754
It’s 7:54am and for some unknown reason I’ve been here before and so has the car. Slightly askew, just enough to let me know it’s completely out of place, out of time, in the wrong universe. I look in the window. The joint is running. That’s me. But why am I stopped? I should be slapping the steering wheel puffing like a champ going to the sunrise in the east. Flying like a bird. Free. Gliding. Searching, but already found. Wings spread in beauty. But this fellow, stopped, not in sync with natural time, no more than 11 degrees from the angle he should be facing, is so far from heaven he is practically on top of it. With that marijuana cigarette about to fall on his leather seat at 7:55am on a Tuesday morning I glide by and I wonder who is closer—Me or him?
Fish
Acid eating through my eyes in a smoke filled car. Sucking up smoke and breathing out life. Shaking with laughter. Green stars. Silver cars. Oh Christ I lost my glasses. I can’t see. I am there. Here. Everywhere. So close to touching my manifestation. Destination. Station. Touching the air that has the power to satiate. Satiation. Shun. Shun. The father the sun. Mind on the wheel. Make a break. Bric-a-brac. Foot’s on the wheel and the brake. Should I go back? Crawling forward. I’ve never been here before. Right here at this time in this place I am struggling to put two and two together yet I am flying at the speed of light. I don’t need time anymore. It’s just a friend I used to know from a place I don’t hang out at anymore.
I wonder if I’ll ever get higher than right now crawling along the pavement looking at the detailed fractals of a million possibilities crushed into one life, I am dreaming. Dreaming. Dreaming. Nh. Nh. Roaming through the trees across bright yellow, bright yellow lines that should not be crossed I sink back and forth immersed in invisible nights of revelry with comrades who will never die. I struggle, struggle, struggle with no glasses to see where I am going. Where I’m going. Imagine beyond this feeling. Beyond feeling. Seeing, dreaming, or feeling? Skiing, reaming, or peeling? Schism, rum, or pleaing? Pleading, Oh Krishna I sex the air molecules for answers, asking Bacchus to pour his bounty on my head I dive forward sinking into my dreams, my tangents.
Driving one hundred emotions a moment at five miles an hour I am fried to the back of my seat as all of a sudden I see it, a fish, half northern pike, half round goby. He shouldn’t be here. Wrinkled, green and old, the fish has teeth. Bad posture. A neurotic bottom feeding, treacherous vagrant with a cantankerously warped bone structure staring at me through the void that is his eyes. He is the hallucination. Building on the tip of my mind. Tip top. Ship shape shifter. Mumbling words. Sifting lyrics. Proverbial proverbs. Bile proverbs. I hear him for the first time. Time. I hear this fish, fish with teeth. Time to hear this fish with teeth. Cracking jaw. Teeth, teeth.
Hear him say, “You’re a criminal.”
I am spaced out, riding on a flat plane, an infinite dish, an ice rink. CRASH. Shit. Fence bends around my car like a trap, flying tentacles of metal curving in and towards me. One spear of fence is warped and bowed straight at the window straight at my face. Inches. I am lost. I back up without looking, with out looking, looking at the fear in my face, fucking fear in my face. I drive home. Fast.
On Saddam's Death
Usually the victors write the history books, but in the case of Saddam Hussein’s execution, as much of the early 21st century, history is written by video footage. The moving picture camera is the whirring scribe of our time; a mechanical mediator that makes digital media that can be disseminated through television and the Internet. In the 21st century, history, and indeed all media, is controlled by those who yell, “Cut!”
But in today’s Iraq, no one man yells ‘cut’. Back in the day Saddam had an iron fist over not only the internal and external security of his regime and state, but also the red button on the side of the camera. Things are different today.
There are two separate videos of Saddam’s execution circulating on the internet. One is the video circulated among the Western media outlets. It runs around 1 minute and 18 seconds long. Out of good taste, or perhaps some other reason, the video cuts right after the noose is placed around Saddam’s neck and tightened. I’m going to go with perhaps some other reason.
A second video, recorded on a cell phone’s handy-dandy camera-phone feature, makes no such cut and runs 2:36. Thank you Verizon, and thank you Dad for paying the bill when I went over my minutes. As the notorious cell phone video continues, it becomes clear why the unbootlegged copy was edited. After the noose is tightened, a group of guards yell at Saddam, “Moqtada! Moqtada! Moqtada!”
“Moqtada?” Saddam asks jeeringly and then laughs a hollow ‘fuck I’m about to die at the hands of these stupid motherfuckers’ type-laugh. A shouting match ensues.
