To burn the shiv

Basically what you're handling is a thing that's on fire, a living thing that's dying in the fire. Few have seen the tiny flammable animals that get trapped in the sea garbage and hauled ashore to burn as shiv. 

The immolation of innocence then turns out to be a central factor in so much of lavajraja. 

We don't know that these creatures are innocent only that they are helpless to escape our will. 

And that they seem to be born to be set on fire and smoked in a pipe. 

Yes. 

And that it's no coincidence that the molecules of their carbonated flesh connect with unique nirvanic receptors in cross-species administration by inhalation, sublingually or crammed into orifices. 

It seems that way. 

Of course who even thinks about it? Right. Hardly anyone. 

They have to be reminded to praise Mthyuh

You were saying that you feel estranged from your own tribe because you believe that they are not able to fully decode comprehend some of the physical characteristics of your face that have developed over time

Age lines gone develop over time on anyone i'm talking about unexpected lines and even deeper structural changes that are not expressed in any of my blood relatives.

And you believe that these changes have been the result of your lived experience

Right, because my predestined trajectory was corrupted and has continued to become so in a dizzyingly fractalizing pattern. My experience has been so different than lidderly any of the Jans ever. 

Jan, i'd like you to reflect on something, and i want you to take your time to respond. Remember that you are in a circle of safety and respect here. 

What is it?

When you say that your experience has been so different, i wonder what examples come to mind, examples of experiences, perhaps, that set you so dramatically apart, as you describe it, from your family and peers in the Chank Lands? 

You are standing at the top of a gigantic scaffolding braced against the face of a high cliff. You have to hold on to a railing to avoid being brushed away by the wind from my nostrils. All that just so that you can look into my face as we speak. I can dart out my tongue and have you whole way in the back of my throat to savor all day if i wished. 

Is that what you would want to do? 

See what i mean? You wonder if i might ingest you. Doesn't make for fun family occasions. 

Well, give me an example. Because apart from what you've just pointed out, i don't feel estranged from you at all. And we just met. 

Ok, i was out on a festival day just soaring not bothering anyone except that i had to drop excrement and there was no way i was going all the way out to sea because I had to be by my Jans for lunch. So there was a nice anonymous patch of green grass aim fire done. 

K's are notorious for dropping dung on undesignated sites. And it was festival so you didn't do the laughing cry, i assume. 

Right. So i get to my Jans and Jan's like never mind we're not going. I'm like what do you mean not going where. She says ya we were gonna have a picnic but some mthyuhfarking K just dunged up the whole park. The tables are completely buried. Alls you can see is a flagpole sticking up there where the field office was. 

Ah, yes, that does sound like a very good example of what you're talking about. Delightful! 

It's one of my favorites. I love to tell that one. She was sobbing so hard but she held out the palm of her hand to signal that i should not come near to comfort her. 

She cried not for the spoiled picnic, but for the devastating toll your genetic path has taken upon your most elemental networks and interfaces. 

Devastating i don't know about that. 

Certainly profound. 

Ya, i'm surprised you would say devastating i had you tagged more as your difference has widened the diversity of the family or just one more aspect of someone they love etc. 

That's what i meant. Of course. And you? How do you see it?

Sobbing is surrender. They have to be reminded to praise Mthyuh. I am not the reality police-- i don't have to be. My presence alone jars one into submission: to me, and therefore to lavajraja.

I'm a peacock on a road

it's taken a while, but the good memories are coming on

all that cement, and then the stone, scorpions poisoned springs

there were words that were pictures of another tongue

i think of the smiling faces among the barbed warnings

a subset of the females was eager to bring you in

they could announce their thirst with bright scarves whereas the men

were so undercover you might mistake them for border patrol guys

working an angle down at the same bar as the wandering eyes

off the same parking lot as the hooptie-tel and the vittle grill 

you can get your mom across or get off with your cousin's boss

there's dim lights and cold drinks like any dive in the heat sink

a private betting parlor more than a moment to think for a wayside crawler

there's a highway runs through

but it cuts us in two

there's a bridge, but it's costly to use

i'm a peacock on a road

you're the last horned toad

in a place that only we knew

by Silvia

Shouting Moons

The Shouting Moons are simply whichever moon or moons are prominent at the time of the regulatory shouting, which is always conducted during Days of Destruction, which can be announced at any time by the Mthyuh Preservation Society.  

