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Apples
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| DJ Shibby |
Man's Greatest Adventure
Jason Clearly
Her name was Journey.
And she was to be my wife.
At least, that's what the twenty two dollar gypsy on Ocean Avenue told me. For anyone else my scoff would have been politely tucked beneath a pokerfaced smile. But not this time. Just in case. This time there would be no scoffing, no hiding and illusion. She claimed to be a psychic, afterall, and if it was true, there would be no camouflage to guise myself. No subconscious nooks or crannies would lead her eye from the truth.
Besides... strange things have been happening. I've been noticing things I normally wouldn't.
Maybe she'll illuminate me a bit.
'Bout the dreams.
When I first walked into the room, my senses were greeted by a thick smoke that I can only imagine reminiscent of downtown New York dives circa 1980. Pre-smoking ban. Pre-a lot of things.
Then the Post Age arrived, bringing new grammar and designs.
The joint reeked of cheap opium incense. The structure felt filmsy, a regular house of cards. I note humorously to myself that the lightest puff of air, say from the lungs of a bad wolf, would blow the whole shack into a pile of flaming toothpicks.
I brushed tackily through a doorless entranceway draped in hanging beads, strung down to the floor in no particular pattern or logical colour order. There, on the other side, waited a decrepit old thing reminiscent of a Greek grandmother if not for her motley attire, standard fortune-teller fair. Behind her was a massive plate piece depicting a stone wall engraving, hand smithed or made to look hand smithed, with the following odd symbol writ 'cross its face:
iiiIiii
I mused to myself about magic tricks and unbelievable things, to put myself in the mood. The universe had led me here for a reason, I needed to relax and let it happen. That's all it was. I just had to let it happen.
Easier said than done. I sat across from her, at a table draped in a deep red cloth with an unusual crystal ball. By unusual I mean, well, "broken."
It's true, it appeared to be broken into four pieces!
"Did you drop the ball?" I quipped.
I mean, really now, if this is her business she should at least have a functioning crystal. Maybe she needed to cut some nickels and dimes on overhead, I mused. Or perhaps I would send her one of those fantastic electric spheres they sell at Spencers in the mall; the ones that attract their lightning to the fingers. Moth to flames.
She looked fiercely at me, studying me, feeling out my aura. Her gaze softened, the wrinkles unfurrowing back into the rags covering matted blond hair.
"I've been waiting for you," she said.
I raised a brow, a bit stunned but mostly skeptical, taunted by cliche, yet curious. I wanted to know more, I was finding the rush of the unfurling scene a pleasure.
"First, though, there's matter of the fee..." she capitalized, "$11 for prophesy, and $11 for time and espaunse."
Before I could blink, or conjure up what an 'espaunse' is, she began to shuffle a deck, deftly pulled from the depths of one of her many right pockets. Every few shuffles she would shut her eyes tightly and cut the deck, quickly flashing the contents before my eyes then reconnecting it with its arcane brethren.
I can't remember much, it all seems so far in the past now, but looking back there's one in particular that stood out. A phoenix and an alchemical beaker. A phoenician sailor, dangled from a rope and choking up the sea.
Was he asphyxiated, or was he a fish with a diamond crown? Was he a coy, or a man of Joy with lungline of gil?
Pulling one card from the deck, she handed it to me. It's face design was unlike any of the other cards, as if it were waiting to inevitably be summoned forth. And summoned forth it was.
"You have received the call..." she forced the words out in a wheeze--and not without effort-- signaling the start of the ritual and the end of my concentration. I zoned off forthright, and right-forth my attention fell into all the bountiful ornaments on display.
One in particular caught my fancy, a statue with a strange head and lots of tentacles--or maybe those were arms. They were inscribed with an apocryph:
"ALPHA - DELTA - DELTA -"
A final script was missing, grainy and in ruin. Pfft, all it was needed was some Morse code, or sign language. Before I knew it, my eyes were on to the next bauble, my ears lost in the psychic babble.
For the rest of the reading she ignored the drawn card, and so did I. I was treated to an unspectacular show of illusion, and thought little else of it until the trek home. I don't know much about about the mystical, but I know when something displays potency. This was potency: a present from a playful source.
