why would you deny the tongue snaking through the folds of your pussy simply because it came from a body that looked just like your own?  Why deny half of all the sex you could ever have?  Go back and confess your sins and catch the first train out of here you freaks.  Its crowded and we haven't got the time or the resources to be having you around.  Face up to the things you are not and could be, step aside and make room for those of us who are here to go.  "I hope for you that you apply this happiness, this peacefulness" -JMS
+
+	“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you” Chloe climbed on top of Maya and began sucking her nipples.  Maya felt her body relax and could smell the familiar mingling of incense and opium smoke floating across the room she raised her head and saw Chloe’s hard nipples rub against her own sending tremors down her spine and an aching contraction gripped her pussy.  The cream ran down her slit and trickled over her ass and onto the pillow.  She drew up the Chloe’s leg until it was rubbing against her pussy, smearing herself on her thigh.  Maya pulled Chloe’s mouth onto her own and kissed her hard, pushing her tongue into her warm sweet mouth, licking her lips and nibbling at her tongue. There mouths danced and the whole religious allegory of centuries seemed to swirl around from the Indonesian tapestries that hung on the walls and ceiling.  Chloe rolled over and dragged Maya on top of her pushing Maya’s head down between her legs.  Maya ran her hands across Chloe’s pussy and down her thighs, pulling her legs apart.  She looked up at Chloe's ringlet hair and smiled her warmth through the cinnamon orange color she felt it flowing out through her chest nipples hard and sticking up like radio antenna.  Drawing Chloe’s ass into her hands and lifting the pussy onto her tongue, Maya lapped at her creaming pussy, stabbing her tongue between Chloe’s glistening smooth and moist lips, dragging it up over her clit slowly to tease her at first, but Chloe grabbed Maya’s hair and forced her tongue between her lips and ground hard onto her tongue.  Cum soaked Maya’s face and she began to lick as hard and fast as she could.	
+
+	
+	Exhausted and Satiated Maya and Chloe left the naked party together at seven the next day, carefully stepping over the delicate piles of sleeping flesh that litter the floor, admiring the groping hands clasped of breasts and clutching at limp cocks, crisscrossed and sleeping in splendor.  Chloe took Maya to breakfast and the twenty four hour diner  downtown and invited her to make the drive up to Boston and stay with her.
+	“So what is it you two do?” Maya said trying to make conversation with someone she realized suddenly —she had had sex with, done large quantities of opium, mushrooms, and cocaine, yet had never really talked to.  Maya thought of the joke about the couple that was getting divorced just out of college.  One of their friends says ‘what happened?’  ‘Well,’ says that man ‘we met and got married in college; I didn’t know we couldn’t get along when we were sober.’  
+	“So now you think because we fucked and shared some drugs that I'm going to bare my soul to you?”  Chloe asked smiling.
+	“I was hoping,” said Maya meeting her smile.
+	“Well, okay, I can tell you the truth but you won't believe me."  Chloe seemed to be measuring her up with words designed to lead Maya somewhere.
+	“'Belief is the death of intelligence,'” said Maya.
+	“Well Well well, you can read.”  Chloe seemed to shift to a certain bitchy character that suddenly made her appear self righteous and altogether ugly in that smug ugliness that New Englanders seem to always have whether they mean it or not.  She looked searchingly in Chloe's eyes and heard a voice, one she had never heard before telling her that smugliness is ugliness is fear/must cut through/ get them down from there/ stuck like a cat///.  She quieted her voices and listened to the way Chloe's green eyes moved as she talked.  She felt her breathe between sips of her coffee and watched to curl of her tongue as it formed words.  She wondered absently if William was in love with her.
+	"The truth is that William and I work for a man named Cary, we make collages and sound loops which he needs when he goes um travelling."
+	"I knew a man named Cary," Maya was thinking aloud and instantly regretted it, but Chloe only smiled.  At first it was warm and friendly but then a consumptive almost animal like fire began to burn behind her eyes or maybe it was Maya's own desires projected outward into Chloe's eyes.
+	"How would you like to come up to Boston and lick my pussy for a few days?"
+	She said it with such feline grace that it sounded as if she giving someone directions to a restaurant, Maya came back: "Are you going to lick mine?"
+	"I'm going to fuck you like you've never been fucked, so you'll stay fucked."
+
+We forget that sacred, 
+respectful sex may not look 
+like heterosexual monogamy, 
+and we forget that human 
+beings are sexual every 
+moment of their lives.  
+-Sallie Tisdale	
+
+	It reminds me of a place i used to live where in dark corners i watched a beautiful brunette and fell deeply in love with her, though we never spoke.  I watched her like writer would smug certitude that i knew the real her better than she knew herself.  I sat alone in that dark corner night after night waiting and watching.  If you listen in silence the Buddhists say, you hear much more.  Silence means no thought no word no picture, if you want to know what someone is saying stop listening to the syntax and watch how they say it.  You only do that if you are internally quiet and listening, which involves the eyes as much as the ears.
+	i like to listen to Chloe watch her lips curl and retracted and form out words thoughts ideas smiles frowns all the expressions of human emotions which words are not needed for.  Words are abstracted ideas intellectual masturbation, bodddiiiiyyy language is here-now happening, really occurring, Maya Maya Maya what are you doing you sound like you're in love with the girl... I am but I'm not; I'm not because being in love turns strange gears in my head and heart and soul and makes me change to better reflect upon the image i am so desperate to duplicate assimilate and make myself into.  My love is possessive lays inroads across lives bringing separate things together i can never again tell someone i am in love with them because they always expect it to last forever.  i hurt them when i leave and i never mean to i still love them i just have to leave.
+	Sex.  the feel of her nipple rubbing coarsely against mine the softness of mashed breasts stuck together kissing chasing her tongue around her mouth.  there is a reason writers are afraid of sex and hate trying to write it, they don't have words for it.  They think its something that is happening, a thing that exists apart from ourselves, but it is not.  It is in us —we are sex.  Sex is seeping from our pores and we hate it, we deny it.  I want to celebrate it, I want to have a mad passionate orgy with the entire world.  I want men I want Women i want plants I want animals, all life in one orgiastic embrace like Kali and Vishnu; mouths locked on mouths, on breasts, on cocks, on cunts, cocks in cunts, in asses, between breasts, tongues licking necks, licking nipples, licking asses, fingers probing flesh, FLESH FLEsh FLesh searing and popping with electrostatic sexual energy.  Is that so much to ask?  Wouldn't you like it?  Are you scared because you know you would and it might turn the world upside down?  
+	How to suck seed:  I like sucking on a man's cock —my mother would call me a whore.  I like cock, the flesh there is much softer than anywhere else on a man's bodies, the cock is the closest a man gets to being a woman.  It amazes me that women don't enjoy sucking cock more if only for that reason, of course that's not all i like about it.  I like watching them squirm, making them twitch; i like looking in their eyes as my mouth slides down the shaft giving them that fuck me look that men spend most of there lives trying to coax out of women.  Men are really quiet simple like that, look at them in the right way, beg for the right things (like pllleeeease ppllleeeease fuck me harder or yes cum all over my face...) and they will do anything you want.  They will still try to front their character armor, try to treat you like an idiot try to prove themselves superior, but I never begrudge them that, if i were as dumb as a man and my ego were that defenseless I'd spend most of my waking hours trying to protect it too.  
+	Maybe i should writing a guidebook for women called How To Suck Cock.  I should definite reeducate them on the come part, many women think men like to come in your mouth, this is not true.  Men want you to get messy, they want come in your mouth on your face on your breasts every where, its like they're marking their territory.  You have to act like you like it too, and eventually you will...eventually you will find you are turned on by things much more perverted then you originally thought possible.  You will find yourself not just wanting to suck cock but to rub your face all over it, devour his balls with you tongue making him twitch and begging for him to fuck your face.  You will discover as I have that sex is not good until you are covered in sweat and cum and have violated all the taboos and laws of the country.  You will also find that this will scare the living shit out of most men who run away when you walk in a room in stiletto skin tight rubber boots up to your cunt and nipple clamps with a chain, and say get on your knees and lick my asshole.  They're good at dishing out perversion and degrading you but most can't take it when its your perversion and you degrading them.  that is why i prefer bisexual women, women who know that sex is everywhere inside you and as the song says the last taboo was shattered by her tongue one night.
+	I think sex with women is more exciting, and easier than sex with men.  I know women's bodies, they are my own body.  By the nature of things having sex with women is more like masturbating, there is no coming to terms with the other.  There is no Other.  And usually women are adventurous than with men.  This is vague and meaningless and horribly analytical,why am i writing this?  No one will ever see it.  Because i am horny and Chloe is at the store and William meeting some guy named Sil.  William says he's cute.  It would be really odd an unfathomable snychronistity if the Cary that they know is the same one i know...I'm tired of writing.  i need coffee.
+
+
+"To a person over 35 or 40 
+the word "drug" means one 
+of two things: doctor-disease 
+or dope-fiend-crime.  Nothing you 
+can say to a person who has this 
+neurological fix on the on the word 
+drug is going to change their mind."
+-Dr Timothy Leary
+	
+
+	Sitting at the twenty four hour diner and I wonder if I'm lost again.  I wonder if i made some horrible mistake.  I wonder if i should have been baptized?  As if being born were a sin?  What kind of fucked up belief is that?  Welcome to hell, i guess.  I want you to be naked always, i want you to be wild like a panther pacing the jungle.  New York.  timepiece.  Dark bruises hanging low on bloody red brick world and the college kids smile absently at each other still snug in surrogate wombs.  Eastern money all sick with age, death and decay do you even remember why you got rich or was it a hand out? I was brought here by money wanting for it that is.  would you like to know what its like to not have it would you would you can you imagine.  Money is a heavy hand; heavy when you got it heavier when you don't.  And you dare to tell me what i ought to do what rules i ought to follow do you hear me labelling up your ugly world do you want to know what i think?  Of course not you just hold your head up high hide behind your religions, your morals, your laws, your gods, your ceremonies, your traditions, your truth.  You want to know what i think?  Of course not.  But you're going to one day I am going to be heard.  I will write you a letter and you will hear it in your dreamsleep and it will seep into you like a virus and start to duplicate itself cell by cell until i break you down, pull out your stubborn beliefs and watch them in the pure light.  And you will see your ugliness for what it is.  And you will see that this is not the peacelove you can market and absorb and redirect like the 1960's.  You will see it in the white light of nova ovens.  It's William Burroughs at your doorstep with Hassan and me, and we will take back your ugliness and show it to all the galaxy and you will be afraid of yourself you will run from yourself and you will go nowhere.
+	Dear Boards, Syndicates and Cartels or the earth Jesse Helms and cold blooded mindless religious idiots of all history, Newt Gingrich and all corrupt power mongers selling the souls that are not yours and never will be yours, Banking families of the earth locking down lives that are not yours and never will be yours; hear me now.  What have you that i do not have what have i that you need why are you vampiring off bodies that are not yours to use?  Where do you base your authority from in what powerless jungles do you hide?  What wet swamps do your bellies stink of knees are muddied with could you find no way into the Quarter but this in your atom splitters in your denial religions you just couldn't keep the lid down because your filth games do not pull in this here.  We are here and we are here to stay and you will hear it you will feel it you will taste it but not until we tell you sill you know it because your books do not have the puzzle do not have the key do not know what you are looking for.  And in those moments of confusion we will tear you to shreds gnawing like demons, preying on your flesh, throwing your ripped entrails on the subway tracks and watching you grind into nothing.  Not a thing.  i am not a thing.
+	Acrid caffeine burned stomach linings peeling off the damn thing girl in charge rages —i need supplies, nutrients the front line is taking heavy casualties.  Stop into a french bistro with awnings covered like the french flag.  Ham and cheese under a better name.  Up the street there is William he's with another man can't make out if he's cute or not.  Quicken pace.  Man is getting into a BMW smiling very cute looks familiar.	
+	A Window in the back of the BMW rolled down and out popped Cary's smiling face.  "Maya I heard you were in the east....would you like to come to the western lands?"
+	"This is so odd," she smiled back at him.  She shifted her hips and leaned down to the window giving Cary a kiss on the cheek.  "I dunno, is Mr.  Burroughs going to be there...?"
+	"Of course."
+	"Well i don't have any money so i don't think i can go..."
+	"If you don't think you can go then you can't go, but i have something for you anyway, actually its for all of you," he gestured at William and smiled at Chloe as she came running from up the street.  He handed an envelope to Maya.  sorry i can't talk we've got to be in Costa Rica by morning..." His voice was overwhelmed by the passing of a truck.  Maya kissed him again and ran around to the drivers door and tapped on the window as Cary said hello/goodbye to Chloe.
+	"I didn't get your name?" She said as the window lowered enough to show a pair of muddy green eyes.
+	"Sil,"  he said rolling the window the rest of the way down.  His lips didn't seem to move and there was no expression on his face, but behind the eyes Maya saw the intensity of something enormous burning.  She was instantly obsessed.
+	"I'm Maya,"  she held out her hand which he clasped and kissed gently.
+	"Its nice to meet you Maya.  Have a nice stay."  the car started up and Sil smiled at her for a brief second before rolling up the black tinted window and heading down the street.  Maya stood there for a minute watching the car disappear into Harvard Square.  You to she thought blankly.  Chloe and William were holding the door for her, she floated upstairs with them.
+	"What's in the envelope?"  William seemed anxious to Maya as she flopped down on the couch."
+	"lets see..." It was a rather large envelope and she tore it apart like a birthday present.  Three passports and three airline tickets spilled out onto the floor.  They gathered them up and realized that they needed to be at the airport in two hours.  
+	"Cary's sending us to the flotilla..."  William seemed amazed.
+	"The what?"
+	Maya was not paying attention she was staring at the ten one thousand dollar bills taped to the inside of her passport.  She noticed that it was her picture but not her name.  She also noticed that Chloe and William did not have money in their passports.  Exchange in Madrid. ...better rates read the note.
+
+	
+Why do today what you did yesterday 
+and can do tomorrow anyway?
+-Maya Stevens from A Game-Circuit Guidebook
+
+	Gliding down out of those Elysian fields you often feel tired lonely and a little bit afraid that if death is not the end then what the hell really is going on around here????  Sometimes looking into and through the eyes of someone you don't even know you get the tragic silence of empty timespace tugging at those mindstrings that hide until the lonely hour of the morning when the I sees itself in the mirror, and tries to reconcile the emotions of so many different state of mind —bring the contradictions of emotion into focus— only to reveal them to be more juxtaposed than you had originally imagined.  What happens to the sad eyed boys you loved, but never spoke to, lusted after but never kissed warm lips, never felt, salty tequila necks never licked in tropical humid splendor.  What becomes of the non-events those give lifes its tragic beauty?  It lends poets' enthusiasm, hearing centuries of events that failed to undergo the formality of actually occurring.
+	Is this occurred, is this happening, are you reaching me or am i reaching you and what is the difference.?  What is the difference between an observer created universe existing -only for the individual- and a set  of1x1000000000000000000000000000000000
+000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 multiverses all existing simultaneously?  Why has everyone lost their wild-eyed enthusiasm for life?  Why was i born in this strange cynical decade?  What will you do when the whole thing goes up?  Change tunnels involuntarily that's what you'll do; maybe you should start practicing?  Do you ever feel hungry tireduglyhungry?  Do you ever feel your fingers dancing on skin that isn't there?  Slow motion glow of torpid rhythms, dancing  like words —first there is skin, then there is no skin, then there is.  Undulations felt time-ripple like, something Dali would approve of.  From right up under torrid kisses a yearning gripping phantasmal emotion claws at you like rust.  digging digging.    Have you ever seen hungry eyes?  gripped and held them for an instant that transcended TimeSpaceMind points and fell together in grace, like Dante's vision standing on its ear, staring you readydareugly in the face?  Don't you want to go?  don't you ever want to let go for a second?  to see the approval oblivion lugs up behind it?  Can you feel it?  Its in foreign cities, lands you've only dreamed of.  Have you ever wandered what it was exactly that makes the milk of paradise, what did Coolidge see?  Have you ever wanted the elixir she carries in that elliptic second?  Have you ever hungered?  She's hungry yearning tie the tiger to a stick.  That thing is going to eat your flesh in horrors you never thought could be true.  Don't you want to go?  We are here.  Don't you want to go?
+	It was a couple of thousand desert miles and a few seasons ago and you were walking fast to catch a train you'd already missed.  And a billboard ad that wasn't new two years ago, spent like a sperm poodle condom.  You're just sitting in the red vinyl cushions at an all night diner spinning a few tracks on the jukebox, burying concrete
+highway traces of noise, headlights dragging past.  Calling up visions of lost highways, dredged out images blurred together; passing seasons traced out in the arks of headlights carved through concrete, and you pull to the side of the road recollecting missed side streets, passed exits and you haven't slept a moment since Taos years ago.  Lying down in the back seat, A.M. only radio, and you're playing along on a dimestore guitar you got this past week for ten bucks in Las Crusas, New Mexico, traded it for dinner from a man who already heard music in the season's knew the uglysimpletruth and had no need to catch what you had missed.  You drowned it out with desert miles spent walking on asphalt.  Mescaline, Morphine and you tried to catch it, photographfreezeframed for an eternity's preservation, just as a moment slid by.  Memory is seared to film.  Another missed exit on desert highways, the dust turned to miles and passed you out on the two lane, rickety and prone to ruin in the seasons when you passed through; too tired not to stop at an all night diner for a Kerouac cherry pie on the plastic stools.  Diner red, hard formica counters raised out of cold concrete floors —scuffed from the worn heels of trucker boots.  Watch them treading season after season across the threshold and into the red glow just to rest wearied eyes and maybe spin a few tracks from days past. The waitress departs without a care for the miles missed and you're writing up a catalog of things to seedothink.  Fresh customers arriving out of the chilled Kentucky mist.
+	Sad desert of two days driving slams you back down in the booth, speakers ease out the rhythm of headlights blearing past and the Las Crusas guitar reflects a Picasso shape on the concrete of the parking lot.  Thee mist interrupting the even light just
+to play proud chords of songs unwritten to mark the passing seasons.  Missed out of haste, sown into concrete known only in diner light whose reflection is just fragmented enough with the past to see all the seasons. 
+	Have you ever been hungry?
+	
+	Maya had never been to Europe or the Middle East nor had she been in a floating geodesic dome before.  The plane touched down at midnight in Madrid.  The three travellers were met at the airport by a limo; maya looked at the sleek black car and suddenly had a change of heart.  She told them she would catch up in the next few days, reasoning that Cary would not have given her ten thousand dollars if he expected her to go straight to the flotilla.  
+	From the airport Maya got a cab and attempted to lose herself in the night of Madrid.  She walked in the crowded streets alone looking for a club or a bar in which she could pass the night.  They buildings were white and the streets narrow she walked aimlessly for a while studying the shops and houses wondering what it was like to live somewhere that people had been living for nearly fifteen hundred years.  The heavy fiction of history seemed to hang like vaporous lead fog on the streets.  When Usincer's travel abroad they are forced to confront the fact that a two hundred year history is but a blip.  Maya had never been on a street that was thousand years old in fact the one she was on now had been repaved in 1986, but this did not enter into her thoughts she was thinking that at least some street had been here for a thousand years.  Eventually she came to a series of side-streets and alleys that overflowed with bars,cafe's and clubs; drunken Europeans spill out onto the streets and she felt drunken Spanish eyes leering at her.  Spanish: Senorita! Come here, you need someone?  I'll take care of you eh?  We dance make love.  Maya ducked in bar without acknowledging them  she ordered scotch  and sat at the bar for a while listening to the swirling sounds of Spanish and French.  She could translate snippets here and there: fuck the government! chinga this and chinga that.  Maya hadn't been around real Spanish before, but she recognized traces of bastardized Mexican cuss words and slang.  The bar was packed and hot the walls were red and Maya felt the stench of centuries of people with poor bathing habits.  Usincer's are a clean obsessed people Maya thought as she finished her scotch and headed toward the door.She went to akl;sdjf lkj, the adfdkjf, and then to a club with the promising name of 69.  It was here that she ran into a boisterously drunk American who claimed he was a doctor.  
+	Waiben was leaving when Maya arrived, but the presence of a beautiful white girl convinced him to stay.  She noticed him primarily because he was the only white person in the club which reminded Maya that she too was white and that she too probably stuck out every bit as much in this sea of olive-brown faces.  But, Maya paid him little mind and settled herself at the bar ordering another scotch.  She got her drink and turned around to see Dr. Waiben standing. leaning against a pole and staring at her.  She felt an ill vibe about his person and turned back around to the bar, but he came up and leaned in next to her ear.  "Are you from Usinc?"
+	She did not turn to look at him and continued to roll her scotch back and forth on the bar shuffling it between her hands like an ice puck.  
+	"Excuse me miss are you from Usinc?"
+	"Je Ne Sais Pas?" she smiled and shook her head.
+	Waiben was quite drunk and he started to ask again only louder like people do when the realize that someone doesn't understand them as if they will when you say it at twice the volume.  He caught himself and simply smiled.  He stared at her in a way she recognized: hungry.  She could tell that deep down he would like to deposit some or preferably all of his sperm on her, Maya knew that was men's first thought when they saw her or any woman for that matter, and Maya was well aware of her biological power over men.  She let her spaghetti strap slide down her shoulder so that he could see the top of her breast better.  His eyes followed it and she wiggled in her stool and leaned forward to get a napkin, playing him like a fiddle.  He just kept staring at her finally her turned and mumbled under his breath and into his drink "Sleep with me you stupid french cunt." 	But loud enough that Maya caught it.  She turned looked him dead in the eyes and said: "If I went to bed with you you won't live through the experience...insecure pencil dicked Usinc businessmen have never turned me on anyway."
+	He stared at her trying to absorb the impact and looking like a Yugo that's been hit by a cement truck.  Maya smiled and stared back, reading him.  He was a curious man; medium build and of nondescript stature, the kind of person who passes without notice on a crowded Usinc street.  Perfectly nondescript and it gave her the creeps, Maya knew that its the ones that you don't notice that you have to watch out for.  
+	"Actually I'm a doctor," he said lamely.
+	"That's the best you can do?" she smiled again.  "What was your name?"
+	"Dr. Waiben."
+	"Well Dr. Waiben it was nice to meet you," she held out her hand and he shook it.  Maya sucked down the rest of her drink and set it on the bar.  "Would you like another drink?" she could tell Waiben thought this was his big chance, men like to think that if they give you something it means you will give them something in return.  They liked that logic so much they built an entire society based on it.  Maya hated the barter system and never sold her conversation for drinks.  She smiled an artificial ironic smile and said yes waited until he turned to get the bartenders attention and then ducked out the door and into the Spanish night.  She hit  he street running and laughing outloud much to the amusement of two men kissing in darkened doorway.  she answered them with catcalls and a whoop chinga me el nino....  for the first time she felt free and continued running down the Madrid street paying no attention to where she was going.  Eventually she found a hotel and got a room.
+	The next day Maya bought a laptop computer and after much haggling and showing of money got the man at the store to give her a number of another man that claimed he could get her modem that could dial off of payphones.  she got a bus ticket to Marabella in the south of Spain which her pocketguide to Spain said was where all the rich and famous movie star types hang out.  This, she reasoned, is usually where all the fun stuff goes on —in the houses of the rich and richer.  The bus ticket was third class which Maya always travelled so that she could see the countryside and be able to stop frequented to smoke joints or get something to eat.  She typed on the bus not worrying about the eyesore nature of a beautiful Usinc woman wearing jeans and a tank top listening to headphones and typing on a laptop on a nineteen seventies bus full of working class Spanish citizens lumber over the hills.  From a payphone in aklsdjf kadjf she emailed Cary a message on how to go about getting a boat and shared a hash cigarette with a boy that looked about fifteen and spoke no Usinc.  he approached her smoking form shyly and asked something in Spanish which Maya took to mean he wanted her cigarette, she handed it too him and he puffed on it and smiled at her after a thoughtful pause, "lkasdjf?" She took it to mean hash she smiled si.  he rambled for sometime in Spanish gesturing occasionally toward the town.  Maya caught some of it it seemed like he was offering her something food perhaps, but she declined No grasias and bid him farewell getting back on the bus.  It took the better part of the day and into the night to get to Marabella.  Maya was tired and went straight to the first hotel and crashed out for the night.
+	She woke up the next morning and wired herself up to the internet expecting directions to a boat of some sort.  Instead there was a map of Marabella with a cafe highlighted and a note below it that read see you here at eleven.  Maya looked at the clock it was already ten thirty she threw on her clothes and ran to catch a cab.  the drive wound through the town and Maya saw the Mediterranean for the first time.  The town reminded her of New Orleans must have looked a hundred years ago whitewash buildings and wrought iron railings.  New Orleans if it had been on a hill.  The cab dove down the hill and into waterfront plaza littered with Orange Trees and sidewalk vendors.  Lovely,  Maya murmured in an British accent, imagining some snotty old British bitch delighting in the mock authenticity of Marabella isn't it just lovely....
+	Cary was sitting at table in front of cafe klajdklf eating eggs.  he got up and gave Maya a hug, offering her a seat.
+	"I see you decided to take advantage of the opportunity to travel...you don't have guilt circuit cut yet though or you would have just said hey can you send a boat for me...
+	I didn't want to put you out...'
+	"No one ever puts me out if i want to do something that i am able to do i do it, if i don't i don't.  I find this greatly simplifies what most people call domestic life and leaves me free to do more interesting things: the why's how's and whatfor's.... He smiled, "now for the funny part " and Maya got the lecture that Sil had gotten many years earlier.
+
+
+
+Within the province of the mind, What I believe 
+to be true is true or becomes true, within the limits 
+to be found experientially and experimentally.  
+These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. 
+ —Dr John C Lilly from The Center of the Cyclone
+	
+October 23,1999	Two weeks later and i feel a little better —less motion sickness.  Went into something like a trance state last night with the sensory depravation chamber and the mushrooms.  Cary kept asking me what i saw when i couldn't really make out anything that was describable he gave me a book how to build maps in hyperspace or something of that nature.  Mostly i felt cold as if i were on a wind blown desert mesa or something to that effect.  Sense of dread and anticipation like you feel when starting a trip that you know will not be easy, but i never went anywhere.  Sat around in the bar last night with Chloe and Cary talking about the potential effects of being able to receive all  the information in a ten dimensional lattice work universe such as ours.  The question being: would computers be capable of translating dimensions the we don't normally have ocular reference points in?  In other words Cary was arguing that if implanting new programs in the human mind is through chemical means does that mean that addition things could be seen if chemical were cross referenced (so to speak) with digitally enhanced ocular images?  Light conversation around here.  That's the thing i can't get over is that there are so much information stored here in computers in nanocreatures and human nervous systems its absolutely incredible.  And Cary continues to baffle me in way that no one ever has before without me wanting to sleep with them.  Not that i haven't had sex with him, he took me through a wide array of tantric and other sex magic traditions the other day and i came so hard i saw other universes the satori things eastern mystics are always raving about.  But it wasn't erotic it was just sex.  Really damn good sex.  Sometimes i think Cary has cracked the code and knows things the rest of us aren't going to know until after we die and sometimes i think he's just as clueless as the rest of us he just happens to be the guy with the money.  I asked him about that this morning and he looked at me for really long time like i was insane.  He got that very thoughtful look on his face like i can tell when he finally hits at emotion; he said just because you're dead doesn't mean you stop programming your consciousness.  You just don't do it with your body anymore.  I take that to mean that he is a trickster like the rest of the religious people of the world, he just tricks me into thinking about things i find enjoyable where as David Koresh did not.
+	Still haven't met Sil Hawkard again and no one seems to know where he is or when of even if he is coming back.  I just remember the piercing green eyes that sparkled and laughed while the face did nothing.  Apparently i am not alone in obsessing over his eyes everyone here says that one of the things they notice about him is that her never looks directly into their eyes.  When he talks he seems miles away that's what William said when i asked him about him on the plane.  But everyone seems to like him or at least respect him even if they don't understand.  I heard a story the second day i was here that he had vanished and that not even Cary knew where he was.  Apparently he lived here for about four years leaving to conduct some experiments in south America but always going back here never said mush just watched.  Some days he just sat in the bar and smoked hash and stared at the walls other days he would just read magazines or watch and laugh as people went about their jobs.  they said they never felt that he was laughing at them rather that he laughed because he liked the way he felt when he was laughing.  I asked Cary about it that and he just started laughing.  He gave me a book that Hawkard wrote though, something called the rubber octopus I read most of it in a day.  Very confusing jumbled sort of book that felt more like an interpersonal wrestling match between the author and the story then it did a novel.  I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't and characters would appear without explanation and disappear again and he kept reminding the reader that they are reading a book and that he is in there mind.  I am writing a new program in your mind sentences would start and then he would go on to say thinks like UFO's are real i saw one in August 4 2954 on a dirt road in Oklahoma.  It was still dark just an hour before sunrise i was driving a '69 Ford truck, the sky was black and the only thing i could see was the road in front of me and then there was a flash and two figures approached me and offered me pancakes and then got back into their spaceship and took off again.  then the text would digress into language experiments with semantics and Linguistics.  It gives you the feeling that the author is brilliant, but doesn't care if you follow him or not he just wants you to have a good time.  And the sex scenes...if he can actually have sex as well as he writes it... he needs to come back here so I can test that theory.
+
+
+November 19, 1999	I flew with Cary to Paris today to have some more tests done on his brain to see if he indeed has a tumor.  He still hasn't mentioned anything to anyone yet, he doesn't seem to be bothered by it, but i cried all night last night.
+
+November 23, 1999	Cary is going to die.  the doctors give him two months tops.  I flew back alone to the Flotilla he said there were some things he needed to do, but that he would come to have a bon Voyage party.  He seemed genuinely excited about death, maybe he is in denial.
+
+November 29. 1999	Cable received on the antique telegraph machine in Cary's office read:
+	A thousand apologies for not being able to return.stop.I leave all of you with sufficient funds to continue the facilities into the near future.stop.shutting down costa rica facility all persons there return to Flotilla if it strikes your fancy.stop.smile.stop.i died yesterday and Sil is dictating this to the woman at the telegraph office.stop.remember if death is not the end then what the hell is really going on around here.stop.
+
+STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP
+47 words  127 pages
+
+
+
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+ 	… It is just, it is just about to, it is just about to rolywholyover.  —James Joyce
+
+Eigenstate One (The Year of the Rocket)
+	It was the year they launched the first privatized rocket into orbit and it captured to imagination of the world much like I imagine Neil Armstrong did, although I wasn’t alive then.  It set in motion a global shift from stale cynicism to optimism; it turned our dreamminds back on.  At least from my point a view, in hindsight the rocket became incidental, as any revolution does after it is over, but at the time it was a monumental event.  The generation I grew up with had no one thing to identify our dreams with, in end we were all on that rocket and for me that’s where it all started.
+Of course it did set off a chain of events that forever change everyone who lived through it but I only know that with hindsight.  At the time it was a symbol and I knew even then that the first step to making a dream reality is to have the right symbols, something needed to change in those days we just didn’t know what that it was.  We stumbled about like sleep walkers toiling through empty existences.  The rocket changed that; it brought the magic of space out of the hands of the government and gave the universe back to the imagination of the individual. 
+ It was also the beginning of the end of government.  Of course the decline of government power was nothing, new for years sociologists had been aware that the human mind was decentralizing itself.  I remember in college a professor tracing the de-evolution of power from GOD to KING, to kings, to Congresses, and so on with control always being more diluted as time progressed.  But the rocket gave us a locus, it drew us onto a common ground of wonder, it was applied theory —reality.  
+In Usinc the primitive tribal-monkey routine of government had been falling out of favor ever since the Internet replaced, first the Electoral College and then Congress itself.  No one was interested in politics anymore, no one cared, we just knew there were problems and we wanted to solve them.  It was a strange and unsettling time to be alive, even I had been a tad alarmed when it was decided that the United States would be privatized and its name changed to Usinc, but in the end it made no real difference in anyone’s daily life.  Except maybe the bureaucrats in Washington who lost their jobs, but most of them moved into the private sector without to much trouble.  
+When the shuttle completed its two day orbit there were huge parties to celebrate and everyone was wondering how long before they could afford to go.  Only Televangelists like Walter Finks decried the new space race as obscene and immoral, but he thought everything aside from god was immoral and obscene. Finks had his loyal followers that were opposed to just about everything fun and no one paid them much mind anymore; only the most backward people still watched television and they had been left (or stayed) behind long before the rocket.  We were through with dire predictions from religious idiots and scientists alike.  In the end I guess Cynicism came full circle back to Hope and even the pessimists lost their audience —we had cried wolf too many times we already knew nothing would come of it.  Everyone talked about what an exciting time it was to be alive… people living in every age may well have said the same thing, but that’s only because being alive on the third planet is exciting.
+
+The rocket went off at 6:23 EST from the NASA pad in Cape Canaveral; I woke up exactly three hours later just before sunrise in Los Angeles.  The room was still dark but I could see the translucent glow of morning beginning to bleed through the window.  I sat up and looked at the clock, it read 6:23; I had only been asleep for five hours. I didn’t know about the rocket yet but I could sense that something had happened, the prevalence of EtherTwo, the Virtual Net, had given us all a boosted feeling of what they used to call ESP.  It turned out that virtual reality activated previously unused portions of the brain that gave everyone a closer connection.  I wasn’t much for scientific detail, but I had noticed the effects shortly after my first trip, everyone had.
+I lay there for a while staring at the rough plaster ceiling imagining it to be the surface of the moon and trying to sense what it would be like if I were slowly orbiting its convoluted landscape at about five hundred feet just floating in the infinite emptiness of space.  I believe it would feel something like I felt snorkeling last summer in the Cayman Islands.  I thought of about it then too, floating there on the surface of the water looking down at the ocean floor trying to see craters and ridges instead of coral and sand. The water filled in around my head, plugged my ears and cut off the outside world; I could hear myself breathing in the silence.  Space is pure silence.
+I lit a cigarette and turned on my lamp; the warm murky-yellow glow of the rice paper shade gave a harsh glare and made me squint momentarily until my eyes adjusted.  At the time I was living in modest sized studio on Huntington Harbor which is about half an hour south of Los Angeles proper.  I was killing time or vacationing or some combination of the two.  I had family in LA so I was in town for the holidays and I had sublet this place for a few months.  I was anxious to get out of LA, but if I was going to be there I figured I might as well get a nice place.
+The studio was essentially one large room with a door to the bathroom and half a wall partitioning off the kitchen. I slept on the couch to conserve space; the only other furniture was an oversized chair and a rinky-dink bookshelf I constructed out of cinderblocks and Walnut boards.   My only improvement on the place has been to paint the walls white and decorate them with my black and white photographs. I didn’t receive many visitors in those days so the place was spartan, but it was better than jail.
+I had been released from LA County about a month before.  Like everyone I met on the inside I was innocent although, to be absolutely honest. I had been a thief, but to prove the irony of life, the crime I actually got caught for I never committed.  However even I knew that I would get caught eventually for something, and since the crime they convicted me of was considerably less than what I could have been charged with, I considered myself lucky and served my six months as a model prisoner.  Six months is a long time to spending a ten by twelve room, but it did have its upside —I read.  I read constantly in between being bused down to various other jails where three other inmates and myself cleaned cells, changed linens and mopped floors.  I read a lot about photography, which until jail had been just a hobby, but now it was a job.  Sort of.  And no I didn’t get raped; I was in county jail not prison.  
+The first privately funded rocket was just passing over Los Angeles when I woke up that morning although it was too early for anyone to care much.  As bleary-eyed business people stood in line for coffee they slowly noticed the headlines and they went home to port into E2 and watch the video feed from space.  I didn’t port in until after lunch, instead I popped into the Garden of Delights and took a short acid trip, after an hour or so I got in the shower, and went for my morning walk.  I went as I usually did to Café du Monde, a kind of all night French diner if there is such a thing.  It was quaint and peaceful around eleven in the morning when I sat down for coffee.  
+Café du Monde was on the boardwalk in Sunset Beach and Claire and I met for breakfast every Monday.  It was January but the weather was typically LA —seventy-two and sunny.  One thing I have learned over the years is that while everything will fail at some point, it will never get cold in LA.  I called LA home for almost twenty-five years and I can safely say that not once in that time do I ever recollect being cold.
+Los Angeles was as it always had been for as long as I’ve known it, the epicenter of the cultural/tech revolution.  It was soulless and bright like the light at the end of the tunnel, but it was my home and had a connection to it whether I liked to admit it or not.  In fact before I began my career as a thief I had written a book about LA, celebrating the uneasy paranoid inferiority one gets from growing up in a land of actors, of course no one ever published it.  I worked here and there in cafés and wrote occasional stories to support myself, which is why I had so much free time.  That’s another thing about LA it always seems like you are the only one that has to work for a living while everybody else just floats from party to party; naturally that is not literally true, but if you spend enough time there it certain feels that way.
+Someone had left a newspaper on the table and that was when I first saw the news about the shuttle; the headline was in one-inch bold type that fairly splashed across the page ‘DeLiTech Launches First Private Shuttle.’  Three executives from DeLiTech were orbiting the earth even as I lit my cigarette.  DeLiTech was the manufacturer of the first commercially available virtual reality system, which I had just used. DeLiTech was also rumored to be the largest and most profitable entity on the planet and many people clinging to old beliefs thought DeLiTech was running the whole planet by now.  EtherTwo was littered with sites ‘proving’ such a worldwide conspiracy, but rational people like myself really didn’t care.  Now they were going off the planet too. It made me laugh at first; I could picture the Ether jam that would hit by two o’clock as the conspiracy sites went into overdrive.
+I sipped a cup of coffee and listened to my stomach growl as it snarled at the acidic liquid churning away in it’s emptiness.  Behind me I heard a middle-aged couple talking about the launch.  He said he wanted to go into space himself and wondered how long it would be before the common man could afford such a thing, and she wanted to know what sex in zero gravity would feel like.  We all wanted to know what weightless sex would feel like; kind of awkward I imagined.
+I was waiting for Claire, it was unusual for her to be late, and I was about to call her Donne when I saw her running up the boardwalk; she was smiling and looked excited.  Claire was seven years younger than I was in age and several older than I was in lifetimes.  She had that inborn wisdom that a lot of us never get even at the end of the timeline.  I watched her smiling face framed by short blond curls; she was wearing tight black leather pants and a red shirt with a mid length coat; she had the smile of someone who has no worries.  But I knew Claire well enough to guess that there was pain down a couple stories in the basement of her mind.  Still she didn’t volunteer much of it and I was not in the excavating business.
+“I’m sorry I’m late, my father called.”  She flopped into the chair opposite me; “did you order yet?”
+“No,” I smiled at her as she reached into her bag and pulled out a cigarette, “what did your dad say?”  Claire’s father was a bit of a mystery to me, I knew he was rather wealthy and traveled a lot; he seemed to work very hard at whatever it was that he did.  He talked a lot about gambling and investing stocks I gathered he did something with IPO’s, but I had only a crude idea of what that meant.
+“Did you see the paper?” she talked as she lit a cigarette.  I nodded and she told me that her father was good friends with ‘Arthur’ the head of DeLiTech, he had called her to say that he might be going into space in the next six months, but nothing was sure yet.  He had called to ask her if she thought he should go.  “What did you tell him?”  “Are you kidding?  I told him to save a spot for us.”
+I smiled and thought for an instant that if this girl could get me into space I would marry her, but then I set that thought aside and pondered the reality of space.  The waitress took our order and Claire told me about her night at a club, but I was still thinking about her father, Arthur, DeLiTech, and what it meant to have civilians in space.  When I was younger the space program had sort of died; the public took little or no interest although I knew that the program itself continued to develop.  But at the table that day it occurred to me that just as westward movement of Americans had been precipitated by westward movement of soldiers, so too it seemed that space exploration was going to look a hundred years from now.  First we send the soldier to check things out and then if it looks okay we fall them twenty years later.
+I read somewhere that the time between a scientific revolution and its seamless absorption into culture was usually about sixty years, which meant that the space thing, if you took the man on the moon to be the starting point, was just about three quarter of the way rooted into culture.
+Claire’s story was that she had gotten kicked out of the club for being underage, but had managed somehow or other to get back in and then to her own genuine surprise she had been asked by some agent type to be in a video for EtherMusic.  My ears perked up at the end when I heard EtherMusic.
+“I told my dad and he said not to do it, but that guy Arthur from DeLiTech… he knows some people who could get me into the interactive stuff if I wanted to do that.  I don’t know, it might be fun…”
+“Is that how come you got VirtTECh for so cheap?”  I had always wondered where she got the money for the hardware; retail stores sold it for over a thousand and I knew Claire didn’t have that much money to waste on toys —I of course had stolen mine.  “Sort of, I think my dad won it somehow or other; he didn’t have time to use it so he gave it to me.”  Claire didn’t seem interested in my question and seemed somewhat annoyed that I had asked it.  She was always rather vague about her father.  I had been to dinner with the two of them a couple of times, but they spoke in some sort of code that I always felt I was intruding on so I mostly kept my mouth shut and listened.  
+Claire was a dancer; she was a very good one, I met her two days before she was due to go and dance for New York City Ballet, but she hated it and came home two months later.  We had been friends since she was in New York, but the sex was limited to those times when we happened to be in the same city at the same time.  Once we were having a late night snack at this café by her house and the waitress, a friend of Claire’s, asked us how we do you do that?”  I assumed she meant the separation, but I wasn’t really paying attention to her and all the sudden Claire started sobbing and moaning out “I don’t know how I do it its so hard…he just doesn’t love me enough to stay in one place…” she put on quite a show and it was all I could do not to laugh.  How we “did that” was quite simple, we didn’t know any other way to do it.  
+Some people have a need to be around each other constantly in order to be happy; Claire and I would have lost our minds in such a relationship, we were far to independent for some kind of obsessive compulsive love.  She was the first independent person I had ever been involved with and in the six months I had known her neither one of us had ever spoken about our relationship.  We were to busy doing to stop and overanalyze what we were doing and for me it was the healthiest thing I had ever had in my life.  I never asked Claire, but she seemed happy with the arrangement.  There was little else we could have done, both of us traveled a lot, me for the hell of it and her for dance.  In fact she had just been admitted to the prestigious Julliard Academy and was getting ready to move to New York.  
+As for myself I was all set up with an odd job in some backwater eddy of Georgia with a wealthy client who wanted me to make AO images of his art collection so that he could construct a gallery in the EtherMet.  I didn’t know very much about AO’s I had helped a friend so something similar and I guess this guy asked him who did it and he passed it on to me, despite the fact that my friend had done most o the work.  I was studying up on digital imaging and if all went well the paycheck from this guy would keep me for a year or more, depending on where I decided to travel to.
+The last three months had actually been the most time that Claire and I had spent in the same eigenstate together since we met.  For the first time I didn’t really want to leave her, but it was inevitable, we both had separate lives and if we didn’t respect that we would never last.  We talked about her plans for a while and then mine; after a smoke or two she had to go and I was left sitting on the boardwalk alone once again. After a while I went home to do some packing for my trip and to port into E2 and check out the space adventure firsthand.
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+Eigenstate Two 
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+	The collapse of the state vector was old news to physicists, but it meant nothing to the average citizen of the United States.  Sil Hawkard changed that.  He mixed metaphors and collapsed the state vector on everyone.  Sil started out college like every other white middle class acid-dropping freshman majoring in philosophy.  After that first acid trip though nothing was ever the same.  He dropped “the liberal studies crap” as he was later heard to refer to it, and double majored in Quantum Physics and Aeronautical Engineering.  When he had first brought this proposal to his professors they had laughed at him and when he refused to back down they got quite angry.  You can’t do that they said, no one could handle it. They were wrong and Sil got undergraduate degrees in both.  
+He was something of a legend around the campus of Berkeley, wild rumors circulated about drugs, occult magic, orgies, the sort of things everyone wished they were doing were projected onto Sil.  The truth was somewhat more mundane, he had no friends in town and nothing better to do so he studied and worked eighty to ninety hours a week to get the degrees.  He then shocked an entire science department by getting a Masters degree in Philosophy. The same professors who said he couldn’t handle the former load couldn’t believe that he had turned his back on them after working so hard.  He went on to write his doctoral thesis on the history of anarchy.  
+By this time he was taking some form of ethnogen on a monthly basis.  Sil refused to use the word “drug” and distanced himself from those who did.  He was primarily taking psilocilium-containing mushrooms, but he had taken acid and peyote as well.  What he got out of them is hard to say, but a good guess would be insight into the nature of reality, because he got very good at altering everybody else’s.
+	Sil was quite amused when he finally left school at the age of thirty-two to find that very few employers would believe his resume. A woman he spoke to at the Berkeley office of transcripts told him that his was the most requested transcript in there entire database.  Sil took a variety of old jobs working in research labs, lecturing as guest at colleges, consulting for the Rand Institute.  Most people that Sil had contact with were academia and bored the shit out of him, so he took to hanging out with a different type of personality ones that were what most people call criminal.
+Of course Sil did not consider them such except in the most close-minded legal kind of way, but a man who wrote his doctoral thesis on anarchy is not going to have a moral problem with crime.  In fact Sil saw crime as the future of mankind.  What is illegal and immoral three hundred years ago is the accepted reality of today.  Less than half of the adult population believes in God, three hundred years ago to say things like that led one to a human barbecue.  Hardly anyone thinks that sex is horrible and should be limited to twice or three times a year, and yet a hundred years go many in the medical profession considered it just that.  The list goes on, but the point is that to Sil’s mind, what is going to change tomorrow are the things we can’t talk about or do today. So it made sense to him to hang out with them.
+Unbeknownst to most he wrote a book. He published it himself and distributed it privately; he called it End Government Now.  It was wildly optimistic and hinted at some rather strange, perhaps creative is a better word, solutions to complex problems like word hunger, human rights, space exploration, physical immortality and what he called “the only true law.”
+	The first page read: 
+Modern mathematical theory seems to validate the logic of anarchy by the simple recognition that events are seldom causal and are, curiously enough, totally acausal.  In other words what appears to be a direct cause-effect scenario is in fact dependent on a myriad of other factors which we can no longer afford to ignore.  A world based on acasual arguments is in essence the natural state of the known universe.  To take such a model of reality and use it to test all the human systems such as government, social conventions, economics and interpersonal relationships is the focus of this book.	Therefore to model the universe any other way and even to use this map without updating it on a minute to minute basis is to misinterpret the available incoming data.  To pretend as we do that the systems thought up by the greatest minds of two hundred years ago are still an accurate model of reality is tragic.  The evidence that nothing is working anymore is all around us and the pundits of all different beliefs are too busy laying blame to notice what is really the heart of the matter —our dreams are not reflected in our daily lives.  
+Anything based on such an inaccurate map is wrong not because the thing itself is a priori wrong but because the map it started from is wrong.  Therefore all systems not operating on the laws of chaos are doomed to failure because they do not reflect what we know to be true.  Government does not work because it was developed from a binary map that is regrettably outdated.  
+Government then is outdated and in my mind no longer necessary for humanity to function smoothly.  Just as we had to shed the feudal system of kings and serfs so now must we shed the democracy which has become every bit as much of a prison (literally and figuratively) as the dominator system it replaced.  Government has become a self-imposed limitation and in order to address the complex web of problems that faces the global community we must first address the system itself.  Government has had the acausal effect on the governed of becoming a surrogate god.  Instead of a savior from the skies we are waiting for one from the well springs of our own DNA and indeed our chances for success may well be less than our ancestors who prayed in vain to a god that we now know does not exist.
+The first challenge to anyone wanting to faze out the dinosaur of government is bring people around to the idea that they need not look to the skies or their fellow man, but in stillness examine the “thing that thou art.”  Education (for those without the background in teleology) is the battlefield on which we will stake our fight.  It is my plan to do the very thing that all stale fundamentalists fear, to free the minds of their children.  Modeling language as a virus William S. Burroughs showed that successful brainwashing (learning) is no more difficult than giving the idea you wish to infect a point of entry. I can say no more than that, but first more on anarchy itself and how we use the term.
+Anarchy is the only system which allows the brain to accurately map ideas, events, emotions, subconscious thought, dreams, hopes, and synchronicities because it allows the free floating mind to build a map as each new situation arises rather than trying to fit it onto an existing map.  The anarchist does not try to put a square peg in a round whole.  That is to say that the human mind in a way similar to a computer creates a path of electrochemical reactions each time it receives new information, however when confronted with the same or a similar situation it sends the idea back down the first path.  We call this process memory and it is indispensable for much of our reactions to stimuli.  For instance we learn at a young age that green means go, a signal path is created that says go and when the brain runs across green signals for the rest of its life it tends to send a go signal.  This is very useful, as we do not need to relearn it every time we are at a traffic light.  But it is not useful when we are dealing with the infinitely more complex realm of ideas and beliefs.
+Fortunately it is possible to retrain the brain and in fact we might well recognize that all of human history is a record of our efforts to retrain our brains into new worlds and new ideas.  The term anarchy in the context that I am using requires you to re-train your brain.
+Most people were taught (brainwashed) to fire the term anarchy down a signal path littered with associations of political chaos where murderers run naked through the street fucking helpless women and doing blizzards of drugs.  This apocalyptic vision is very much necessary for the current state of affairs to be maintained.  And a powerful minority of neophobes has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.  I do not mean to herein imply a conspiracy, on the contrary someone who is not open to new ideas could never manage a conspiracy.  What I mean is that static brains gravitate toward static ideas. Thus the secret to changing the world is to change the way we live in it.
+	Anarchy, like life itself is infinitely more complicated than simple political gaming, left wing right wing; the whole concept of a binary system is not accurate.  The problem with the west in general is that it makes dichotomies out of what is really just a gray cloudy lump of shit, so to speak.  What I mean by that statement is that nothing is reducible to being either/or, belief itself is multidimensional. Any belief is necessarily wrong on two levels.  First it is wrong because it is not taking in any new signals and therefore does not reflect our day to day existence; that is what we mean when we say “yes I agree in principle, but the reality is…” Secondly a belief is inherently wrong because it is the product of a unique historical period and reflects loosely what Korzibsky called time-binding.  That is we are human and what we believe is true is a product of our internal personality not a reflection of the outside world.  In order to reflect the outside world one must first transcend the limitations of personal, cultural and even species histories. 
+	Everything is in our heads, everything that occurs around us occurs in our gray matter which is to say that everything is an internal experience of the individual rather than the external event that is happening to the individual.   The promise of the anarchist who steps into this ontological mess is the promise of one who sees light at the end of the tunnel.  The anarchist realizes that in order to accurately reflect the outside world he must spend enough time in transcendence of himself, his culture, and even his species.  He is the modern day shaman and it was with good reason that the ancient tribes kept the shaman isolated on the edge of the community; he was not so much a part of the community as a tool of the community.  Our misguided belief that an isolated individual from inside the community can represent the entire community makes no more sense that saying a spoke of a wheel is the wheel.  
+Anarchy is not a threat to political institutions; life is a threat to political institutions.  We are only human, meaning that only when we are beyond our mere humanity can we begin to perceive what humanity is.  We are finally beginning to perceive the ancient riddles were not riddles at all but clues not things to be understood but things to explore.  
+We are drawing out all that which you have feared in order that you may see it and no longer live in fear.  
+	
+	Needless to say most people would not have the slightest idea what Sil was talking about, nor would they have been interested in learning, which is why he never attempted to publish it publicly.  Sil reasoned that it was not important to have more people understand; what was needed was a greater understanding and appreciation by those who were interested.  Sil was a rare breed; he was attempting to bring modern culture up to date in order that it should accurately reflect that which it ‘knew’ to be true and he knew that to do this he would have to start with a small group of missionaries, so to speak, and then move on to the world at large.  He gave this book (it went on for another hundred or so pages giving techniques for experiential validations and further illuminations of his theories and how he came to have them) to people he felt might understand it and occasionally for variety to those he did not think would understand it.  Out of this group of friends, acquaintances and strangers he formed a virtual reality think tank that he called DeLiTech.
+DeLiTech began life as a consultant think tank, but quickly found that its ideas were way ahead of the people asking for its’ advise so Sil recruited a second group of “technicians” made up of like-minded (although in most cases not as eccentric) scientists, mystics, and computer programmers to design and build a new reality.   DeLiTech was beginning to think in gestalts instead of action-reaction analysis; it was trying to become a collective brain for humanity.
+What started out as a whimsical idea of one strange man ended up in massive group effort that would in three short years turn the world upside down and inside out.  What went on in those three years is the stuff of legends; what first came out is more easily quantified; it was a virtual reality game/educational tool called ALTER, and it did just that.
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+Eigenstate Three: Utah Desert (five years until the rocket)
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+	Maya Stevens was born in a jacuzzi out back of her parent three room shanty house.  The Jacuzzi sat on a patio and overlooked the wind swept mesa country of southeastern Utah.  ‘Abbey country’ her father called it in reference to Edward Abbey a twentieth century anarchist and writer of unpopular fiction about the red rock canyon country into which Maya was born.  The day of her birth it was sunny and cold the air temperature was in the twenties and snow had dusted the distant La Salle Mountains the night before.  The infant’s first sight was a naked, grizzled old Ute Indian man named Horseshoe; he was a doctor of sorts and was there to assisted Maya’s mother in the birthing process.
+He remarked later that she was the first child he had seen born that was not crying.  He left shortly after she was born and headed back down the canyon trail that led to his own depilated shack some three miles away from the Stevens’ place.  On the average the land just north of Moab Utah was sparsely populated boasting only about one person per twenty square miles.  It was a fine place to live if you could stand the desert and the isolation.  The nearest paved road was ten miles from the Stevens family doorstep, and that was the way Mr. Stevens liked it.
+Maya’s father was a white upper middle class intellectual who, under the influence of Edward Abbey and others, had become a radical anarchist.  During the nineteen sixties, while hiding out in the desolate desert wilderness of Utah from charges of “drug” and weapons trafficking, he fell in love with a Ute Indian girl named Mary Waters.  They were never married but spent the rest of their lives together with their one daughter Maya.
+Maya grew up as a Ute and all of her friends were Utes, in fact the land where they lived was actually part of a Ute Indian reservation which allowed her father to relax slightly from the fear of arrest.  Maya was raised in the Native American Church, which her father had joined in the late seventies when he found out that peyote was used as a sacrament for contacting god.  At the age of sixteen Maya herself ingested peyote as part of a traditional coming of age ceremony.  Of course only the peyote was traditional the rest was an elaborate contrivance on the part of her father who felt that one could mature better if there was a physical event to mark the passage between childhood and adulthood.  Besides she couldn’t get a drivers license since she did not officially exist in the first place.  
+Maya did not know that the majority of the people in her country would classify her as mentally unstable and morally wrong for this little ceremony.  She did not know that most of the world believed that mescaline, the active ingredient in peyote was a drug.  In fact in the Ute culture the word drug does not have any contextual meaning; they do not see peyote as any different than corn.  One is food for the body; the other is food for the soul.  
+Maya’s experience with peyote was convoluted and unique to her, she was not expected to talk about it, but her father noticed that shortly after her first time she started asking him about college.  Up until then Maya had been home schooled by her parents and had schooled herself reading and using the internet that her father had given her for her twelfth birthday.  She was not an isolated ignorant hick, on the contrary she was an intellectual of a very dangerous sort —she knew the words, but didn’t believe any of it.  That is to say that with her father’s ideas and her mother’s cultural sense Maya believed what she believed and no intellectual argument was ever going to sway the fundamental truth in her mind.  
+Now if one had been able to give her a new understanding of something through direct experience, some sort of Gnostic conversion, that she remained opened to, but the silly mind games of western intellectuals meant to her what they meant to everyone except silly western intellectuals —nothing.  When you feel it you understand it, you don’t need to talk about it, understanding transcends words which is why people’s sympathies mean nothing in a time of crisis.
+When Maya was seventeen she went away to a public university on a scholarship.  She went because she was young and wanted to see the world, the school part was largely because of paper magic.   Maya had no real goals like most college students; she did not go to school for job training which is what most people living in Usinc at that time did.  Her first year at the University of California at Long Beach was one of massive culture shock and if not for a chance meeting with a like-minded neighbor, Maya would likely have dropped out.  
+To come from the relatively isolated reservation, whose main contact with the outside world was the internet, to the hustling-bustling wheeling-dealing town of Long beach was bad enough, but to make matters worse she found herself ostracized for her beliefs and feared because she was different.  Radically different and she brought with her the idiosyncrasies of her culture.  Little things that put people off, for instance she had adopted her mothers habit of quietly singing Ute songs as she went about her day and no one told Maya that to do such things at the supermarket in metropolitan areas was “wrong.” 
+Her father, in the tradition of all anarchists wary of brainwashing, had raised Maya without commercial television and since his taste in movies ran toward the surrealist side of the video store, Maya was frighteningly ignorant of pop culture.  She knew the Internet well, but had never cared enough to have it be a real part of her life.  Her father had however made sure that she was well read and she was educated far beyond most of her peers, but that only served to make Maya feel even more like she was from another world.  This is not to imply that pop culture was totally foreign to her, it just didn’t mean anything, it wasn’t real and she had no connection to it and consequently no basis from which to connect with other people.  Thus to be cast into the epicenter of modern silliness—Los Angeles—was a shock to say the least.  One pearl of wisdom that her father had ingrained deeply in Maya’s psyche was the phrase “always question everything.”  In fact it was so deep in her brain it was sub-verbal, that is it wasn’t a continuous thought or conscious skepticism but an involuntary action of her existence and such anarchism does not fit well into the constraining venerated halls of higher learning.
+	But Maya didn’t drop out.  She went to class and did her work and was a model student, but inside she was continually horrified by the behavior and culture of those that surrounded her.  She made no friends and lived alone.  She felt like an alien, and most of her classmates treated her like one.  Perhaps the genes of her mother made her able to survive, that Ute DNA that has been ostracized and plagued for hundreds of years has a coping mechanism —internal emotional composure.  
+	But the truth of the matter was that Maya had far too little free time to actually worry about being lonely.  She also wasn’t entirely alone.  Maya was living in a fourplex, which was basically a big old house that had been subdivided at some point and was now four separate apartments that shared a common entryway and staircase. Maya’s apartment was upstairs and to the left if one were facing the building.  It was a twenties Spanish style villa with an arched entrance that lead into a courtyard with a little fountain, one of those pissing statues, and then on the far side underneath an arch supported terrace was the main entrance.  The courtyard had large willow trees in three corners; the one that would have been adjacent to Maya’s patio had been destroyed the previous year in a storm.  Maya’s upstairs place was small, but retained a quaint sort of charm that made her forget about the sordid neighborhood that lurked two blocks south on seventh street.
+The ground floor consisted of a parking garage that opened into an alley and above the cars were the apartments themselves.  Maya had the end unit that overlooked Seventh Street, and owing to the lost tree her window was visible to anyone walking by.  She solved the privacy issue with a tapestry, but it depressed her that she had no view.  Being from the wide open redrock mesas, Maya had learned to appreciate the landscapes’ effect on character and mental health.  She found a solution just a week after she moved in.
+As one came up the communal stairs and into the hallway their was another door before Maya’s.  For a week no one came in or out of it and Maya was going to ask if it was available, but then one afternoon returning from class she met the occupant.  His name was Cary.  Maya introduced herself and Cary, learning that she was new to California, offered to show her around.  He took her to Fluer De Lie a little French style café/coffeeshop and bought her lunch.
