Circle of caring

So completely sober, or as sober as i ever am, i started this project where i auto-stim a psychedelic journey from which i can learn.

I'd been reading wacky but reasonable versions of the plant-induced variety with accompanying sides of terror and physical revulsion.

But why? All of that only goes to show that the brain is perfectly capable of doing that all on its own, and that it may actually be always doing that anyway without our ever noticing.

So I surrendered to the colors and shadow anyone might notice with their eyes closed or partially rolled back into the head, relaxing.

The trip reports had mentioned being carried along on a current that you can't stop. I thought of the swollen stream rushing past right outside my door and what it would be like to be on it.

Distracting thoughts for me, a ruminator, don't have to be chased down, and my morbid imagination is not afraid of and indeed occasionally produces scenes of carnage and destruction, as does any red blooded. So i was not afraid, but that did not happen. There was lucidity as in partial dreaming.

But then i remembered my own last experience with a bio-halucinogen: the very real sense of another presence, not a cartoon guide frog sitting on a stump, but something round that was just next to me and actually overlapping into my own head, so like my head was a Venn diagram, except both halves living and potentially aware of one another, at least i of it.

Now tho as i hung my head in frustration, wishing for the ego obliteration splinters of which were variously described as lighting, ants, fractured bisected perspectives, no instead my hand on my head became the hand of that thing. It was my left hand and the thing had been intersecting with my left brain.

The hand was familiar and maybe it was someone i knew who is dead and earlier, even before the experiment, i had been experimenting with prayer and reflecting on how it's different from talking to the dead, and whether or not talking to the dead was more dangerous than prayer. Which assumes more agency? etc.

The hand not only held my head while I wept but let me bury my face in it and felt my face as if it had not felt it for many years and wanted to remember. It's not like i never feel my own face.

Lately also i've been saying thanks to my previous self: "Thanks, past self," and really meaning it. I do something that will help out later like putting the groceries where I can find them again, and it's a pain in the ass while i am doing it but i feel like i need to say thanks to that person for going to the trouble because so often everything seems like a lot of goddamn trouble but sometimes i find the energy to do it anyway because i respect my future self that much at least or at least have the optimism to expect there to be a future self.




Dr. Donna Thong
"Doing my time on the Chang K. Chang Chank Drunk Tank Chain Gang."

4 classifications

Hey Sylvia

Spotted you out in the CCC parking lot this afternoon snapping clouds with your long-ass lenses and your convertible looking cool.

Your story: world is divided into following classifications: annoying, agitating, exasperating, and upsetting.

Yet there you were maybe grooving or maybe gathering evidence.

And then those of us who survived
realizing nevertheless how sluttily
chilling in the dez on mandated recreate

Remainder of world gaydom reeling
but seasonally flooding the pool
may they take home some flavor

of days when men roamed live
like it was life's last laugh
every night a glowing surfeit

alcoholic firebrand drumkits
there was this was a counterculture
so many soft-cotton swaddled dicks

everyone a similar golden color
workers were crowning paramount
unlimited beer and cigarettes

now freeze dried forever, a residual
fanciness, snide or glassy earnest,
not flannel or denim in that sense.


Love, Tom

to shake and pray

Hyperbole soothes my emotion sickness;
I have behaved as jane fonda in the morning after,
Meryl streep in she devil, alternately
Wracked with laughter and sudden bitter sobs,
Hugging herself, her own elbow bones, against
the illuminated wall hanging of a drink tumbling
down mountain boulders in chiffon-slick streams,
light wheels working a mill house under blue plastic.
What I share with womanhood around the world,
Even in its masculine expressions, is the fortitude
to shake and pray and rock and sing to my babies.

by Donna

Cuernavaca

Cuernavaca, under key and lock, a
passenger in his own custody for
so many gin-rocks that his massage chair
could have flown to Mexico, but they
wunt be enough air in the city for he
and his ex, who would talk about him.

