INTERFERENCE. Part One: Chapter Sixteen.

Chapter sixteen

            Stephanie's spelling test scores began to suffer. She began to fail spelling tests. Her mother was incredulous.

            'You used to be such a good student,' she would muse in a crippling sorrow. It wouldn't have bothered her, were it not that Stephanie's emotions were troubling her more than they would have usually. Since she had met with Falcon for the third time, she felt strangely as though a chasm had opened within her innerds as though they were merely a holding tubule for some caustic acid. She noted the scientific truth of this fact, yet never before had it affected her this way.

           

            She had not seen him in several months.

            She did not know where he lived. She had to try to find his home.

            One day, she sat on a statue dolphin at the top of the hill where the playground was. She sat atop it for several hours, only interrupted by hypnotic stretches wherein she stepped down.

            Her own heel became fascinating to her as she sank her sandals into the grass.

            The next day, she sat atop this dolphin for only a few minutes. She would revisit it five times throughout the day.

            She found a jungle gym adjacent to the playground. She sat atop it for several hours. The sky sank into a darkness that scraped against her heart.

            Young boys came by and stared up at her. Boys were always obsessed with tiny matters. They had no subtlety. They were like badgers.

            Two approached the foot of the jungle gym. She paid them little attention.

            'Why are you up there?' The voice was from the boy with gray, goatlike hair. He had a constantly nervous desperation in his eyes, which were yellow and gray. His father was in the military. She liked him.

            'I'm waiting for a friend.'

            'Who is this friend?' He could be forceful in speaking sometimes. She did not mind the sarcasm too much.

            'It's a boy. You might not know him.'

            'Is it that Falcon kid?'

            Stephanie's stomach was inflamed with an intolerable pain. It had been the other boy who spoke. He looked up at her curiously. Her eyes glared down at him.

            'How do you know him?'

            Ryan, the other, goat-haired, boy, spoke up.

            'We can tell you where he lives. We just need one thing in return.'

            She was, for once, not entirely paying attention. Her breathing had stopped at the mention 'where he lives'.

            'Where does he live?' she heard a female voice say.

            'You have to answer something for us first,' Ryan responded.

            'What?' came a voice slightly more cutting than she wanted. An angst like the black smoke from the furnace of a nuclear reactor rose into her heart.

            'We want to know. If you do talk to him. What would you do?'

            Her brow furrowed. The clouds were sulfur in the midst of a Sun that looked like the yolk of an egg.

            'We think you like him,' said the other boy, with too much eagerness and curiosity for her tastes.

            What does he know? Even Ryan, probably, regretably, can't know.

            'No.'

            She avoided looking down at the other boy. To her frustration, she could hear him climbing onto the first plank. Ryan was more respectful. Of course.

            She began to cry.

            'Why are you crying?' It was the idiot.

            She jumped down from her ledge and exited the jungle gym by a series of metal bars that stuck out at a corner of the structure that was opposite the gaping entrance that the idiot had entered into.

            She was about to go home, but she could not. Her intestines reprimanded her.

            The sky was all ready setting. She looked back to see Ryan approaching. His voice was concerned.

            'Don't you want to know where he lives?'

            'Just if you both stay away.'

            'Okay,' he seemed calm, but he was holding a lot back.

            She found the door when the night had already set in. The deep violet of the evening seemed more comforting than her mother's womb, as though she were suddenly removed, as she had so often felt in earlier years, from the pains and hassles of being an individual human being. The emotion was not her own but that of something else, however impersonal it may be, as though, for one brief moment, she glimpsed a heart at the center of the Universe clockwork. Blue clouds were visible in the midst of the violet haze. The smell of cooking rice wafted from a neighbouring backyard.

            She rang the doorbell.

            She checked the number of the house. '315'.

            A woman with a mass of hair like a giant corsage opened the door. She was elderly, and she was shocked to find that Stephanie had rung the bell.

            'Yes?' she seemed to try to become amiable, but only as a facade.

            'Is this where Falcon lives?'

            Something in Stephanie's total absence of hesitation or reluctance struck the woman, absurdly, as intrusive.

            'He is busy at the moment.'

            Stephanie stood there.

            'When will he be free?'

            The lady was shocked to hear her.

            'Why do you want to talk to him?' she asked indignantly.

            Some monstrous flame ran up her chasm like regurgitation.

            'Because he's my friend.'

            'Well, he is a very strange boy.'

            'Are you his grandmother?'

            'Yes.'

            'What is strange about him?'

            'He has A.D.H.D.'

            A brief pause.

            'When will he be around to play?'

            'I'll tell him you came by.'

            'My name is Stephanie.'

            'Hello, Stephanie.'

            'Tell him, also, that I will be on the dolphin statue tomorrow and over the course of the entire following week.'

            She grimaced. Hatefully.

            'Okay. Good day.'

            She shut the door rapidly.

            Stephanie stood for another few minutes, looking at it.

            Finally, the door opened again.

            'Can I help you? I'm sorry, but I told you that he is busy right now.'

            'I was just wondering about a question.'

            'Okay,' replied the woman dismissively and began to close the door.

            'Why are adults so eager to close their doors in your face?'

            The door was closed five eighths of its entirety. It paused. Then she opened it again.

            'Listen, young lady. Both you and that boy need to learn respect for your elders. He thinks that he is the boss. He doesn't even listen to what his parents tell him. That boy doesn't even care about his appearance. He just has an answer for everybody.'

            The sheer number of statements was a bit overwhelming.

            'Well, is he right in his answers?' she chose to ask first. The grandmother began to close the door again, muttering.

            Stephanie took her opportunity to ask the next and more important question.

            'Wouldn't a lack of concern for his appearance help him when he is an adult?'

            The sentence had been perfectly phrased. Stephanie could not understand why the grandmother's face seemed to shrivel at the sound of it.

            'You may need to see a psychiatrist. You should talk to your parents about it tonight. I feel sorry for them. Tell them.'

            She shut the door for the last time.

            Stephanie had thought back to that day repeatedly for years. She still could not think of anything the woman might have said that would have been more insulting.

