Dream Grimoire Episode 2

I am Anthony DeNozo from the CBS television show NCIS. Except in the dream, I look like me. The cast of NCIS just keeps calling me "Tony."

I am supposed to be a stand-in for a mob stool pidgeon in some kind of sting operation, so I am supposed to pretend to hide out in this safehouse and wait for the mob to kidnap me. Catch is, I have to be naked. I'm not sure why I need to be naked, but the sting operation won't succeed and the mob won't buy my identity if I am not thoroughly naked when they arrive to abduct me.

So I am waiting around naked, assuming this very humiliated pose. Agent Gibbs is hiding around a corner waiting to shoot the mob dude who comes to get me. Some guy does eventually arrive. He looks like an extra from a Sonny Chiba movie. White guy with moppy hair and a mustache in a Johnny Cash-style black cowboy get up. Some mob enforcer.

Anyway, the guy actually succeeds in kidnapping me, much to Agent Gibbs chagrin (I am imagining this part, but vividly, based on the show). I think before the mob guy does this, he tortures me or kicks me in the balls or something. I have a distinct memory of something particularly gruesome and painful happening to my naked body.

When I wake up, I am tied to a bed in a small unfamiliar room. My arms are free but I can't move anything else and I can't free myself. I look at my palms. They are covered with blood--in the dream I recognize this as an irrational proxy stigmata. The words "I bear the stigmata" keep running through my head. I find myself deeply horrified.

Next, something invisible, heavy, and very alive tries to sit on my chest and suffocate me. I can't breathe. I can see the thing, strangely, even though it is invisible. I can see it with a sense that is not sight.

It has no head when it looks at me.

I am moaning or gagging and I wake up, still moaning rather fearfully.

Dream Grimoire

Dream one -

I am hanging out with some 'friends.' These are people who do not exist in real life, but my brain has invented them solely for this dream. They are a couple--the girl actually kind of reminds me of the girl who used to live upstairs from my apartment. I never actually spoke to her. The guy, her boyfriend in the dream, is indistinct. We are sitting around their apartment.

They introduce me to their cat. He is a smallish, dark grey male kitten. I can't remember his name. Something like Ivan or James Joyce or Oppenheimer. The kitten and I lock eyes upon being introduced. He has very big green eyes. We stare at each other for a very very long moment. The couple resumes their conversation with each other, ignoring us. Myself and this strange kitten just sit there and stare into each other's eyes, transfixed, for several seconds, the kitten with an almost searching expression, like he is trying to decide something about me. The air becomes pregnant with meaning and I finally whisper "you can talk, can't you?"

The kitten replies, in the voice of young child voice actor, "yeah, I can. Don't tell anybody."

The kitten and I start talking. What about, I can't really remember. Possibly he told me about the secrets that lie in the hearts of dead stars, or the wisdom found just within the event horizon of a black hole, or what it was that laughed in the moment before the Big Bang...

At one point he tries to swallow a telephone or a vacuum cleaner. I tell him "no no, you can't eat that," and pull it out of his mouth, the elongated appliance emerging from his throat like the lamp coming out of Mary Poppins's hand bag. As I slowly pull the object out of the kitten's gaping mouth, I can see all the way inside his body--he is pale pink and hollow and ribbed on the inside just like the whale from Pinocchio. I can see all the way to the back of his body. Some light is shining into him from his butthole.

The kitten and I talk some more. I wake up. It's about 4:30am and I can't get back to sleep right away.

Dream two -

I am at a bonfire or some kind of outdoor party at night. It must be summer. The location is in some small, rundown back street in some small rundown town--it reminds me of a shabby, Chesterfield Township version of Harsen's Island--some place on a waterfront but populated by seedy bungalows, trailer homes, and bait-and-tackle shops that triple as diners and bars.

In my company is a polyglot crew--people from real life--Joey Gunnells, Aaron Aitken, Tony Khaled, possibly Luke Larson--scrubby, unchanged versions of minor characters from high school--Chris Ponton, Tim Papiez, maybe an Ebel (Greg or Ryan, I can't tell in the dream)--and a confusion of redneck/trailer trash types who don't exist outside of this dream.

We're all hanging out and talking. Joe is sitting in the bed of an orange pickup with Papiez and Ponton. He is smoking and expounding upon some subject at length. He is wearing his leather jacket. I keep yelling at Joe, "Why are you smoking? My god, don't you know you're hanging out with Chris Ponton of Vaseline-in-the-hair fame!"

Tony Khaled comes up and starts confronting me. He's pushing me and complaining, in that awkward sort-of-joking way of his, that I think I'm too good for him. He has a cigarette tucked behind his ear, and another one somehow tucked under his dyed black bangs. He is smoking a third. I don't actually answer him, or respond. I merely grin as he shoves me around, half-friendly, half-bullying.

The party tapers off into various conversations that I am not following. Some of the redneck kids are standing behind me. They are talking over a kid sleeping on a bail of hay. One of the redneck kids, a tall boy with longish blonde hair, reaches down and puts his hand on the sleeping kid's face. He starts crushing the kid's face with his bare hand until the kid's head caves in and his eyeballs smoosh out of the sockets and blood starts gushing out his ruptured skull. I stare at this. The redneck kids kind of laugh.

I turn back to the party and after some more conversation one of the redneck kids his crushing someone else's face, maybe Ponton's or Tim Papiez's. The crushee is kind of standing there letting it happen, his head collapsing in a kind of 80's Italian horror movie slow-motion. The lethargic implosion of this random minor high school character's face looks like a cheap foam latex practical effect, which is what makes it all the more gruesome and unnerving.

Now everyone starts noticing what's happening.

Someone yells something at the redneck kids about their band sucking. Someone else says something about them becoming a better band when they take peoples' souls. Suddenly a bunch of really weird-looking rednecks pop out. They have big, colorless moon-faces, stand taller and bigger than everyone else, and they look ready to take souls. Souls for their band to become better.

Mayhem erupts.

A youngish trailer-trash kid appears out of nowhere and wraps his arms around my ribcage. He starts to squeeze. I tell him to please stop squeezing me. It actually hurts. It hurts a lot. He doesn't stop but starts walking down the dirt street, holding me in the air while he squeezes my ribs. I feel like I am suffocating. It really hurts in the dream. I tell him to stop, but he won't. I tell him his band sucks, and he lets up a bit. "Our band won't suck...after we suck out your souls." He grins, his little boy face innocent-looking under his lank, moppy bangs.

As he drags me down the dusty street, chaos all around us, I grab a random farm implement and jab him with it. It breaks. I grab another out of a rack that just happens to be next to us. It looks like an enormous rusty scalpel blade attached to a long wooden handle. Just as the boy starts to squeeze my ribs again, I bring the implement down on him and chop his arms off cleanly in two or three easy slashes. Then I am running away.

My alarm wakes me up at 9am.

Simplicity Denied

I was just reading an article in Rolling Stone about the teabaggers. It had some interesting insights into the ideology (idiot-ology?) of that particular group of angry white people, and I think it spelled out something that is kind of consistent between the tea party nuttiness and most right-wing Christian conservative thought--an overwhelming desire for simplicity. There is present a cry or a longing for easy answers, a need for the world's problems to be spelled out in few words and the solutions in even less. This whole movement is formed by a group of people who yearn to see the world in the lowest possible resolution.