They'd met at an enchilada party, shared
an edible guac basket. They breathed the
smoky ambient grease in and out and
bobbed in their pelvises to a dvd-rom.
Mouth-rolled cigarette filters littered
themselves freely on small lamp tables.

Who does it make you, a pino with no
woods, Cuernavaca? If spring birds
never seen you then what's yr name?
Are yor lungs still clenched with the
wisp of char that yr breath took away?
Cuernavaca, la enchilada ya no te quiere.

Swords for Olives

it's a perfick place for us:
where today is gone and tomorrow yet to become;
cheque the other mammals pacing.

locked in a dark ball, some teens'd
scream, grope, roll. All heroes see
night as best, either for rest or manufacture.

then when they grow old, hanging on
and that alone might seem the likely approach,
but no, it's a planetarium, a gyroscope.

Wayne
"I reelie, reelie just don't give a shit, Jan."

Joy Laffter

Joy Laffter shows up at Ted's in big sunglasses with a box just as the sun's popping behind Chukka chank. Her blonde wig is human hair, a little frizzy. She stands there in nothing but a black pantsuit but for a khaki parka instead of the jacket. The vest gives it a tank-top affect. Ted answers the door, all negroid with maroon-rimmed eyes. Peggy was seeing so much red his blood seemed to swirl on the wrong side of the skin. Who are you? asks Ted, on his day off, after a couple of mad dogs. Joy Laffter, Peg responds. Her lips are pink-orange. And she steps on in.

So this is your dive. The back of her parka flutters cape like.

Ms. Laffter. I have an office. I'll give you an autograph outside.

I have something for you.

Ted takes the box.

Then all the eaters of the world swarm out. They cover his flesh except for his mouth. They have evolved to let a man scream during dinner because it makes him taste better.

Interview with a Captain of Industry

"Looking for yr fren David?"

"Yes, I know it's last call, but..."

"Who's got a call butt?"

"Have you seen him?"

"Per my advice, he'll be arriving shortly in Gary, Indiana."

"Far."

"I'd say."

"Well, I've got five dollars. Can I buy you a White Russian?"

"I'll take that drink and offer you a job."

"What's yr name?"

"I hear yor a mediocre ho."

"It's what some say."

"But yr better than that."

"Don't you love Kaluhua?"

"Some glamour, but more regular."

"It's in Gary, yr operation?"

"It affected my amygdala, actually."

"Mom'll wanna know where I've gone."

"It'll hep you get a loan on a hooptie."

"With a visor mirror?"

"I told you you wr jus right."

Empathic Implant Report

Empathic Implant Report: Birth Boot
Mod#GAYSHINER89.1-6.10 Glass n’ Foolz Gold Filament
WD40

Sun about 80% of the way down, straight ahead. Visor employed. Two men about 20 years apart stand close enough to touch in a V facing me. They both have long goatees: one is grey, and the other is red.

A trailer with silver stripes frames them in back. A campfire oranges up the nic-stain faces. Subject A waves. “Hey Micah howya doin!” it says. It gives too loud and too fast even at 50 yards, its movements cartoonish. Pfist is projecting a man who is giving himself to you and fighting you. He acts as tho he would perform fellatio and shoot you for having let him do it.

Flakes can be found easy in trailers. Rolling up to the big one, made clean with stucco, there were the bitches. La La’s eye fur is bruising in mocking tear blobs. She sports a fresh jaw bone from the carcass of an escaped embra kid. M’Lady comes fullallopping up to the truck and scratches the trim with her gnarly black foot pads. Amygdala has some degenerative hip going on and smiles her painful greeting with fangs.

Sometimes her eyes glow red, as if she’s in a spoiled foto. She nods her head toward wherever there’s trouble, never taking them off you. Her front legs are permanently mangled into a hug. I, too, have a disease of giving.

Mike and Jan came out to help lug groceries and my cameras, tripods. Pfist runs up pulling out a gun. I’m caught with sun in my eyes for a moment-- too many glinting metal objects. Jan and Pfist take me down to the vegetable garden and set up an empty 2-liter PowerShiv bottle. "Shiv" is any worldly comfort that simulates death.

