If yer into listening to music while you read, may I suggest the prescribed background music for this piece, Cosmic Interment Camps and Allegiance. (played one after the other). These mp3s can be found free at http://techra.elephantus.com.
I think that if you weigh the many options, you’re going to just
love your time at the local cosmic internment camp. There’s one on
every corner, for every persuasion of man, woman, and child—and you
can choose from a myriad of concentrations to ease your monkey
brain. Thrill as the monotony of life rips your pudding mind into shards
of icantdothat, falling to modules of sweet—oh—my—darling,
clementime. There are lines being drawn, and it’s either on the
sidewalk, subject to the mystery we must shirk or destroy, or on a fast
elevator to the top floor going up, up, up.
Surrender now, or our precious way of life may forever be in
peril. Without the drive to succeed, the motivation for upward
mobility—the entire system is in ruin, the world imperfect and not to
the standards of the Consortium.
I too came here seeking gainful employment when I was only a
Lad; the Interaction Corps not being my inclination, I knew I had to do
something socially penetrating. Be someone. I couldn’t find a way to
define that someone myself, so I molded my life in the image of our
camp’s founder, Edible Lawrence—I read the mythologies, how the
President sat beneath the plastic gangrene trees on an Empire State Building waiting room sofa. Drinking a whole pot of coffee, stirring it
with his butterscotch biscotti. The lights went dim and he was
confronted by a pulsating soundsnake, kaleidoscopic in portents of
aural indiscretion, giving him three weighted options: confirm his belief
and dedication to the high cocolorum of the shady trees above him
("But it’s plastic" he forgot to think) -- following its humanistic path to
the end of all dreams, and all nightmares -- to create a life in its
artificial image. Option #2: Without trepidation, without reluctance
allow the snake to puncture him, forever sanctioning himself drowned
in an archaic network of pulsation and tangential correlation—full
release from the world at command. Or, option #3: "Install a local
cosmic internment camp, offering these three options to every asshole
that walks in, recruiting as many followers of venture creed as
possible."
Well, as I said, I wanted to follow in the President’s mighty light-
filled footsteps. So I hooked my self in as a recruiter, spreading the
message. They call us Unselective Devotion Outputs—and we can’t
spread ourselves too thin.
You’ve been prepped by your schoolings of the shattered bell that
rings for everyone—and that trajectory has led you to this place. So
what’s it going to be? You’ve got to make a decision. It’s either on the
sidewalk, or off the sidewalk.
"What about the 2nd option?"
"The 2nd option?—"
"Yeah," said Bobby Masters, the blue boy wonder, hoodie pulled
over his doe-stuttered eyes, "the middle path. To shits with the cosmic
interment camps, I want to find my place amongst the cosmos!"
"I fear I do not understand that as a valid option. Try again,
Bobby Masters."
"You said you wanted to follow in the footsteps of your
president. You said he was confronted with the opportunity to make a
choice between three options: a) homogenization, b) severance, and
c) incorporation. He made a choice."
"He made the only choice. There were no other options," the
recruiter blabbered.
"—for you. Step aside, granddaddy and let Bobby Masters show
you how it’s really done."
Bobby Masters pulled back the delicate fabrics of consensus
Reality that muddied his blue hood, previously obstructing his face.
Bobby was a boy, bowl-cut. His eyes alternating between violets and
emeralds in tandem with the twist and hum of the machinery that
made the camps possible, he continued "there’s a choice, and they are
not limited to those three options."
"Honestly, Mr. Masters!"
"Honestly, Dick. I mean it."
The mystery was not his alone, and he felt no impedance upon
sharing it with others. "You can’t copyright a particular version of the
world, offering it in busted cans and packages. And though I
personally have nothing against the concept of a logo or emblem, you
can’t imprison the lifeblood of a thousand wandering sheep, thinking
their shepherds inside a well-advertised package of mass murder and
lemmingism. Categorization and configuration into menageries and
compartments will capsize your collective interests. Reflect chaos, and
you reflect the will of unobstructed nature. I refuse to stand here idle
and allow the Cosmic Internment Camps to continue."
And with that, Bobby Masters walked through me slowly, like a
virus passing from one membrane to the next--leaving the way he
came in. I like my job. It brings me comfort knowing that I spread the
joys of marketeering to the world, transaction by transaction, iota by
iota. We claim to hold court for every persuasion of man, woman, and
child. I’m sure we’ll have a place for Bobby Masters as well.
__________________________
Bobby Masters lived in the basement of his parent’s home, in a
suburb of a placeless place. His house made of stuttered bricks and
ectoplasmic forces, which dripped settling on his amplified-data brain
while sleeping—dreaming dreams that belonged to long since past
fishermen, artists, and foremen. Down the street from his house, a
watch factory exhumed the oily odor of time, which crept into the
lethargy-filled lives of every suffering inhabitant.
Bobby plugged himself into his hifi, sat down in front of the TV –
popped in the home-console edition of the Episodic Vibrations of
Techra, and let his mind wander. Had he parents watching out for him,
looking from the top of the staircase leading into the basement, they
would have seen his image flicker as he passed from one world to the
next. All the while his chapped hands grasping a black rubber joystick-
-orange guidelines pointing every which way to heaven and back.
And didn’t the episodic vibrations flutter? The Triangular Dissids
approach and retract, growing like spongy membranes of emotional
spuncake sourcesauce ,8,1– the flitters, the jitters. Infinite-pixel-width
grid-based reality modification devices and willful manipulation of
mindsilence ingrained outgained headache tomato punch. ,8,1 Pull out
the threads from your worn sweaters, envision a secluded place, that
far off place inside your mind that you may have never seen but have
always known is there—put yourself there, in the Waiting Room, and
look out to the scary world through prismed windows, trembling.
