28:
Speaker Tweakers are by far the strangest sub community in the rave crowds. They are more often than not males between the ages of 16-24, though I have seen exceptions to this in every set. Regardless of the age or sex they are always thin (which is not to say I’ve ever seen any of their waistlines) and they are ever decked in enough cloth to smuggle in a caravan of gypsies. Unlike other attendants, the Tweaker’s clothing is devoid of the typical garish colors, are without pacifiers, and never have excess amounts of hard candy.
The Speaker Tweakers–for as anti-social as their public disposition is–are found traveling in packs, never speaking, but usually just passing the indispensable hollowed out compact and straw. Their poison is almost always K (Ketamine, an anesthetic for animals) whose reverie effect without euphoria allows them to keep their heads in the floor to ceiling 1200-watt speakers all night. The effect is called being in a K hole. Imagine what it feels like to be a Praying Mantis having an indifferent dream about not possessing a sense of equilibrium on a floor made out of oatmeal and getting the slight recollection that you’ve been there before–that’s being in a K hole. Like I said, K is only the staple and it’s a downer. Most Tweakers have to mix in an upper into the K so that they can keep up. The archetypal cut is glass (the purest form of crystal meth, refined more times than most vodkas) with a dash of coke if available, for a mix called CK1.
Of the Tweakers that I’ve known and talked with (which is a rarity since most are without any outer audio perception other than the hard house bass hits) the fix is always the same. They’ve always got two bottles of K on them at all times. They could be butt naked on the shiter of the funeral home at their Grandmothers wake and the little bastards have two “vials of juice” stashed in the tank. Either way, one of vials is for personal use and the second is for sale or barter, which is always a valuable commodity. See, the problem with Ketamine is that it is not produced in rogue labs like most other “club drugs”, no that’s way too costly. Instead, the only way to procure the shit is to steal it from a veterinarian, or from the lab that it is supplied in. This is great business: a hundred percent profit margin no matter how you cut it. While I have never met anyone who has jumped a lab, I met one guy who had broken into a vet before, though I don’t think it counts because he just took the key off his mother’s key ring. Anyway the bottles are the same size as insulin so getting through customs is a breeze. Cooking it down to powder is the pain in the ass; no one will shoot it and there is never a stovetop at “rave” venues. Another heat source must be found.
One time a few years back, when I had just started to become acquainted with the hierarchy of the rave scene, I used to catch a ride with a few Speaker Tweakers to raves. At the time most of us were under legal driving age, so the one who was lucky enough to have access to the family car was lucky enough to cart several under age suburban kids to the worst sections of Chicago. For the record, I was never a Speaker Tweaker, never a big fan of K (not to say that I wouldn’t use it if offered, but I only paid for drugs that made me happy; I didn’t need any help feeling weird) and in general was never hard into the party circuit, though I would find my niche later. These little car pools were always a “pleasant” exchange, since there were not enough of us to form any kind of rally for a particular set. Plus there was always the matter as to who was holding what, when were they going to share, and how much they would knock the price down “for a friend.”
The particular evening I am referring to was one of those plague of Moses style heat waves in ‘94 that was dropping the elderly like a sack of potatoes. We, the party hoppers, were unfazed. At about twelve in the evening we gathered in the driveway of our rides’ house, waiting with baited breath as he snuck his mother’s Honda Civic CX out of the garage. Once successfully out of the parental radar we made the final pick up at one of the Tweaker’s houses. He hopped into the already critically massed car holding his perpetually packed backpack, a Pyrex casserole pan, and the canonized two vials between his teeth. He had all the fixins’; he just needed a place to cook. The car was going to have to do; few people know this about the heating unit in a Honda, but the damn things could put a glaze on a honey-baked ham. With all of the other passengers faced with the dilemma of sobriety or the sweltering heat of this Honda deep fryer, the decision was quickly reached to start cooking. With the windows rolled up and the tepidity of the interior rising, the Pyrex pan was placed at the feet of the front passenger with the liquid K contained within. This was not a quick process, and I began to fear that our own blood would turn to powder before the narcotic.
The party that we undertook our hellfire travel to was being held in some burned out warehouse on that industrial tumbleweed temporal void that blurs the Deep South side and Gary Indiana. Along the gambit run through Beverly, where it is probable cause for being white, we were pulled over for being just that. For once the only key to the kingdom of jail was the translucent crust forming in the basin of a cooking pan, and it was difficult to conceal. The officer tried hiding his shocK upon pulling over a Kar full white Kids with no signs of intoxiKation, perspiring profusely and looKing liKe the Kat that just swallowed the Kanary. I think it was this disbelief that led him to inform us what neighborhood we were in and to flee quickly in any direction rather than toss the car, as was normal procedure.
The other oddity with Speaker Tweakers is that they get to the venue the earliest, without fail. If the flyer says that the event begins at eleven, the Tweakers will pull up in borrowed mothers’ minivans at around ten. This just to stake out their meccaed speaker of worship for the evening. Most party kids think that the Tweakers just materialize, or come with the speaker. This is because most kids don’t get to the parties until two hours after the event begins. I, however, always arrive two hours before the event gets started. And now I bring my own chemistry set.
I truly can’t say what actually brought me to sign on to Dancesafe’s ideals. It may be that I’ve been burned on more deals than I care to admit; I’ve also had a few phenomenally bad trips, even on ecstasy. This is just the rule, if you stay in the game long enough, your going to get burned; nothing that good comes free. Maybe I am concerned for the young ones who now eat up this new sense of party culture freedom and I want to keep them as safe as I can. Catcher in the rye syndrome I guess. I could be trying to preserve the community ideal before a law enforcement agency becomes a serious presence. I’m just trying to give something back to the drug culture that I’ve taken so very much from.
The Chicago chapter of Dancesafe was set up by a group of five kids last year, right after a girl in Naperville ODed on what she thought was X but turned out to be PMA and PCP. Now when I say kids set this up, I mean between the ages of seventeen (Heather the youngest) and twenty (Tom a reformed Speaker Tweaker). I was the first non-founding member to join, and quickly I became the whipping boy.