+Maya liked Cary immediately, he reminded her of her father and she found herself finally able to sit and talk with someone who understood her if not totally at least better than most she had met.  Cary was well-educated in eastern philosophy which wasn’t very far removed from Maya’s own Ute beliefs, he was also an avowed anarchist so the two of them had long discussions debating the practicality of anarchy. As time went on she found herself more and more spending the warm fall evening with Cary talking for hours on his patio.  He introduced her to Marijuana, which seemed to her like a mild-mannered second cousin to peyote; he took her for drives up the coast to see Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Francisco; he even took her shopping and bought her nice clothes.
+They were even lovers for a while, somewhere between a joint, Monterey, and sexual thirst, she found herself taking his pants off one day.  Cary made her come in ways she didn’t realize existed previously, but after a week or two he cut it off because he thought it unhealthy for her and because certain state and federal statutes strictly forbade such things.  The looks people give a couple thirty years apart in age told Maya more about the emotional sickness of white culture than a thousand sociology textbooks ever could have.  After all Maya’s father was nineteen years older than her mother, so to Maya age was not a factor love.
+Cary was only the third person Maya ever had sex with, and the first that she had felt anything for that might be termed love.  She did not know if she loved him or not, but she did sense that whatever it was it was more from her end than his so she let it go.  Their friendship however, continued.  A lot of people might have considered such a thing strange or even wrong, but when you don’t put fences around sexuality it can be a fluid thing that ebbs and flows through a relationship.  Theirs ebbed and then flowed away again.  Maya believed life was a rippling processes, not unlike a constantly churning pond, you can’t be static and remain alive so she accepted her relationship with Cary for what it was on a daily basis, setting no limitations or expectations.  Cary privately marveled to himself that in his near fifty-year life he had never run across anyone quite as natural and Maya, and yet he wasn’t even sure what he meant by that.  He just understood.
+	Cary was gone a lot traveling out of the country virtually once a week, and when he was away Maya spent most of her time alone studying for classes or out of her own curiosity.  Cary got her into Taoist and Egyptian beliefs; he also introduced her to the scientific skepticism of Aleister Crowley who taught in a manner far different from her structured life at the university.  Maya started to become more and more interested in exploring the great unknown —the human mind.  Sensing that she wanted to be on the edges of human though Cary outfitted her apartment with the recently released and very expensive EtherTwo.  EtherTwo was the third generation of the internet, but instead of requiring a machine like a computer E2 as it was called ran off your own mind.  By the use of an infrared portal which fit over the face and recognized users by retinal scan; a small DNA based circuit board which you held in your hand; and a series of electrode patches which powered it up using the energy field that surrounds everyone’s body; one was able to explore a digital world that felt seemed every bit as real the “real” world.  It was interdimensional insofar as the dimension it led to was human created rather than “discovered” as in science fiction stories.  You walked out onto the street and took buses and cabs or subways to wherever you wanted to go be it a library, a hash den, or a business meeting.  It was just about to change everything and Maya was one of the first thousand or so people to start using it.
+	Maya was absolutely enthralled by it and spent more time in E2 than in the real world, as everyone would later on.  It was simply better, safer, and more fun than the “real” world.
+	But to be completely cut off from humanity, studying intensely, and living in different reality does not make for a well-balanced human being.   For that Maya had to force herself out of the house into personal interaction with others.  Thus once a week she would go to a bar or a coffeeshop or somewhere people congregate and observe and occasionally interact with strangers.  She often found that she couldn’t maintain conversations with people because she didn’t share their belief that life was a mess.  Most people she met ended up laying out their problems and at first Maya tried to help them but gradually she realized that it was the act of complaining that these people enjoyed so much.  They didn’t want to solve their problems because they believed that life “would be boring without them.”
+	This crowd of neurotics tended, Maya noticed to congregate around establishments that plied the trades of caffeine and alcohol, and while she did not see either as the sole cause of their unhappy states of mind, they certainly weren’t helping the problem.  At first and in general for as long as he could remember being around other people was something Maya only did out of a sense of necessity or obligation.  It had never entered her head to want to spend her free time with others; she felt she needed to.  It was a distinction that caused a certain air of indifference about her, and others sometimes picked up on it.  Sometimes they seemed hurt or offended by comments that Maya never gave a second thought to, until Cary called her on it. 
+“You may not put any stock in the words, but you live in world that does, and if you don’t respect that you will find yourself surrounded by bitter sarcastic people whom you don’t like.”
+	“The words never seem to come out the way I want them to.”
+To make matters even worse Maya was strikingly beautiful meaning that women hated her and men were afraid of her.  She had her mothers slim defined figure along with her sharp features and jet black hair, but her eyes were the piercing ocean blue DNA of her father.  In Freudian terminology she had taken an imprint at the oral stage which gave her the soft edges of femininity and inquisitiveness, and at the anal stage she had shifted slightly so as to be thin and strong, both emotionally and physically.  She was every emotionally deficient man’s worst nightmare and could reveal deep personal emotions as easily as she could analyze and abstract the complex causation that had led to the emotions.  Naturally she majored in psychology.
+	Most men that Maya met were frighteningly simple creatures and one could only deal with them on the most mammalian of levels.  Every time she watched men and women trying to interact with each other her mind went back to a psych class on primate behavior patterns.  The Alpha male of the pack would spy a desired female across the room (often herself) and move in to attempt to mate.  Shortly after this the rest of the pack would come over to pick among the remaining presumable less desirable females or occasionally to challenge the Alpha Male’s authority.  The latter usually took place by means of a game called pool.  These poor men would have been completely lost without the pack structure, which Maya puzzled over for so long it became her thesis and senior project.  Her professors thought it was hysterical and graduated her with honors.
+	Maya was accepted to graduate school for Psychology at Harvard University, but before she went east she went home.  As part of her graduation she and her father performed a peyote ceremony.  In her voyage Maya traveled backwards through the DNA loop and took the form of her father.  Maya saw herself through his eyes and felt his pride for her and she looked upon her mother and felt his love for her, she turned to her mother and speaking with her father’s voice said: “It is all here, I will see you soon.”  Her mother hugged her and kissed her and underneath the Utah sky Maya lost her last remaining piece of fear.  She replaced it with understanding
+	Until then Maya had knowledge, immense amounts of knowledge, but no understanding. It was here through her “father’s” eyes that she learned that knowledge can be retold and formed into language, but understanding is unique to each individual.  For a moment with the help of an ancient herb Maya transcended herself and felt another beings understanding.  She saw the world from another alien point of view.
+	Maya gathered up her books and moved to Boston Massachusetts to attend graduate school in the Harvard Psychology department.  The day she left DeLiTech introduced the first virtual reality game ALTER.  As a going away present her father had one of the first models sent to her a few days later.
+
+
+
+
+Eigenstate four (the doctor will seen you in a moment…)
+
+	Dr Waiben read to many science fiction stories as a child and as a result he was no longer a doctor anymore.  Officially anyway; that is he lost his license to practice in a fiasco that the CIA still referred to as “that Brazilian snafu.”  Dr Waiben preferred to call it ‘the Brazilian Caper’ and didn’t think it was a fuck up at all other than the fact the his staff and several government officials were killed.  Waiben had been crossing various strands of DNA namely termite, human and bovine; and had created something he called E.A.T.E.R. which was not actually an acronym, but he made it into one because he knew how congress loved them.  Engineer Augmented Territory Enforcement cReature was a hideous thing to behold.  It was like a termite of steroids with seven stomachs like a cow and the intelligence of an Arkansas hillbilly.  It went berserk one day and ate most of Waiben’s lab, his entire staff, and two visiting house representatives from North Dakota.  Naturally the CIA blamed the thing on Waiben and promptly promoted him back to the United States and made him in charge of “gathering information” from captured enemy operatives.  Naturally Waiben loved torturing people, but unfortunately he got so involved in the process he sometimes forgot to ask them for information.
+	Waiben was a real artist and he spent his off time doing what any artist does —he looked for inspiration for his art.  One day while he was driving through upstate New York Dr. Waiben stopped at an antique store that was actually a converted barn.  In the very back corner of the barn there was something Waiben had never seen before, a rather phallic looking devise, which the proprietor told him, was a cattle prod.  Being from the city Waiben had no idea what it was for, but upon hearing that it delivered what the woman called ‘a motivating shock’ to get a cow moving, Waiben bought it for twenty-two dollars.
+
+
+  Eigenstate one (Los Angeles)
+	Two days before I left for Atlanta (Claire was already gone for New York) I gave up on the ghost.  I borrowed the phraseology from someone whose name is now long lost… part of giving up on the ghost.  The ghost tried to give meaning to everything to order the chaos and make some sense out of it, but I always saw through it and turned every thought into paradox and crushed it under the heavy weight of theory.  I wanted a model that would make shape out of the chaos, order it into some tangible thing that my mind could wrap itself around.  But from the beginning there was nothing but chaos and when I gave up I sailed smoothly through.  
+Without the ghost everything proceeds with stark certitude, even in the midst of chaotic confusion.  And from the beginning there was never anything but that chaotic confusion and it enveloped me like a warm water blanket, saturated my amniotic gills until I was ether, vaporously thin and ghost-like.  I took the antidote from a Dr. of Letters, a fecund pact between the nefarious odor of my own ego and perfumed smooth heights of the chaos that falls like a curtain when you find yourself staring at the obsidian side of the moon.  
+	I had a gift/curse which led me to always see the contradiction, the opposite, the paradox, the non-existent line between the real and the unreal irony.  I saw the joke and it was on all of us.  I was my own worst enemy; there was nothing I could do that I could just as well not do.  I was a philosopher even when my mother was still wiping that shit from my toddling ass and I was doomed to forever think.  Somewhere in the years that followed I contacted the outside world, the alien otherness of humanity.  I found them all dried and stinking of the putrid death-rot smell that hearkened me to a deeper understanding of the true horrors of the death camps. 
+	I had no interest in life, if life was what surrounded me.  Most everyone I knew was a failure or if not, it was only because they were worse than failures they were great successes in a game called failure.  I pitied them and they thought me kind and generous and a host of other things that I was not.  I may have acted after those fashions but I was not any of them and in acting them I only did so because I pitied those that surrounded me.  I never failed.  I did something far worse and far more contemptible in their eyes, I never tried to live, I glided day to day doing the bare minimum of what was necessary to survive.
+In their words I had no life and if what they called life; the money they carefully gathered up money in the bank and checked on it daily; the books they stacked neatly on stylish shelves; the gluttonous meals they sucked into ever larger stomachs; the hideously false and atrocious gods they prayed to; if these things are living then I was dead.  The world of Usinc disgusted me; I was only at home in the disjointed chaos.  That day I gave up on the ghost because I realized that all my life I had desired not to live —if what others do is called living—but to express myself.
+	I wanted to live at the speed of light and found that the only way to do such a thing is to express myself at the speed of light to think faster than anyone could possibly live.  Whether I die tomorrow on a plane or four hundred years from now is of no consequence to me what I am running after is the specter, the holy grail of the infinite mind, the ineffable nothingness of my life.  I gave up on the ghost. Not out of volition or moral superiority but because I could no longer not give up on myself.  I climbed into the cell I made for myself with the gilded bars of intellect and logic I sealed it off and stopped living in order that first I would express myself
+	By all accounts and standards of those around me I was not a total failure, but well on my way.  My friend John once called me a ‘junkie waiting to happen,’ which I take to mean that there was nothing important enough in my life to keep me from throwing it away on heroin and he ought to know he threw away four years himself to the endless game of trying to fill the needle.  I had my addiction, for the signs of failure are hung on posts called addiction; caffeine, nicotine, cannabis; I kept myself from heroin by feeding in a steady diet of slightly less dangerous, less parasitic drugs which kept the ultimate parasite, my own mind, at bay.
+	For years I desperately wanted to succeed by their terms if only so I could then turn my back on them and show it all to be meaningless, but you can learn nothing by being the most successful failure, and then there was my own failure to attain such a standing.  I could not master that thing that ineffable separation that people manage when they separate themselves off into carefully cordoned halls and passageways that lead from room to room and in each ephemeral room is a different personality.  One room for work, one for friends, one for their loves, one for me, one for you, like great hotels these peoples’ minds confuse me I get lost; I could not subdivide my brain into carefully constructed track housing.  I tried for a while in spite of myself, just to see what it was like.
+	I remain in gestalts, in patterns; I remain chaotic, I still see every contradiction between reality and the unreal irony of it, I puzzled over this in all the gutters of all the streets, of all the cities I have ever found myself in, and I have found the sweetest and most feminine caress of an answer, nothing could be more stark and aridly true —just like the ghost itself.
+	Now I have learned that if I speak in riddles and rhythmic rhyme people will listen to what I say with a suddenly detached air of force abstraction, they look at me as if I might give them some insight they have always wanted into the “true” nature of existence as if I know something they do not.   The truth is that I know less than anyone does.  Talking with a well developed vocabulary and taking interest in my own mind are not things that I would logically expect people to take an interest in, but they do.  Everywhere I have been for any length of time inevitably someone says to me that I make them think about things that hadn’t considered before. As if I had somehow forced them to when it was after all their minds and their thoughts not mine.
+	People tell me I could make great sums of money selling my words, I have my doubts about this, but if it were true for what end? Would I be any more alive?  Am I to finally succumb to the end-of-the-day philosophy that what ever else happens its money that makes us able to live?  Perhaps that is all there is.  I have some piece of paper somewhere that says I studied a lot of theories on the nature of life and that is true I have read many books and could name a couple dozen theories on the nature of life, but that all told me nothing about my own.  It told me in vivid detail what it was that certain peoples’ lives are all about, but nothing in it grabbed me and took hold in such a way that I wanted to act it out in my own life.
+	I love the mystery of not knowing.  Gave up on the ghost and flew to Atlanta.  The plane ride went from being a banal way to spend a day to an electrifying adventure and an absolute act of faith in my fellow men and women with the simple realization that this moment this timeless intangible thought might be the last as the plane tumbled out of the sky. It didn’t but it was the most exhilarating flight I ever had.
+
+
+
+
+
+. 
diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/book one sez i.txt b/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/book one sez i.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e91b374
--- /dev/null
+++ b/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/book one sez i.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,419 @@
+In the beginning 
+there was the word	
+	
+
+
+<<<<<<<<<begin transmission ghf8672y101003:35:10 PM03⌘		03	031xZDFß∂ƒ©˙¥®´∑¨^øøπππ“π“∫∫~∫∫Ω≈ç√∫~µ≤≥÷⌘12430315	0315
+
+\
+
+03:35:10 PM101
+
+03:35:10 PM03
+
+åß∂ƒ©˙∆˚¬…æ
+	œ∑´®†¥¨^øπ“´®†¨¨¥ø^¨^ø¨^¡¡¡£™¢∞§¶¶•ªºº––åß∂ƒ©©©©©©˙∆©˙∆∆˚¬˚¬…æ¬
+æΩ≈ç≈√∫~µ≤≥÷-Oct 03, 2015«« `	¡™£¢∞§¶•ªº–≠123235⌘031515	10 10
+1031tyiyiu
+
+
+ƒ¥†∆†^˙˚∆^¥¥†∆˙ƒ˙©©∆˙˙˙˙ƒƒƒ©©©©©©©©∞§§¶•ª•ªª§∞§∞¢£¢£∞¶§¶∞¶§∞¶§∞¶§§¥†ƒ©∆˙©ƒ∆¥ƒ∂˙©√µ∆~√©ƒ≈߃∂≈Ω˙©∆˙熃∂ߥ®ƒ√˚∆©¨¥†ƒ∂	\03:35:10 PM
+1515
+151515	©ƒ†ƒ˙©¥¥©¨ƒ∆ÁËÂËÁÊÌÁÔÓÔÓÌÁËÁÁÊË„ÎÏ◊ıÙÇ ÓÔ‰ÊÏÁËÈض§•ª–º–≠§Ê¶Á•ÔÈØ
+103
+,
+1/,68487654321>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
+Fragments of Ash falling.  
+White washed ceilings hanging so ominous  
+Hallucination of bubble-headed figures 
+crawling like the Michelin Man 
+across an indescribable mountain of tires 
+Motels Motels Motels 
+Whiskey Bourbon.  
+Tow truck 
+non-ordinary state of reality 
+precludes a state of reality 
+that something is real  Point at 
+the autistic manwomanchild  
+Autistic man pointing at you 
+laughing unable to fathom how your brain 
+functions and quite self righteously 
+you you cling to its definitions.  
+Must delineate between abnormality 
+and those of us who Understand 
+The Human Virus breeding 
+like rats unconsciously conscious and aware
+of our disorganization.
+Gas Station Cold Fusion dreams
+of the Anarchist are breeding
+in the minds of the oil men
+who don’t want to
+loose their stranglehold of reality.
+Fragments of Ash falling
+the continual settling of dust
+weighing down humanity and the 
+French Maid masturbates discreetly in 
+the next room.  You need her 
+to keep the dust off your mortal
+coil spring.
+Rebirth mythology.
+Mythology of reality.  We must
+distinguish between what will be defined as 
+sane and what shall be referred to 
+as insanity.  Kevlar definitions
+constructed to make a better shampoo
+seem like a logical item on which
+to squander your paperbacked slavery bills.
+After all these years Tide still
+gets your socks whiter 
+Its a wonder 
+that they aren’t transparent by now.
+that your brain retarded 
+in its development
+that evolution had not 
+anticipated the advent
+of the opposable thumb the unopposable
+domination of the thumb leading
+to and insect superiority of mating
+rituals stolen from a textbook
+on damselflies darning needles
+sewing shut your lips, mind atrophy.
+Weber's White Race Enriched for Superiority
+Scorched earth campaigns raining Ash.
+Shit from the sky.  Tax man came
+for your baby in exchange for unpaid balance.  
+You understand.  Nothing Personal 
+Just doing our job.  Same as the
+next guy.  From Auzwich on down the 
+line.  Didn’t make the rules.  Sorry.
+We perfected them.
+There are no innocents in a world of
+free will.  You don’t have to survive
+at the expense of others.  You could
+die with puncture wounds in your hands
+and others would create a new mythology
+strange irony would find another with holes 
+in his hands unwilling to accept
+cockroach mentalities.
+You want to beLIEve Hitler 
+was a madman but he lives on in quiet
+cafes centralsouthamerica not so free 
+not all the communists have been shot yet
+Your mistook misunderstood missed 
+the lesson in the situation that unfolded 
+Dr. of dialectic excuses you want 
+to beLIEve Hitler was a madman 
+Hitler killed everybody's body 
+only taking orders you understand 
+just doing my job from Independence 
+on down the line. 
+It was a sad money grubbing hunter 
+gather up his children and thank 
+his gods they are his and he their god 
+behold I have come to tell you that 
+everything you know is wrong 
+stop doing you job its not yours 
+see Hitler in your mind you want him dead 
+but he's not he liveson
+buried under restraint in everyones mind.
+Only taking orders you understand.  Didn’t have 
+a CHOICE.  Got a family to feed.
+radio crackle.  pop.  hiss.
+silence.
+<<<<<<<<<<<END TRANSMISSION>>>>>>>>>
+	
+	The preceeding was dictated and broadcast on intercellular radio frequencies by the ostriches.  It came on the eleven hour of the terrestrial scale.  It appears to be encoded in DNA as at threat check and broadcast as a record of what it was all about, intergalactic agencies monitoring in the area recieved it and passed it along to the CCCC wherein it was decided that the matter should be investigated.
+	
+	Sil Hawkard always wanted to be.  Which differentiated him from the bulk of the people alive on the third planet who wanted to be something.  This semantic anomaly was epidemic in nineteen ninety nine, but Sil was beyond it; lying around in his floating palace off the coast of the piracy haven of Mandalay.   Mandalay is in the South Pacific Seas three hundred miles Northeast of Australia.  Originally settled by rich expatriot Americans whose money came from dubious endevors Mandalay evolved over the years into a Freeport city-state with no government and swift and highly effective way of dealing with murder --the only crime.  Mandalay was warm in September and every afternoon the storms would roll in the thunderheads and rain wouldn't fall so much as materialize right out of the air.  The extreme humidity made one --not sticky like those in humid temperate zones are accustomed to-- downright wet.  Life went on in the rain with the exception of clothes as few people wore them around Mandalay; that was one of side effects of the Freeport's origins in sensual based anarchy which -like the word istelf- began with a letter... 
+	Sil is sitting much like he does every afternoon, on a bambo chair smoking petroleum.  Petroleum was in fact ultimately one of the things that had led Sil here.  
+Actually to fair petroleum was a rather inaccurate name for what Sil was smoking.  It was rather a carbon based opiate smoke made by trapping the opiates in a petroleum vapor and then condensing the vapor into a liquid which was in turn mixed with pure hash oil and boiled through alcohol leaving behind a sticky, oily, candy-goo hence the name. The black substance was roughly the consistancy of petroleum jelly and it would burn (with flames like tiki torch) for hours slowly releasing together the THC and the densely packed opiates.  The flames would down over time the jelly itself turn into a glowing coal, the heat from which release more of the pyschoactive chemicals than any other method of injestion.  The process was remarkable in that it didn't matter how good of a starting point drug you had because you could alway cookin more --itturned ugly grey heroin dirty mexican pot into the finest high imaginable.  Needless to say the product was um profitable so long as one avoided the normal channels of distribution it was this rather shaky profession combined with a book recounting the adventures of an anarchist named Captain Mission that had led Sil to establish he own Freeport.
+	Sil hits the huca again and feels his face going numb his head slumps down until his chin is nearly on his chest, he snaps his fingers twice.  Two Arab dancers appear and began to dance crooked, spinning patterns mastered over centuries of hypnotic oppression (which the cockroaches of skid row motels had only recently begun to learn) which gave it power in its freedom more power than things born free.  Oppression is a drug; it acts equally, though differently, on the oppressed and the oppressor alike the oppressed gain a more acute vision of the things in life that can not be controlled.  
+	All things must remain at equilibrium or fall into decay, this is a law of physics, and it is true of all systems mathematical --however if one considers spiritual and emotional systems one must take into account negative entropy.  The negative entropy of opression is such that as the oppressor gains more control the opressed gains more as well and as chaos theory teaches the repition of varibles in different systems leds to massive oscilations in output.  What makes the oppressor stronger in the common fabric of reality only pushes the 
+oppressed into areas outside of the common fabric of reality until eventually the oppressed simply leave.
+	The crooked dance is hypnotic to watch and all consuming to perform.  In India they teach it to snakes, and in the sewers of America cockroaches feasting on the radioactive waste have begun to learn it on their own.  Like terrible creatures from a Kafkian nightmare they sit quietly underground, as we go about our lives, learning the dance passing it on to their children and teaching them how to use it as an evolutionary tool --for all systems are also trying to succeed one another.  One day a properly evolved cockroach will crawl out of a sewer drain just as the head of state is stepping to the podium to address the nation.   He will devour the president raw as the live camera crews feed man's downfall to a nation of viewers even as it happens.  The blood soaked cameramen will never stop filming and the cockroach will scurry to the podium, strain himself to an upright position and address the nation...Behold I am.  He will dance and spin and all will be entranced.   Women will castrate men and men will bludgeon themselves to death with pickaxes until they are suitable for cockroach consumption and life will continue on much as it always has. The system is independent of its elements, humans are not necessary, cockroaches would uphold the system just as well.  Sil falls into a profound haze of self-absorption.   The boys continued to dance trance-like as the numbers explode at the edges of his vision.
+	Sil's story is a rather long and convoluted one and subject to enhancement on his own part, because that was one of Mandalay's charms, no one cared who you used to be but who you are.  Sil had not made the mistake of trying to hold power over others rather he used it to make himself more powerful
+	. At the age of twenty one Sil Hawkard discovered that while he vaguely enjoyed torturing the professors at Columbia university, most people in the United States are squares, and Sil, already an avowed anarchist was weary of the materialists whom he felt lacked the imagination and understand to really get the it --so to speak.  So he dropped out 
+for a semester and bummed his way around the United States.  In the middle of the Utah desert one night in July he ingested a rather large quantity of psylicilim in the form of mushrooms.  He also met someone but that is not important just yet.  The Quantum Reality convergance that Sil felt during the experience was rather hard to forget and it prompted him to extend his dropped out face for a few more years.  One other rather peculiar thing happened to Sil on the mushrooms.  A bouncing humanoid of eary homo ercuts origins told him that the rosetta stone of the word was in safe hands with the ostriches.	
+
+And the word was with god
+
+	Sil arrived in Africa in nineteen ninety-three to find a talking ostrich; instead he found cryptotechnology --or it found him if you work from a Jungian perspective.  He arrived in Angola aboard The Decatur a British cargo ship bringing in weapons to fund a counter insurgency movement to a government disinformation lope which the west was hoping would topple the rather lax disinformation system in power --a government that welcomed technological refugees with open arms.  Angola had become a haven for code writers who were not willing to dumb themselves down to the technology standards of the United States and its allies.  Sil was a code breaker so to speak.  He wasn't interested in simple binary code breaking and writing he was interested in finding the rest of the characters which would form the semantic code to language, but the technology for undertaking such an endeavor was in Angola.  He asked around for all of two days when he was approached to take a package back to the United States in exchange for ten thousand dollars and a plane ticket anywhere in the world.  Naturally at the end of his funds and having no chance at a grant, he accepted.  Two months later, after delivering a package to a man named William in Rhode Island, he made his way Tunisia where an ostrich (Sil was already having regular transmissions with the ostrich intercellular radio) had told him to find a man named Cary Downs.  Downs was an eccentric billionaire obsessed with the 
+occult and interstellar transmission of pure information; Sil was told that he had been looking for someone in Sil's area of expertise  In this spacetime point most people thought Cary Downs owned an oil empire, but really it was the floating cities of geodesic domes attached to the oil derricks that people talked about. But Sil didn't know anything about the oil he just wanted a job at Downs' bar in the floating city-state, and the rent-free fully adjustable two-bedroom geodesic dome that had been offer to him over a casual phone call from New York.  
+	 Sil, like the rest of you, desperately wanted to understand what the hell was going on , and as most people realize in some vague sense that while no one knows what the hell is really going on there are nonetheless those who believe that they do and are willing to destroy anyone who dares to invade their sacred planes of understanding.  Most of them at this time were concentrated in the united States where they made good and sure to track what everyone was doing and saying and thinking and feeling.  They have devised extremely elaborate game-playing circuits with uniquely complex languages like legelese and mathmatics and only those who speak them can acquire power and get stuff, and they have created strange loop disinformation systems to keep the knowledge from spreading.  They say that such information is classified and can only be know by them; they say you don't understand the big picture, the interests of the nation, for our collective safety, to protect those still living --so that they can hide from their crimes against human souls the scorched atomic earth it getting used up like gutter whore and they are going to leave you here and head into space and you are going to try to stop them which is exactly what they need you to do.  oddy within the disinformation loops they are themselves bounded as well and must work inside the verbal fences of currency and truth and the American way.  They have even created an elaborate mythology to support the system wherein the truth is always shown as lying in the hands of the few and the many are stuck to live out normal lives while they them selves are extrodinary and important.  The History fiction principle is not widely understood outside of the contol elite loops.  
+	It wasn't that Sil wanted to illuminate the world or anything he knew that was a fiction as well he merely wanted to left in peace and he would accord others the same respect.  On meeting Downs in person and looking into his eyes he saw the recognicion of these ideas he saw someone who had decoded the gaming and was ready to move on.  He saw a man to whom power and wealth were as irrelevant as Nobel Peace prizes.  Downs was of medium height and had a rather slight build with a effortless way of walking across a room which most people were immediately put at ease by;  after a short introduction a hashish pipe was produce and the two relaxed and spoke at length.
+	"There is some thing you should understand before you decide you want to stay here," Downs began.  "This structure is a living laboratory and there is no hierarchical structure that dictates what you should do.  You are free.  You may do or not do anything you wish, but you may not tell others what they can and can't do, no matter how much you find them annoying backward or incomprehensible.  You will find that even the most ignorant," his tone condescended the word, "mindsets become quite enlightening in this environment.  There is a rather large library at your disposal and gourmet chefs will prepare most anything you want.  You do not need currency to get anything you want here, but you do need excellent signal reception and frequency adapters in order to keep from losing your semantic grasp on spacetime while you're catapulted into spacetimemind."  Downs lit the hash cigertte and passed back to Sil, "in order to expand the potential of the human brain I built this city and I have tried the gather all the possible maps of the human brain together into one place and see what they had to gain from each other.  just because it might prove interesting, " Downs paused and smiled at Sil, "and I like you which is not true of everyone here."
+	Sil moved in to a dome apartment furnish in luxurious tapestries and artifacts that ranged from cuneiform texts to what appeared to be scrolls of Tibetan text.  There was a couch of warm dark orange velvet and piles of pillows with scenes from the Tibet Book of the Dead and the Kama Sutra.  The mixture of oriental and occidental gave the room a 
+circular feeling, which was reinforced by the spherical walls and roof.  Sil's head felt heavy and he laid down in the pile pillows and felt the room spin drunkenly.  Don't worry the spinning will fade, your brain is conditioned to judge perspective on three dimension planes.  Taking away the planer walls it is used too causes distress and disorientation, but it will eventually go away as your brain maps out the new system and eventually you will forget that you live in a circle. 
+	Cary Downs' flotilla as he liked to call it consisted of seventy-two people, ranging from ethnobotanists to a fundamentalist Baptist preacher.  All the flotilla's food was grown in to large greenhouses or caught in the waters around it; meat was flown in every week by helicopter although only a few people ate it as meat was generally considered by the scientists as an inefficient means of nursing the human body.  It had been proposed by one of them named William that the body was but one part of the human existence and the appetite and random whims of taste should not be ignored in some ascetic quest that blinded us in sterile orwellian futurenightmares as he had put it.  There was also a bar and smoking lounge, which was Sil's contribution to the system --as the residents referred to it.  It was a closed system (save the imported meat and alcohol).  Three additional greenhouses grew THC enhanced marijuana of a strain called alamant which was processed into hash and given out in bulk to the inhabitants.  Also grown were peyote plants, poppies, coca plants, tobacco plants, close to twenty varieties of hallucinogenic mushrooms including the Kuri-coo, and several other mind altering herbs and medicines that Sil had never heard of.  
+The inward curvature of the walls gave Sil the impression that the room was collapsing back in on itself, the disorientation and the intensity of hash rendered Sil immobile for three days which Cary assured him was normal.  He furthur suggested that Sil not restrain himself on the drugs, but realize their potential incompatibilities after all he said everything you ever wanted is here no one is judging you and no one is threatening you so you'd be fool not to let go for once in your life then we'll initiate you into our program .  So Sil spent close to three months usually alone (although he sometimes experiemented with the 
+exotically beautiful tantric sex guides) playing with the nuero chemical circuitry of his brain.
+
+EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG
+EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS RIGHT
+EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS A MAYBE
+EVERTHING YOU KNOW IS MEANINGLESS
+-from A Game-Circuit Guidebook by Maya Stevens
+	
+	Sil found himself in a spacetime point called Tucker.  Discipline is an agent's greatest virtue, thinks Agent Tucker to himself as he draws a long and satisfying hit off the oxygen tube.  Behind him Doris Day and her Waxing Loquacious Lesbians play a sultry 60's motown number on a dimly lit stage, and the general atmosphere of the bar takes on a surreal quality.  The walls seemed to breath as if threatening to go ahead and speak.  bars are excellant places for observing the least attractive maps of humanity the best you can hope for is one where the possibilities remain endless regardless of the irrefutable realities.  Agent Tucker is well aware of the realities, but his mind is only now beginning to sense the infinite set of possibilities that comes with every new reality.  Occasionally he suffers from what he calls voices, other people getting in his head through warped words written words, sometimes they tell him things he believes as evil and other times they mindlessly hum product jingles from the seventies.  But Tucker has no self-pity, he considers self-pity to be a symptom mental illness (more so then hearing voices nevertheless he is smart enough not to mention the voices to anyone) because it requires the ego to be divided into pitier and pitied.  He likes his ego together as one in harmony he is quite proud of this justification and it helps to ease his innate sense of anxiety at the idea that thoughts not originating from his own mind can work their way in regardless.  Tucker is an Agent of the State.  The State is not to be confused with the government as many of you would assume.  On the contrary the government is but an instrument of the State, the State is a separate entity whose ultimate identity is unknown even to Tucker; he is but an agent of it charged with ceasing 
+the drug trade.  He has for months now been stalking the elusive Sil Hawkard, a man whose face is unknown to him, he realizes that Hawkard could well be in this very room right now planning Tucker's demise, the thought sends a cold shiver of fear down his spine and he cringes thinking again like a manta: discipline is an agent’s greatest virtue.  
+	A man near Tucker but thankfully behind him is rather drunckenly slurring something akin to scientists have feelings too you know.  Tucker thinks to himself that the scientists on television always seem rather cold at their little press gatherings where they sollomly talk about finding new galaxies and what not if it were me i'd be jumping up and down fuckin yelling and carrying on, they must are incredibly logical cold people.
+	The TuckerSil coordinate thinks of butting in to the conversation to give them a piece of his mind, but then he decides the attractive blond to his right would be more interesting and could lead to sex, but  after a few failed attempts he overhears the cruel whisper that guy is bugging me ,you want to go over to a booth?	 Half shocked half hurt the Tucker gets up to leave; standing at the urinal on his way out he is shocked to find a poem scrawled on the wall
+	So old the place was, I remember none
+	The like upon the earth: what I had seen
+	Of grey cathedrals, buttressed walls, rent towers,
+	The superannuations of sunk realms,
+	Or nature's rocks toiled hard in waves and winds,
+	Seemed but the faulture of decrepit things 
+	To that eternal doomed monument.
+What a very curious bar he thinks to himself getting into his car.  Those people must be intellectuals he thinks morosely I never understand what everyone is talking about.  I am stupid he is thinking as he drives away, at least the voices are gone.  
+	
+	Sil is smiling to himself and lighting a cigarette.  At another point in the fabric of reality Sil is feeling a primordial yearning to devour raw flesh and roll in a room of naked women. You are at a club wearing skintight black vinyl pants and a black tank top with no bra, your nipples are hard and everyone can see them through your shirt.  You're dancing with a black haired girl also wearing tight black clothing, sitting at the back watching from a distance.  Your pussy clenches and sends tremors through your body every time the girl brushes against your skin, she teases you dragging her finger along your arm, and as the music stops she grabs you by the hand and leads you two a corner booth where two more women are locked in delisious animal fire; locked naked and sitting upright they grind pussies together, shuddering mouth to mouth, breast to breast legs entwined....
+	
+	Sil along with the rest of the residents in the police state he used to call home, hates cops....I fucking hate 'em.  I hate 'em. I hate 'em. I hate 'em.  I want to kill them all in a violent sea of time-released explosive donuts that when eaten mix with the stomach acids and explode in violent blueberrystrawberrylemon filled death he fanicizes. Die pig die.  Imagine it, a million sworn upholders of THE LAW dead in an instant.  Think of the society we could have.  Think of the freedom, think of the beauty.  The sweet satisfaction of tearing down all the rotting pig gut filled doughnut shops in the nation.  No more sweaty palms.  "License and registration please."  Fuck you, never again.  Never again.  kill every cop you see --a populist revolt.  We don't need all these damn laws, the people are okay --we know how to look after ourselves.  The laws are the ones that fucked everything up the first place.  And who hurts the most people in this here little world?  The State.   A cattle car streaming over the tracks of life, slick with the blood of the people.  The train can't go up the hill because the tracks are too slippery with my guts your guts our guts.  Cut off by THE LAW, our heads impaled on the ends of the its tentacle-like arms as they strangling the last hold outs of resistance into pacified stupidity.  
+	The anger subsided and Sil found himself dialing a number he didn't know he picks up the phone --the other end never rings, instead a voice says: "hello?"
+	"May I speak to Captain Clark please?"
+	"I'm sorry he's not in.  May I take a message?"
+	"No. No message."  Sil hangs up the phone.  He walks to the back of the room and flops his body onto the luxurious pillows and is swept by an overwhelming sensation of peace; his mind begin to expand, and he feels the desire for more consciousness --the death of us all, Sil thinks idly to himself as he lights a pipe and sucks in a deep inhalation of opium and hash.  The sticky sweet smoke that fills his lungs brings forth tape loops and strange loops of static memories.  Twisting and turning their way through the circuitry until: Anarchy is the only answer to all questions which begin with why?  whY?  wHY? WHY?  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law --future memories of books he hasn't read yet.  In distant memory filtering strands of DNA locked deep in Sil's cerebral cortex a vibration begins, infinitely small at first but building slowly into his medulla and finally spring forth into the part of the brain referred to as consciousness.  The cameras rolled even as the lights were dimming.
+"BRING THE PRISONER FORWARD"
+	Unrolling a weighty and sterile looking scroll of antiseptically white paper a voice whose origin is masked by the size of the paper itself reads:
+	After making reviews of the past actions, thoughts, and attributed sentiments, it is the judgement of this committee, and therefore the judgment of the government it represents, that due to a general lack of ability to perceive the options open to the work potential of the drone in question in simple terms of an x or not-x negativism which would be most helpful in these situations and would consequently decrease expenditures and lower taxes for other individuals living in said dualism and therefore we hereby decree that all metaprogramming undertaken by the individual without the consent and simultaneous approval of this committee and the government it represents to be criminal in intent, hostile 
+in action, and punishable by prison and/or death upon conception.  Thank you.  You may go.
+	Sil Hawkard finds himself dragged from the tribunal; hands tied in front of him and legs trailing uselessly behind.  His guards use his head to open the heavy wooden door and then they dump him unceremoniously onto the filthy street where a group of children are playing.  A monkey runs by, tugging its penis with one hand and slapping its bright red ass with the other.
+	Eventually broadcast is deemed irrelevant given overwhelming incoming signal that sweeps across all frequencies, visual, audio, chemical, and physical.  There are five senses, sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, and only four signal sources; both smell and taste are chemical reactions with tissue that are then turned into different chemical reactions in the brain.   Sil tried at first to kill the reception entirely, but this proved a bit to radical of a step so he worked in phases first chemical manipulations of brainwaves --what the simians referred to as drugs Downs used to say.
+  	
+	Teletype for Corsica the agent sent in for returns,  Home office denied request for reinforcements, all communication to be ceased henceforth.  Piss in the riddle thought the old man wheeling his chair back out to the porch, he picked up a Mason jar of corn whiskey and laid the shotgun across his lap.
+	The languid afternoon floated in and up the beach from the Atlantic bringing photomontages of Mandalay and the Dutch East Indies spice trade boats, far off places he had heard of only as words and imagined smells.  Up the beach from the house were the beginnings of the rocky South Carolina shoreline teeming with crabs, sponges, sea anemones, and circle swooping gulls feeding on sand crabs exposed in the fluctuating waves.  It was low tide, in fact it was always low tide or at least it seemed that way to the old man.  He was partly right, the tide was lower than it had been a year before when a man by the name of Dr. Waiben began overseeing construction of a nuclear power plant 
+buried two miles under ground to hide its heat signature for pesky government satellites. The plant, whose only entrance was from the sea, was Waiben's new research facility but right now that is but future memory fighting from space at a coordinate that won't have it.
+	
+	Sil is in New Orleans renting an attic in the French quarter following a strict regiment to kick the opium habit he developed at FREEDOM Inc.  The best cure downs had said is to get a job in INDOCTRINATION Inc., where you will be forced to confront the ugly stupidity of life.  
+	
+	The old man stood up on the porch and paced back and forth waiting...you understand the seriousness of the matter... obviously we would not expect an ordinary agent to do such a thing...your expertise in these fields...well frankly it's unparalleled..there is no other...These orders are coming straight from the top...your cooperation is non-negotiable...
+
+
+...to be an abstraction does not 
+mean that an entity is nothing. 
+--A. N. Whitehead	
+	
+	Two years earlier: Dr. Waiben, pathologist for IND Inc., surveys a long horrifically clean hallway whose smoothness is interrupted only occasionally by the presence of polished sliver knobs indicating doorways.  There are no observation windows or any other windows within the rooms.  This is the housing quarter for the derelicts of society: prostitutes, schizophrenics, lobotomy patients, drug pushers, anarchists, communists, AIDS victims, the aberrations that society never needed nor found a use for, end up here, under the care of Dr. Waiben, pathologist for IND Inc.  The good doctor has, for twenty odd years, been the caretaker of the derelicts, charged with restoring to them a level of 
+functionality deemed necessary by society.  He is the man who puts the cogs back into the wheel.    
+	Waiben is an expert in mind manipulation which by its nature made him the butt of most of the jokes at the facility, but Waiben really didn't care what other people thought of him because he had watched the semantic breakdown of the game curcuit from the perspective of orgone energy.  he was required to give electro shock therapy to dissedent citizens in order to get them reconditioned by the government, but in reality he spends most of his time smoking petroleum and sitting next to an orgone generator In really time he knoes he must administer electro-shockto a whore whom the state had deemed a "revolutionary" for her accidental participation in a protest against the seizure of private property. Her constant screaming was disturbed the other doctors, but Waiben found them soothing in the same erotic kind of way that a soft candle lit room made him desperately want to masturbate.  Regardless, he hated departmental friction so he was treating her with his standard dosage of ten thousand low amplitude watts delivered through acattle prod in her cunt, and even then she had held out for nearly an hour before confessing to her actions -it was a record for the floor.
+	He watched her on a TV monitor from the station at the end of the hall.  She alternated between foaming a bloody spit out of her mouth while her eyes bulged menacingly, to sitting apparently quite peacefully on the edge of the toilet seat.  Her vital stats were typical for the voltage he had given her.  He watched with the detached apathy of those who have seen the degradation of life for twenty odd years and never thought to bat an eye toward suffering.  He thought the whole process rather silly, why give them mental anquish which only makes them stronger (see A Theory of Surpression and its Counter Effectsby Doctor Waiben, New England Journal of medicine Aug. 1993 )  Afterall why torture people when you could just as easily manipulate them without them realizing what was going on.  He considered himself an expert in mind control because he realized that the well places suggestion or auto association tricks were far more effective means of 
+controlling large popluations.  However he kept this knowledge largely to himself and the occasional stranger in a bar.  like that guy the other night that guy who said he heard voices of course you do everybody dows what did you think a television was for?
+	He panned the room camera around and noted blood and little clumps of flesh lying on the floor near the bed, he zoomed in and momentary renewed his distracted interest as he realized the whore had been picking the burnt flesh out of her cunt.  His stomach turned, not at the idea of her suffering, but at the tradgedy of the ineffectiveness of the government to maintain the control that had so intricately laid.  For a moment he considered the fragility of all control and the necessity of constantly defending it, he tried without success to remeber the I ching quote about ruling least and that being the best or something of that nature.  He sighed and picked up a bic lighter with a picture of Uncle Sam on it, the typical picture was warped due to the surface curvature of the lighter giving Old Sam a peculiar evil bent that Waiben admired; he lit it and held it at the base of the hash, taking a deep and satisfying drag.  
+	hash was part of a new foray for Waiben a sign of his growing discontent with the rigid structure of the scientific community.  Doctor Waiben was something of an anomaly among scientists; he enjoyed being proved wrong, he loved arguing theory purely on the basis that if one is opposed and one for a theory to gether that might discover a new theory.  Being proved wrong also saved him the trouble of having to prove anything right.  Waiben was one of the unique individuals of this century that understood that when you open one door its real value is not what is behind it but whether or not there are any more doors that revel themselves to the researcher.  He did not suffer from what Wilson calls the New Inquisition, a catch phrase for those that try to make a belief system stand up with scientific legs, when in fact science is a tool or method of research, it is amoral  science dows not fit model realities it is merely one way of testing models of reality.  Science does not believe anything because it is not a thing, it is a language.  From Wilhelm Reich in Hell: There is also argument by Logic.  This can sometimes be combined with scientific experiments and 
+if the two mesh we have a "fit" of theory with fact and scientists are delighted.  Pure Argument by Logic however does not require this experimental back up and only demands that the conclusions by reached by the game-rules of an abstract symbol system. In our hypothetical case, some witness might inform congress: 
+All mome raths need to be distimmed; 
+All frammisgoshes are mome raths; therefore;
+all frammisgoshes need to be distimmed 
+	
+	This so-called transitive property has led scientists into the same dead end alley of faith that religion finds itself in, I have faith in science the mad man rants on silver screens... Waiben felt foolish when confronted with this logic bound personification of science so he took to smoking hash and playing with orgone generators, he was finding a freedom that was tickling the little grey cells back into the crooked dance.
+
+	Unfortuanately for him Doctor Waiben's habits did not go unnoticed by others in his department however, and as he was already unpopular for his rather unconventional methods and ideas, it wasn't long before a doctor by the name of Kellinger reported him to the state.  In the tumultuous time that was the present the good doctor was asked to resign, but did not instead he called a press conference which was sadly rather ill attended, he proceeded to get up in front of the local new cameras and launch into an anti-government rant.  He was promptly arrested for "divulging state secrets" and brought to trial before a hastily put together tribunal of senators and judges; It was the beginning of the Inquistitors hearings on Science and Sanity.
+	One person who did happen to catch the broadcast was Sil Hawkard who was in a New Orleans attic when he heard a voice from on the television drift up to his room...the united states government is by its own legal definitions, insane and incapable of 
+distinquishing between reality and non-real realities.  The cat is coming out of the bag <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<Fragments of ash are falling>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
+	Sil bolted upright in his bed and ran downstairs in time to catch the name Waiben before the camera cut out.  That's the man I heard at the Tucker point, he called Downs and mentioned it to him.  Do what thou wilt was all he said.  Two days later Sil was arrested and thrown in prison in the cell next to Waiben.  Because Sil was not a United States citizen he was merely given a lecture and thrown bodily out of the building bringing future memories to a head. He made a deal with Waiben before he left, come to New Orleans and meet with me to discuss nuero-research and I will get you out....
+	
+	Transcribed from tapes: the terminal disease clerk took orders by the turnstile, finding the story in the story and logging in the disease workers all night long.  At five in the morning he got off and headed to a tavern as the sun was coming up.  Direct confrontation with the terminal virus word is a bit confusing to those who are not properly prepared.  poor fuckers never had a chance; the technical sergeant takes off his helmet and slams it on the table the near moronic mumblings of discontent.  Waging war is semantically impossible without overtones of homosexuality.  Heavy handed, the second wave fell in line with the technical sergeant at the lead.  The thing you have to watch out for are the warblers --the distractions coming in at the sides, sound is their most effective weapon, primordial hangover he called it drunkenly raising the glass.  And some of you may think this suspect but take my advice sounds where it all started.  In the beginning was the word and the word spoke.  The sergeant stoops and cups his hands to light a cigarette.  Then there is sex or not enough of it, both is equally dangerous --biology is not something to scoff at.  sexuality is the best cover an agent can ever use.  Rockets come searing in overhead ripping flesh and scoffing at the notion of eternity, out here you don't have time to talk, the thoughts are things, they are no longer words...keep your radios tuned boys its getting ugly.  Another rocket sears in severed limbs fly out the explosion and olive drab 
+body parts litter the scene. Watch out for the bloody words, sharp words that hang in the air like knives and when uttered returned to slit the throat of their speaker and if every word you have spoken returned to act upon yourself would you survive the experience?   Me no way i’m outta here.  Situation getting sticky, humid like vaporous blood hanging on in the air.  Still acrid smell of urine and small children playing in a asphalt playground ringed on all sides by immense brick walls with basket ball hoops hung half way up each of the sides.     Realize that that which we are taught from childhood to distrust is in fact a pawn of something far more immense and much much more dangerous.  The governments and nations of the world are incidental pawns of there own control systemsand then beyond them there are even more and so on like looking two mirrors facing each other and going on to infinity.  The monster of power is faceless there is no one person or group that controls everything they are all parts of a immense and multi-headed monster that is constantly biting itself and attacking it own heads until some day it will destroy itself.  The end of time leaves space and word alone together
+	we're taking heavy fire!  The sergeant calls for back up, the captain says love one another and cryptically hangs up the phone. The Spanish soldier selling chiclets say no good no bueno, pictures worth not even half a thousand words.  Wouldn’ give you ten words, worthless gringo words don’t mean shit. no good no bueno, not worth the blood their written in. The blood of all peoples not yours, not your shoes, by god keep your slave labor camps a closed-mouthed secret.   Gotta keep that in house, dis-credit all new agencies by routinely feeding them false information.  News doesn’t happen events happen, and the department of television information broadcasting inc. a subdivision of indoctrination inc. decides what gets out and what remains forever sealed in baby pissshitguts.  No that's not true. No comment. No need for comment, the preceding has been since proved to be untrue, cut to shots of smart bombs. Couldn’t get fifty words for those now gringo -over exposure- nobody buying.   Same old stinking shit.  No Good. No Bueno.
+	Gringo go home in thousand languages in a million words, why don’t you crawl back in your cave get your tail so far between your legs it goes half way up your ass?  Lead me to the holy spigot and we’ll show you the bidet of death, constructed by gringos, for gringos, to flush out gringos, to show them all what you do behind closed doors.  Can’t close them all --we have our technicians as well and they’re getting to be better than yours. We got the money rolling in --even offered you the picture words but you don’t want them. No Good.   Can’t use those, too strong.  No fair, crying boy heads home for cave to lick his dirty balls clean.
+	I gotta picture for you I on vacation in your country go to hear senator’s speak but all door are closed, all sealed.  So i gotta fiber optic and feed it in from the roof show all senators mad with sexual lust and blood thirsty, clamoring for war and stealing souls and bodies and driving them off wherever they see fit.
+	The technician is retro actively of course --the papers said the man was mentally ill.  ‘my cod!’ screamed a church lady in the front row, ‘satan has garbled the lords message, this isn’t what he meant for you to hear, no it was not all like that, there was to be understanding.’ she is parading her old cunt bones whining at the justices --tissue conducts signals, animals communicate through the use of visual, acoustic , chemical, tactile and electrical signals.  Our laboratory is an abundant and well preserved feed back loop to understand and interpret Eusocial behavior. negative feedback inhibition to make you shiver Gringo.  Make you shiver good.
+	Repetition unsuccessful.  The radiologist was called in to examine the patient --blisters and burns indicate high probability of skin mutation, what would you say Dr. Waiben?   Crested and on the nod? Diminutively yes definitely.
+	Information potential exists --its an unsettling thought, dependency --and what happens when things start to think? How do you draw the lines then.
+	HOW THE PLAGUE BEGAN:
+	The wish to preserve -not worth saving what already is- in this scenario.  The word,  the loss of body situated at the origins of recorded sound -the temporal metaphysical and esthetic possibilities.
+	<insert sounds of truck on dirt road>  
+	Old man yelling.  Get off of my laaawwwnnn!   Sits down to oil his gun some more and then half turns in his chair to face the camera and says "i haven't left the porch since i got this CDRom PEOPLE version 3.0.   Updated and expanded human potential at your fingertips.  Its the only thing i need --got no use for the stinking gringos anymore--  camera pans out and down revealing a yard strewn with shotgunblasted bodies of young children.  We see wife, face half torn off, crawling towards a pistol <shotgun blast stage left> her head disappears entirely.   Old man: "human potential, the new CDrom makes wives unnecessary." cue logo: on sale now at a sanatorium near you....
+	I'm going to finally send you the orgy papers this time  -been fixing to get 'round to that for some time"  <heavy southern drawl>  don't think he's the type to do it though but i been wrong once or twice a'fore.    Don't want people showing up on my lawn though that's never good.  get off of my lllaaaawwwwnnnnn! <shotgun blast again, distant screaming sounds of deaths final agonies eeking out blood gurgling windpipes> Fucking Gringos! Go home in a thousand languages!
+	  Experience as much of the human potential as possible retain the container and forward the frog to the fun sun freaks of eastern Tibet all is well with alkaline, and acidity is on the skids with death rooted out leaving only chicken shit shoveled scrapped and scraped like lemon lime Gatorade poured from a fuck buck of love.  Stop talking to yourself --listen to the virus talk to you.  All that you consider to be a accident was carefully orchestrated for your benefit by a benevolent cocksucking god from the twenty-third dimension to just plain old irritate the fuck out of you like a bad rectal itch.  Stupid gringo got no cure for the ass itch i show you some pictures, yes very dirty, little girls you like??????
+	<<<<<commander in chief of the NATO forces in Europe is fucking small refugee boy in the ass, the boy cries for his mother the general is laughing, your mother’s down the hall boy ,she’s busy with the president of France right now.  But maybe later you’d like to lick his come off her dead face.  Ban those words tear them right out snip snip.  Can’t say that, its disgusting.  War is a snuff film for the rich.  <<<<We gotta step up the bombing chief the public’s losing innarest in us screams the chief of staff running in circles jerking off and slapping his ass until it turns a bright purple and with all seriousness General Jesse Helms pauses to reflect:  I remember a time when life was good no one got in our way, why in Europe under Patton i musta raped twenty thirty little boys and a handful of nuns too. He smiles lost in memory...
+	But God hath given us these trying times....
+	Yes it is bit hard to get cunt these days isn’t it, mumbles the chief of state as he strokes his wife’s cock....Yes dear start a war, get me some cute refugee boys, i so love snapping their necks when i’m coming, she growls affectionately.
+	That's it gentlemen were going to war!  The president stands and ejaculates on a map of the world KOSOVO it is he says as his thick oatmeal consistency sperm all but covers the former republic of Yugoslavia.
+	You like?  You like, no?  Too bad.  You can’t have those words, too strong.  I get power, you give me power, I steal power from you, to expensive to buy it.  I get power and you get pictures and maybe I tell you how to cure rectal itch? Eh? Eh? Eh?
+
+Perfection is attained not 
+when there is no longer anything to add, 
+but when there is no 
+longer anything to take away
+-Antoine de Saint Exupery
+	Experiments with the death ray tape and image guns began with William Burroughs in the nineteen fifties, but was sidetracked by the advent of digital technology.  The newer is not necessarily the better though folks sometimes they just have different uses 
+--like the image gun that shot...In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh by a cacophonous blast out of heaven's pearly cum-stained ass creating the father, the son, and the holy spigot which lies in a secluded garden on the cliffs overlooking the Sargasso sea.  The spigot is buried in a volcano designed by Czech ostriches in the eleventh hour of creation to drain all human excrement off the continent of Europe and into the Sargasso sea all lumpy with turd so thick Jesus "conny" Christ in drag is walking along to the amazement of the gullible, floating gently from turd to turd.  The piss blood of a million cunts and cocks line the shores giving the whole place a radioactive iridescent red glow not to mention a awful stench.  Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo are standing on the bluffs watching the spectacle and scanning with hawk eyes for sweet tight asses in which they can stab their hungry cocks.  The father caught the son sitting in the middle of the garden sucking on an apple and he became enraged and hog tied the boy and penetrated every orifice in his body with a peeled and sculpted cucumber cock; the boy was left a whimpering quivering lump of fleshy jello from which spawned humankind.
+	The piss gut rotting flesh smell, air taunt necked and jerking at the nose, the captain's eyes role back into his head as is guts are blasted out his ass by a giggling man headed tape worm of extraordinary wit who was prone to quoting Joyce and Bugs Bunny in the same sentence in a way that reminded listeners of Buster Keaton in some strange drugstore hurricane kind of a way.  The skatolic odor was rich and the worm refused to bath.  Owing to the peculiar nature of its origin the soldiers did not disturb the worm preferring instead to watch the captain writhe in agony pulling his legs back behind his ear to attempt to lick the matted blood soaked pubic hair over the torn orangish flesh that hung in ribbons over a large hole that had once been a simple anus.  The upshot of it all was that the worm ate less rations than the captain so the men were basically satisfied with the arrangement and they followed the worm wiggling through the jungle as it did impersonations of Fred Astaire...
+	Blasted rot gut con-artist with ten huge molars running across the front of his mouth in a clump owing to his mother's industrial accident with the cunt acid from the chink's hyperdrill.  Drilled right on through back to china, the asshole couldn't even close the damn thing and the lower mandible just kind of hung there like a tire swing.  Maya spits in his face in disgust and revulsion you don't have enough money for me to kiss you there isn't enough money on the planet...
+	The giggling Hyenas are dressed in black and high on amphetamines looking to turn you inside out.
+	Tongue-tied porn queens scream obscenities at passersby "I'll suck your dick until your eyeballs pop out your ass..."
+	Steady...wait til you see the whites of their eyes...Blown newspapers and advert scrapes cover the bottom three feet of a brick wall like sardines neatly packed in a kipper snack tin from a 1983 supermarket shelf....Horatio Alger's sodomizing menage-a-toi with the Maytag Man and Uncle Sam has led us to train station on the SpaceTime line where freedom is an irrelevant inconvenience of language that is slowly being fazed out of history.  Language is a virus. The i that is You speaks, I speak and the vibrations of air we create controls our every move.  Science gives rise to Magic in the form of powerful papers that tell who what why and how you are to be.  You can't march down to city hall to protest without a permit filed ahead of time with the city clerk.  You can't drive an automobile without the Proper Papers.  You can't leave the country without PAPERS, you can't perform honest labor without PAPERS.  You can't buy or grow certain pharmaceuticals at all, nor can you pursue the happiness of your choice unless it falls into one category.  Consumption.  We are all free to consume which when you think about it, is the only freedom we really need in a CONSUMER SOCIETY.  Televisions, radios, automobiles, washing machines, drying machines, refrigerators, freezers, ovens, microwave ovens, convection ovens, alarm clocks, computers, headphones, home furnishings, bicycles, video games, tennis shoes, laser disc players, DVD players, record 
+players, compact disc players, cordless telephones, wireless phones, digital phones, cellular phones, two way radios, short wave radios, car stereos, home stereos, and every accessory you can conceive of and millions more you couldn't.  We have all the entertainment and modern conveniences in the world in our home each assessable at our fingertips whenever you chose.  Which is a good thing because the minute you step out of your house some OFFICAL OF THE STATE is going to want to see some goddamn-papers-on-the-double-what-the-hell-are-you-doing-here-cough-up-the-fee-place-your-hands-behind-your-head-you-have-the-right-to-remain-silent-lie-down-and-spread-your-legs-and-shut-the-fuck-up-right-fucking-now sir!
+	Uncle Sam came on the ground and left without a trace.  Horatio and Maytag were emotionally tormented for years until their eventual deaths through ritualistic dismemberment.
+	Sil Hawkard: And I don't have any papers standing on a cement sidewalk slab starring at the FREEDOM OF AMERICA locked inside a now closed appliance store.  The Ace Appliance Store to be precise.  I feel suddenly nervous like they know what I am thinking.  They know that I am thinking.  
+	-He's not smiling. Oh no, not yet, we're working on it though.-
+	We the people we govern you the other people have decided for reasons which are beyond the scope of this broadcast and may well be beyond the scope of your comprehension entirely that all freedoms which you previously thought you had but never in reality did possess are summarily denied from this point forward.  Please report to the nearest biomedical programming center by the fourth of May where a new human program bio-unity 3.6 will be installed into your seratonin and allow for future dopemine programming without the need for physical intervention please go about your lives as you always have all those not present for the reprogramming procedures by the fourth of May will be consider fugitives of the state and will be dealt with in the harshest manner allowed by law and endorsed by the entertainment loving public...
+	
+
+	Naturally Waiben wanted out of jail and was perfectly willing to meet with his former cellmate who had struck up most unusual conversations about the edges of science and how far did he think they were from the fringes of magic and shamanist traditions and methods?  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magick ...Sil struck Waiben as extremely well read and without the usual pretensions of one who is in as deep as he appeared to be,  Waiben's hopes were somewhat dashed when he refused to answer the question who do you work for prefering to lapse back on a well developedhabit of mumbling incoherently and abruptly changing the subject usually to something about the merits of anarchy.  Waiben wanted to hear the words i am rich and i will pay you large sums of money to work for me to do pure research untainted by political agenda and what not, Waiben realized he was beginning to sound like some science utopianist and mentally slapped himself in the face.  
