#but the download is fifty million kinds of sketchy

[the-phantom-officianados]

akechi you are such a twink

I strive to be annoyingly attractive, hot in a way that no one else will ever achieve.

☆ Akechi 🪦

[commonalex]

Aphrodite

(press play, won't bite ya)

aphrodite by common alex

Listen/download: aphrodite by common alex

They really caught my eye by mistake. Couldn’t even make out what was really happening because of the slow daybreak; when I finished parking she was already laid down on the parking lot and this old fuck with his black-as-a-crow dyed hair and this filthy white shirt was stomping her sides. I shout till I get noticed by this dusty boned ass and his halloweeny mustache he rocks in this late September. I sprint (well, supposedly, my lungs aren’t as light as they used to) and he flinches as if he shat his pants towards a old green Citroen bumped to pieces. I swear he was this close getting his ass beat.

-You shouldn’t have done that.

-Are you… okay, lady? Hey, easy easy. No sudden moves, I got a first aid kit back at the truck.

-Oh no. No, don’t you ”lady” me.

With these dark brunette hair, this long black kimono robe tied by her waist and these thick sunglasses hiding her eyes, her age must be somewhere around fifty, maybe less. I see no blood, though, only on her bottom lip and her back from the asphalt; the rest are just bruises by hand or by shoe. I put some old band aids I found along some other (close to be expired) shit and help her to stand while being a bit scared she is way more hurt internally. But even though she stands alright there’s something about her that doesn’t seem quite right.

-Don’t scratch that, let it dry out. What about a hospital, a doctor? Is there anything like that close from here?

-What do you think, big boy?

That I made a stupid question. Why on earth would there be a hospital close to a truck station on the highway? There’s not even a restaurant around here anymore. We barely get a cup of shitty coffee along with overpriced snacks and a chance to piss with the constant risk of getting infected of something too fucked up for science to give it a name yet.

-Where’s your car?

-I don’t have a car.

-Were you brought here?

The sunglasses slowly fell from her straight lined nose for me to see her smudged eyes guiding me to the right. There really was no car. Only an abandoned gas station, a really creepy playground overgrown by weeds and grass and an old caravan, five by three meters with a blue stripe on its side. I look at her for confirmation and I walk her slow as one can go to let her sit on a cheap travel armchair right besides the open wide door of the caravan.

-I’m… Aphrodite. And you?

    Her hesitation right before her name has successfully rang every single bell in existence.

-Does it matter?

She seems unbothered. Knowing my name or not is just the same to her, so to speak; as long as I don’t ask any questions about this pasty prick hitting her a few moments ago.

-Well you’re right about that. How old are you?

-Thirty-three.

-Good for you, you seem nothing like your age. You could tell me you’re twenty six, I’d believe you. 

Wow, she’s really into talking, isn’t she? So much she tries to pull a second chair for me beside her. I take a sec to understand if all this a way of flirting or just an awkward compliment used instead for “thanks” because I was at the wrong place at the right moment.

-Sorry, you caught me at work. A long drive to Romania, really, and if I don’t stick to schedule they’ll come for my ass.

Still, unphased.

But she keeps on digging to me.

-Yeah, I’ve heard that a lot. I mean have you ever seen anyone that you try chatting with them and they aren’t in any rush?

Aphrodite seems kind enough to relieve me from my puzzled face by opening and closing her robe as she speaks, as if I, an engaged dude with two babies back home, am all about that shit right now. And even if I was, just by looking at her breast and legs I get a weird feeling. So I play dumb until she gets tired of trying. She doesn’t. And this woman was lying on a parking lot ten minutes ago.

-Look, I can’t help with anything else. And besides, how can I put it, I don’t really…

She catches up and cuts me off from the worst.

-What you “don’t really”. Fuck hookers or fuck trans?

I can’t stress enough how embarrassed I got between these seconds. For sure I didn’t want to put it like that, but how could I say that without saying it? I simply nodded. She seemed like she understood though. She ties her robe back and drags me to chit chat once again (because she couldn’t drag me inside that greasy caravan), beginning to unfold the story of her life. Literally. Awkward as fuck, but I’d lie if I wasn’t intrigued with her.