Unlike the rest of the DS kids, I have a real job and with it comes the liberty to certain office supplies. I can’t recall how many hours and pints of toner I wasted at the photocopier, but for all the wasted time I better have saved at least one wasted kid. Then I’d drag these boxes upon crates of promotional material to a party on the weekend and hand it all out. This was my least favorite part of enlightenment.
When I strolled around these warehouse parties, certain epiphanies began to walk with me. Like the fact that at the chronological juncture of twenty, I am far too old to be participating in a scene that is made up children. For men in the party scene, after you turn eighteen you are one of two things, if not both: a promoter or a pedophile. I am not so eager to grasp onto a youth that I am still not certain validates its cumbersome grasp on my present; and I have no urge to try and land a candy flipper girl who just turned seventeen and dresses as though she just turned this many fingers (ed. note: she’s holding up three).
Candy flippers are the ones I speak most often to when working the table and the chemistry set. Candy flipping by definition is the result of taking X with acid. This is the most complimentary mix in my mind. The X adds the much needed euphoric feeling and the acid adds the mind alteration that X lacks. Well, all fine and good for the user but they are an eye sore for the rest of us. Candy flippers are the stereotype A raver: baggy pants with absurdly flared cuffs, little ringer baby-T’s with cartoon characters on them, face painted like a bubble-gum geisha, bulging pockets like a marathon runner’s on Halloween, and a backpack containing every toy you ever thought you lost from the early eighties.
The flippers are safer by nature and almost always test their pill before eating; most everybody else doesn’t want to hear that they just paid twenty bucks for Sudafed non-drowsy formula. Flippers are the physical manifestation of what none of us want to acknowledge; we are recreating and extending childhoods that were cheated from us. Talk to any kid in a party long enough on the rush and they’ll lead on to it, but not glorify it. The Gen-X wave before this one wallowed in their problems, sought pity for things wrought unto them that they felt they didn’t deserve. This generation is just trying to forget and get back what little they had. The flippers still posses that key note idealism that founded the scene, “everything is alright”. I guess this is the kind of ideal that keeps me sober while walking through mine fields of intoxication, trying to help those who are just boarding that self discovery Titanic every weekend night. I liken it to the first time the parent who is so caught up in the holiday spirit when they’re reading The Polar Express to their kid that they themselves start to believe it. I guess I want others to feel it now, which allows me to not let go of that ideal myself.
28:
There are little nooks of backwater retention ponds in every major religion. In the east, Hindu’s had their Buddhists, Buddhists then in turn had their Vedicts (extreme reformers) and then their anglo Steven Seagal infusion. Confusionists had their Taoists, who then had their Shintoists into Capitalists. Jews had their Christians who then had the Muslims and Mormons. I used to think that Alchemy was such a place, a surreal little forgotten offshoot from mystical and scholarly Christians. I thought that it had long been the science of God, a way for those of us who have difficulty comprehending the concept of faith to access the Christian deity with rational actions that prove the might of the creation. This independent knowledge on the subject came to from hearing my Grandfather (who is actually a Free Mason, which was birthed from Alchemy) from the “old country” (the Netherlands) telling me about his Grandfather who was one of the last practicing the alchemist in my long family history of alchemists. Then I procured various bound galleries of alchemy chart work that had little explanation with its great works of symbolic text (making for great wallhangings that I could not quite explain), most ascribed to practitioners of mystical Kabbalisim or Christianity. Also feeding my finite understanding (which I took to be infinite) were numerous novels that incorporate the subject as fictional pretext, i.e. Diaries of a Drug Fiend or The Alchemist, both of whom’s authors pretty much made it up as they went. All of these things misled me until I found out through personal investigation that there is a distinct possibility that Alchemy may have in turn led to Christianity, instead of the other way around.
To assess what alchemy is in relation to Christianity, first we must look at what alchemy is. When corresponding with someone whom I hope was serious alchemy historian (he at least knew more than I did), he told me that alchemy was a “clever parable wrapped in a fable and cloaked as an allegory”. I responded by telling him that so were most of the major religious movements. However trite the correspondence on the surface may seem, it is closer to the truth than expected. Alchemy is not so much an object to look at, but more a series of objective mind frames to look through.
One can see by the myriad of cultural wrappings that the plurality of its name is the start of a metaphor omelet. The base word is chemia, the art practiced based on the collected secret teachings from fallen celestial beings (we’ll get to that in a moment) recorded in a book called Chema by the first alchemist, a woman named Chemes. When the word hit Greece it was translated into chemia, here is when the Christians first applied it. From there it traveled to the Arab world during the early days of Mohammed and picked up the “al” in the front, which merely means the, translating to “the black” or substance of mystery. Once unwrapped of all its cultural hearsay, it still does nothing to clearly define it.
To most, myself included, the idea of alchemy conjures up thoughts of a self-righteous slacker with a head full of half-right ideas sitting in a room full of intoxicating mercury smoke trying, ideally, to turn lead to gold so he doesn’t have to shepherd anymore. The theory is often best defined by its practice, in this case, the Alchemical Method: revelation, demonstration, and transmutation. In the more explicit text Vincent Bridge’s essay A Moment to the End of Time in Alchemy and Mystisim on alchemy in Alexandria to Black Death he says: “(1.) The inner transmutation involves the conscious refining of effect psycho-sexual energies and fluids (don’t worry I am getting to that. (2.) The outer is the ability to use those energies to effect transmutation of physical states, including the elements. (3.) The third transmutation is that of time itself, from the darkness of the Iron age to the splendor of the Golden age Only Nature can overcome Nature.” This is a broad view of the process, but it allows us to see the kind of philosophy that encompasses the alchemy Christian, not one separate view, but all views at once.
