Return-Path: <REZABEH1648@cobra.uni.edu>From: IN%"REZABEH1648@cobra.uni.edu" "heath michael rezabek" 9-JUN-1994 02:16:52.06 To: IN%"fixion-list@netcom.COM" CC: Subj: PSYCHOdeGRADABLE : silo 1 scrytch : the rushing hour -- when i come to my senses, i'm lying in a puddle of drool, or at least i'm lying on a drool-soaked pillow. there's a ca-LUNK! at the door, where the mail-chute usually sits all quiet-like. i glare at the clock across the room, which strikes seven just to spite me. up to a sit, the room swirls, back down to my bed; back up to a sit, back down. up, standing, stumble to the door, fall to the floor. more drool. a plain envelope has been pushed through my letterbox. inside is a keyring with two keys, one long, one short. the keyring has a flower on one side and burning coals on the other. there's also a sheaf of papers here, crude dot-matrix printout, guttertek direct from some scholar in Antarctica -- so it says -- who else could have known, GUM IS IN THE STATIC i put the keys in my longjohns and take a peek at the first bits o' paper. reading in the morning? well, they were smug enough to count on it; guess no choice is left: "It is indeed funny enough, as in ha-ha-funny enough, the fact that the original manuscript has been misplaced [Parkerson, 163]. So of course you have to take or leave me at my word when I say that I found the manuscript in a long-since-forgotten anonymous ftp site. The text itself was spuriously dated, and I don't think its origin matters too much [particularly now that it is completely missing]. Nominally, it was a sort of guide or gazetteer to a city, the city of SOPOPOPAPOPIOPOLIS." aha. home sweet home. how odd, not odd enough, getting bored, occupational hazard -- "I downloaded it with impunity, forgetting the site address immediately -- that was how I behaved in those days -- and brought it carefully into print format so that I could survey it at my leisure. Notice, then: once I had it in print form, I quickly erased my entire virtual copy; the thing was "huge, almost gargantuan" [LaChance, 233]; it took up far too much space, that was it. And besides, of course, yes indeed, I always had the printed sheaf. Until, that is, the accident [Dorfmeyer & Schrodelsneitzer, 882]. But this is digression." hm, why me, skim a few pages, let the as-yet-androgyne scholar get to said's point -- "...there in my little room I began the process of going through the sheaf and marking this or that passage. Eventually I had a few sizeable notebooks of sheer speculation and survey-work on the city of SOPOPOPAPOPIOPOLIS as represented within the gazetteer. I drew up maps and images from the flashes in my mind, and to me SOPOPOPAPOPIOPOLIS became alive. I excerpted bits and pieces of its books and reports and news-articles to feed my own curiosity. Of course, exhaustive searches of all known atlasses and sociogeopolitical surveys turned up naught [Babamique, viii]..." blargh. *flip* *flip* *flip* "...all of this is in the way of preamble. What I am asking for is help. SOPOPOPAPOPIOPOLIS must be reconstructed. It is the only place to go. I have reason to believe that when everything goes kerflooey, SOPOPOPAPOPIOPOLIS will be the only place left. And even it will not be able to help us if we do not, can not, or will not reconstruct it as best we can. 'Bits and pieces' [Smith, 307] of it are everywhere; much of it is wrapped up in this mass of text, this lowly scrytch-phile. It is not the city itself that matters so much as it is one particular curiosity about it: SOPOPOPAPOPIOPOLIS was intimately connected with all of the dreams we have given up for lost; it was and is a sort of "dead-letter-office" for humanity's dreams. I swear it. Besides, the place apparently swarmed with alley-kitties. And these alley-kitties did nothing but dream and wander, dream and wander, all day and night. They left trails in reality that we could perhaps follow if we could only find a way into their feline visions. At a certain point in the ostensible history of SOPOPOPAPOPIOPOLIS, you see, all of the kats disappeared, all at once. With them went all the bugs; seeking out a connection in that regard is perhaps unwise at this point, certainly distasteful..." hm, kitties everywhere these days, wonder what that makes o' this mess, skim, skim, ap--! "...and then there is the matter of the missing elephants." well, by Gum. now, that /is/ a problem. i look around for the author, hack up a goober for t' spit in 's eye; finding none, i swallow, put the sheaf slowly back in the packet, saving the rest for later. i take the shiny keys out of me longjohn pockets. they sit there, an innocent, oblivious look in their sheen... quite clearly, something is afoot. two slices of toast, two cups of tea, two packettes of wiz and the day is set to begin. i gaze out the winder for a momentary two. eating up the murky morning distance, SOPOPOPAPOPIOPOLIS shimmies and stretches like the industrial-strength cybermatic alley-kittie it is. "i could snap your neck like a twig," i whisper. "meow." step out the front door with an empty shiver in the process