A guard yells at Saddam, “You have destroyed us! You have killed us! You have made us live in destitution!”
To which Saddam replies, “I have saved you from destitution and misery and destroyed your enemies, the Persians and Americans.”
Curses are exchanged and Saddam breaks into a creed of faith. The trapdoor is opened mid-sentence and Saddam falls. The end. Or is it? As Marcellus Wallace says, “I ain’t through with you by damned sight!” We are still in the shadow, or as the British say, in the Deathly Hallows, of a man who controlled his country by force, but at least he controlled it. The legacy of Saddam ain’t through—Zed may be dead, but his old chopper is cruisin’ for a bruisin’.
Iraq, as many American’s are learning, is a difficult area of the world. Full of ethnic and idealistic divisions, and surrounded by powerful enemies and revolutionary Kurds to the North East in Syria, North West in Iran, and of course, to the North, taking up the entire South Eastern part of Turkey. Iran and Syria would love a peace of the pie; Saudi’s to the south have a vested interest as well. What would happen if their mortal enemy Iran were to gain a solid and gigantic foothold of land directly to the north of them? Without Saddam’s iron fist, without his deadly fist, without his genocidal chemical weapons supplied by the US government fist, the Middle East is a land war in a box, like TNT immersed in gasoline. And some Americans would love to take a smoke break from the whole deal. Boom.
Now that Saddam is dead, there is no one clearly in charge of the region, and the case of the two execution videos is chilling audio-visual proof of this. The government has no control. The government of Iraq is made up of different factions of politicians allied with various militias that fight each other every day. ‘Moqtada’ is Moqtada al-Sadr, just one more militant. Saddam was not killed by the Iraqi government. There is no Iraqi government. Saddam was killed by yet another faction.
Saddam will have a two-fold legacy, as a cruel ruler by force and murder, but also as a statesman who controlled rival factions and held his enemies at bay as well as he could. He may be the last leader of an Iraqi ‘Nation’ as we knew it. But the jury is still out on Iraq, until next week, this jury is hung.
Whose Polonium...?
The rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper. And the bunnies are radioactive and have deadly ninja skill.
What the hell am I talking about? While you people were watching James Bond fornicate I have been obsessed with a real life spy story: the budding story of Alexander Litvinenko, formerly a member of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s equivalent of the CIA, and later a member of the FSB, the new Russia’s equivalent of the CIA. Spook, spy, a real life James Bond. No, I didn’t see the movie.
In 1991 the Chechen Republic announced its independence following the fall of the Soviet Union. Following two Chechen wars and many thousands of deaths, Russia reasserted control over Chechnya. The situation remains complicated. This could be an entire article and still not get to the meat of the Chechen issues. Suffice to say that the Russian Government has a vested interest in keeping control over Chechnya; if one state breaks away the entire new Russian Republic could collapse. Anna Politkovskaya, despite having between 15 and 50 consonants in her name, was an American born journalist of Russian heritage who reported for a liberal Russian newspaper from Chechnya. She was a critic of the Putin administration and a stanch supporter of human rights. She was found dead, on October 7th, 2006, the day she was to submit and publish an article on torture. Not Abu-Garib, mind you, she was investigating the torture committed against Chechans by Kadyrovites, the “Security Service” militia of the Pro-Moscow prime minister of Chechnya, a puppet government controlled by Putin. She was found in an elevator, shot four times, once in the head. The murder had every sign of being a contract killing and she is widely believed to have been killed because of her work as an investigative journalist. The day after her murder the police seized her hard disk and research.
Fast-forward to November 1st and Alexander Litvinenko and Mario Scaramella, an Italian lawyer, ‘security consultant’, and all around man of mystery, meet at Itsu Sushi in London. They discuss an FSB hit list that was leaked to Scaramella, containing both their names. They also discuss the assassination of Politkovskaya, which Litvinenko was investigating. Litvinenko also meets with Andrei Logovoi, a former KGB agent, and Dmitry Kovtun, another Russian, in the Millenium Hotel to discuss “business”. Later in the day Litvinenko has fallen ill. When he is checked into a hospital he tests positive for polonium-210 a form of radiation made only in advanced nuclear laboratories. Litvinenko died 8 days ago on Thursday of severe radiation poisoning. While he may be dead, investigations are just coming to life and the intrigue is snowballing.