           

Dm.A.A. 

INTERFERENCE. Part One: Chapter Fifteen.

Chapter fifteen

            Stephanie knew one boy whom she had related with in her early childhood. His name was Falcon. Meeting eyes with him felt like staring into the workings of a clock. He was the only boy that she ever could relate with.

            She would meet with him on a sidewalk that ran through their apartment neighbourhood, back when she lived in his apartment neighbourhood. They would meet at random, always. She preferred it that way, and he agreed, although he never said it.

            They met in the shade of two opposite apartment buildings one day. A cement sidewalk ran from the playground down to the parking lot that lay between every cluster of apartment buildings.

            The Sun was setting. The sky was a vivid and terribly tenacious blue that was descending into deeper indigo. The last rays of light still pierced it.

            She could still remember his eyes. He had the eyes that other children accused of changing colour. They appeared at times blue and, at others, hazel. She observed how particular and ornate they were. The slits in the iris, circumventing the perfectly circular pupil like the increments on her father's watch or the ridges on the rim of a quarter, were interrupted by vivid blotches of a poisonous, gorgeous nebulae that reminded her of the tornadoes on the surface of Jupiter.

            In between, the blue segued into green seamlessly. Yet some days it looked brown. She always held her breath when they talked, yet she spoke much. His eyes always looked straight at her. Usually there was no differentiation between his eyes and hers. There were words, and they were sometimes in a female voice and sometimes in a male voice that synchronised with his face and its gestures. He would grin often. He was a part of their environment, and the fading of the day light was met with no friction or restlessness. It changed as though it were a second hand running along the rim of his eyes.

            The same eyes looked on as the morning light turned to daylight, becoming a bleak white. Time seemed to be reversed as he spoke, as though, while the light of one day faded, behind it, another, white, light set in, bleak as that morning light.

            Sometimes there would be a lapse in their conversation. She would find herself breathing out. The exhalation was always followed by a pang of gentle pain, and she tried to make it less bearable.

            He noted the interruptions. He would simply look on, suppressing the desire to look around, waiting for her to speak again. Sometimes he would find something to say that would immediately catch her interest, and the seconds would seemlessly again begin to move.

            Time was not an entity during their pauses. She would simply look down at her skin and observe how pale it appeared. Yet she would feel a strange sense of identification with it. Her flesh felt as though it had its own tone. She would have felt pride in it were there not Falcon living in her community.

Dm.A.A.

[Long overdue and finally ripe:] Critique of Homosexuality.

It could have been written only yesterday. Down* to the opening sentence.

*I use this idiom “Down” not to signify that its aforementioned relevance ENDS at the first sentence, but rather that it includes even this introductory part of the analysis.

“I have come to terms with the fact that I did not perform my first attempt at stand-up on Thursday, yesterday.

My present restlessness must be the enciting force for this regret. Its true direction must be towards the future, not the past; in the absence of a critical external party it is difficult to find practical value in reflections upon the past, outside of (mere*) utility towards the future.

*?

At first I blamed myself.

Then I blamed my parents, not as an alternative but by extension. Blame is inevitable, and blame of self invariably produces blame of others.

Action and revision depend upon exercise of Will, and for that to be justified the others must be blamed.

Blaming the coaching staff at Palomar helped to alleviate the tension. That way, it was not my fault that I chose to attend. The means of attendance justified the unpredictable ENDS of wasting my time.

In truth, though I have taken pains to reform my parents’ behaviour, insisting that they do not SURVEILL me, I cannot pretend, sado-masochistically, that THAT power conflict, proven Absurd by their satisfaction with my purely SYMBOLIC attendancy, was the solitary cause for the time spent in college. Had I INTENDED, deeply, to per-

form, impressing those lucrative girls with first my boisterous flirtation and then tempting them to watch my set, learning whom among them was a participant and selectively signing my name just prior to hers, strategically, upon the sign-in list – I would have done so. Appeal to ability is the surest cure for a regret; rather than bewailing what I COULD have done, I can simply use the FACT that I had that ability un-consciously to attest that an OTHER impetus, equally under the surface, had fore-stalled me.

I have labored to honor my introversion. I was not yet Certain that the stand-up invitation was not a Temptation. Did that render the cat-like Blondie (not Alanna, but nameless) a temptation? Per chance.

The question seems to hinge upon this: Is the Unconscious one’s friend? Or one’s foe?

Alanna shall return.

I know it.

Dm.A.A.

Is sexuality a right?

If not, or it is ONLY a right insofar as it is an unrequited urge, then why bother to defend it?

The province of the Strong:

If *I* am entitled to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, what is it to say others are not?

But in FACT this is merely a way to defend one’s own Arbitrary Emotivism by seeking solidarity with a tokenized minority.

Of course, the struggle to develop a private relation to sex, ethically, is unheard of in a community of feminists and a-males.

What guarantee is there that such an enterprise would accommodate homosexuality?

Much love is self-love.

Homosexuality is narcissistic.

‘Homo’ = ‘Same = Self.

The proper function of sexuality is to under-stand the Other.

This will cure emotivism.

The Other cultivates Com-Passion.

The emotion of Jealousy stands as Evidence that we as human beings* have vested interests in the private lives of Others.                                                     Dm.A.A.

The question arises:

Is the other man an Other, if the jealous person is all so a male? Or is only the female on Other? Logic would find comfort in confining Other-ness to gender. But in fact the other man IS an Other. Yet he is not an Other from the per-spective of Sex. Why?

The function of sex is to understand the Other gender. This is no taut-ology. Even if we did not establish the man as Other, as we are tempted to in order to separate him from the woman, the argument would stand. The CONCLUSION – that sex must be a meeting of opposing genders, for it is a function OF gender,– does not DEPEND upon the establishment of the male as an Other. The latter depends upon the former as a Premise, but since that premise does not depend upon this fact in order that it may be a Conclusion, the reasoning is not even circular, or, at worst, it is not EXCLUSIVELY so.

