Issue Five
I WALKED THROUGH THE FOREST TO THE PLACE WHERE THEY KEPT THE FIRE THAT KEEPS ME ALIVE
KEEPING THE FIRE KEEPING ME ALIVE AND LIVING IN PAIN AND PLEASURE SHOW ME THE FIRE
HOLDING IT IN MY HANDS LETTING IT BURN ME LETTING IT WARM ME AND KEEP ME ALIVE
SHOW ME THE FLAME THAT BURNS IN MY HEART IN MY MIND FOR THE TIME TO PASS
SLOWLY MOVING I EXPERIENCE EVERYTHING MAYBE NOT BUT SO MUCH MORE THAN THEY
WALKING THROUGH THE RAIN AS THE WATER WAKES ME WETS ME MAKES ME COLD
I FEEL ALIVE READY TO DIE AS THE RAIN POURS OVER MY FACE INTO MY CLOTHES SOAKING
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GOD
God never helped me.
Wondering in life what I shall be,
choosing for myself what is right
and wrong.
Driving without a clue is walking
on three legs.
her eyes are the colour of the sky on a rainy day
her hair black ebony
her skin white as snow
her lips like roses
i nicknamed her snow white
Drifting through faery tales like sand through an hour glass. The beauty of a single grain of sand.
Running along a beach with a gun in my hand, a body decorated with elaborate ornaments jewelry
clothing colour swirling into strangeness, blackness, darkness, dreamness.
verbing words is fun; adjectiving them is better; but nouning remains the best.
Bouncing through my life, my ball on my biorhythm. Nine is the number of your fate.
DUST
I dont' want to think now
I will just lie in my 3:00 a.m. coma
And
Let the 976-number's and the Flobee commercial's numb me
And
Let the cold stale air suffocate me
And
Let the vast blankness engulf me
Tonight I will not think about Bill Clinton's $200.00 haircut
Or about how imperfect the world and I are
Or about how much fun Drinking Pepsi is
I will not think tonight
I will just lie in my 3:00 a.m. coma
- Jake Lavin
HYPERDRIVE
Concentrated doses of orally ingested THC allow one to not only
separate all units of sensory stimulation into particles but to see
through the spaces between the particles. The 'spaces between' are where
the user's subjective interpretation of time and memory
(collective/archetypal as well as individual/nostalgic) color and define
the user's relationship to the immediate environment. Such responses
could be due to the chemical stimulation of neural clusters left long
dormant through evolutionary adaptation - this, however, is only
speculation.
At very high dosages, the immediate environment contracts to the
area of the user's physical body. Each specific nerve ending acts
independently of all others and the user will involuntarily formulate
visual or theoretical metaphors as navigational guidelines through a
space/time sector where laws of causality have been invalidated. There
are situations where these efforts fail because the parameters of sensory
dislocation change at too fast a rate for even subliminal comprehension.
Unlike most hallucinogenics, which offer internal consistency
within the altered-consciousness paradigm in an analog-continuum format,
high doses of THC render all sensory input (as well as internal thought
formulations) into a digital matrix where each particle of energy is
autonomous. It seems that I have misjudged the digital/machinelike
aspects of THC in relation to amphetamines - the amphetamine rush is
mainly indicated in the lack of affect in the subjective/'emotional' area
whereas the THC dosage affects the neurons responsible for perception and
cognition, thus altering the user's capacity to formulate a consistent
model of a framework of physical/spatial/temporal axioms.
If, as the structuralists maintain, individual world-views are
culturally (i.e., linguistically) constructed, the phenomenon of aphasia
demonstrates the ease with which cultural parameters can be stretched,
mutilated, or discarded at will. As in the dreams of schizophrenics,
spaces between objects are never closed and are accessible by moving
energy particles lacking in mass, possibly allowing the particle to
travel at speeds that would cut corners in time. To move through
hyperspace requires placement at 45 degree angles to every point in the
three-dimensional universe - however, if the 3D universe can be
actualized as a flat grid defined by autonomous points of energy, this
permits the instantaneous linkage of any two points in infinity.
COLD LIFE
Heat is created by friction between objects. If this friction is
impossible due to eternal separation of all components, no energy is
expended in conversion to heat and real-time stasis becomes the dominant
environmental factor. In this state, not only entropy but the
predetermined cyclic nature of real-time experience can be invalidated.
The androgyne was once a child who lived in a world of dreams.
Every tree and hill and garden was an exotic foreign land populated by
people who were not there but would speak to the child just the same.
This child cried often, but never more so than the day he realized that
from then on he would see objects with the eyes of others. The child
displayed frailty without gentleness, hypersensitivity without empathy,
and aloofness without special gifts.
