Available on:
Straight outta the 90s two-track tape recording of a live set. Enjoy. Try the Spotify… |
Available on:
Straight outta the 90s two-track tape recording of a live set. Enjoy. Try the Spotify… |
Chapter dfhgospgjiks45+vgn
And so there was a dead man in the bathroom at the grocery store. Breakfast of whole wheat bread, an entire loaf, a raw potato and an orange. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and not every supermarket has paper towels these days. These are the days of wall mounted blow dryers, fine for hands and feet, but lacking in the ability to satiate the scrub craving face. As to the urinal, I was urinating, and glancing around. The cement lines that frame the tiles had messages for my eyes.
“Excuse me sir, I was just glancing at the floor in an innocent sort of way when I happened to notice your foot sticking out from underneath the stall in a vaguely unnatural manner.” I jiggled my weedle, and another short stream came running.
“Excusez- moi, monsieur, J’ai regarde ton pied, la, a…. Hey mister are you O.K.?” I put my monster away and then I knocked on the stall door. I knocked on the stall door. I knocked on the stall door. I knocked on the stall door. I knocked on the stall door. I opened the stall door and saw the dead middle aged man with his pants around his ankles lying awkwardly over the commode. I saw the shit smeared on the underside of his right thigh and the urine dribbling from the edge of the seat onto the hospital tiled floor. There was a single wadded tuft of toilet paper still gently hanging from his right hand, a small brown spot in the middle of it. He had been looking.
“Are you dead?”
“…………………”
“Well, since you are. I was wondering if I could ask your opinion on the nature of an individual’s death in a cosmos so huge as to make such an individually meaningful event seem to obviously be, and ridiculously be, I might add, an insignificant and incomprehensibly unnoticed non-event.”
“…………………”
“You see, I can’t remember before I was born, just like anyone else I think. And although I can imagine my absence from this world in a physical, spatial sort of sense, I can’t seem to come near to grasping the idea of my absence in the sense of my actual consciousness, except in reference to sleep.
“…………………”
“So really, what I’m getting at is, just how exactly do you feel right now?”
“…………………”
“How did it feel in those last moments, which there must have been, to know that every impulse and thought and feeling and word and lover and mother and every bit of the energy that countless others have given to you, how did it feel to know that it was, at least from your point of view, over, done and useless since you were dying right then?”
“…………………………………”
“Were you married?”
“……….”
“I don’t see a ring. I think that I’m willing to bet that you were divorced.”
“……….”
“FUCK YOU TALK TO ME SPEAK TO ME DIRTY DEAD BASTARD ROTTING PEACE WAS THERE PAIN ARE WE REAL IS THERE CONSCIOUS IS THERE THOUGHT OR COLD BLACK IS THERE PEACE IS THERE PEACE IS THERE LOVE ARE THERE MEANINGS WHAT IS HAPPENING WHY DO I SEE AM I NOTHING ARE WE LIVING IS THERE ENLIGHTENMENT IS THERE MASTER WHO IS THE MASTER IS THERE DESIGN IS THERE FORM IS THERE LOVE AND HATE OR EFFICIENCY WHY IS THIS HARROWING WHEREFORE THIS FORM THIS ADAPTATION IS CHANCE MASTER THERE IS SOLIDARITY THERE MUST BE MOMENT.”
This is what death is. Said the dead man. I am born and I awake to find myself alone. I am hanging on a wooden stick with what one has learned to call arms. I am hanging over a void. There is nothing within sight except for purple and orange mist, but I have reason to believe that this color is particular only to me. There is nothing above me, below me, anywhere. My arms grow tired and so I climb up onto the stick, only to find that it is suspended in midair by absolutely nothing. It is a golden stick, with indecipherable and appropriately mystical engravings covering it end to end. The stick is roughly one meter in length, and aside from my body, it is the only corporeal thing known by myself to exist. And so I sit there for a time on the floating stick in an orange and purple void. I wonder if I am moving, since there is nothing to mark it. For comfort, I imagine that I am still. Death is when you let go of the stick. Sucker.
