"Suck it up you namby-pamby,whats with all this whiney bullshit,oh, you changed my magazine, oh, didn't like that didjawell, guess what. It sucked, it has a shitty name, always did, and you stole the idea from me. And you can quote me on that!"

-Darryl Openheimer, offered to me by a sarcastic Mr. Channing.

Editorial by Exhibit A
by ReWiReD

Ever get an itch that originates from inside your head? I hate that.

... what? We never left. We've always been here. Sure, maybe you haven't seen an issue published in a whole bunch of months, sure, but that's not because they're not there -- it's just because you're not looking hard enough.

Rumors spread like wildfire sometimes... like the rumor that Gopher is going to disappear after issue 23, which is a few thousand months too late, or that some ex-gopher society members are plotting to make their own zine modeled after Gopher, only remarkably more censored and probably housing more quality material... but you mortals know nothing. You always believe what you hear. No wonder the government has brainwashed you so - through MKULTRA, yes, but on a much wider scale through the government's fourth `unofficial' branch, the media, and through word of mouth, which is no more credible than… say, the Bible.

Another rumor is that the world is going to end this December, and another rumor that states the world is going to end not in 2000, but in 2001. C’mon, people, you don't really believe the aliens came all this way to just grab some few billion sperm and ovaries from a few billion abductees, load them with implanted devices to psychotronically control them at times of need, conspire with the governments of the world, establish underground bases, use the corn fields of our planet as an etch-a-sketch and nab cow privies for perverse reasons and merely decide, just at the end of the millennium, that they're going to kill us, do you? Hell no, they’re going to transport us to another star system to use us as slaves and pronounce the earth their new home, that’s all – we’re not going to die. Oh sure, some think comets, meteors, floods, volcanoes, Jesus, Eris, wars, polar shifts, a dark age, a new collective awareness are all on their way for the new millennium - but it's all just hype. I am also not being made to tell you this - I am not being persuaded my anyone or anything, and most certainly not this pale-complexioned oriental looking fellow dressed in black digging the barrel of his gun into my temple. I tell this because it is truth.

Getting back on firm ground for a moment… I apologize for our apparent absence, but I have traveled afar within the last months... well, actually just an hour away, but far enough... but I am back. You know why? Because this thing called `the Gopher’ is beautiful, as well as the host of diverse characters who write for it. I put this zine out so I could say what I want, and so others could say what they wanted and not be censored. That’s what gopher’s about: literary freedom, creative expression, anarchy – which we all know can only truly work when it’s hand in hand with responsibility, maturity, and understanding. It is a group effort, and it’ll always be that way – excluding no one when decisions about content are made. That’s what’s beautiful about Gopher: no dictatorship. No one trying to control anyone else, behind anyone’s back. With that in mind, enjoy this new issue.

i have a little device
i feel it in my head
all it does is make me
wish that i were dead
my angst machine is running
it's working overtime
i feel the gears all humming
they shake and warp my mind
my thoughts are warped and darkened
they're twisted from my hands
my minds eye watches waiting
so far to fall if i can't stand
i don't know my emotions
i can't control my hands
i want this pain to stop now
i want to make it end
i haven't got the power
i haven't got a plan
i haven't got a notion
of how this life should end
drag a razor down my arm?
a bullet to the head?
a pill to make the hurting stop?
or have i gone insane?
i wonder what Her blood tastes like
i'd like to taste Her pain
i wonder if She likes my blood
or wants to share my pain
i wonder what is wrong with me
i wonder if i'm sane
these thoughts sound like products
of a troubled brain
i want to taste Her smile
i want to know Her mind
to know all Her emotions
to touch Her heart with mine
i hope to know Her secrets
i hope to tell Her mine
i hope that we can share our fears
and conquer them in time
i fear that She'll reject me
i fear to face that loss
i fear to let my heart show through
i fear what might be lost
but i would give up anything
gladly pay any cost
i'd sacrifice mySelf to Her
if that's what it would cost
i'd give my life in trade for Hers
i'd give Her my last breath
and if i give my life for Her
my soul will not be lost
my spirit will continue on
i'll keep my Self on ice
until She has to pay again
then i will meet that price
and only when i've given Her
all that i have to give
my angst machine can stop its work
and i can finally live

The Fairy Tree
by The Grey Shade
10/7/97

I was mad, really mad, I mean like the wild boar mad you get when you are yelled at by your parents for something you didn’t mean to do. How was I supposed to know that carpets were so very flammable? Since I was mad at my parents, and they were mad at me, I decided to let off some steam by knocking down some dead trees in the woods behind my house. I was so mad; in fact, that I forget the reason I’d come into, so I just walked in a general direction under the philosophy that any place was good as long as it was far from home. I’d been wandering for a good twenty minutes when suddenly I saw something that not only stopped me in my tracks, but also took my breath away in its beauty. There, almost right in front of me, were two trees that had become entwined eight feet off the ground, making a kind of tree trunk doorway. Everything about these trees screamed magical to me, from the way the light played across the branches to make a spot of yellow sunlight right in front of the "doorway to the way that if I stood quiet enough for a time, I swore I could hear faint music. The tree trunks were so smooth that I felt like I was touching powder. I knew what kind of trees those were. They were "Fairy Trees! I could just imagine little elves or flying fairies coming out to greet me. I truly thought that, if the conditions were right, I could walk through the "doorway" and be transported to a magic land where I would ride dragons and fight evil creatures to save damsels in distress and all that other heroic stuff.

I decided to sit down and wait to see if anything happened, but alas, for the next half-hour I waited in vain. Then, all of a sudden, while I was dozing, I caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eyes and when I looked up I saw one of the biggest crows I had ever seen! Instantly I remembered the story my grandfather told me about how witches used crows for communication and how, if I listened for long enough, the crow might say something. To me this was the final sign that the trees were magical.

After that day, I always went back to the "Fairies Tree" to sit and wait for elves, fairies, or dragons to come out and take me to that magic land, but they never did. Even though they didn’t come I always went back to sit and wait, always hoping against reason, always waiting, for what is life without hope? I kept going back, until about a year later when everything changed. After a really bad storm, I went out to where the trees stood and found out that during the storm both trees had fallen down. And so with the death of the "Faire Tree" came the death of a part of me.

"One unalterable difference between a civilian and a soldier. The civilian never does more than he is paid to do."
-- unknown.

Soldier
by RuAtha

I was that which others did not want to be. I went where others feared to go, and did what others failed to do. I asked nothing from those who gave me nothing and reluctantly accepted the thoughts of eternal loneliness…should I failed. I have seen the face of Terror; felt the stinging cold of fear; and enjoyed the sweet taste of a moment’s love. I have cried, pained and hoped… but most of all, I have lived times others would say were best forgotten, at least someday I will be able to say that I was proud of what I was… a soldier.

The Sounds of Summer #1:
May, April, and June poems
by ReWiReD

Take the elixir, the blood of life
there’s no escape from it now
in the eerie mist, he breathes down on you
feel the chill of his breath upon your back
the maker, like spiders crawling along
your spine, unsure as to whether it’s all in your mind
don’t turn your back, they will bite you
the watchdogs of the twilight
don’t close your eyes, they’re a bad influence
the demons in your skull
you stare at the clock, turn it forward,
turn it backward – just rip it off the wall
just one more thing that breaks you
laugh, for the eyes see right through you
your ego becomes a façade of transparency
and slowly melts into nonexistence.

for a moment there, you had me
scared out of my mind
I was thinking, what if you’d
died? you believed you had died inside
and decided to help your body catch up
since your mind was crowded, your heart
felt hollow, fourteen years old, fourteen pills swallowed,
so close, you were so goddamn close, the dark
route you chose was headed off the deep end,
you went off the edge, to turn around and run back home again
but you know the map, you know the way
will you visit, and ride insane again one day?

all that’s left is you
I’m not sure I’m present anymore
how you glimmer in the candlelight
as you drift down to my wrists
I can feel the bliss you’ll bring
don’t be afraid, it’ll all take a moment
until all the worries just fade away
into the daze of a forgotten yesterday
a puddle of my own essence that
I drown in on the floor
all because of these things about me
I can’t take anymore a cruel intention a
disembodied dream, an eternal curse
drowned away in a silent scream
a soundless swap across my arms
and I’ll float up to the stars to
once again return home, finally whole
content in alone – a freedom I can bear
out here I’m just so scared
why can’t you help me please
I just can’t stay on these knees of mine
and make myself fall in line
to march with the zombies to a
skipping tune on a broken record, following
steps, footprints that these soles can’t follow
it seems so hollow, it seems so corrupt
I drink from the fountain as you offer me
the cup, it seems so cold but I’d rather drink from
the toilet bowl than crawl into the arms of a world
who wants to dig me a grave of sorrow and meaninglessness
they define as purpose when I’m better off by myself
where I can transcend your hell.

Assorted Poetry
by Thinking Tic-Tac

Recorded phone conversations
Objects witnessed in the sky..."illusions"
Lies pawned off on the public
The truth buried...rarely surfacing...a consistent burning wick
And so the truth is created in the publics' minds'
The actual truth, so far away...we shall never find
Damned the spooks...fuck them all...
Perhaps someday their empire will crumble and the truth shall once again stand tall
Useless Fact..... ~ You kill seven brain cells every time you sneeze ~

Yes...I bathe in "the Holy Tub", this way it's almost like a daily cleansing...kinda baptism thing...and yes I'm deeply in love with God, but Jesus has the nice ass. Why else would I have him hanging up all over my walls? Naked Jesus...nailed on a cross.....the perfect female pornographic fantasy. Don't Ask.

