#guess who's back on her bullshit finishing up the Scorch Trials

[x-i-l-verify]

You know, I was actually willing to believe W.C.K.D. had the greater good of people in mind when they were harvesting immune brain juice as a cure for the Flare, but them coming in guns blazing to the Right Arm encampment just proves they actually don’t really care about curing the Flare. Because if they DID, they’d go in stealthily and capture as many people as possible; they wouldn’t firebomb the camp first thing ffs. Any number of immune people could have been caught up in those blasts! Including the kids they’re freaking trying to find! wtf!

[tcshearts]

Session 1, Chapter 2 - History

Content Warning: Violence, PTSD/Anxiety, Death

I wake up suddenly from a nightmare, sitting upright in bed and gripping the sheets tightly to my chest. Every bit of the nightmare felt so real, I could feel the flames on my face, the burns on my sides, the fear in my family members eyes as Heatstroke burned them to death. In the first year or two when I would have nightmares about Heatstroke, I would transcend in my sleep and end up burning the sheets or the scorching the walls. I haven’t done that in the past few years, I have better control of my powers now.

I reach for my phone and check the time, it’s just before four in the morning, which I set my alarm for anyway. I figure it’s time to get up, so I grab my robe and towel from my dresser. The showers are just a few doors down from my room, and luckily, they are almost always empty this early in the morning. Today is no different, so I quickly step into a stall, undress, and turn the shower on. All throughout the shower, I try as best as I can to avoid looking at my scars, to avoid thinking about how they mark me for life, and how if I ever wanted to get intimate with someone, they would have to know exactly who I am.

I turn the water off and stand in silence for a moment, thinking back to the conversation with Dragon. Could we really be on the brink of finding Heatstroke? Could I really be on the brink of avenging my family? I don’t want to get my hopes up, but I trust Dragon. I grab my towel and dry myself off before putting the robe on. Once I’m sure that no parts of my scars are even slightly visible, I leave the shower stall and the bathroom to return to my bedroom. Waking up this early has become as much a routine for me as anything since I started attending this school. I’m cautious about my identity being discovered, but I need to be. If someone discovered who I was, my life would be effectively over.

Anyone with powers would be picked up by the Archduke’s regime, but people like myself, Dragon, and Chimera wouldn’t even be given a trial or a chance to work for them. We’d be locked in The Wall, or maybe even the Archduke’s tower. We’d be tortured for information, and when our usefulness ran out, we’d be killed or brainwashed to serve the Archduke.

I often wonder why Heatstroke hasn’t given them my identity yet. For the first few years, I was expecting a full troop of the Archduke’s soldiers to show up at my door almost every day. Some days I still expect that. Maybe my dad still has some sort of protective feelings for me, or maybe it’s just a sick joke and they’re letting me get a small sliver of hope before they take me away in the night when I start becoming too much of a problem.

I go to my dresser and open up the top section where I hang up some of my clothes, pulling out my uniform and rolling my eyes at it. The uniform includes a skirt, a short sleeved polo, a small ascot, and a jacket. The polo is entirely white, as is the skirt, save for a small purple stripe running across it a few inches from the bottom. The ascot is purple with a pristine purple gem in the center, meant to match the armor of the Archduke. The jacket is a very dark purple with the crest of the Archduke Valentin’s Boarding School in Oru on the left breast pocket. I put the uniform on and check in the mirror to make sure it looks perfect, nothing seems out of place, and there are no noticeable wrinkles. The only deviation from the average student at all is my glasses. I put on black socks and shoes to complete the uniform and take one last look in the mirror.

I glance at my phone again and see it’s a quarter before five, which means I still have to wait almost two hours before the dining hall opens for breakfast. I decide to pass the time by working on some of the homework I didn’t do last night. I finish up some math and music theory, which takes me about an hour, then I glance at my history book. The book is pristine, printed within the past three years. When the Archduke rose to power, most of the old history books were burned and replaced with a “corrected” history. A history that paints my family as monsters and barbarians. A history that calls being different a bad thing. The history books that exist now may as well be propaganda, calling the Archduke a “heroic champion” and calling his decision to outlaw gay marriage a “return to traditional values,” among other things.

I don’t want to read more of this vile pseudo-history, but I know I have to. I read slowly, taking a few seconds to breathe between pages. I’m a Flamewake, I’m a superhero, and I’m a lesbian, so almost every page of this book reminds me that I’m “wrong” and “deviant.” Fuck this place.

I finally reach the end of the chapter and slam the book closed, shoving it back into my backpack. To my annoyance, I see it’s already half past seven, which means that if I want breakfast, I’m going to have to walk through a horde of other students. I glance out my window to the courtyard, seeing a massive line of students outside the dining hall. Getting food isn’t worth it at this point, so I lay back on my bed and focus on my breathing until my alarm goes off, signaling it’s time to get to class.

I head to my first class of the day, history, focusing on my breathing all the way there. I enter the classroom and take a seat at the back of the classroom as a few other students pour in. Kailee Consin, one of the more popular girls in the senior class, gives me a dirty look. I don’t blame her necessarily, we had a bit of a thing last year that we tried to keep very secret. When she wanted to get physical, I broke it off. I wasn’t willing to risk my identity and she wasn’t willing to wait. She didn’t take it well and still holds a grudge.

I sit up and try my best to listen and stay calm as the lecture begins. If reading about my family being murdered was bad, hearing a speech about it is excruciating. Our teacher, Mrs. Fields, starts out with just the “facts,” clearly distorted by the regime, but she’s mostly just parroting the book. Eventually, however, we get to the discussion.

“Heatstroke turned on his family, becoming a hero of the state. This couldn’t have been an easy decision, but it’s one he’s revered for. Even if his family were marauders and raiders, they were still family. What does it say about the man, at his core, to make a choice like that?” Mrs. Fields says. I choke down my anger, biting my lip and gripping the edge of the table slightly.  What does it say about him? That he betrayed his family to serve the fucking Archduke? It says he’s a monster, that he’s a traitor, that he’s a murderer, that he-

“He’s a patriot.” A boy in my class says “he put what’s best for his country over what’s best for him.”

Fuck that. Fuck all of that. He killed my entire fucking family with a smile on his face, and we get to remember him as a “patriot.” No, he’s a monster.

“Very good, now, we aren’t exactly looking to examine morals in this class often, but I think examining the reason behind Heatstroke’s decision is important. His decision significantly affected the war and allowed other heroes to follow in his footsteps. So understanding the reasoning behind his choice is, in part, understanding the history.” Mrs. Fields says.

“Why did his family have to be killed?” a girl in the front row, Sarah Garvey, the class president, asks. “Why not just imprison them? I know the regime wasn’t in power then, but they had enough power to hold them until they could arrange for a proper prison.”

“Heatstroke says he would have preferred that route, but they didn’t accept his offer to take them into custody. He was heartbroken about having to hurt them, but it was his only option.” Mrs. Fields answers.

No fucking way! He asked us to surrender? He tried to take us into custody? We tried to take him willingly, to convince him to turn himself in every day for months until we finally decided to hunt him down. That bastard said he tried to offer us a chance to surrender? He’s not just a cold-blooded killer, he’s a liar.

“Bullshit,” I mumble, a little louder than I mean to. Mrs. Fields head snaps towards me.

“Yes, Ms. LeFeu?” She questions. “Did you have a comment?”

“No, ma’am.”

“No, please Rachel, by all means. We’d love to hear your input on this discussion.”

I freeze, glaring at Mrs. Fields. I feel the anger pounding in my chest, every instinct I have is begging me to transcend. I want so badly to turn into Phoenix and set this whole school ablaze. I know that wouldn’t accomplish anything in the long run, it would just speed up my death. I take three deep breaths, just trying to force the anger to subside and let me think. I feel my anger, the essence of The Cinder inside of me, push back. I push harder.

“Um, yeah.” I say, my voice cracking. “Uh, he di-did what he had to I guess.”

A ringing starts to fill my ears, sending pain coursing through my head. I try my best not to react, barely letting my eyes flutter. My whole body feels hot and wrong, I can feel my body screaming at me, just wanting to feel the power of transcendence and unleash it on this prison. I force the anger back down, sure that my face must be turning red.

“Very good.” Mrs. Fields says “Rachel, perhaps you’d like to reiterate the theme of this lesson for everyone. In your own words, what does this chapter teach us about the Great War? About Heatstroke?”

Fuck, no, not me, not now. I close my eyes to get my bearings. When I open my eyes, I see flames in the corner of the room and feel the heat of fire on my face. What did I just do? Did I just transcend? Did I hurt someone?

I glance down to see that I’m still in my school uniform, and when I look back up the fire is gone. That doesn’t make me feel any better, or any less hot. I’m hyperventilating and sweating, I can’t get my ears to stop ringing or my head to stop throbbing. I feel my hands shaking slightly. I need to get out of here, now. I need to escape. I need to be Phoenix. I know that storming out or even asking to leave is just going to make a scene. It may even get me found out.

“Heatstroke is…” I start, I glance at Mrs. Fields, only she’s gone. Standing in her place is Heatstroke, and the whole room is ablaze, all of my classmates reduced to ash. I feel my anger and hatred welling up in me, begging me to transform and fight. I start to feel the anger, and the power of The Cinder take over.

“Well, Rachel?” I hear Mrs. Fields ask. I focus my eyes on her again, she’s back. She’s fine. There’s no fire. All my classmates are fine. It was… it was all in my head again. I try to take a deep breath and stomach what I’m about to say.

“Heatstroke is a hero who paved the way for other heroes to change their ways and reform themselves.” I manage to choke out, not worrying the slightest about sounding convincing or making sure my voice doesn’t shake.

“Mrs. Fields, may I go to the nurses’ office?” I ask, begging her with my eyes.

“Yes, of course. You do look a little flushed.”

I don’t wait for her to finish her sentence, as soon as I get permission I grab my books and bag, and I’m gone. I run straight back to the dorms, shoving my key in the lock as soon as I can reach it. I slam the door closed, throw my bag down and collapse on my floor in tears. I’m shaking, I’m hot, I’m sobbing, I need to escape. I need to escape.

I call on the power of The Cinder, the anger boiling in my chest and transcend. Within seconds I’ve gone from Rachel to Phoenix. I feel the leather of my gloves, the metal of my mask, the flame that makes up my eyes and hair. I feel the stronger, better trained muscles and the more resilient body. I’m safe. I’m safe. Nothing can hurt me, not here. Nothing can hurt me. My headache is gone, I can think clearly, I can’t cry when my eyes are just fire. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.

—–

  I stay in my room for the rest of the school day, but I only remain transcended for a little less than an hour. I spend the day meditating and thinking. At about four-thirty, I realize that I haven’t eaten breakfast or lunch, so I head down to the dining hall. School’s been out for an hour, so I’m hoping not many people will be around. I enter the hall and see it mostly devoid of people and, to my disappointment, food. It’s the awkward phase between lunch and dinner, so there isn’t much that’s left out. I do manage to scavenge up an apple and a couple of chocolate chip cookies, but it’s hardly a meal.

  I head down to the choir room, a tiny room behind our schools’ auditorium. Three rows of risers line the far wall, along with the motivational and instructional posters that hang on every wall in this room. The main thing taking up space, and the only reason I’m here, is the old grand piano that sits in the center of the room. It’s not pretty, nor is it performance worthy, but it’s in tune and it’s accessible, so it’s good enough for me. I’m not technically allowed to be in here without a staff members permission, but if any of the staff actually cared enough to write me up, it’s such a minor mark on my record that it’s worth the risk. Besides, playing the piano isn’t exactly the biggest crime I’ve committed.

  I sit down and start to play Chopin’s Nocturne in C# minor, one of my favorite pieces and one of the first I truly mastered. It may seem unusual for the girl with the power’s fueled by anger to be a pianist of all thing, but it soothes me, and I can find a bit of bliss in it. My mother taught my brother and I to play from a young age, and we both found it to be an easy way to calm down and relax.

  My eyes close for a minute, getting lost in my own music. I think back to my family’s home and our lives before this whole world went to shit. I was ten years old and sitting at our grand piano, an instrument as beautiful as it was expensive, playing this same piece. It was almost Christmas, and just past nine in the evening. I casually glanced to my right while playing, the entire far wall of our living room was made up of windows, and saw the ocean and sand of the beach our house overlooked. The light of the moon was reflecting so peacefully off the water.

  My brother Zion, fourteen at this time, was sitting by the fireplace, doing some sort of artwork on his tablet. He was a talented digital artist, and I always loved to look at his work. The fireplace was lit, we could easily afford to heat our house and just have an electric fireplace, but it figures that the family of fire-based superheroes would want a real fireplace.

  My mother was standing by the Christmas tree. The tree was unreasonably large, ours always were, we had to have it shipped over here on a proper semi truck and set up by professionals. It fit in our house just fine, the ceilings were high enough that we’d have plenty of clearance, even for flying. Not that we ever flew in the house… and told our parents about it. Being a famous superhero actually paid quite well, so our parents were able to afford such a large beachside mansion and, essentially, whatever we wanted. Not to say we were spoiled, we weren’t. We had lessons on work ethic and responsibility instilled in us since we were in diapers. We were just very wealthy and got to enjoy the fruits of my families labor. My mother was examining some of our ornaments idly while listening to me play. I knew she was paying close attention to any missed note or tempo mistake. She was a great teacher, and I knew she would gently correct any error after I had finished.

  My father had just come in from the kitchen, finishing the glass of wine he had been sipping for the past hour. He watched the whole scene for a minute, the fire, the tree, the music. He just sort of smiled and kissed my mom. We were happy. Things were different. We had faced adversity, but the LeFue family, the Flamewakes, always had each other’s backs. Until the day that one of us didn’t.

  Sometimes I still think that I’m going to wake up from a nightmare. That I’ll be in my bed at home, that Zion and my parents will be there, that I’ll go back to living the privileged life of a rich, celebrity, superhero. But no, every morning I wake up, and the Archduke is still in power, I’m still in this school, my dad is still a supervillain, and I’m still a criminal vigilante.

  I play the final few notes of the Nocturne and pause as I think of what to play next when I become aware that the door to the choir room is being held open. I turn around, hoping a faculty member doesn’t actually care enough to kick me out and am relieved to see Sarah. I shrug and eye her carefully. Sarah’s a petite girl, fairly waifish, with big green eyes. Her long blonde hair is almost always done up or tied back. Her pale skin is covered by just the slightest bit of makeup. Her outfit and shoes are kept immaculately clean and proper, without a thread out of place.

“Yes?” I ask.

“Hey, Rachel. I was just walking by and heard music. I wanted to find out who was playing it.” She says, her voice shaking a little.

“Well, now you know.”

“Right. It was lovely by the way, Chopin?”

“Mhm.”

“I thought so. Hey, are you doing okay? You didn’t look so good in class earlier.”

“I’m fine. I just wasn’t feeling well. I was up late doing homework and didn’t get enough sleep.”

“It’s good to hear you’re feeling better. Are you sure you don’t want to talk? I am the class president. I’m supposed to help out my fellow classmates.”

“I’m fine. Just overtired.”

“You did seem pretty upset by the Flamewake discussion.”

“Well, it’s a little sad, don’t you think?”

“The Flamewakes? Yeah…”

“A whole family, gone like that.” I try desperately to mask the bitterness in my voice.

“Well, except his daughter.”

“Phoenix. Yeah. I bet he regrets that now.”

“Maybe he really loves her.”

“Maybe. Sure.”

“What do you think of them? Phoenix, Dragon, Chimera…”

Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me! I just can’t catch a break today.

“Idiots.” I say.

“Really? I- I think they’re heroes.”

“The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“I think they’re brave and cool. I’d like to think I’d stand up for what I believe in if I had powers. I’d want to help people.”

This feels like a trap by Valentin’s regime, but I highly doubt Sarah Garvey of all people would be a spy.

“No. You wouldn’t. That’s not how the world works. Not anymore.”

“I believe things can change. I think all that’s needed for change is a few good people to really believe in something.”

“You’re naive. This isn’t a world for naive people. You either get wise or end up a victim. I know which I’d rather do.”

“What happened to you to make you this jaded before you’ve even finished high school?”

“Life, Sarah. Life happened to me.”

“Well, I think they’re heroes! If I ever got powers, I’d want to help them!”

“They’re going to die.”

“We all are.”

“Young.”

“I-”

“Very young. You’d die too if you had powers. This isn’t a world for heroes anymore.”

“Maybe it’s not…”

“Let me ask you something, what’s the purpose of life?”

“To leave the world a better place than it was when you came into it.” She says, her voice trailing off when she meets my eyes. I sigh and shake my head.

“The point is to survive. Every day that you survive is a victory. You do what you have to in order to survive. Anyone who puts that at risk is either a fool or suicidal.”

I smirk for a moment, I believe what I said. I wonder, for just a moment, which one of those I am.

“I still believe. They’re going to make a difference. There is more to life than surviving. You make everything sound so, hopeless.”

I hear a soft ding from inside a hidden compartment in my backpack, my burner phone. Dragon or Chimera are trying to contact me, which means I need to leave.

“Look, I’m just being honest. Anyway, I need to go. See you around.”

I turn on my heel and head toward the door. I forgot, however, that my backpack was open and my math book loudly clatters to the floor. I bend down to pick it up and feel a searing pain run down my side.

“Ow!” I let out a breathless yelp of pain as I drop to my knees.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I was just trying to h-” Sarah starts, she had tried to grab my book at the same time I did and accidentally knocked her elbow into my side. Dragon’s warning about nerve damage pops into my head for a brief moment,

“Give me that!” I mutter gruffly as I pull the book out of her hands.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I was just trying to help.”

“Like I told you, stop trying to help and start trying to survive.”

Sarah and I exchange the briefest glance before I slam the door shut. I’ve never had a talent for reading faces, but hers is somewhere between “I’m really sorry” and “holy shit, you’re Phoenix.” I’m really, really hoping it’s the former. I hurry up to my room and pull my phone out of the hidden compartment in my backpack. I quickly pull up the texting app, and the message I see means that this day isn’t about to get any easier.

  Chimera: Duty calls, girls. Bank robbery in progress.

—–

Dragon and I meet on top of the sky bridge just above a long stretch of road in downtown Oru. We’re both in our cloaks and masks, waiting until the most crucial moment to transcend. She and I crouch, watching the roadway and waiting for the getaway car to pass under us. This isn’t the type of mission we would do when it was just Dragon and I, we were more like freedom fighters than vigilantes. Chimera has an obsession with public image, and it’s one that we entertain to have her on our side. Chimera still believes in heroes and wants to make the public believe in them again.

For a while, I entertained the idea that Sarah could be Chimera, but I’ve seen them in the same place way too many times for that to be the case. They just have an annoyingly similar outlook on life. I used to think the world needed people like them, but it doesn’t.

Dragon and I made an effort to get here stealthily and conserve our transcendence, Chimera doesn’t care much for such subtlety. She arrives just a few minutes after we do, fully transcended and floating through the air. She looks like a superhero torn straight out of the nineteen-forties. Her body is covered by a form-fitting blue body glove, accented by her clean, white gloves and boots, A cape hangs from her shoulders to her knees, it’s the same shade of white as her gloves and boots with a bright gold trim. She wears a cowl that leaves her eyes, mouth, and hair uncovered. The cowl is the same blue as her suit, with a small white mask around her eyes. On her hip hangs a three-headed whip. Her lips are a stunning deep red, her eyes are a sparkling crystal blue, and her hair is a wavy, shoulder-length, golden blonde.

“Good afternoon ladies.” She says in a chipper tone, her whole body glows blue as she levitates slightly.

“Hey Chi, you’re sure they’re coming this way? It all seems pretty quiet.” Dragon replies.

“That’s what the police scanner said, enforcers should be in hot pursuit, so we have that to deal with too. Transcend up, we need to be ready.”

“Any spirit-touched?”

“One spirit touched robber. No spirit-touched cops, but they have two paladins.”

Dragon and I both transcend without a second thought. I feel the energy of The Cinder flow through me and let the anger I’ve built up over the course of the day take over in full force. Transcending is, quite possibly, the greatest feeling on earth. The rush of new energy and power flowing through my body, the strengthening of all my muscles and the pure electricity in the air after my body finishes transcending. I smirk behind my mask at Dragon and Chimera.

“So, what’s the plan?” I ask.

“Well, first of all, I brought a friend.” Chimera says.

As if on cue, a zip line launches and hooks onto a pole on the near side of the bridge. A thin girl in white and black armor slings herself up to the bridge via the zip line and does an athletic flip as the zip line shoots back into her wrist-mounted launcher. She stands up and gives us a full view of herself. She’s rail thin and average height, maybe an inch or two shorter than I am. Her armor is white padded cloth with black leather plating covering her chest, back, elbows, knees, and neck. She wears black boots and gloves, with metal cuffs just below the gloves. She has two war fans neatly tucked behind her back plate, her only true weapon. She has long white hair cascading down to her chest, which blends seamlessly into her white fox mask which covers her full face. The mask is pure white except for a bit of black around the eyes and a menacing Cheshire cat style grin on the muzzle of the mask.

“Thought you said you could keep up.” Chimera taunts.

“Considering I can’t fly, I think I made pretty good time.” the girl responds.

“Thanks for coming Kitsune,” Dragon says, extending a claw to shake her hand.