ANIMAL LANGUAGE
When spiders are given doses of lysergic acid they spin
geometrically patterned webs. When given doses of mescaline, they spin
webs that are chaotic and lack any discernible patterns. Mescaline is a
natural amphetamine. Snakes and spiders are feared for different
reasons, reasons that reflect upon the personality of the afflicted.
Those who fear snakes are hypersensitive to unconscious biological
rhythms. Spiders are industrial organisms and deliver an unpleasant
shock of recognition, much like encountering a prematurely aged double
prone to unpredictable acts of violence.
At a young age, a child is placed in a completely controlled
environment in which the only sensory stimulation consists of
continually-showing films projected on a concrete wall in a room without
natural light by an old man who has designated himself the child's
master. The films play on endlessly without comment or explanation from
the old man, who believes that the films themselves will be self-revealing
in their effect on the child's psyche and learning.
Unfortunately, the man becomes gradually unfocused in his thoughts, which
gradually turn exclusively toward self-gratification. Aware of the power
of the films, he attempts to construct them in a way that will alter the
child's behavior in a manner beneficial to himself. This does not work,
however, because the man is too out-of-touch with his own emotions to
create a coherent thematic principle that would link the individual films
together, and the disjointed nature of his cinematic indoctrination
produces results that he could never have foreseen.
If the dosage of THC is high enough, the visual effect is analogous
to the 'compound eyes' of insects, except that each section of the visual
field is a window onto something else.
ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES
After 72 sleepless hours I find my way back to my own space bubble,
and I'm transported to a far future time, when mechanically-wired
superhumans 'live' in sparsely-populated geometric white-light deserts
and emotionally-tangled heterosex is a distant memory, as these
machine-creatures are equipped with plugs and sockets only, free from
evolutionary slavery and emotionless in any case. The far-future vision
recedes, and I am left with a crystalline object, a still-life from
another world. A world perhaps inaccessible, but one to dream of, while
we still have the capacity to dream.
- Dave Quaglia: The Machine Queen
San Francisco, CA
RELEASE
Three candles burned on the circular oak table shedding the only
light in this dark place of the mind. Around the table day three
finely crafted oak chairs, plain yet exact in their craftmanship. At the
centre of the table sat a pile of dark rich soil. Three glasses of
wine placed in a perfect triangle forming a six-pointed star with the
candles sat to the right of each chair. The air filled with the electricity
of the storm yet to come.
Slowly a deep violet light began to form in the air above the
first chair. As the light brightened, a thin sickly grey smoke drifted
upwards from its source. Twisiting and cajolling, it sought to form a
face in the fog it created. In little time the smoke congealed into the
insubstantial form of a body. It smiled.
The flames brightened as the first began to spiral and flow upwards
into a tornado the air was creating directly above the table. Slowly it
began to move in circles growing in size until the tornado was moving
above the flames. And as it did so, passing over each candle in succession,
the flame would explode into the tornado, increasing its
fury tenfold. Finally on the third pass of the third candle the tornado of
fire, earth and air moved to the second chair and formed over it a
ball containing its storm.
Finally in the third chair a darkness began to form in the shadow of human
form. From its neck hung a simple necklace on which contained
a small single white light almost drowned out by the candlelight of the
table. As it formed the form on the first chair shuttered in fear and
anticipation.
"You have summoned me out of the deepest recesses of your mind, why?"
"I ask of your gift."
"Many would call it a curse."
"Many are fools. I have suffered enough."
"Few have ever gotten what they expected from me."
"I expect nothing but repreive."
"I have not met one such as you in some time."
"It has taken me years to come to this place."
"And so it has. Your wish shall be granted. My gift is yours."
"I thank you."
The two forms took a glass each, clicked them together and drank
to the resolution. Time began to slow as the two forms dissolved into the
darkness. The ball of earth, wind and fire now took on the form of the
first, drank the wine and collapsed upon itself. The room faded into darkness
as the flames dissolved.
# # #
Somewhere in a plain white room a man held a woman's hand. In the last
week she had shown the first signs of brain activity in fifteen years.
Now as he looked on in hope, her face relaxed into a smile. The smile
disappeared as the rhythmic beeps of her heart became a solid tone.
The man lowered his head and cried, then whispered one word: happiness.