The seduction of easy answers to the tangled problems of an increasingly complicated world is kind of easy to understand, I guess. Hell, just me sitting here saying that the tea party movement and hardcore christian conservatism is motivated largely by the need for simplicity and easy answers is itself an easy answer, and the satisfaction I'm getting from thinking I've 'figured it out' is pretty blatant.

I don't know if it's the answer, but I think it definitely forms a big part of what motivates most of these people. It's an interesting thought exercise in a way because it predicts some of the weirdness that has resulted from the largely incoherent ideology of the tea party on the one hand and the largely retarded ideology of christian conservatives on the other. The idea is this: because the world isn't simple, trying to picture it in simple terms forces you to believe some weird things in order to keep your initial premise intact. As you go on and you experience or discover or are forced to acknowledge more facts or situations that utterly contradict your worldview, you have to keep twisting the minutae of your ideology in order to compensate. Eventually what you're left with is a worldview that no longer retains any of its original simplicity and is now also totally divorced from reality. You end up becoming a kook.

The Creation Museum might be a great example of this, with its human-riding-vegetarian-dinosaur displays. The basic premise - the world is only 6,000 years old - is pretty simple, but trying to force that notion to accomodate the enormous mountain of scientific fact which contradicts it puts you in a position where your rationalizations get weirder and weirder. Even if you judiciously ignore one or more piles of facts, a lot of twisted intellectual compensations still have to be grafted in there. To the point where maybe you build a whole 'museum' as a way to try and solidify your massive pile of patently stupid rationalizations. Just the one little belief in a simple 'literal biblical creation' becomes contingent on believing so many other completely ridiculous things that the mental contortions completely tear your brain out of its moorings.

The problem is, lots of people are having no problem doing this.

Proving negatives?

Apologetics: n. process by which the religious make up excuses for still believing in their religion when there are absolutely no good reasons at all to still believe in it. Typically, these excuses range from bad to piss fucking poor to completely ridiculous lies.

Talking to the religious can be an interesting excercise in teasing out tangled lines of thought.

For example, when someone asks me why I don't believe in god, it seems they're actually asking me two questions at once and I'm sometimes not sure which one they want me to answer.

The first question they're asking is 'why don't you believe in an omnipotent mammalian creator spirit that is the author of the cosmos?'

My answer to that is simple: because there isn't one.

This simple, direct, and rather self-evident answer usually flusters the religious.

The following dialogue may result:

"But you don't know that for sure."

"I don't have to. I don't know for sure that unicorns don't exist and I have no problem disbelieving in them and no one else would object to my disbelief. The reason is because there aren't any unicorns."

"You can't compare god and unicorns."

"Sure I can. There really isn't any difference between an omnipotent mammalian creator spirit and an imaginary white horse with a narwhal horn sticking out of its forehead. In fact, at least the unicorn has a real life counterpart which is easy to visualize--a horse. The point is, you can't really give your 'god' privileged status as an intellectual artifact just because you've chosen to believe in it. In reality, both god and unicorns are human inventions and because neither are real, they are most definitely comparable as non-existant things. But I'll try to make this a little easier to understand. I don't have to know for sure that Zeus doesn't exist to disbelieve in him. Why? Because there is no such person. And you would not object to that reasoning. I disbelieve in your Abrahamic mammalian creator spirit for same exact reason you don't believe in Zeus, Aphrodite, Hades or any Greek god."

"Okay, but you still don't know for sure."

"Like I said, I don't have to. Until someone can show me some evidence that your creator spirit is real or that unicorns are real or that Zeus is really hanging out on Mt. Olympus, I don't have to believe in any of those things because all we really know them as is human fabrications. If you want me to withhold my disbelief, you have to show me some evidence. I don't have to prove something doesn't exist. That's ridiculous. It's a complete mistake in thinking, and a totally counterproductive exercise. Every human being who has ever lived could each spend their entire lives trying to prove the nonexistence of a single nonexistant thing and still never be able to. It's a metaphysical goose-chase. Instead, if I am confronted with an intellectual invention, like gods, who are very very unlikely to exist based on what we know about the world, I look for some evidence to support the claims of those who posit their existence. When no evidence is forthcoming, I conclude that these very unlikely ideas must not be real. Quite simple. It works for unicorns, it works for leprechauns, it works for pink elephants, it works for fairies, it works for Quetzocuatl, Horus, and Asshurbanipal, it works for Ahura-Mazda, it works for Santa Claus, it works for King Kong, it works for Zeus, and it works for your mammalian creator god."

"Yeah...but...we don't know everything about the universe..."

"But we know some things. And those things don't really seem to support your claim that a mammalian creator spirit is behind the cosmos. Yes, there are gaps in our knowledge. Those gaps represent things we don't know, as you said. Unfortunately, when we don't know something, we just don't know. We can guess, or speculate, or hypothesize, but even then only if there is some evidence off of which to base our guesses, speculations, or hypotheses. When it comes to what we don't know, we just don't know. We can't really say anything valuable about what we don't know. So, you can't fill in the gaps in our knowledge with wishful thinking about a creator intelligence that made you specially. You can't fill in the gaps with anything. The gaps stay gaps until we know what fills them. Until then, you can't take something we don't fully understand, claim with certainty that we'll never understand it, and then claim that your imaginary mammal deity is behind it. Why? For precisely the same reason you were trying to claim that I couldn't fully disprove the existence of your god earlier--because you don't know. In point of fact, you don't know for sure any more than I do."

"But god works in mysterious ways."

"That's a copout and you know it. Saying god works in mysterious ways is essentially the same thing as saying the universe is godless and indifferent to human beings. From what we humans can tell, a universe without a god seems to behave in the exact same way as a universe run by a god whose plan is mysterious and incomprehensible. If the outcomes are the same, why posit the extra object for which we have no evidence? If god's existence is such that his role in the universe is reduced to something we can neither experience, measure, or observe, then what use is the god as an idea? We simply don't need the god. We have no evidence for the god. So, we can safely set the idea aside. Quite simple. There isn't a god. The universe works exactly the way we would expect a universe to work if there was no god running it. The incomprehensible plan idea is like a retrofit of some earlier notion of monotheism in order to fit that observed behavior of the universe. It's a copout."

"Yeah, well...you can't know everything. You have to come to god through faith."

Here is the point where we can discern the second question the religious person was actually asking.

That second question is 'why don't you believe in the god of my particular religion?'

That question, I think, is a little more complicated. I mean, aside from the fact that I already don't believe in any gods, why I find a particular system of belief objectionable is multi-faceted. My reasons for finding Christianity utterly worthless as a mental construct are somewhat different than my reasons for rejecting Islam as a complete pile of human thought-garbage. The same goes for Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or whatever.

The fact remains, I don't believe in any gods. But each religion has its own different pile of extraneous brain-excrement that they have fastened onto to the more-or-less easily dismissed concept of a universal creator intelligence. For each set of ridiculous truth-claims each religion makes I have my own moral, political, philosophical, and scientific objections. That conversation gets a little longer.

