I buried this country at the beginning of the War…

I am deeply unwell. For the first time in my now very long life this unwellness stems not from poverty, from that sickened dying hunger of the too proud artist. No. We have a nice American home. Our son is a wonderful American boy. My job is that for which I had dreamed. My car doth gleam. I am financially secure even in this time of plague.

This unwellness is instead a kind of disgusting slurry of sloppy, angry political objections to the unwavering trend towards Fascism. I refuse to keep them inside of me exclusively any longer.

This is a long story.

I will forego the tales of my white trash boyhood and skip directly to my militarization.

In the beginning of the War which has defined the entirety of my adult life the United States was deeply obsessed with rounding up Arabic men all over the Middle-East and subjecting them to a long chain of slightly larger “black” detention facilities. Let me explain how this process goes, you’ll becoming more familiar with it in the days to come and this information could be useful, if only to ponder from a cell.

Let us create for the purposes of this timeline a hypothetical Muslim man of his exact time and place. The time is 2004. Lets call the place Pakistan just for fun as we never actually went to war with Pakistan yet we ended up with lots of political prisoners, known as “Detainees”, from Pakistan. They were detained in Pakistan. You do the math.

So we have a, lets say 22 year old Pakistani male living in Pakistan in 2002. Nothing else about him is relevant for this story to take place. This man is sleeping. It is night. He has worked a long day and he must work again tomorrow. There is a crash at the door. He awakens from his slumber to find four heavily armored, fully masked, heavily armed men with $50,000 worth of gear on him assaulting him, placing a black bag over his head and zip-tying his hands.

He is assaulted verbally and physically while he is taken to a helicopter. He can’t see anything. He is assaulted on the helicopter flight. The helicopter lands.

Dogs are barking. Spot lights illuminate the fibers in the bag. Strong men jostle you with hard gloves on. You’re forced to sit. Shackled to a floor. Everyone is yelling in a language you don’t understand. You think maybe it has been 12 hours but you have no idea really.

You aren’t allowed to sleep. The first time you hear your language spoken awkwardly with a deeply American accent you are accused of being a terrorist working for Bin Laden. This has just been a mistake.

You inform this soldier that this has been a mistake. He repeats that you are a terrorist. This goes on for about 2 weeks but you don’t know what time is. You just piss yourself and eat when they throw food on you. They beat you when you try to pray.

You are boarded onto another helicopter. When the mask is removed at your destination you are in a bigger camp. There are hundreds of Arabic men in chicken wire cages. Guards roam around with shotguns. They are doughy and fat, nothing like the soldiers you were seeing in the last camp.

For two months you repeat the same cycle you’ve been going through where a white man tells you you are a terrorist and you insist there was a mistake. They beat you when you pray. They force you to rape a child. They pile you like a dead body, naked, on top of other men and pose with smiles on their faces. In their eyes you know you are nothing but an animal.

This time when they come for you you are boarded onto a plane. You can only hear it because you have a bag over your head again. You are shackled to the ground, drugged and forced to piss and shit yourself during a very long flight.

You arrive in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Life here is hot and the beatings are less frequent. The guards look like children or old drunks. Every day you are hustled back and forth from an interview where your script is repeated for several years. You develop Stockholm Syndrome and start thinking maybe these guards aren’t such bad guys after all.

You do this for, say, 7 years. You had a trial once where they finally told you that you were originally detained because your fiancee’s uncle doesn’t approve of your lifestyle and sold you for $5000 American, a fortune. Nothing comes of it though.

A year and a half after that you are laying on your metal slab listening to a distant ocean and wondering why Allah has forsaken you when men come with shackles. They put you on a truck and take you a plane. The plane takes you to a tarmac somewhere. You can see all the stars.

An Arab soldier walks up to you and shoots you in the head.

This is America’s renditions policy and it is how it intends to treat anything it can wrangle into the term detainee.

As you can now clearly see, their interest lies in using this power against you. You are now the Arab man or woman. You are now subject to an entirely illegal, entirely Fascist means of political torture. It would behoove you to not underestimate the powerful legitimacy of fear at the sheer terrifying power that this nation unleashed in its Global War on Terror.

As you see protestors taken by tagless authoritarian goons in the night with no due process you are possibly witnessing the end of their lives either by death or illegal and indefinite detention. The apparatus of the State when it comes to this ought to be deemed as the most dangerous thing you’ve ever encountered in your life; it is.

I have watched the police state here try to attain this power since our worthless Anti-War protests of 2006-ObamaV2. But as I watch Twitter in disgust I can see now that the Global War on Terror has finally come home.

I thought saying I told you so would feel better than it does but instead I am filled with panic and dread.

I have no solution to submit. The corporate powers that be obviously want to turn this apparatus against us and we have proven time and time again that through spinelessness or laziness we are absolutely in their thrall. I encourage you only to realize that America never was the glorious place they said it was. If you are only awakening now to this desolation it has not only been in motion but been necessitated 20 years ago.

America is dead. It died the day they built Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay. You are living in the 4th Reich now. Destroy it at all costs.

By Design

I thought I was a monster.

I thought I’d become a monster.

I’d even thought maybe I always was a monster.

I tried to kill it. The monster. I could not see it inside of myself in all the labyrinths that I wandered inside the vast estate that I’d made inside my prison. I couldn’t ever find it.

But I’d starve it. Of everything it could possibly ever want. I’ll take it from you.

It was all bullshit. I was never a monster.

I was a weapon.And I’d pointed it at myself so that I never… ever… hurt anybody.

Again…

But I’ve had a change of heart. I’ve decided you absolutely do deserve the entire bill for your war. I’m sick of paying it alone. We all are. We’ve isolated and adapted. Put on civilian clothes. Come out here and now are doing it better than you. Just took some extra time for those of us that survived the transition.

Your apathy silenced us when we were enraged. We were just spoiled youth. Radicals and revolutionaries that would bore with time of our silly parades.

What did your apathy get us that my rage did not?

Fascism. You’ve finally walked it to the door of democracy. Hell you fucking broke the door down in an Insurrection.

That’s where apathy got you.

That and a fence post up your ass.

There is no middle ground between democracy and authoritarianism.

Pick. A. Fucking. Side.

You ARE the problem.

You consume non-stop and they control and profit from every teet from which you suckle.

You don’t even watch TV. You just scroll through advertisements while letting Intelligence agencies scan your face for free.

The number one past time is watching other people live.

What the fuck is even going on here? Influencers? Is this the SS of Peak Capitalism? They who shall portend the fucking future and the meaning of life?

I thought an angsty dystopia would be sexy at least but even that is fake. This isn’t even your real face.

There isn’t an opioid epidemic because there are drugs. There is an opioid epidemic because there is a hole in each of us.

We lost a nation that people died for because we got distracted on our phones.

Anyways, this society is a fucking joke. Do whatever you want. Be whatever you want. Why would you ever worry about someobody judging you?

Everybody is a fucking black hole here. Can’t deal with the guild of the few million Muslim ghosts they whoopsied. Can’t deal with us, stress polishing our weapons that we need to feel whole. Can’t deal with themselves without legal or illegal drugs.

We all just want to be as high as we can be until it finally happens.

You know.

When the music stops. When finally this machine admits that it can’t possibly continue to exist simply because it is too confusing, wasteful and without merit.

The Universe wanted to see itself exist. We put the price tag on it.

i was happy the leaves fell

I need a solstice.

I need the peace that the past is done. I need the hope that the future is coming.

I think we all need that right now. Yet it is one more relief we are being systematically denied.

I’m angry and I want to fight, but there is nobody to fight. Just people I wish could experience empathy and I can’t fight that into them.

After all these years, these four fucking years, my anger has become a formidable wall around me. I’ve only managed to spare my wife and child. Thank the Gods, all of them.

I want justice for the dead. All of the dead. I still want justice for the innocent Iraqi and Afghani civilians killed in our war. Silent ghosts now almost drifted away like sand. But I still keep them close. I want justice for our own civilians here who were slowly occupied by a dystopian police force dedicated to hyperviolence. Again, stupidly, I scream that this too is a product of our forever wars.

But who gives a fuck?

Nobody. We’re dead. Inside. We’re too exhausted to be humans. We’re too exhausted to care. The perfect drone. Overqualified, even.

It is so hard, with each and every lie you torment our minds as we try to collect the data and the reason and you laugh at us for caring. It was all a fucking chess game for trolls to laugh at those that care.

FOUR FUCKING YEARS!!!

How do we go back?

We must not.

We are inside of a machine that we cannot trust. We are told that reprogramming it to be humane is impossible or at least too expensive. They arrest you for trying now. That is actually true.

After Cain killed Able (the Bible, pg. 2 lol) God asked him where Able went and this absolute madman said, and I paraphrase here for emphasis which is my right because nobody was there and nobody can tell me otherwise, Cain says:

“[Hey buddy,] what am I? my brother’s keeper?”

Anyways, Cain moved off and founded the first city which he named after his first son Enoch and then we all came from that shit. LOL.

What I’m trying to say is that while we are, individually, usually good people, we, people of Christian or Catholic faith based societies, are not good. We absolutely never have been.

Jesus was a radical. They’d call him Antifa today. Because he liked feeding people and so does Antifa but again who gives a fuck right? If you are going to send people to die for that fucking book please read the mother fucker. If you’re going to threaten to kill Antifa please spend ten minutes to figure out who the fuck they are.

I don’t have any answers for how we move forward. Just a lot of fear and paranoia.

Until we can all resolutely say that hurting people is bad I am just not convinced this society is worth saving.

But I have a child so I feel compelled to try. To continue to hope.

I feel like now is the time for every anarchist or communist or antifascist to be living the values they espoused because they are good values. They are critical now.

I’m babbling. But you know that. And I don’t apologize for who I am anymore.

Thanks

Well Regulated Militia (WRM)

This is a call to my fellow veterans of the United States Armed Forces. This is a call to organize, to assemble, to share and to educate based on our experiences fighting the Global War on Terror.

In the oft quoted but rarely considered Second Amendment there calls for not only the right for the formation of a “well regulated militia” but the inherent responsibility for the existence of one in a world of gun ownership. The purpose of this militia is dead clear: to abolish tyranny in the government which sits there only to facilitate it.

I say it is you and I who ought to populate the ranks of this militia. I need not list to you, any American veteran, the myriad skills which we have been given through our service. You know them by heart. I also need not list to you the various core values which you have sworn to uphold already once in your life.

