Two words . . .

 . . . PROTEIN CIGARETTES. 

They don't even have to contain actual protein in 'em. Just print the words PROTEIN CIGARETTES on the packaging.

Hire on a bunch of social media influencers to hype 'em as part of the Keto Diet or Atkins or whatever happens to be trending inside the misinformation cesspools of AM radio, podcasts, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

And then you know what you do?

You kick the fuck back and let your eyes go WIIIIIDE as a mountain range of cash money manifests before you.

That's all you gotta do!

You ever notice . . .

 . . . how products are perennially vague on the issue of ducts?

They have 'pro' right there in their name . . . and yet they have no official position for or against ducts. 

Well, we do live in contentious times. Perhaps products seek to avoid getting caught up in acrimonious debate and being held to implied commitments and so forth.

Watching The End of Evangelion again . . .

 . . . and I'm thinking, "You know things are going badly when your destrudo is detectable by instrumentation."

EVERY DAY IS HALLOWEEN #21: Hell in the Depths of Franchise 2

 . . . killermade good . . .

. . . I stab no more . . . 

. . . I can makepain for effect . . .

. . . make of my Divine Servitude a comeback kid memoir, packed tight with cute little nostrums and Rules 4 Existence . . .

. . . there’s got to be new sources of truth . . .

 . . . the masked-killer-turned-pseudo-intellectual-stand-up-comedy-hack-podcast-grifter-asshole realized,

"My God . . . I'm more ads for sketchy boner pills now than man!"

. . .killermade better . . .

. . . well you can't trust the, uh, what do we call it . . .

. . . it's  got to be a medical establishment of some kind . . .

. . . I  can makeenemy for effect . . .

And so he swallowed the free samples, got erect, and proceeded to record the audio of his own sloppy-slurpy auto-fellatio for seventy-six minutes, with an unconvincingly faked orgasm as a closer. 

Fortunately, his in-studio fake laughter toadie was able to drive him to the emergency room after the recording to get a bloodletting procedure done to his prick. 

Killer probably needed to avail himself of one of those sketchy privatized mental health subscriptions. Or just microdose himself with some Serpent Residue . . .

And on the next episode our sit-down stand-up scumbag was selling bottles of his dick blood as a vitality supplement. 

And the toadie did howl and guffaw . . .

And all the dipshits with Next Level Daddy Issues in the audience quickdrew their credit cards . . .

Such wonderful people. Finding each other out there in the ether . . .

-March-November 2021

MOVIE REVIEW: THE FACE OF ANOTHER (1966)

Directed and Produced by Hiroshi Teshigahara
Screenplay by Kobo Abe, based on his original novel
Music by Toru Takemitsu
Sound by Junosuke Okuyama
Cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa
Lighting by Mitsuo Kume
Art Direction by Arata Isozaki and Masao Yamazaki
Set Decoration by Kenichiro Yamamoto
Edited by Yoshi Sughihara
Still Photography by Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Sculptures by Tomio Miki
Titles Designed by Kiyoshi Awazu

Starring
Tatsuya Nakadai as Mr. Okuyama
Machiko Kyo as Mrs. Okuyama
Mikijiro Hira as Psychiatrist
Kyoko Kishida as Nurse
Miki Irie as Radiation Scarred Girl
Bibari Maeda as Beer Hall Singer

---

"Is it my true self that's getting drunk, or the mask?"

---

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Mr. Okuyama lost his face in an explosion in a factory. This is one of those things that wasn't supposed to happen. It's not like he worked there on the regular, y'know-he was an at-a-distance supervisor. Mr. Okuyama spent most of his days in cushy, modish 1960s offices, smoking cigarettes, perhaps complaining about how much time and money his wife spends on her gem-polishing classes, occasionally flirting with the beautiful young female secretary, and, oh yeah, doing some actual work, now and again? I assume he met with buyers, and took down orders, and then the drudges on the factory floor executed the dictates from home office. But, there comes a time when management must venture out among the worker drones and BOOM! Mr. Okuyama loses his face. 