When I peel back this lipstick, I feel true lips
When I wipe off this eye shadow, I see true eyes
When I take off this mask which hides myself I shudder
For I know the truth, and indeed the truth can be a scary thing

Sunken eyes
Hide a bed of lies
Sealed lips
From which no word drips
Diseased heart
Insignificant love, only hate parts
Useless soul
Weakening, fading…digging itself into a treacherous hole
All at once it has come
The end indeed…now all is done

Stare at a mangled face
Try to hide in an empty space
Confront your only fears
Plot the deaths of your fellow queers…

Brain Gal vs. The Control Gang
by Kevin James Miller

The fortyish woman sitting in front of Professor Irwyn was six feet tall, and slender, and wore a sky blue businesswoman's suit, which included a stylish double-breasted suit coat. Her carefully styled hair ended sharply at her shoulders. Her face formed a perfect oval, and light brown nestled in her eyes. In her lap was a black, shiny leather briefcase. She had the smallest, most businesslike of smiles, and she suddenly had a business card in her hand and slid it across the desk:

I. S. S. A.

***** INSTITUTE FOR SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL ADVANCEMENT

***** Mrs. Andrea Rose

***** (Field Representative)

Professor Irwyn peered at Mrs. Rose over the top of his glasses. He could hear, from outside, the sound of Chicago's early morning traffic, including the El trains. He set the card down.

"What exactly does a 'Field Representative' do?" the teacher asked.

"That's a lengthy story. What exactly does a 'Professor of Inter-Disciplinary Science' do?"

"What do you want to chat about?"

"I want to talk to you about Jane Lorant. We are an international organization of individuals in positions of government and business leadership. Miss Lorant would be a dynamic asset."

Mrs. Rose opened her briefcase, took out a white laptop computer and placed it on Irwyn's desk. She opened it with the screen facing him. What looked like Jane Lorant's driver's license photo filled the screen, a face, of course, familiar to Professor Irwyn. Jane Lorant had a strong jaw, large pale green eyes, a hawk nose and, in contrast, a shockingly feminine mouth. She had shoulder-length hair with streaks of orange and green. A shiny metal stud made its home in her nose. For a second, the professor could see her in his mind's eye: the short young woman who wore trendy, "hip," and baggy clothes. The visitor reached over and tapped a key on the laptop. On the bottom left of the computer screen a graph indicated some kind of high score.

"What's this?"

"Results of a standardized test measuring academic and intellectual ability."

"Well, I know she's smart," Professor Irwyn said.

"This test is from her kindergarten years," Mrs. Rose said, lacing her fingers together.

"Kindergarten?" The Professor mentally kicked himself for repeating the last spoken word, just because he was momentarily confused. He didn't like that when his students did it. Mrs. Rose reached over and tapped another key. Jane Lorant's photograph and the chart with test score vanished. One by one, starting from the top left corner, ten new graphs appeared on the screen. The first five showed progressively higher scores. The last five dropped off to more moderate levels.

Mrs. Rose said, "These are the scores of the same basic test she took as she progressed through her schooling, versions of the test for the appropriate grade level. You note the sudden drop off, of course."

"Uh-huh."

"We found no reason for this apparent decline in Miss Lorant's academic abilities."

"Well, when in doubt, blame television. We all do around here."

She ignored the feeble joke. Instead, she was studying the walls of his office, as if memorizing them for future reference. Now she looked right at him. "And then one of our investigators suggested a radical hypothesis." She was a cool woman; she wasn't cool in the sense the kids used it. She was cool in the sense that any ephemeral, personal warmth seemed to be absent from her -- and she was the diametrical opposite of Maureen, the teacher's old girl friend, and the woman he once thought he would marry. Again Mrs. Andrea Rose leaned over and again she tapped the keyboard. The graphs disappeared from the screen. The machine replaced them with a photograph of a comic book cover. The cover looked worn around the edges. Garish red and green letters announced the magazine as Tod and Maggie, issue number 113 from Hey Now Comics. The cartoon illustration showed a girl in a high school cheerleader's outfit, working the controls of some sort of sci-fi pulpish-looking contraption. A second teenage girl wearing a "caveman" outfit smothered a teenage boy in kisses. Behind the "cave girl," a third teenage girl had her arms crossed and she looked angry. The caption read

SALLY ANN'S NEW INVENTION GETS TOD MIXED UP WITH

A STONEAGE CUTIE AND MAGGIE GETS STEAMED!!

Professor Irwyn looked at his visitor. Despite himself, he smirked. "This conversation just took a very strange turn, Mrs. Rose."

She hardened her expression. "In high school, Jane Lorant started reading this comic book. This comic book had a regular character named Sally Ann, a cheerleader. Sally Ann was described in the comic as having a genius I.Q." She paused. "Sally Ann decided to keep her true level of intelligence a secret, because she feared the government would force her to make guns and bombs."

He put his elbows on his desk, cupped his hands under his chin and looked at her. "Do you make guns or bombs?"

"No."

"I must say, I find this all very odd," the teacher said. "I mean, traditionally, kids get plenty of clues that to appear smart is not, uh, 'cool.'"

"Despite her appearance, our investigators don't profile her as a young woman truly concerned about fashion. She does, however, have this bad habit of picking up warped ideas of ethics and morality from the oddest of places, including comic book trash like this." Her expression and tone softened. "We want you to put in a good word for us, for I.S.S.A., with Miss Lorant. In exchange, if she agrees to take a job with us, we're prepared to make a substantial donation to the school."

"Yes, the president of the school said that's what your group had in mind."

"Oh.," Mrs. Rose said. "So you know."

"I thought it would have been rude to not give you a chance to make the offer to me. I'd be happy to go to bat for you and I.S.S.A., Mrs. Rose. People with talent like Jane Lorant's should use it, and not just sit in their basements hacking into the so-called 'military-industrial complexes or some such rubbish. But why don't you approach her yourself."

"Our investigators tell us that Miss Lorant has a problem with conventional authority."

"So I'm not 'conventional.'"

"Well . . . "

"I'll take that as a compliment."

The next morning, Professor Josef Irwyn opened the door of a class room and went in. The door handle was sticky. He'd have to talk to the maintenance people about that.

"So let's have a look at this 'bold new use of virtual reality,' Miss Lorant."

He found her, Jane Lorant, alone standing at the far end of the classroom. A typed manuscript bound with brass clips sat on the desk, next to her knapsack. She stood next to a machine. Part of the machine resembled the device Professor Irwyn's optometrist used to test for glaucoma. He thought this because of the conical projection with a flat glass tip coming out of the machine. Walking in front of the machine, he saw bits of pieces of what looked like a PC, VCR and a DVD player. It was all integrated together with some type of apparent, mysterious plan, and there seemed to be other parts whose nature and function the teacher could only guess at. Jane Lorant said, "Have a seat, Professor."

A rock and roll kid suddenly with the manners of a nineteenth-century hostess, she gestured grandly at a chair. He sat in front of the machine. She tapped the manuscript. "I have here my project documentation."

"I'm sorry you abandoned your ideas about holograms."

"Oh, I'm also still fiddling around with that," she said, scratching her abdomen for some strange reason. "Well, anyway, VR, then . . . So shouldn't I be putting on goggles and a glove?"

He looked around, playing not just teacher but impatient spectator. "Not for this type of VR."

She shifted her legs until she sat in full lotus position. "This machine, among other things, beams visual data directly into the eyes. You might be aware of the increasing sophistication of computer animation. It's only a matter of time until such animation has, to the human eye, the apparent full veracity of the real world."

"What are you getting at, Miss Lorant?" He drummed his finger on the arm of the chair.

"I mentioned two fields: virtual reality and computer animation. They form two thirds of the basis of my machine. I'll tell you the third in a moment." She reached into her knapsack and pulled out a huge automatic pistol. Professor Irwyn shot out of his chair. With the dexterity of a juggler, Jane Lorant took the ammunition magazine out of the pistol's butt. She took out one of the bullets from the magazine and held it up for Irwyn to see. She put the bullet back into the magazine, then slammed the magazine into the butt of the gun. And she pulled back the hammer, brought the gun to her chest, and shot herself at point blank range. By the time he got to her, the blast from the gun had bent her back over the desk. Blood pooled and flooded and dripped. Dear Christ, he thought, she just snuffed out her own life like blinking an eye. A butterfly came out of Jane's chest and came to rest on Professor Irwyn's nose. Jane's eyes snapped open.

"The third science is chemistry. When you touched the doorknob, you absorbed an hallucinogenic drug, a new one I created, through your skin. The drug and the direct optical VR and the high veracity computer animation make up a Mobius strip-like hyper-realistic illusion device. I began the machine when you sat. You're still sitting in your chair. The gun? Not real. I didn't just shoot myself. A butterfly didn't fly out of my chest and land on your nose."

"Why are you doing this?" He was shaking.

"The stakes are so high I can't rely on how a philosophical discussion will turn out." She laid the gun under his eye. "Just an illusion, Professor Irwyn."

"Don't kill me. Please." Sweat ran down his nose. "I like you. I respect you. Most important, I trust you. Remember this." She smiled. When any young woman smiled she never looked innocent.

"Say cheese."

She pulled the trigger.

He stood in the projection booth, Maureen's projection booth, at her job. Her hands knew when to transfer the reels, as she sat in this room high above the dark auditorium. He stood in a corner of the room and watched.. . ... . .

Himself. A ten years younger version, talking to Maureen. "I know the job waits in another state, but I can still grab this chance, and we can still be together."

"I'm here -- and my job," Maureen said. She flicked one projector off and the other one on at the precise moment of the reel change.

"Friends are here. Co-workers." The Josef Irwyn of the past said, "You could get a job in the same city where I'm going. I couldn't go anywhere and land on my feet, like you."

"'Land on my feet'? I just got out of the mental hospital. Remember?"

"The prescription drugs control your . . . situation."

"'Situation'? Josef, the words you're looking for are 'borderline schizophrenia.'"

"And on and on, " Jane Lorant said. She stood next to the present day Josef Irwyn, watching his younger self, and Maureen. The present day Josef Irwyn said, "Why are you being so cruel to me?" He had growled out the words. He paused for a moment and his head snapped to where Jane Lorant, now playing a ghoulish master of ceremonies, was standing.

"Are we going to . . . What happened next?"

Jane Lorant pointed at the windows through which the projectors beamed, the windows opening out to the dark auditorium below them. He looked through one of the windows. Down in the dark he could make out the audience: Skeletons. They talked to each other, ate popcorn, drank sodas, looked at the movie... Before he could look away, the movie screen showed him Maureen, in her bathrobe, with the carving knife, slashing her throat. He shut his eyes. He opened them. He laid strapped to a table with a long thin top. Beams of light withdrew from his eyes and up into the ceiling. He lifted his head and saw, several yards in front of him, a glass wall. Behind the glass wall stood Jane Lorant, only now the hair had no orange or green, just brown, and glorious, silky length. The metal stud in her nose had gone away. She dressed in what look like a scientist's white lab coat, and she wore glasses with chunky black frames.