One is tempted to combine the Otherness of both the woman and the man into one fact, so that the fact that the Conclusion depends upon is no different from the fact that uses the Conclusion as a premise…

But we can only do this by treating Otherness as a phenomenological fact.

And when we acknowledge that this Otherness only occurs in the Other gender, where sexuality is concerned, by virtue of the same phenomenological episteme, we have no right to complain about the contradiction. Our conclusion looms as a premise the closer it approaches. Besides that, the fact stands unequivocally and ubiquitously: Choosing same-sex partners over partners of the opposite sex is a prioritization of Self OVER Other, whereas passing judgement of both sexes treats them equally.

Neither is this judgement an attempt to sub-sume the Other to the Self, for jealousy hurts.

And this is chiefly triggered when the Other has failed to HONOR the Otherness of the judging subject.

One might ask: Why do I bother to even DEVELOP an ethic so stringent?

But I assure you:

Those who would laugh at me are precisely those men who would commit crimes of jealousy. And I CHALLENGE you, reader, to explain how THEIR debauchery is just-ified by MY saintliness and trust.                                                  Dm.A.A.

Fed up. Least I'm read up.

Post-modern Rage:

Most troubling is this meme that I am in some way wrong for condemning the recent atrocity that is the Internet because I employ it as a tool against its self. How severe is our idolatry that we must treat it as a human being, who must not be turned against one's own devices? How severred is our intellect from our wisdom if we must forget to use the machine against its self, as though by principle of judo.

The absurdity of this neurosis is unsettling. We must surely all be schizophrenics!

1. We believe money to be a resource.

Dude. It's a number.

2. We believe in "self-interest".

I am not doing this for my own health, faggot, but for yours. There is no I or you. There's only WE. And if WE must address a collective problem then that is MY responsibility, as well as yours. I must be the one to do it, to break it to you, and you are to follow, for in the same way I was to follow by participating in the example that YOU set. Non-participation is a sin tantamount to sodomy.

3. Intolerance for any contradiction.

You nigger-lover. EVERY thing is contradiction! Even computer code is comprised on ones and zeroes.

I have to accomodate YOU by pretending to our separateness. Yet fundamentally I only serve the WE, as you are obligated to.

Have we all lost our fucking minds?? No century before this had been so depraved!!

Dm.

INTERFERENCE. Part One: Chapter Fourteen.

Chapter fourteen

Fritz’s thumb was cemented in the ‘Up’ button for several seconds.
The lift rose by one increment. A sweating rage permeated him as every fiber in his lungs seemed to scream for him to scream at the elevator control board.
With every passing floor, Fritz furiously sank his right thumb into the ‘Up’ button, unyielding until the absurdly glaring light behind it shut its eye. He would resume this for countless floors.
He knew not how he would escape the man. Fritz’s mind raced. If he were to make some sign that he was on the twentieth floor and then immediately sprint into the cloistered solace of the elevator, he could then run across the fifteenth floor, sprint down the staircase, and escape onto the first floor.
He had lost count all ready of which floor he was on. With a gripping terror, he allowed the door to slide aside.
There stood the man, interrupting two blocks of cubicles like a dot between two bars in Morse Code. A glaring sapphire washed over and past him like an Ocean. It was like seeing a lunar eclipse.
Fritz screamed again and kept screaming until the doors were firmly closed. The man took only three steps towards him, and then broke into a sporadic berserk. Fritz’s heart seized.

Fritz kept pressing the triangle as though every moment that it was illumined spared him a year in a boiling pot. All the while, the button that rested beneath it, pointing in the opposite direction, remained unillumined. He felt as though it were an absurd temptation. Moving down would serve only to submerge him in an infernal abyss.

He counted something like ten or eleven floors, and he allowed his nerves to yield to his desperate cunning.
The doors slide aside.
It was as though he had rewound an unreal episode which he had experienced on the prior floor. The man was approaching him briskly on a floor identical to the prior floor in everything but the light. Fritz saw him emerge like a bat from a cave.
The doors closed again. Fritz would not waver again. He kept pressing the button until it failed, as its twin had several eternities prior, to come alight.
The doors slide aside.
The man was sprinting at him again.
Fritz jumped out from the elevator, smashing the left side of his body against the left wall of the cell and seguing immediately into a sprint down the corridor.
The doors of cubicles sped past him.
He darted then towards that haunting corner where the black window looked upon the infernal door.
Fritz grabbed at the door with a nervous agony. He felt as though the terrifying stranger had already pounced upon him. He was being drowned in a swimming pool of whiskey. He was staring up at the underside of the top bunk. Hearing his brother's screams, his own were stifled by the weight of lion's paws sinking into his ribs, rupturing them in clumsy defiance of their uniform solidarity, and the innerds unraveling in gushes of surrender to the biological whims and needs of the oppressing predator.
These were the contents of his subjective mind. The objective was secondary. The door would not yield to him. He stared at it incredulously, pushing. He tried his shoulder. With each shove, the door doubled his effort. He pushed, each time, with a magnitude of effort that must have been to a greater exponential power than the previous attempt. Each such effort, in turn, amplified his incredulity to constantly stand double to his threshhold of exertion.
The man appeared at the end of the corridor. He was no longer running. Was he tempting Fritz? Was he teasing him? Fritz screamed as though to blow apart the windows of his aquarium. The whiskey spilled away from him in a flood that ushered in a flood of blue descending upon him from the tiles of the ceiling. He was in the hold aboard the burning ship. The lights glared down upon him like the impersonal, methodical eyes of researchers observing a paramecium lying in a petri dish under a stark white microscope. The eyes had the same degree of affect and empathy towards him that the paramecium could be presumed to have towards its observers. Fritz wanted, with a sudden urge that seemed to have originated at the moment that he first saw his hand, like a tiny rose, approaching the doorknob, to toss himself through the window, unnerved that this one fourth wall of his holding chamber had remained mercilessly, maliciously solid and unshattered as this predator, like a shark whose every tooth was surely a piranha, swam towards him with torturous hesitation.
He screamed again. Strangely, he could not hear his own voice, and neither did his nervous system register any of the impulses or sensations – any of either pleasure or pain – that would serve to indicate that he was, in fact, underwater. His scream was layered with a fleshy plea, as though he were petitioning some non-existent God for advice as whether to sprint down the corridor to his left, one horrifyingly identical to every other corridor he had seen this night that must have spanned several eternities or to jettison himself with a moment's orgasmic tension in his calves through that yonic window into the cool chasm behind, falling to the end of all pain and terror, to be found by meth addicts like vultures and to be buried respectfully.
When his own scream failed to fall upon his own ears, a rage that he could not feel crammed into his forebrain. His attention sought one final refuge in the hind-brain, where his intuition, like a blaring desk lamp whose serene, informed and equanimous amber glow penetrated the sterility of the white lamps overlooking him like fleets of Nazi jets from an unperturbed, black corner of his psyche, made an absurd joke of them.
It told him to jump. Just jump backwards. He tried. His knees folded. Within one moment, he was on his knees, as though about to prostrate himself before this approaching stranger. Within the moment, the lights swam over him and enveloped him like the comforting arms of a wave. He would run no further.

