conscriptions

[conscriptions]

how do i feel?

how should i know what feelings are.

i don't manufacture feelings.

i can't provide their MSDS sheets.

[conscriptions]

I build a computer to create a perfect simulation of the world, for me to live in, where I build a computer to create a perfect simulation of the world, for me to live in,

[conscriptions]

I often desire to self-destruct,

Orchestrate my own demise,

Cut off all social ties,

Make myself a pariah;

Wouldn’t things be simpler then,

As simple as nothing is.

[conscriptions]

Condé Nast Owns Everything

Condé Nast really has it out for you. You tried to be a successful writer because they told you in school that your stories are so interesting! and your spelling is perfect and your grammar is impeccable and your syntax, urgh, it's absolutely sublime and that this is your true calling. After being shoved into the real world, you realized no one gave a shit. And that's to be expected. You already knew you lived in a civilization of markets and profit ambitions and decisions governed by sales figures and ad revenue. You have your own voice of course, but according to market research, your voice isn’t what the people want. And Condé Nast owns everything now.

Of course, they've owned all magazines since the beginning of time. That needn't have been said. But it's too late now; those words have already been charged to my account. Condé Nast owns all writing, all fonts, all copyrights and intellectual property rights, undisputed. This is normal.

Condé Nast owns all fiction and non-fiction publications: novels, short stories, poetry, spark notes, textbooks, how-to guides, cookbooks, history books, biographies and memoirs. Dead lives are owned and monetized by Condé Nast, all quotations.

Condé Nast owns the Bible and the Qur'an, the Rigveda, the Upanishads, the Ramayana, the Dhammapada. They own the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and every bill and law that has ever come and gone. All the contents of the former Library of Congress. They own the Magna Carta and the Communist Manifesto. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Vatican Secret Archives. The State Archive of the Russian Federation. The Historical Archives of China. The Charter of the United Nations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Treaty of Versailles. The Geneva Conventions. News Corp. Al-Jazeera. The Associated Press. The International Bureau of Weights and Measures. The Human Genome. The Rosetta Stone. Internet Protocol. The Gregorian Calendar, all maps of the Earth, and all telescopic images of the universe.

Condé Nast owns all the scientific journals. Ph.Ds. and post-doctoral candidates regularly grovel at executive feet, begging to have their works published: new proofs, cures for diseases. They’re willing to do whatever it takes, suck whoever’s dick needs sucking, to make sure their families, mortgages, and insurmountable student loans are fed.

Condé Nast owns the insignificant and trivial: the nonsensical work jargon written on legal pads and Post-it notes, the monthly newsletters that secretaries collate and distribute around the office exuberantly. Every letter sent home to mom and dad from college or addressed to Santa on Christmas. Condé Nast snatches up the schoolwork of all children, a high priority for them. Editors appropriate kindergarteners' first written words on contracts disguised as worksheets. Condé Nast copyrights all material children should ever produce in their likely-to-be insignificant lives, their first letter A scrawled on the dotted line as proof.

The Writer is a privileged position in society. Industries are built around memorable pseudonyms and their famous combinations of words are memorized by the world. Those lucky few who do become Writers don't write what's in their hearts or minds. They write based on trends and surveys for the publication to which they're assigned. The Writer becomes their genre, their aesthetic assigned from birth. Original ideas are no longer required. Creativity is no longer required. Just produce content no one wants to write: that's the function of the Writer now. Condé Nast has seen to that. Nothing is published for the world to read unless they say so. A story is tailor-made for every publication. The Writer doesn't matter, the content doesn't matter either, just the mentions, the market, the audience Condé Nast made for themselves, from themselves.

Millions of editors are bred to read through the unending reams of paper that shoot through Condé Nast's doors, classifying and cataloguing each piece of paper, one by one, filing it away, scanning it into the massive underground databases: unvisited, restricted libraries made from the abundant silica of the Earth, repurposed to store information, an unimaginable quantity of bytes beneath massive editorial city-factories where forests used to grow.

Editors-at-large spend their time studying images. They scoop up used paper and photographs into huge piles, raiding homes and schools and offices. They take pictures of etchings and frescos and graffiti using specially-made cameras, which send jpegs to Condé Nast that are then automatically deleted from the device they were sent from. They work to discern whether or not symbols and shapes of various natures are glyphic. They look around from time to time at the objects in their own lives. Are they glyphs? Condé Nast's editors-at-large wonder. At what point do the three-dimensional objects become glyph, become copyright, their only existential question. All known objects can be transposed two-dimensionally, made wingding, they recall. There is no limit to what can be glyphed. When it was discovered that sound waves could be considered glyphic, they became copyrighted too. So did video. Any sound or motion or wavelength shape that conveyed language was seized and repurposed to be governed by the mass media company.