+	Waiben studied Sil's face in the last rays of New Orleans sun noticing the wild sparkle that seemed the jump out of his eyes when his mind began to race and Waiben could abrely keep up with the blast of ideas.  But they were not incoherent rants he watched the wheels truning half wondering whether he had actually thought this up ahead of time or whether he really just talked as fast as the words formed in his head.  Sil appeared to be around twenty five perhaps a bit older, but his head was a jungle of hair the crawled all over his glasses and eyes obscuring them entirely at time such that he reminded the doctor of the hairy talking thingy from the Adams family.
+	Still Waiben was happy to be talking to someone who was as least way beyond the game curcuit and seemed to pocess at least a spotty grasp of partical theory and probabilies.  He seemed especially obcessed with frequencies and radio transmission which intriguid Waiben as his own experiements with orgaon had seemed to be pointing in that 
+direction.  Sil was a furocious smoker Waiben noticed --such a rediculous drug habit he thought somewhat indifferently.  
+	"What?  I'm soory my mind was wandering."  Waiben felt momentarily ackward, but Sil seemed not to care.
+	"No I'm sorry I've never done this before."
+	"Done what?" Waiben could only think horrified of unwelcome sexual advances and suddenly reality filpfloped for him.
+	"recruited anyone." was Sil's not so reassuring reply
+	"recruited for what," asked Waiben uneasily feeling the squeeze of reality tunnel uncertainty.
+	"Perhaps invited is a better word.  There is somewhere I'd like you to go with me."
+	This was too much for Waiben and he had to blurt out, "are you trying to hit on me?"
+	Sil just laughed "Downs was right your still planer, but don't worry you don't have to have sex with anyone although I recomment you do have sex with someone perhaps even everyone.  Now I'm going to do some coding, you have room waiting at the mondrain and I'll pick you up at about eight tomorrow morning we have a ten o'cock flight to Buenos Aries.  I'm glad to have you along," he smiled.
+	Waiben absorbed the information and sudden thought aloud "you can't fly from New Orleans to Buenos Aires the airports not big enough..."
+	"We're not taking a commercial flight," Sil said as he walked away.
+	Several hours later as the heat dissipates slowly bvack inland to the swamps and the ocean breeze brings in the gulf night, Waiben is thinking about Voodoo, Gringos and the Quantum Uncertainty principle.  It had occurred to him that in addition to the homosexual tunnel he had accidentally step into and the imagined tunnel he wished he could find there was another tunnel to consider:Sil couled be some fundamentalist nut case 
+trying to lead him out of the country and to his death.  Religious nuts hated science more than science nuts hated religion and learning the languages of each in order to pass one's seflf off as a scientist or a baptist wasn't that difficult.
+	He sat up in bed reread the letter Sil had given him...With practice you can teach yourself to receive peoples signals or thoughts; what we want you to figure out is how to create a sub-audio broadcast that can actually be controlled and directed like an ordinary radio signal.  Telepathy is an interpersonal form of radio, and my understanding of the general theories of chaos, what is true for one system should be relatively the same in another if only the signal amplitude is being changed.  The problem I see is that even subtle changes in input can cause radical oscillations in output or more poetically: somewhere a butterfly is beating its wings and changing world history.  Waiben thought about it for a while and fell asleep to a tunnel where television was the ultimate telepathic control signal broadcast onto an unwitting population and designed to create subtle and undetectable mind control.  It was a fitful sleep.
+	Waiben slid into what shamans call the dream body, Jungians call the net of synchronicity and phycisist call the uncertainty principle where spacemind over whelms and breaks down the normal balance of spacetime and mind.  Sixty years earlier in a different coordinate point Dr. Waiben is inventing Color Television.  It was the basis of his realization that mind control was possible, it was merely a question of finding the right tools and methods of applying the tools.  He had stumbled on to the idea of television as a form of mind control about the time the first color sets were coming onto the market.  He was just by coincidence (if you believe in such nonsensical notions) studying the orgone theories of Doctor Wilheim Reich at the time.  
+	Even in the nineteen forties Reich’s theories were revolutionary to Waiben and he felt he had found someone besides himself and Korzybsky who truly understood the implications of Einstein's relativity notions and revolutionary view of the world that he gave us.  The sentence that leaped out of Reich’s notes as Waiben stared hypnotically at the 
+bluish glow of the first color television set was one that warned prolonged exposure to the bluish radiation of bion energy has had negative physical ramifications such as headaches, red swollen eyes, and the feeling that one had been staring at the sun for too long....  The synapse fired and Waiben hurried home to begin experimenting with blue light emissions to find out if they had any connection to orgone energy and in the end he found that blue wavelength radiation with prolonged exposure irritates the eyes and actually appeared to drain orgone energy out of the individual presumably by neutralizing the signal and allowing it to pass through the individual with out interacting.  This reasoned Waiben would make people tired from watching television, but simultaneously unable to break the strong magnetic bond that the TV was creating.  The potential for a sedated and  apathetic culture with a very high threshold for persecution thus raised its ugly head.  Waiben never mentioned his finding to anyone and merely offered to help in the perfecting of the television signal --always quietly insisting that blue light was the easiest method of signal transmission     	
+	Waiben used to drive the suburbs around nine o'clock just watching the eerie blue glow coming from the hundreds of thousands of houses he had infected.  He like to think of television as a virus because in many respects it was; like virus it was benign until the right electrical connection from the host triggered the release of the disease.  Like a virus it was passed from one generation to the next, and like a virus its spread was exponentially related to the human population growth ie. more people = infected people.  The greatest side effect of television though was quite unintended by Waiben, it had radically reoriented the global mindset from isolated consumption into total slavery to consumption and fashion.  Thus Waiben learned that the fastest and most effect way of controlling a large population was to make it genuinely believe that it own enslavers were in fact its heros, its gods, thus eliminating or at the very least co-opting naysayers by making them part and parcel of the disease.  Additionally as TV became more widespread even its detractors had to use the very channels of oppression as their only outlet for resistance.  Much like 
+controlling any signal path,  insurrectionists and radicals were diverted by capacitors (“the media”)  and squelched by resistors (“the police”).   Thus the people remained happy and content with their oppression and no one was able to convince them to give up the convenience of slavery for the hardships of freedom.  Would you?
+	It wasn't enough though; true mind control would leave the victim unable to disobey the signal or ideally, unaware that he or she were even being controlled --like Christ reborn, Waiben thinks of the old con artist sitting laughing from con artist heaven. 
+	sub-audio messages are below the threshold of human hearing, but not that of comprehension.  It is the noise of someone thinking.  Listening in is just a matter of having the right receptors, psychics and clairvoyants had been doing it as circus tricks for centuries.  The granddaddy of all his research would be that day when he could say definitively that he had a method for true and total mind control.  It was this quest that had led him back to a state lab in Las Vegas where tonight he is planning to induce mind alteration and manipulation with the legendary Ayahuasca which contains a harmine that some believe bonds directly with human DNA.  In the good doctor's mind that meant opening up a channel directly into the cellular level, allowing for deep meta-programming and possibly a key for using nanotechnology --but that’s too complicated right now.  “Think of it as inter-cellular radio” he told his colleagues who mostly ignored his fanatical rantings.
+	Stupid fucking scientists he is thinking. I hate 'em I hate 'em I hate 'em I fucking hate 'em.  They spend there whole goddamn lives studying the brilliant thoughts culled from centuries of genius's without ever stopping to think that maybe genius lurks in there own minds.  Ingrates. Ought to have been stamped out with the rest of the conservative christian movements, they have no understanding of novelty.   If it hasn't been done a hundred times before they won't even talk about it let alone attempt to experiment with it.
+	Paging Dr. Waiben. Dr. Waiben please come to Lab 203. Dr. Waiben  Lab 203.
+	What the fuck have those morons done now?  Probably killed one of themselves by mistake.  Lab 203 was of course the antidote lab for the biological warfare experiments he had been conducting back east.	Nowadays Waiben was finding even in his close colleagues’ a certain hang up, they felt they had found the key when in fact they merely had the next step to the door, the key itself was still along way off.  Thus he decided that Kellinger and his other lab assistant, Dr. Frederick were becoming even more of a liability then a help.  True to his ruthless and cold pursuit of power Waiben logically concluded that they were no longer necessary, but at the same time they knew to much to risk turning his back on them --Kellinger had, after all been as much a part of inventing the eaters as Waiben had.  So Waiben arrived at his lab with his mind made up, he knew Kellinger was in Los Angeles for the Weekend with his lover Simon, and he also knew William was in Los Angeles with an eater doing some work for Sil, he called Sill and Sil called William and not thirty minutes later Dr. Kellinger’s tendril like arm snaked up and grabbed his own ringing phone...Doctor Kellinger? Speaking....   universal breakdown short curcuited the word and left you here naked and cold.
+
+familiarity breeds contempt
+-William Brandon 
+from the Origin of Consciousness
+
+
+	The next morning, true to his word Sil picked Waiben up in a limosine and they caught downs' private jet to Buenos Aries.  Sil could tell that Waiben was suffering Space Time Mind confusion and that the first signs of the breakdown of scientific rationality were already manifesting themselves.  Sil left Waiben in the main compartment of the jet and disappeared with a wavering walk into the back of the plane, Waiben could hear another man talking to what he assumed was the cockpit crew giving flight instructions.  The plane was not unlike most government planes it had couches instead of seats and revealled to one how much room there realy is on the inside on an airplane.  This particular plane had a few 
+things that Waiben doubted were government planes --an assortment of medical tools that were stored in glass cabinet near the front of the cabin and beside each of the black leather couches were a permanently attached hucas which, Waiben noticed by bumping one, were flexible at the base so as not to spill their contents during flight.  The cabin also contained an impressive collection of computer hardware and curiously near the door marked COCKPIT, on a small desk was an antique typewriter with the word Underwood inscribed on the face.  The walls of the jet were covered with tapestries and pillows with scenes from the Tibetian Book of The Dead and the Kama Sutra lay haphazardly in the corner the mixture of oriental and occidental gave the room a circular feeling, which was reinforced by the cynderical walls and roof.
+	The door to Waiben's back flung open and Sil and another man came struggling through it, laughing and carrying a giant mirror full of cocaine.  “So you found our coordinate eh?” said the man in the three piece suit, laughing and pointed at Waiben.
+	“Yes I did.”  said Waiben staring at the coke.  
+	“Oh, pardon me how rude, would you like some cocaine, I fear this is all we have left, but help yourself.”
+	“No thanks”
+	“No thanks you don’t want any or no thanks you want it but you aren’t about to do on a  jet with two people you don’t know?”
+	“Second”
+	“Lay off him Cary he's already trying to live at least six tunnels at once, you know how disorienting it is at first” Sil flopped down on a couch and began to load a huca with hashish.  "Just remember if it doesn't make you laugh it probably isn't real..." his voice trailed off into mumblings Waiben did not catch.
+	“Just so you know Doctor, if we were going to hurt you, we would have pushed you out of the plane as soon as we were over water, so relax and do some drugs, we’ll tell you what we need you for later, right now you need us, you got the need we got the drugs 
+so lighten up eh?”  Downs had decided that since the doctor was already in a tunnel of anylitical scientific doctrine he would be best brought around by his cankerous old southern man routine that he imagined to be somewhat akin to hanging out with William S. Burroughs.
+	Waiben sat somewhat reluctantly on the couch next to Sil who handed him the end of the surgical tubing and when Waiben put it to his lips Sil lit the huca.  Waiben noticed just before the hash hit him that the lighter had a picture of christ with a crown of thorns on it.  This realization man him chuckle and wonder if Sil had seen his or perhaps it was his or perhaps every gas station in America has them.
+	"Uh oh he's gonna get the giggles," Downs said laughing himself, "here do some coke to speed up the signal processing, it frees the word."
+	Waiben felt a delicious chemical alkaloid taste on the back of his tongue as he sniffed a long line of cocaine --a brilliantly awakened peacefulness settled over him.  Downs noticed the change in mindset and dropped the old man routine in favor of his smooth warm welcome-to-my-world voice...
+	broadband signal strength test market for better higher climbable mountains:”:”:”::”:”:”:”:”:”:”>>>>>>>>>wicked evil sentiments have been exercised and all words and virus contained>>>>>>government works like this more or less:>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>The waiting drove me mad...so stop waiting ya stupid fuck... transmission broadcast’s proposals for your demise. incomplete and ill planned. the joint chiefs of staff would be happy to coordinate efforts for a small fee. Do pictures have a language?  static. message garbled. transmission lost.
+	
+	Waiben surveys his hotel room with its view overlooking the Buenos Aries airport he stares at their plane off to the right of the terminal just barely visible from where he is.  Well so this is South America. Huh.  The room is midgrade not nice, but so far free of roaches which when flying over the city on their approach seemed quite an unlikely 
+possibility.  Waiben lies down on the bed, lights a cigarette, and turns on the television.  Spanish broadcast MTV.  He rolls on his side reaching into his bag and extracting a vial of DMT, do whatever you want tonight they had said just be sober by six in the morning.  He pours the white powder into a glass pipe feeling a bit like a crack whore the taste is reminecint of cock that soothing artificial quality...the world game stopped the truth game stopped and finally in less than thirty seconds the Waiben game stopped what happened after that is a matter of some speculation, but he was pretty sure that he hadn't really talked to an ostrich that explained to him the future and his role in something called Freeport.	Sil and Cary were in the next room listening to Waiben on a short wave system they had set up prior to giving Waiben a key.  
+	"He's going to see them I know it," Sil found himself saying.
+	"I don't unerstand why you think this doctor is so useful, I already have scientists that are further along in his field that he is."  Downs didn't like Waiben he sensed something familiar about him as if everything he was capable of he had already done once before with disaterous results and Downs had spent enough time messing with the fabric of reality to know that his brain knew a lot more than it would let him see all at once.  A sufi story came back to him...a man walks into a store and says to the shop keeper have you seen me before? The shopkeeper says no and the man says then how do you know it is me?
+	Sil is insistant on Waiben's necesity and even when Cary raises the control game issues Sil does not back down, "thats why I gave him the hallucinogens because it rids you of the ego, he doesn't know who he is right now, he thinks he invented color television.  Relax."   Sil smoked a little DMT himself and tuned his shortwave radio to static.  This helped to establish in his mind a kind of rhythm and seemed to link the drug to the static, if only in his mind.  Pictures are a language he is thinking.
+
+I do not believe that the world 
+is made of quarks or electromagnetic waves, 
+or stars, or planets, or any of these things.
+I believe the world is made of language.
+-Terence McKenna
+	Madison Avenue is a faceless row of buildings filled with thousands of advertising agents, it is an entity in Abstraction.  Abstraction is the legal basis for the sanctity of the state, and it is a wholly bianary system.  Its language is bianary coding form the conceptual level down to vast systems of information stored in computer cuniform.  It was to put it mildly the last place one would look for spiritual insight.  But Sil Hawkard was not bounded by the archtypal mythologies of his culture.  In any age and any culture the shaman is the the oddball who is seperate from the cultural images of the human experience.  The non-shaman citizen is in constant conflict between expectation of habit and the nagging guilt of novelty or rather the lack of novelty.  The shaman is merely one who has allowed the self to take over the citizen in such a way that bahavior and even brainwave patterns are altered.  And it is for this reason that the shaman is exiled to the edge of the village, because tampering with the fabric of consensus reality is dangerous to its continued existance never call anything up that you can not put back down.  
+	The most common method of acheiving such a feat over the years has been chemical mind manipulation.  Sil's fascination with mind manipulation did not began with drugs though, it began much earlier in a high school biology class where he realized the simple truth that the brain is a continuously changing chemical reaction.  The nuero circuitry of the brain is like the inner workings of a computer, of course it is infinitely more complex, but the computer is still a useful metaphor.  Eventually through his use of drugs he came to realize that even chemical maps are in fact a rather poor guide to what the hell is really going on.  If you see something you have never seen before, you want to tell about it you want to talk about it you want to describe it.  You are tempted to say it resembled a woman but was nothing like a woman.  The first thing you need to move on from the temporal reality that most people cling to is a new language.  
+	It was this reason that had led Sil to Madison avenue because even if their goals were slightly less benign than Sil's own they nevertheless possessed a wealth of data on manipulations of language.  They had managed to create a universe in which people were 
+convinced they needed everything they didn't have.  This was a powerful tool of magic and while Sil wasn't entirely sure if they were even aware of what they were doing they were undeniably doing it.  Manipulating language is one of the shaman's starting tools, kind of a chip flint arrow in the bigger picture, but technology builts on itself --if you can't chip an arrow head you can't split an atom.  So he arranged to have one hundred televisions brought to Buenos Aries and tuned to different stations in all kinds of languages and he began the immense task of taping, editing, and splicing Madison Avenue's commercial language.  
+	It was for this reason Sil wanted to bring Waiben to Buenos Aries and now as Waiben sat in the chair staring around the room at the overwhelmin sensory input potential of one hundred televisions in one room he felt overwhelmed and not up to the task.  He had at his disposal a team of over two hundred electronics experts, but he had the annoy task of looking for something without knowing what it was.  Downs and Hawkard had left him a copious amount of DMT, mushrooms, peyote, cocaine, and hashish to help him along.  Sil recomended hash and cocaine together as the best decoding agent for the madison magicians as he had taken to calling them.  His proposal came after a week of drugs and sex which Waiben had enjoyed and felt for the first time really truly free and alive.  Sex is as good as the body gets Downs had said, but now he had years worth of work staring him in the face.  I know you want to find the face behind the mask behind the face behind the mask behind the face behind the mask... Sil had chanted as he left.  The most curious event of the week was the time when Sil had been teaching Waiben how to use mantras and hash as tools in meditation.  Waiben realized after selecting a mantra from an astrology book in Downs' apartment, that Sil was chanting I can't believ its not butter, I can't believe its not butter I can't believe its not butter....  
+	Sil and Downs returned to the oil derrick city while the good doctor spent the better part of the day in an oxygen pure environment subjecting himself the recuperative acupuncture therapy on his muscles which were stimulated one by one with needle pricks 
+while an orgone generator hummed steadily in the corner.  The preprogrammed alpha waves stimulated his body's brain functions that were healing in nature and as the experienment went on electro graphs of brain activity mapped the centers stimulated and was compared with the frequency emitted until each frequency had its effects defined and clearly mapped.  In another room one of his researchers was having similiar electro stimulation through flicker television screens recorded and the alpha waves would be compared to Waiben's and others.
+	  Chemical stimulation of the brain acts at different frequencies than orgone so Waiben entered into a tunnel of reality where the healer believed that orgone would rejuvinate the body and help it recover from the destructive side effects of the drugs.  Similtaneously doing research and healing appealled to the self centered side of Waiben.  Waiben was not a regular user of drugs and thus prone to over-enthusiasm from the get go --Downs had cautioned him about the difference between want and need and how thin and blurry the line could get.     No one said the doors to the chapel perilous wouldn't be guarded.  Addiction is the first to rear its ugly head the word is obliterated by the need.  need is driven by re -action rather than action.  The first rule of anarchy is to never react.  Re-action is a non event, it doesn't exist in reality and it futility is readily apparent to anyone who ceases to do it. The human brain is taught to feel a certain sensation and because evolution was soooo effective the brain learns to adjust to fit the new reality --making ot real.  Thus it reacts to the stimuli by negating its effects and like the man in the floppy hat said it never got weird enough for me.
+	avoiding addiction is no easy task --you're up against over ten thousand years of terrestrial survival instincts; shedding them is the damnedest thing like the Kimono dragons continually picking at the dead flesh that refuses to leave the beast that it was once a part of.  Waiben felt up to the task on many levels, but he had made a mental note to not have any opiates around because after all a man has to know his limitations.    
+
+
+
+
+reality is a narrow 
+definition of existance 
+-Sil Hawkard from The Rubber Octupus
+
+
+
+one year and six thousand miles northeast Sil sits in his room of tunisia smoking hash and reading a letter from the doctor that said:
+
+observations on the Madison Avenue language/image institution:
+	The rigid censorship guidelines for language that may or may not be used by broadcast media is the first thing that one notices when evaluating the Madison language manipulation.  What you don't hear is more obvious than what you do hear.  This arbitrary crystaline definition between what is accepted as language and what is perifrial gives added power to the abscant words given there selective nature.  The powe3r is largely meaningless but the pricision of its delineation tends to suggest that those making the choices do indeed have power.  At this point there power is largely exercised in the form of fines although who continue to push usually fade out of the picture. The restriction of language, even of a few simple words like sexually oriented words, gives the controller power over the sender who is dependant on the controllers approval prior to broadcast.  The censorship itself is not so strong as to limit image rather disrupt the free flow of ideas without raising the suspicions of the majority who, it is important to remember can ultimately disrupt the delicate balance.
+	image control of broadcast media is much more sexually oriented than language.  they don't let them them see sex in realtime, they let them see violense in realtime, but never ever the actual sex act.  It is endlessly mentioned and alluded to but never shown.  This seems to create a message of sex being more powerful than death, which in the ordinary magical arts is not necessarily true.  The lack of sex images is complicated.  By depriving them of biotic need creates a tension and stress and without equilibrium, power can never be achieved.  But it also creates a subculture, those who enjoy the nudity so much that they are willing to go out and buy it on the free market.  This can never be stopped, therefore it is best to marginalize this subculture through city zoning laws and force them into the “bad parts” of town.  This marginalization makes them ineffectual during rebellion because the dominate culture knows that no matter how bad the current situation may be they sure as hell don’t want some “porn watching trash monger” in charge.  
+	The human consciousness is latent with sexuality.  Not hetro or homo, but simply sexuality, however in wordimage track television it is almost exclusively hetrosexual mythology --conditioning the brain into a binary system of either/or hetero/homo, one disrupts the normal circuitry of the brain creating mono memes (see footnote).1  Monomemes lead to 
+repression and non-symetical personality types.  Signal processing in these brain patterns is much more open to autosuggestion --research continues in this field.
+	3.Language manipulation:  When attempting autosuggestion it is worth bearing in mind the KISS principle of which I believe Madison Avenue is acutely aware.  The so-called “sound bite” is simple and enables you to plant marginalizing catch phrases in the mind of general public It also leaves room to constantly create and update the marginalization.  In addition, by providing easy to recall words and phrases that simplify and therefore make meaningless complicated patterns and repitions you create a tendancy to narrow brainwave activities.  Examples: Nigger, Nazi, Lesbo bitch, rock’n’roll, just a junky, anything with monger at the end of it, etc.  It is also worth noting that Madison employs what shamans and priests have known for centuries the --rythem of the words is as important as the meaning which is why jingles were so popular for so long.  Repeated exposure, however, creates an irritablility so I think there would have to be ceremonial in quality; as in a concert, but thus far the government newsbroadcastshave not employed such a technique (perhaps it is too obvious)
+	I could not (through the nature of the medium) tell if any sort of orgone generator type of energy was being used, but such a device requires a symbol transfer system which in my opinion has not been toyed with yet although I believe that it might be with further reasearch.  I also plan to look more into the blue light synchronicity between Orgone and the neutral background of television.  One of the technitians here has a tunnel in which the connection is real and the distruction of Reich's research a typical sloppy government cover-up to conceal what they were doing...you get the idea.  It is a tunnel that I have yet to explore.  
+
+personal notes:  television (and here i mean all television because all television is advertising) seems to be primarily a means of diffining language and image.  It presents polarities so often and with such a remarkable sense of irony (unitended?) that it seems to be telling us what the limits are.  "The news" often plays the most violent stories back to back with the most heartwarming ones, obstenitly to not depress the viewer but it has rather the opposite effect of creating a constant tension in the viewer causing one have an inevitable sense of doom in every situation of pleasure.  This helps to instill a sense of control over behavior, however this is not something that can be clinically evaulated it is just instinct.  Ordinarily I would disregard the rather direct nature of the causality, but because especially America in some very real sense allows its fabric of reality to be held together by television I think that some sort of syncronise behaviorial patterns could be instilled through the airwaves.  The Question of intelligent origions I still have no opinion on --I think that the fastest way to determine such a direct causality would be to delibriately try it and judege the results.  Thank you for your continued support and be advised that I am returning to the united states under the name Chase Hollister.
+
+	New Orleans: the bus is gone leaving a surly crowd of Mexicans behind coming to work in restaurants they can’t afford to eat in.  Down the street tourists buy overpriced and ugly looking wood carvings because the sign on the shop says Voodoo and they want funky stuff so their relatives back home will find them more authentic --as if reality were not a fabric tearing down the middle.  Sil Hawkard is sitting at his favorite stateside tavern waiting for the arrival of Dr. Waiben whom he is beginning to suspect may in fact be turning out as Downs had said --be careful what you wish for.  Waiben was making Sil wait and Sil new it, Waiben was letting him know that one can not escape the control circuit if one is going to attempt to live in the fabric.  Of course Sil knew he would have a well thought out and logical excuse, not to would have been Sil's style; he knew the game curcuit and he knew the games and he never bothered to play.  Sil was excited by the prospect of what he might be getting in terms of research from Waiben, but he was also logically paranoid and knew human behavior so he developed the possiblity that Waiben might be giving him a stranglelope of disinformation.  As a precaution Downs had insisted he take entourage who were now spread around New Orleans waiting for his signal and amusing themselves at the same time. 
+	Sil saw Waiben outside as he rounded the corner and Sil ducked into the restroom--two paranoids meeting is always a contest of wills and never simple.  First the feelers--Waiben headed straight into the bathroom and started to pee in the urinal, Sil stepped noiselessly out of the stall next to him and gently eased a gun behind his ear, “Doctor Livingston I presume?”
+	Waiben was visibly shaken, but tried his best to hide it, he smiled “Sil your paranoia is unfounded, occasionally troubling, but always amusing.  Sil paused for a moment unsure if Waiben’s lips had even moved. 
+	"Don’t pull telepathy games with me Waiben, it's irritating.  Half the time all i get is gibberish, just save it until you know what your doing, okay?”  His tone was deliberately 
+condescending and he said it with out moving his lips and looking straight into Waiben's eyes
+	“That wasn’t telepathy is was sub vocal speech, but okay we’ll just talk, can i get you a drink?”  Waiben looked a touch surprised, but Sil couldn't tell if it was genuine.
+
+	Dr Waiben had arrived in New Orleans after a short lecture stop in Los Angeles, California where he had experimented with speaking in tongues.  The central nervous system is much like a radio antenna and Waiben was obsessed with finding a powerful enough signal to reach everyone at once.  The tongues method appeared, from the LA experiment anyway, to be strong enough only if you knew how to pick it up.  Much like his experiments with television, it required the listener to make a conscious effort to tune it in, which meant that it could be tuned out just as easily.
+	SpaceTime events collide.  Words bounce out uncontrollably and with no respect whatsoever for the recognized conventions of english grammar and proper method of coherent speech.  Pick up your marshmallows and walk  -Christ is drunk and babbling in the streets of Bethlehem, Mohammed heaves him over his shoulder and carries him to a remote cave in the Gobi desert where they make sweet love under the waning stars of eternity like Calvin Klein and Gorgio Armani before the great clothing wars of the late 1990's.
+	
+	Sil sits down with Waiben and starts to tell a story, but thinks better of it and simply studies Waiben's face for a minute.  "Cary has a brain tumor and he is going to die within a month."  he said suddenly.  "Everything is being turned over to me on the condition that I withdrawl all support and contact from you and your research facility, but I have not agred to it yet.  I came here to ask you if the rumors are true."  
+	For the first time Waiben genuinely felt spacetimemind curving and he saw Sil Hawkard fade and crumble as if he had actually been made up of structuralized ants.  
+	The assistant beside him watches horrified as the virus pushes in bubbling crispy blisters against the outer skin of the boy's cock.  The cock begins to move as if independent of the boy, it twists and turns in ways that one would not expect a cock to be able to move.  It seems propelled about by the force of the popping skin blisters.  The skin is searing and the acrid smell of burnt flesh permeates the air,  a faint trail of delicate whispy smoke emits from the top like effervescent semen.  His cock continues to dance about as if possessed by a viral cobra, the skin is disfigured and slides off in sheets that look like red black strips of chicken skin. The blisters are popped like a burnt hot dog, the vein on the underside splits open and oozes out a hideous trail of ochre liquid that snags in the boys pubic hair and trickles down his ass.  
+	The virus begins to organize itself into more complex structures as though it were leaping up the evolutionary ladder right before the good Doctor's eyes.  The boy screams in pain and terror as the blisters begin to form on his  chest.  
+	"By God i think its going to his brain, its ten minutes old and its evolved from a virus to a sentient creature capable of locating the vital organs of its host and destroying it.  Waiben is momentarily shocked, the assistant retreats to the observation room for fear its growth rate might be too exponential and drags Waiben by the arm.  Behind the antiseptically clean glass they continue to observe the beast as it burrows through the boys body, and then suddenly it stops and the monitoring devise on the boy falls silent.  It dies with the host, how tragically effective, thought Waiben.  
+	"What we need to do is tamper with its genes so that it doesn't die with the host  -a virus that evolves in to a completely independent creature in an evolutionary span of two or three minutes..."  Waiben's assistant Dr Kellinger's mind is racing ten ton truck-like around the viscus fluids of his skull and two years away a phone is already ringing.
+	"Did you hear that?" Waiben asks suspiciously as his spacetime point begins to warp forward.
+	Kellinger stops mid sentence. "Hear what?"
+	"The phone, I thought I hear the phone?"
+	"Are you okay?
+	"Yes, why?"
+	"You're the one who had the phones down hear removed two weeks ago because you said they were distracting you from this project and now you're still hearing them ring?  You might want to lay off the cocaine for a little while Doctor."
+	"It not habit forming."
+	"All elements of mind control are habit forming --you of all people ought to know that."
+	Fragments of ash are falling.  Government radio broadcasts interrupt still air to create wavelengths...my god thinks Waiben its working on me He grabs a cattle prod and heads out of the room.
+	Somewhere a man shoot a monkey and blows off its balls.   The monkey laughs obnoxiously as the cells reconstruct themselves and a new set of balls rapidly grows in place of the old ones, he advances menacingly on the man who now realizes his error and begins to flee.  	Always subjugate reality. 
+
+	Waiben burst out laughing and took an exaggerated sip of scotch, "you're the one who tried so hard to get me to believe that nothing is true...are you afraid to live your own reality?"
+	Sil stared at Waiben for a bit and got up silently and walked to the bathroom again he smoked DMT and sat on the toilet seat and braced himself.  Fragments of Ash falling.  White washed ceilings hanging so ominous  Hallucination of bubble-headed figures crawling like the Michelin Man across an indescribable mountain of tires 
+Motels Motels Motels Whiskey Bourbon.  Tow truck non-ordinary state of reality precludes a state of reality that something is real  Point at the autistic manwomanchild  Autistic man pointing at you laughing unable to fathom how your brain functions and quite 
+self righteously you you cling to its definitions.  Must delineate between abnormality and those of us who Understand The Human Virus breeding like rats unconsciously conscious and awareof our disorganization. Gas Station Cold Fusion dreams of the Anarchist are breedingin the minds of the oil men who don’t want toloose their stranglehold of reality.Fragments of Ash falling the continual settling of dust weighing down humanity and the French Maid masturbates discreetly in the next room.  You need her to keep the dust off your mortalcoil spring.Rebirth mythology.Mythology of reality.  We must distinguish between what will be defined as sane and what shall be referred to as insanity.  Kevlar definitionsconstructed to make a better shampoo seem like a logical item on whichto squander your paperbacked slavery bills.After all these years Tide still
+gets your socks whiter Its a wonder that they aren’t transparent by now.that your brain retarded in its developmentthat evolution had not anticipated the advent of the opposable thumb the unopposable domination of the thumb leadingto and insect superiority of mating rituals stolen from a textbook on damselflies darning needles sewing shut your lips, mind atrophy. Weber's White Race Enriched for Superiority Scorched earth campaigns raining Ash. Shit from the sky.  Tax man camefor your baby in exchange for unpaid balance.  You understand.  Nothing Personal Just doing our job.  Same as the next guy.  From Auzwich on down the line.  Didn’t make the rules.  Sorry. We perfected them.There are no innocents in a world of free will.  You don’t have to survive at the expense of others.  You could die with puncture wounds in your handsand others would create a new mythology strange irony would find another with holes in his hands unwilling to accept cockroach mentalities.You want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman but he lives on in quiet cafes centralsouthamerica not so free not all the communists have been shot yet Your mistook misunderstood missed the lesson in the situation that unfolded  Dr. of dialectic excuses you want to beLIEve Hitler was a madman Hitler killed everybody's body only taking orders you understand just doing my job from Independence on down the line. It was a sad money grubbing hunter gather up his children and thank his gods they are his and he their 
+god behold I have come to tell you that everything you know is wrong stop doing your job it is not yours see Hitler in your mind you want him dead but he's not he livesonburied under restraint in everyones mind.Only taking orders you understand.  Didn’t have a CHOICE.  Got a family to feed. radio crackle.  pop.  hiss. silence.
+	
+	“Alright, so what are you going to do?” Waiben asked as he came back.
+	"I will not sell you out to the State like Cary wants me to do, but you will never see me again." Sil walked out of the bar and got in a waiting car.
+
+	Anything everything like a hurricane blowing bits of ash in from mountainous eruptions.  Sil is sitting at a table, coat turned collar up and looking like a grainy photograph, harsh contrasts under a sterile florescent bulbs, mad-smoking a half lit cigarette.  Old Cary Downs is inside, diffidence hangs like a fern in the corner to liven the place up and remind freshly wed virgins that drinking the seed is a gift of God.  God who rots like a gaslamp whore waiting to get back what life owed him.  Sil lays down the napkin he was blowing his nose in and gets up to leave.  
+	Sil remebers a peculiar buzzing sound rang near the edge of his ears, a sound not unlike what a bear must hear with its head stuck inside a hollow log with  hornets nest buzzing at the other end and echoing up the length.  The sound began to organize itself at first into random pulses and thumps until a pattern emerged and Sil saw the rhythmic pounding of African drummers crouched by the fire and Aztec dancers whirled like calavera dolls blowing in the wind swept rafters of a Mexican village and far off, back in the shadows a thousand villagers chanted a harsh wilderness voice that carried up into his consciousness and spoke: 
+	Behold we are ants.  Tonight we appear to you as  a headless horseman suit driven by a midget who smokes cinnamon sticks and who before this is over will likely find sexually desirable in the same way those lechers looked at Snow White when she 
+would bend over the stove.  Only KiKi can save you, but that is irrelevant for now.  As we said we are ants and our purpose is singular.  Attachment is a pattern and in runs through you.  Beware of the singularity of Time and consult often the wisdom of the last carrier pigeon.  She waits like a pregnant woman ready to burst forth with impenetrable mysteries.  Might well be the key to the universe handed by a pervertial passageway of dreams.
+	Cary died two days later and Sil flew to an island he had only recently found on the map.  An island where sad tropic storms made one want to just sit on the porch in a bambo chair and stare at nothing for hours.  Sil was sad about Cary, but primarily he suddenly felt the full weight of his own life on his shoulders --everyone in tunisia was waiting to see what he would do.  He had taken the manufacturing codes for the production of the synthesiation of hashish and marajuana using carbon as a carrier and sold it for seven million dollars which he then parlayed into the stocks of the companies using a false corporation and funnelled the money into an e-cash account in the carribean.  Sil was finacially poised to build an international empire and without word he left the derrick taking cary's jet and most of his informationresearch code machinery.  As far as anyone on the rig knew he just disappeared they heard odd stories like one that an old man had approached him on the beach and converted him to christianity.  One person did show up at the rig in tunisia though: the doctor will see you now.
+
+	The encroaching millennia had several side effects which most people in the state had not antisipated, every society has its periodic upheavals and tumult but every society is different in what the upheaval is about.  No one expected the fucking in the streets routine to really happen, but it did or at least it had for a while --it was dying off now some of the old purist religious types where beginning to crawl out of their bomb shelters to realize that the world had indeed gone mad just not violently mad.  Instead sex evolved.  It made sense to Waiben, after all the continuation of the species was more or less assured by DNA, why not have some fun, Waiben had developed a perverse sense of 
+humor in Buenos Aries. and had begun investigating ways of dilberately controlling the mind.  scenes from the labritory play on tape loops in the new smithsonian.  Do what ever you want just make sure he's in pain the whole time.  I want his brain to remain in shock and agony for as long as it can before it turns itself  off completely. Waiben was working on a theory of ego destruction --what happens to the mind if there is no ego?   So far his experiment with television had been a disaster the only thing resembling a result was one freakish accident in which a Wichita cop, after 189 hours of uninterrupted signal, had blasted his own eyeballs out of his head and sent a strange grey ooze that had once been a brain flying across the room plastering on the wall like abstract art .  Then the unexplainable parth his assistants puzzled over: projectile vomit squirted unrecognizable organ goo onto the television screen, when they wiped the ooze off the screen the television had short circuited itself and was spitting out random numbers for ten minutes or so and then at the bottom it scrolled out slowly and deliberately drwaibenlovesyou.
+	As a half joke half experiment (founded one Sil's premise if it isn't funny it probably won't work) Waiben had begun buying up control of broadcasting stations around the world and inwritting his own autosuggestion programs that everyone should get naked when the zeros came.  It worked. Old friends who hadn't met in years would run down the street toward each other and instead of just hugging, they would fuck.  At first it had been a bit odd, but as more of the herd joined in it became more acceptable.  It did lead to many people who sort of slunk around in the shadows desperately trying to avoid running into a third grade teacher named Mrs. Fendleskin or other, who chased them nightly in their dreams.  She was archtypically three hundred pounds overweight and yet somehow able to keep up with him chasing after him screaming you were such a bright boy.  Think of all I did for you, come give Mrs. Fendleskin a little fuck! Invariably people woke up drenched in sweat and nervously double checking their underwear for dried cum.  That's the problem with unlocking the unconscious, its libido often runs directly contrary 
+to that of the conscious.  Time and Space are illusions created to fill a void, the one crack religion didn't quite reach --the gap between us.
+	Broadcast directives:  Dr. Livingston i presume with your melting walls and Anne Clarke, saturated drug-induced sixties peace movement. Have you any idea what silliness peace inspires?  We don’t need peace on earth we need to get the fuck off of earth; the space ship planet home evolution mythology is tired and worn.  The cunt earth mother mythology is weary-eyed and thoroughly sick of our presence.  Where is it writ that homo sapians ought to remain forever a terrestrial stupid creature fighting over gold and oil and dooming itself to specicide?  Have you no sense of the inevitable; conceiving only of that which you know is possible?  Is your terrestrial stupidity a symptom of the oxygen saturated environment that spawned you?  Get rid of addiction, get rid of heroin, get rid of oxygen. Evolve.  Survival of the fittest --you hear these words and think only of brawn and strength and lions ripping zebras to shreds.  Fools! all of you.  Survival depends on thought and intelligence we step of the food chain dilemma  thousands of year ago, now its time to step off the planet all together we no longer need it.  
+	Bless your lucky soul that you were born in the day and age when cessation of planetary constraints is possible.   Don’t give me your morals, your religions, your beliefs --you can’t even justify your existence without them.  Something can not be the source and justification of the source even the cave man Thak standing next to the first wheel must have seen the stupidity in these circular arguments. <sound of a woman whining Thak! Thak! get in here and take out the garbage>>><<<hear Thak's internal wheels turning conceiving of gunpowder shotgun blasted cunt's to high hell!>>>>>  Have we passed the zero hour?  Were we all sad eyed asleep at the wheel worried about our individual emotional experiences and missing the collective consciousness required to assemble a planetary brain collective capable of solving the hard realities of prevention.  Prevention of leaving.  Don’t go you may die.  Don’t stay you will die.  No we were not sad eyed asleep, you were sad eyed asleep and missed the boat but we know.  
+	Assemble in the presence of god and know that i am peace. i am iam iam and i know why.  Sorry can’t tell i am enjoying my intellectual, emotional and physical superiority because i have kicked the carbon death loop and caught the virus and decoded it for you, but i’m holding out on you waiting until you can grasp the fundamentals.  Einstein died almost fifty years ago and you are still fifty years behind him.  Let go of Newton let go of Aristotle and embrace a reality that is forever “plural and mutable,” realize that belief is a misconception, a temporary insanity which leads the human mind to mistakenly assume that it is capable of processing all signals.  Like a radio you can only be tuned to one station at a time some of you might manage two or three at best --there are billions of signals incoming at all times.   Some are visual, some are auditory, some are beyond normal comprehension, and some like nuetrinos are so small they can pass through the molecular spaces in your body.   So by default you can not receive all the information and without all information all belief is stupid foolish games of semantics and power.
+	
+	Boards and syndicates of the earth did not take kindly to Dr. Waiben's reprogramming of the human computer and an all out cultural war started in 2001 with Waiben attempting to superimpose his own indoctrination over that of the Ind. INC mind contol game,  or as he had renamed it: the U. S. A., Unconditioned & Systematic Autosuggestion state.  The boards fought with conventional weapons and propoganda; Waiben used nonviolence (which indeared him to the people) and nano-technology.  This last piece of technology forced the boards and syndicates to move ahead with their time table and institute operation TOTAL CONTROL.
+	>>>>>>>>these are trying times my fellow countrymen with a heavy hand ahem heart it was that i signed into law the seizure of private property and confiscation of all land into the hands of state>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<we caution you against overreaction as these measures are necessary and temporary so all resistance will be dealt with in the interest of time and efficiency,,,,,,,,,,>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<Your will be receiving 
+a vaccination pill sent out to all persons using the IRS databanks to select names you are instructed to take the pill and remain indoors until the virus alert sirens have blown for a second time.  <<<<<<we appreciate your understanding and trust that you will realize that this is time where it is decided whether democracies will work in the post modern future>>>>we believe that we will send a message to the dictators of the world that democracy is inevitable and necessary to preserve the way of life we hold dear>>>>>>we will take your cooperation and compliance as a show of faith in the leaders you have elected to make decisions for you>>>>>>>>
+	Waiben knew that the so called vaccination pill contained a nanochip encoded with in a neutral virus which in humans found its way into the brain where it remained without harming the host, accept that this one had its own computer circuitry etched onto its molecular structure which would cause it to mutate and release a chemical agent that caused the chemical makeup of the host brain to switch and tune, so to speak, down to a longer alpha wavelength.  At this wavelength the human brain processes at lower signal reception and in behavioral science experiments it had showed a tendency to be more open to auto-suggestion.  No stumbling over lines, the computer chip in you brain has precision craftsmanship unequalled in its uncompromising quality.  No expense has been spared in the programming of your life.  And then there is me I am special screams your useless ego.
+	Crumple up the word and throw it into the sewer drain hope that someday a big bloated alligator will choke to death on words.
+
+
+		
+
+the legend of the toothless woman chased down the street with giant plastic candy cane saying you're gonna like it in your ass!!!!!!
+
+	      
+	All was well --cooking up plans to leave and then Waiben goes spilling to whole thing off to the boards --gotta have more power-- he says.  
+	“Goddamnit!!” Sil crushes another flesh eater.
+	So the board goes apeshit right off the bat, they got this whole thing brewing in the Mediterranean --insurrection, that's why i work alone --trust nobody in the carbon death loop --burn you right up for sure.  Work alone, should be the number one rule, never shoulda gone to Waiben in the first place.
+	Anyway the board’s got a problem down in the Med --sensitive area you know lost word truths hanging around <they think> You know --the Egyptians, Cleopatra and her goddamn cats (I hate ‘em I hate ‘em I hate ‘em), the Roman gods-- so they say to Waiben write it all up make it realunreel it all back so we know how to play it.
+	You familiar with the fictionhistory principle right?  Well, so Waiben writes the whole thing up and sticks it right at the beginning thinking they’ll miss it --they’re ugly and they’re scared, but they’re not blind.
+	So the best update I can give you is that Chicago got the Neutron bomb <just buildings and viruses now> Europe's in civil war and “ethnic strife” <always has been stupid fucking cave dwellers> New York’s a shit hole on account of the Antarctic ice shelf heating up and dropping off <swallowed the whole goddamn city mosta L.A. too>  Geiger counter at ten thousand feet told me to stay away from China <goddamn mess it is, which really isn’t good on account of the battle plans coming outta Tibet, only decent maps you can find these days> so I hightailed it here to see you.
+	The Old Man smiled and lit a cigarette looking thing that smelled of hash and cow shit <powdered mushroom brew from the brujo con artist at a time like this?>
+	“There is no future and no past Sil, you know that” --the three dollar principle.
+	He hands the twiggy cigarette looking smoke to Sil who takes a hit and watches The Old Man pick his nose aggressively.  Sil starts to laugh, but controls himself.  The Old 
+Man pulls an earwig the size of a human thumb out of his nose and puts it in his mouth.  He grabs the cigarette and takes another drag, he leans forward and kisses Sil blowing smoke into his lungs and the earwig down his throat.  Sil tries to gag, and recoils in horror.
+	“That’ll keep the flesh eaters offa ya,” The Old Man drawls, “Whatever Waiben wrote sure as hell did make them mad, and the smoke will take your mind of the time coordinates, you’re gonna need all your energy focusing on the other three circuits --we’re going to see the ostriches....”
diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/book two sez i.txt b/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/book two sez i.txt
new file mode 100644
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+++ b/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/book two sez i.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,351 @@
+ 
+
+Consciousness is the feelings of the contrast 
+of theory, as mere theory, with fact, as mere fact.  
+This contrast holds whether or not the theory be correct
+					-A. N. Whitehead
+
+Transcribed from intercellular radio:  Half an hour later over Mexican food and she said my name is...beady eyed half faced men in a diner cut out eyes and fucking rotting corpses to overcome insecurities handed out at birth —afterbirth is death thrown in a biohazard container and trucked off to a point on a continuum I've never seen.
+	She glides and is not.  Day 4: sounds of light and transmorphing Indian deities gives way to vampire children gnashing teeth and gnawing off the toes of the dead.  Sound becomes rhythm and gives way to light and objects manifested out of try temporal vacuum air.  Get out your accumulators— Egyptians, Tibetans.  Kundalini guides prey on the new arrivals in death as in life, no different.  "Best try to buck up boys" the sargent bellows "since none of you paid a rats ass worth of attention in basic..."
+	funeral dirges still ringing in their ears the cast of corpse memories not yet faded.  i went downtown to see the firelight fountains and all the pretty hippies in costumes from centuries ago.  Pull me under pull me over take off my shoes.
+	She was feeling quite distressed and wanted to get undressed —naked not nude— she doesn't know the difference and i don't care enough to tell her.  Some things you can't do —enlighten others—fuck yourself in the ass—.  Jumping around too much these days?  Perhaps a synaptic workout is in order; something to make the goo go?  The Mexican boy selling—hey mister you wanna but some chiclettes?  One dolaar buy one box, lotsa gum —eh? no?  
+	Cambodian prostitute with HIV contorts to accommodate the small, mutilated and misshapen penis of wealthy Usinc busy ness man.  Inc had all the magic sown up in paperback bills weighing down the servile.  she opens her mouth and closes her eyes, come splashes across her face like elastic and gooey silly string.  He slaps her face and punches her, mashing come and blood —the rampant spread of dis ease—he leaves without paying and she feels luck to be alive, but doesn't know why.  And the poets cry li la la li lalali or some such nonsense, blowing winds rustling trees, photomantages of bordem turned to alcohol like the infinite mysteries —just starting to ferment.  If you can bake a cake you can build a bomb, you could split an atom  —won't you please keep that thing away from me?  oh won't you please keep that thing away from me.  Keep that frying pan away from me.
+
+	Maya took the trip many years after Sil, but no ostrich appeared, little flighted birds hovered about her window sill and bardos of tibetian death held out.  Skinny cold fingers like withering men, like <horus sirus oriosis> and all the other dying gods who laid the framework for the christ con.  
+	Little birds that said we shit and we piss and we masterbate and we don't give a good goddamn about much else.  An emu drifted out of a bellowing purple sheet that hung on a clothesline two stories below Maya's window.  He looked up at her and said 'beware the the creature, the parasite holding you down, call you it the eye that is looking for me?'
+	do what i am doing he said and promptly made a fiberous ball of light that twisted and turned and hovered in the air as if it were made of the very sound that had described it into being.  God said "let there be light" or sounds to that effect.  Maya saw great persian empires laid out, expanding and retracting, moving across time in slow molasses-like motions.  Cities where the sun stood still in the sky and mosterous creations of the mind, horrifying and seductive at the same time.  Like ancient Tibetian art there was no distinction between the provice of the mind and the province of the body.  Women swam in south china seas of ambient warmth moving in playful erotic motions, cresting like dolphins.  Creatures of all forms walked streets of near ancient origin, cobblestones and whitewashed buildings with European wrought iron balconies.  Tapastries hung out from the window beckon the passersby to climb up into untold pleasures of body and mind.  The scene was overwhelming and undescribably beautiful and horrifying in a way that held horror and beauty to be ultimately different reactions to same observed phenomena.
+	Like most people who have experimented with consciousness expansion Maya's initial voyage into hyperspace left her feeling elated and reborn, with all of life's secrets tucked neatly in her mind behind her beautiful eyes.  But like most people she lacked the vocabulary to make these places real in fourth dimensional planes.  Large parts of what she confronted lay dorminate in her mind because she was unable to face them.  As a result her "enlightenment" was short lived and in the weeks that followed all the old patterns and programs of her life, both the conscious and the unconscious, reasserted themselves until two months later she felt her life was indeed just as shitty as it had been before she had drifted out into the bardos.  This fact caused her much anxiety.  Maya was (like all of us) trying to figure out what the hell is really going on down here.  Innerspace had been her holy grail if i can get inside deep deep deep inside it will all make sense, but the inside is far more tricky twisting and ever elusive than the outside.  going into the quarter alone is a touchy proposition, you tend to end up with one foot here and one there and you come out stone paranoid and schitzophrenic.  Best to have somebaody with you to help navigate this side of things while you're on the endside.  Maya enjoyed the risk at first, mainly because she had no idea what she was dealing with, but she quickly came to realize that going it alone is doubly difficult and rewarding at the same time.  But if you get there alone you inevitably want to bring everyone back with you.  (See archival records under Leary, Timothy)
+	One day Maya was looking for innerspace maps at the book store when she ran across the name of a man who had written many books on the subject of 'what the hell is going on down here?'  Aleister Crowley claimed to have a map and method for getting to places in the innerspacial world that Maya had difficulty believing really existed.  She had been there, but up until now she was able to run programs in her mind that said that everything could be a delusion, a creation of her own mind.  Crowley described the same phenomena and experiences that Maya had feltseenknown, his imagery was different bounded in his own spacetime experience, but neverthless Maya could feel in the spaces between the words that Crowley had been somewhere like where she had been.  Maya was hooked and began to study his methods of Magick focusing on departure techniques; she soon found herself capable of reaching the subway station under the quarter, although she didn't yet know about the quarter or even where she was.  She merely had sensations and saw things that seemed to behave as if she were in some sort of intergalactic train station waiting on an outbound line.  She didnt know how to get on the subway yet.
+	Crowley gave Maya that ability to similtaneously absorb these experiences whith all her existance, and remain detached from them at the same time.  He preached that nothing is true or untrue, but that one should be open at all times to be able to accept temporarily anything as true or untrue.  If you are skeptical of the process you learn nothing, you must embrace the process and remain skeptical of the results.  There are merely different MAPS OF THE UNIVERSE, some of them are more and less interesting than others, the point is to learn as many of possible before you start choosing between them.
+	In the present Maya existed as a member of the genus homo species sapian.  She lived in Usinc.  Usinc had its a wide variety of maps existing in it but one overwhelmed the rest and was often unconsiously dictated by the Alpha Mans of her tribe.  The dominate map in USinc as far as Maya could determine was what one of the Sapians, Noma Chomsky, called the Star System.  This map (or tunnel reality, or set of beliefs) holds that most people are really stupid,  or more eloquently in Chomsky's words: "...people would like to think that there's somebody up there who know's what he's doing.  since we don't participate, we don't control and we don't even think about questions of vital importance, we hope somebody is paying attention who has some competance.  Lets hope the ship has a captain, in other words since were not taking part in whats going on...  It is an important feature of (this) ideological system to impose on people the feeling that they really are incompetent to deal with these complex and important issues: they'd better leave it to the captain.  One devise (for programming people to feel incompetent) is the star system, an array of figures who are often media creations or creations of the academic propoganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control our lives..."  
+	This sort of map serves to divide people in two groups; those who are on the mapped described in detail and have nothing to worry about and those who are fucked and just get to listen and watch the map as one might listen and watch a talking bird.  They tended to listen to what they called the TELALINGUS, a blunt box-like object with voices and images being projected outward into their consciousness.  In older times people who heard voices coming out of the walls were called crazy, but in Usinc they were called consumers.  The screen of the Telalingus created myths and metaphors by which they could make some sense of the world.   Maya did not like these people they made her feel icky and she avoided them at any cost.
+	In Usinc most people believed this system is in fact THE WAY THINGS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN, but such is not the case.  The dominate Usinc map was a rather new and untested prototype reality which increasingly did not measure up to even the most basic parts of concensus reality.  There is another school of thought, a door that Crowley threw open, a metaphoric door to a metaphoric place called Gnosis.  Gnosis holds that the only way to learn is to experience to confront the unknown directly to experience the sensations without having to make an apriori judgement about there validity.  This map allows for a greater variety to life and makes it infinitly more fun and adventurous than listening to voices in a box.  Maya went back to the innerspacial experience with a new sense of what the hell was really going on.  She entered into belief tunnels and researched brain metabolism and learned what happened with typtamines and how the beta-carbaloids bonded with her synapses and what harmines and harmalines were.  Then she went to the mystical maps from the eastern parts of the world and compared and contrasted ecstasy with satori and other states of consciousness outlines in Tibetian and and other eastern MAPS OF THE UNIVERSE.  Maya was learning that in the innerspacial world there is no consensus reality you created your own and learned how to manipulate it to your own satisfaction and desires.  This put her at odds with the dominate Usinc belief system of the day which labeled this behavior delusional. and found it threatening, she began to get paranoid.  One foot in one foot out.  She lacked the proper equipment to get all the way in.    
+	There are two things wrong with the label delusional: first in order to have something be delusional you must first have something that is non-delusional.  There is nothing that exists apart from ourselves this was something that a particularly revered Usincer named Einstien had been trying to say for almost a hundred years.  He asserted rather bluntly that without us there to observe it the world only exists in potential or delusionally.  It was rumored that later in life he regretted saying this.  The second problem is the people who label certain things delusional and others non-delusional.  A long time ago when the ansestors of Usinc arrived on the land they brought with them this map; the natives who greeted called them they-who-have-stick-up-there-ass-and-are-no-fun which has a much nicer ring that scientist or doctor or priest which is what most USincer's called them.  The natives used to chuckle about it and ridicule the size of their shrivelled white penises behind their backs which irritated the Usincer's so they gave them small pox and killed them all.  Elimination was a standard threat defense system in Usinc and was still practised in modern times.
+	The sense of direct confrontation and followed by personal  understanding (limited though it was) gave Maya the emotional fortitude and strength to travel further and further down  mysterious roads in pursuit of the truth or whatever.  It might also have driven her quite batty and killed her depending on what map you the reader are bringing along.
+	The Crowley doctorine of not having beliefs also provided Maya way to experience things without terror, for the conquest of fear is an absolute necessity when one approaches the fringes of what is known and not yet known.  Out in the Quarter fear is rampant, but without fear one is free to have myrid of experiences that are not availible to those with fear, objective subjectivity Maya called it.  For instance just because one is presented with the sights of mass slaughter and carnage and every evil satanic thing ever recorded by man one is not bound to be afraid of these things because one is not bound to the system which labelled them evil in the first place.  If that doesn't follow think of it this way:  we have genetic memories encoded in or DNA (in twenty years science may well find the actual gene that has Dante's satanic visions stored in it), but in the mean time if you should accidentally dreg the hidious severed, bloody, snarling head of Lucifer up out of our genetic memory banks you can make him go away.  You just internalize the event and lable it endogenetic which doesn't sound nearly as frightening as a seven headed monster spitting fire, gnashing its teeth, slashing up your record collection and generally making a mess of the living room.  Of course if their actually is a seven headed fire-breathing beast from hell in your living room then you really do have a problem and you might wonder if your losing your mind.  But ultimately even that is no comfort because if you've lost your mind you have to wonder who has it and why are they putting multi-headed-fire-breathing-demons in your goddamn living room?
+	Maya had fun with gnosis and managed to avoid seven headed satanists in her living room for the time being, but she did quickly find that she could no longer keep up with the pace of her mind.  The racing mind is a difficult thing to stop, you find thoughts at every corner and you can't seem to find room for new ones to modify the old ones and your mind tends to enter a static loop.  You'd have better luck stopping a train then stopping a train of thoughts.  The best thing to do is to take time to fully absorb and understand each journey before taking another, otherwise knowledge becomes static and starts to feedback.  
+	Maya had discovered that knowledge has an expontial rate of accululation and soon she found she knew so much about so much that she came to the inevitable conclusion that information has timebounded saturation points.  She started to have to rely on artifcial means of meditation and breathing exercizes to get herself to sleep.  	
+	This may sound like a nightmare of some sort, but actually it is quite a skill to have, it like finding the on/off switch to the human brain.  This gives one an extreme felling of detached vivaciousness, like you can walk through walls if you wanted to and eventually you decide you can actually walk through walls you just don't know how.  Hassan i Sabbah will be driving the bus for the remainder of the tour you may direct any further questions to him...
+	"The British biologist, Richard Dawkins has coined the expression meme to designate a signal traveling in human space-time and carrying information (or mis-information).  In Dawkins view, just as biological evolution depends on the circulation of genes, sociological evolution depends on the migratory habits of memes." —from Wilhelm Reich in Hell, by Robert Anton Wilson.  Menes like genes can only be in one brain at any given time, the trick is to learn how to leave the individual sense of mind and find the point at which consciousness is pure essense with itself.  Out there one is not bounded by the standard saturation points.  Too many menes in "your brain" leads to a danger that it will all be static and meaningless chatter.  If you want to decode the static that builds up in your brain you have to graph it on a time scale.  Maya graphed the static in a journal.
+
+
+life is far to grave of a 
+matter to be taken seriously
+-Oscar Wilde	
+	
+	William S. Burroughs once said that language is a virus,  most Usincer's thought this was cute and humored the old man.  But when you stop and think about it language does act very much like a virus.  It is passed from old to young, it mutates according to the host, and it is fatal —when you stop talking you are dead.  If we are to humor this cute notion further we might eventually want to cure ourselves of this worldwide epidemic.  Memes may well be the genetic key.  Why do we need information?  Why do we need to be alive?  If we are to suppose that the viral pattern of language is consistent with other virus patterns then it's transmission and ability to replicate itself must have a genetic code which it uses to trigger reprodution and the consequent mutation of the host cell structure.  What is the DNA of language?
+	This theory rests on the supposition that ideas come before words ie the typical theory of language development: we speak because we have something to say.  Suppose we speak to create the things we want to see....  Shit or get of the pot the old man screams.
+	
+Static System Sampler: 
+
+	Sex and violence, she smiled that's what these people need —sex and violence.  She feels the rage building.  Writing is transmission it is the creation of alternative realities, the first step in creating a new world is to write it down. 