Further. Deeper. More towards the owl’s eye, you encounter the
marblic encasing of the previously exclusive baby glasses vision --
thought island tangents of insurmountable passages, language
reengineering, spreading uniquely. Bobby Masters. The video game
trajectory legend. His name in bubble letters ground to a metallic plate
that-- oozing in bits and data—narratives and regress, each letter
vibrantly moving in motion to the kinetic hifi. Slowly pulses a story
about a story about a story that’s been going on all along. The story’s
the same. ,8,1 Bobby Masters, always along for the ride. Bobby
Masters. Closer. Penetrating closer. To as it is, what it is and other
phrases. If you hate the words, but want to act like you love
them.
From one place to another. From one story to the next.
EPISODIC VIBRATIONS
Reality Modification Device Operating System
Command? LOAD “*”,8,1
Nine years old, plugged in, searching through the labyrinths of
knowledge and information. Which, always wanting to be free—floats
through multiple minds hooked onto the vast network that makes up
the Dissid. LAN parties of Commodores and sea captains—Tommy
Tutor and VIC-20, tinkling wine glasses and taking tokes together in
the corner. Classic but reborn. A sensual atlas gives way to an
intangible flame beneath pop culture’s mess of icons and itemization, a
core of a purple skied world emerges over a pulsating island of
language.
The roar in his stomach. The concatenation in his head. A reality
formed in SQL statements and closed-source operating systems
teeter-tottering transparently while no one noticed. Those who did had
not the energy to put forward to alter the imprisonment ,8,1.
And then, a dinner table. The sentating spiral galaxies sitting in the
head chair, plate of aqua-colored thundercat underroos being eaten
with a fork. His voice is strong and commanding while Bobby Masters
feels like he himself is a water fountain, water pouring through his
metallic mouth to a young boy’s waiting intestinal passages. "It’s your
life!" the angry giant seemed to tell him, the room turning to shards
and pieces of what accounted for vision and ocularity, clarity to Bobby
Masters in infinite repetition.
And as he got closer to the very *.* and ,8,1 of it all, as the crystal punctured the
muscularity of language and static waves of visual hemorrhaging decapitated to a tonal
inebriation—he saw each single worry and purpose drop before his eyes, the secret of
living revealed: Though the world unfortunately has no ultimate meaning and purpose,
you’ve got to pretend like it does—like hey man, for reals though.
I could almost see the faint torque in my mind as I realized why we
give children the choice—why the Consortium formed laws stating that
every mentally adept child of nine must be given the opportunity to
opt out in the activities of our particular vision of reality. I've been
trained time and again to identify those we could consider of unsound
mind, those criteria designed by the Consortium in response to
authentic recessive eras—But Bobby Masters doesn’t work that way. I
can name a dozen attributable criteria, but I confess that I do not find
Mr. Masters of unsound mind.
Bobby Masters awoke to the waiting room. I woke with him.
Bobby screamed. I screamed with him.
He’s been here all along, beneath the plastic trees and the
tangerine papered walls, a hot sun burning as if a cobweb in the
corner, the steady sound of fax and copy machines in a symphony of
torment and insanity, expulsive pollution buzz of computers and ham
radios, refrigerators and phones, buyers and sellers, condiments and
fries, the smell of money and the erection of capital, museums of
wounded victims in his fight for societal difference. And he, Bobby
Masters, boy wonder and tender footed champion of the Techran
forces, in search always of the Triangular Dissids of Issid, wherever,
whatever, whoever they’d be – made a choice, and I could understand
why. I always do.
He’d always feared no one would be there when he’d done
something right. But when he finally had to go it alone, Bobby smiled.
He didn’t care he was alone. But he decided to act as if he did.
Bobby Masters pledged an allegiance. He did not offer his piece
to a misspelled nametag and a leather portfolio. He forfeited not a
single right or freedom. He did not trade a forest for a fireplace, a life
for a dinner. Bobby, as usual, he just played it cool.
He disappeared. And I almost forgot all about him.
I like my job. I sit in my office ,8,1. When I sleep, I see what
Bobby sees, I can’t help it. I’m not sure of what to make of this world
anymore; I’m scared that I may fall to pieces, losing my job. Losing
who I am. I fear the dreams will stop, and I’ll confuse myself for being
the Cosmic Internment Camps again. I take comfort in my buildings.
My television and car. According to the Consortium I was found unfit at
nine to make the Choice. The Choice was made for me. I still don’t
know what judgments gave me this life. And I don’t know whether I
like it, but I’m going to pretend as if I do.
In every culture there’s the story about the man who went to
heaven, sat amongst the godstars and fallacies, cut through the
bullshit and saw it all for what it really was. Always when they come
back the world taunts, reams and destroys them. Calls the
truth—insanity, dementia, falsified claims of untestifiable nature. They
spade the fuckers. Delete *.*, insert shit_reason here, lonesomeness
there. Sweet clementime and the pledge of allegiance to cover it all
up.
I hope, for his sake, Bobby Masters doesn’t come back. He deserves
his place amongst the cosmos.
Imploding clouds surround me. My mind it splits like an atom –
When worlds merge, there is oscillation. And we’re just its episodic
Vibrations, phasing between man, ape, and microorganism. The
formality of actually occurring, my body lilted and transparent--I float
away in a mess of words, my entire sentence, sedated.