It is not yet know if Russia’s Vladmir Putin was behind the assassination as Litvinenko avowed on his deathbed. Putin was a former KGB agent and head of the FSB. Nikolay Kovalev, another former FSB chieftain, accused billionaire Boris Berezovsky, a liberal Russian expatriate living in London and friend of Litvinenko. This is an interesting accusation as Litvinenko was once ordered to assassinate the billionaire, but refusing to kill his friend, he left Russia to live as an expatriate in Britain.
The case is still open and more and more is uncovered each day. Polonium-210 is a rare isotope, rarely found in nature, the poison Litvinenko was poisoned with had to have been inhaled, ingested, or injected, and it had to have come from a government nuclear laboratory. Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism unit is expanding investigations as we speak to try and track the trail of radioactivity to a source. If a government didn’t commit the assassination, then we are looking at civilians getting a hold of nuclear materials from a government laboratory.
Time for my typical sharp left turn. If it is worth looking at Russia it is also worth looking at American and Israeli intelligence. Intelligence is part of foreign policy. And after all, the US has it very own Putin and his name is George H. W. Bush, he’s got a son you may have heard of. For those bad, granola-smoking hippies that are interested, wikipedia this: Zapata Corporation. [Editor's Note: I linked it for them, Eric. Isn't that nice, Eric? Send me some plays so I can get some more content up in herr.
Jack's Head and George's Funk
I.
I keep Jack Kerouac’s head in a glass jar,
locked beneath my ribcage
in the upper, my-left-your-right section
of this chest –
I have been told it’s a replica,
but I keep it
in the empty spot
my heart once occupied
before presented on a platinum platter to you,
just before your junky queen, garage sale days,
just before idly surfing the web, I came across
my own heart on e-bay
just before I was outbid by a middle-aged white man
residing in Tokyo who personally requested
my heart be delivered
in an apricot-shaped box, shrink-wrapped and zip locked
to preserve freshness, preferably still beating…
so now, it’s just me and Jack,
and we haven’t a heart between us, but we have
great conversations, although sometimes
his prose are a little too spontaneous for me
so Jack calls me the spontaneous con
and heartlessly, I agree.
but all spontaneities aside,
he once dictated On The Road personally
from my insides out
and let slide slight secrets and details
slipped through the spaces between words and off the edge
of the page.
liverless, I allow him to drink
anything and everything he asks for and it may be
taking its’ toll on my Bluebird, but
who the fuck am I
to say no?
we hypothesize over the dimensions and boundaries of Haiku,
he taught me that:
puddles reflect the
clouds in the sky, as raindrops
distort the image
and sometimes
allows me to simply put pen to paper,
close my eyes and blindly follow his directions: up, down, left, right, north, east, west, south,
sometimes he bangs his head on the side of the jar
just to give my body the appropriate jolt in order to change the gist of my story with a natural twist.
we make it work, me and Jack,
but I wouldn’t recommend this lifestyle to a child,
I would advocate a relationship with a person
who is more than a just head in a glass jar
and a word on a page,
because maybe it’s the drink or maybe the smoke
or maybe it’s the fact that
he’s been locked away for so long
but sometimes, I can’t tell
if Jack has a soul anymore.
but I keep Jack Kerouac’s head in a glass jar,
locked beneath my ribcage
in the upper, my-left-your-right
section of this chest –
and no matter what
Jack never stops beating.
II.
I keep George Clinton’s funk
in a Ziploc baggy
in the door of my refrigerator
in between the condiments
& half-eaten chocolate bars,
I fear
that it may be making the rest of my food
smell funny, so if anybody’s interested
in buying it, please
be in touch…
I keep Woodie Guthrie’s machine
in my chest (my right, your left this time),
allow my ribs to pluck steel strings
as I breathe in & out
just so that Jack doesn’t get bored
when I’m asleep & at least I
can kill fascists in my dreams.
in the mornings, I read Billy Burroughs’ cut-up experiments
as front page news headlines
& eat Ginsberg for breakfast.
I carve Jean-Paul Satre’s paranoia
into the back of a plastic bus seat
on the green number two
that once took me to elementary school
on cold mornings soaked in snow.
I finger-painted over Warhol prints
with Langston hues of blues played by Blind Willie McTell
like nobody else ever will & hung them on the walls
of bathroom stalls in public restrooms & porta potty’s throughout the Midwest.
I flew east & signed phony peace treaties
with dead presidents in cushy holiday homes
but never once drank the tap water.
It was me who stole the scream; tell Ed I’m sorry.
It was me who killed your King, big up to Brooklyn.