VII. Wasn't that the Latin for 7?
A king--or wizard--or was it a priest??--in a chariot, riding across his astron ether. A star among stars.
Yeah.
Post Age stuff.
I remember what the oracle spake. There are things to come that will transform my life, and yours, forever.
"Well, I said I would give you $22 if you were right. So here is eight," I said, handing her a fiver and three ones which looked like they had seen the gates of Elysium.
-*-
Before we touch on that, let me say that I am a particularly eccentric character.
Yeah. Or, as Sam would say, "Crazy Jay."
To put it in perspective, I always tell my friends I'm "bringing back the Shakespeare." The evil that men do live after them. Bear with me here, my fauna familiar is the bunny, my astral animal the ox. When I look at the moon I see the man, and the rabbit, because it's all our cosmic reflection.
While I was never a superstitious person, I know not to with a clairvoyant. Honestly, she was wrong. Sort of. If I had realized at the time the mess of trouble that $14 would cost me, I would've surely paid. It wasn't about the paper, it was about the adventure.
Besides, what kind of seer would be trumped by legal mumbo jumbo?
The divine law always trumps the laws of mortals.
Walking home past the shops, I stared into the windows and daydreamed in corporatia. My reflection looked back with intense brown irises. Puppy dog eyes with a hint of on high. I
was on top of the world, because I had that reflection, that reflection spoke as I spoke.
"Cogito Ergo Sum," we both said, simultaneous, joking.
Ah, with no element of time even a thousand mouths could never converse. If it weren't for Sam I suppose it would be just me and my reflection, alone in the Kingdom of the Taciturn. And my dog, Ganesh.
It's easy to get lost in the refractions of the light, their sacred geometry like little beacons of the world as they fade into crystal clarity, then translucence, then, finally, nothingness. These reflections... these reflections are the exhale of the city. My reflection, carbion dioxide!
I wondered what that other me was thinking, beyond his pupil event horizon. Thoughts of Chandrasakar's Limit and dinner crossed my mind, as my twin and I moved through the briney soy scent that wafting through the air. In this part of San Francisco--or rather in all parts of San Francisco--it isn't uncommon to see a multitude of eastern restaurants, all ragged looking from the outside, but Eden through the doors.
Yes, rice would be delicious right about now.
Nah, I'd rather keep walking.
I've got a girl to meet, apparently. Ha!
"Journey."
I roll the word over my tongue and around my palatte, tasting it, savoring its delicacy.
"Heh."
I Dream of Jeanie plays in one of the storefronts on a large flat screen plasma TV. What a thing, I think. I only catch a few frames, a brief glimpse at her blonde hair and breasts tucked into that little pink piece.
My reflection danced across the pane, unaffected, moving on and over the stereotypes and Pavlovian shadows of a charming, albeit obsolete, tool of control. Sometimes I even have trouble discerning between the silhouette and the cathode ray.
To quote the bardo, "There is much you can learn from a shadow, but never the true natures of substance."
-*-
Sam emerged into the room from the kitchen, shaking a box of pizza at me adamantly.
"Okay?" I half-queried.
"What, have you never had pizza shaken at you before?" he retorted.
"Um, no." blankly.
"Oh. Well then it's a new experience."
He was right. I sat there, for 16 seconds, in silence, thankful.
-*-
I never flinch. Except when letters hit the floor, through the door.
It's something about the sudden "Smack!" they make as they hit the tile. Despite arriving every day around the same time, it slams into my consciousness like an anvil falling from a cartoon heaven, harpooning my head with its hard, steely body.
"We leave behind anchors to find our Self again."
Whoa. What?
Where did that thought just come from?
What does it mean?
It means I need to take a nap.
write some about getting home, tossing the keys on the counter, using the computer to program for work. comparing it kaleidoscopically to a painter of geometry and worlds, heavy on the art imagery working and meta.
use dream sequences to mesh together out of order plot sequences
"Thirty days hath September"
I was born outside the wheel of the year. Between Ostara and Beltane.