“This job seemed mutually beneficial. I’ve been meaning to take a look around some enforcer vans. You know my rules. I don’t help cops, we aren’t letting these guys get arrested.’

“We aren’t evil. We’d never let anyone get taken by the regime. We’ve never sent anyone to The Wall, and we aren’t gonna start now. Enforcers are on the way, we take them out to.”

“Then what’s your endgame?”

“Money goes back to the bank, the thief goes home safe.”

“The enforcers die?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m in.”

“So, what’s our plan?” I ask.

“Take out the enforcers first, then paladins, then we deal with the thieves.” Dragon says, looking out on the horizon.

“Do we have a more specific plan?” Chimera asks, tapping her foot, which looks admittedly odd while she’s floating in the air.

“Yeah, cover the roadway below us in water.”

“I can try. Fluids are hard for me.”

“That’s why I’m having you do it now.”

“You’re the boss.” Chimera says with a shrug. She takes a step forward and stares into the water of the bay that runs alongside the far road. She points a hand towards the water, and slowly a small orb of water emerges from the bay.

“Anything obviously alive in there?” Chimera asks, holding her head.

“Nope, clear of fish.” Dragon informs her.

The orb of water quickly flies from the bay to just under our bridge, quickly settling on the ground and covering a small stretch of road.

“Is that enough?” Chimera asks, letting out a deep breath and sitting on the bridge.

“It’ll do. Nice work.” Dragon says, flying down to the newly drenched cement. Dragon takes a deep breath in and focuses before letting out a torrent of white light from her jaws, the light quickly washes over the water and leaves a thick layer of ice laying over the roadway. Dragon now turns her attention to the barricade separating the road from the bay. She grabs down on the barrier tightly and pulls up, sending bits of concrete and metal into the air. She tosses the destroyed bit of barricade into the water.

“Now we wait.” She says, leaning on a still intact section of the barricade as we start to hear police sirens in the distance.

Within a few minutes, we see a black sedan turn the corner and speed down the road towards us. A man sits in the driver’s seat, his hood up and a bandana and sunglasses covering his face. He’s driving with one hand and holding a pistol out the window with the other. In the back seat sits another man, dressed in a hooded jacket and a Halloween mask of some sort of wolfman. He’s holding a large shotgun and pointing it out the rear window, which has been fully broken open. Lastly, in the passenger seat, is the spirit-touched. He’s got dark black skin with glowing blue marks running all up his arms and continuing down his chest. He has large, blue, angelic wings tucked neatly behind him. His eyes are glowing with the same blue color as the markings on his arms. The image of this figure sitting calmly in the passenger seat of a car is almost comical.

“Chimera, you’re up again.” Dragon says. “Let them go.”

Chimera points a hand toward the car as it starts to glow blue, the wheels of the car spin as it’s slowly lifted off the ground. The panicked driver unloads a clip at Chimera as the gunman in the back shoots for Dragon. Kitsune moves a fraction of a second faster than I do, pushing Chimera to the side and letting the bullets harmlessly impact one of her fans, creating a dull metal on metal sound with each impact. The shot aimed at Dragon barely managed to hit her and almost certainly didn’t break through her icy scales. She shrugs it off nonchalantly as the car flies over the patch of ice and Chimera sets it down on the road. The car speeds off and quickly turns the next corner available to it.

Before we even get a chance to breathe, we hear the sound of thrusters blasting as two paladins, ten-foot tall hulking chunks of metal in a vaguely humanoid shape, fly over us and follow after the car, the turn it took not throwing them at all. Just before it turns, one of the Paladins glances at us for the briefest of moments.

  “Chimera, don’t lose the car. We’ll be right behind you.” Dragon orders as Chimera begins to glow with blue energy, quickly taking to the air and following after the metal giants. As soon as she round the corner, two black and white enforcer vans show up. The Cheshire grin on Kitsune’s mask seems to grow for a second as she watches the cops, focusing on them.

“Kit, do it.” Dragon orders.

Kitsune throws her hand to the right as the driver of the first van hits the ice. Just as the driver hits the ice his arm jerks violently to the right as he crashes the van into the metal wall of an office building, almost totally flattening the front end. Kitsune wastes no time dealing with the second, this time throwing her hand to the left. Just as this driver hits the ice, his arm jerks violently to the left. The second van slides and skids awkwardly as it finds a location where the barricade has been torn out and careens into the bay, sinking beneath the water.

“You know? Your power is really fucking creepy, but I’m so glad you’re on our side.” I tell Kitsune as she draws both of her fans and starts to jump down from the bridge.

“Yup, I’m a fucking freak. Now you two go, I need to have a conversation with the police.” she yells back up to me. Dragon nods to me, and we both take to the air, her with her natural wings and me with my wings of flame. We’re worried for a second that we may have lost Chimera, but we start seeing clear signs of laser fire and Chimera throwing things from ground level at the paladins. We actually manage to get pretty close to them, the sound of laser fire becoming obvious the closer we get. We’re actually pretty sure we’re getting close.

I hear a loud blast from behind me as Dragon is struck by a red laser and impacts the ground hard, leaving a small crater in the pavement. I immediately turn and check for our assailant, seeing one paladin with a laser turret coming out of its shoulder. Great, these things have learned how to set traps, that’s all we need.

The paladin lets loose a few blasts of lasers at me, not finding the mark as I dodge between them. I lower my hands and clasp them together as I fly closer to the robot, I swing my hands upward quickly and call fire to them, sending a concentrated jet of flame at the robot. The fire hits it square in the chest, but it doesn’t seem to bother it at all or even make a dent in the armor of the paladin.

It ejects a second turret from its right shoulder, this one looking more like a rifle. It fires both at me simultaneously as I fly back slightly, looking for a better angle of attack. I feel a searing pain in my knee as I see the cannon from his right shoulder made contact with my knee. My costume isn’t broken by it, but it still stings pretty badly. I quickly fly down to street level and grab Dragon, checking to make sure she’s breathing, which she is. She was hit by the stun gun of the paladin, which basically feels like an intensely localized flashbang going off in your face. She’s probably out for a few minutes.

I get back to the sky, flying around to the back of the paladin. It tries to grab me as I fly around it but doesn’t actually turn. I grab onto the back panel of the paladin and call flame to my hands. If I can maintain a grip, I can probably burn my way in. It tries to fly to shake me off, but I manage to hold on well enough. It switches tactics, this time landing on the ground as I start to feel part of the top layer of metal giving way. I see the hinges of its mechanical jaw open as a small cannon appears in its mouth as white energy begins to gather. Fuck, it’s not trying to get me off of it, it’s trying to hit Dragon.

  I can probably melt through it if I keep at it, but I have no idea if I’ll be even close to fast enough to shut it down before it hits her, so I jump off. I fly to the crater that Dragon’s laying in and call on every bit of my enhanced strength to lift her scaled body out of the crater. I throw her over my head as she starts to come to. As soon as I’m finished moving her, the paladin fires its mouth cannon at the crater, catching both my legs below the knee. It isn’t painful, but both my legs go numb as soon as it hits me. I look down at my legs and see them encased in an opaque crystalline substance, rooting them to the spot.

  It’s a containing carbon, meant to hold spirit-touched in place. It won’t actually kill or leave lasting damage, but I can’t move or feel my legs, and it would take a huge portion of my powers to get out of. Lucky for me, Dragon’s back in the fight, and she’s angry.

  Dragon flies at the paladin, pouncing on it, and pinning it to the pavement. With a quick blow, she knocks the stun gun off of its shoulder and bites hard into the bare shoulder. She’s not able to break through, and lets loose a blast of ice in its face. The paladin shakes it off and doesn’t seem at all phased. It hauls back and hits her with one of its massive, metal fists, sending her flying into the side of a nearby building. It fires a few of its burning lasers at her, but they don’t seem to have much of an effect on Dragon’s scaled hide.

  It’s a stalemate, and in a fight with a paladin, that’s a death sentence. Paladins don’t run out of power or need to detranscend like us, so we’re basically fucked if I can’t do anything. I’ve fought paladins before, but I’ve been lucky enough to never get hit with carbon until today.

  “Dragon, any ideas?” I ask, futility trying to burn through the carbon.

  “I can’t slash through it or freeze it. Can you get loose anytime soon?” She asks.

  “Trying, but… actually, maybe! Hold on.”

  I’m struck with an idea. I call on my special power, the ability to enter my Cinder state, and I’m relieved as my feet start to disappear, leaving empty carbon behind. Within a few seconds, my entire body has disappeared, and I’m in the Cinder state, totally invisible and intangible. Instead of dropping out of it now, I get an idea to take care of the paladin. I float towards the Paladin, locked in combat with Dragon, and slide through its back panel. I look around the chest cavity of the robot, seeing a thick metal frame and a mess of wires and cables. If I can make myself appear in just the right place, I should have enough room. I’m not exactly sure what would happen if I tried to materialize into a solid object, but I don’t plan on finding out.

I focus the fire within me and start gathering it. I’m such a fucking idiot for getting jumped by a two-ton robot, I’m such an idiot for getting my feet encased in carbon, and we shouldn’t even be here in the first place. If Chimera didn’t have such a fucking justice boner, I’d be in my dorm right now. Not like I’d be having a better time there, but I wouldn’t have a massive robot trying to lock me in a high-security super prison for the rest of my life. I grit my teeth and drop out of the cinder state, curling into a ball. A wave of flame erupts from around my body, slicing the paladin down the seam. I land on the concrete and look at Dragon.

“Let’s go, we have lost ground to make up.” I say as I take to the air. Dragon follows after me, but I’m faster than her at this point. My fire is burning hotter than it has in a few weeks and I’m not planning on slowing down. Within a few minutes, I finally catch up to the stopped black sedan. The two guys with guns have them trained on the paladin, their bullets deflecting off of its armor harmlessly. The glowing man is fighting Chimera, throwing bolts of electricity at her, which she is mostly dodging rather than deflecting.

I waste no time, charging into the glowing man and striking him in the chest while letting loose a jet of flame. He falls onto a nearby rooftop and I land next to him. I don’t give him the chance to get up, striking him hard in the face and letting for flame loose. He takes a step back and takes to the air, laughing softly and staring at me.

“You’re not too bright. Are you?” he says, creating an arc of electricity between his hands.

“Phoenix! Stop! He absorbs energy and turns it into electricity!” Chimera warns me, I turn back to the figure just in time to take a blast of electricity to the chest, I go flying back along the roof and hit hard against a ventilation shaft. My head is pounding and my hands can’t stay steady. I open my eyes and I’m seeing double. There’s a solid chance that hit just gave me a concussion. I growl under my breath and see he’s back to fighting Chimera, who’s frantically dodging him.

Dragon arrives a few seconds later, landing on the roof right next to me. She gives me a hand up which I begrudgingly take. She watches the man fight for a second, trying to get a decent read.

“So, what’s the plan?” I ask her.

“Chimera isn’t hitting him, why?” she asks.

���He absorbs energy. Hitting him just makes him stronger.”

“That’s a passive effect?”

“Seems like it.”

“No, he… he’s spending powers to use his shield. He has to be. Nobody is that strong on a base level, not even the Archduke.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Dragon sounds mildly offended that I even asked.

“So what do we do about that?”

“Get him to use his power up, evasive maneuvers, keep him shooting at all three of us. Don’t engage him, just keep dodging him as best you can.”

Dragon takes off towards him before I get a second to reply. Okay fine, she wants us to draw fire, I know a thing or two about that.

I fly to the nearest rooftop to the fight and look him dead in the eyes.

“Hey!” I shout. “I never caught a name.”

“Didn’t give you one.” he replies, firing a bolt of lightning at me. I take a step back to dodge out of the way.

“I like to know who’s ass I’m about to kick. For records and all that.”

“You’re fucking crazy. The name’s Voyager. You?”

“You’re kidding, right? That’s not even in the top hundred coolest electricity based names. Fucking Voyager?”

“Yeah, come say that to my face.”

“Whatever, I’m calling you Sparky.”

“Yeah, and I’m calling you an ambulance!”

Voyager throws two bolts of lightning at me, I backpedal and dive off the back of the roof, quickly calling on my wings again, I swing around the base of the building and fly up towards him, very nearly hitting him but changing course in his face. He fires a shot that almost grazes me as I spin to avoid it. Dragon flies in front of him to get his attention and now it’s more bolts her way. Not long after, Chimera cracks her whip right next to his ear and dodges a few blasts herself.

“Hey, Sparky!” I yell when I see Chimera getting a little worn out. He turns his head to look at me and I flip him off. He readies another beam of electricity, and I prepare to dodge it. He smirks at me as he fires the beam right into Dragon, who wasn’t anticipating it. The beam hits Dragon hard in the chest, and he locks it in on her. She crashes into the ground, but he doesn’t let up, keeping the electricity trained on her.

I fly into him, bumping him slightly. He does stop shocking Dragon but instead grabs me by the hair. He tries to shock me that way but ends up burning his hands on the flames. He swears loudly and shakes his hand as I fly past him. Dragon is down, but as long as Chimera and I can keep up her plan, we have a shot. He extends his hands and tries to train one bolt on me and one on Chimera, but we are both able to dodge those pretty easily. I fly closer to him and slow a little as I pass under him. He stops his beam of electricity and suddenly fires it ahead of me, I was expecting that. What I was not, however, expecting, was his second beam to be right behind me.

I feel waves of electricity course through my body. I can feel my heart quake with each jolt that passes through it. It’s hard to breathe or even focus. I crash hard into the dirt of an alleyway, he doesn’t stop until he’s sure I’m down. Getting a little extra in for good measure. I’m not unconscious, but I’m in no shape to stand and fight.

So it’s just Chimera and Voyager. They eye each other for a moment, Chimera staying rooted in the air. Voyager fires a blast of lightning at Chimera, which she dodges with ease, sliding right back to her original position once it passes.

“Missed me!” she taunts.

“Wasn’t aiming at you.” he says.

Chimera gasps as sparks spread onto her back, she’s next to a transformer, and Voyager just overloaded it. Before she can move, the transformer explodes violently, baptizing her in bright light and electricity. She falls to the ground below hard, smoking and scorched.

Voyager floats about us, calling more electricity to himself. He’s going to kill me, this is how I fucking die, to a petty bank robber in some alley in Oru. I’m not going to make a difference, and I’m a fool for thinking I could. My death doesn’t mean anything, I’m just going to end up a dead in a street fight. Fuck. At least I didn’t give Heatstroke the satisfaction of killing me himself.

His blast misfires into the sky, he looks at his hands, confused. As if his wrist called for his electricity to go well before he meant it to. Suddenly, in a bright flash, he drops out of transcendence and back into his mundane form. He’s a dark skinned man with short curly hair and a thin mustache, he’s dressed in a grey sweatshirt and blue jeans. He starts to fall out of the air and to the ground, the drop is more than fatal, but suddenly he stops. A razor-tipped hook poked through his hood. Kitsune stands on a rooftop, a fan in one hand and a zip line extending from the wrist launder on her other hand.

—–

  It takes a few minutes for her to pull him to a rooftop and for Dragon and myself to carry Chimera up there. When we all get there, she has a closed fan in her hand and is eyeing Voyager.

“What are you supposed to be? What did you do to my powers? What the hell is that fan supposed to do?” he says, trying his best not to let his voice shake.

“A fox, but I could easily become your worst nightmare if you don’t cooperate. I made the line of communication between your brain and fine motor skills hiccup, which is why you shot lightning at nothing.” She explains, she pulls back slightly and shoves her war fan into his chest in a quick strike, extending the fan on contact.

“And that’s what this fan does. Question its usefulness as a weapon again, it’s not a mistake I let people make three times.”

The man stays silent. Kitsune walks around him, pulling three backpacks and a large duffle bag from behind some vents.

“So, here’s the deal. You try to run, and we kill you, you try to fight, and we kill you, you try anything we don’t say you can do, and…  

“You kill me?”

“Good. I’m glad you’re learning. Oh, and if that girl dies from her injuries, we kill you, is that clear?” Kitsune explains, indicating to the unconscious Chimera.

“Weren’t y’all supposed to be the good guys?” he asks with a small chuckle.

“Yes, so think about what the enforcers would have done to you.”

“Look, what do you want?”

“Well, first off, we’re taking the money, but you aren’t in a position to negotiate where that goes. Secondly, I just want some information. Here’s what I got so far, correct me if I’m wrong. You’re either Trent Long, Jalen Howard, or Michael Lewis.” Kitsune pauses a beat after each name and takes a second to look at him afterward.

“Okay, so you’re Michael.” she says, it’s not a question.

“Wait, what the fuck?” he asks.

“I’m not getting into it, but I only have to ask you a question to figure out the answer. You actually answering is optional, it also means that lying to me is pointless. Understand?”

“Fine, yeah, I’m Michael.”

“You have a younger brother, Edward. Goes by Ed, no, Eddy. Yeah? Yeah. Parents are working in internment, and you’re his guardian. I figure you want the money to start a new life, somewhere far from Oru. Maybe Fangar, or the Diamond Coast. Yeah, Diamond Coast. So that’s why you stole the cash. You aren’t a criminal mastermind or anything.”

“Okay, what do you-”

“Shh. You just got your powers when, last week? Two weeks ago? Three? Three, okay cool. This is your first outing, and you’ve never pushed them to their limits. You’re confused as to why you detranscended. The bad news for you is that just happens when someone pushes themself too far. That’s why you have to conserve energy. Strike smarter, not harder. You weren’t ready for this, you got way too far in over your head and actually put on a pretty good effort against my friends, but you burned too much power way too fast, and it should have killed you.”

“Yeah. Okay, fine. So, it y’all really are the good guys, why did you stop me?”

“Cause we’re the fucking good guys. The Archduke deserves to have his shit stolen, but you need to take directly from him. All your doing with this is making sure that some bank workers get reprimanded and possibly imprisoned by the Archduke. You’re making your life better by making someone else’s worse. That’s no better than them.”

“Banks are insured, nobody’s go-”

“You buy that? You think the Archduke is gonna actually provide insurance to money that isn’t his? No, that’s a lie that petty thieves tell so they can sleep at night.”

Michael stays silent and looks at the ground for a second.

“Here’s the deal.” Kitsune starts, reaching for a small bundle of credits in her backplate. “Your friends are dead. The paladin killed them before I got here. You’re going to take this. It’s 5,000 credits. I can afford to give this to you, it’s worth it. As long as you take your brother and go. You’re going to take your friends’ car and their guns. You’re gonna leave Oru forever. You’re gonna teach your brother how to defend himself, you’re going to master your power, and you’re going to lay as low as possible. You’re a spirit-touched. Ninety-five percent of people in the world with never be anywhere close to as powerful as you are. Fucking own that and turn it into something positive.”

“Okay. I-”

“Okay, and one last thing. If you ever try to get my people imprisoned or hurt my friends again…”

Kitsune throws her hands out quickly, and Michael spreads his arm in a spread eagle pose. She then raises her hand gently, and Michael stands. He looks downright terrified, and his eyes quickly dart around the roof. Kitsune twirls her finger, and Michael spins on his heel. His feet start to move in an almost unnatural way as Kitsune waves her fingers, walking him to the edge of the room.

“All I have to do is flick my wrist, and you jump five stories to your death. I won’t hesitate to kill you next time. I know your secrets Michael Lewis, and that means I have all the power. Now go. Leave Oru. Don’t come back.”

Michael drops his arms and sprints to the fire escape, trying to get as far away from Kitsune as quickly as possible. Kitsune’s power can be downright terrifying, and it’s still uncomfortable to watch someone she has that much control over.

“Did you fully control him?” I ask. I’m not even totally sure she can do that.

“No. I just had temporary full control of his limbs, I had like five secrets on him and nothing big. I could only make him walk very slowly, I wasn’t gonna get him to sprint or beat someone to death or even talk. I need way more than that to make someone a total meat puppet.” Kitsune says.

“You can do more?”

“Yeah. Give me some of your secrets, and I’ll show you sometime. It’s great, I promise.”

“I think I’ll pass. But seriously, how do you do that interrogation bit?”

“I get some pieces of information that could pertain to them, like a list of names, and say them until I read a mild panic or fear reaction on the correct answer and try my best to make logical leaps. All I had to do to get started on that guy was search his backpack. Part of my gift is the ability to read emotions. Of course I was going to find a way to weaponize that.”

“Please never turn to the darkside. Your powers freak me the fuck out.”

“Don’t plan to. Burning to death in a rage inferno freaks me the fuck out.”

“Fair enough.”

“Speaking of death, I did just save all of your lives. So, how about a favor?”

“Sure.” Dragon says with a nod, Chimera is finally sitting up, but her hands are shaking and she’s gripping her head gently.

“I took this from the paladin, it’s a memory core. Can you decrypt and analyze it for me?” Kitsune says, handing Dragon a small metal box with some torn wires.

“Yeah, that’s no problem at all. I can get it to you this weekend if that’s good.”

“That’s great, you know how to contact me. I trust you can return the money.”

“Yeah, I can do it.” Chimera says, her voice shakes slightly as she picks up the duffle bag. “I was the one who said we should go on this job. It’s my fault that we almost died, I’ll take it back.”

“Chi, you can barely walk.” Dragon insists.

