seventeen

Seventeen

17.1

Punchy is writing a love letter to Carrie Ann Moss. He is telling her how awesome she was as trinity in the matrix movies. Punchy hopes that she will send him an autographed picture that he can masturbate to at night before he goes to sleep. Punchy loves Carrie Ann Moss. Punchy loves trinity. Punchy has plans to inject realness into the world. He wants to bring alive the contradictions of life. He knows in his heart of hearts that life is more than love and hate. Punchy hates Carrie Ann Moss because she is not a real person to him, she is a fictional character is a science fiction movie. He longs to make her a real person. He wonders who is kissing her. He wonders who is making love to her. Punchy wants to make love to Trinity. He is convinced that Trinity would be real good in bed. Punchy wants to kill Carrie Ann Moss because he knows that she can never be Trinity for him. He knows that his image of Trinity is not real and therefore he is not real.

17.2

Bonnie is fascinated with the spectacle. She wants to be entertained. She wants to see your personal crisis displayed before the silent majority on the television screen. Bonnie is an addict, she is a junky. She is insatiable and wants more and more. Her needs are unsuitable. The television has become more real than the real it has replaced. This fantasy world is more than real. I thought I would repeat this for greater emphasis. Thus, the unreal becomes the real in Bonnie’s mind. The mass emerges out of her television screen. Electrodes and diodes, they speak to her in language she can understand, in brief 30 second intervals. “Have you guessed me yet? I’m the slime oozing out of your tv set.”

17.3

We project ourselves into fantasy worlds (youtube). Private lives become the fodder of the internet. The old divisions between public and private have disappeared. The internet and videogames have created a surplus army of entertainment consumers. Entertainment has become the central commodity of this current age. Others have suggested that information was the central commodity, but entertainment has replaced information. People do not want to be informed or educated they want to be entertained. The commodity that dominates in the postmodern world is entertainment. People no longer operate in the real world they operate in the virtual world. People no longer produce things they only consume things. We have become a population of parasites living off a dead carcass. Your value is now signified by your score on a video game or the number of friends you have on facebook.

17.4

My intention was not to eat you only to bat you around a little bit. To toy with your feelings and emotions was my desire. I can always expect you to be a contrarian-to see a different view from others. Ivy, you are toy to me, a play thing that I use to entertain me and amuse me.  You are a little bug caught between my paws. I have made you a spectacle for the whole world to see. Ivy, you are a beautiful machine. Your fucking mechanism is so pure and so functional. You make me feel like everything in this world works together to create harmony. But, I know that is not true. I know that life is full of hardship and conflict. Sometimes I forget you are a machine. Sometimes I think you are a profit that has a message for the world. I think sometimes that you were sent here by an alien race to save us from ourselves. But, no one can save us, we have already destroyed ourselves.

17.5

I asked her about some sublimatic fun. She was a goth that was in college, worried about her fingernail polish and other shit like that. She was writing a book about death. In fact, she was infatuated with the topic of death. She studied death, read about death, she visited morgues and cemeteries all the time. She considered death to be the thing that brings balance into the world. She said that death brings harmony. When things get all fucked up and all out of whack, death comes along and straightens things out. It serves a purpose in society, sort of a balancing agent. We naively think of death as being bad, when in actuality death is good. It removes us from the realm of pain and suffering. It sends us back to the realm of the spirit. It is like a free ticket out of lost town. We get on the bus and away we go to another place where things are more clearer. We get joined back with the big universal spirit and we become a part of this big thing, something that is beyond us. We all long to be a part of something that is bigger than ourselves. I think this is just our spirit longing to be rejoined with the big spirit. She is wearing stripy tights and dark delights. Her love is always gift wrapped and ready for a party. She makes me feel her darkness, a darkness that is deep inside of her. I let my fingers fly over her, like little birds fluttering. I am pecking at her with my beak. She wants to speak, but I have silenced her with a ball gag. I step over her frozen heart and work life and fire into her muscle. I watch it pumping in and out with new life. This is the subjective something that overwhelms our lives. At least we are overwhelmed by our interpretations for a moment. Our movements become a subjective dance. I have given her a vibration that can reach her numbness. I am diverting her attention from the razor blade. When I am done she is in metamorphosis, changing into the nothing. Her will to become the nothing is what makes her perverse. I love her perversity. She is a conquest in the superficial. I participate in her emotional explosions. We are working in Sodom. I am making the unwatchable and she is selling tickets. We spend most days sitting around and talking. We never have any customers. I remember when there used to tourists. It would be nice to have tourists again. Tourists don't care about fascism or fulfilling dreams. They just want to live for the moment, to be entertained, to escape for a little while. Bonnie is good at helping me escape. She unzips me and pulls me out. She strokes me ever so gently. I laugh and tell her that it won't break. She says you would be surprised what I can do with this thing and then she shows me. I was surprised.