Jan’s clothes are apparently meant only to constrict her hottest parts. There is not much warmth or protection. She feels this intimately when she shares her eyes with you. She is always scrubbed clean and ready for sex. She passes out $100 bills coming back from the casino. She and her kids once lived with Wayne, or Jack. There she is posing with the tiny Colt Automatic 25.

I get my training with a beer and fire off the only copper pellet in the clip. La La & M’Lady’d followed us down and laid there patiently in the rows. I’m standing like a cap’m on a ship or ready for a big-star bow while jazz dancing. Ball went high on the kick, made an explosion in the sand, and the girlz jump a good 10 feet. From there my moral standards were set for the weekend.

The next step was to run shiv for the whole mountain. It was the only thing Mike was out of except butter, mayonnaise, vinegar, salad dressing or any other balm or salve for things that raise themselves from the ground. Me and Pfist take to the truck for the local PharmSupply.

There’s a flake in the road who rents out his Caterpillar and a day’s work. He’s walking three giant mastiffs in the dust, one of them in an empty saddle. Hey, Joe! You don’t remember me, but we dug a hole for a whole lot of cattle. And a dog. And a cabron. Which went in first. It must have been 20 feet down. Perfick on his knees, a bowing pony clown. And then a Dalmatian. With the bullet stigmata. I had to fling it by the ankles. It ended in the predatory pose gravity'd chosen: teeth dead across the back of the old goat’s neck; legs struck, spread so hard as to pop the nails. We used to call it Death Farm 3000. Say—you were the one in the cockpit that time, on yr backloader!

No, I don’t remember you.

The Flake in the Road squinted into the extended cab. Nope. Who are you? I could hear Phyllis, my editor, cackling in the auditory node. On the way back Joe was walking in the same direction but about 100 yards behind where he’d been.

The liquor store guy reached for his alarm when Pfist came in and they both started laughing. Pfist starts to rant: I hate you! Everything’s free today! I want that, that, and that! while I get the libations. And one of those, please. At a discount! Pfist chimes in, then quiets down. Yeah, guy knows me. I beat up a flake in here. He was, he was touching chillun. He’s doing time now.

Get the phuck out of my store, liquor-guy stage yells. Yeah phuck you brother. I’ll see ya now. Pfist smiles like Clark Gable. Pfist is OK! the guy says. Are we all done here, I ask him.

Back refreshing remnants of our earlier cloud, we rumbled out of town again and toward the stucco trailer. Cactus whiz past so close they could give Pfist a ruddy shave while he sounds off in the open winda. Yeah, he was coming in, and me and some friends were coming in, and he says here come the snitches. I say good cum goes to things who wait. Then I was all saying shit and he was all saying shit even more, and then we just let free like when yr drinking and you get to the point where you know it doesn’t make sense, and you just feel this hate, and you just don’t care? Well we were both getting to that point and he hit me and I hit him and knocked him on the floor, and then I beat him up until he got knocked out. He was all blood and drool. And I said, “I’m a felon; I’m on probation, and I can’t even vote. I got some meth, and a gun. I’m goinda jail. I’m goinda jail.” Pfist said this in an exaggercized way that would make you think he was ready to suck your dick or mad and ready to really wail into and murder you or both. The question was when. I felt excited and sad then.

Should I pull my briefs looser in my jeans or mourn my own offing. Back at the ranch we poured the shiv into the rest of the morning coffee and broke up a box of hard brown sugar into stones perfect for casting in with some ice. Skole!! Pfist shined with his mug of beer and played a game of stealing mine at the point of toasting. We were clicking just fine as he let me claim a joke about Johnny Walker and answered Right on Micah, friends for life, or if not, phuck you!! Phuck ya’ hard and in the head!! His glass had raised to cover one eye and wink at me through it.

