EMBOLA

The tiny screen prompts me to "post content," missing the irony. In a post-content society, an anti-culture, it only remains to be seen what will fossilize and what will just melt into the background hiss. Perhaps some bird-beaked, visored rogue techno-archaeologue will fall in love with me, like Cohen's Catherine, eons from now. Poor thing.

Days in which any signifier protrudes into awareness are days worth living through, if only to catalogue those holographic, occult ruses-- invent a naming convention to describe the effects of a strained-for convolution as it shines through forlorn orgasms and the transparent protocols of the current info-mentalism. Like Lieber's, our paramentals blit into our telescope eyes; blit into cumming storms of ghost paper and SMS; insecure channels blooding thick through the belly; an enforced garden for ensorcelled bullets to impregnate; a constant slice and digging into the brute shoulder of security as it barrells through the doorways.

Always I feel the scuttle of the black roaches of norm troops-- flashbang and capsicum, suppression fire; the stumble of the gutted grandmother-- moral and elemental dismemberment hoovered away by Reuters and AP wasp eyes-- film like a candy roll; like a tongue shunned in favor of video's French kiss; analogic artifact snake that balked at the ungranulated display of contemporary brutality.

Perhaps there will be a whiff of powdered gypsum, just before the shutters slam everything dark. Perhaps we'll have a million more tomorrows, all ionized and dreaming.

BLACKSITE

I keep imagining that one day I'll wake up and not be me.

I've found that life tends to consist of insult after betrayal after disappointment.

To live in the year 2016-- especially to be unable to escape American society-- is not worth living. No better argument for nihilism could have been created intentionally. From the very beginning, our society was founded on a great lie, and nothing, really has changed. Children to this day are taught the rhyme of Columbus; that the American Revolution was a tea party over taxes, and that black people are now equal.

If I could, I would take a giant literary shit on all of it, but it would be nothing compared to the painstaking efforts of unfathomable heroes like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.

I'm just a divorced loser whose body is ripping itself apart. I pay money I don't have for X-rays, physical therapy, and Gabapentin. I like to write because I love to hear myself talk, just like every other retarded fuckface in the universe. It's just about all I can do anymore.

I'm supposed to think about how other people have it worse than me, and they do. Hell knows they do. There are people who probably have the same kind of nerve pain that I do, and they're in jail, or being Tronald Dumped in a CIA black site in Qatar, or a sex slave somewhere there aren't many network-ready cameras. There are people right now having their vaginas or assholes ripped apart, or their dicks cut off and fed to them. There are babies and toddlers being smashed against walls. There are heads coming apart in the street. There is rape beyond what any filmmaker could imagine. Rape of life itself, by people who share an ancestor with apes, but who have convinced themselves of some kind of divine origin.

I'm just throwing my hat in the ring of also being fucked while strangers watch.

If I'm lucky, I'll wake up tomorrow, and we'll all be debriefed that the simulation is over; or at least, I'll wake up and be someone else.  Someone with rich parents, and I can just take some better, more powerful pill, and roll back over, and go back to sleep.

If you have rich parents, you can do whatever you want. It's completely meaningless, but at least you don't have to suffer in pain while the world you've helped murder spasms in agony.

I truly hate all of us and I can't wait for our extinction.

A scare is a not-so-secret wish.

CENTRALIZATION

Once we admit we're living in the bad universe, does it even make sense to continue on?

Let's not get into politics here, but the mere fact that Ronald Cump is a player in the final presidential showdown prettymuch proves that we've ended up in the universe where the cat dies. There is no need to open the box anymore-- not for me. I hate what's happening to us. We're going grey at the edges; losing the synapses between one another; swamped by the mere struggle of the calendar roll. Somehow we have to set a fire, or the damp will kill us.

What are you wearing, in your dreams? Hints come through the serially chained frames of illusion known as reality. Light comes through not a keyhole, but between the links. Signal light. You've got to care what happens to yourself in worse universes than even this one; got to make the distribution fall on kinder hills; climb out of these local minima; nucleate a religious resurrection-- the cat is only sleeping. Pet him and he wakes up. What is bombarding us in bed at night? Is it nerve damage or DNA? The hot thrush of neutrinos? Autonomic ill-will from parallel worlds? We have to love the other instances of ourselves that are doing better; let luck bleed through the refresh cycles. Love comes in from somewhere-- look, Mom, I'm even praying desperately now. An acausal prayer; a hymn to Boltzmann, a blood sacrifice to Susskind-- Tycho Brahe as a girl; Susskind as a priest; Boltzmann a barista-- the moon, the matador; me.