17.6

I was all over her. Just like all the others before her. I'm tearing down the walls of my jail cell. The warden is swimming in deep waters. I'm mixing voodoo with Betty rooter choker checker  doing the twist and selling plastic dimes to the honkies. I've been in a car before. Making bangers and harsh and stuffing them with freddie mercury hohos and twinkies. I'm gonna need a lawyer, guns,and money before I can get out of this. I'm saying my prayers and crossing my fingers to the sweet baby jesus cause my momma didn't make no bugger with mosquito spray id bracelets. I'm building that new invention, the one with flashing lights and nuclear capabilities. We are going to roll this mother fucker along. I am talking to my cock. We are talking about politics. For some reason, my cock is very interested in politics. My cock will go on and on about what the latest politician is trying to do to the country. Basically, my cock thinks all politicians are dicks. I guess it is that it takes one to know one scenario. My cock thinks that everyone should be involved in politics, not just dicks. My dick thinks that serving in a political office should be mandatory for everyone just like jury duty. People should have to serve a year or two as the mayor, or as a city council person, or as a state senator or in congress. There would be no need to have elections and there would be no need for people to campaign. This would just be part of your community service for being a member of society. My cock always has big ideas.

17.7

An army of orange aliens are surrounding me. They are bigger than I remember them. It is like they have taken steroids and pumped lots of iron. I'm running from the sisterhood. They want my balls to sell the echo maker. I'm speaking to an elf and he is making me a weapon. He is filling it with dreams and albino skin amulets. Time is rushing by me and I am collecting all the lost seconds. All those moments that got away from you. I know that you have lost so many and now they are so precious to you. They are more precious than all those ghosts, even the ones that talk to you. I'm talking to you god damn it, listen to me. We take only what we need. There is just enough time to make you properly bleed.

17.8

She walks in carrying a bag of bullets. I'm throwing playing cards against the wall. The cards have naked ladies on them from the 1950s. It is just another fuzzy apparition with sunglasses telling me about the new constitution. My heart is so full of love. Redirect the traffic so it goes by my hotel room. Circle the wagons and flag down that helicopter. Tell them the general is staying here.  Tell them the general is ready to go. Blow your nose and shake all those hands, it is time to go. I'm drawing a mandala on the bathroom floor. I'm rising up the devil again. The devil looks like Elvis with a don ho tan. We are taking more than we need. There are only so many souls to steal. I wonder when god will discover our dirty deeds. I'm another inspector for the government. I'm inspecting the fish and checking the beef. My hands are dirty from burying all those dead bodies, the ones that the general needs. I am becoming a monster. A green headed monster. I got my hand up Jesus' ass and I'm making him talk just like a puppet. 

17.9

I can’t remember when the voices started. Back then I thought I was demon possessed. I saw her at the graveyard. She followed me home from the graveyard. I would sit up at night and talk to her. Sometimes I think she is still here, but I ignore her now. When she starts to speak, I just shut her up. She says that we can’t stop the train. She chokes on the sun. When the daylight comes she is gone. The rockets fly out of my head. They are heat seekers. They seek for you. I don’t know how to get rid of you. This dream never ends. Time seems to stand still when you spin around. Everything is splitting at the seams. I don’t think my heart can hold it all. Sometimes it is too much. Sometimes I wish this world was real. Then there would be ecstasy. She says that she will send me a postcard in the mail. I’m holding my breath and turning blue. She is following Buck Owens on tour. She is wearing her spurs and fringe vest. I stole her cowboy hat and set it on fire. She left this dirty old town for new horizons and a love that is dusty and country. I kissed her goodbye at the bomb factory that was shut down. It has been closed for thirty years are more, I can’t quite remember. My daddy used to make those bombs that they dropped on Dresden. No more bombs in this dirty old town. Now the ghosts won’t come around. I kissed her by the killing wall with my hand and my heart and a brain.