“I don’t need to walk, I can fly.” Chimera says taking to the air as she straps the bag across her chest.

“Chimera!”

“Just let me do this. Please. I think the people are starting to trust me, at least a little.”

Chimera flies off. She’s clearly still in pain, but she’s determined. Kitsune shrugs and fires a zip line in the same general direction as Chimera.

“I’m headed that way anyway, I’ll keep an eye on her.” she says as she takes off swinging down the block.

“Thank you.” Dragon says.

“Well, see you next time?” I say, igniting my wings back and walking to the edge of the rooftop.

“Hey! Phoenix! Dragon!” I hear a voice call from the street, I look down and grumble when I see Sarah Garvey of all people. That’s all I need to end my day. Of course, Dragon flies down to meet her on the street, and for some stupid reason, I decide to follow.

“What can we do for you civilian?” Dragon asks, going into her full “professional superhero” mode.

“I know Phoenix must be looking for her dad. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I did some research and checked out a few buildings. I think I might have found some interesting information.” she says, holding a thin manila folder.

You’re fucking kidding me. She thinks she can find anything that we, a team of superheroes, can’t? Fuck her.

“Leave.” I order.

“But I just wa-”

“Don’t care. Don’t presume to know what I ‘must be’ doing. Don’t mess with me today. Leave and stay out of our way.”

“I’m just trying to help.”

“You wanna help? Then stay out of the way. You’re not a hero, you don’t have powers. You’re just a liability if you keep trying to look into the business of a fucking supervillain.”

“You think that’s all that makes a hero? Powers and a suit?”

“They certainly help.”

“You can’t believe that. I know you have the heart of a hero.”

“Maybe I did. If you wanna find it, go sifting through the pile of ash that is the rest of my family.”

“You’re our best hope for the future, and you don’t even believe in yourself? Why do you even do this then? Why not go join your father?”

“I’m sorry. Did you just say what I think you fucking said?”

Sarah clasps a hand over her mouth and looks at me with genuine fear as I step closer. I feel heat and flame expel from my fists. Every inch of me wants to light her on fire, every inch of me wants to make her pay for that comment, every inch of me wants to make her an example of what happens to naive victims in this world. I grab her by the neck with my right hand and pin her against the brick wall of a nearby building.

“Repeat what you just said.” I order her.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t me-”

“Repeat. What. You. Said.”

“Phoenix. Stand down.” Dragon orders me, bearing her claws and teeth.

I drop Sarah, she immediately cowers, crying and apologizing.

“It’s probably best you get home civilian, thank you for your information. I’m sure it will be a big help.” Dragon says, picking up the folder. Sarah runs off, leaving me alone with Dragon.

“Really? We’re threatening civilians now?” She asks.

“Don’t start with me.” I say, brushing past her.

“If we’re trying to rebuild the image of hero-”

“I don’t give a shit about the image of heroes! I care about finding the bastard that killed my family and making him pay! After that, I could give a fuck what we do! Maybe I’ll quit!”

“Phoenix…”

“Don’t fucking talk to me.”

I take a few steps past her before igniting my wings and screaming into the sky on a jet of flame. Fuck everything about today. I almost died, and I’m not even sure if that cracks the list of the top three worst things that happened to me today. Fuck all of this. I don’t need her. I don’t need anybody. I’ve been on my own since I was twelve, and I could be alone again if I had to. I could be a solo hero. She and Chimera wouldn’t last one week without me!

Or maybe I’m holding them back. I’m not sure which possibility I like less.

[castlehead]

I’LL BE DONE WHEN I’M FINISHED: The Broadcasts of a Shit

“Still even wounded you do not see it. I can tell. I do not see it myself but I feel it a little.”

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms INTRODUCTION, MOSTLY APROPOS OF NOTHING: [One need not be familiar with an entirely new vocal register to understand the random streetcorner persiflage between the two working men echoing down the street, as cross and cross the Citizenry, who slave and slave to ignore it or any such jovial ballbusting.

Pavement radiating with dogday heat—I have engagements with others to get to and so on, one thinks. Harried in the city.

The interaction remains incomplete when the working men decide they must return to work. Attempt to sew up the awkward leave with a middling joke and a strong laugh from one of them echoing. Men as these they perfectly just almost overlook personal space. And then the punchline to take home. Priests that beg we make not too much upon their energies, right now. Not a warm leave but not creating a spat in the street either. Lonely persiflage between two strangers: talking about the amusing circumstance that since they are both stopping between deliveries from to to the other’s destination then nothing will get there!, ha ha ha ha ha.

And about how it must be to put food on your plate among the throngs on throngs of strangers striving for that same thing. And so on. No. One need not heed a variation of the idea to understand a whole language. Nor be familiar with every stranger’s voice in order to recognize words said in English. The ideas of one’s lover if spoken without the face to match them are the same ideas from someone else’s mouth. To these delicacies etc. I think I shall offer, uh, these my shreds of creaking strain, you say. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . It was the first noises of thought or perhaps one thought. Me fighting the indigestion of a death rattle once, at three in the morning. Noise of that was different from the noise I presumed was morning birds and the afflatus. It spoke through the web of obstacles into my wakening. Only first evaluated as a sweet monotony, similar to crickets out in the sticks. But nobler. Crickets that I hear once I am outside and finally smoke. One gets it already! Jeez. Without needing to be educated further, in the monotony. Will recognize it. No worries. Something snatches up from subterranean mind with the pluck of a young mole. It is exactly what one thought. If the thought is important it will quickly catch the verbal expression meant for it anyway, and this can be explained if one simply follow the journey. It is zen to say no destination is required but that is not quite what is meant here. Only, that no destination is required to plan to travel. One can have arrived last week in Baghdad and been introduced to boredom and status quo. A keeping of the peace with the redundant echo of gunfire far off. He remembers July fourth fireworks Ronnie let off when I was back home, he thinks; he travels across the sea back there momentarily, and is massively dissociated, by whatever timeless time he arrives there. Dissociation flares up so as to feel at home with the death and in any case it extends the story with a new and scarier human rhythm. On the other hand: somebody walks a few feet to the john at night, thinking that will be that after turning off the john lightswitch, only to study their issues and continue their own story after hours, for hours: at first they think to pass the time while they poop in silence but soon zone out thinking of whatever gripes in reach, soothed by their cloister. Reaching for toiletpaper. Futility. Environment of solitary misery. But simply follow the journey; that will locate its proper coordinates; the coordinates tell one where the journey will end. Herein is that voyage described till The Last Step that is taken . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        .

CHAPTER 1 One already feels inclined to voyage beyond it. One is rightly consumed by the thought, along with other such beyondthoughts. Information rarely happens predictably. Its influence is across the many highways bleeding us in and out of this planet. It is almost respiratory. It is an influence to be loved because it will grow old and geriatric and vibrating, old like we do. Death resets the collective unconscious generation by generation. Squint your eyes a bit and look at it this way, maybe tilt your head. You’ll see that everybody on Earth or anybody at least on Earth who is a little wise is just like the elderly: Because we are eternally concerned with getting our sea legs, floating, and yet weighed down into the abyss by the gravity of years of knowing. This personal evolutionary process will repeat in the hearts of future people with little variation, recycling the same list of bullshit to choose from regarding what to let ruin your life. Imagine being atop a weathervane: it is the single fleeting chance anointed in youth. Anointed in golden drizzle. To hone one’s middle ear in preparation for when you are an oldtimer. Maintaining a frame of reference will be a day’s feat, and traversing a parking lot past all the needless circus will leave you confused at all the saturation of life around you, smacking at the sun’s aftertaste laboring.

If only we lived in Palm Beach Grant! Says your wife. Someplace where you can hear the ocean. You flip the shades up on your glasses and think that cellphones used to do that, mutter something about remaining a faithful luddite, about how literacy in computer coding will become mandatory one day, then try your hand at imitating this sort of fluoride stare you have witnessed in the eyes of many an Ipad person.

For you call them fucking Ipad people. Noticing currently that the virus has made a host of the young. A man can live easy there, you say; he says to his lover, Palm Beach the furthest thing from his mind; and what is in his mind the idea of turning back, at least to remind us where the car is. He says. A voice in the second person emerges suggestively again: you pass a burp from deteriorating lips. Then you regress a little and ask your mom if this is a good idea as if she were there, who has by now been doled back to God these forty years prior? That one sad thing left you almost kind of widowed. There are all these demons in people and all of them are buzzing words to me and causing an autistic scene, thinks one, one as you might be, that is; I find I panic less because at least I know my insanity belongs to me. All this pain of selves that offers no salve, and to which I am slave. They scream of no idea where I am. Demons. Pah. Disorienting like Vegas lights. I should go to Vegas. You think abstractly of some horrible radio song by this horrible band from the seventies. The group was called…America? You think thus: Some guy, you always forgot his name, the jackass, and an especial jackass tonight, you remember thinking, that night, or were straining to think, over that horrible song playing on the jukebox of the local senior honkytonk in a white as bleach neighborhood. He was being as usual a jackass, even fucking worse than a horse with no name, because he had one,—he asked you once if ever you grieve the mother’s milk she never supplied for the sake of her figure, and which she sold, the milk, not herself: she sold it being very poor. The jackass said to him in so many words it was a sacrifice never used to her advantage because it didn’t last long enough to put to any use besides fucking the townies. Because she died. You remember what you said verbatim: I am widower of the purity in fun I used to see, I guess, and then a memory invade your eyes within the memory: me, clutching my mother’s breasts when I was four years, but as one would plump a pillow, and upon worrying a nest together in her belly while she sat prone in an empty bed, falling asleep, and then promptly thinking nothing of any of this for the rest of my life. These past things that mean so much…you are not even halfway there, one thinks. And, panting and scorching, you are not halfway to the market. What is it you consider too elaborately now, and create pros and cons for, your wife saying that her legs are getting sore? Clear the hurdle and think it through once again without running aground: to turn around and brave passing a second time a group of obese children. Not even halfway there. Calling the World a place is a strange thing to do referring to it but it is one though. It is a place of consumers rattling their groceries forth. And children overfed to sallowness and spinning stimuli that destroy human will. Balancing one’s life is an imperative one assumes responsibility for. One does it, wreaks spirit from nothing, or gas, pushing a pedal to move the wheels. One credits it an absurdity to balance perfection. But those are never the cards dealt. The perfect life will live and make problems no matter what. Despite the job not be of any necessity for that perfect life; an imbalance to correct. The pediment will suffer the impediments of its inventor’s chiseling hand. Shaking. This weathervane we do not understand called contemporary culture might have done it. Yet after weathering the trial and error, when we finally find the right dance moves to keep us upright, a gale knocks us off the weathervane, and then we are old and out of the spotlight. People quake at this and also at the million things on the menu that could go wrong if you order the blowfish, which is the most expensive thing on the menu at this new Japanese place in town you’re trying out. Like the apocalypse for example. But that fate seems to remain a distant one for now or at most at a slow yearly crawl towards plausibility, almost offensively intimately close to that plausibility. It knows humanity is that stupid and won’t prepare but also assures us we are not stupid, ironically making us overconfident, and then we end up getting in range of it with the proverbial dick in hands. It crests like an infant’s head from the dilated mothervoid. In life, ‘how it went’ will not be obedient to the assumption etc. And the rustbelt politicos will show no mercy to the liberal elite, and vice versa. Aw hell: even talking about America for just a few tiny minutes is tiresome. Minutes shrunk to iota. Meaning: shadows of the circumference they once were. Minutes still taking as much time to pass as before the decreased radial stretch. Tires me out I think. Like an emotional undertaking or winging a pilgrimage to the girlfriend on a night bus like two hundred miles at the last minute, except in that latter case I do not feel empty getting off, the bus that is, the way I do when trying to have an opinion, which is a thing does not get me off: because nobody here realizes that America as it stands is a natural disaster. While its population drowns in the ocean, the pundit pretends to be embassador and the president a WWE wrestler for some reason, and it is only then ah I see what is happening like a damned Wordsworth who is looking out from bridge at Tintern Abbey. Ah I see. And I realize this is my privileged moment. Though I be not listening to quiet with an owl’s hoot interposing, though I be not sitting my pensive dourness on a rock in the thickets and marshlands; though this all be true of me not experiencing nor having experienced, I myself am, like God, incarnated as those spots of time. With one last breath before water floods in I see what is happening here, die, and then sink to an ocean floor before offered a chance to say what it is I see, instead, how selfish!, sneaking out to be friends with this human otherness of death I had heard so much about while living. One imagines it with delight: the fish and stuff. Oh I beg you watch in delight the placid amble of octopi among herds of bright coral wilderness.— . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . There is rarely a clear glimpse a fortiori before it is come across, what has been prophesied. And one must be sharp about the apocalypse. But this musing has no main purpose or pronoun. Guess it would be helpful to know the proper idiom for it, for what to properly call The Last Step? What to properly call the future that would bring you there in so calling? Something like a code for a safe. Something like, if one has a bondage kink, the safety word a kinkslave use when the endorphins start to dry and the pain is no longer pleasurable. If in the following any of this is made clear, great; one suspects the epiphany will involve backtracking: it will come in a place before, a field of snow you passed yesterday; using as breadcrumbs the indentations of one’s feet in the snow that you made yesterday. One had felt the epiphany there in that lonely field but refused to allow it signify the actual epiphany, because it was not the same as the ideal of it in one’s head. It manifests as something more obvious than one’s vision of it had attributed vast nuance to. Isolated and without fanfare you thought. But the physical manifestation of it yet resembles what the concept of negative capability elucidates. In words. Like, a signifying euphoric power, come upon invisibly and solemn once the place is synchronous with you. The power however is too powerful. Any mortal would be blind to a nuance so huge, and be eaten up. A power of God which probably would not stand for any refusals, especially annoyed if I was as close as my tracks in the field tell, one thinks. Refusals of spirit to maintain the logical familiar. But I now turn my back on that narrow humanity I fed once. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . At first any epiphany or finality will seem evil: rooted deep and tumorous in one and something you think is only for you, only you will find out you are deceived in this. It experienced by both the weak and strong the same way. It I make voyage to. Voyaging I shall reach it where it calls to me. I am created again: as the finality the self was waiting to be. After all this time spent in despair. Assuming I was done and the laurels crushed. God devolves in speech but that is our sole link, so then I apologize to God when I share God with the muse. The Last Step. That eh? Got to be kidding. But one still tries to speak it . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . If one is even to begin propagating a system of one’s rightful own, with any success, one must by then have seen the project through to its end. But where is this end? The last step is crucial, but it might not be the finale. Sure it knots it all up without being asked; knots up the whole conceptual endeavor to invent, not just the practice of inventing. So that it makes sense when the inventor reviews it later. Knots with an embellishing knit bow, striped in calming yellow shades. There were still all these spare parts thrown around the garage though. And the calming colors seemed not to be serious enough for the occasion, almost trying on purpose not to catch one’s eye, the rationale being to avoid the hysterics and cultural hype. Suppose then it must show itself with flair and finesse, at least if the last step has truly been reached. One would need to be assured this was not some ersatz participation trophy. Would need something flashy, not a dull yellow; help to jog the memory of inspiration and find the fact of the last step a fact present now, if it wasn’t when it first was but you hadn’t been, and this leads one to the revelation that the invention has been finalized past all remonstrance. You are there. Remember how the image somewhere hidden so long in the marmoreal sledge had been tunefully cut shipshape? That was now. And that the inventor can do no more is the beautiful reality; unless to risk summary perfection were the point. But then the years of hard work would have been just an exercise right? . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . Just one or two pieces of evidence of possible mediocrity need come to the fore, however, to shake confidence that one is done—traveling from someplace far in one’s thoughts to the light of day; in fact, seeming to be from so perfectly remote a distance as to create the impression like it clued into something deeper one could not see. Then more evidence starts swirling in one’s head. But all that is is hearsay to attract the exigent attention of this inventor, you don’t even have your ear up to the door. You can’t know it is the actual truth. One thinks and thinks, with fear of this. This one might admit with no trouble yet by listening closer to the statement itself assume as one’s own the universal praxis supported there, but the other way around, the truth of nothing being true and this invention being the only true thing if of one’s artifice alone, or anything not just humanly made, manufactured, but made by the human that is you particularly, one thinks this or rather says this to themselves, clearer because thoughts are sensations to one usually, yet this in actual words in precarious head.

It might be a good idea. Be doubtful of truth the other way or anything’s truth. One can invent much to answer back in retort. Wrapped up in yourself, you get wrapped up in doubts that multiply when there is no outside objective answerer to stanch the seed, one thinks; in the privacy of one’s garage one thinks. God is not overwhelmingly organized like that though. Tapping the end of a ballpoint pen; it clicks against the surface of this desk I see before me and I making little neighing sounds with my mouth, one thinks: but you knew that already, oh my God who must know all. One must transcend mere certainty regarding when to stop though. Meaning that, like, to have a fight or flight knowledge of this. Hm. Challenging… It is that or to raise the stakes and for one’s own safety not endeavoring further. The options are those two. But the fight or flight stuff sounds more sensible. Like if one hopes the system they have made be christened done. Christened by fame too, that is; must treat the lumpy flaws like lumps of soiled laundry, not pets. But you are obedient to this command because it is easy: have already ushered together all the flawed stuff and left your flaws together in a disarray. All the loose ends and other haywire. One eyed every corner of one’s house for them flawed shits. It is a house more like a sanctuary for empty mousetraps forgotten about and other crap gathering dust. And then you must have pushed all that haywire and other shit up against the outside walls of one’s furnace, in one’s room, but you don’t remember or just the memory is hazy or something. Pin them against the furnace wall; think of it as if you were going to question them about money’s whereabouts. Like that show about drug dealers and bowling and the nihilists ask Lebowski where the money is. Where’s the money Lebowski? One will quickly realize this is useless, which is the point: jetsam and trash are a second and third language, and glory, no shit, one’s first. So, bummed about this anticlimax, the flaws, the lumps and laundry, disappointed and bummed at not understanding, vacate, and in very clear speech of step. Mysteriously almost wanting you to reconsider their death. They foot loudly down the hall to the front door. Ah shit. They are walking on the linoleum with shoes. I forgot to tell them. Fast forward hours later: withal that stressful furnace heat and the threatening of death and the communication barrier, bullying the flaws a sour fucking deed and making you feel bad for hours after,—withal that, by nightfall, one, uh, one thinks: I get to rest easy now: knowing none of the worthy spare parts diminished. On which did feed the dirtier stuff, laundry, and its heart of chaos: feed to the weakening of said worthy spare parts, almost to the point of a last retreat to yon deathbed, themselves and their worth going like the eyesight of a senile. Dirty laundry housed in your soul: rest easy: no, none of anything of worth had been injured by it. And you get why now: the flawed shit didn’t want to leave that sugar momma with you to use. For they wish to meld with your excellence, selfishly unaware that to do so would annihilate it. Later you found it out: because God told you in code through a friend you invited over, to see your invention finally integrum.

That all your pet flaws know this one natural rule was also a mystery, even to God. This rule about how if the dirtier flaws died you would go with them. Ironical duality that it is, you had not been aware of this. Why weren’t I told? But God invade the World in fragments that tell and tell not. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . It was just to give a scare anyway. The threats were. But still how callous. But for other reasons besides this a few miscellaneous fineries will become less fine if now you must stop before fleshing out them but they will be there when you return, for what it’s worth, so no harm anyways.

Good to be cautious of forsaking the sacred last step. Glossed over stupidly when they were spruce and shining, those unfleshed fineries withereth and fadeth. And then just ignored into neglect. One sometimes feels a broken record but this may be just returning to the same mistakes over, like, awhile. Dwelling on past mistakes over the course of years, of less proximity of repetition to make a pulse than a broken record technically; because afraid to mourn their loss once without a daily default to fill the void, or because not thinking of them anymore would assure the same faults of mind make the future a curse not mere benign fate, an inevitable river flowing for anyone the same if death could be considered all fates. One suspected it was in the early days of the system’s conception. When much for the sake of finesse would have been aborted, once the finesse overwhelmed the practical application of something else, as the what the design would be like thing began to take shape, two dimensionally at least. But for all that it was once merely a vision, not come in a dream but coming before sleep each night, right before. One thinks: Well in fact it was so often this imagery recurred in my head, always before sleep, that eventually the intending of a sign by something upstairs was clear.

After many occasions of this happening, I spent one morning doing it out. After the damasked vision with a pencil and paper.

Days passed; it began to take shape; or stuff was in the blueprints written after no sleep and then puzzled over later. Thinketh, one wastes time doing this puzzling until one realizes stuff drawn up in a dreamstate. Diamonds in the rough as these could be, God say, will have become less fine by now. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . But one will get to that when one gets to that, which is probably what was placated unto this inventor, exactly before one glossed over them, ha ha, you think, to yourself. And this thinks one, thinks one speaking it in the third person: in the tired cranium simultaneously focuses and forms a dialogue with the ghostly otherness. The one hinted at or like denoted by these freakish pronouns, and filed away under Interesting Possibilities. And so thinketh that some secret companion should be fabricated in everybody’s head, for their sanity really; I have a hard time believing this not to be in reality true, that people do this—you ‘thinketh’ pointedly. 