Important shimmering of the regulatory codex happens between partisan representatives either in different parts of heavily wooded areas or at the edges of adjacent cliffs or even sometimes in abandoned bone nests, which can hang from the cliffs as long as the rock can hold them. 

K's peering from the occupied nests lounging in caves or soaring above keep mostly quiet during Days of Destruction. Legend holds that the festival was designed for that reason: to hypnotize Mthyuh's hosts.

They wanted and needed to hypnotize K's not to have a big party but so that they could get done all the doables they couldn't do as random prey owing to the burdensome and costly precautions they had to take in order to take turns in an orderly fashion to calculate who can have a chance to be eaten next, and so on. 

Plus, even a single K's earsplitting HAHAHA and its wingspan against the sun, creating temporary climactic changes and blinding darkness, all of that had an effect on overall sanity, even of pets, and this was the most caring respectful traditional way possible to get Ks to just stop. 

Flekes themselves of course don't make critical inquiry upon their own generational habits and mostly consider the rather low chance of a violent, live blood sacrifice the least of their worries. The specter of living to a very old age is the greater terror.

The partisan fleke representatives shimmer the codex during the Shouting Moons from forest meadow to forest meadow or cliff to cliff and they must conduct the regulatory negotiations only by shouting back and forth as loudly as they can. This tends to keep the messages short and heartfelt. They all know the festival is only a weekend long. But they have needs, which tend to be generously met if they can get them across and back again, sometimes heavily depending on the winds. 

The partisan fleke representatives must wear very bright robes as a sign that they are vulnerable and evocative to Ks and that their spiritual duties always come first. Again, these details are not on their minds at all. It's just another day for them. Some might find all of this fascinating and even life changing if they ever sat down to reflect on or read about it if, no that isn't fair: reading's not a thing for them. Maybe they might talk about it with another fleke on a break or, it is said, share it with their faces only. 

During the Shouting Moons it's very important that you remain as still and quiet as possible. Ks nodding out during DoD can wake up. The whole idea is that everyone cooperate at this time, even guests. Allow Mthyuh's hosts to feel the tingling in their spines and pyncos. They say the regulatory shouting first started when the early flekes figured out how to distract a K for a few minutes by shouting at it simultaneously from adjacent hilltops. Eat me first! That is how that famous chant became part of the fleke daily parlance, especially during volca, when one may shout out Eat met first! and it's never a non sequitur. This wish must be at front of mind. 

More on the communicative skillset

They seem to show one another their teeth and the insides of their mouths a lot. Does this contribute to their violence. 

They're expressing themselves or sending a message. 

False messages with their teeth. How do you know when they'll attack?

You really don't but you have to also send messages with your facial plates and central mouth.

So complicated much more than if i would just be feeding them to Mthyuh.

Our objective is more sophisticated and social not nutrition.

I'll call it diplomacy. For this i can learn their false language. To serve lachama. 

Remember they also know how you taste. 

Yes after cooking. Or they walk around using our scalp thorns as penile implants.

This is the place to air those grievances for now. With me. And thorn farms come from barns and cause no harm.

They come from barns these thorns how so. 

Think sponge sores that grow on cairns or warts on toes. They rear your horn cells in rows and harvest them like corn.

An attempt to talk missy down

Why is it that you lack the basics of physics and so much else?

I went to MPS school. They said our regular subjects were permanently suspended due to end of days. 

The days had already ended? 

Well no silly then it would all be moot. 

Do they still say that in MPS school? 

I don't know. I am here to escort a flock to the end of days. Without looking back.

A flock of. 

Pilgrims. All are welcome but few would survive long without knowing how to work the scripture. 

The pils are born for that. 

They say i was too but i'm a free agent now. Yeah. I take the stipend but that's all. 

Not every crospee gets that. 

Depends on what it is you're half of. Same as all the flekes get. 

That's how they work it. 

Ya. 