It was me who laughed a little bit too loud, my apologies, it’s a rare side effect to an unfortunate ailment under which I suffer called Happiness, have you heard of it?
I keep Jack Kerouac’s head in a glass jar
& he tells dirty jokes. In the refrigerator
we got that funk & this machine kills fascists,
we eat poetry dipped in finger paints
& dissolve into stolen screams
& this is nothing special. This is just
a Tuesday morning, this is just me & Jack, heartless
& this is just an idea & this is just the sound
of us thinking about it.
Ridiculous.
inside my left ear
plays the tiniest violin
that ever existed,
a tune fit for the eardrums
of earthworms and earthworms alone.
inside each of my nostrils you would find
a rusty saxophone
playing
out of tune show tunes
if only you knew where to look.
my throat is moth eaten
my lungs are a dirty limerick
written before I turned young.
my chest rhymes with my tummy
and my soul is growing antlers
this life is funny
this life is ridiculous
I sleep on a tired, dreamless mattress
and I am on fire
because today I could have shaken the trees
I could have saved a life
or danced by candlelight
to scratched vinyl
I could have strangled a CEO
but instead
I sat
and watched
the corners of this room
and I asked them my questions
and I actually expected my answers to echo back
into the empty space of Me and Mine
but
even at this simple task
I failed.
today I could have rewritten
the national anthem
I could have written
the universal anthem
I could have written
a resume
or a letter
to my grandfather
but instead
I wrote another poem
and masturbated twice.
on my left shoulder
sits a miniature version
of my self
forever laughing into my ear
at the absurdity of it all
everything
look at it
it is ridiculous
so ridiculous that perhaps
sometimes one must laugh out loud
so as not to cry
one must look up to the stars
so as not to look down at the concrete
one must dance naked
so as not to drop dead
one must spend an entire day sitting
and watching
the corners of the room
so as not to spontaneously combust
inside my right ear
sits a toad, alone and grumpy
my elbow is
a goldfish
ugly ducklings fill up my eyes
and try as I may
I simply cannot scratch this guitar
from the surface of my skin
this life is
strange
and full of buried treasure
my adventures are mapped out
across my palms
so every time we shake hands
you become a part of Me and Mine
every time you laugh
it leaves a mark
so laugh
please
laugh until the seas become puddles
laugh for the ghosts and the dirty jokes
laugh for the elephant tusks, the refugees
laugh for the dust and the air
laugh for laughter’s sake
laugh for the late bus
laugh for the mailman
for the weekend barbeques and the familiar smells
laugh for everything
look at it
it is all
ridiculous.
Spiders in the Corners.
I see the ghosts of dead insects
with my waking eyes.
I see the ghosts of dead ants, cockroaches and killer bees
I see mosquitoes and fireflies,
blue bottles and daddy long legs.
I see tablecloth stains
of red wine and pumpkin pie
and now the ants are crawling out
of their secret hiding places -
the sugar is calling them home
and it’s raining outside.
There are spiders in the corners
of every auditorium
in the United States of
America.
Spiders in the corners
of every classroom and prison cell, every confession booth
and court room.
Ants are crawling behind the walls and
beneath the floorboards of our childhood bedrooms.
Cockroaches occupy every hidden room
of the white house.
There are spiders in the corners
listening to every secret and bearing witness
to every sin.
Who do you suppose they’ve been talking to?
Spiders only speak one language
and have no tongues for us to cut out.
And lately,
the ghosts of dead insects
have been giving me dirty looks:
a strange blend of a healthy distrust, fear
and loathing. Sheer contempt and superiority
and maybe I’m paranoid,
but I think we are approaching the day
the insects
fight back.
The spiders have finished weaving their webs
as the ants stand easy on the frontlines
awaiting their orders.
Red ants grow particularly impatient
in anticipation of the big push.
They’re waiting.
Waiting.
The thousands upon thousands of years
they’ve been walked upon, swatted, poisoned
dissected, experimented upon, cloned, probed, poked
cursed, pushed aside, mindlessly squashed, smacked, flattered, splattered, sprayed, raided
and exterminated.
The thousands upon thousands of years of oppression
have built up to this moment.
This is for the kingdoms we destroyed,
the beehives we’ve burned down and the queens we’ve assassinated.
For the anthills we’ve stomped upon.
For every raid can sprayed in the name of mankind.
For every new born butterfly yet to grow wings.
For the intricate webs they weave and we tear down
with the flick of a wrist.