+	The tired shopkeeper is out smoking her obscenely thin cigarettes leaning out the front door ducking the afternnon sun.  She smokes constantly pausing only to give a tired answer to the same tourists she has to stare at day after day.  An endless reminder that they, not her, are the ones enjoying life.  Too many of them day after day year after year look look looking never buying.  The Leather Connection doesn’t do a lot of business on warm spring days —who puts a leather shop on the beachfront.  Nor is it the kinky sort of fetish shop you might hope for.  Not even any leather in the windows.  She moves her lips mumbling incoherences intelligible only to herself.   She lights another cigarette.  A rabid dog paces back and forth across the doorway as if protecting it from unseen horror.	
+	The sharp eyed Asian hawk sitting behind me at another table closes her purse, pen safely secured inside.  She licks stamps and affixes them to postcards.  Notes for those at home.  “Jenny: LA is great -warm sunny.  I’m having a great time.  Remind me to tell you about this guy Bill I met the other day.  Take care of yourself.  Say hi to Tom for me.  Love....”
+	Families wander down the hill looking for a nice place to eat.  The neon signs offer Mexican Italian Greek food, “but we need a children's menu.”  “Tommy’s only nine, he can’t eat a whole meal himself.”   “Do you think they could split a dinner, I’m not very hungry myself?” “You brought the credit card right?” “No, but I’ve still got some cash left over from breakfast this morning.  “Wasn’t that a charming little place?” “What was it called?”  “Lets go there again before we leave.”
+	The locals, the non-travelers, the doomed-forever-to-live-in-one-placers stream by in shinny cars coming home from work in THE BIG CITY.  Their flimsy soda can Japanese cars that look as if a good size bird could, with decent aim, crush the plastic colored roofs.   The locals drive with windows up and frowns turned down.  “Did I remember to e-mail that memo to Tony at the office in Chicago?  I wonder what sort of crap Diane cooked for dinner tonight?  She is the worst cook.  What happened to that tri-tip on Friday?  I wouldn’t have known what is was if I hadn’t bought it myself.   Dave and Linda smiled and said it was delicious the lying bastards. don’t encourage her she might actually believe she can cook.  Dave probably just wants to sleep with her.  That whore.  I wonder if she’s fooling around behind my back?  She never wants to have sex anymore.  Its always the same routine.  Me still dripping from a shower her reading some book I crawl onto of her . ‘Not tonight honey I’m to tired.’  I wait till she’s fast a sleep and sneak down to the kitchen reach behind the fridge and pull out the nudie magazines and —off quietly to the bathroom.  I wonder what Diane would look like in tight leather, probably fat. She still hasn’t lost all the wait from the pregnancy.  God its been what like eighteen months Justin’s starting to walk for christsakes.  The light is green, fucking traffic.”  
+	The static of ordinary life is horrendous and boring this brief sample was brought to you to remind you that not everyone, perhaps not even you, leads an interesting life. Was that you i heard saying that someone else said that the newscaster said that the stockbrokers think that the CEO's are going to rig the oil market and drive us into recession?  ...hope the captain knows, cause us tech sargents are just barely able to gather enough memes to pull ya through the day and get into the missionary possition with a half limp cock and let the lov'in let the lov'in come back to me.  Swing your hips and let it all get lose.  No really.  put the book down and swing 'em.  Uncle Sabbah likes to see the little girls and boys shakin' de hips.
+	
+	Fog is settling in from the hills meeting up with banks rolling in from the sea, threatening the star’s view, tiny windows of the gods peeping in watching our silly games in continued amusement.  They keep doing it every night   Reminding me of San Francisco, the golden gate after sundown glowing like it were Apollos chariot itself.  Proudly beckoning the traveler with tale of endless wanderlust -out here the final frontier come swim discover secrets hidden from mankind...Come the sharks are hungry.  The mashing of teeth and bone, the tearing of flesh.  	
+	I would not fuck you in Thailand/ I would not fuck you in a plane over Japan.  One of Dr. Suess’ lesser known couplets.  
+	 The sun is setting and several miles out at sea a trident nuclear submarine is preforming manoeuvres in preparation for a war that most people don't believe will really happen.  I like to pretend the submarine doesn't exist,  I like to think that no one has ever really refined and mutated the Anthrax virus to make it deadlier and that no one ever dared to split atoms, but they did and it leaves me feeling hungry and tired. 
+	I find myself surrounded on all sides.  Everyone these days is completely obsessed with Being Bizarre.  So much so that nothing really is Bizarre anymore.  Yuppies ride Harleys and frequent bondage parlors on the weekends while pulling in double incomes of 150K during the week scurrying from house to latte to work to the onceaweekmatrimonialassfucking.  
+	You want Bizarre?   Circus freaks castrating themselves on the street corners and pimps shooting heroin in their balls while screaming whores accost their long dead mothers in hotel rooms a cockroach won’t set foot in?  Lawyers sitting on the roof, television antenna protruding from their limbs as policemen ritualistically torture themselves gouging out their own eyeballs to avoid the scene below?  You think that is normal?  You think it sounds better when you call it Urban Life?  You're all nuts.
+
+
+Star System Sampler:	
+	
+	"Are you making this shit up? Or has it really been found by anthropologists?"
+	"As if that lends it some sort of credibility?  Their PhD's mean they can't possibly be wrong or maybe deliberately lying ?"
+	"Are you that paranoid?"
+	"That's not paranoia, you always assume that wrong means bad.  I am just saying it is really every bit as possible as the usual tunnel that says science is true."
+	Maya is lying on the couch rainy-day-ranting in the Fornical sunshine about the chemical similarities between DMT and human seratonin.  DMT is in fact so recognizable to the human brain that it passes the through the blood/brain barrier in a matter of seconds. it is her theory that Seratonion was origionally DMT and as the terestrial ape moved out of the trees into caves and cities the chemical structure of the substance was altered, perhaps by diet perhaps by culture or perhaps deliberately by secret sect conspiring against humanity.  	She doesn't necessarily believe it, but she has fun tormenting her next door neighbor Pete with theories she knows are beyond what he has decided is real.  People who refuse to admit for even one moment that "reality" and "fantasy" might at some point merge miss out on so many wonderful ideas.  Maya loved to point out the ridiculus and far removed ideas that most people overlook as possibilties.  She liked to remind everyone that we could be living in a great novel six billion pages long or our entire universe might be an intricate and complex dream some alien entity is having.  Maya liked brain twists and loops that led directly into unsolvable paradoxes which, in her mind, always pointed out the stupidity of trying to use language to build things.
+	"unicorns don't exist right?
+	"right."
+	"Then how do you know what they look like?"
+	"They're the imagined creations of an artist."
+	"How do you know that?  How do you know they didn't used to exist and they just don't now?  How do you know that they aren't actually called dodo's?"
+	"Because somebody would have...i don't know... what are you getting at....?" 
+	"The thing is, is that for any set of equations there is an infinite possibility of solutions; I'm not trying to say this is the right solution, I'm just trying to point out that it is one of the possibilities.  And I can't understand why you dismiss it solely on the basis that it sounds rediculious."  She smiled at Pete's bewilderment, the way an adult likes to smile its superiority at a child, but Maya knew that superiority is fleeting and ever relative.  
+	She kissed Pete on the cheek, chiefly because she liked to watch him turn red and he shifted in his chair trying to hide his hard on while she pretented to be oblivious and went into the bedroom to change clothes.
+	"I guess its time for me to go huh?" he called from the other room.
+	"I guess so," she called back thinking time is not an object, its inside you.	Maya was living on the western edge of Usinc (a state labeled Fornical) in a town by the name of Long Beach, which did not in Maya's opinion pocess a beach that would lead any rational person to call it Long.  She lived in the upper left hand apartment of a fourplex building.  The aforementioned Pete lived below her and next to him was a sweet quiet old woman whose life went on interminal pause between visits of her two grandchildren.  The remaining apartment directly across from Maya's belonged to a man who called himself Cary, but Maya suspected that that was not his real name.  He was rarely home, extremely wealth, extremely brilliant and seemed vaguely powerful in some way Maya couldn't quite place.  Certain people when you meet them give off an air understanding that makes them appear powerful to others who don't have that sense of omnipotent confidence —like they are aware that their "self" is not the sum total of experience. Maya had met him a few times and said hi but she did not know him very well.  She wanted to though and when she found out from the old woman down stars that Cary's daughter went to the university Maya enrolled in one of her classes.  
+	Anna was a beautiful girl with black raven hair that swung across her shoulders and bounced when she laughed.  Which she did a lot when talking to Maya.  She was nothing like her father seemed.  She was however always in a good mood and did not seem to have the psychosis of most people in Long Beach.   But Maya was disappointed that she couldn't get Anna to divulge any scandelous details of her father's life.  But Maya did use her as an impetus to talk to Cary more.  This led to vague friendship consisting of a  cursory discussion of his world travel habits, lack of official citizenship, and an invite to use his balcony whenever she liked.  He did not lock his door and professed not to believe in property instead he had the entire place wired with cameras so that if indeed someone stole something from him he could find them and accertain whether or not they needed the item more than he did.  All of this intrigued Maya and secretly she wanted to know more, but she was happy to just use his balcony which was the largest one in the building.  It opened virtually right into a palm tree and gave one the feeling of being at some Mediterranean villa.  It made Maya want to waltz around in a leopard trimmed chamise wearing platform  shoes and sipping pina coladas.  Maya's balcony was drenched in afternoon sun and not a pleasnt place to read so she would go to Cary's in the afternoon and read his books and drink pina coladas in her underwear and pace back and forth in her leopard trimmed chamise.  She didn't know there was a camera in the tree as well and that it could be remotely moved and zoomed so as to allow Cary to see what she was reading.  In fact Cary knew a rather lot more about Maya then Maya realized.  That was only because Maya was looking on a different map scale, Cary's map was much much larger.  But this is Maya's story and now a one act scene to show character development:
+
+	Scene one:  ONE DAY IN MAYA'S APARTMENT
+MAYA
+PETE
+NARARATOR
+(Stage is a smallish square room with deep red walls, two couches perpendicular to the audience and facing each other with a table between them.  MAYA is a slinky sexual girl of twenty-four with fiery grey-green eyes, short black hair like ravens trying to get out of her head and slender arms and legs that slip around her body like ribbons.  She is wearing tight black satin pants and a green spaghetti strap tank top which is also tight.  She is sitting cross legged on the left hand couch smoking a cigarette.  PETE sits across from her watching her with a puzzled look on his face.  He is obviously younger than her and of a tall lanky build with an insecure awkwardness that is betrayed in his shifty mannerisms —as if he were not quite comfortable in his own skin.)
+
+Narrator (sitting on a stool stage left)  ...Pete watched Maya with absolute fascination, he had never met a woman, no he had never met anyone, as intelligent or as goddamn sexy as her.  He did not fully realize it but he was devastatingly in love with her and this we know meant that she would devour him and destroy his life.  He did not know this yet, but the thought did pass through his mind occasionally when he masturbated —imagining her in all sorts of ridiculous situations where the end result was always her sweet innocent but wise voice begging him to Cum all over me...ya come on my face.    (aside: wouldn't you?)  Pete was smart enough to realize the unlikelihood of him having sex with Maya but dumb enough to pine after her nonetheless.  
+PETE:(existentially in his own mind) please pleeeeeeease have sex with me.
+MAYA:  Would you like to see me naked?
+PETE: (too eagerly)  Yes!
+MAYA: huh... i guess that's better than not.  (she makes no move to get naked)
+
+NARRARATOR: It especially disturbed Pete that she seemed to take so much delight in teasing him and frustrating him further.  It also disturbed him when she went out with other men instead of him, especially when the other men was Jared Towers.  Towers was in Pete's World Religion class and represented a peace of humanity deeply disturbing to Pete, he represented strength and masculinity.  Pete was young and still believe that masculinity is limited to those specimens of the male population that look like they just walked off the cover of GQ or its ilk.  Later, like the rest of us he would come to realize that these cro-magnon motherfuckers are in fact far to fragile to satisfy a woman in bed and spend the majority of their adult lives desperately trying to convince themselves that they are not gay.  But, Pete had fixated on a rumor that Jared had a twelve inch cock, thick as a flashlight and had convinced himself that this was why Maya went out with him.  It served the need for self torture that Pete's brain seemed to possess.
+
+MAYA:  "Will you do something for me?"
+PETE: (hesitantly) "Maybe"
+MAYA: (with deadpan sincerity) "take off you clothes"
+JARED: standing as if to strip and then thinking better of it sits back down) "NO"
+	
+	(A seven headed snarling beast of unknown but leaning towards demonic origin leaps out of the floor from stage rear he first bites at PETE; several heads lay into his flesh and rips off first his arms and then his legs, and then holding Pete upside down by the stumps of his legs it chews on his balls staring out at the audience.  The beast leaps on the narrator and tears him to bits as a laugh tracks play offstage.  MAYA is still watching sitting behind the beast on the couch oblivious to the goings on.  The beast leaps down and starts to eat the audience; critics first the juicy fat ones in the front row and then the rich lesbians behind them all the way to back ripping up art fag kids who snuck in without a ticket cause there friend works at the door.  The beast runs snarling into the streets of New York devouring east village types causing people to go into panic and leap from the tops of burning buildings.  Carnage and Mayhem abound.)
+Curtain falls.
+
+(The End) 
+
+	
+	Jared was not really Maya's type either she only went out with him because she liked nice dinners, but didn't like to pay for them.  Jared was rich or rather his parents were rich and he would do pretty much whatever Maya told him to.  She had never had sex with him and didn't want to.  You can't have sex with a man who let you hypnotize him and then revealed under hypnosis that his father once chased him a around the house with a meat cleaver when he caught the boy masturbating to a picture of the Virgin Mary.  Maya used to wonder over fine french food: what kind of sick fuck finds the mother of god sexually appealing?  I mean if sacrilege is a turn on masturbate and think of fucking god in his own ass like he thinks of fucking you in yours...Maya had laughed for hours on that one, of course she didn't tell Jared anything about the revelation or how far into his mind she had gotten that afternoon.
+	
+	Pete had left and Maya had changed clothes and was heading out the door to meet Jared for dinner when she noticed light leaking under Cary's door.
+	"Cary?      It's Maya are you home?"  She knocked and hearing no reply she pushed gently on the door which floated open as if on its own accord.
+	A voice floated languidly in from the balcony and said, "Come in... I'm outside..."   Maya went out onto the balcony and there was Cary sitting and smoking a cigar shaped object which smelled like hash.  
+	"Hi." 
+	"Hi."
+	"Sit down," he took another drag and exhaled.  It definitely smelled like hash.  He caught her staring at it as she sniffed at the smoke.  Cary laughed, "would you like to smoke some hash?  I brought it back from Morocco..."
+	"That would be lovely," Maya felt the awkwardness of a setting too intimate for the relationship that was being cast onto it.  Cary did not appear anything but relaxed, but of course he was likely quite stoned.  Maya accepted the blunt and smoked it for a while before handing it back.
+	"Have you been enjoying this balcony in my absence?"
+	"Oh ya, i sit out here in the afternoons and read," the hash hit fast and hard and Maya had to fight to keep her wits about her, she thought vaguely of Hassan i Sabbah and his brainwashing techniques and for a moment she understood why he was so effective.  
+	"This stuff hits hard at first but it settles down and leaves you in a nice contemplative frame of mind, i only smoke it in the evenings.  I prefer something more active for the daytime."
+	"I would never have guessed that you smoked pot..."
+	"That's the idea." he smiled, handed her the blunt and leaned back in his chair reaching for cigarettes.  Maya took the blunt and reached in her bag for her own smokes, lighting one she asked,  "What exactly is it that you do?  Your daughter told me you own a casino or a mine or something?"
+	He laughed. "Doing research are we?" Maya blushed, but Cary just kept laughing.  "What i do has nothing to do with either of those things.   I just believe in diversifying my financial assets...so that if one particular area of the world economy goes snafu i don't lose everything...just good business you know........ but yes i do have both of those things, but they are just things  and not even ones that I'm actively involved in..." his voice trailed off.   "What i do is more complicated...some might say that i am trying to figure out what the hell is going on down here...others say that i already have figured that out and i have moved on to far more nefarious projects..."
+	He said the sentence like he knew that Maya would recognize it and the realization gave her an acute sense of paranoia which was accented by the canaboids floating in and out of her brain.  Banish fear.   Someone knowing you well without having spent any time with them is not necessarily a bad thing...people fall in love and they seem happy about it .  Secretly i think they're deluded but this is different.  Its a common phrase perhaps we've read similar books or maybe more people are into this sort of thing than you realize.
+	"So do you know what the hell is really going on down here?" Maya asked as coolly as she could in her stoned state.
+	He just smiled, "you're the one studying in college trying to figure it out... why don't you tell me?"  He settled back in his chair as if waiting to listen to a lengthy discussion on the subject.
+	"It would take more than pot for me to tell you that..."
+	"I have more than pot if you would like it."
+	"What do you have?"
+	"Do you know anything about South America shamanism?  They make a hallucinogenic brew  —some people call Yage some call Ayahuasca, i call it the orange  stuff that bubbles....
+	"Ya I know what Yage is, William Burroughs went looking for it, i read that book...."
+	"Ah yes the Yage Letters...unfortunately mister Burroughs was an acute heroin addict at the time and heroin tends to not put one in a positive state of mind...the book is a careful and imaginative account of one man's failure to transcend himself."
+	"I like Burroughs," Maya said slowly, "but sometimes his whole nightmare apocalyptic routine gets a bit old, but he's good at seeing what could go wrong in any situation.  If you want to know what could go right, you've got Leary or McKenna."
+	"You've read a lot of interesting books...i overheard you saying something about Aleister Crowley this afternoon... that's why i decided it was okay to let you know that i can get you anything you want...drug-wise and otherwise....you seem very intelligent."   Maya blushed slightly and couldn't decide if Cary was hitting on her or if he was just a genuine intelligent man trying to be nice.  "It would be easier to know if we had a script wouldn't it???"
+	"Excuse me?"  Maya had been lost in her internal musings and the question seemed to come out of nowhere
+	"Nothing I was just listening...I'm going to give you some Yage that i had brewed up for me, its a healthy dose but i think you've the skepticism to handle it.  Are you interested?"
+	"Yes I'd love to but um," Maya hesitated not wanting to be rude,  "not to be rude but i don't particularly want to do it right now... in front of you...."
+	"Of course not, you should go back in your room and drink it on an empty stomach and lie there in the darkness and just watch the back of your eyelids...that's the way you get into this stuff."  He was staring at her with his piercing, but unobtrusive green eyes, "but you have to promise me that you'll take it tonight and tell me about it tomorrow afternoon sometime because I have to early the next morning and I want to know what you get out of it"
+	"Ummm, okay ya," Maya thought for a second, "i can cancel my plans tonight,"
+	"You should he's a waste of time."
+	Maya started, confused "you know Jared?"
+	Cary smiled and pulled a vial of Ayahuasca out of his pocket "know i didn't even know you were going out, but since i changed your plans with an exotic blend of South American hallucinogens, he can't meant much to you."
+	She blushed and took the vial, "thank you.  I'll see you tomorrow."
+
+
+
+In the cosmic computer are all repitions, 
+all tape loops necessary to keep the cosmos going; 
+the noise, sight, sounds, feelings, rhythms are obvious and full.
+-John C Lilly, M.D. from The Center of the Cyclone
+	
+	Sleeping fitfully under a moonless sky dreaming of a stale, smoky bar's liquor-stained floors and a headless horsemen riding like Icarius out of the fiery sun-gilded gates of hell.  The headless horseman swerves and bears down on the I that is you with menacing intent, jolting the dream element awake and into a sleepnonsleep trance on the isthmus of reality.  The horseman dismounts and walks in to the bar.  
+	I was bewildered and in my heavy-lidded gaze saw a man with no head standing just inside the mosquito netting that covers the tropical doorway.  Closer inspection revealed a pair of blinking eyes peering at me from where the neck tie should have been.  A hand slipped out from the waist and motioned for me to rise. I climbed clumsily off of my barstool and followed him out into the middle of the jungle night.   The headless horseman motioned for me to sit on a fallen tree and pulled out a long stick of cinnamon, he lit it and inhaled through a button hole in his chest.  I sat down on the log opposite him and staring eye-level at the cinnamonette and I began to appreciate the sheer size of the horseman and realized that even without his head, the horseman was taller than me...
+	Time passes by in jerky motions not unlike the first motion pictures; uneven and without regard for continuity.  Maybe moments maybe hours maybe at the same time, an old man with a sickly grey beard and a ridiculous suit is sitting where the horseman had been.  One hand is out of sight down his pants and the other wags a long finger at you and he begins to jerk his cock screaming i want you i want YOU i WANT YOU!  Eventually you slouched over against a wall and sleep.  
+	
+	Cary was looking at Maya through eyes that seemed galaxies away, "you didn't say whether or not you enjoyed it."
+	"It was horrifying and beautiful at the same time."
+	"Did you feel fear or joy?"
+	"At times i drifted into spaces that started me on a fear program and then a voice or some unspoken thought would say 'don't be afraid.'  Fear is judging i kept thinking and i was trying to hold out on judgements until after the experience.  But i did have an overwhelming feeling of sadness as i started coming down and i saw the whole tree of humanity... i was decending through it and i felt as if i could have chosen an infinite variety of bodies...experiences...and then i found the Maya one and instantly i was back and that was that..."
+	You went into what the sufi's would call the cosmic control center only you just touched the edge of it...or you went in and you repressed the memories of the horror...that happens to sometimes..."
+	"So now what?"  Maya felt genuinely lost.  She wanted to go back up out into deep deep inner space, but she knew she didn't really even understand what had happened yet.  She didn't tell Cary that she had repeated the trainstation imagery or that a headlight had been boring down on her and that the sound had overwhelmed her and blown her back down.  I saw the train again she kept thinking, why do i keep seeing a train?
+	"Well i have to go back down to costa Rica and take care of some business at my research lab, but here is my email address," he handed her a slip of paper.  "That code at the end makes sure to forward it to my cell phone so i will get it as soon as you send it."  He stood as if to leave and Maya jumped up with him.
+	"Okay ya I'll write you...i have a lot more questions..."
+	"Well I'm not sure if i have any answers, but i'll do what i can for you."  He kissed her hand and closed the door as she left.  
+	And so it came that Maya found herself fully committed to the task of figuring out what the hell was going on down here.  The Star Map of Materialism was discarded completely from Maya's life and she begin slowly but surely to slink into the corners and fringes of society, she entered onto the Usinc list of potential threats and though she was unaware of it she was marked for elimination.  Cary met with her when his schedule allowed for it and they corresponded by email when he was out of town.  Frustratingly he never gave her answers instead he asked questions she hadn't reached yet.  Cary knew what it was like to be eliminated and he cautioned her against talking to anyone about these sorts of things.  
+	The Taoists say those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.  Most Usincers familiar with this philosophy found it irritating and believed that things indescribable don't exist.  And how they humored him when he said language is a virus. Maya began to see the emotional plague.  The self limiting and self fulfilled negative programs that the majority of her fellow sapians exhibited became horrifying and Maya alternately found herself swinging like a pendulum between the poles and love and hate.  At times she felt a tremendous force radiating out from her chest trying to embrace the entire world and bath it in LOVE,  At other times the repulsion for all things human drove her into isolation where she would sit meditating and using psychoactivating devises to leave her body to exit the game, role-playing curcuit that is "reality."  As the game circuit and its contractions became more and more painfully obvious Maya found herself drifting out of her body quiet involuntarily, right in the middle of conversations.  The things that most Usincer's talked about rarely amounted to much more then meaningless chatter and Maya could feel and had to internalize the death imagry, the negative body images, the lable obsessions that comes from lost dreams, lack of love, and leaves only hollow shells to bundle up confusion and static.  Drifting out of the body without warning was quite disconcerting, but it forced her to feel people and use this to know them rather than words.  It was a step into another dimension.  At first it only happened when she was stoned, but gradually she learned that certain thoughts and breathe techniques could produce the effect while "sober."
+	Sober was an obsession for most usincers, they believed that despite the fact that they ate mind alterning chemicals all day long (usually caffiene in the form of coffee or metamphetamines in the form of diet pills) that they were actually in a state of mind that was sober or natural.  Maya was constantly siezed by desires to show people their biocomputers their souls whatever metaphor was necessary to give them back control over their lives.  But Cary's advise held her in check and she avoided trying to show or teach anyone anything.  You have to want to know something before you can learn it.  She learned from the mistakes of Leary and the rest of the early western explorers.  
+Pointing out to people the sheer futilness of trying to stop someone from exploring the unknown regions of the mind was ridiculous, and it also meant risking identifing oneself as a "drug user." This term was used to religate mind exploration and its necessary tools into a periphrial segment of society that irritated and generally frightened most Usincers.  Over the centuries people with ideas that are unpopular have noticed that people in the past with unusual ideas about life and its potentials tended to meet rather untimely and painful deaths. So the observant ones learned to shut the fuck up, or write in code like Da Vinci or Crowley.  Great myths are spawned, the Knights of Templar, the Illuminati, the Masons, Taoists, the Assassins, the Sufis; history is riddled with mysteries.  
+	Plans were underway at the upper levels of the Alpha Male dominators to get some more small pox blankets to these unwanted citizens.  Plans had in fact been underway for some time, but since the serious students of innerspace had learned centuries before how to survive under adverse conditions it was difficult to figure out who need to be eliminated.  Slowly and carefully Cary was admitting Maya into the ranks of those networks which exist in the periphrials of organized primate societies.  He took her underground.  
+	Most Usincers remained oblivious to the underground.  It was something they heard of but assumed did not really exist.  In fact Most Usincers had no idea that they were  the most electronically advanced biocomputer in the known universe; consequently they wasted much time in imitating the behavior of other less electronically sophisticated animals.  The Alpha Male orientation of the political system was little different than any primate group.  A select group, after fighting amongst themselves for the approval of the rest of the tribe, set themselves up somewhere they called HEADQUARTERS and from here they ruled over the rest of the primate masses.  This allowed the masses to relax from worry about decisions and beliefs and ideas.  The Alpha Males supplied these things for them.  They felt the Alpha Males did a good job of it most of the time.  But this began to change and the Alpha Males began to feel threatened by the socio-cultural changes that were taking place so they reacted defensively like any cornered primate —they became paranoid.  This paranoid psychosis manifested itself in the form of small pox blankets which by now had been improved.  There were now Anthrax blankets, Leprosy-Anthrax blankets, atomic blankets, HIV blankets, and the Alpha males continued to invest more and more of the resourses of Usinc, and indeed the whole world, into developing new lethal blankets.
+	It wasn't long before one of them suggested that they out to test the blankets just to make sure they work you see.  The first subpopulace to be identified were the "drug users."  Infected needles were distributed, secret police raided and siezed property, and in time strip searches on public streets became common.  This angered many Usincers even those who were not "drug-users" but they did not speak up because they would be labled drug sympathizers which was only slightly less irritating to the Alpha Males than actual "drug-users."  In short they knew they would be given blankets too.  Usinc was fast becoming a rather shitty place to live.  
+	It was about this time that the first glimpses of the boiling of the Usinc political caldron began to manifest themselves; riots broke out in Detroit, Chicago and Atlanta, and the entire infastructure of communication was threatening to take away the Alpha Male domination.  The Alpha Males silenced these protests with blankets, but then labor strikes broke out all over the country followed by advent of technology that deeply threatened the Star System.  Communications technology was taking vast arrays of previously rare and complicated information and making it availible to the masses of primates.  The people banded together and decided that the Alpha Males had to go, but the Alpha Males were ahead of them again.  They had already found that outright violence was unpopular within the tribe (although perfectly acceptable against those in other tribes).  They began to study those things that irritated them and they learned that silence and secracy are far more effective than noisy riot-type events.  They used paper magic stolen from the great magicians of the past.  
+	Cary had decoded the paper magic and learned to move through it without it touching him.  He learned how to use it against the Alpha Males and this made him very very threatening to them.  He quickly learned to be very very quiet and resourceful.  Maya didn't have access to the resources that Cary did so he told her what he could without putting her life in danger.  He told her about the Alpha Males and how to explore innerspace without raising there interests.  He taught her how to walk without being noticed and how to use their paper magic against them.  He told her that any hunting pack will inevitably develpoe a complex system of signals to communicate with during an attack.  He told her the most important signal would be a riot in  New York City which would cause the population to ask the Alpha Males to use the blankets on them.  Unsinc was full of deeply confused primates.  He told her that when such an event occurred the best bet would be to head to somewhere on the planet that the Alpha Males did not care about.  He gave her a list of such places and told her that when the time came he would help her get to one of them.  He did not tell her that they were all places he controlled and that very very few people on the planet knew about them.  He also did not tell her that some of these places did not actually exist in the concensus timespace coordinate. 
+	Maya found the whole thing adventurous and exciting like a spy novel, she kept it in the back of her mind, where, like most of the citizens of Usinc it fought with another voice in the back of her head that kept saying its never going to get that bad, it never going to happen...
+	
+	
+
+	In the meantime she stayed in Long Beach and kept up her research into inner space, occasionally using Ayahuasca, but primarily concentration on Psylosilum Cubensis which was the most commonly available a particularly psybocilum concentrated species of mushroom that was along with LSD 25, MDMA and a host of other hallucinatory drugs, officially declared a schedule one deadly drug by the government of Usinc way back in 1965.  No government investigation or tests were ever performed on psylocilum it just got lumped with the rest of the psychedelic drugs of the nineteen sixties and deemed inappropriate for human consumption.  
+	Chemically altering your own brain processing structure is hardly a new idea, people have been taking strange drugs and eating different plants throughout history.  But it also important to notice that these people have also been persecuted by almost every Alpha Male government and syndicate since the beginning of time.  It has its genesis in the Christian story which THE CHURCH has so cleverly glossed over for centuries.  
+	Christ was a gnostic; he claimed a direct communication with god, and while Maya did not believe in the consensus definition of god, she understood that there was something out there and that Christ more than likely had seen it and what happened to him?  He got nailed to a goddamn tree.  That has got to fucking hurt.  You go about minding your own business and one day you confront a world that is an entirely separate reality from your own, and you like it, it gives you a feeling of ecstasy, you want to share it with others.  At first they think you are insane, weird or overly imaginative at best, but you keep trying and trying and trying to tell them that there is a better way, you do some amazing things with the knowledge you have and they realize you might not be kidding and this makes them nervous so they tell the Alpha Males.  We fear.  And the Alpha Males use their paper magic on you.  They write things into LAW and they make you ILLEGAL.  They claim that this then gives them the right to stop you.  You are amused by their unwillingness to try what you speak of, but you keep telling them ...it can be better than this...and you know this.  One day they get desperate and they nail you to a cross.  Through the physical pain you finally gain what you were lacking the power to transcend the body, you find death before they did and you leave, but they never understand.  And you are dead to them.  
+	
+
+
+	There are worms in the soul of the materialist and they are eating from the inside out, logic and the belief that things which can be replicated through objective experimentation are the only things which can possible be true, is not wrong, but rather a very limited way of viewing life.  Why is science so reluctant to investigate phenomena like UFOs, demon possession, chemical induced brain change, telekinesis, psychic communication, telepathy, witchcraft, Auras, Orgone energies, Gaian sentience, collective unconscious, and the rest of the fringes?  Simply because its own self limiting philosphies have consciously chosen to ignore them.  If it were proven true that telepathy is possible would it invalidate all of biology?  No why then is science afraid of this possibility and fight so violently against it and those that are willing to investigate it are labled frauds and charlatans?  Because it would force science to admit its shortcomings and the Alpha Males would have to give up the powerful personality egos which are the only programs that their biocomputers are capable of running.  
+	The irony of the star sytem is that those who go fathest out of the limbs get the greatest respect as humans (Gandi, Einstien, Galilieo, Bucky Fuller, Tim Leary et al) but their ideas are never taken seriously and when they are finally proved right it is only with the greatest of begrudgement that science and governments will admit what they secretly fear:  that consensus reality is not a good map of what the hell is really going on down here.
+	The worms are eating from the inside out and the decay is not easy to see unless you look from the inside and crack the elaborate schematics of secret societies.  Science is perhaps the most elaborate and widespread secret society to ever grace the face of the earth.  It has gone so far as to develop an complex and untranslatable language unique to each of its subdivisions —any hunting pack will develope very sofisticated and complex signals with which to communicate during the hunt.  The complexity of science is so great that even within the heads of the beast can not understand each other.  Biologists pay no attention to physicists and physicist can't understand chaos theorists, chaos theorists sneer down their horned rimmed glasses at botanists and none of them take psychologists seriously.
+	The for instances:  Sigmuend Freud in his investigation of the human mind predicated that one day psychology would be but another field of biology, that is that most psychosis has some definite interaction with physical biology.  In other words if you tend to suffer from delusions of grandeur it might well be because you chest muscles are in a constant state of hypertension or something to that effect.  Enter Wilhelm Reich, at first Reich merely takes Freud one step further, outlining a better method of psychotherapy that focuses on how the patient behaves rather than what he says.  Reich recognizes that most people give away more of the unconscious in behaviors and habits than in conscious thought-out speech and ideas.  Slowly psychology accepts this and he publishes Character Armor, there are of course those who refuse to accept it but in twenty years they receded from majority to minority.  Then Reich turns to the question of biological causes of mental psychosis and he is drowned out in a cry of protest, biology is unwilling to accept or even experiment with his Orgone energy.  While biologists happily admit they have next to know idea how the brain works they are damn sure that this is not within the realm of possibilities.  
+	Reich is arrested by order of the American Medical Association and imprisoned for the remainder of his life.  His research is hauled out of his office and labs and burned in the New York City incinerator.  Reich thought as a scientist that he was immune to such primitive charges as heresy or the like.  He is wrong and pays an exacting toll for his mistake.  In an ironic twist sixty years later Bell's Theorem seems to bare out that at least there is a chance his hypotheses could be correct and to ad another spoonful of irony, they major American Medical Association endorsed method of treating seriously mental illness is biologically based chemicals, which we call drugs.
+	Another for instance:  Bells theorem (that familiar bell curve on which you were graded) seems to suggest that points on opposite side of the familiar curve could in fact be behaving in the exact same way.  For instance if you were to take to molecule on opposite side of the universe and look at their behaviors they would in fact appear to be the very same thing.  A whole branch of physics has sprung up to study this idea they call it non-local energy transfer.  However despite the fact that any farmer in Iowa could easily see the implications of this theory that if two things can be doing the same thing at the same time then two people could reasonable be expected to be thinking the same things at the same time, the physicist will not investigate telepathy and the like.  why?  His own map of the universe says that it is at least possible why not look into it, it seems like an interesting and certainly revolutionary idea?  Because he or she knows that this is not how life is.  Self limiting prophesies are always fulfilled.  If you know something is true or not true then it is true or not true for you.  There is no objective reality.  Sorry kids there just isn't.  Einstein told everyone that eighty years ago, but unfortunately he wrote (like Crowley and da Vinci and the rest) in a very clever code called physics and the star system holds that you could not possibly understand physics.  
+	Let me destroy that myth for a moment.  Its simple, relativity says that the measurements made at any given point (you being a point in this case, belittling i know but work with me here).  At any given point what is seen by the observer is only accurate at that point.  In other words what you see and experience is uniquely your own perspective and is not true for any one else.  We all know this as common sense, but sadly few understand it.  This means that we are all uniquely alone and separate from each other —incapable of ever seeing the world through someone else's eyes —so long as we remain bounded to the spacetime point we call our "self."  Transcending this point of observations suspends the laws of physics as we know them and throws us out of the time bounded Quantum Universe into the Multiversial Flow that mystics have been babbling incoherently about for centuries.  The Tao Te Ching is not enigmantic it just doesn't operate on the same logic and rational that we do.  Transcending the self is not hard you can do it on a daily basis; the human brain has known this unconsciously for thousands of years and developed something called empathy which allows us to try to see the world through another persons eyes.   If you go further you forget that there are people and non-people there only is.
+	
+	The Star map consists of litanies of hierarchical structures at the tops of which reside experts who hand out information that travels down the ladder and is collectively agreed on by those in the lower rungs to be true.  Thus only a select few of the people presumably know what the hell was actually going on.  This leads to holding beliefs and is very detrimental to the mass of the population, tending to produce psychosis which tends to manifest in the Nabisco sponsored M&M&M Monotheism Monogamy Monotony.  Polly gets a cracker.  Peoget.  Its been written up, described dis affected, looped and fed back so many times the signal is garbled into meaningless static.
+	Usinc primates were a curious group.  Maya liked to watch them and felt at times like an alien anthropolgist sent to study this unique, bizzare species.
+	
+
+We're all Fucked
+-Sil Hawkard from Pissing on Gravities Rainbow
+	
+		
+	Of course there were some good things about Usinc primates, some of them were goddamn sexy.  The males of the species tended to believe that if they put their cocks in you this then gave them control over you.  Maya found this irritating and consequently spent most of her sexual energy on women who tended to be less controlling and more open to multiple partners.  
+	For some time though Maya's inner space exploration had taken over her sex drive.  She spent three months in near isolation save her contact with her neighbors.  During this time she travelled into spaces very foreign and exciting.  She learned how to gain control over what experts in the field called the biocomputer or the soft machine.  The human brain is the most sophisticated thing in the known universe; it is capable of processing data at a rate that so far exceeds everything else as to make it seem unique.  But it is not unique at all, computers operate on a very similar principle of electrical impulses to move and interpret data.  Instead of synapses and ganglia they use resisters and capacitors.  If we reverse the analogy and view the brain as a much advanced computer questions present themselves, questions like what programs are running?  Who is the meta-programmer in charge of loading and running the programs that the people use?  Can you seize conscious control away from the meta-programmer and program your brain yourself?  Maya found that she was not in control of many of the programs that her brain ran, some being run on a daily basis.  Her three months in isolation was an attempt to catalog the programs stored in her hard drive.  She got quite good at leaving her body and she had the experience of communicating with entities that do not occupy physical realms.  One afternoon one of these entities addressed her directly and questioned why she wanted to be alone.  No one in here is alone.  To be alone is to no longer exist in a relative universe.  
+	Maya gradually came realize that you can not remain in static isolation without necessarily limiting the number of reality tunnels available for exploration.  This is why people who never leave their hometowns tend to believe that their lives are the way THINGS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN.  Stasis leads to static which leads to confusion and eventual psychosis like emotional attachments to things.  This psychosis eventually leads one to become the memetic duplicate of the parent program.  Primate Bio-Computers get anxious when they start to feel like they are becoming their parents they have a "mid-life crisis."  This is because the nuero-circuitry on the soft machine is not designed to run pattern lopes, we are the only self programable computers in the known universe and you're worrying what color curtains you should have in your window, what style of clothing is more popular among the rich and famous, how you can accumulate and store as many scraps of papermagicmoney as possible?  
+	The more you travel the more you know is the ultimate extention of this logic.  Mathmatically: Stasis=static=boredom=fear=death.   As the sufis used to say before they got co-opted by the Hippies Uplifting Humans (HUH? for short) don't put anything over your head, it could fall and hurt you.  Maybe they had to much ether in the temple or maybe you're just taking it all too seriously.  
+	The more "other people's shoes" you can fit into the more perceptions you will have on what the hell is going on down here.  The more perspectives you get, the less you care which one is right, and you stop taking any of it seriously.  But that doesn't mean you aren't serious about it.  Achieving states of ecstasy feels really fucking good otherwise why would you bother?  It seemed curious to Maya that religion had chosen to portray enlightenmnet as this serene eternal peace on a mountain top kind of image.  A good ad company selling ecstasy wouldn't get clients with an ad campaign like that.  Its worse than some late night hack job: Do you feel bored? restless?  Try the new godatic ecstasty pill! feel the energy of the entire universe pulsing through your body!  order today, supplies limited, only three easy payments 19.95.... 
+	Ecstasy is takes many forms, sex, chemicals, food, smells, tactile sensations of skin on skin.   There are no limits in the province of the mind save what you put on it.  You don't have to live in one place mentally or physically so why would you want to?  She hit upon the idea of living in a reality tunnel without a home base without a steady income and surviving on a daily basis rather than a monthly one, or a yearly one making decisions on the basis of a lifetime's worth of time makes it very hard to act.  Be here now the Buddhists say.  One of the easiest ways to get into the now is to force the body to have to constantly adapt to new surroundings.  Cats always land on their feet because they start running before they hit the ground.  
+	Listening to Cary and reading the emails he sent her from the far corners of the earth tell made Maya realized constantly moving altered your consciousness.   Cary came by one day with an eightball of  cocaine and said I thought you might need this.  She was in New York City forty-two hours later after a three our nap in Denver, Colorado. 
+	Maya arrived already in an altered state of consciousness, she had run out of coke in Kentucky and kept herself awake by taking massive dosses of caffeine and occasionally slashing her arm.  She found that eventually after thirty or so hours it is harder to fall asleep then it is to remain awake.  Her eyeballs ached and her hands were callused from gripping the steering wheel of the trusty ford ecnoline van which despite having 238,654 miles on it was still the most reliable vehicle she had ever seen.  Although as she took off all her clothes and drove through the stifling Kansas heat she wondered if maybe Cary would have given her a BMW or something if she had asked him.  I need to be rich she thought.  
+	She went to her friend April's house and called her from the front porch on a cell phone that Cary had loaned her.  Halfway through the catching up she walked in the door.  It made Maya smile and seemed to shock the shit appropriately out of April who was getting head from another girl while she talked and who nearly leaped up to the ceiling when Maya burst in the door.
+
+Snapshots:
+
+223 slipping in splish splash boom band boom and it was in Arizona when i noticed.  Creosote bushes Juniper trees growing up through brown grass and dry red earth sky painted black and blue Culumous clouds held off in the distance and dirt splatters the windshield rolling rolling on rolling on what i need is.
+	disappointment click clack tree wheels tuffs of white cotton mixed in with the rumble of thunderheads and i had a line on and there was a sign jelly roll.  Cigarette ash and the rain was holding off.  Headed east headed east ping pong sing song.  Desert air alone.  Never had much time to talk about money, when i need a hammer i use it the rest of the time i leave it in the garage.  Not much you can say about a hammer.  It works.
+	I like your diction ohhh baby i loooove you diction.  contemplate chemicals as a means of communication, if all you got is language all you got it four dimensions up-down, left-right, back-forward and what time is it.  Bodeey is communication, sex is communication, chemicals are communication, images are communication, words too.  My mind your mind ITS mind.  i want to dream in eight sided polydimensional technicolor.  
+	Corky voice over: New Mexico is dark few lights here and there, but they don't seem to have a sun.  Ya its dark.  theres some stars there's the dig dipper looking bigger and dippery then ever, looks more like a spatula to me but whom am i to say.
+	Southern man voice over:  and there some rocks over thar by tha Indian gaaaming facilities. and there's a big blinkin,' one a 'em radio towers i reckon
+	Homer: uuuuh look. truck. mmmm donuts.
+	Glow on the horizon could it be?!      waiting for alien abduction mind fading.
+	You don't think we are Indians?  Look at all these teepees we are....Indians.
+`	The first genuine signs of an altered sate of consciousness:  inability to distinguish between movement and sitting still.  Time becomes plural bendable mutable and simultaneously objective and subjective.  Bending time affects space the ability to look into the distance behind the eyelids disappears and the world feels right on top of you, flattened out like a blanket over your head.  then a feeling of dizziness and disorientation of visual field inability to judge distance.  followed by flawed depth perception difficulty in walking and a feeling of separation of mind and body.  The body will remain intact but the mind goes into something akin to active sleep.  You are asleep without being asleep.  The body seems to function on a light dark binary pattern regardless of whether or not the mind is there with it.
+	the final unanswered question of humanity:  where do thoughts come from?  The brain?  how does a gooey cellular substance flush with electrical charges and billions of strung together molecules formulate complex abstract ideas about things that don't exist?  I feel like a lucky strike, i think I'm toasted.
+	Once when i was five i had an imaginary friend named steve.  We got along great until one day he tried to steal my blanket and i kicked him out of a moving car.  that was the end of steve.
+
+	Maya no intention of spending much time in New York City but she got slightly side-tracked by brown liquor, green marijuana and an eerie sense of syncronicity that seemed to scream out follow me.  Her friend April had a friend who had a friend.... that had invited her to the annual naked party that the rebellious hippie type students threw every year at NYU to somehow prove that they were cooler than anyone else.  Maya was amused by hippish college students and thought it was inane, but she also knew they tended to be in possession of chemicals that Maya was lacking.  And they never even realize that drugs are not phase, they're a way of life that so threatens humanity that they have come to be the cardinal sin. 
+	The naked party was a nationally known event held in an enormous old Victorian house three stories high wedged back off an alley in the East Village Mall.   As you might imagine everyone at the party was naked, and as you might expect they were all severely inebriated.   Maya danced around the rooms looking for some sort of powerful mind altering drug, she spied a wretchedly foul looking hippie boy who seemed like he was having a more innarestin' time than the rest of the people and cornered him to get an eighth of Psybilsilm Cubensis at the  reason price of two minute of kissing and brief grope during which time Maya ate the mushrooms and escaped from further advances.  The alcohol rumbled with the addition of stale fungus and suddenly she felt dizzy and alot drunker then she had the moment before.  Maya stumbled toward the bathroom to rid her body of the alcohol pollutants wondering if the mushrooms would act like peyote and be stronger after you through up.  She opened the door too drunk to care if it was occupied and burst in to catch William, a slight man of about twenty five with a thin but muscular body,  gently fucking a girl doggy style.  Maya's world was beginning to become less and less vertical, but she caught the girls beautiful face in the mirror, perfectly framed by long angelic golden ringlets of hair that Maya’s eyes followed down to her sweat glistened nipples and heaving breasts.  William was leaning toward the sink to do a line of cocaine, at that instant Maya was too drunk to be taken aback, she simply squeezed in and closed the door behind her and threw up in the toilet for a minute.  After several gut wrenching heaves she tried to get up and sit down to pee, but the world was refusing to hold itself up and the toilet seat leapt up at her resulting in a fairly loud noise that made the girl turn her head and shimmy slightly looking back at her.
+	“you look like you could use a pick up, give her some coke William.”  She smiled at Maya .   William pulled his cock out of the girl but lost his balance turning around and accidentally slapped his cock against Maya's cheek
+	“Oh my god!    I’m sorry!     oh wow, did that just happen?”  It was by far the most immediate and personal introduction to anyone she had ever had.  The girl just laughed. 
+	“Usually I date someone for a while before I let them slap my face with their dick.” Maya had found that  sarcasism was funniest in the midst of insanity.
+	 The girl laughed again, she bent down and licked Maya’s cheek, “Just getting my cum off your face,” she whispered in Maya’s ear.  Maya did a line and felt much better and then another and then another and another until she felt downright spectacular.  Then the girl grabbed her by the hand and led her out of the bathroom and down the hall into a room that was empty and smelled of the delightfully sweet aroma of Opium.
+	“You have Opium,” she murmured as the girl pulled her into bed.
+	“Yes I do."  She pulled Maya down onto the bed.  "My name is Chloe and that was William, and that's enough talk,” she lit and huca and passed the hose to Maya.	
+	Picture: A blurry collage of images short circuited by imperfection and redeemed by the great opportunities of flesh and smokey tongues.  Maya liked men and women, and was not, like most of the other bipedal apes of Usinc, afraid of having sex with her own image.  Bisexuality exists in potentia for everyone, but only a handful realize the seductive pleasure of a body so close to the I.  In fact Maya was far more selective of the men she slept with then women, but William, Chloe's boyfriend, was a sleek muscular yummy as one of Maya friends used to say, so she didn't complain when he climbed in bed too.  Others at the party came and went but the three paid them no mind.  Maya was lost in a world that for a moment offered the opportunity to let the music and the swirl of opium lights carry her into a sexual trance that welled up in her feet and travelled deliciously up her spine until it erupted in a whole body orgasm.  
+	There was an odd moment  after the orgasm when  Maya had returned to the dance floor for a moment and then decided she wanted more and wnt back to the rooom only to catch William getting dressed and looking like he was going to leave. "Where are you going?"
+	"My friend needs some stuff."  William eyed her suspiciously.
+	"At three in morning?"  Maya furrowed her brow and held back from asking prying questions like who or why.  "addict?" She asked.
+	"He pays me very well so that i won't have a problem catering to his whims."  William pulled on his boots and got up to go, "Chloe's still in the bedroom you should let her take care of you..." He kissed Maya on the cheek and headed for the door.  Maya watched him go and then walked back to the bedroom.
+	"Where the hell did William just run off to?" She asked closing the door behind her.
+	"Our friend Cary needed some things that William and I got for him."
+	"Cary?"
+
+
+
+Why aren't you gay?
+-Sil Hawkard from Pissing on Gravities Rainbow
+
+	The poetics of Allen carry long over and over into the the Quarter like Voodoo music and you know that they are with you and all will be solved when you are recognized.  You hope that all you have come to believe is true and you want to know if we're all lost in the confusion and you want to think the smoke is clearing and surgeon will be stitching up the lacerations and you're licking up the blood.  And every one seems to walk so confident and proud like they know so well what they are doing and you cutting into fear and they don't seem to notice.  You're feeling like an idiot because it is so easy for them to walk proud and unafraid and you no longer care you want to see yourself smiling in a nineteen twenty's black and white photograph yellowed over the years and you want to know if you've been stuck in this station for to long you want to know if you've been down this line before.  No one seems to understand why you're saying what you're saying and the lesbians don't understand men and the fags hate women and the hetros hate everyone and everyone is so dead dead dead afraid of sex.  Why would you refuse an open mouth on your cock why would you deny the tongue snaking through the folds of your pussy simply because it came from a body that looked just like your own?  Why deny half of all the sex you could ever have?  Go back and confess your sins and catch the first train out of here you freaks.  Its crowded and we haven't got the time or the resources to be having you around.  Face up to the things you are not and could be, step aside and make room for those of us who are here to go.  "I hope for you that you apply this happiness, this peacefulness" -JMS
+
+	“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you” Chloe climbed on top of Maya and began sucking her nipples.  Maya felt her body relax and could smell the familiar mingling of incense and opium smoke floating across the room she raised her head and saw Chloe’s hard nipples rub against her own sending tremors down her spine and an aching contraction gripped her pussy.  The cream ran down her slit and trickled over her ass and onto the pillow.  She drew up the Chloe’s leg until it was rubbing against her pussy, smearing herself on her thigh.  Maya pulled Chloe’s mouth onto her own and kissed her hard, pushing her tongue into her warm sweet mouth, licking her lips and nibbling at her tongue. There mouths danced and the whole religious allegory of centuries seemed to swirl around from the Indonesian tapestries that hung on the walls and ceiling.  Chloe rolled over and dragged Maya on top of her pushing Maya’s head down between her legs.  Maya ran her hands across Chloe’s pussy and down her thighs, pulling her legs apart.  She looked up at Chloe's ringlet hair and smiled her warmth through the cinnamon orange color she felt it flowing out through her chest nipples hard and sticking up like radio antenna.  Drawing Chloe’s ass into her hands and lifting the pussy onto her tongue, Maya lapped at her creaming pussy, stabbing her tongue between Chloe’s glistening smooth and moist lips, dragging it up over her clit slowly to tease her at first, but Chloe grabbed Maya’s hair and forced her tongue between her lips and ground hard onto her tongue.  Cum soaked Maya’s face and she began to lick as hard and fast as she could.	
+
+	
+	Exhausted and Satiated Maya and Chloe left the naked party together at seven the next day, carefully stepping over the delicate piles of sleeping flesh that litter the floor, admiring the groping hands clasped of breasts and clutching at limp cocks, crisscrossed and sleeping in splendor.  Chloe took Maya to breakfast and the twenty four hour diner  downtown and invited her to make the drive up to Boston and stay with her.
+	“So what is it you two do?” Maya said trying to make conversation with someone she realized suddenly —she had had sex with, done large quantities of opium, mushrooms, and cocaine, yet had never really talked to.  Maya thought of the joke about the couple that was getting divorced just out of college.  One of their friends says ‘what happened?’  ‘Well,’ says that man ‘we met and got married in college; I didn’t know we couldn’t get along when we were sober.’  
+	“So now you think because we fucked and shared some drugs that I'm going to bare my soul to you?”  Chloe asked smiling.
+	“I was hoping,” said Maya meeting her smile.
+	“Well, okay, I can tell you the truth but you won't believe me."  Chloe seemed to be measuring her up with words designed to lead Maya somewhere.
+	“'Belief is the death of intelligence,'” said Maya.
+	“Well Well well, you can read.”  Chloe seemed to shift to a certain bitchy character that suddenly made her appear self righteous and altogether ugly in that smug ugliness that New Englanders seem to always have whether they mean it or not.  She looked searchingly in Chloe's eyes and heard a voice, one she had never heard before telling her that smugliness is ugliness is fear/must cut through/ get them down from there/ stuck like a cat///.  She quieted her voices and listened to the way Chloe's green eyes moved as she talked.  She felt her breathe between sips of her coffee and watched to curl of her tongue as it formed words.  She wondered absently if William was in love with her.
+	"The truth is that William and I work for a man named Cary, we make collages and sound loops which he needs when he goes um travelling."
+	"I knew a man named Cary," Maya was thinking aloud and instantly regretted it, but Chloe only smiled.  At first it was warm and friendly but then a consumptive almost animal like fire began to burn behind her eyes or maybe it was Maya's own desires projected outward into Chloe's eyes.
+	"How would you like to come up to Boston and lick my pussy for a few days?"
+	She said it with such feline grace that it sounded as if she giving someone directions to a restaurant, Maya came back: "Are you going to lick mine?"
+	"I'm going to fuck you like you've never been fucked, so you'll stay fucked."
+
+We forget that sacred, 
+respectful sex may not look 
+like heterosexual monogamy, 
+and we forget that human 
+beings are sexual every 
+moment of their lives.  
+-Sallie Tisdale	
+
+	It reminds me of a place i used to live where in dark corners i watched a beautiful brunette and fell deeply in love with her, though we never spoke.  I watched her like writer would smug certitude that i knew the real her better than she knew herself.  I sat alone in that dark corner night after night waiting and watching.  If you listen in silence the Buddhists say, you hear much more.  Silence means no thought no word no picture, if you want to know what someone is saying stop listening to the syntax and watch how they say it.  You only do that if you are internally quiet and listening, which involves the eyes as much as the ears.
+	i like to listen to Chloe watch her lips curl and retracted and form out words thoughts ideas smiles frowns all the expressions of human emotions which words are not needed for.  Words are abstracted ideas intellectual masturbation, bodddiiiiyyy language is here-now happening, really occurring, Maya Maya Maya what are you doing you sound like you're in love with the girl... I am but I'm not; I'm not because being in love turns strange gears in my head and heart and soul and makes me change to better reflect upon the image i am so desperate to duplicate assimilate and make myself into.  My love is possessive lays inroads across lives bringing separate things together i can never again tell someone i am in love with them because they always expect it to last forever.  i hurt them when i leave and i never mean to i still love them i just have to leave.
+	Sex.  the feel of her nipple rubbing coarsely against mine the softness of mashed breasts stuck together kissing chasing her tongue around her mouth.  there is a reason writers are afraid of sex and hate trying to write it, they don't have words for it.  They think its something that is happening, a thing that exists apart from ourselves, but it is not.  It is in us —we are sex.  Sex is seeping from our pores and we hate it, we deny it.  I want to celebrate it, I want to have a mad passionate orgy with the entire world.  I want men I want Women i want plants I want animals, all life in one orgiastic embrace like Kali and Vishnu; mouths locked on mouths, on breasts, on cocks, on cunts, cocks in cunts, in asses, between breasts, tongues licking necks, licking nipples, licking asses, fingers probing flesh, FLESH FLEsh FLesh searing and popping with electrostatic sexual energy.  Is that so much to ask?  Wouldn't you like it?  Are you scared because you know you would and it might turn the world upside down?  
+	How to suck seed:  I like sucking on a man's cock —my mother would call me a whore.  I like cock, the flesh there is much softer than anywhere else on a man's bodies, the cock is the closest a man gets to being a woman.  It amazes me that women don't enjoy sucking cock more if only for that reason, of course that's not all i like about it.  I like watching them squirm, making them twitch; i like looking in their eyes as my mouth slides down the shaft giving them that fuck me look that men spend most of there lives trying to coax out of women.  Men are really quiet simple like that, look at them in the right way, beg for the right things (like pllleeeease ppllleeeease fuck me harder or yes cum all over my face...) and they will do anything you want.  They will still try to front their character armor, try to treat you like an idiot try to prove themselves superior, but I never begrudge them that, if i were as dumb as a man and my ego were that defenseless I'd spend most of my waking hours trying to protect it too.  
+	Maybe i should writing a guidebook for women called How To Suck Cock.  I should definite reeducate them on the come part, many women think men like to come in your mouth, this is not true.  Men want you to get messy, they want come in your mouth on your face on your breasts every where, its like they're marking their territory.  You have to act like you like it too, and eventually you will...eventually you will find you are turned on by things much more perverted then you originally thought possible.  You will find yourself not just wanting to suck cock but to rub your face all over it, devour his balls with you tongue making him twitch and begging for him to fuck your face.  You will discover as I have that sex is not good until you are covered in sweat and cum and have violated all the taboos and laws of the country.  You will also find that this will scare the living shit out of most men who run away when you walk in a room in stiletto skin tight rubber boots up to your cunt and nipple clamps with a chain, and say get on your knees and lick my asshole.  They're good at dishing out perversion and degrading you but most can't take it when its your perversion and you degrading them.  that is why i prefer bisexual women, women who know that sex is everywhere inside you and as the song says the last taboo was shattered by her tongue one night.
+	I think sex with women is more exciting, and easier than sex with men.  I know women's bodies, they are my own body.  By the nature of things having sex with women is more like masturbating, there is no coming to terms with the other.  There is no Other.  And usually women are adventurous than with men.  This is vague and meaningless and horribly analytical,why am i writing this?  No one will ever see it.  Because i am horny and Chloe is at the store and William meeting some guy named Sil.  William says he's cute.  It would be really odd an unfathomable snychronistity if the Cary that they know is the same one i know...i'm tired of writing.  i need coffee.
+
+
+"To a person over 35 or 40 
+the word "drug" means one 
+of two things: doctor-disease 
+or dope-fiend-crime.  Nothing you 
+can say to a person who has this 
+neurological fix on the on the word 
+drug is going to change their mind."
+-Dr Timothy Leary
+	
+
+	Sitting at the twenty four hour diner and I wonder if I'm lost again.  I wonder if i made some horrible mistake.  I wonder if i should have been baptized?  As if being born were a sin?  What kind of fucked up belief is that?  Welcome to hell, i guess.  I want you to be naked always, i want you to be wild like a panther pacing the jungle.  New York.  timepiece.  Dark bruises hanging low on bloody red brick world and the college kids smile absently at each other still snug in surrogate wombs.  Eastern money all sick with age, death and decay do you even remember why you got rich or was it a hand out? I was brought here by money wanting for it that is.  would you like to know what its like to not have it would you would you can you imagine.  Money is a heavy hand; heavy when you got it heavier when you don't.  And you dare to tell me what i ought to do what rules i ought to follow do you hear me labelling up your ugly world do you want to know what i think?  Of course not you just hold your head up high hide behind your religions, your morals, your laws, your gods, your ceremonies, your traditions, your truth.  You want to know what i think?  Of course not.  But you're going to one day I am going to be heard.  I will write you a letter and you will hear it in your dreamsleep and it will seep into you like a virus and start to duplicate itself cell by cell until i break you down, pull out your stubborn beliefs and watch them in the pure light.  And you will see your ugliness for what it is.  And you will see that this is not the peacelove you can market and absorb and redirect like the 1960's.  You will see it in the white light of nova ovens.  It's William Burroughs at your doorstep with Hassan and me, and we will take back your ugliness and show it to all the galaxy and you will be afraid of yourself you will run from yourself and you will go nowhere.