Lofty ideals, but from where to they spring, and what does it have to do with Christianity? For that answer we have to start at the creation of the Judeo-Christian world, and like all things good, it begins with a little hanky-panky. Back when the world and the Heavens where getting used to their new digs, a few of God’s helpers got restless and went to rustle up some action. Genesis, chapter six reads “When men began to multiply on earth and the daughters were born to them, the sons of heaven (a.k.a. fathers of the Nephilim) saw how beautiful the daughters of man were, and so they took for their wives as many as they chose.” There was once a movie by the title of ‘Earth Girls are Easy’, I doubt that they were referring to our original ladies here, since they weren’t just handing it out. No, they started trading it for information, and started the oldest profession. In the oldest surviving alchemist manuscript to date is the story of “Isis the Prophetess to Her Son Horus” in Codex Marcianu. It describes the details of the bargain. Each time an angel came back for sex, they had to hand over a little more information on the nature of God’s elements: Earth, fire, air, and water. Later on this search for knowledge will be condemned and drive the movement that becomes synonymous with Gnosticism underground, but up until this point the pursuit of knowledge has only gotten humanity thrown out of the Garden of Eden.
For most of the Old Testament, alchemy stays in the Near and Middle East, with its main hotbed of activity in Egypt. From Egypt it spreads along the trade routes to Greece where it then influences Roman science as well. All of which are picked up by the various Jewish tribes, now referred to as Kabbalistic and pagan Romans alike to utilize as a way of looking deeper into themselves, their world, and their faith. With it being widely taught through out Egypt, the chances of a little boy escaping Herod’s wrath might just pick up a thing or two are great.
In Matthew’s Gospel, the first of the Gospels, we see a focus on the teachings and miracles of Christ. More openly teaching in this gospel than any other, Christ is found openly proclaiming “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” Afterward Matthew points out in a quote from 2nd Isaiah that “the people living in darkness have seen a great light, on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.” The context can be seen as either the fulfillment of Christian prophecy or the influence of Egyptian alchemy text saying that immortality can be gained from inhaling light. This is also echoed in Matthew 5:14 when Christ declares “You are the light of the world”, and this is further reiterated in the Lord’s Prayer. In his parables, which are layered in the same way that alchemy is, we can see yet another meaning in the mustard seed teaching. What he may have been talking about was that the nature of God, which is always referred to as magic, will soon spread through out the entire world and choke everything else out. This has been charted several different ways in various alchemy circles. While it is not an attempt to single out Christ as a magician, it is important to note the influences around the parallel time. The alchemy train of thought was far more ingrained and expected in scholarly circles by both pagans and Jews. But everything in the world changed after Christ’s brief and explosive appearance.
Shortly after Christ’s death and resurrection, many groups of followers spotted the landscape. Much to the dismay of the conservative Orthodoxy, the Gnostic following was growing in strength and followers who believed that Jesus not only taught ’secret’ lessons to his disciples, but to Mary Magdalene as well. These Gnostics bought into the alchemy system and history which led them to believe that Christ was the “divine messenger, an angelic being disguised as a man, sent to reveal secret knowledge of the path of return” as listed in a side note to a chart of the cross. They also believed resurrection was not literal, but the spiritual conquering of death, the light of the soul would join again to the divine light that it had been split from in the fall of man.
This all-encompassing inclusion is one of the main fractures in doctrine that led to the split, and Gnosticism’s being forced underground. This idea that knowledge was power angered many of those in the orthodoxy that felt only the apostles had any kind of spiritual authority. They were not big fans of women in teaching positions, which in this case almost all the women were. Mary Magdalene was a key Gnostic theorist and hailed as the first practicing alchemist, which spread her secret learning. This claim led to larger comparisons to the thought that Mary and Jesus had been married. This drew parallels to the creation story of the Sons of God trading information for sex, and understandably the orthodoxy, still on fire for the Lord at the beginning of the second century, was not going to listen anymore. The Orthodoxy claimed that the Gnostics were all heretics and had them banished. The persecutions lasted for centuries, and slowly as the groups Gnostics got further spread apart by the influx of Orthodoxy and the in turn began to die out, and with them there texts, charts and celestial secrets. Only until another sweeping religious movement uncovered these texts while conquering much of the land in the Seventh century, it was then that Muslim scholars made use of these texts and gave birth to the Sufi’s movement.
The cycle from there continues until the Church of England starts up and ties gather as many documents that it possibly can, including the Gnostic alchemy texts. Later still, these documents are sold and become property of the Free Masons and other organizations that still carry on the alchemy traditions today, for the most part in Northern Europe. While this report is merely a general overview, and light at that, it highlights the possibility that alchemy and the pursuit of knowledge over submission have been influencing today’s Western religions far deeper than we can imagine.
While coincident is one of the mother’s of invention, I think that it is obvious that these two movements courting one another had to have had influenced one another. These practices have influenced every worship text from the Laws of Moses to the modern day Koran. In this case we see that alchemy was prior to Christianity, chicken before the egg. Even today with the world being as wired as it is, we are starting to see these Gnostic texts circulating through out the world. The gaps that the original church used to kill off these chapters are being bridged by disillusioned church goers trying to find the magic that was sucked out of Christianity thousands of years ago. Trying to remember what it was that drew them in rather than the guilt and the children and the extended coffee hour. Looking for that spark that went out a long time ago, looking for kindling, looking for the chemistry.
WORKS CITED
Web Sources:
www.levity.com/alchemy
www.secularhumanism.org
Bound Sources:
Meyer, M. The Gospel of Thomas San Fransisco: Haper, 1992
Meyer, M. The Secret Teachings of Jesus. New York: Random House, 1984.
Miller, R. The Complete Gospels. San Fransisco: Haper, 1994.
Roob, A. Alchemy and Mystism: Hermtetic Museum. Lisboa: Taschen, 1996.
28:
She sat. She sat across from me and the rest of the world, the finite flora of vagabond violence gulping down gallons of rotgut. She sat in Her woven canvas web of purple-gray nicotine-down nesting. Her, with miles of elevation between the Her and I, She like the bust perched raven. She, lost in Her own Machevleon marvel, Her complacent, post-cognitive comprehension that She no longer required mundane mediation on the mediocrity of the Self. She knew, and the rest of us stumbled in blushing awe.
She sat. She sat, satiated by the query-worth cup filling that occupied her chipped-tooth-yellowed mug. Her forbidden flesh nestled in thick folds of unworthy cashmere, as subtle a sight as a silk marshmallow immersed in dove-down with an ivory-cream coating. Her stoic countenance could have only been hand crafted by the righteous right hand of Adam’s Father. Her cheeks, the tincture of a maternal pearl’s pride and joy. Her slender, yet ample lips painted a hue of auburn that Solomon would have had been stuttering their praises. And still these crimson cherubim could barely concede the forked tongue that had caused the serpent to lose his legs.
