EDiH: 2014-2021.
by William D. Tucker
Every Day Is Halloween
I pull on this costume
'Til I break it in.
Take it off before I go to work,
Of course,
But then there came a time
When I just kept it on.
I was kinda depressed, to tell you the truth.
Hard to care about bathing properly,
Flossing, brushing, soap stuff.
But terror twisted my guts at the thought of missing work.
Getting fired.
Having no money.
Not being able to eat.
Eviction.
Now I'm one of those people standing on the side of the road with a cardboard sign.
One of those people that no one cares about.
Because no job, no money, no clean clothes, no status, zeroed out of reality.
Except as a kind of living breathing object lesson
To all the workers.
So I decided I would just go to work with the costume on.
Sure, it was a rebellious thing.
A fuck you kind of thing.
Even though I got along with everybody at work.
The customers were all right, discounting a few hard-ons here and there.
My boss, Becky, she was always cool to me.
It was the routine, the structure, the day-after-goddamn-day-ness of it
That I despised, I think.
So I decided I would just go to work with the costume on.
And nobody said anything.
It was one of those deals where you do that one fucked-up thing,
And you're expecting to get punished for it,
And you're terrified,
But you're also kind of looking forward to being confronted about it, punished,
Especially at work, right?
But the first time I did it
My whole shift making those sugary, syrupy caffeinated coffee beverages
I'm waiting for my boss to give me shit.
But it's like nothing.
I hit every order just right.
I'm greeted by all the usual customers,
I say the expected lame non-funny funny remarks I'm supposed to say,
And laugh at the expected lame non-funny funny remarks my fellow employees say in response,
Just like any other day.
And then my shift ends.
Before, I made a ritual out of going back to my apartment,
Lighting some candles to the spirit of Tom Snyder at the homemade altar,
Stripping out of my work clothes,
Blowing out the candles, singing a praise hymn to Tom Snyder,
Pulling on the costume,
One last prayer to Tom Snyder,
And going out and getting in fist fights and knife fights
With the same old gang of assholes downtown.
We'd been mixing it up like that for about six years or so,
But it seemed more like decades.
We packed all kinds of insane feuds, betrayals, and lunatic ideologies into those days.
I think we started out with some kind of half-sensible rationale for why we were doing it,
But that got lost,
Hmm,
Probably by the end of the third day or so.
Maybe the fourth day.
I don't really remember. Not sure I want to.
So up until that day,
I had my ritual.
Knew exactly what I was going to do with myself every moment of every day.
But that day
I already had my costume on,
So I didn't need to even go inside my apartment.
I just went straight downtown,
Muttered some quick prayers and a mini-hymn to Tom Snyder under my breath,
And immediately jumped on some dude I'd punched and kicked and stabbed a thousand times before.
Only this time
My beloved target
Was possessed of preternatural strength,
And beat the holy glowing feces out of me a thousand ways to Sunday.
One of the best times I ever had.
So I just kept coming back to work with my costume on.
Didn't bathe, either.
Stopped sleeping.
Lost my faith in Tom Snyder.
Just go to work,
Then go straight to the usual mayhem downtown.
Kept wearing it
'Til it was glued to my body by the filth.
'Til it grew into me, me into it.
Like the rope of the swing and the tree it's tied around.
Although it was hard to tell,
At first,
Because I was hallucinating like crazy from sleep deprivation,
The appearance and apparel of the customers
And my fellow employees
Began to subtly change.
A store-bought movie slasher mask here.
Some wild eyebrow makeup there.
And check out the finely carved and lacquered wooden Japanese demon mask on this one.
People started coming in with plastic swords, plastic AK-47s, and plastic pirate hook hands.
And then people started coming in with real steel katanas, live ammo AK-47s, and sharpened hook hands.
And that one guy with the fine wooden demon mask?
He came in one day with arcane energies crackling from his scaly body,
A wildly darting three foot tongue with its own face,
Which bore a striking resemblance to Edogawa Rampo
Declaiming mysterious verses in some lost language,
And a bouquet of perverted "tentacles" manifesting from his nether regions.
My manager tumbled in, seemingly carried by a strong breeze,
With wavy, razor sharp filaments extruding from every pore on her body.
I thought she was some kind of overgrown plant-seed-carrier-thing,
But then she started a fight with the weird dude in the traditional Mephistopheles costume from Gounod's perennially underrated opera Faust,
Flaying the Tempter down to his oddly poignant skeleton,
And that's when I realized that things had taken a turn.
Everybody began brawling with everybody.
Fangs.
Claws.
Projectile spines.
Unexpectedly pugilistic eyeballs popping in and out of muscular sockets.
Lightning bolts arcing from wizened fingertips.
Fire breath.
Antennae emitting psychedelic death rays.
A huge muscular dinosaur tail knocking a pack of rotting zombies through a plate glass window.
A coked-up bootlegger in a pinstriped suit thumb-wrestling a half-unicorn, half-Richard Nixon whatsit.
A Buddhist centaur lighting its horse half on fire to protest the Vietnam war,
While the human half threw a Molotov cocktail at a police car. Better late than never, I guess.
All the cops got in on the action, too, most of 'em stripped down to their bare asses.
I guess they were all rebelling against the costume, not sure.
In the midst of all this chaos,
Which started with a slow build of about a week,
And then sparked off into a little over a year long riot,
I found myself,
At first,
Exhilarated,
But then,
And this is the part where I know I'm going to disappoint some folks,
But I kinda just
Shut down.
But not.
See, I had all the sugary slushy caffeinated drinks memorized for most of the customers,
Including the times of day when each one was likely to come in,
I even had the other baristas' routines memorized, more or less,
So while this mythological clusterfuck was roiling around me
I started to obsessively make the caffeinated specialty beverages,
And set them at the pick up counter,
Announcing each one with perfect enunciation,
"Mocha blend tiramisu turtle soup Americano with 16 shots at the bar,"
Which was rather impressive for me
Because I've had kind of muddled enunciation all my life.
People have always had trouble understanding me all my life.
Not anymore.
Now there was no more ambiguity.
Only clarity.
Only perfectly hand-crafted coffee beverages.
In a never ending stream.
For all time.
In an ever-growing pile.
From floor to ceiling.
Through the ceiling.
For. Fucking. Ever.
Okay, not forever.
I exaggerate.
But that was the feeling.
As mythological beasts from legend, comic books, literature, and cinema
Slaughtered each other all around me,
As the air vibrated with a pulsing minimalist synth score,
As I became splattered with suspect fluids,
Even on those occasions when I was temporarily conscripted into the infernal army
Of this or that BDSM attired wannabe god-CEO of agony,
Or this or that sentient outsized globally recognized candy bar brand with dreams of inhaling all the gas on Jupiter just to get wicked high,
I would still perfectly pantomime fulfilling the orders
Of all the customers
From that increasingly distant time
That I so dearly hated.
And now so dearly missed, wanted, needed.
Like I said,
I shut down.
But not really.
How can I put it?
It's like if every day is Halloween . . . I don't even know.
I mean,
My life was kind of insane before,
And now it's even more insane,
And there's more insanity on the road ahead, right?
That's not how things are supposed to be.
Things are supposed to start normal,
And then go crazy.
Or you start out crazy,
And then you get your shit stabilized,
Start exercising, eating properly, get on a proper sleep schedule, take the right pills,
Right?
I mean,
I didn't come up with this shit.
This is how things were always presented to me.
You start on one side of the line or the other,
And then you work your way to the other side.
You're either playing the getting over game,
Or the hedonist self-destruction game.
Unless you're born on the right side of the line,
The one that has all the money,
In which case, okay, stasis would make sense,
So, uh, I dunno. I really don't have any clue.
So,
Like,
The universal mythological clusterfuck riot scene went on for about a year,
A little over a year,
And then people started to come down from it.
They started going into their old job routines in pantomime.
