I myself remember plopping down this end of The Crack.
I was a kitten in a birth sac.
What poked a hole was the beauty here.
I found a functioning society
paradise and horror side by side
infinite replenishment
We learned in order to survive
to keep our privileges close by
or risk adventure in the boundarylands
Not only do they shit on the community, and not only is it deliberate, but it is also clearly amusing to them personally because you can hear their cackle echoing in the clouds or bouncing off chanks. Why don't they go out to sea.
They do. We have to take the same precautions there. You're right. They crap wherever they want, and wherever they want is often a populated area, and yes, they think it's hilarious.
Our ancestors were wrong to put up with it for all those years.
You forget it was the other way around. K's were queen. We were their transition from hunting and gathering to farming and ranching, and they are the only reason we still even exist because some among them wanted to just keep eating unsustainably.
But now that they're in preserves, they've agreed to stop killing.
True, but we know that many flekes die each year working serving worshiping vacationing in close proximity to K's, and we do not have jurisdiction in those lands. The high chanks, although modern and popular with pilgrims and tourists, are governed entirely by the Mthyuh Preservation Society, a group that also holds an iron grip throughout the Greater Chanks Phenomena on all cultural missions and communications.
You refer to the Filter of Loathing.
I am afraid so. They could decide to simply switch it off.
Their religion, well, our religion would not exist without K's. They are living relics and so holy to the MPS and to the flekes as well.
Are you willing to challenge all of that to avoid a few hours of shoveling each year?
JAN: My levels of unfocused anger are making me a sitting duck for petty triggers, microaggressions, fear-fulfilling hallucinations.
JAN: What makes you say that?
JAN: I feel like lashing out at inanimate objects.
JAN: Oh like your husband?
JAN: Ha ya fer example or my pynco-brush or the rock I swallowed wrong or my slaves who cannot waft a frond to save their inanimate lives.
JAN: Did you say petty tigers? On the gizz-issue, I'd purge and start over. Gargle with seawater.
JAN: Ya you know what I think you got to the core. I said triggers. Now I know that my gizzard was the trigger for the anger.
JAN: What if I were a fear-fulfilling hallucination?
JAN: That term does not describe a being but a projection. Don't you think actual hallucinations give themselves away by being so obviously psychedelic? What if they were smarter than that?
JAN: If hallucinations were smarter than that as if they could be smart or dumb at all they would start crossing over into the realm of technology.
JAN: Ya that's why paranoia is so much more dangerous than a hallucination because it's all based on shiv that's real. Ya ick paranoia, ocd, that's what I don't want. So uncomfortable. A poorly-defined melting wall or ridiculous amphibious countenance staring from above those can be useful metaphors.
Trans. by Phyllis (embedded)
JAN:
Well they've got to realize that from the very first moment of our employment, they were setting us up as opponents. Not quote coworkers.
JAN'S BOSS JAN:
Yes, we had to draw straws. For seniority. We were starting the same day.
JAN:
We had to strategize. There weren't just two straws. There was a lidded grass basket.
JAN'S BOSS JAN:
The tips of seven straws were sticking out at just the same length.
JAN:
They were made of balsa wood. Guess they got them at the HR supply along with the psych kits.
JAN'S BOSS JAN:
The HR lady's palm was holding the basket, gently turning and lifting so that it seemed to hover in space.
JAN:
I went for the shiv on a plate after volca rule. Take the closest one.
JAN'S BOSS JAN:
Lost opportunity. You had first shot. I would have taken
JAN:
I know, the one closest to me in case the HR lady had rigged it that way.
JAN'S BOSS JAN:
That's not to say I didn't strategize. I mean
JAN:
Right, you're the boss now. Seems to fit you.
JAN'S BOSS JAN:
Do you think that bossships are for the bossy?
JAN:
Ya.
JAN'S BOSS JAN:
What is ambition: putting to best use your strongest gifts for the good of all or a coincidentally necessary expression of paranoia and contempt for humanity? That the nirvanic system needs quote leaders to tell the workers what to do and use pain and pleasure to bend them to Mthyuh's willhead.
JAN:
Or that each of them as well are ambitious and recognize other ambitious servants and honor them and serve honorably to honor the nirvanas and the will of Mthyuh. Yes, all of that.