She sat. She sat until the stare ceased, then glided by in a gilded exodus that caused us to choke on the void she left as a concave calling card.
28:
Hysteria. The head has become so steeped in sickness and depravity that it now feasts on the tender, manicured hands that were once used to hold itself up with. This masochistic cannibal is none other than the conservative and charming town of Naperville IL. Metaphorically, much like the urban legend of a young boy who upon rousing after a nights slumber discovers a tiny boil on his neck, as the day progresses the ‘tiny’ boil advances in growth to become a seething, tawny cyst. When the slightest pressure is applied, the fetid contents bursts to the surface to reveal hundreds of pulsating suckling arachnids pouring out of the gaping wound. That’s right, the seemingly flawless pearl among oysters, the ‘Gold Coast’ without the coast, was torn asunder by the writhing inner turmoil of several occurrences, in two months time.
A $90,000 bank heist, a brutal slaying of a disabled mother; a child buried on his seventeenth birthday due to an apparent overdose; a police officer discharges the contents of his fire arm into the center of his head; mother sedates and suffocates her three children; fifth former employee at near dormant Amoco plant dies of brain cancer. These events, if viewed over a five year span, would be no less horrific, but possibly more consumer friendly, more digestible. Your run-of-the-mill SUV navigator is overwhelmed with the complexity of these trespasses into their Faberge egg-like utopia. Much to our misfortune, the chances that a polite FBI agent with slick black hair will pull up on a Harley praising our local diner’s coffee and delectable cherry pie�all the while dreaming of a bow legged dwarf sporting a red tux who enunciate words like he has a mouth filled moist peat moss�has grown slim to none. Still the public needs a rationalized martyr to heave their emotional stones at. The effigies the media are offering, if any, are the mindlessly reiterated bastard offspring of some foul drunken Spock and Freudian copulation. For some in this drive-thru culture these bad seed and postpartum justifications are feasible. Still, close inspection on both individual and a broad sequential scale warrants further speculation that a far more sinister nature lies beneath the pale, livid surface.
For some time the common optimistic and social lethargy inducing phallic has been that children are the ‘Hope of the Future’. This has almost become the self-imposing cliche of the last decade in this century. These futile ignorant ‘opti-mystics’ never entertain the possible scenario that unravels before them at an alarming rate. The youth of Naperville have, over the past five years, under gone a truly consternatious metamorphosis. The adolescences have amassed into hoards of heathenish Philistines with fiber optic IVs and accomplish nothing more than acts of pillaging, massacring, and senseless procreation. In comparison, their cranial capacity is sub-par even to the most asinine mongoloid. Adjoined to their mass ingestion of whatever squalid bathtub pharmaceutical they can get their deviant hands on, they are utterly drained of any instilled morality and social decency.
No less than two years after Naperville is hailed by numerous forms of the mass media as the “greatest place in the United States to raise a child” does the sugar coating crumble and the decayed cavity of reality occupy its place. Shortly after these accolades are betrothed, the ‘ideal’ children venture outside their Eden-like playpens to make daily Meccas to Cicero Av. and other such tributaries. There the ‘well adjusted’ babes develop an insatiable lust for heroin and its ugly stepsister, crack. The ‘child friendly’ town’s solution? To run a week long, hard-hitting expose in the Naperville Sun on degenerate teen junkies from the suburbs surrounding Naperville. Having thought this placebo cured the plague the expose is praised. Thereupon, little less than a month later, a child was nestled beneath six feet of soil on his seventeenth birthday, due to an apparent overdose. This in fact was not the direct cause of death, the heroin he snorted late at night a few days before his funeral had been cut with powder Clorox bleach, causing his heart to explode.
A few days prior to this ‘mishap’, a disabled, middle-aged woman is brutally murdered and is left in her bathtub. The culprits? Three eighteen year olds, two male, one female. The female was the expired’s trusted caretaker. While two of the associates ransacked the meager living quarters, one of them brutishly torqued the handicapped woman’s cranium back forth until her brittle upper vertebra shattered. During the groups’ appearance in court to enter a feeble plea of not guilty to the charge of premeditated first degree murder, the demented girl looked only once, to give a wide tooth grin at her parents.
In the following week a gang of eight youths stage a bank heist, under the nurturing guidance of a pathetic swindler who is employed with these Tarintino refuse. The young entrepreneurs make off with $90,000 and proceed to spend it on inane tripe such as jewelry and electronics, a shimmering reflection on the spending pattern of their adult contemporaries. It would seem in the past two months that Naperville has broadened its child life cycle adaptability. Not only is this a great town to raise the little hyper-capitalist portages, now it’s also a delightful place to bury and incarcerate them as well. My how we’ve grown!
To think that it is merely the refuse permeated drainage ditch of youth that pollutes the pristine lagoon waters of Naperville is to peer through the identical cataracts that the local news suffers from. The previously stated youth affliction, no matter how deprave, is merely a canker sore on a leprosy-ravaged body. There are countless volumes of preordained justifications that rape the child of self-accountability and the parent of responsibility. Such is not the case with the carnage that sodomized their most trusted staple citizens.
On a chilly March afternoon a house wife and mother sits in the kitchen of her attractive Victorian home methodically mixing several doses of heavy tranquilizers for various over the counter drugs. The precision gained from being employed by Edward’s hospital as a nurse aids her in the task. This Sunday school teacher administered the dosages to two of the three children. Each one she calmly laid in their bed to sleep. Then her soft, tender hands cut the flow of oxygen to their young, pink lungs. One hand pinched the small button nose restricting its function, the other, placed firmly over the delicate lips so that she felt the hot breath of life slip through her maternal fingers one last time. When the third child returns home from school, she sees in her motherly wisdom, that his life too, is not worth the energy it takes to live it. All three children lay lifeless and blue in each of their rooms as this giver and revoker of life attempts to drain her crimson fluid out of boorish holes in her arms. Then, a MOMENT OF CLARITY, her life is now worth living! This powerful deduction of destiny seemingly manifests itself while she lies half-conscious, caked in the half-dried pool of blood. Strength is mustered up to phone police and her life is saved thanks to the help of modern medicine. While residing in the hospital that she once deployed life saving measures, her former fellow co-workers have to draw straws to decide who would treat this new angel of death. Meanwhile, a city frantically searches for rationalization, or justification for this A.C. Wells’ like story. The best the towns’ people can muster is that a belated case of postpartum syndrome reared its horned head. The novelty sweeps through the town more rapidly than the terror of the actual deed. Soon most of the city alternates shifts of macabre milling in front of the police tape with flowers waiting for the CBS news team to appear.