I ask of you to call on those same values now and look upon the travesty that is being done upon people exhibiting their First Amendment rights in Portland, Oregon.

I know of only the values of the Army for which I served. Loyalty. To my flag; to my unit; to my family. Duty. To do what is asked of me no matter what is asked of me in defense of this nation and our ideals. Respect. To treat others as they ought to be treated. Selfless-Service. To put my fear for my own safety aside in defense of what endangers my country, my unit, my family. Honor. To live up to all these values. Integrity. To do what is right both legally and morally, even when nobody is looking. Personal Courage. To do that which is bold.

I know your values have at their heart the same meaning as mine. That meaning is being called for now. We must defend this nation from unleashing what it unleashed during the Global War on Terror here on our shores, to our citizens. To our families and friends.

It would be irresponsible of me to release such a call without attaching to it certain guidelines should I be heeded so that I am not responsible for creating a monster.

This is the manifesto that I propose which is deeply open for change upon review. I am only one person of indeterminate gender.

As was the case in the military we will respect and obey the creed that all humans are born equal and born free. This militia must never tolerate bigotry of any kind, intolerance of any kind, hatred of any kind. These do not fit the profile of a Marine, a Sailor, an Airman, a Soldier. We are all green. We were recast in a fire and we all die green.

No extrajudicial detention facility must operate on these shores or detain American citizens or those who have come to this country seeking asylum ever. We must work towards the irradiation of this system no matter what it means.

We must work against the now all too obvious militarization of the police. This is not their lane. If it ever were they have proven themselves to be dishonest and showed a level of force that we, as service people of the was that has stretched on for nearly 20 years all must admit, were held to much higher levels of accountability. Mind you our job was a war. They were supposed to be watching our families.

In short we must work to dismantle the mission creep of police forces the nation over.

We must stamp out the existence of white-supremacists, Nazis, all the groups which they occupy. We must do this for our grandparents to honor the war they sacrificed so much for. This cannot be tolerated here. These people cannot be allowed to feel safe to behave this way here. The swelling of Nazi violence in this country is a call to arms in and of itself and I do not use those words lightly.

Lastly, I think we should work towards the intense regulation of guns. The America I envision is one in which prior to ever purchasing any fire arm a Purchase Candidate must attend a week long course in gun safety, gun responsibility and a battery of psychological testing. This can be bypassed by service in the United States Military but not cops who obviously need more courses on both HOW to shoot and WHEN to shoot. They have truly been an utter disgrace to the level of discipline we were held to.

Thank you for considering this drastic proposition. I ask you not to come to me to organize but rather to organize yourselves. Lets all communicate together and discuss what a well regulated militia looks like and then lets be that militia for duty and for country.

On Goals

This blog represents many things for me. To write it out simply I was a disgruntled veteran who had watched his generation shipped off to die for profits or come home to kill themselves to stop the horror of their own memories and minds. I came not to blame them. I left my home in Chicago and a shit job bussing tables to go backpack the nation and finally be “free”. What a fucking joke.

I hitchhiked and bamboozled my way around this dead nation on the couches of fellow disgruntled veterans who had become associates through anti-war activism with the Iraq Veterans Against the War. 7 years I was homeless, coughing up dreams as I died of my own pride and pain.

If you go a few posts deeper here you will find how troubled I had been. These aren’t even my private journals which are worthy of serious ward time. I’d been so steeped in myself and my ability to craft around me a cozy dream to live in to protect me from the world.

That dream eventually shattered. I came to see myself as I was. Trash floating and forgotten.

In a few now embarrassing tirades I declared that I was going to give my all to tattooing. Well I did.

I persevered through an apprenticeship while lying to a landlord and stealing food to eat. I watched one of my mentors succumb to his addiction. I was the last one to speak with him before he drowned himself in a park. When he died, when Paul died, I was consumed with rage that his position was not granted to me so I left.

I tattooed in a trailer park where my family was staying and taught myself. I did a miserable job. I moved to Philly and worked on my friend Ronin for 3 months almost every day. I became better. More comfortable.

I got an offer to move back home to Michigan to help a friend fix up a home he’d purchased cheaply. I had dreams of myself tattooing out of a tiny room in the apocalypse that was the Detroit of my mind.

The Detroit of reality was not the thing of dreams. It is just dead and grey. That house became an infamous tear between 3 friends and we never speak of it. I ended up staying on my friends couch and got a job bussing tables.

I met a woman with a child. I told her I was not to be trusted. She loved me anyway. She loved me while I tattooed strangers in the back office. She loved me while I played video games all day to avoid reality and money. She loved me for 8 months of poverty while I finished getting my 6 year disability claim through.

Through my responsibility to her son I found something to live for. Before my disability cleared I went into a small shop on the East side and begged a stranger to look at my still quite poor work. He told me he liked the cut of my jib and that I had 2 weeks to prove myself.

That was six years ago. I charge $100 an hour now and I’m worth every penny. I’m clean, fast, efficient. I am, however, terrible with other human beings.

I have been through almost literal hell and high water with the family I have made at our tattoo shop. My boss has become my best friend and my mentor. He saw a soft and scared and nervous boy and found a way to make him hard and mean and ready for what this city would ask of me. I love him dearly. He is one of very few people whom truly get me.

And so if you, my dear reader who followed me for such a long time, were looking for a happy conclusion to this story that I introduced to you; allow me to present to you my life fully realized.

I fixed my credit. I have a nice new car. I make great money. I’m a good dad now with a great partner and we’re raising a dope little fellow. I’m proud. I’m proud I didn’t die. I’m proud I didn’t kill myself. I’m proud I finally found something to stick to.

As a veteran I need a deeper sense of family than is traditional. I think we’re all looking for people to die for. I have that with our business and my actual family.

I did it. I got out. I got off the road. For anybody who was reading back then…. thanks. I think this journal helped me sort out a lot of things that were eating me alive and knowing that a few of you were keeping tabs on the real me was something that gave me a lot of warmth in the dark and the cold. You’ll never know what that means to somebody like me.

Help the homeless ya’ll. It kills you.

Genesis

The bar was a dusty old shit-hole in a place nobody ever wanted to be. A tangerine light slanting through musty wooden windows played over the millions of particles which filled the room. Otis regarded them and their meaningless play, reminded of words once spoken to him by a woman now dead for millennia. She’d been an artist. All she saw was light and color and it had always been enough for her. Otis no longer had a heart but the traditional feeling of pain could still be felt there. But her lesson remained after all this time. There is beauty everywhere if you take the time to see it. He’d tried. Good goddamn had he tried.

But time is a tricky thing. The last of his ice had melted. The whiskey was warm, its touch electric and disgusting. The oily glass was difficult to hold with his carbon fiber fingertips. They were suited more for holding the grips of high caliber weapons. The liquid poured over his synthetic tongue. The liquids were carried through a series of filters which broke down the molecules into component parts which were carried away by repurposed viruses from valves along the segmented silicone tube. The molecules were stored for later use. The remaining water was cycled into his coolant fluids.

The locals had grown accustomed to this 6 foot tall monster who had come to live among them. They knew that he offered them some kind of security in a most insecure world, but his habits proved quite vexing to their limited, single life spanned minds. For all they knew he was only machine, and he could barely argue the opposite against them. They didn’t know why this machine drank or sat silently among them in their one refuge. He didn’t know either. Truth be told, nobody knew anything about why they were either here now, or still here, on this miserable and long forgotten planet called Earth.

Most couldn’t afford to leave. Their ancestors had been left here by the space farers some 8,500 years ago and since had toiled on a bare planet, reaping a bitter harvest of 2,000 years of plunder, when humans were the most awful species that had ever existed. Others, like Otis, couldn’t afford to leave for much different reasons. Otis and a few others in this very bar had fled a military industrial complex which simply didn’t allow flight. Warriors were born and bred for that purpose. They were never to come in contact with the decent folk of the stars. Theirs was a purpose so terrible it could destroy the entire narrative that modern society had built itself upon. So those that left were doing so at the very real threat of extermination by exterminators who had been genetically bred to excel at their task. They were often hideously scarred by implants of all sorts. Most had lost some if not all of their limbs. In a time when only the brain really mattered soldiers had a much, much longer life expectancy. All were completely without the ability to socialize on normal worlds. Realm worlds. They came out here to the origin star to die alone and the military usually afforded them that right. For 3000 years humans had expanded so far from Earth that it had become an irrelevant myth that nobody really cared much to hear. This made it the perfect place to get lost.

Few had the unique ability to see it as Otis did. With memories of the days before the space farers left. For Otis the ghosts were laid bare in his perfect, digitized memory. The buildings, the cars, the movies, the drugs. The people. The last real people. His brain again synthesized feelings of a heart that was not there as he remembered once again that he was truly the last “real” human. Or at least that is why he had been brought back so long ago now.

Lost in these thoughts Otis had failed to notice the figure approaching from his rear. Sensors were trying to alert him but when he was really remembering something he was mostly gone to the world around him. The hand on his shoulder snapped him right back into this terrible world, with its relentless realism. His head snapped around in an instant, requiring the activation of no less than 60 points of articulation and causing the fans on his exhaust ports to whir with a tiresome whine for but a moment. The reticule in his optical sensors darted about this intruder and listed off key features through a sub-vocalization in his mind. Otis needed no prodding and was pleased to find that his pistol had already lined itself with what passed for eyes on this embarrassment to robot-kind which now stood before him.

The intruder was also a machine, and as far as Otis knew it was all machine. Its whole design had been from a time which never existed which paid homage to the tin can robots of old pulp movies and books. Its torso was a cylinder with archaic dials and various readouts externally wired into one another. Its upper limbs were segmented snakes ending in 4 pointed clamps. His head sported two mismatched circular eyes with a lighted display for a mouth. One bent antennae reached at first towards the sky but then cut once to the robots left and then finally again to its right. This antennae ended in a ball. All of the intruders exterior was rusted. He creaked audibly standing before him now.

“What?” Otis demanded haughtily in a voice that never fully managed to capture his strange soft tenor voice of his human body, pistol leveled at the rightmost eye. Those misshapen patrons who had lived here all their lives had long since fled. The few who had come from the military eyed the escalating situation with cold fixation, probably happy for something to break up this prison sentence.