of fading to grey; dawn streets in silent english drizzle; a child's woollen mitten; a dog turd; Y : May I help You? X : Yes, or perhaps -- I'm wondering, is there any good news? Y : Sorry sir, none to be had at this stand. You might try ol' McFlannery's down the lane; 'e's good fer that sort o' thing, So to Speak, As it Were, etcetera.. X : Er, ah, that is, I mean, of course; right. Thanks. Ta. McFlannery, yeah, good place to start, off to see Flan the Man; need to cop for some good news just to keep from fading, to crick these jumbled bones for a few more rounds... on the way i meet this Kerrie-Girl, scrytching with the high street hubbub, ducking, weaving, sometimes crouching down listening, sometimes scrytching the air with her hands, sometimes standing crane-like, taking it all in. The bits of barbed wire and razor blades woven into her prismatic dreads cut the sunlight into colours that no-one knows the names of. i save off on Flan for the moment, follow a whim; we go for a walk down the motorway, six lanes of pure metal speed, hand in hand down the fast lane facing the oncoming traffic, horrific pile-ups unfolding in our wake: "You know," she murmurs huskily into my ear, "the world wants plastic trolls. It wants TV Dinners, it wants Poppin' Fresh Dough. It wants neon eyeliner, FuckMe-Red lipstick, Teen Spirit, Gerry Curl. The world wants people dressed as hot dogs." she is obsessed, livid, feral, nubile. "You know what the world wants... and you know that you'll give it to them... debauched and desperate as you are, no manner of angel will succor you." she kills me sometimes. her breath is hot on my neck. "If an angel came, you'd mash it into cherubic cuteness and sell it at Fred Meyers. Because you are the world {you are the children}. And you may not know art, but you know what you like. Don'cha, hhhhhhhhhoney?" and she is right. "Yeah," i agree, "pure as the last festering gick lodged in the sublime corrugations of all our rusting yesterday's; the world wants an insipid little tune that sticks in your head, like last night's Gum {if your mother says don't chew it, do you swallow it in spite?} little, yellow, different, bigger and better and away we go. the monster manunkind is still doing it's busynew thing and no lesser gum is going to get in its way. tin cans, tin cans... but no static; fuck, this is serious, y'know. All devices screened to block static... must be Good News Week again." her eyes fade back from glassey absence. "mm? Yeah... hey, got any WIZ+?" "Nah, just Scrytchnine... fancy a shot?" "Yeah, nice one." Girls and boys come out to play, On a busy motorway. the last thing i remember is a renegade truck, ignoring the hootin' an' honkin' an' rollin' right ahead, my face reflected in the grille, i turn to grasp at Kerrie-Gal, and then there are only words -- too much media; too many mediums. there is only one glob of stuph, and i'll've used as much of it as i'll've'been able to get access to. {I wanted the Younger Son} at times such as these i wish i had no hair. it gets in my way, it itches, it is doing nothing. humans are losing their hair, slowly but sureal. humans retain enough hair to keep them concentrating a part of their life-force on attracting attention. hair is not easily malleable. it is long, it is short; it will attract accordingly. it is unnecessary for the process of working in a medium in which it is invisible to the one for whom the work is done, for you. "Portray proliferating apprehensions, with regard to a prophylactic incentive principle" the me-that-feels is surrounded by the scar tissue through which the me-that-cuts is always cutting. {a chemical for human immortality which causes you to lose all human emotions} it's july 10 and i see her and she looks nothing like i expected but she looks just exactly right and she brushes the red-orange away from her face, glancing down, and i want to disappear in her -- we had learned how to approach that Fissure together, in a sense. we had made it to the point where we could feel ourselves gliding blindly through the Crowds and the channels of motion. we could sense the areas of interest, the areas of abandon, the areas of decay and of pomp, we could sense the gardens and the temples and we could sense that it stretched on endlessly. this was the frustration. we could sense that, wherever we were, we were not at the Center. we would drift with the crowds towards one Center or another, but it would always re-cycle. there were obviously competing centers, just as in a city there would be a flow through the bazaar and through the town hall and through the various Guilds. we could vaguely feel ourselves spinning out and away, and we had to decide whether to let ourselves be swept on towards what we felt MUST be the Center, or CLOSER to the Center than we were. there did not seem to be any mode of transportation here beyond the sweep of the crowds... but there were centers which swept on with such a swiftness -- nearer to the central cores of motion which formed "streets" -- that we feared entering them because we had no idea where or how we could