Mr. Okuyama is first seen in an X-ray camera view-he's nothing more than an eerie talking skull. He numbly describes how and why he ended up in the factory on that fateful day. He's full of irrational guilt-the explosion came about because of a technical error, a fuck-up-and yet Mr. Okuyama invokes his "technical background" as though that should've been a mystical ward against harm. He put in the years. He paid his dues. Nothing bad was ever supposed to happen to him, certainly not on the job. Certainly nothing so . . . random . . . so . . . unplanned . . .

Mr. Okuyama is speaking, as it turns out, not to We the Audience, but to a Psychiatrist who specializes in replacing lost and/or mangled body parts and skin tissues with artificial replicas. This Psychiatrist has seemingly taken on the task of bridging the perceived gap between mind and body, which is pretty damn progressive, I think, moving beyond the internal fantasias of Freud and Jung, and engaging with people as they are-as bodies in time and space. 

But, alas, this is a movie, which means our Psychiatrist must be some kind of a Frankenstein, and therefore obsessed with bizarre and taboo projects that go beyond the norms and ethics of medicine. I mean, if this was just a straightforward saga of healing and making one whole and resilient, would we watch? Would we care? I probably wouldn't, if you must know, and what does that say about me?

William gasps, and takes up a cat o' nine tails-the old naval whip-to flagellate himself for his perversity. 

Our Psychiatrist sees in Mr. Okuyama a suitable test subject for a new way of life. Mr. Okuyama is obviously traumatized by his experiences and therefore justifiably angry and hurt and lost. But our Psychiatrist also detects a discontent that goes back well before the accident and begins to finesse the faceless man towards a radical form of therapy. 

Of course, our Psychiatrist offers pro forma hand-wringing about "ethics" and "potential dangers," but this is all calculated to push the macho, hard-driving Okuyama into taking a plunge. Once Okuyama agrees, our Psychiatrist blithely drops all reservations and gets to work. 

Our Psychiatrist constructs a new face for Mr. Okuyama out of an advanced form of rubbery plastic that can function as a skin analog. This New Face shall enable Mr. Okuyama to become a New Man and thereby lead a New Life. 

Which is terrific, right! Especially for the 1960s. 

If this were a comic book or a TV show-as opposed to an adaptation of a rigorously deranged Kobo Abe novel-this new putty face technology would allow Mr. Okuyama to become a master of disguise and fight gangsters and solve crimes and shit.

But because this is indeed an adaptation of a rigorously deranged Kobo Abe novel . . . that's not how it goes down. 

What our Psychiatrist is after is satisfaction for his own curiosity: what if you give someone a face that they can put on and take off like a hat, a coat, a scarf, a pair of pants, what happens when we can do that? Hmm? What happens when you enable someone to put on identity like you put on your clothes in the morning or take 'em off in the evening? 

How does that play out?

Well . . . it depends on the quality of the removable face . . . and it depends on the nature of the test subject doesn't it? If the face is convincing enough . . . and if the person wearing it commits to that New Face . . .

. . . well . . .

Of course, Mr. Okuyama is a Frankenstein's Creature to some degree. But not absolutely. Yes, our Psychiatrist pushes him down a strange path, but our defaced industrialist is a bit of a self-aware monster, as it turns out. The tense domestic conversations between Mr. and Mrs. Okuyama consist of terror and philosophy like something out of Edward Albee directed by Roger Corman. It becomes clear that Mr. Okuyama has a grotesque and toxic sense of entitlement over his wife's mind and body, and proceeds to use the New Face to assume a New Self and thereby seduce her as though they are strangers all over again. 

But maybe they were strangers all along. Yes, this is one of those movies that sees husband-and-wife shit as a form of social theater, and I tend to agree, but I imagine it won't sit too well with the "family values" crowd, but whatever does with those folks, y'know?