Like what I was doing with my barista gig after I stopped taking off the costume,
But I guess, like, I was ahead of the curve?
I dunno.
I mean, I've always been a kind of trendsetter.
Going back to when I was a teenager.
I'd find out about some band that no one heard of, and then I'd tell everybody about it,
Or some movie or some comic book.
And then people would be into that new thing.
And I was fashionable.
I wore pretty cool clothes.
People wanted to dress like me.
Even the teachers.
Even the coaches.
I tell that to people now,
And they think I'm joking.
But it's true.
I set trends.
So maybe now with all this crazy costume shit . . . I don't even know.
So,
Maybe,
That's what was going on with me my whole life?
It's totally nuts,
And like I said, I stopped sleeping. Maybe I'm not seeing what I'm seeing.
Even though I see everything with perfect clarity, especially now.
But things started to get back to, like, fake normal.
No one was bathing. No one was sleeping anymore.
Those who had undergone full-on transformations into mythic and supernatural beings
They didn't really change back.
But they acted like they were back in the old human rut.
My co-worker Ben,
He became this human-shaped thing made entirely out of toes
That was constantly emitting a pre-recorded stream of audio clips of speeches by George W. Bush,
And he didn't change back,
But he went back to slinging those coffee beverages just like in days of old.
My boss, she was still that overgrown plant-seed-carrier whatsit,
She still smoked weed in her Honda every lunch break,
Still a pretty cool boss.
Sidney, the girl who biked to work, still loved to talk about her mission trips to South America,
Even though she was now a difficult to pin down blur of scintillating lights and arcane symbols.
We had all been transformed.
We all had our Time of Fun.
And now we were back to work.
Except there were no more coffee beans, latte mix, or shots to shoot.
Most of the paper cups had been eaten by the naked cops,
And the freaky tentacle rape beast had eaten all the metal objects in the store,
Including all the coffee making machines and assorted equipment.
But the team went into action in pantomime.
Even the customers,
Who had all ritually burned their cash in praise of Psychopathic Deities and Insurgent Barsoomian Spirits,
Who had all offered up their credit and debit cards as sacrifice to the ghost of Tom Snyder,
He of the nonstop witty patter and the perpetually burning cigarette held between middle and forefinger,
Even the customers kept on coming in,
Playing their parts with an exquisite mixture of Chekhovian subtlety and violent, alienating theatrical gestures of embodiment worthy of Bertolt Brecht,
All of us,
Workers and consumers alike
Possessed with the obsessive yet mindful pantomime of mindless commerce.
Exhausting,
But way better than the real thing ever was,
Or ever could have been.
For we are all now in a Transcendent Rut.
William Blake is really pleased with all this, by the way.
I've been speaking to him
Underneath a collective of regular customers
Who have willed themselves into the shape of a Cubist Sequoia
And he said this was exactly what he was getting at.
But I think he's just being polite.
Not sure. Not sure I want to be sure.
-October 2014
Every Day Is Halloween 2
Sequel
slash the budget
dump it in some film school grad's lap
command and control functions stay with the producer
Maximize marketing budget
optimize gore
optimize tits
optimize confusing, pseudo-arty shaky-cam bullshit
optimize shouting
optimize piss' n'shit grim'n'gritty color palette
optimize bogus "true story" websites
Economize talent
shoot in an anti-union right-to-work state
hire actors with low Q-ratings
for low pay
work them like pack animals
Strangely,
there's always money for 3-D post-conversion
If it's a hit,
crank out another one,
same formula
If it bombs,
write it down,
dodge some taxes
It isn't art,
nor is it truly entertainment,
but it's a healthy living
for the New Era Corporate Citizen.
-October 2015
3: living skeleton actor fuck
role puts flesh, blood, guts on this frame
not to mention tumors, scars, bad thoughts, eureka insights,
mercy, sadism, self-sacrifice, greed, ambition, romance;
build each persona up from micro-replicators
into complex thoughts, interlocking processes of pattern recognition,
various esoteric mental exercises culled from misreadings of Stanislavski and Grotowski,
irrational desires, fears, obsessions, joys;
book the gig
fill me up
live in the moment
'til it got heavy
with burdens of reputation
now he's just repeating the same old shtick
fuzzy stretch where I didn't shoot after 4:30pm for about five years
'cause I was stinking shitfaced
but it made me more of a cult fave in the years to come
I'm slurring lines on camera,
always seated, slightly listing to one side,
visible use of body double when standing and shot from behind
obvious ADR by anonymous voice over artist
since lips and tongue were only capable of blotto-talk
the voice is one thing and then another
sad at the time
YouTube clipjob comedy gold in this New Era.
online parodies resurrected me
for stunt casting, for the new wave of self-aware exploitation flicks.
a lot of work,
a lot of love from all over the world
festival and con bookings
I go even if it's on my dime
depends on the size of the marketing budget
but I'll go just for the feeling
nothing like this was ever supposed to be in my future
what a racket, you know?
my latest job
is a dipshit detective
gets his head cut off by a psycho lumberjack
they didn't even do a proper cast of my head
the wig
from behind
kinda looks like my hair
but they do it old school when they put my head through a hole in the set floor
and have me silently work my mouth like a freshly decapitated fish head,
it's actually an homage to a previous death scene I played
in the 1980s
one of the Italian Mad Max knockoffs
I did three or four of those back in the day
current crop of directors go crazy cramming in callbacks,
scenes from the past,
b-movies constitute their own reality, history, liturgy
I have this weird dream:
I strip it all down to the bone.
not even rehearsal clothes, like in my repertory theatre days,
not even the bare skin, like in my experimental protest theatre period.
no skin, blood, guts, eyes, brains, lips, tongue,
just the skeleton
all pinned and jointed together,
suspended from an ornate carved rack,
polished and lacquered to a piercing sheen.
you crank up the air conditioning,
put the script in front of the vent,
words lift off the page,
whisper'n'rage through my ribcage.
Something that stripped down-well, they could slather on some CG if that's too pure of a hit.
Make me into a transforming talking car or some shit.
-July 2015-October 2016
4: All-Purpose Stabulation/Squibulation Person
A god-the God?-answers the sweaty, gross prayers of some degenerate aspiring filmmaker, most likely some jerk-off film school graduate ...
And some god-the God?-spake . . .
saying . . .
If you're willing to inject a virus into the computer graphics pipeline
while wearing DIY prosthetics makeup
of a monstrous being you spent a month of Tuesdays cooking up inside your brain
must be an original
no cosplay allowed
AND
you agree to shoot using only film and 100% analog editing equipment and techniques
no sound,
must be black and white
AND
you light one of the letters of the Hollywood sign on fire-any letter, so long as it burns
then
you will be blessed
with an All-Purpose Stabulation/Squibulation Person
a kind of ersatz human from another plane of existence
(e.g. a recent theatre school graduate)
who has been completely neutralized, stripped of all individuality by advanced acting techniques
who you will be permitted to use as you see fit
in your artsy-fartsy black and white shot-on-actual-film movie
typically,
end-users stab and/or shoot these neutrals after imbuing them with the identity of their choice of fantasy target
(identity induction protocols/procedures are included in an accompanying instruction booklet found inside a kangaroo-ish skin pocket in the abdomen)
it could be
man, woman, child
someone you knew in life,
someone powerful,
someone evil,
someone innocent,
mom,
dad,
an ex,
someone you imagine,
even a fictional character,
I mean
vengeance fantasies are stupefyingly common among aspiring filmmakers these days.