OK here’s the deal I say. If I die, and it’s of natural causes, you can phuck me in the head. You can phuck my cerebrum. You can phuck me anywhere cuz I don’t care. But if you kill me, no. You can phuck my stinking corpse in the ass but that’s as far as it goes. Hell I can phuck you in the nose for all I care; you can’t do anything about it, says Pfist, who’s pulled in; You’re dead. I’ll come back to haunt you, I keep on. I have friends. They know how my head’s supposed to look. Where the holes are. I’m sure they do; I’m sure they do, wavers Pfist. Man, that’s sick!! You one sick Mthyuh phucker.

Meanwall Jan is done marinating pork steaks. Ooo. What are you guys talking about? That’s sick. Sick Mthyuh phuckers. Jan, you look beautiful, I say hoping to piss off Pfist. She looks at him. Thanks. Pfist gives me a thumbs up with the top row of his teeth pressing on the bottom lip. Taking a piss, I find a bar of baby soap.

Ya’ll have littluns yr not tellin’ about? Nah. Just my baby. The girlz caught her mousing in the bedroom the other night and now she ain’t right. They got her in their teeth. And shook, chimes in Mike, staring at the beets in the salad spinner.

Mike, yor a scientist; why don’t we all go down and have a look? You can tell us, on a scale from one to ten, how grave it is. Pfist wants a wager. I’ve got 8 and 9, him one through 6. Seven is the Wild Savior. 10 is dig a hole, Chihuahua meets its maker.

So after dinner we all tramp on through the stickers to the silver trailer under no moon, just torches. You can see the fabric of stars and boobs and thongs and hear Pfist and me working through the conditions. There is no payment unless my numbers prevail. We call a vet. No responsibility is required in the unlucky event that the scientist pours his tube in the direction of your fate. Mthyuh will be in charge then. But we don’t know yet.

There is a tiny, dobie-like bitch trembling in a pool of yellow light on a 99-cent astro-turf Welcome mat as a space-age altar to the sofa on the mauled and hoary w2w carpet. Get out or pipe down; we can’t hear anything, warns Mike. Yeah you guys, says Jan sitting, looking up and hugging her own naked brown openings. We can’t hear a thing. Get out.

A casino girl and a scientist through an oval plexiglass window. Pfist and I smelt glowing acorn smoke and an accordion RV hose dumping slowly under some oak. Mike'd got his training with a swimming scholarship and a grant from the Preservation Society. He was stroking the pooch and listening hard for a job or sounds of protest when he pressed for trauma and/or seeping. Ouch! Pfist barked at the sill. Bitches get all the attention. The night was still.

Micah
with Phyllis, Embedded

Worship Section

It says here that on Cabaret Night the Chama was serving cocktails to a crowd of tourists in a Carol Channing wig and wacky makeup. When she looked into one of em's eyes and saw a hatchet murder. Now she's coming out as having seen her own ghost through psychic time travel. Sports N' Sex Crimes Bugle is expanding with a section for worshipers. Tom?

Tom stepped out of the bathroom like a robot, glowing in purple light. He seemed to have a bumping soundtrack. Sylvia stood and let the paper sag and watched him stroke the spines on the back of his neck.

Devices

The Can Opener and The Wine Screw

In the wake of a white tornado, two
surface structures abide, ready.
We can wait while the contents of
several different cans bubble tog-
ether in a large can.
Some wine had to be thrown in,
and now the bottle is open.
Perplexing. Staining red hydr-
aulics charged with an acid.

by Hoolie

My Husband is a Rickshaw Driver

Krais I think me air bladder's full, Syl.
Well just don't take to the skies, my love. And walk behind me.
Nothing like a brisk and life-risking stroll t'the hotel after Thanksgiving with the savages.
Do you refer to the motorcycle dodging?
And the blackout and the open pits and filth piles.
Happy Turkey Day, Tom. If yor lucky yule get eaten too.
Did you catch the framed photo of the dumpy colonists and dead tigers?
Hideous. One lain atop another. Lifeless as rugs.
And what about the way they announced our consumption from the minibar to all the other guests in the lobby.
You are ashamed?
There's such as thing as discretion.
In drinking or in collecting drink's wage?
Bastards will gouge you with their handlebars to avoid a stone.
Or maim a dog.
But we've come so they may see, remember.
Or for fear there's nothing for us anywhere.
Yor maudlin as a milk-begging cripple.
Yes, everywhere cows roam free, and yet...
Here we are.