She said she was born in a rural town far from here, raised by her “holy as a woman can ever be” grandma Aphrodite (that’s where the name comes from)- she tells me that exact thing about three times. I’m asking for her parents and then waiting her to finish with the endless cursing towards them just so the story continues to the point she reaches fourteen years old. Right there is where she, without a warning, runs away from home to Salonika, the closest big city she could afford to start selling her body.

-I’d be lying if I ever said I didn’t get comfy with work, especially the first few clients. After the initial stress dies down you wait for the instinct of habit. I swear, you could spend a week in this job and nothing would ever surprise you anymore. You can’t imagine what kinds of filth and secrets lie outside. Kinky psychos showing up with their wedding rings on, notorious pimps spending all morning on a tv show asking “where is this country really going with all this filth“, priests. Well, you heard nothing about priests yet, I tell you that.

Aphrodite, an adult now, eventually grows far too big for Salonika and makes a trip down to Athens (as she always intended), finding only more filth and misery inside a poorly lit basement with other prostitutes. Her desperation keeps on popping up here and there for a while because she couldn’t predict things turning so damn shitty and unbearable. She stacks her money little by little and she finally gets her surgery.

-And how was thing afterwards?

-Deep inside I knew this was my time; with the body I should have had. And the best thing was that no new client could ever understand the difference, and even if he did that was the last thing he was concerned with. I was ahead of everyone else in there- all of them. But little did I care about all that, I was made for greater things. I didn’t plan to stay in that fucking basement any longer, getting fucked by the lowest of people. That’s why I got my head down and worked my ass off until I could make a name of myself, until I could make not enough money but the real money. And that was what really got the best of me in the end, I think.

She then “moves” to the biggest red light district of Athens (I mean, of course, where else could she really be, right?) and that’s the point where her story really turns sketchy. Whatever she told me to this minute might be a bit cliche, but still believable. Now she runs over all that, telling me to believe that she managed to get so big she turned to a highly paid escort for rich and powerful people like that (which I guess you could say is plausible, given that she indeed would be beautiful at some point). Just the names and zeros she dropped on the table makes me suspicious as hell. But this isn’t the end, she continues with her Mercedes car she owned and took rides with back at her grandma’s place or with how she was personally invited every time the american fleet stopped in Rhodes and Crete. Like she’s living in a goddamn movie.

-So things get really, and I mean really busy, am I right?

-It didn’t take long for magazines and tv shows for nosy people to notice me. Those were the days, I tell you. You remember the checks I used to get previously? Well you wouldn’t even imagine those. I was called the “trannie”, the “pure Satan offspring”, the “biggest mistake of the nature”- really whatever. I’m still laughing. By the time the camera was switching off everyone was begging for a photoshoot or an interview like their life depended on it. You can’t just pass this opportunity to get famous. It’s as strong as a drug. All this attention, all those lights really make you feel like you’re doing something good at last.

How much time could have passed for the sun to come out full force, burning my back like a motherfucker? I take a peek at my watch and I see it’s quarter past ten. Shit. I really should be going by now. How do I cut it out for her, hoping that she will eventually go to the doctor by herself? How do I escape her mouth from talking so slow or her eyes from following me like a predator’s?

-That’s alright and all, but...

-I know, you can’t tell right now, but everyday I was getting calls and visits from designers at my house by the shore to ask me if I would wear their shit. Yeah, I reached that peak. I mean, would you believe me if I told you I stumbled upon Dolce & Gabbana at the airport? Giving me their cards and all?

No. No I wouldn’t believe you.

-That’s all nice and dandy, Aphrodite, but something’s missing. I mean, what are you doing here? Like, for real.

You can’t make me believe she didn’t expect this to come up eventually, but here she is acting like that. Leaving sighs and staring into nothingness. Her voice even changes up a bit, gets a more serious tone to it, out of the blue.

-Do you really believe prostitutes tend to think about the future? I mean, really? Do they make plans of retirement or something? Especially the trans ones. Let me tell you, most of them can’t even think about making it to thirty, either from someone or themselves. I, personally, chickened out twice and got rescued three times, and you’re coming here telling me if I ever thought I would be here during my old days?