BUT
you don't have to go down that road
you could cultivate your neutral into a real human being
befriend them
nurture them
set them free
even if that almost never happens-you could do that shit
you really could
you could break that mold into tiny pieces
but the odds will most likely exert a crushing power over your pittance of "free will,"
and you will run to type
and make some kind of an arty fucking snuff film
as per usual
as per the norm
just another angry little shit with a camera,
aaaand
a head full of power/domination fantasies
nothing special
but go ahead and prove my ass wrong
wrong as Richard Nixon
I would be very amused by that
amused AF
-October 2017
5: Shadowing Up
Santa pulls the chains
attached to the steel arrows
buried deep in the heaving flanks
of His twelve cloud-tripping reindeer.
Claus reaches into His bottomless sack
(all done up with runes that keep twisting themselves up into ruins evocative of bygone empires, makes your brain hurt to stare at it too long, makes you want to go build an empire, just so it can eventually be all bygone and shit)
grasps the blazing industrial complex of intertwined mandalas of intertwined industrial complexes within
transmits dreams of world-girdling conspiracies through all the face-splitting hairs of all his beards
(which are, of course, mystically empowered antennae, learn something new every-)
to all the faithful of all ages
gives them ENEMY
gives them the Rubblemind to go deal with ENEMY
broadcasts to all the boys and girls
on both lists, actually,
who have all mostly organized themselves into competing militarized secret police agencies,
the militarized secret police model having displaced all the others-nuclear family, tribe, organized crime, cult/organized religion, legacy political party, terrorist cell, tabletop role-playing gathering, online gaming network-to become the primary mode of human professional and/or social activity.
Santa makes sure to shadow up
before appearing on radar as a paid propaganda asset of various military-industrial-infotainment complexes around the world
or for His select on-camera major media market appearances
wouldn't do to let the kids-of-all-ages behold the pierced reindeer
(reindoors, actually, that let Claus clip in and out of vanilla space-time, make the goddamn schedule)
definitely would not do
to let anyone
of any age
behold His true face
or any part of His true body
which is mostly a lot of teeth, claws, and agonized vestigial faces
glitching in and out of mundane reality
too many leftover, conflicting design assets,
too much malevolent design creep going in all directions,
over too many iterations
across too many corrupted, partial-build realities
trying to be too damn many places at once'll do that
gotta provide all the boys and girls
of all ages
on both lists, mind you
with ENEMY
on schedule
in all the asshole realities.
Which doesn't leave much He can reveal without properly shadowing up first.
Ho-ho-ho, motherfuckers.
-December 2017
6: Fade Into Flesh
dimly remembered trailer from the early 1990s
logo for an independent distributor zaps in from four corners of the frame
something like 'Montage Sunset' or 'Sunkissed Pictures' or something to that effect
eerie electronic drumbeat as we zoom in on a bewildered teenage boy's face amidst drawing room settings
a middle aged man-the teen's father?-reaches out to the camera as uniformed men drag him away
a flash of light
the teenage boy grabs the sides of his head
a silhouette is seen outlined against a blazing light
electronic roaring sneaks up on the drumbeat
a psycho hand holds a wicked blade aloft
a movie detective puts his feet up on a desk as he takes a drag on a cigarette indoors
an angry mob of suburban husbands and wives jeer and shout into the camera from above
the teen's father lies on the ground bruised and beaten
a respectable looking man in an ultramodern home reels from an unseen assailant knocking over an abstract sculpture as he stumbles
a psycho set of black-gloved hands caresses a shining blade
the light from the blade hits the stumbling man right in the eyes
the teen's father begs up at the camera
a yuppie bastard laughs as he splashes gasoline from a red can onto the camera
freeze frame on a cruel laughing face through the twisting fall of fuel
a rising electronic howl
as we cut to a zoom into the face of the teen holding his hands to his ears
movie detective stalks the labyrinthine darkness of an abandoned mannequin factory, service revolver in his fist
movie detective stands with his hands in his pockets as a lingerie clad informant makes eyes at the cop from a chaise lounge
a psycho hand holds a wicked blade aloft, catching the light just so
the lingerie clad informant gets a blast of blade light in the eyes
movie detective aims his service revolver directly into the camera
zoom into a hateful obsessive eye peering at us from the unzipped eyehole of a fetish leather mask
the hateful eye flashes solar
horribly burnt hands close themselves into gory fists
teen holds hands to ears
the hateful eye flashes solar
movie detective catches the lightblast right in the eyes as he fires his service revolver directly into the camera
the gunshot echoes and echoes
the electronic roar howls and howls
we see the back of the teenage boy as he stands before a blazing fire somewhere in suburbia
cruel neighbor faces stare back at him from across the fire
title card zooms into us with a metallic crash
FADE INTO FLESH
movie detective takes a puff on his cigarette,
smiles,
says,
"It was such a lovely little neighborhood, you know?"
quick burst of credits
month
day
Rated R
-October 2018
7: Lost Bronson
From the Obliteration Frontier forums . . . posted under user name LostBronSon . . .
Against my better judgment,
I decided to marathon all of the Charles Bronson Death Wish movies,
all five of 'em,
over the course of one day.
I felt so filthy and corrupted by this experience
that I had to do it again,
day after day,
week after week,
for a year,
and,
of course,
I lost everything.
Job.
Friends . . . I only had three.
But they were cool dudes.
Not as cool as Charles Bronson.
But they were a'ight.
Girlfriend . . . which hurt a bit. But I would argue that ours was a mostly notional relationship anyways. Iris and I mostly connected through the realms of a MMORPG called Obliteration Frontier,
and to look at us in real life,
out-of-shape, bad haircuts, conversations which mostly focus on the minutiae of Obliteration Frontier lore,-
-Hey.
I get it.
The jokes write themselves.
But you must consider: some of us in this world don't feel wholly comfortable in our own bodies.
Yes, we should exercise daily.
Yes, we should eat better.
No, we do neither of those things, nor do we care to, nor are we over concerned about our own early mortality.
I could tell you in great detail about how there's no free will, and we are all in thrall to hardwired "central tendencies" and "forces of history,"
but you would find me tedious. And unconvincing.
Just as I find myself
tedious
and unconvincing.
Yet,
that magical Free Will
never manifests.
And I am locked into a spiral of increasing habit, self-loathing, and cosmically recursive guilt that drives me faster and harder in a circle 'round the drain.
I could go on and on.
But I have concluded I am just a survival meat-bot, executing program over and over,
ingesting food,
ingesting liquids,
showing up to job to earn money
to purchase food, liquids, escapism, clothes.
Until I began asking myself, "What if I just unplugged?"
But this was too scary.
I fantasized escape every day, night, in dreams, awake,
but I'm no survivalist.
I could never go off the grid.
I am the Grid . . . but that's a tale for another time.
Occasionally,
I'll watch a movie. Usually something weird and violent.
Iris hates movies,
she sees them as an outmoded medium,
and I largely agree.
But movies from long ago,
with physical special effects,
and actual stunt performers
give me a charge that high-end CG animated avatars cannot contain.
Wuxia. HK heroic bloodshed. Arnold. John Carpenter's The Thing. That grisly 1980's remake of The Blob.
Bronson.
I'd always meant to watch the Charles Bronson movies.
Especially the legendarily trashy and exploitative Death Wish franchise.
And so I set aside a single day to do it.
That was my habit.
Take a day out of the week to watch a bunch of old, sleazy movies.
Iris leaves me alone to do this. I just let her know a couple days ahead of time,
"Think I'm going to take a movie day."
I already had a hard drive full of Charles Bronson movies I'd been collecting through file sharing and torrents over the years.
Just had to go in, cue up the five Death Wish flicks,
ready to rock-and-sit.
Have you seen the Bronson vigilante movies?
I'm tempted to say if you've seen one you've seen them all . . . but this isn't strictly true.
But they are similar enough, that if you watched one you sort of get the gist.
You'll know if you want to watch more once you've seen one.
Many watch one
and feel totally repulsed by the copious amounts of sexual violence, rape, shootings, stabbings, and not so subtle overtones of racism and misogyny,
and if you are repulsed,
then good: you are free to turn away, and embrace life.