The idea of faith, however, is the most distressing. From what I've gathered in my experience as a living human part of a large human society, the notion that believing in something unquestioningly with no evidence is one of the highest human virtues is pretty disgusting. Far from being a virtue, I would say the human capacity for completely unwarranted assent to the ridiculous claims of others, made from totally unearned positions of authority, is one of the worst flaws in our psychological makeup that can be acknowledged. It goes entirely against every rational thought process we have at our disposal. I'm talking about our capacities for reason, skepticism, systematic questioning, curiosity--all traits which have allowed us to become not only more knowledgeable about the cosmos and more advanced and sophisticated technologically and culturally, but traits that have allowed us to achieve the mental and social progress necessary for more progressive, more ethical, and more just treatment of other human beings, politically, and economically.

And I might point out that even with the progress we've made since the stone age, we still have a very very long way to go as a species. So the idea of faith, which contradicts and often renders null those important human traits, bothers me a bit.

Faith is not a virtue to be lauded but a chink in our mental armor which can be exploited--a mental weakness by which people are manipulated for the agendas of others at best and turned to totally corrupt fanatical shitbags at worst.

I've come to despise the entire idea of faith because of what it does to people. It's a poison, something that seeps into and rots out every functional mental process in a person, something that eventually destroys the basis for all of their reasoning. In my opinion, without a strong, implicit rational basis for our behavior, morality becomes an arbitrary construct--something that can manipulated and rearranged at whim by whatever demagogue or power freak controls the faith that has its intellectual tentacles around the notion of morality. When the use of objective, rational thought becomes unfashionable for analyzing the world; when the need for employing systematic and rigorous scientific-questioning is contradicted; when our natural skepticism becomes unneccesary for decision-making--then faith becomes a basis for knowing the supposed basic truths of the universe; then faith becomes the basis for acknowledging the rights of other human beings--and then the entire implicit notion of cooperation, compassion, and justice becomes extraneous and arbitrary. Those ideas become things that come from outside of us, and as such, become subject to manipulation.

If morality comes out of a stupid sacred book instead from a rational standpoint inside of us, what's to stop faith-muddled fanatics from changing the book to fit their bizarre prejudices? The prevailing morality will change as often as the book is reprinted, and that is something we have in fact seen if you look at any biblical history. The book itself doesn't even need to change one iota, all people have to do is make claims about what the book actually means and there you go, the result is the same--morality has been manipulated to fit the xenophobic agenda of some spiritual oligarchy--once again, something we have seen historically.

I think this trend has had a pretty disturbing effect--it seems like in a lot of faith-communities, the entire notion of fact-based-discourse is reviled. Facts have become the enemy of the religious, even where the facts don't necessarily condemn their religious beliefs. Facts have become the philosophical problem of the apologists because in any situation facts can snag their attempts to manipulate not just morality but reality. So all facts should be regarded with contempt, just in case some aspect of reality needs to be manipulated in order to goad the faith constituency. This is, of course, already a problem in media and politics to a degree, but I think it has taken on its most comprehensive, sophisticated, and virulent cast with the evangelical and fundamental religions. As religious zealouts, spiritual leaders, and evangelizing public figureheads have inserted themselves deeper and deeper into media, politics, education, and the public eye, there emerges a pretty frightening likelihood of further poisoning and degrading the intellectual discourse at ALL levels in our society.

And I mean our global society.

And that is pretty fucking gross.

Ruminations, obscenities

I think it's funny that real life has a lot more in common with the Christian concept of hell than it does with the Christian concept of heaven.

Tells you something about Christians.

So, a Christian is supposed to, by analogy, be able to understand something about hell. However, they don't really know as much about heaven, because there is no analogy in real life. Suffering, people understand. Eternal bliss? Not as much.

So here's what it boils down to: people can conceptualize hell better than heaven. Therefore, what must the operating factor be in motivating people? Heaven? Or Hell?

Obviously it's the punishment that motivates. One only needs consult a Calvinist. One only needs to read or research any revivalist teachings. One only needs to sit and listen to Pat Robertson talk on a Sunday afternoon.

Fear of hell. Not desire for heaven.

So, the punishment more than the reward.

Punishment.

A religion based on punishment. Fear. Threats. Suffering.

Not a big huge surprise, or even a real original line of thought on my part, but I thought I'd detail it out since this stuff tends to come to me in the shower.

The Abrahamic faiths are one long legacy of religions that treat people like dogs.

Things in my life that have devolved into utter abstractions

1. Women - Beyond my ability to comprehend. They are like a physics equation with underiveable constants and unquantifiable unknowns. Only soluable to men who are better at guessing or luckier than I am.

2. Morality - Contrary to popular religious thought, religion's focus on an absolute and yet totally abritrary moral code has disintegrated the concept of moral behavior into an utterly unconvincing chimera. To my mind, without an intrinsic, human basis for ethics, morality becomes much the same as theology--a fancy construct with no foundation in reality. The religious have turned moral thought into a worthless academic exercise. The only answer is to regard morality with the utmost ambivalence and relativism. We call this a teachable moment.

3. Popular music - I can't figure out which parts, if any, are supposed to be interesting. The idea of popular music being either 'popular' or 'music' is something of a philosophical conundrum--a question without any real answer that probably only makes you more unhappy for having attempted contemplation.

Centipede that walks like a man

The two men are talking, oblivious. Spearle sits across from them while their voices lurch and strut, the snaky threads of an argument. The sound is like two phlegmy hagfish debating ownership of a rotting carcass.

He who produces the most mucus wins said argument.

The bar is smokey, and crowded. The clientele are quiet. The dark, chill air is hushed with muted talk of quiet money. Very very quiet money.

This is a quiet bar.

Spearle stares at his beer and listens to the conversation with little interest. The older of the talking pair, a balding man with a patchy beard named Asaph, is still slowly pronouncing his estimation of the relative worth of Spearle's offer. By Spearle's count, he has repeated the same line of thought three times in the past ten minutes, each time producing different numbers. The younger one, Wade, seems alternately anxious and bored. He vacillates between sharp, coughed disagreement with Asaph and almost baffled indifference.

Asaph's eyes drift lazily around the bar as he mutters. Spearle keeps his gaze on his beer, waiting patiently and without thought.

This is all academic.

This is all necessary, and yet totally unnecessary.

He flicks his eyes at Wade. The younger man sports a bewildering mustache. He wears the air of a coma patient recently awakened to find the entire world resurfaced with mohair yarn. He seems surprised and slightly irritated by everything that is transpiring.

Wade cuts into Asaph's monologue with a sour comment. Asaph's eyes momentarily focus. Without turning, he congeals his voice into a thicker spill of glutinous speculation, smothering the younger man's acid tone. Wade bites his interjection off. His viscid locution flowing momentarily to a halt, Asaph sets his gaze on Spearle, waiting.

Spearle continues staring at his beer.

"I think you're full of shit. Did you fucking hear me?"

Spearle finally looks up at Asaph. The two lock eyes momentarily. Spearle's clouded gaze imparts no meaning to the speaker. Neither acknowledgement nor ignorance.

"When did I ask whether you believe me?"

"No way...what you're saying is fucking horseshit."

"Did I ask if you believed me?"

"Look..."

"Did I ask if you believed me?"

"No, but..."

"I don't give a fuck if you believe me. That's not what I asked."

"Yeah, hey...."

"What did I ask?"

"..."

Wade watches the exchange anxiously. His boredom is frothing over into frustration.

"What did I ask?"

"You asked how much."

"Yes. How much?"

"Look, even if you had...like...captured...Chuck Lister...I mean, seriously...Do you know how that fucking sounds? I mean, do you know how that fucking sounds? But even if you did have the guy, no way Grissholm is gonna pay for him. No way those fucking guys will pay what you're asking."