Mr. Okuyama uses his New Face to set up a double life. He approaches people who have met him before and dares them to see through his mask. There is a dizziness which comes with this freedom. And a giddiness which our Psychiatrist shares, as these two men hang out in a German beer hall-I guess this is to Japan what phony "Irish" pubs are to America-and plotting a brave new world where we will all become as strangers to one another and fly free of social gravity, and mold our fates as we mold our New Faces of Putty-

Honestly, this should all be a lot of fun, right? But I think our Psychiatrist picked the wrong test subject, and, also, I think, if you really pay attention,  our Psychiatrist is also an insincere asshole who gets off on screwing with his subject, but doesn't want to be on the hook when it all goes bad. We come to find out that our Psychiatrist-who is charming as fuck it must be said-is leading his own double life by cheating on his wife with his loyal nurse assistant. It's one of those infidelities that happens basically in the light of day. Our Psychiatrist is a successful man and therefore he gets to fuck around on his wife with no real consequences. And no mask required!

Mr. Okuyama is, essentially, getting his wife to cheat on him . . . with himself. Although-because this is a Kobo Abe story-the question arises: if a relationship is fraudulent, and loveless . .  aren't we always fucking around with a stranger . . . just one we happened to be chained to by marriage?

Maybe, just maybe, going to the extra effort of putting on a mask actually just affirms what we already know: that life is already a form of social theater, and we are different people in different contexts/relationships, and our troubles grow from rigid adherence to roles we either choose or are imposed upon us.

Meanwhile . . . there's another thread involving a young woman with a radiation scarred face. She's sexually harassed by young men in the street who don't see her scars at first, and then express revulsion when they do. This young woman works as a volunteer at a psychiatric hospital for World War II veterans. As she arrives at the hospital we see men muttering to themselves and in catatonic states and we hear the manic, barking voice of Hitler on the sound mix. Perhaps some of these insane soldiers think Uncle Adolf is still transmitting orders to their brains. A group of men play an open-ended baseball game that gets interrupted by hallucinatory air raids and phantasmagorical confusions about who's higher on the chain-of-command-basically, a super-fucked-up version of The Sandlot. 

The scarred young woman does laundry for these damaged souls, and, for her trouble, one of the old soldiers tries to rape her. She's able to get away, even as we hear Hitler barking away again on the sound mix.

I find these scenes to be the darkest in the whole movie. They seem to depict the madness of war and fascism-the obsession with rigid roles, and hierarchies and the resort to force-and link it to a terrifying misogyny. You hear the voice of Hitler as a Japanese soldier attempts to rape a woman who tries to show compassion and bring comfort to troubled souls, for Christ's sakes!

Yeah . . . maybe this situation goes deeper than the "talking cure" can touch.

And these scenes lend a creepiness to the tacky German beer hall bits . . .aren't Mr. Okuyama and our Psychiatrist plotting their own kind of "putsch?" Sure, sure, it could just be a couple of entitled men getting deep up their own asses as they toss back too much beer, and dose themselves with a little morphine from the secure cabinet . . . but they do see themselves as superior. And they ultimately have a vision of all people as infinitely malleable and carried along by fashion and social pressures and fate . . . why not use these insights to live as you please?

The entire world was convulsed by war not so long ago. Japan's rulers led the nation down a road of empire and humiliating defeat. Unspeakable savagery practiced by those who claimed supremacy over all others. The slaughter was incalculable. Japan was firebombed and nuked without mercy when they refused to surrender. Entire families and cities and histories obliterated. Not so long ago.

And now-1966-Japan finds itself between the nuclear powers of USA and USSR. US military bases on Japanese soil launch aggression against Vietnam. The whole situation could spark off into global nuclear armageddon. 

So why cling to a past or even your own face? Especially when the same old savagery wells up out of the abyss of the human heart over and over again. 

Yesterday's Righteous Victors . . . Today's Villains . . . and what will Tomorrow bring?