Might as well develop my otherness, then; whatever its makeup, since these many unruly threads and rosebuds that once entertained me will soon be on their way in the car bleeding down a branch of a highway not yet adopted by…whoever adopts highways. Has to be rich probably. Sadly they remain hapless, I mean the unruly threads and rosebuds among the invention’s wiring I pursue more, to flesh out thus: despite being told stop it for the sake of the final draft. Hapless, as jetsam of any kind will forever tend to be. Completely hapless. It’s like they think they are going to Disney World! But will be getting thrown into the local dumpster fire. That’s where I am driving now. To keep one in the loop with my looping disorders one might this very thing a’saith. 

My personality disorder will take up that hard job later of explaining death to what has been recently made, created. How alien that must be seen as! A perfection that asks, without a grain of artifice, that asks:

“father where did the flaws go to; uhm will they be back from where they went? [Inaudible] Be back right?” One’s system is a child still in fledge, luckily they are that. All the fucking dirty laundry will be gone: evil will be schooled and scorched for this system I don’t care how long it takes. Scorched off like pimples dried with cream. And then this pesky figuration visits the creating: because a wrench actually is in the machinery. Annoying the cogs. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . I think about it and say the following for any flaws still hanging around: really say, in English, at an actual hearable vocal register, and my voice, the flesh to drape over these words that are not kidding you, reader, now: “Hijack me? What gall you have, you will be taken to some warehouse of doom by my fucking cronies. There is gall even in thinking me weak enough to not need to kill. Because if anyone to kidnap my energies and sap them dry then throws me from the back of the van and gives me the chance to get back to my powers and get back at them, moreover, well holy hell let me tell you. Let me tell you: you are lowered to the status, in my eyes lowered, to the status of a mouse, one mouse. Or more forgiving: you are a cluster of mice in a gaberdine suit pretending to be a detective; it is that subterfuge that is the genetic structure of flaws, and perfection too. Your own genetic passive aggression does not help the obsessing over this mystery because something in the obsessing is not in hurry for the big reveal. That would be wretched. Ugliness in the light of day, and no longer something to pursue. One could die of this, really die. It is this or to have fought them by fighting everything in the World. Ha. Mice in suits…” Perhaps that is God said that. Also yet it is to have fought for them to do the same things to destroy them,—everything Earthly is lowered by reneging to ire. If especially it is welcomed into the heart for any reason other than to admit it is there, like to a friend or something, in the form of an apology. Like to a friend, for a situation or something: for them being the victim, unfairly, of this garbage affect they by happenstance had been at the butt end of. Ire persuasive enough to give one over to a willess moment and cause an argument no one will finish. For being is too tired. Though unlike most of the insufferable, which I am on another level, I do not hold grudges, whether I be misinformed of the fault found or not; on principle I cannot see how someone can bring the ire home. If such a thing happened! Walk not, no way; with such a heavy thing clutched to my chest? It would waste me. Maybe if I had not been angry for awhile. Then maybe I’d give in. And then still never without informing my family. It’s bad luck to lie to your family they say. Or don’t say. Or whatever. Like, it’s hard to imagine me being that fake pleasant sort of fifties era guy, like stuff you see on television from when everyone was afraid of communism. That episode of Seinfeld about the communist Elaine dates opened up new avenues of acceptance for the general public but that is a less obscure story. Command me, o God, that I come not through the door, hang my hat on a hatrack next to the door, and chime to a faceless honey that I am home! Like everything’s alright when the sincere and stupid melodrama of this is that it never was. Alright? Cue the listless sigh looking into the distance while I smoke, again. The habit is getting frequent again, more than before. Worrisome? Shit yeah. But: To preemptively suggest, to those soon to be, will be, in close proximity of your bad mood, like your family,—to do this it at least allows some time to handle nerves; and for someone, probably the mother, to cook up some calm. Surprise. It’s for you; she does it by adding oregano to the meatloaf. Just bought it today while you were out dear. What? Irritation. To the meatloaf, dear; I thought to myself, well, the stringbeans will be fine with a little salt as long as they are boiled right. Surprise! If even the son will not escape a beating. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . Maybe if the knowledge of ire is gathered enough in advance, then, I don’t know, prepare a written statement, like Hawaii did with congress about the right to vote they didn’t have even though also a state. Look it up though guy!, on your iwire gadget kids have now. Belch, gurgle. That sounds right uncle Jay but I’m not sure it’s a historical fact. Son of yon drunk, oh, you are too much. Look it up see if that works mook. Ha. Hm. Sounds like something my uncle would say, though; I mean I am fabricating most of this so but it sounds like he’d say that and subsequently fall asleep. He’d be upright in a chair but spend the night on the porch like this when he was drunk and my aunt wouldn’t let him come in the house. Commence snoring loud enough to create voids and find yourself immediately an uncle whether or not you have a sibling actually. Their rhythm is mercifully left undisturbed by the son sitting there next to him who gets up on tiptoe to go inside. Aunt said once he needing similar treatment to a baby. If one hopes keep agreeable company with that man she said. The snores almost in time with the sway of the plastic lawn flamingos assorted on the front lawn in the wind. The snores are interspersed with yawns that kill the tempo yet introduce greater naturality in the diffusion, something like jazz. Flamingos. Christ why’d we buy those I’d hear him say I remember. Memory: I was with him at my aunt’s house. She kicked him out for good for awhile and I never learned why because they are both dead but my aunt was a weird one also. She wore a blue wig because of the stomach cancer. The chemo made her hair fall out,—and my uncle was bald too but that was due to stress and I never learned why that stress was either. The whole house stuck in the back when. Some professional astrologer/psychic from the sixties owned it previously, but that is a more obscure story. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . I myself do not understand wrath and do not inflict it upon others. It is wrong, but still something true. I mean about people. That alcohol consumption is in direct correlation to acts of violence is not surprising. Hyperbolic statements of love as well but that can be its own trauma. And if not that I were a pacifist anyway, nor yet lucky enough to make someone unlucky enough to love me, I would foresee abuse being the probable outcome, statistically speaking, in America. I would not hope for it. Oh America. Oh damn. Now then. I do not want to seem like I doth protest too much but ire I find it repellant and would have it expelled from the souls of people if it could be… But not even God can do that! This is a pessimism goes too far of course but I like its propounding way. So many, desperate for a stance to come from out of the blue, without work. On something they do not understand, no less. Just to be accepted! Do not nurse ire in such a way: and if you weren’t going to don’t get any ideas. And I do not understand how others can carry that with them. I have experienced that grudging pain, I cannot tolerate it nor even fathom how one lives like that day to day. Perhaps I am sickly and have a weak stomach, or something, a tapeworm, is in there, devouring my delicate humours. People live and remain alive though in spite of crisis. But to live and share a bathroom, with the crisis? 

. .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . A list of demons. We all have kept a list of demons. It helps inspire those who do live in fear of getting clocked over the moral limit, to find a priest. Oh! Exorcise these demons, through awful heinous extremes like domestic abuse. Fuck, probably more often it is an event at some quotidian thing, something to comfortably blow out of proportion with an arsenal of explosives called human artifice. Anger at the quotidian has more gunpowder for the fault being obvious in retrospect, after anger cools, and the one perpetrating, sober enough either to convince themselves of the lie about themselves, like lawyers do, or realize they and their shit personality have done wrong. Again. Maybe even realize they are trapped in how they are, moments before the onset of psyche’s darkness, then, the daily protocol moral amnesia; and then the falsehoods return in full force, like an evangelical getting lazy about saving face and tired of pretending to feel bad about the public exposure and outcry. 

Before the poetic justice of a cocaine overdose the deacon in question goes back to the usual raiding of collection plate to pay for gay sex stuff. He will give in and go downtown to diddle men who are strangers and this is fine but hypocrisy at this nuts level is not. After enough time has passed and some new outrage takes up the baton, he will do this. An event has extra gunpowder for alone the simple fact of being made mountain of molehill. It would not be so bad if it did not hurt anybody. Were it, were the memory of it not at times so twisted up by the drunk to protect an ego itself drunk on being a martyr, if ego can stand on its own as a self in some unconscious form enough to believe it is its own egg of individual experiences. Drunk, on being a martyr: for its vessel’s destructive habits. In the vessel’s recalling, it was right to act such a way. About whatever the problem was; and this tendency can lead one to memorialize oneself like they were dead. And perhaps they are in some capacity: trapped in dwelling. What is dwelled on isn’t important I said Mary! Getting sick of this highfalutin wondering of me, thinking one is better than others, the inventor thinks, then the wondering fades and comes back and then the inventor truly starts to think. The self is a code, not unable to be cracked, but which unlocks no truth without it tinged wrong.

Anyway I need therapist.

I, reeling, wonder at the people, not without some disgust too; the people who will sustain one perspective then ask to get quoted on their statement of another they post on the facebook or something, a statement which does not but they say does most represent their belief system then and now. This politics of absence, more specifically an absence of inner moral reckoning. Reeds who do not think they are reeds. Blaise Pascal. It is said that people are truest to themselves quiet in bed alone but that might also be one of those things people say. The opposite of that seems to be true. In my opinion, to them, the time a statistically normal person has to themselves, in privacy, offers up an opportunity to lie about how one is in the World, value systems, etc. In the mind of even the statistically normal person. Well. I sense most use their privacy; use it to reinforce lies with more lies. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . [Introducing. An androgynous character? Na just lazy writing. Here out, let’s call her, One That. She seems only convinced of how grumpy she is. One awake in early morning following thinking a few minutes still in bed if it is worth it to indulge only aggravation if that’ll be the day. Over some ubiquitous wreckage everywhere around. One that evaluates her day so far when it’s been five minutes since removing from bed. Really it is about waking up in the morning, and this wreckage she sees. Trying to be cute she makes the following complaint in the kitchen to an older friend or parent figure or one of the parents themselves. She says. Everybody bitches about it but nobody torpedoes the sun so there’s no transition anymore and we all can go back to sleep. One person to another person. Boy do they love smacking oatmeal while I talk she thinks, while talking. Click. Change the channel. Family Ties.] . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . As for people lying to themselves in private like they must do in public; or doing this when they have the freedom not to, uhm. Why choose this? Nobody is really listening to that fabricated narrative, anyway.

Who does the math, patents the equation, takes the time to lie to themselves in privacy: that the sincere, and morally better belief, is the one found once the self digs deep?

Believe sincerely what? Asks the ego, candidly. You are not sincere with anything! Falling on deaf ears. Impossible to do but not impossible to convince oneself is done. One does not simply alter one’s own repressed beliefs when to the self they are not known. And once found if they are there usually is no core change. I am not done nor perhaps done, nor are the chores, which the son’s lack of doing would lead to his being done in by father and a belt but that part is only sometimes. Depending on what it is and whether it was demanded of some fifties husband to be done by the time he gets home. O dear. So many are like this so then many victims. Thinketh this. And it be the thought of a moral God: demonstrate the desire to understand it in context. For to use it implies the plan, no matter what is naysaid: to inflict pain. Which is its only use. Ire I mean. And the only reason why one would poison one’s heart like that. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . In the context of that big ultimatum in the sky, nobody, nothing to be had down here, is really The Boss. I can see that now. Figure out how there will always be the other way that works too, sure: if one can ably knife through that fuss and shit about opposing sides. Move on. Think of all the stuff to move on to, like the sidereal shit, will you?, and walk your way onwards. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . Here’s this. Ok? Think that you are a bearded fellow, supported perhaps by a wooden staff, walking in the woods, till you are upon unfamiliar grounds. Approaching the shade of a canopy you hear running water. The canopy opens out to the source: a waterfall is there beneath it pouring down. Foaming eternal form. A watery dynamo off the toprock. The lip of the waterfall is fibered round with bushes covered in mist from the spray.

Well, here’s this. If you must visualize something to hit it home, whatever ‘it’ happens to be or how it happens. Or wait: let’s start over. Let’s say: you are a bearded man, ok, and you have instead just found your way to familiar verdure. But only after being lost awhile. So forget the waterfall. So you see this path inclining out of sight, obscured.

The entrance being familiar you are not too scared, but what lays beyond the plaiting, a great, green folding of some interwoven trees you and your beard cannot determine because you have never taken that way. A dog is there. It is your dog. But the path, you follow it with your dog, thinking of certain complex things you think of. Dog hollers to snap you out of some forgetful revery. And you smile: you see the town off there, in the distance. Leave it to the Lord you say to the dog, who has no idea what you are saying because dogs cannot speak English. But the beard, it understands. You live in this town, by the way. Lifted from your daydreams lifting your head up. The World is fresh enough to appear fully. But like before for the entire life of you it was not full if it could be like this. O perfidious dialectical laze. Distractions only, daydreaming. Cool your addiction to it. Head is leant against your stick to shift the weight of thoughts to there. You examine the surroundings, head lifted up. That you are up out of the woodlands at the brink of a field. It is the only thing separates you from home. You and your beard seem to have known the way wouldn’t get steeper; it hadn’t. Let’s backtrack: Some agreement was made, somewhere, at the brink of somewhere, yes: to risk a steeper incline or worse getting lost again, both seemed likely. At the start neither of these possibilities are good and daunt the impractical choice when one thinks about it but you go and risk it walking out of sight into the mouth of the green growth in search of the porous spaces of wisdom that soak us in. You know, somehow, this being verified following some intuitive proof, to follow the path likewise. Follow it long enough that the highest point, not even too bad, once reached, gives you the relief of a decline from it to salvation: the air pressure returns to normal, and the village is in sight! That is how it went. Now back to the present engaged before: you think of your pastoral cottage there. A path that was a sky littered much with stars and the wisps of stars, but not too lofty and not for long. More to handle in a day than one is able seems a striking euphemism for death. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . So far one is open to taking serious all the friendly, mostly friendly, admonitions provided here. One in doing so will at least know to remain humble. The Last Step is for reeds who know not they are reeds. Believe instead that nobody inhabits those spiritual straits nor can. To put one ahead of God is to put words in the mouth of The Creator. Please. Nobody should feel enamoured with, or rather immured within, their own confidence like that: enough in love with themselves to start preaching the way to accomplishment, before accomplishing it. As if a human right were all personal and professional success! The concept is to be spoken of. Thereby not preached, but spoken of: a pursuit, or it is the chasing, of accomplishment. The roles of desirer and desired, usual principals to be played considering anything like ambition; are confused and shuffled up though.

Are aggravated, by the flurry of incidents befallen one who thinketh. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . The accomplishment stagnates behind an idiot in the left lane: this sort of example or typification of an idiot preacherman. Idiot loser who does not get it. Like how is this supposed to work? Suddenly, at intervals between cruise control, a fleeting moment of torque and rev. Speeding; unpredictable like any idiot is. Speeding, only enough to but force the very divinities each that provide for the concept behind the invention, like a boat ribbed by the keelsons, each one keelson one that may linger behind this unvindicated asshole—forcing them heel, the divinities just trying to go to work, at just about the length of a tailgate, behind the idiot, who asks why they ride his ass so. And this is ignorance!

This is ignorance personified to show how ignorant it is the need of getting ahead of what is desired; and then, well, the asshole just remains squarely at that cruising speed! Forever. Maybe even desiring nothing in any case. Only yet another asshole on the highway. Meh. One who would be exampled on Earth among the mortals better, nor here in the figuration alone be an idiot, to be publicly characterized as an asshole by the civilians on the road about him who are not divinities in cars that are not divinities. Just to cover all the bases, I refer to most things as a metaphor for divinities. They are an unwilling audience nonetheless: to this holocaust of cluelessness’ bad manners. A torrent of highway idiocy. At least it comes with no torrent of rain they say: the highway is looking like it’ll have a rush hour for the ages later. And so on so on.

Cuts off the other cars, might cause an accident, the bastard: irresponsibly out of a recordbreaking degree of vanity in one recordbreakingly otiose. That seems to be it. Without ambition moving thus to escape having no dreams. Or does that cut too close you idiot loser? The wheel unconsciously clenched tighter by the handless hands of one divinity herein.

But without the chops to do anything beyond shoving a way in front. Only managing to slow down the moving traffic of these other divinities in their cars, accomplishments, in their cars, some fuming, some remaining aloof and sarcastic, some just as idiotically slow I guess—but, at least aware of this fact: who drive just behind and want no part of this idiot’s day.

Generally accepted as gospel: fear of the gaspedal usually ends up causing accidents, instead of actually abridging the recklessness also a cause, for sure—and this fear of the gaspedal is reckless for not being actually of the gaspedal; being in this case the sum of many kneejerk fears placed as one in a slot in the heart reserved for safe keeping. Fears, or a fear in the heart, so then within, as to the sanctity of their idiot owner’s soul. This idiot driver’s soul, how laughable!, who feels them all; and of a quality, ironically like the soul in question, of no such temperance, temperance as goes dutifully discarding all the fallacious nonsense, leaving only the essential nonsense.

And in this following a similar strategy of wanting it all and getting nothing as the idiotic contortions that subvert God: spoken of here is not just a loser on the highway. In being ahead of what is pursued so as to trump it. That’s what is spoken. And this is an illness of pride, of one’s own pride.

. .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . Where after all will finality be before it can arrive at where it is discovered by the pursuers and inventors out there? As if a location mutually agreed upon before a meeting of enemies: and there is something thuggish and paranoid about this comparison. How does one assume who will win before scanning the immortal challenger, compiling a dossier, so as the proper reaction be measured, in figuring the ratio between its size and the sizable fact its pursuers are mortal? 

To be ahead what is chased! An absurd idea for metaphor to detail. A job that really needs consistent proximity with what is chased; to be ahead of it implies that any objective is degrading if it is desired. Though ironically the objective falls deaf on human cries, cries of frailty,—cries that the objective be brought to one who in the end is pursuing nothing. This is the reason there is no accomplishment, on the side of hubris at least, in the first place. Yes, yes, the Titanic has enough lifeboats, not to worry. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . Yet what a sad history this is to choose for repeating, and what a silly cliché,—air jets gathering dust accorded to the Taliban or someplace or other that is corrupt. Still dwelling in hangars.

Stocks of weaponry unused and like new and when to be given a chance at the purpose for their pathetic making will kill off the resources of others, as many as possible: some resources with minds and souls even. Actually most of them.

So then, where are the supplies, the resources needed to make the whole world a damn paradise? In a tastelessly excessive surfeit, somewhere hot, like in Arizona or New Mexico. Someplace home to miles of unpopulated desert. No, none have died in vain, not to worry; just don’t bring down the banner yet, with the specious statement on it, if to do so is only to sell reassurance via the daily news. Do not be so impatient. It is not important to capture a photo of the president at a podium right now, in front of his banner with the specious statement.

Tell the photographer to forget about a front page anyway: such imagery will only ever avoid the predictable ironies preemptive absolutes attract, if the specious statement not specious, ends up proleptic actually. But if jumping the gun ended up being correct we’d have less guns. And which ended up not being correct at all. These ironies are God’s sarcasms, cropping up organically around all the examples of human folly there have ever been. Absolutely. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . Kill the thing to life? I must, must, must have sunk in the weapon then, all the way in, thinks one, using a somewhat diffuse metaphor. Well it made sense in the moment thinks one, hearing the voice that was his dear criticism.

Looking on: with the obsessive unreadable blankness of beautiful love. Capturing the entirety of one’s attention. Understandable that it’s a feeling too a feeling for the public to see from the outside. Nothing faded that would cross visages like tears when it’s not too deep for them. A’saith Wordsworth. Inner dispute is a toughie; or perhaps a feeling not too much one is automatically in need of a facial cue for lacking being recognized inwardly. If it’s faded. To make the faded thing less faded and more a reality reality for engaging the naked eye. Not of that do I speak but a sincerity realized fully without epileptics. I look on blankly. On, at the invention before my naked eyes. It had come to seem, well, like a child. Or maybe was. A summation of all that work. But still the question remained whether the thing was futile or not, unlike a child—if the expected efforts are put in that is. Or unlike a good Christian child at least if the womb is pure of sin and sloth. Thinks one: I want to give up. As to this a pure assessment seems impossible. Both realities, hung in precarious balance and counterbalance as validation overtakes despair and vice versa. One had tried to recollect it: any final actualized event of completion. One thinks now: The problem is you are tentative to approach proof of any kind if it’s from a distance. Keep to your cautious, vague outskirts, then: something someplace between expectation and physical hunger. You are in fear of approaching it: the dangerous ‘no’ reverberating back. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . But now I, one thinks to oneself, in the way one speaks to oneself, in one’s head, a conspicuous ‘I’ silencing for some few seconds the familiar otherness taking up space in one’s being, one’s fatigued being; and which was suspected broken, or even if in the best condition yet obsolete. So, hah, one thinks: but now I am inflating dilemmas again.

But such a worry would come to be just measly, an echo without a source. It is only that the danger of this I cannot see but anyway it is not there. Otherness must have knifed it to life: into that seriouser, stranger heart of some animal. A rodent maybe. In any case it is an animal curbed there behind every conclusion possible to draw from the finishing. One then continues to remain. To battle each animal on the path. To those layered reaches of improbability one thought one had covered before,—going on like so till there are none left to lash out at one, no gripes from whatever anomaly had not been heeded because now all of them had been heeded, certainly were done with being heeded. 