Wade cuts in, "They'll chop your fucking balls off instead."

"Yeah, no shit."

"They'll fucking find you and they'll chop your fucking balls off."

"Plus, if DeBoyo finds out you're trying to sell his brother to the Lord, he'll fucking go nuts."

"Yeah. And then he'll find you and cut your nuts off, too."

Spearle relaxes. He takes one pull from his beer.

"So, let's just put this out there. No one will pay for Chuck Lister. Not Grissholm, not DeBoyo, not anyone. They'll just come and cut my balls off instead?"

"Yeah, dumbass, so I wouldn't go around telling people what you just told us."

"They'll find me?"

"Yeah they'll fucking find you."

"You're sure?"

"Fuck yeah I'm sure. Sure as shit stinks, I'm sure."

"How?"

"How what?"

"How will they find me?"

"Fuck if I know. They just will."

"Right."

Asaph thumps the table hard with his gaunt fist. One or two eyes shift briefly in the direction of their booth. No one actually looks.

"What the fuck is your problem, dude? I'm telling you this bullshit is gonna get your ass fucking dead. This is fucking bullshit. If you have a fucking deathwish, go somewhere else and fucking die. Get the fuck out of my face with this fucking crap. What the fuck? I mean, seriously, what in the fuck, dude?"

Spearle looks at Asaph, then at Wade. Maybe he smiles a little. The two won't be sure afterwards, but then, they'll never mention it to each other either.

"So you're sure they'll come after me and they'll know where to find me?"

"This conversation is fucking over."

Wade and Asaph slide out of the booth like meat rigged to a conveyer. Asaph throws a couple wadded bills on the scarred tabletop. The finish is scuffed. Spearle's unemptied beer stands sentinel over the soggy lumps of cash.

The two leave without saying anything. Spearle downs his beer, pays the tab, and strolls out into the dank evening.

Seventy Per Cent.

Hot thick air buzzing with insects. Fluttering things weaving around the cold fluorescent lights. The concrete walls smell of wetness. Auto fumes.

Asaph Whateley drops another quarter in the slot, hoists the heavy metallic wand. The rubber hose is reluctant. He fights it as he maneuvers around the car. Water jets out of the nozzle with satisfying pressure as he sprays the car down. The slowly clotting blood rinses clean from the scuffed paint, pooling into disconcerting shapes on the cold concrete flooring.

The car is covered with blood.

Asaph works quickly, taking care with the grille and the wheel wells. There is a lot of blood. And he doesn't have a fuck of a lot of quarters.

Wade sits in the car. For awhile he stares unconcernedly at the blood-coated windshield, the cold lights of the carwash leaking through the thick crimson sheet making it look like the glass is made of candy. Strawberry Jolly Ranchers maybe.

Then the blood is sprayed away, drizzles down the windshield in dissipating rivers, a froth of diluted scarlet.

Wade turns his gaze to the dashboard. His eyes are lazily drawn by the patterns of sawdust and cigarette ash. Traceries of another language. Something hidden. A meaning not quite apparent to him. He tries to decipher it for a moment, his mind poised to tease out the secret, before he loses interest.

He turns his gaze back out the windshield. Asaph is behind the car now. The water makes a comforting sound as it buffets the rear fenders. You could fall asleep to that noise. Wade closes his eyes a little and tries to relax. He listens to the sounds of the water as his brother carefully washes the coagulating blood off the beaten up police cruiser.

The water pressure fizzles out. Asaph spits a curse. Trudges over to the shiny steel panel, digging in his pocket for another coin. Pulls one out and shoves it in the slot.

Nothing happens.

He curses again and punches the panel.

Nothing.

Hits the coin return button.

Nothing.

Reaches into his pocket again, digging out another quarter.

Starts to shove it in the slot. Stops. Looks at it.

A fucking nickel.

A goddamn fucking nickel.

A god motherfucking damn motherfucking shiteating fucking nickel.

It sits in his palm, accusing. Mocking.

Asaph is out of quarters. He throws the metal wand on the ground. It clatters loudly and uselessly as he stalks back to the car. Blood pools thickly under the driver's side door. He splashes through it, unmindful as he heaves the door open and climbs in.

"Is it clean?"

"Yeah, sort of."

"You didn't finish?"

"We're out of fucking quarters."

"Oh."

"..."

"...so is the car clean?"

"Fuck if I know. I couldn't finish."

"Oh. Do you think anyone will notice?"

Asaph pulls the door shut with a resounding slam and stabs the key into the ignition. Grunts as the car starts up--coughing, angry, old.

The battered cruiser pulls out of the carwash port tentatively, headlights painting the night like the surface of the moon, like some airless asteroid. Living in the cold, disapproving glare of the distant Earth.

A drowned pig.

Morning and the flat metallic ache of a minor hangover. Its dull glow from the back of my head seems to light everything in an ugly contrast.

An insulting pageant no longer convincing, stripped of its bravado. This dressed up pig is now just a pig. Decoration seems to make it more hideous.

My stomach turns, waking up with me reluctantly.

I try to brush the catshit taste out of my mouth, try to suck my eyes back out of the muck filling my head.

Moments of clarity like this are hard to swallow, but they do their job, if you can keep your unreliable gorge down. Just keep it down, I tell myself. Fight that all too poignant sense of mental nausea. Keep it down.

I know I shouldn't be doing this. This is a bad idea. You are a bad idea.

Heartache and uncertainty. But I'll live.

Why is there something instead of nothing?

The short answer: because there is something.

The long answer: I don't give a shit.

I love the irony of some self-assured asshole coming at me with a big "bet you don't know, your atheism can't explain this" argument not realizing he's shooting his own fucking feet off. I don't disbelieve in god because the atheistic worldview provides me with answers.

I disbelieve in god because there isn't one.

That much should be obvious. Religions make truth-claims about the natural world. Those truth claims are not supported by evidence. In fact, they're often contradicted. Thus, if Religion A claims some dude rose from the dead, or that demonic possession is a real phenomena, or that a piece of cracker is magically transformed into the connective tissue of an unemployed Bronze Age carpenter, and those claims are unsupported by any physical evidence, direct or indirect, it is completely reasonable to reject all of Religion A's truth claims.

The apologist says "maybe some of Religion A's tenets are not meant to be taken literally, but what about the ultimate question? Maybe Religion A truly provides some insight?" Am I throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Yes. I am. Especially when the baby is totally indistinguishable from the bathwater.

Basically, my conclusion is that for the Abrahamic faiths, the largest of the world's religions, the question is not whether or not god exists. That 'ultimate question' seems to be rather buried under theological scat-sculpting and moral authoritarianism. I could give the lie to the idea that there is some omniscient intelligence guiding the physical universe and still have nothing to do with Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. The fact is, for those religions, their real focus is on all the crap that they argue stems from their supposed relationships with the one true god. Their baby is the fucking bathwater.

It's not god who takes center stage, it's Mohamed and Jesus and Moses and all the stories, scriptures, apocryphal tales, canonical beliefs, and faith-defining tenets. And none of that stuff is true. It's all bogus. Christianity can't even get the story straight on the life of their founding sociopath.

And when you throw out all of those scriptures and tales and beliefs, what are you left with?

You're left with maybe there's an omniscient creator, maybe there's not, and where did this notion that there should be one even come from in the first place?