The day prior to the mother/nurse/Sunday schoolteacher’s brain producing or not producing enough of a certain chemical causing a praying mantis like backlash, a guardian of truth and justice resolved he could no longer protect his body and soul against tyranny of his mind. The day this conclusion is deduced, he enters a forest preserve and with his police issue fire arm, the Naperville officer uses the lead projectiles to displace the contents of his skull onto the snow laden forest floor. He leaves behind no written confession of inner guilt, no evidence that is admissible, not even a warrant-worthy inkling of probable cause. He exits instead, a happy family, as the highest decorated officer on the elite Naperville police force and head of crime investigation unit. Opposed to the long and vapid out cry over the children’s slaughter, the public is given few details and fewer reasons. The local media left this conundrum of self desolation on the cutting room floor for half page photos of children staring at three white, haphazardly assembled ply wood crosses placed in front of the morbid, Victorian home. The rest of the montage consisted of inane quotations from the readily available, and publicity ravenous village idiots. A man, who felt his life of protecting and serving was not fulfilling, and his daily walk was not important enough to be missed, was swept under the carpet by these he protected.
This accursed city of fast food ideals and microwave morals demands ratiocination to be dictated quickly and in bite-sized morsels. They need to be able to expel all incomprehensible horror with a brisk swipe of psychology buzzword and a reaffirming and self-empowering quip from their Chicken Soup for the Soul library. They need to construct a protective layer between them and the atrocities at hand. This makes evil a debunkable term, individual and conceivable only under certain pretext, thus becoming easily avoidable. Much like trying to access the seas’ one creature at a time.
The thought that these incidents could be some sort of karmic recoil is so grossly self incriminating and cumbersome that it is quickly dismissed as to not disrupt the ‘ego’ barrier. There is a Chinese proverb that says, “He who defecates upon his doorstep is soon to step in it.” The retrospective glance quickly reveals that there are quite a few injustices waiting in the cosmic wings. Over the past forty years, farmers have been forced off their land by the spread of the festering plague of suburban excess and the rabid dollar nipping closely at its heels. After the astro-turf is laid, the feverish need for convenience sets in so the virus infects the last few farms as to establish strip malls were fresh food may be shipped in from other states. Prior to the dust bowel survivors there were the Native Americans. They are considered the single largest blasphemy in American, as well as suburban mentality. The abstract concept of working with the land is one that seems to go against the entire North American theology. Up until the semi-recent present, nature was our stepping stone, a wild and mindless prairie beast who need to be broken and bit placed in its mouth. Then, once the land has been spayed, what of these sun worshipping pagans? The feckless few that remained after prairie genocide are pushed into separate plots of unworkable tundra and demeaned to the point of rejecting their proud heritage and ingesting hair spray for its intoxicating properties. The cultural sympathizers in Naperville concur that naming the plush neighborhoods they congregate in after the defiled tribes is the best tribute they can bestow. Second best in fact, the always liberal people of Naperville reward them the utmost honor of having high school athletic teams named after a derogatory jeer.
The preeminent consternation of the latte-consuming public is that there is no grandiose elucidation, karmic or otherwise. The notion that pure evil exists in that farthest folds of our gray matter, and the ability to act upon its wickedness lurks in the eclipses of our souls, is most haunting of all. No matter how pious an individual, the spiritual-batter for evil lies in each of us. No matter how many garages, no matter how many zeros behind the paycheck, no matter how many degrees, when it comes to the recesses of evil, we are all on a level playing field, and that concept frightens the city of Naperville the most.
28:
Daze. It is quite possible that some days are just born depraved, they’re bad eggs from the beginning. Maybe Mother Midnight malnurishes some of her children so that they become counter productive to their light and life granting goal. It’s conceivable that these days are rebelling, in typical preteen fashion, for some kind of negative attention, to set itself apart from the streamlined conformity of its drone siblings. Can you tell a bad day to go sit in the corner and make it think about what it’s done? And if such is the case, how does one go about treating temperamental temper tantrums from celestial beings like days? Do you scold it sternly as you would a three year old who just peed his pants to agitate you for not stopping to heed to his thimble-sized bladder? Do you stand on top of the highest spot you can locate and draw your hand back while uttering threats of giving it the wiping of its life if it doesn’t shape up its attitude and stand up straight? Or do you try and reason with its sullen smirk by informing it that we humans invented the measure of time that it is defined by and if it doesn’t work with you here, you may just a have to un-invevnt it? I’ve been told by some that it is merely a matter of mindset on such days of disorder, of course these are the same malignant, misanthropic mongoloids who mainline the merriment of the broad Buddha without winking at his weeping counter part, optical optimists. This is a matter for better days, anyway, certainly even those karma kumquats can say that they have felt the wet towel snap of bad days.
Sometimes the day doesn’t even seem to put any effort in to your relationship, like last Wensday for prime example.
I could feel something seeping through my embroidered embryonic quilt of Quaalude sleep, that warm womb of nocturnal nectar. Without any kind of windy warning shot it screamed at me through my depraved Chernobyl alarm clock, like symphonic forsepts wrenching me from the balm of slumber, I was partially aborted from the incubator of unconsciousness. There was no yellow sticky pad note warning me the kind of day this one was, his day older brother sure as hell didn’t warn me, and my cerebral fax machine must have been out of cerebellum paper. It is always Russian roulette with the Aztec calendar cylinder.