You sort of look like a frail old giraffe. 

Well. You have to pay to get here, and my youth was all i had. 

How can i follow you if yer looking back Hank.

Where you wanna go Joe.

I donno yor a taxi not a beacon?

Just another guy on the path Jack.

Then what was all that training for.

I can see the path can you.

No but i don't believe in a path i wanna believe in you.

That's yor issue Sue. 

You seem so smug despite heading for the edge Jed.

Someone's got to occupy the borderlands Jan. 

by Phyliss, embedded [trans.]

Tomorrow at Dawn

The deceased asks that you permanently destroy all and any evidence that this funeral or her life ever took place. Please respect her eternal privacy at this time and for all time. 

If you purchased clothing or jewelry for this day, be so kind as to drop it into the furnace shoot near the exit of mausoleum, which is only a pop-up shop and will disappear also with no trace immediately after the close of services. 

Remember that Donna spent her last living moments trusting you and taking comfort in your pre-mortem agreements. 

How can you be held accountable? There are no lawyers. By your conscience. Idiot. 

That's it? 

Yes what do you think. 

I think you're not dying any more than anyone is. 

And while there are those who'll care...

They won't care more than they would for another bloke. 

This is precisely why I don't think they'll mind signing on.

It doesn't help insulting them in the end does it?

That is my projected answer if any participant touches the How Can I Be Held Accountable icon.

Wouldn't you touch it out of curiosity?

Sure, I'd wonder how she'd had the spunk to assume we'd ask that question, especially if our signatures were so important to her. 

And your answer?

That it doesn't take spunk to know that plenty of folks will touch the icon just because it's there. Right, that part's out of the scheme. But the rest launches as per tradition by smoke signal. Tomorrow at dawn.

And then? 

And then, we wait. 

Sonic remnant trace dump B0003033

Location: Patio
Thought to be: Dr. Thong + "Mike"
by Phyllis [trans.]

Destruction is a door

destruction is a door and so much more

malfunction is but a single way of many

sabotage being other-oriented limits one

may your every thought and gesture from

this moment going on be soulless madness 

not hateful not partisan not with pleasure

may you disestablish disintegrate and 

encourage facial gladness in your peers

the end will come the foretold end of the

foretelling of that which has been foretold

and it can be in you the end is dwelling

and for once the strongest forces ever seen 

will not only not live but also no longer be

except for completely and thankfully

blank in a vast gap at the end of history

Voice of La Chama

cartoon

On the topic of trying to better animate my face, what exercises perhaps or massage schemes would you suggest. 

As you know Missy i am a newly trained hygienist so i do not pretend to assume what will or will not work for any trans-species client. 

You would not carry the pretense of replacing anyone on my nursery team or even my entire nursery team come your first day on the scaffolding. 

I believe we are on the same page then. How about an exercise. 

Ok then. I am all yours-y if you can handle it. 

Remembering that I am not able to receive your thoughts by channel of our minds only, try instead to communicate a thought by moving your facial plates in any way that seems most expressive of those thoughts. 

More likely i could possibly convey an emotion as they do in a cartoon. 

Sure, that would be a great start actually! 

...

Are you doing it now?

...

Oh good nodding, that is a universal signal in the public domain that you can always make use of when you mean either yes or no.

Is that it for today then?

...

Did you get that?

Oh lamthyuh, how could i understand?

But you did. You could tell i wanted to know if we are done with this crap for now.

But how.

I can aim and calibrate my facial plates to your own labyrinth of subtle muscular fascia which totally gives away everything you're thinking,

What happened?

They figured out how to pump cool air up from the tombs. They planted a tree that could only grow in cool weather near the top of the pipe and let it grow into a symbol and they began to worship it. Maybe it was a symbol of the spirit hope resilience etc. The generations started relying on the tree to explain what they couldn't didn't want to. In turn their own growth was stunted. And then the pump stopped working. As the tree died there was social upheaval drunkenness stupidity. Religious factions grew more cruel and warlike. Then somebody planted a native tree in the same place and it thrived without the still frigid air of the tombs so it became a fascist rallying point. It had to be only geological fascism because of the diversity of the community. Then the boundaries of the master plot came into question and many suffered and died lidderly on the boundary line itself so it was hard to tell what side they had been on. 