See thing is the idea that the invention, if it is to actualize itself, needs some semblance of uh wholeness and completeness, no matter if it be the invention of a memorable idiom, or an innovation, or rebellion’s first seed,—is an idea it would be more beneficial to make too clear, even way too clear. Forget how farfetched, or stretched, or strained, or ugly one is afraid it might become. One thinks to himself a thing. Again one goes about resuming the soliloquy, or maybe call it an inner, or an interior narration, sans any voice but for the soundless, toneless voice in one’s head, of the blessed ‘I.’ I think to myself a thing. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . The cuttingfloor will always fill up with things that get lost in the clutter you wish hadn’t, one thinks; at the other end of the problem, eliminating the spare metal can lead to everything being extraneous, and then the result clipped together is too scanty and stiff and anemic. Both still are for my consideration solely and made by my hands and thus both are the bedfellows of the same flawed creating. No matter the gallons of sweat I lose in poring over the details for a fix. The dialectical hammer hammering. It is figurative though and if I bang a finger that also is figurative and no blood is lost. One accepts this. One is also forced and bullied by their genius, and in this way do I suffer something more like the dizzying pain of blood loss. 

Yet what is spilled is not my own blood but my lifeblood. Something very different this is but also is something figurative. I think of my signature there, on the contract I hold with surety. Skeletal hieroglyphic script. I think my very ordinary name is a sort of ontical doodling: or, to say it in a different way, a sketch of my pure being: done out of boredom, or the product of an anxious idleness that is anxiety at staying so idle, and that crinkle up one into their idleness like a trash idea on paper thrown in the wastebasket, missing the novelty basketball hoop hanging above it but only by a few inches.

The way a sickness gives one to hunch their back in a chair and retire from society to the World of their room. I am in trouble. I have forced my deliverance. Hark! I have my hand crammed up the length of this cornucopia! In the asshole of a cornucopia: my left hand. At a deep spot within the sweet smelling loam, there. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . Say this just get it out of the way already. One will say, or might say, this: I am parable, or should be. Listen to me: I will be learned from, so that none ever again live so broken. And will inform posterity on my own time; do not think it is not your problem too. But as I grow old I will lose sight of the future and this invention that is my very child shall start to arm up, being programmed by me to arm up for a threat at the time of my death either antiquated or solved; arm up for something forgotten by then after all the scrutiny of history and passing time, after all, that I thought would remain a problem and should be happy by considering it possible to one day not be. But I am not. But I am made the fool by these fatal ironies of the original predicament. Guiding life until it doesn’t simply put. Or anything bad as may come of this youthful eagerness or impatience to fix.

My invention, still without a last step, I am not sure. Will I say: when I was young and the future was clearer. And was it also even more questionable than a lucid dream: I will not be foiling anymore what I have created. Swear it now. Already enough a shitstorm in my tampering with what was fine before. I scorn it happening, of course, now: it is like being shoved just right into the smallest space a crack in the wall has, a crack that is getting worse. But I will do nothing about my behavior. Am downtrodden: my work ethic alone shalt not sustain me unless sanity is sacrificed and a numbing mania introduced. Yet I am having trouble with whether it is really sanity or something else in the cornucopia that I can’t loosen my grip on.

It is absurd to do this. Oh my God this has got to be some heavy metaphor for something: or perhaps just the usual retribution…because my life is hell. It’s useless to do this: I mean I am wholly without the ability to deliver to the air what I am mired to, am stuck holding on to. Only was venturing coyly to reach, went in for its stash. There in the void. I do not caress opportunities like a big pussy but grab them with the language of my clenched fist. Yet it is the clench that somehow suctions my hands there stiff at present. My left hand is stuck: but still my arbitrating what shall finish up this weary little confluence of inspiration does its job without relent, and I wipe my plate clean. That necessity sings, it has been vigilantly singing out of tune a little now, though muffled it be. But my made sense is stubborn like that and it does its job to preserve me and who I am in the heads of those I know and love. Hopefully others, one day. The reasoning behind any sort of preservation, no doubt, will always stink of ego. Like old tobacco residue to be scrubbed from the counters, where it thickens and yellows for a decade. Along with the rest of the doublewide, it has not been cleaned.

. .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . There beneath the waxing and justifications is the stink of preserving a shit status quo: though too the ego is a healthy selfishness that literally everyone has and which requires accepting. Accepting that you need to escape the acedia, one thinks to himself, talking of himself in the third person like if right in front of one. Besides when he was needing another voice tell him advice, to least simulate the objective view. Then second person: acedia encroaching by the day and that flares up at night for a skirmish with you, then it ebbs as you sleep. It is ubiquitous like the sun’s creeping all over everywhere as the sun itself encroaches. Sailing across the same new boundaries of sky each day. This need is ego and is useful just to you, while others perish without an antidote and without themselves. In fact, everyone perishes, as a rule; also, as a rule, an antidote can only work if it is your personal antidote. It makes sense: each of us after all is given a distinct ego we use to exercise our hobbies and interests. Yet all interests can be reduced to an interest in will, or focus upon it.  There will be different meanings for life that each of us will test out, exercise, as they come and go; after the workout, returning them in a neat yet severe pile to their home in your head, someplace rosy and remote in there. Thing is you were created by God for just such selfish use, and anything else one is asked to purchase, a wack scam, crap to sell, idols to the paranoia that is castling more and more, gradually; the paranoia one feels as to one’s human worth, wondering if they are deluding themselves. To be dogged like this! Forget delusions of grandeur, that’s easy shit! What about delusions of delusions of one’s decency and inherent value, sans all the bells and whistles that can only drily indicate value’s outline, distracting us from a soul’s actual quiddity, with a skill. Yet what shall I say: that I am he who stinks of selfish desires? Ones that chemically mirror those of poor white trash for the tasteless guido possessions, but is for something more cultivated, which probably makes the whole thing worse: that is, transcribing one’s physical memento mori, an elite keepsake that no one understands and no one will, there among the forgettable crap in your bureau. That no one could understand—and, as if it could be done!, making that, accurately, into the dynamism of a text. Reality but on the page. Or if I am not so deft a creator to do that, then maybe just life, a concept of life that is found in a thing. Life stocked with all its numerous hassling fears of death. Able to be printed and circulated, immemorially. One will at last get to leave one’s mark.

. .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . The procedure here, one used to find the holy finality I am aware I have ruined, and rescue it—before yet another hasty action, on my part, that would cause its further ruin—it is a procedure whose aim is to sandwich the original desire for finality, almost to preserve it and keep it in place, between the euphoric rush in accepting this foreknowledge, a usual ecstasy for me and probably a lie, that I have done something momentous in engineering the face of that desire, that drama; the procedure sandwiches itself adroitly between that, and my own sense of accomplishment I feel upon reaching the end of the mental errand, whatever it was for. This sense of accomplishment, moreover, is in direct proportion to the accuracy of my depiction. Of that face. Whatever piece of art you can name, and the most of it which you cannot even pronounce, is made unalterable—not necessarily when the last step has been reached, but when it is known for certain, by the artist, to have been reached. That in itself could be the justice needing be given to the depiction, the one in front of you that one looks for, that one waits for when it is right there proximate you, one thinks. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . To keep myself stubborn will not sustain me, and my will to keep stuck here, reaching way up the asshole of this mutant cornucopia, does not sustain me now. Yet my dastard thoroughness will not let go those fruits and now they are rotting, and will not sustain me at all. I have gathered most of my tries at sanity in my hands. Which has been limiting. So far the message that wants to leave itself behind in me, one that I am ignorant of,—because, after all, it is not mine to own—has for awhile thought it best to reveal itself in its different forms of the same synaptic music. What is now too deep in to hear from outside the cornucopia. And now it will suffocate in this gagged, airless cornucopia. Well take some of its fruits you wanted, had wanted, of the genius, take them and accept them as marred by your cruelty. A genius thing is perhaps located in this mixed metaphor. I just unleashed it, irresponsibly, one thinks; it was that or words of two different lexicons at least. Mixed together and left there. I shrugging for what is good enough, though if dissected it turn to something confusing, to visit upon one’s mind out of sequence and out of sorts. A euphemism for the editing process in filmmaking, in using the term cuttingfloor; and something about Thanksgiving. There is a vast space between these two things I created in the interim, tying up loose strings, threads. Four pages to be exact. This I do without destroying much of the seasonal assortment however. And how disorganized is the cuttingfloor! It must be cleaned. Especially if it is the floor of one’s garage. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . I’d rather be visited by some little extra thoroughness, I to buff it out presently, than be not clear enough and leave it at that: this maxim will be the saving grace. Your sacred wish you tell no one though: that is, to put on a last drape, a final drape, of burnished flesh over this design. This invention of thought I stare at, blankly. Well: examine the situation in light of knowing physicality is just an added varnish to any reality, and by that I mean the physical reality of what you made depends not on an arbitrary added layer, thinks one to oneself, in conversation with oneself. Oh your silly wish to put on that last drape of burnished flesh, over this design of thought I stare at, blankly. So long have I been crabfooting at the steps before the last step: but the invention, being here now, must take it for me, my progeny, towards being. Alas, at times the thoroughness will be an adverse reaction. I have worried creations into mess. I often slowly witness my distracted engineering turn a stuck lock into a broken door. I fear for the invention: I beg it not muddy up with additional guts of wiring. Lest some percentage of the body politic, made up of all my thoughts together, be weakened, and made homeless and destitute, by some halfass theory I toss in somewhere tiny and odorless: but my intuition seems to eventually sniff it out, one thinks. Some deformity in the guise of a theory. A wart right there in the middle of the logic to be; and to be made better, incubate into something fuller, if pierced to the root and fundamentally removed. Really it is like the behavior of a weed. One thinks: my mental garden, if it is that. I visualize it as a small space of flowers on the façade of my bedroom window, except thrust out from my forehead and providing my eyes with shade. Whatever is thorough is prepared to last if it is truly driven by thoroughness, which is humanity’s only outlet it was provided, thrust into being surrounded by a cloud of divine emissions that will never leave the perimeter of the human body, and always pushing on us the possibility of God being visible to the naked human eye. For being so focused, it is surprising one does not need a microscope to see God; but then again, thoroughness begets vastness ultimately, and thoroughness after all is the divine outlet, where we can plug into the Most High, and momentarily conduct light from all these sensed purities hovered just above our skin. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . The creation, invention, should be factoryready before it is even ready to be put into the hands of strangers; nay sometimes I think even before one’s family touches it, one thinks, one thinks. One makes the thing, most times, without a prototype. It will have its sickly charm. It will likely be susceptible to viruses at first, knockoffs. But one should remember this, if nothing else, for it holds especial gravity: that in terms of the concepts one must teach, the directions one must give, for handling it, the invention, are the same. The creation that you made, thinks one; and that made you God. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . Concepts, which are things, real things, need too their wholeness if to truly exist as an argument is the goal. For they inspire actions from real things that alter the culture, or mood of life at large, of still more real things. Anyway be sure to have it finished to a ‘t.’ Also: teach not the creation itself to others, but the passion of ego that inspired one to spread the creation, further, to the further reaches of people: others, beyond nations and across borders. If none of this works of course, one usually does better just to guess blind and then make the claim to whoever will listen: that it is as true as true can be though

. .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . Until, right, an eon tips the final domino into yet another ‘new’ millennium. Strips of the truth anybody’s claim to it, inevitably, and abandons the warped truth thought of it so long accurate—by a warping culture.

There are those of course who might still be surrounding its ghost out of respect or something. But then these tribes are abandoned too, by progress, by The Progress made of a merest minute, the only minute in life important to one: between the problem and its solving.

Progress, which is an expression, likely one of many, of God’s plan, venerated periplum of manias. If you prefer. I think of a record of all the change in the universe, and wonder if the record knows what’s left. Simply in that the record lives not in time but simultaneity if that is the record is omniscient. Hm some holes there. The record is able to encompass future records, then, if only perception of time be transmuted from one to another locale. So, rush it our way, way down the factory line, made to fit our loose commandments of time, like a pair of shoes not bought until one of them gets there to your left foot. Yet even footwear though too a general human conceptualization and also something universal and mysterious, is not something nobody knows why it is mysterious; nor how for this long what with all the lackluster bureaucracy implicit in requiring organization, and at that An Organization, enough for a record be kept by somebody at least. But perhaps the mystery is, there is no chaos. Thus there is no freedom, and then all us will dash our longstanding denial of it and succumb to the fate, no, I mean accept our fate, that the nature of all being is inherently boring, and lackluster, like plain eggs; and will only be something wonderful if proven the only Bible of God’s word, the one that points most to the truth behind things, has itself some relative thoughts on the truth, but more importantly, ties in the idea of nothing being behind it all, or at that the idea of nothing being behind, at all; as in, that all of us are ahead of ourselves, can only get more ahead of ourselves, and the hierarchy a sort of dependable chaos, one that would sooner jive with the founding supposition that all of us are usurpers, criminal takers of the throne, an abstract throne, a disappearing throne, a throne that is too complicated and that is not there.

. .  .   .    .     .      .       .        .

Beings on Earth go at each other and could make sense of it by supplying the empathy where empathy will be allowed give; but make sense of it by saying instead that everybody is in a constant occasion of furtherance, movement, thus, it is only natural. I say however it is only natural to think we transcend on more occasions than we do. In reality. In reality: ha. The greatest of all caveats, reality. Know and follow me, saith The Progress. For though what you believe has been dispelled by now and was before you came back to say the finality it is among other things dispelled that at one point had been proven with equal vigor: laws at the time thought to be always vital parts of the World of humanity and the World of universe; laws that will merely expose a stupid soap opera love affair humans will indulge. 

Like a law to be in love with touching up dead things, that is, with all our vitality we seem to have in surplus, stockpiled like government weapons. Doing this attempts remove the insincerity we see in things from things probably more sincere than us if in the first place they are not conscious. Like how the self has frowned itself out of existence, in choosing its keepsake be the resting bitch face of pessimism. 

Oh, how much good we think we do in damasking pillars of marble: the blushing frolicsome chains of roses and tulips seem to dance. What drives this, we all know, however, is the absurd hope of witnessing a momentary cognitive flicker in the stone. It is an open secret and we only conceal it more desperately each time we beautify senseless carbon. This goes for words too. Predictably it becomes harder to prevent the reactionary overflow of bile from a psychological place in us we strike down, without fail, in making blush the suitable pale of things that just want to be their organic coldness, not play pretend with organisms who despise their fathers, their fathers with their throats of brass. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . But no World is eternity. None of them are, none of the Worlds: this is true no matter how much one of the Worlds does this less or that more. Take note. Here are some examples . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . One example of a World out there. Equivocality is its pollution. It seems and seems and seems, it is a repulsive mobile that will keep turning with deceptive strength until finally it all blacks out. Without warning I would guess, but how much can be suspected studied predicted and then prepared for in a World made of indifference? This redundant twilight gyre. It is a planet in motion now solely to keep up appearances before its cosmic wake. No diurnal ebb and flow anymore though seasons wheel through Arctic night. The inhabitants of this World ontically mirror the stasis of where they are. Because they are afraid of its desertion. They start to die off. At the least wane of hope no less. which would be fucked up of their planet. But bathos and bad timing is an unfair ‘law’ of the land. Unfair considering it is not a law followed by the land itself. And reality would be no such prodigal at The End. It would leave them all myths, being as all nothing. So people go ahead and live up to their only duty for lack of anything better to do they say but mostly because that duty is all the chips they have when it comes to a cosmic downsizing. Best chug ruthlessly for a small say on the council after all than deny a heritage of stasis just to be different. This is bad besides the fact one is ultimately denied a chair on the council so to speak and thus a chance to draft up input the night before the council meets. Once again the council’s hour will be taken up by discussing the coming week’s survival strategy, probably. But the strategies have all been joylessly rehashed in a cycle spaced over a long enough time to almost trick one into thinking that things could be freshly built of change, not merely revolving in orbit growing nauseous at the many vibrating frictions that, uh, that in those parts is such a commodity! But to the universe nothing is a commodity. Nothing is sold it just is. Run it by the mercurial chiefs of neighboring galactic tribes and note of any misery to their collective peasant body and see the truth of this in what their orders given highlight as important, maybe food related. It is some strange misguided effort to them, even as a system of bartering; money was even forgotten by the aforesaid people of that imaginary World of what seems. People who do the job despite they do not understand it. They do not understand the commodifying because there nothing is rewarding. Guerdons and wreaths. Pah. Forgotten at the end of the last millennium this was. Now all that interests anyone who lives there are new mandates for rest or better, death. I indulge the scoff. Me and my insipid nihilism, o. Who knows but at The Rapture it might well be a World reserved for evidence of some erosion to the universe going on behind William Blake’s closed doors of perception. A tragedy, like brain damage. And that is too harrowing for toughest carbon. Not to be eventually smoothed. And will prove the death of certainty. Kill that one alive will you. It is a World in that pathetic state, a unique breed of pathetic familiar to the place, resultant of some owner’s neglect, something unacceptable and inhumane like that hamster you won at a carnival that started eating its own pellets of shit because you were too lazy to feed it, and which ended up being flushed alive down the toilet. Not even monitored by God anymore; yet it did not experience a slow moral regression, unlike other planets on the list, other Worlds that were provided with a sacred text, yet suffering a quicker moral atrophy. Or it is some farmlands for raising to mature certainty the farfetched things scattered in spacetime. The universe does not have time to parse out all the karma though and no evidence this is the case exists. Of the turning them into believable things at least one wishes. By adding a use to them would be preferable, since practicality seduces the naysayers. Say this place is for the lone wolf, the unclear statement. Passive Aggressions. A heavens for souls leftovers lifted from a doubt that has been buried or some other, emotionally or with shaken hands and some eye contact. Doubts that float from elsewhere in the universe migrate here. To this World. Karmic balance must be involved somehow. Else why would it be acting this way? Though I would stop short of calling it a heavens for doubts, thinks one. Who knows: maybe this World disappeared when it got too comfortable with seemings, every fact a loaded fact; the people tired after too long exposed to all the seemings. Like the way one is exposed to radiation; people too comfortable with lack and boredom and pause to even surreptitiously try again. Even if the reward is like catching yet one more breather in footing the bill when yearly Progress lags behind its quota. Thinks one: I mean like footing the bill, malingering home to rest precious rest. Let me speak to these people. Of course it is restful but it is not for your health if you have any old shred of empathy. Malingering is bad anywhere but is generally accepted on Earth to be bad. One must experience a moral amnesia, quote unquote; not literally amnesia. And deny one has done this to the detriment of all the rest of the staff at work. Deny it like Big Oil CEOs deny climate change. With that sort of vigor. But no the halflife of their energy gets snipped, more exacerbated the dose of fatigue per hour per capita. It is a World defends having no responsibilities: by always bringing to light the same former blast of Progress in its history that was the own creation of this World itself. But it says it was not that long ago. All is illusion or close to the cliff. O World of seeming. And it that but then slinks away all pouty disappearing to be alone once and for all. Motheaten hand me down hood of moody pith all left the inhabitants to stave off Winter then go and perish in the endless imaginary night there. It is a mood slathered as fuck. On and on by a selfish cosmos unable to separate Ghandi and Hitler because teleologically it’s all the same state from the top. Just it is fractured once shrunk by these differentiations called morality got cropped up over time there in people of a World away at the corner of the Milky Way. As this would in the conscious mind of any World’s conscious inhabitants, who themselves are an anomaly of God. This cosmos would have a martyred World for doubt be if destroyed, then excessively: a mind quicker than daylight goes off the frigid alien poles of Earth; a mind that knows icy distance like the poles. Let us say I am of this rhetorical World forever, though it will be just for now. That I put the onus of my own improvement there, tucked away, a pitiful dirty sock shoved down the side of the bed, a temporary solution: deep in there: some swampy place among the mushrooms. To linger and rot among responsibilities of a different World’s population. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . These scores of persons to consider on Planet Earth think, for for the moment there exists no large scale alien invasion to sway one, that there is only Planet Earth to make the list of themselves complete. It is only one list and Moulder says we are not alone but that is a more obscure story. End of X Files reference. The universal list is limited to what is pulled by gravity moreover. The merit of a youtube video like by its number of views. But there are myriads out there and more ways to consider merit. Populations bound to their terrestrial housing projects. Populations of wanderers up and down a planet mentioned so far or not yet or not to be. Scores of them nobody knows about not limited to the all of us on Earth like that were all of everybody, and further than that as if that number were representing all in a given galaxy! The population of a World is its makeup. They are the soul of the place and we are. Essentia. And God’s thoughts each are planet and individuals each are neuron. Yet some individuals are barely able to handle duties the size of an atomic particle. Something was said about this already. Strung out on stale worries that turn the new day edgy. Subsequent comedown resembling the effects of too much coffee or meth. I or God maybe gives out past circumstances and cultures to populations: like flyers to the disinterested mob. Flyers handed out by cosmos that must have gotten into their hands: the inhabitants of aforesaid seeming World. Looking for someplace not so coded or seeming; or would be happy, thanks, with a holy proverb brought down to shed some holy light. Would chance it must have been that the flyers, though casually accepted by these individuals as they walked away, were seen the last step for them and their strifes of tiredness. Casual but hiding how desperate for disappearance, to have it be at an end. For only so long can one conceal it though, I’d imagine: how discomfited about living so pathetically pisspoor. A hamster consuming its own feces to live. No wonder this neutralized World, sterile World, suffered so explosively before it disappeared, if the cherished makeup of selves up and down on it took advice from a flyer that came down like a message in a bottle, across seas of universe; but not known whether its author be venerated or deranged or even still alive. That habitual seeming implodes is no surprise. I know it not, thinks one. I know not seems. If only whole populations feeding on it need not be so pathetic to the degree of experiencing an increase in confidence and seeing illness: going to the doctor’s office like a diabetic must there to it because blood sugar must be wonky. Confidence at following the advice of a simple, pathetic ass flyer. Hoping maybe it was the proverb so long in search! It won’t be. Whether from me or Moses the population will call it from Moses if the flyer truly got handed down from the sky to whoever lucky recipient, who said I don’t want to buy anything man and walked away. This population of people to consider! From the land of seems! Witnesses each, not agog, to a heavens for doubts dead that still shine their ghost on at the speed of light like a star in the night sky does which might already have snuffed into a supernova or chilled to what is termed a white dwarf. But no star ever disappeared without some ripple. But this disappeared into dread vortex, into what never was, like. This population of people to consider! Thankful for the relieving of self called introducing confidence in one’s reality like it were a luxury car to an uncivilized tribe of pygmies. Into one’s routinest mortal gestures introduced; and calm into the stride. But finally it falls apart. Riding on the wave of confidence in being situated precisely in the hellscape of God’s plan, blaming the deceit of Moses, the makeup of that World dies out. Its inhabitants do before the planet itself. One is reminded of instances on Earth in helplessly gaping on at the quiet carnage: like that giant bolus of plastic that floats around the ocean, or that barge of garbage that floated around nobody wanted that somehow entered the World stage and became an international problem. The immense mileage of this orb will not save it. Topography made sorry by the ploys and subterfuge received it by the rest of the universe, and told to inhale. A World a patsy for the moral pollution emitted from all that is and the token cosmic dumping grounds. Everybody at school ignores the guy who transferred there this semester. The core of the planet grows colder until it is as cold as the crust, being all alone, with no remaining witnesses to feed on the clods of a dry crust. Discarded more is each day by a mediocre ecosystem in the first place that was too comfortable with its dying, such that God or some other observer, like me, if they were to observe, would not be able to figure out whether this was ignorance or extreme denial. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . So then death goes on with its wear and tear, too busy with its own docket but to coordinate an evaporating whisper be the apocalypse given for the place, and one almost hears an audible washing of hands somewhere, though death itself has no limbs; though it helm itself through one then another galactic mess and through all the swamp of time for the sake of its job quenching fates, many other straggling dots out there still to go, all careering in space just the way it does, death does. Yet death is shielded from death: it is a dialectical rule of thumb to apply to any germ of a negation caused, in the contact of void with void, or whatever it may be: that only without the power to die may one enlist the power to kill. 