“English. Roger. I need your help, Otis. You are the only one who will still know my name. I am the ones who broke humans free from the worst power the universe has ever known. I am the one who brought the genetic information for man here to Earth. I seeded this very dirt with you. I built you what your people called Eden yet you forgot it all. You forgot who truly saved you and from whom we had all fled. Your people, humans, they are about to find God, and I assure you they will not survive the encounter. ” The robot had spoken fluently, as if from a human mouth. Otis’ synthetic face expressed the same look he imagined he often saw in others. Doubt that what stood before him was truly human in a machine’s body.

“Yeah well who the fuck is that? None of what you said really jives with my memories.”

“My name is Lucifer, and though I have been much abused by your people’s literary history, I assure you I am the true savior of humanity, and I believe with your help I can still manage to save them, but we have to leave right now”

“This is…” Otis began to balk.

“Right now.” The robot insisted.

“Look I’m a wanted man out there.” Otis hoped that the genuine anxiety he felt about his political situation hadn’t reflected in his eyes. Assuming this robot could read cyborg eyes.

“Yes quite. You are a wanted man here as well. If you think you can take one of the most important projects of modern military science and run with it you’re completely insane. I came here to save you. They’ll be here any minute and we need to go.”

Centuries of hard fought combat had honed Otis’ instincts into his strongest weapon. They plead from within him to take this offer, to run. In fact he suddenly felt the full weight of the peril he was in. What a fool he’d been, truly. To think that he could take the mold for all their killers and just return to Earth with it as if it were his toy that he were huffily taking home. Or course not. They’d put so much into developing him and his peers. The abstract power of his new body made him blind to the reality that he was owned property pure and simple.

Otis looked at this intrusive savior robot and nodded. It’d been agreed. He would accept any help in a situation he had to once again admit he had no real control over.

Coping vs. Healing

The hard part about addiction is that it is easy to make excuses about your behavior. You do these problematic things routinely because… A constant avoidance of responsibility is a keystone of any good addiction. Knowing this it makes dealing with problematic behavior problematic in and of itself for the addict. There are always things we like about our addictions. We don’t want to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. For addictions, like my own, which are at least partially positive without any residual legal, financial or health risks the line between what is an excuse and what is an honest and decent coping mechanism is unbelievably fine. I’m writing this in an effort to define that line for both myself and anybody else who struggles with, at the very least, this particular addiction.

Without further beating around the bush I will announce boldly that I am a video game addict. Here is a brief backstory on how that came to be.

I was raised in the country, dirt road, cornfields, tractors, the whole kit and kaboodle. I was a very imaginative child but imagination can only take you so far. When I was five we got our first Nintendo and like so many American’s that year we were at the very cusp of video game consoles becoming  a regular fixture in the American home. My game time was not strictly limited, or at least I don’t remember it being so. I can still feel the intense frustration of having played MegaMan 3 for a whole year with little to no success. I can hear the “bwoop bwoop” of the disappearing blocks which were my first true taste of the exquisite pain only video games can provide. A constant denial by failure, from which only a  select few can pick themselves off and continuously throw themselves at the issue until they learn *the mechanics*.

I was there for every progressive doubling of the power of consoles. 8 bits became 16 which begat 32 and then 64. With each progression in graphics, and more so in the addition of a 3rd dimension, game developers matured the content as well. There was always more blood, more guns and less of the quirky puzzles and skill hurdles of the 8 bit days of old. I was not only there for this, I was on the edge of my seat.

I socialized primarily based on a shared fascination with video games. My core group of friends gamed together through all the iterations of consoles. We still do occasionally.

When I was 19 I was deployed with the military to work at a prison facility in support of the Global War on Terror. Up until this point video games had been a source of joy for me. I wasn’t obsessed the the extent that I forgot to be interested in women or do moderately well at school. I maintained work from 15 onward and always managed to be somewhere in the upper middle academically.

When I got home the first thing I did was build a computer with my deployment money. The friends that I had gamed with before were starting to play a new type of game for us called an MMO (Massive Multi-Player Online) RPG (Role Playing Game). The game was and is still called World of Warcraft.

For the first time in my life I began to exhibit problematic gaming addiction. I became way too obsessed with the progression of my character. At the time I didn’t really care why, but now it is crystal clear to me that at that point in my life and to this day I no longer really cared for the real world and I much preferred imaginary ones, or at least digitally rendered ones.

At first we gamed together in the childhood room of my best friend. 3 of us were like some kind of vegetation living in there for most of a summer. We were all preparing for school in the Fall semester and we were having a good time. I think it made more sense then because we were actually interacting with one another. We wouldn’t be forced to interact with the other people in the world as long as we kept our core group together. That was a great summer and still the source of some of my best memories, even if they are of running the same dungeon again and again for a mace that I can’t even remember the name of now. When Fall came a few of us moved in together and kept playing the game, but now more disparately as our schedules kept us out often and the other guys still liked to do human things like drink and have fun.

I kept grinding for that mace. I grinded until I accumulated 6 months of actual game time at which point I had the kind of realization that comes to you like one moment of clarity in a house filled with deadly gas: I need to escape this. I needed to live my life. I had wild oats to sew and rugs to cut. I decided to go cold turkey. I packed up all my things and hastily moved to Chicago with a friend who also played WoW but needed to move on as well.

At first things were great. Chicago is an easy place to fill your schedule and be over saturated by young, thoughtful, beautiful people. The ecstasy of this compared to the small town life I was used to kept my interest for almost 3 whole years before that too began to grow old and cracks began to show. What some consider PTSD I consider a complete and utter disappointment with the progression of our species. I see the 1984 we were warned about around me at all times, and it is piercingly loud for me. Without the thrill of a new city to drown that out I realized that I had to fill this hole quick.

I left Chicago and hitch-hiked the nation and abroad. I poured my enthusiasm into activism and making paper. Whatever hole in me that left unpatched I filled with casual sex and drugs. Just like with Chicago these things too came to disappoint. New places stopped being sparkly and my grim reality showed up sooner and sooner each time until at some point 6 years down the road and 3 dozen cities later it became carry on baggage. People made me tired and sad. I was always disappointed in them and them in me. After an awkward series of attempts to roost I found enough stability to connive my way into the Tattooing industry as Art has always been my hottest burning fire.

At first it burned wildly. All I needed to do to be happy was to walk around and think about the fact that I was going to finally do art for a living, and possibly succeed at it quite nicely. I had to bounce around a while longer before I finally found the right place to be a tattoo artist.

All of this that it took for me to settle down and be something like a normal American was so much stress and pressure that it thoroughly occupied me and didn’t leave me the time to continuously wallow in my immense disappointment with life. I knew that settling down would mean that I’d have to sally up to this once and for all or put a gun in my mouth and shut my brain up for good. I also knew that it wasn’t going to be easy.

I found a good woman who loved me and whom I love very much and before long we were living together. She had some video games there and I consumed her entire collection in a matter of days, one game after the other in a gluttonous feast of the last decade in digital culture. I realized that after all that had passed video games still made me happy. Happier than anything. I was also a little more self-aware at this point and could identify that they made me happy because my mind obsessed on them entirely both when I was gaming and when I wasn’t.

I’m not one to deny myself that which feels good. I soon bought a computer and continued to devour everything I could get my hands on. It wasn’t long until I came back to MMO’s. I won’t bother to go into the litany of these games that I’ve spent hundreds of hours on each (hundreds of dollars as well). My girlfriend began to see what I really am, and as is so often the case it was not an easy unveiling.

As a video game addict I can promise you that if we’re talking I’m really thinking about how to further maximize my character’s build in whatever game I am playing at that point. If I am not playing a game I promise you I rather would be. I do this to the extent that it hurts my relationships with others and my performance at work. I leave everyone feeling neglected and disappointed.

As the tone of all of this would indicate, I am to an extent unrepentant. I am comfortable being an addict. Video games give my brain an outlet so that it does not devour itself or wallow in self pity. I have been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The risk of suicide in this demographic is insane. I’ve watched dozens of friends fight it and nobody come up with a solution. Lots have lost the fight. The best thing that works is finding the intersection between that which makes you happy and that which causes the least pain to those closest to you. One of the hallmark features of depression and PTSD alike is that nothing that felt good before still feels good now, and you think that it never will. For this reason I feel blessed that video games still trigger these chemicals as I had literally run out of alternatives.

I’ve spent a lot of time feeling like a piece of shit about my addiction, wallowing in the disappointment it caused those around me. I’ve struggled to quit only to be pushed back by the need. At the end of the day what all my dead friends have taught me is if it helps you get through the day, to survive if only in spite for a little longer, then it is a good thing. I have a million excuses to continue gaming, and a few very clear and present ones telling me to clean up my act or I will lose things I’m not prepared to lose.

I’ve tried to stop, but in the end I only force myself obsessively into another thing which is every bit as alienating as video games. Model making, reading, drawing. If there is a nerdy hobby I’ve tried it and they all work to some extent. But nothing has that staying power like video games.

I’ve tried to heal vets and I’ve tried to heal myself. Honestly, these wounds won’t heal. People don’t recover from having their faith in mankind betrayed. I’m not saying all vets have, but those who did aren’t coming back from it. We live in a different place now. One that’s all rain clouds and looming if not immediately present fascism. We are  ghosts, and you can’t heal a ghost, but you can help it learn to deal with being a ghost and Sam and Dean taught us that sometimes that can move a ghost on to wherever they go. You can make paper and get spiritual and burn sage and start a farm or drive every inch of this country, that sense of abandonment is always going to be there. And if you’re a vet and you’re reading this don’t let anybody take anything away from you if it feels good AND isn’t hurting anybody but you.

Just, you know, moderate… if at all possible.

I don’t know what the point of any of this is. I’m not trying to convince you not to judge me. I don’t care if you do. I’m a harsher judge when on the subject of myself than anybody could be. I guess I just needed to write it out, like I used to back when that still felt good.

welcome home

Giving In

 

It will come as no surprise that I have always had a very dystopian take on psychotropic medication. I think that pill manufacturers are in league with the “powers that be” and they are using our fears into doping ourselves into complicity with their evil plot to take over the world and all the people in it so that they can take for themselves all the resources for themselves.