"You're done, Joey," she said through a hidden speaker. Joey?

"How are you?" she went on through the hidden speaker. "You just had one of our more convincing illusion programs. The urban college science professor with a schizophrenic girlfriend who commits suicide, all of this way back in the early twenty-first century, we classify as an illusion program reserved for felons serving neo-time for tax fraud. However, I see from your record you had a particularly harsh judge.

"Irwyn ripped off his restraints and got up. He looked around the room, then picked up the table he had been lying on and threw it at the glasswall. Instead of fleeing as it hurtled toward the glass wall, Jane Lorant just stood there, smiling. What I just did is impossible, the teacher thought. And why not, he continued to reflect, with dawning clarity. After all -- this has all been an illusion. And then, unwounded, not bleeding, no gun or butterfly in sight, Jane Lorant (baggy clothes, nose stud, and goofy hair color back) sat in lotus position on the desk in the classroom and looked at him passively. Slowly, quietly, and shaking slightly he got out of his chair, and walked right up to her. He spoke with rage in the most quiet of voices.

"Miss Lorant, please tell me, if it's not too much bother, why the FUCK you think you had the right to do that?"

Jane Lorant picked up the written thesis documentation and held it in front of her. And it was actually something completely different:

INSTITUTE FOR SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL ADVANCEMENT CONFIDENTIAL REPORT

PERSONALITY DISINTEGRATION AND RESTRUCTURING

He snatched it out of her hands and looked at it. "Is this real?" He looked at her, the manuscript, her, then the manuscript again.

"Yes." Really lady-like. Still confused, he blurted out, "Where did you get this?"

"Where do you think?" She looked up at him and smiled, very satisfied.

The Professor smiled back. "I must seem pretty clueless to you, hmm? Smart, at least officially, but basically clueless."

The student shrugged. "Well, I'm just someone who wanted to lead a sheltered life. Maybe that seems like a worthless ideal to you, but you'd be surprised what a sheltered life can accomplish if the mind stays productive and busy."

He tapped the report. "A friend of yours hacked it off the Internet?"

"Because another friend works in an I.S.S.A. field office and found out about P.D.R."

Professor Irwyn flipped through the pages of the confidential report." This reads like what you did to me."

"Except the restructuring part."

"How exactly does this hellish device of yours work, Miss Lorant? Or were you planning to use it to rape somebody else's soul before you told me?"

She shifted her weight and tried to transfix him with her gaze." I.S.S.A. has plans to remake everybody's head."

"Why?"

"Why not? Politics and commerce are growing into one creature, Professor. One global creature, with anybody who has a uniform, a gun, and a badge as an indentured servant of the new lords of the Earth."

He held up his hand to indicate "stop."

"OK, OK. You made your point and then some. Do you know what you sound like?"

"An angry, mixed-up young lady," she said sarcastically."

I realize the conspiracy tale is a popular modern genre, but please . ... "

"What did Mrs. Andrea Rose tell you, Professor? Business and government coming together, remember? These people don't want us to pull our own strings and whether they got elected to office, or just try to make and sell better stuff, they find communism, capitalism, government, 'the free market,' the military just a bunch of pesky, old- fashioned labels-- including my favorite game card, the one that says 'Free Will.' Nobody's ever had to face adversaries quite like this before. All the people behind all the curtains finally figured out that they're really on the same side."

"Why don't you and your friends just expose these people?" the teacher asked.

"Expose them where? You don't think the news media is anybody's friend, not now, do you?" She crossed her arms. "I.S.S.A. has had plans for the P.D.R. program for years. But they didn't have the technology. My friend showed this report to me and it terrified me. My personal research project could make P.D.R. possible."

"Do you want to use it this way?" Professor Irwyn held up the report.

"No!" She was thrown off balance for a moment with shock, then regained her composure. "Seamless immersion VR entry, reliving personal trauma and inner ontological frame shattering . . . I wouldn't dream up such a sequence!. I'd like this technology to be used therapeutically, not for brainwashing."

"Therapeutically? That's chilling to imagine this device being used that way."

"I had a cousin who was completely mad by the time she was 21. Her parents got warnings from everybody, teachers and so on, that she needed help when she was growing up. They ignored that, because they thought that would have meant their daughter was weak, helpless, if she got that type of help. On the other hand, my aunt tried to kill herself after the divorce. The therapist she saw was a total weirdo, a combination primal scream/Reichian/New Age guy. She had nightmares for months, seeing him. But at the end of a year, the nightmares were gone and she was the most happy, and well-adjusted person. Healing can hurt."

"I bloody well didn't heal after that, thank you very much. Do you know Andrea Rose?"

"I've heard of her," Jane Lorant said. "And I heard about her visiting you. This is a small school, Professor."

He looked at the confidential report again. "Why would anyone want to do anything like this?"

"People like I.S.S.A. have been mainlining the control drug for years, Professor. But each day the world is less hierarchical. The I.S.S.A., and people like them, will have to go cold turkey off the control drug, unless they find a way to colonize our minds."

"Aren't you saying that the Internet is a kind of social and/or political panacea? Pardon me for keeping my feet on the Earth, but drums/carrier pigeon/messenger/telephone/Internet . . . it's just a more or less straight line of development, an evolutionary family of communication technology. You can't pull the kings off their thrones just because somebody's invented a flashier way of writing a letter."

"That's not all that's going on with these connected computers, hooked up all around the world, and you know it. What happens when some little country taps its wealthiest citizen to wire the whole country, and you don't need a government; everybody runs the country with a PC, and maybe you just need one person to be a kind of national manager?"

The teacher looked thoughtful. "That will never happen."

"Oh no? You already can vote in some places, over the Net, and some communities are already completely wired. What happens if you create a whole new form of currency, that you can't touch or put in your wallet, and people all over the world start buying and selling good and services, that you can't touch but are none the less real."

"Uh, that would be anarchy . . . or something."

"Call it what you like. And what happens when some smart, enlightened person -- who doesn't have any credentials or the right friends – tries to negotiate the end of a war that's happening across an ocean?"

"That would be dangerous!"

"But what if he or she could really do it? Why not? You told me yourself some of the smartest and wisest people you've known never had the chance to go to school, make the right connections. Everything I'm talking about is potentially possible with the Internet, Professor. And you're right -- it's not finding the Holy Grail, or Aladdin's Lamp. But it's the closest thing this often sad planet will ever see."

"Well, if you want to go fight the forces of evil, you go right ahead, Miss Lorant."

She put her knapsack on her lap. "I.S.S.A. will find out I turned them down. Then they'll know I'll never give him the machine, or the drug that activates it. They won't leave me alone. And they won't leave you alone for failing them and for hearing everything I just told you." She took a plastic bag, filled with what looked like the contents of somebody's wallet, out of her knapsack and held it up. "Fake identification for you and me. Go underground with me, Professor."

"You have a too active imagination. Why do you want a fuddy duddy college professor to join a group of revolutionaries?"

"If I got to pick, I wouldn't have made that choice. But Mrs. Andrea Rose dragged you into this conflict, and now we all have to make the best of it," the student said She put the fake i.d.'s away.

The teacher said, "Before you go play outlaw fugitive queen against Ming the Merciless I should tell you this project gets an 'A' from me."

He started for the door.

"Where are you going?"

He looked at his watch. "Lunch."

"I just showed you new wonders of the age, and told you a dark and terrible secret of earth-shattering importance!"

"Miss Lorant, if Jesus Christ asked me to partner with Him in a game of stud poker against Satan and his brother-in-law . . . I may or may not take the offer, but I would definitely not skip lunch."

He turned the handle. It was locked. "What the -- "

"I did that. I didn't want anyone interrupting us." She touched a switch on the VR machine and the contraption telescoped downwards with startling swiftness. She positioned the knapsack squarely on her back, and the folded and locked up the machine -- and picked it up by its handle! The damn thing now looked like a suitcase. She walked over and unlocked the door.

"I was wondering exactly how you've been hiding this genius of yours," the teacher said.

"Planning. Lots of planning. For example, it took me months to get a classroom, for an hour, with no windows."

As they headed down the hall, for a moment, Jane lagged behind him. He wasn't sure, but it sounded like she clicked some other sort of device. Great, he thought. What's she going to do now? Bring the sun burning through these walls to teach me how evil the oil companies are for neglecting solar energy?

She caught up with him and they continued down the corridor toward a row of elevators. The teacher was looking forward to walking the real streets of Chicago. One of the elevators slid open to reveal Mrs. Andrea Rose. She held the leather briefcase.

"Ah, you must be Jane!"

"And you can only be Andrea Rose," the student said.

"So, Professor," Andrea Rose said. "What did this fine student think about our offer?"

"I'm afraid she turned you down."

"Too bad." Andrea Rose pulled a tiny submachine gun out of her suit coat. She fired, at him and Jane Lorant. The weapon made no sound. Her aim had been far off, two or three feet to the left. Without dropping the suitcase, or shifting the knapsack on her shoulders, Jane pulled a pistol out of her jacket; the gun looked like the same one from the illusion, but instead of firing a bullet, it shot out a dart with pink feathers on the end.

The dart landed into Andrea Rose's neck. Mrs. Rose's eyes rolled up into her head. Still standing in the elevator, she slid down the wall of the elevator interior. Jane put her gun back in her jacket and turned off a switch in her belt buckle. A low hum sounded, then quickly died out.

"Hologram. Mrs. Rose saw our images three feet to the left from where we were really standing."

"Is she . . . dead?"

"No. She'll be knocked out for a few hours." "How can something like this happen here? For God's sake -- this is a university!"

"Excuse me, Professor, but big deal. I.S.S.A. has been in operation since 1990. They've blown people away in the middle of churches and police stations, among other places."