People don't write or speak much anymore because Condé Nast bills them for every word written. Every piece of paper, every writing tool, every eyeball has an imbedded nano-chip used to tell Condé Nast when their glyphs are being transacted. Every month, an invoice comes in from Condé Nast detailing how much you owe them, payable by credit card, online bank transfer, or the Condé Nast Pay app. People don't have the kind of money it takes to write. They wonder what it was like in the past, when words were free, like when water was free--what a concept! Even a leisurely walk becomes expensive if one were to look at all the advertisements. It's expensive to the consumer to be sold products, to read all the hazard signs put up by the government. Most people have forgotten how to write or speak, or never learned at all, living uncreative lives of silence in order to make ends meet.

A child decided they want to be a Writer when they grow up because their parents loved their writing and they're told they're good at it in school, but when they grew up, they realized that there’s no place for them, the Writers’ Circle was inaccessible. They couldn’t afford to do it on their own, characters have come to cost so much, so the child instead became an editor at Condé Nast, sitting at a cubicle in an office floor filled with ten thousand occupied cubicles, reading through what others had written. They sit there now, quite old, wearing glasses because of the strain of reading their whole life, a permanent hunchback, a thin cardigan worn to barely stay warm in a cold arena-sized office-floor home, emaciated except for their sitter’s paunch. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the writing that passes across their desk is of no significance or interest, but every once in a while, they'll see something a child had written, like in crayon or on construction paper, several shakily-written pages detailing a fantastic story played out in the child's mind at recess or at home after school one day, and the old editor smiles, remembers to themselves when they were inspired to write in this way, the mind frame they used to possess, but then the editor wonders if the child was severely beaten by their parents, punished for writing behind their backs, costing them precious money on that month's expenses. The pot-bellied editor sadly scans the item and slips it down into the bin, falling down to the underground libraries where pale goblin-like clerks file the papers away, some place, no one really knew where to find them again.

[conscriptions]

energy whore

there once was an emperor whose fetish was to consume excessive amounts of energy. he liked to leave the power plants of his worlds running endlessly, expelling 99% of their output as heat into the cosmos, completely useless, because that’s what got him off. he’d make his slaves flick switches on and off as fast as they could until they collapsed from exhaustion. he directed grand invasions of star systems to harvest the rare elements he needed to fuel his lust. he attached wires to his spine, plugged himself in, believing they charged his ions, charged him all up. he stared out at the dark galaxy while plugged into his empire. he was in charge. he had power and he could never get enough.

[conscriptions]

the singing man on the street might meet a passerby whose deli meat sandwich on rye smells so divine that the man would sing to the passerby about why his meal should lie on his eye instead of on the eating man’s.

[conscriptions]

the cycle is a comfort and he records himself saying the same soft words to himself until he dies of starvation which feels better than life but nothing feels better than the comfort of the endless cycle of the song of his own words repeated back to him.

[conscriptions]

there is food here and i shovel it into my mouth

there is drink here and i drown my cavities with it

and yet i am not filled

[conscriptions]

uphold the value of faggot bindings in due time the fine world will wink divinely ms. diamond of mine though her shine will blind the poor beggars who lap up her crystalline wine but sadly they’ll find that the world will drown in the lavish pouring of winkly show-all ms. diamond, i

[conscriptions]

perpetual motion

i was dying on a sunny day one day and then i saw him standing there and i thought maybe i wouldn’t die anymore. (maybe maybe.)

can we maybe go for a drink

go for a lay and rub each off

suck a tickle and moan a tiny

speak a thing to make each laugh

cause a bliss and kiss. (and kiss.)

he looked at me i think but i kept walking like i was too good for him and i dreamed about how nice 

how nice being looked at would be 

especially by someone as handsome as he.

five seconds later, a new face appeared.

[conscriptions]

birthdays

i went out with a guy once who wouldn’t tell me when his birthday was. i insisted but he refused to tell me. so i threw him a birthday party every day until i got it right. the first few days, they were all surprise parties. once he figured out what i was doing, he started altering his schedule. i’d show up at work first thing in the morning with cake and balloons, or at the places he’d eat lunch, or on the side of a road he’d be stopped at during rush hour. it got pretty elaborate. if he was going out of town on business, i’d have flash mobs show up at his hotel or at the airport. i threw him a birthday party on christmas. easter too.