In the German beer hall, a beautiful woman sings of a stranger she sees in the fog. Is this stranger a lover from the past? Jack the Ripper? A new dictator? A colleague from work? Godzilla? A new friend? An old friend? A drunk?

Later, our Psychiatrist and Mr. Okuyama have a seemingly shared vision of a crowd of their fellow citizens exiting a movie theater with bizarre faces of clay. 

Do they see the truth, or is this their warped vision?

Or is it the common perception, clarified?

Maybe, our Psychiatrist and Mr. Okuyama had to take the long way round to realize what everyone sorta already knew but tried so very hard to forget. 

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEWS #19: NINJA GAIDEN II: THE DARK SWORD OF CHAOS (1990)

a heavy dude named Ashtar

sets it all in motion

I don't know if Ash is supposed to be a cyborg or a demon or a devil or an angel

-I tend to see demons, devils, and angels as the enforcers for different styles of spooky authoritarianism, BTW-

but he’s got schemes afoot,

he's standing tall upon the battlements of a Dracula’s Castle, 

he's got a messenger ninja kneeling before him with portentous news,

-the music of Chaosium Sword is maybe one of the most ominous opening themes on the NES-just feels like a gate of evil opening upon the Majesty and Mystery of World Annihilation-

lightning bolts, fer shoot'n'darn's fuckin' sakes coming out of boiling shadow clouds,

this Ashtar dude's got all the atmosphere backing him up,

but let's get back to the message

which is that the occultist maniac big bad of the previous installment has been killed,

and this defeat

is just a part of Ash's own secret scheme

or something 

so right off the bat

this Ashtar dude is making like a Puppet Master Supreme 

like

this is the dude that was secretly trying to fuck up all of our shit

or something 

and as we go along

Ashtar reveals that he's packing a Dark Sword of Chaos 

and he ain't afraid to put it to deadly work

okay

so we know who our big bad is for number two

and we gotta endure levels and field commander boss fights

'til we can put our Dragon Sword of righteousness through Supreme Commander Ashtar's fearsome skull

but 

when we finally kill Ashtar

the Chaosium Sword disappears 

and we have more danger road to travel

before we can nod our heads to the Staff Roll theme 

okay

so

like

was it the Chaosium Sword Itself that was in charge this whole time?!?!

maybe

the soul of a warrior is said to reside within their sword, right?

our protagonist is the Ninja Dragon Ryu Hayabusa, himself just the latest in a lineage of shadow warriors wielding the bodacious Dragon Sword

so you could say that the Dragon Sword and the Chaosium Sword embody opposed souls of Good and Evil 

persistent cosmic forces that outlive the Individuals who carry the battle forward 

to whatever outcome

fated or random or brought on by the prowess of those who

by choice or destiny or chance

take up 

whichever blade

something along those lines

of course

in the end

Jacquio 

our enemy from the first game returns

enhanced'n'mutated by his time in hell

into a fanged and metamorphic screenfilling multiform pain-in-the-ass 

and when we finally 86 Jacquio all over and again 

we know he's vanquished for true

when the blood drinking Chaosium Sword 

shatters 

like a cheap prop

but what of Ashtar?

who or what the hell was he?

was there behind-the-scenes drama that required him to be written out of the big bad spot?

maybe Ashtar was the 8-bit version of some insufferable Method Actor fuckstick that the devs couldn't stand

so they were like, "To hell with it"

and they just brought in Jacquio to reprise his big bad routine from the previous game

or maybe Ashtar stormed off the cartridge 

refused to do any more levels

I don't know 

but it's always struck me as strange they spent so much time building up Ashtar

but then he's not the guy

y'know?

maybe

Ashtar 

was an unwitting projection of Jacquio 

who was still burning in hell

and so Ashtar was

like

Jacquio's video game avatar way of being In the World, and getting his claws on the Chaosium Sword 

even as his soul was roasting 

but maybe Ashtar didn't even realize he was an ersatz big bad, y'know?

you wake up

realize you're just a pawn

even tho' you absolutely believed 

you were the Puppet Master 

kind of a bummer for Ash

and he had a cool look

I thought

but looks aren't everything. 