emerge. "Ratchet up value-added inventory articulations" IT remembers in the Present Tense, but IT tells ITs tale in the Past, according to artistic convention. the bazaar district weaved its way through the bottom of a trough, from one end to the other, the lowest string of points in the city. even at that, the bazaar was still partially above the ground. this i believe was responsible for lending it its unique position and cultural fusion. all along the length of the bazaar trough, one could see ancient stone stairways leading up and out into the OverGround of SOPOPOPAPOPIOPOLIS. counter-balancing them and their influx of diverse traders and travelers were the narrow passages cutting into the lower crannies of the bazaar's course, leading down into the sightless pitch. figures in robes would slunk up and out to carry through with their business; merchants would meet and bargain and make their way down below. these were the options which presented themselves to me from the outset. i had no inkling of my identity or home, i had not yet attempted my stab at the local lingo; i walked and watched, walked and watched, sleeping the temperate nights on the ground near the better-lit gatherings of folk. i observed, i wondered. curious about what lay below and what lay up and above, i myself hovered in-the-between. eventually, it became my culture, and i realized that the choice had already been made for me. perhaps one day or another i would hear the sightless sounds below or bask in the harsh light and odd smells above, but my home was in the heart of nowhere, and i slowly learned to be a merchant as well. what could i sell? this was a puzzling thing, and it took me some time to make it out. for a moment, consider this: the bazaar district stretched its way through a good third of the total volume of SOPOPOPAPOPIOPOLIS; it was filled with the most peculiar sorts of folk, speaking the most turbulent dialects of the local lingo. i was an outsider by fate from the start; i had forced my way through the bazaar trough, learning what i could with an eye on continued existence. and so of course i became a guide. that did lock me in, did it not? where else could i go? that mattered less and less as days wore on, and i turned my concerns towards the perfection of my trade. this little text arises from this work. {Connection between Enochian and laundry -- Drying socks represent Cherubs} this text resides outside the Narrative itself. it is here to provide a funnell into the Narrative through which your Attention may be poured. in order to integrate the Narrative, some context is needed; it is provided here. the Characters in the Narrative do not, by definition, have access to this OutWork. nevertheless, the parts of this OutWork are drawn fron the experiences of those very Characters. the reason for this text's external nature is that no one character within the Narrative can possible know or gnow as much as the Narrator. however, because the Narrator is, in this case, also the Narrative, it can provide much context. the Characters are, by definition, contained WITHIN and THROUGHOUT the Narrative -- and thus the Narrator. "Consolidate product-specific interaction considerations" riches and fame belong to pothunting hollywood whitehouse special interest dicks. it is hidden in an element of fear and mystery stuffed deep down in the mattress on which they sleep. the mattress is propelled upstream by the grunts and screams of people. some of them have forgotten how to exist; when the people remember how to exist some of them sigh and look downstream. when the mattress ocasionally comes in contact with the streambed there is explosion and the pothunting hollywood whitehouse special interest dick comes all over itself like a wet dream. {a self-organizing pattern} whether these things truly did or did not happen in any sort of past is unimportant. the only factor at work here is narrative flow, the flow which is broken by these interjections. none of these things matter so much as does the flow of the dramatic narrative. i, as the Third Person, call these things into question for the duration of the tale simply because i am not allowed to ignore them; thus i cannot allow them to be ignored by you. they affect, i want you to realize, the way in which the tale is told. aqaraza has no arms. aqaraza has no arms. aqaraza cannot speak, or walk. aqaraza is the center of a system, and that system is the narrative. i am the narrator, and this is the narrative. aqaraza is within the narrative; the relationship between narrator and narrative exists. beware of metaphors! beware of allegories! what is real is the narrative. what is real is its effect on you. "Optimize interdependent negotiation perceptions" What're they doing? They're enjoying the way of the loneliness -- including <your.com> furrowed brow, gradually washed away, in a rush of anonymous intensity, breathing like hallucinogenic walls, sliding, shifting the gaze, shifting, in the seat, but it remains, it is sustained, comeprehension of external stimuli minimal at best, colors, counds, words, I