+	Dear Boards, Syndicates and Cartels or the earth Jesse Helms and cold blooded mindless religioso idiots of all history, Newt Gingrich and all corrupt power mongers selling the souls that are not yours and never will be yours, Banking families of the earth locking down lives that are not yours and never will be yours; hear me now.  What have you that i do not have what have i that you need why are you vampiring off bodies that are not yours to use?  Where do you base your authority from in what powerless jungles do you hide?  What wet swamps do your bellies stink of knees are muddied with could you find no way into the Quarter but this in your atom splitters in your denial religions you just couldn't keep the lid down because your filth games do not pull in this here.  We are here and we are here to stay and you will hear it you will feel it you will taste it but not until we tell you sill you know it because your books do not have the puzzle do not have the key do not know what you are looking for.  And in those moments of confusion we will tear you to shreads gnawing like demons, preying on your flesh, throwing your ripped entrails on the subway tracks and watching you grind into nothing.  Not a thing.  i am not a thing.
+	Acrid caffeine burned stomach linings peeling off the damn thing girl in charge rages —i need supplies, nutrients the front line is taking heavy casualties.  Stop into a french bistro with awnings covered like the french flag.  Ham and cheese under a better name.  Up the street there is William he's with another man can't make out if he's cute or not.  Quicken pace.  Man is getting into a BMW smiling very cute looks familiar.	
+	A Window in the back of the BMW rolled down and out popped Cary's smiling face.  "Maya I heard you were in the east....would you like to come to the western lands?"
+	"This is so odd," she smiled back at him.  She shifted her hips and leaned down to the window giving Cary a kiss on the cheek.  "I dunno, is Mr.  Burroughs going to be there...?"
+	"Of course."
+	"Well i don't have any money so i don't think i can go..."
+	"If you don't think you can go then you can't go, but i have something for you anyway, actually its for all of you," he gestured at William and smiled at Chloe as she came running from up the street.  He handed an envelope to Maya.  sorry i can't talk we've got to be in Costa Rica by morning..." His voice was overwhelmed by the passing of a truck.  Maya kissed him again and ran around to the drivers door and tapped on the window as Cary said hello/goodbye to Chloe.
+	"I didn't get your name?" She said as the window lowered enough to show a pair of muddy green eyes.
+	"Sil,"  he said rolling the window the rest of the way down.  His lips didn't seem to move and there was no expression on his face, but behind the eyes Maya saw the intensity of something enormous burning.  She was instantly obsessed.
+	"I'm Maya,"  she held out her hand which he clasped and kissed gently.
+	"Its nice to meet you Maya.  Have a nice stay."  the car started up and Sil smiled at her for a brief second before rolling up the black tinted window and heading down the street.  Maya stood there for a minute watching the car disappear into Harvard Square.  You to she thought blankly.  Chloe and William were holding the door for her, she floated upstairs with them.
+	"What's in the envelope?"  William seemed anxious to Maya as she flopped down on the couch."
+	"lets see..." It was a rather large envelope and she tore it apart like a birthday present.  Three passports and three airline tickets spilled out onto the floor.  They gathered them up and realized that they needed to be at the airport in two hours.  
+	"Cary's sending us to the flotilla..."  William seemed amazed.
+	"The what?"
+	Maya was not paying attention she was staring at the ten one thousand dollar bills taped to the inside of her passport.  She noticed that it was her picture but not her name.  She also noticed that Chloe and William did not have money in their passports.  Exchange in Madrid. ...better rates read the note.
+
+	
+Why do today what you did yesterday 
+and can do tomorrow anyway?
+-Maya Stevens from A Game-Circuit Guidebook
+
+	Gliding down out of those Elysian fields you often feel tired lonely and a little bit afraid that if death is not the end then what the hell really is going on around here????  Sometimes looking into and through the eyes of someone you don't even know you get the tragic silence of empty timespace tugging at those mindstrings that hide until the lonely hour of the morning when the I sees itself in the mirror, and tries to reconcile the emotions of so many different state of mind —bring the contradictions of emotion into focus— only to reveal them to be more juxtaposed than you had originally imagined.  What happens to the sad eyed boys you loved, but never spoke to, lusted after but never kissed warm lips, never felt, salty tequila necks never licked in tropical humid splendor.  What becomes of the non-events those give lifes its tragic beauty?  It lends poets' enthusiasm, hearing centuries of events that failed to undergo the formality of actually occurring.
+	Is this occurred, is this happening, are you reaching me or am i reaching you and what is the difference.?  What is the difference between an observer created universe existing -only for the individual- and a set  of1x1000000000000000000000000000000000
+000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 multiverses all existing simultaneously?  Why has everyone lost their wild-eyed enthusiasm for life?  Why was i born in this strange cynical decade?  What will you do when the whole thing goes up?  Change tunnels involuntarily that's what you'll do; maybe you should start practicing?  Do you ever feel hungry tireduglyhungry?  Do you ever feel your fingers dancing on skin that isn't there?  Slow motion glow of torpid rhythms, dancing  like words —first there is skin, then there is no skin, then there is.  Undulations felt time-ripple like, something Dali would approve of.  From right up under torrid kisses a yearning gripping phantasmal emotion claws at you like rust.  digging digging.    Have you ever seen hungry eyes?  gripped and held them for an instant that transcended TimeSpaceMind points and fell together in grace, like Dante's vision standing on its ear, staring you readydareugly in the face?  Don't you want to go?  don't you ever want to let go for a second?  to see the approval oblivion lugs up behind it?  Can you feel it?  Its in foreign cities, lands you've only dreamed of.  Have you ever wandered what it was exactly that makes the milk of paradise, what did Coolidge see?  Have you ever wanted the elixir she carries in that elliptic second?  Have you ever hungered?  She's hungry yearning tie the tiger to a stick.  That thing is going to eat your flesh in horrors you never thought could be true.  Don't you want to go?  We are here.  Don't you want to go?
+	It was a couple of thousand desert miles and a few seasons ago and you were walking fast to catch a train you'd already missed.  And a billboard ad that wasn't new two years ago, spent like a sperm poodle condom.  You're just sitting in the red vinyl cushions at an all night diner spinning a few tracks on the jukebox, burying concrete
+highway traces of noise, headlights dragging past.  Calling up visions of lost highways, dredged out images blurred together; passing seasons traced out in the arks of headlights carved through concrete, and you pull to the side of the road recollecting missed side streets, passed exits and you haven't slept a moment since Taos years ago.  Lying down in the back seat, A.M. only radio, and you're playing along on a dimestore guitar you got this past week for ten bucks in Las Crusas, New Mexico, traded it for dinner from a man who already heard music in the season's knew the uglysimpletruth and had no need to catch what you had missed.  You drowned it out with desert miles spent walking on asphalt.  Mescaline, Morphine and you tried to catch it, photographfreezeframed for an eternity's preservation, just as a moment slid by.  Memory is seared to film.  Another missed exit on desert highways, the dust turned to miles and passed you out on the two lane, rickety and prone to ruin in the seasons when you passed through; too tired not to stop at an all night diner for a Kerouac cherry pie on the plastic stools.  Diner red, hard formica counters raised out of cold concrete floors —scuffed from the worn heels of trucker boots.  Watch them treading season after season across the threshold and into the red glow just to rest wearied eyes and maybe spin a few tracks from days past. The waitress departs without a care for the miles missed and you're writing up a catalog of things to seedothink.  Fresh customers arriving out of the chilled Kentucky mist.
+	Sad desert of two days driving slams you back down in the booth, speakers ease out the rhythm of headlights blearing past and the Las Crusas guitar reflects a Picasso shape on the concrete of the parking lot.  Thee mist interrupting the even light just
+to play proud chords of songs unwritten to mark the passing seasons.  Missed out of haste, sown into concrete known only in diner light whose reflection is just fragmented enough with the past to see all the seasons. 
+	Have you ever been hungry?
+	
+	Maya had never been to Europe or the Middle East nor had she been in a floating geodesic dome before.  The plane touched down at midnight in Madrid.  The three travellers were met at the airport by a limo; maya looked at the sleek black car and suddenly had a change of heart.  She told them she would catch up in the next few days, reasoning that Cary would not have given her ten thousand dollars if he expected her to go straight to the flotilla.  
+	From the airport Maya got a cab and attempted to lose herself in the night of Madrid.  She walked in the crowded streets alone looking for a club or a bar in which she could pass the night.  They buildings were white and the streets narrow she walked aimlessly for a while studying the shops and houses wondering what it was like to live somewhere that people had been living for nearly fifteen hundred years.  The heavy fiction of history seemed to hang like vaporous lead fog on the streets.  When Usincer's travel abroad they are forced to confront the fact that a two hundred year history is but a blip.  Maya had never been on a street that was thousand years old in fact the one she was on now had been repaved in 1986, but this did not enter into her thoughts she was thinking that at least some street had been here for a thousand years.  Eventually she came to a series of side-streets and alleys that overflowed with bars,cafe's and clubs; drunken Europeans spill out onto the streets and she felt drunken Spanish eyes leering at her.  Spanish: Senorita! Come here, you need someone?  I'll take care of you eh?  We dance make love.  Maya ducked in bar without acknowledging them  she ordered scotch  and sat at the bar for a while listening to the swirling sounds of Spanish and French.  She could translate snippets here and there: fuck the government! chinga this and chinga that.  Maya hadn't been around real Spanish before, but she recognized traces of bastardized Mexican cuss words and slang.  The bar was packed and hot the walls were red and Maya felt the stench of centuries of people with poor bathing habits.  Usincer's are a clean obsessed people Maya thought as she finished her scotch and headed toward the door.She went to akl;sdjf lkj, the adfdkjf, and then to a club with the promising name of 69.  It was here that she ran into a boisterously drunk American who claimed he was a doctor.  
+	Waiben was leaving when Maya arrived, but the presence of a beautiful white girl convinced him to stay.  She noticed him primarily because he was the only white person in the club which reminded Maya that she too was white and that she too probably stuck out every bit as much in this sea of olive-brown faces.  But, Maya paid him little mind and settled herself at the bar ordering another scotch.  She got her drink and turned around to see Dr. Waiben standing. leaning against a pole and staring at her.  She felt an ill vibe about his person and turned back around to the bar, but he came up and leaned in next to her ear.  "Are you from Usinc?"
+	She did not turn to look at him and continued to roll her scotch back and forth on the bar shuffling it between her hands like an ice puck.  
+	"Excuse me miss are you from Usinc?"
+	"Je Ne Sais Pas?" she smiled and shook her head.
+	Waiben was quite drunk and he started to ask again only louder like people do when the realize that someone doesn't understand them as if they will when you say it at twice the volume.  He caught himself and simply smiled.  He stared at her in a way she recognized: hungry.  She could tell that deep down he would like to deposit some or preferably all of his sperm on her, Maya knew that was men's first thought when they saw her or any woman for that matter, and Maya was well aware of her biological power over men.  She let her spaghetti strap slide down her shoulder so that he could see the top of her breast better.  His eyes followed it and she wiggled in her stool and leaned forward to get a napkin, playing him like a fiddle.  He just kept staring at her finally her turned and mumbled under his breath and into his drink "Sleep with me you stupid french cunt." 	But loud enough that Maya caught it.  She turned looked him dead in the eyes and said: "If I went to bed with you you won't live through the experience...insecure pencil dicked Usinc businessmen have never turned me on anyway."
+	He stared at her trying to absorb the impact and looking like a Yugo that's been hit by a cement truck.  Maya smiled and stared back, reading him.  He was a curious man; medium build and of nondescript stature, the kind of person who passes without notice on a crowded Usinc street.  Perfectly nondescript and it gave her the creeps, Maya knew that its the ones that you don't notice that you have to watch out for.  
+	"Actually I'm a doctor," he said lamely.
+	"That's the best you can do?" she smiled again.  "What was your name?"
+	"Dr. Waiben."
+	"Well Dr. Waiben it was nice to meet you," she held out her hand and he shook it.  Maya sucked down the rest of her drink and set it on the bar.  "Would you like another drink?" she could tell Waiben thought this was his big chance, men like to think that if they give you something it means you will give them something in return.  They liked that logic so much they built an entire society based on it.  Maya hated the barter system and never sold her conversation for drinks.  She smiled an artificial ironic smile and said yes waited until he turned to get the bartenders attention and then ducked out the door and into the Spanish night.  She hit  he street running and laughing outloud much to the amusement of two men kissing in darkened doorway.  she answered them with catcalls and a whoop chinga me el nino....  for the first time she felt free and continued running down the Madrid street paying no attention to where she was going.  Eventually she found a hotel and got a room.
+	The next day Maya bought a laptop computer and after much haggling and showing of money got the man at the store to give her a number of another man that claimed he could get her modem that could dial off of payphones.  she got a bus ticket to Marabella in the south of Spain which her pocketguide to Spain said was where all the rich and famous movie star types hang out.  This, she reasoned, is usually where all the fun stuff goes on —in the houses of the rich and richer.  The bus ticket was third class which Maya always travelled so that she could see the countryside and be able to stop frequented to smoke joints or get something to eat.  She typed on the bus not worrying about the eyesore nature of a beautiful Usinc woman wearing jeans and a tank top listening to headphones and typing on a laptop on a nineteen seventies bus full of working class Spanish citizens lumber over the hills.  From a payphone in aklsdjf kadjf she emailed Cary a message on how to go about getting a boat and shared a hash cigarette with a boy that looked about fifteen and spoke no Usinc.  he approached her smoking form shyly and asked something in Spanish which Maya took to mean he wanted her cigarette, she handed it too him and he puffed on it and smiled at her after a thoughtful pause, "lkasdjf?" She took it to mean hash she smiled si.  he rambled for sometime in Spanish gesturing occasionally toward the town.  Maya caught some of it it seemed like he was offering her something food perhaps, but she declined No grasias and bid him farewell getting back on the bus.  It took the better part of the day and into the night to get to Marabella.  Maya was tired and went straight to the first hotel and crashed out for the night.
+	She woke up the next morning and wired herself up to the internet expecting directions to a boat of some sort.  Instead there was a map of Marabella with a cafe highlighted and a note below it that read see you here at eleven.  Maya looked at the clock it was already ten thirty she threw on her clothes and ran to catch a cab.  the drive wound through the town and Maya saw the Mediterranean for the first time.  The town reminded her of New Orleans must have looked a hundred years ago whitewash buildings and wrought iron railings.  New Orleans if it had been on a hill.  The cab dove down the hill and into waterfront plaza littered with Orange Trees and sidewalk vendors.  Lovely,  Maya murmured in an British accent, imagining some snotty old British bitch delighting in the mock authenticity of Marabella isn't it just lovely....
+	Cary was sitting at table in front of cafe klajdklf eating eggs.  he got up and gave Maya a hug, offering her a seat.
+	"I see you decided to take advantage of the opportunity to travel...you don't have guilt circuit cut yet though or you would have just said hey can you send a boat for me...
+	I didn't want to put you out...'
+	"No one ever puts me out if i want to do something that i am able to do i do it, if i don't i don't.  I find this greatly simplifies what most people call domestic life and leaves me free to do more interesting things: the why's how's and whatfor's.... He smiled, "now for the funny part " and Maya got the lecture that Sil had gotten many years earlier.
+
+
+
+Within the province of the mind, What I believe 
+to be true is true or becomes true, within the limits 
+to be found experientially and experimentally.  
+These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. 
+ —Dr John C Lilly from The Center of the Cyclone
+	
+October 23,1999	Two weeks later and i feel a little better —less motion sickness.  Went into something like a trance state last night with the sensory depravation chamber and the mushrooms.  Cary kept asking me what i saw when i couldn't really make out anything that was describable he gave me a book how to build maps in hyperspace or something of that nature.  Mostly i felt cold as if i were on a wind blown desert mesa or something to that effect.  Sense of dread and anticipation like you feel when starting a trip that you know will not be easy, but i never went anywhere.  Sat around in the bar last night with Chloe and Cary talking about the potential effects of being able to receive all  the information in a ten dimensional lattice work universe such as ours.  The question being: would computers be capable of translating dimensions the we don't normally have ocular reference points in?  In other words Cary was arguing that if implanting new programs in the human mind is through chemical means does that mean that addition things could be seen if chemical were cross referenced (so to speak) with digitally enhanced ocular images?  Light conversation around here.  That's the thing i can't get over is that there are so much information stored here in computers in nanocreatures and human nervous systems its absolutely incredible.  And Cary continues to baffle me in way that no one ever has before without me wanting to sleep with them.  Not that i haven't had sex with him, he took me through a wide array of tantric and other sex magic traditions the other day and i came so hard i saw other universes the satori things eastern mystics are always raving about.  But it wasn't erotic it was just sex.  Really damn good sex.  Sometimes i think Cary has cracked the code and knows things the rest of us aren't going to know until after we die and sometimes i think he's just as clueless as the rest of us he just happens to be the guy with the money.  I asked him about that this morning and he looked at me for really long time like i was insane.  He got that very thoughtful look on his face like i can tell when he finally hits at emotion; he said just because you're dead doesn't mean you stop programming your consciousness.  You just don't do it with your body anymore.  I take that to mean that he is a trickster like the rest of the religious people of the world, he just tricks me into thinking about things i find enjoyable where as David Koresh did not.
+	Still haven't met Sil Hawkard again and no one seems to know where he is or when of even if he is coming back.  I just remember the piercing green eyes that sparkled and laughed while the face did nothing.  Apparently i am not alone in obsessing over his eyes everyone here says that one of the things they notice about him is that her never looks directly into their eyes.  When he talks he seems miles away that's what William said when i asked him about him on the plane.  But everyone seems to like him or at least respect him even if they don't understand.  I heard a story the second day i was here that he had vanished and that not even Cary knew where he was.  Apparently he lived here for about four years leaving to conduct some experiments in south America but always going back here never said mush just watched.  Some days he just sat in the bar and smoked hash and stared at the walls other days he would just read magazines or watch and laugh as people went about their jobs.  they said they never felt that he was laughing at them rather that he laughed because he liked the way he felt when he was laughing.  I asked Cary about it that and he just started laughing.  He gave me a book that Hawkard wrote though, something called the rubber octopus I read most of it in a day.  Very confusing jumbled sort of book that felt more like an interpersonal wrestling match between the author and the story then it did a novel.  I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't and characters would appear without explanation and disappear again and he kept reminding the reader that they are reading a book and that he is in there mind.  I am writing a new program in your mind sentences would start and then he would go on to say thinks like UFO's are real i saw one in August 4 2954 on a dirt road in Oklahoma.  It was still dark just an hour before sunrise i was driving a '69 Ford truck, the sky was black and the only thing i could see was the road in front of me and then there was a flash and two figures approached me and offered me pancakes and then got back into their spaceship and took off again.  then the text would digress into language experiments with semantics and Linguistics.  It gives you the feeling that the author is brilliant, but doesn't care if you follow him or not he just wants you to have a good time.  And the sex scenes...if he can actually have sex as well as he writes it... he needs to come back here so I can test that theory.
+
+
+November 19, 1999	I flew with Cary to Paris today to have some more tests done on his brain to see if he indeed has a tumor.  He still hasn't mentioned anything to anyone yet, he doesn't seem to be bothered by it, but i cried all night last night.
+
+November 23, 1999	Cary is going to die.  the doctors give him two months tops.  I flew back alone to the Flotilla he said there were some things he needed to do, but that he would come to have a bon Voyage party.  He seemed genuinely excited about death, maybe he is in denial.
+
+November 29. 1999	Cable received on the antique telegraph machine in Cary's office read:
+	A thousand apologies for not being able to return.stop.I leave all of you with sufficient funds to continue the facilities into the near future.stop.shutting down costa rica facility all persons there return to Flotilla if it strikes your fancy.stop.smile.stop.i died yesterday and sil is dictating this to the woman at the telegraph office.stop.remember if death is not the end then what the hell is really going on around here.stop.
+
+STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP.STOP
+21717 words  58 pages
diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/chapter one.txt b/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/chapter one.txt
new file mode 100644
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+++ b/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/chapter one.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,419 @@
+in the beginning 
+there was the word	
+
+
+Sil Hawkard always wanted to be rich, filthy fucking rich, because rich people lie around in opium filled rooms and snap there fingers for food and sex and drugs and what else is there in life really?  Fortunately for Sil he is filthy fucking rich and lying around in his own little palace in Mandalay exploring the outer perimeters of sanity by the ingestion of galvanized petroleum vapors.  He is an oil man, though he didn’t start that way.  He sucks on the thin plastic tube, lighting the huca with a bic lighter bearing the insignia of a crucified christ with crown of thorns.  Sil Hawkard notes the christ's crown and thinks to himself  -this was not an oil man.  Fucking Arabs have the greatest drug on the earth and they won't share it.  So Sil had applied what was now called the Kellinger method in the industry; that poor fucker Kellinger had no idea...  
+	Halfway around the world  and twenty years before the phone rings; your ears implode at the sound and you look up to the wall where a phone hangs; reaching up with a tendril-like arm and tentatively snaking its receiver to the ear, a voice from far away says "Dr. Kellinger?" Speaking.  "I have found the glitch in your prototype Eater and fixed it.  It to be an invaluable help in our trade and I have decided that since I have modified it to an extent which you did not anticipate, that it is by all rights my idea.  Do you hear that scratching at your door?  By altering the genetic coding of the beast I realized that many different applications become available to the user, the one on your door step is called  Kellingereater prototype number 1.  Goodbye." 
+	The door blows apart into fragments of wood sticking in your wrist and ankles, but this is no more than a passing sensation for the ferocious nature of the Kellingereater is that they have twenty three stomachs each of which must be constantly fed.  It rips into you like a butcher chopping meat, systematically picking out vital organs and stuffing them into organized pouches attached to its stomach as its masters had trained it.  It sucks the remaining scraps of quivering flesh into its mouth, rises on its hind legs and runs homeward...
+	Sil lapses back onto a burgandy velvet couch, people would do anything to avoid being fed to the eaters.  Anything.  Like work until they died of natural causes, sell their daughter for prices way below the market value,  sacrifice themselves for their children; Sil takes another deep inhalation of petroleum smoke and contemplates the difference between luck and organized coincidence.  For instance he really knew nothing about and had no hand in creating eaters and yet they were essentially his key to wealth.  Getting rich is easy in the underworld, staying rich is hard, but if your enemies don't know you exist then there is no one to harm you.  hence the end that befell Kellinger who by all rights if his luck had been better, should be sitting on this red velvet couch.  Petroleum it was generally believed was made into smokable drug, first by the arabs looking for some potential use for the waste products given off in the refinement process, but this was not strictly true.  In fact petroleum was a rather inacurrate name for what Sil and a good percentage of the world was smoking these days.
+	Sil hits the huca again and feels his face going numb his head slumps down until his chin is nearly on his chest he snaps his fingers twice.  Two Arab boys appear and began to dance crooked, spinning patterns devised over centuries of hypnotic oppression which the cockroaches of skid row motels had only recently begun to learn.  Oppression is a drug, it acts equally, though differently, on the oppressed and the oppressor alike.  All things must remain at equilibrium or fall into decay, this is a law of physics, and it is true of all systems mathematical --however if one considers spiritual and emotional systems one must take into account negative entropy
+	The crooked dance is hypnotic to watch and all consuming to perform.  In India they teach it to snakes, and in the sewers of America cockroaches feasting on the radioactive waste have begun to learn it on their own.  Like terrible creatures from a Kafkian nightmare they sit quitely underground, as we go about our lives, learning the dance passing it on to their children and teaching them how to use it as an evolutionary tool --for all systems are also trying to succeed one another.  One day a properly evolved cockroach will crawl out of a sewer drain just as the head of state is stepping to the podium to address the nation.   He will devour the president raw as the live camera crews feed man's downfall to a nation of viewers even as it happens.  The blood soaked 
+cameramen will never stop filming and the cockroach will scurry to the podium, strain himself to an upright position and address the nation...Behold I am.  He will dance and spin and all will be entranced.   Women will castrate men and men will bludgeon themselves to death with pickaxes until they are suitable for cockroach consumption and life will continue on much as it always has. The system is independent of its elements, humans are not necessary, cockroaches would uphold the system just as well.  Sil Hawkard’s mind is racing, horrible conspiracies are leaping at him from the walls like ostriches gone mad, heads palpating and seeking some soft cerebellum to penetrate.  The initial paranoia of the petroleum smoke is fading away and Sil falls into a profound haze of self absorption.   The boys continued to dance trance-like as the numbers explode at the edges of his vision.
+	Sil's story is a rather long and convoluted one and subject to enhancement on his own part, but this much is true:  At the age of twenty one Sil Hawkard discovered that while he vaguely enjoyed torturing the professors at Columbia university, most people in the United State are squares, and Sil, already an avowed anarchist was wearymaterialists whom he felt lacked the imagination and understand to really get it so to speak.  So he dropped out for a semester and bummed his way around the united states.  In the middle of the Utah desert one night in July he ingested a rather large quanity of psilosilum in the form of mushrooms.  His facination with with mind manipulation did not began with drugs though, it began much earlier in a high school biology class where he realized the simple truth that the brain is a continuously changing chemical reaction.  Thus if one wanted to escape the pattern of chemical reactions typical of human thought, one ought to change the chemistry of the brain itself.  Sil's mushroom experience was typical of innerspace voyages except for one thing, he bcame convince that ostriches held the secret to the universe and it was this discovery that led him to Africa.	                             
+		*		*		*		*		*
+	Discipline is an agent's greatest virtue, thinks Agent Tucker to himself as he draws a long and satisfying hit off the oxygen tube.  Behind him Doris Day and her Waxing Loquacious Lesbians play a sultry 60's motown number on a dimly lit stage, and the general atmosphere of 
+The Knight takes on a surreal quality.  A good bar is one where the possibilities remain endless regardless of the irrefutable realities.  Agent Tucker is well aware of the realities, but his mind is only now beginning to sense the infinite set of possibilities that comes with every new reality.  For instance when considering the overall picture of life and its universal quotient of suffering it is hard to feel pity for one’s own self.  There is not nearly enough pity in Tucker to cover even his immediate family.  He has no self pity, he considers self pity to be a symptom mental illness because it requires the ego to be divided into pitier and pitied.  He likes his ego together as one in harmony he is quite proud of this justification and it helps to ease his innate sense of self pity and focus his mind on work.  His work is the great work as a the masters would have called it.  He is a Agent of the State.  The State is not to be confused with the government as many of you would assume.  On the contrary the government is but an instrument of the State, the State is a separate entity whose ultimate identity is unknown even to Tucker; he is but an agent of it charged with ceasing the petroleum trade.  He has for months now been stalking the elusive Sil Hawkard, a man whose identity is also unknown to him, he realizes that Hawkard could well be in this very room right now planning Tucker's demise, the thought sends a cold shiver of fear down his spine and he cringes thinking again like a manta: discipline is an agent’s greatest virtue.  Agent Tucker takes another hit of the oxygen and notices the numbers exploding at the edges of his vision.  Exploding numbers are the smoker's worst fear.  Suddenly seized by the idea that Hawkard may be present, Agent Tucker nervously fingers his pistol and glances furtively around the bar.  He notes, but passes over one Sil Hawkard quietly sitting at the other end of the bar with a soda water in front of him.  Sil is also caressing his own gun and contemplating the effectiveness of the copeater he has tied in a van outside.  He watches as Agent Tucker gets up and moves toward the door Sil can see the fear in his eyes he knows that weakness has set into Tucker’s mind.  Sil reaches into his pocket and pushes the intercom button on a two way radio, he is thinking about a Keat's poem he hasn't seen since high school.  
+	So old the place was, I remember none
+	The like upon the earth: what I had seen
+	Of grey cathedrals, buttressed walls, rent towers,
+	The superannuations of sunk realms,
+	Or nature's rocks toiled hard in waves and winds,
+	Seemed but the faulture of decrepit things 
+	To that eternal doomed monument.
+	Outside in the back of the van, one of the Arab boys unchains the copeater and lets it out the back door.  Agent Tucker is opening the door to his own car with a sense of relief when he feels hot breath on his neck and a dull ache at the base of his spine, but this is fleeting and an instant later the copeater is sucking the remnants of flesh from a spinal chord, being careful not to damage the raw nerves as his masters taught him.
+	Hawkard is still inside the bar sipping quitely on his soda water, his phone rings, he pulls it out of his jacket and puts it to his ear...
+	"The Agent Tucker problem has been solved and the shipment will go through as planned."
+	"Thank you William, your services are invaluable to me, and I will wire the money first thing in the morning." Sil is smiling to himself visualizing the final horror as death met Agent Tucker.  Sil replaces the phone on its receiver and lights a cigarette.  
+	Sil hates cops....I fucking hate 'em.  I hate 'em. I hate 'em. I hate 'em.  I want to kill them all in a violent sea of time-released explosive donuts that when eaten mix with the stomach acids and explode in violent blueberrystrawberrylemon filled death.  Die pig die.  Imagine it, a million sworn upholders of THE LAW dead in an instant.  Think of the society we could have.  Think of the freedom, think of the beauty.  The sweet satisfaction of tearing down all the rotting pig gut filled doughnut shops in the nation.  No more sweaty palms.  "License and registration please."  Fuck you, never again.  Never again.  kill every cop you see --a populist revolt.  We don't need all these damn laws, the people are okay --we know how to look after ourselves.  The laws are the ones that fucked everything up the first place.  And who hurts the most people in this here little world?  The State.   A cattle car streaming over the tracks of life, slick with the blood of the people.  The train can't go up the hill because the tracks are too slippery with my guts your guts our guts.  
+Cut off by THE LAW, our heads impaled on the ends of the its tentacle-like arms as they strangling the last hold outs of resistance into pacified stupidity.  
+	The anger subsides as his mind rationalizes that at least one more is dead.  Sil picks up the phone again and dials a number the other end never rings instead a voice says: "hello?"
+	"May I speak to Captain Clark please?"
+	"I'm sorry he's not in.  May I take a message?"
+	"No. No message."  Sil hangs up the phone.  He walks to the back of the bar and flops his body onto the luxurious red velvet couch and is swept by an overwhelming sensation of peace; his mind begin to expand, and he feels the desire for more petroleum benzoates creep over his body.  It is his only weakness, the last and greatest of drugs.  The weakness of any great mind is that it is constantly aware of its greatness.  Consciousness is the death of us all, Sil thinks idly to himself as he lights a pipe under the table and discreetly sucks in a deep inhalation of petroleum benzoate.  The sticky sweet smoke that fills his lungs never fails to remind him of his first time and the decision it had forced upon him.  Anarchy is the only answer to all questions which begin with why?  whY?  wHY? WHY?  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.  In distant memory filtering strands of DNA locked deep in Sil's cerebral cortex a vibration begins, infinitely small at first but building slowly into his medulla and finally spring forth into the part of the brain referred to as consciousness.  The cameras rolled even as the lights were dimming.
+"BRING THE PRISONER FORWARD"
+	Unrolling a weighty and sterile looking scroll of antiseptically white paper a voice whose origin is masked by the size of the paper itself reads:
+	After making reviews of the past actions, thoughts, and attributed sentiments, it is the judgement of this committee, and therefore the judgment of the government it represents, that due to a general lack of ability to perceive the options open to the work potential of the drone in question in simple terms of an x or not-x negativism which would be most helpful in these situations and would consequently decrease expenditures and lower taxes for other individuals living in said dualism and therefore we hereby decree that all metaprogramming undertaken by the 
+individual without the consent and simultaneous approval of this committee and the government it represents to be criminal in intent, hostile in action, and punishable by prison and/or death upon conception.  Thank you.  You may go.
+	Sil Hawkard is dragged from the tribunal, hands tied in front of him and legs trailing uselessly behind.  His guards use his head to open the heavy wooden door and then they dump him unceremoniously onto the filthy street where a group of children are playing.  A monkey runs by, tugging its penis with one hand and slapping its bright red ass with the other .
+
+
+
+the doctor will
+see you now
+	Teletype for corsica the agent sent in for returns,  Home office denied request for reinforcements, all communication to be ceased henceforth.  Piss in the riddle thought the old man wheeling his chair back out to the porch, he picked up a mason jar of corn whiskey and laid the shotgun across his lap.
+	The languid afternoon floated in and up the beach from the Atlantic bringing photomantages of Mandalay and the Dutch East Indies spice trade boats, far off places he had heard of only as words and imagined smells.  Up the beach from the house were the beginnings of the rocky South Carolina shoreline teeming with crabs, sponges, sea anemones, and circle swooping gulls feeding on sand crabs exposed in the fluxuating waves.  It was low tide, in fact it was always low tide or at least it seemed that way to the old man.  He was partly right, the tide was lower than it had been a year before when a man by the name of Dr. Waiben began overseeing construction of a nuclear power plant burried two miles under ground to hide its heat signature for pesky government satelites. The plant whose only enterance was from the sea, was Sil Hawkard's 
+Eastern Atlantic Trans-genetic Eectro Radiation facility and it pumped sea water in like a vacuum cleaner to cool the core of the nuclear reactor.  Officially neither Waiben nor Sil's names were attached to the plant, and its proported purpose was the rather benign cause of recycling facility.  
+	The old man stood up on the porch and paced back and forth waiting...you understand the seriousness of the matter... obviously we would not expect an ordinary agent to do such a thing...your expertise in these fields...well frankly it's unparalleled..there is no other...These orders are coming straight from the top...your cooperation is non-negotiable...
+	
+	Sil had contracted with a building company to construct the domed facility under the rather vague heading of "recycling" which provided the guise to obtain the the necessary building permits and then after it was done, he had brought in his own oil drilling teams to dig down, but it was Waiben who had set up the nuclear capabilities.  Of course one can not build a nuclear reactor without some authority noticing but that was where the eaters had come in handy. 
+	Sil decided that nuclear research was of the utmost importance and that scientists and the new scientific inquisition were making it nearly impossible for the work to be accomplished.  Naturally Sil himself did not possess the scientific background necessary for research in these fields so he brought in the Doctor.
+	Two years earlier: Dr. Waiben, pathologist of the state, surveys a long horrifically clean hallway whose smoothness is interrupted only occasionally by the presence of polished sliver knobs indicating doorways.  There are no observation windows or any other windows within the rooms.  This is the housing quarter for the derelicts of society: prostitutes, schizophrenics, lobotomy patients, drug pushers, anarchists, communists, AIDS victims, the aberrations that society never needed nor found a use for, end up here, under the care of Dr. Waiben, pathologist of the state.  The good doctor has, for twenty odd years, been the caretaker of the derelicts, charged with restoring to them a level of functionality deemed necessary by society.  He is a man who puts the cogs back into the wheel.    
+	Waiben is an expert in mind manipulation through the use of psychoactive chemicals like the Ayahuasca mushroom which he has recently fed to one whore whom the stae had deemed a "revolutionary" for her accidental particpation in an protest against the siezure of private property. Her constant screaming had disturbed the other doctors, but Waiben found them soothing in the 
+same erotic kind of way that a soft candle lit room made him desperately want to masturbate.  Regardless, he hated departmental friction so he was treating her with his standard dosage of twenty ripe Ayahuasca caps blended into a protein shake.  The girl was a fighter and she knew she didn't want the shake; he had been forced to strap her down on a table and put a low voltage cattle prod in her cunt, and even then she had held out for eighteen seconds -it was a record for the floor.
+	He watched her on a TV monitor from the station at the end of the hall.  She alternated between foaming a bloody spit out of her mouth while her eyes bulged menacingly, to sitting apparently quite peacefully on the edge of the toilet seat.  Her vital stats were typical for the dosage he had given her.  He watched with the detached apathy of those who have seen the degradation of life for twenty odd years and never thought to bat an eye toward suffering.  He panned the room camera around and noted blood and little clumps of flesh lying on the floor near the bed, he zoomed in and momentary renewed his interests as he realized that she had been picking the burnt flesh out of her cunt.  His stomach turned, not at the idea of her suffering, but at the idea that she would leave it lying about on the floor like a common animal wallowing in its own shit.  He sighed and picked up a bic lighter with a picture of Uncle Sam on it, the typical picture was warped due to the surface curvature of the lighter giving Old Sam a peculiar evil bent that Waiben admired; he lit it and held it at the base of the petroleum pipe, taking a deep and satisfying drag.  
+	Petroleum was a recent habit for Waiben, he typically avoided addictive substances out of the repulsion he felt toward people who were dependant on anything.  But with petroleum he found a peaceful state of mind that he felt might make a person more susceptible to mind control.  However, in experimenting with the drug he had accidentally developed a habit.  But since it was basically harmless -as long as he stayed away from open flames- he made no effort to quit.    	
+
+	Doctor Waiben's petroleum habit did not go unnoticed by others in his department however, and as he was already unpopular for his rather unconventional methods and ideas, it wasn't long before a doctor by the name of Kellinger reported him to the state.  In the tumultous time that was the present the good doctor was asked to resign, but did not instead he called a press 
+conference which was sadly rather ill attended, he proceeded to get up infront off the local new cameras and lauch into an anti-government rant.  he was proply arrested for "divulging state secrets and brought to trial before a hastely put together tribunal of senators and judges.
+	One person who did happen to catch the broadcast was Sil Hawkard who by this time was already not a U.S, citizen but moved through the country in underground netwroks wike the weathermen that had been around for centuries and were activated whenever enough people felt they were needed.  Sil was in a New Orlean's safe house when he heard a voice from on the televison drift up to his room...the united states government is by its own legal deffinitions, insane and therefor incapable of being held accountable for its decisions....
+	Sil bolted upright in his bed and ran down stares in time to catch the name Waiben before the camera cut out.  Two days later Sil was arrested and thrown in prison in the cell next to Waiben.  Because Sil was not a United States citizen he was merely given a lecture and thrown bodily out of the building, but he made a deal with Waiben --research these subjects and I will get you out....
+	Doctor Waiben was something of an anomaly among scientists, he enjoyed being proved wrong because it saved him the trouble of having to prove anything right.  Waiben was one of the unique individuals of this century that understood that when you open one door its real value is not what is behind it but whether or not there are any more doors that revel themselves to the researcher.  He did not suffer from what Robert Wilson calls the New Inquisition.  This term is a catch phrase for those that try to make a belief system stand up with scientific legs, when in fact science is a tool or method of research, it is amoral.  Science does not believe anything because it is not a thing, it is a language.  I quote from Wilhelm Reich in Hell: There is also argument by Logic.  This can sometimes be combined with scientific experiments and if the two mesh we have a "fit" of theory with fact and scientists are delighted.  Pure Argument by Logic, however does not require this experimental back up and only demands that the conclusions by reached by the game-rules of an abstract symbol system. In our hypothetical case, some witness might inform congress: 
+All mome raths need to be distimmed; 
+All frammisgoshes are mome raths; therefore;
+all frammisgoshes need to be distimmed 
+	This so-called transitive property has led scientists into the same dead end alley of faith that religion finds itself in, I have faith in science the mad man rants on silver screens... Waiben, like Sil, did not have the semantic virus that infects the mass of mankind and Sil thought he might be just the man to cure the bug in the rest of the population.  He had built for Waiben four research facilities one in Mandalay which was devoted to semantic research and verbal anomalies, the biologic research facility in Las Vegas devoted to inter-organism research, a non-local mind-body facility in Buenos Aries, and the one in North Carolina for inter atomic structure research.  Sil had cured himself  with a rather haphazard method of self-experimentation with chemical, wavelength and various energy manipulation technics; Waiben on the other hand seemed to have never had the virus in the first place which was why Sil respected and fear him.  Sil had learned to step back --transmission deemed irrelevant given overwhelming incoming signal that sweeps across all frequencies, visual, audio, chemical, and physical.  There are five senses, sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, and only four signal sources; both smell and taste are chemical reactions with tissue that are then turned into different chemical reactions in the brain.  Thus the chemical input takes on a greater role suggesting perhaps that additional chemical experimentation is warranted.  Perhaps? perhaps not.  Quien Sabe?
+	
+
+
+
+	Sil however realized that until such time as the doors are open one might as well input positive frequencies which is why he found himself sitting on a porch in Mandalay, scotch whiskey and cocaine laid out like an offering before him, Chloe and maya were having sex on a couch behind him and he heard them orgasming as he sniffed a long line of coke and stood up to refill his glass....
+	
+The good doctor spent the better part of the day in an oxygen pure environment subjecting himself the recuperative acupuncture therapy his muscles were stimulated one by one with needle pricks while an orgone generated hummed steadily in the corners.  The pre-programmed alpha waves stimulated his bodies brain functions that were healing in nature and as the experiment went on electro graphs of brain activity mapped the centers stimulated and was compared with the frequency emitted until each frequency had its effects defined and clearly mapped.
+	Needless to say this was not effective in the field so the theory then presented itself how can you produce those effects through chemical instead of electrical stimuli.  Mapping the effects of chemical stimuli was naturally Waiben’s favorite part of the job.  Which is why he and Sil were such good friends --because chemical stimulation of the brain acts at different frequencies then orgone --ones that drove people insane in self destruction.  No one said the doors to the chapel perilous wouldn't be guarded.  addiction is the first to rear its ugly head the word is obliterated by the need.  need is driven by re action, the brain is taught to feel a certain sensation and because evolution was some effective the brain learns to cope and adjust to fit the new reality.  Thus it reacts to the stimuli by negating its effects and like the man in the floppy hat said it never got weird enough for me.
+	avoiding addiction is no easy task --you're up against over ten thousand years of terrestrial survival instincts that are no longer needed.  But shedding them is the damnedest thing like the Kimono dragons continually picking at the dead flesh that refuses to leave the beast that it was once a part of.     
+	Sil taps out cocaine on Chloe's nipples and drags his tongue in circles around sweeping powder and nipple into his mouth maya nose glides a velvet straw along the line on Chloe's stomach...
+
+
+
+         *                     *                  *                      *
+
+
+	"Pterodactyl winged birds flew overhead and the ground was squirming the way heat waves shimmer the horizon.  The Fort at San Juan rose distinctly to my left as if my subconscious were unabashed stealing its imagery from Salvador Dali.  I licked my fingers and and found them to be an interesting Teriyaki-lemon flavor quite unlike anything I had ever tasted before.  I looked at my shoes and realized I was standing on a giant skeleton key which I somehow knew was to the old Fort at San Juan.  I tried to pick it up and carry it to the door but it was much to heavy for one man.  In the distance I could see a bus approaching and felt as though I had been waiting for it the whole time.  It pulled up next to me and all my college friends were gesturing for me to come aboard.  The door opened."
+
+		Two years before on the west coast Maya Stevens is also hating the public, in her case however it is due to overexposure.  She is beginning to think that perhaps Skinner was right maybe there only are eight different kinds of people in the world.  She is sitting at a table chain smoking and waiting for William.  He told her to write whatever she saw if he was late, well fuck him, writing it down was too much effort it took all she had not to kill them all in some kind of horrifically violent frenzy of sexual energy.  Sex and violence, she smiled that's what these people need --sex and violence.  She feels the rage building.  Writing is therapeutic, that must be what William meant when he said write he meant get out the anger, get out the seething molten rage without going to jail.  Maya picks up the pen she had stolen from the bookstore and begins to record the people as they pass her on the street...Dr Waiben's plane is touching down two years away....
+	And the Galaxy girl walks down the street, boyfriend in tow, brown stomach seductively bare, midriff shirt.  They're meeting friends later at the gate hanging ten feet high down town.  She and her shirt with GALAXY GIRL written in glittering silver, would like to get drunk, high on little golden yellow pills, and float in the ecstasy of swirling music.  Who wouldn't?  Maya thinks 
+about Chloe and candles and wine and glittering golden sheets and the smell of incense and opium smoke floating across the room.   She raised her head and saw Chloe seated on silvery blue satin pillows.   Maya's arms shook slightly as her hand nervously ran up Chloe's stomach and circled her nipples.  Maya grabbed the chain that held Chloe's nipples and tugged causing her to gasped and press her breasts against her own.  She felt Chloe's hard nipples rubbing against her chest sending tremors down her spine and an aching contraction gripped her pussy.  Maya's pussy contracts in realtime and seers her back to the chair the table the extent of our known reality.  
+	She looks up as three marines drive smiling and pointed in a squarish red truck (marines de reguir) desperately hoping for some sweet young girl to cross the street coming back from the beach.  Stoplights are a woman’s worst nightmare.  Catcalls. Warbles, like sex crazed crows float up the street.  Victim.  Hoping for a smile of a acknowledgement to insincere flattery.  Them squirming in their truck.  Hey baby... Marines cruising for cunt.  Any cunt will do Maya thinks disgustedly.  If you want to jack off in something warm and wet why not just use the shower?  Why involve women at all?
+	And they keep walking by as she begins to wander if maybe William isn't going to show at all, but there is the aging club girl with bright cherry lips painted extra red by the contrast in her black leather jacket eyeing her.  Maya stares blankly back at her picturing the memories in her mind.  The girl sits slouched in a chair as if resigned that she will never make it back to New York.  CBGB’s.  Those were the good days.  Now its just slouched days in slouched chairs cigarette aimed skyward dreaming of darkness and the wild seductive wails of guitar (what was that blonde guys name?) the rhythmic pounding of the beat forcing its way into your chest, the throb, the guttural appeal of all things taboo and enticing.  Maya giggles at the stupidity of attributing anything so noble as nostalgia to someone who probably doesn't even know what CBGB’s was.  	The surfer and his girl stroll by, her breasts spilling out of the too small top, losing its Herculean battle to save the world from nudity.  They wander into the cafe for snacks, drinks, to gorge the thirst induced by the haughtless sun now carving the end of its tyrannical arc.  They order designer water and leave.
+	The tired shopkeeper is out smoking her obscenely thin cigarettes again (excuse me is there any tobacco in those?).  She smokes constantly pausing only to give a tired answer to the same tourists she has to stare at day after day.  An endless reminder that they, not her, are the ones enjoying life.  Too many of them day after day year after year look look looking never buying.  The Leather Connection doesn’t do a lot of business on hot spring days.  Nor is it the kinky sort of fetish shop you might hope for.  Not even any leather in the windows.  She moves her lips mumbling incoherences intelligible only to herself.   She lights another cigarette.  Get some thicker smokes, they’ll last longer Maya wants to shout.  But she can tell the woman's not the type to take unsolicited advise.  Besides Maya is shifting into first person and writing without pause now:
+	The sharp eyed Asian hawk sitting behind me closes her purse, pen safely secured inside.  She licks stamps and affixes them to postcards.  Notes for those at home.  “Jenny: LA is great -warm sunny.  I’m having a great time.  Remind me to tell you about this guy Bill I met the other day.  Take care of yourself.  Say hi to Tom for me.  Love....”
+	Families wander by looking for a nice place to eat.  The neon signs offer Mexican Italian Greek food, “but we need a children's menu.”  “Tommy’s only nine, he can’t eat a whole meal himself.”   “Do you think they could split a dinner, I’m not very hungry myself?” “You brought the credit card right?” “No, but I’ve still got some cash left over from breakfast this morning.  “Wasn’t that a charming little place?” “What was it called?”  “Lets go there again before we leave.”
+	The locals, the non-travelers, the doomed-forever-to-live-in-one-placers stream by in shinny cars coming home from work in THE BIG CITY.  Their flimsy soda can Japanese cars that look as if a good size bird could, with decent aim, crush the plastic colored roofs.   The locals drive with windows up and frowns turned down.  “Did I remember to e-mail that memo to Tony at the office in Chicago?  I wonder what sort of crap Diane cooked for dinner tonight?  She is the worst cook.  What happened to that tri-tip on Friday?  I wouldn’t have known what is was if I hadn’t bought it myself.   Dave and Linda smiled and said it was delicious the lying bastards. don’t encourage her she might actually believe she can cook.  Dave probably just wants to sleep with her.  That whore.  I wonder if she’s fooling around behind my back?  She never wants to have sex 
+anymore.  Its always the same routine.  Me still dripping from a shower her reading some book I crawl onto of her . ‘Not tonight honey I’m to tired.’  I wait till she’s fast a sleep and sneak down to the kitchen reach behind the fridge and pull out the nudie magazines and --off quietly to the bathroom.  I wonder what Diane would look like in tight leather, probably fat. She still hasn’t lost all the wait from the pregnancy.  God its been what like eighteen months Justin’s starting to walk for christsakes.  The light is green, fucking traffic.”  The typical suburbian woes.
+	Fog is settling in from the hills meeting up with banks rolling in from the sea, threatening the star’s view, tiny windows of the gods peeping in watching our silly games in continued amusement.  (“they keep doing it every night”)   Reminding me of San Francisco, the golden gate after sundown glowing like it were Apollos chariot itself.  Proudly beckoning the traveler with tale of endless wanderlust -out here the final frontier come swim discover secrets hidden from mankind...Come the sharks are hungry.  The mashing of teeth and bone the tearing of flesh.  	A bitter couple take a seat behind me. “out here in the great outdoors the largest smoking section in America.”  Amen brother.  Places out of reach of the spreading TYRANTS OF HEALTH.  Would you like extra grease on that steak?  Why, yes please.  Breakfast in Memphis, eggs pancakes toast slices of orange parsley, juice and a happy go lucky waiter offering free Sprite?  Why, yes please and keep it coming.  William could I borrow your lighter? Certainly.  Cigarettes coffee and more open road that's what I need.   Bad coffee, bad roads full of chuckholes and entire lanes wiped out in flood, and of course really good cigarettes, that's what I really need -enough of this damn city.
+	The eastern couple hesitates on the steps below he Indian she Asian.  Such a wonderfully raceless baby they could have.  We need a worldwide orgy to end racial differences.  End racism, fuck a foreigner!  And of course end culture, diversity and everything interesting about people.
+	I would not fuck you in Thailand/ I would not fuck you in a plane over Japan.  One of Dr. Suess’ lesser known couplets.  
+	Maya puts down her pen and lights another cigarette.  She contemplates that effectiveness of writing as a release of anger, it doesn't work, she is thinking --now I just know why I want to 
+kill them.  She leaves the table and jumps on the bus headed into the city.  I'll call Chloe she thinks.  The sun is setting and several miles out at sea a trident Nuclear submarine is preforming manoeuvres in preparation for a war that most people don't believe will really happen.  Maya knows nothing about the submarine, nothing about the eaters, nothing about petroleum, nothing about dancing cockroaches, and nothing about a man who goes by the name of Dr. Waiben.
+
+		*		*		*		*		*
+	
+	"I find myself surrounded on all sides.  Everyone these days is completely obsessed with The Bizarre.  So much so that nothing really is The Bizarre anymore.  Yuppies ride Harleys and frequent bondage parlors on the weekends while pulling in double incomes of 150K during the week scurrying from house to latte to work to the onceaweekmatrimonialassfucking.  This is not bizarre this is vaudevillian comedy gone real life.
+	You need bizarre, truly bizarre.  You need circus freaks castrating themselves on the street corners and pimps shooting heroin in there balls while screaming whores accost their long dead mothers in hotel rooms cockroach won’t set foot in while lawyers sit on the roof television antenna protruding from there limbs as policemen ritualistically torture themselves gouging out there own eyeballs to avoid the scene below them.
+	<<<We the people who govern you the people we rule do with heavy hearts sanctimoniously declare...>>>>
+	Sil Hawkard is lighting the petroleum filled huca once again he thinks of the pastpresentfuture as a continually unfolding singularity which can be viewed from points within time or from Nuit outside of the system.  He lifts the phone to his ear and dials William to see about the numbers...
+	William's phone is ringing half way around the world in a slum neighbor hood in Los Angeles California, but Maya is too tired to get it and Sil leaves a voice mail message thus missing his first contact with the Queen of Numbers.
+	"The bus stopped and I got on board the driver was a stick figure that I had drawn in the fourth grade with his head between his legs and his balls on top of his spine.  We took off across a dry lake bed leaving the fort at Old San Juan in the haze of desert road dust.  It was going fast for bus so fast I remember becoming alarmed and thinking that we were in danger of bending the SpaceTime perhaps more sharply than I was accustomed to.  True to my fears or perhaps as a result of them a balloon in the shape of Einstein's head became to approach from the distance until it gently floated through the window and attached itself to the head of a seagull and began squacking about approach velocities or viscosities and other nonsense I didn't understand, but the kid next to me started feeding it alka seltzers and William Tell began to chase it around screaming seagulls! seagulls!  Einstein appeared quite disturbed by the process and began to vomit out great multicolored spears of glass that formed a giant 3-D Kaleidoscope that drifted in midair like a mobile.  Seek beauty Seek BEAUTY!  Einstein squacked and then the driver blasted the head off with a shotgun and Einstein disintegrated into multicolored bits.  It was quite beautiful like the fourth of July.  Do you understand what I'm getting at here?"
+
+	"I’m sorry I’m late,”  William opens the door out of breath
+	“I wrote you a poem, and the phone rang but I didn't get it .  Do you think that I'm going out on a limb by saying that an ancient skeleton remains from a Tunisian oil field seem to show trace elements of Psilocybin in the molecular structure of the bone."
+	"Slow down woman one thing at a time.  I like the poem,” he says glancing at a three line couplet of Suessian origins.  “Let me check the message....Psilocybin in a fossil bone...Is it human?”
+	"Of course its human who cares if rats have that shit in 'em I want to know if we ever did."
+	"Have you been reading McKenna again?  William yells from the bedroom over the distant sound of Sil Hawkard’s voice encoded message.
+	"No, but the one time I did made a lot of sense.  Do you think Pete could get me Ayahuasca?
+	"Pete can get you just about anything but my friend Sil called so I've got to go to a remote phone and call him back what time do you think it is in Tunisia?
+	"I don't know.  Wait you didn't answer my question what about the skeletons?
+	"Are you making this shit up or has it been found by anthropologists?"
+	"As if that lends it some sort of credibility?  Their PhD's mean they can't possibly be lying right?"
+	"Are you that paranoid?"
+	"That's not paranoia, that's  the language of power."
+	Maya is lying on the couch rainydayranting in the sun about the link between Psilocybin and human seratonin, it is her theory that the mushrooms that now contain Psilocybin were once a fungus whose primary host was the human skin.  The peculiar flesh disease was in fact our link to nirvana, and as it evolved it found us unnecessary for its survival so it evolved into the more independent form it takes today --the mushroom.  She doesn't necessarily believe it, but she has fun tormenting William's mind with the possibility. 
+	"The thing is, is that for any set of equations there is an infinite possibility of solutions I'm not trying to say this is the right solution, I'm just trying to point out that it is one of the possibilities and I can't understand why someone like you would dismiss it solely on the basis that it does not fit your model of reality. Does this mean that you've come to have beliefs?"
+	"Belief is the death of thought'"
+	"That's great, you're well read, but you're not living what you know to be true so what's the fucking point of knowing?"
+	"That is the point of knowing, if you know that you can't know anything then you ought to equally realize that you can't know that you don't know anything."
+	"What the fuck are you trying to say?"
+	"I'm trying to say that we're all waiting for Godot to get back, and I think that there is no us, there is no waiting, and there certainly is no Godot.  The facts are events happening at a point in time and they can only be observed from the point at which they occur, all attempts to 
+reconstruct them after the point are futile and doomed to failure, you can not escape the fact that you are bounded by time, you are doomed to exist in the present.  You can recall the past or think and plan for the future but you will never be there."
+	"Thank you Einstein, but you're defeating your own argument which was that Ayahuasca was never part of the human metabolism because its outside of your sphere of observation, but that doesn't mean that as an event it never happened."
+	"Right. It just means I wasn't there to observe it."
+	"So would you like to try it to see if maybe observing it first hand gives you a better point from which to observe the facts of the event?  I think you may find that time is not so rigid of a boundary as you might think.  Time is inside you, not around you and you can program the human mind just like you can program any other computer."
+	"If you're really interested in meta-programing and mind control you should go down to Fahrenheit tonight and hear this guy Dr. Waiben lecture.  He's an expert on that shit.  He's that official pathologist of the state and according to Sil, head of the psychotropic/biological warfare and mind control division out in Nevada."
+	"When?"
+	"I don't know I gotta go the flyers on the nightstand I think...." he shuts the door behind him.
+	
+		*		*		*		*		*
+
+	     Television was Waiben's idea and he was quite proud of it. The emission of a steadily pulsing signal from a transmitter within the individuals' home was low-grade mind control  --quite passively making them think less or not at all.  But it had an unexpected and quite satisfying side effect --low level blue wavelength energy has a draining and hypnotic effect of the cerebral cortex of the average human brain.  Waiben used to drive the suburbs around nine o'clock just watching the eerie blue glow coming from the hundreds of thousands of houses he had infected.  
+He like to think of television as a virus because in many respects it was; like virus it was benign until the right electrical connection from the host triggered its disease.  Like virus it was passed from one generation to the next, and like a virus its spread was exponential.  The greatest fallout for television though was quite unintended by Waiben, it had radically reoriented the global mindset from isolated consumption into total slavery to fashion and consumption, the the fastest and most effect way of controlling a large population was to make it genuinely believe that it own enslavers were in fact its heros, thus eliminating or at the very least coopting resistors and making them use the channels of oppression as their only outlet for resistance.  Much like controlling any signal, resistors insurrectionists and radicals were diverted by capacitors (“the media”)  and squelched by resistors (“the police”)  Thus the people remained happy and content with their oppression and no one was able to convince them to give up the convenience of slavery for the freedom of hardship.  Wouldn’t you?
+	It wasn't enough though; true mind control would leave the victim unable to disobey the signal or ideally, unaware that he or she were even being controlled --like Christ reborn, Waiben thinks of the old con artist sitting laughing from con artist heaven. 
+	Sub-audio messages are below the threshold of human hearing, but not that of comprehension.  It is the noise of someone thinking.  Listening in is just a matter of having the right receptors, psychics and clairvoyants had been doing it as circus tricks for centuries.  With practice Waiben had taught himself to receive some peoples signals, but what he needed to figure out was  how to create a sub-audio language whose broadcast could actually be controlled and directed like an ordinary radio signal.  Telepathy is an interpersonal form of radio, and using the general theories of chaos, what is true for one system should be relatively the same in another if only the signal amplitude is being changed, the problem was that even subtle changes in input can cause radical oscillations in output...somewhere a butterfly is beating its wings and changing world history.  
+	The granddaddy of all his research would be that day when he could say definitively that he had a method for true and total mind control.  It was this quest that had led him back to his 
+lab in Las Vegas where tonight he is planning to induce mind alteration and manipulation with the legendary Ayahuasca which contains a harmine that some believe bonds directly with human DNA.  In the good doctor's mind that meant opening up a channel directly into the cellular level, allowing for deep meta-programming and possibly a key for using nanotechnology --but that's to complicated right now.  Think of it as inter-cellular radio he told his colleagues who mostly ignored his fanatical rantings.
+	Stupid fucking scientists he is thinking. I hate 'em I hate 'em I hate 'em I fucking hate 'em.  They spend there whole goddamn lives studying the brilliant thoughts culled from centuries of genius's without ever stopping to think that maybe genius lurks in there own minds.  Ingrates. Ought to have been stamped out with the rest of the conservative christian movements, they have no understanding of novelty.   If it hasn't been done a hundred times before they won't even talk about it let alone attempt to experiment with it.
+	Paging Dr. Waiben. Dr. Waiben please come to Lab 203. Dr. Waiben  Lab 203.