-October 1999-November 2021

Now, people, you've got to listen to me . . .

 . . . I had a vivid dream of driving, okay, and I noticed there were all these crashed vehicles and dead bodies scattered all about. At practically every intersection and crossroads and traffic light-nothing but automotive and human wreckage!

I had to maneuver my vehicle carefully. 

And where were the ambulances?

But I noticed a strange shimmering quality to the wrecks and the corpses . . . my God! They were all holograms!

I immediately intuited that what I was seeing were layered afterimages of all the vehicular crashes and human casualties that ever happened in the land!

Soon enough, in deep distress, I made my winding way to a well-stocked library, and diligently worked my way through volumes describing the world of the Dead and the transit to and from the Afterlife.

I discovered that such automotive carnage sent souls directly to the world of La Florida, where dead souls would be reincarnated as Florida Men and Florida Women. And those reborn into La Florida would spend eternity tailgating each other, driving too fast, failing to properly calculate how many car lengths it takes to come to a full and complete stop, and committing acts of violence fueled by their dumbfuck road rage. 

La Florida is a kind of hell where the roads are simultaneously forever being repaired, yet never properly drivable. 

Yet, La Florida is indeed a place for the souls of dead people that drove like assholes in life.

And everybody's gotta be somewhere, y'know?

So, it all works out!

In a dream, at any rate . . .

My favorite conspiracy theory . . .

 . . . is the one that claims that when Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone's vault they didn't just find a couple of empty gin bottles and a displaced stop sign.

Oh, no, my friends!

They found the Future Fox News Stooge Version of Geraldo standing at attention, eyes placid, fate sealed-

But that was way too weird and artsy for mainstream audiences, so they shooed Future Fox Stooge Version away, and filmed the world famous anticlimax we have all come to love and adore across the years.

A variant of this conspiracy involves either Phil Donahue or Phil Hartman impersonating Donahue inside the vault-but this very clearly flies in the face of all logic and evidence!

EVERY DAY IS HALLOWEEN #20: The Insects of Obsession (AKA The Cinema of Cocaine Psychosis)

 . . . insectoid tightener-frighteners 

buggy fates

born of primal cokesnot 

piloting me into the Future

of Nostrils 

and the Nostrils' Hunger . . .

I can't stop doing backflips

-it's the actor doing backflips, of course, but as director this whole project is a cinema-body extension of myself, you see-

finish with walking through plate glass

ten thousand takes

must have the moment 

of sublime threshold 

body had to get through the glass 

just so

I'll live in the editing bay

forever

just to get that body through the glass

at the right moment 

forever 

car chase forever

through the mall

it's actually kind of a musical

but I let the second unit do the song-and-dance shit

little buzzing

steers me to my passion 

for crashin' 

gotta get to the jungle beyond mall

never let me live my blockbuster self down

gotta get to the allegorical jungle of our national dark night of the soul

win the Vietnam War

forever 

fantasy shaped towards ends history denied us

forever

it's bullshit forever 

but look how I shaped that frame

forever 

tell me the bullshit doesn't win this round

forever 

lumbering hulk of an overblown Method actor fuck emerging from shadows to desecrate holy text of script in an effort to get me to fire his ass 'cause he gets paid either way-the way of nested, interlocking heart attacks, or the way of revolver-in-my-fist-murder-my-way-into-live-ammunituon-cinema-history-

well, 

we had to rig up a concealed earpiece and an elaborate system of cuecards and intravenous biscuit gravy drips not to mention an automated full suction blowjob machine, but I finally extracted the necessary performance-