Stumbling through my room something was vaguely different about the air, I didn’t recall it being the same consistency and texture as the atmosphere in a seedy Turkish bath house. The stale humidity pawed like an idle lion at my newly birthed to day-body as I prepared to shave. The shave itself is enough to invoke shudders of stainless steel terror in most fair skinned men, such as myself. The pure notion of dragging that hideously dull, rusted blade across my tender tar-tar face made me wish for a second draw at the sexual lottery. At least women can stand tall with their fuzzy legs leaning on a brick wall of feminist rhetoric, while men can only explain their lumberjack beard with names like Jim Beam, and Captain Morgan. Shaving this early in the newly sprung morning humidity makes a person hyperaware of certain aspects in the daily hygiene ritual, like every pore on your face, for one. You can savor, in the dank edification, each individual hair being torn from its follicle hiding spot and fresh, crimson blood replacing it. These are the preemptive marks of a mischievous day, humidity. In smooth, dry climates when one cuts themselves shaving, there is a distinguishable cut, measures can be taken to clot its flow, and it is an isolated instant that won’t stay on the permanent record. In the seething, cumbersome morning humidity however, one does not have the convenience of a singular standing cut to cover, no, instead there seems to be a myriad of “soft” spots of the face that merely ooze blood. There is no direct source of these hemoglobin hobgoblins in crimson retention ponds. It is more like clusters of pores just opened up the floodgates and, by osmosis blood appears, and brings its ugly kid sister, stinging agony, in tow. Trying to stiffen these brutish blood squatters is nearly impossible, better luck is had wallpapering the entire face with toilet paper.
Showering in this climate is futile as well, for by virtue of the day’s demeanor alone, a toe must my stubbed on the near-by toilet for passing toll. It is boorish manner of barbed day’s like this one that are not content with the blood spilt at the sink alter of alms, but it requires various humiliatingly torturous consecrations with every step, as to reaffirm just who is dealing the cards. This particular backhanded baksheesh involves the sacrificial little toe to be caught on the jaded edge of a sweating porcelain toilet, the one that segways into the nude stubble into the mildew slicked shower floor.
The few moments that seem to come duty free from the humidity border patrol are moments spent in the shower. Its no matter that on mournful mornings as these the water spits out on me in that luke-warm urine kind of way that only truly old building’s plumbing can provide. Still the shower remains the confessional booth of the secular world. Refuge from the outside and admonishment from the within, these things and Zen treats will unconditionally await humanity no further than the shower curtain. Proverbs of which you can create your own Tao to take with you. Lasting, one hand clapping debates on whether the glutinous folds of verdant mildew in the cracks of the tiles highlight them, or does the tile highlight the fetid flora. On these days, whimsical wisdom giveway to acrid prophecies on the damned day that dawns currently, thoughts of the various manners of eluding any kind of interaction with it. With rent to be paid there is no way to go under or over these distempered days. With my head hung as low as the tail between my legs, I wax on if there is any opposing the day deity, is there level of sacrificial lambs that must be slaughtered for the proper bad-day Passover to be met. Isn’t peeling a layer of facial flesh off with a rusted razor and the stubbing of a toe enough?
With these thoughts in the waiting room of my mind, reading Highlife’s or year old Newsweek’s, I hopped out of the shower only to slip again. Only this time landing the base of my skull with the thick thwap of impact on the rim of the toilet. “At least now my little toe and my skull have some kind of empathy for one another.” I bemused my rattled thoughts with, trying not ponder any further on what this day might have me do for it’s merriment. Springing to my feet with the speed of Apollo on greased ball bearings, I tried to regain a manner of duty so as to not let on to the snickering day that it was wearing on me already. I took quickly to trying my nude, freshly bruised body in away to try and catch that Irish Spring Zest. Despite my efforts, the tenacious humidity spurned any notion of mercy, and by the time I had dried my self, I was newly anointed with the saline dew of sweat afresh. At this point, only a puny twenty minutes after my crude awakening to this temper tantrum of a day, I was broken. With chipped teeth grinded as my mind pleaded for exoneration from the punishments of such a callow mannered day. But once again I ask, what can a mortal bring to the astral blackjack table when the chips are stacked in the house’s favor? Sure, you can grovel and plead with the dealer to give you another hand, but that just makes the day laugh at you even harder. I suppose you could try and get heavy, you’ll just end up with a black eye, or a head recently bounced off a toilet bowl. Instead, I merely looked to have the terrible twenty four-hour’s blood lust satisfied. On the way down my three-flat’s stairwell, which was recently baptized in vomit (a welcome sign that I was not the only one afflicted with the morning’s sickness), I began to marvel at the sheer size of this day’s vindication. And even more pressing was the tariff that must be offered up to quell it’s rampage. The early civilizations had the right tip off on how to handle the anger off the heavens, sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice. Whether or not this spilling of cherry crimson virgin blood actually mattered to the god’s that be is completely irrelevant, it helped the people. It was like the ever-popular scheduled riots of Central America, it may not make a lick of difference to forwarding the cause, but it sure is nice to make the innocent pay for it. This is completely rational, we sinners (that’s all of you) have obviously committed some kind of sensual sin, there fore the God’s that give out bad days have dealt a heavy hand; locust, first born dead, holocausts, forty years of wandering in the wilderness, failed crops, you get the idea, fire and brimstone, baby. Then you have your pious and blemish free individuals (that’s them), while you receive the cat o’ nine tails of karma, they are humbly working or praying, well if they are getting off so easy then they must be in cahoots with the powers that be. The only logical solution to imbalance of suffering is to go after those who don’t suffer, and force them to. Besides, when offering up a sacrifice to the gods, one does not want to use anything but the best. Well, with time these things have evolved so that the retribution is fit into our nine to five lives, the payment is sent from on high and pops up on the palmpilot to ruin the next few days or so, when ever is inconvenient, how’s your ten o’ clock looking?
With a head full of depraved ideals on human sacrifice to appease a bad day, I stumbled out into the street, my mind still functioning as the cherubim’s meat grinder. The stench of humidity swarmed me like a hoard of angry water molecule wasps would; the air was a kin to the mating musk of a large mammal, running on a primordial gas powered generator. There was no solace to be found in the sky, which was coated in an oatmeal veneer that looked as though God had spilled soured buttermilk all over the sky, and was trying to use that pale, tawny sun to dry it up. The effect of such a heavy, washed out filter was a lose of actual distinction between color and cobwebs. On days such as this, there is an overwhelming gray imbued lighting that ember burns brightly, nothing and nobody is privy to their own enunciated tone, we all share different tonalities of totalitarian Gray, and mentally, not unlike Dorian’s portrait.