"Well, I yield to your superior knowledge of certain aspects of this wicked world, Miss Lorant. It seems impossible to have a boring day with you. So far we've had that De Sade meets Lewis Carroll number back in the classroom, then a little philosophical debate between you and me, and now, if I have the genre correct, some sort of hybrid of the traditional western." "'Traditional'? I used this hologram device." "I said 'hybrid' -- didn't I? What do these people want, anyway?"

Jane said, "Don't you think that's a no-brainer, Professor? They obviously want power."

"For its own sake?"

"Sure," Jane said. "Why not?"

"Please, Miss Lorant. You are a scientist. Please continue to think like one. No one craves power merely for its own sake. Hitler wanted to create a racially pure world. Alexander the Great thought the world would run better under the control of a single, superior individual -- himself. Pol Pot wanted to terminate what he saw as a decadent, capitalist order."

She shrugged. "OK. You're right. They must have a specific agenda --we just don't know what it is yet." She paused. "You can't sit this out, Professor Irwyn. If you want to live, go underground with me now and help me and my friends fight them."

He didn't say anything for a moment. Then he sank against a wall. "She's really dead -- isn't she? It was just an intellectual idea for me before, but now it's something true that I feel. She's really dead."

"What? No, I told you. I just knocked her out for a while."

"Not Mrs. Rose. Maureen."

"Who is Maureen?"

"My ex-girl friend who committed suicide."

"How horrible!"

"You didn't know this about me?"

"No," she said. "Why should I?"

"Your machine gave me these illusions about her, re-living part of that past."

"No, Professor, listen," she said. "The program in the machine begins with a perfect copy of reality, then a violent interruption of that perfect copy, then an attempt for the user to resolve his most painful memories, combined with the user's worst and most fantastic fears."

"It's like you have everybody's head in that suitcase."

She shrugged. ""The white guys with the square jaws and the fake Zen space aliens aren't going to come off the next elevator to deal with this. Real persons have to solve this problem," she said. "All I have to do is wipe that door handle completely free of any traces of the drug and we're out of here."

"But . . . If this is another illusion . . . "

"If you can't decide then they've already won."

THE END

Herald Bodinski
A Neep Story
by ReWiReD
5/20/99

Herald Bodowski was walking once in a beautiful strawberry field in his hometown - then, all of a sudden, time seemed to freeze: the wind stopped blowing, the flies hovered in mid-air, and the gas that had begun drifting out of his anus simply hung there in the air about his ass. What, pray tell, had happened?
Just then, a tiny purple toad hopped through the field - bouncing over a foot in the air with every leap it made, until coming to rest it's lumpy little toad hiney upon a large rock nearby, to turn it's head and gaze at the boy with it's buggy eyes.
"Might I inquire?" Replied the boy to the oddly-colored stranger at this odd moment.
"Certainly," said the purple toad, "for that is why I am here, you mindless automaton."
"Ah," he said, before going on. "Why has time, for all intensive purposes, ceased to move forward in a chronological fashion - or in any fashion at all, for that matter?"
"Why, such a question need not be asked - the answer needs so profound intellect, or heavy thoughts woven into complex philosophies," he replied in a notably unfroggy tone, "time does not move forward for this reason, boy: it has stopped."
The boy, enlightened, stripped himself of his cloths and ran through the strawberry patch, running faster, faster, until he ran into an apple that had frozen in the middle of it's decent to the ground - and cracked his head wide open.
And time went on.

Hottie's
A short play
by PJ

Betty: Well honey, I think there are other ways to express yourself.

Billy: I told you mom, I'm not trying to express myself, I'm trying to be natural. I'm just trying to feel good. Nudism, I believe can rid man of sin if we all practice it together.

Betty: Well we're going to be eating soon and I'd rather have you wear clothes at the table.

Billy: Come on mom, don't worry about it. This is uncomfortable for me too you know? I think we should all try to get used to my new way of life.

Betty: Well, alright. (Betty yells:) Linda, Mary, come down for dinner. (The girls come running)

Linda: Hi Billy

Mary: Mom, you're not going to let him eat like that, are you!? Eww, look, he's got an erection!

Billy: Aww shucks, just ignore it and it'll go away.

Betty: Now, now Mary, we should all try to cope with Billy's newfound practice, I don't know just how long he'll be doing this for.

Mary: I'll tell you how long, about three inches is how long.

Linda: Shut up Mary, just leave him alone!

Betty: Alright, let's have no more talk of your brother's ways.

Mary: Okay, whatever, what's for dinner mom?

Betty: We're having flounder.

Mary: Mmm, yummy.

Linda: Come on mom, you know I don't eat fish.

Betty: I know honey, but I'd just like you to try it, if you don't like it you can make yourself some microwave quesadillas.

Linda: Alright.

Billy: I'll be right back, I'm going to the bathroom.

Betty: Let's all sit down and wait for Billy. (Billy returns shortly)

Mary: Billy forgot to wipe himself, I can see his dirty sphincter!!

Linda: Oh grow up Mary!

Betty: Mary, dear, please don't talk like that at the dinner table. Billy, will you say grace?

Billy: Yes mom. Bless us oh lord with these, thy gifts, of the bounty of Christ, which we will soon receive, our lord, amen.

Betty: Very nice Billy, thank you. Alright, let's eat. (Linda takes a bite of the fish)

Linda: Oh mom, I can't eat this.

Betty: That's fine, go heat yourself up some quesadillas.

Mary: Linda's right mom, there's something wrong with this fish.

Billy: I'm sorry mom, but your fish seems to be having an argument with my taste buds.

Betty: Calm down everyone, let me try it. (She takes a bite) Oh my! I wonder what could have gone wrong.

Mary: Just let dad cook next time.

Billy: Mary, will you stop being so rude!?

Mary: Fine you naked goat!

Betty: Hush children, I have an idea. Because my fish didn't work out the way I would've liked it to, why don't we try this new restaurant here in the City Paper, likes to call itself "Hotties." We'll just wait about an hour for your father to come home so he can join us. Is that okay with you Mary?

Mary: Yes mom, that's fine by me.

Betty: Where are you going Billy?

Billy: I'm going to get dressed.

Betty: Oh no honey, you don't have to get dressed for this place!

THE END!!

"The Evil One, the demon blight
Who hides in day and stalks the night.
He steals the stars and drags them low-
Darkness comes where Nightfall goes."

Nightfall Goes.

A somewhat psychotic interview with Nightfall
by The Evil One
Winter 1998

E1 – So…how are you?

N – Well, once I was happy but now I’m just somewhere in between. You know, like limbo, but I hate limboing, so I’m more or less on top of HeLL, looking down.

E1 – Sounds like fun, but if I were you I’d be upstairs with God…. definitely, don’t you agree??

N – Geody is boring. He spends all his time sleeping on his lazyboy, and well… I’ll sleep when I’m dead. I like to have some fun, even if I did put my car through two ditches and a fence post.

E1 – Oh yes, that’s right, I think you were on crack that nite. But, that’s just my opinion. Don’t forget, you were lucky to get out of the ditches alive, God was with you!!! God gives good head.

N – I wasn’t on crack, I was cracked! God doesn’t give good head, but Paco (who thinks he’s god) does (or so I’ve heard).

E1 – Well, I must argue with you, for I still think god gives good head, then there is always the cookie head, which I’ve heard is good. Enough of that, what do you think of eating with plastic objects found in a damp basement? …..I pulled that question out of my ass, but answer anyhow. I must now wait…. while my blue- tailed friend unwraps useless gifts with his normal relatives, that, I would imagine to be hell. A kool Christmas gift would be finding a flaming bag of dog shit on your doorstep brought by an evil Santa from across the globe.

Babble while awaiting Nightfall’s unwanted return ~ To see an old man flying by while sitting on an invisible chair would be quite funny. I would like to turn a box of deadly spiders and scorpions loose in my school, I would be sure to pull the many I truly hate into a separate room. There I would…put my tasty cigarette out in one of their eyes; the other would be scooped out with a plastic spoon from the icky cafeteria. Next…. it would be nice to make them drink the dreadful Dimetapp [grape flavored medicine I once drank too much of] until they felt so icky they wish they were dead. I would then do them the favor and kill them off one by one after peeling their flesh with a carrot peeler. But not before I made them swallow a leech, if they choose not to swallow it they could just suck on it as it sucks on them. Then the death comes…. I need a creative and memorable way to end their wasted…pathetic lives. I think I’ll go with a fiery death? Yes, for some. The others it will have to be starved to death, they’ll be the lucky ones who get to watch their friends burn to death. But, enough of the killing, it’s making me feel dark and negative. I want to dissect a Teletubbie, see what the evil creature is made of…. see what lies behind that mentally disturbing grin. The time is now 4:44. My good friend, Maddie wants to get into the movie business someday, if I ever get the chance to help her out, I will make sure that the dark side will win, at least once. It’s just not fair that in every goddamn movie I see, evil loses. People never take the time to think about what would happen if the evil did win sometimes. Personally I think it would make movies very interesting. My ear itches. Shannon’s throat is scritchy. And Tim has a hairy ass…. Josh is just there, Liz likes books, Ethan is normal for the most part, and I am terribly bored now. Instead of babbling on and on I will take time to think of the reason for having an anatomically correct spoon man in Josh’s room, I think you should think this over too…. we could learn of new things involving Josh…..Non-smoking places suck. Question, how do you turn any boring time with friends upside down? Answer, use the tasty coffee flavoring to spice up the evening, yes, any flavor you think of, come on down to Gloria Jean’s in the Eastwood Mall to pick up your own bottle of coffee flavoring. I now turn the keyboard over to Nightfall.

N – The Teletubbie web site is up, the dark side has won over and over again, everyone just refuses to admit that fact, if you turn that frown upside down, you let all the blood flow into your head and you turn purple, and what good is that. Personally, I’d rather be green. Josh is quite insane, if I do say so myself. Once upon a time, there was a room that was black. Now it’s just every color in the lack of a rainbow. Neon orange dressers are cool. If you have to kill someone, use a spork from Taco Hell. I could sell you a spork key-chain for 23 cents, but I won’t because I don’t feel like it.

E1 – No, I have a better idea, I will use the anatomically correct spoon man if Josh can deal with not having him around on the weekends anymore. I think if I could be a color I would be…ThuRp. Let the men in white suits take Josh away to a safe, warm place where he may bounce around for all of eternity.