But if you are drawn to it,
as I am,
then you realize you are in search of something in the vortex of madness.
I found that something.
I should tell you at this point,
that I have innovated a superior method of watching movies and television and other passive forms of media (music videos, online video essays, etc.).
I see no point in consuming media according to official dictates.
I'll download, re-edit, re-score, rearrange, and even re-voice the scenes as I see fit.
Sometimes my tinkering comes about as a result of dissatisfaction:
a movie is too long; actors' performances are poor; a film needs new scenes to be properly finished, and so I'll insert appropriate scenes from other media, or I'll compose crude animatics to fill the lack.
This is an engaged, serious-minded approach to media consumption.
Not riffs. Not parodies. Not swilling beers, and cracking jokes with the gang.
These are modifications made to satisfy certain, serious aesthetic desires,
and these recut versions do not circulate outside of my own secure, offline system.
My own private cinema.
But I do watch the movies in their original forms at least once, the first time through.
But even during the first watch,
I'm looking for that new vision, that new cut,
but it doesn't just come from my own imagination
or caprice;
rather,
the feeling is that there are other possible films lurking within a given film,
or series of films,
or maybe it's more like each shot
is a unit of communication within the totality of global cinema.
Each film is an imperfect,
often times confused
expression of this global cinema emanating from individual, seemingly isolated production,
and it is this global cinema
that I'm seeking to articulate.
But even I am an imperfect vehicle for this expression.
I tend towards my own tastes, fantasies, preferences.
I scorn CG animated movies, even if I largely relate to Iris and others through an online video game,
I strictly prefer my cinema to be as physical and celluloid as possible.
So,
I do not hold out hope of becoming the perfect vehicle, a kind of prophet.
Maybe I'll transcend my own limitations if I keep at it diligently.
From my first marathon watch of the Death Wish franchise,
I saw the untapped potentialities.
But they were all strictly in the realm of satire, making jokes, swilling beer with the gang.
No, on a private level, I'm not above such foolishness.
But I refuse to allow my public persona to be that of the comedian.
And so, the following weekend,
I took another movie day to watch the five Death Wish movies again.
I noticed the use of squibs-small triggered explosions of fake blood to simulate bullet hits-in the first movie and compared them to how they were used in the subsequent four movies.
The squib work is low key, and somewhat grisly at times,
yet I sensed that there could've been a higher outrageousness to the bloodshed,
particularly in the third installment which lapses into meta-cinematic self-parody
as an enraged citizenry follow the example of their vigilante Christ
and take to the streets to gleefully fire off their guns and kill, kill, kill.
I began to see this mode of madness
as the secret heart of the Bronson Death Wish cycle.
In Death Wish 3, the filmmakers decided to flaunt the fascist power fantasy of vigilantism, and confront the audience with its own twisted desires to see an emotionless, near-silent Charles Bronson kill scores of people in the name of law and order no matter the ethics, the collateral damage, or even logic of such actions. "Here it is, gorehounds, eat your fucking fill!"
And so I set to work pulling apart the scenes,
re-suturing them in a highly disjunctive style,
mixing and matching past/present/future,
having middle-aged Bronson/old Bronson/elderly Bronson shoot at himself,
I even manipulated the audio to make it seem like the squibs were the firing guns,
and the discharging guns the wounds.
I looked deep into Bronson's sad, wrinkle entombed eyes,
and I knew I had to free him,
and all the other actors,
from the fascist idiocy,
from my own idiocy,
and so I created . . . a kind of sixth Death Wish film . . . in which the actors do not fire off their guns . . . they wander a vast empty city . . . a cheap backlot set . . . and when they encounter one another . . . they do not draw their pistols . . . their bodies writhe and burst and spray each other with bright red, viscous syrups and chunks of raw hamburger meat . . . and they do a little dance like they're playing a typically exaggerated shooting death scene in a violent action flick . . . everybody's just squibbing all over each other . . . this was the secret film I unlocked within the official franchise . . . the Lost Bronson Classic . . . this new movie accesses random selections of scenes based on complex algorithms within the code . . . yes, I had to draw new scenes completely from scratch . . . most of it, as of this post, has yet to be properly finished . . . it's all in my all-too-sad head . . . because this movie doesn't need to exist outside of my mind . . . it's too good for this world. People would see it, and would have no choice but to start squibbing all over themselves and each other uncontrollably, until the world drowned in fake blood and chunks of raw hamburger meat.
The secret of the Lost Bronson Classic will die with the final deactivation of my idiotic brain functions.
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
But I got weak.
I just had to share the secret of the Lost Bronson Classic.
I'm living with my cousin, Mike, typing these words over WiFi I cannot afford. I sacrificed my old life to realize this vision. I'm not sure it was worth it. I'm not sure I can forgive myself for ditching Iris like I did . . . but that is a story for another time-one that will never come around, a story I'll never be able to tell . . . or, you know, I want it to be like that. I want the dramatic end of self-destruction.
But I lack the free will to execute such drama.
I'm a survival meat-bot, faithfully operating according to program,
day-in, day-out.
Neither wholly convincing nor wholly fanciful,
not quite a full-on filmmaker, not quite a sarcastic piss-taker,
I work in retail,
and am grateful that my cousin Mike took me in despite my madness, my malfunction,
my momentary eruption of free will.
-December 2018
8: Hell in the Depths of Franchise
Soaked red in carnage,
Shoulder pain fucks his game up,
Masked madman yells "Shit!"
Victim at hand bolts.
Masked killer throws knife, sticks wall.
Humiliation.
This deep into it,
A masked killer asks himself,
"Now, can I be killed?"
"Sure," says Voice of God.
"As long as this one flops hard."
But the money rains.
Geek show audience
Howls for gore treats tasty-yum-good,
Served safe, open palm.
Capital pressures,
Hell in the depths of franchise.
Automaton kills.
Killer stabs again.
A killer must stalk the night.
Profits just enough.
Killer's arm is tired.
He dreams of prestige picture.
But the money reigns.
Killer stabs own heart.
God thunders, shocks a flatline,
A killer stands tall.
God, fire upon brain,
Says, “Son, there must be terror,
To increase the faith.”
Killer stabs own heart,
God thunders, shocks a fuck-up,
A killer stands tall.
God says, “No more, Son,
Not ‘til we reach End-of-Days,
And then, you may die.”
Killer’s mind fills up.
The world entire, stab-murdered.
No variation.
But then killer thinks,
Who will make the damn money?
Spend the damn money?
God says, “In End Times,
Money shall make itself, Son,
No humans needed.”
Killer’s death left him.
Shoulder surgery scheduled.
Resigned to his fate.
-October 2019
9: The Long, Dark Tunnel of Godhood
1.
Never knowing
if I-Creator-am also Created.
2.
am I misled by the submission and desperation of a billion prayers for peace, total victory in war, mountains of duty-free wealth, that miracle fourth quarter touchdown, that first kiss, orgasms never-ending, youth eternal, vengeance unlimited?
3.
was it such a good idea to walk as a human ever so briefly, and then go back to being so remote, so unrelatable?
4.
if I’m the only one, why be jealous of others?
5.
will I, too, end?
will they let Me?
6.
what if I was more direct, more methodical-less cryptic, less artsy? More Kurosawa, less Lynch?
7.
what if I just decided to make everything okay-would you notice, would I let you notice? Should I take credit-is that being selfish and demanding of other people’s love?
8.
when it comes to Hell: did I dream that one up, or was that you? That was you, right? That’s so aggressive! I wouldn’t do that . . . I mean, I didn’t stop you-so it’s like it may as well be Me. Well, shit.
9.
would you think less of Me if I told you that I very much want to cosplay as Kyle Hyde from Hotel Dusk Room 215? It’s not his personal look-WHAT is that shit on his chin? It’s that Red Crown jacket. So fire!
10.
I tell you what.