You're not even left with the same fucking question that our smug religious apologist came at me with in the first place, "why is there stuff?"

Just strip away the superficial narrow-mindedness of that question, and its failure of perspective is revealed: Why is it so important that if stuff exists, that something or someone created it? Is that really the only explanation that can be fathomed by some people? Or is it that if we're forced to explore other possibilities, the apologists have to admit that 'god done it' is only one of many answers (and likely not counted among the plausible ones) and the privileged position they have come to expect from their membership in a kooky semi-literate deathcult is no longer a guarantee?

Atheism doesn't provide me with answers. It is just a rejection of the answers that have been given to me by pretend know-it-alls. It's a rejection of notions that are unsupported by evidence and a rejection of the notion that it's virtuous to believe ridiculous truth-claims without supporting evidence. It is not a set of answers.

Anything that provides you with a set of answers about the whole universe is a religion. Anything that provides you with facts, theories, questions, and the tools to seek more facts, test those theories, generate new ones, and directly or indirectly get answers to questions--that's thinking. Maybe it also sounds an awful lot like science.

Probably not a coincidence.

One other objection, though. Agnostic apologists will often whine that while atheism may be valid in addressing organized religion, it can't address more personal beliefs or notions about the universe. I might be able to deny the existence of Jehovah or Allah, but I can't say anything about the personal god of Thomas Jefferson.

Problem is, stripped of all the rule-mongering and praying and truth-claims that make an organized religion, those personal beliefs are rather worthless to argue over. Sure, I can't say anything about your very very personal conception of an omniscient creator, but...you can't really say anything valuable about him/her/it either.

If it has to abide by the laws of the physical universe as we understand them, if your god or anyone else's has to fit the facts as we so far know them, if he cannot cause miracles or respond to prayer or suck your soul out of your body, then all we have is a god of the gaps--a do-nothing god.

I don't think any special consideration needs to be given to human flights of fancy about what we don't know. Sure, you can fill in the gaps in our knowledge with wishful thinking and garbage, but that doesn't mean I have to give a fuck.

Further, there is no special privilege that a divine creator deserves over any other supernatural crap that a person can invent. The idea of a giant anthropomorphic ruler of the universe itself is a human invention, and when considering things that 'could exist but we have no evidence for' that particular human concept is no more valid than fairies, unicorns, He-Man, or the Predator.

My point is, I don't have to disprove every ridiculous truth-claim made about the universe. Anyone can have a personal belief in a beneficent omniscient universal intelligence that loves them personally but has no actual effects on the world--I don't have to address their claims with my atheism because it's perfectly reasonable to withhold provisional assent to such ideas.

I can make-believe about a fungus that turns people into zombies. That doesn't mean my fictional notion fits into our cosmic understanding somewhere, or should even be considered.

Too many agnostics shy away from atheism because of its certainty. They get all huffy because they think that we think that we have the all answers.

I'm not an atheist because I have all the answers. I am an atheist because religion has none of the answers and doesn't even know the real questions. I am an atheist because your personal belief in an all-knowing creator is still unintelligible at the end of the day, no matter how beautiful it sounds and how reassured it makes you feel.

Maybe I am also an atheist because I don't think it really matters whether we find answers or not. It's cool to just look.

Less than failure.

Every day seems fraught with possibilities that dissolve on contact. I see a pattern of never being able to fail, even spectacularly, because I never get into the running. Not even considered a competitor.

I suppose I just want a chance to lose big, or get rejected hard, on my own merits. Rather than having to accept the artificial barriers that keep me stuck in my own rut. I don't mind being blown to bits if I'm the one who pulls the pin.

I'm frustrated with this day to day sterility. I want to set something on fire.

You won't burn. You're encased in ice. So am I.

I guess I have to do this with a sledgehammer instead of a plan.

Temporal Terminus

Inescapable suspicion that there is no future. Yawning blank waiting for me. Ready to swallow me whole.

I think I'm more afraid of growing old than dying. Dying is bad enough. Growing old and then dying sounds worse.

I can't imagine time stretching out in front of me. I'm drawing a blank trying to imagine my life. A total blank.

Edit:

Can't see myself having kids or starting a family. Unless a girl comes along who can change my mind irreversibly. Otherwise, I don't see it. Not because 'the fun will be over' or because it means 'growing up.' I think I'm doing a lot of that as it is.

I don't see it happening because the thought of marrying, starting a family, raising children, building a life reminds me rather painfully that I don't really know what I want out of my life. I have no real reason to want a family. But I don't know what I really want or what I'm supposed to do.

Summer blues, I guess. Some people are down in the winter. I get it in the summer.

Blood. Beer. Blastbeats. Bullets. Bruised brains.

So I've given myself a week to sort of process all of the illicit motherandfatherfucking awesomeness that was Maryland Deathfest.

I think, like all epic events, this one is still coloring my perceptions to some degree. My proverbial ears are still ringing with the din.

I tweeted pretty heavily in terms of describing my reactions to the various bands I saw, so I'm probably not going to spend a lot of time here recounting live performances. A few highlights stand out that I want to mention, though, because they tie in to an over-arching point.

First of all, I have to talk a little about Portal's set. Mainly to gush. Freakishly.

I guess the thing that hits me hardest about that band is the totally original imagery and approach they've developed. Love them or hate them, there really is not another band like them. They come closest to giving one a tangible feeling of otherworldliness. Something about their music actually sounds like what a rip in the fabric of reality might be expected to sound like.

Anyway, as I was standing there, in almost complete darkness; bathed in stuffy, humid air; breathed on and smothered by sweaty, smelly strangers; watching the Curator gesticulate and inhumanly pontificate on whatever arcane and outre knowledge he had to expound on, I realized I was seeing and hearing something pretty damn incredible.

I probably won't soon forget that.

Next, Gridlink. Oh man. I could probably type a couple million characters about how awesome it was to just be in the same room as ex-Discordance Axis and Human Remains personnel, I could gush like a quivering fanboy at my physical proximity to the yowling, manic form of Jon Chang, or about how I was actually watching Steve Procopio manhandle his guitar with my own eyes; but that's not really what I was most conscious of while I was watching Gridlink tear through their set.

All I was thinking about was how FUCKING. AWESOME. THEY. WERE.

Also...HOW. FUCKING. FAST. THEIR. DRUMMER. IS.

Those blastbeats...they were...they were...beautiful.

Finally, Eyehategod. Of all the bands that I think just nailed both their live performance and live sound, Eyehategod were the fucking standouts. They sounded exactly like they should sound. They played with all the fucking oily, pissed off, ugly, bluesy sleaze with which they should play. It was not disappointing. I probably punched the most air for them, and that's saying a lot. There's something to be said for taking 20 years to really hone your fucking craft.

The point that these bands make for me, the conclusion I've come to after almost sixteen years of listening to heavy/extreme music (more than half my life) is that music itself seems more rewarding when it's heavy. I can't escape the conclusion.

At one point we're all hanging out in the hotel room after just arriving in Baltimore, taking a little time out to rest up before we headed up to the Pre-Fest Party. We're watching Brian Posehn on Comedy Central and he's going through his bits about being ugly and being married and having a dog lick his wife's vagina, and then he starts talking about metal. He says "you never hear fans of other music walking around growling "R AND B!!!! FUCKIN R AND B!!!!!"