BABY ICE DOG
Desert hyperreality logic - the wail of the muezzin, puzzling out
monolithic stone structures, designing crude astronomical and musical
instruments to quantify and communicate, designing the self-replicating
virus of language to call the subconscious darkness of the amniotic jungles
into the mathematical realm of the desert. The polar deserts where the
virus has been permanently disconnected from the life-force, thus a cold
race, casting off anachronisms like the biorhythm and the adjustable retina
- unneccessary, with 24-hour periods of light, and of darkness. Machine-like
sexuality, not the warm curves of analog affinity but the cold
contours of digital frigidity. Vapor trails provide simple blueprints of
aerial architecture - though the desert dwellers may have their imperfect
cellular interiors violated and impregnated with radioactivity, nothing
will stain their impermeable skins.
I carry this heart of radioactive coldness everywhere I go. Did you ever dream
that time suddenly froze as you turned your head, suspending all movement?
(Schizophrenics, who know more than others, dream in still pictures - the spaces
between objects will never be filled. The simple act of dreaming destroys even
the laws of gravity and makes the separateness of things eternal). Anyone who works
at a higher level of awareness sense this, and avoids me.
THE SUBHUMAN
Those who would receive the seed for purposes of reproducng
the species are given extrasensory powers to identify those who
are genetically unsuitable due to defective phenotypes. I am one
of those and am marked by a sign that is as obvious as it is invisible.
Self-administration of pharmaceuticals is advisable only to those
with machine-like nervous systems that are seemingly impervious to
punishment, so those who are unmarked by the defective phenotype
will willingly destroy themselves, and they only learn by example.
In days past, those who would destroy the defective phenotype
would build camps for suspected subhumans and gas them, perform
medical experiments on them to discover the mystery of their viral
efficiency, work them to death building canals, have them drugged,
lobotomized, electrocuted, garrotted, burned, fed to animals.
Unfortunately for them and their innocent victims, they were working
on a primitive level of technology, which is to the science of the
future what the papyrus scroll was to the sentient computers of today.
Often being the participant in a diaspora was enough to
identify the 'subhuman' as such - this is the one reoccuring factor
that the viral technicians of tomorrow have seized on like slavering
dogs, starved into psychopathic frenzy by trainers who would turn
them into machines.
DEATH VALLEY NIGHTS
Inside the bars, daylight means nothing, because there is
only darkness, like the 24-hour darkness of the polar days and
nights, the rouch trade is never satisfied with the number of holes
in their bodies and there are two foolproof ways to increase that number -
by piercing various areas on their skin and filling them with pieces
of metal for continuous stimulation, or (the more 'feminine' way)
to puncture the skin with a syringe and inject the bloodstream
with a foreign substance. Those who prefer the amniotic stasis of
the jungles choose the opiates, those who prefer the cerebral,
geometric white-light patterns of the desert choose the amphetamines.
The chemical death-drive is more 'natural', more deeply rooted
in the past than the sex-drive, because while specific sex acts
are temporally fragmented, in a disjointed digital manner, the
drug-altered state can be maintained indefinitely, a warm continuum.
Coming down from a high without a chemical crash-pad
is like being born, with all the trauma that implies - time is
starting again. Not the relativistic time of deep space that one
experiences while drugged, but the quantized time of the earth's
rotation. That is why one burns and disintegrates when re-entering
the atmosphere - who would choose that voluntarily, but for those
who have most successfully integrated their own death-drives?
DOMINANCE AND SUBMISSION
To transcend yourself, you must internalize the idea that
there is something greater than yourself. The mathematical religions
of the desert know this. The lash of the whip violates the flesh
for the sins that the flesh has committed - in so doing, it reminds
the faithful that the body is only an ephemeral tool in the service
of the perfect machine consciousness that only unwavering discipline
can produce. The whips and chains of the modern urban aesthetics
can only approximate a pale shadow of that consciousness, because
they are regulated by limits (fetishism and consensuality) that are
determined by the participants' own 'pleasures', not selfless
abandonment to a higher power that knows nothing of such trivial
matters. The great metaphysicians of the desert devised codes of
conduct that seem arbitrary and capricious, but only in the same
sense that a structure seem logical to our eyes when seen in full,
but would appear to be chaotic on the sub-molecular level.
Love of others is only fear of being alone. Love of order is
only fear of anarchy. Love of beauty is only fear of what's under
the surface. Love of truth is only fear of the unknown.
When the one dispensing the lashes has internalized the power
of a higher being, any act is possible - complete freedom has been
achieved. If the one receiving the lashes is also faithful, he is free
from fear also.
SINFUL LOVE
Flesh is better when it's on paper. Flesh is better when it's been
videotaped. Flesh is better when it's pierced. Flesh is better when
it's adorned. Flesh is better when it's paid for. Flesh is better
when it's fantasy. Flesh is best when you don't need it anymore.
- Dave Quaglia