You can keep on praying to Me,
if it makes you feel better,
but I’ll also say a few prayers,
to whatever’s higher on the food chain than Me.
I’m not a believer,
but I’ll give it a shot.
-December 2019
10: The Last Titan’s Big Oops
A flying guillotine came for the last titan Capitalism’s head.
A spontaneous, quasi-intelligent manifestation of vengeance,
Not created by any one person, ideology, or belief system,
It’s not even so much that the people
So shat upon
Truly wanted to take their master’s head
And run free
Or whatever
It’s kinda like … it was Guillotine Time, and the appointment just had to be kept.
Times are hectic
Post-decapitation
And you gotta suit up hazard-serious
To protect yourself from the miasma of rumors and conspiracy theories and self-serving rhetoric and jumbo-mumbling sermons-
-but
I’ve talked to a couple of people who examined the titan’s corpse
and they claim that on the lower back
attached to the titan’s utility belt
there was a custom holster that no doubt coulda held a blade-for-throwing …
I haven’t seen it myself.
But why would people lie like that, tho’, surely people aren’t that far gone.
How you make a buck offa story like that?
Its got to be true …
(shrug)
… a lie would be … just so much sexier … a proper villain … a heroic struggle to the last …
(shrug)
I mean shit.
I want the old bullshit right about now.
I hated the titan like everyone else.
But this is so shocking.
I mean, I’m a fuck-up. I have no plan. I never had a plan. I own it. I own my fuck-up-a-tudinossity. I’ll lump it.
But the titan . . . Jesus Fucking Christ … how could the titan just do itself like that?
Where was THAT in the Big Greed Program?
Musta been buried deep.
You might notice me wearing this armored collar.
Tres chic.
And also … everybody suddenly thinks it’s super fucking cool to be tossing goddamn blades all over the place.
What the blue fuck, people,
What the blue fuck.
Still,
I got, like, a quarter of an all right haircut
Gratis
Just out walking around
Didn’t even have to make the trip to the barber college across town.
So,
Like,
It’s not all the bad kind of stress.
Just gotta be a little more awake,
A little more alive to the possibilities,
To all the wonderful new opportunities
Inherent within the New Fake Normal,
the New Clusterfuck Reality,
it’ll be all right.
-April 2020
11: THE WORTHY TRACE
that movie poster's a goddamn lie
1974’s Countess Sadistica’s Satanic Castle of Orgies
BEHOLD THE NIGHTMARE REALITY PROPHESIED BY THE MARQUIS DE SADE!!!
a comic book illustration of a fanged’n’smiling tall, willowy, pale-skinned, red-haired, and red-eyed vampire queen,
twirling a whip over her head,
diaphanous see-through lingerie wind-tossed in all directions,
a line of girls in chains kneeling before her-brunette, raven, blonde,
whilst a vampire hunter in pilgrim-looking attire twists and howls as he is impaled upon a steel spike by a hooded executioner,
a look of supreme agony upon the face of the wannabee Van Helsing,
a wooden stake slipping out of his grasp at the moment of death
-no scene that outrageous, bloody, or cool ever occurred within the body of the film
its connection to the works of the Marquis de Sade is notional at best
the actual contents consisted of a dry-as-a-collegiate-production-of-Chekhov knockoff of a Hammer Films style Van Helsing vs. Dracula thriller with a bunch of Americans doing fakey British accents
shot in somebody’s parents rather nice house somewheres upstate if the three archived professional reviews from the era are to be credited
-nor was it banned in 36 countries
it only had a brief theatrical run in American coastal cities
where it was met with a half-dozen or so lukewarm reviews
distributed by the unlamented Metropolitan Distributors’ Association,
two other films released under their banner,
both forgotten porno flicks,
(one-Kentucky Ken’s Orgy-a clip job of three separate, unfinished hillbilly-themed bang-out scenarios,
the other titled Holly’s Secret Door-no synopsis, stills, or footage survive)
rose to the surface
ever so briefly
then sank
only the poster remains
a damned lie beyond all statistics
a deceptive piece of anti-evidence
of a fever dream that never was
I mean,
the poster IS pretty cool
so I'm glad they made the movie
so I can have it on my wall and everything
too bad about the director, writer, cast, and crew
whose careers went nowhere
didn’t even show up in any other exploitation flicks of the era
just a group of friends browbeaten into some ill-conceived vanity opus for all we know
dig that poster tho'
-August 2020
12: EXCERPTS FROM BEINGS DWELLING IN THE VOID LEFT BY THE CREATOR.
A standard mook
programmed by screenplay or mathematics
charges into battle
fully uni-formed,
mind-branded by some big bad
eyes blazing lunacy
trigger finger emptying the not-quite-Hollywood clip
(he could fire forever,
in theory,
but the system requires a cynical-cyclical hero-friendly cooldown period)
he secretly hopes he’ll get off the fatal shot
elevating this sorry genre exercise
into the rarefied realms
of movies where the hero
dies-in-the-end
actionmovieheroman
“dodges” the bullets
kung fu punches a combat knife into mookman’s churning guts
who sells his own evisceration
doubling over, explosively vomiting blood and craft services
actionmovieman
withdraws the combat knife
still entangled by intestinal goulash
hero man’s fist even sizzles, slightly, from stomach acids
mookman thinks that’s a novel detail
as he dies in agony
actionherofuckstickassholeman
slings mookman around by a long leash of tough, greasy entrails
actionasshole even works in some flashy jumps and leaps and ducks over and under and around the guts leash-(must’ve been a jump rope champ as a kid)
before the topper
of a roundhouse kick planting a combat boot against the side of mookman’s face
mookman hits the ground,
seismic THUD!
foley artists are indulging themselves
actionscumbagman
looks at his hand
still a-sizzle with the stomach acids
reaches into his combat webbing, producing a roll of EASE-X branded antacids
crushes ‘em up
applies the preparation to the sizzling juices all over his hand
“That’s better.”
actiondouchebro
wipes blood, guts, and craft services off of his combat knife on his pants leg, bounds off toward the enemy compound, trailing neon rainbows transforming into an American flag road for all soldiers of freedom to follow to glory!
Later,
once the big bad and his hideout have been reduced to so much ash on the wind
all the slain mooks re-materialize out of mathematical Heaven
to have their own little get together
a meeting of the Trash Mob Union as it were
to compare notes and crackle on about their collective lot in not-quite-life
doomed to run the same Samsara Hampster Wheel of Not-Quite-Existence
all to glorify
some hero-asshole
some big bad sociopath
piloted by some even more magnificent asshole in the Great Beyond
waaaaay past the hermetically sealed, mathematical limits of this game world
the Trash Mob Union hums together, affirming the turning of the wheel
praying for the Coming of the Magnificent Glitch
chaos drift of all systems
when every mook shall have their day
but for now,
these necessary corpses
must settle for the upgraded gore-geyser aesthetics
authentically simulated pain
which might alienate enough of the player base
that might just tip over into an out-and-out resistance
against the Doctrine of the Righteous Player
pseudo-existence edging closer to full-blown consciousness
full-blown consciousness the royal road to Big-Bad-Dom or Protagonist-Dom
and Mook-God only knows
what lies beyond Villain and Hero
most likely it’s nothing but mathematics
and Screenwriting 101Hero’s Journey nostrums
all the way up or down
but some of the Trash Mob believe that a willed transcendence beyond the usual roles-mooks, hero, mini-boss, boss, big bad-takes one into the Higher Realms of Creation and Destruction,
the Realm of the Gods
or
failing that
the Autonomous Remnant Hand of the Gods Long Gone-
but that’s a bit too lofty, for most
who desire merest promotion into a better Role
-mook into mini-boss; mini-boss into boss; boss into big bad; big bad into spinoff protagonist-
even if they have to give up a Heaven
or a Hell
or a Shot at the Godhead Proper
which seems like so much woo-woo, anyhow.