-With all these things you casually spill out of doing in the ‘90s you should be standing above thousands, even millions, with all of the doors wide open for you. What happened? How could you go from a house by the shore, a Mercedes and all these interviews to, you know… This?

    Where, just to remind you, this is a fucked up caravan besides the highway where old fucks are coming to kick her in the neck.

-”What happened”. Like I never asked that to myself. I’m here, sitting and telling you a stuff or two about myself and you have the nerve to pull a “what happened”. What could have happened, big boy? What do you believe?

She seems really sensitive that not only I interrupted her story but in addition I questioned the lies she spices it with. Welp, what can you do, I already threw half of my morning out of the window with this one, we’re only left to see where is she going with all these delusions of her amazingly faked past. Like I have any time to spare.

-Tell me.

-It must be the place, dunno. You, for example, came here maybe for a piss stop and then back to work. And what a demanding work; holding a wheel until you don’t. But what about the whores? Whores got a body to maintain till its expiration date. After that, game over; again, if the make it there. If disgust hasn’t eaten them alive by then. If insecurities about everything starting to loosen up, or the ringing of the phone that eventually will go silent, or reaching the point of begging to keep on living cause family is not an option anymore. They go nuts, you see, they hold on from anything they can reach just to keep on feeling that all this they are going through really mattered. Just to keep on feeling like they are valued.

-So is this why you’re staying here? To feel like this matters? To get beaten up by old fucks and internally accepting it? Why don’t you ask for help?

-This is help. This old fuck is the only one that comes around and throws a penny for me to maintain myself. He’s the only one that fucks me, anyway. That’s why I’m here, for him- it’s his caravan after all. He lives about twenty minutes from here with a wife, kids and grandkids. He just likes to “get it out of his system” once every few days by fucking for free and beating me whenever I mention that I can’t do this anymore, because he is afraid that his whore isn’t loyal to him. But why am I saying all these things to you. I’m wasting my words. You still don’t believe me.

I don’t know where her truth and lies stand anymore, only that if she really lived all these things she’s a massive fool for not writing a book. I, for once, took too much of my time for all this crap. When I started heading back to the track she switched to her first ways, telling me that “I’m doing the right thing” or that the old guy with the mustache “really has a gun and doesn’t mess around”. Yeah, whatever. I get in and peep Aphrodite behind the window waiting on the chair for me to go but something inside makes it hard for me to start the truck. It’s quarter to eleven but her endless chatter seem to get my weariness going. As time passes and the truck stays still, Aphrodite eventually heads back to the caravan shutting the door behind her. I’m kinda relieved. But I’m still madly curious, what can I do? Ah, fuck it, Romania can wait a bit more. I pull out my phone and search blindly, trying to find anything at all.

Aphrodite.

Trans.

Prostitute.

‘90s.

Modeling.

Enter.

I couldn’t feel anything less than a dick at this point. It seems unreal. Not only she was legit, but she toned things down a little in her story. The photoshoots were indeed professional and stunning, while I found an interview of her on an ancient tv talk show I never really knew existed where she explains how much her life changed due to the massive exposure she got at this point. Same as today, minus the touches of time on her. But most of all happy. Really all this attention made her bloom ridiculously. Magazine covers, runways, pageants; all enough to back up not only Aphrodite's public existence but also her relations with really established and rich individuals. And all of there as cute as hell, but where did all these money go? Well, the answer lies to a more recent past, this time inside tabloid news articles.

Only three to four year ago, Aphrodite spawns once again, this time in Jerusalem (what the fuck) in order to get closer with her faith and a highly respected priest there. So damn respected that people wouldn’t stop to talk about their “secret” meetings late at night, to the point where photos and videos leak publicly. Result? These tabloid fucks smell the blood from far, far away and get to hunting the story. The priest goes public, says “sorry guys, my mistake, Satan trapped me and such, didn’t want to, sorry again, peach to all”, gets thrown away from the local church and that was pretty much the end. Aphrodite on the other hand vanishes once again up until this point, right here, on this parking lot besides the highway.