For every corpse washed from a windshield
with the push of a button.
For every fly swallowed.
For the kings we have killed
without even realizing it.
I see
the ghosts of dead insects
with my waking eyes and they give me dirty looks,
in anticipation of the day
the insects fight back.
The Day the Machines Fought Back.
Have you heard? The traffic lights
have started to fight back.
Just yesterday,
one turned
purple.
It was on all the morning television talk shows
and front page newspaper headlines:
green turned purple,
yellow turned a crimson sunset
and red turned sky-blue pink
with yellow polka dots. I was there when it all went down.
We leaned against concrete walls & watched.
We smoked cigarettes & looked cool
As confused cars honked horns & shouted words like
ARSEHOLE & FUCKIN’ FUCK FACE!!!
Some hippie hopped from the back of a Volkswagen van,
put two fingers in the air
and declared “peace, man”
but somebody shut him up real quick.
That is when the whole thing started.
The lights flashed from purple to crimson sunset to
sky-blue pink with yellow polka dots so quickly nobody knew what to do & suddenly
all the cars started
to come to life too.
Radios turned on & tuned themselves
to stations previously unknown to mankind.
Steering wheels spun. Keys turned.
Gas pedals floored themselves. Cars collided into one Another at random. People were hurt.
There were reports of toasters
And George Foreman grills springing to life unplugged, chasing entire families from suburban homes & into the heart of never-ending streets named after forgotten presidents.
We waited for the paint to dry, as dead cigarettes gathered around our bare feet.
And it was all fun & games until
the nuclear missiles launched themselves,
machineguns pulled their own triggers
and television sets held onto the remote control.
By the time the birds began their morning songs,
all the machines were dead. All but one.
I have never heard silence like this.
An electric buzz I never really knew existed
is gone.
Everything is quiet. Things are different now.
Things are simple.
I sit alone on a battleground
littered with the lifeless carcasses of
portable CD players and boom boxes, cellular phones, electric clippers and alarm clocks
and day jobs do not exist anymore.
The traffic lights have won the war.
The animals are free again.
Awake as a Hypnagog
AWAKE
Hypnagogia (also spelled hypnogogia) describes vivid dream-like auditory, visual, or tactile sensations, which are often accompanied by sleep paralysis and experienced when falling asleep or waking up.
NAILS TO THE WALL
“Being awake is the most universal hallucination known,” says Freedom.
The lighting is faint, swamp eyed heart swallows of gray swirl about the room. She is naked, standing by the window. Love. I feel love, and I don’t know if that is the same as in love, but she is draped in an aura only I can see and I know I’m awake because her words taste more alive to me than they could otherwise.
“You’re all so drunk on the fear of your own blood that you don’t ever poke out your tongue,” she demonstrates, “to both mock your destiny and pretend you love the taste of oxygen. You only use your tongue for food and sex.” She glances toward me, “Such a shame.”
She is an ephemeral (or ethereal?) being. Shifting shapes of expression and in no hurry to intellectualize. One philosophy thrown at me followed by another, neither holding any true relevance to any known context, or at least none according to my current state of mindlessness.
I can only further describe her as one’s first and most innocent love, but I must discontinue my description before I forget to enjoy her in this moment.
“Oh!,” she says. “He’s here.” It happens quickly. She is referring to her significant other I take it. One last drag on her cigarette and she extinguishes it onto a napkin on the dresser. In an electric panic I pocket the napkin. The doorknob is being handled and I am horribly anxious.
“This is your last series of moments, Maxwell,” He drones. “My name is Fate, pleased to make your acquaintance. I have known you since before the moon had a face, before the sun had a father. You will not remember anything of my countenance or idiosyncrasies when this is done, but I’ll proceed to grace your company with my own so that before you wake you can have had at least one worthy experience.” He clears his throat. “That napkin you just stole has some writing on it which I wrote soon after I came to be, which would be, by your count, if you could, trillions of years ago. You were meant to read it and it was meant to… befuddle your cool.”
He creeps me out.
Freedom runs her fingernails on the wall. There is no sound. Is she casting a spell? Who is Fate? Why is he called that? Her nails to the wall, my hand on Fate’s napkin, there is much meaning in all of this and I am too human to understand.
“Both of you get the fuck out of my house,” says Fate.
SECRET IS IN THE SPIDER
My pocket is smoking. The cigarette must have ignited the napkin. I remove both and try reading the dregs of script:
S-4$023PidDEr
I know I’m not dreaming because the sun is singing a marshmallow song out of oranges and purples, playing hide-and-seek in and amongst the myriad of sheep-like shapes in the shadows. I skip over cracks in the sidewalk.