N – Actually, he was at the same one Rewired was at. He checked himself in for a while and then left. I got a new knife for christmas (you know, the holiday where we celebrate the birth of a guinea pig who we tortured and crucified in the name of Geody), can I try it out on you for a while? You don’t need all that blood that just sloshes around in you. ‘Sides, I’m thirsty!

E1 – Ack!! I just leaned back in your broken chair, what is the point of having a broken chair in your room?? It’s a danger to all who choose to sit their lazy ass on it! Good boy! The cheese-rats have taught you well.

N – If I spent my hard-earned money on a new chair, then how can I buy my Top Hat?

E1 – Ummm……there is always the option of THEFT.

N – Have you ever tried to put a new chair under your trench coat? It’s a little obvious.

E1 – First of all I don’t have a trench coat, second of all, I wouldn’t put it underneath my trench coat even if I did have one, I would simply roll around on it, through the store and then roll on out the doors, continue rolling…. until I get home or hit a large pothole in the shitty roads of Chardon and so on. Jicks.

N – All homicidal maniacs need trench coats!!!!! Last time I rolled around on a chair, they tried to kick me out. There’s something going on in this room and it’s not me. Are you insane or do you just laugh maniacally periodically for no reason?

E1 – Oh trust me, I have good reason for laughing maniacally this time, occasionally I won’t have a reason at all. Good god!!! Nightfall is now blowing a blue alien. This is when I feel unsure about his sexual preferences. Scary…..Ick. Ack. So on and so forth.

N – I’m not gay, the alien just needed refilled. He was out of air.

E1 – Sure…. you are the first one to tell me that and I still don’t believe you. You are a terrible liar, I think you need magical beans.

N – Magical beans? I’m sure I don’t have to remind you about what went on in your bed between your friend and me do I?

E1 – Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek! ! ! GiR. You’re going to be visiting my torture chamber sooner that you thought you would be.

N – Does the cute blonde still work down there, or did you take her off of your payroll. Wait… she worked for free, didn’t she?

E1 – I don’t recall any cute blondes ever working for me, but, if you insist. I’ll argue with you later, but for now…..You gave TAZ mouth-to-mouth!!!! Don’t try to cover it up either, Tim and I both saw you do it.

N – It’s a PEZ dispenser for the-lack-of-a-god’s sake!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

E1 – So you say, but I think you are wrong. It comes alive when you are alone doesn’t it? It just seems to be a PEZ dispenser to me and any other fool that sets foot in your room. I know the truth.

N - $23 crack whore. Nothing comes alive in this room as far as I know. What do you do to your body pillow when no one’s looking?

E1 – You…. icky brother of a fuzzy bastard!! I can no longer stand you, this interview must now end, you will receive great amounts of pain from me in just a minute. I HaTe YoU. You sick fiend. GiRR…..

N – Arg.

The End Begins Here…………. :o)

/X\(; ;)/X\…-=bite=-…You have just been bitten by an extremely poisonous spider,
you will now die, although you would have died without being bitten by this spider, I have hurried the process. You’re welcome.
[**]D Coffee cup…. or possessed toaster. ~ Sorry, but I had the urge to type. :o)

The Sounds of Summer #2
by Rewired

Lost One
2/18/99, 6:33am

Thoroughly intoxicated, her intellects no longer constipated
by the dark, swirling, chaotic emotions that’ve drug her down.
Cigarette in hand, the door to her room no longer locked,
the medication seeps into her brains and, numb on the chemicals,
she feels the artificial bliss wash over her, and she can feel
the emergence of that warm, plastic smile she’s shot for.
For a moment, the world seems perfect
because she doesn’t have to think it; not even feel it - she’s clouded
and complacent; comfortable in the dazed state she’s resented in others,
that partially caused her pessimistic, nihilistic tendencies, which
eventually drove her to seek the mindset she so bitterly despised
because her own hand held her too tight and her curiosity toward something -
anything else
-had reached out it’s arms to her, and she took it’s hands,
for they were the only ones open to her, or the only ones in reach,
or the only ones she saw,
and until the drugs wear off, she’ll enjoy the lightness to escape her heavy burdens
to escape the tar in the shadows that gripped her
all that she sees is the now
all she thinks is the listless
all she feels is the numb
as she rests upon this seated cloud.

Ode to the anal-retentive
7/22/99
12:00 am

Do you think I benefit from your consistent bitching
Or that I’m reborn in the face of your ridicule?
Do you really think you can win against this stubborn mule
When you’re such an ass?
You try and belittle by touchy ego
It’s become sensitive because it’s sick of people like you
Who start little, and then work bigger in their insults and annoyances
Taking a few years to tell you why, amidst other severed alliances
I’ll never do this again, I won’t put up with it because I respect you as a friend
That respect goes both ways, and if it doesn’t it’s the end
I’ve got my shield and I’ve got my fist and their hunger for your blood on them is growing
As the atmosphere gets cold between us and one can almost see it snowing.

Poem #1: …through the trees
by Scott C. Holstad

they say I shouldn't write
about death and misery
should be more
positive
that's the biggest crock
of shit I ever heard
I know I shouldn't have
kicked God in the nuts
back there, but you
peace loving, happiness
seeking religious do-
gooders can suck my
asshole dry
your beauty
is my beast,
got it?

Windows of the Soul
by Marlin Bressi

"I'll work my magic on you like a voodoo priestess," she said. I, of course not knowing what she meant, just shook my head up and down like a retarded child. Unable to speak, I began to wonder if she had cast her evil black magic spell.

I felt her gaze penetrate through my eyeballs, looking into the window of my soul. I felt so naked.....

I closed my eyes and hoped that when I opened them, her stare would be gone. But even with my eyes closed I could still feel her presence coursing through my being. Like a hundred volts of electricity, I felt her power flow. My flesh tingled with anticipation and fear. My senses were confused; I could taste her smell, and smell her touch. I could be in her without being near her.

Thinking about cotton candy skies, I smiled to myself, remembering a childhood tainted with rage and sprinkled with the savory flavor of gluttony. She was making me remember my past, in all too vivid detail. The hate toward an unseen entity, who denied me the pleasure of pain. Oh, sweet youth, where have you flown away?

I could feel only joy mingled with the sickening sweet tinge of guilt. Like eating an ice cream cone covered with bird droppings; beneath the bird shit was the tasty morsel that I eagerly devoured, not caring about the putrid refuse atop my tasty treat.

Life is like an ice cream cone, vanilla flavored with a fudge swirl, covered in bird shit and broken glass. The sweet part satisfies your need for fulfillment. The bird crap satisfies the need to ruin the experience with guilt (because we can never accept good things without feeling guilty), and the shards of broken glass fills your hunger for the sweetness of pain. Without pain, we have nothing to compare pleasure to. Swallow that down, and you have swallowed all existence.

And I was being swallowed by the voodoo lady...down her moist throat into the stomach that churned in an uneasy state. A state of restlessness.

Now I'm inside her, her heart pounds and makes me lose my balance.

Falling down, I grab hold of something that is not really there, but it must be. Because I am no longer falling, but instead I find myself swimming.

There's an ocean, in which I am merely driftwood, floating atop gentle waves. I am flotsam, waiting and hoping to find a sandy beach to be washed upon.

And above me she soars, the voodoo woman, in the form of a giant bird flying overhead. She diminishes in size and substance until she disappears and is no more. She vanishes, like my youth. Oh, childhood, how cruel a joke to leave me on the rocky shores of adulthood; staring across the bay to old age, and death is an island in the distance, slowly looming nearer.

She has gone, the woman, the bird, and all memories I have of a life once lived. And I am alone. Truly, utterly, demonically alone.

And there's laughter in the form of mystical silence. I have to scream to drown the laughing out. "You bastards! You fucking bastards!" I sob, clutching my chest. There must be a way to rip out this heart. My fingers fail at the task of murder, leaving me a laughing, crying, howling jackal of a man lying naked on a desolate beach...a salty shore in some place and time that only exists in my poisoned mind, and in the magic of the voodoo lady.

"Long days. Unconventional thinking. Panic at midnight. Lots of coffee. Inspiration at three am."
- from a magazine ad, supplied by Star-Gazing Dreamer.

Cosmic Interconnections
(From the Other Authoritative Blue Notebook of Mental Excrement)
by Rewired
6/18/99

EnP, circa 12 am

Waiting to be seated at Eat and Park, some hefty bitch of a woman throws her kid into a wall because the little girl bumped into her stomach.

I wanted to beat the shit out of her on the spot. How could a parent be so cruel and ignorant?

"I hate my father," said the little girl, after her mother threatened to tell her father of her behavior.

The pudgy brother, obviously his mother’s pet, turned to his sister when she mentioned she hated her father, who I guess was probably as violent if not worse. "That’s not what you said when he gave you fifteen bucks," he said. He looked like a physical manifestation of a South Park character – if you pushed the kid, you could imagine him rolling into the wall.

The little girl actually had some balls. "I don’t want the fifteen bucks," she proclaimed, "I hate dad."

Good, kid – stand up for yourself, I thought. Rebel against that bitch of a mother.

I was taken to my seat, purposely walking ahead of them, as we were taken by the hostess at the same time. As I sat down, I saw the two mysterious beauties again – the Gemini and the Leo, looking unbearably attractive, as usual, though seeming rather estranged from their dates, if, indeed, those apparent bozos were actually their dates.

I saw Trinity today – I’d wanted to stop into Burger King and see her, but I’ve only been through Chardon as of late and not in it, except for three in the morning after escapades with Claire. I wonder how she is, anyway.

Manager Trinity is just as I had remembered her when I worked here and she was on a lower level on the Burger Barn chain: her hyped-up attitude, all happy and excited to see me. Apparently the New Guy is going out with the New Girl, and now Tom the Drug Dealer is living with both of them in some apartment across the street. I remember how in high school Tom and I used to hold heated discussions. He was the most hard-headed Christian I knew at the time – save Amy the Skeptic, the girl who couldn’t believe dinosaurs existed because they `weren’t mentioned in the bible’ – and now I look at him and laugh at the irony: he’s a kindly drug dealer who says that there’s a room open for me if the whole thing in Kent doesn’t work out.