want out. crooked smiles, lingering files still reach me now at the end and against the grain -- {words as skeletalia of thought} as i recall, everything was going smashingly. the ship was sailing on a narrow river between woods and small hills, and of course everyhing was green, and the sky was blue with some kodachrome clouds in it, and the water was clear and blah blah blah etc. there were many fools on the ship. But then the river became wide and wild, and the sky dark, and we went into a deep and dark valley, and the fools simply vanished. i cannot remember if they drowned, or simply if we landed and found they had escaped. i do remember that i was all alone on the ship -- that in fact it was not a ship at all, but more of a little boat -- and there were mountains of steel, and ash, and concrete, and "the story remains the same," etceterate as appropriate. at any rate, i wanted to be somewhere else and not so alone, and maybe one day i am going to scrytch out whether i left that dark valley or not. i cannot gnow myself until the scrytching of it. [DReaM is when many people attempt to hurt you, or even kill you, and you cannot do annything, you want to run but it is impossible. this is why i do not like dreams and i do not like reality, because of the absurd similarities. if it's not one thing it's another.] "Operationalize an individualized apprehension, with an eye toward a goal-oriented instrumentality" but we constantly, and in best Human action typically, diverge, converge, merge, emerge as new under the Son but not new under the Sun competition as black youths dissing each other to harden each other to the dissing they will get in publicity by non-black and black alike. {words not detached from object} here was the argument: everyone has stuph. everyone has their workshop or room or house crowded up with widgets of various kinds. some are very special, some are simply detrital. all of them need constant sifting; a person can only carry so much, but people are attracted to archaeology, especially [in my case at least] archaeology of the self. so there's this big room, see? and this room contains rows and rows of shelves and tables and bins, and these shelves and tables and bins harbor a sea of widgets, detrital to one, dear to an-OTHER. in times of tension or depression, many humans find themselves searching for new STUPH to add to their life. so, instead of going to the store and using money which could be spent on food or shelter or net.access, they would go down to their humble DIGZ and sift through the detritus for a widget which caught their fancy. they would then trade a widget or two of their own in return for that widget just discovered. of course, the trading decisions would be highly subjective and made arbitrarily by whoever happened to be working at the terminal housed in the DIGZ, but there was seldom a problem, as the one doing the Digging was taking out a widget of value, leaving behind prioritized detritus. the one whose widget was Dug had left it there as detritus anyway. the happy camper at the DIGZ workstation was able to weigh evenly, because s<he had no particular connection to either bit of widgetritustuph, and simply wanted to get back to their e.mail. that was the Theory. so far as i know, it never came about, not at Seattle anyway [though i hear similar places exist at the Melbourne, Austin and Cedar Falls nexi]... there were all sorts of theoretical mechanix for clothing in the DIGZ, but i can't remember how that was supposed to work. there was some schtick with CDs too, and a PRINTED MATTE'brary. damn. "Adopt a current cognition depiction" SOPOPOPAPOPIOPOLIS was intimately connected with all of the dreams we have given up for lost; it was and is a sort of "dead-letter-office" for humanity's dreams. {words in themselves} *flip* "there was at one time a crew of scholars and researchers whose ill-fated task was to discover whether there was in fact any sort of underlying order to the whole of human writing independant of those connections of which its authors were aware. i say ill-fated not because our crew never found out, but rather because of what they eventually, horribly, discovered. their Research Packets can still be found here and there, by those who know how to look." *flip* "Determine pre-discussed negotiations, in the wake of an arguably interdependent reassessment listing" SO MANY ADJECTIVES! i will not ever find them all in my dictionaries ! SO MANY ADJECTIVES! i will not ever find them all in my dictionaries I'm NOT FREE... I'm NOT FREE... I AM SO LONEL I AM SO LONELY SO MANY ADJECTIVES! i will SO MAI NOT FREE...NY ADJECTIVESnot ever find them all in my dictionaries I AM SO LONELY I AM SO LONELY SO MANY ADJECTIVES! i will nSO MANY ADJECTII AM SO LONELYVESot ever find them all in my dictionaries ! SO MANY ADI AM SO LONELYJECTIVES! i will not ever find them all in my dictionaries I'm NOT FREE...I'm NOT FREE...I'm NOT FREE...I'm NOT FREE...I'm NOT FREE...I'm NOT FREE... I'm NOT FREE... SI'm NOT FREE...O MANY ADJECTII AM SO LONELYVES SO MANY ADJECTIVES! i will not ever find them