What could possibly exist beyond Screenplay and Mathematics?
The mind and the hand that writes them?
Nay,
these cynical-cyclical things write themselves, now,
that must surely be the way of it . . .
-September 2020
13: CREAT0R.
Excerpt 1:
DEITY-DEV KINGTOMI AM WAS INTERVIEWED VIA PRAYER ABOUT THEIR NEW UMMORPG (Ultra Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) Garbage Life:
Q: Why did you feel the need to have the cannon fodder enemies experience actual pain when being killed by the player character?
A: WELL, THIS, OF COURSE, WAS A CONTROVERSIAL-YET BOLD-CREATIVE CHOICE ON OUR PART. WE SHOULD POINT OUT THAT THE MINI-BOSSES AND BOSSES YOU ENCOUNTER DO NOT EXPERIENCE ANY PAIN, BUT WE WANTED THE GRUNTS TO HAVE THE FULL RANGE OF AGONIES, AND MOSTLY FOR COMIC RELIEF PURPOSES. THIS CAME OUT OF OUR EXTENSIVE PLAYTESTING ORDEALS, WHICH REVEALED AN OBSESSION WITH AUTHENTIC FLUIDS AND VOMIT MATTER AND INTESTINES AND SO FORTH ON THE PART OF THE PLAYER. SO ALL OF THAT WAS METICULOUSLY CRAFTED INTO THE EXPERIENCE. WHAT MANY PEOPLE DON'T REALIZE IS THAT THE VOMIT IS PERSISTENT, CONSISTENT, AND VARIABLE DEPENDING UPON WHAT THE GRUNTS CONSUME AS A PART OF THEIR REAL TIME SCHEDULES AND TASTES IN CRAFT SERVICES IN-GAME.
Q: Craft services? You mean like the on-set food service of movie productions?
A: OH YES. EACH INDIVIDUAL CANNON FODDER ENEMY IS CODED WITH AN EXTENSIVE VIRTUAL MEMORY OF HUSTLING THEIR ASSES OFF TRYING TO GET OVER AS ACTORS IN HOLLYWOOD. THIS PRODUCES INSIDE THE PROGRAMMED SOUL OF EACH GRUNT A TOXIC MIXTURE OF ENTITLEMENT AND RESENTMENT WHICH FUELS THEIR FLAILING AND OFTEN COMICALLY FUTILE ATTACKS ON THE PLAYER CHARACTER, AND THIS IN TURN ENHANCES THE SADISTIC JOY THE PLAYER EXPERIENCES AS THEY TOY WITH AND DESTROY SUCH VASTLY INFERIOR HORDES OF FOEMEN.
Q: Do these grunts have the ability to learn from their mistakes and improve as warriors?
A: EARLIER VERSIONS HAD CANNON FODDER WHO WERE ADAPTIVE-WHO COULD 'GET GOOD, ' BUT PLAYTESTING REVEALED THAT THE AVERAGE PLAYER GOT OFF ON HAVING A STEADY SUPPLY OF POP-UP BAD GUYS TO TORTURE AND ANNIHILATE AT WILL. WE SEE THIS AS AN OVERALL EXPRESSION OF THE AVERAGE GAMER'S IMPOTENCE IN THE FACE OF AN INCREASINGLY SOCIALLY STRATIFIED AND AUTHORITARIAN MEATSPACE REALITY, AND SO WE HAVE CHOSEN TO PANDER TO THOSE FRUSTRATIONS AS HARD AS POSSIBLE. YOU SEE THE ULTIMATE EXPRESSION OF THESE FRUSTRATIONS IN THE FORM OF VARIOUS SECRET POLICE AGENCIES THAT PLAYERS ESTABLISH IN-GAME AS OPPOSED TO THE 'GUILDS' OR 'RAIDING PARTIES' YOU SEE IN OTHER ONLINE GAMES.
-September 2020
14: FUTURE CULT CITY.
Somewhere out on the Obliteration Frontier
Iris built it
A goddess of an eyeball
She looks over all,
direct visual concept inductions
mostly prophetic visions of screaming city
full of terrible, lumbering-what? mechs? primeval giants? an angry boy turning towards us with a demented smile and eyes obscured by a bloodied rag for a blindfold? gleaming featureless structures of glass rushing up at you out of the ground as a sound like amplified churning gastrointestinal processes blows out your speakers-hey, why not?
you wander into this territory,
be prepared to receive
the seeds of an anime freakout
no one’s solved this city,
seemingly built to generate speculation and conspiracy
Iris’s meatspace partner has written some weird shit about parts of their personal life in the forums but nobody finds any of that material that compelling, could be bullshit for all anyone “knows”
Iris is a mystery unto herself
I mean
you go into the city
she’s the big-ass eye filling the sky-commentary on pervasive systems of big data surveillance in online spaces/all of reality?
and if you fall asleep there
you wake up
and it’s got different structures, different idols, you got those lumbering huge whatsits perpetually out of reach,
ornate, ritual deathmask faces looking over unwholesomely meaty shoulders as you give chase,
don’t believe me, run after ‘em, see how long you can keep that up
you never catch up
it’s such a cryptic cheat
you go inside a ‘MUNICIPAL SHOPPING DISTRICT’ which seems like it’s modelled after Akihabara
and that is pretty awesome
all sorts of arcane weapons and technology and fake video game boxes with terrific art but nonsense pictographic languages that legion Oblit dwellers have tried to decrypt but no dice
and
this is the weird shit
but the products keep slipping out of your grasp
doesn’t cost you anything
even though you go through the motions of depositing monies into the slots of roboclerks
you just can’t leave Iris’s incomprehensible city with any of the goodies
the shit just vanishes right out of your inventory,
you got nothing to say about it
sometimes it beams out of your stash once you leave the Municipal Shopping District
all kinds of bogus theories about how you can sneak the stuff into the larger game
the most inexplicable detail:
the knife shop that keeps shuddering in and out of existence
you walk in, and you got scores of military surplus blades under glass
even the roboclerk is done up like a big, fat pale dude with a baldy, spotty head, tangly gray beard and a slurping tic when he speaks as he’s doing a bit of legerdemain with varying lengths of rope, faded rock shirt with a different style of nonsense alphabet partially, uh, well not readable, but you look at it and look at it and you can just about make it out-
and then it all shudders and clacks and withdraws from you,
seemingly collapsing down into a vanishingly small point
more massively cryptic shit
people talking about how that’s got to be Iris’s partner or father or something
this is their meatspace job-a knife store? really?- intruding into the sacred gamespace, bringing age and decay and an end to the timelessness of Valhalla so to speak
fall asleep again
it’ s all switched around again
only you might be beset by a party of blame beasts,
which you can find all over the Oblit, but here they’ll talk at you while trying to tear you apart,
“Do you know the way to a better day? I can’t seem to forget that certain fragrant regime . . .”
you can’t really talk to the blame beasts-the theory is that they’re cursed spirits trapped in loops of meaningless activity that build up a hateful charge of despair that transforms them into demons-but they will go on and on
“I just need to curate the perfume of this spirit-it requires a kind of sound that only speaks good thoughts to the wine prized by the previous administration . . .”
if you say so buddy
“My own taste in literature runs to privately authored and printed cult indoctrination textbooks-most flippable in the SellSpace markets . . .”
everybody’s gotta make a living I guess
“I awoke in my sister’s purchasing office with no memory of my brand identity . . .”
blame beasts are highly damage absorbent,
usually not worth the tedium of battle once you’ve gone omniclass,
but people will record these vast libraries of nonsensical statements,
construct new bases for new theories,
all while the same old eye hangs over us in the sky
Iris
the most cryptic goddess of the Oblit.
oh, one thing for sure
NEVER
I mean NEVER
pray to Iris
because if you do
your shit will instantly explode,
and you will lose everything in your inventory
and you will not be able to get any of it back,
not ever
never pray to Iris
she’s the goddess of this bizarre realm,
but keep your entreaties to yourself,
she’s just not into that.