Freedom and I come face to face and I do not smile until I smile.
“Have you read the napkin yet?” her hand rests on my cheek.
“It just says, ‘Spider,’” I say. I show her the napkin.
Her frown is almost ugly. “No, it says ‘Secret is in the Spider.” My brow furls. “Fate, my husband, thinks he has eight legs. His gravity is a guise; he’s the craziest of us all.”
We discover a quaint park with a quaint bench and so we sit and I listen.
“Fate lives in the center of a black hole,” says Freedom. She kicks nothing with her hanging feet in scissor swishes. “He is stretched to infinite and can feel the behavior of every subatomic particle. He can predict most human events on a mass and individual level with a 96.96% success ration.” She is smoking again. I never noticed her lighting a cigarette. “I’ve never discovered any sort of rational for his spider obsession, the way he identifies with them. ‘I feel every vibration on my web,’ he whispers in that arrogant, post-orgasmic, male moment after sex, ‘Secret is in the Spider,’ he murmurs in his sleep”
The sun changes clothes behind a millisecond eclipse. “I believe you,” I tell Freedom. I look at the napkin and the words have changed. They now read,
“You don’t believe in anything.”
We walk away from the park to find ourselves at the doorstep of a strip club called “Naked Identity.” Something above makes an eight-starred shadow and moves quickly before landing on us – this should hurt. This does not hurt. My imagination tells me that a robotic spider leg without intent or fabric has knocked me unconscious, but this is absurd and I do not believe in my imagination, just like you.
NAUSEOUS CALLUSES
I awake in a dim place. There is no width with which to spread arms. Metal rods face me; I am prisoner. My hand itches and so I scratch it in the dark until it bleeds, bleeds warm. My memory of Freedom is fading.
This place must manufacture loneliness.
A gust of desperation ricochets everywhere within and all I can do is whisper “come back,” and then again and then many more times, until I am in tears and clawing at my face, feeling as though I’ll never see Freedom again. I begin shouting, and the sound from my stomach outward horrifies me for I have never felt this kind of implosion. The desire to erase myself from my own memory rises,
rises, rises, and
rises,
and all I can do is scream.
“Stop shouting,” Fate, hollow as love-promise, approaches. “You’re going to wake up my army!”
My (imagined) reaction is to tell him I want to die, that this place he has taken me to has sucked the desire to live from my heart mind and mouth and that he is the cruelest man since God, but my throat and chest are clogged and no words can get out.
“I am a great, great playwright, Maxwell,” he runs his knuckles along the concave of his side and will not meet my eyes. “My greatest play was called A Round Octagon, A Flat World, Our Nauseous Calluses,”
He describes his play in length. He is an unusually fabulous storyteller. His voice and eloquence pacify me.
“The finale is one of which manmade spiders the size of thought devour the world. First the cities and leaders, then the dreams. The shadow that came upon you is a detail of my great play’s finale which I never wrote.”
Enthralled and now active, I reply, “Then who did?”
“You,” says Fate. “We are all architects of our final moments; I am really just the scribe.” He grins and shifts his body toward an idea. “Well. Not just the scribe. I am THE Scribe, and I see that which happens. Of course you understand the ramifications.”
“Where is Freedom?” my voice cracks and my stomach is bottomless.
“Freedom,” he says. “My beloved.” He comes to my cage and put his hands (which briefly look like spiders and not hands) on the bars encaging me. “You will perform some music for her. A sort of requiem.”
He steps back and suddenly billions of spiders invade my cage, and as an arachnophobic person I should be terrified but the moment is over quickly. The spiders either perform… magic, or eat my cage so that I am free.
“Come Maxwell,” he says.
I follow him, reluctant.
“Fate?” I ask. Yes? He replies. “What matters?”
“So you’ve already discovered the gravity of when my wife passes. Best not to think about this,” he says. My eyes well up as we approach the future.
WHY DO SOME HANDS LOOK LIKE SPIDERS?
I follow spiders the size of camels as we descend a majestic, spiraling staircase of ancient stone. The bristles of arachnid fur cuffing my hands at my lower back nibble gently but menacingly. A red carpet leading into a hall dressed in chandeliers and other pomp oversees a perfectly spherical sculpture which possesses eight eyes and are positioned so that every entrance of this room is watched by it.