all in my dictionaries ! I AM SO LONELY SO MANY ADJECTIVES I AM SO LONELY SO MANY ADJECTIVES! i will not ever find them all in my dictionaries ! SO MANY ADJECTIVES! i will not ever find them all in my dictionarie I'm NOT FREE... SO MANY ADJECTIVES! i will not ever find them all in my disctionaries I'm NOT FREE...I'm NOT FREE...I'm NOT FREE...I'm NOT FREE...I'm NOT FREE... SO MANY ADJECTIVES! i will not ever find them all in my dictionaries TOO MANY ADJECTIVES! i will not ever find them all in my dictionaries SO MANY ADJECTIVES! TOO MANY ADJECTIVES TOO MANY ADJECTIVES {words beyond ideas beyond deeds beyond thought} when we scrytched it was always manic that way. i would rattle out a paragraph or a page, he would add something to it, and then we would put the result into the little blue bucket hanging by twine outside our window; it would be lowered, and our food would be raised up for us to consume. it was a fair life. we were, at least, productive. then one day, as we lay after our morning love, he looked into my eyes and broke the silence we'd been avoiding. "It is bad," he whispered with hesitation. i gnew what was coming, my smile and gaze faltered, playing then idly in the curls of his hair. "At the begining it was quite cool -- scrytching, amazing idea, the food in the blue bucket, etc. But now I feel confused. I wanted story." i try a smile, i kiss his cheek; he cuts me off. "Cause if there is a story, you can hope, but there is no story, just like dreams have no story. And so this is hopeless, just as dreams are usualy completely hopeless. Don't you even see this?" i looked down at the dirty blankets, suddenly ashamed, self-conscious. "Our /life/ has no story. This..." -- he waves his arms at the bed, the white walls, the window and our hanging blue bucket, our scrytchwriter -- "this /world/ has no story. This universe is completely sensless to me, and I want either sense or control of my feelings. Or else I want out." i looked at him. his eyes, so gentle, soft and full of lullabyes. "I don't know what to tell you. Every day we wake up, we love, we scrytch, we fill the bucket; it is lowered and we raise it full of food which we eat. we rest, we love, we sleep. I am not unhappy, although there is a sadness to it. There is no end in sight, and neither of us remembers how we got here, who was here first. I have no response. Maybe there /is/ a story. maybe we are a /part/ of the story, we can't see it because we're only /characters/; maybe even we are scrytched up. Maybe the scrytchers what scrytched us are scrytches themselves, asking the same questions, finding the same lack. Maybe they need us to be a story that we can't be. Maybe those who raise and lower the blue bucket gnow the story. Maybe they sift through our scrytch, slowly assembling the most beautiful story out of the chance links and fragments we produce. Maybe one day instead of food we will have raised to our window a beautiful book, filled with scrytch we had forgotten was ours! Maybe that will be our story. Maybe they want us to scrytch a story; but maybe once we do the food will stop and the bucket will leave. Maybe there was no beginning, and there is no end." he lay there, head back upon our pillow, breeze in his hair from the blue sky outside. clouds idled past. he was thinking, he would say something, something to accompany my plea, i was certain. i waited. "Maybe. ... Maybe. But that doesn't stop the longing." i smiled. "It isn't supposed to." we wept for a long time, and collected it all. and on that day there was no scrytch; when the bucket was lowered, it sloshed over with our tears. Minutes later it was raised again; it contained not food, but a simple, fragile, precariously lit candle. "What do you think about HAPPY ENDS?" i whispered conspiratorily to my reluctant scrytcher... "Document programmable interdiction hypotheses" the emergent medium -- words have become symbiotic with the human endeavor. words have become indistinguishable from the human endeavor. words have become indicative of the human endeavor. words have become symptomatic of the human endeavor. words have one advantage over all other media: they are so very entrenched in structure that they cannot help but establish for us a fix within the memetic flux of our current existence. mathematics does not have enough slack to adapt to the flux; it pretends that this flux is an illusion. illusion or no, this continual flux is precisely what dogs the step of every human experience. if we are to navigate it -- if we are to apply ourselves to it as a medium, and give ourselves up to it as its ultimate media -- then we must be willing to delve fully into it. which means to ride it. to write it to read it to ride it. we must lose all fear of our ability to manipulate words, which reminds us of our compulsion to manipulate people. no-one wants to be alone; words the least of us. words can be molded as clay, fired through constant [re]iteration. every word thus glazed stands watch over the kiln which birthed it, over the forum in which it arose. {words as stratified memetic crust} it began