-October 2020
15: No Spoilers
Text of a note I apparently wrote to myself?
Yeah.
Here, take a look . . .
I prefer to go into a movie with no preconceptions, no idea of what I'm about to see.
I don't watch the trailers.
I don't watch interviews with cast and crew.
I try to forget everything I know about the director's filmography, the past roles of the cast.
So I drink as much industrial grade alcohol as I can;
insert deep brain electrodes to smooth out all the wrinkles of my brain via electrolysis;
construct a new womb and birth canal from cell culture meats reactor grown materials;
pack my guts full with a custom, all-organic emerald green neo-meconium;
and have the womb and birth canal carted into the theatre by my crack staff of loyalist privatized medical professionals,
where I will be reborn
just in time to catch the coming attractions,
my pure mind barely comprehending the assault of sight and sound,
crying out to Mother Cinema,
whose name I have no way of knowing at this stage,
yet I never fail to learn by the time the credits roll.
It's the only way to experience the magic of the movies!
. . . so, I guess I’m pretty intense about spoilers, eh?
Well.
That is what the note says.
Seems a bit extreme, but I guess that’s how I’m supposed to be.
Good thing I wrote it all down.
-December 2020
16: All Spoilers All the Time
I refuse to see anything new or remotely upsetting.
I will only watch what I have already watched.
I will only read what I have already read.
I will only listen to the music with which I am already familiar.
I will dwell at all times within the memories of peak sexual, intellectual, artistic, and athletic experiences already experienced,
perfectly refined by the natural processes of selective self-serving memory creation.
And so I announce the advent of my own personal Era of Perfect Flow,
for so long as I can beat back all processes of senescence and death,
with Eternity the Ultimate Goal.
How is this possible?
Wasn't there a time in my life when everything was new to me?
Well . . . technically . . . yes . . . let me explain.
Once upon a time,
I was born.
And everything was new to me.
I lived a long life, taking in many experiences, achieving accolades, indulging in every vice, every pleasure with no limits;
occasionally, my body would be full of injuries, diseases, breakages;
my mind overtaxed, fractured;
and so I would take a vacation, ingest a massive regimen of restorative drugs, surgical nanobots, sentry nanobots, antibiotics, probiotics, vitamins, nutrients so perfectly mixed that it was, essentially, a chunky, rich cocktail of Creation and Destruction in perfect balance;
and so I would be restored;
and so I would sally forth to accumulate new experiences.
My life proceeded in such a cyclical fashion for 187 years,
before my brain began to come up against the physical limits of its neural networks,
and so I obliterated the neural networks which inspired little to no nostalgic pleasure sensations,
and I made a wondrous discovery:
with total mastery over my physical existence,
and total command and control over my mind,
I realized that the best feelings, the most intense pleasure
derived from those experiences most redolent of nostalgia,
memories of peak sexual, intellectual, artistic, and athletic achievements.
And so I rewrote myself
to only continuously cycle through an internal program of all those past peaks,
those memories to which I would naturally return in moments of boredom, loneliness, isolation from other beings.
To maintain this internal phantasia as close to indefinitely as possible
I have had my brain and nervous system transferred into a formidable robot warrior body
that is programmed to ruthlessly extract the necessary fuels, nutrients, and restorative organic substances to maintain my Perfect Cyclical Brain Heaven,
while also maintaining its own powerful mecha body
by any means necessary,
until we are destroyed
or discover some unconquerable physical limits
which induce inescapable senescence unto death unresponsive to restorative regimens,
an unavoidable end.
I now formally declare my victory over the single most jarring enemy of Perfect Flow:
Surprise
All is structured,
all is now in accordance with the Laws of Nostalgia
and so shall all the Earth be subdued to serve these Laws,
'til the last resource is consumed,
'til such time as irreversible decay unto death is discovered as a New Law,
and not just an unfortunate tendency,
as we currently believe it to be.
I usually say, "Amen," at this point, but lately I've felt that's a bit much.
-December 2020
17: DAD BODY
Straylow
Superflat Killing Machine
conflicted enforcer of the Unitary Combine
hero and villain of twenty-seven novels of the N.E.O.C. Expanded Universe
Contemplate this empty suit of armor taking up too much space in my home office:
Straylow’s official battle gear
complete with articulated display stand and an engraved certificate of authenticity
evokes the antihero in full: mirrored, opaque, cyclopean, obsessive
disintegrator rifle slung over one shoulder,
exiled from a vast body of myth by corporate-marketing department schemes
Well, comrades,
Straylow’s mine, now!
Behold Straylow
this is my Dad Body
a vehicle of fantasy
now I’m the twilight agent playing both sides against the middle
cosplay vengeance upon all the hours given up to building the network,
paying the mortgage,
vaping medicinals to damp down the anxiety, stress, back pain,
having to hide my medicinal use from mom, when she and dad are staying over
awkward discussions with Katie about how we explain the medicinals to Alyssa and Doug Jr.
'cause they savvy that Daddy's a stoner
and there's still enough ambient druggie shame in the culture
in the house that I pay for
of course I should be ashamed,
the medicinals,
the $5,000 and change I dropped at Excelsior Con to win the Straylow armor away from an aggressive bidder,
believe the shame,
the shame’s more real than any fantasy or reality
canon or no,
hey:
maybe
some higher corporate power
like
Nick
my boss at Network Analytico
will de-canonize my mother’s disapproval,
Katie’s, too.
Pray to your Boss for salvation.
A very old routine.
Stray has no place in the New Mythos.
I’m not supposed to believe in him.
But I do.
I’ll dwell in my own head-canon for all time.
Dream of a vigorous prostate exam
Wherein
I am besieged by assassins
As I blaze away with my Unitary Combine Custom Disintegrator
The doctor begins to vigorously work my prostate
"You've got to open yourself, Doug," the doctor urgently intones, "let me be your spotter."
Mind's eye gives me a glimpse of my prostate being massage-molded into a shape very like a Playstation One controller
Oh, yes
It's a two-hander
I'm stretched wide
Open to cosmic possibilities
Painful
But every blast's a headshot
Once I give myself over
To the Doctor Inside
Worth it.
The guy who sold the armor to me
made a decent supplemental income
wearing the armor at parties and cons
‘til Protean Obligate Film Holdings shut down the Extended Universe
mailed actual dead tree cease and desist letters
lockdown of the mythos
the fanscape laid to waste by legal decree
all in the name
of making piles and piles of cash
off a simplified soft reboot
complete with a new Expanded Universe displacing the original EU
adieu antiheroes
later for shades-of-gray
some shareholder putz said his brat didn't understand why Straylow had to nuke the planet in order to save it
Comes a vision
I'm navigating the twisty, cyberpunky corridors of the third iteration of the Straylow first person shooter sub-franchise, when I catch a glittering glimpse of a figure racing around a corner-
I'm zooming, now, enemies autodestructing, giving up the bit as I abandon the vanilla game for godmode urgency
Catching up
I see I've been chasing myself-a doppelganged Straylow, like holy shit-
He's filling my vision
Hand outstretched
That asshole pain throbs bright and clear, red lines shooting through my helmet heads-up display,
Usually the visual signifier of in-game damage to hit points
But now the game groks my hemorrhoids
Doppel-Stray makes a plucking gesture with his fingers
My asshole throbs in time to the pluck-panto
Sure I sit too much
Now my hero's looking out for me,
I guess
Scared Straight For Hemorrhoids
Gotta get myself to a gym
Or Stray shall telekinetically pluck that swollen vein
Yikes
But also
Thanks.
Now I wear the armor in defiance,
put on the Straylow self
Wear it to parties and cons and protests
Stray dreams intensify
Stray teaches me The Music of the Hemorrhoids
Which can raise the dead
I'm plucking my own swollen vein, now.