I wonder if Kent – or anywhere, for that matter – could ever compare to the variety of characters the Chardon/Mentor area holds. I sure as hell hope some place does, or I’ll never get the hell out of here for good, and forever will I be wound in the web of Geauga County.

Maybe, in a cosmic sense, that’s the point.

It seems as if there’s this new wave of facts dominating the collective mainstream as of late: everyone has to get either a tattoo, an area of their body pierced, enter a branch of the military, get married or have a kid.

Once again, I am an outsider – and I’m beginning to admire that stance I’ve been able to hold onto for so long in a way. To whom would I be trying to prove myself to by doing such things, anyway?

I’m almost getting back that inspiring feeling I use to have – I hope it lasts, I hope it grows. I’ve been working on my autobiography, but also in this notebook – living the future, documenting the moment and trying to have the past in my mind catch up with it.

I wonder how Cindy, Post-Evil Mike and Jamie are. I wonder about Lindsay. I wonder about Chaos. And though it’s only been a few days since we drove into hell to see her drunk, cheating, violent nuisance boyfriend, I wonder how Claire is, and how that third-shift nursing home job is going.

Those guys over there across from me really are bozos.

I wish I was strong. I wish I had muscles, and I wish I knew the arts – mystic and martial – so I could kick ass if I wanted to. It’s good to be in shape, because when you’re strong people sense it and stay away so you can’t use it. Yet when you’re a wimp, you’re a good target for assholes I just wish I could have the self-confidence and physical, mental and emotional strength to stand up for myself and various people. I could be a protector. I could talk without getting nervous or shying away, or calmly going: "No, that’s okay," as some negligent, greedy asshole married to the woman I love, calls me a fagot for no damned reason – all rage and booze. I probably could’ve taken him anyway, but maybe I just say that in some delusional, faulty arrogance.

They really are beautiful women, those two. Why are the ones always attracted to assholes? I don’t get it. Maybe it’s the physical world’s opposites-attracts forces in process. I don’t know – it makes no sense o me.

Now the Leo’s fishing around for something in her coffee, and as I watch and then write, I wonder: why do I observe these apparently pointless things and then document them?

Everything holds meaning – especially the details; the small things. How they’re looking at each other’s eyes.

Fuck – that guy’s here, and I think the Girl in the Hat’s here with him, only without her hat. That way a cool night, way back when. Definite subspace interaction here. I wonder what’ll happen.

Reality can be such a blast for the easily amused, you know?

Why is Holly the Gemini and the Leo so damn interesting? I don’t know why, which is what makes them all the more interesting. Why does that woman beside me keep picking her obese ass? Why do I feel like a jerk for just saying that?

I’m scared now – Erika, my sister, has graduated; Lisa’s going to be sixteen tomorrow; I’m 21 in November… Time’s going too fast now. I’m being left behind, and I’ve got to catch up. I think my watch stopped at age sixteen. Too bad my body’s growing older… a virgin who’s had numerous chances to have sex but held back due to fears he hid under the guise of a strong and sturdy morality; a twenty-year-old who can’t hold a job and who’s not in college and has done nothing in his spare time but write about his past and daydream about his ex-girlfriend and read up on occult matters that he’s experienced but which have never experienced him, which he has never initiated because he doesn’t have enough focus or… why am I talking about myself in third person?

I do that sometimes.

I feel weird quite often – like I’m very different from everyone else and that they actually notice. Sometimes they like it, and other times they discriminate, but my anxious, frightened reaction is always the same. I’m not black, obese, gay or unbearably unattractive – that’s not the kind of `different’ I mean – it’s just the essence of my soul, the intensity of my emotions and the contents of my mind, I believe. Something distinct that I can sense they sense, and which worries them (… ah… the paranoia, the arrogance…)

Assholes. Why do they always end up dating assholes? I’m, in the least, less of an asshole – date ME.

Mandy just walked in. I like that girl; I think she’s from the same planet me and Omin are from. I gave her my address, which I left for her at Pizza Hutt, were she worked, which she never received. Her friend just walked in behind her – as well as another one of her friends, which just happens to be Tom’s friend, the one I’d seen at the pool hall a few weeks back who knew Raingirl as well – god, the fucking synchronistic interconnections here are fucking cool. I am amused. Yet in the very-present chaos I wonder: does it spread to Kent, even farther, and is it just waiting for me to discover – or uncover it?

They’re really drugged up, though – at least the one. Tom’s friend is a heavy pot smoker and an acid head – I caught that at the pool hall when I bumped into Raingirl.

I suppose the urge to use drugs has always been present in the collective consciousness of subspace… those interlinked, naturally-occurring covens between groups of people, created by the bonds that form between them – they’re group minds; sort of `clusters in the web.’

The passion I had in high school, and those various group minds I encountered… as well as the independent minds of it’s members, each unique but rather influenced by the elements…. how I could see into them; feel their thoughts and taste those mysterious emotions; how I’d turn to my artwork to deal with my own mindworlds, my own thoughts and emotions…

I am now in an odd, apparently naturally-occuring state of mind. A different consciousness, one I am always close to, sometimes immersed in, but now I’m only a little off the edge of… where I can be, see, taste, touch, connect with the underlying reality; what’s beneath it all that makes it real…. where I know without understanding, feel without thinking, unite without trying and draw as easily as I exist, if indeed I do.

`If indeed I do’ – that’s a disturbing remark.

I certainly think I exist. `I think therefore I am’… but if I doubt, I might be… if I’m sure I’m not, am I right as well? Is how you view reality what makes reality?… quantum physics… solipsism, nihilism… blah.

When I really pay attention, reality seems like such a dream to me – a group dream: there are many dreamers – the question being who’s the dreamer and who’s the dreamed within the dream. I don’t care how dippy this sounds. Things are so naturally surreal when you take the time to notice them; when you take the effort to look at and into them and through them. Back in high school, I could relate to the druggies more than the mundanes, yet I wasn’t a druggie – to the contrary, I feared foreign chemicals, aside from caffeine, in my body. Yet the world they saw was part of the world I saw and live in. It was so much more real – it is – only I’ve learned how to screen it out to move ahead in this world.

Things are set up now… I’m onto them… my unconscious is at work with other unconsciousnesses, weaving the network of synchronies… building up…. to something. Go ahead guys, throw in a 23. Add to the ambiance, the mystery, the awareness, the oddity. Neep.

That was fucking cool. I can’t believe what just happened.

Some guy at Gemini and Leo’s table asked, "Holly, how old are you?"

"She’s twenty-three," says the guy in the lifeguard shirt, standing nearby.

"Yes, I am," she says in mock defense – and perhaps on a bigger, more cosmic note, a mock of me. I smile.

23. Fuck me, world; fuck my intellect and emotions hard. Oh yeah.

This is so weird.

I go home after awhile, and, on a whim, I check the Internet white pages under `Neep.’ At the bottom reads: RESULTS 1 – 5 OF 203. 203, scratch the zero, is twenty-three. Okay, I’m stretching it a bit, and looking far too hard. I take the address of the first person with the last name of Neep. I take the address, 95531, and add it up on another whim: 9 + 5 + 5 + 3 + 1 = 23.

Coincidence? I think not. My belief in the 23 conspiracy has been brutally reinforced, and I like it. J

At 2:55 am, the dog barks like a maniac at the window. I don’t want to wake up my parents – they don’t know I’m in town, and most certainly didn’t know that I came back here to eat their food, go on the internet and sleep, being too tired and lazy to drive the hour back to Kent – so I try to keep her quiet and calm as I follow her outside. There’s nothing there, which isn’t at all suprising with my dog, but she’s a little more jumpy than usual – and suddenly at the side of the house I get this creepy feeling. Shortly thereafter, the dog begins to whine. I bring her inside, and I try and shake off the strange feeling.

Weird night.

I swore I’d never sleep here again, and I’m trying to keep my word. I was watching `The Graveyard Shift’ downstairs in my parent’s front room, having felt too uneasy to sleep, when I had a vision of ee again. It was sort of a bird-eyes veiw again, where I saw my body and this black body above my own, trying to slip into it, trying to attach to it again. I thought the fucker left. He hasn’t been with me at all – only when I’d come here last time at five in the morning without my parent’s knowing and I had to leave and rive the hour home because I was afraid that the fucker would attack to me again. I couldn’t take the presence in this house. I wouldn’t act as a carrier; he’s staying here and he’s not coming back with me. I won’t be his ride out. Fucking get off me. He’s here in the goddamn room. I should’ve known this would happen. I’m never coming to this house again. Fuck it. My parents can go fuck themselves; this is crazy. GO AWAY. I say The Word and I’m protected, but it’s a waste of fucking energy. I don’t want to be here. GO THE FUCK AWAY. I can’t even get on the internet, and I’m wondering what the fuck is up with that. Maybe him. Maybe that’s what the dog was barking at. Maybe that’s why I got the creeps. GO THE HELL AWAY, YOU FUCKER.

Fuck it. No more psychic leeches draining me of energy. No more 23s. This isn’t my home anymore. I know where home is. I may be tired, but I can’t stay here – this isn’t home.

I’m going home.

Assorted Writings
by Thinking Tic-Tac

Going back to the sixties...most everyone joined in an excellent rebellion...but in time, the rebels grew old...and with age came less and less motivation for rebellion...and so...through the years...the rebel has come the conformist. Quite sad...no more questioning of the laws...no more exercised freedom of speech regarding important issues...instead the only way they choose to speak...as they've become older is...once a year voting...which sux because, they choose what you have to choose to vote or not vote for. So then..if you'd like to express your thoughts regarding sometime of interest to you. personally, you simply can't. GiR.

Withered leaves surround a grieving woman on a chilly autumn day. She sits there alone, crying and mourning the loss of a person she once knew. They young woman is kneeling in front of the semi-new looking tombstone with her hands covering her pale face as she cries. Nobody is there with her, so perhaps it was the only family she had left or her one and only close friend…or she’s just there by herself. An old fence runs around the yard of the cemetery. Near the corner of the full cemetery, the flag of a veteran blows in the crisp autumn wind. No signs of animal life are in sight, the thing to be seen in this gloomy looking place is the mourning woman.