escape jungle

hustle ever onwards

clawing after dream of self-sufficiency 

and the hermetically sealed musical pleasure dome soundstage beyond the jungle

refurbished high school zeroed out of some flyover county's budget

directing from a jacuzzi via closed circuit camera feed, 

piles of lobster and stimulants and buckets of chilled wine and my own aquatic full suction blowjob vortex machine and M&Ms by the basket which go good with Cherry Coke Sundae Floats with sprinkles and roast chicken juice drizzles over tiramisu turtle soup augmented with onsite espresso machine service and two biscuit gravy IV drips one in each arm while I scream into a walkie-talkie for my assistant director to unfuck my lead actor's face for the close-up and defuck my lead actress's face for the close-up-this is supposed to be about uninflected purest young romance in its prime in the midst of an induced Vegas neon puke dream production design boondoggle of Napoleanic disproportions-but all shall be redeemed by first love if only I can get the coke bug tightener-frighteners to loosen up the faces of my leads therefore I scream for my assistant director to use his actual fucking hands to do a hamburger patty massage regimen on my cokeheaded thespians which they balk at-cold hands I guess-so I recommend biscuit gravy IV drips to counteract skeletal cocaine forces with hearty-attacky homecooked meatstalgias of the soul-a heart attack is just the spirit reminding us of how our meatselves can only endure so much joy before we must needs fly perma-free-but cynicism wins the day, biscuit gravy IV drips spurned, five-hundred eighteen takes I'll spend seventy-two days sorting in the edit-

ascend

from there 

to godhead forever

pile-up of forty thousand cop cars

-asshole critics and knuckle-dragging audiences rejected my vision of fakeshit actors finding purest First Love amidst Neon Soundstage Pukeopolis-

so I go back to my passion for crashin'

every gas tank shall ignite

burning people

flailing about

YEEEEEAAAAARRRRGGGHHHH!!!!!

'til it gets good to them

'til they get the hang of being fire people 

now they throw fire at will

fires

spread

forever

power all in this picture

I throw structure 

like no structure was ever thrown before 

in this picture 

when we crashed up that mall

in this picture 

there were just as many people jumping and cheering and gladly throwing themselves under the screeching tires as there were frightened folks diving for cover 

let me tell you

we had people stripping off

eager to join the circus

so to speak

cops and soldiers and holy men and special weapons and tactics guys and firemen and ninja and amphibious assault technicians and communists and capitalists and orthodontists-

stripping out of their uniforms 

forever

and so our numbers grew

forever 

my skin seizes up

my teeth so gnashed

it's pulling my hide tight

that's where the bugs come in

you know

gotta get bugs all over

to chew my skin loose

you know

people say it's an insectoid delusion

but they don't know

you know

how tight my teeth clamp down

how tight my jaws chew back my skin down into my throat

so what I want people to know

is that the bugs aren't Enemy

bugs help chew me loose

okay

bugs are my friends 

forever 

you know 

which is why I need 'em to pull my skin tight sometimes in order to deflect bullets fired by assassins in the employ of studio executives, 

or the bullets fired by that MIB/Mothman deathsquad hired on by a certain bloated Method Actor fuck who still thinks I owe him a narcissistic pass on the edit-

that's why I insist

upon roofs and ceilings

with anti-ESP shielding

so the antennae of Mothman cannot clock me from the air,

bunker down deep

forever

which is why I can't stop commanding backflips of my actors forever 

journeys through plate glass together forever 

better than any mirror forever 

even if I take heavy casualties 

among my cokebug frightener-tighteners forever

they knew what they were signing up for when they chose existence from the primal slime of cokesnot inside my perma-grimace stressed director's fuckfaced persona forever 

. . . the buggy fates do the tighten-up all over my body to remind me who's in charge forever . . .

live helicopter decapitations forever

you balk and condemn forever

but I'll never catch more civilian bodies than Uncle Sam forever

yet I'm still better than your garden variety jag-off serial killer forever 

my glory self burns bright forever 

fuck Oscar forever

I blow my nose into the clouds 

seeding glory forever

rain of statues forever 

I'm on the heart attack workout forever 

serve the vision of primal cokesnot 

forever

. . . I hustle 

til I'm nothing but Nostrils 

and the Nostrils' Hunger

Forever . . .