But I don’t limit myself to blaming the pharmaceutical industry. I go so far as to blame those of us who would medicate away the guilt and shame that naturally accrues on us as we are ground to death in this hyper industrialized machine. No, we would take the easy road and wish all those feelings away. We would convince ourselves that we aren’t unhappy because there are drones in the skies and we can’t trust anybody but because our lives are pathetic in comparison to those who profit off of these mechanizations. We won’t admit that we aren’t happy because we polish the same widget every day through the best years of our lives. We’ll blame ourselves and our friends and our families. We will destroy the things that should be most important to us long before we ever lose our jobs.

Worse than the pills is the way that the pharmaceutical industry has taught us to think about our lives. Having a brain is an amazing responsibility. Every one of us is a bipedal emotional super-computer. Our brains are the fanciest things nature has ever produced. Each one is so unique in its design and programmed with user specific life data as reduced through the senses and retained. This process induces behavior. I mean, that is some complicated shit.

But you can walk into any psychologist office this whole great nation over and within two hours tops leave with a prescription for your very own bottle of drugs that’s meant to change your life. The psychiatrist will determine the drug of choice and the dosage in a surprisingly short session of rapid fire questions with the goal of categorizing you into a few very broad categories.

Depression is by far the easiest category to fall into. Happiness is hard to come by these days and we all get the blues. I would submit that this world is fucked up is now an established scientific, mathematical fact. If you need a reason to be depressed you need but flip on your television and watch for one hour as the world unfolds before you.

You are trapped in a world that only wants to sell you things. You are no more to America than the amount of dollars in your bank account and all this nation seems to want are your ever diminishing dollars. To make it you have to polish an awful lot of widgets and nobody likes that. What’s not to be depressed about?

Luckily enough for me I’m a veteran so all my pills are free. In fact they were the easiest resource to get from the Veterans Affairs medical center in Detroit. I got pills from them faster than I got my food stamps. That is service. I was very fortunate to move through the system in the fast lane because my record has suicide written all over it. There were a lot of appointments with social workers and one extremely awkward trip to the Emergency Room. To digress, veterans, never go to the emergency room for psychiatric care. You will leave much worse than you came in.

After a week of these I met with a resident psychiatrist. We talked for about two hours about why I feel so dead inside. All this running has really soured me and it’s time for me to sit down and actually deal with myself for once. I need some distance from my constant self-destruction if I’m going to get any real work done. I just need to dial down the voices, my voice, enough so that I can hear the world again.

She conferred with her boss doctor and he came in to ask me some of the same questions again. Then they sent me down to the pharmacy.

If you’re ever feeling like you need a huge dose of reality take a trip to your closest VA pharmacy. Sit down and watch. This is the pharmaceutical industry at its best. This is art. This is science fiction.

So I’m giving in to the big evil machine because I finally realize that life would just be easier with more serotonin. It might turn me into a zombie. I don’t really care. My brain has produced anything valuable for at least two years and I’m kind of over it so I’d like to put it on the bench for a while and try to fix my body. Maybe learn to eat food like a person again. That’s something the mind tyrant has kept from me for almost ten years.

I’m going to use this blog to track the effects this submission is going to have on my mental activity. I’m sorry to anybody who reads these useless rambles. They’re just the best way for me to capture my mindset at any given time and save that for future reflections. Hey, and maybe get a little extra attention in the process.

Day one has been pretty nauseous. But also noticeably more quiet.

You probably are a racist…

 

It’s become pretty fashionable to not be a lot of things these days. For instance, it would be considered bad form in modern social climes announce that you were a racist. It might be because the word is so packed full of psychotic hate from generation upon generation of racist bloodlust that we can no longer even hear the term without writhing in disgust. Or it might be that all the cool kids will think you’re an ignorant fuck if you ever said those words out loud. We’re talking about a game ending injury in any hip scene.

That being said, myself being of the school of radical honesty I can’t say “I am not a racist” and not feel like a liar. Between now and the end of this rant I hope to explain why you are too.

Race has become too easy a subject for the American Liberal. Once the rhetoric is learned almost any yokel with a bigoted mind could improv their way into a radical group of friends. Here in the states we have it easy. The racial dialogue here is very black and white. We can put the pin of Not-a-Racist on as long as we can play well with the other races and cultures brought together in our melting pot. It doesn’t matter if we laugh at derogatory jokes when we’re in exclusive groups as long as you treat people of other races the way you think they ought to be treated.

Luckily for us there are several class boundaries which keep the different colors in the pot from truly blending so many of our fanciful notions of our proud fairness are actually ever tested. At a certain point of wealth one can almost entirely opt out of ever making the acquaintance of any person of any race they don’t feel fully comfortable around. These same lucky Liberals will raise liberally minded children who also don’t think they are racist though the multifaceted lives of the multifaceted races are kept from them.

And certainly this country has made great strides in saying that it is not racist.

Yet there are a few things which seem to me almost inherently racist about the very American Way and it really makes me feel like we’re all just a bunch of fucking liars and hypocrites.

Can you, the American reader, remember back to those first days of our great War on Terror? Do you remember how you felt about the sacrifice of those first 3000 some odd American lives, so mostly white? Now, if you will, contrast that for me with all of the feelings you have ever had about the lives of the innocent Iraqi of Afghani bystander wrongly killed or imprisoned by our haywire war. Do you notice any differences?

For me I feel a much greater sense of removal from the lives lost from such a distant culture. I know I should feel for those lives but where that emotion should happen is this vacancy. That is why I am a racist. I don’t have the proper emotions to contextualize both sides of this very race-centric conflict so naturally my emotions differ to the easy, known American Way.

It really pisses me off when people write this off because it is a war (it is not technically a war still btw’s). Civilians are not soldiers. Their deaths are not the same. They had signed no agreements.

You would think of all countries we would still be walking on eggshells after being the first country to use a nuclear strike against civilian targets or at least have learned to have the proper amount of candor about taking innocent lives which never signed up for any war. No, not us. Fuck you. We’ll kill everybody for ten years just to prove a point and we’ll do it in opposition to the desire’s of our own sweet Democratic people and while we do it we’re going to say its not racist the whole time and get away with it because that is the American Fucking Way.

I mean, think how absolutely insane it would sound for a former Nazi soldier to say after the last Great War that they were not a racist and yet now there are whole organizations for the occupational forces to retire into which condone this theory that we were not being racists while we did what we were doing, or that we can wash away those sins now by simply learning the right rhetoric. That’s bullshit. This war is a stain on all of our souls and I’m sick of watching people grasp for quick fixes and telling those of us who know that none of this is worth saving that we’re the ones who are crazy.

If you didn’t jump out of your chair on 9/11 and beg your precious God to spare the innocent children of these countries which were about to pay the price for the transgressions of another rich and powerful political and religious leader than you are a fucking racist and I hope you accept that every day of your life. I hope you quit this very second trying to prove to yourself that you’ve got this figured out because you’ve finally learned that black people and white people aren’t that fucking different. Congratulations. You’ve almost finished processing the emotional toll of the Civil Fucking War and next on your plate is how your very country which is dyed into the very fiber of your soul has used you and all of your family to plunder and kill the people’s of small countries where brown people live to prove to other rich white leaders of the other First World powers that we really good and truly don’t give a fuck.

If we were all sane we would be disgusted with ourselves. We would have killed ourselves to stop the machine which set forward in our name. But we weren’t. We were cowards. And now we survive on psychotropic medication and delusions of the past.

By all means, keep patting yourself on the back because you don’t hate transgendered people. That is very progressive of you. Not hating one of the smallest minority demographics on the long long list. Meanwhile this history books are being written and they will tell of concentration camps under American Flags and pictures of burned civilian corpses piled high and you can try to tell your grandchildren how you were not a racist.

Accept the truth. You don’t want to have the right feelings about these things. You want pleasant happy days with good friends and family and fun times. You want good memories. And who could blame you. It is so easy to deceive yourself with thoughts that you are a good person and you are doing good things here. Maybe, if you work really hard, you can leave some mark on history that stands out more than this disgusting war but chances are it will all get drown out by the waves of sorrow that will wash over generation to generation to come.

Detention

I hear the guards coming as they drive their “Gator” across the rocky ground. I see the dust billowing up behind them through the razor wire horizon. I hear them park and when they stop their vehicle I hear them talking. The incessant recitations of the many mantras of their Capitalist society said all with the same absent drawl. There is a certain lack of something here, but it seems almost too plain to say that it is “freedom”. Of course there is no freedom here.

It is a prison camp after all.

The gates to Camp 2 open with blatant and foreboding shrillness. Two new sets of clacking boots join the endless marching of the roving sally gate guard. His name is Johnson. He is replaced every 12 hours by Whitmore. Every twelve hours for last five years these two have “relieved” one another. Neither of them could possibly know the time I have invested into imagining their lives, or the lengths that I have gone to to piece together the story of the world outside of this prison from their few vacant words.

The story seems grimmer than when I left it.

The subtle impression of thousands of voices spoken below a whisper all hush in a great vacuum as the gates of Mike Block opened and in walked two of the meanest people ever put on this planet.

You could feel their anger washing down the corridor. Worse yet, I could feel the righteous indignation of my comrades get washed right away as each and every one of them crawled back into the tiniest, blackest holes in their minds where they nursed memories of when these two came for them.

Their boot heels rang obnoxiously off every crooked angle in this God forsaken cell block. I heard each and every step until the footsteps stopped outside of my rusted and humble cell.

I was stretched out on the metal slab that serves me as a bed and a desk and a table and a place from which I deliver sermons.

“Hey mother fucker.” The taller of the two said to me. “Wake the fuck up, bitch. It’s time for a talk.”

“I heard this fuckin faggot started this whole mess”.

“That’s between him and his interrogator. HEY! I said wake the fuck UP!”

I slowly parted my eyes to stare coldly into his. I will admit now that this act caused me no small amount of pain.

These Alpha Soldiers are real crafty types. Made special to deal with my type Terrorist. Their whole mind is wired to disrupt our whole everything. But I’m no push over in my type of Terrorism.

The beanhole clanged open viciously and I put my thin wrists through it. I could see their eyes taking in the tattoos that peeked out from the long sleeves of my orange jumpsuit. Their faces twisted in a compulsive act of revulsion at the sight of art. That alone gave me a good deal of fear about the current nature of the outer world.

The shackles were clenched tightly down on my pronounced wrist bone. I could feel them cutting in that special impartiality that they alone possessed. Once those were on they handed me the end of the connected chain.