17.10

You promote the narrative myth and never sought for emancipation. You drag humanity along behind you. I ask you, “What is reality?” over and over again. We never can quite figure out the correct answer to the question. Once again, an answer eludes us like an endangered species. We withdraw from the “real” because the “real” is an illusion. We reject the nostalgia of the past. We have buried the past in the backyard and we have moved on with clean hearts. The dead should be left to rest and the living prospers. We are attempting to present to you the un-presentable. Welcome to our theater of the absurd. Sit down and make yourself comfortable. Would you like some candy or maybe a soda? We are here to entertain you and to meet your basic needs. Maybe you will find the spectacle exhilarating. Maybe you will be inspired and leave here a changed and new person? We are magicians working with the magic of possibility. You will discover that the show produces solace and pleasure. Reality is complex and it refuses to be simplified. This is the illusion we are selling at the theater of the absurd.

17.11

We live the real through the mediated lens of a virtual world. We are terrorized by over-information. This world we live in is not a totality. There are many webs that connect us to each other, but these webs do not make a coherent whole. Everything has been broken into a million pieces. The stories you once told us to not reach an easy conclusion. There are too many gaps in the story line. There are too many contradictions to make any real sense of anything. This rejection of what we once thought was real shows that our past perceptions were frauds. We know understand that what we once thought were real is not real at all. We used to play upon that pile of rocks. Do you remember? Remember that huge pile of rocks that used to be by the old abandoned construction site? Remember the man that wanted to build some big fancy hotel in the middle of our little jungle? He was in all the papers back then. First, everyone was praising him for bringing progress to our under-developed world. He was going to transform our crime infested streets. Then, he was in the papers because he didn’t have enough money to finish the project. Everyone ridiculed him as a fool. He became an example of how the mighty fall. Well, any ways that pile of rocks we used to play on is gone. Everything is gone, in fact. Someone else tore everything down and built a big fancy hotel there. I work there now as a bell hop. I think about the fun we had playing on those rocks every day at work. It sort of makes my day of drudgery go by a little faster.

17.12

There is no touching, no trespassing in your temple. You the prophet can only touch the relic and the cult object. We are set apart by armed guards. They stand ready to shoot us if we cross over into the sacred. We are forbidden to reach into your anima and yet, you can touch us, the impure with impunity. You rape us and abuse us. You burn us at your stakes of justice. This is how we know there is no justice. Your halo cannot be disrupted. Who are we, as mere mortals to venture into the realm of the divine? We disentangle ourselves from your diverse pressures and your unwanted perversions. You are the king of art. You stand alone upon your hill. We all worship you from afar. Our ways of seeing are not your ways. You want to explain to us the world. You want to bring in all the loose ends together into one explanatory narrative. You think progress has a purpose, a divine manifestation. The slate has been cleaned for a new romanticism and the celebrations of the prophetic word. We have seen the weakness of your words, how you have stumbled drunken and confused. We knew that our king is just a man and not a god. We are floating in a ship on the Amazon River. The ship’s crew is performing the opera, The Barber of Seville. We eat roasted piranha as we watch the performance. Dr. Bartolo is being played by the ship’s captain. Figaro is played by the coxswain. The coxswain looks like how I imagine Queequeg must have looked. He had this exotic and barbaric look to him that makes him seem more earthly and alive than all the others. Count Almaviva was played by the bowhook. The buoyancy of the boat is a trick of displacement. We clapped as best we could as we were being attacked by flying arrows coming from the hidden cover of the jungle.  Queequeg manned the 50 caliber machinegun and sent flesh piercing hot metal into the bushes and trees along the river’s bank. Queequeg’s real name is “Three Planks.” He said that his father gave him that name when he was a small boy. We all watch as the steam boat moves across the mountain. The truth is found in the imprint of our eyes and not in the visions of your madness.