+	What the fuck have those morons done now?  Probably killed one of themselves by mistake.  Lab 203 was of course the antidote lab for the biological warfare experiments he had been conducting back east.	
+	
+	Nine hundred miles east Sil Hawkard boards a jet bound for his Tunisian oil fields in the cargo hold of the private plane is a capsule containing the genetic coding of a man who went by the name of Agent Tucker, whom Chase is planning to update into Agent Fucker a man of many talents.
+	"We should figure out how to make his neck come out of his ass so he shits out his mouth."
+		"I don't know if now is the right time for you to be doing this it can bond to your DNA it can open up your mind in ways I don't think your able to envision yet,  it'll blow your life apart and turn it inside out and once you're there you can never came back."
+	"Just give me the stuff, I've done LSD, and mushrooms and lots of shit."
+	"Alright but let me tell you something so that later when your trying to make sense out of it all you can think about this:  there is no more firmament."
+	"There is no more Firmament?  Okay."
+	Maya takes the vial of Ayahuasca tea and leaves Pete's apartment she wants to share it with William but is afraid that he will send her on a bad trip.   She heads to Old Cary Downs house and he opens the door wearing nothing...
+	"I was just...you can come in but take off your clothes first I'm having a naked party."  Maya enters and sees no one.  Cary sits down in front of a tape machine he hits play and the walls disappear.  
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+24/,68487654321>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
+
+	"I slept fitfully under a moonless sky dreaming of a stale, smoky bar's liquor-stained floors and a headless horsemen riding like Icarius out of the fiery sun-gilded gates of hell.  The headless horseman swerved and bore down on the I that is me with menacing intent, jolting me out 
+of my dream and into a sleepnonsleep trance on the isthmus of reality.  The horseman dismounted and knocked metaphorically on the nylon tent door.  I was bewildered and in my heavy-lidded gaze saw a man with no head standing outside the mesh doorway.  Closer inspection revealed a pair of blinking eyes peering at me from where the neck tie should have been; without the neck they seemed appropriate in a way that only Jules Verne could have understood.  A hand slipped out from the waist and motioned for me to rise. I climbed clumsily out of my sleeping bag kicking it to the bottom of the tent and crouching down under the low ceiling, I unzipped the door and carefully stepped over my pillow and out onto the the red Utah sand.   The headless horseman motioned for me to sit on a log and pulled out a long stick of cinnamon, he lit it and inhaled through a button hole in his chest.  I sat down on a log opposite him and staring eye-level at the cinnamonette and I began to appreciate the sheer size of the horseman and realized that even without his head, the horseman was taller than me..."
+	In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh by a cacophonous blast out of heaven's pearly cum-stained ass creating the father, the son, and the holy spigot which lies  in a secluded garden on the cliffs overlooking the Sargasso sea.  The spigot is buried in a volcano designed by Czech ostriches in the eleventh hour of creation to drain all human excrement off the continent of Europe and into the Sargasso sea all lumpy with turd so thick Jesus "conny" Christ in drag is walking along to the amazement of the gullible, floating gently from turd to turd.  The piss blood of a million cunts and cocks line the shores giving the whole place a radioactive iridescent red glow not to mention a awful stench.  Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo are standing on the bluffs watching the spectacle and scanning with hawk eyes for sweet tight asses in which they can stab their hungry cocks.  The father caught the son sitting in the middle of the garden sucking on an apple and he became enraged and hog tied the boy and penetrated every orifice in his body with a peeled and sculpted cucumber cock; the boy was left a whimpering quivering lump of fleshy jello from which spawned humankind.
+	The piss gut rotting flesh smell, air taunt necked and jerking at the nose, the captain's eyes role back into his head as is guts are blasted out his ass by a giggling man headed tape worm 
+of extraordinary wit who was prone to quoting Joyce and Bugs Bunny in the same sentence in a way that reminded listeners of Buster Keaton in some strange drugstore hurricane kind of a way.  The skatolic odor was rich and the worm refused to bath.  Owing to the peculiar nature of its origin the soldiers did not disturb the worm preferring instead to watch the captain writhe in agony pulling his legs back behind his ear to attempt to lick the matted blood soaked pubic hair over the the torn orangish flesh that hung in ribbons over a large hole that had once been a simple anus.  The upshot of it all was that the worm ate less rations than the captain so the men were basically satisfied with the arrangement and they followed the worm wiggling through the jungle as it did impersonations of Fred Astaire...
+	Blasted rot gut con-artist with ten huge molars running across the front of his mouth in a clump owing to his mother's industrial accident with the cunt acid from the chink's hyperdrill.  Drilled right on through back to china, the asshole couldn't even close the damn thing and the lower mandible just kind of hung there like a tire swing.  Maya spits in his face in disgust and revulsion you don't have enough money for me to kiss you there isn't enough money on the planet...
+	The giggling Hyenas are dressed in black and high on amphetamines looking to turn you inside out.
+	Tongue-tied porn queens scream obscenities at passersby "I'll suck your dick until your eyeballs pop out your ass..."
+	Blown newspapers and advert scrapes cover the bottom three feet of a brick wall like sardines neatly packed in a kipper snack tin from a 1983 supermarket shelf and William is lighting a petroleum pipe behind a school yard where two children shot each other in the asshole with dart guns until the weaker one screamed "uncle!"
+	<<<<<<<<<<end transmission>>>>>>>>>>
+	An old man with a sickly grey beard and a ridiculous suit was sitting where the horseman had been.  His hand was out of sight down his pants and the other wagged a long finger at me and he began to jerk his cock screaming i want you i want YOU i WANT YOU!  Eventually I 
+slouched over against a tree and slept the rest of the night soundly.  I awoke with a start, sweating profusely in the glare of the midday Utah sun.  Struggling to my feet and I stretched my arms overhead as if to grasp the immensity of the deep, almost purple, sky.  I remembered the arrival of the headless horseman and the sense of telepathic communication it had given me.  The campsite was covered with horse tracks and it appeared the headless horseman had left in the same direction he came from.  There was no sign of how the bearded man had arrived or departed there was only a gooey clump of sand where he had come on the ground."
+	Outside the streets are cluttered with wind-junk blown in fifty odd miles from the desert and clinging to the stuccoed buildings like piles.  Whores prance at the street corner; occasionally a car swoops in a carnivorous vulture to a road kill, sucking up the promise vacuum cleaner style in a way Hoover himself never have dared dream possible.
+	One is in a shop window tugging idly at her clit and occasionally spreading her fleshy lips at passersby, she shifts on her pillow and evidence of past customers dribbles timelike out of her ass.  Pete watches in idle fascination.  Disturbance up the street; an old woman is battering a man with her false teeth stuck on the end on a cane... The teeth leave jagged cuts and tears on the man's face threatening to turn it pock scarred like Jared Towers' whose father once chased him a around the house with a meat cleaver when the boy was caught masturbating to a picture of the Virgin Mary.  Pete recalls Jared telling him that he could hold back from climaxing by thinking about meat cleavers and consequently in trying to discourage him from having sex, his father had created a sexual machine capable of satisfying women for hours on end.  Jared was a legend among the whores, most of whom would have slept with him for free, but of course professionalism required them to charge.  Jared was rumored to have a twelve inch cock, thick as a flashlight, Pete winces as he considers him own cock shriveled down to two inches by the biting cold of the public restroom.  
+	A whore from up the street walks in to wash the cum off her face in the sink.  I never seen so much cum and outta such a small dick!  She looks squarely at Pete, screws up her face and says you want one too?  Twenty five to swallow, thirty on the face.  For fifty I'll spit it back in 
+your mouth.  No?  Well I have this one guy who loves it and most people don't know about that option so I like to offer it up front.  Pete smiles and leaves.
+
+		It is here with in these four walls that American realize their final manifest destiny.  It is here that we have struggle so hard to get.  The twentieth century Horatio Alger is the Maytag man and a used car dealer rolled into one.
+	Horatio Alger's sodomizing menage-a-toi with the Maytag Man and Uncle Sam has led us to train station on the SpaceTime line where freedom is an irrelevant inconvenience of language that is slowly being fazed out of history.  Language is a virus. The i that is You speaks, I speak and the vibrations of air we create controls our every move.  Science gives rise to Magic in the form of powerful papers that tell who what why and how you are to be.  You can't march down to city hall to protest without a permit filed ahead of time with the city clerk.  You can't drive an automobile without the Proper Papers.  You can't leave the country without PAPERS, you can't perform honest labor without PAPERS.  You can't buy or grow certain pharmaceuticals at all, nor can you pursue the happiness of your choice unless it falls into one category.  Consumption.  We are all free to consume, which when you think about it, is the only freedom we really need in a CONSUMER SOCIETY.  Televisions, radios, automobiles, washing machines, drying machines, refrigerators, freezers, ovens, microwave ovens,  convection ovens, alarm clocks, computers, headphones, home furnishings, bicycles, video games, tennis shoes, laser disc players, DVD players, record players, compact disc players, cordless telephones, wireless phones, digital phones, cellular phones, two way radios, short wave radios, car stereos, home stereos, and every accessory you can conceive of and millions more you couldn't.  We have all the entertainment and modern conveniences in the world in our home each assessable at our fingertips when ever you chose.  Which is a good thing because the minute you step out of your house some OFFICAL OF THE STATE is going to want to see some goddamn-papers-on-the-double-what-the-hell-are-you-doing-here-cough-up-the-fee-place-your-hands-behind-your-head-you-have-the-right-to-remain-silent-lie-down-and-spread-your-legs-and-shut-the-fuck-up-right-fucking-now sir!
+	Uncle Sam came on the ground and left without a trace.  Horatio and Maytag were emotionally tormented for years until there eventual deaths through ritualistic dismemberment.
+	And I don't have any papers standing on a cement sidewalk slab starring at the FREEDOM OF AMERICA locked inside a now closed appliance store.  The Ace Appliance Store to be precise.  I feel suddenly nervous like they know what I am thinking.  They know that I am thinking.  
+	-He's not smiling. Oh no, not yet, we're working on it though.-
+	We the people we govern you the other people have decided for reasons which are beyond the scope of this broadcast and may well be beyond the scope of your comprehension entirely that all freedoms which you previously thought you had but never in reality did possess are summarily denied from this point forward.  Please report to the nearest biomedical programing center by the fourth of May where a new human program biounity 3.6 will be installed into your seratonin and allow for future dopemine programing without the need for physical intervention please go about your lives as you always have all those not present for the reprogramming procedures by the fourth of May will be consider fugitives of the state and will be dealt with in the harshest manner allowed by law and endorsed by the entertainment loving public...
+		Textbook introduction to Linguistics as  Maya heard at the lecture  in the slum district of Berkeley California.  The sixties were molded to create confusion and remind the people of the comfort the felt they had once felt in the peaceful emptiness of the 1950's.  Stupidity is a drug and I am on it thought Maya.  She sipped more of her  tea and watched the speaker's DNA evolve into something more Avian in appearance .  Suddenly he raised his wings like the hooded sirius hawk of Uri Gellars nightmares and turned his head to the side as if to receive some kind of outside signal
+	<<<Extinguish all rational thought>>>"
+	He's parroting William Burroughs, she laughed to herself and then the voice narrowed its frequency range and began to become two separate voices at the same time.  Oh shit thought Maya he knows about tongues, she looked again at the flyer that William had given her, it read: 
+Speaking on the subjugation of minority races by mind control speaker Dr. Waiben 2:45 rain or shine.
+	Fragments of ash are falling falling falling......
+	Elsewhere a frog hiccups and the premier of Angola nervously fingers his new found nuclear release button dug up by archaeologists looking for the queens underwear we find pig tails and decapitated cats arranged in ceremonial fashion the smoke is unbearable like Milan Kundera's ashes filtered through a sieve and mixed with two cups of cold chicken stock to form surrealist soup.
+	Circus freaks are castrating themselves on the street corners pimps shooting heroin in their balls while screaming whores accost their long dead mothers in hotel rooms cockroachs wouldn't set foot in while lawyers sit on the roof television antennae protruding from there limbs as policemen ritualistically torture themselves gouging out there own eyeballs to avoid the scene below them.
+	"The world’s end was at my doorstep.  A white hot light had flashed civilization out.  Cities ran as great metalglassconcrete rivers of deathdisfiguremanglement.  Citizen’s charred limbs protruded like rocks that were floating with the stream.  The searing smell of burning flesh darted through the hazy yellow air.  A great clock tower was dripping time from its hands and Maya saw herself arms severed and lying by her side.  Her face had been burned off and eyes dissolved.  Her head was upturned and its jaw hung down swinging stupidly in the yellow flesh burning air.  Time was pooling in her mouth and dribbling done her chin like come."
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+Chapter Two
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+	The plane touched down with Sil clutching the seat, it wasn’t that he feared flying it was that he feared commercial airline pilots.  Too many pill do not make for steady hands.  He always breathed easier on his own jet but when landing on US territory that was not an option.  Sil generally did not come into the the united police state he had other people run these errands for him, but Waiben himself had called this meeting and insisted that it be at the Knight and that the transfer of technology must be done in the flesh.  Waiben had promised to give him something pertinent to your line of work he had said in a heavily encrypted email two days before.  Sil had been in Bangkok recruiting mercenaries and whores he enjoyed the company of whores even when he wasn’t horny, they like him had no pretensions of honesty or goodness, they were whores and he was a sultan or so he fancied it as he stepped off the plane and into the east Texas night.  The McAllen airport still sported the old ladder exits, no air-conditioned luxuries.  He was greeted by a government car which whisked him off toward New Orleans.  Sil never flew into major commercial airports, far to risky to many hero cop types hell bent of memorizing the pictures of every “bad guy”  that came of the wire and while Sil was pretty sure that no one was looking for him it just wasn’t worth the risk.
+	“Mind if i smoke a little petroleum”
+	“No sir the Dr. gave me some to give, you he figured you would want it.”
+	Sil shuddered mentally.  “How long will it be before New Orleans?”
+	“probably get there by sunrise”
+	Seven hours, perfect for a puff or two and some dream time.
+	
+	*		*		*		*		*
+
+	<My god sir Mercuries in retrograde and Saturns looking a bit piqued looks like heranus is the place to be.  Johnson this is serious business no time for puns! good god man what the hell is wrong with you?! Now getback in there and pull Sirius back so mercury levels off or were going to have worldwide epidemic of assfucking>>>>>This is Ted Kopel...Millions of women world wide can not sit down to day do to a near hysterical episode of ass fucking that in inexplicably broke out around eight EST last night reporting live from Bangkok heres Richard Gere....Thank you Ted <sound effects of screaming and grunts pigs> as you can see behind me the assfucking still hasn't let up oooohhh that's gotta hurt <closeup handheld camera shot of a man being fucked in the ass by a horse> lets see if we can get a word in <moves up to man> sir how does it feel to get fucked in the ass by a horse?  We'll i tell ya Richard it takes some getting used to but everybody's gotta make a buck somehow! You mean you're getting paid? Ehy yes of course this is my job I am THE MAN WHO TAKES IT IN THE ASS FROM HORSES.  I have a cable show starting next month on the Family Channel, followed hopefully by a live show on Leno the month after but that's still in the planning stages........
+	Was I saying something reverent <<<<excuse me sir but this is Ted Turner and you sir are interrupting my broadcast>>>> go to hell I'm writing here and I say there is no Ted Turner so THERE IS NO TED TURNER.  What are piles anyway?
+	Time like most thing is best when foolishly squandered on meaningless pursuits.  Useless Stuff.
+	A ford Econoline blasts headlight beams through a cold Kentucky mist.  Clouded sky obscured like Man Ray.  Inside Maya is sucking oxygen and sipping Ayahuasca tea, one hand 
+steadies the wheel --this is it, back to the big sky's, the west ,the desert the last places to hide.  Enough of this goddamn smooshed together states claustrophobic monosyllabic citizenry.  Ignore the people they're only a temporary inconvenience of sanity. Count Korbinsky fueds with demonologists in the back of her mind.  Signing off with lalala she smiles.
+	Well Well Well cigarette time don't go no where kids and remember crack is good because...<chorus of children chanting> ...it raises money for the CIA to conduct covert operations against foreign nationals that would otherwise lead meaningless and happy lives...that's right now sit tight whilst Mr. Robertson gets a fix.....Kentucky is a beautiful state -if you take the right drugs.  The drugs obscure the frightening backward racist mentality that the New South’s propaganda claims is gone.  A thing of the past.    Earl’s miracle potion wears off and Maya stops for gas in Jasper.  
+	She wires herself into the payphone at the back of the station and quickly sends a message it William on the west coast.....all is well in high spirits. will see you two days hense. will be last transmission.  in Jasper.
+	
+
+	
+	*		*		*		*		*
+
+	It was the Spring of nineteen ninety three when I first stated to write this down in journal form, I was struck by a deep seeded biological need to write, the only problem was I had no story to tell. I was a college sophomore attending the University of Redlands in the smog filled pestilence of Southern California’s Inland Empire.  Exactly whose Empire it was remains an uninteresting question.  I had know aprticular interest in school, it just seemed better than getting a job and thanks to a small inheritance it was a possibility, so I went with it, but like I said i needed a story not a lesson in how to tell it.  I learned to useful things in college, the first is that marajuana will keep moist and fluffy even in the dryest of climes if you keep it in a jar with a small slice of 
+carrot.  The second thing i learned is that to alter the human brain’s tranditional pattern of processing information by the injestion of any chemical is to expand the minds pontential to process the information in an origional way.  This processing change is deemed bad by society at large and especially by the middle class, can[t quite afford the countryclub set that my parents belong to.   My name is May Steven’s I am twenty one years old and my only loves are the word virus, mind alteration, and my dog named ATW (Al the Wonder Dog).  My only hobby is masturbation.
+
+	Maya’s journal was the thing that prompted her to make that fateful decision to turn her back on all that was good and easy and comfortable and drop out of school to find a story worth telling.  Journals that said....today i hung out with my friends smoked pot, went to class and then played on the computer until i passed out, do not sell.  And Maya above all things realized that in this society money is synonymous with freedom and she wanted freedom more than anything.  
+	
+	And i don’t mean freedom in the abstract american idealism sort of a way, i mean an Anarchy of the senses, the obliteration of logic and “common” sense, there’s enough of that garbage around that's why its common, what we need what i need is uncommon sense.  Anarchy of sense.  Most people when they hear the term anarchy associate it with the popular mythology of a chaos-like state with no government where murderers run naked through the street fucking helpless women and doing blizzards of drugs.  This apocalyptic vision is childish at best.  I do not propose to herein give a true or accurate version of anarchy or how it would work in the current sociological setting.  Indeed the central message I hope to convey is that political anarchy is the least of my concerns.  I only know what is in my head.  If yours is different then you are wrong.  At least from my point of view.
+	Anarchy, like life itself is infinitely more complicated than simple political gaming, left wing right wing, the whole concept of a binary system is illogical.  The problem with the west in general is that it makes dichotomies out of what is really just a grey cloudy lump of shit, so to 
+speak.  What i mean by that statement is that nothing is reducible to being either/or, belief itself is multi-dimensional.  That is to say that to hold a belief is to filter information through an infinitely complex system and into the brain where the information is organized further and through electro-chemical responses, an opinion is formed.  In light of something that is infinitely complex many philosophers, politicians and other freaks of nature have chosen to assume a starting point from which it can be safely assumed that everyone is at least in agreement of basic "facts."  But as cutting edge physics and chaos mathematics show, these facts are subjective at best and nonexistent for all practical purposes.  Everything is in our heads, everything that occurs around us occurs in our grey matter which is to say that everything is an internal experience of the individual rather than an external event happening to the individual and as poet Bernard Wolfe called the brain.  That is to say that everything is constantly in question and it is here that I encourage the reader to remember the words of Robert Anton Wilson who wrote in the preface to Cosmic Trigger: "belief is the death of intelligence."  He went on to elaborate saying that once a belief has been decided upon the questioning of the issue ceases.  Everything is to be doubted.
+	Thus the anarchists starting point is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere much like the timespace experience itself.  
+
+	Maya’s journal became her life, her drug, the thing that took over.  Everyone has a thing that takes over completely --Children, jobs, heroin, art, photographs, anything that feels like genius.  Maya’s genius was her journal.  Kind of sad that at the time only us ostriches recognized her genius, but you humans did take about ten thousand years to figure out away to dispose of your own feces so I guess that we shouldn’t expect any more.
+	Maya met William three years ago at a party in Rhode Island --a naked party.  Maya dropped out of Redlands at the end of nineteen ninety three, well technically and much to the horror of her parents, she taken an indefinite leave of absence.  Her only requirement of life is that it please dear god prove interesting so she piled her belongings in the back of a ford Econline van (suitably painted barf green), and set up a laptop computer with remote internet access in the space 
+between the seats.  Together she and ATW had cut wide random swaths of road across the United States in a vain attempt to write or explore or get lost or take drugs or be or some such nonsense.  After the Georgia affair (later) She headed up the East Coast with a vague notion of seeing Boston.  She had friends in Rhode Island at Brown University and got slightly side-tracked by brown liquor and green marijuana.  Her friend John had a friend who had a friend.... that had invited her to the annual naked party.  The naked party was a nationally know event held in an enormous old Victorian house three stories high that had been converted into some sort of hippesque domicile for supposedly poor college students who, mysteriously, were able to afford tuition, but unable to provide a sufficient amount of alcohol, a terribly depressing reality to stumble into when you are also low on cash.  It was here she met Yukon Jack, and with a bottle under each arm, he made everything okay.  
+	She met William and his sometime girlfriend Chloe at the naked party. As you might imagine they were all naked, actually everyone was naked, and as you might expect they were all severely inebriated.  
+	Maya stumbled toward the bathroom to rid her body of its pollutants and of course make room for more.  She opened the door too drunk to care if it was occupied and burst in to catch William, a slight man of about twenty five with a thin but muscular body,  gently fucking a girl doggy style.  Chloe’s world was beginning to become less and less vertical, but she caught the girls beautiful face in the mirror, perfectly framed by long angelic golden ringlets of hair that Maya’s eyes followed down to her sweat glistened nipples and heaving breasts.  William was leaning toward the sink to do a line of cocaine, at that instant Maya was too drunk to be taken aback, she simply squeezed in and closed the door behind her and sat down to pee. The world was refusing to hold itself up and the toilet seat leapt up to meet her resulting in a fairly loud noise that made the girl turn her head and shimmy slightly “you look like you could use a pick up, give her some coke William.”  William pulled out of the girl and turned around confronting Maya with his hard cock which accidentally slapped her cheek.
+	“Oh my god I’m sorry! oh wow did that just happen?”  It was by far the most immediate and personal introduction to anyone she had ever had.  
+	“Usually I date someone for a while before I let them slap my face with their dick.” She stumbled over her words trying to remain sarcastic in the midst of insanity.
+	 The girl laughed, she bent down and licked Maya’s cheek, “Just getting my cum off your face,” she whispered in Maya’s ear.  Maya did a line and then another and then the girl grabbed her by the hand and led her out of the bathroom and down the hall into a room that was empty and smelled of the delightfully sweet aroma of Opium.
+	“You have Opium,” she murmured as the girl pulled her into bed.
+	“Yes I do.  My name is Chloe and that was William, okay that's enough talk,” she lit and huca and passed passed the hose to Maya...	
+	The events that transpired the rest of the night remained a vague and blurry collage of images for all three of them --good times tend to be remembered that way when one is ingesting large quantities of drugs.  Maya was short on money and needed a place to crash and work for a little while, so William and Chloe adopted her and took her back to their studio loft in Boston.  For four days they took Maya on an opium holiday and had sex and just when Maya was beginning to think that they never worked or in fact did anything at all other than fuck, William received a phone call in the middle of having sex with Maya and inexplicably left without saying a word.
+	“Where did he go...?” Maya heard her voice before she was aware that she had even spoken.
+	“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you” Chloe climbed on top of her and began sucking her nipples.  Maya felt her body relax and could smell the familiar mingling of incense and opium smoke floating across the room she raised her head and saw Chloe’s hard nipples rub against her own sending tremors down her spine and an aching contraction gripped her pussy.  The cream ran down her slit and trickled over her ass onto the pillow.  She drew up the Chloe’s leg until it was rubbing against her pussy, smearing herself on her thigh.  Maya pulled Chloe’s mouth onto her own and kissed her hard, pushing her tongue into her warm sweet mouth, licking her lips and 
+nibbling at her tongue. Chloe rolled over and dragged Maya on top of her pushing Maya’s head down between her legs.  Maya ran her hands across Chloe’s pussy and down her thighs, pulling her legs apart.  Drawing Chloe’s ass into her hands and lifting the pussy onto her tongue, Maya lapped at her creaming pussy, stabbing her tongue between Chloe’s glistening smooth and moist lips, dragging it up over her clit slowly to tease her at first, but Chloe grabbed Maya’s hair and forced her tongue between her lips and ground hard onto her tongue.  Cum soaked Maya’s face and she began to lick as hard and fast as she could.	
+	
+
+	Exhausted, and for the first time in her life thoroughly sick of having sex, Maya dragged Chloe out to have coffee at a twenty four hour coffee shop in Harvard Square.
+	“So what is it you two do?” Maya said trying to make conversation with someone she realized suddenly --she had had sex with, done large quantities of petroleum, cocaine and opium, and yet had never really talked to.  Maya thought of the joke about the couple that was getting divorced just out of college.  One of their friends says ‘what happened?’  ‘Well,’ says that man ‘we met and got married in college; I didn’t know we couldn’t get along when we were sober.’  But Chloe was to smart to be just a junky.
+	“So now you think that because we’ve had sex and shared drugs that I should tell you about myself?”  Chloe asked smiling.
+	“No right now i just want to know about you and what you do,” said Maya meeting her smile.
+	“Well, I paint and write and practice Crowleyian sex magic rituals, how’s that for soundbite length personal history?”
+	“okay.  So William pays your rent huh?” Maya asked a little jealously.
+	“We have a business together, we sell.”
+	“Ah” said Maya finally putting the pieces together even as the last of the drugs cleared out of her brain.
+	“Maybe you could make some money...talk to William see if he needs anything done....”
+	I don’t know, it was hear that Maya hesitate if only for an instant because she knew that the descent into the world these two were part of was not a simple employment proposition.  there are people who work and lead nice lives and are happy and then there are the people who do things, change things and generally control the lives of the other ninety nine percent whether directly and consciously or indirect accidents of “fate.” Maya suddenly realized that the proverbial apple was being thrust in her direction and she was really fucking hungry. 
+	“You want to get something more substantial to eat?” Chloe looked cold.
+	Sure, you know this town better than I do,” Maya stood, “you lead the way.”
+
+	*		*		*		*		*	           *
+
+	Three years before and one ocean east William was sitting in the Heathrow airport scribbling a journal note about the fat woman selling British flags at a souvenir stand.  He had no ticket and was forced for monetary reasons to fly standby, consequently he had been sitting in Heathrow for the better part of forty-eight hours trying to get on a flight bound for New York.  At this point however he would have settled for a flight anywhere in the America’s --hitchhiking, while dangerous at the end of the century, was at least more interesting then sitting around an airport selling sketches of tourists to buy cigarettes and donuts.
+	Sil Hawkard was at this time still funding himself with the international campaign to end petroleum addiction and his recent key note speech in front of the Queen of England while totally meaningless in terms of raising money nevertheless filled him with an ironic sense of power.  He struggled throughout the speech not to burst in to hysterics light up a petroleum filled huca and run around the room giggling and blowing petroleum smoke up the snatches of wealthy old British ladies, maybe even goosing the queen for the hell of it.  But he had contained himself until now.  He slid into the airport restroom, locked the stall behind him and bent down to check for any arrant pairs of trousers that might denote the presence of an Englishman.  The only thing worse than the 
+English are the French.  White people victims of a tragic and ancient nuclear accident which had mutated the melatonin cells giving them a sickly white appearance and penchant for dwelling in caves.
+	He lit the pipe and took a deep hit, coughing profusely at the end of it.  
+	William, being a smoker of many substances heard the coughing in the bathroom and headed for the door to see if it be a sharer or not.  See slipped noiselessly in and crept into a stall being careful not to close the door or make a noise, he stood up on the toilet and peered over the edge.  He was confronted with a man that looked to be of medium height and muscular build with a hair that all but obscured his head.  Shit thought William, a white boy smokin’ petroleum in the airport, gotta be a junky, he cleared his throat.
+	Sil heard the noise and snapped his head up for and instant, saw William's face peering down at him and then Sil rolled onto the floor and fell into convolutions.
+	“Shit!” William leapt over the stall falling on the toilet and soaking his foot and pantleg, “Fucking christ, don’t OD here you stupid fuck!”  He turned Sil over and slapped his face --a petroleum OD was not uncommon back in the early days, new drugs require test subjects to overdose a few times before the parameters of ingestion are known to the users at large.  Sil was crumpled in a ball unconscious, William pulled out his passport and sat down on the toilet, he noticed a piece of paper hanging out of Sil’s coat pocket and pulled out the speaking guide to the symposium on addictive narcotics at the Royal Palace in Buckingham England, he also noticed that the keynote speaker was the same man now crumpled before him.
+	“Holy heads of lettuce, he whispered to himself.  He glanced at Sil’s face recognizing now the most outspoken proponent of banning petroleum.  “This is the oldest con i’ve ever heard of you bastard, he kicked Sil in the chest and felt something metallic and hard hit his tow, he bent down to pull the gun out when Sil’s hand flashed across his peripheral vision and pulled the gun first.
+	“Oh shit man, I’m trying to help you for christ sakes!” said William raising his hands.
+	Sil was dimly aware, given his state of mind that shooting someone in an airport bathroom was a bad idea.  He stared at the twentish black face for moment and said “Help me to my plane and I’ll give you a lift to South America.  William had never been poor, but most people he knew didn’t have access to their own planes, he hesitated suspiciously “you have a plane, like your own plane?” 
+	“Technically no, but its available for my use at my convenience, and since I have gun pointed at you, just help me or I’ll shoot you and run for it.”
+	Okay, fair enough.”  William helped him to his feet and they headed out of the bathroom turned into an unmarked door that Sil gestured to, and were soon aboard the government jet of one Dr. Waiben, headed for Buenos Arias.
+
+ 
+	William was out of his mind, or what the nonprofessional drug user refers to as wasted, sound was obliterated as a form on communication, Sil  and the other guy were not speaking but William began to hear words forming in the air, like an LSD trip might be , but these words were free of the vibrated source that had created them or rather they had not been created they just were, like turning on a radio and just picking up whatever station it was tuned to.m   Bloody words sharp words that hung in the air like knives and when uttered returned to slit the throat of their speaker and if every word you have spoken returned to act upon yourself would you survive the experience?////??//::”::”::”::”::”:”:” <<<<curious words hung about the room William saw them in the air or at least thought he saw them and them the edges of his vision started to dim turning first deep red and then black until the natural light filled his vision and his lost consciousness.  He awoke with out having remembered passing out at all.
+	Sil was still seated next to him and Waiben had brought his chair up in front of him and was leering close to his face shining a red light in his eyes.  “Take this,” he handed William a small round pill.”
+	No thanks man that was heavy enough shit,” he shook his head.
+	“That's why you need to take this, we haven’t quite perfected this shit yet and it tends to give you glaucoma like symptoms for a few days if you don’t take one of these.”
+	William took the pill and sat up a little bit “man i been travelling all over Europe and the orient and i’ve smoked a lot of shit, but I’ve never had anything like that.  Who the fuck are you guys and where do you get that shit?”
+	“That as you know is Sil, his last name is Hawkard, and I,” William could sense the pride in his voice, “am Doctor Waiben, pathologist of the state.”
+
+	Chloe and Maya are in Boston nineteen ninety six eating dinner to fill the aching acid burned stomachs after to much caffeine at the coffee house.  Now slightly drunk and feeling quite floaty Maya is thinking about sex again.  She’s thinking about sex with William though, not Chloe.  “When will William be getting back?” she asks
+	“Probably not ‘til tomorrow or the next day, why you getting tired of my tongue?”
+	Maya turned red and stammered “no, i mean i was just asking...would it bother you at all if i wanted to fuck him?”
+	“No only if you wanted to take him away from me...”
+	“Well I was thinking that since I have a van maybe I could help him with deliveries or whatever it is that he does...” her voice trailed off.
+	Chloe stared at her coldly for a moment before speaking then spoke slowly and deliberately, “Look Maya I like you and you’re a tremendously good fuck, but you have no idea where William’s past comes from and no idea what it is exactly that he does, the people he works for can...”
+	“What, kill me?” Maya interrupted her.
+	Chloe laughed, “if they’re generous.  If not they can do things that are a lot worse than death, and they do it to people on a daily basis.  They’re not criminals, they’re not interested in any end objective, they just want to push the human experience as far as they can, ‘because it might 
+prove interesting’ is what Sil always says.  Do you understand that you’re way and I mean way, way, out of your league?”
+	Maya sat in silence for a moment contemplating a life of crime potentially running from people who would torture her or worse with no ultimate objective.  She ran it over again and weight it against the thought of eventually returning to college and meeting some guy and getting married and pregnant, and fat.  “Please Chloe, get me out of the boredom of my life, physical torture is no worse then psychological torture and I’ve got enough of that already.”
+	“Alright lets go home, I’ll call William and see if he needs anything.”
+
+
+
+	 he wondered feeling the full force of the drug take him over.  Spanish man selling chicletts say no good no bueno, pictures worth not even half a thousand words.  Wouldn’ give you ten words, worthless gringo words don’t mean shit. no good no bueno, not worth the blood their written in. The blood of all peoples not yours, not your shoes, by god keep your slave labor camps a closed-mouthed secret.   Gotta keep that in house, dis-credit all new agencies by routinely feeding them false information.  News doesn’t happen events happen, and the department of television information broadcasting inc. a subdivision of indoctrination inc. decides what gets out and what remains forever sealed in baby pissshitguts.  No that's not true. No comment. No need for comment, the preceding has been since proved to be untrue, cut to shots of smart bombs. Couldn’t get fifty words for those now gringo -over exposure- nobody buying.   Same old stinking shit.  No Good. No Bueno.
+	Gringo go home in thousand languages in a million words, why don’t you crawl back in your cave get your tail so far between your legs it goes half way up your ass?  Lead me to the holy spigot and we’ll show you the bidet of death, constructed by gringos, for gringos, to flush out gringos, to show them all what you do behind closed doors.  Can’t close them all --we have our technicians as well and they’re getting to be better than yours. We got the money rolling in --even 
+offered you the picture words but you don’t want them. No Good.   Can’t use those, too strong.  No fair, crying boy heads home for cave to lick his dirty balls clean.
+	I gotta picture for you I on vacation in your country go to hear senator’s speak but all door are closed, all sealed.  So i gotta fiber optic and feed it in from the roof show all senators mad with sexual lust and blood thirsty, clamoring for war and stealing souls and bodies and driving them off wherever they see fit.
+	The technician is retro actively of course --the papers said the man was mentally ill.  ‘my cod!’ screamed a church lady in the front row, ‘satan has garbled the lords message, this isn’t what he meant for you to hear, no it was not all like that, there was to be understanding.’ she is parading her old cunt bones whining at the justices --tissue conducts signals, animals communicate through the use of visual, acoustic , chemical, tactile and electrical signals.  Our laboratory is an abundant and well preserved feed back loop to understand and interpret Eusocial behavior. negative feedback inhibition to make you shiver Gringo.  Make you shiver good.
+	Repetition unsuccessful.  The radiologist was called in to examine the patient --blisters and burns indicate high probability of skin mutation, what would you say Dr. Waiben?   Crested and on the nod? Diminutively yes definitely.
+	Information potential exists --its an unsettling thought, dependency --and what happens when things start to think? How do you draw the lines then.
+	HOW THE PLAGUE BEGAN:
+	The wish to preserve -not worth saving what already is- in this scenario.  The word,  the loss of body situated at the origins of recorded sound -the temporal metaphysical and esthetic possibilities.
+	<insert sounds of truck on dirt road>  
+	Old man yelling.  Get off of my laaawwwnnn!   Sits down to oil his gun some more and then half turns in his chair to face the camera and says "i haven't left the porch since i got this CDRom PEOPLE version 3.0.   Updated and expanded human potential at your fingertips.  Its the only thing i need --got no use for the stinking gringos anymore--  camera pans out and down 
+revealing a yard strewn with shotgunblasted bodies of young children.  We see wife, face half torn off, crawling towards a pistol <shotgun blast stage left> her head disappears entirely.   Old man: "human potential, the new CDrom makes wives unnecessary." cue logo: on sale now at a sanatorium near you....
+	I'm going to finally send you the orgy papers this time  -been fixing to get 'round to that for some time"  <heavy southern drawl>  don't think he's the type to do it though but i been wrong once or twice a'fore.    Don't want people showing up on my lawn though that's never good.  get off of my lllaaaawwwwnnnnn! <shotgun blast again, distant screaming sounds of deaths final agonies eeking out blood gurgling windpipes> Fucking Gringos! Go home in a thousand languages!
+	  Experience as much of the human potential as possible retain the container and forward the frog to the fun sun freaks of eastern tibet all is well with alkaline, and acidity is on the skids with death rooted out leaving only chicken shit shovelled scrapped and scraped like lemon lime gatorade poured from a fuck buck of love.  Stop talking to yourself --listen to the virus talk to you.  All that you consider to be a accident was carefully orchestrated for your benefit by a benevolent cocksucking god from the twenty-third dimension to just plain old irritate the fuck out of you like a bad rectal itch.  Stupid gringo got no cure for the ass itch i show you some pictures, yes very dirty, little girls you like??????
+	<<<<<commander in chief of the NATO forces in Europe is fucking small refugee boy in the ass, the boy cries for his mother the general is laughing, your mother’s down the hall boy ,she’s busy with the president of France right now.  But maybe later you’d like to lick his come off her dead face.  Ban those words tear them right out snip snip.  Can’t say that, its disgusting.  War is a snuff film for the rich.  <<<<We gotta step up the bombing chief the public’s losing innarest in us screams the chief of staff running in circles jerking off and slapping his ass until it turns a bright purple and with all seriousness General Jesse Helms pauses to reflect:  I remember a time when life was good no one got in our way, why in Europe under Patton i musta raped twenty thirty little boys and a handleful of nuns too. He smiles lost in memory...
+	But God hath given us these trying times....
+	Yes it is bit hard to get cunt these days isn’t it, mumbles the chief of state as he strokes his wife’s cock....Yes dear start a war, get me some cute refugee boys, i so love snapping their necks when i’m coming, she growls affectionately.
+	That's it gentlemen were going to war!  The president stands and ejaculates on a map of the world KOSOVO it is he says as his thick oatmeal consistency sperm all but covers the former republic of Yugoslavia.
+	You like?  You like, no?  Too bad.  You can’t have those words, too strong.  I get power, you give me power, I steal power from you, to expensive to buy it.  I get power and you get pictures and maybe I tell you how to cure rectal itch? Eh? Eh? Eh?
+
+
+	Chloe and Maya, got back to the loft just as the answering machine was picking up the line in nineteen ninety three.  leave a message.....Hi ladies it’s me i need a favor of you, or at least one of you...call me at.... “Hello” Chloe picks up the receiver midway through the message.  “Ya okay I’ll tell her.”  long Pause.  “Just don’t think that she’s yours cause she not she’s ours, okay.  Okay.  She hangs up the phone 
+	“Well?” Maya is anxious.
+	“Three months ago William was trying to catch a flight back to the United States from England, and he saw a guy OD on petroleum in the bathroom so the guy helped him out in return for saving his life.  This guy is someone you don’t mess with and if I were you I would avoid even having him know who you are.  Anyway William needs someone to meet him in Los Angeles next week and I told him you would go.”
+	“Okay.......that's where i just left from,but what the hell”  Maya is slightly disappointed.  “What am I going to do?”
+	“I didn’t ask, but I can almost guarantee you you’re going to be waiting alot, so you can write in that little notebook of yours, and think of me.”  Chloe smiled.
+	Two hours later Maya bid her good bye and the econoline blasted off into the early morning light.  The sun finally rose as Maya cut through Virginia and across the Blue Ridge Mountains.
+
+
+
+	Dr Waiben in Buenos Aries nineteen ninety three the warm summer air is wafting into the hotel room through a window, hot muggy sticky oppressive air Waiben is tuning a radio to short wave frequencies and feeding into a computer which, following a chaos math program for shoreline patterns, varies the signal at seemingly random and sporadic intervals which decay on the same scale as a Koch curve.  The computer is broadcasting the signals which Waiben is hoping will be reprinted in some part by William in the next room.  This kind of low grade telepathy experiment has become Waiben's latest obsession --having completely abandoned television as a form of active mind control.  It’s great as a passive he was fond of saying, but I am an active person and I so are the people I want to control.  He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes, he focuses hard on the darkness trying to hear something anything a pattern of sounds from the horns on the street below any repetition that might be considered a signal pattern which could be captured by microphones and modelled by computer.  The problem with the technology in the recording industry is that it records what we can already hear he thought suddenly we built the instruments to record what we already know.  How do you build instruments that can record something you’re not even sure exists and how would you know if you did record something that that was in fact what you were looking for?
+	<<<<<<<<<<<exterminate exterminate exterminate>>>>>>:::” radio tissue is chirping broadcasts continuously down the line xxxxxxxxxxxration food and waterxxxxxxxxxxx
+<<<<<<<<nothing here now but  The Recordingsç∫~µ≤:::::::::”:::::::”::”::::::::::::::  
+	its an act of will short circuited all back down to earth and at some point deconstruction patterns form.  lots of fear bubbling up around the edges the old cunt pears mysteriously self 
+mocking into a crystal ball, she shakes it again harmonizing the electron spins and creating some unstable sarcastic flux. your gonna have the pellets one day boy, shooda listened to your mother. 
+	in another room the british physicist reminds us that life begets life through the slow rhythms of geophysical oscillations.  Whimsical elves re-peal labels back onto soda bottles in a backwards tape loop. 	
+	
+
+	The next morning William woke in Buenos Aries to the stink of smog and fumes and too many people living in to close a quarters with not enough bathing going on --the general smell that pervades all human outposts.  He stumbled out of bed grabbed the pad of paper that he had been scribbling on last night, walked down the hall to Sil’s room and opened the door.  Sil was still in bed with several women lying askew and presenting William with a scene of tantalizing depravity.  He crept up to the bed, “Sil.”  “Sil.” he whispered in a hiss
+	Sil bolted upright in bed and muttered, “the thing to do i suppose would be to recreate the future disassemble the present and cut up the past.”
+	“What?”
+	“Nothing where’s Waiben?”
+	“I don’t know.”
+	“Nevermind.  Are ya good with numbers?”
+	“No but my girlfriend is.”
+	“She’s not here but i’ll keep that in mind...alright i’ll do the numbers part you go down stairs and get the blue van its with the valet.  Bring it around front in half an hour and make sure the gated door is locked with three dead bolts.”
+	“You got it,” William stood and left taking a long last look at the sleeping girl’s firm round ass.
+
+ William was out front in the Van at the appointed time and Waiben came strolling across the street leading a monkey on a chain.  “Meet the President,” he said climbing in the van and shoving the monkey behind the seat.  He grabbed the notes William had made the night before and screened them quickly, “Damn...” he muttered.
+	“Did I do something wrong?” William asked nervously.
+	“No, would you stop acting like a scared school boy?”  Waiben glares at him for an instant and then relaxes.  “Look I’m going to explain as much as you need to know okay?  Get on the highway right there no just stay on this road for about twenty minutes and pay close attention to me.  Don’t worry about me I have no use for you, not right this minute anyway, but Sil needs your help.  You’ll start as errand boy or something of the sort if you want to move up Sil will let you, but remember no matter how stupid your part might seem from your point of view you don’t have any other point of view to see it from.  Picking your own nose could if viewed from the proper perspective be considered an act of pure genius......
+	Waiben continued on in strange circular lines of logic from which William was able to gather only that Sil would pay his bills rent food and all, and give him a cell phone so long as he, William was available whenever Sil needed him to do whatever Sil asked him to do.  In a way this was antithical to William's anarchist senses, but no rent and no job were always the true goal of his underdeveloped anarchy anyway.  Besides he needed an in to this sort of a life and these guys, whatever it was they did, certain gave a solid illusion of being rich and powerful.
+	Waiben was using an old police interrogation trick on William, although not because he thought William was stupid, rather because it always works.  he set himself up as the wild eyed scientist lunatic (lighthearted good cop) and Sil as the pragmatic realist with the money and means (powerful serious cop).  In fact they were both both, but William didn’t need to know that --the less you know about crime the longer you can expect to do it and live.  If he had in fact told William that he and Sil were not really good friends and would have killed each other if they thought they could get away with it and live to tell about it, it would have created an uneasy foundation for him to work from and might even have led him to believe that he might off them 
+both or play them against one another.  Sil trusted this kid so Waiben trusted, not Sil, but at least his judgement.  So Waiben had taken it upon himself to show him the Buenos Aires research facility.  It was something even his assistant Kellinger didn’t know about.
+	
+	The following was transcribed from audio tape recorded during the actual research faze and combined with analysis at a later date, it is intended to serve as a metaphoric representation of the dream process.  I have printed and edited it into this form so that my many benefactors and supporters both public and private may benefit from the research that they are paying for I thank you for your continued support and sincerely hope that the information I have gathered benefits you and that you will continue on with that support as there is much ground yet to be tread.  Sincerely Dr. Waiben:
+
+
+	Get me the fuck out of here.  bloody words sharp words that hung in the air like knives and when uttered returned to slit the throat of their speaker and if every word you have spoken returned to act upon yourself would you survive the experience, me no way i’m outta here.  Situation getting sticky, humid like vaporous blood hanging on in the air.  Still acrid smell of urine and small children playing in a asphalt playground ringed on all sides by immense brick walls with basket ball hoops hung half way up each of the sides.    Its two months latter and William has settled into his loft with Chloe, he is still trying to make sense of a world in which eaters can exist for years without any one knowing about it.  He sits dazed on the couch processing the information like anyone who has suddenly had the proverbial wool removed from their eyes and realized that that which we are taught from childhood to distrust is in fact a pawn of something far more immense and much much more dangerous.  The governments and nations of the world are incidental pawns the real powers control them and then beyond there are even more and so on like looking two mirrors facing each other and going on to infinity.  The monster of power is faceless there is no one person or group that controls everything they are all parts of a immense and 
+multiheaded monster that is constantly biting itself and attacking it own heads until some day it will destroy itself.  William is unaware of the kind of power that is beyond human ability as we generally think of it, a world of ghost and goblins does not do justice to the power of stars and black holes with there inescapable gravitational pull.  William is at the beginning of a tunnel that is long and dark and which only one in million live to see the end of.  Its the oldest con, the rebirth mythology chase it forever and you’re only farther away.
+	Chloe is getting ready for the naked party, painting glitter and neon paint around her breasted and in stripes up her legs.  William is admiring her ass and knows nothing about a girl named Maya, a man named Pete, or that Sil Hawkard and Dr. Waiben are slowly but surely attempting to navigated the tunnel and to  push humanity down in with them kicking and screaming all the way.
+
+
+		*		*		*		*		*		*
+
+
+
+
+
+
+	portrait of exhaustion your face hangs from bones like a projector screen, not much happened since the 1995 drop off but don't worry the drinks are on me.  Avert eyes look nothing head on --wary gaze averted to the passersby hung headed --lot of insignificant coordinate points brought together by chaotic butterfly thoughts.  And then you have to shave.  Maybe fifty five heart attack watch on your wrist hung like a trophy in the atrophy with the cigarette still burning --nicotine.  number patterns all broken down on account of the Lottery, the old man thinks of nothing but cigarettes and shotguns.
+	sorry to say that all I really wanted was to lay on rock and smoke your dope, forget fever fears and empty telephone alarms.  iAM tired again.  hung down and now:where do we go from nowhere --everynothing thing that isn't anywhere will be nothing now here.  newspapers blow in slow motion film loops a little too grainy to be real, everything is fine you can spend my money on a lottery ticket, cigarettes and whiskey.  Cellular red white and blue control symbol couldn't be reached for comment the old man stands up from the rocking rests the shotgun against the front of the house and retreats inside --Uncle is that you-- you saw uncle?  Unencumbered you will float off into abstract nothingness the suits are there for weight-cover --near the end of the line the bathroom attendant of stranger nightmares is helping the man back into his coat...
+	"ya know sir the thing that's going to get you through the oxygen chambers is going to be this breathing apparatus."  He drapes the fleshy blank of virgin skin over the old man's brittle wrinkled canvas innards and sharp protruding age bones.
+	the attendant adds with snicker "you can't always turn right on red ya know...."  he throws the skinned carcass into a lavatory stall where a pile of bloody skinned bodies is building up the old man steps back onto the porch, picks up the shotgun and sits back in the rocking chair the creaky of floor boards sound like screaming children.  Shoot her again.
+	Let me sleep until we have disappeared.  The train pulled out of the station before I could my papers in order.  Sad desert night and I stood in the phone booth for forty five minutes trying to remember a phone number.  I got confused when i remembered nothing was real and couldn't 
+really have mattered anyway so sat on my suitcase outside the train station and smoked cigarettes until the thought passed.  I am alternating between heavy and light like breathing into a balloon.  Cars never will be the same, and headlights don't do much for vision in the moonless night.  It was dark. Black.  Simply black.  I slept until morning and caught the next rain east....
+	There is nothingeverythingthatis.  In Canada great black crowds of crows will descend and attack in mass a single great horned owl and peck it to death in great bombing swoops beaks extended like cheap imitation switchblades from a drunken night in Tijuana.  eventually the owls next snaps from the continual battering and the crows fly away and return to eat the body after it has ripened up in the afternoon heat.
+	I used to go out after work to drink a beer.  But i don't anymore.  But i likely will again.  I likely will do everything i have already done all over again in slowmotion three year cycles like a film loop.  This makes me feel safe.  Safety makes me want to vomit on fat ladies that take up a whole bench seat on the subways up in San Francisco when i was twenty two I rolled on a new film when I am twenty five I rolled a new film when I am Twenty eight I will roll a new film.  This makes me feel safe.  Safety makes me think of national geographic pictures where brown skinned natives wrap worm heads on sticks and slowly twist the stick to pull the worm from under their skin with out ripping it in half and leaving its disease riddled body under their skin.
+	Nowhere anywhere as fast as they could run leaping timespace life elfian nightmarish flashes of light. I think I saw the end as a post script obituary for the living.  Its not going to be any better I can tell you that much --Dr. Waiben removed his shoes and sat back on the chair smoking a petroleum cigarette.
+	menes memories and magnetism
+	"The British biologist, Richard Dawkins has coined the expression meme to designate a signal traveling in human space-time and carrying information (or mis-information).  In Dawkins view, just as biological evolution depends on the circulation of genes, sociological evolution depends on the migratory habits of memes." --from Wilhelm Reich in Hell, by Robert Anton Wilson.  
+	memes by the definition given above would seem to bring the virus of language down yet another level to the point of perhaps decoding its genetic structure.  If we are to suppose that the viral quality of language is consistent with other virus then its transmission and ability to replicate itself must in the biologists reality tunnel, have a genetic code by which it reproduces and mutates the host cell structure.  Dawkins theory rests on the supposition theat ideas come before words ie the typical theory of language development we speak because we have something to saw.
+	On the way to visit the ostriches I had the peculiar sensation of running down a long tunnel of green black liquid in which little hairy elf like creatures were urging me to speak I could not speak and I felt a panic at the urgency with which they were probing me to speak I had the distinct feeling that If I did not speak I would cease to inhabit four dimensional spacetime, and I was struck by the overwhelming feeling that without words I would experience what those around me would have called death but what I now simply consider a loss of language I gave not concluded partly from this experience and partly from what the ostrich's told me afterwards that loss of word is loss of body and that we are in fact much like a computer monitor, the hard drive will continue to receive information even if those on the outside can not tell what is being done with the information received.
+		
+
+
diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/open your eyes.txt b/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/open your eyes.txt
new file mode 100644
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+++ b/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/open your eyes.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,115 @@
+ 	… It is just, it is just about to, it is just about to rolywholyover.  —James Joyce
+Eigenstate One (The Year 1999)
+	Open your eyes to Los Angeles, 1999, the sun is coming up and in state of sleepnonsleep you start to feel, for the first time, the pre-millennium tension building.  The room is nearly dark but the translucent glow of morning is beginning to bleed through the window.  The clock reads 6:23.  The distant sound of crashing waves jars a notion of abstract and ocean size uncertainty into the backbrain of a terminally nebulous domesticated primate.
+I lie there for a while just staring at the rough plaster ceiling and wondering if it’s texture is as close to the surface of the moon as I imagine it to be.  Sometimes in that half sleep state I try to imagine I am slowly orbiting the moon at about five hundred feet instead of lying on my back staring at a ceiling.  I jilt myself out of this mini-eigenstate by lighting a cigarette and turning on the lamp, the warm murky-yellow glow of the rice paper shade is harsh in contrast to the dark room and I am forced to squint until my eyes adjust.  The room is of modest size and contains the bed I am sitting up in, a nightstand with a lamp and a half-size bookshelf; the walls are decorated with black and white photographs of New York, Paris and the rural south, some of them I took myself and others are by professionals.  The bookshelf holds mainly science textbooks interspersed with occasional antique occult/magic tomes, all of which are related to my work; on top of it is a small meditation shrine which I set up as part of an elaborate personal joke.  
+I don’t normally get up this early but right now I am still living on New York time.  I wear two watches, one is a twenty-four hours stopwatch that I start over everyday when I wake up and the other has the local time of whatever country or continent I happen to be in.  I started this practice years ago when I decided to live in a Quantum Relativity State.  Not long after I read a joke somewhere that said the man who wears a watch always know what time it is, the man who wears two is never quite sure, I am never quite sure about anything and time is certainly as transient as anything else.  
+	This is, as I said earlier, nineteen ninety-nine on the modern calendar, but it is not technically Los Angeles its actually Sunset Beach, a small ocean community about half an hour south of LA proper; but I refer to everything within a hundred miles of LA as being LA.  I never did have a high regard for lines that don’t exist.  The house I am staying in is on Huntington Harbor and although I don’t personally own it do I pay any rent on it, nevertheless I think of it as one of my homes.  I don’t live anywhere, really, but I have homes here, New York, Paris, and one that actually is in my name —a farm outside of a small town in rural Georgia.  I travel a lot between the three cities and only go to The Farm for research and recruiting purposes.  
+	I crush out the cigarette and get up for a shower and shave after which I spend half an hour doing Hatha Yoga followed by some push-ups and sit-ups.  This has been my morning routine for three years now and I find that in spite of my love for cigarettes I am in better shape than most people in the western world.  This routine also helps to center me in whatever eigenstate I happen to be inhabiting, and serves to remind me at the start of everyday that is just one eigenstate among countless and it is subject to radical and irreversible change at any given point.  (Note: an eigenstate is a fancy name for any point at which an observation is made.  In Quantum Physics this term is used to denote the activities of particles when they are being measured and helps to differentiate from the actual activity of the particle which may be quite different at other points.  In laymen’s terms it means nothing.)  Any one interested at all in transcendence or brain modification should take up Hatha Yoga immediately, I also happen to think that Hatha combined with Kundalini can be viable sure for addiction, to quote the master addict himself “anything that can be done with chemicals can be done without.”
+	I took up yoga because I had a hypothesis that consciousness was a result of the antenna that was receiving it; in other words I thought for a time that we see what we see because of our physical shape.  It turned out I was grossly underestimating the complexity of things, but I did walk away with a lifelong habit that keeps me in good physical shape.  I have two major drug addictions and no plans to kick either of them and this morning like any other found me at the coffeeshop ingesting caffeine and nicotine until around noon.  Of course I was also working a case, but I will be the first to admit that it was a definite second priority.
+	This particular case had been open, but remained unsolved for eleven years before I was called in to help, and I am pretty sure that I was a last resort for my employer since he has gone to great pains to make sure that there is no trail between him and me.  What is it you ask?  We will come to that, but let me first say that I am not a cop or a private dick or anything of that sort; I am a specialist and I am not cheap.  I started off by soliciting my services in private circles where law does not tread and when I produced results where no one else had, word traveled and now my clients seek me out.  This leaves me the luxury of choosing which cases to take and which to walk away from.  I have recently gotten in the habit of taking on jobs that do not at first appear solvable to me; it’s the only way I could figure to keep myself on my toes.
+	Naturally before I committed to this case I checked out my employer who it turned out it was an ex-CIA man with a career that stretched all the way back to the old OSS days.  He had, from what my sources told me, worked this case himself for several years without results and apparently it had gotten to him enough that even after he retired he was still working it.  And now he wanted my help.
+	Over coffee and in between cigarettes I hacked my way through some networks and got in touch with an old associate in Rangoon who had some connections that dated back to the OSS; I also put a man on my employer told him to watch but remain hidden.  This meant that we could lose him for a while, after all he was CIA and therefore stone paranoid that somebody else might have more information than he did.  Such a man can rarely be relied upon to make good judgements, and I knew that he was never going to give up all his information without some effort on my part.  I didn’t want to play any card I didn’t have to and most of all I didn’t want him to feel watched, but I did want to know what he was up to.  I have found that if you watch people they will usually tell you what you want to know without you having to force it out of them.  William handled the grunt work for me without questioning why I was wasting his talents on spook stuff, which was a good thing, because I didn’t really have an answer for him.  It just felt right; I thought about the job and he came to mind that’s the way I work.
+	The CIA man (his agency name was Raptor which was so cheesy and stupid I decided to keep it for him) had made a muck out of project way back in the nineteen fifties.  The project was one of those stupid black ops things that are rarely actually operations and never black.  “A Secret Agency is an oxymoron run by morons and build on the hard work of more morons,” William used to say.  He harbors some bitterness toward the NSA for not recognizing his talents as legitimate, but he is basically right and this case was a spectacular example of an intelligence op that was well neither intelligent nor much of an op.
+	It was called WAIBEN for the doctor/agent that initiated it and it was really not an issue so far as I could see —they gave some LSD to prisoners several decades ago to see what the drug would do.  They were trying to figure out mind control, but the tests had been inconclusive and the project was abandoned in 1963. Waiben had had an accident crossing the street in 1990, but he was old to begin with and had probably threatened to write his memoirs or the like, so they got rid of him.  The CIA looking for mind control devises is like a monkey trying to find a monkey.  How can you study mind control when you have all the minds working for you under your control?  No wonder they didn’t have any luck.
+	William’s voice was echoing in my head when I put the report down.  The gist of it was that it had been a fuck up, and indeed it was true from what the documentation showed it had blown up in Waiben’s face, but where was the case?  I noticed a list of names at the back which I assumed were the prisoners who had been given the LSD, two pages and nothing I recognized, but then on page three a name was highlighted Eugene Sean Patriman.  On the back of that page held in place by a small paper clips were two photographs; one which showed Mr. Patriman in the traditional mug shot pose, it was dated 1963.  The other was color and showed Mr. Patriman eating what looked like breakfast at a table outdoors, he was wearing sunglasses and the photo seemed to be taken from quite a distance, it was dated 1989.  None of this struck me as unusual at first glance, Mr. Patriman looked to be well adjusted to society and seemed in good health… really good health on second look, and then after looking at the two side by side… far too good of health.  Mr. Patriman should be sixty-one years old in the second photograph, but there was not wrinkle on his face…. I found it unsettling, but I still saw no case.
+	William dropped some mail on the net that Raptor was preparing to leave for New York and that he had been reading the project reports, apparently there were some pages missing from mine.  I read them over quickly and caught a cab to the airport, by ten thirty local I was at café Dante in the East Village waiting on William.