Art Fair Rapist

In my fifties, bare aesthetics will turn to hungry assault.
I'll have less self-control, in proportion to attractiveness.
At a salad bar just the other day, a German tourist near
-ly brot me to my knees on the plastic runway protectin
-g the rug. I was on my first beer, but I could have slain
his frau and drug him home by the hair with a second m-
ug. I vow to haunt art walks, retrospectives, book fairs a-
nd lame conventioneers who are paid to stroll their carne
between miracles of the marketplace and crudités variés.

Promo Script:
Dr. Thong's 10-Minute Day, with No Workout

Living as a Career Bachelorette

Last night's doggie-bag salmon with safflower mayo, squeezed lemon, romaine, salt, dill. Downed with a cold $5 sav-blanc. I got the wrong fork, I know!

2nd course: Reheated spinach linguini. It looks so yella cuz I'd added a ton of turmeric to the bottled pasta sauce along with ground sirloin, fennel, cayenne. Topped from a tiny bottle of Kraft parm from the AM/PM Mini-Mart.

All still welcome at the fortnightly Endangered Foods Summit and Pot-Luck.
Mthyuh Preservation Society HQ, Ritual Death Salon, Partition IV.
1st and 3rd Wednesdays.

Donna

Ass-assination of Amygdala Jones

If you can remember what it was like to be an organ in a wurl without bone around you;
If you can imagine your own medium, what you breathe so to speak, doubling as armor;
If you could see in every direction only by manipulating basically the optic nerve alone;
You would begin to resemble our homegrrl, Amygdala Jones.

You might feel bottom-heavy, like you want to scream, "Don't pick me up!" when he greets you at the airport, knowing yud break. And it's hard to move 2 pair of lobster claws across a polished marble floor with so much weight. Some would call you paranoid. But you're misunderstood.

When yor skin is soft as a toad, the body a shapeshifting load, and your interface, peeled grapes on noodle stilts, is all over the place, you begin to crave solids. Like vasa deferentia, you may only be able to make a difference with a second opinion and the help of additional fluids.

Cumulative parables such as these beg the wisdom of unconditional evolutionary confidence. Amygdala Jones couldn't help putting feelings at the top of her tdhu list. When you haven't any lids and there isn't a drink in sight, one can only hope that tears are general throughout the hood.

Fragment, "To the Student"
Sin-Gaberra Ms., shards 6a-d.
Ass-assination of Amygdala Jones: Princess or Goddess, It's the Same

Taco Party

Hey youse feeling ennui or tragedy but might be wearing developmental pasties on yor nips, Spike TV, mirrored embroidered Rajistanic bedspreads. Yo pet adopted greyhound is running circles around dogfarts in his sleep man. This is the end of his line. Do you feel the wind? Put yor tops away boy. This street is cleared for wide tires and vice sweep only sweetlips. Do you hear his epileptic claws scratching your plastic office chair pad? Here's where you trade mainlined Scottish peat burns for a frozen Mudslide: time for a Taco Party, playboy.

Ken's rash note to Mike after the final swimming blog entry

Amygdala Jones

Was that her under the avalanche of gratuitous accessories and empties at the sidewalk cafe?
Did she never become that buck-tooth, saddle-shod shooter from whom we all long to flee?
Was her rearing not overdetermined by scripture, her apocalyptic destiny given us to slay?
With safety in righteousness, patrimonial soil, swarm this story for your spleen, worker bee!

She shall be known for whatever it is you call a curse which is a name: Malediction?
Since she is technically a goddess, leadership nomenclature splatters out of her everywhere:
"I hold out both my hands, like giving anal polyps: fingerless but ready, fertile, present.
"Imminent, I hold you in my balls, which are fists. My arms, living tubes, can be dicks to you.