Fritz had one flashback. His father came home. He was a man with a perpetually angry demeanour. Fritz had two sisters.
Fritz had two friends over. The older of these two was a recent friend. He was the author of this book. Fritz felt himself enlivened by the strange, ornate thought patterns of this young man, who had made the acquaintance of Fritz's group by virtue of volunteering to act as a mentor for his high school Video game club.
The author had the perpetually unsatisfied demeanour of a Thoreauesque outdoorsman with what, at that original moment, Fritz had identified simply as 'a hippy vibe'. The author always seemed desperate in pursuit of some Cause, some unattainable horizon, and Fritz could not deny – and nor could he spare his friend any wry, sarcastic disapproval at the thought of this – that at times his friend's ambitions just seemed too much to involve Fritz himself, threatening to push him out of his comfort zone in pursuit of some self-righteous and surely, at heart, though his friend would never admit it, selfish pursuit.
The nerve of him. Fritz would hear his own thoughts as though listening to a recording on the kind of tiny cassette player-recorder that Fritz had once owned and held, for some time, routinely in either of his pockets. It had usually been the left, because the right-side pocket had been so frequently leased to his wallet.
I put Ubuntu on his computer. I spent hours at his house doing this, and that was NOTHING compared to the hours, which probably added up, honestly, to several days, I wasted trying to start a business with him. He would miss meetings ('One meeting', said Phoenix, as though he had heard Fritz's musings and were making a composed and voluntary effort to defend himself. He always had difficulty with criticism, not because he was too self-assured but because he took everything either too personally or too seriously, if not both.) to take random trips, ('once to retrieve my bass guitar from Vista, California, which is not one of the safest places to be after a certain hour,' he defended.) sometimes for entire weeks ('I left for three days,' corrected Phoenix, with a grimace whose anger seemed somewhat overblown but strangely more pardonable than it was unmerited. 'It was the only window of more than three days that I happened to come by in the midst of my work schedule, and it may have been my only opportunity to see either of my friends up there that entire year.').
'Wait'. Now Fritz was talking out loud. 'You said that it had only been three days. Now, you admit that it had actually been a space of more than three days. Is that correct?'
'No,' Phoenix negated with both fortitude and reproach, but more fortitude. Briefly but palpably, Fritz felt a sense of admiration for how calm and collected Phoenix's voice seemed, like a light peering through the shutters of their disagreement, as though it constantly emanated from a distant sunlight of which this stonerish fellow was only a mouthpiece. 'I actually left very early on the first of the four days and returned late on the fourth day, but the journey both ways occupied a substantial portion of time, and I was only in the Bay Area for two and a half days at most.'
If only he did not have such a high opinion of himself, thought Fritz, and he was surprised to find that he had said it aloud.
'Woah, man,' and here appeared Phoenix the man and not the symbol. 'There's nothing wrong with having a mirror.'

Dm.A.A.

INTERFERENCE. Part One: Chapter Thirteen.

Chapter thirteen

The episode she remembered might, in fact, have been a dream. She did not think much of that formality. The event was not practical, but the remembrance of it was entertaining and sometimes almost seemed significant.

It was six o'clock, approximately. She remembered looking up at an open window on a trailer classroom.

It was a small window, at most twenty centimeters tall and approximately a foot wide.

It only revealed a few of the tiles of the ceiling of the trailer. They were gray, and the light that illumined it was white with a tint of green.

Between five o'clock and six o'clock, the Sun went down. In the absence of a watch (chiefly by virtue of her mother's insistence that she was 'too young' for a watch, but also because of her father's choice to reinforce her decision, if not to corroborate her reasoning for it, the latter of which assuaged her resentment), Steph kept track of the Time by noting the change in colour of the sky. This afternoon it had been a remarkable, glaring and unprecedented azure blue.

Stephanie walked directly from the window to the smaller of the two playgrounds on her campus. It was directly adjacent to the parking lot wherein her father would routinely pick her up. She observed the steel of the playground architecture as the blue light, becoming, steadily, closer to what was called 'Robin's Egg Blue' on the covers of Crayola crayons, illumined them.

They were ghostly and especially vivid. She rested her left hand on the cool, chilly bar. Her palm wrapped about it, her wrist bent in a right angle. The wind suddenly appeared. It blew onto her breast, and she felt a strange pain in breathing out. She gasped. All of a sudden, her eyes watered.

The wind suddenly blew. She felt as though it were within her chest. She took a sharp intake of breath. She began to cry.

Dm.A.A.

SPONTATION. My Covers. One.

Dm.A.A.

MYRBOSCH. || Episode Five.

Dm.A.A.

SARKASM.

Dm.A.A.

Aphorism: may be...

May be it's not that I feel Liberated because I am a frieloder. May be I am what you call a frieloder because I am Liberated.

You ought to try it.

Dm.A.A.