Trees started popping up everywhere with the accompaniment of fervid claims that it was the original tree or grown from a cutting or whatever of the original replacement tree. Groups described as terrorists started planting even more trees clandestinely until they were basically living in a forest of hearty native trees probably more what it looked like before they had come in and cut them down to grow food. The economy started getting worse because eating of the sacred trees was not allowed and there was no room for other food to roam or grow. Many were imprisoned for trying to lick the trees or strip and boil the bark of the trees even though they had never been grown or developed as food before. Why can't we eat the trees was the echoing question even though everyone knew that the answer was that we can't eat the trees because they taste bad and lidderly cannot sustain life other than their own. 

Then The Crack spilled open like an ugly seed pod and there were actual foreigners everywhere buying up the trees and the land and the tombs. The natives started to lash themselves to the trees live in the trees give them names as if they had always lived together in harmony with these trees and were as one with their heartiness and value. They made a rule that any time a purchase of a tree or a piece of land was made trans-Crack the resident of the property from which the tree grew or the resident living in the tree itself must also be purchased and promised lifegiving sponsorship for life and also for their generations. In this way the natives who had invented the pump and planted the cool weather tree and worshiped the tree until first the pump and then the tree was dead and progressed to fascism and then despair became more highly sought after as living resources than any tree or archeological find anywhere in the Known Crack even though they only degraded all of the lives they came in contact with and lived as idle parasites in many of the worlds for millennia. 

my struggle

In attempting to translate the random pigeonization and often mind-only chatter within the diversity of species and communities that share rhetorical moments behaviors decipherable codes or patterns here in the Greater Chanks Phenomena, I come upon a number of challenges obstacles. 

All questions of believability or or you know unreliable narrator etc. are obviously moot because I am the only person that we know of obviously who can do this and I certainly did not you know want this to be my dream job. 

Right, you might not normally think about me at all, my needs, who am I. That just means I'm doing the work at a good basic level. So please don't even reflect further on this topic. 

But perhaps for linguists or historians, the obstacles challenges can be roughly gathered from among these categories:

The tasteless vs. no-taste spectrum

My own prior knowledge skills or lack thereof in mathematics or the sciences or advanced levels of just about any topic

My own personal disregard, ultimately, for a reader's comfort respect or even understanding

My own vast deficiencies in capacity to understand or accurately describe these anomalies

The temptation to prescribe a template of my/our own value systems to a transdimensional context but what else can I do? 

Rise in affective filter while in MPS restraints. Remote muscular positioning gets me into the seat and facing the mirror and knowing that what i record must be contributive to destruction but my resentment at the mandatory nature of the task the punitive consequences for not carrying it out cannot help but trigger some fog of recreation. 

by Phyllis (embedded)

meditation on a fixed point

lavajraja both predicts and accomplishes total destruction

la vajra is a weapon and a darma and a universal microcosm

she is truth not love or only love of truth but truth for sure

she is everywhere so outside of time but the source of time

the mystery at the center of her spinning is my same mystery

it's not more valuable because it stops because she doesn't stop

there is no recycling of charnel beyond the gastric ministry of

la Mthyuh no afterlife of the soul because the only soul is la

Mthyuh and your precious journey to her bowel is lavajraja

even a dog can say vajraja by flapping its jaw but it does not

live by vajraja it is only charnel and not holy due to ignorance

but he is vajraja and his life need not prove an allegiance to 

what he is already a sentient being who is and can say vajraja

Missy

manual course correction

We're looking at you right now, and it seems pretty obv what the deal is. 

Good because i could tell something was wrong there was a sound i tried to describe when we first spoke, if you remember, like a

Yes i recall that

Ok right that high weeeeeeeeee sound. And am i supposed to veer directly into the path of adversity?

Haha, well it's just that your autopilot is pretty jacked. 

Whut? 

At this moment it is trying to take you places you don't wanna go.

Well what's that gonna cost me?

...

...