Alright, I know what most of you are thinking…you’re most likely thinking since I say it’d be good to legalize marijuana, I must be a pot head, well, if you think that, you’re quite wrong. Personally, I think alcohol is worse than marijuana. Alcohol is addictive….creates alcoholics….drunk driving accidents….family problems such as abusive family members…more harmful to the body….and so on, now when you look at marijuana it is much less harmful, unless you use it practically everyday of your life throughout your lifetime. Marijuana is not addictive, to my knowledge…does not cause car accidents and deaths, nor does it cause many bodily problems, besides the fact that you are going to lose many brain cells, but when you drink you lose many brain cells as well so…it’s an even trade. Also, when you’re drunk, it may be fun then, but by the next morning, you’ve got one hell of a hang over. Another point I must make is, why would you want to drink shitty tasting alcohol, when they could be smoking a joint, which tastes much better….and not have a hang over when the high wears off. I do not think anyone should judge whether or not marijuana should be legalized unless they’ve had experience with it. To me it’d be better if alcohol was illegal and marijuana legalized.

As most of you know word has gone around regarding Tinkie Winkie, the purple teletubby…the gay teletubby. It’s hard to believe that even such an accusation was brought up on the news, how does a gay teletubby affect us? Why must it be on the news? Simple….to get more viewers, don’t deny it, when you heard they were going to report on the gay teletubby, you too continued to watch the news, only to find that you waited all that time to watch a two minute newscast on the gay teletubby, if that did not piss you off, you must be an extremely soft person. Now…back to business…..if indeed Timkie Winkie is a gay teletubby…were the makers of that show trying to breed homosexual children? Is this even possible? Perhaps so…kids these days do pick up on things much more easily…believe me, I know, even when I was eight years old, I was making up my own concoction to replace vomit, just so I wouldn’t have to go to skool the next day….and that was quite some time ago. I bet kids today are already inventing ways to bribe their teachers into letting them get away with no homework.…or coming up with new ways to trick their too gullible parents. You never know. Maybe all this Tinkie Winkie panic was caused by one person with too much of an imagination. Hmmmm….I’ve got yet another possibility, perhaps the makers of the Teletubby TV show were just trying to prove a point…trying to introduce homosexuality to children…to show them that it is not strange…and should be accepted. So many things are possible now; it baffles me to even think about all of those obscene ideas. If I can get any of you to begin thinking though, I suppose I’ve done some good.

Another useless fact…~ A whale has got an eight foot member ~
More useless facts include…A gorilla has a one inch member….
A golf ball has 316 dimples…..
And pigs do fly.

Poem #2: Twin Towers
by Scott C. Holstad

LA County and the Sheriff's
Deputies treat you like
human scum
i keep reminding myself
that my taxes go to their
fucking paychecks
as they lie to you,
fuck you over,
ensure you DON'T
get your meds, you
end up crazy and they
wonder why
every fuck you i got
felt like a knife in the ribs
my ribs are still healing
from all the wounds
i'd give anything to
take one of those
fuckers one on one
in a back alley
no weapons
pussies

Annoyance
by Gemini

First and foremost, people chewing. Loud, slurping, heavy breathing, crunching, and squirting half chewed food through their teeth. I just cannot handle this. Second thing is people that say they know what love is, but continuously fuck over the people they supposedly love.

In no particular order, these are the things that drive me completely insane, things that settle heavily in my stomach and turn my face fleshy red with annoyance.

#3 People that wear clothes from fashion bug and say they’re different, freaky, wild, or crazy. Sorry girls, but my mom shops there for stretch pants.

#4 People that steal. Short of extra envelopes from the ATM or a handful of ketchups from McDonalds, stealing drives me crazy. Its pathetic. Get a job.

#5 Arrogant people-This should actually come first on the list. Stuck up, snotty bitches, are the worst kind of bitches because they don’t do things out of insecurity but pure meanness.

#6 White people, dirty little white boys from Hartsgrove, that walk and talk like boys from the ghetto.

#7 Old people (like a certain someone’s grandma) that comes over and talks about punch for 6 hours.

#8 People that turn the base way up in their mini vans to Celine Dion.

#9 Celine Dion.

#10 Crickets

#11 Middle school rap songs about math

#12 Complete silence

#13 Constant humming

#14 People that nag. People that are pushy.

#15 People that try and be different by copying original thinkers.

#16 Tight tapered jeans

#17 People that fake being stoned or drunk

#18 Celery

#19 Fat people who think they’re skinny

#20 Skinny people who think they’re fat

#21 Skinny people.

#22 People that sing loud to a song they don’t know the words to.

#23 People that recycle...EVERYTHING!!

#24 People that talk for their cats.

#25 Peace signs. If i see one more.....

#26 People that mow their lawn 30 or 40 times a day.

#27 Ex boyfriends that try and make me jealous by hanging on a 300 pound woman. See me caring?

#28 People that talk during a movie and then ask what’s going on right in the middle.

#29 People that flick ashes on the floor, or just let it burn out in the ashtray instead of putting it out.

#30 Last, but not least, people that don’t wear deodorant. Its a dollar and a half kids. Buy some.

Poem #3: Party
by Scott C. Holstad

waking up in your own vomit
is not always the best way to
start the day out - that and
the black eye, dented fenders,
missing hubcap, two bras,
one pair of panties and
me
in my car with nothing
but my boxers on
musta been a hell
of a party’
wish i coulda been there

"You laugh just like the angles on a head of the pin jabbed into my minds eyes."
- from the list of Discordian quotes.

Echoes from the Barren Wasteland of My Mind
(From the Other Authoratative Blue Notebook of Mental Excrament)
by ReWiReD
7/5/99

"Life is a tale told by an idiot."

I seriously questioned today exactly where I’m going in life – in a year from now, where will I be? Still on my ass contemplating the whys and wherefores of the universe, analyzing the diverse forms of life around me, and writing it all down, beside words that still ask where I’m going? I miss high school, and so college seems to be the most logical direction – but what on earth would I major in? There’s not much you could do with a Philosophy degree, and likewise an English degree – and do I have the patience to shoot for psychology? Perhaps I should go with the passion for the visual arts that I displayed the first time my mother handed me a piece of paper and a crayon and I drew that bird… but would any of these satisfy me? Would any of these allow me to exist in financial comfort?

Do I know what I want, somewhere deep within me, and even how to get there? I’d fancy the idea that I’m heading there now, but I’d just be fooling myself. I’m just here, waiting, my world full of distractions I’ve put before me in order to occupy me until that time comes when something will come along that might give me a sense of purpose in my life. I silently wonder how much longer it will take.

My mind has been rather barren lately. I took some time off from my autobiographical novelette to work on my comic. Seems like whenever I turn, I find myself still sitting, staring off into the murky waters of the past. Danes is hopeless and I’ve given up; James hasn’t responded to my e-mails and that part of my childhood remains with large question marks. I’m lost and lonely, overflowing with spiritual questions and raging hormones, trying to solve both problems – if only the people I’m reaching for would turn around and notice I’m there.

Another problem has surfaced. The thoughts of the little gray fuckers has drifted back into my life. I thought I was over this. I’ve had no missing time; I haven’t woken up standing by the coffee machine, and I haven’t realized at five in the morning, while sitting up in bed, that I’d spent a long span of time talking with someone who was in the room who is no longer there and of whom I have only a few foggy impressions. I haven’t woken up with odd marks on my body, the electricity hasn’t acted up and no one – even me – has seen anything strange lately, so why are they back in the brain again? There’s nothing more I can do, and little more I can hope to understand about them. Yet I stretch to understand the phenomenon because I’ve come to believe it’s an important part of our reality. I don’t know why it is – I don’t even know if it is what I think it is – but I know, in the very least, that whatever it is it’s important. I know that in this reality there are no indisputable facts, but that hits pretty damn close to the mark, as anyone who’s taken the time to look into the matter has realized.

Since I’m done with Danes, done focusing, wishing, regretting and waiting patiently – I have this newfound energy but nowhere to throw it, and so I sink into old habits: the Occult, the Self-Quest, and the alien phenomenon. Yet I’ve been through this before, and I know what can happen if you get too involved in it. So I’ll be careful and cautious, but curious and questioning. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what else about the whole alien thing I really want to know – generally, I think I’ve got a good idea what’s going on. Yet how do your prove or disprove your beliefs in a phenomenon that is so ignored, so flexible to interpretation? The evidence can justify and support any theory, for though it is, indeed, evidence, it is only evidence that something is going on. The loose facts merely indicate holes in what we’ve looked upon as undisputed facts in the past, and we take the tiny pieces that float around in those holes and try to sew them together into our already-existing patchwork of perception, and in doing so may find links in things that, in reality (the loose term of all loose terms), may not link up – at least not in the way that you suppose. Yet, again, it is evidence enough that something is going on – that cannot be refuted – but then you have to face the real question, which gets more defined and elaborate as you delve deeper. That question is, of course: just what the fuck in particular is going on?

"You’re not a nihilist – you’re a humanitarian."
-Reverand Doggnutzz, to me, a few days ago.

I want coffee. I know they’re busy, but can’t they come around with a pot of java every now and then? Sheesh – I mean, I work here and all, but I’m new and I don’t want to push it by sneaking back there for a refill.

Now, if I had a restaurant or a café I’d have taps at the tables. Yes, I’d be polite enough to give the clean-lunged their own section – smaller than the black-lunged section, of course – but when you sit in the smoking section there will be ashtrays there waiting for you at the table. You won’t have to wait twenty minutes for a waitress to bring one to you. It’s happened to me many a time and it’s frigging annoying – it’s SMOKING, so have a fucking ASHTRAY at the table. Sounds logical, doesn’t it?

Goddess, she is hot. Have I seen her before? The short black hair, the eyes… familiar… She’s disappeared, at least for the moment, but her blond-haired friend is attractive as well.

This mystifies me: there’s this guy at the EnP bar right beside me to my right. He’s a very polite, well-mannered individual – he’s a poet and a writer. He also happens to be homosexual. He knows everyone it seems – and most certainly the attractive women, which seem to flock around him like flies to a light bulb on a warm summer’s eve. I am trying to understand this phenomenon. So far the equation, judging from this one case in the least, is obvious, but rather mindboggling: gay = chicks.