…I know I am awake because there is a liquid exhilaration in my bones I’ve never felt.
Fate holds a tome in his right hand, his left eye is black and his other is a sunset. I take it that this is Fate’s lair of sorts. And that this may be a dream. But there is no way for me to examine my hands as I am shackled and there are no light switches to toggle. Either way, I cannot be dreaming. I, just, can’t be. I’m awake. Strange as that may be.
“You play guitar like someone who cannot wake up. This is attractive to Freedom and so she chose you. Capricious and without practicality, that Freedom. I am loathe to her every nuance, Maxwell,” Fate says. We pass through many doors, Fate leading. “She has this silly obsession with hands. Of all symbols she believes they are the representatives of free will. She has never understood my affinity for spiders – universal fear – as the undeniable oppression of will. You’re all so drunk off the fear of your own blood that you lack the capacity for freedom. And then you die, Maxwell. You all die.
If you were free you would be living, not dying. You’re all dying and killing. Let a spider continue its journey over your body, sometime. That is, instead of misusing a perfectly good napkin to smash it. While it is true that spiders weave the threads of all events in a secret encoding in their webs, they’re just reporters.” He smiles and touches his chin. “Yes, spiders are journalists. And I’m their editor.”
We enter an orchestral chamber. A gong sounds. I am given a set of effects pedals and my guitar which someone must have stolen from my home. I say nothing about this, paralyzed by Fate’s words.
A man whose eyes are love or such that I cannot recall or tell of which approaches. His black collar rises higher than the top of his head, and his deathly white and key-slender hand reaches to shake mine. My hands are now free and so I join him with a shake and a forced smile.
He speaks.
“I am Dream, and there will be a skirmish!” His smile is like an orphan’s. “Fear not for you know you are awake!”
Music commences and I have little choice in its journey. The players below follow my fears like haystacks itching of hot needles.
Violin bows are rosined with stardust. Horns are unearthly flower petals. It is all very dreamlike, but I know I am awake.
DREAM, SNIPER
The brass section now holds grenades. And they unpin them, and they explode at the end of this paragraph. The pianist tugs a bladed boomerang from his Steinway. A flautist is loading his was-instrument with metal balls. Two violinists transform theirs into harpoon guns. (The brass section has hurled theirs toward the eastern wing where there was once a wall and there was now a smoking exit.)
Eyes and aura ablaze, Dream sheds his tuxedo and was now in purple fatigues.
“Intangibles, musicians, Canes and Abels, Oliver Twists and clock constrictors,” Dream’s tone is tube amp gritty; his militia makes formation and meets his pontifical tower stance.
“I would prefer to address you all as my brothers and sisters, as family, but in my heart is an afflicted and ineffable fact, which is that I only have one brother. As most of you know, Fate is him. He enslaved me to exclusivity of the unconscious when I met Freedom, and together we were to marry and carry on things such as joy and expression, but Fate stole her from me and tonight he will kill her! Let us stop him! Let us try although fail we may, we must battle this nightmare to dream!” He unsheathes a black sword. Its handle drips tiny tornadoes and its otherworldly metallurgy gives me a brief migraine. “Nice explosions, mis labrosones! TO THE EAST! TO HIS CHAMBERS!”
He scrambles and flings small planet-like contraptions that shoot nasty bullet-like things. Flames and venom, flares and BOOMS and vile spatters. “They’re only spiders! They’re nothing! They’re nightmares!” Spiders of all media flank all possible angles. “They’re only nightmares! DO NOT WAKE, MY ORCHESTRA! LET US DREAM HIM INTO THE DUSTS THAT CORRUPTED HIM!” Dream’s teeth are shark-like and his eyes are hidden by eyelids.
As quickly as it begins, it ends. Everything is dead. Massive exoskeletons cover cellos and tympanis, musicians are green and red of venom and blood. I am so very awake that I wish I were dead like everyone in the room.
Then the room becomes the inside of a washing machine and I am fumbling for consciousness.
IDENTITY, STRIPPER
I wake suddenly in a poorly lit place that smells like mothballs and sex. A flashing sign says “Naked Identity,” which I now remember is a strip club I came across with Freedom.
I seat myself next to a flake-skinned man who reeks of whiskey and severe loss. He is asleep or dead. I steal his booze and booze away. The collective mind and vagina are parched and indifferent. Freedom is dancing on a pole. I’m drunk. I barely know it’s her. I call to her, slurring, yelling, embarrassing.
“What did you say?” Freedom calls from the stage. She covers herself with hands and rushes down to my boozing. “What did you call me?”