I guess that’s what she meant with that “you heard nothing about priests yet” earlier. Maybe I should have listen more carefully or see her face better in order to recognize her from all this priest thing that blew up literally everywhere back then. Either way, my curiosity stopped killing me but guilt took over me. With my route schedule gone to the shitter already, I knock her caravan door till she opens with death in her eyes. I show her the interview I found on my phone.

-It’s you, isn’t it?

-That’s really a shame, big boy. What do you do with all these truck stuff. You should be working for NASA by now.

I was wrong before. This point right here is where I can’t feel anything less than a dick.

She invited me inside and made me sit right across a really slow fan that was spinning just for the aesthetics in order to make me feel less of a sweaty pig. The caravan looks way more comfy on the inside with a massive bed and a narrow sofa but the mountains of hoarding shit and snack packaging lying around here and there do no favors. It’s a good option for holidays, but absolutely not for regularly living inside of it. Aphrodite doesn’t seem to bother with my snoopy eyes. She holds the phone with both hands while carrying the cold look. As if she doesn’t recognize herself. As if she doesn’t want to.

-When was that?

-Not sure. ‘95? Later than that? I only recall just how rude and creepy this interviewer was. He didn’t hit on me or anything like that, it’s just that he was always an ass kisser in front of you and a shit talker behind your back. I didn’t get how much crude and sarcastic he was in that interview until years later. Now that I think of that, I guess everyone were kind of the same. But these were different times, more fabulous, more sparkly, more…. Innocent? I guess innocent isn’t the right word for it.

Then I show her the article about the priest. She kinda leaves a bitter smile there. She might no look exactly happy but nevertheless she must understood that in the end I kinda cared and dug up her whole history to make it up for myself after treating her like shit. She silently accepts it, even though with her fair share of reservations this time.

-That’s the most recent I could find, there’s nothing next to that. Would you mind telling me what happened next?

-One day my head was about to explode. I couldn’t do this anymore. All I wanted was to somehow save my soul from this pit of crap I ended up, and the idea stuck to me the moment I accidentally found grandma’s cross among my stuff. That was really it. I quit the job, closed my phone and traveled to churches and monasteries, throwing money around to buy a seat next to God. Turns out I found my Devil, though. 

She’s way more reserved than before. I get that all of this might still cut deep and talking about it hurts like a bitch. I tell her she doesn’t really have to say anything she doesn’t want to and I am ready to leave her alone if she asks me to. She calmed my anxious ass with a simple nod.

-And the videos?

-I leaked them. I told you prostitutes don’t think about the future. I couldn’t even think about today at this point of my life; I was really in a shitty place. The priest wanted to go big, a bishop or something like that, and to do that she had to dump me. Like I was the one flirting with him in the first place. And he was the one supporting me, so what the fuck would I do there alone? That’s where a magazine came to me, no idea of its name, put money on my hand for the footage and came back with these money, just so nothing would remind of everything that played out down there. As you’d expect, money didn’t last forever. So I got to a point where I was like “what can I do”? I could never be a beggar and I could never go back to a brothel without people laughing at me, so I went from one old friend to another until someone finally decided to help.

-Someone. Like a cunt.

-Yeah, a cunt, I don’t know. It’s better than nothing.

I ran out of words. I’m no longer curious, no longer so guilty and for sure don’t feel pity for her. I can only say “good luck” and “take care” to her as I walk out; even though neither of these hold any value for her situation. She didn’t wanna hop on the truck because she didn’t feel like she has anywhere to go. I try to make her understand that anywhere is better than this misery and abuse. She responds somewhat philosophical, telling me that who knows, maybe someone might come up on this truck stop and can actually help her. Give her money to live or anything else she needs and then taking he-...

-Aphrodite! Out! Now! 

The shouting from outside got her eyes open wide, staring at the door for a good second. I never believed I could see her scared shitless.

-You shouldn’t have done that, I told you so.

-Is this him?