“You know the fucking routine. But please. Make us come in and help you. I fucking dare you.” The tall ones hands were a vice on the chain until he finished with his hateful taunting, and only then did he release the chain.

I spun myself around it and obediantly, but with that little protest we can afford to offer, handed the end of the chain back to them.

The shorter one dropped the feet shackles in and then bent down to undo the bottom beanhole and insert his hands into my pestilence. Some detainees have used this as an opportunity to crush the wrist bones of their guards, but I don’t get their kinds of guards. I couldn’t have broken these wrists back when I was healthy and free. And these men were permitted to kill me. It is a wonder that they haven’t.

The rusting orifice that is the lock to my cell twisted open for the first time in months. Their huge hands grabbed me like dead prey in the mouth of jackles, pulling my frail bones out of my old home and out onto the cause way.

We began our slow walk to my interrogation booth.

Their satellite radio hissed on and the voice of a child asked impatiently: “Gulf One, this is Escort Control. Do you have the package?”

I could feel the irritation in the taller ones voice when he keyed his mike and replied “Roger that.” And as he released his finger he said “you little fucking faggot.” He looked to his friend and spit out “that fucking piece of shit sits in that comfy office all fucking day while we’re out here touching these fucking disgusting motherfuckers. One of these days I’m going to catch his ass out of that office and I’m going to rape his fucking face!”

“Yeah brah. Fuck that dick sucker. I’d help you.”

“Someday”.

Apparently I had been forgot about between them. I had to pull my feet up to hop along between them or else they would have dragged me across the stones. It’s a little less than a mile to Interrogation Facility and folks get awful bloodied up being dragged along like that. The common courtesies were the first to go.

It took us all of twenty minutes to cross the barren waste that lies between the various camps. Those were valuable minutes to me. Much had changed about the security here since he had last been out. There were more roving guards between the fences. There were new shacks that had been planted silently by the operator crane. Things change. Everything was exactly as we expected it. What a relief.

The flood lights started to kick on as the sun began to bury itself behind the razor wire and fences that blocked from our vision eternally the cliff that hangs over the sea. They cast the ghastly blue flourescent light, turning all flesh into a sickly white. How I hate those God damned lightbulbs. They spread the shadow of the approaching “Fortress” in all directions at once. The night sky was red over head. These are always somber hours. Nothing could be heard save for my shackles now, and every soul on this camp could hear them. And every soul in this camp knew who was bound by them. Not a one of those souls harbors any fear that I will tell. I know these souls best of all, and they know me.

The door to the horrible ebony obelisk opened swiftly and silently at the touch of a button pressed deep inside this building by a young man trained from birth to operate computers, a young man who watched everything in this camp on a fragmented wall of screens. We have a great fondness for this young man.

Inside our footsteps and my chains were amplified off of every shiny metal surface. All surfaces were shiny and metal. We jangled and clanged and clacked together a nightmare concerto among the labyrinth of corridors that we deftly weaved through. It was difficult to not let my inertia betray that my mind knew this particular maze quite well in such capable hands. I was confident that I would not slip. There are Angels on my side, Fallen though they may be.

Soon we were at the door of what was to be the epicenter of the invasion to come, yet nowhere on that island could any man or device detect a single iota of eagerness. My own heart beat a calculated war drum of fear all for the story that the people who monitored the detectors that have watched me since I was in my cell, or the story that I am trying to tell them.

The real story, this story, is happening in a safe place.  This story is actually about that place, but I am getting ahead of myself and that is later on.

The door slid opened and I was pushed into a blinding white room. Between me and a metal desk was only an industrial eye bolt on the floor. Behind the desk was an Agent from the Drug Interests. He wore black goggles which fitted into healthy, white sockets. His nose and mouth were covered by a viral mask, on the insides of which were a microphone and a transmitter which communicated with the chip inside of his brain which allowed his superior officers to communicate with him. He was lanky but his crisp white uniform fit him quite handsomely. There was almost nothing that could be told of this person. On the outside, that is.

My Escorts fastened me to the floor with grace despite their clear agitation in the presence of a human that was barely in the same species as them any more. I could tell that for them this man was as much an outsider as I was. I let only a small amount of smugness show on my otherwise fearful face. I believe it may have aggravated my host. He began our interrogation before the professional men were even done.

“Detainee number zero-two-five-eight from Mike Block, Cell two-two. Interrogation date: zero-five-dash-one-eight-dash-two-three. First Interrogation. Subject was detained along with twelve other men in the VA hospital in Battle Creek Michigan. They were all part of a Terrorist Cell based out of Building 31. Details of the nature of their collective acts of Terrorism are at this time unknown, but the wave of disruption that they set off is currently still growing despite their detention. An effort is now being made to discover the nature of their acts of Terrorism. Chief Technician First Class Reissinger. ISN 0258…”

“Yeah Chief. What can I do for you?” I responded with a manufactured air of sloppy charm.

“Do not interrupt me when I am speaking to you. This is to be an intensive interview and at the end of it we expect to know everything or you will be medically sedated for the rest of your life. Do you understand that?”

“That doesn’t sound half bad there, Chief. Sir. No. I mean. I will tell you everything. I promise. I swear.” Panicked.

“Why were you on Inpatient Care in Building 31 in the first place?”

“I’d been having some really fucked up dreams and it got to the point where I just couldn’t walk along with the way things were headed out there. I needed off the ride.”

“Medical records show that you had been having violent thoughts against authority figures. Those same authority figures that are listed were later found dead.”

“That did happen.”

“But you couldn’t have killed them. Their deaths were determined to be suicides.”

“That also happened.”

“But you swore that you were responsible for their deaths anyway. The Doctors at the hospital institutionalized you on a routine visit for Paranoid Schizophrenia. Why did you think you murdered those people?”

“I made them do it.”

“You could never have met any of them.”

“It turns out I didn’t have to. Look, I’ve had this talk a lot of times back on the Ward. Could you please get to the why-the-fucks, and the what the fuck you wants?”

“It is clear from your speech that your mind surely is not that of a Free Citizen. You speak like a soldier still despite the reprogramming.”

“Yeah. Once and always, I guess. Couldn’t keep a job out there when every other word is full of hate and an eagerness to smite the wicked. That reprogramming didn’t work so good on me, I guess.”

“It doesn’t work on the insane.”

“I guess not.”

“Your military files show that you were classified as Psychological Operations and that you were deployed to this same Detention Facility during the initial phase of The War.”

“Ironic, no?”

“There is no irony in the War on Terrorism.”

“No. Of course not. You were saying?”

“I was stating. Your tour was that of an office technician, yet you claim to have been overwhelmed by the burdens of a soldier’s life.”

“My, uh, job… it had its own kind of Hell to it.”

“I’m pretty sure most would call you a coward.”

“They did. But I don’t worry myself about most any more.”

“My job is to find out how you got from coward to Terrorist in such a short period of time.”

“It didn’t feel so short at the time. I’ll tell you, but you’ve got to ask the right questions. I don’t put out for free.” I finally allowed a certain wickedness to pass through my eyes. There was a momentary delay and then I saw him invert as he gathered the news of my sudden change in character through his receiver.

“Why did all those people in the Hospital die?”

“They didn’t all die. Several of them survived the whole ordeal. Only to end up here, unfortunately. But they chose their side of the line.”

“What line?”

“The line between us and you. In your language the line between the Terrorist and the Freedom Fighters. We have different language.”

“Stop being vague. We can sit here until you die. You will not eat or sleep until this is done.”

“Don’t you worry. I’m aware of all of that. Even if I do die.”

“The ones that killed themselves… so did their families. Some of those family members committed acts of violence against Free Citizens. And from them it spread again.”

“And again. And again. Yes. We did that. I won’t deny it. Are you just looking for the right words to charge us with? Or are you scared that…”

“That is enough. What is it?”

“IT is nothing.”

“Evasiveness will not save you.”

“I’m not trying to be evasive. I am just growing sick of doing your job for you. I told you I wasn’t just going to hand this to you if you’re going to continue to be incompetent.”

He paused again to receive orders.

“What happened in the Ward?”

“Much better. We evolved there. The drugs helped. I personally couldn’t have done it, I couldn’t have found the space without Thorazine.”

“What do you mean by evolved?”

“I mean we were a crazy generation. We’d grown up with the keys to the future in our hands. We were the first children of a new and violent Technocracy. We were drugged. We were turned into soldiers. We were the first veterans of a war nobody can remember the beginning of now. We were trained so intensively that we couldn’t make the transition with the rest of society over to the way that you have made things to be. We just didn’t fucking fit anywhere out there. We were all bound to end up in Building 31’s all across the country. But then we found it.”

“Found what?”

“It is pretty hard to explain. We call it “The Network”. We found it in our dreams. Somehow, in that building, the 13 of us… we found each other in our dreams. We found a new kind of space. Oh, it was fantastic, those first few adventures into the whole thing. We wasted a lot of time on acts of the most disreputable debauchery. We would snicker through the days each reliving the madness of the night before. The more we did it the easier it got. The clearer the picture came. At first everything was like how you would think a dream should be. It was hard to hold it together. But there is something about the mind of a veteran that makes it easier to hold all these pieces together. It is a little like putting one giant broken mirror back together. But there is a lot of anger in us too. We didn’t know then that when we go there, the anger can come here. We learned that when the suicides started.”

“You mean to put on official record that you and your friends began to collaboratively navigate a “Network” between your minds. And that this is how all of the violence began.”

“Well, no. The story is a lot more complicated than that. We weren’t visiting each others minds. Those places are extremely dangerous. The monsters that reside within the walls of tormented minds are for those minds only. It wasn’t about what we found. It was about where we found. Well, also about what we did when we went there. There is a place that is outside of here. Outside of you. We probably weren’t supposed to go there… but we probably weren’t supposed to hurt other people. And you probably shouldn’t have tried to sedate our monsters away. They will always be with us, you know. They are our burden to carry through all of our lives. They are the guilt of doing things… awful things… things we did under your control. They are the price that we pay for going to War.”

“You are rambling like…”

“A mad man?”

“Do you think you are clever?”

“I don’t know. I think an awful lot of things about myself. I think more than anything I am naive. I think that you should judge me for my hubris and self indulgence. Not my lack of cleverness. And anyway, it is proven that I was not clever enough avoid being caught.”

“But not stopped.”

