Phantom Limb Syndrome

12FEB2012 – Dutch Boy, Franklin Avenue, Brooklyn. Waiting for coffee and eggs Benedict amidst the sonic swath of: the singing click of washing plates, running water and loud reggae flowing forth from the kitchen; the layers of conversation bolted to the cafe walls by sibilant hooks ejected into fricative fucking existence by the deadlier of the species dominating the room; the silence of couples exchanging a kiss on the sidewalk outside.

On top of the world one minute, lying prostrate in the valley with a face full of frozen pig shit the next. It’s not as complicated as you make it. (In fact, it’s much, much worse…) The clock ticks louder, each second resounding like a rifle shot until the explosions are loud enough to wring water from blood. Each blastwave shakes the table, rattling flatware and clinking the glasses. I am beyond screaming at this point. This goes unnoticed by everyone else.

Everything we do takes place in this world, during this timeline and in this dimension. We are captive court jesters; reciting our lines at the top of our lungs and juggling just as fast as we can, giving our all to a sleepy king who yawns once an hour, resting his fat head on a meaty palm. No escape pod, and no way to hug the beyond from here.

While escorting a friend to Grand Central Station on Saturday, I theorized that our emotions were somehow anchored to the ocean. When we enter this world, we are issued an anonymous measure of the sea which goes about behaving as the sea is meant to behave, all the while manipulating our moods, governing our capacity to give and our eventual tendency to need something in return for ourselves. The throbbing desire to give is proportional to the clawing need to receive. Some of the blocks are subsurface, cold and salty. Some of them crash frequently upon sunny shores and white sand beaches, aerated like blue champagne. When we pass on from this world, our block of ocean is returned. Renew, reduce, recycle. Our emotions are by no means new. Sign and date here, please.

Maybe I’m getting it right but I’m not loud enough. Maybe I’m doing it wrong and thankfully no one has noticed. Or maybe I’m doing it wrong but no one has bothered to tell me, like the elderly deaf uncle who shows up to a funeral with his fly open. I have no choice but to carry on — the desire to write burns as brightly as ever.

On good days, it feels like having lengths of exposed copper hair shoved deep beneath my skin; there is a stink of ozone and tiny sparks are born to die as the wires are scraped across the leads of a battery with a pop, propelling my left hand to spasm and flail for the nearest pen and begin stabbing words into existence across the surface of anything that will carry ink. Those of us afflicted by this terrible disease meet twice weekly in anonymous church basements, sharing our shame over stale donuts and buckets of burnt coffee. It is foolish, embarrassing and wrong but I know I’ll never be able to stop, even if I fail.

Putting way too much thought into the expression “I don’t mind”,

Charlie Sixteen

14OCT2010 – MSY – I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy to leave New Orleans…

The piece of paper that sent me down here in the first place clearly stated that I was to be “(*)repeatedly stretched to the breaking point, ground into paste, ingested and excreted from the assholes of both September and October for a period of no less than sixty days at the leisure of the King of Hawaii for no good goddamn reason at all.” That I should find myself in the departure lounge, boarding pass in hand forty-four days later is a lucky break, and I have no true business staring into the mouth of a gift horse.

Howe’er.

I arrived at Louis Armstrong International only to discover that my 1130 flight back to LaGuardia had been canceled, and the next one wouldn’t depart until almost 17 p.m., getting me home at 21 p.m.  Lesser men would have screamed, possibly taken hostages.  And still others might have hailed a cab and headed back out in search of debauchery.

But in some weird and admittedly perverse way, this makes me happy. I’ve got the entire gate to myself, I’ve got a seat next to an outlet, and I came prepared: laptop, iPhone, headphones, journal, Sharpies, a brand new copy of Cory Doctrow’s “Futuristic Tales of The Here and Now”, a lightning fast Wi-fi connection, and a damn good cup of coffee.

Pending a zombie invasion, a Die Hard-esque shootout between a burned-out cop and Ze Germans, a colicky baby or some other natural disaster: I’m aces, thanks for asking.