The drab, hot asphalt street seems to bubble out of the clogged drains, like despondent lava from sewer volcanoes. And the things above ground seem to sway under the humidities heavy hand as if all life, flora and fauna, is drowning in Mother Earth’s milky musk. Could there be a certain penance that is reserved in a break-in-case-of-emergency glass box?
“The weight of this challenge firmly rests upon my shoulders” I find myself saying to the flock of pigeons that trudge in front me. The flock’s total lack of understanding of my early dawn epiphany provokes me to discern that one of the rancid birds will be my first hollowed offering. Coming upon a stationary group that were huddled about like a leper colony at a cannibal picnic, the PIGeon’s attention directed around the bloated carcass of a fallen brother of theirs. The misfortunate comrade cum culinary delight received an on going circle of flesh protruding pecks through his rank flesh at the hands of former friends and family. The staggering metaphorical content of the cannibal carousal that was commencing at six thirty am caused me to shutter momentarily before drawing back my left shoe right above my sacrificial selection as he greedily awaited his turn in the pecking order. I steadied my foot of justice over the pigeon that was closest to a dove in appearance, probably due to the fact that it was caked in the albino frosting of fecal remnants from all its family. As I was slowly bringing my vindicating foot over its shit laden body, my past inner monologue kicked in and I remembered that the first rule of sacrifice is that the subject must be pure to be received. With this in the lubricated chamber of my mind, I paused my crushing foot right as it grazed the chosen bird, resulting in its drilling my tender ankle with its now blood browned beak. The reversed attack so surprised the pack that they scattered from the Earth, leaving me to nurse my gapping ankle wound and the half eaten pigeon meat to watch me with its pecked- clean ocular cavities.
Wounded again by the day and its pigeon minion, hobbled down the empty, heat throbbing street towards my L platform goal. My mood had been serapes momentarily by the pumping of fear that I would not only not be able to find an appropriate sacrifice, but now I feared that I might actually be that sacrifice. Turning the corner near an abandoned bus stop on the abandoned street, I was then confronted by the one thing that no man on his way to ten hours of soul-numbing work ever likes to see a fucking derelict. This was not your run of the gin mill derelict either, this was a full blown, gray-skinned, tattered flannel shirted, soiled trousers, bare footed, glue-sniffing, paint-huffing heathen. It is not that I like I lack empathy for him, nor am I the kind that has ever suggested to another living thing that they should go out and get a job, right before I pelt them square in the forehead with a lint laden nickel. No, it is the actuality that I detest that he gets to spend the whole day getting stone-blind twisted and I have to go to work. And for what? So that I can do the same fucking thing? So that I can silently beg through my indentured servitude enough at the end of the week I can afford to go out and hold my own medulla oblongata holocaust? The only thing that separates us is that I have better taste in the brain rot grog that inflate my skull and ego, and he is direct in what he wants and he goes out and gets it. “You Know Rich, so and so junkie is a ‘shoot from the hip kinda guy’ he knows exactly what he wants and goes for the gusto to get it, no holds bar, never give up at any cost, know what I mean, Richer, that’s the kinda guy that I want in my corner office.” I hate him and them for having both brass cock rings that I could never grab onto, the ability to have little shame in the innate carnality that drives them to exist everyday, and then the self truistic nature to not deny themselves that. Yeah, well I still have nicer teeth, smell pretty, so fuck you.
Trying to avoid his gaunt gaze, I only made him more aware of my presence, and avoidance of his. The funny thing about huffers, such as this gentleman, is that they think they are the only ones that know that they ingest paint like paunchy vampires at a fat farm. He and I do the same dance every morning, the nod of presence into stare into paved nothingness at my shoes, while he chokes on his viscous words, trying to get the traffic jam of words over the toothy road block in his mouth before I can speed by the request for money I really don’t have and the cigarette that I’m not going to relinquish.
On this already ill fated morning, I attempt to find some kind of solace in the fact that at least this small ritual will be honored. I in turn, decide to alter the dance alter that will typically tango on, instead of just careening past him with my head firmly focused on the ground, allowing him to approach me, hoping that he can offer some kind of cabala Qutip of comprehensive cohesion to mend a broken day. But, he too decides to change his course of action as well, he stumbles towards me like a drunk lemming and topples to his knees like his Achilles tendon went back to roast behind his knee cap. Spilling his Diet Coke can filled with white spray paint to the pulsating pavement, he looks up at me with yellow, lacer-coated eyes, tilts his skull open at the mouth, producing more vomit than I have ever seen. He proceeds to unburden this heavy load onto my tennis shoes with heaves violent enough to elicit aftershocks somewhere felt in California, and a mudslide in Mexico City. The regurgitate return was the consistency of yeast in cement mixed with two thirds soiled bathroom rug from an invalids home, the utter girth and amount that was produced forced him to gag even more, arching his dragon vertebra back lick a behlemic dog in heat.
It wasn’t until I realized that tiny dough drops from the sick had splattered into my fetid pigeon blemish that I jumped around him, violently cursing him and secretly envying him at the sametime. I am a Tijuana tequila worm of envy that he was just able to unload all of his inner strife of bile inlaid burden onto stranger’s feet and then be completely relived of it. Instant admonishment at the price of my soles. I thought quickly of the needed sacrifice that had yet to present its presence at present. I lurched forward in strangely calm demeanor, while the huffer wallowed in the puddle of his fresh baked stomach casserole, trying to straighten my mental tie in case anyone was watching, kicking the actual vomit from my limping, whimpering leg. Just trying to grab another quill that the day’s porcupine had placed into my soul’s thigh.