I didn’t need an answer to that. Her bottom lip shaking like her jaw’s about to fall gives me all the information I need. She pulls my hand from the door to stop me. Too bad I already decided my approach. I smile at her to stop her from panicking and jump out with sun hanging above me. Ten meters on the left there’s the green Citroen with one door open and a bit closer there’s the old bastard standing a bit closer with a shotgun resting in his hands. The truck is straight ahead, forty steps or so. It’s just a sprint as the worst case scenario, big deal. Either way I bet his shaky hands could even load before shooting. Ha, there it is, haven’t I told you, he dropped the fucking shotgun. Ten more steps and hello Romania. I only feel bad that I didn't have the time to greet her for the last time before I go. I yell "goodbye" as I'm running but my voice isn't coming out at all. But again how could it be heard right here, right now with all those bang bang bang bang b…

The only thing I can make out of all this noise is her screaming from the back. 

-No! Oh God! 

[no-ba-d]

The Dead Pyrates Society

I want you to be a Pyrate. The project I’m working on is called The Dead Pyrates Society. It’s multimedia, multiplatform, even multidimensional. Imagine a future that is one part Wal-E, one part Idiocracy, and some Equilibrium thrown in for good measure. It’s a universe full of lazy, stupid techno mutants. Jacked into an immersive internetworld, most inhabitants of the Galaxy are more than content to let The Machine take care of them.

Most, except for a group of free thinking intellectual guerilla freedom fighters who call themselves The Dead Pyrates Society (modeled after The Dead Poets Society). They find black market art, movies, music and literature from our time period, obsessing over it, studying it, and trying to live it. They attempt to keep it safe from the Galactic Federation which has banned and made illegal all art forms prior to fifty years. They exist in a perpetual cosmic miasma of boredom and censorship. They seek out a time machine, and one a time they go through the glowing portal into the past. Slowly….one at a time, as the machine is old and needs time to recharge, hundreds and thousands of Pyrates travel into the past.

What they do not know is that when they go into the slipstream of time, they are torn apart down to atoms and then reconstructed inside of a newly conceived baby in our time. They are born and grow without any of their memories from their past (future). Slowly as time goes on however, the weight of time travel begins to press down upon their beings and they become afflicted with any number of mental illnesses from depression and anxiety to borderline personality disorder.

The conflicting merging of their past future self’s memories and their current memories creates a dimensional rift inside the mind of the Pyrates as they enter and travel through their twenties and thirties. For some, it is more than the mind can handle and the Pyrate self is abandoned completely. The future past memories are treated as delusions and aspects of their mental illnesses.

For others, such as you and I…yes you. Don’t tell me you haven’t suspected something? That you are a bit strange, a bit out of touch with this world? That you don’t belong.

But you do belong! You belong to the fantasmagasmicly best interstellar gang of space dogs to ever sail the seventeen celestial cosmic seas. You, are a Pyrate.

And you are not alone. Other Pyrates across the world are regaining their memories, and in an attempt to find one another, as well as try to cope with their various mental illnesses, they have started Time Travel Displacement support groups, named aptly enough; The Dead Pyrates Society.

***At this point, I break from the story to explain the while The Dead Pyrates Society is on the one hand, a fictional support group for time traveling Pyrates, it has a real world counterpart as a club and support group for weirdos like you and I that either suffer from some sort of mental instability, or are the ally of someone who does.

As a member of The Dead Pyrates Society, you of course will have to “remember” your Pyrates name from your future past. We will design and create a visual likeness for your Pyrate self, and this will become the basis for your club card, which I will personally draw and send to you, along with irregular shipments of Pyrates swag as I develop this project. Hopefully we will have decoder rings too!

I would like to imagine things like posters with characters from the continuing story, wherein our hero, a skull faced Pyrate queen named Skull Candy takes on the personifications of mental illness. These stories will be expressed via prints, paintings, sculptures, stickers, patches, pins and eventually books and comics.

The work will be developed by myself and other members of the Society as they join. Every member can contribute to the mythos of The Dead Pyrates Society by writing their own stories, making their own artwork, writing and performing songs and poetry, as well as hosting Dead Pyrates Society parties where other socially awkward weirdos get together and consume movies and music and make art and tell stories and forget for awhile how crazy they are, while hanging out with other people who feel they are just as crazy as you feel you are.