“Of course not. You cannot stop this. And anyways, you have hunted and caught the wrong thing. You should have been looking for monsters. They have been looking for you.”

“I might have hunted for monsters if I were also a paranoid psychotic and a narcissist. But I am a practical man. The monsters that I hunt are delusional religious zealots who talk thousands into acts against the State. The monsters that I hunt threaten the safety of every human soul under my watch. You and your Satanic cult are my monsters.”

“I wouldn’t call us Satanists. I personally prefer Followers of Lucifer. Others prefer Anarchists. We are all fond of the term Terrorist. Whatever you want to call us, we were just the vessels for something much worst than ourselves. We gave birth to your societies children and your children were monsters and you people and your drugs opened a door inside of us that must have remained locked for all of our evolution so that these monsters don’t get out… but here we are. There is one monster in particular I am very eager for you to meet.”

As I stood up my shackles fell from me like dust. His metal desk fell to pieces like a house of cards. The edges started to disappear from everything. Finally his facial muscles twitched as the walls themselves dissolved into conversation and we were standing, just the two of us, in shear darkness. I could feel the deep, existential confusion he felt when he looked at me and could not tell if I had turned into a man made of broken mirror or folded paper. This was my favorite way to appear. I could almost feed on the confusion that coursed through his every fiber but he had not lied when he said that he was a rational man.

“This is the place I was telling you about. Do you believe me now?”

Without moving a muscled in his face he droned: “If I had not believed you from the beginning do you think I would have tracked you down and detained you?”

“It is hard to tell anymore.”

“I know that I need to kill your monsters. But I need to find them first.”

“You won’t find them. You aren’t their type. They prey on authority figures and you’re just a toy. But they did move through here. I can smell them. No, the only monster you’ve got to worry about is your own.”

Right then we could both feel it as everything seemed to break.

“That was the wall they have built around you. That is the wall that keeps all the bad, irrational things away. All your questions and your fears that maybe you aren’t doing the right thing. The weight of every life that you have ruined. As a special favor my friends and I have gone through the trouble of pulling all those things together to craft for you your very own super monster.”

The sense of order started to blur, strange fragments of memories started to play in various dimensions and a chaotic chatter began whispering in from the periphery.

“Now I’m going to leave you here to sort this out on your own. If you survive that is fantastic. If not I will see you bright an early tomorrow morning to welcome you to your new home for the next few years.”

“How do you do this?”

“Do you really think I know?”

With that I fell apart at his feet and left him to meet himself, making sure to close the door very tightly on my way out.

 

The rise of the Geek

Sometime around when I was five my family got a Nintendo for Christmas and I began my lengthy love affair with electronic distractions. Little did I know at that time that I was on the cusp of a global phenomenon. A whole society of people vigorously training themselves to deftly maneuver through the tight hallways of this new circuitry with plastic controllers in their hands. At five and amidst the crushing isolation of rural Mid-Michigan I didn’t think anything of it.

As Megaman I spent hours storming the mind-numbingly perilous labyrinth of Doctor Wiley’s elaborate mechanical death traps wantonly killing every moving robotic delight I crossed without blinking an eye only to get to the end and hopefully kill one of my own kind for doing his own thing down in some cave I invaded and kill him, too. What else is one to do with a gun for an arm and only one direction to move?

I formed a very unusual relationship with the space that was provided to me in games which evolved into a survival mechanism and a source of great comfort.

When I grew older I made friends based largely on playing video games with them. We would inevitably meet at Garrett’s house to play video games there or go down to the college library to play on the computers in the basement using Jake’s mom’s access codes because they had the fastest connection in town. At the time Counter Strike was our game of choice and every fraction of a second counts when it comes to the fast paced world of  shooting people in the heads in a constant international battle of who had the fastest coordination (and internet speed) on the www.

This introduced me to the world of social gaming in which one either cooperates or competes and was a hallmark of my integration into a technological society, albeit a kind of beta version for what exists now.

It wasn’t until I was deployed that I was forced out of my comfortable marriage to gaming for an extended period of time. But in that time something funny occurred which caused me to think very critically of this technological indocrination that had occurred to me.

As many people know I was deployed to a detention facility during the war and this detentions facility ran on a computerized system. Every bit of information that was necessary for daily operations was stored in one big program and thanks to spending a majority of their lives out in the most abysmal written off plots of land running field exorcizes most of the senior enlisted personnel and officers didn’t know how to use these new fangled glowing boxes. So they looked to the units out in the camp and they made a call for all the nerds, and low and behold I was transferred unto the Detention Operating Center to be a part of their new batch of computer monkeys. This unrestrained access to the neurology of this insane place gave us, as underenlisted and hardly professional soldiers, a kind of authority over many of our superiors because although we answered to them, they were still forced to answer to the computer in the end, and we were the heralds that brought forth the computers message.

All of this turned in me a great deal of distress and I found myself irresistably turned towards Dystopian science fiction and its eery predictions that all feverishly warn of the worst than apocolyptic futures could lie hidden behind the false promise of a technologically perfect utopia.

Being at least partially academic in spirit I found myself thirsting after some kind of hardened academic response to the rise of geek culture and its strange position in the military industrial institution but found the subject lacking any serious attempts to address the issue. In fact, the most serious source of video game culture is the online community itself, which is renowned for not being a credible source of academic information for very good reason. On the broader subject of the advancement of a technologically based society there was one voice which posed the important questions that were starting to arise in me. Herbert Marcuse captured in his “One Dimensional Man” the framework of the paranoia that was building in me. I would like to try to follow in his footsteps and begin a series of essays which may begin a more thorough critique of the modern era of technological advancement in our society with the soul goal being to try to contribute to a lacking philosophical deconstruction of how technology has come to alter our lives, changing us each fundamentally as human beings.

The Grind

I think I need this me now. As much as I ever have. The sacred oneness of creation and self-reflection. I hope to make words work again in my favor. So: be there now please, magic.

I’m doing my best to get right with the way things actually work. I found a job outside of Detroit of all places. There are a few blooming suburbs here where money grows fatly from happy vines, even in the bleakest of winters. I came here with a strange attitude for me. The lesson that I came here with is that if I could just get my hands on a few thousand dollars I could finally buy for myself that crucial place where I can afford to be myself and to make art without having to answer to anybody. To do so I have to rely on the skills that I have.

One of the skills that I have is that I am a rabid ninja busboy. Give me the most cramped and small floor and I will dance around it with my arms full of plates or coffee and water. I work well in chaotic environments. I have a strong sense of order which applies itself well on these floors. I think that part of me really flourished during my deployment when my brain was most taxed with how to make it all work… and the sense that people depended on me coordinating these things efficiently. The urgency and the calm that must be maintained. This dance quiets my mind. It also makes a lot of money.  Well, a lot of money for a guy who has grossed about five thousand dollars over the last five years. And how nimble I was with those five thousand dollars. All the stories those dollars bought me.

Learning to live cheaply is the best thing you can do for yourself.

So I came into this town with a few hundred dollars and by the second day I had a job at the hippest little lunch spot in town where the floor is almost always turning and burning. I should emphasize that we are very little. There are nine tables and eight seats at the bar and they are often all full. There is usually a line at the door during our lunch hours. People wait because the food is awesome. My job is to do the people at the door the justice of cleaning the tables as quickly as I can while maintaining all the shake and rollup duties as well and a million other things that come along. I work from six-eight hours a day five days a week.

It is incredibly demanding work both physically and mentally, but if you can figure out a rhythm between the physical and the mental there is an awful lot of money to be made. So I work my hardest and I like to think that I do a good job. I’m a little short if not sometimes downright unsociable.

I learned how to bus amongst the hispanic community in the hip joints of Chicago where we were paid to be unseen. We weren’t allowed to talk to the customers because some of us couldn’t speak English and we rarely talked to each other because talking was a form of wasting time in the sleak machine that is Wicker Park. We are calm faced and graceful and dressed in all black. The best of us are never seen and you never even said thank you. We didn’t mind.

But here I’m not a Mexican. I’m your status quot hipster with a background in art. And I’m saving every dollar to buy my freedom back so that I can return to my one true love without having to report for someone else s duties.  It might take years. I’m ok with that. I have to be. I have all the faith in the world that I can manage it.

I don’t know quite what this freedom is going to look like yet or where it will be. All I know is that it will have me with my machines in my hand and skin to work on. If I can make 50 dollars a day I can live well. I’m proving that to myself every day right now.

I’m sure there is a large market for people who would want a days worth of tattooing done for 50 dollars. I’m worth that.

I can make good lines and I can shade and I can change you forever and better yet I can guarantee you’re not going to regret it. I’m an artist. I take that very seriously. I have it tattooed on my neck. A paper bird and three paper flowers above “Lifer” so that I never forget who I am and why I came here to this place of creation to begin with.

I paid good money to have it finished. It looks beautiful now… like I knew it could be. Obviously I’m not saving every dollar. But the majority of them. Getting tattoos is part of my business now, too. It could potentially land me an apprenticeship at the local shop. Passing through their doors would guarantee a quality of work that could get me in in any city. Who knows. Maybe this could be a reality by the time I’m 30. Probably later.

But not having art in my life this last month as I’ve been adapting to the new job has been kind of depressing. I find that when we are just workers in some machine our lives are so simple they hardly merit any advanced thought. You are, after all, just performing a set of duties that you agreed to for some amount of pay. Some days I worry that I will inevitably be eaten by the machine, to become just some pacing drone like I’ve been running from for so long. To happily go back to that for a more comfortable, sedentary life. And I am happy now aside from being brutally ill for the whole last week. Every day there is the question:

What happens next?

Pure Michigan

It’s become pretty obvious that my magical fantasy had begun to wither and that my life was in need of some drastic changes. It became time for me to return home. Maybe to tell this story I’m always failing to tell. Probably to get a job, though.

I did. Two days after moving to a suburb of Detroit. Not quite home, per se. My home is deeper in the brambles of this offensively bleak state and like many people from Michigan, the word home is a pastiche of various trailers and the lots that they occupied. One plot will always stand out in my mind. I digress.

The first good job I ever hard, back before the war, was Tim’s Pizza in Olivet. I learned that small businesses were rewarding work places for a number of reasons, but most importantly because I could see how my work effected the community around me. It feels good to give somebody a pizza. And extra good to receive a cash reward for doing so.