The Re-Birth of Racism and Sexism (a satire):

Chapter Five:

Now it just so happens that the population of the United States had appointed to it seven controllers. Every Major Power was appointed a prime number of controllers, which was usually odd, so that factions could not develop within the Control Unit, and so that decisions could be decided by the most barbaric and hegemonic of all political instruments: The vote.

And it was proper that each of the controllers be given jurisdiction over one of the Seven Major Bodies, or, as the common herd called it, the Corporations. And by virtue of this monetary wealth they could find whatever adornment fit them best, and they would use it to mold the population through advertising and by avenue of cultural terror.

The Governers of the United States of America were four men and three women. Each of the men represented each of the Four Major Tribes: The White, the Yellow, the Black, and the Red. And according to their identity the Tribes were constructed. The remaining women were allowed to choose whatever ethnic identity they wished, for they had had no stake in the proceedings. The women had a more profound task: to divide the population into three religious groups. And thus was the Religion of Abraham split in three: the Christians, the Mosenists, and the Mohammedans.

And they employed the pain-staking work of Americans to develop, along the lines of Kvart prophecy, an immense Hive Mind. And this was known to be Oracle, or the Spider’s Web. The term “web” was sold to the people as a way of describing the increased connectivity that one felt whilst employing it, but literally it was explained by the fact that every computer in the world was connected by avenue of it. Of course, this web was modeled after the cosmology of the Ancient Mystikal Cults, such as the Brahmanists, whose conception of the World was that it was an interpenetrating net.

Ironically, yet in accord with the intent of the Oligarchy, the very absence of Brahmanists in the North-Western Continent was what allowed for the appeal of such a net. For, as some sensitive people like Nestor Snare would learn, most people do not feel connected to the World of Nature and the Cosmos, unless it is so by avenue of a tremendous instrument. So it was believed by a generation of people who grew up alongside it that no connectivity had existed hitherto. And this was of course preposterous.

They even forgot this: that a “web” is used to ensnare; a “net” is used to capture.

Now the Oligarchy had not anticipated the effect that this Net would have upon the population. For it was not long before information began to “leak”, as the common phrase goes, that exposed the hegemony of the Governers. As it so happened, statistical science grew to the point that one fatal statistic was published that exposed the oppressive Oligarchy:

One per cent of the country’s population owned ninety-nine per cent of the monetary wealth.

The effect of this solitary piece of data, spit out by the Hive Mind and made instantly available to all who were plugged into it, was jaw-dropping. Within mere moments, it seemed, protesters were gathered at the feet of the North American Trade Node, bewailing their misery like so many cattle to the slaughter.

The mess was unreal. It took an entire squadron of militarized police forces to clean them up. And to this day protest was considered a National Crime enforced by a Police that had shown its claws to be studded by the military.

Yet as the old saying goes one can do every thing with bayonets but to sit on them. Consent of the Ruled had to be restored. And it could only be done by exploiting the Resentiment of the Weak, re-directing it back on their selves, as Preachers all ways do.

The infiltration of the Educational System was subtle. The standard college student would only have noticed a few classes to have been dropped mysteriously from the catalogue, and only a few were inexplicably and curiously added.

These “classes” were of course funded by the puppet government to circulate a new statistical and social narrative. To weave a tighter net. And the Net had its part to play in this, for the easiest thing in the world was to circulate a meme, and to wage memetic warfare upon the Truth.

A meeting was arranged between the Seven Agents. The first to speak was the First Black Man: “We have to do some thing about all of this. All of you know that they are on to us. But how do we get them off?”

A few feeble chuckles were made at the unintended innuendo, and then a jeering woman raised her voice: “Well, it is obvious, is it not, my dear? We simply give them a new set of statistics.”

“What do you envision?”

“Think deeply,” said an other woman. “If their courage is in the future, then we must look to the past.”

“The past,” mused the Red Man. “The most dangerous of all abstractions. The Arch-Snare.”

“Up until this point,” narrated the White Man. “It has been sufficient to mold them in our image. To have them aspire towards our strength. To offer them back what was their petty birth-right,” he wrapped his arm about the first woman, “That which we steal we sell. And the price is all ways…”

“Conformity,” they all recited.

“But times have changed,” said the Yellow Man. “They want nothing to be like us.”

“They shall still all ways desire sex,” mused the third woman.

“Yet,” qualified the first, petting her lover. “sex can be taken by those who wish.”

“Rapists can be assuaged.”

“But not hippies.”

“Hippies can be murdered.”

“But not forgotten.”

“Narratives can be altered.”

“But not effaced.”

“Some do go rotten.”

“But are never replaced.”

They mused for a moment in poetic silence.

“Culture is our instrument here,” concluded the Yellow Man. “If sex is seen to be a mark not of anti-hegemonic power but of social status, people shall conform.”

“All that is left is to eliminate the deviants…” contributed the surly Red Man.

“Feminism can help,” smiled the second woman. “Those cunts still look up to us. Let them! They can turn half the population against the other half in a blink of a cosmic eye.”

“Deliciously manipulative, my dear…” said the first woman. “Yes. Even here we are a minority.”

And at that moment an idea dawned upon the First Black Man.

“I have it. The total solution. The final solution.”

A pregnant pause invited him to continue.

“Statistics. Of course. What we do: we persuade them that racism and sexism still exist.”

“As though they ever did!” retorted the White Man.

“They will all ways be believed to exist, by the weak…” the Yellow Man mused wisely. “Yet we can aggravate this subjective superstition.”

“Racism: four out of seven people here,” began the Black Man, grinning professionally at the ladies, “are White. With your consent.”

“Granted,” they all said in Union.

“That makes Four out of seven of us. White people are now worth four times as much as I.”

“And to what do we owe the honour?” grinned the White.

“Racism,” said the Red and Yellow Man together.

“PRECISELY.”

“ingenious.”

“People will recall that statistic, you know,” said the Second Lady. “About the one per cent thing.”

“That is why we edit it. We can do that, you know,” said the First.

“One per cent owns seventy per cent of the wealth,” grinned the Yellow Man. “We get a C for our hard work. They get an F for not trying hard enough. A likely narrative for college kids to consume.”