No there is no at last, and was not, for that World of seeming, which is but slow death, or if stretched is equivalently the hasty reducing of existence to a pair of temples between extended stupor or what was just some random blockage, trashy void, patient and prone keeping within its supernatural coffin, obeying the expectations of what seemed to come from outside the coffin, an emptiness speaking its emptiness, its charge, to sleep, without changing guard, and sometimes few extremities available to hold all the realities, and a few dropped, and some damaged when balled together, of necessity, into a handful. Goodbye evaporating dunce of a planet, forever: forever may its deluded and dead families of consciousness be conserved beneath it, or scattered around it in trashbags, which happened once infrastructure fell to ruin across the board.

And these were families, you know; and their lives not mere numbers given seatholders to assure no ire for the vacancy, seatholders who are more like usurpers, and so then ‘harbingers of death’ in their own way and would pretend the number given them is for all the previous reincarnated lives of their own that they truly owned once. Themselves given to spread around a greater circumference with greater freedom, sycophant to none till the vacancies return and they the seatholders realize this is all for a limited time. A circumference more than these vacancies do transit, these numbers, privileged with the time and money to essentially buy a stairway to heaven and go without reproach for a selfish detaching from God into incurable twain. Whoring out their life like that: any vacancy does not appreciate properly the ease with which it is allowed to exist. It is a life without retribution for snubbing God. They do not even know they gamble with a mutinous possibility, nor seem all fazed with worry at the indication of incident to come; nor would a vacant seat, which became what all those on a dead planet would ever be, really be stoked by any sort of intrigue to get up and leave besides going to the bathroom. Intrigue or standoffs calling for the involvement of the authorities. Perhaps jealousy on the part of the seatholders does not mesh with murder in the first degree, necessarily. Or even with a nasty power struggle. It is just an empty seat, no matter it held on cosmos or council or even for a wedding, the plans were to fill it with that person. And now it’s not. Is it indifference to the divine privilege does this? Hm. Cosmic privilege would be less a threat when if used to endorse the actions of a mortal human it were not perceived indifferently by mortal humans. All the colors in the rainbow, speaking metaphorically, would agree. If only such a bitter gift were given to those cognizant of what they had, just enough would want more to get enough and be satisfied, with at that some extra divinity to pass around. But this shit is not a joint rolled out of weed that was stuck to the fabric of a stoner’s couch.

And the emptiness of empty seats pounds to boredom one’s pair of temples, and makes one turn to drugs. Well they will be vacancies as still suffer the bad look of conspicuous absence. At the wedding, or council meeting, or meeting at the foot of the universe. But be clueless about it once you arrive, so that to need not be present at your son’s Briss is no big deal because you didn’t know, one thinks. There are these delightfully aware celestial families too, ok with snubbing because they do it, who delight in the expanse when it shows up, and know also they cannot hold all the expanse on their shoulders anyway, nor be put up for awhile in the mind with a few theories for roommates. Interesting that mind and shoulders both can be made independent visions of what consciousness might be. Meanwhile may vacancies made by the dead be kept by seatholders without comment, without a need on the part of the bride and groom to decry the sudden absence: a terrible thing, to hold death against one, but hard not to do if it’s the reason they miss the life event and Grandma always wanted to see you married. Nothing, as in the entity, or called The Nothing, controls who holds that seat in their place, a man or figure assembled of stuff the most real in the concept of it; a picture hung up on the wall, or something. ‘Being’ and ‘selfhood’ are perishable: these cannot be applied to the present moment that encapsulates all one’s life truths living at rest in chambers of memory, memory only; and death the reason the chair is empty. And what if so to speak all things not quite sensible then met neatly in this here eloquent irony, and these dunces really conserved like wax collectibles somewhere more vibrant than they could have taken advantage of when alive and clueless, for Pete’s sake. Let all of them, this army of empty chairs, of empty seats, who actually without knowledge of it are dead and peopling these areas of paradisal sunrise and sunset, there in the wherever, well, let all of them calm the rest of us down, for there is too a place for their lax little reclining souls, a place in the heaven in need of balance, too enslaved to the speedy resolutions that the bigger problems that need deliberation unravel and loosen into chaos. But this cleanup is no job for the lazy, nor then might it be solved by these newcoming swathes of emptiness, to a land for the angels strictly, angels remaining in disguise, so as not to be treated any differently by their visitors, but mostly just to fool them all into believing they were not yet close to the harvest of cosmic death, who sings his nails into the coffin with talk of a last step, and in that case thank the freed piss of the incontinent powers that be upon this village of vacancies, freshly erected and done with, at last, to the gravelly tone of hands clapping off their dirts and dusts of effort with the friction. It is easy to fantasize about a risk at benevolence met with understanding, despite wounded pride at being kept in the dark about a spiritual harness upon that mediocre one who would naturally in this situation be the more dependent and bound to their home. It is easy to think the vacancies will get around to figuring it out with a shrug, at most an entrylevel discomfort shrouded behind pleasantries, which is the universal language for no harm no foul. Somewhere this has got to be true, yes; and everywhere there will be parts of the falsity that light up in beauty enough to distract one from the falsity, though in space truth is all we have, thinks one, catching up with the angels, on leave, for a week, while the archangels assume that lesser throne built of miniature laurels, placation, since God is to his children both coddling and condescending as a parent, and whatever merit as one would think oneself into feeling for them likely a hallucination of political sway in a World above all the rest, where every absence ever is and will be ever loved. This love is not along the lines of those same equivocal congratulations, stickers on the refrigerator for all the good they’d do to raise the rank of an angel. Though why care besides to be a radical in the face of proven emptiness, proven at this point? They are not there if they are not there, these impressions of things that play with chairs and fight for control over pressing the Divine Button, which would annihilate everyone, on top of that, make suddenly weightless all the banqueting reality that scoops humanity in and leaves us at the bottom of this bowl of soup called either existence or the meaning of existence, but not both; for one of the two of these only the other one not it, for the other of the two both. Expect disappointment if one is expecting the checks and balances of that Unreal Mind upstairs to be in being the finger that pushed as infallible as God. As should be so, should, but isn’t. If given that responsibility in the first place? Imagine it: connected to the Divine Button where the senses collect as sediment, leaving time the last thickness, and time, thus, with the ability now for others to enjoy touching it, though maybe not enjoy what the touch is, its fiberlike gelid structures no sort of banquet compared to the heat that would radiate from its chugging assertion of time’s kindling of minutes of heat and fire, and passing on and on. The time visible and surreal in smoke helpless risen in plumes that once were alteration and now represent all Worlds at once in static frames of an apocalypse, an apocalypse gifted to us by a God sick of the suffering, and to which all humanity must make obeisance and die in before facing the last glorified step, when nothing is left to measure but a flux of physical law as the clockwork of the universe stammers and then wheezes back into sync at increasingly shorter intervals, and more audible each round the desperation of being doomed to live in the lightless meanwhile of some hell ruled by myth, a myth that tantalizes with blurry prospects of deliverance without delivering, or delivering the wrong gift of apocalypse to whoever bows down in greeting, head tilting away from seeing it, and they in the end punished for their good manners towards The Grand Thing, which is a name for something else, and not the finger that pushed, one wagers; or at the very least that will push, definitely, the Divine Button, which symbolizes I know not what at all. But the inventor had picked the worst moment to indulge their karmic knack for bad timing, which they did when aware more than usual of the creeping dread of time, usually bowed down to in lieu of averting gaze at The Grand Thing, maybe death, offending him thereby, death, whose visage of love and transcendence and all that new age spiritual mishmash was meant for all to see, which by the archangels was preferred, for the sake of better harmony once all the sardines, numbers, and numbers for chairs, were neatly expatriated to their state after: for according to the divine statistics people who saw the visage would not be so mad about dying once they picked up on the fact that nothing at all anymore was fact, save that moment of visage before the mandatory extinguishing of life. To be savored, a tender memory. The chance passed, one would have to be doled their medicine without having seen The Grand Thing, stirring up only discontent, in one, or anyone stupid enough to not drink up the last sight of their life, life, which is a name for something else. Life, like the way a touchable time was made the quick substitute for a reality crumbling before nobody’s eyes, became as it approached the finest degree of a last step a place before that where one had felt nothing but even then still not The Nothing. It depends upon its thickness, thinks one, underscoring a maybe there, but lightly, not wanting to wake up the universe when she has just fallen asleep, like a babe, out of a fear for life, a babe. One accidentally revealing the limited brain capacity of life, to this romantic partner, named the universe, which is, more than anything else I might’ve listed so far, a name for something else.

If the Divine Button has been pushed then will humanity, a bickering tribe of hermits in essence, have to learn the bad news from others, what had happened, and not to have noticed it at all without others, before disappearing? The ubiquitous baggage of existence, and the all but faceless universe quite peaceful now without all that population. The burning of minutes would go on and persist wheezily as timber lessened and then everything would be futile and silent once again and all would sleep. The mechanism thumping on and on: like a lilywhite blondehaired foot, sans a sock on for, keeping time with the music, the other foot thankfully covered, which he usually did to hide the varicose vein: and then one remembers fully: for no reason, one remembers it with tenderness their smelly avuncular contra, keeping time wailing at his smelly banjo. The one whose visage too close to your face often lent with it a whiff of bad breath. Did you did remember seeing him as a child, and up through adolescence, to even just the last few days prior no less? Futility this is a fact of human makeup that now you have barely any time to turn over in your chagrined head before the apocalypse, and didn’t as a child. Before you die you will not know the invention, one thinks; nor when you and perhaps your mother traveled to visit him.

