An Inhuman Condition

She worked nights at the jazz club. The stars were glitter on her chest; her legs skewered the moon to garnish a Gibson. The boys called her Strawberry Martini, and you knew from the look of her she was trouble. Her hair was the red of revolutions – writhing in united uproar, curls whipping fury across her slate-blue eyes, lashing out at anything close. Her face was a pale and fragile kind; her smooth cheeks luring you to stroke them gently. Keen to kiss her lips, crimson and wet with little ripples and ripe, raspberry dimples, the smoking scarlet sent shivering twitches down your spine – a primitive warning of danger, an imminent sting and impending venom.

She danced a pole between the bars trapped in the seclusion of her burlesque seduction. They kept her back there like top-shelf liquor so expensive you could never afford a single sip. Stare and swoon all you like, there was no getting into the tigress’ cage. The real irony was in the wild freedom of her dance. We were the ones trapped, stuck under her spell. We swilled and smiled, hollered and hooted, leapt and lunged, longing for a sip of her attention. She was fluid stone, hot magma that kept on moving – too hot to touch and immune to outside intervention.

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Most people waste their lives collecting commodities and idling as if that’s all there is to life. But life is much more complicated, more faceted. Having a mass of body parts doesn’t make a person – there is animation in it, electricity. The house, family, school, job, obligations – those are just insignificant particulars. Those meaningless things disappear eventually into dust. But a real spark – a bud on the edge of destruction – could flicker into nothingness in an instant. The fragile energy of the spark is what life truly is.  It is beautiful and sad and perpetually now, existing exclusively in the present. Life is something only the creative soul with its beating heart can embrace.

Jake spent his youth unwittingly searching for a spark. He saw through the veils and understood that titles and possessions weren’t a life. He had foresworn material culture and rebelled against it. His existence was one flask-of-Jack, punk-rock, cigarette-burning-before-it-faded-away moment at a time. Like many in his generation, he lacked the mental programming for hope and future thought. Instead of simply abandoning the old, pointless rules and rituals of his parents, he disowned those of his generation as well. Like many of his peers who understood even a little, he spiraled into apathy.

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“This is my doing. It’s me, and I accept that. Sartre said our actions and decisions make us, and this war is mine. It’s inside me now, and I own that. The world, my isolation – it’s my fault. I’m not saying I caused the political bullshit, but it’s like the pieces of a puzzle. You start with these odd, disconnected bits and assemble the corners, work along the border and fill in the middle from there. At some point you should start to see what the photo is, but I didn’t. There was no box; it was all blurred. I never even finished the damn thing, but they saw the entire picture first. Envisioned and given life through my work, there was no way to unsee it, and then they remade whole, damn planet in my image.

Looking back I feel like a naïve child. When they started using DNA to manufacture microprocessors, I should have made the leap. When we tagged ourselves with radio-frequency chips in the name of healthcare, people should have filled the streets in anger, but instead it was all a convenience. We were coddled at every step with the cushy blanket of progress. We dumped ourselves to the Internet, gave it our thoughts, wants, emotions – we became it. We reinvented ourselves as pixels communicating at unprecedented speeds. From the server room to the home then the coffee shop and the pocket, the next logical step was under the skin.

With rampant dematerialization and convergence giving us smaller computers, the lines blurred between our devices. The desktop was a TV, the laptop made phone calls, the cellular phone checked email and our TVs browsed the Internet. People carried a record store’s worth of music on something the size of a cigarette pack – a library of books the size of just one. We could buy any novel, song or movie in the world and have it on a gadget in our pocket within minutes. It was the fastest and most effortless form of consumption our species invented – the Internet. Once the ones and zeros made their way into every home in the country, there was no coming back. The ease of consumption consumed us all.”

Cras Populus Ero Machina
Attenuator Zero

I’ve finished the script to Bear and Bear, P.I. finally. Artist and I have it in a state we’re happy with, and if all is going well he should have some thumbnails for my perusal soon. Whenever I get some pixels from the project, I will finally do something with our website BearPI.com beyond displaying the number pi. I’m sure anyone reading this is aware of the poster on CockTracy.com, but in the event some unknown stranger makes it here, I want that stranger to see Artist’s cock in all it’s colored splendor.

I’m about 3,500 words into a new short story that will require much editing before I put it here. I need more time or less distraction to get writing, webstuffs and maybe even some submitting to publishers finished.

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Dearest Amber,

Your minuet breath still lingers resounding through my ears. I long for the tender touch of your legs entwined with mine. I miss feeling the slight rise and fall of your chest in my arms – sliding my fingers across your sound and sleeping stomach hesitating just a moment to circle your belly button. The taste of your skin, the ever-youthful joy of your smile, the life immortalized in your quiet eyes – those soft, hazel prisms – all of you will reside in me ever thus.

I remember the days when we were the world – forsaking sleep to sit together in urgent ambling through our verbal rambling. We lived entire lives inside those moments. Idling with you was my most pressing passion.

You are responsible for the vast expanse of my emotions from blissful happiness to harrowing sadness.

Watching you kill yourself with determination of your life’s work, seeing the way your beauty and tenderness has been overwritten with decay, watching the world rob away your sunshine ounce by ounce with every day – these things I can no longer do. I have held together the past year for you – to try and help you get back that piece, the essence of the thing that is you. But it seems now that it was lost before either of us ever really noticed it was missing. One cannot hold a wilted flower in winter and forever insist it is still the vibrant, myriad effluvia of spring.

And that’s why I’m going, now. I’m leaving to be with the eternal YOU – the one we can never hold or touch or taste again in this life no matter how hard we try or how determined we are to hold on.

Goodbye my love.
Res ipsa loquitur.

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His bright face fell, fading to a partial frown. The weight of unspoken sentiment dragged his cheeks from their elated pedestals – pillars on which they stood drugged from the nostalgic encounter. As they sat silent, his mind flipped through the scrapbook of their moments and memories only to find the numerous hurt personified in its final pages. This slow dissent into the past’s faded pictures staggered his thoughts with its thunderous conclusion. This gradual forward reminiscence and his merry mood guised the facts, blurred the content of the thing so much that his surroundings were uncomfortable and alien when he abruptly awoke. He was akin to a boiling shellfish slowly simmering to the final choke of its death concealed behind a comforting curtain. The thing had become real again too quickly and too fully for him to brace against the fall; he was stripped bare amongst his own thoughts and once again vulnerable to their venom.

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The whole fucking world has lost its God-damned mind. The military a-la DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is currently perfecting unmanned, aerial vehicles or UAVs to drop bombs and carry out missions of destruction in areas that are too dangerous to send flesh-and-blood troops because when those bastards die, people pay attention. These technological, stygian, deathcraft are capable of killing, maiming and setting ablaze as many poor, brown people as the U.S. government deems necessary in a matter of hours from the wiggle of arcadesque joysticks. Lockheed, Boeing – the big names are all signed up for lucrative contracts making bits of these killer, robot drones so the long arm of imperial law can slither into the third-world rectum.

As if that wasn’t enough, DARPA also intends to build megawatt laser cannons that can intercept missiles or melt enemy soldiers into gooey piles of I-Can’t-Believe-They-Aren’t-Butter. These future-fucked assholes have watched too many James Cameron movies and are so brazen that they want to mount these eye-burning, super-lasers on God-damn jets. If you make the leap of technological gadgetry that has given us a portable telephone that plays television and browses Internet porn, you can see how this sci-fi ejaculation could be mounted on an unmanned aircraft and used to make brown-people stew worldwide without waking some schmuck pilot from the barracks.

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