Wrecked; the car torn nearly in two; the body recognized as my own; the spiderwebbed glass, showered with spinal fluid; the nerves, the dying of the light of thought; Spinoza as a bum, finding my wallet-- reaching through the refresh cycle, a nexus handshake with the seventy-eight dollars there, then dropping it back through the surface; the wallet winging open; the debit card; the purple star winking through daylight; camera beam through an alien dell, third-eye chiming in revenant combat Christ; the Fool in a Burzum shirt; the hawk at the typewriter.  Silbergeld; Heiliger Geist.

It's impossible to distinguish from a parody of itself-- this always signifies the end of something. Something has been lost, never to return. It's different now.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. Can u buzz me in?

TOPOLOGY

Sometime last night, the baby mouse died.  I found her clutching the paper towel in the rescue container I'd hastily made.  Maybe I'm at fault-- I shouldn't have intervened; should have just let her hop around franticly in the garage at work, confused and unable to find her way.  Maybe I let her get too cold, or maybe I should have got some Pedialyte-- should have used the dropper to nurse her, but I was unsure. She was the sweetest little creature.  A grey puff with a face on it.  A poor jitter with a tail stuck to it. A somebody.

I couldn't say when things went green. I had my head down all winter, and I never saw it coming.  There is a half-hearted garden outside the car window with a rogue's gallery of spiky grasses and chartreuse bunches of baby leaves.  Baby leaves. Miserable-looking elders huff up the road in some kind of marathon.  I just drive by, arm aching at the wheel.

I stare at the green lights to make sure it's safe. I'm afraid one of these times I'll lapse in attentiveness, and then SLAM-- never see it coming.  I was somewhere else for a moment.  Somewhere beautiful.  Still dreaming.  Everyone says that what you focus on, you attract. The thoughts you dwell on, you make them come true. It doesn't seem to work for me, because certain people haven't dropped dead yet. I guess I'm not straining hard enough at the wishing thing. Maybe wishing is like taking a shit. Wish in one hand... no difference, really.

The Game Genie suddenly plops into existence behind my car parked in the driveway. Jagged yellow pixellated lightning rotates and scales around a purple halo of intertwined dicks, pumped to full boners. They look like huge worms, choking and slurping, and slinking around one another-- a real writhing mass of fleshy jizzing thunder.  The Game Genie is all green, a musclebound wrestler floating the lotus above a gilded cusion-- you know, exactly how a genie is supposed to do.

"NAME THY CHEAT CODE, PATHETIC MORTAL," he bellows.

I dunno.  Maybe the ability to see through ppl's clothes. I realize this isn't an original idea, but I'm not really interested in changing reality all that much. You can never predict the outcome with much accuracy. Everything could go to shit, or decohere, causing some kind of spacetime domino cascade disruption, or split into crazily improbable thermodynamic configurations, like friction suddenly ceasing to be a property of matter.  Imagine that shit.

"YOU REALIZE THAT YOU WILL HAVE TO SEE EVERYONE NAKED, RIGHT.  EVERYONE..."  He leans forward a little and looks at me skeptically.

Ehh, yeah, that's a bad idea.  It's a good lesson. Examine your whims-- why do you want that thing on the shelf? That scarf, or that pair of headphones, when you know that getting what you want is the worst thing that can happen, because you never only get what you want, you get all the other problems associated with change. You can't just go around changing one thing at a time.  A whole network of connections shifts with that one instance of obtainment, and then the universe where the desire originated, well, it ceases to be the same universe.

"I would like to cheat death for my little mouse. I want her to have another chance to exist, out in a real prairie-- not in the city. Bring her back to life," I say.

The Game Genie howls, "THAT'S NOT GONNA HAPPEN. BUT I WILL DO WHAT I CAN."

With a clap of his hands like a grenade blast, he nods his massive head, and is sucked back through the vortex of purple dick lightning, which puckers in the air for a second or two, then POP, is gone.

I'm looking at green lights. I'm through the intersection.  I was off, daydreaming again.  Neuronal patterns are like wet constellations in the dark sky of your head.  Remember Escher, remember Hofdstadter.  Remember the black and white fractal shapes of formally reachable and unreachable true statements. All at once, a shift in topology, a little squiggle goes dark.  Like a puff with a face on it.  A memory of Somebody; suddenly, as I press the gas, I'm drawing a blank.

QUORUM

Another grudging awakening-- another jaunt back to square one. No guarantee of relief in sight; just the cunning impalement of a javelin along the radial nerve, the weight having settled in the vicinity of the right middle thorax; the shaft of the weapon made of some jungle wood that oozes numb.