17.13

Is this the result of your amnesia and delusions of grandeur? Are these the knives you have stolen from the kitchen? Why only knives, why not the forks and the spoons? Is this some kind of restoration of the domesticated life? I have bandaged your wounds and I think you are no longer bleeding. These attacks of yours seem to be increasing in volume and viciousness. If this were all that could be said about you it would not be worth the trouble of talking. I might just as well stop right here and join the formidable chorus of those who lament the loss of your quality and proclaim your decline. While the recent media hype about you has propelled you into the limelight, no knows or they choose to ignore and obscure your long and complex history. They don’t recognize that you are a slow and emerging transformation. You have altered the context of our interpretations. Today is Valentine’s Day and you treat us like we are children in your first grade class. You give us candy and Valentine’s Day cards.  Many times you have been accused of being a fraud perpetrated on a gullible public. The blood on your wrists seemed vaguely familiar. You built your reputation and we gobbled you up faster than a panic. We are witnesses to the frenzied brushwork of your life. I think “frenzy” is a good word to describe you. That, which once seemed so vital, is now spinning its wheels and speaking in tongues. You are collecting more evidence of the lost Mayan culture. You say it is nice because there is no wind. I am reading a fossilized book that was written about you. It is about your silver period when you thought of yourself as a volcano that spits out silver nuggets. You are wondering about the workings of a brick.  It is important you to understand how the brick works. You want to understand its purpose in the world. We are a happy collusion of megalomaniacs. You show me the door handle. You could have been a songwriter, instead you became an actress. You say you are doing horrible because you are drinking. It is one in the morning and you are telling me you are a loser. You are painting a picture with a cop in it. You say he represents freedom. I am reading your status update on facebook. No, not that one, but the retarded one. You know how to spell and you know proper grammar. You want to teach me how to ice fish. I imagine you inspecting your snatch before you go fishing.

17.14

I am embracing the unpredictable. This is the force of a dichotomy. I had to hunt for you for a while. I am showing you an endless stream of crackling. I am building a bigger idiot. When the curtain goes up, the first thing you see is a dead body and we are reminded of the passion that is humanity. I am breathing you into life as best as I can as I run toward the machinegun nest throwing a grenade. We all get tricked sometime or other. I’m listening to you tell me about my serendipity. I love how that word rolls of your tongue. You are thinking of oblivion and using a dowsing rod to unlock the critical moment. I am preventing you from coming into focus. I have positioned you as relational. The maze that you are became ever more impenetrable. Punchy said that you are like a glass curtain wall. Up close you are more than what you appear far away. He says that you revive the Philistine prejudices, that you beat the baby seal when no one is looking, and that you lament the death of god. I know that somewhere Swampy Pete is laughing at you. He would say that it is your will that you should focus on. You claim that you were never monolithic, that you were only filled with the euphoria of futurism and that we shouldn’t judge you so harshly. But, Punchy believes that he is the judge and that he should follow after is calling. He doesn’t want to be accused of not making a profit. Punchy has a utopian fervor which ultimately makes him veer back into mythology. Don’t you think Punchy looks stunning in his high heels?

17.15

I first saw you on the assembly line. You had those damn pink curlers in your hair and then again on the bus. We rode together into the downtown. We stopped at a bar next to the bus station. I think the place was called “Pinky’s.” Back then you thought you were a blues singer. I remember you used to sing in the band “Pretty Little Things.” You broke your hand when you fell off the bus. I took you to the emergency room and they put your arm in a cast. I fed you roast beef sandwiches for a week. We would stay up all night and watch the sun come up. You were always amazed that I wanted to talk to you. We made our world in your backseat smoking a joint. We were pretending to be imaginary animals. It was the agony of movement that united us and the several slab blocks of Saint Louis. We were dynamited and the collapse was displayed on the evening news. You were a modern machine for the living and I used you to plow the garden, to plant the unlivable into the fields of the obsolete. These are the sins committed in your name. I told myself that you were only a regional tradition, something that I would soon get over. It was you who taught me to look two ways simultaneously. It was you who pulled me out of the tradition of slow moving codes. I owe you a debt that I can never repay. I cried for hours when I heard that you died.