One hour till departure: Seat near the window, bonus! Listening to: Dead Can Dance, Led Zep, Deftones.  Charging: my gadgets.  Checking: my email. Watching: Several hundred tons of taxi gather the much-needed speed to fuck its way into the unresisting sky.  Gravity, lift, drag, and thrust.  Peanuts and Sprite.  Over and over, these common theme of my travels.  All those people, all those aliens, all those dress shirts.., (X) ft of white headphone cord, and (Y) lbs worth of “Compounded Negative Body Issue Monthly” being spread like a fucking virus, their once-glossy corners now gently bent and fetal against the protective interior leather of designer carry-ons.

My eyes move around the room, mining the details, but wholly unable to keep pace with the flow of arriving passengers, the rolling rectangles, the designer sunglasses and three thousand other items of little to no consequence. It makes me wish I could sketch.  Finally, my oculars come to rest on the matched set of thigh-high silver cylinders guarding the entranceway to Charlie Sixteen, my home of record for the next hour.

Trash cans they are, and trash cans they will stay. When one finishes ones damn good cup of coffee, one is expected to do the decent thing and force the empty paper cup into the mouth of said cylinder, where it will tumble briefly southward before coming to rest in the whispered clutches of a petroleum-based, quasi-disposable stomach lining, later to be gutted and gathered by minimum wage taxidermists whose first language is probably not English.

Look at the trash can, now look at me, NOW BACK TO THE TRASH CAN:

Out of sight, out of mind. But when you throw something away, what does away really mean?  The more I stare at the cans, the more I begin to see them as something else, slowly rebuilding them in my head, swapping the plastic intestines for something else:

Suppose that when you tossed a piece of trash into the can, it was instantly incinerated, and that the energy extracted from the incineration process went toward creating the energy required to incinerate the next piece of trash, and so on, and so forth.  How far ahead in our technological evolution would we have to be to pull off a stunt like that? Get back to me on this.

There’s my flight,

TWM

(*not really.)

STANDBY TO DEPART CAUSAL LOOP

23AUG2010, 1730 – Riding home on the Brooklyn-bound “L”, midway between Lorimer and Graham, I experienced a sudden and overwhelming sense of deja vu.

The car was slowing down, and I moved toward the door.  Looking down to my left, I saw an olive-skinned girl in a black polo shirt, unbuttoned. Black hair pulled back in an end-of-the-day ponytail. Blue jeans, battered Chucks. Eating pretzels from a brown bag. Me, I’m listening to Lamb’s “Lusty”:

When the echoing sound from 1:58 began to chime, everything hit me at once. I had been here before!

When I move to a new place, it is understood that a significant amount of time has to pass before I start to get the feeling that everything prior to that moment was just a dream, and that I’d always been there. Getting it this early isn’t a good sign; it implies burnout. I’ve been in NYC since June 3.

As soon as the car stopped and the doors opened, I did something I’d never done before; I stepped out of the car and walked to the left, knowing full well and good that the exit was to the right. Then I halted, right-faced and without thinking, I walked over and touched the wall. Turned back around and walked toward the exit but stopped short again, sat down on a bench, pulled out my notebook and began to scribble furiously: STAND BY TO BREAK CAUSAL LOOP. Stupid Uni-Ball let me down, threw it at the tracks, dug out a felt-tip, kept going, waiting for something…

Looked up. Checked my watch. Nothing happened. The ragged tunnels were as unapologetic as ever: no back-masked dwarves, no parquet floors, no red curtains. No offers of coffee:

Instead, I was alone on the platform. Just me and my dementia.

I stuffed my notebook back into my bag and capped my pen. The next mechaWorm had arrived, and I joined a fresh wave of tired bipeds as they shuffled toward the turnstile. We climbed the steps to the street. We waited for the light. We crossed Metropolitan, but I headed home alone.

I keep trying.