JAN'S BOSS JAN:
That's good because sometimes I feel like an outlier, you know?
pathetic is the baseline the center our common nonvariable
this coming from both myopic and telescopic points of view
and thus my admonishment to all to live between the two
between as well oblivion and obliviousness
while getting consuming recreating and building
your smallness hopelessness are for my eyes alone
i will give you only strategically timed glimpses
if you ever find yourself overwhelmed with patheticness
know it's you and not me doing that to yourself
as the avatar of worthlessness i suck all of it
so what you're doing is ganking my stash of your shit
once i go into mthyuh you'll try and pray to give it back
but you'll realize it takes a long time for me to regenerate
and by then you'll have lost your pathetic mind
it was your baseline and you didn't trust me with it
it seemed like i was born dnr but i kept on waking
a hive or suspension of healing molecules buoyed
my cells did what only one immune system could not
do by itself
these were friendly robots with drone-like intentions
a frightening singularity of focus that lidderly
cut and skewered and sewed in service to their
own profession
some might say if it weren't them they'd prolly assume
what's most healing is the stripping and cleaving and
what's left will live interred in debt to pay for
re-ignition
that a done submission of spirit and character
rare deferment to the throbbing support structure
trembles in turn at the business end of an
org-tree mandate
but can they stop me before i commit again
to rampage on the place that brought me in
ghosts of my venom strangling the landscape
cries and sharp tears
by Ilyn
tiresome dreams redundant dreams
not being stoned the night
sees us seeking stupid bliss
hallucinations are standing by
anxious insight finally produces
granite roads leading to villages
my own anti-trans bias against
my own painted fingernails
intense gastric identity response
it's just ahead in the dark and
self-powers a familiar slog
seems to be moving toward the town
by Jan
bullshit sort of shook out
pillars standing nakit
floor kinda sunk down
felt i couldn't take it
teen wanna party down
twenny wanna drown
tirdy he could coast at
fordy all dat
fiffy come a reckning
sissy going down (sissy going down)
sennie is a beckning
a.d. please now
o-nonny nonny nonny
hey nonny nonny nonny
nonny nonny nonny
[repeat]
by Ilyn
Jan and Peg are hanging upside down in a gentle cataract. Their dust and dung are coloring the water purple. They do not have to raise their voices because they are able to speak and understand with their minds only.
JAN: I was lidderly punching myself in the head with my uh... claw knuckles, caused an avalanche that wiped out a populated chank. Trying to think of where i stashed my cloakawax. It can feel like one is lost in life when it's just their bobbles they can't find.
PEG: What is it like not being lost in life, Jan?
JAN: Ah so perhaps--I mean, I get it, I can't answer that question--maybe misplacing health and beauty products is just a reminder of being lost in general, and therefore it's even more annoying.
PEG: But you have goals, a plan of some kind, or you think you should have those.
JAN: Uh both; i mean wherever you get your values, as imperfect as they may be, what else are you going to go on? My drive to contribute to society to make something of myself if not a beautiful family then a mark, a good mark, an edifice even.
PEG: That thought carries the obscenity of manliness, no?
JAN: Are you saying that learning to live without linear time is the same as dephallocentralization? That the concept of work as building toward the future and goals themselves are outdated masculinist tropes?
PEG: I'm saying that our environment provides for us. We don't have to worry about our next paycheck. When we are thirsty, we drink from a rivulet of melting snow. There's nothing more to do than turn our heads. When we are hungry, a fleke is right there, on a cliff hike or a chain gang. Our purpose is only to be and to enjoy. Forever.
Trans. by Phyliss (embedded)
At a late in life wedding there was a tribal dance
performed by the bride and her brother
the guests expected them but not the other
Their feathered sleeves scraped the all-purpose flooring
The track was more than six minutes long
They each took more months than that to recover
Their bodies were blurring into the wallpaper
Even there indoors their hair sweat dried in wind
At several points he tried to stop her
She seemed to be expressing a life of incomprehensibility
And he a cattle rancher's drive to drive and drive
Lesser ceremonialists may have left it to stationary
headbanging but this was a once in a lifetime
reckoning with sense itself its corrosive limits
its lack in every answer
and dancing through that crack
no one joined them on the floor when it was over
Reptily-ily
this surgeon was into plastics and he
sewed me up in tiny careful knots
that one almost bursting in anger
seemed to be so afraid of the nodule
he dared not insult it til the final moment
another claimed no students were involved
but he was one day a kid with a drafting table
and the next an umbilical slasher
my favorite and i conspired to decline altogether
and send him off instead to the cayman islands
Ilyn
It's brave of you to be in touch as I dissemble disassociate dissolve
It's clear it's not just morbid curiosity that makes you stay involved
Perhaps you learned before i did to not expect tomorrow
This sorrow born of understanding time and vanity sloth vice
You got the best three times on steps: formal wear throwing rice
They got pieces of our minds a lot of meat and plenty deep
We've got our pain to mine shallows to drown in words to keep
I got to explore occupy the boundaries thrilling roads to take
And now, as I stand in the rain on terminal monday, a scene to make
I see how fucking fucked this fucking world has fucking fucked me
I see the shit the shitty shit this shit of shit has shitting shat me
And i can take a breath and feel the float of my floating being floating
And if it's the end the ending means the end of trying to see ahead
To what the hell hell would have been that i'd have done instead
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