-July 2003-November 2021

No matter how fervently I pray to Christ the Jesus . . .

 . . . there is still no Rifftrax for The End of Evangelion. 

I am filled with despair and doubt.

Not even Taco Bell Fourth Meal elevates me. 

Starts exercising and getting a good night's sleep all the time.

Holy shit!

Arbitrary structure and empty routines volumetrically displace bad thinks and uncomfortable feels!

I welcome myself to the New Vacuity with open arms and whole grain brickbreaker farts!

I focus now on Money and Power and Aggression!

Do you see the contents of this trash can?

Behold: Introspection,  Doubt, and Idiosyncrasy!

In the name of self-love, farewell to anime!

Looks in the mirror at Perfected Self of Muscles and Avarice. 

Congratulations!

All nations fall before William. All peoples worship him as their New God. William mints his own Taco Bell Black Card with unlimited credit.

I am now perfect, and I have everything!

And everyone applauds his ass enthusiastically. 

Everyone is making the correct decisions!

Something fun you can do . . .

 . . . is buy a cheap notebook and write an obsessively perverse erotic thriller by hand.

Or, you know, a fictional mecha "rat patrol" after action report. Or maybe it's entirely non-fictional. 

Or a long, profane monologue about the nuances of grinding your molars down into the gum meats due to stress or anger or cocaine or curiosity or joy or all of those things or maybe you don't even know why. Or maybe you know why . . . and you're just super into crafting a brand new rhetorical construct to instantiate a preferred cause of such terrible effects-you can make it your prerogative all night long, if you want to!

I wrote a "lost episode" of Miami Genesis Evicegelion just because it felt good. 

My point . . . is that notebooks and pens and pencils are relatively cheap. You can use these cheap things to take notes for some boring class . . . and you can use them to have some wholesome and/or unwholesome fun. Why not choose the fun every now and again?

Remember, these methods and materials are totally offline. You don't have to share them with anyone or anything. They stay offline until you make an effort to alter that state. 

And I'm not offering this up as some sort of Protestant Work Ethic cat o' nine tails to flagellate yourself with, or as a way to stay on top of your Nanowrimo goals or what have you.

This isn't even journaling . . . unless you want it to be. You can make it that, if you want.

What I'm into . . . is doing something . . . that may or may not be allowed . . . that has questionable value in terms of productivity . . . and that only I get to fully enjoy . . . because I choose to do something for myself and not the grind. 

An indulgence, perhaps . . . but that's one kind of fun you can have if you want to have that kind of fun.

And the notebook has whatever lifespan you decide. You can rip it up, put it in a shredder, feed it to your dog, eat it yourself if you're a freak for that paper flavor-

Yes, you can burn it. I've burned some of my notebooks. It was very dramatic. Just don't fuck with fire if you're in a drought zone, we don't need anymore regional megafires, okay?

My preference is for a black, plasticky college ruled notebook-and not the spiral-bound kind-I hate those spirals, I don't go near 'em!-of seventy to a hundred pages in length. 

But that's just me.

You can buy whatever kind of notebook suits you. Any color. Wide ruled. College ruled. They got dot journals. And grid paper. Hexagons for the armchair generals-

Get whatever works.

Indulge yourself.

Have an adventure. 

Or maybe it's really intimate, and intense like Autumn Sonata. Or it's a lavapunk sequel to Don Quixote that rambles all across the overworld map. 

Just do it for you.

Extract some value from the grind-and don't give it back. 

Be dissolute-yet resolute-with your joy of creaton for its own sake.

I swear to Fred Rogers-it's worth doing at least once!

Wake me up . . .

 . . . when Hayao Miyazaki's adaptation of Dune drops. 

That's the one I actually want to see. 

Like . . .

 . . . the millenium was a big pile of suck.

It wasn't even the millenium depending on how you measure it, right?