It's hard to estimate the costs to you. If you're committed to going forward in this vehicle, it'll mean waking up, looking up, coming up for air, whatever you're doing, and just check in on how things are going and probably including a lot of manual course correction even braking. It just depends on how consciously and responsibly you want to live your life even if it's only yourself you have to take care of. 

I mean what's the charge. What are you charging me for this in shiny coins. 

Oh, no charge ma'am. 

Whu-whut? 

Ya, like i said, it can't be fixed. Just keep an eye out and drive like it's yesterday. 

No, i mean why did you call me ma'am. 

by Reptily-ily

"It's a Take!"
Chukka Chank Screenwriting Festival
Table 12 Leader: Vinnette Cotidiene

She had been devalued by the light of the True Moons

She had gone to the festival like all the other drunken daredevils with their shiv-stained lips and hurricane-party approach. She had stood in the light just as foretold, and she was changed forever. From her own internal point of view. And therefore others climbed on that too. 

It felt like a normal light, as you'd get from a public oracle dispenser on white. But it had another purpose (we can infer for our own purposes despite complete unknowing being the moons' central fact): a purpose to make so clear as to be horrific, hell-like. 

It didn't just illuminate, and it burned, but only inside; it provoked some genetic changes that had been dormant to date. And would have remained so. 

I heard there were those who didn't turn away. 

Ya, there were the ones who stared as if i'd been asked a question i couldn't answer, and then they couldn't stay.

Because they didn't understand what was happening to you? 

No, because they could see the answer. They could see everything. 

So the ones who didn't turn away

The ones who didn't turn away just didn't give a shit i guess. 

Both: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! 

No, but I'm saying, it devalued me. The light did. Sure it put me in a pantheon but where the other ones are dead.

So many others were made holy-hideous in the True Moons. 

Mostly flekes and the guy at the festival who was trying to save me. But i already had a place in the temple. I didn't need MPS to create a whole other branch to embrace my disfigurement. 

That's what you say now, Tilly. 

from "My True Moons Story" from "Hangar Hangs With Big Jan"
by Reptily [Phyliss, trans.]

True Moons

3. "True Moons"

The True Moons bring social upheaval across cultures at measurably higher levels than any other moons phase. These five moons congregate to create an intensity of light very close to that of our sun in a very narrow beam on unlucky persons places things, which immediately become too hideous to view, much less contemplate. As the moons wane, insanity can ensue. The beam's inexorable and unknowing trajectory leaves heartbreak and often suicide or land devaluation in its wake.

There is no True Moons festival. La Chama's famous speech named for the occasion is hypothetical, explaining the use of the article "a" instead of "the" to name the phantasmagorical event, as one would cite a fairy tale in a sermonette. 

Instead, lights are out and eyes are shut far before sunset across the Greater Chanks Area throughout this time. Sensitive persons should either take precautions against or heartily welcome deep vein thrombosis and sluggishness during True Moons. 

What seemed to be dead

As bright as any life-giving sun, ours shines a light that's

cold and desolate without the moons' generous translations

And where else but in a context of darkness?

In there we seek and uncover associations and recreations.

Only in the folds of unknowing can we find the space for

deep violet or maroon or escape from tyrannous reason

your dreams are the prisons you make for 

facts that don't fit disappear under examinations.

As the sun sets and the All becomes much more clear

We can shut our eyes and see that there aren't many differences

between what passes for alive and random projections

how what seemed to be dead drives your need for protections

 

by La Chama [Phyliss, trans.]
from "On the Occasion of a True Moons Festival"

Three Same Moons

2. "Three Same Moons"

The Three Same Moons festival, in remote Dubba Berra Chank, is distinct in that tourists, who are almost universally on their way to the Fire Shores Medical Museum & Scarification for a once-only lifetime pilgrimage and either get lost or have to stop anyway, arrive in Swirling Ponde dazed by travel and hunger, and by chance just as the procession toward the towne centre is getting underway, and are taken in by the elaborate costumes and somewhat menacing but compelling bell shaking and drum battering. A highly decorated adult bull would be at the front of the noisy caravan, trying to shake off his own bells, his own flowers. 

