Club 27 TIMES 2

story written in March 2021 while visiting St. George UTAH

“The future isn’t what it used to be” �" Yogi Berra

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  I was groggy, still waking up… it’s a lifelong process.  “He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said, alerting me to the fact I was existing on occupied territories.  I was asked once and more than once what dreams I had and what I wanted to be.  A ninja and then a video game developer.  Then I realized, at the age of 13, I’d have to actually get a job.  Then I had an existential crisis.  Then I realized, at the age of 26, I didn’t have to do s**t… and I felt much better.  Then I realized, and this I don’t recall my age, that all paths end at the same place and depression was my lot forever then.

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  I am in the shower.  The water is felt on my skin.  Felt on skin.  I move… do I?  I… see my hand… a hand… a hand with an arm connected comes into view.  I am a viewing experience.  A feeling experience.  Why do I feel in control?  Because the image first shows itself to my mind before my eyes?  Because I feel the sensations of the movement?  This is control?  I don’t even know whose body this is.  I watch these eyes as these eyes watch this arm lift up and watch the water wash down it… as in control of the water as the body and the universe.  And all this I saw in the brain.  These ever spavining rags.  The brain was never our ally, never on our side, never optimized for our happiness… working for the enemy, the universe, the maltheism.  Survival and replication, breeding misery and torture and maximizing the chances of suffering by making sure there are as many of us existing as possible to feel as much pain as possible in as many ways as possible.  So many of us feared having no purpose, but this maltheist deity did give us purpose… suffer as much as possible, that’s what we existed for.  That was the mission god gave us.  So... rejoice yee that doubted and feared for nihilism, you now know what you must do as servant of a higher consciousness.

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  Temzik tick crawled up my arm and sunk its masticating mandibles in.  The tick, it was usually the case, that it would pump you full of anti-itching kiniases.  It would do this so that you wouldn’t feel the bite and flick it through the air.  If you still saw the tick, you would still flick it.  This was a smarter tick, much smarter.  It pumped you full of opium, so that even if you spotted it, you wouldn’t dare smash it to bits, watching the dopamine tears drip down the drain… unless you were a servant of maltheism and mind.  “Your” mind clamping down on dopamine release ‘till you give in to its demands… this Temzik tick more your ally than the thing that pumps and works within your boney prison, prison to your conscious experience, experience to arbitrary aches, mana from maltheist gods, feast upon their negligent nectar.

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  The foot appeared in the mind and the mind showed the foot stepping out of the shower.  Sensations of shower showered off onto absorbing towels and stepping into raiment not for the sartorially squeamish.  Eccentric man they called this creature.  You don’t really see who you are because you see all the options of the mind as equally open possibilities, but those around you are shown only the single path �" dictated by reality - to determine who one really is.  But why should I be me when I don’t even know what it means to me to be me, a borrowed body that isn’t mine with a mind that neither is mine.

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  The bathroom door has a letter on it: R.  There were numbers under it: 26.1.8

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  “My” body, mind, and consciousness stepped through.  There were creatures there I experienced as jamais vu, all new.  We sat on the couch, hoping this motherly manifestation and her spawnling wouldn’t press into our world.  Most were servants of maltheism.  Everyone is so excited to perform bad behavior for a good cause.  The body sat there waiting for the veins to deliver to the mind the medicine.  Wring-wring went the phone.  The body plucked up the hammer waiting for us at the end of the hall, a tool perfect for use against this child-infused pinata.  And we smashed, smash, cracked, crack, the skull and face open of this little being.  Putting to sleep his suffering and future crises, great expectations and expectorations mollified by the cudgel, the ears didn’t even hear the boy cry… maybe he was more aware �" children frequently are �" of my benefit than his mother.  For she let out a honey-curdling creamy scream; it came out mellifluous, beautiful music mid-prandially provided by this atrabilious angel, lugubrious salubrious serenity.  She was wired wrong, what could I do?  I was but no engineer to rewire god’s mistake… no… god made no mistakes, he wired us like this on purpose.  I would have to finish my meal first.  Kandinsky’s synesthesia was in me… or in this mind I borrowed, acting as medium �" I wanted no silver lining to go to waste, everything was but a graham cracker hut with icing for paint, Hansel and Gretel, and so I, or my borrowed arm, reached for the candy within the pinata, pulling out what one would suspect to be awful offal, but awfully appetizing as it turns out, thanks to my new puppetmaster.  Chunks like Turtle Chex Mix, sweet ‘n salty on the tongue and teeth.  I was welcomed to tantric zen.  No smile, no laughter, no sound fell from my puppet strings.  Zen flow in place of the usual boiling steam’s relief of phallic petresence.

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  Who was I to thank if not god?  We would have to thank each other and one another.  I put them both into the most restful and anodyne sleep they would ever not-experience, free from experience.  For what is the etymology of “experience”?  The latin “try”.  And trying is failing.  The end-goal of every success or failure is the pay-off vacation from our vocation of misery.  Retirement.  I grant them early retirement.  Sometimes it’s darkest before the dawn, and thus it is that the screams were the loudest right before they halted forever.  It sometimes seems like people are willing to suffer forever if maltheism enabled them to do so… I don’t understand their protestant work ethic.

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  It was then that the lot of us walked into the lobby of the hotel.  A roscoe was pulled out at first.  The legs walked as down a tranquil labyrinth, zen on the mind.  No one ever just thought to hand out gifts.  But there I was, my legs leading me down halls as bodies collapsed into the comfiest beds they would ever not-experience.  No one likes to admit how lazy they are, but I could look beyond the mask and see the smile on the other side of their lying countenances.  “Thank you,” I felt from each human creature as the warm honey-blood flowered from them and onto the floor, crystalizing as crème brulee.  And inside me a wamth kept building too, a non-zero sum.  No diminishing returns.