I didn't even, uh, I didn't even burst loose from my routine meats to, uh, you know, manifest a tentacular devil form complete with, like, those eyestalks? Shootin' the death beams and such?

No . . . milllenium came . . . and I was the same old asshole . . . clothed in the same old meats . . . same doofus expression on my face . . .

You'd think . . . you'd think you would at least . . . at bare minimum, I'm just asking for the barest, uh, of minimums here . . . that my face could've at least sparked, smoked, bubbled, and just go into a blister-bursting bit. And then, from beneath the melty flesh . . . a new face, like, a new face of cosmic terror could just, you know, surface. From up outta that melty face bit-but no.

Not even that.

Universe is like, "Fuck you. Millenium is all hype. And you get jack shit. So fuck off back to your spare, miserable room."

And then I got that, ah, I just got that fucking with me. 

Like I'm a sucker.

For getting caught in the undertow of hype.

It's enough . . . it's enough to make me wish I was True Crackpot.

Y'know?

And then . . . I dunno . . . I could say . . . I could say that the millenium was a fake millenium and that the real one's still on the way . . . 

But I'm not that far gone.

Which sucks.

Sucks hard in the way that reality, like, there's this . . . kinda . . . maximum suck power . . . that only reality can muster. 

No suck like the reality suck. 

Long pause. 

Say . . . do you know . . . cause I've been seeing a lot of stuff online about it . . . but you know how they say . . . that exercise is good for you? It can improve your whole, I dunno, like your whole outlook and attitude and all of that?

Do you think . . . if I exercised super fuckin' intensely . . . that that could get me to the melty face with the cosmic devil face welling up out of the boiling meats ocean bit?

Like is that what that hot yoga shit is?

You don't know.

Well.

Ah, you know, it's something I can start looking into in any case . . .

Never looks into it.

Introducing . . .

 . . . GRINDSLEEP . . .

It's the New Sleep.

Grind . . . while you sleep.

GRINDSLEEP 

Because if you're not grinding, you're not generating value.

And we wouldn't want that.

GRINDSLEEP 

DISCLAIMER: GRINDSLEEP may not entail actual sleep. Consult your pastor-boss-priest-supervisor for vacuous ideological-religious rhetoric to bolster your foolhardy decisions predicated upon various pants-shitting fears that your life shall never be your own no matter how long and how hard you work.

GRINDSLEEP 

EVERY DAY IS HALLOWEEN #19: In the Grip of a Full-On Frankenstein Routine

 

. . . yep

it is done.

there it is

a proper allegorical body

via the schemes and schematics

-METHODS AND MATERIALS REDACTED-

dreamed up by a proper Frankennutter

in the depths of a full-on Frankenstein Routine 

gestures at self

it'll carry the weight of ten thousand theses

the outsized model whosits 

doomin' and loomin' 

of all our existential dilemmas of late

a magic eightball with 'tude'n'talkback 

plumb its virtual depths 

doom it to a billion misreadings by the learned, the ignorant, and the malicious 

come back with a stark vision of wandering in the ruins of a false prosperity 

maybe even provide the justification for a war or two

dunno

but I live in the vanity

of a bloodthirsty hope

which is the main thing

not to get dehydrated 

lust-exerting

after that glory hit

yeah

it's got all of my really awesome shit

none of the boring

you look at me now

post-masterpiece

I ain't much

keep clipping out of the regulation construct

sure, I had to get cheaty

make of myself

my own source

go ahead

bury me with judgment 

did you actually write all those term papers yourself?

you never ONCE hired a mercenary to do some inconvenient thinking for you?

hmm?

okay, then

I'm not NOT paying the price

am I?

I bear the full cost

of my own thinking,

goddamnit, 

no regrets

even if

you can barely see the what's-left-of-me 

just a residual of a survival of a remainder of a trace of a scrap of a stain of a crumb of a drop of a-

you get the idea.

what's left of me, anyways. 

-October-November 2021