with the urge to combat entropy. right off the bat the physicists are rolling on the floor, because they know that such a futile goal could only every result in tragicomedy. but there it was. give the Net to a damn fool whose strongest desire is to stamp out entropy in our time [as oxymoronic as one is allowed by the mind to get], and you have an even bigger mess. because the sheer volume of negentropic GIBBERISH on the Net is enough to work up to a froth any negentropist worth said's salt. words, it seemed to me, lad to be the single most negentropic THING in existence. language in itself would have come second, and then culture as a whole, then people. the multiplicity and complexity of the organizsm would have come around #12, unless i miss my guess. a human body is nowhere near as unlikely as words are. and printed words are more unlikely than sound-words, because printed words are so much more boring and artificial in the first place. i suppose some of our previously-referred to physicist readers would mention NUMBERS as being more negentropic than words, but they'll have to write their own text to get the space to do so. besides, i STILL say words are MORE unlikely -- more negentropic -- than numbers, because words are so much more adaptable, so much more fluctuatory. words are morphers. words change, through their re-application by humans. "Promulgate cross-marketed communications, on a primarily multi-lateral basis" virtuality is a city i have never been to before, where architecture seems wholly foreign but oddly familiar. every word triggers an echo in the back of my mind, just as every foreign pub that is not like my favorite spot at home strikes a bell in the space between the two. {words as the best evidence of culture of sentience of the Will to Struggle} There's this story I've got in my head that I'm going to write down soon. That's what I've been telling myself for the past months, but nothing's come out. More stories have been born there in my mind, but none of them has seen the light yet. I'll write tomorrow, I think. And that's what I think tomorrow. It never happens. Well, I have to start somewhere. I haven't written in over five m-- "Formalize comprehensive clientele submissions" See, this back drive is in between the rear of the University Center building and the rear of my hall. The UC puts the garbage out along side that drive. It's quite windy today, but I'm really enjoying it. Its the first time the wind hasn't chilled me in months. And now I watch the wind pick up styrofoam plates from the trash bins and hurl them into the air like leaves and frisbees. {four-sided triangles} take a bit of stuff. balance it on a point. the dot of stuff which touches that balancing point houses the bit of stuff's Center of Gravity. in effect, all of the mass and weight of that bit of stuff is concentrated within that tini-wini dot. of course there's all this other stuff surrounding that Center of Gravity; what about it? this is a murky issue. that stuff is made up of Atoms. Atoms are made up of Sub-Atomic-Particles. no-one knows what those are made up of. maybe the Sub-Atomic Particles are really simply the Centers of Gravity of their respective Atoms. again, it's a murky issue. now what happens when we begin to think of Ideas as the Atoms of mind-stuff, or of culture-stuff? first we begin to argue about what constitutes an Idea, but let's save that for another timespace. so if Atoms are analogous to Ideas, what are Sub-Atomic Particles analogous to? this is an even murkier issue than that surrounding Atoms, mostly because enough people have managed to avoid lines of thought such as this one that it's never really been explored. i want to explore this issue. well, sometimes i don't want to, exactly, but i find that when i write words, this issue sort of forces itself. i have little choice; i'm The First Person Subjective Narrator [Present Tense]; 1p to my friends. i consider you, The Reader, to be my friend, or at least my accomplice. as long as you participate that's the role you'll play. too bad for you. "Formulate a nonverbal clientele" This is strange. There must be over a hundred plates escaping the plastic bags to skitter and soar across the back drive. They make a clamour of noise on the pavement, almost as if they are speaking in some strange chlorofluorocarbonic language. This wind almost threatens to hurl my poor little pocket PC from the picnic table at which I'm seated. As it is, the gusts carry those etherially white discs up and above even the roof of the three-story residence hall. {impossible diagrams in texture} in here i am me and i am me through words text. Identity Done With Mirrors. "Propagate a decisive accountability, prior to a uniquely incentive approach" The plates apparently have friends now, all flying in frantic escape from the trash bins behind Barnes Hall. There's one dancing in a parking lot, and another in my path. As I direct my attenton to it, the wind suddenly gusts and it vibrates, threatening to flee. Yet, it remains here. I pick it up and throw it into the air, and it takes