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  The hand dropped the gun, it didn’t need it, we realized.  As the legs continued trundling and turning corners, the body could shoot spikes of blood from within us, piercing into them from pointed fingers, making us blood brothers.  Orgasmic conquest.  Choices were being made, but did that make choices free?  Because things appeared to me in both mind and vision, was it made my decision?  I was in a vessel named X, but was that me?  Who were these people I was so eager to help?  Who of them ever met us on our wavelength and how fewer of them remained on it, playing the same melody from their mettle?

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  Consciousness, perhaps, like a bullet in the chamber.  The subconscious just a magazine for ascending bullets to blast from into the world and ether.  And then it occurred to the mind that I was attached to to look closely at their faces as they fell.  Unlike the mother’s lamentations, there seemed a tabula rasa upon their faces, no exclamations.  They seemed to stare into the hiding abyss where this man’s soul should reside.  We began making eye contact.  Many had eyes like a lighted glass door at night, the glare and refraction causing you to squint to search in sight for what fright lurks on the other side, if one dares do.  This march of mine began feeling like one long march towards the gas chamber.  Healthful hemlock to Socrates, a c**k to Asclepius owed.  His executors giving him the night off, eternal night, carrying his load until fate pushed them off the clock as well.

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  It was time for me to clock off my voluntary charity.  The eyes pointed towards a door with an E on it.  Under the E were three more numbers: 13.1.8

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  The body walked outside, into open air, to witness mass lay-offs commencing.  Maybe god was ready to offer reprieve.  Maybe god was ready to atone for his sins.  Ice-nine to this asinine design.  Time for a smoke break at least, we were being smoked to tobacco ash.  Creatures came flying in like langoliers, flicking us like god’s cigarette dust to the concrete where we crisped apart.  None of us were adults, we were just children with vaster experience being children.  Take pity, please, on your loyal niggerman, Cthulu.  We spread your message Marduk, to f**k us up.  Satico Satellite, god of technology, we took your vision to its utter max with an internet and wonderous web filled to the brim with discontent, spreading as much discomfiture as could be uploaded into the ethernet.  WE DID WHAT YOU ASKED OF US!  The delight of heaven is to look down into hell and witness the suffering of sinners, but with no heaven, we can merely hope that hell burns hotter on the other side, while claiming it burns hottest under us.

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  Vin-dit my god.  Grant me not plot armor now.  Thank you for letting me enjoy my strings, finally, finally.  They can not be snipped without me collapsing to the ground with the others.  No puppet walks free from his puppet master, so let me free from your fingers, so that I may fall and slumber without guilt with my brethren.  There they come to snip our strings, the uncountable number of strings attached to me and “my” parts and threaded through every molecule in the universe.  I see them!  Cascading!  Coruscating!  The micro-world made macro to envelop us.  Titanous seraphim dressed as mantis shrimp and centipedes and flying tarantulas and scorpion flies, masticating this machine of malevolent purpose.  There I see them come to save us from ourselves.  We are all frozen here in place, the strings pulled tightest tight, giving no give for optional movement.  Indolent cogs, the humans the innocent the mothers fathers serial murderers rapists and pedophiles.  You see us not move, time is eating us away, our movements being measured no more, relieving us from our own pain.  “Death invented time so it could grow the things it killed.”  The nightmare was that it hadn’t happened sooner; the tragedy was that they hadn’t stopped growing.  Last words of a bokononist for this 54 year-old world.

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  As it all fell apart, the eyes showed me a skyscraper standing alone and upon it was the letter F (or maybe it was a damaged A) and under it were 11 and 9.

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  And then as god’s gesticulating pantomiming play was wrapping up and the actors all took a bow, katabasis in kurnugia, Ereshkigal directing under the stage, a wandering dog came delivered to me.  And he put a show of his pitifulness and he looked up at these eyes with human eyes and it was then that the brain had known that it had seen the finest crisis actor among Sandy Hook’s casting.  Though perhaps too maudlin and over-played of hand and yet it worked.  It wasn’t sure to end this godful creature.  It was its test, it knew.  The strings, manipulated on by everything and manipulating everything, directed the body to reach for a granite chunk, a piece that fell from the lonesome sole scraper, and everything and the brain worked in accord to strike this creature down, because we didn’t want to.  Sprout of evil, seed of guilt.  Prelapsarian days left behind and all that’s left to do is unwind.

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  The skyscraper had one door of entrance accessible to it and on this door was an L or an I, which we could not decide upon, and under it I saw two numbers again, these being 2 & 15.

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  An empty room as it turns out.  Discarded by god’s imbuement.  No books to read, no video games to play, no movies to watch.  Just serenity in boredom.  No need to move, so the body I resided within had a seat and myself as passenger consciousness with it.  They had always told us that if we didn't work that the machine would fall apart but what was the purpose of the machine? Perfection attained when no actions more needed.  As within Toy Story or George Berkeley... when god was no longer looking would one be free to move again?  Ever try deep thinking?  You expect one day to hit rock bottom, that's the fear, but the truth is much worse, for as you strike with your shovel all of a sudden the ground gives way and you start falling, as above so below, just so much empty space.  Finally the ouroboros eats its tail: those that are most awake, they put to sleep forever.