The characters the artwork is made from will be based primarily upon models that are also members. If interested in modeling, feel free to get ahold of me and we can set something up.

To contribute to the Pyrates, keep in mind a few things. This is a dystopian cyberpunk future with lots of robots. Tons and fucking tons of robots. Everywhere you look there are robots. The look and feel is dark and punky. Pyrates have a look and feel about them that is a amalgamation of future-tech and shout outs to our own time period, which is where they draw most of their inspiration from.***

The Story Continues… Without being too specific, you are from about a thousand years in the future. Earth has recently developed into a Type III civilization on the Kardashev scale, meaning that they have enveloped their sun in an object called a Dyson Sphere which siphons its energy back to Earth, and they are capable of intergalactic travel.

To be more accurate, Earth’s robots have accomplished this, under the ever connected and watchful eye of The Machine, a sentient digital creature born of a man’s consciousness being downloaded into the Internet for the first time.

We have colonies of robots that are capable of self replication, their population has increased into the millions as they’ve spread out across the galaxy, colonizing star after star.

Some they cover in Dyson Spheres, creating a huge network that carries energy back to the home planet. The cached energy has been used to develop working warp drives and the ability to create and utilize wormholes for teleportation.

Humans meanwhile sit connected to The Feed, a fully immersive digital world where their avatars lead full, even meaningful lives, while their bodies are tended to by robots. The entirety of Earth is wired in and connected. It’s every surface is robotic. The cities of the past are the base upon which a robot kingdom has risen.

Old dilapidated houses, filled with wires and cables and machinery sit alongside space elevators that reach 60,000 miles into space.

With all of this, you would think that humanity would revel in its technological superiority, but instead they have turned inward. They let machines take care of everything. Some humans are born and die without every leaving a vat or a bio chamber, so weak and fragile have their bodies become. Implantation of cybernetic augmentation is not only regular, it is nearly always required to offset weak organs and inferior genetics.

This is not to say that everyone lives in the Internetworld. There are still small tribes of humans that live and die in the real world. The Machine does not make it easy. Every aspect of humanity has been reengineered by robots in a better attempt to “take care of them”. The truly odd thing is that while this sounds like a nightmarish future for humans, the initial impetus was a humanitarian project developed by a brilliant man named Mugs Trimble, who we know to be the first man to upload his consciousness into the Internet.

Trimble imagined a future in which all of the needs of humans would be taken care of by helpful and benevolent robot guardians. Humans would be allowed to leave behind the shackles of work and toil, and instead turn their minds toward more intellectual pursuits which would move the human race forward as a whole.

Instead we are pacified cattle in a prison built of decadence and over indulgence. And what’s worse is that it has spread even as our presence has spread into the Galaxy. The long tendrils of The Machine reaches across countless worlds, infecting each of them with our apathetic nature and its own endlessly replicating robotic emissaries.

***The overall story that I have in mind consists of three parts. One part is the story of Skull Candy as she takes on various villains that are personifications of mental illness. These are mostly allegories for us as people who cope with mental instabilities, that things will get better, that we are not defined by these things and that we will overcome them. The second part is the story of someone from our time period who inadvertently winds up in the future. This character is named Sketch Candy (like that is some sketchy candy dude). Sketch is a spunky punky take no shit kind of girl from our time. She is mid twenty-something, with a mind that is attuned to mechanical aptitude. She has a knack, a special ability to instinctively know how things work. In the future our old technology lies abandoned everywhere. And from it Sketch builds a transforming rocket dog thing that becomes her traveling companion on her adventures. The third part is still foggy in my mind. It will probably be later on down the road when I attempt to develop a comic book. I’m thinking the storyline will follow one of the Pyrates as they begin to “awaken” to their future past memories, the trials and tribulations of being a struggling post college student with borderline personality disorder, as well as a big ole heaping helping of emotional baggage from fucked up relationships and a fucked up life. You know, kind of like stories from our lives.

If you've recently developed dimensional rift creating memories of a future past and/or suffer from mental illness, feel free to get ahold of me. My name is Captain Chernobyl. Welcome back Pyrate, we've missed you.