“Spoken like a true Oriental.”

The entire group guffawed.

“So that means: Fourty per cent of the wealth is owned by me,” recalled the White Man. “Ten is owned by each of the other controllers.”

“And the remainder is thirty,” said Black. “even if My People owned the entire remainder, you and I would be but tied.”

“And we can’t have that.”

“We would not need to. I hear you’ve got some rich friends down in the mob.”

The White Man grinned, as did the Yellow Man.

“So let’s say that the thirty per cent are divided along those lines,” said the Red Man, “Yellow, Black, and White. Okay. It comes out looking like Whites owned fifty per cent, Reds own ten, Blacks own twenty, and so do Yellows. Fifty plus ten plus twenty plus twenty. It all adds up. But won’t the Universities catch on?”

“Leave that to us,” said the woman who made the Feminist comment. “Disgruntled poor kids are the perfect target for warriors in our favour. We’ll call them the Social Justice Warriors.”

“Nigger is so nineteen-fifties. “Black body” sounds better.”

“Or Red Body.”

“Brown body to be more realistic.”

“Right.”

“And what about the women?” asked the Feminist Sympathiser.

“Let’s be real. We really own the wealth. If we round. But there are three of us here and four of you guys.”

“The perfect statistic,” mused the Feminist.

“For every seventy-five cents that you make…”

“You guys make a dollar.”

“Of course, it’s really that and half of one per cent.”

“And the same goes for our three quarters.”

“And each of those halves of one per cent is in fact millions of dollars…”

“But who’s counting.”

“If we round it up to the single digits,” concluded the Feminist. “it is easier to spot.”

“And harder to deconstruct!”

“And much easier for poor swine to relate to,” added the Yellow Man as a finishing stroke.

They all toasted and drank.

Dm.A.A.

Statement of Anomie:

Statement of Anomie:

I have reached an impasse. Years ago I chose to become a musician. Hearing the works of Modest Mouse and the Postal Service made me feel a nostalgia for a time I never knew. It felt fated, and I swore to become like my heroes, relics that are the product of the Northwest Scene, an enormous community of musicians playing together in literal harmony.

I all so loved video games. And in time I came to realise that my much older dream of designing games could be actualised in college. After all: I had a strong intuition that ideas were more imperative than deeds (as Zizek corroborates) and so I expected my Concepts to be well-received and even lauded.

But now what? I have written four albums and produced two E.P's. I have played in a reggae band, as well as a psychedelic duo I do not like to talk about. My closest band-mates have cheated me, betrayed me, fired me, or simply abandoned me. And I am left with five USD in my pocket.

People at bars keep telling me not to "give up". Yet giving up seems not only wisest but most noble.

Every one consumes music. Yet in half a year of hustling my art how many albums have I sold? I could say "countless". But that would give you the impression that it was a lot. I could probably recount the number if I really wanted to. And you might be disappointed.

The point is that some people will not pay the cost of a Starbucks coffee that takes five minutes to brew for the music that took me twenty days to produce and years to write.

And yet they listen gladly to the artists that "made it". Whatever that means. I never figured it out. It's up there in terms of mystery for me with my old high school English essay prompt: what was Seymour Glass's tragedy?

And where are my band-mates? Fans are well enough. I can do without admiration if I have camaraderie. Yet people are not running to play with me; I am running after them. Why? I have been playing my keyboard for over ten years!

Programmers are even harder to deal with, for they are so condescending. I would learn how to program if I felt called to it. But why would they who all ready know the skills not be eager to work on an idea? After all: I have studied philosophy, both Eastern and Western. Sure: I never finished a 'degree', and my professors were more exhausted by my unconscious attempts to teach the class than excited. But I could tell you about all most every major philosopher from this past century, down to his or her astrological sign, and what I think of her, and how I've factored his philosophical view into my own.

So what gives? The argument I get is the same one as I hear from people in the music industry: there are too many of us. Too many idea people. Too many musicians.

And I think: great! The more the merrier. We live in an economy of abundance. And if it was true fifty years ago that we could feed the population of the World, then surely, granted that reproduction has not somehow slipped past production, we can still do it today! And continue to do so, for we have more than enough people willing to toil for the benefit of all, and the scarcity in jobs stands simply as evidence that work its self is not even necessary of every one!

So I am puzzled. Where is this community of musicians? Where is this think tank of game designers? Where is my family? Where is my legion?

And then I am told this: that to work with people I require money.

But other people have "money", and it is not, as Louis CK put it, "their" money but THE money. And besides that Watts was right of course that money is simply an Abstraction and an Obstruction. Besides: the post-modernists explained that currency, by the very nature of its-Being-mutable but representing an Absolute, pre-disposes us all to schizophrenia.

So why is it that when the police come to my home the officer voices his concern that I am neither "working" nor "going to school"? If my parents' only reason for calling was that I was drooling in a meditative trance, why did they not leave me Be?

School must at some time have appeared to be a viable alternative. Yet what if I should become a professor? If I am wrong or arbitrary, I shall have miss-guided an entire group of people. If I return to the Debate Team, will I finally be able to form a legion large enough to implement our ideas of reform? Or shall I encounter again this sort of sociopathic behaviour of enjoying victory and bewailing defeat, forgetting that my victory is but some one else's defeat and my defeat some one else's victory?

Some have suggested that every issue has an other side. But this is a schizophrenic delusion. If Debate taught me any thing it is to treat such thoughts without mercy. For the true aim of discourse is not to defend a "private interest" (???) but to be Objectively Right. Dissent only becomes necessary when one introduces the much less necessary sin of "competition".

Competition...

The wise would take times like these as a sign of peace and plenty. I would wait for money to come, as well as attention, sex, food, and housing. May be even happiness. For if people are not looking for me, why would I be so bold as to look for them? It would be selfish to create a demand in some one who is desireless. It would be the mentality of a drug lord breeding addiction.