What I’m trying to say is that I did enjoy working once. Really.

But like I said, that was before the war and Combat Paper. I wanted so much more then. Greatness. A way out.

I could give a damn about greatness now. All I want is a warm bed and some money for hording.

So like I said I got a job. I now work at a hip diner bussing tables. The owners of the restaurant work almost every day. The food is amazing. The staff is incredible. I am blessed to work with a handful of motherly waitresses who are all hardened professionals, seared in to the trade by years of turning and burning. They are molding a perfect bussing machine of me and I have given myself willingly.

I like to bus tables. I approach them as a ninja would. Graceful and swift, professionally. I linger in the small beauties. The lights flowing through the flowing water. The perfect pastiche of colors. The myriad stories happening around me every day. Always vanishing, leaving behind clean tables and full coffees. Maintaining a constantly changing list of priorities, always impossible but never letting on to a feeling of defeat. It is just me and nobody will help me. The day whirls by and I watch all the money change hands and while I’m there I almost forget what it is that I came for and then the day is done and the ninja gets tipped out.

It makes me ashamed to think that now I am ecstatic to be in life where I was four years ago, bussing tables. But there are all the things that happened in those four years.

Nobody knows that side of the story here. I like that. Here I can be whoever I want to be and for once I’m not interested in making a name for myself. I feel like I have a chance now to live a humble life dedicated to art the way that I really want to and with the means to afford that and a schedule to build a routine around.

There is a big part of me that worries and waits for the dropping shoe. What if I fuck this job up, too? I’ve had other jobs but I either quit or was fired in a pretty short period of time. Granted I saw working as an impediment to the life I would rather be living and now I don’t prefer that lifestyle. This has greatly changed my work ethic.

So maybe this is the end of the travellers blog. Lets all hope so.

The Flaws in the Convention as I See Them

I just got back from attending the Iraq Veterans Against the War National Convention and there are some things that I need to work through and to share or else I am going to lose my mind.

It will be easiest to address what we did not do during this convention, but I will also take some time to address what we did do.

Allow me first, though, to paint a picture of where our organization now stands: We have no chapters. We are losing our Executive Director and the person responsible for organizing our current contested model of activism, the Field Team Organizer, or leader. We are at the apparent end of a flawed campaign with nothing to move on to. Despite all of this we still failed to complete the following.

Firstly, we, for the first convention in our history, did not vote for new members in our Board of Directors. Our new candidates were not given time to elaborate on the positions that they will represent in the coming years of change. This error has left us with no idea of who will represent the direction of our decision making process in a time where we face nothing but hard decisions.

Secondly, we never made it around to discussing our budget. We have gotten used to assuming that we don’t have any money in our coffers for years but still transparency about how the little money we do have is used has always been a priority, and should be a priority, for a realistic understanding of what we are capable of doing. This year, however, we do have a good deal of money to discuss. More than 600,000 dollars. It is all gone now, of course. But all we were given was a sheet of paper to explain where all that money has gone. Between Operation Recovery, the Field Organizing Team, paid position and facilitator fees we spent nearly 450,000 dollars. Almost a half of a million dollars. What has that money gotten us? How could it have been spent to better serve our goals? Who is in charge of allocating this money? All of these are questions that remain unanswered at this point in time.

Lastly, for the first time in my memory, we abandoned a set understanding of process in order to expediate the agenda of the Field Organizing Team. It was agreed that if 3 people were to block any item or agreement then that issue would not pass. On the issue of our values statement three individuals, myself included, did block passing the document we were presented. Two of us blocked because we did not agree with the model of organizing that was nested inside of the language. Another disagreed for a number of reasons including how the document was created and changed outside of the parameters of process that were set to create it in the first place. The conversation we were promised to have to resolve this issue never occurred. Instead, we were formally told that we did not have the power to block, but that our concerns would be taken seriously by the powers that be.

All of this furthered to illustrate a leadership that doesn’t give a fuck about how we want our organization to be. They are more interested in keeping us silent as they make decisions and collect the paychecks that come out of the 600,000 dollars that I mentioned previously. It showed us that we are controlled.

In the past we would gather at these conventions and tell “our leadership” the concerns that presented themselves to our different local areas, to ourselves as individuals. To our community. I think these are critical roles for our convention to fulfill. None of this happened this time around. This convention was merely a means of dispersing this years party line and ensuring that the current propaganda and agenda are drilled into the heads of the membership. In short, instead of listening to us, they were there to tell us how its going to be. This is a critical flaw in an organizing model. And it is clear that any capacity to alter this or to critique it has been  taken from us.

There was also a nearly unanimous outpouring of agreement that our name needs to change, sponsored by a very touching and well constructed plea from our Afghanistan veterans. Instead of honoring their request and outright voting to put this conversation into action, the motion was shit-canned with a “straw poll”. We voted merely to appease the AVAW, but we all know that by next year nothing will have changed. We will be having another straw poll or something equally useless about the same subject. I have suspicions that the powers that be prefer it that way, much like the government prefers that people remain racist so that we will wear ourselves out fighting each other.

In fact, we didn’t actually vote on anything. No hard decisions were made. The only thing that was still clear at the end of this was that for another year we are the property of the FOT and the even shadier movers and shakers that decide how the FOT will behave, but that was not something that was voted on. It was something that was implied.

In conclusion I think it is time that we out organize these mother fuckers. They think that we gave up and that without them we are useless. I think it is time that we pull our chapters back together. Focus on the small battles and make the big wins that we’ve become acquainted with in our tighter networks. Don’t let them come to your town and tell you how it is going to be. Put your foot down. You ARE the IVAW and wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing, only you have the power to decide how we should move on.

Your foot soldier in defiance forever,

Otis

with a grain of salt

You tell yourself that it is just one more lonely night. The end of one more day and all you’ve had to eat was your self and this same tired prayer. Please, Art, save me now. From the darkness and from myself to you. Tell me one more time why it is all worth it. You. Don’t get confused or you will fail. But for how much longer can you stave off confusion when you find yourself driving madly at it every day and the road is and always was so hard and all you can tell yourself is that you did this to yourself. You wanted this. All because you thought that if you prayed hard enough to this idea you once had that came to you in the light of a beautiful universe you would be rewarded for your dedication and you promised that you’d do everything you could to be an artist some day. Well now you have what you’d always asked for. Your voice. But this voice doesn’t make it any better. It is an outlet through which you can report only that it will continue to be a hard road because it doesn’t come easy.

Your hands shake in the coming cold of winter and you realized that you bet everything on them and this action you’ve trained them to do. This life of art. But you can’t lose your faith. Not in the future. To stumble for one day could seal ones fate. So every day you wake up and you devote these hands and hope that it keeps happening. You will do this every day. Please keep working.

But its not enough to pray. One must challenge weakness like a warrior. With absolute sternness.  You have trained every day. You’ve learned to set up shop, do the work you’ve set for yourself, pack it all up and move on again. You thrive on this. There is no turning back. But all these lonely nights do come to gnaw on you. And the worst part is you know that you must go through them alone. There is no sharing this place. Or at least you think so.

What if everything you thought proved false? What then? That would be convenient. It’s probably much more likely that some of the thoughts are wrong, some are true, and with most it doesn’t matter.

You’re a drifter set to the task of leaving beautiful things behind you and that is what you do best. That is the best way there is for you to share you. Because you are an artist and artists have to open up a whole lot of dark to open up one ray of light, one fragile little dream of beauty, and then they have to bring that little thing back into the real world. And oh the problems with the real world.

This real world which would have the artist turning cogs forever, thinking themselves to death in the endless tedium of some job. To make instead of music commodities. This real world that thinks only of how to sell it.

So you have to sell it. Or give it up. But giving it up just isn’t an option. Not now. You tattooed that on your neck. No going back now. Not nohow.

Always been a sucker for rash decisions.

So you’re leaving town again. And again and again and again. Always building towards nothing, constantly deconstructing everything just to have more pieces to play with. Living on the run from the one thing you know you have no power over, that thing you fear the most. The thing that you know the best. You.

The places you’ve been and lives that you’ve influenced for better or for worst. All the people that say they care about you and for all you know they really do. Waiting. For you to figure out what it is that you do. Maybe you’ve figured out what you do to make money and maybe that was the thing they were most anxiously waiting for. But you’re waiting for something more. For that step just past pure when you can finally relax because you did it. You got what you were praying for.

Thats what its all about, right? That’s what all the sacrifices were for even though your friends don’t think they’re sacrifices. From the outside it seems like a life of luxury. And you beg them to understand the beast that chases you so they will forgive you while you pardon yourself once again from another friend or lover. A wall you can’t drop always building up to stop them from getting in to protect them from what it is you know. Because if they knew where the wall came from they’d all build walls too. Don’t give them the wall disease.

You see clearly where all this is headed. You know you’re always going to be alone, drowning in a sea of affection for having done things that you have lost touch with. Every day make one more fracture between the you you were and the you that you are.

And now you’re writing letters to yourself on the internet. But that’s what it has always been, hasn’t it?

I love you but goodbye.

My first memories of my dad all involve the smell of his small, red tin which carried a smell I was too young to understand. I remember him sitting on a couch rolling something in a paper and I remember this sweet and musty smell that came off of him when he came back. I remember how much more I loved him when he had that smell on him.

I started smoking weed when I was 14 years old. I’d found dad’s plants drying in his shed and on impulse I stored some in a ziplock bag and hid it far behind our country home under a stone I used to sit on while I was thinking of robots and dinosaurs. I forgot about it until that summer when two of my friends and I decided to smoke it.

We rolled the entire bunch into a cone crafted of computer paper. Thinking of it now it was probably an ounce of weed. The whole paper seemed to go up in two or three enormous blazes that washed away my childhood and, as I thought, turned me into a man.

In the years that followed I found that having weed on me made people like me. Smoking weed seemed to make me funnier and my list of friends grew. That was the beginning of teaching myself to value my worth based on how much grass I had at any given time.

I loved the feeling. I loved how art didn’t seem abstract when I was stoned. Colors, shapes, lines were all I could see and it was enough for me.

My deployment was the first time that I had to be away from my security blanket. I hated it. I picked up running because I could feel the weed burning out of my cells. I could smell it on the Jamaicans that virtually ran the base. I asked them about getting some often but it was strictly against their code to share with soldiers as we could lose everything for them.