In midieval times, people would hold massive raves in the streets, their limbs punished into dance by ergot and other sorcery.
in the other world, grammar and word use/creativity/creation is the weapon to escape and control the "machines", since they look for pattern recognition.
we have always been able to visualize the other world. the buddha speaks of it, the egyptians strived for it, christians die for it.
Journey Clearly
THE GATE TEST CHAPTER -- initial entry into the other world, through dream at first. Here the main character will be tested by the keeper at the gates of heaven and hell. It's a program simulation/firewall designed to keep unwanted elements from entering the control zones to physical reality. ie: avatar hackers. In later chapters, it will turn out his pass code is somehow special, granting master administrator access to the cosmos.
"Where am I?!"
"Krrr Tsch -- Tssssch Tsch Krrr Tsch"
What the hell is this place?!
"Calibration Complete. Command Error: abort/retry/fail?"
"Um. Retry?"
Whoa, that's a weird--
-*-
"Where am I?!"
"Jay of the tribe of the Rib of Atomic Dactile Autonomic Multivariates, welcome to lucid dream interface [unintelligible], ID 2501. Please avoid overuse of rhotacism while within the interface in order to avoid permanent injury to the avatar host. Thank you, and if you require further access permissions or Akashic factlinks please do not hesitate to use your specified pass code to summon this helper interface."
With that it powered off.
Before telling me what my pass code was!
Where was this weird place I had found myself dropped within?
The sky was red, with a purple cloud possessed of the shape of intestines hovering overhead. It seemed almost like an organic nuclear fallout, trapped in a radioactive glitch of its own design. What could have caused such a thing?
-*-
Floating up to the strange stone temple, its beautiful architecture reminiscent of a church back in the real world, I noted a tablet. I begin to read:
In the Year of our ORD(L), 4488;
Jay stared ovt vpon the starry Void, tasted the svveet secretions of creation on his lips. He Vievved, here in himSelf, all that had been, all that is, all vvhich vvas to come. His Jovrney reqvire he solve a level 12 puzzle vvhile only himself level 6. Svch a feat is impossible, since it wovld reqvire waking vp."
*KRRR TSSSSSSSSCHJ*
I awoke to the horrifying sound of static on the radio. It must have been playing for at least an hour.
The dream was already breaking away from my memory, but... that temple had a slab with my name on it, in some weird dialect. Something about the story was starting to come to a boil.
a chapter opener for chapter 3.
You know, I always believed that Los Angeles was the media capital of the human race. Then, coming here, I gradually realized it was San Francisco.
The star of the west, the shining pearl of civilization. A city of kings, destined to follow Atlantis to the sea. Here artists and engineers mixed and merged and amalgamated out magical new ideas, disseminating them throughout the world.
Well, the world of men. That material place beyond these strange dreams I've been having.
I tried to recall what the tree spirits said to me in my dream. Something about Earth being an organism. Like a cell.
Are we living on the Earth's skin?
Hmm.
Wait, that's it! I remember now!
"What do you mean? Organelles? I... I don't understand." I stammered, I felt so irreverent and silly.
"You are the immune response of the universe, my child. You are that which will turn your world around."
"Immune response? Is it ill?"
"Very intuitive, my child. I'll show you Will."
-*-
The confusion of everything always served to confuse me more. As my logos transitioned from REM sleep to a woken state of "Whoa. What?!" I considered how amazing what I had just experienced was, and how I needed to write it down and log it and pursue it until I found its source!
I laid there, endlessly, locked within the countless, sinking spans of the minute. While I brainstormed the need for a bedside pen and pad I lapsed back into unconsciousness, most likely forgetting the entire sequence which had transpired.
"Why do I envision you as machinations and computers?" I asked.
"Because you see a greater order in us, though you will come to know us as the Entropics."
I woke abruptly, aware something was different, but without any idea what. I just had a strange dream where I was outside of a bar in the Castro and I saw that Dead Kennedys guy dressed in drag. It was stunning, to say the least.
Mouth agape, I shot my away in shock. imagery faded of his bulky frame dipped in the mask of a geisha.