It's true. You don't. You don't get that sense of an almost fanatical religious devotion to a musical form. Maybe we've just had to work harder for it, so getting to hear the music we want, or see the bands we love is more rewarding. Maybe it goes along with being a social misfit, so the music ties us together, binds us in our own special subculture. But I think it's more than that. I think it's the structure of the underground music scene. It's safe to say that in punk and metal, the majority of people aren't just spectators. They are involved in one way or another. They're in bands, they promote shows, they run labels, they do artwork, whatever. Most of us are involved as musicians.

I think that separates underground extreme music from every other musical genre out there. All other forms of music attract largely non-participant fans. But with metal and punk...that's just not the case. The point I'm getting at is that, with the possible exception of jazz, no other genre comes with the same almost ubiquitously musically educated fanbase. And unlike jazz, where an obsessive academic dissection has left it a rather static and sterile relic for music historians and snivelling snobs to paw over, metal and punk are still dynamic, still evolving, still living, breathing, fighting, fucking, and eating.

And yet, even the past is still alive with underground music. Old legends only seem to grow in stature as the years go by. A classic record remains a classic record no matter what trends come and go, and most underground music fans are reverent towards the classics.

So when you hear some metal fan start pontificating over a band, you can bet his opinion is a little more informed--he's not only aware of the technical aspects of the music from his own experience, but there's also a sense of history to his perception. Basically anyone listening to grindcore, hardcore punk, or metal understands that the music is inescapably colored by, and compared to, Slayer's Reign in Blood. Anyone listening to modern grindcore knows the music is inescapably influenced by and linked back to Napalm Death, Repulsion, and Siege in the 1980's. A lot of historical allusion is in the music, and there's a real feeling of messy, unpredictable evolution.

I don't get that sense from other forms of music. I don't get that sense from other music fans. I do get snobbery but without much substance to back it up.

Worse though, I get shallow, uninformed 'music criticism' (particularly of what I listen to) from people who can't even play Mary Had a Little Lamb on a guitar. It's hard not to feel that people who can't play music don't really know how to listen to music. And not knowing how to listen to music, they certainly can't form valuable insights about music. And as such, I usually feel it's safe to discount their opinion.

That's my big point. All of this discussion has just been to say: shut up. You can't play. You're not in a band. You've never written a song yourself. You don't even know how to listen to music without being totally distracted by the rhythm and the vocals. So, I honestly cannot force myself to give a shit about your opinion. Stop trying to tell me what's good or bad or 'easy' or 'dumb' about the music I listen to. Stop trying to tell me what's good or bad about any music, because you don't really know. You're like a tongueless, noseless troglodyte trying to describe the experience of eating Thai food. You can only describe it by your limited senses, but you're missing the real deal, you're missing ninety-percent of the experience.

It makes me wonder sometimes how such people can even consider themselves music fans. It really is like being a food connoisseur without a sense of taste. What do you focus on? The texture? That is to say, what are you listening for, exactly, when you can't draw any real inferences about the performance, when you can't separate the various melodies and see how they were arranged, when you can't appreciate timing, a well-placed hook, a particularly badass riff, or a paint-stripping blastbeat played to perfection?

I could go on, but I'll leave it with this: why is most modern popular music mostly composed of a drum beat and a person singing? I propose that those are the two easiest components for non-musicians to understand. They can't really appreciate much else, so most popular music consists solely of that. Think about it.

Slack face of extinction

The Tea Party, to me, is not so much a political movement as it is a horde of panphobic reality-deniers huddling together for comfort, drowning themselves in the confused babble of their mutual delusions, hoping, by doing so, to shut out any minute intrusion of fact. In some ways, I guess they are more than a political movement; something worse in fact. They represent a cohesion of all that is pathological, paranoid, and hypersensitive in modern American political thought.

They are, I think, symptomatic of an uncriticized conservative paradigm run amock.

Well, high-flown verbosity aside, what I'm saying is the Tea Baggers are fast becoming the symbol of, and the party for, the American Dumbass . They are the Stupid Party. One only needs to examine a few of their platforms--which I won't do here, mainly because I grind my teeth enough as it is--to see how ridiculous they truly are.

It's enough for me to say that the Tea Baggers are right up there at the Altar of Platitudes, worshipping away. Platitudes don't just have to be delusions that we ALL find comfortable. Sometimes they are ridiculous ideas that just a few people find comfortable.

Examples? People of white skin color are vastly superior to those of any other. A ridiculous idea, obviously only comforting to people who are actually white. Taxes are bad. Another ridiculous idea which only seems to have any weight with people who sympathize with the plight of the downtrodden, overburdened rich of our country. Big pharmaceuticals have orchestrated a massive conspiracy to give your children vaccines which will make them autistic. The key word is conspiracy. The idea of a shadowy oligarchy behind a perceived evil makes the world into a black-and-white battleground between the Good (tm) and the Evil (tm). That kind of absolutism, while paranoid, is pretty comforting to certain people. The idea that the medical community still isn't certain about what causes autism and the notion that, for the most part, vaccines are extremely beneficial for society as a whole but that some individuals may be negatively affected by them isn't as easy to swallow, and so is not, by contrast, as comforting to believe.

So, I think the Tea Partiers, Scrotum-Suckers, whatever, look more and more to me like a segment of the American population who have backed themselves into an ideological corner, clinging desperately to any platitude that gives them the least comfort, snarling like rabid animals at any fact that might commit the outrage of contradicting their increasingly erratic worldview. These are people who are offended by facts, who are indignant over reality. But rather than committing themselves to any real change, they have determined to believe whatever is easiest for them to believe and, from that point, push an agenda that is positively senseless and incoherent.

They live in a make-believe America that doesn't exist. And as such, if politicians respond to their perceived voter clout, they will see the enactment of make-believe policy that only makes sense in that make-believe world. Can't be good for the rest of us in Actual America, can't be good for the Actual World, can't be good for our Actual Civilization. I mean, just look at Arizona.

It's ironic to me that, in the press, the staunch, oblivious middle-Americans who appear to be flocking to the Tea Party in droves are characterized as "disillusioned" voters. I think, more precise would be to say "hyper-illusioned" voters, maybe even "delusional" voters--that is, fed up with America's problems they may sincerely be, they still have failed to recognize those problems for what they are and have turned to a set of imbecilic platforms as the way out. Like libertarians (read: narcissistic conservatives whose political worldview did not mature after ninth grade), their ideas have become based on adolescent, knee-jerk sound-byte politics. Aside from the astonishing idiocy of their platforms, one is hard-pressed to find any actual depth to them either.

For a group of people who have to believe pretty hard in order to keep their leaky worldview afloat, they sure haven't given themselves a heck of a lot to buy into. When you clear out the puffery, it's hard not to just laugh at their ideas. It's also hard not to openly weep when you set their ideology right next to the facts.

If there really is a threat to our civilization, it's that civilization will choke to death on this glut of overbred, submoronic fact-phobic provincialists who've become so insulated from reality by media, platitude, and redecorated Bronze Age superstition, that they, like a cancer, cease to function as contributing cells, but just fatten and multiply and whine and piss themselves and abuse democracy with their dreamworld policy-platforms. Like human cholesterol, they will choke the arteries of life with their slimy faith, counterproductive behavior, glorified selfishness, and near-constant indignation.

It will be a slow crawl to extinction with these people at the helm, but it will be an agonizing one.