Stooped down he got too close to one’s face in greeting, then he, your uncle, telling a story between his coughs and vague digestive trouble. Though he lived in a coal mining town in the case of the avuncular the story was not of time, not of the coal burned by time: that accumulated in sheddings of ash once around some managerial ultra clock that got broke and was removed without repairing it, a failure which is another name for time, something powered by its otherworldly sourceless mechanism, and meanwhile having all us whisking barely through the mud of such harsh gonging sounds of the hour. All the beefs of time in time will be confessed, and the whole sick plight of its shorn wastrel at the lever, who pulls open the flue or something or serves some menial purpose to the mysterious perpetuum mobile, which is another name for time’s going. Beefs swallowed until nobody anywhere is real, they must have gone on to that last place by now and by now past all the caved in theatre of meanings after meanings assaulting its coordinates. The sound of clucking tongues comes from all these other niche realms out there of cosmos. Blessed with a reality better than theirs, but, propelling into no such earnest future for The Nothing, it should have known better than to think the reality would lead anywhere, if the same Button pushed, oh, planet that once yearned: to if not be there, imaginary people in that imaginary place, at least not lose the precious strands of ambition emitting from the people there. Of that ghostly dot in the cosmic notation. And endless trails of gas, and the clouds of dust trailing off asteroids once themselves planets, and now the remaining volcanic bones divorced of all those false starts. Be ye not, almost into that shitty realm or some ruthless indifferent death, a deathly indifference? One dies no matter the barricade made, and however much one be the pith of certainty, sometimes so strong almost to make death live. One dies having crawled so long from out a hellish muddle, then failing, surprise; and then to wither back painfully and prodigal as but discharge of that new batch of things and certainties or whatever in one’s place, as had been cooked up from that World, that planet, hopeful intrepid and ambitious and foaming at its ambitious mouth of World to go and there from its ignorant place with everybody else. And since nothing else wants to be anything other than what seems, at this point, time, ironically the most seeming thing, will be, at least, that exact last gauge for falsehood left. And time left craved for by Progress; by the real prophets and fake truthers alike. And this is reassuring. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . The Last Step—a misunderstood phrase, or maybe just too easily simplified by people. The tragedy of this it is almost cute. And how else to go about accepting such vileness? Such entropy? So many folks on the outskirts of one’s handsome daily orbit,—idiots, or hopefully just blithe at heart once gotten to know,—but so many folks, they are ok with it, they are patently ok with leaving a statement where it is, forever, and what something means exactly where it is, and every orphaned statement at its furthest, quaintest dilution. Thinks one: you would not be surprised if these people at the start were fools, and fools to that complacence, eking out the minimum argument only when they have to: each one a slouch, a linguistic anodyne. They are even of this character when forced to admit a principle, even just one: the words they say take up the responsibility to question them. These anodynes: when nothing else works. And when that fails, rob them of the power to communicate anything: a single irate bubble of gas erupting somewhere within breaches their lips as drool instead of words when they try to speak. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . The Last Step—a phrase, nearly identical, phonetically and syllabically, to a vault of others. But with special affinities!, I think, thinks one, but this time speaking in the brains only, a voice to themselves and with it the gift of an I. Affinities, to this one phrase you have in mind out of all the rest, thinks one: Besides that both are and have been reliable clichés, so far,—cultural workhorses when the culture has not enough time,—and the second phrase of the two, to be mentioned soon; and besides that they mostly fuck with separate duties to definitions at partial variance,—still, it remains true for any phrase, even for the invisible ones like this one, which is staying invisible, so far, because, well, it has not been mentioned yet, the words put down here so far in willful wait of such an astounding gravity as could carry the latter half of this argument without the arguer needing to mention it almost at all, and anything more than that, all but parting the red curtains for a tasteless obviousness,—and whatever the phrase be called, still: it feels, admittedly, obliged and awkward to say, stepping forth as uncertain royalty into the spotlight and into recognizing, an unnecessary gang of footmen, sans faces, towing along behind.— The phrase thereof is as royalty, a royalty to be met not with the usual flourish of trumpets but ponderous silence, which then magnifies the sound of the dumb shuffling feet around the phrase, faceless men searching for their stage directions. These damn unnecessary lackeys are unnecessary: suddenly it all seems an embarrassing hubristic display, and the idea of royal footmen silly nonsense. One thinks all the rest of these gaudy, chaining gildings a waste of space and resources, and altogether a brutal expense, even worse for the fact it was for the good of the phrase, for the wellbeing of the dignity of the phrase. But in this the true jerk is the phrase itself. Called too early a thing that exists by you yourself who is ironically a partial existence in the writing. Less than mere words exist, requiring more reality than that to exist, for after all it will be a self: one made of voices, strange, inner ones, and the words must live up to that dignity of being and of name. It is as of now though still a halfhearted self. One as you took it straight from your inner litany, shrugged and took a risk on it, and began your molding from parts of the inner litany. One day you woke up and considered this your own challenge to this human devotion to the state of being; now, one prays that one not lose focus before abandoning the mold in utero essentially, as a mutant, who will dream his poor dream of at one point in the narrative sequence herein, attaining enough a physical otherness, perhaps collected from all the stunted logical threads, into some patchwork, over years of starvation, enough, and though walled at first within these miserable paragraphs each, scrounging for his own able threads there in the imaginative poverty, so to finally make his being himself and ditch the words of his creator without himself also disappearing—words that, almost like a drug, so long sustained the unfinished reality that kept him an abomination. This thinks one. Before your throat could prepare all the way to clear again to shout that you did want this the same as he the embarrassment comes full circle: that is once everything is revealed centerstage and all the subtlety fails, and, the only confidence in uncertainty, as to the phrase, and as to what predictably will always come out of the woodwork regarding it, which generally is something darker if it was hidden in the woodwork, but especially bad if created from the rib of your own bad character. Yet it is an entrance still and meant to be an entrance: and if it lingers long enough before coming on strong, perhaps till the end of a civilization but obviously not of a language, it inherits something more by whatever graces of English, the phrase does, whatever’s appropriate,—something like the connotations as live within different qualifying camps of theory but that say the same thing. Else to blow God’s plan and stoke the shredded orange fire of God burn us all were a better fate than to strangle the organic process of metamorphosis a language must undergo, or remain where it is and be abandoned, and the right to talk robbed from fools who die without having once doubted what they say.— . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . The Last Step: a phrase nearly identical, that is, to The Big Sleep, which will follow it, this by all accounts the unequivocal case for all human beings—and this exact location by the way now so infamous, at least among the cavalry of inquisitors who think they wear white coats, and not Klansmen, but the ones like you, who will bother over the coordinates, fix the math—and one thinks: What is it, what do people mean when they say they are taking The Last Step in their process; was it a slog or a breeze? Or will it not really end at all? Or, one thinks: it is one lastness out of them all that is the most agreed upon, you say? No. Nothing like a science riddle, a fucking science riddle, to make you get crusty as hell, about all the fancy science, one thinks: and your pitiful person to rage over it in private, and not understand, for hours, one thinks. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . It is an intellectual coldsore you get during the Winter that you prod with your tongue despite your mother’s intercessions: this verifiably compulsive behavior in combination with the frigid weather leaves the whole inside of your left cheek damaged raw eventually. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . One thinks: in the sole context of a finite universe this would be enough of a riddle to tolerate, much less if applied to what is surely an infinite universe in any case. But words are weak, of weak constitution, lighter than dust. I mean they are literally flimsy paper and maybe some graphite too. That’s it. And even worse, this riddle is one about a thing said in words, with language, not with words, in a language—it should be obvious, unless you literally cannot read English or are not familiar with Germanic languages, that I write in English—anyway, you, in all likelihood, will give up, reflexively. Give up answering the riddle, that is: as humans do when mentally cramped, cornered, past the point of their will’s sway—well this, and also, they succumb to madness—give up, that is, and discard these certain implications before solving anything, because you need to sleep, one thinks. But all night you will dream of questions as to words as being. Any exact location overstimulates the mind with clarity so that the location becomes relative and fractal, much less one to be considered on an infinite plane. Yet for all herein you expect to live through of the mortal, or planetary, onslaught, still, the tired eye will want to open.— . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . And this^ is an image you have quickly sampled, herein, for lack of another image at the ready. You find it floating in anonymous clutter, orphaned, and pluck it out for the wanting expression. You cannot help but feel the proximity of the next one in the roster though: what your mind by chance will face and detect, and then fix itself to there, in the celestial makeshift of your imagination, as its satellite,—yes it will want to open, the wide eye will, when the eye thinks it is in sight of an answer clearly through all the semantical wilderness and weird, and then, all options for the metaphor will be at the ready. This answer is for you: maybe it is even still a riddle, the answer only what first few rearing spoils got plucked at the end of the first act, before half the story was ripe and the stakes alive and burning, and the answer, because not pushed to be more, dead. And not by you or any of the other squares seen as more than dead, whether it is or not in reality irrelevant, just as should be what is the true last step that will quell the machine, will only properly unfold if given a narrative sequence. It will not be watched bloom nakedly. It is no naked heartflower bleeding out from a leak in the stent and will not reveal its soul for that waste of plasma. For the image being simply what it means, sans a theme, and nothing more given to transcend the audience of watchers, till all comes to a bitter putting on of gloves and a corralling of the afflatus to dirt. It is too shy for that and without the narrative it stays in bud. For the answer must have its story and lullaby. Else it will get all fidgety and act like an infant up too late: though as the hours creep on this infant will never once be out of immediate sight of the father and his tired eye. The answer I myself do father. It is an eye too tired in fact to know he has made an answer, or many, his babe, and he himself now the one handling all the many stillborn questions as they are transferred to a different line to fill out the form wait in the next line again for authorization and the line to existence or an upwards landslide to St. Peter: but nonetheless it is the job of the father to care for his lot regardless of the lot. He fingers lightly each question, tests the surface of each one, some prickly, some smooth, all treated as if in possession of a single, fragile piece of nostalgia. Yearning for the right horoscope to make it past the bureaucracy one day and deliver itself to the World as yet another thing of answers, one to delight the planets with its system, which manifested here, as it should be, through good works of the system once solely his own, now neither his nor the answer’s but a purgation of both. Like browsing for snippets on T.V., it always seems to be an answer that goes to commercial at the worst parts. In the end, thinks one, the story has barely explained itself anyway, either because you forgot some detail or the story explaining itself did. Tantalizing us always with a fragmentation even more annoying if it was purposeful. Perhaps crucial to its art then but not satisfying; on the other hand if it is purposeful it is controlled, no matter if the effort is or is not towards an ideal that is obscure, most likely the creation will have a better future. Thinks one. Definitely it is a more than primitive creature, though no person, nor even daresay spirit. With enough wit to meddle with human desire—and definitely cognizant enough if it turns out the creature is acting alone.— I imagine a strungout gremlin or something, unfamiliar with human life, but of a certain facility regarding the maneuvering what humans hate, to its sharpest precarity, one that might fall with the single further degree of an obtuse into an acute angle, of grief, of all the grief. Something what who crawled out from under the bridge where the kids shoot heroin.— Something, whose job is to insert the omissions right there in the very development most needed witnessed to ease us, but forever; at that precise moment it is about to be witnessed reconciled, and left neatly, or at least left ugly with a beautiful concept somewhere in it. But instead one is left to piece together clues with more clues. Anyway. Comb through infinity’s bigness for an apex and find just more infinity of cosmos without the question of a first or last at all. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . I do not have a kosher sort of empathy for this however. Its demolishing back to finitude,—so as to bring back to life the possibility of a last step,—I visualize as not so rough a thing, compared to what had been lost with the introduction of endlessness or of something incapable of limitation. What exactly is put together out of this morass of sums? It is of such loveliness though: this thought on ends: so much that it requires no arranged deadline to be, obeys nothing but the master sketch of its own terms, which it will study and use to give up, and then, well, the last step exits us incognito, with the schematics rolled up under its arm, without anybody picking up on the change in the air. Exits into the heavens, a monotonous omniscience, which the last step, a deviant, had cheated out of deciding its birthday for it. The heavens tried to without even asking…and the angels became furious: to know when exactly the guests would arrive, so to speak. But they were not to know when: and once such a precedent is initiated on high by the low, the inflexibility of the concept of God’s deeming goes axiom to particle. The heavens had always been able to know everything else before, if just they followed the wishes of God and continued being in divine good favor: ultimately were surprised, no, they were shocked: by that lush apotheosis: of an eternal whittling of lastness. A last step evades the pressures of needing be appraised with an equivalently earnest pair of eyes, tired though they be. Though it is final when it happens, final is relative, depends on the quality of the shoes one is walking up and down in. Even in a finite universe, one begs for arch support, if that is one happens to have taken up this responsibility to travel to the wrapup, the horizon, of…time, time maybe? To colonize the horizon when this planet is finally gone wack and rotten? Eventually one soldiers on and toughens up though and gets to playing along with the knot in my back I get from lifting garbage too long; you need not launch out of bed early to get a jump on this school project with a foregrounding hypothesis, just need space to move and time to enable the move there. If my last step, one thinks, is to be considered taken, or is close to that point,—besides that, of necessity, it is followed by a step after, well, before that, my travels, my peregrinations, so to speak, one thinks, must have had to develop muscle, on their way, or something more like a common thread to the experience: a thread starting to beef up with more other threads discovered, between the problems baffling one and the problems baffling another, and through which we listen for an answer to how such a thing of nature can be so intricate, yet fragile,—even though that's pretty much how everything is and we shouldn't be too surprised: holding an empty tomato can to our ear from safe up in the treehouse, one thinks, though this image be somewhat comical, even jejune, even naïve.—And, please, this time, have it, it, the last step for the first to reach their true last step, be more for that person than a location transmitted via radio signal to those venturers of  deliverance, out to get a thorough briefing to the public—saying we have been let in on the life after: the media will say it is something like a gratifying meltdown of all the striven and scratched, whether for or in, in or out, but always out of arrogance, though we only have really dreamt it so reductively at particularly woke moments. See, thing is, and this is at most at the outskirts of obligation, to say nothing of what we actually need—again: to have truly made one’s last step one must have judged the matter closed with a strong sense of place in mind at the first, really. One must know it had even begun if now it can properly end, with at least a better understanding of, if it cannot reach, its ‘where’—or else it might just be one of the many lies there are about finishing up we will make it seem to others and ourselves like one must accept believing, o, it is imperative for us as the human byproduct of a shit culture to, of course, keep that scheme afloat, when it is culture that should have always been the byproduct. Just as we did with Christianity, the afterlife and shit, so shall we with whatever genius we may find in the things not at first religious. Like this belief in summing up a place to give it being. And you know, the many other attractive unproven possibilities probably impossible, or just thoughts to get through this life, here—amiably. So then we call the job finished when it is not, and wake up to find that when putting to use once again what you repaired, it falls to a shambles and is quickly deformed by that original impatience to finish. Progress becometh easily a focus on the need for a status given to something, which itself transposes to a need for a status given to ourselves, and this is the disastrous result of a strange and sickly moral amnesia one might observe in people overwhelmed by either their bad deeds and the desire to start over, or by an artificial imperfection seen incorrectly by them as a given, a natural part of the world. Abortive efforts of interest are a symptom of that discontent: they are a vile ouroboros. These human efforts to really own the nurturing of one’s own ideas are really all idols to human desperation. All of it is forfeit anyway if you clearly do not know where you are going. The skill is knowing this in direct proportion to your ignorance of what the destination will look like, how you envision the destination, which is called the future and which if one were not ignorant of it, one would be quite easily bored with knowing. The ‘last step’ is not this sort of strange epiphanic sorcery and is not the result of enlightenment at all. People will remain angry towards most of the imposed limitations, yet first and last are not schemes like that, to them, would not dog them, are the same as them: a code in unison with the laws conjured up by whoever has put their shoes on. But geographically, at the time the line is crossed, the line is crossed. It is nobody's fault. In this case, here: a symbol is introduced, manufactured. An old man with a mind long ago run ragged: he has thought each precious thought in his head past all conclusion. It was to reach some weird heavens of insight he thought he made out from afar.  A certainty at the end of a hair. Has he run out of thoughts, then, cloistered in his mortal place? Stages are set up, between first and last, confining the offroad notion where it is not fully itself, and people often mistake this, a lag in energy for the notion, to be the end of the notion. Where it starts to rot is where it is yoked upon a series. This, it is said, is for the sake of organization. One might see and know the intrepid wandering notion as a sort of innocence similar to the freedom one once had, and its fate the same also: wandering through its hidden country and picking the daisies or something like that for garlands later. The notion is a child: anticipating the least chance at rousing nature to speak for nature, beyond the usual pastoral hymn and beyond a versified humanity really an abasement of both perspectives. The formalism of verse, destroyed by the unstructured greed of people; and the rawness of people made cold by verse. Well, we yoke it all upon a series—or an arc—or some other premature hierarchy, of enjoyment. This child is the father of the res, or just some dun and filthy ancient on a train. He is the fiction here: yet who knows if the fiction is real, or if he is the only fiction? Perhaps all of humanity is a flatness of projected film upon the screen, and people, the mere spawn of a whim, or even just one poor decision; and we to bring with us as our baggage a heady, thickheaded solipsism that is invader unto God. The old man is a composite of selves, and lacks those familiar unities of one individual self we all recognize and which rule us well enough to make our minds, words, and actions, as people, somehow make sense to some cackling voyeur upstairs, or some cosmic Other, who may just be watchdogging the replete timeline for any mistakes. The ‘old man’ is a mirage, but a reality; he is a collection of microscopically personal stuff one could not even hope to relay a fraction of to their therapist within the hour slot, and I mean a fraction of the evasions and buzzings that knock around and die over the course of one mere day, nay hour, nay minute, and the which God will have promptly insured your secrets you do not even know for very long be packed away in some closeted oblivion you can return to, and review, yourself, if you want, upon the moment of death, though God does not promise any deceased an immunity to headaches or anxieties, just an increased, or vastly matured, wisdom to help deal with those mortgaged emotions given back to us, you, in the afterlife. However, God had assured, made sure, that you, and all the hustling human race, for that matter,—had, probably long ago, by this point, had definitely assured, if not 1,000’s of years before you or anyone were born, or something ridiculous like that, that nobody, nobody mortal would be able to listen in to another mortal’s narrative: nor for you specifically that anyone too warped by their urban privacy a privacy to such people something more like an alienation as leaves and will leave them raw enough to blow up a building, or work for HOME DEPOT—that, no, no, for you, nobody too pale and surreptitious could ever pick up on and shadily file in your dossier they keep of you that inwardness, despite what you think the neighborhood obsessive across the street must have accrued by now, of a better facility, you suspect sensibly, than the way less dangerous stray catcaller who may lean against his nihilism on a streetcorner at 2:00 A.M. and call you ‘pig,’ but at least lets you know you are in his sights, in that moment. “Don’t be silly,” God saith: “Such a carefulness, such discrete, devoted surveillance, would be required as to go beyond unhinged and rather breach the realms of a psychic intuition approaching the liminal Divine of my own: like, Santa ain’t always watching, honey: and if he was, like I am you, now…o tragic morph of Icarus…if that was the case, it would truly baffle me why this newlyminted God would choose to listen to your thoughts and not trouble me with mine!” Moreover: God is not of that shitty caliber of person, not the uncasual lecher, who will watch you undress through your window without saying a word about it at work the next day, thanking his creeper stars that your apartment happens to be at the floor adjacent his own, offering a view of you, through your window, from his perfectly inconspicuous bathroom window, no less. One might say this offers a bit of excitement light up his evening schedule in his famished domicile, number 6 on a floor of the building asleep nearly, besides the cockroaches that dutifully scrounge somewhere unseen, in a building falling apart, across the street from your own shit building, with its own affinities to his, affinities the man exaggerates and romanticizes to feel not as alone in a new state, away from mother and living in his horrible, famished domicile, infested with bad vibes, yet that is always too quiet: and the floorboards have weakened bad and creak atop the shifty trust of the old foundations: and when the man even pads to the kitchen at night the noises and his inability to figure out which floorboards to avoid to avoid them eventually stir the cobwebs off a boyhood fear of ghosts. It lights it, and him, up. As ugly and as pathetic as it is. Yes. A consistent opportunity to see you naked lights up his glum fucking hermitage, with its least semblance of conceptual human contact, you know, to beef up the evening schedule. Something to tell mother. It lights it up with its benefit. Its gloriously confusing benefit: it happens to be just enough therapy for him that he never goes postal and kills everyone. Thus go the subtle acts of God. Thankfully mostly he isn’t able to take too much advantage: most of the time it’s just you popping your boyfriend’s blackheads in the mirror on the opposite wall, also visible from his perch at the bathroom mirror, at least, with the help of binoculars. That, and every now and again, allows himself to be mesmerized at you laughing at your boyfriend’s jokes, or offhand comments, wishing with all his weirdo self that he was able to be so verifiably offhand. O oddity, ye who cannot hear the punchline your own life delivers to an audience of strangers, all of them looking at you and laughing for a reason you cannot understand: o irony of ironies, haha, o delicate voyeur. One could use this information against him, if they knew it, some of it, about him, but nobody he comes in contact with regularly returns the favor, nor even will know him, period, for very long, much less his inner shadiness. So he ghosts the parties of acquaintances that he invited himself to in the first place, getting into his fickle head that it’d be less stressful just to go home and jerk it. No, nobody has any proof, outside of feeling like in parting ways from him, they are extricated by him, let us even say it is to his great relief, both to be in full control and to have different human people get out of his hair: removed from his presence. As if by giant invisible tweezers: as if to him, in the feeding eyes of his undiagnosed complex, they had shrunk to the size of a tick. Though of course nothing is said during the given exchange here and there that would back up the feeling each of his ‘friends’ have had. Until they all get together and have a powwow about it in secret once tensions build to the point of espousing suspicions as to his sanity, and then they all, all of his ‘friends,’ learn they share an experience of the same phenomenon of their goodbyes and wellwishings. Yes, each time they, but really anyone, even bids him a simple adieu, there is a feeling like one needs to itch, or wash oneself, like an annoying nag telling the child that the child smells a bit ripe and should wash their underarms, ass, and crotch while you’re at it. There is a feeling with anyone who is by nature antisocial of being thrown off but with him that is always temporary and is never substantiated with the, in reality, infinities of circumstantial proof there would be, if there was really a Big Brother Government monitoring us for seditious activities, or maybe even just for jerking it too much. But that would be crossing a line into territory more fascistic. If we haven’t gotten there already: when really, it is the benevolent God all of us know when things go right and none of us know when a random earthquake, deciding it wills to just go ahead and off hundreds of people, mindlessly jigs its tectonic plates a sec for the laugh and fucks up everything…well, well, well: it is and who knew the benevolent God all this time logging us down so we can revive certain destinies we in life had been too dense to tax our memory further with, actually a more nuanced instinct of selfpreservation, especially if with time and additional context that happy moment of the past that was forgotten is to turn sour with a fresh experience of trauma or something, precluding us that feel of any bit of happiness about it. O though there is not much business in keeping track of certain tiny facts, the thinking a thing here and there that becomes something you forget maybe, besides that it felt important to remember before you went to the store. Sadly you could not locate a pen for the napkin you snatched quickly, chasing the momentum of recollection and finding only that and the kitchen surface in time, before things slowed when the likelihood of juggling both finding a pen and keeping the thought in your mind diminished, and then you yourself became unlikely and fleeting as half the thoughts you never think again, and from there you tunneled home, knowing the rest of the way, to your sweet deep darkness and brine, your home, in existential sewers. Your rudest of privacies. But some of that information despite its tininess could still be used to summon up anger in other people, and misplaced at that, because an anger at themselves; or is of things coaxed from the depression of folks; or is the same old focus on the latest proof of one’s perceived questionableness, and the insights made into that during the celebrity interview, once the ballgag of their own fatigue is removed and people realize the truth of their own celebrity, which is even more in the troubled nobody than in the actual celebrity, for the former’s very reaction to any semiserious allegation of such a thing: “A strange little scoff, I’d imagine.” God saith. “Jovial but filled with rue. A scoff as might tend to say again and again in their hearts what is their slant on themselves, to themselves, fearing that criticism will not have the last word. As if the convincingness of that were even more convincing, were some consuming revelation all about how they are actually shitty and wrong and bad in their daily life. As if anyone whose aim was simply going about who they are were not the decentest, most sincerest schmuck alive! Negativities, am I right? At the hand of which, we are made the sap or witless proxy, and dethrone our very ego from the kingdom of ourselves, just to get the negativities away from us—but we do it by giving them the throne, the negativities, and banish ourselves from the region, hauling our ass and ego with us by mule: a region where now dwell, in a castle once ours, the bearded members of a senate, each one kept alive only by the shelling out criticisms to peasants like us, fixing them up in the dress of compassion, a tough act of guile to succeed at seeing through to the end but made easier if there are none in the bunch compelled to moral maintenance—as a weekly given; nor is it made harder if those who will rule our emotions once we relinquish them are openly shitty and see nothing in persuading anybody of the opposite. The rubric, then, is inaction in the face of assaults on scruples that at most are a hallucination of any ever there, good or bad; or they were fabricated in the attempt to bring this senate of negativities closer to what are our human stakes in life: vulnerability and such. And yet not anything done to rectify this or that atrocity, nor a string of words made at a public function that waffle over the resulting outcry, but as is the rubric and code in this circumstance of senators, these bloodless figurations, when it comes to any assault on scruples, the answer is detachment, like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers,—when it comes to confessing the piling eternity of evils any given person has ticking in them, you can be sure that person fills no senate seat in their cruel minds, but might thirst for confessions of older, obscure cruelties they maybe have only imagined remembering, so to soothe some remote masochism in their hearts that are not bloodless, though the usurpers in their brain might feel nothing as they continue on and on with their torments as if each torment were to be filed and the bureaucracy maintained, the one that is religious or not religious, but probably the former, if one, having been forsaken by these men of the senate who might water their unalive beards out of vanity like starving flowers, flowers that each one are the cilia of the guts of the world, going on awhile now,—if one, that is, causes in themselves gestating a repentant grief at criticism that has smitten ego to the quick too quickly to mean that it comes purely in peace. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . He is an old man without vice and without virtue, and he was made just to move one past hating the regularity of that one or other small, miscellaneous annoyance, as will emerge, if we take the misplaced time to play therapist silently to ourselves, dangerously, while driving, you got it, to therapy, so as to decompress, and so as to burn a stray stash of energy while driving, or say, so as to shut off our fatigue with a mental emergency switch we can only use sparingly, with our own spite to connect it, to some deeper issue, as would usually tip the day overboard into ruin. One extra thorn that wants to be a thorn too much, sometimes, is one that is especially detested, heatedly living out the fidgets of this aporia, this malady, one of the soul, thwarted soul, and to place us, as in all people, in a beginning, manifest at least a beginning; a thorn in a consolidated ‘where.’ In what crazy region of this old man's head might this infamous last step officially be delineated? Is it a hieroglyph only he has decoded? Directing the arrival of a change? Even if it is just for him to know, forever: a solution given to him for the sake maybe of some unreasonable preemption? And alienated from all the other people who are not a fiction: a change in the atmosphere is recognizable to all, nonetheless, at the exact spot the hieroglyph had indicated to him alone.— A change. Not even many but just one, to be plucked from the senile ravel, which is the job of God, and then made all of the creation. The bordering space earmarked before he forgets. Then he will move on. Perhaps he has been making a pilgrimage to the sacred end of the story since he began himself to fester in the cranial soup. To him it feels a little less complete an end with all this help, but no matter: connoting a start or an end, but usually both, works as an impetus to go on; that, and the lifting his legs within their filthy boots, and the bringing down of them, to precede whatever next flawed human action as could bring him forth into but then past it, past the last step, maybe even into more keener, vegetable finalities. In any case, delineating a clear change, that is, of one place from another place, so that one senses it, almost like magic or, more apt, a placebo,—with the first step into it senses it; and also depending on the exact distance still to be covered before meeting that delineation, nay even that last step before the ‘now’ of having arrived, before his two feet are firmly planted on the platform—before he made his last step off the train he wondered if ever he had really moved anywhere or changed at all, or moved anyone, ever. But he need not have measured to there from the spot he got up from his seat to linger at as the train neared home: to feel a proper escape from the stasis. Or like it was official. So then he asks for nothing when the traindoors open straightaway and he sees the challenge clearly before him. He is to most of the public, maybe—or maybe they are indifferent—an elderly transient or some elderly yaya who went and mismatched his pills that morning, thoughtfully waiting to traverse the precarious gap. The rubber hazardyellow lip extending over to the opposite concrete perimeter and a little beyond so as to root itself sufficiently on the station platform, like a bridge, and this extra last step now exposed and plain to him by the maw of the opening traindoors. Sure, it provides easier access to the platform of the station, created mainly for the benefit of the elderly or lamed, but this easier access is to one day be for the benefit of a different elderly or lamed: Some sort of inhumane people, youth, who fled to these suburbs, these towns which are all with their own vacant stops a train might stop at for nobody or few. Fled to avoid hearing their boomer father use the word ‘bootstraps’ ever again, or ‘responsibility.’ For we are wounded by this defeat. In the eyes of we the young it is a defeat and almost evidence of a selfdeluding millennial nature. I guess in response we became walking mysteries. An olderlooking man, going Alzheimer’s on the commuter rail. We were indifferent to whatever mystery they said we were, and yet shamed the earnestness of those horse’s mouth statements so as not to feed the egotism possible to bloom from some few words being so true. Thinks one. We go on consuming the starved plenty to this day: a fleeting culture’s bled out, fleeting products, of irony and meta; perhaps we are even punks or goths that will become tolerators of plaid and khaki, are other bad priests of the norm who mainly cannot use their walk too well, well enough to get to finishing up, and need more than intuition to figure out where change ends and change begins. Out of a certain laziness of presence, we youth develop the needing of a presence, whether with us as one we do not quite understand or one as us that we must understand or else be rendered meaningless and absurd. O we youth who walk our usual walk to the neighborhood coffeechain looking to become caffeinated enough to free some manner of beast,—and expectedly find nothing. This lip or perimeter or halfway bridge or a public aid, exposed once the train inches to a stop, extends, with a pneumatic hiss. This sound, the hiss, is almost expressive; it has its own subtle characterizing awareness, as if glad to rid itself of its numinous anxieties of machinery. Or whatever other griefs as would undermine a locomotive machine with the pressured gas, released when the doors open. The old man, his muddy eyes, what they see, having betrayed him past help, this time. And suddenly, for the old, or older, man, or transient, a foot or so more of extra last steps still to cover to get to that sweetspot, that delineation,—well, that he hadn’t seen from where he was standing, at all. He a bobbing blur on the train, infinitely waiting. So hadn’t been able to judge whether or not to hurry from where he lingered, further off than the old man preferred, once given his mundane chance to arrive at the end of something, like, the mundane; or to go home, or both: go back to a home, his, that is a vagary or fluke somewhere in nervous aether. And lastly, this, this ‘last step,’ depending, also, on the ground covered between one and his next individual step of his old feet, though this anyway to be negligible, with each individual step taken by this poor transient fellow. . .  .   .    .     .      .       .        . He with his many odors that travel into the next room probably when he goes indoors anywhere. Individual steps. Generally speaking, the approximate length of them, that is: each shuffling and slight step to be predicted based on a record of every move this old transient has made dragging a pendulous ghostliness in trash bags, because he had had nothing else, across the Earth: in search of a life in which to throw the garbage, or liveliness, or something—he now for sure as one sees it happen from outside of this reality, having really intended to get off the train, off this clanking hooked-up chaining of big metal parts that look like XANAX on wheels: in frank need of repair: and the fake wood siding and posters for events longexpired and uncomfortable seats and all of it a holy dissociating: it is all there, in there: Having arrived at his stop, or his stop, so could one only presume,—before taking his last step off the train: an olderlooking man, or transient, with these very brown and sightless, almost suffering eyes, suffering, and drowning in, and blinded by, and steeped in prophetic mud,—an olderlooking man there, before exiting the train, silently faltered, and he, silently blocking the doorway; in his head, but who knew, multiplying all these processes like distances and other quibbles, through time itself: though the traincar was not at that time populated by more than a handful of riders: and the hassled hump of his spine, going stiff upright, though he in his tacit universe without speaking. Or was just maybe a haggard diviner for some higher spiritous language.]