"I can under-take your miss-stand!" the rabbit lawyered before the Judge the High Hyphenate.
"Crossing reason is Treason!" cried the Rabbit.
-piece on getting the message on the cell phone, when the phone is both out of service and without battery 77
a chapter on return to the real world and all the good things that happen... synchronous things that bring good tidings, offering to get me into politics, which i successfully decide is a test. et cetera
interfacing between social networks, email, texting, etc and the ghosts in the avatar world. its a portal of sorts, through Word
"My world feels different here. It feels like what was once fragmented is more whole." <- will be a self-fullfilling commentary on the nature of the book itself, with Jay's world being fragmented by ADD spastic chapters, and the surreal "other world" -which is spastic in nature- will be written in a third person omniscient narrator form which is relatively solid and serious and descriptive and intense. A stark parody on the light, humorous nature of the chapters featuring Jay in the real world in first person.
"if its something to believe in that you're looking for, then I think i might have just the thing."
"Who are you?" I asked.
"We are who architect' the blue print of your Tower of Babel, and the keepers of the heavenside gateway to the otherworld, found atop the ziggurat's zennith."
Pyramids of babble. It was all held together through this.
I looked upon the ultrachromatic landscape in front of me. It felt like Shinjuku district, it felt like a million human lives crossing the street at once, ballast to the cluttered neon-sign sky. Emissaries of change.
Past the fronts of the shops, where there should have been glass. Instead, there was only space. Past the space, there was material goods, scents, sights licking the eyes wet with the chorea of pastel.
And beyond the material,
which lay beyond the space?
There waits someone's face.
The butcher, behind the racks of meat on display, garbed in doctor's white. Red stains plaqued and betrayed his sterile canvas garb. Any alabast intention betrayed by his vocation.
As soon as it was, so it was not.
I walk.
My stride was long; I wanted to be home. I wanted to be home, and instead the city stretched in front of me, promising to match holes into both my socks.
I walk.
A salon. French. Nails are being painted, but no air steps out of place, there is naught to disturb the process of drying.
Without the windows everything just felt, well, cleaner and clearer. In this strange place, there was not even a louvre to be seen. No venetian tiles sealing off the light of the sun, no one horded borders or shut off their soul.
How can any man argue with me and call my feverish persuit in vain, when I have already succeeded? I say, "I am doing the work of God in his glory," and half understand. I say, "I am experimenting empirically with halides," and another quarter understand. Finally, "I am," and "I love you," and we're all on the same page.
Though they all share the common bond of being word, it is through their words that common bonds come into being.
Nocturn Electis
It's tough to trust someone who claims they enjoy the sound of silence. I can only imagine it to be a test, or them to be foolish. They say, "In the name of Zen, keep it down before someone hears!" then they watch TV, read the blogs and chat on the web, or at the sports bar down the street. That's just honest.
Mostly nocturnal, I dream when I'm awake, and I sleep FAIL. lol
once upon a time someone wrote the history of man. then, we wrote the future.
while humans exist in a self adapting system, in this world we are sectioned off from all things. similar to how humans might have to keep wasting their hands to get rid of bacteria, since the system is constantly in auto evolution.
It's interesting to note that in advanced cases of worming illness a dog will eat grass. People will began to foods such as chalk and dirt. It's almost like our higher order systems break down and we bend to the will of the organism within us with the most stockholder "shares". Usually we assume this to be just "us", because we consider all our cells to be us, but truly the majority of our being is outside upgrades from viruses, changes caused by the environment, and things that are "us" but distinctly separate. Like intestinal flora.
It's difficult to believe that I'm a good person just because others instilled their values onto me. It's too base survival.
Yes, we are all the vulture. Err--the eagle. Every living creature on this planet is a part of the design and architecture, and a designer and an architect.
If all the world is a tower we are building, there are of course the masons working the stones, and the overseers. Anyone can make a mistake in the chain, but over time it always sorts itself into the state it needs to be in, and the best state suited to God.
ALPABET
SIBOLET |
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| jonze |
| i thought this was going to be about Apples to Apples, the greatest party game ever invented |
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| verndogs |
random....
closing |
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