We need civilization chemo...

Where are the fucking zombies? My apocalyptic future scenario featured zombies. I was promised zombies. Where are they?




...maybe the Tea Baggers are the zombies.

Line up the meatbags. Don't bother to write lines for them.

My feelings upon viewing the A Nightmare on Elm Street re-make can be summed up as: an acceptable horror movie in most respects, doesn't hold a candle to the original, lots of missed potential, boring characters were not believable as teenagers.

Every time I see a horror movie I come away with more and more certainty about the biggest problem with modern horror cinema, whether it's a remake of a classic or an original property--the characters almost without exception suck balls.

Hollywood writers seem to have a fetish for filling their movies to the gills with 'everyman' and 'everywoman' characters. These characters are simply repositories for cliched writing, uninspired dialogue, clumsy stereotyping, and lowest-common-denominator personality traits.

I've thought about this a lot. I suppose there are several good reasons to do this.

One, assuming your intended audience really is incredibly stupid and unable to identify with a character without hamfisted personality cues to set them up, it's maybe possible everyman/woman characters are the only characters people are able to comprehend anymore. I don't necessarily believe this, but...I occasionally see people when I go outside. It isn't pretty...

Two, it's real easy to write these characters. Hell, they may even have an automatic method for writing them in bull sessions: assign each hackneyed and boring personality trait an integer number between 0 and 9 (such as occupation, motivation, mind-numbing platitude of choice, # of loved ones that need to be saved) and then use the random number generator on your calculator.

Let's see...ah! Married fireman with extreme protective disposition towards dogs believes all babies are special, has nine children to save from monster.

Third, these characters generate so little sympathy, empathy, emotional response, or even mild interest, that they are able to more efficiently carry out their role of walking, exposition-spouting meatbags whose only purpose is to die in incredibly contrived, yet largely uninspired ways. This is even easier if CGI is employed instead of a single bottle of karo syrup. Cuts down on the mess and/or creative exertion.

Eh. My dissappointment knows no bounds.

Fundamental Untruth

Once one admits to oneself that he or she no longer believes in a particular platitude, there will come the realization that one never really believed in it in the first place. The real solidity of any platitude depends entirely on one believing that they really believe. With such clarity, it becomes apparent that you wasted your time trying to convince yourself you believed in something simply because you were too fucking lazy to confront the alternative.

That's the problem with falsehoods. They are easy to comprehend. They are comforting. They strike one as worthwhile to at least pretend belief in, even if only to ignore the alternative.

Falsehoods almost always employ gross oversimplifications of reality as one of their premises. They swallow quite easily.

The alternatives to a falsehood (I will not call them truths) are not easy for the mind to comprehend. They require thinking. As one grows older, one is required to constantly revise one's world view. The alternatives tend to leave people on their own to make their own way.

Hell, it's not even really that the alternatives are 'bleak' or 'scary' or induce suicidal nihilism as many people like to pretend they do. It's just that they are hard to think about, and require you to think about them for a long time.

But that's how it is. Death isn't any easy thing. But platitudes only allow people to escape from what death is. It isn't supposed to be easy. It isn't supposed to come factory-sealed with a bunch of irrational outs that make you feel better.

That's what has pissed me off so much about people well-wishing me. Fuck you. There isn't some 'better place' where dead loved ones go. They aren't 'smiling down' or 'still with us' or any of that shit. Dead loved ones are fucking dead. The stuff they are made of no longer does the same stuff it used to do and so that particular condition of matter--consciousness--is no longer possible. Life is just an event, a single event in a universe full of almost unbelievable events. Some of the crazy shit that happens in this universe occurs on scales we can barely comprehend. The universe is much, much fucking bigger than us.

How can anyone grieve to any healthy extent with all this Lifetime movie, Ghost-Whisperer mumbo jumbo floating around? With well-meaning idiots trying to convince you that the person who has died (i.e. reverted to inert matter), has only really 'gone some other place?'

I'm kind of rambling now, but I want to make one other point: when some religious sackhead gives me the tired old litany of "evolution says life is just a random accident" I rebut on two fronts. My first reply is the more obvious: the above notion is the result of a complete misunderstanding of the theory of evolution. Speciation is not random or accidental. Natural forces act on individuals in a species and, along with the genetic variation guaranteed to individual organisms by the process of sexual reproduction, some level of random mutation makes individuals of a species slightly different. Some of those differences have no effect on survival or on ability to produce offspring. But those variations that do have an effect will either be lost from that species because the individuals bearing those traits do not survive or reproduce, or they will be preserved or even amplified in that species because those individuals bearing those traits will be apt to survive better or will reproduce more. Over time, the species will change as it accumulates more and more variations. This process just happens, the same way a bunch of dead trees growing on the precipice of a valley will be acted on by wind and gravity to eventually fall into the valley and roll to its bottom. Do we then say that some designer thought it would look nicer if all the wood lay at the bottom of the valley?

Seriously, even non-religious people when talking about evolution make the mistake of personifying Nature (capital n?). It is not an anthropomorphic force with a goal or a thought process! It's just stuff happening.

But the other front on which I take issue with the whole 'life is a random accident' objection of the religious to the reality of biological evolution is that to even call life an accident implies that life is some kind of special or abberant event that has any real consequence on a cosmic scale.

It doesn't. When the earth is barren of life, when the sun becomes too bright for photosynthesis to occur in about 500 million years; or even later when the sun enters the red dwarf stage after finally using up all its available hydrogen and begins fusing helium, consquently swelling up to engulf our planet; or even later when its possible that the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our own and its gases and matter will feed the black hole at the center of our galaxy, which will then emit so much high-energy radiation that it will likely blast our galaxy apart, or even later when the entropic process at work in the universe is finally complete and there is no longer any energy left in the universe, just inert matter--it won't have mattered that we humans were ever here, or that any living organism ever lived here. The event of life will have had less consequence on the other bodies and objects in our universe than even the planetary collision of a single smallish comet. Our advent and passing will certainly have far less consequence than the advent and passing of our sun. Accident, life is not. Life is simply an event, and a minor one at that.

So, you're here now. What the fuck are you gonna do while consciousness is possible as a result of this insignificant event?

I know what I'm going to do.

It involves heavy metal, road trips, beautiful summer days, horror movies, shooting zombies, beer, friends, family, and good food. And hopefully, casual sex. All pre-marital.

I know what I'm not going to do: I will not live in a dreamworld of platitudes that are maintained for my ignorance and comfort. I will not egotistically convince myself that there is some special plan for me and that the universe is anything other than indifferent to my existence. I will not cloud my perception with wishful thinking about the necessity and specialness of human life or any life, or convince myself that there is some vaporous essence of my personality separate from my all-too-real fleshy body and brain, or worry about some ethereal, vague immortality. I will not delude myself with notions about some 'force' or 'creator' operating in the cosmos that has a design for me.

I'm just gonna be here, learn what I can because our brains happen to be wired for curiosity; create things, because our brains derive pleasure from creating things; and fucking chill.

Fuck you for expecting anything else.

Prologue, A Fungus Among Us

4am call. Some kind of disturbance at the Sewerage and Water Department's big treatment facility on West Jefferson. Reports of gunfire.

Two cars are called to the scene. Dispatch routes the calls with customary unconcern.