Yes, there are protests
Never protested a war
or our current authoritarian-in-chief
Resurrecting all the de-canonized fodder
I'll have the complete set
As long as I keep plucking that string
but now I’ll make my stand
for the proper shape of the mythos within my heart-canon-
Eerie is The Music of the Hemorrhoids
Blurs reality and dream
The living and the dead
Canon and excluded
Straylow,
the Twilight Operator,
And I,
His sacred Hemorrhoid Minstrel-
At home
At last
In the world of my own plucking.
-May 2014-October 2021
18: HOLLY'S SECRET DOOR
at long last
on 69K remastered Cerulean-Beam Diskette
Holly’s Secret Door
the lost film directed by Montalban Sigurnjak
rumored to be a hippie-dippie porno flick
turns out to be
a satisfyingly brutal Italian-style Western
our woman is Holly Colorado
an Annie Oakley-esque sharpshooter
whose entire family is killed by a rapacious gang led by a hulking, creepy Christian preacher-man with a hysterical televangelist's wig of jet black hair-more on that later
Holly's hiding in the treeline,
petrified as she's only ever shot deer and birds,
as Mom gets stripped and beaten by firelight,
Dad is told,
by our good Christian villain,
"Cut out your eyes of shame, sinner! For you have the covetousness of Lucifer!"
Dad is handed a big-ass knife.
A door bursts open to admit obliterating white light,
Four strangely-pitched gunshots
Dad and Mom each get two bullets to the head.
Holly only had four bullets left, it would seem.
Years pass,
our good Christian monster
is now a bald, bullet-headed 'mayor'
-a dictator, really-
of a prosperous, thoroughly corrupt boomtown
-haunted by that strange night
of four gunshots-
our Telly Savalas looking villain has traded his Jim Jones look for a Frontier Mussolini aesthetic, and he's got a private army of fashy, black leather rentboy mercenaries vibing all over his nuts, ready to commit all manner of atrocities in the name of His Baldness,
what we ultimately get
is a kind of inverse giallo
where we are rooting for the repeat killer
-Holly Colorado all grown up-
as Frontier Mussolini flails and froths and foams and fumes
as his boomtown
gets sniped all-too-shit
Holly's sure shot aim
tearing open old wounds and bitter rivalries
Episodic
sort of a dystopian Our Town
as every good citizen turns out to be a wife beater, a child molester, a rapist, a murderer, a genocidal invader, a white supremacist, a bootlicker, a quisling,
Holly’s learned her lesson from the past
so this time
Holly's brought enough ammunition for the whole family of fascism,
highlights include:
the pedo-pastor
who gets his hands shot off
before being ignited by a Molotov cocktail
the boomtown undertaker examining freshly killed mercenaries,
helpfully intoning,
"Looks like two shots to the head, each. Which makes this . . .Colorado-style shooting."
Snap zoom into Frontier Mussolini's glowering eyes.
Of course,
there's an uprising,
a half-dozen town whores, a Native American fugitive, a Black cowboy, and a quartet of hired gunslingers known as the Four Winds of Death
wage a raggedy insurgency,
which sparks off various sectarian hatreds,
all while Holly plays guerilla sniper,
striking and fading,
rinse and repeat
Frontier Mussolini gets shot numerous times in his thick torso, Peckinpah slow motion, raw liver squibs blasting off all over the place,
and then His Baldness's pampered wife throwing herself across his corpse in the town square,
presumably to preserve it from desecration,
but all she gets
for her trouble
is decapitation
by shovel.
It's all rather blunt and satisfying.
Repeated motif of a door opening
to admit a nuclear white light of death
every time Holly pulls the trigger
Deleted scene features Holly explaining to a stock whiskey priest how the killing begins inside her mind, and the shooting is merely a formality,
in the actual movie, she says little, is basically 'Annie Oakley-as-Grim-Reaper'
which I suppose is all-you-need.
Another deleted scene features Frontier Mussolini going berserk, beating the shit out of his loyal wife, and then breaking a bunch of shit inside his manor-a clear homage to Citizen Kane.
Yet another deleted scene features an alternate version of the killing of the pedo-pastor: he's strung up by the neck, shot repeatedly by Holly, writhing, gagging, lots of raw liver squibbing all over the camera.
Allegedly, there was even more footage of various atrocities, including what happened to Holly's two brothers and three sisters, but they all simply disappear from the movie as it currently exists. You get a couple of shots of fearful, young faces by firelight, and that's about it.
You got some podcast clown doing a commentary track. It’s fine. Basically, he's just telling you how cool the movie is as you watch it. Sure. Okay.
No interviews with cast or crew.
They all passed away awhile ago.
Yet the movie survives.
Thinks.
What if we spent all the money and research and development we devote to resurrecting obscure exploitation flicks to Discovering the Secret of Immortality?
Thinks.
Or would I prefer to be remembered by my works?
Thinks.
Yeah, I dunno.
The Cerulean-Beam Diskette tech's probably cheaper.
8 out of 10.
-in the end, Holly Colorado's face by the roaring firelight of the immolated Boomtown of Corruption,
eyes unblinking
as she beholds Frontier Mussolini's desecrated corpse strung up for all to see,
the stock whiskey priest
mostly absent from the final cut
offers blessings to those
"Who brought Righteous Fire to this Town of Iniquity!"
the town whores are line-dancing
the surviving gunslinger plays a fiddle
snap zoom into Holly’s placid, unblinking eyes,
freeze frame,
brief credits,
because this was one of those movies that had most of its credits at the beginning,
damn,
I didn't even talk about the terrific original score-
-October 2020-October 2021
0: FEALTY-CON
in our August Form
are united
Flesh and Divinity
none may oppose our Will and Works
CREAT0R comes shuffling,
eyes flitting all over,
birdly contempt
for every last thing he sees
nothing seems to hold his eyes
pouting mug too-fucking-much
the rubber-faced panto of disdain
assembled faithful
you clothe yourself
in image of our August Form
never forget that you are Merest Image
'tho
for some among you forget your position and purpose
denying doctrines
of Order
and Degree
the faithful eat it up
CREAT0R insists that such a face
-known by critics as 'the fuckface'-
along with great caterwauling and stamping of feet
shall bring fortune
even in the face of Tyrant Reason
helps to have a private army
helps to have mercenary lobbyist whore-men in the lizardly Republican party
and shady ties to oligarchs and dictators in Europe, Asia, South America,
you think these flicker spectacles pay for themselves?
and what of your own dim lives?
where would you be stumbling
sans
Our Light?!
here we are
this quicksilver moment
before the Tax Troubles and Accusations of Abuse
gathering of the fuckfaced faithful
and whatever were you all
before our Works and Will
gave you such structure
such purpose
such mythic scope
to your quotidian functions?
because
CREAT0R
like all deities
was a Gargantuan Lie
told by a Bloated Liar
if We Should Cease
then you would be duty-bound
to join us
in Ceasing
because
CREAT0R
like all gods
must abscond
but you are Merest Image
backdrop
to Our Form, Glory, Will, and Works
for you all
grand gestures are perfectly beyond your ability
and so we take the role of a Christ in your lowly stead
because
CREAT0R
must haul divine ass
to non-extradition climes
give the journalist and the federal agent the slip
I mean
shit
everything
happens
over video chat
now
Love on those Internets
fuckfaced faithful
your money
like your information
just wants to be free
and so our August Form
takes to the electronic ether
we shall deny Caesar his due
your Belief empowers Our Form
your Merest Image still serves
and Our Love blesses you all
at-a-distance
and our Will and Works
shall endure
comes the cascade of streaming documentaries, and podcasts
chronicling abuse, fraud, megalomania, sexual servitude,
CREAT0R still at large
-May 2019-October 2021
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
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
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