Sighing, Peg took off her ridiculously large and fake sunglasses frames, palm rolling a sweaty 7/7 across her forehead for clarity. Listen to that clinking. Sears is going to be here any minute. Shd I try and cram in a nap and say I'm just groggy from dreamin? Or might I go ahead and ride this current/wave of Violade like a Mayfair lady in a white sateen and foxtail cape?

Partial Ch. 4 and notes.
Sin-Gaberra Ms., shard 4c.
Ass-assination of Amygdala Jones: Princess or Goddess, It's the Same

Hystadelic Rejoinder

Sylvia: I don't want to put away dishes with you while you're in your underwear.

Tom (turning toward her in grey boxer-briefs with a sauce pan in one hand and a rat's tail shivknife sharpener in the other): I want to open up some opportunities for you. To talk about what you saw. I know I was all wrapped up in my time experiment, and nothing registered. Not time. Not even horror.

Sylvia: Time lies, you know. It's a liar. Put on some baggy pants and we'll talk.

While waiting, Sylvia stands absentmindedly pressing what seems like her taint against the back of a faux-Rococo dining room chair. It boasts a darkly varnished hardwood patina, and it's downright cocky about its Shorn Crushed Red borganna brusquely shielding all the parts on which one might normally leave prints. Bare-flesh contact with wood, tile, lead causes Sylvia to auto-hypnotize and occasionally seizure. Even through knits, that kind of pressure triggers a not unpleasant hystadelic rejoinder.

Since that first week when Tom began trying to explain his "announcement" about his "Pax on Us" goddess coming to save the middle chanks, it had been over. Now crime was their bond. Tom's agreement with Collie was so strong, the power of his surrender so profound, that they could only dance with the beckoning animal that kept them stepping on. Tom singlemindedly distribute shivplate, stone compasses, Hopinaskipina for his corporment sponsors until his ears bled for lack of Filter of Loathing. Everything was dephallocentri-size now.

Tom: I'm back.

Sylvia (opening her eyes): Oh.

Tom: Are you calm? Why don't you sit on that for a moment.

Sylvia (lowering slowly, bracing herself on the borgana armpads): It was a bird.... It was obscene. You never believed me; no one did, and I lost my job. Now our whole county can't leave, and our essential compositions have shifted dramatically from gaseous to chemical.

[FLASHBACK: Going over the conversation in his mind, Tom recalls a strobe light of important snippets, a bucket of chicken, Patron shots. He squints, and spits. All he can see is her lips talking. What he hears makes him want to make her stop.]

"...one wing, but like a cape. You could say pleathery. White veins...

"...I thought I saw it again last week, but high up. It looked like a letter K. Going backwards. Flying with its legs spread eagle.

"Are you listening, Tom?"

Man's Drink in a Queen's Double Old Fashioned

multi-faceted, I bet you cd tell me
if this rock, that frame, Any Scotch

was real. bet you know how an Ice
Dispenser in a Refridgerator Door

can Bring Heavy cubes smashing in-
to and breaking a Fifty-Dolla water

-ford Lismore Vessel at the Rim In
the shape of a Gaping Lipstick Stain.

--Gone Peggy: Wallowing in Treasure
Los Chanques Condominium Assoc.

"Dee Loop" [the Mp3]

Thought Wash

Shall I sit outside and smoke by the last hour of sun
Or on the information highway in a cathoid-ray tube?

I prefer to forsake insects, mildew, sorrow
for a measured poisoning by light and booze.

These cancers attack from the outside,
Little Dr. Kevorkians teasing your hide.

These scabs you can't remove but at yor peril.
Death hardens and plugs itself for a while.

Smokers Don't Need Fireworks

Tomorrow we're having meat laid on red-hot steel bars over the cinders of aromatic junk wood and brush. We soak it in vine and sear it this way until it is white with pain. Upon removal from its host, we nearly always receive thanks. With those nerves and tendons gone, it can go about its business faith healing and puking on bartops.