The bruise black sky is just starting to bleach an imperfect purple. Chill of early spring. Frost and crusted, scummed snow caking the curbs, alleyways, icing a pile of overstuffed trash bags.

Lertog stares down at the white coffee container in his hands. The cruiser breezes down the empty, frigid streets. A landscape dead and alien; forlorn buildings laced with inscriptions of filthy snow. Interplanetary cold. Stale corpse of winter in the city.

The engine has a faint knock. McKenzie drives absently.

Lertog can see white mist pluming thinly on McKenzie's breath. The car is too cold. McKenzie always leaves the heat off. He's also mouth breathing again. Lertog shivers disgustedly and goes back to staring at the coffee container.

The disconsolate drive climaxes half-heartedly with a rasp of balding tires on gravel, headache-inducing blue-red strobe of cruiser lights. Buller and Wentlock are already out of their cruiser, standing with arms flat to their sides and heads hunched as if making themselves smaller will fool the cold into overlooking them.

Sighing heavily, Lertog heaves himself out of his seat and swaggers over to his companions. McKenzie takes his time joining.

"No sound right now. I don't hear shit."

"Maybe it's over. Call in the cleaners and go home?"

"Come on, fat ass."

The four men trundle across the lot towards the sullen orange lights of the treatment facility. A few vehicles are scattered about, all dark, all shapeless. A battered Buick swims into view, cheerily declaring "Jesus is coming. Look busy" through a shroud of dried slush.

The lights on the towers above pulse on and off, the red eyes of a nodding beast.

A vacant parking kiosk. No attendant. No guard.

The structure looms ahead, all overhanging girders, rusty steel turrets, razorwire fences. The fleshless skeleton of the nodding beast. The men reach a companionway, clatter along it indifferently, not looking at each other, not speaking. Paying attention only to their feet, the darkness, and the cold.

Lertog uneasily eyes the service way ahead and takes another swig of coffee. Lukewarm. Tasteless and brown. He reaches down and checks his gun. The butt is freezing, sucking a little more warmth out of his bones.

The cold and dark make him feel like he is swimming through slushy murk.

Buller suddenly calls out.

"Police! We are responding to your call!"

His voice barely reverberates off the sullen steel and concrete. No answer.

"Is anyone injured?"

Wentlock turns around and looks at McKenzie and Lertog. Mutters to himself before yelling.

"Put down your weapons. We are police officers!"

Still no reply. The shivering quartet continues down the companionway, seeming to shrink smaller into themselves. Lertog tosses his empty coffee cup over the rail.

Even in the cold, the reek of the water treatment vats assaults his nose. Sharp, astringent chemicals. Noxious, lush smell of waste and living things.

A large open bay emerges from the stony gloom. Hulking halfway through, an orange smear in the chilly glow of the arc lamps--a small work truck. Its windows are slimed with fog. The ragged black paint on its utility rack a dull sketch against the scummy chill of the air.

Buller yells out some more, but his voice receives no answer through the gelid cold.

The officers creep in through the bay. Lertog unholsters his gun. Its chill is now vaguely reassuring. The others take it as a signal. Buller looks about to call out again, thinks better of it.

The orange light seems to distort the air inside the facility proper. A confusion of piping and valves, concrete and sheet metal all around them. A sign says "No Unauthorized Access" with grim finality.

Another declares "no smoking."

The smell of sewage slithers around them, punctured sickeningly by bitter chemical odors. Lertog's face screws up involuntarily, a solid reek of chlorine flooding his awareness. McKenzie is breathing hard, through his gaping mouth.

Ahead, a shapeless tangle spread out on the steel floor. Wentlock and Lertog move up quickly, navigating a knot of heavy pipes and yellow safety rails. Several bodies are strewn crazily, a snarl of flung limbs and twisted torsos. Yellow hardhats litter the spaces between them.

Wentlock grimaces. Lertog just stares and chews his lip. "We got bodies. Get the fuck over here, fat ass."

McKenzie heaves up behind, panting like a pig. He takes a step back suddenly. Lertog looks down and sees the blood blooming outward toward his feet. It is dark and gluey in the cold. It spreads leisurely, putting out sticky red tendrils, dotted with little steel islands from the floor pattern.

Lertog moves back, gingerly.

Buller snaps to alertness, somehow dialing up his professional demeanor by another several degrees. His gun straightens, pointing at the ceiling.

"Put down your weapons and come out, now! Police! Come out now! Show yourselves immediately!"

Christ. Submit to the law, submit to the law, Lertog thinks.

He looks down at the bodies. They are riddled with bullet holes. He doesn't understand why someone would shoot another human being with so many bullets. These men are practically spaghetti strainers.

Each one bears several wounds in their torsos and carelessly tossed limbs. They also each have a gaping gunshot wound to the head. Lertog eyes one or two of the discarded hard hats. A few are pierced, dented, cracked.

His eyes search the carnage, following the knotted thread of twisted bodies and glutinous blood. Off to the side is another body. This one different. Lertog hisses sharply. McKenzie steps around him.

"Jesus," he breathes.

The man is ripped to pieces, literally. His intestines form a ropy map of crisscrossing innards on the patterned steel. He is opened all the way up to the rib cage. Part of his throat is torn out, frayed hunks of gristle hanging from the ugly wound, a boulevard of blood painting a wide, crimson lane around his head, like a clotted halo.

Near his left hand is a large caliber handgun.

Peppering the floor around the corpse, stuck in the froth of coagulating blood, are spent .45 cartridges.

"Our shooter?"

"Christ, what did they do to him?"

"Who the fuck did this to him?"

"How the fuck???"

Buller sweeps the carnage with practiced determination. Lertog shakes his head impatiently, irritated. Every hair is standing on end. He just wants to get the fuck out of here.

He begins to finger the action on his gun nervously, looking around. No sounds. Every glint of orange on the surrounding forest of pipes seems to harbor an ambiguous threat.

McKenzie murmurs, his deep voice sticking. "What happened to their eyes?

Not yet caffeinated.

He was a typical Macomb County lowlife, tall, ugly, and shaped like Grimace. His truculence was perfectly balanced by bovine complacence.

Despite being fat, he still managed to wear clothes two sizes too large for him (I'm not much on fashion, but I think you have a problem when they start putting coefficients in front of the X's on your clothestags). He'd thrust his head into an ill-fitting baseball cap, the bill curled into an Ohm sign, the edges threatening to pin down his eyelids. It looked like it hadn't been removed since 1995. A shapeless tan Cardhardt jacket further obscured his bulk--must hide inside it year-round, like a hermit crab.

For decoration he wore a lonely little patch of curly hair on his chin. Yep, just on his chin, as if that one little touch could repair all the damage his face had done.

He probably either worked in construction or auto repair, or he was unemployed. He had no use for education, no use for the arts, and consequently, he loved commercial rap and only had enough of an attention span to sit through TV ads sparsely interrupted by basketball.

He would be a huge sports fan, but wouldn't be able to play (on account of his bad knee, which he blew out in junior high [on account of being fat and raised on Arby's and Mountain Dew]). For fun he might go up to Buffalo Wild Wings with his crew, but mostly he'd prefer to stay in his apartment or trailer, smoke grass clippings that smelled like diarrhea, and show off his expanding vocabulary on the internet.

OMG.

U r a fag.

If curiosity really killed the cat, this guy would live forever.

Fortunately, heart disease gets first bid on curiosity's leftovers.