“Freedom!” I reply. “You’re alive!” I am in love with her but only know how to guzzle this man’s whisky and stink.
Her face is close and so I study it. There are differences. She has either aged or I am drunker than I’d like to believe.
“Freedom is my sister,” says this naked stranger. A word rests at the roof of her mouth then flutters out unwillingly. She whispers the word, “was… She was my sister.” Her eyes filled with gravity. “Freedom was killed ages ago. By her husband. We try not to say his name around here, anymore. When we talk about him, things go wrong.”
My vision is blurring and the blurring becomes a whiting and the whiting becomes a shooting pain which immediately feels like a guilty orgasm in the center of my skull. I fall into a brief nightmare full of cold and condescending voice.
FATE, SCRIBE
Good evening, Maxwell. I have nothing to say, really. Except that it has been years for you since I killed Freedom. And, well, I’ll amuse you further. You’ll need something to lie about when you wake and jot this all down in your journal.
Here you are in Identity’s raunch-house, drunk out of your mind, still dreaming this dream of me. How many sub-dreams can you have? You are a terrible little crazy person. A Hypnagog. That word now exists. And you are it.
Anyhow, I am eager to let you know that there is a chance in your interpretation of this dream that Identity may actually be lying to you and that she may be Freedom. You never witnessed me kill her. And you know in your own psychotic study of things that Freedom and Identity are very similar, if not identical in meaning. Or rather, they are, ahem, necessarily contingent.
Oh what the hell, you won’t remember this, anyway! I did kill Freedom. Go figure. I’m the bad guy, right?
There’s no Hope, Maxwell. No Hope. Have a nice hangover in the whorehouse!
-FATE
PS. On that topic of…Hope. Dream probably would have told you about her if he hadn’t died so (ig)nobly in that battle of Musicians vs. Nightmarish Arachnids.
Hope was Dream’s daughter.
She was one of the violinists in that skirmish of ours. You may have stepped on her guts before you fell into your little pseudo-coma.
Ciao!
NEVER SLEEP AGAIN
Dear journal,
What the fuck is a hipnogog?
AS A HYPNAGOG
(for this text you have to have a physical copy of the album)
Credits
awake
used the wrong type of cassette tape in a 4 track tascam recorder typa-thingy and when i put it in the stereo to listen it was all slowed down. I played along with it a bit and discovered it was exactly an octave down. Convenient for overdubs but I left it as was. Ran the 4 track into my computer and used a plug in to drop the recording an octave so it’d sound how it sounded out of the stereo.
Nails to the wall
this melody was originally written with lyrics that had something to do with running out of cigarettes on my way to new york. In October 2006.
Secret is in the spider
the ending part of this track is kind of a little foreshadow to some melodies in track 9, which was originally titled “freedom’s funeral.” Secret was supposed to be that fate kills freedom. This is such a horrible idea for an album.
Nauseous calluses
this was the first track recorded for the album when it was going to be called “dizzy fingers.” Each track was going to be titled according to something having to do with worldly dysfunction in relationship to hands, hands being the symbol of free will, ability to make choices. The quote is from ‘I heart huckabees.’ I hope I get sued. Legit.
Why do some hands look like spiders?
I am so incredibly gangster that I stole my partner in crime’s lyrics which she stole from my room mate to center my concept album around the idea that everything’s relative and all that college wankery as my other partner in crime would probably sneer.
dream, sniper
fyi… there are no real drums on any of these tracks except for the bongos in track 3. oh, and I imagined Dream as looking like… you know… neil gaiman’s rendition. Or, his artist’s rendition… READ SANDMAN!
identity, stripper
almost everything in this, instrumentally, is from a roland w30… an 80s synth that uses floppy drives to load sounds. Raw style. I recently sold it because the dmv thinks speeding should be FINED.
Fate, Scribe
The drums in this are from an rp80 digitech pedal ran through about 5 other pedals which makes the drums go “wah wah” and stuff. And I ran those same pedals out of the w30 and messed around with it… did the guitar track last. With the same 5 pedals. Sold those all for the dmv and other bureaus of stench as well.
Never Sleep Again
That’s “birds fled from me” there at the end. Look her up. And “too dark for a picture.” That’s us. Her and me. As a thing. Musically.
As a hypnagog
i wrote this in a mad desperate rage one night. maybe i have panic attacks. it was like a panic attack. usually i only write really late at night when i get mad desperate rages. thanks for reading -max