I was not going to turn around, what then anyway? I knew without the day offering a formal memo that events would continue in this manner no matter what topographical direction I headed. Situation was frightenly bowing on critical mental mass. The gray sky had now started to coagulate into cottage cheese like rings around the sun, like God had tripped over the sun and skinned his knee. I promptly resolved to keep pressing forward to the L tracks even though I was absolutely no state of any kind for travel. But know I had caught the fear, fear that if I did not carry through to my goal, though I actually doubt I would have gone into my place of employment festooned in a dope fiend’s puke and leg probably already swelling from rabies and various other parasites coursing through my blood stream and into my brain. Still, I had to push forward for fear that the day would seize this moment of weakness and pounce on me for the kill, and who knows how much more its depraved anguish could be twisted like a screw into the meat of my mind, or like a pigeon beak into my ankle.
Hobbling at a good clip, putting about a block or so between the vagrant and myself, I slowed my pace enough to catch my tumble weed breath and to let loose with a fresh pack of sweats. This sweat was a bit more determined than the last, this one held more sinister implications in the pour that it let loose and the icy tempeture that it contained. The mass out pouring of precipitation caused me quiver and loss my feeble attempt at balance. I attempted to push forth, making it about half a block closer on the necropolis block of gyro take out stands and weave parlor’s with blown up pictorials of Jabba the Hut women. Slumping against the heat and a liquor store called Islam’s Valley; I tried repeatedly to regain any form of cognitive thought process, to no avail. My mind systematically spun like a nickel washer filled with my mental mud.
“What the hell led me to this point? Where did these perceptual populations surface in regards to Aztec sacrifice?” I found myself inquiring to a raw-boned CTA trooper as he helped push my sweltering body through the turnstile. He simply grunted at me as my brain searched its creamy nougat for a caramel swirl of memory on how I had finally gotten to the L. I looked down at a source of rout tension coming from my throbbing arm to see that my hand folded into an origomy interpretation of Jonny Truman with althritest. My entire body wash saturated in the slick sick of my saline pore’s pouring sweat. I could no longer feel anything form my ankle, minus the thick lava flow of crimson life force from it. Whatever that damn bird or the fucking paint huffer had given me was kicking into high gear, and fast. I imagined little minnow parasites nibbling on my nervous system like stale bread.
Clawing my way up the red brick stairwell towards the train I was narrowly missed in the flash flood of stampeding commuters up and over me, and I in turn narrowly missed the train. As I made it up to the platform, I nearly broke the dam of tears that had been welling the resivours of my eyes from the mornings out set. I plopped down on one of the benches and let a wave of nausea induced by cessation of my motion. Staring down at the oil sweating wood, I tried to calm the havoc in my guliver that traveled, up my throat to be released in a foul bile spray in the path of an on coming train. Thinking this gut release would be my last; I climbed aboard a Southbound Redline. Assuming I was still on schedule more or less I glanced briefly at my wristwatch to find that the time was now eight forty three am. Some how in my misadventures, I had also sacrificed two hours, along with my health and dignity. I was then assured by fate that I was the sacrificial lamb for the day. And maybe it is not even sacrificial; maybe it is just food, that the planet has a quota of people it must eat before the day can go about it business. I thought these things to myself because I found that inner monologue was all that I had available since my jaw had suddenly locked into place, forcing a permanent Cheshire grin. Anew, the eye offending brine appeared in my sockets just waiting for the calvier of sobs that had not been allowed to charge through my locked jaw.
I quickly glanced around, and observed that I was the only passenger on the train that wasn’t suffering from jungle sweats and tetanus. No one else on the train bled like I bled, from the places I did.
The train jerked and sputtered like an impotent champagne bottle, and all its human cargo mimicked the little carbonation bubbles within. Sitting frozen in paralysis, face pressed hard against the window, staring out at the day that had so far tried to level me. I was trying to learn its speratic jesters and motions as the little train that could stuttered along like an ADD afflicted squirrel with a lisp. As the social petiri dish pulled into the station at Bryn Mar, the train finally blew its frustrated load, and black smoke poured from each side of it. Like an iron frog on a wooden lily pad, the train cuddled with the platform while most of the tadpoles that rode with in abandoned ship.
Pondering my new found magic touch of transforming things from normalize into shit, I noticed a large long haired German Shepherd on top of one of the nearby roofs of a decapitated three flat. The serene scene inspired me to lean further into the troubled train’s looking glass and follow the hound’s smooth movements. The Dog was about a story above me, prancing about on a torn tar papered roof. He was built like an organic armored truck, muscles rippling as he leapt about. From where I was frozen it was difficult to tell whether his German jig was due to joy or melancholy. The subtle grace that he exuded placated my fevered head comparable to opium silk smoke pouring over a freshly flawed pearl. Focusing on the frolicking canine above me seemed to subdue me and the rampaging Mothra day that threatened to destroy the city of Me. I was not the only one enthralled by the dog’s day dance, several others stayed on the train to view it, most smiled wearily to themselves.
I never questioned when the dog was dancing why he was dancing. I never wondered why he stopped and saunter to the edge of the building looked over once, down at our miserable, sweat saturated faces. I never questioned when he slowly paced three times around the shanty rooftop. I always questioned why he returned to the same focal point where he had looked at us before, and jumped.
I suppose reflecting on it; the dog didn’t really jump. He didn’t scrabble like a lummox on greased ball bearings over the edge either. He merely walked over the brim of the roof onto nothing. I wouldn’t accept that he was chasing a bug or that he was to close to the edge, because he sized everything up, he knew the risks and just walked in to the thick humid nothing.
Just like the rest of us.
I recall a rush through my aching body as I watched the dog plummet to the hot asphalt that lie in wait with a cement catcher’s mit. I wish that I could call this rush one of fear or horror, still it was one of total release. It was as if that horrible day had been violently jerking off in that back seat of a ‘73 Cadillac Elderodo with the heat on and the windows up, and it had finally blown its angry red load on the passenger side vinyl seat, and was now relaxing with a half smoked Swisher Sweet. I think I may have even let an exhausted laugh slip through my clenched teeth, while others let out shrieks.
I don’t recall hearing or seeing the dog hit the ground, but I suspect that it was around the same time that a spasms ripped through my back like a lime Jell-O tsunami. I stepped out on to the platform and curled up on the bench due to some kind of labor dispute between my muscles and my brain. I laid on the bench and felt wave after wave of laughter took body away in the giddy under toe of the dog’s sacrifice.
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