365 birthday parties went by and he still wouldn’t tell me. after that, i decided not to press him anymore. things were okay between us though. i’d given him enough birthdays parties for five lifetimes. he told me one day in our seventies, while we were lying on the sofa reminiscing about that year, that i’d made him feel immortal.

[conscriptions]

i suck the food from between your teeth

i suck the food from between your teeth

i extract the dirt from your pores with my mouth

i smell our dehydrated saliva on your skin

i stare at the black void of your eyeballs for hours until we both feel awkward and uncomfortable

i feel like i'm having a heart attack because i'm near you

i sweat unpleasantly from our combined body heat

your dick smells gross but i stick it in my mouth anyway

you groan with pleasure but i'm pretty sure you're faking it to make me feel better about myself

i think about if you're a liar while i suck your dick

it makes me flaccid because i feel sad and alone

going through the motions, sucking your dick because that's what adults do

like it's what you expected

i think about if you're picturing someone else sucking your dick

you don't even try to make me come

you eventually shoot your load all over yourself

i help you clean up

you sleep facing away from me

i lie down facing upwards for a while

i could probably cry but i don't really have to, so i don't

i turn over and spoon you and you indulge me but i don't feel anything

i detach myself from you after a few minutes and turn the other way, assuming my regular sleeping position when alone

you decide to leave in the middle of the night and you say it's not my fault

i knew you were a liar

[conscriptions]

daniel and the clouds

it was daytime and daniel was on the sidewalk walking along and asking the passers-by to kill him. please he said. please put him out of his misery. one less person to bug the fine folks on the sidewalk to kill him. daniel was mostly ignored. daniel didn’t understand why he was feeling this way. /// it was nighttime and daniel was still there, wandering around all the shitty alleyways and ungentrified parts of town and got a few to stab him and give him two bullet wounds. no one helped him up and he felt bored on the ground bleeding. /// as the sun rose he looked up at the clouds that never went away anymore. he picked himself up and went home. daniel applied some brand-named medical units to his body and consumed some brand-named food and took the brand-named water and washed himself with it and threw the empty bottle where the sink used to be. the years passed and the clouds got more plentiful as daniel counted his money and felt confused forever.

[conscriptions]

the feeling of falling through a glass ceiling

air whips across your skin and clothes and

hair blows and whips around like grass and

there is the anticipation of falling through glass and

nosedive with eyes closed and arms flailing and

crash.

at a frame per second

you feel the shards electrifying your nerves as

they pierce your flesh slowly, precisely, and

you realize there is no chaos in slow motion,

concern for matters and matter subside on

your disillusioned suicide.

your bones fracture into tiny pieces within your meat

a slurry of calcium and fat

bursting from orifices old and new

sharing life with those who won't appreciate it either.

when people are exponentially made from

a limited amount of organic matter 

excavated from a shell

you shall be on the side of rebalancing the scale

from which we appropriate

yet own nothing of

[conscriptions]

nathan sold all his art online

nathan liked to paint. he filled his rooms with paintings he’d done over the course of his life. he painted mostly disturbing symbolisms or things from memory or surreal ideas that he didn’t fully understand but flowed out of him subconsciously. he felt that these paintings accurately represented his identity in a way that nothing else ever could.

one day in his 30s, nathan started getting attention from a model named jason who was into minimalist aesthetic, adonic forms, free spirit, clubbing, designer labels, and ambition. nathan adored jason but felt that he was nothing in comparison. he made a budget and discovered that he could imitate jason’s lifestyle, and thus win his love, by selling all his art online. he created an etsy and posted pictures of all the paintings in his possession and he did the same on amazon and ebay and craigslist. he didn’t know what to value his own paintings but he decided on $50 for the smaller ones and $100 for the larger ones. over the course of a month, they mostly sold. he decided to keep painting and selling his art since people seemed to like his work. he discovered a formulaic approach to creating his art that could maintain a solid income without much risk. he could now afford the gym membership and the trainer and the supplements, the hip clothing every three months, the haircuts, the food, the parties, the clubbing, the vacations for instagram photos, and jason appreciated this. they stayed together for a few years at least in nathan’s house where the rooms were empty.

[conscriptions]

objet petit a

desire has dwelled

within a thousand bodies, yet i

come no closer

to a

[conscriptions]

my life is nothing i have