INTERLUDE He was about to take his last step off the mostly empty train, or so could one have only presumed it the last.—

He then blinked twice, quickly; then stopped at the threshold of the doors as they opened, and remained standing there inbetween them, for awhile, stockstill and lifeless. If one had chanced to observe him entering the train, if he really did, and sit down, till about prior to this moment, if he really did, one would have found that he did not move much, even when he moved at all, or whether a little or a lot; but, rather, appeared to be here, and then there, without any visible explanation. A man of a series of slides. Yet there was a smaller, a microscopic way of him, and which, by those means, he located all of himself in everything at once. In the farthest cracked ubiquity of the scene, he was there, the old man, without moving, with moving; he was on the train and outside of the train; and as well there was a strangely microscopic Name his presence indicated was there but which he did not spell out. One got the feeling it was a smaller way than could be described, to one another, without the words getting clumsy. It was a way of him, that somehow defied physical laws, and made airlessness be emanated like it was something full all along. Like a cartoon; almost lifeless, almost. Surely there was a reason this trick was done so well by the old figuration. Some learned trick of presence, or of carrying oneself, learned way before having arrived at his very elderly state—a way to cope the old man, poor, absurd old man that he now was, had developed early on, perhaps to adapt to something horrible, or something perhaps not horrible. But still it should count as following along life’s roads, unless he truly was nothing more than figuration,—and still then, if that were not the case, a thing made of traumas.

CHAPTER 2 [I have one, single hunch about this old, elder man, one thinks: and at that, a bottle of single malt scotch left to burn, tonight, so hear me out before I lose that hunch to drinking, and my wallet, and also what I will order at McDonald’s later on tonight, before I lose my wallet, when I happen to stop by a bench outside the park afterwards to sit down for a moment and put my head in my hands, trying to sober up, thereupon getting up again and leaving the bag of food out there like a forgetful ass: See: it is some personal avoidance trick he uses, or something. Ain’t that this movie? Haha. Maybe he developed the trick over the course of his tour in ‘Nam fighting the damn gooks. Haha. Right Gramps? Ain’t that movie Platoon it’s called? Is it realistic? My hunch is I think it’s this or some shape in him he harnessed as it strolled by, which then the old man carefully studied, and which now guides the old man, who last time he remembered had left it, the shape, tucked away, a bookmark in a book: a book he bought that explained all the origins of geometric stuff: an easy purchase, if indeed he could know better from it his beloved shape, perhaps quell his rising curiosity: and in other ways: a hunger for even stuff like the etymological background, of course, of this thing called Tesseract. And it was a shape that was changing and fevered but also would redundantly get to floating back through the town in the old man’s mind, again, after a week on its own scraping by, and by now somewhat overcooked in the same role as prodigal son. Returning, once again, to the nice quarters in him, in the elderly, uh, man. Now see: an oddity, an odd geometric form would be the only thing to work: it was indeed the only possible twin of his own shape, and must have prompted his interest, the elderly fucking man’s interest, when seeing how oft it shadowed, and so closely, his own form’s unbroken daily routine. It is a shape that haunts him, as in literally, like a ghost. It is not without the usual shades of anomaly, with even some advanced shades, as any fascinating thing has,—anomaly, after all, ever hopes to draw the smart people in. But crucially: it is only the one shape, just the one, for his convenience. Tesseract. He needing only rely on one consistent shapeshifter after all if it be consistent though of course it be still a shapeshifter. Moreover the elderly old man might have done well to notice this consistency before losing his lunch of processed burger and fries at the fact of it. It, a theoretical flower let’s say, budding a too abrupt surprise, for him: too much for his ancient health. But: a Tesseract fitted almost like a suit around the skeleton and meat of himself he found. But sadly he could only get a hold of a rental one, or maybe it was used: the old man owned enough of it, then, to squeeze himself, or parts of himself, out of the third dimension with it as once again the shape left Worlds behind. So: this fugitive shape this elderly little man studied, if I were to guess, thinks one. Thinking, or hoping, he would manipulate life, or rather light,—so as to have itself grow into his preferred way for the given angle of a shadow, whether from a lightbulb or the moon, to be thrown upon him. In such a way as might enhance the arthritic hassle. Yet if even it was during the day and he going about his day innocently, I’m sure the most objective observer would sense that something was darkening him always, like a shadow; it pursued the contours of the old man’s body, a body that seemed to hang even though it was not hanging from anything: his body, suspended and looming over victims in its motionless motion, like a silly damn Dracula upon just morphing from a bat. He must have wished so hard to defer his body to the shadows. What a legend: the first old fucking man to have instilled in each of the twitchy workings of his loose intermediary parts, the valid appearance of an optical illusion. And most importantly, to have left the conclusive whole form of himself a perfection, and at that automatically wherever it was supposed to end up, depending on his schedule that day. But what do I know? I’d imagine there are times he wages the full capacity of the Tesseract, when he can do it, in front of people who have no idea, and, well, maybe I am one of those people, maybe I am just hallucinating the damn thing, one thinks, or might think, or might have thought. I do know however: a man can’t move that way. If this old man is real and in the universe then reality has faltered. But then, thinks one, this aim I devise of his is so pedestrian and mortal: that it’s all for the avoidance. Well, he uses it to cope, probably. . . . . . . For example: it might have been something cultivated by shame, originally: the pesky immortality of an alienating look, recalled a decade later for no reason; sour grapes that end up fundamentally being your fault, one’s fault, generally speaking, one’s fault; all the rest of that damn juiced up, permeating trauma,—it will be fodder enough, whatever the event of shamefulness in example. A trick of the light or rather of darkness, a darkness, made glued together: out of all the horrors he an old man and brave enough still would rather not brave if one result of doing so was yet another complicated coping mechanism drawn out to the point of, this time maybe, rending apart, for real, the fabric of spacetime, which he may even be too afraid of doing to risk angering with continued perturbations against the thin screen. Yeah. Whatever divinities he did not know about, much less would he rob them, and along with them all the horrors from before that had got him, the old man, to this skyey lost place of his own invention, he on the verge of getting lost himself, in realms of his own invention, or at least where his own invention led him in splitting the screen between Wrathful God and Wrathful Man, the latter too dangerous to make as Gods, and anyway our humility at knowing ourselves the frail reed outpaces the greatness of angels. No he the old man would not rob from these elements, these higher elements, that universal respect for their standing, as prophecy or as the equivalently impressive combustion of all of time, every time, within the present moment, and each present moment. No he the old man would not rob from these elements their own omniscience, nor could do anything but bow in deference to them, his face to the floor, if out of pride he must conceal his awe at their exquisite baffling parts they pick up as but lowly rocks and hurl thunderously from the perpetuum mobile, at we systems of flesh who try to untie ourselves from a humanity that every mote of dust in space wish it possessed. Do not disrespect these titanic, wandering mysteries sans a face, who throw their rocks of order from echelons above where is the World; which stoke all the universe as time and change and form, and yet they are these, the way an elderly old man, man of paper, with his paper ambitions: he had not the tools and cannot have them. And actually these are these, these rocks are form, and change, and time, and are how they are made and unified, and how they are done: the mysteries have the tools: so, then: he will let himself be scared off at witnessing some heights, ordinary, after all, to what is divine, just as the people of the World, and life, to any mystery at all, is more an answer than any as could be found instead by them who would have more access to it, because they breath in dust and exhale fire, and yet would suffocate if left to breathe the air. A’Saith Wrathful God [the absolute]: “Being itself is all the actual tidings of his life to come he needs to know, well that and how to get along with finishing up what’s not yet glued together: whether it blossom as existence alone without glory or concept without focus will depend on whoever helps me glue it together. Then I will make of it a gigantic boat to play with in the gutters in the rain, the gutters reefs, the rain oceans. Let us just hope you do not leave my description here to rot, forever, for for that forever I will be, and how poignantly lain waste, a barge of shit, plotting against our hero, bitter enemy to the lover of the shapes made by the clang of rocks of time. Our old man he should quit his archeology.” . . . . . . Yet with just a little cosmic teamwork might it be so: that whoever these mysteries are, they have created a franchise around divinity. Many will be the usurper to come, after me, after my anomaly gets out and throws the Scientific Mind into the same gaol of chaos as everybody else: everyone struggling to figure out who stole God’s chair for one fracturing like ice shales of the minutes without minutes, without truth, that had all the World in chains. It might just be the Tesseract, protected as a star witness for the divine lawsuit God’s wrathful ass is in for if he lets humans get that close again without blowing them up. If it be no such elderly who touched the thinnest part of the screen between intelligent mortals and the liminal rocks radiating deeper intensity, then perhaps the rocks of a fourth dimension were the ones dumbly toiling alongside wrathful God. . . . . . . Imagine to be ashamed for just being. It is called the human condition. To have shame that—simply put—puts the self on trial and cites original sin in its defense, asks one of a being and existence already what right one as you has to get one's own presence when good citizen shame has presence not; and being, well, the concept of shame perhaps is, ironically, or maybe it just makes sense, a being that is merest out of all in the pecking order of things to be considered in the living of one’s life, and the least thing of being itself, given barely a slice of it, being, to make it so that shame may exist on its own, without being a virus needing a host and to be by definition exorcised. I guess, depending on the rock thrown, shame could always have had being to its concept, without it needing be necessarily about or related to someone, anyone, internal to external or vice versa, outside of all the secondhand turmoil behind its purpose, but rather in fact only a summation of its definition in such wholeness as to imitate the wholeness of flesh and of existence, beyond the little free rides given by some God,—thinks one, scoffs one. The Human Condition. It is the guilt that one is. Anybody who has lived long enough in the World will understand this. However there is also the idea it relinquishes a sort of wisdom after a long period of abuse, that is, and this insensible, unwashable guilt as comes with the package of simply being is suddenly quite worth it: The prize is the wisdom of diligence, a diligence verging on obsession: a diligence that is learned through failure—but as to maintenance of ego, it works. Embarrassment is a catalyst for this wisdom, this diligence that is also a kind of funhouse representation of selfrespect. One takes the most showers who is told the most times they stink. Embarrassment is something of a similar rub as shame, it is the shame of a tested ego that has failed its test. It is of that same wrecked ken as one having no ability to see and being barred from seeing just but the color of just but one friend’s iris, without seeing some nefarious other aspect in them I guess there for good; nay the iris as all in the eyes of everybody to meet eyes with in a lifetime. An iris as one hopes and prays always to see, and to alone see,—and yet sometimes it is not even that that is given—and instead, with the same moody brown vagary in them, there becomes a kind of hate in them too, the eyes there, that soon has one digging beneath the eyes, infinitely, for something, a connection, clarity of any kind, or at least a pupil in the center, somewhere. Though it is shaded past darkness, one must know that by now. All this digging gets one no clarity but only will ever reveal a fresh layer of confusions, which will be read by the digger as judgments they will force themselves to see as insights: stuff and dirt and revelations as to the flaws and anomalies of themselves. Alas. That poor, poor one who is attuned to this, and has so sensitive a mental scale: on which to weigh what one may think constitute the particularly lasting judgments.— A scale: which one thinks will tell them an accurate number, each time, when all it does is break down, each time, beneath not you but an exaggerated heft made up mostly of this girth of anticipation collected around all the disputable portents, like fatty tissue, and waiting to be doled out by a scale which for all anybody knows could have slammed a member of a drug cartel, who would really be carrying weight, literally and morally, with as punishing a sanction, or, notpunishing, as one, or you, received just yesterday. You, one thinks: who lives in his parental hovel and shyly eats oatmeal in the morning before his parents wake up because he is too embarrassed to admit to them he likes oatmeal, which was his favorite as a child, but which also, he being in his twenties, is not a fact of his personality that would reinforce any idea on his parents’ behalf of him being mature enough to leave the nest soon.— In any case, if one with their, uh, scale is so preternaturally able to retain in their minds for so long the least proof to signal the grandest virtue, from cradle to grave, and not only that but then stir it back alive on the web, until every good deed one has ever done is thrown a parade for, paid back, because, well, it’s only fair; but only in direct relation to one’s awareness of the bad deed that was having it so easy, expressed in groveling before the bad deed as the popularity chips rain down upon ye, but first upon the masterminds who figured out this moral bilking, then the dregs of that upon the sheep, who all are out of breath, who want a ride, then none for the antisocials who don’t see the big deal about it, about both sides, and shrug at both having it so easy and being so aware of that. But the sheep are always looking for a chance at turning in all their own past guilts and sinning and shit, via internet confessions, and all the weeping their digits upon the keyboard: each teardrop a stain upon the Information Superhighway. But maybe that’s too mean. But there will be a point no doubt when all this conditional letting of blood is made a sea, coagulated monstrously into something alive, becoming a consciousness of shit that shouldn’t have been, caused by all the bougies’ unnatural balancing of the imbalance, like forcing an inedible binky into your infant’s hungry mouth once again because one happens to be too far away from the formula to get it right now. A sea that yet to the gardenvariety backpatter must be replete with, somewhere beneath its waves, or perhaps encrusted upon its coral floor,—with the pure gold of so much contemporary sacrosanct, because who cares as long as there will be yet more others, strangers, to see them walk the streets as one with the little guy, going in tempo with the swing of all their martyr cred they have, in the form, god help us, of something tasteless, let’s use the word bling, even though it is kind of out of style. Fugazi chains hung round their necks to show off all the woke they have. And these sheep will flock like birds anywhere, but not until after the latest Rick And Morty episode is over, and in preparing for travel, making sure to pack as many Che Guavera Tshirts as they can into their luggage, they will set out to purchase a scale specially for themselves. So as they might get to weighing all of what’s the garbage and trash, receipts and broken smokes, on their moral person, that are in the pockets of their selftokened lair of shitty, the deeper in the lair the more precious popularity chips to be had. But: this already feels like something that should have been a science that is now dismissed as alchemy because made into alchemy, provided by an ignorant culture with that path to take, which it did, way back, at a time longer back than anyone can remember. There will be those who feel the same as I do inevitably, will begin to see this, and they will, I have no doubt,—as a commodity and skill, which is retarded; but not an entertainment, of which it is the most, and which to admit would prove the least humility in that person admitting who would extort such as even their own tears, as unworthy, something disingenuous, for the sake of appearing to be Aware Of Things. And this absurd detecting of the slightest judgment, it becomes a skill, a profession, well, like owning at fidget spinners, and each old sadsack a new guru of guilt, at once, and the sadsacks of guilt with their insights a source of awe in the eyes of a few others who want a ride backseat, with one and their marvelously sculpted dog, Guilt, a woofing dog, Guilt, going and barking like crazy, with her chops flapping in the wind, and her head out the window. Guilt that is really a misinformed hatred, and which then, in all its fire and fury to curse oneself before anyone else, ignites a subculture of depressives all who look for insights into their own hidden flaws now, insights that will be in high demand,—as if a natal chart and the whole of astrology wasn't already a thing for this and also really hip. But this, it would be a skill, for those who try hard at their grief enough, but hang acceptance out to dry. One thinks: they do not know if they are for or against the very old idea of the unhealthy scamming of a people, called a stereotype: and that makes every personality a punchline. Too used to it the youth is. Best get down on knees anyway and exonerate oneself through shittalking oneself, so as to not feel so gagged by society: well to shut them up their room has so far done nothing.] . . . . . . There is something transcendent to the discipline of keeping apart one’s sense of mortality, which ebbs and flows, and one’s simultaneous sense of infinity, which consumes, and leaves parched—both feed and pressure the ego and enter from an opposite border of the ego, with different lengths to their rivers each time, and sometimes clash, hence, the need for an everchanging distance, one from the other, when one tide is out and the other in. Maybe this old man, this ancient man, maybe, he was so beaten by life’s lurid contraries and life’s amoral nonsense, and all of it, caused by these nonsensical clashes of being,—that he could not help but, after years of shame, involving in even the least, muscular twitch, an avoidance of presence. Like those afflicted with polio might lose the purity of a limb—but this butchering done, not by God’s megrim, but as a form of penance. That is, could summon perfectly his existence as a nonexistence; the way someone with polio might easily hide from view a disabled arm, so that the fact it is marred is not even brought to light, anytime, nor brought up, among acquaintances and friends, not for it being a taboo subject but for it being an unknown problem. And this trick of stillness performed even as he did actuallymove, while waiting stockstill for something,—shifting around to discreetly clean the dirt from his hands by wringing them together briefly and dazed and then clapping them to his pants. And even then, he remained still in all other respects, like a picture, almost tired. As if his whole tired being and self were stuck in a form of time comprised of many motionless frames that slid him into actions like dominos but at the same time robbed the man of any oomph or torque or spring to his stepless steps. . . . . . . So: the old man blinked twice, as was said, and paused, and he wavered there, at the threshold of the opening doors, for who knows how long, to allot time enough for him and his senility to catch the musk of why he might have paused. This is a fairly common strategy among the sane. Especially among those elite among the sane, who do not believe at first what they see as a matter of course, no matter how sane it seems for how long. Those for whom their own scepticism is the best possible meteor to have hurdle through space straight into the turf, if there has to be an end to this World. They would rather that than the air be poisoned by the contaminating bias of others, opinion’s argumentative cousin. Though really it is a hard worn strategy by cognizant people around the globe, who might always be on the trail of their own thoughts and visions; or even just harried, gangly people, forgetful of certain easy, daily responsibilities while they build castles in the sky. Though in the case of this old man the rapid blinking and aboutface and moment’s pause could not have been acted out in a worse spot on a train usually. this train had not departed from the city five stops ago and now was riding through remote suburbs. When they must clear their heads to notice what they did not before, or had allowed only peripheral attention for, and that yet asks to be noticed, somehow, in the heads of people, usually wordlessly, for if what was to be scoped was pointed out by another explicitly there would be no need for a momentary pause, just to assemble one’s wits enough to prove something there to observe at all. Usually people will do this and see if it is of some importance to them within a second: sort of a way to rub one’s eyes when one has full hands, though I could tell the old man he did not rub his eyes with his hands because he was too weak. He just stood there. He would have held up the line if there actually were any other civilians, pedestrians, folk, on the train itself. Then he became more lucid, then stopped where he was. Gauging his surroundings, or perhaps it was just reality itself. For all of where his eyes wandered it seemed so. As if taking in the entire map of the World just looking around him on a train; or it was a gaze not drawn to one thing in particular but overwhelmed by something all around him, ghosts unseen but by the damned maybe, or a truer, rarer reality than this that if the old man focused got itself captured in his pithy glass. If he focused, perhaps sniffing out some newly realized horror. Perhaps not. It looked like whatever he thought at that moment was not pleasant, pleasant like the weather was today; nor did it seem to have come upon him in a mundane pattern, like a chain, the way one would usually experience their mind in transit among strangers. He hesitated again: then turned his head slowly, with one hand cautious on the guardrail, towards a younger man who was sitting a few seats away. The whole pantomime seemed needlessly dramatic, but nobody had noticed. The younger man at present did not notice the older man nearby. The ancient there at his threshold sniffing out for the varying portents everyday life begat. The patiently idling train’s doors were opened to a station not to be specified here, fully precluded from the narrative, here. But perhaps is somewhere else living out its possible story. An anonymous destination somewhere in a World of the more abstract details.