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You….
Here are the directions to get here if you are Superman. You glide over the city at dusk, the incandescent bronze street lamps making love to the hazy polluted blue sky below you. Your sense of direction, as sharp as your jaw, leads you to the heart of downtown in a matter of seconds. From there you fly west, past the polished phallic skyscrapers, and past the unshaven stubble of parking meters stretching around them all. Turning a bit north, and slowing a little, (you don’t know your own speed, do you?) you glide over the rusted ghetto, where there is so much racism, and so little color. Just on the ghetto’s westernmost edge, like a dead limb, you spot it. It’s just a little alley, an old scab on the knee of the city healed and forgotten, but still slightly discernable to you from the mottled complexion of the metropolis.
You notice a place that used to be something, but you’re not sure just what. Was it part of the slums? A bustling foreign town? An industrial district? An apartment and residential area? But for some reason, you don’t really want to know what it was, you just want to look at it. So you alight your highly reflective red heels onto the verily flinching urban gravel. Pitch gray pebbles scamper away from your every step. Now that you have arrived, you tell us what you see.
“I…,” he said.
“Well….,” said Superman, in a voice that you could measure with a ruler, “I don’t see much of anything but empty buildings, abandoned cars, and an almost quaintly decrepit alley.” Here he paused and humphed, and in one superhuman skip, found himself on the roof of the building next to him. “I see lots of weeds, crumbling cement walls, and unkempt graffiti. It’s probably a haven for crime, if I know anything…he-he,” he chuckled.
But beyond the surface picture, in the empty buildings, deprived of windows, doors, and paint, were eyes. These eyes were in deep contemplation, wondering whether or not Superman would notice them, and describe what he saw. The eyes started placing bets on the likelihood of discovery.
“Well…,” said Superman, and just as he was about to kick in his X-ray vision, just before he got his first glimpse through the surprisingly loose packed molecules of the brick buildings, he was possessed by the spirit of the late, great, Edgar Allen Poe. Or at least someone who claimed to be the spirit of Poe. In the Windows, the eyes had stopped all bets.
“Well…,” said Superman/Poe, “There hangs a sort of stifled dread on this place, one that would chill the bones of a Republican, yet hardly tickle a Democrat’s subsidized goosebump. The centerpiece of the area, what might be called the area itself, would have to be the alley, with its halfass and crooked streetlight wrestling for height with the dead leafless maple. When one looks down this alley, one feels as if though he were looking down a tunnel of filthy weeds that led to a dark and seedy pre-civil war New Orleans slave cottage. This alley has its own particular humidity. One cannot imagine day here. Day would be scared of breaking a nail here. The brick pavement (what there is of it), consumed completely by an ongoing battle with the upshot weeds and grass, probably has no idea of the fleeting images it brings to mind; of horse drawn carriages and gang killings, of prostitutes and men in tall hats, of poor children riding rusty Schwinns, of a pitch black pupil surrounded by a golden iris and a cracked blue-white retina.
“The iris is the shed at the end of the alley, and its dark open door is the pupil. One can imagine at any moment an evil lurking figure walking through that door. The figure would lean up against the shed and give you a dirty look. They would either want to fuck you or to rob you.
“In the buildings themselves, those giant battered Dalmatian rectangles, the frame of the alley, with their carpets of sawdust and welcome mats of rat hair, are eyes. These eyes belong to men and women of the street, each one a soul. The junkies, the ‘not quite insane enough’ ex-mental patients, the prostitutes, the abandoned and those abandoning, they are in the buildings.” Finishing his spiel, Superman/Poe hung his head, closed his eyes.
“There’s nothing here,” he said, “except those things forgotten, or those things wishing to be so blest. Dust and crumbling walls do make one feel sublime though,….. It would probably be a great place for poets to seduce proletarians,” and off he flew, leaving the eyes wondering what he meant by that last line, and as to who won the damn bet.
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