Three Moons is also the seasonal festival most likely to be left uncompleted by virtue of the ever-refreshing crowds of guests, how little word travels about the goings on at a sacred spot, and those innocent, bucolic opening moments of what turns out to be a march up to the ancient stupa at towne centre, surrounded by a moat. 

Even before arriving there, it is now known, the bull is goaded into becoming anxious with a rag soaked in menses slapped against his snout. If that were not enough, just as he's getting out of hand (and you might expect a bullfighter or other culturally appropriate heroic mime to play their part here and slay the agitated beast in the most skillful, merciful, cathartic, and beautiful way possible), the towne elder retrieves an olde pistol from a fold in his toga and shoots the dumb innocent proud strong patient vittle box in the head, twice. 

The bells and drums stop at least, and the marching as well, for a respectful beat. Upon starting up again toward the stupa, the merriment is swelling and drunken while the bull gets dragged off to the picnic grounds by dozens of children and a thick rope, and the lovely hand-embroidered designs on the backs of the costumes of the quaint olde country festival cosplayers turn out to be all the letter J, taking their true form at the height of the Jans' beige issue. Even tourists know the meaning of that letter and its legend, but not that it happened in this very towne of Swirling Ponde. 

Where all of the ancient Jan family potters and carpenters from the surrounding hills and the Jan merchants and hygienists and Jan tour guides from the comfortable homes around the center and all of the street Jans and manufacturing Jans, all the Jans, the original towne dads and dad's dads, were being mass-replaced by crusading Pharmsupply employees, who blamed the Jans for their own terrorist attacks against homeless non-compliants and forced the Jans of Jansbuurg to wear these gowns and march to their deaths in the moat around the stupa. 

Spontaneous mobbing of triplets in urban areas are overreported during this time. We now understand that relatively few actual triplets are ever involved in these incidents, but rather that the enthusiasm for being able to act out mass violent social aggression, in celebration of a deeply cultural tradition, on unsuspecting but perhaps naturally wary individuals or small groups, perhaps the kind that knows or thinks they know at some level they are indeed a freak or freaks, the chance to light upon them is irresistible to many youth and may even appear to them to be their purpose as socially responsible and deeply spiritual beings. 

Three Same Moons, or "The Ritual Mobbing Moons," occur when three of our smaller moons, Jan, Jan, and Jan, appear side-by-side in a beige refraction of sunlight and can temporarily be confused as to which is which—as can other random persons, places, and things at this time. 

Under which moons are disasters most likely to happen?

A disaster is a welcome vessel of destruction under any of our moons and/or moon combinations. 

Having said that, we can add that there is consistent albeit anecdotal historical evidence for the convergence of some disaster categories and a seasonal clustering with storied lunal counterparts above Mthyuh. 

1. "Fellow" Moons

When Hank and Joe take on a parallel trajectory coming at Mthyuh just before their divergence around the beginning of Shiv Days, there is the Festival of the Fellows, when naked satyrs dance while holding a medicine ball in place between their chests in the Dance of the Fellows. Since the origins of Peg, according to residents of the Host of the Fellows, Olde Jansbuurg Village, domestic restraining orders and inter-special peace treaties are often broken during this time.

The Known Crack

All the temples and all the shiv joints and hygiene parlors community burning collectives allied Jan Jansdaad Jans of Jansdaadbad fleke hunters associations and flekes who are hunted brotherhoods and sisters of la chama the shabs or followers of the cart and all the cults of illyn and so many more earnest and upright societies dedicated to the furtherance of mthyuh's journey of destruction contributed throughout 70 moons spun their good-luck homecloth cut up vittle sacks and sheets of fine woven flowers fluff from the garment recycle trap under the spinner that deals with all that annoying charnel that still has its clothes on each and every knowing one contributed to the project for a sociological movement to harmoniously doggedly and single-mindedly work together to create a very large adult diaper for Peg, whose internal organs had begun to both age and decrease in age every since The Crack was breached with the new arrival, a Jan, but from another dimension, a previously humble and self-satisfied existence in certainly one of the most uneventful holes in all of the Known Crack, and in breathing this new air, the becoming of an emerging crusher of worlds.

wake of landing