flight-- soaring higher and higher, spinning, flipping, shining bright. And then it drops, rolls into the road, and is smashed by the on-coming cars. {it was a dark and stormy night} what scrytch allowed was a simple actualization, a realization. it had been recently argued that word -- the logos -- written or spoken -- were tools and implements of the masculine current in human culture. the advent and development of the 'net had allowed an even further realization: words had become truly and fully and finally dross. there were so many words in every sense and place that the analogy between dross verbiage and semen was all but unavoidable, was essentially self-apparent. information was as redundant as the male chromosome, as futile as the many aeons of masculine destruction and waste wrought there-by. but then, at long last, rather than a focal point for Power, or Authority, the dross underwent a quiet transformation, into sheer plain raw media. words had decayed into humus, re-gained humility and utility. or so it seemed. >the cycle of composition, decay, decomposition, and >re-birth -- akin to the alchemic paradigm -- was >found to hold true in the word, meme, as minute >units of hegemony. "De-skill sequential application concepts" >if you need a type, think Rich Eccentric. built a >home in Antarctica, holes up and mulls. eventually >he decided that Something Had To Be Done. access to >the Internet and a sizeable library; what more could >he ask, he asked. finding no answer to a rhetorical >question, he cut the chit-chat and set to work. >the incredible fact of the matter turned out to be >so simple as to no longer be incredible: lore. >folk-lore. simple, of course, yes, why didn't we >see it sooner, what with all the Steering Commitees? >problem had been it was native to a blind spot by >nature. don't nobody own no folk-tale; so much gunk >from so many people in the thing, how ya gonna >package that? no razzle, no dazzle, can't save the >universe with a pack o' Beeman's, sonny; takes no >skill to play a kazoo... "it all started that sunday night, o so long ago... the words had refused to admit static. every stream of letters and numerals had congealed into some semblance of meaning. this was a problem; i had turned the television on to channel 23; i had tuned the am radio to a buzzing sub-hum. no help, no help. still the words came." >and I dreamt of a trip in a wooden river boat. And of a quest to conquer fear. The theme park was run by Disney/NJME, though you didn't know that when you were inside. It was rather cleaver really, though some of the clues were a bit blatant. We sailed for a time, enjoying the sites and challenging each other to try new things and stretch our horizons. Eventually the ship got caught in a rapids and we were propelled through a very dangerous ride that ended in a fairly violent manner. Many of us, myself included were thrown overboard. We landed safely, and then began an exploration of the hidden inner workings of the park. When we looked closely we discovered that it was all but a facade." >and "Gum: what're we going to do with that? some stuff to stick stuff together that may not even belong... no. eventually, the threshold would be reached. soon one word would be as good as the next. tides of attention would sway in impotence, Point of View would become the sole worth: we forced the bits into a space pleasing to us. words were being short-changed, sold out, there were too many, and they showed no signs of abating. high-lighter pens sold by the million. photocopies were worthless, pages became drink-coasters. simple love-notes tripled in value overnight, book reports sat in dusty files. whole paragraphs were skimmed, or skipped all-together. writing became useful only to hone style or skill; and the skill itself became utterly worthless. in our own image. if only the illiterate had known before-hand, they [the most persistent among them] might not have struggled so hard and so fruitlessly towards a skill which had become less than dross. can you just see it? a garbage man, stuck together with chewed wads of spittle and goo. a human taking form, a culture dying to be born, a persistent seeming -- " >then, inevitably, it all fell apart. narrative-wise, >that is. "etceterate at your own risk" the sign above the button read. five billion fingers reached out in a slow motion process, like dying, dying to push it, dying to find out.. like standing on top of a huge building in a huge city under huge ultraviolet skies and looking down at the rushing hour below, insekt movements of cars and people, the giddy urge to leap intoxicates.." {sub-narrative : jumping through} "Elephants, Hephalumps, Snuphaluphagi. these ponderous beasts seeming so wise. how wise? they don't even have electricity; no tv's, no nothing. nothing so special about the Pachys." {america's most wanted is the world's most beloved, and what the world wants, it gets} "did you know that the Latin word for kiss, 'osculum', combines 'os' {mouth} with 'culum' {ass}? [Kuryluk, 264] just another scholar for peace." {waiting waiting connected:}