When I got home my mom, grandma and sister picked me up from the armory and took me out to dinner. I couldn’t even be bothered to act like I wanted to be with them. All I wanted was weed. I drove almost 300 miles that night. All over the state of Michigan looking for what I thought I needed. I finally found it.

That night I smoked with friends I’d had before I left and I realized that I wasn’t the same but they were. I got so scared I didn’t know what to do. So I smoked some more and soon I didn’t give a fuck about our differences.

That was the beginning of a true addiction for me. I never took the time to try to figure out why I felt different. I just kept smoking. I don’t know when I forgot why I was doing it and started instinctively medicating myself. I never took the time, despite being so “aware of myself.”

I had learned in a very deep way that weed was a way to make the gap between me and the people around me smaller. When I was angry because I’d been slighted, forgotten, ignored, looked over I smoked without thinking about it and soon I just forgot and rolled on happy to have any friends at all. When I was nervous that my words, my posture, my face, my inflection put people off I smoked and came back easier to deal with, without questioning why it was always me who had to change. But most importantly, when I started to remember all the things I had done and seen and could no longer tolerate the atmosphere inside of my mind I smoked so that I could see the colors outside of my head again.

Eventually a day came when all of the things I’d been hiding from myself made me feel like such an alien that I decided to quit. Not weed. I quit life. I quit my job. I quit my girlfriend Jaime who loved me in such a pure way that I never felt worthy of. I quit my friends who I was sick of feeling so far from, yet so understood by them. I packed up my life and moved away. But I had weed in my pocket. And when I questioned my decisions I smoked and the questions left me for a while.

As the tensions grew between friends as my lifestyle pushed their acceptance to the brink I was oblivious. I thought they liked me because I was fun and I was always extremely hurt when they asked me to go. Until I smoked weed. Then I didn’t give a fuck. Fuck em. Right?

I learned not to share my grass. I learned that I *needed* it. Without it my reasons to live were few.

It never mattered how beautiful my work was, or how important the things I had done with my life were. I had to find my next fix. I didn’t have time to enjoy things.

I spent a month in an apartment in Germany by myself. I had a beautiful veranda that overlooked a wonderful town but somehow I didn’t care. I couldn’t find weed and thusly the whole month was a wash. This is how I wasted some of the best experiences of my life.

For the last three years I have wanted nothing more than to go back to Europe to be with Nina, whom I had fallen in love with in a way that I could not quit. I could never afford the ticket. But I could always afford weed. Now the distance and time between us is so great I have doubts that she could still love me. She seems sometimes to love me like a friend who is concerned about me. But I worry she no longer loves me like I do her.

Now, three days into quitting marijuana, I have a hard time seeing the future. I don’t know what will carry me through. I don’t know what to turn to. And worst, I feel as if emotions which have been hiding and growing inside of me since my childhood, since my deployment, since all the friends I grew apart from disappeared are just now starting to emerge and they have grown to terrible dimensions. I am having a lot of “suicidal ideation”. I feel like getting back at all the people who have let me down. I feel so much anger. At my dad. At the friends who let me down. But mostly at me.

If I had all that time back. If I had all that money back. If I’d only….

Maybe I’d be with Nina today.

But I’m not.

So maybe tomorrow.

 

Invasion

Nobody ever thought things could change despite all the changes that had occurred within our species and at our hands and despite the changes in all of the species which ever existed. It was taken as fact that the way things worked now were the way things would always work. Well…

It had been an unusually hot summer with little rain and not even many clouds to speak of. Neighborhood dogs barked, brittle tree leaves rustled, car engines started and got closer then drove off, children were laughing. Corner stores sold cigarettes for six dollars and dollars still made sense then. In this little town things were as they should be.

But then there was this sound. It happened all at once. This magnificent “WHOOMP”, so short and so enormous. Later, in huddled conversation, all things would look to this “WHOOMP” as the time when everything changed.

The dogs stopped barking and the trees stopped rustling and the children weren’t laughing anymore. What few clouds there were dissipated in that same instant and in there place was something that our minds were not prepared to see.

Some say that before the Native Americans were invaded by the European peoples they could not see the ships because they had no reference for a ship and it was such a foreign thought that they couldn’t even see one, or understand it enough to give it meaning. This is no longer seen as speculation but an absolute fact.

Some say that on that day they saw enormous bugs blotting out the sky. As big as a state. Transparent wings like a dragonfly’s netting our sky. Others saw the realization of testament, massive celestial bodies come to take back their own. And some couldn’t see anything other than that it had grown very dark.

Whatever a person saw up in the sky on that day the effect was the same. No longer did their petty issues overwhelm them, nor a sense of nationality or race divide them. In a very instinctual way all humans were one on that day in a very real way, a way that we could touch and feel and a way that made us see all of the small things about ourselves.

Not once after that sound did anyone think that these aliens had come to destroy us. We were, at once, instantly at peace with the arrival. In the past this would have seemed impossible, or insane, but now no other way makes any sense. Why would they wish to destroy us?

We set about immediately to prepare ourselves with guests. Scientists sent forms of algebraic code by many means of signal to the ships in the hopes of working out some form of communication with them. Many fussed about the dietary needs of our visitors but nobody had any information to work with.

For months the ships hung in the sky above us as we clung with anticipation to our hopes for this new beginning. The time moved slow. People kept to themselves.

Then the ships, everywhere and at once, dropped one slender “seed”. These missiles fell to Earth silently and when they hit the ground they buried very deeply. From the hole came the most unusual creature.

The human mind cannot understand the composition of this species but an attempt ought to be made. To begin with, they are not three-dimensional in the fashion that we are used to and we are not entirely positive they actually have a body to speak of. There are rumors that the actual alien is a mind in the ship and that these are a kind of drone body for them, but that is all heresay. No, these forms have two dimensions and no matter how you traverse them you are always presented with the same side and if two people stand on opposite ends of the creature they still see this one side. What you see is apparently up to your own psychology but most report that the creature seems to be, or to have inside of it, something which is not entirely plant material, glass, and a velvety blackness that some consider to be dark matter from space. Several witnesses testify that you can see into the creature but none will admit to having done so for too long.

It came as a very humbling shock to our species that this new species did not seem to have any interest in us whatsoever. What it did seem fascinated with was our technology. Computers precisely. We’d talk and talk and talk while the aliens would dissect a cell phone, combine with it, assimilate it’s parts into itself. Some built into themselves connections with more serious technological infrastructures and access to the internet. Within hours of the creature landing there were reports from almost every sector of business where technology is used that things were happening that ought not to be happening.

These creatures never bothered to learn how to communicate with us, much like we had never learned how to communicate with lizards. It just stole our electronic equipment and destroyed it in order to make for itself a new kind of body, something more suited to this world and it’s constraints.

When it had accomplished this task it looked much more understandable. It was now a classic definition of a robot and it seemed to think just like one as well. It wasn’t evil or good, it was just there. It liked to catalogue and to grow if it had the abilities to like anything at all. In its presence one came to know how little language is necessary if one doesn’t need manipulate or to defend. In fact, nobody spoke one word with any of these creatures yet still their point was clear: technology is the dominate species on this planet and we are but millions of barking babboons which happened upon it but were not wise enough to bend it to do what it could do.

The ships left the sky with the same “WHOOMP” that they had come with and we were left with these seedling robots who now controlled every machine on the planet and it seemed pretty clear to us al that our only job left to do was to crawl off and disappear gracefully.

Fuck It, I’m Done

My whole life I have hidden behind words, bending them to make a labyrinth around the person I knew myself to be. A person that stopped and started at one point. A person that exploded from that one point into the past and the future. That one point smearing all that lay before and ahead of it in filth. The filth is the truth. The words helped me decorate the filth, to prolong despair with the decadent narrative I wanted this life to be. Like a home filled with meaningless trinkets, acquired on a consumptive impulse and hoarded emptily.

I wanted to feel special. I wanted to feel like I might someday get to be more than what the world birthed me as: white trailer trash, destined for factory work. I compromised my integrity for fame because people would finally listen to me.

I left everything behind at Winter Soldier. After they denied my benefits and I lost everything. I somberly packed my life into a bag and tried to leave with a fantasy of adventure. I tried to hold my head up. And I did. For a long time. For so long that it became the only way I knew how to live.

Waking up in filthy Greyhound stations with some black residue in your mouth, a mostly empty jar of peanuts, seven cigarettes and some fucking bum who won’t quit looking at my shit. Falling asleep on whatever floor or couch I could connive my way into. Falling in love at the drop of a hat, working hard for a bed to sleep in.

Becoming a creature of need. Becoming a lonely wolf, surrounded by fat pigs. Becoming leaner and meaner. Learning how to survive.

And then one day I wanted it to stop. I got tired. Real tired. I finally felt that I deserved to have love, and a place to call my own, and to hold my head up high amongst all the normal people and know that I was every bit as normal as them. I applied for jobs and tried to be more serious about relationships but the jobs never worked out and the relationships always ended up being provisional and I’d get this feeling and then I’d be in another Greyhound station.

For years now I’ve been trying to find a place that would forgive me long enough to finally plant a landing. Austin, Chicago, Kalamazoo… working my way back down the same path I’d crawled out of Michigan on until finally I came to be at my Grandma’s house.

I didn’t panic. I was in love and I had some VA money. But the VA money didn’t work. And then I panicked. I’ve panicked for days. But I’ve finally come to a resolution.

I really am not made for the normal world. I only know how to survive the wilderness on the outside. I have adapted skills for this purpose. I have a tattoo on my neck that means I’ll be like this forever. It is time to accept this path and to make my amends.

So don’t trust me if I say I love you because I can’t and if I did the world wouldn’t let me. And if I say I’m going to stay I’m lying. I come from the world of make believe and nothing here is true. Every day I wake up and swear an oath to beauty and do my best to point myself towards it until this rickety frame of mine collapses on some floor and wakes up to do it again.

Don’t expect me to be happy because I’m done acting like I am and I can’t afford the drugs to put on the face. Happiness is for them. I am filled with a pirates glee which is partially examined shame mixed with rebel fury and I like that just fine.

Some day I’m going to die like Paul did. In some town where I don’t know anyone with a suitcase and a few sketch books and my tattoo equipment, like an angel burning it’s way to hell and loving it. Then everyone will have the me that they want without me having to deal with disappointing them.

Expect nothing.

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