I certainly cannot return to retail. The dream of independence might have died the moment that a portly woman called herself my "boss".
Yet maturity does not die so easily. Keeping a dream log every day is enough to remind one's self that one is still a child so long as one answers to any arbitrary micro-manager's authority. And were we all content then none of my colleagues at the fabric store would have been so eager each night to leave (despite their peculiar eagerness to show up at work, once a fortnight, the day that their checks came.)

I could become a comedian. But Watts was right: all humour has a bit of malice. My jokes are sarcastic and self-deprecating. They are well enough in times of crisis. I transmute my existential woes to relief not only for my self but all so every one around me. I can even make women smile, which tends usually not to be the case with me.

But to deliberately mock neurosis in an antic disposition? Nay. For that would set a standard for others to imitate, and it is unhealthy. Besides: every open mic has a limited number of slots. If I get there first to sign up, how do I know I am not operating from a position of luck, at the expense of an other who is in greater want but lesser availability?

My old guitarist once broke down crying at the wheel when he realised that no matter what he did he would be supporting the Corporate Conspiracy. I consoled him, confident that it was not so. As Bukowski put it, one should "be on the watch. There are ways out. There is light somewhere." That was our band.

But then he became a social worker, by avenue of a connection through a girlfriend, and in my personal experience social workers are polite slave drivers for a misunderstood and very enlightened class of people.

And it was not long before he started getting on my case because I "paid no bills."

I was so taken aback that the more obvious answer did not occur to me then: Bills?! No one needs to pay bills. Energy is in constant circulation. It cannot be created, ostensibly, but neither can it be destroyed, and the planet has plenty of it! As for payment, that should mimmick the natural process. People with money can pay the bills; that is their obligation by HAVING money. It is certainly not their right to refuse; I my self had to think long after I first refused to spend money on my pal Micaiah when he was homeless. I mean yes: he had broken the digital drawing pad that I had bought for him within a few days. But he was a rational fellow; I am certain he had no conscious purpose for doing so. And it would be a hideous commitment of the Naturalist Fallacy to use that in order to justify my refusal to pay my debts to him. I had really to suspend my reasoning to allow for such tenacity, but then of course I was not telling him to "get a job" or refusing to buy his meals. (I once spent forty dollars at Marie Callendar's, all in one morning, just to feed him.) I simply refused to apologise when I spent several hundred dollars in order to get a LinkedIn account with InMail so that I could contact my old friend and crush, for she was not replying to my texts.
But I did not tell him to "get a job"! That would have been an arrogance more egregious than hypocrisy, for whilst the hypocrite tells others to follow a path that he does not himself follow, the employee demands that they follow a path that he himself has blocked. So even if they find an identical path, as though one could be certain that any two paths are identical, they will only become like him: a road-block for others.

It is of course the duty of the rich to pay the poor, for the winners of any game owe the spoils to their losers, and the participants in such an absurd conflict owe the fruits of it to the innocent non-partakers.

So fuck the bills. My parents have that covered. I have yet to find an ethical path that happens all so to produce money. Tiny shortcuts do so, but only for a short time, by the reckoning of the outside world. If my parents have managed to find such a path, then they can prove it by providing for me, as they chose to undergo as parents. If not, then they owe to me their spoils for their sin. Naturally.

Sin. My ex asked whence it came from. The love of money is the root of all evil, but not, according to Old Joe, money herself. Yet the academics seem to blame capital in large part.

I know that not all money is the same. The hundred dollars I earned playing with Fourth N Cedar was worlds more valuable than the hundreds of numbers accrued at the Fabric Store. Was it simply because the check was not made of cash? That seems unlikely. I usually know how things will end up, and even if seldom I chose to avail my self of cash it was all ways available to me. I suppose that it is true, though. Capital breeds schizophrenia. In the absolute realm, ten dollars in the bank is identical to a ten-dollar bill in the hand. Yet: why does being handed one by my band manager feel so much better? Too many variables exist to say with scientific certainty, though my mind is of course not confined to science.

My plight is the same as ever before:

If I enter the military, I shall find Solidarity and Duty, but not justice. Other people who might have been my friends would either kill me or be killed by me.

If I returned to the work force, I would again be obligated to pay the Micaiahs of the world, for I took their job. To this day Micaiah, who has moved on to corporate work (good for him!) refuses to work with me and  insists that my disrespect has lost me partners in the past and will continue to do so.

If I returned to school, I would be signing up for classes that others wanted to sign up for, or otherwise accommodating classes arbitrarily just so as to make the professor happy. And these classes I tend to fail, for the demand is low because the class is either boring, a trade class, or the teacher just wants more money. They can be fun, but so few people persist with the class that by the end of it it feels like a waste of time.

Yet the crowded classes are a sin to get into.

And what am I aiming for? If I became a CEO, would the power not corrupt me? If I became a professor, would I not corrupt a few minds?

Only music seems pure.

Yet the industry is impure. Music is harmony, and musicians must live in harmony. Is it no surprise that an industry that coerces people to compete produces music that is progressively more discordant?

And is this not a metonymy for society? For capitalism herself?!

• • •• ••• ••••• •••••••• •••••••••••••

I knew a girl once who told me we could change the world for the better with music. She acknowledged the evils of capitalism as having their root in competition.

She had slept five times with my old guitarist. This was after he had concluded that life is entirely a game of zero sum. Drugs had addled his mind.

I had introduced them at one of our shows. She wanted to be a musician. I wanted to entertain her. If some miracle happened, I thought, I might finally experience intercourse. The girl was of course prone to disavow Eros, but it would surely be preferable to Thanatos. She was suicidal. It was not, of course, with any competitive intent that I observed that the guitarist too had a morbid fascination with Death. I just would not have foreseen her attraction to him, for it would have been an unhealthy prospect.
Besides: erotically speaking, despite his mortal fixation, he had boasted of sexual exploits with countless women. The thought that he would have any romantic interest in her did not even cross my mind. How would it have crossed his? One simply never abandons one's best friend to talk to a woman, without permission. That just does not happen. Right??

Needless to say, when I perceived his intent, I disbanded our duo, of which he had been the leader. He texted me to inform me that he would continue to use the name.