This was to be some kind of driver; some inspiration toward constructive action, yet even I have grown tired of its hackneyed vignettes. It is shameful to write anything at all. There is no space the awareness might find to rest upon in the first place, amid the vomiting catastrophe of human society. I can't even whimper without adding to the collective, idiot babble.

To act, then-- to commit the act of speech must be a crime. Perhaps it is like the Catholic notion of masturbation, of nocturnal emission-- the pollution of oneself. We just love the sounds of our own voices so much, we tell ourselves we-- us human beings-- represent some grand achievement wherein the cosmos may understand itself through the evolution of consciousness.

What a record-breaking crock of shit.

In fourteen billion years, we are what the universe managed to fart into being, because it needed content. Creators, makers, designers-- nevermind the greatest minds of the ages past-- this, right here is how we go out.

And we are going out. Like a switch being shut off. There is an actual singularity approaching-- a threshold beyond which we may not look-- and it isn't the fun one full of benevolent AI and wealth-distributing, ubiquitous nanoassemblers. No one in the White Wild West is even beginning to imagine what true scarcity will look like. We'll have plenty of guns, but no one to kill with them. And then we will turn them on ourselves.

You're gonna die. Probably before that happens, Mom and Dad will die, and you will watch it happen to them. Maybe it will give you some idea what is coming-- sort of prepare you for it.

But it will hurt you, and you will cry.

If I started crying now, I would never be able to stop.

SKIP IT

I found a patch of skin, not being fed. I'm tending it like a garden, digging out the weeds, the infected soil. I've breached an aquifer and had to manage the co-mingled grey and red ooze several times. I wonder; would it be repulsive if I was digging inside someone else? I think I would enjoy administering injections, probing inside, cleaning; cutting out the bad things, letting the blood escape clean in volume; stitching the skin together; sewing the hole shut. I would enjoy it.  But I never said it would make me happy.

I have never been truly happy. I don't often think about what it might be like. It must be very shallow, like a kiddie pool in the park-- filled with toys and laughter and light physical play. My big head always dragged me down, under a softness-- I guess the place they poured the concrete is still not set. I've got my injuries now for good-- they've proven themselves to me and become Real, like in the Velveteen Rabbit. I've done everything for the sake of some temporary little relief, and that is a game for losers. Losers like me never truly reach for success; never grab it and twist it like the handle of a knife in a lover's back. I'm unequivocally okay with being a loser in a garbage world like this one. This world can suck my fucking dick, basically. I do not give a shit anymore. I never really did. My head always led the way. I've got my extra tissue-equals-weight, like the Elephant Man.  A giant brain case slowly breaking my neck; slowly dragging me down. I've always gone down whether it was allowed or not. I've always gone deep, deep down inside. Then, when I wake up again, I'm always me.  I'm always still me-- just a worse version.

How many more times can this realistically happen?

I was already so tired when I started.

NO FUCKS

Neuromechanics-- a body in revolt; a numbness at last encroaching upon lands long fatly settled into-- an array of profligate minima; and, aping the storybook corpse, an uprising from death like lecher-liches-- a cold, bony ass-grab upon our tutor, pain-- the Constant Governor.

The first lesson is that action is not possible. I've inherited this prairie fanned out to the horizons in undifferentiated, stultifying basicness. I prop myself up with what's in reach; reluctantly acknowledge the slump of my sluggish blood, buzzing as it squeezes through too-narrow vessels like specific instances of pedestrian particle flow, nicotine-thick as it bustles by the freaking spasms-- the hostile javelins of other fucking people and whatever they are trying to tell me. But what does the landlady really mean when she strains, ejecting her hard totems of impacted shit out her blabbing cloaca?

Anyway, I can't move-- I can't even stretch. I'm a useless thing now. A wasted tool. All gestures-- all pretenses have been peeled back, laying bare the glistening network like global investment capital flow.

The second lesson is that there is no one else. Solipsism is the one true philosophy. Blessed are those who comfort the widows of loved lost ones. Blessed are all others, orphans of thought-- from the sable minxes tugging the awareness backwards in time-- bunched comforter eyes, staring and reforming and staring-- to the genius of "Only You," crooned by red-eyed towers in everyone's sky, in my sky, the grinding of the sky into every unquiet night. Maybe just knowing I could still be satisfied is comfort enough, even if satisfaction never comes. And why would it. No one else ever shuts the fuck up for long enough.

I've come out of the latest round of divorce curses like an abortion slurry, each clot and clump a bit of baby, shimmering in a wet blue surface sheen at each static discharge-- each blob briefly flaring epileptic as it's dumped into plastic and sealed away.

Don't be discouraged. There were only ever two lessons.