+	 William arrived right on time, he was driving a cab an in the back was Raptor.  They were having some sort of argument from the looks of things and eventually I saw Raptor look over at me.  I was wearing a smiling Richard Nixon mask to piss him off and through him off guard; I was all ready catching the eye of nearly everyone waling by and if there is one thing that a CIA man hates it’s conspicuity.  Raptor was not the timid paranoid man I was expecting, but he did seem truly frightened to be seen with me.  Spooks are so easy to throw off their guard its really not even fun to me any more.  I need to work with an exhibitionist to see if I can throw them off guard.
+	Raptor had collected himself by the time he reached my table; he sat and stared at me in silence.  In moment or two the waiter came and he order a burger fries and coke which he never touched through out the meal.
+	“I hired you because you have a perspective that I don’t and its is now obvious to me that I underestimated your capacities for the more mundane aspects of our work so now I will come clean with you.  I’m not sure entirely what your man was able to get his hands on, but hear is my information.  This case is the biggest thing you are ever going to work and I suspect that you will be killed before you solve it, but if you want to know what really happened in that cell is that the subject made contact with decidedly unfriendly and seemingly alien agencies which you can read as individuals and/or organizations.  This sounds ridiculous every time I say but I have found no other explanation for these events that are one these tapes.  
+	He handed me an envelope, which I could tell by touch held three VHS tapes; he kept talking as the waiter set the food down in front of him.
+“You have to see the tapes to understand what you are dealing with but the basic gist of it is that some sort of alternate reality seems to exist quite parallel to out own, but frighteningly different and decidedly alien.  Dr.Waiben’s experiment –in ways we still don’t understand- appears to have inadvertently created a bridge or passageway between these realities.  The really interesting part is that the bridge or link or whatever… is a man.  We haven’t been able to get in touch with him since 1989, but we have found photographs of him as far back in time as the American Civil war.  Apparently he can um well as improbably as it sounds…he can move through time.  The consequences of this experiment remain largely unknown… as if that wasn’t enough….  I know your background in Quantum events… you will understand what I mean when I say we aren’t entirely sure anymore that any of this ever happened that is we have come to question everything and found nothing to be reliable… 
+“We put timothy Leary on the case for a while but he couldn’t make heads or tales of it either and in the end he concluded that his talents were needed elsewhere… its been hard finding people to work on this sort of a case… rather sensitive you understand… there are two people one I know you are familiar with… operating out of Rangoon I believe.  The other wishes to remain anonymous for the time being… I have had about all I can take of this case… I feel like something is taking over my body, my mind, like I am no longer in charge…like there is no control left… I am going to disappear… but the best of luck to you… look up your friend in Rangoon he has been on this one for a couple of years now, he’s the one who took the picture earlier this year good man…
+	He abruptly jumped up from the table and sprinted down the street.  I was in shock.  William yelled and started to pursue Raptor but I yelled back to let him go.  I took off the Nixon mask and motioned him over to the table. I stood as he approached and told him to bring all of our people to the farm within the next three days.  I ran out into the street, jumped in the cab that William had been driving and headed to La Guardia again.  
+	By the time I touched down in Atlanta my brain was spun through, looped and twisted beyond everything.  Its one thing to live by certain mantras like changes in perception can come at any second, any one who had ever read a few Quantum Psychology book or been to a transactional theripist new as much as I did they just never thought to use them as tools to make money, but it is an entirely different proposition to be told that everything you hoped was true was indeed true.  This was going to be the biggest case I had ever had in fact I had the distinct feeling that after this nothing else was going to matter.  The first call I made was to Rangoon.  Sil agreed to come to The Farm; it would be the first time we had met since I took it over from him.  The second call I made was to a girl; she promised me she would look after me if I lost my mind which by now seemed inevitable.
+	I put in the first video the minute I walked in the door.  It was shot from a ceiling camera and started with a man in a white coat injecting Mr. Patriman with what I assumed was LSD.  What followed was largely uninteresting except for a phrase that he kept repeating (it seemed wholely incongues to me) I can’t believe its not butter, I can’t believe its not butter….  At 04:58:23 on my VCR counter, Partiman calmly stood up and walked through the wa	ll!  I rewound the tape so many times it was in danger of being damaged.
+
+
+Eigenstate Two (The Year of the Logitician)
+
+Sil Hawkard awoke with a cramp in his neck.  He found himself lying on a cold cement floor inside a small room with bare cinderblock walls and two tiny windows that were high up on the walls, near the ceiling.  He did not know how he had come to be in the room, there were flashes of falling distant memories of panic that might have been from a movie or might have actually happened.  The room felt fake as if suspended in between the known and unknown, not unlike a train station and Sil half imagined that at any moment a giant coastal flyer engine might come crashing through the walls.  The windows were too high to see out of and they gave him a dizzy feeling that made him quesy. 
+He got up to take his mind off the churning in his stomach and see if there was a way out; the door opposite him was locked so he jumped up and down trying to see out the windows, but only glimpsed what he figured was probably another room just like the one he was in.   He thought about yelling but was wary of attracting attention.
+	Far off as if it were traveling a long cooridor came an echoing voice, it was garbled by echo andSil could only hear the word Tribune or was it fly, June?  In any case it did not help, you rarely get to the castle in situations like this so Sil resigned himself to waiting.  The voice gave him some feeling that at least something somewhere was happening and—good or bad—that thought gave him the comfort to sit down facing the door.  He did not remember falling asleep, but he was reasonably sure that the door opening had awoken him.
+	The door opened and two official looking gentlemen entered, they were wearing uniforms that Sil didn’t recognize.  The second one in the door had a syringe in his hand and Sil sae bad things in his future, but the first man very politely asked if he would come with them.  They led him down a long hall lined with doors that Sil assumed were more rooms like his own.  At the end of the hall was an arched entrance that led into a mezzanine where various officials were milling about and other prisoners were being processed through a serious of desks.  His guards led him up to the end of the line and simply left him there.  Sil assumed escape was not an option.  None of the other prisoners appeared to be trying anyway.
+Then Sil realized that such a thing did not technically mean that one could not.  He broke out or line and walked toward what seemed like sunlight.  That is he went in the brightest direction, no one seemed to pay him any mind and he was soon out of the lobby and found himself on the street
+
+I hit the street running and the first thing I noticed is one of those old time banners they used to string up between light posts downtown by the park, back when they had light posts and parks, such things being out of favor today.  But today for moment I got to get me up outta these old bones and that old banner dragged me kicking and screaming all the way back to San Francisco, Chinatown, big red streamers hanging from windows and red banners with indecipherable Chinese characters strung up between buildings.  I was with Mike Cultch and we were mosing our lazy way up to Coit tower to sleep on the cold stone wall on the ast side where the bushes grew up and you could hide from the washout cops.  Security guards being the most dangerous form of human know, we like Coit in spite of them.  Plenty of light to read by and no one goes up their except the tourists and they're all gone by sundown.  Just us and the handfull of wash ups who were mostly too drunk and stoned to notice anything that wasn't trying to bite them.  
+	not that we didn't have few close calls on the day.  Like the rent a gun downtpwn standing by the gate of parking lot like he really was Neil Cassady or something and he thinks he smells some shit from my cigarette.  he trys to pull a real cop routine on us and mike starts to turn around and I pipe up hey can I see your badge their mister washout.  Now he didn't like that name to much so he comes at me swinging and I just duck.  he punches the side of a car and it makes this awful crunching sound like when you're biting into a stale rock hard pretzel.  I was ready to get out of their on the double, but Mike is pissed cause he got suckered so he starts kicking the cop in the side.  I can tell by Washouts expression that its cracking ribs and more than likely creating one hell of mess with his internal organs.  I felt sort of bad, but Mikes crazy when he gets mad so I wasn't about to take one in the face for a washout.  By the time he let up on him the washout was spitting blood and coughing uncontrollably.  we split and never looked back.  Maybe that Washout learned the fine are of minding your own business, but more than likely he just beat the crap out of someone who reminded him of mike.  Violence as a virus rarely does anything but duplicate and breed.
+	Today's a long way from washouts, chinatown and the whole San Fransisco scene;  today is New York, slivers of sky and me, walking memory, invisible to others because I see them first.  I make it my point to see them first that way they don't notice me as much.  someones got to be paying attention and as long as someone else is giving off the vibe of paying attention some little nuerocircuit in the back of the brain relaxes and they don't see me.  Its an old trick I learned from a voodoo priest one night walking around New Orleans.  He had this bone staff with a human baby skull tied to it along with bead and teeth and other little artifact of his trade.  I saw the skull, but I never saw him.  He distracted my mind and controlled the situation.  It so happened that later I did see him sitting on some steps later on in the evening when the salt air was turning to fungus and laying the rest down to sleep.  He asked me for light and I noticed it wasn't a cigarette he was smoking so I made myself and home and he shared the joint with me.  By and by we feel on the topic of straights and how dope frees up the mind and makes you hyper observant and one thing led to another and I learned how to do invisble.  One of the handy thing about this skill is that you can cut through the static of humanity and you start to notice who sees you and who doesn't.  As old Bull would say you get to meet the johnsons.  right now here walking down the street, long past the red banner and moving up town I am on my way to meet some Johnsons.  Nice family, good neighborhood, mind their own business and they were good enough to ask me to dinner. 
+	Living on couches and corner mattresses crawling with tick and bed bugs and fleas you come to miss the home cooked meal.  Eventually you stop craving it stop even being aware that such a thing exists, but its a good thing to let someone remind you of every now ans then.  I can almost taste it
+	I closed my eyes and saw a finger print.
+
+
+
+
+
+Eigenstate Two (The Year of the Beast)
+
+Scene one:  ONE DAY IN MAYA'S APARTMENT
+MAYA
+PETE
+NARARATOR
+(Stage is a smallish square room with deep red walls, two couches perpendicular to the audience and facing each other with a table between them.  MAYA is a slinky sexual girl of twenty-four with fiery grey-green eyes, short black hair like ravens trying to get out of her head and slender arms and legs that slip around her body like ribbons.  She is wearing tight black satin pants and a green spaghetti strap tank top which is also tight.  She is sitting cross legged on the left hand couch smoking a cigarette.  PETE sits across from her watching her with a puzzled look on his face.  He is obviously younger than her and of a tall lanky build with an insecure awkwardness that is betrayed in his shifty mannerisms —as if he were not quite comfortable in his own skin.)
+
+Narrator (sitting on a stool stage left)  ...Pete watched Maya with absolute fascination, he had never met a woman, no he had never met anyone, as intelligent or as goddamn sexy as her.  He did not fully realize it but he was devastatingly in love with her and this we know meant that she would devour him and destroy his life.  He did not know this yet, but the thought did pass through his mind occasionally when he masturbated —imagining her in all sorts of ridiculous situations where the end result was always her sweet innocent but wise voice begging him to Cum all over me...ya come on my face.    (aside: wouldn't you?)  Pete was smart enough to realize the unlikelihood of him having sex with Maya but dumb enough to pine after her nonetheless.  
+PETE:(existentially in his own mind) please pleeeeeeease have sex with me.
+MAYA:  Would you like to see me naked?
+PETE: (too eagerly)  Yes!
+MAYA: huh... I guess that's better than not.  (she makes no move to get naked)
+
+NARRARATOR: It especially disturbed Pete that she seemed to take so much delight in teasing him and frustrating him further.  It also disturbed him when she went out with other men instead of him, especially when the other men was Jared Towers.  Towers was in Pete's World Religion class and represented a peace of humanity deeply disturbing to Pete, he represented strength and masculinity.  Pete was young and still believe that masculinity is limited to those specimens of the male population that look like they just walked off the cover of GQ or its ilk.  Later, like the rest of us he would come to realize that these cro-magnon motherfuckers are in fact far to fragile to satisfy a woman in bed and spend the majority of their adult lives desperately trying to convince themselves that they are not gay.  But, Pete had fixated on a rumor that Jared had a twelve inch cock, thick as a flashlight and had convinced himself that this was why Maya went out with him.  It served the need for self torture that Pete's brain seemed to possess.
+
+MAYA:  "Will you do something for me?"
+PETE: (hesitantly) "Maybe"
+MAYA: (with deadpan sincerity) "take off you clothes"
+JARED: standing as if to strip and then thinking better of it sits back down) "NO"
+	
+	(A seven headed snarling beast of unknown but leaning towards demonic origin leaps out of the floor from stage rear he first bites at PETE; several heads lay into his flesh and rips off first his arms and then his legs, and then holding Pete upside down by the stumps of his legs it chews on his balls staring out at the audience.  The beast leaps on the narrator and tears him to bits as a laugh tracks play offstage.  MAYA is still watching sitting behind the beast on the couch oblivious to the goings on.  The beast leaps down and starts to eat the audience; critics first the juicy fat ones in the front row and then the rich lesbians behind them all the way to back ripping up art fag kids who snuck in without a ticket cause there friend works at the door.  The beast runs snarling into the streets of New York devouring east village types causing people to go into panic and leap from the tops of burning buildings.  Carnage and Mayhem abound.)
+Curtain falls.
+
+
+Eigenstate two (year of the Logitician) 
+	
+Maya was living on the western edge of Usinc (a state labeled Fornical) in a town by the name of Long Beach, which did not in Maya's opinion possess a beach that would lead any rational person to call it Long.  She lived in the upper left hand apartment of a fourplex building.  The aforementioned Pete lived below her and next to him was a sweet quiet old woman whose life went on interminable pause between visits of her two grandchildren.  The remaining apartment directly across from Maya's belonged to a man who called himself Cary, but Maya suspected that that was not his real name.  He was rarely home, extremely wealth, extremely brilliant and seemed vaguely powerful in some way Maya couldn't quite place.  Certain people when you meet them give off an air understanding that makes them appear powerful to others who don't have that sense of omnipotent confidence —like they are aware that their "self" is not the sum total of experience. Maya had met him a few times and said hi but she did not know him very well.  She wanted to though and when she found out from the old woman down stars that Cary's daughter went to the university Maya enrolled in one of her classes.  
+	Anna was a beautiful girl with black raven hair that swung across her shoulders and bounced when she laughed.  Which she did a lot when talking to Maya.  She was nothing like her father seemed.  She was however always in a good mood and did not seem to have the psychosis of most people in Long Beach.   But Maya was disappointed that she couldn't get Anna to divulge any scandalous details of her father's life.  But Maya did use her as an impetus to talk to Cary more.  This led to vague friendship consisting of a  cursory discussion of his world travel habits, lack of official citizenship, and an invite to use his balcony whenever she liked.  He did not lock his door and professed not to believe in property instead he had the entire place wired with cameras so that if indeed someone stole something from him he could find them and ascertain whether or not they needed the item more than he did.  All of this intrigued Maya and secretly she wanted to know more, but she was happy to just use his balcony which was the largest one in the building.  It opened virtually right into a palm tree and gave one the feeling of being at some Mediterranean villa.  It made Maya want to waltz around in a leopard trimmed chamois wearing platform  shoes and sipping pina coladas.  Maya's balcony was drenched in afternoon sun and not a pleasant place to read so she would go to Cary's in the afternoon and read his books and drink pina coladas in her underwear and pace back and forth in her leopard trimmed chamois.  She didn't know there was a camera in the tree as well and that it could be remotely moved and zoomed so as to allow Cary to see what she was reading.  In fact Cary knew a rather lot more about Maya then Maya realized.  That was only because Maya was looking on a different map scale, Cary's map was much much larger.  But this is Maya's story and now a one act scene to show character development:
+
+	 (The End) 
+
+	
+	Jared was not really Maya's type either she only went out with him because she liked nice dinners, but didn't like to pay for them.  Jared was rich or rather his parents were rich and he would do pretty much whatever Maya told him to.  She had never had sex with him and didn't want to.  You can't have sex with a man who let you hypnotize him and then revealed under hypnosis that his father once chased him a around the house with a meat cleaver when he caught the boy masturbating to a picture of the Virgin Mary.  Maya used to wonder over fine french food: what kind of sick fuck finds the mother of god sexually appealing?  I mean if sacrilege is a turn on masturbate and think of fucking god in his own ass like he thinks of fucking you in yours...Maya had laughed for hours on that one, of course she didn't tell Jared anything about the revelation or how far into his mind she had gotten that afternoon.
+	
+	Pete had left and Maya had changed clothes and was heading out the door to meet Jared for dinner when she noticed light leaking under Cary's door.
+	"Cary?      It's Maya are you home?"  She knocked and hearing no reply she pushed gently on the door which floated open as if on its own accord.
+	A voice floated languidly in from the balcony and said, "Come in... I'm outside..."   Maya went out onto the balcony and there was Cary sitting and smoking a cigar shaped object which smelled like hash.  
+	"Hi." 
+	"Hi."
+	"Sit down," he took another drag and exhaled.  It definitely smelled like hash.  He caught her staring at it as she sniffed at the smoke.  Cary laughed, "would you like to smoke some hash?  I brought it back from Morocco..."
+	"That would be lovely," Maya felt the awkwardness of a setting too intimate for the relationship that was being cast onto it.  Cary did not appear anything but relaxed, but of course he was likely quite stoned.  Maya accepted the blunt and smoked it for a while before handing it back.
+	"Have you been enjoying this balcony in my absence?"
+	"Oh ya, I sit out here in the afternoons and read," the hash hit fast and hard and Maya had to fight to keep her wits about her, she thought vaguely of Hassan I Sabbah and his brainwashing techniques and for a moment she understood why he was so effective.  
+	"This stuff hits hard at first but it settles down and leaves you in a nice contemplative frame of mind, I only smoke it in the evenings.  I prefer something more active for the daytime."
+	"I would never have guessed that you smoked pot..."
+	"That's the idea." he smiled, handed her the blunt and leaned back in his chair reaching for cigarettes.  Maya took the blunt and reached in her bag for her own smokes, lighting one she asked,  "What exactly is it that you do?  Your daughter told me you own a casino or a mine or something?"
+	He laughed. "Doing research are we?" Maya blushed, but Cary just kept laughing.  "What I do has nothing to do with either of those things.   I just believe in diversifying my financial assets...so that if one particular area of the world economy goes snafu I don't lose everything...just good business you know........ but yes I do have both of those things, but they are just things  and not even ones that I'm actively involved in..." his voice trailed off.   "What I do is more complicated...some might say that I am trying to figure out what the hell is going on down here...others say that I already have figured that out and I have moved on to far more nefarious projects..."
+	He said the sentence like he knew that Maya would recognize it and the realization gave her an acute sense of paranoia which was accented by the canaboids floating in and out of her brain.  Banish fear.   Someone knowing you well without having spent any time with them is not necessarily a bad thing...people fall in love and they seem happy about it .  Secretly I think they're deluded but this is different.  Its a common phrase perhaps we've read similar books or maybe more people are into this sort of thing than you realize.
+	"So do you know what the hell is really going on down here?" Maya asked as coolly as she could in her stoned state.
+	He just smiled, "you're the one studying in college trying to figure it out... why don't you tell me?"  He settled back in his chair as if waiting to listen to a lengthy discussion on the subject.
+	"It would take more than pot for me to tell you that..."
+	"I have more than pot if you would like it."
+	"What do you have?"
+	"Do you know anything about South America shamanism?  They make a hallucinogenic brew  —some people call Yage some call Ayahuasca, I call it the orange  stuff that bubbles....
+	"Ya I know what Yage is, William Burroughs went looking for it, I read that book...."
+	"Ah yes the Yage Letters...unfortunately mister Burroughs was an acute heroin addict at the time and heroin tends to not put one in a positive state of mind...the book is a careful and imaginative account of one man's failure to transcend himself."
+	"I like Burroughs," Maya said slowly, "but sometimes his whole nightmare apocalyptic routine gets a bit old, but he's good at seeing what could go wrong in any situation.  If you want to know what could go right, you've got Leary or McKenna."
+	"You've read a lot of interesting books...I overheard you saying something about Aleister Crowley this afternoon... that's why I decided it was okay to let you know that I can get you anything you want...drug-wise and otherwise....you seem very intelligent."   Maya blushed slightly and couldn't decide if Cary was hitting on her or if he was just a genuine intelligent man trying to be nice.  "It would be easier to know if we had a script wouldn't it???"
+	"Excuse me?"  Maya had been lost in her internal musings and the question seemed to come out of nowhere
+	"Nothing I was just listening...I'm going to give you some Yage that I had brewed up for me, its a healthy dose but I think you've the skepticism to handle it.  Are you interested?"
+	"Yes I'd love to but um," Maya hesitated not wanting to be rude,  "not to be rude but I don't particularly want to do it right now... in front of you...."
+	"Of course not, you should go back in your room and drink it on an empty stomach and lie there in the darkness and just watch the back of your eyelids...that's the way you get into this stuff."  He was staring at her with his piercing, but unobtrusive green eyes, "but you have to promise me that you'll take it tonight and tell me about it tomorrow afternoon sometime because I have to early the next morning and I want to know what you get out of it"
+	"Ummm, okay ya," Maya thought for a second, "I can cancel my plans tonight,"
+	"You should he's a waste of time."
+	Maya started, confused "you know Jared?"
+	Cary smiled and pulled a vial of Ayahuasca out of his pocket "know I didn't even know you were going out, but since I changed your plans with an exotic blend of South American hallucinogens, he can't meant much to you."
+	She blushed and took the vial, "thank you.  I'll see you tomorrow."
+
+
+
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+	I awoke at the age of twenty-five in reasonably good shape and with a seemingly sound mind, but I awoke to a world of total insanity.  I say I awoke because the reality I possess is one I would not have voluntarily chosen; no I would have hoped for something where I had a bit more control, more say in the directions of my life.  So I say ‘awoke’ because everyone has at some point had that disorienting sensation of awaking in a strange place and for that instant not knowing how or why.  I live in that instant.  
+I am a character in a book.  I don’t even know the title of the book, so far it has read at times like a spy novel, a romance, a science textbook, an occult obsession, a personal journal, a metaphysical protein shake, and surrealist soup.  The surrealist parts are the funniest, the romance parts the most exciting, and the rest cover a range from downright frightening to mysteriously intriguing.  
+I have studied extensively, though by no means thoroughly, both eastern and western philosophy from existentialism to Sufism to Christianity to the Gnostic Mushroom Cults of Mexico looking for ways to understand and cope with my situation —how does one behave in a novel?  Some have proved useful but there is in the end, I fear no escaping my situation.  I live within the constructs of words not objects.
+Words are image and idea to me, I do not have your luxury of being able to evaluate and abstract myself, I can not say this thing is real this one is not because everything that could be is.  Some days I live dramatic events that shape and influence the entire book other days I spend under a tree reading a book within a book.  I never know what I will do until the day is over and this realization has given me the ultimate freedom, but no control and without control I don’t feel at home with the human race.  The vast majority of the human race believes that it knows certain things to be true (i.e. you assume each night when you go to bed that you will wake up in the same place) whereas I have found no such consitency in this book.
+My awakening as I have called it was simply the realization that I was a character in a novel and that to exert any control whatsoever over my circumstance would require that I gain an audience so I am here for you to let you in on my awakening.  I have to offer my finest verbal worlds and the infinite constructs of the imagination which are totally without the bounds of reality which you have to abide by, I can travel the globe at the stroke of a pen.  Enough reasoning, you’ll see my predicament eventually.
+
+All that we are is the result of all that we have thought.  It is founded on thought.  It is based on thought.  —Buddha (transmitted on WORD INC airwaves all rights restricted)
+
+I am lying back supported by pillows on a small couch in the back corner of an underground bar, dawn, Paris 1999, listening to the radio and staring at walls not yet written by Rembrant, Miller, and all the dead poets.  Peace back here in corner where I watch all time pass me by with the detached apathy of non-compliance —after all freedom is the one thing I have the most of.  Static chirps of French corporate radio interrupt my musings on arts finer abstracts.  Step aside and let the man go through.  I feel like a lead train, heavy from hash, muscles detached from their control centers, inoperable, trying to struggle out the words for another espresso to wake the gray cells that hang like storm clouds on the edge of my brain.  I am watching Nina who in her lovable French fashion is totally ignoring me.  Such a sweet girl, waitress, Nina, cherub cheeks —she puts up with me long after closing time.  I dream she loves me but I know she merely wants to go home; she certainly doesn't need me here.  I tried to sleep with her once, but her heart wasn't in it.  As a kind off consolation prize she lets me stay late until she is done closing up.
+	Every night I slouch my way here for my fix of stimulants, hallucinogens, and depressants, it's a full time job, shoveling coal in the engine.  Of course my drug taking is metaphorical, but I have to explain things in terms you will relate to and you are all addicts of one of the aforementioned whether you know it or not.  
+Paris in the rain —dark and ugly, a city of dreams gone wrong.  Parisians, like New Yorkers, seem to know something that the rest of us are missing, and they show no signs of sharing.  Scaring information out of the agents here is like ripping rotting molars from a tweekers corroded mouth —no one wants the job.
+	Strange French lounge music tumbles in from the WORD INC. speakers behind the bar, it rolls across the room like an ancient reminder of an inadequacy that has been building up since the last ice age.  Music ripped the fur from the ape body and made up man/woman, gave the creature a sense of wonder and beauty that demanded self-inspection.  Why? Art thou not a self-reflexive monkey?  Ancient questions that have been buried so well by the trappings and excrement of civilization; they learned to live in the gutters in alleys, only the homeless and displaced dropouts of society have the time left to investigate.  Or course most of them lack the vigor and rigor of mind for such endeavors, but junkies know more about the nature of economy than stock market analysts in sickly air conditioned rooms can ever hope for.
+This is the nightmare at the end of the century and like most of some forgotten race of seekers lying in languid rooms in far off dream cities, Paris, Prague, Peking, St Petersburg, I prefer to rest in peace now and start the real work on the edge of death. There at the final moment you will start to get the real digs. 
+ Nowadays, reclined on Persian pillows and sweet perfumed hash dreams, I live here.  I also have realities here.  Nina with her drooping doe eyes pulls on my arm helping me off the couch, tearing me from the peace of inner reflections.  She throws my arm over her shoulder and helps me toward the door.  Stumbling up the stairs and onto the street I am blinded by the morning sun finally breaking its way through the sullen clouds.  I light a cigarette and draw deeply.  Using the building for support, with the cold Paris wind blowing winter right through me and my pea coat, I brace myself for the long stumble home.
+The streets of Paris for those that have never had the good fortune to walk them, seem to perhaps been built by someone with a sense of humor someone who sat back and asked themselves: what would travel be like if we made it deliberately difficult instead of deliberately easy?  The answer is here somewhere in the meandering alleys, bridges, tunnels, and streets that seem designed to get one lost, confused, and disoriented.  Only in such a state do you begin to discover the real Paris. At least that’s my friend Allie says and I walking to her house on this sobering morning so I start to think like her.  
+Allie is French-Canadian by birth and I know her from Canada where she was a stripper for many years.  Three of which she also spent living in my house and I have come here to Paris to return the favor by living ever so briefly in hers.  Her full name is Allie Suviguile which I used to tease her about because in the crudest midwestern american accent she is only one r away from sounding like “survive guile” and she does indeed survive by being guile.  Everyone at some point evolves to suit their name which is why I am deeply frightened of having children —far to much responsibility, in the back of their minds all parents store guilt at the thought that perhaps some of the wayward tendacies of their children are the result of parential influence, conscious or not.
+My own memories may have filters on them that were shaded and toned by my parents.  Take for instance Mexico City: I remember Mexico City in hazy brown discolored way, but its not the smog its the nature of memory.  The image collages overlay themselves like a bad acid film from the sixties.  Cut to a shot of the subway, sad brown faces and I want to know why they aren't on vacation like me… lay on top of it an image of pyramid excavation digging up and trying to solve the Mayan Caper.  Years ago you would. Understand she was standing right next to me and then...Warm sweet smelling cab and my father says “hey, look a Kentucky fried Chicken” and sure enough I see one.  Americana right  in the middle of foreign chaos.  
+I've had quite a time ever since then trying to pick up the pieces of a world that exists in only my subjective phantasmal experience, but that is partially explained by the fact that I live in book and am subject to forget that at times and think that I actually exist, and that everything is actually happening.  Some days everything actually is happening, but I’ll come to that.  For now that kaleidoscope memories of my youth — I focused up into the sun , it burned in fantastical visions that all of Dr. Hoffman's LSD could never quite reach and then there was the sound...an unbelievable pulse of something so guttural it would announce itself for years to come by illicit in me the most terrifying kind of fear that paralyzes you.  Leaves you like a woman I saw once stone still and shell shocked right in the middle of this great arch in Canyonlands National Park, Utah.  She just stood there unable to move, feeling the digging hooks of unbridled terror burning into her brain and creating an endless and spellbinding feedback loop that forbids you to move, rips you right out of the very fabric of collective reality and propels you into strange land of pure abstraction.  I watched her sit there unable to help herself doubtless staring at the two thousand foot drop and the meager four foot wide sandstone arch that was holding her there suspended in mid air, seeing herself for the first time the way we are.  Naked cold and deathly afraid.
+	But the cab driver just laughed and said, “here in Mexico City there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat, Kentucky Fried Dog, But definitely no Kentucky Fried Chicken.”  He smiled this crooked smile revealing gold caps and over moist gum structure that was so large it seemed to be slowly crawling right up off his teeth.  Okay no, that was a devise of literature, but he really did say that and he really did laugh at us, and then sternly advised in all seriousness against eating there, not that we would have anyway.  And all this was years before I would ever get to India to learn that first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.
+	But alas I did not have my Mexico City cabbie advise to help that woman frozen there on the Arch, in fact I went all the way to the end of the trail (funny I don't remember were it went) and came back and she was still there, frozen for time.  Occasionally I wonder if maybe it would have help to walk by here real quietly and whisper...don't worry there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat or Kentucky Fried Dog, but certainly no Kentucky Fried Chicken.  
+	But that sound would never go away that Kaleidoscope burned out my eyes and left me open, Naked and exposed to be brutalized by sound.  But I can't paint the picture that way the sad poet crap...Wilde would never have stood for the half alive black clad zombies that run around pretending to see so much deeper into life than the rest of us and they want to sell their torture to you for an outrageous price.  I never saw the likes of such a con, I wouldn't spend a goddamn dime of the crap, sower up punks, shave, you read this stuff, it is mocking you.  Yes you!   Sour-headed mongrels sucking the joy out of it all, it drives me nuts, makes me want to live in Paris in state of perpetual disgust digging through trash can with this old bum I met once who went by the name of Henry.
+	But fortunately I ditched Henry for the time being although I have noticed that the oddest characters tend to pop up at the most inopportune times.  Now the streets of Paris take on a particularily sinister intent and I duck into more obscure alleys trying to avoid Henry all the while thinking that that might well be just what he would expect me to do.  Its not that I don’t want to see him its just that I have a certain hunger right now that Henry can not fill.  I need a woman. 
+I am hoping that Allie did not bring anyone home last night because I am like a primordial beast in heat.  The Paris nightlife does that to me, makes me get back in touch with very immediate physical yearnings for things like female flesh and the blessed rite of sex.
+	Allie and I share only two common points we like to talk about nothing for hours and we like to fuck.  I don’t love her at all, though I care emensely for her and would never do anything to hurt her.  Unless she asked me to in her special I’m-about-to-come extra breathy voice that crawls all the way to my backbrain and lets me tie her to chairs and whip her and fuck her mouth and joyfully consent to having the same done to me.  Allie is Joyce’s worst nightmare, I have yet to find something that will make her blush —I remember the time I walked in on her and some man and without so much as hello she through him on his back impailed herself on his cock and yanked out mine and sucked it as best she could while bouncing up and down.  She has dragged me to countless orgies, dominatrixes, and fetish balls all in the aimless pursuit of pleasure.  Eventually I grew weary of the scene and I left her, but a chance meeting in the tube has led me here.  That’s another great thing about living in book —you have chance meetings with nymphos on subways. 
+	All this and now standing ringing her bell it seems that she has spent the night elsewhere.  You never know how your day is going to be until its over. 
+
+Post Script:
+	
+	I saw a man upon the stair,
+	A little man who wasn’t there.
+	He wasn’t there again today;
+	Gee, I wish he’d go away.
+		-WORD INC broadcast all rights are served
+
+I had a most marvelous vision one day of red brick buildings.  Boston -harvard square- fall; the Charles river slips by without a sound, the streets corral throngs of people- onlookers drunk beyond comprehension of what they were there to look at- they stumble out of bars and lurch through doorways like grenades rolled out on the street.  Inside the Radcliffe boat house a reserve of surplus energy is released in muscular spasms that pulse in orgasm.  Her breasts pool salt onto my tongue.  And in walks Truman Copote he looks it over for a minute and then, having taken stock of the affair, proceeds to hand me the rosete stone of Knowledge.  He lit a cigarette, took the stone back, and walked out the boathouse doors.  I tasted salt in my mouth every time I called up the memory. 
+
+	Its cold this time of year in the East out there in backwater eddies towns where the frost had long since burnt the leaves red, yellow and then right of the tree where they pool in sidewlks and street and covered paths in Kaliediscope blankets.  We huddled in blankets rather than paying the bills and having heat, we were agents we had to make do, get by on the absolute minmum 
+
+	
+
+
+"...and the best part of it is, you're gonna love this, not one word of it is true.  I've run it through CHIPS three times and we have no noise coming out of that sector in the last ten years..."
+	"Could it be an anomaly?  We've missed things before..."
+	"What are you trying to say?  that I'm missing a part of the game?"
+	"Look, how many timetracks are your people watching right now?"
+	"we're running twenty thousand day in and day out for the entire year local objective..."
+	"Well maybe somewhere in what must amount to over twenty million local subjective tracks, you missed something.  Did i ever tell you the one about the house that smiled?"
+	"Enlighten me"
+	"I was killing some time down in the south, waiting between assignments you see, laying low from a job out in LA if I recollect properly, anyway, I had this ramshackle joint out in the woods all overgrown with vines and tree drooping right onto the porch.  I spent most of the days working on the Brazilian Caper trying to put together the pieces, information synthesis was my specialty.  so one day I came driving home from the bar, now I'd had a couple of gins which is key to the story, I pulled off the highway onto my driveway which was a dirt road maybe half a mile long and you could see the house when you turned off the main road but then you ducked under some trees and lost it until you were right up on it.  when i turned off this one particular day I could have sworn the house smiled at me, when I got up on it it looked normal enough and I assumed it was the gin that made it smile.  It never occurred to me to look from the point of vies that it was the gin that let me see it smile...I was preoccupied at the time.
+	"Some weeks later I thought about the incident so I ran the house through on CHIPS to see if we had any information on the place.  turned out the house had a history of jealous behavior, so I checked into a skid row hotel and avoided the place for a week.  I went back and everything I owned had been burned to the ground and I am still to this day convinced that i missed the clues because I didn't know that I had any.  You see everything has a relationship with you, everything you see and do has a reaction to you and if you look at it another way everything you are doing might be a reaction to something you can't see."
+	"You're saying I'm looking at it wrong?  Fine count me out of it, you wanted a background check on the area and I gave you one, if you don't like the information that is not my problem.  I'm getting out a here this place gives me the creeps...."
+
+
+	I rather liked the place, it was in fact my favorite bar in the state the state being Georgia the country being USinc.  The plaster was peeling in great sheets from the ceiling and the walls had a rough texture such that you had to move around and find just the right spot to lean your head back on.  I had my spot, it was in the corner and I sat so I faced the front door I liked to see who was coming and going, comes with the trade you understand.  I was in a red booth that wrapped the corner and had a table that was too short for it, worked out more as a foot rest than a table, although it held up my legs and drink without too much complaining so I guess you could call it a table, if you wanted to.  There were these red lamps sticking out of the walls here and there, that and the kerosene candles on the tables were the only light.  It was a small bar (all good bars are small) maybe six seven tables and a handful of stools; the place was a real diamond, but they kept it looking like coal.  At the moment I was the only one here except for Harry Woods, the bartender, and of course the man who had just left my table.  A man I was not having kind thoughts about right now.
+	His name was Scratch because he once clawed his way out of a lockup with his bare hands, or so the the story went.  The information he was to have imparted was incidental, I had set him up to see if he would feed me a line or hang me out to dry, always good to hit a source with something you already know if like me, you haven't hit the source in a while.  I crossed his name off of the list of reliables and I was packing up my bag to go when my phone rang.
+	I had recently gone into private practice after being with the company for fifteen years.  To be completely forthcoming I would I guess have to revel that I was forced to go private on account of a royal fuck up of mine in Brazil, but I was putting it behind me and trying to drum up some work.  The phone was an auspicious sign and when I looked at the ID'er it was coming straight in for the quarter itself.  Holy Shit I thought, they must be more pissed at me than I thought.  When people are trying to get a hold of you and you don't want them to the best idea is to keep moving.
+	I made a bee line for the bathroom, turned off the phone and pulled out a syringe.  I went to do this once and some old junky thought I was shooting up and tried to get one off of me which I refused and he got mad and ran out to tell the management, course I was gone before they got there.  I sat down on the toilet and set out the electromagnetic generator on the floor in front of me.  I was tapping an old west piano line with my feet while it warmed up.  When I saw the portal open I started to masturbate 'til I was just about ready to shoot.  With my other hand I readied the needle and felt around for the sore at the base of my spine and inserted it.  This was the trickiest part; I drew out a milky white cellular substance and I felt the familiar tingles around the edges of my body, starting in the feet and hands, I knew it was going to hit fast.  I made a good jump and landed right on Maya's table where she drew it up into another syringe and then shot into the back of a good looking head.
+
+	
+
+
+	Have you ever tried to live at the speed of light?  I don't mean literally of course, just so there's no confusion here, we are after all in the middle of what is shaping up to be science fiction story of the worst kind.  Agents popping up here and there without warning and always mysteriously knowing more than they could if they possible lived in your world, you the reader that is.  But you see at the end I am the one who has to live through it so you ought to be able to read it with out too much pain, that is if I can live it….
+Word comes down from EDITORIAL RE-WRITE, ah ahem we don't quite seem to know what this is...could you expand on the science fiction stuff, now that we can sell.  Have a really big hit! I see best seller lists in your future? eh?  You want the chiclettes mister?  Spanish boy sell that goddamn gum again come stumbling up to you on the street in Mexico City. 
+NOTICE FROM RE-WRITE:
+	We can't seem to decide what category of the book store to put this in sometimes it seems like a science textbook, then the next minute it getting dragged by some pimple faced clerk down to the science fiction shelves and then without warning you turn it into a personal confessional and start address the reader directly...could you organize this better we're very interested you see....
+	Have you ever tried to live at the metaphorical speed of light.  I mean you.  Not an abstract self that you think the writer is talking to whenever you see the personal pronouns.  You and I are having a dialogue and I'm trying to ask you a question except that we have a time travel issue.  Is this nonfiction and true always, or is it fiction and entirely made up of unique emotional moments that fade as quickly as they show themselves?  I don’t have that delimma so I don’t have to worry about it.  I know I live in pure fiction, not even real you know, just words strung together….  
+A while ago I mentioned Henry, well its time for the real digs…. 
+	Nobody around the quarter could stand Henry he was —I admit— a paranoid schizophrenic and sometimes he would forget if he was talking to you or to the voices in his head.  They would get kind of mixed up at times and he might occasionally chase you around and try to kill you with his umbrella, but he really meant no harm and he was too old to catch you even if he actually did mean you harm…. Besides I was just to naive to see it in terms of crazy/not crazy.  Its all in how you paint it you know…you can try to cut it up and rearrange it and maybe you come closer to the abstract notions of truth that philosophers are always blabbing about, but nobody lives in an objective universe.  This is the way I saw it: Henry had good stories, he thought he was an agent see and he loved to tell anybody that would listen to him all about how he had the inside scope on the CIA.  “Used to be an agent see and they had me in on the Kennedy job and what better way to discredit me then to drive me out here on the streets?”  Sometimes when I was really stoned it did have an eery ring of truth about it, after all NO ONE believed him.
+	No one really believes anyone really though, I mean we like to think we trust each other and we love to say that we do, but I've watched this tired old game long enough to know one thing, its a game.  And in a game nothing is ever what it appears to be because if everything were right there for you on the surface for you it would be a pretty stupid game.  So over the years the bipedal monkeys have dreamed up an elaborate universe of intricately interwoven moves and counter moves and rules to the game that has lately had the nasty side effect of becoming terribly obvious and not so much fun anymore.
+	I studied history quite a bit, I was drawn to it I think because I don’t have time. These stories are only linear in time to make it easier on you the reader, but for me its all always existing forever somewhere and at sometime which makes the whole time concept lose shape and eventually it collapses back to the state vector.  There is no such thing as TIME.
+
+	
+	Something rather strange has been going on lately, too many jumps I think you can't move between the threads of reality to often before you start to wonder which on of them is real.  Denizens of psychedelic drugs refer to such people as acid casualties, this is mainly do to their tendency to not be able to let go.  You can't move in and out of worlds until you detach, someone once said to me about the experience: first the human game stops, then the time game stops, and then the me game stops.  At this point you are confronted with the ugliest aspect of what you call reality, the personalized ego that fights all the way to the bitter end.  It might not ever go away for good, but usually in the past I have been able to let go and move and now I find that I have more and more fear about jumping.  The very sight of the needle and the apparatus this cold electromagnetic...thing, made partly of inorganic microchips and partly of neuron cells stolen from leeches.  
+When the thing was first tested the story goes that they used jellyfish, but the director, Dr. Waiben was struck by this "duty to the irony of our situation" and switched the neural tissue to leeches because this thing is going to suck away the last defenses we have.  Only that didn't exactly happen, the thing is that people can't be pushed to do anything they can't understand, and therefore they rejected it.  so now we’re where we are, like the yogi said —wherever you go there you are.  And here we are, with two sets of humanity, those who went and those who didn't.
+	Naturally this created a certain power dynamic of have and have nots, but the thing is that most people who went lost all concern for what had been their lives, they fell victim to sabetoge, which is okay because it gave me job.  I work for the Agency of Interdimensional Control, under the direction of Dr. Waiben.  The good doctor and I were working on this project for years before anybody was aware what was going on and consequently we know the system technology and emot vortexes better than most and when people started to get wind we already knew which way it was going to blow.  So we started setting up the agency and recruiting like minded individuals to help us keep things under control.
+	I must take time here in the narrative to mention exactly how the system works.  We were both stumbled upon a kind of understanding of the way things work at the same time and hence we wound up in the same place one day which we later realized was not in fact an act of stumbling at all, but anyway we met near the outer edge of the universe on an 8th dimensional string.  We had both realized at the same time that the string theory emerging in physics at the end of the twentieth century was in fact a more technical description (less poetic I might add) of the Egyptian book of the dead.  At the time I thought this was coincidence, but then one day I was watching movie about virtual reality games and I started thinking about what would happen to human mind if you turned everything on at once.
+	I couldn't find any literature on the subject so I decided to make my own.  I started with a virtual reality suit, a sensory deprivation chamber, ten years practice of yoga, a variety of hallucinogenic chemicals, orgone generators, talismans, magick symbols, and a room full of books, everything religious practice recorded by man, the latest in theoretical physics and everything in between.  then their was Maya, but we'll come to that later.
+	My actual experiments were rather undisciplined and were not yielding much in the way of results until I accidentally left the stereo on one day.  In the sensory deprivation chamber on 200 micrograms of DMT, with the orgone generators humming I had the literal felt experience of being on the edge of the universe and I was sure I found GOD.  As it turned out I was on the edge of what up until then was thought of as the universe, but I met Dr. Waiben, not GOD.  Although I spent the next two years quite sure that I had seen GOD.
+
+	I noticed rather early in my life that movie actresses made me feel funny.  When I say this most people think I mean some sexual entendre or maybe funny peculiar.  What I really mean is that they made me feel funny.  One guy in bar once told me that it is impossible to feel funny, you either are funny or your not he said.  I asked him how he could be sure that no one felt funny as in funny haha just because he had never felt funny.  He tried to hit me and I left in hurry without finishing my beer.  I made it a point not to discusses the "funny" feeling with anyone again.
+	But I still felt funny and wasn't quite sure why.  My natural assumption was that this was some sexual feeling I was having, but at the time I didn't  have sex life to compare it too.  Over the years I have found that sex will at times produce the funny feeling, but it is not as strong as with the actresses.  Another thing that gave me the funny feeling over the years is cannabis.  I have smoked pot nearly everyday for three or four years now and I find that toward the end of the night I tend to slide into the "funny" feeling quite naturally now.  recently however I have found that the "funny" feeling can be induced at will anytime you want.  This is or course the religious secret of the ages and you now expect that I will tell you how to do it yourself.  except that words won't let me.  I offer you this as a consolation prize: somewhere out there between the eleven dimensions (the four you know, four more you know if you have read mystics, and three more which can not be described they are only lived) there are portals through which you can move your consciousness.
+	That is why I said that you have to know how to detach.  Most people I have noticed tend to think of themselves as their bodies.  Interestingly most religions that most people tend to believe have always said that you are not your body, I was never religious though.  the language that told me that was science, science said in rather more complicated terms that nothing exists.  There has been much despair in fact over this statement. people have natural tendency to belief in what they call "life" that is the material world.  They believe that it is real and existing at a point in time.  When you learn to let go of the body (usually when you die) a vast array of possibilities open themselves up for examination and I can assure you that there is every bit as much to be feared as any hell fire and damnation sermon has ever threatened, but you only get their if you want to go.  I'm not sure how realities come to exist, I can only tell you that they are their, and if you want to find them you will.
+	
+	It was sometime before I made the connection between the stereo and GOD, but one day in a vain attempt to get back to where I was I left the stereo on again.  This time however I was catapulted into a nightmare of despair and utter gut wrenching fear and I "saw" the music drawing me into it and I had the experience of wrestling something off of me as if every cell in my body were desperately trying to get out of an invisible blanket that was tearing at my flesh threatening to rip me apart.  i had a heart attack and started bleeding from my nose and mouth and Maya saved my life.  she had walked into the room and thinking that I was gone turned off the radio, when she did I let out what she called the most inorganic noise I have ever had.  she called the paramedic and started CPR which saved my life, sort of.
+	By this time i was quite detached from what most people would call life.  I hadn't seen anyone aside from Maya in months and I only slept on Sundays.  I had also long forgotten about things like the police and I was busted for having a rather large quantity of what they called controlled substances, the whole thing made the paper and my life went down hill.  I moved into a different twelve by twelve room and got a new (and rather boring) wardrobe, but down in Atlanta a similarly minded individual read about my story and contacted me.  In fact he managed to get me released and out on bail before the end of the month.
+	So I happened to come into the more formal experiment complete with government shadow funding.  Private companies often donate to private research groups for tax deduction purposes and this money goes into the private sector where the CIA usually recommends projects that ought to get money.  It was a rather complicated network of money laundering in the name of science which was why I joined up, its not everyday that you can live in spy novel.  Except that I was very bad at it sometimes and liked to smoke pot while doing research and got pulled over stoned at four in the morning which landed me back in jail.  this time they didn't want to bale me out so I sat there for a while and thought the nature of the thing.  And somewhere in the middle of it I heard Maya recounting that she had turned off the stereo and I remembered the music episode and I had a Joycian moment where I just saw how it was working and it came to more complete and laid out like a plan.  Of course now I know why, but at the time it was a monumental feeling to have that thing handed to me.
+	So I built just like I had seen in it, at a friends house over in Athens.  We had worked on some musical experiments, he knew what I knew about the power of sound, and he was pretty open to going out on the edge, which is a good quality to look for in friends.  I don't exactly know what I would say if some one came to my door and said hey I was wondering if I could set up an electromagnetic field generator in your living room and maybe project myself into a different multi-verse,  but William shrugged and said "um okay."
+	So we did and it worked and I met Maya finally, although I was under the impression that we had already met in what I was still calling "the real" world.  Maya is a  mmm , entity is a tempting word but it implies a singularity when Maya is continually unfolding, you can meet here, but its never as good as elsewhere.  Elsewhere became the name of the first reality that I encountered In the expeditions Bill and I embarked on.  In what we called objective time tracks we had our bodies and world as I knew it, put in Elsewhere their were only subjective time tracks.  We started with 1=1.  One "normal" world and one "induced world" (since then the ratio has changed to 1=1,000,000,000), jumping between the two involved 200 intramuscular injection of DMT, sitting in a comfortable spot we used an array of speaker wire and amplifier heads to create a magnetic field around the body.  When the DMT kick in the walls became electric and vibrated and I saw the cross waves coming in from the speakers (later we found that the low frequency bass helped make the waves easier to see) if you "thought" yourself at the harmonic convergence of the two, you stepped into Elsewhere.
+	It took two days of tinkering to master it, but when we did we had a reliable and repeatable experiment demonstrating the existence of "tangible" realities other than the consensus one.  I took pawned it off on Waiben for a Swiss account and Bill and I were going to hit the road, but Maya intervened.
+
+
+	New York City at the end of the 20th century: woman says to me: don't you know you can't smoke in the subway? ya.  :you don't give a fuck do ya>no< It was unquestionably rude: she deliberately intruded on my reality and imposed her own.  I did not exist in world where people couldn't smoke in subway stations and she imposed RIGHT and WRONG on me.  This is of course seen as quite okay as smoking causes death, but I knew that dead was not the end of things so I didn't have to cling like a crying widow to life.  I started think what might happen if people expanded and just extended the old rules into the new.  It was then that Bill and I laid plans for IAC.  At first our goal was to just make a survey of the area.
+	I ended up on rainforest subtimetrack out on a routine patrol, I had always wanted to see the Jungle so I signed on.  the group sailed right down through the mouth of the Amazon all the way down into her bowels it seemed by the time we put in at little fishing village.  The sergeant was a trustworthy enough fellow, even looked a bit like some painting I had seen once of Vasco De Gama.  He headed up to the mission to see if we could get lead from the Padre.  He came back with an ear and the word the Eve El Gui, this woman of revered skills or so we were told.  The sergeant was of the opinion that if the company was going to send us into death, it should at least be at the hands of a Sexual Goddess.  Eve as we started to call her, was a tantric demonese hauled her self down from the Queens area nineteenth century, spit and polish deal and now wrecked her havoc through seven dimension.  There was, besides me two soldiers who carried our heavy cannon, a map man and the sergeant.  At first it was normal enough, I've run similar jobs before, just never in the jungle.
+
+	I live in great fear of psychiatrists, which they would doubtless say it irrational, which in turn is the sourse of my fear.  Imposing on the world the power to interpret what is real (sane they call it) and what is not real (insane) is to make yourself the living god that the ancients so greatly feared, reverd, and worshipped.  The modern psychiatrist is playing out a script that the word created back in the beginning.  It started as a word (always does) and it then became an idea, then an emtion...love of god, now it is flesh.  We are god.  How anticlimatic is that.  When Waiben and I were first laying out the architecture of the word created universes we hypothosized that to kill the flesh would be to kill the word.  But as we got further and further into the concreteness of the thing the more we realized that the flesh is not the word it is the word that becomes flesh.  In other words killing the flesh was analogous to cutting out a tumor, only to have another start growing.  Only pure image or pure emotion can knock out the word completely.
+	Image guns contained word defying images so that when you got shot with them the response would not be in terms of word.  This is still the most effective way to rub out the word, although we do also use emotion guns which hit one with wonderous and overwhelming feelings, but some of the more skilled of the enemy have been able to cut these up and move thwn along irrational and chaotic lives and arrive at word.  Poetry for instance will often render an emotion gun useless.
+	In the beginning the enemy started with an agent gone bad which we spun off as a metaphor in the Christ-con caper.  Christ was originally one of use and we wrote him in to try to bring things to head, but we were way early on that timetrack and the whole thing blew up in our faces like the CIA at the Bay of Pigs fiasco.  At that time the majority of the enemy was moving under the name of Christians, powermongers trying to horde the system and leaving the details to be worked out for future generations.  The reverberations cut across nine dimensions and we had a hell of a mess to clean up.
+	Unfortunately the enemy is wilely, or perhaps that would be the end of the story, but its not, we got even bigger doodoo now.  Now they call themselves scientists and they do there work from deep within jungles, concrete, and tropical like the one sarge and I are staring at.  somewhere in the dizzying maze of trees and rivers and insects and the very air that is permeated with life, is Eve, the sudectress of word cons and we are being sent to take her out.
+	It was somewhat unusual to go into a literal jungle, I generally operate in the concrete metaphoric ones, but Eve had special credentials, and so did I.  Eve was acting on the Iris script and trying to pick up the scattered pieces.  She wanted things run on systems and she was going to bring down the shit house with her, as we say in the trade, one of her systems was an elaborate sex con called unilove.  Unilove holds that the self can only love one other self at a time.  Monogamy they call it back where I come from.  We were having a hell of time trying to bring that one in for trial, and Eve was our chief opposition.  My special talent was the ability to bring in the multiplicity of the issue, you see the singularity is but a convergaence of the multiplicies, but shop talk is not what you do sitting in camp at the edge of the jungle.
+	
+
+	Soem readers no doubt are familiar with the losely defined concept of lucid dreaming, that is consciously indusing in oneself a dream state.  Once when I was about ten my dead grandmother called and talked to me on the phone.  I have no idea whether or not this actually happened, but I am certain that I experienced the phenomenon of it happening.
+	years later I had a similar experience of stumbling onto the dead in lucid dream state.  this experience was not unlike what happens in virtual reality games only it was self indused rather than coming in from an outside apperatus.  This discovery (which is as much of a discovery as Columbus landing and finding a population of five million and then claiming that he had discovered america) led william and I inexoribly into a tunnel of reality that paved the way for a global awakening.
+	By now we were fairly adept at moving in and out of realities that were from our point of view totally artifical and then we hit a snag, a big snag.  We began to think perhaps we had induced some sort of sctizophrenia and conjunctual hallucinations.  this proved to be fortuituse thing in the end, because we met the enemy in a virtual sense rther than unwittingly encountering them as actual intities.  intities is as I ahve said a poor word for the phenomena, all thing are conceptual nothing exists, (sub atomic physics 101) words define things that exist.  anything that can be put into words then has a fairly mapable probability of occuring in subjective reality.  
+	We confronted the enemy before we knew they were the enemy and thus gained the upper hand.  gradually we found the Elswhere had distinquitive cities and places not unlike the ones we were already familiar with.  One we nicknamed the quarter, because of its resemblance to New Orleans.  We chose it as our base of opperations in Elsewhere and went about setting up the scenery to our liking.  WRITE and IMAGE were our tools and we painted quite a picture.  I was inclined toward french quarter type of arcitecture and went so far as to go down to the "real" french qarter in New Orleans with the image guns to make a rough replica, in time of course others would find the quarter and now its a treaturous hell hole, but its still our jumping off point.
+	
+		Lying back supported by pillows on a small couch in the back corner of a bar, Paris 1999, staring at walls not yet written by Rembrant, Miller, and all the dead poets.  Peace back here in corner where I watch all time pass me by with the detached apathy of non-compliance.  Step aside and let the man go through.  I feel like a lead train, heavy from hash, muscles detached from their control centers, inoperable, trying to struggle out the words for another espresso to wake the grey cells that hang like storm clouds on the edge of my brain.  I am ignored by the sweet French waitress, Nina, cherub cheeks —the girl puts up with me long after closing time.  I dream she loves me but I know she merely wants to go home; she certainly doesn't need me, I tried to sleep with her once, but her heart wasn't in it.  As a kind off consolation prize she lets me stay late until she is done closing up.
+	Every night I slouch my way here for my fix of stimulants, hallucinogens, and depressants, it's a full time job, shoveling coal in the engine.  Paris in the rain —dark and ugly like a city of dreams gone wrong.  Parisians, like New Yorkers, seem to know something that the rest of us are missing, and they show no signs of sharing.  Scaring information out of the agents here is like ripping rotting molars from a tweekers corroded mouth: no one wants the job.
+	Strange French lounge music tumbles in from speakers behind the bar, it rolls across the room like an ancient reminder of an inadequancy, building up since the last ice age.  Music ripped the fur from the ape body and made up man/woman, gave the creature a sense of wonder and beauty that demanded self inspection.  Why?  Ancient questions that have been buried so well by the trappings and excrement of civilization; they learned to live in the gutters in alleys, only the homeless and displaced dropouts of society have the time left to investigate.  Or course most of them lack the vigour and rigour of mind for such indeavors, but most junkies know more about the nature of economy than stock market analysists in sickly air conditioned rooms can ever hope for.
+	This is the nightmare at the end of the century and like most of some forgotten race of seekers lying in languid rooms in far off dream cities, Paris, Prague, Peking, St Petersburg, I prefer to rest in peace now and start the real work on the edge of death. There at the final moment you will start to get the real digs.  Nowadays, reclined on Persian pillows and sweet perfumed hash dreams, I live here.  I also have realities here.  Nina with her drooping doe eyes pulls on my arm helping me off the couch, tearing me from the peace of inner reflections.  She throughs my arm over her shoulder and helps me toward the door.  Stumbling up the stairs and onto the street I am blinded by the morning sun finally breaking its way through the sullen clouds.  I light a cigarette and using the building for support I brace myself for the walk home.
+
+
+	There wasn't much to go on the radio signal was weak and difficult to piece together.  Rangoon Jungle Operation Unsucessfull.  I ran that over and over the short wave and hoped for the best.  The heat and the pain kicked in together like waves on the beach and you have to lie their and feel it, really digging it down deep before they let up.  the plane was scattered in the canopies of the trees for several miles.   My foot was definately broken in the fall, but the doctor was worse, with a deep puncture wound and labored breathing.  He wasn't up to moving and I wasn't up to sitting out a night in the jungle, with god knows what hungry creatures running amuck.
+	Using the compass I tried to head north to where their should be a river, I had seen it from the plane, but the jungle was thick and I was moving slowly on my bad foot.  I reached the river by nightfall though and a fishing boat heading down river picked me up and got me to the village, there was no phone, but I had food and shelter.  I suffered a spasm of guilt over some rice when I thought of the doctor, but it passed.
+	The next morning at dawn I attempted to guide several of the men from the village back to the site of the crash, but we were unable to find the chutes or any sign of Waiben, by nightfall we gave up and the new took me up the river in darkness.  At the first road crowssing I stole a car and headed back into Rangoon.  I called the Agency and was greeted with a lecture regarding my job performance which I hung up on, and after a brief stop at the hospital where I was assured by ankle was not broken, but badly sprained; I headed to the local bar.  Six beers later I no longer cared about the Jungle or Rangoon or anyother 
+
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+	The cold streaking blur of the express train colors the night in Kaliedscope lights that play out in little dances.  The train seems on bender this metalic night, New York, 1999, and my head spins after the woman wouldn't let me smoke in peace; the caustic light from the flourecent reflections of white tile at the forty second street station burns on my skin. Letting my head bounce off the window in sway with the movement of the train, I hardly notice the man sitting opposite me until his voice assualts me.
+	"Where ya from?"
+	
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+	No good shits run the world.  It's a well established fact, everyone knows this, but that doesn't bother me.  Absctracts are okay, the world exists only in my head anyway.  What trouibles me is the no good shits are driving around bodies and forcing themselves and their games on you.  This is of course what makes them no good shits in the first place, the question is what are you to do about it?  The most amusing thing to do is to play their game; times ten.  reducto ad absurdum the romans called it; make it fucked up.  Agents are always trying to sulk about in corners where no one notices them, but that is of course where people have come to expect them to be, you have to stay ahead of the metaphors.  The normals one is the psycho killer (he was such a quite boy), now we got are eyes on the quiet ones...television, gottat stay ahead of the metaphor.  Its played out you have to move into some new metaphors, just ahead of the other guy or he's going to mark you for what you are...someone hinding something.