TWM

Tomorrow and Tomorrow

“I changed my mind / and looked no better.” – 16 Horsepower

“The future of computers means walking away from the computer, and becoming the computer.” – Unknown

(Tomorrow) – One might feel bad for the poor fool who comes factory wired with a taste for unnatural acts; when the revolution comes to town, there’ll be thousands of these perpetual organ-diddlers, wholly prepared to fritter away their lives chasing an electronic dirty dream. They’ll tie their mental inbox to the ‘feed from their favorite Blue sites and lie around in puddles of their own bodily fluids as their brains turn to tapioca and their fingers get wrinkly, too busy swapping memories of a quasi-happy childhood in Meatland for enough storage space to house their computer-enhanced relationship with a perfect partner, an electronic lover who’ll find them desirable no matter what they’re wearing, or how much weight they’ve gained. On and on it goes, until the frequent flier becomes the plane…

Becoming mostly computer means exposure to BrainSp@m. Imagine you’re passed out on your couch, in the apex of a fantastic lay, or taking a shower before work. Basically, anywhere you don’t want to be disturbed. Suddenly, a piece of BrainSp@m breaks through your firewall, bombarding you with offers of discount miracle pills designed to quadruple your sex drive, reset your alpha waves, re-grow your missing arm, and re-animate your dead dog. Time to upgrade that firewall, my friend. And maybe next time, you’ll steer clear of Windows? (We tried to warn you.)

Becoming mostly computer means the streets will be crawling with DocuNauts; hard-wired head haunters who Viddy-O trips to exotic locales as requested by their clients; invalids and shut-ins so afraid of this electronic future that they refuse to unlock their apartments and venture outside, relying instead on these ozone-reeking meta-beings to provide ‘the full experience’. Come Tomorrow, you’ll be able to purchase any experience you’ve ever dreamed of – the attention of beautiful women, the acceptance by your peers,.. sh*t, even the love of your own mother.

Becoming mostly computer means hosting an Innerweb site in your brain, the ultimate home business. Imagine your ‘Headsite in this pay-per-thought world: full immersion touch, smell, sight, taste and sound, and interactive documents that leap to life! Come down with pneumonia and you’ll have to quarantine your ‘site for a few days. That’s revenue lost, unless you stored several days worth of programming in advance. Can you copyright your own thoughts? Where does your mental identity begin and end? Guess we’ll find out Tomorrow, because that’s when the future arrives.

By Tomorrow, those who meditate will be able to offer us portion of their serenity, a place away from the noise of this new existence. You can count on your contracted ‘spiritual technician’ to meditate for you an hour each day. While they’re deep into the Aum, you’ll slink among the shadows of their No-Thingness, sipping black coffee and sucking down cigarettes within a stones throw of elderly Korean women practicing Tai Chi in the park, savoring the peace they exude.

As we become more and more computer, our bodies will serve less and less of a purpose. Society will be able to register its invalids, vegetables, coma patients and infirm for a higher calling. While their slumbering bodies are given the highest level of care medical science has to offer, their still-conscious minds, unified for greater purpose, free from ego, free from division, will be plugged into special bays and their sleeping intelligence will be harnessed by NASA as computational horsepower for calculating deep space voyages and solving the worlds problems. When (and if) a Sleeper should awaken from their coma, their mind will fairly dance with quantum calculations and intimate recollections of distant galaxies. As you can imagine, Post-Cosmic Calculation Depression will present a real challenge to Tomorrow’s care-givers, and suicide rates among ‘Wakers will be fairly high. It’s an acceptable loss. What more can this life on this Pale Blue Dot offer to those who’ve wandered the universe?

What will be the legal terminology for someone who hacks your mind and diverts your conscious soul into a specially-crafted reality loop, while they use your physical body to rob, rape, murder and buy decaffeinated coffee? What legal process will be required to solve such heinous crimes? No doubt a crack investigation team will be required to download your entire life, dissecting your naked memories in search for entry points and signs of intrusion. Imagine, your life laid out on a workbench under intense scrutiny, the rape and pillage of your mortal soul. Some might find this refreshing, realizing there’s truly no place to run, and nothing left to hide from.

See you Tomorrow,

TWM