I am recently told he might not have produced the name himself. But as Juliet would have said... Well you get the idea.

People stare at me when I recount my tales as though I am an unreliable narrator. They said that of Holden Caulfield as well. Why? Who are we to project our own experiences onto an innocent voice?

I must have had some unconscious instinct at self-defense, as evidenced by the tension in my (para?)sympathetic nervous system (the one on my left) that had endured for months after the incident when she and he started flirting in my bedroom. I am told by her that it is the sympathetic, though it feels like the parasympathetic. Formally and dogmatically, sympathetic governs fight or flight, whereas parasympathetic does rest and relaxation. Yet I am certain with her love of Greek and Latin roots that she will sympathise, or at least empathise, with my deconstruction. Besides, since he was sitting on my bed, and she beside it (so cutely), it might very well have affected my rest and relaxation in the on-coming months.

I know what you will say: that he deserves my sympathy as well. He certainly was one to deconstruct things. Even when I asked him if he ever read the post-modernists and Absurdists, he reacted with rage at my condescending curiosity.

She defended him and his actions. That was why she persuaded me to let him have access to our old bandcamp account. It was the least that I could do for her, yet I suppose that it was such an indirect service, and my unconscious defenses, as hitherto stated, were so on-edge, that I ended up giving the wrong password. It turned out that we had to devise a new password, and we had fun doing so, striking a balance betwixt vengeful scorn and kindness, as a sort of compromise between me and her respectively. It TURNS out that the site I was signed into was none other than my fan account. So he had no use for it.

She must unconsciously have known, for that same night she turned bitter the moment that I had done what she requested. I would not see her face again for a long time. She never allowed me to take photos of her.

All ways she empathised with his plight. Though she claimed to oppose some of his views, it would be long before I saw this opposition for my self. Before then she ardently defended both his words and his actions. And that was fine. I only wished that she would do the same for me. My envy, mixed with pain at his betrayal, turnt to a most indecorous rage. Yet I am told that scars are a man's adornment.

• • •• ••• ••••• •••••••• •••••••••••••

So here I am, one year later.

She told me a year ago, or nearly, that I would have to wait a year before she might be available to me for sex. It simply was not "in the cards" back then. She seemed surprised that I would wait that long, and perchance for nothing. Why the surprise? A year is nothing.

A year after I saw them walking through the golf course, having abandoned me to a seat that night, for my head was spinning and my nose bleeding, and I saw that they were holding hands, (I must have felt psychic for having produced the paranoid fantasy in my kind before it was made flesh before my eyes.) I decided it was time to "let him out of the ice box" as my old friend Jay would have said. (Don't try to sue me, Jay. I know how you are but trust me that I have no money to give you, save for these five dollars.) i thought he would have changed. The last I had seen him had been in Autumn, for the girl had so successfully intervened that an unsteady but passive-aggressive truce was struck for some time before this. Yet this time I had not heard from her in months, despite my faithful stream of letters to her. This time, I took the path my self, and with a whole heart ready to forgive.

But he no longer wished to play in a band with us. The last I saw of her was the night that she and I last tried to persuade him. Yes: she was adorable that night too. Though she does not care for such flattery.

Now all my old friends have either left me, or I have left them. Mother is right: every one has gone. I am alone, without job or degree. I dropped out of college as soon as I could to make this band with the hot rocker girl work. The platinum blonde beauty has returned to whence she came, for I had met her quite by chance one night in the Parking Lot of San Diego State University. She has chosen graduate work over music, though for an entire year she had said that she wanted music more than any thing else. The fantasy [the melody, if you will] changed but the beat remained the same: Music would heal all wounds and absolve all debts. Whether she and I were together, working to supplant him, or he was with us, but she and I were romantically involved, or she was married to him but I spent more time with her, in the studio (presuming now that for some reason he would be less often at work), or she and he were dating but I would never have to see it whilst we were together as a band (though paradoxically the band would become our life, our family, and thus a perpetual state of togetherness), the goal was the same. And if he failed us, there should be no problem. We would simply find an other guitarist.

It is hard to say, as Woody Allen would put, "where the screw-up came in."

I suppose that I got too touchy when I heard him say, whilst we were all together hanging out, that I would not be singing in his band. What I took personally she took professionally. She explained that pitch was an absolute thing and that he had it and I did not. I had my doubts and counter-arguments, having grown up on Modest Mouse, Dinosaur Jr and Tom Waits. But she did not understand that I was not trying to supplant her as the lead vocalist. It was simply that I had taken a walk through the old high school, listening to my old recordings with him, and I had found compassion in reprieve; whereas before this I had felt self-conscious of my voice, now I could hear how beautifully our voices sounded together. Harmony. Solidarity. Family.

He would be the business mind, I would be the musical genius, and she would be the leader. What could go wrong? What went wrong?

I finally severred ties with him after a tormented altercation via text. He refused to do that which would make her most happy. And he tried to accuse me of harbouring self-interest. Every concession was met with five counterarguments. It was like fighting a Hydra. I could not take it. For the first time in my entire life, I found that I had a peculiar gift:

I could block a person's cell phone number.
Last time I had simply ignored his texts. And that was difficult enough. Though she had insinuated that I was a coward for doing so.

So alas and a lack, a lad loses his lass. The Valedictorian of Communication Studies goes off to Graduate School, and I am here at year's end. Her excuse is that music is corporatised. Every day I find more evidence for this. And yet is she not committing the Naturalist Fallacy? It was our entire AIM to redeem it! That was why I loved hearing her rant about music over the phone, venting her frustrations with the status quo.

And I recently asked again if she would sleep with me. I got angry that she did not reply. I wrote her this poem, mere minutes before a twelve-hour period had past without answer:

You have nineteen
Minutes to answer.

I thought I would have woken up to your reply.

If not, then this correspondance
Is a cancer
And good
Bye.

Sure. It was cruel of me to write this to her. But even a simple "No", without warrant, is preferable to Silence.

Dm.A.A.