+	Who isn't you say?  Princeses and Diamonds and opals those living on the edge of the shell like little spinning protons hovering the nucleus of infinite faith.  The best cover an agent can have is not have a cover.  Believe that you are and nothing more, do not become what you are or you will no longer be.  You will be something.  everyone is something.  The only time you're not being something is when you're having sex.  Hence the old phrase "sexuality is an agents best cover..." or words to that effect.
+	The human mind is infinite and what have we done?  tied it dopwn with the finite, like impounding a spaceship for being a spaceship.  What logic?  In order to win you have to play by your own rules and you have to make sure that you are the only one who knows what the rules are, otherwise they will anticipate the next move.  disinformation comes from the understanding that you opponet believes womething to be true and you then feed them information that is likely to confirm or adapt to fit what they believe.  This is best demonstrated by the Christ -con.  This involves convincing people that something exists, once they are convinced that it is real, the world either confirms this at everyturn, or in more severe cases the world is conformed to fit the theory.  Mainly only Scientists employ this logic anymore, but few pay them any mind.  the Christ-con is wore threadbare and wreeks like drunk from across the room, nobody is being chiclettes in this parts anymore meester.  When children laugh at you your cover is blown.
+	Time to move on they decided so we kicked out for the forest Sarge was riding shotgun and I was driving, an old army jeep looked like it had served half a dozen wars, but it suited us because we had served half a dozen wars.  We blew up north on some information passed along by the natives at the outpost, some tribe up in the hills still living in caves and foraging for grubs and roots in the forest repudated to have the key to the rosette stone of knowledge.  I was on the look out for a Truman Capote, but we saw no sign of him in the forest country.
+
+	Two days in we picked up an odd broacast from the inspector back at head quarters and for the longest time I couldn't make heads or tails of it.... "The 1994 erie Ordinace was aimed specifically at such established public beliefs as Imagination, Belief, and Constitutional thought...spin like an actor; electricals and the reason that it happened in the first place...The Lawyer sought continuance on the planes altitude."  We didn't have the descramblers to go with the code so to speak.  We holed up in a nice sleepy town of eighty thousand and sat down to rest up and try to break the transmission in hopes it would have some sort of clue as to what we should do.  we came up with...
+	A full retreat back to headquarters.  unacceptable as we were not in any perceivable danger.  At least not yet which is why we put it on the table, because they turn you know.
+	Hole up here for conciderable length of time and dig into the network.  We laid the ground work even while we were toying with the idea, always keep working even if you don't know what you are working toward.  Focus and concentration can have clearing effect like farting in an elevator.
+	Jump out of the loop completely and try to tackle the problem from the outside working in.  In persuance of this thought we obtained passports and other paper and supplies.  There was talk of the eastern front, they always need pack up and the rumor was good lodgings.
+	Try to jump out and then back in.  Reconocince is difficult and involved much tedious and boring work, it was also shocking to the body and in some cases led to death.  We made no move on this one, but we talked about it from time to time, but I think it was really more on my mind than Sarges.  Sarge was all for the Eastern Front he was hooked on information, and he was checking out his sources in his spare time.  I toyed with it, in between Martinis, but my heart wasn't in it, yet.  I was working on trying to remember the future.
+	.  Most people who visited were appalled by the rather makeshift nature of the furniture and the transitory feeling that hung in the air around the place.  It was not a howm it was a research center for the depraved, we were on to something and we just didn't have the words to wrap around it yet.  
+	from time to time the word wing would float heavy in the air and I used to wonder if I alone felt this or if perhaps it truly was there, tangible and in air like the way the Japanese feel about feng shui and the cannelling of chi.  It was pulsating and alive aroung there, nerves were being held bare and exposed to the radiating burn of now.  Naseau and disorientation were come and though it was an unwritten rule that one would ascribe the unhidable effects of them to food poisoning or the like, uinderneath it all we knew that something big was a foot.  Wing, and truman capote and a little boy coming by all the time selling promotional candy bars to raise money for his little legue baseball team.  those are the snapshots that come up when I am drawn back there in memories.  It was a good time it flowed right through our bodies and shot out the finger tips, something was most definately going on.  It would be years before I was able to day what the it was, but even then I knew it was real.
+	There was a furniture store downtown in hwat most places I had been would have been called old town, except that here everything is old; old town and oldertown.  Normaltown was just up the street from us, though I rarely set foot up there, the name was too obvious, something fishy about the scene.  The scene was too transpanrent to have actually existed, at the time I ascribed it to faulty perception, but I was wrong.   Awkums razor is no way to shave.
+
+
+It's a self serve station, one of the good old boys that used to fuel Packards from a lever pump, back when driving meant something.  When it had risk, and it was an accomplishment to get somewhere.  At the pump there was no digital blink in your face, just the rolling click of numbers turning, trains that bore out through the desert country.  The town had two smoke stacks and a wheat field to the north side of the station; not much else.  This one drifter had pulled through years ago, bit of mental case they said later, he burned three barns a couple of houses and killed of all but two families in town.  You can still see the crumpled black barn-skeletons if you cross the road and climb on the top rail of the wood fence that runs the length of the field.  When the sun sets it's a magical sight —give you visions, remind you that its all really funny when you stop to think about it.
+
+
+
+	Old Doc Waiben used to sing "you got to get behind the mule every morning and plow" when he was looking through the kitchen for coffee.  The "fridge" was this old ice box that Doc had found at the side of the road and fixed up.  When he drank to much and passed out before sundown he'd forget to restock the ice and the melted remnants of the morning would eventually force open the door and the bag of coffee would go sliding across the kitchen floor finding its way into all kind of strange places.  "You got to get behind the mule/every morning and plow" Doc used to sing when he looked for the bag, and when he invariably found it lying in the farthest crack he would squat down like a child and scoot it along the floor over to the table, just laughing and singing "...every morning and plow..."
+trashy-girl/aol
+	I had a most marvelous vision one day of red brick buildings.  Boston —Harvard square— fall; the Charles river slips by without a sound, the streets corral throngs of people, onlookers too drunk to remember what they were there to look at-.  They stumble out of bars and lurch through doorways like grenades rolled out on the street, and inside the Radcliffe boathouse a reserve of surplus energy is released in muscular spasms that pulse in orgasm.  Her breasts pool salt onto my tongue.  And in walks Truman Copote he looks it over for a minute and then, having taken stock of the affair, proceeds to hand me the rosette stone of Knowledge.  He lights a cigarette, takes the stone back, and walks out the boathouse doors.  I taste salt in my mouth every time I call up the memory. 
+
+
+
+	You have to sleep, because if you don't sleep you are unable to exist in the consensus reality...sleep is time travel and if you do not travel thru time you become a singularity existing only at one point in time, and the minute that point is passed you no longer exist...the only way to exist in consensus reality is to keep showing up at different points in time...leaving a trail that other reference points can piece together...the flow... the thread, so to speak... and out of this assembly process —run through all the complex webs of the human mind— other observation portals (humans) are able to organize a map of what you are...you exist at said points, exhibit said behaviors and therefore are to be called this object SIL, DR WAIBEN...these are the things we know about you...you must therefore...based on what we know about X...be Y.... 
+	ADAM and some snake and he apperently had the thread the rosette stone of knowledge and you scream...NOT TRUMAN COPOTE!!  But there he is nontheless, like a chamelaean, shifting from here to there, becoming what you are...TRUMAN COPOTE...wherever you go there is already an ostrich there...waiting....
+
+	Happenstance carried you here sitting out on a red rock mesa top forgetting each sunset as quickly as it passed.  Staring out into nothingness the purest complete nothingness outside of ocean, in fact this was once a sea floor, even the fish wouldn't have it.  But sitting on the porch of run down wood shack that passed as a house and rented for the paltry price of twenty five dollars a month.  Actually thats what there paying me, twenty five a month to sit here and write reports; let go of all contact and take notes for somebody elses script, I never would have sritten myself into a role this melodramatic for a million bucks —reaks like hollywood cheese.  I keep think that one day I'm going to wake up and find out that I really am just a collection of ideas that if fact at the bottom of the search for everything we're going to find nothing...  The Tao Te Ching says that the smallest thing is in the biggest and vice verse, it seems to me then that since we already know that "everything" is actually made up of  indescribably tiny "nothings" called electrons that it is only a matter of time before the big stuff, God, god, philosophy, science all the big stuff is going to turn out to be founded on nothing.
+	I first had this realization years ago and I decided to take on the big job myself I set out to find the unknown and find some way, however thin, to make it known.  I wrote a book on what I found and met the interedting folks at the AIC and then I wa here, like you just sitting on the porch of a shitstye in the unbearable afternoon heat —southeastern Utah in August.  All I do is wait for the mercy of the thunder clouds which manage to bring the temperature down to the high nineties, of course the trade off is in the humidity.  I write reports, though not many anymore, for the AIC.  Actually the bulk of this book will likely be filed away somewhere back in D.C. which is really just as well I guess, should it ever be needed at least someone can find what they're looking for.  I'm just not looking for it anymore.  But its a long way from here to there and I have to give some background.
+	In the beginning was the word and the word was with God.  Like most sunday scholl children, I have no actual memory of hearing those words or at least I paid no attention to the idea of them.  Not until years later, but lately I've been thinking that it might have been there the whole time from the beginning.  Anyway at one point that little sentence was threatening to take control of my life and I met Sil and the rest of the people at AIC and found out rather to my embarassment that I was not the novelty I thought I was, rather I was endanger of becoming left behind with the women in children so to speak.  And somehow the whole time I think I was trying to solve a riddle that had been subtly implanted near birth and which wormed its way out to consciousness just before the turn of the millenium. 
+
+
+
+	Sil lived in train station. He was not employed by the train company nor was he waiting on any particular train, he simply lived in the train station.  It was his house, it just also happened to be train station.  Trains came and went at all hours of the night, the worst were the ones that didn't stop, moving through at high speed it sounded like a freight train going through the house.  Sil didn't mind it too much, only when he couldn't get to sleep nor did he mind the people milling about the station except for the tourists who would walk out into the flow of traffic and just stand there trying to decide which way to turn until some commuter collided and propelled them in one direction or another invariably the wrong one.  These people are lost anywhere and that frustrated Sil, but the ones minding there own business didn't bother him some of them he even recognized and greeted, a few of them were true friends of his.
+	The lost ones were usually heading to the airport from some outer bungalow turned town in the sticks, off to Paris on family outing.  The mass transportation of lost families was not Sil's specialty, he was doubly unhappy to have to share a home with them.
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+	I awoke at the age of twenty-five in reasonably good shape and with a seemingly sound mind, but I awoke to a world of total insanity.  I say I awoke because the reality I possess is one I would not have voluntarily chosen; no I would have hoped for something where I had a bit more control, more say in the directions of my life.  So I say ‘awoke’ because everyone has at some point had that disorienting sensation of awaking in a strange place and for that instant not knowing how or why.  I live in that instant.  
+I am a character in a book.  I don’t even know the title of the book, so far it has read at times like a spy novel, a romance, a science textbook, an occult obsession, a personal journal, a metaphysical protein shake, and surrealist soup.  The surrealist parts are the funniest, the romance parts the most exciting, and the rest cover a range from downright frightening to mysteriously intriguing.  
+I have studied extensively, though by no means thoroughly, both eastern and western philosophy from existentialism to Sufism to Christianity to the Gnostic Mushroom Cults of Mexico looking for ways to understand and cope with my situation —how does one behave in a novel?  Some have proved useful but there is in the end, I fear no escaping my situation.  I live within the constructs of words not objects.
+Words are image and idea to me, I do not have your luxury of being able to evaluate and abstract myself, I can not say this thing is real this one is not because everything that could be is.  Some days I live dramatic events that shape and influence the entire book other days I spend under a tree reading a book within a book.  I never know what I will do until the day is over and this realization has given me the ultimate freedom, but no control and without control I don’t feel at home with the human race.  The vast majority of the human race believes that it knows certain things to be true (i.e. you assume each night when you go to bed that you will wake up in the same place) whereas I have found no such consitency in this book.
+My awakening as I have called it was simply the realization that I was a character in a novel and that to exert any control whatsoever over my circumstance would require that I gain an audience so I am here for you to let you in on my awakening.  I have to offer my finest verbal worlds and the infinite constructs of the imagination which are totally without the bounds of reality which you have to abide by, I can travel the globe at the stroke of a pen.  Enough reasoning, you’ll see my predicament eventually.
+
+All that we are is the result of all that we have thought.  It is founded on thought.  It is based on thought.  —Buddha (transmitted on WORD INC airwaves all rights restricted)
+
+I am lying back supported by pillows on a small couch in the back corner of an underground bar, dawn, Paris 1999, listening to the radio and staring at walls not yet written by Rembrant, Miller, and all the dead poets.  Peace back here in corner where I watch all time pass me by with the detached apathy of non-compliance —after all freedom is the one thing I have the most of.  Static chirps of French corporate radio interrupt my musings on arts finer abstracts.  Step aside and let the man go through.  I feel like a lead train, heavy from hash, muscles detached from their control centers, inoperable, trying to struggle out the words for another espresso to wake the gray cells that hang like storm clouds on the edge of my brain.  I am watching Nina who in her lovable French fashion is totally ignoring me.  Such a sweet girl, waitress, Nina, cherub cheeks —she puts up with me long after closing time.  I dream she loves me but I know she merely wants to go home; she certainly doesn't need me here.  I tried to sleep with her once, but her heart wasn't in it.  As a kind off consolation prize she lets me stay late until she is done closing up.
+	Every night I slouch my way here for my fix of stimulants, hallucinogens, and depressants, it's a full time job, shoveling coal in the engine.  Of course my drug taking is metaphorical, but I have to explain things in terms you will relate to and you are all addicts of one of the aforementioned whether you know it or not.  
+Paris in the rain —dark and ugly, a city of dreams gone wrong.  Parisians, like New Yorkers, seem to know something that the rest of us are missing, and they show no signs of sharing.  Scaring information out of the agents here is like ripping rotting molars from a tweekers corroded mouth —no one wants the job.
+	Strange French lounge music tumbles in from the WORD INC. speakers behind the bar, it rolls across the room like an ancient reminder of an inadequacy that has been building up since the last ice age.  Music ripped the fur from the ape body and made up man/woman, gave the creature a sense of wonder and beauty that demanded self-inspection.  Why? Art thou not a self-reflexive monkey?  Ancient questions that have been buried so well by the trappings and excrement of civilization; they learned to live in the gutters in alleys, only the homeless and displaced dropouts of society have the time left to investigate.  Or course most of them lack the vigor and rigor of mind for such endeavors, but junkies know more about the nature of economy than stock market analysts in sickly air conditioned rooms can ever hope for.
+This is the nightmare at the end of the century and like most of some forgotten race of seekers lying in languid rooms in far off dream cities, Paris, Prague, Peking, St Petersburg, I prefer to rest in peace now and start the real work on the edge of death. There at the final moment you will start to get the real digs. 
+ Nowadays, reclined on Persian pillows and sweet perfumed hash dreams, I live here.  I also have realities here.  Nina with her drooping doe eyes pulls on my arm helping me off the couch, tearing me from the peace of inner reflections.  She throws my arm over her shoulder and helps me toward the door.  Stumbling up the stairs and onto the street I am blinded by the morning sun finally breaking its way through the sullen clouds.  I light a cigarette and draw deeply.  Using the building for support, with the cold Paris wind blowing winter right through me and my pea coat, I brace myself for the long stumble home.
+The streets of Paris for those that have never had the good fortune to walk them, seem to perhaps been built by someone with a sense of humor someone who sat back and asked themselves: what would travel be like if we made it deliberately difficult instead of deliberately easy?  The answer is here somewhere in the meandering alleys, bridges, tunnels, and streets that seem designed to get one lost, confused, and disoriented.  Only in such a state do you begin to discover the real Paris. At least that’s my friend Allie says and I walking to her house on this sobering morning so I start to think like her.  
+Allie is French-Canadian by birth and I know her from Canada where she was a stripper for many years.  Three of which she also spent living in my house and I have come here to Paris to return the favor by living ever so briefly in hers.  Her full name is Allie Suviguile which I used to tease her about because in the crudest midwestern american accent she is only one r away from sounding like “survive guile” and she does indeed survive by being guile.  Everyone at some point evolves to suit their name which is why I am deeply frightened of having children —far to much responsibility, in the back of their minds all parents store guilt at the thought that perhaps some of the wayward tendacies of their children are the result of parential influence, conscious or not.
+My own memories may have filters on them that were shaded and toned by my parents.  Take for instance Mexico City: I remember Mexico City in hazy brown discolored way, but its not the smog its the nature of memory.  The image collages overlay themselves like a bad acid film from the sixties.  Cut to a shot of the subway, sad brown faces and I want to know why they aren't on vacation like me… lay on top of it an image of pyramid excavation digging up and trying to solve the Mayan Caper.  Years ago you would. Understand she was standing right next to me and then...Warm sweet smelling cab and my father says “hey, look a Kentucky fried Chicken” and sure enough I see one.  Americana right  in the middle of foreign chaos.  
+I've had quite a time ever since then trying to pick up the pieces of a world that exists in only my subjective phantasmal experience, but that is partially explained by the fact that I live in book and am subject to forget that at times and think that I actually exist, and that everything is actually happening.  Some days everything actually is happening, but I’ll come to that.  For now that kaleidoscope memories of my youth — I focused up into the sun , it burned in fantastical visions that all of Dr. Hoffman's LSD could never quite reach and then there was the sound...an unbelievable pulse of something so guttural it would announce itself for years to come by illicit in me the most terrifying kind of fear that paralyzes you.  Leaves you like a woman I saw once stone still and shell shocked right in the middle of this great arch in Canyonlands National Park, Utah.  She just stood there unable to move, feeling the digging hooks of unbridled terror burning into her brain and creating an endless and spellbinding feedback loop that forbids you to move, rips you right out of the very fabric of collective reality and propels you into strange land of pure abstraction.  I watched her sit there unable to help herself doubtless staring at the two thousand foot drop and the meager four foot wide sandstone arch that was holding her there suspended in mid air, seeing herself for the first time the way we are.  Naked cold and deathly afraid.
+	But the cab driver just laughed and said, “here in Mexico City there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat, Kentucky Fried Dog, But definitely no Kentucky Fried Chicken.”  He smiled this crooked smile revealing gold caps and over moist gum structure that was so large it seemed to be slowly crawling right up off his teeth.  Okay no, that was a devise of literature, but he really did say that and he really did laugh at us, and then sternly advised in all seriousness against eating there, not that we would have anyway.  And all this was years before I would ever get to India to learn that first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.
+	But alas I did not have my Mexico City cabbie advise to help that woman frozen there on the Arch, in fact I went all the way to the end of the trail (funny I don't remember were it went) and came back and she was still there, frozen for time.  Occasionally I wonder if maybe it would have help to walk by here real quietly and whisper...don't worry there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat or Kentucky Fried Dog, but certainly no Kentucky Fried Chicken.  
+	But that sound would never go away that Kaleidoscope burned out my eyes and left me open, Naked and exposed to be brutalized by sound.  But I can't paint the picture that way the sad poet crap...Wilde would never have stood for the half alive black clad zombies that run around pretending to see so much deeper into life than the rest of us and they want to sell their torture to you for an outrageous price.  I never saw the likes of such a con, I wouldn't spend a goddamn dime of the crap, sower up punks, shave, you read this stuff, it is mocking you.  Yes you!   Sour-headed mongrels sucking the joy out of it all, it drives me nuts, makes me want to live in Paris in state of perpetual disgust digging through trash can with this old bum I met once who went by the name of Henry.
+	But fortunately I ditched Henry for the time being although I have noticed that the oddest characters tend to pop up at the most inopportune times.  Now the streets of Paris take on a particularily sinister intent and I duck into more obscure alleys trying to avoid Henry all the while thinking that that might well be just what he would expect me to do.  Its not that I don’t want to see him its just that I have a certain hunger right now that Henry can not fill.  I need a woman. 
+I am hoping that Allie did not bring anyone home last night because I am like a primordial beast in heat.  The Paris nightlife does that to me, makes me get back in touch with very immediate physical yearnings for things like female flesh and the blessed rite of sex.
+	Allie and I share only two common points we like to talk about nothing for hours and we like to fuck.  I don’t love her at all, though I care emensely for her and would never do anything to hurt her.  Unless she asked me to in her special I’m-about-to-come extra breathy voice that crawls all the way to my backbrain and lets me tie her to chairs and whip her and fuck her mouth and joyfully consent to having the same done to me.  Allie is Joyce’s worst nightmare, I have yet to find something that will make her blush —I remember the time I walked in on her and some man and without so much as hello she through him on his back impailed herself on his cock and yanked out mine and sucked it as best she could while bouncing up and down.  She has dragged me to countless orgies, dominatrixes, and fetish balls all in the aimless pursuit of pleasure.  Eventually I grew weary of the scene and I left her, but a chance meeting in the tube has led me here.  That’s another great thing about living in book —you have chance meetings with nymphos on subways. 
+	All this and now standing ringing her bell it seems that she has spent the night elsewhere.  You never know how your day is going to be until its over.  
+
+	
+	I saw a man upon the stair,
+	A little man who wasn’t there.
+	He wasn’t there again today;
+	Gee, I wish he’d go away.
+		-WORD INC broadcast all rights are served
+
+
+"...and the best part of it is, you're gonna love this, not one word of it is true.  I've run it through CHIPS three times and we have no noise coming out of that sector in the last ten years..."
+	"Could it be an anomaly?  We've missed things before..."
+	"What are you trying to say?  that I'm missing a part of the game?"
+	"Look, how many timetracks are your people watching right now?"
+	"we're running twenty thousand day in and day out for the entire year local objective..."
+	"Well maybe somewhere in what must amount to over twenty million local subjective tracks, you missed something.  Did i ever tell you the one about the house that smiled?"
+	"Enlighten me"
+	"I was killing some time down in the south, waiting between assignments you see, laying low from a job out in LA if I recollect properly, anyway, I had this ramshackle joint out in the woods all overgrown with vines and tree drooping right onto the porch.  I spent most of the days working on the Brazilian Caper trying to put together the pieces, information synthesis was my specialty.  so one day I came driving home from the bar, now I'd had a couple of gins which is key to the story, I pulled off the highway onto my driveway which was a dirt road maybe half a mile long and you could see the house when you turned off the main road but then you ducked under some trees and lost it until you were right up on it.  when i turned off this one particular day I could have sworn the house smiled at me, when I got up on it it looked normal enough and I assumed it was the gin that made it smile.  It never occurred to me to look from the point of vies that it was the gin that let me see it smile...I was preoccupied at the time.
+	"Some weeks later I thought about the incident so I ran the house through on CHIPS to see if we had any information on the place.  turned out the house had a history of jealous behavior, so I checked into a skid row hotel and avoided the place for a week.  I went back and everything I owned had been burned to the ground and I am still to this day convinced that i missed the clues because I didn't know that I had any.  You see everything has a relationship with you, everything you see and do has a reaction to you and if you look at it another way everything you are doing might be a reaction to something you can't see."
+	"You're saying I'm looking at it wrong?  Fine count me out of it, you wanted a background check on the area and I gave you one, if you don't like the information that is not my problem.  I'm getting out a here this place gives me the creeps...."
+
+
+	I rather liked the place, it was in fact my favorite bar in the state the state being Georgia the country being USinc.  The plaster was peeling in great sheets from the ceiling and the walls had a rough texture such that you had to move around and find just the right spot to lean your head back on.  I had my spot, it was in the corner and I sat so I faced the front door I liked to see who was coming and going, comes with the trade you understand.  I was in a red booth that wrapped the corner and had a table that was too short for it, worked out more as a foot rest than a table, although it held up my legs and drink without too much complaining so I guess you could call it a table, if you wanted to.  There were these red lamps sticking out of the walls here and there, that and the kerosene candles on the tables were the only light.  It was a small bar (all good bars are small) maybe six seven tables and a handful of stools; the place was a real diamond, but they kept it looking like coal.  At the moment I was the only one here except for Harry Woods, the bartender, and of course the man who had just left my table.  A man I was not having kind thoughts about right now.
+	His name was Scratch because he once clawed his way out of a lockup with his bare hands, or so the the story went.  The information he was to have imparted was incidental, I had set him up to see if he would feed me a line or hang me out to dry, always good to hit a source with something you already know if like me, you haven't hit the source in a while.  I crossed his name off of the list of reliables and I was packing up my bag to go when my phone rang.
+	I had recently gone into private practice after being with the company for fifteen years.  To be completely forthcoming I would I guess have to revel that I was forced to go private on account of a royal fuck up of mine in Brazil, but I was putting it behind me and trying to drum up some work.  The phone was an auspicious sign and when I looked at the ID'er it was coming straight in for the quarter itself.  Holy Shit I thought, they must be more pissed at me than I thought.  When people are trying to get a hold of you and you don't want them to the best idea is to keep moving.
+	I made a bee line for the bathroom, turned off the phone and pulled out a syringe.  I went to do this once and some old junky thought I was shooting up and tried to get one off of me which I refused and he got mad and ran out to tell the management, course I was gone before they got there.  I sat down on the toilet and set out the electromagnetic generator on the floor in front of me.  I was tapping an old west piano line with my feet while it warmed up.  When I saw the portal open I started to masturbate 'til I was just about ready to shoot.  With my other hand I readied the needle and felt around for the sore at the base of my spine and inserted it.  This was the trickiest part; I drew out a milky white cellular substance and I felt the familiar tingles around the edges of my body, starting in the feet and hands, I knew it was going to hit fast.  I made a good jump and landed right on Maya's table where she drew it up into another syringe and then shot into the back of a good looking head.
+
+	
+
+
+	Have you ever tried to live at the speed of light?  I don't mean literally of course, just so there's no confusion here, we are after all in the middle of what is shaping up to be science fiction story of the worst kind.  Agents popping up here and there without warning and always mysteriously knowing more than they could if they possible lived in your world, you the reader that is.  I know its all crap, that's just the hack shit people work in.  Word comes down from EDITORIAL RE-WRITE, ah ahem we don't quite seem to know what this is...could you expand on the science fiction stuff, now that we can sell.  Have a really big hit! I see best seller lists in your future? eh?  You want the chiclettes mister?  Spanish boy sell that goddamn gum again come stumbling up to you on the street in Mexico City. 
+NOTICE FROM RE-WRITE:
+	We can't seem to decide what category of the book store to put this in sometimes it seems like a science textbook, then the next minute it getting dragged by some pimple faced clerk down to the science fiction shelves and then without warning you turn it into a personal confessional and start address the reader directly...could you organize this better we're very interested you see....
+	Have you ever tried to live at the metaphorical speed of light.  I mean you.  Not an abstract self that you think the writer is talking to whenever you see the personal pronouns.  You and I are having a dialogue and I'm trying to ask you a question except that we have a time travel issue.  Is this nonfiction and true always, or is it fiction and entirely made up of unique emotional moments that fade as quickly as they show themselves?
+	I don’t have that delimma so I don’t have to worry about it I know I live in pure fiction, not even real you know, just words strung together….  A while ago I mentioned Henry, well its time for the real digs…. 
+	Nobody around town could stand Henry he was I admit a paranoid schizophrenic and sometimes he would forget if he was talking to you or to the voices in his head.  They would get kind of mixed up at time and he might occasionally chase you around and try to kill you with his umbrella, but he really meant no harm and he was too old to catch you even if he actually did mean you harm and I was just to naive to see it.  Its all in how you paint it you know.  you can try to cut it up and rearrange it and maybe you come closer to the abstract notions of truth that philosophers are always blabbing about, but nobody lives in an objective universe.  this is the way I saw it Henry had good stories, he thought he was an agent see and he loved to tell anybody that would listen to him all about how he had the inside scope on the CIA.  Used to be an agent see and they had me in on the Kennedy job and what better way to discredit me then to drive me out here on the streets?  Sometimes when I was really stoned it did have an eery ring of truth about it, after all No one believed him.
+	No one really believes anyone really though, I mean we like to think we trust each other and we love to say that we do, but I've watched this tired old game long enough to know one thing, its a game.  And in a game nothing is ever what it appears to be because if everything were right there for you on the surface for you it would be a pretty stupid game.  So over the years the bipedal monkeys have dreamed up an elaborate universe of intricately interwoven moves and counter moves and rules to the game that has lately had the nasty side effect of becoming terribly obvious and not so much fun anymore.
+	I studied history quite a bit, I was drawn to it I think because I don’t have time. These stories are only linear in time to make iteasier on you the reader, but for me its all always existing forever somewhere and at sometime which makes the whole time concept lose shape and eventually it collapsesback to the state vector.
+
+
+	For that brief instant that the I that is me was in Maya's mouth I had the delectable sensation of what I imaging a cock must fell like roosting in a warm mouth.  One of my projects with the company had been (my own design of course) to try to concentrate the entire essence of consciousness into the penis.  That is to take on the identity of a cock and live through an orgasm that (in my theory) would resonate though the entire conscious.  the only problem was that realistically we had no way of defining ourselves.  so I took it upon myself to put aside the dope and cocaine and endless gratuitous blow jobs to first find this here consciousness thing that nobody would quite put there finger on.  Regrettably I failed and that is the gist of the Brazilian Caper, maybe later we'll get into the tasty details but first I needed some time to adjust to a new body.
+
+
+	
+	Something rather strange has been going on lately, too many jumps I think you can't move between the threads of reality to often before you start to wonder which on of them is real.  Denizens of psychedelic drugs refer to such people as acid casualties, this is mainly do to their tendency to not be able to let go.  You can't move in and out of worlds until you detach, some one once said to me about the experience, first the human game stops then, the time game stops and then the me game stops.  At this point you are confronted with the ugliest aspect of what you call reality, the personalized ego that fights all the way to the bitter end.  It might not ever go away for good, but usually in the past I have been able to let go and move and now I find that I have more and more hear about jumping.  The very sight of the needle and the apparatus this cold electromagnetic...thing, made partly of inorganic microchips and partly of neuron cells stolen from leeches.  When the thing was first tested the story goes that they used jellyfish, but the director, Dr. Waiben was struck by this "duty to the irony of our situation" and switched the neural tissue to leeches because this thing is going to suck away the last defenses we have.  Only that didn't exactly happen, the thing is that people can't be pushed to do anything they can't understand, and therefore they rejected it.  so now were where we are, like the yogi said wherever you go there you are.  And here we are, with too sets of humanity, those who went and those who didn't.
+	Naturally this created a certain power dynamic of have and have nots, but the thing is that most people who went lost all concern for what had been their lives, they fell victim to sabetoge, which is okay because it gave me job.  I work for the Agency of Interdimensional Control, under the direction of Dr. Waiben.  The good doctor and I were working on this project for years before anybody was aware what was going on and consequently we know the system technology and emot vortexes better than most and when people started to get wind we already knew which way it was going to blow.  So we started setting up the agency and recruiting like minded individuals to help us keep things under control.
+	I must take time here in the narrative to mention exactly how the system works.  We were both stumbled upon a kind of understanding of the way things work at the same time and hence we wound up in the same place one day which we later realized was not in fact an act of stumbling at all, but anyway we met near the outer edge of the universe on an 8th dimensional string.  We had both realized at the same time that the string theory emerging in physics at the end of the twentieth century was in fact a more technical description (less poetic I might add) of the Egyptian book of the dead.  At the time I thought this was coincidence, but then one day I was watching movie about virtual reality games and I started thinking about what would happen to human mind if you turned everything on at once.
+	I couldn't find any literature on the subject so I decided to make my own.  I started with a virtual reality suit, a sensory deprivation chamber, ten years practice of yoga, a variety of hallucinogenic chemicals, orgone generators, talismans, magick symbols, and a room full of books, everything religious practice recorded by man, the latest in theoretical physics and everything in between.  then their was Maya, but we'll come to that later.
+	My actual experiments were rather undisciplined and were not yielding much in the way of results until I accidentally left the stereo on one day.  In the sensory deprivation chamber on 200 mc of DMT, with the orgone generators humming I had the literal felt experience of being on the edge of the universe and I was sure I found GOD.  As it turned out I was on the edge of what up until then was thought of as the universe, but I met Dr. Waiben, not GOD.  Although I spent the next two years quite sure that I had seen GOD.
+
+	I noticed rather early in my life that movie actresses made me feel funny.  When I say this most people think I mean some sexual entendre or maybe funny peculiar.  What I really mean is that they made me feel funny.  One guy in bar once told me that it is impossible to feel funny, you either are funny or your not he said.  I asked him how he could be sure that no one felt funny as in funny haha just because he had never felt funny.  He tried to hit me and I left in hurry without finishing my beer.  I made it a point not to discusses the "funny" feeling with anyone again.
+	But I still felt funny and wasn't quite sure why.  My natural assumption was that this was some sexual feeling I was having, but at the time I didn't  have sex life to compare it too.  Over the years I have found that sex will at times produce the funny feeling, but it is not as strong as with the actresses.  Another thing that gave me the funny feeling over the years is cannabis.  I have smoked pot nearly everyday for three or four years now and I find that toward the end of the night I tend to slide into the "funny" feeling quite naturally now.  recently however I have found that the "funny" feeling can be induced at will anytime you want.  This is or course the religious secret of the ages and you now expect that I will tell you how to do it yourself.  except that words won't let me.  I offer you this as a consolation prize: somewhere out there between the eleven dimensions (the four you know, four more you know if you have read mystics, and three more which can not be described they are only lived) there are portals through which you can move your consciousness.
+	That is why I said that you have to know how to detach.  Most people I have noticed tend to think of themselves as their bodies.  Interestingly most religions that most people tend to believe have always said that you are not your body, I was never religious though.  the language that told me that was science, science said in rather more complicated terms that nothing exists.  There has been much despair in fact over this statement. people have natural tendency to belief in what they call "life" that is the material world.  They believe that it is real and existing at a point in time.  When you learn to let go of the body (usually when you die) a vast array of possibilities open themselves up for examination and I can assure you that there is every bit as much to be feared as any hell fire and damnation sermon has ever threatened, but you only get their if you want to go.  I'm not sure how realities come to exist, I can only tell you that they are their, and if you want to find them you will.
+	
+	It was sometime before I made the connection between the stereo and GOD, but one day in a vain attempt to get back to where I was I left the stereo on again.  This time however I was catapulted into a nightmare of despair and utter gut wrenching fear and I "saw" the music drawing me into it and I had the experience of wrestling something off of me as if every cell in my body were desperately trying to get out of an invisible blanket that was tearing at my flesh threatening to rip me apart.  i had a heart attack and started bleeding from my nose and mouth and Maya saved my life.  she had walked into the room and thinking that I was gone turned off the radio, when she did I let out what she called the most inorganic noise I have ever had.  she called the paramedic and started CPR which saved my life, sort of.
+	By this time i was quite detached from what most people would call life.  I hadn't seen anyone aside from Maya in months and I only slept on Sundays.  I had also long forgotten about things like the police and I was busted for having a rather large quantity of what they called controlled substances, the whole thing made the paper and my life went down hill.  I moved into a different twelve by twelve room and got a new (and rather boring) wardrobe, but down in Atlanta a similarly minded individual read about my story and contacted me.  In fact he managed to get me released and out on bail before the end of the month.
+	So I happened to come into the more formal experiment complete with government shadow funding.  Private companies often donate to private research groups for tax deduction purposes and this money goes into the private sector where the CIA usually recommends projects that ought to get money.  It was a rather complicated network of money laundering in the name of science which was why I joined up, its not everyday that you can live in spy novel.  Except that I was very bad at it sometimes and liked to smoke pot while doing research and got pulled over stoned at four in the morning which landed me back in jail.  this time they didn't want to bale me out so I sat there for a while and thought the nature of the thing.  And somewhere in the middle of it I heard Maya recounting that she had turned off the stereo and I remembered the music episode and I had a Joycian moment where I just saw how it was working and it came to more complete and laid out like a plan.  Of course now I know why, but at the time it was a monumental feeling to have that thing handed to me.
+	So I built just like I had seen in it, at a friends house over in Athens.  We had worked on some musical experiments, he knew what I knew about the power of sound, and he was pretty open to going out on the edge, which is a good quality to look for in friends.  I don't exactly know what I would say if some one came to my door and said hey I was wondering if I could set up an electromagnetic field generator in your living room and maybe project myself into a different multi-verse,  but William shrugged and said "um okay."
+	So we did and it worked and I met Maya finally, although I was under the impression that we had already met in what I was still calling "the real" world.  Maya is a  mmm , entity is a tempting word but it implies a singularity when Maya is continually unfolding, you can meet here, but its never as good as elsewhere.  Elsewhere became the name of the first reality that I encountered In the expeditions Bill and I embarked on.  In what we called objective time tracks we had our bodies and world as I knew it, put in Elsewhere their were only subjective time tracks.  We started with 1=1.  One "normal" world and one "induced world" (since then the ratio has changed to 1=1,000,000,000), jumping between the two involved 200 intramuscular injection of DMT, sitting in a comfortable spot we used an array of speaker wire and amplifier heads to create a magnetic field around the body.  When the DMT kick in the walls became electric and vibrated and I saw the cross waves coming in from the speakers (later we found that the low frequency bass helped make the waves easier to see) if you "thought" yourself at the harmonic convergence of the two, you stepped into Elsewhere.
+	It took two days of tinkering to master it, but when we did we had a reliable and repeatable experiment demonstrating the existence of "tangible" realities other than the consensus one.  I took pawned it off on Waiben for a Swiss account and Bill and I were going to hit the road, but Maya intervened.
+
+
+	New York City at the end of the 20th century: woman says to me: don't you know you can't smoke in the subway? ya.  :you don't give a fuck do ya>no< It was unquestionably rude: she deliberately intruded on my reality and imposed her own.  I did not exist in world where people couldn't smoke in subway stations and she imposed RIGHT and WRONG on me.  This is of course seen as quite okay as smoking causes death, but I knew that dead was not the end of things so I didn't have to cling like a crying widow to life.  I started think what might happen if people expanded and just extended the old rules into the new.  It was then that Bill and I laid plans for IAC.  At first our goal was to just make a survey of the area.
+	I ended up on rainforest subtimetrack out on a routine patrol, I had always wanted to see the Jungle so I signed on.  the group sailed right down through the mouth of the Amazon all the way down into her bowels it seemed by the time we put in at little fishing village.  The sergeant was a trustworthy enough fellow, even looked a bit like some painting I had seen once of Vasco De Gama.  He headed up to the mission to see if we could get lead from the Padre.  He came back with an ear and the word the Eve El Gui, this woman of revered skills or so we were told.  The sergeant was of the opinion that if the company was going to send us into death, it should at least be at the hands of a Sexual Goddess.  Eve as we started to call her, was a tantric demonese hauled her self down from the Queens area nineteenth century, spit and polish deal and now wrecked her havoc through seven dimension.  There was, besides me two soldiers who carried our heavy cannon, a map man and the sergeant.  At first it was normal enough, I've run similar jobs before, just never in the jungle.
+
+	I live in great fear of psychiatrists, which they would doubtless say it irrational, which in turn is the sourse of my fear.  Imposing on the world the power to interpret what is real (sane they call it) and what is not real (insane) is to make yourself the living god that the ancients so greatly feared, reverd, and worshipped.  The modern psychiatrist is playing out a script that the word created back in the beginning.  It started as a word (always does) and it then became an idea, then an emtion...love of god, now it is flesh.  We are god.  How anticlimatic is that.  When Waiben and I were first laying out the architecture of the word created universes we hypothosized that to kill the flesh would be to kill the word.  But as we got further and further into the concreteness of the thing the more we realized that the flesh is not the word it is the word that becomes flesh.  In other words killing the flesh was analogous to cutting out a tumor, only to have another start growing.  Only pure image or pure emotion can knock out the word completely.
+	Image guns contained word defying images so that when you got shot with them the response would not be in terms of word.  This is still the most effective way to rub out the word, although we do also use emotion guns which hit one with wonderous and overwhelming feelings, but some of the more skilled of the enemy have been able to cut these up and move thwn along irrational and chaotic lives and arrive at word.  Poetry for instance will often render an emotion gun useless.
+	In the beginning the enemy started with an agent gone bad which we spun off as a metaphor in the Christ-con caper.  Christ was originally one of use and we wrote him in to try to bring things to head, but we were way early on that timetrack and the whole thing blew up in our faces like the CIA at the Bay of Pigs fiasco.  At that time the majority of the enemy was moving under the name of Christians, powermongers trying to horde the system and leaving the details to be worked out for future generations.  The reverberations cut across nine dimensions and we had a hell of a mess to clean up.
+	Unfortunately the enemy is wilely, or perhaps that would be the end of the story, but its not, we got even bigger doodoo now.  Now they call themselves scientists and they do there work from deep within jungles, concrete, and tropical like the one sarge and I are staring at.  somewhere in the dizzying maze of trees and rivers and insects and the very air that is permeated with life, is Eve, the sudectress of word cons and we are being sent to take her out.
+	It was somewhat unusual to go into a literal jungle, I generally operate in the concrete metaphoric ones, but Eve had special credentials, and so did I.  Eve was acting on the Iris script and trying to pick up the scattered pieces.  She wanted things run on systems and she was going to bring down the shit house with her, as we say in the trade, one of her systems was an elaborate sex con called unilove.  Unilove holds that the self can only love one other self at a time.  Monogamy they call it back where I come from.  We were having a hell of time trying to bring that one in for trial, and Eve was our chief opposition.  My special talent was the ability to bring in the multiplicity of the issue, you see the singularity is but a convergaence of the multiplicies, but shop talk is not what you do sitting in camp at the edge of the jungle.
+	
+
+	Soem readers no doubt are familiar with the losely defined concept of lucid dreaming, that is consciously indusing in oneself a dream state.  Once when I was about ten my dead grandmother called and talked to me on the phone.  I have no idea whether or not this actually happened, but I am certain that I experienced the phenomenon of it happening.
+	years later I had a similar experience of stumbling onto the dead in lucid dream state.  this experience was not unlike what happens in virtual reality games only it was self indused rather than coming in from an outside apperatus.  This discovery (which is as much of a discovery as Columbus landing and finding a population of five million and then claiming that he had discovered america) led william and I inexoribly into a tunnel of reality that paved the way for a global awakening.
+	By now we were fairly adept at moving in and out of realities that were from our point of view totally artifical and then we hit a snag, a big snag.  We began to think perhaps we had induced some sort of sctizophrenia and conjunctual hallucinations.  this proved to be fortuituse thing in the end, because we met the enemy in a virtual sense rther than unwittingly encountering them as actual intities.  intities is as I ahve said a poor word for the phenomena, all thing are conceptual nothing exists, (sub atomic physics 101) words define things that exist.  anything that can be put into words then has a fairly mapable probability of occuring in subjective reality.  
+	We confronted the enemy before we knew they were the enemy and thus gained the upper hand.  gradually we found the Elswhere had distinquitive cities and places not unlike the ones we were already familiar with.  One we nicknamed the quarter, because of its resemblance to New Orleans.  We chose it as our base of opperations in Elsewhere and went about setting up the scenery to our liking.  WRITE and IMAGE were our tools and we painted quite a picture.  I was inclined toward french quarter type of arcitecture and went so far as to go down to the "real" french qarter in New Orleans with the image guns to make a rough replica, in time of course others would find the quarter and now its a treaturous hell hole, but its still our jumping off point.
+	
+		Lying back supported by pillows on a small couch in the back corner of a bar, Paris 1999, staring at walls not yet written by Rembrant, Miller, and all the dead poets.  Peace back here in corner where I watch all time pass me by with the detached apathy of non-compliance.  Step aside and let the man go through.  I feel like a lead train, heavy from hash, muscles detached from their control centers, inoperable, trying to struggle out the words for another espresso to wake the grey cells that hang like storm clouds on the edge of my brain.  I am ignored by the sweet French waitress, Nina, cherub cheeks —the girl puts up with me long after closing time.  I dream she loves me but I know she merely wants to go home; she certainly doesn't need me, I tried to sleep with her once, but her heart wasn't in it.  As a kind off consolation prize she lets me stay late until she is done closing up.
+	Every night I slouch my way here for my fix of stimulants, hallucinogens, and depressants, it's a full time job, shoveling coal in the engine.  Paris in the rain —dark and ugly like a city of dreams gone wrong.  Parisians, like New Yorkers, seem to know something that the rest of us are missing, and they show no signs of sharing.  Scaring information out of the agents here is like ripping rotting molars from a tweekers corroded mouth: no one wants the job.
+	Strange French lounge music tumbles in from speakers behind the bar, it rolls across the room like an ancient reminder of an inadequancy, building up since the last ice age.  Music ripped the fur from the ape body and made up man/woman, gave the creature a sense of wonder and beauty that demanded self inspection.  Why?  Ancient questions that have been buried so well by the trappings and excrement of civilization; they learned to live in the gutters in alleys, only the homeless and displaced dropouts of society have the time left to investigate.  Or course most of them lack the vigour and rigour of mind for such indeavors, but most junkies know more about the nature of economy than stock market analysists in sickly air conditioned rooms can ever hope for.
+	This is the nightmare at the end of the century and like most of some forgotten race of seekers lying in languid rooms in far off dream cities, Paris, Prague, Peking, St Petersburg, I prefer to rest in peace now and start the real work on the edge of death. There at the final moment you will start to get the real digs.  Nowadays, reclined on Persian pillows and sweet perfumed hash dreams, I live here.  I also have realities here.  Nina with her drooping doe eyes pulls on my arm helping me off the couch, tearing me from the peace of inner reflections.  She throughs my arm over her shoulder and helps me toward the door.  Stumbling up the stairs and onto the street I am blinded by the morning sun finally breaking its way through the sullen clouds.  I light a cigarette and using the building for support I brace myself for the walk home.
+
+
+	There wasn't much to go on the radio signal was weak and difficult to piece together.  Rangoon Jungle Operation Unsucessfull.  I ran that over and over the short wave and hoped for the best.  The heat and the pain kicked in together like waves on the beach and you have to lie their and feel it, really digging it down deep before they let up.  the plane was scattered in the canopies of the trees for several miles.   My foot was definately broken in the fall, but the doctor was worse, with a deep puncture wound and labored breathing.  He wasn't up to moving and I wasn't up to sitting out a night in the jungle, with god knows what hungry creatures running amuck.
+	Using the compass I tried to head north to where their should be a river, I had seen it from the plane, but the jungle was thick and I was moving slowly on my bad foot.  I reached the river by nightfall though and a fishing boat heading down river picked me up and got me to the village, there was no phone, but I had food and shelter.  I suffered a spasm of guilt over some rice when I thought of the doctor, but it passed.
+	The next morning at dawn I attempted to guide several of the men from the village back to the site of the crash, but we were unable to find the chutes or any sign of Waiben, by nightfall we gave up and the new took me up the river in darkness.  At the first road crowssing I stole a car and headed back into Rangoon.  I called the Agency and was greeted with a lecture regarding my job performance which I hung up on, and after a brief stop at the hospital where I was assured by ankle was not broken, but badly sprained; I headed to the local bar.  Six beers later I no longer cared about the Jungle or Rangoon or anyother 
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+	The cold streaking blur of the express train colors the night in Kaliedscope lights that play out in little dances.  The train seems on bender this metalic night, New York, 1999, and my head spins after the woman wouldn't let me smoke in peace; the caustic light from the flourecent reflections of white tile at the forty second street station burns on my skin. Letting my head bounce off the window in sway with the movement of the train, I hardly notice the man sitting opposite me until his voice assualts me.
+	"Where ya from?"
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+	No good shits run the world.  It's a well established fact, everyone knows this, but that doesn't bother me.  Absctracts are okay, the world exists only in my head anyway.  What trouibles me is the no good shits are driving around bodies and forcing themselves and their games on you.  This is of course what makes them no good shits in the first place, the question is what are you to do about it?  The most amusing thing to do is to play their game; times ten.  reducto ad absurdum the romans called it; make it fucked up.  Agents are always trying to sulk about in corners where no one notices them, but that is of course where people have come to expect them to be, you have to stay ahead of the metaphors.  The normals one is the psycho killer (he was such a quite boy), now we got are eyes on the quiet ones...television, gottat stay ahead of the metaphor.  Its played out you have to move into some new metaphors, just ahead of the other guy or he's going to mark you for what you are...someone hinding something.
+	Who isn't you say?  Princeses and Diamonds and opals those living on the edge of the shell like little spinning protons hovering the nucleus of infinite faith.  The best cover an agent can have is not have a cover.  Believe that you are and nothing more, do not become what you are or you will no longer be.  You will be something.  everyone is something.  The only time you're not being something is when you're having sex.  Hence the old phrase "sexuality is an agents best cover..." or words to that effect.
+	The human mind is infinite and what have we done?  tied it dopwn with the finite, like impounding a spaceship for being a spaceship.  What logic?  In order to win you have to play by your own rules and you have to make sure that you are the only one who knows what the rules are, otherwise they will anticipate the next move.  disinformation comes from the understanding that you opponet believes womething to be true and you then feed them information that is likely to confirm or adapt to fit what they believe.  This is best demonstrated by the Christ -con.  This involves convincing people that something exists, once they are convinced that it is real, the world either confirms this at everyturn, or in more severe cases the world is conformed to fit the theory.  Mainly only Scientists employ this logic anymore, but few pay them any mind.  the Christ-con is wore threadbare and wreeks like drunk from across the room, nobody is being chiclettes in this parts anymore meester.  When children laugh at you your cover is blown.
+	Time to move on they decided so we kicked out for the forest Sarge was riding shotgun and I was driving, an old army jeep looked like it had served half a dozen wars, but it suited us because we had served half a dozen wars.  We blew up north on some information passed along by the natives at the outpost, some tribe up in the hills still living in caves and foraging for grubs and roots in the forest repudated to have the key to the rosette stone of knowledge.  I was on the look out for a Truman Capote, but we saw no sign of him in the forest country.
+
+	Two days in we picked up an odd broacast from the inspector back at head quarters and for the longest time I couldn't make heads or tails of it.... "The 1994 erie Ordinace was aimed specifically at such established public beliefs as Imagination, Belief, and Constitutional thought...spin like an actor; electricals and the reason that it happened in the first place...The Lawyer sought continuance on the planes altitude."  We didn't have the descramblers to go with the code so to speak.  We holed up in a nice sleepy town of eighty thousand and sat down to rest up and try to break the transmission in hopes it would have some sort of clue as to what we should do.  we came up with...
+	A full retreat back to headquarters.  unacceptable as we were not in any perceivable danger.  At least not yet which is why we put it on the table, because they turn you know.
+	Hole up here for conciderable length of time and dig into the network.  We laid the ground work even while we were toying with the idea, always keep working even if you don't know what you are working toward.  Focus and concentration can have clearing effect like farting in an elevator.
+	Jump out of the loop completely and try to tackle the problem from the outside working in.  In persuance of this thought we obtained passports and other paper and supplies.  There was talk of the eastern front, they always need pack up and the rumor was good lodgings.
+	Try to jump out and then back in.  Reconocince is difficult and involved much tedious and boring work, it was also shocking to the body and in some cases led to death.  We made no move on this one, but we talked about it from time to time, but I think it was really more on my mind than Sarges.  Sarge was all for the Eastern Front he was hooked on information, and he was checking out his sources in his spare time.  I toyed with it, in between Martinis, but my heart wasn't in it, yet.  I was working on trying to remember the future.
+	I had a most marvelous vision one day of red brick buildings.  Boston -harvard square- fall; the Charles river slips by without a sound, the streets corral throngs of people- onlookers drunk beyond comprehension of what they were there to look at- they stumble out of bars and lurch through doorways like grenades rolled out on the street.  Inside the Radcliffe boat house a reserve of surplus energy is released in muscular spasms that pulse in orgasm.  Her breasts pool salt onto my tongue.  And in walks Truman Copote he looks it over for a minute and then, having taken stock of the affair, proceeds to hand me the rosete stone of Knowledge.  He lit a cigarette, took the stone back, and walked out the boathouse doors.  I tasted salt in my mouth every time I called up the memory. 
+
+	Its cold this time of year in the East out there in backwater eddies towns where the frost had long since burnt the leaves red, yellow and then right of the tree where they pool in sidewlks and street and covered paths in Kaliediscope blankets.  We huddled in blankets rather than paying the bills and having heat, we were agents we had to make do, get by on the absolute minmum.  Most people who visited were appalled by the rather makeshift nature of the furniture and the transitory feeling that hung in the air around the place.  It was not a howm it was a research center for the depraved, we were on to something and we just didn't have the words to wrap around it yet.  
+	from time to time the word wing would float heavy in the air and I used to wonder if I alone felt this or if perhaps it truly was there, tangible and in air like the way the Japanese feel about feng shui and the cannelling of chi.  It was pulsating and alive aroung there, nerves were being held bare and exposed to the radiating burn of now.  Naseau and disorientation were come and though it was an unwritten rule that one would ascribe the unhidable effects of them to food poisoning or the like, uinderneath it all we knew that something big was a foot.  Wing, and truman capote and a little boy coming by all the time selling promotional candy bars to raise money for his little legue baseball team.  those are the snapshots that come up when I am drawn back there in memories.  It was a good time it flowed right through our bodies and shot out the finger tips, something was most definately going on.  It would be years before I was able to day what the it was, but even then I knew it was real.
+	There was a furniture store downtown in hwat most places I had been would have been called old town, except that here everything is old; old town and oldertown.  Normaltown was just up the street from us, though I rarely set foot up there, the name was too obvious, something fishy about the scene.  The scene was too transpanrent to have actually existed, at the time I ascribed it to faulty perception, but I was wrong.   Awkums razor is no way to shave.
+
+
+It's a self serve station, one of the good old boys that used to fuel Packards from a lever pump, back when driving meant something.  When it had risk, and it was an accomplishment to get somewhere.  At the pump there was no digital blink in your face, just the rolling click of numbers turning, trains that bore out through the desert country.  The town had two smoke stacks and a wheat field to the north side of the station; not much else.  This one drifter had pulled through years ago, bit of mental case they said later, he burned three barns a couple of houses and killed of all but two families in town.  You can still see the crumpled black barn-skeletons if you cross the road and climb on the top rail of the wood fence that runs the length of the field.  When the sun sets it's a magical sight —give you visions, remind you that its all really funny when you stop to think about it.
+
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+	Old Doc Waiben used to sing "you got to get behind the mule every morning and plow" when he was looking through the kitchen for coffee.  The "fridge" was this old ice box that Doc had found at the side of the road and fixed up.  When he drank to much and passed out before sundown he'd forget to restock the ice and the melted remnants of the morning would eventually force open the door and the bag of coffee would go sliding across the kitchen floor finding its way into all kind of strange places.  "You got to get behind the mule/every morning and plow" Doc used to sing when he looked for the bag, and when he invariably found it lying in the farthest crack he would squat down like a child and scoot it along the floor over to the table, just laughing and singing "...every morning and plow..."
+trashy-girl/aol
+	I had a most marvelous vision one day of red brick buildings.  Boston —Harvard square— fall; the Charles river slips by without a sound, the streets corral throngs of people, onlookers too drunk to remember what they were there to look at-.  They stumble out of bars and lurch through doorways like grenades rolled out on the street, and inside the Radcliffe boathouse a reserve of surplus energy is released in muscular spasms that pulse in orgasm.  Her breasts pool salt onto my tongue.  And in walks Truman Copote he looks it over for a minute and then, having taken stock of the affair, proceeds to hand me the rosette stone of Knowledge.  He lights a cigarette, takes the stone back, and walks out the boathouse doors.  I taste salt in my mouth every time I call up the memory. 
+
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+	You have to sleep, because if you don't sleep you are unable to exist in the consensus reality...sleep is time travel and if you do not travel thru time you become a singularity existing only at one point in time, and the minute that point is passed you no longer exist...the only way to exist in consensus reality is to keep showing up at different points in time...leaving a trail that other reference points can piece together...the flow... the thread, so to speak... and out of this assembly process —run through all the complex webs of the human mind— other observation portals (humans) are able to organize a map of what you are...you exist at said points, exhibit said behaviors and therefore are to be called this object SIL, DR WAIBEN...these are the things we know about you...you must therefore...based on what we know about X...be Y.... 
+	ADAM and some snake and he apperently had the thread the rosette stone of knowledge and you scream...NOT TRUMAN COPOTE!!  But there he is nontheless, like a chamelaean, shifting from here to there, becoming what you are...TRUMAN COPOTE...wherever you go there is already an ostrich there...waiting....
+
+	Happenstance carried you here sitting out on a red rock mesa top forgetting each sunset as quickly as it passed.  Staring out into nothingness the purest complete nothingness outside of ocean, in fact this was once a sea floor, even the fish wouldn't have it.  But sitting on the porch of run down wood shack that passed as a house and rented for the paltry price of twenty five dollars a month.  Actually thats what there paying me, twenty five a month to sit here and write reports; let go of all contact and take notes for somebody elses script, I never would have sritten myself into a role this melodramatic for a million bucks —reaks like hollywood cheese.  I keep think that one day I'm going to wake up and find out that I really am just a collection of ideas that if fact at the bottom of the search for everything we're going to find nothing...  The Tao Te Ching says that the smallest thing is in the biggest and vice verse, it seems to me then that since we already know that "everything" is actually made up of  indescribably tiny "nothings" called electrons that it is only a matter of time before the big stuff, God, god, philosophy, science all the big stuff is going to turn out to be founded on nothing.
+	I first had this realization years ago and I decided to take on the big job myself I set out to find the unknown and find some way, however thin, to make it known.  I wrote a book on what I found and met the interedting folks at the AIC and then I wa here, like you just sitting on the porch of a shitstye in the unbearable afternoon heat —southeastern Utah in August.  All I do is wait for the mercy of the thunder clouds which manage to bring the temperature down to the high nineties, of course the trade off is in the humidity.  I write reports, though not many anymore, for the AIC.  Actually the bulk of this book will likely be filed away somewhere back in D.C. which is really just as well I guess, should it ever be needed at least someone can find what they're looking for.  I'm just not looking for it anymore.  But its a long way from here to there and I have to give some background.
+	In the beginning was the word and the word was with God.  Like most sunday scholl children, I have no actual memory of hearing those words or at least I paid no attention to the idea of them.  Not until years later, but lately I've been thinking that it might have been there the whole time from the beginning.  Anyway at one point that little sentence was threatening to take control of my life and I met Sil and the rest of the people at AIC and found out rather to my embarassment that I was not the novelty I thought I was, rather I was endanger of becoming left behind with the women in children so to speak.  And somehow the whole time I think I was trying to solve a riddle that had been subtly implanted near birth and which wormed its way out to consciousness just before the turn of the millenium. 
+
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+	Sil lived in train station. He was not employed by the train company nor was he waiting on any particular train, he simply lived in the train station.  It was his house, it just also happened to be train station.  Trains came and went at all hours of the night, the worst were the ones that didn't stop, moving through at high speed it sounded like a freight train going through the house.  Sil didn't mind it too much, only when he couldn't get to sleep nor did he mind the people milling about the station except for the tourists who would walk out into the flow of traffic and just stand there trying to decide which way to turn until some commuter collided and propelled them in one direction or another invariably the wrong one.  These people are lost anywhere and that frustrated Sil, but the ones minding there own business didn't bother him some of them he even recognized and greeted, a few of them were true friends of his.
+	The lost ones were usually heading to the airport from some outer bungalow turned town in the sticks, off to Paris on family outing.  The mass transportation of lost families was not Sil's specialty, he was doubly unhappy to have to share a home with them.