Shannon is overworking – I know she’s trying hard to do her work, and she succeeds; she’s a great waitress. After being pissed off at her all this time, I’m suddenly beginning to admire her again as a person, though I still occasionally have the urge to rub her face rapidly across a hand-held meat grinder. Truth is, I’ve done a lot of stupid things, and the fact that she stuck with me as a friend through it all makes me value her even more. Damned if I’m gonna tell her, though.

I am so weird. I just now realized how much I have – and what great friends and family – and how much I can offer things through my artwork and writings. (NOTE: BREIF OPTOMISTIC, HALF-FULL, POSITIVE KICK IS NOW OVER. A MORE ADEQUATE PERCEPTION ON REALITY MAY NOW FOLLOW.)

I just talked with Gay Dan (gay = chicks), and he was talking about how he wanted to go sit down in a booth because he didn’t feel comfortable at the bar. He was paranoid, he explained, and I laughed and asked him who he was afraid was going to come in the doors that his back was too – and were they short, gray, with black slanted eyes? He laughed and said no.

"You ever been abducted?" He asks bluntly and seriously.

"Yeah," I answer on a reflex I never knew I’d had. Both his question and my response were straightforward and direct – I’ve never revealed by whole abduction belief like that before. He said that it’s not that he didn’t believe me, it was just that he didn’t understand it. He joked on how he thought he used to get abducted when he was little, but they got sick of him. No, I said – when they get with you they stick with you to the end.

We ended up talking about déjà vu and reincarnation: he said he got the impression when he was with certain people that he’d known them in a past life, but he only got impressions, not memories. His little cousin told him she had killed her boyfriend – and when he began questioning her about that odd remark, she proceeded to tell him that she’d done it in her mid-twenties while driving drunk. Her parents – a hard-ass Christian family, I gathered – dismissed it and said she picked it up off of television. Typical. It’s this type of thing that teaches a kid to screen out communicating such things to others – and eventually screen out such things from their own consciousness. How developed would our intuition and past life and abduction recall and psychic abilities be if, as children, it was approached as common knowledge and accepted fact, and conversation regarding it was open and routine?

Most societies tend to regard the paranormal as mystical – at least, that’s how we look at how they look at it. What I’ve been searching for for quite some time now is that science that underlies it all. I know it has to be there, and I know I’ll figure it out and use it, and that I’ll gain that wisdom I dream about having so often. Yet no good can come out of using this power without a strong moral and ethical framework – and that, in my opinion, should be the prerequisite to any `mystical’ teaching.

What worries me now is the advancing technology – I know I can’t stop it; I know it’s the `way of the future’, but somehow I know in the pit of my stomach that technology is heading towards some dangerous waters that we’d best ponder about before delving face-first into. Science is getting down to the very roots of reality, and they’re on the verge of bursting headstrong into a new one – they’ll brake through the border of the physical reality and see the workings of the spiritual one that underlies it, that reflects it. When they do, will such technology destroy what we truly value in life?

Psychotronics will give us mind-to-machine interface – and therefore mind-to-machine-to-mind interface. Technological telepathy, in other words; a mental Internet (this is where Bill Gates is taking you: FEAR HIM). The military application of this technology is it’s most frightening aspect to me. Brave New World and 1984 were nothing; MKULTRA is a firecracker next to this A-Bomb: psychotronics would be a great Totalitarian tool, and you can say bye-bye to individuality and free will, folks. Say adios to the beauty of human diversity in character, passion, and independence – and, topped with the other new technology arising, you can say bye-bye to the human reality and biological diversity as well.

Another new branch of science that’s emerging that has frightening potential is, of course, cloning. Scientists are uncovering more secrets about our genetic nature by the day, and tinkering with them like kids who’ve just got some new toys at Christmas. I’d like to duct tape those lab-coated whackos to a chair, pry their eyelids open in a Clockwork Orange fashion in a movie theater and make them watch Jurassic Park over and over again until they finally get it: DON’T FUCK WID DA GENES.

Nanotechnology also brings out some obvious fears – the potential this new science has, especially mixed with the mind-to-machine interface of psychotronics, can make anyone paranoid (paranoia = heightened awareness). Nanotechnology involves creating machines at a subatomic level, and with it one can break down and build up, eradicate or manipulate matter at it’s very roots. If these tiny machines can be controlled remotely by a direct link-up to your brain, you have a technological way of achieving psychokinesis. Dangerous, I believe, and also unnecessary. The Occult literature clearly shows that we possess the abilities of telepathy, empathy, and psychokinesis naturally – and we don’t need machines, we just need to focus our will to achieving an altered state of consciousness through which we can channel our will. Put away the laptop and meditate, you technological materialistic boobs.

I’m a spiritualist/willist in a land of materialistic/technologists, and I hope they stop and think about that last step they’re heading towards before they open up the door to Pandora’s Box.

As we get down to quantum physics, psychotronics, nanotechnology, and genetics – as we get to the very roots, the very foundation, the border of science and strict materialism, we’ll burst into this much more broad, expansive and breathtaking spiritual reality and we’ll have to expand our perceptual framework in order to handle it and understand it. We’ll end up tying up loose ends between much of science, philosophy and religion and pave a way to a new science that bridges what we’ve come to know as the physical and the spiritual. A danger comes, however, when our emotional maturity – our empathy, our imagination, our sense of what is valued in life – doesn’t exceed or at least match up to our analytical, logical, mechanical, and materialistic maturity. We must ensure our spiritual evolution meets up with our physical evolution at the bridge where the two realities meet, or we’ll end up causing more damage than good. We’re reaching that bridge now – only a step away – and I only hope we cross it with our willed souls and not our laptops and ignorance.

Poem #4: It's not technically self immolation
by Scott C. Holstad

10:10 p.m. I’m reminded
of you as i blow cigarette
smoke in the air in little
ringlets and listen to new
Bowie. the dim light
makes for a horror show
of lightmares. sleeping
all these nights alone,
you begin to get a little
paranoid
stir crazy
crazy
i don't know how much
longer i can take it
before
i pour gas around myself
in a giant smeary wedding ring,
light the cigarette and
drop it.

A Proletariat Lovesong
by Michael Jarrette-Kenny

Once upon a time, in the land of the hostess twinkie and the energizer bunny….

"I can't stay…" She said to me, lighting a cigarette. "Do you hear me? Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Photographing you…" I say. She just laughs. Do you know those moments? I assume

everybody has them, but hey I've been wrong about a lot of things. I remember going to visit her at work, I can't even remember where it was. It was summer, and the place, whatever it was (does it really matter?) was at the end of this old country road, along this hilltop. At the edge you could see the tree lined landscape (in your mind you probably see one of those Bob Ross paintings with the 'happy little trees', but it wasn't like that at all). As I came up over the edge of the hilltop in my beat up Toyota, I saw her standing out in front of the place, and between that and that perfect blue sky, I was skating on the edge of an almost perfect happiness. In the immortal words of Richard Hell, "Love comes in spurts". The rest is heartache, blue balls, death threats and restraining orders. You hold those three second bursts of bliss in your mind to get through the millions of others that have you putting the barrel in your mouth. Anyway, this, at least in my mind, was one of those moments.

I sit up next to her, placing the finishing touches on the image. The wisps of bluish smoke impaled by the noonday sun. The torn fabric of the concealing comforter. The distant sounds of passing traffic on the highway a few miles north. The throbbing grind of industrial beats and blackened growling guitar chords on the neighbors radio, accompanied by a groan of exertion as he lifts this or that grease covered auto part. The play of light from the crest of her forehead to her belly. The soft gold of her hair splayed in haphazard patterns on the down pillow.

"There, your finished…" Another laugh … I open my eye's to a dubious questioning expression… she doesn't ask and I am grateful…

"What are you thinking about ?"

"I'm not sure I can put it into words…" She pulls on her white cotton panties, I help her fasten her bra ... she pulls on the dress and says goodbye, disappearing out the door and into memory. Jimmy sits in my living room in my pilfered jeans and tee shirt munching on cold pizza, dirty blond hair tied back behind his head, scratching his goatee with blackened finger nails…

"You don't have any beer left…"

"How the hell did you get in here…?" He points to an open window…

"Who's the girl?" Lascivious gleam in his eyes, licking a remnant of congealed sauce from his lips.

"Nevermind her…you didn't say anything to her I hope?"

"She's yours man…what the hell do you take me for…"

"I don't own her." I say.

"O.K leasing with an option to buy."

"How long have you been here?" He smiles, launching into a long series of mock spasms and orgasmic moaning. "Your a real fucking piece of work." He folds the empty pizza box sticking it into the overflowing kitchen garbage.

"You guys playing tonight…?" He fishes with dirty fingers through his mouth extracting chunks of pepperoni.

"Not tonight." He jumps up from the couch, escaping into my bedroom, and begins foraging through the dresser drawers.

"You could at least wait until I'm not here to steal from me." He looks as if I just produced photographs of his mother coupling with a German shepherd. His hand reappeared , unearthing a small bag of white powder. "What the fuck is that?"

"My emergency stash…"

"What the fuck do you think you're doing? Don't ever leave your shit in my place…I'm not going down for you, you bastard."

"Would you fucking relax? You're a fine, upstanding citizen… No one's going through your shit.. No one will ever know it's there." He clears off a glass coffee table, fishing a half gram onto the dusty surface, chopping it expertly into two long lines.

*******************

A half an hour later I'm at work, talking with a group of grimy Australian nomads.

"Phil 'ere only 'as one kidney…" The leader cackles. He has no front teeth. He explains that they travel the world …a month in Zurich…Berlin…six months partying in Amsterdam, then London. It's their first time in the states…medical laws too strict for their taste. The bunch lease themselves out for medical experiments of an extremely questionable nature. The one called Phil sold his kidney for twenty grand. The leader has had all of the fingers on his left hand removed and reattached. Not a bad profession if you ask me. He adjusts his glass eye in the reflection of a c.d. case. I look up some dance single in the computer for them, gliding past the boss. He is dead man in almost every respect. Vacant eyes and acne scars. Bad jokes always at the expense of others. He seems just likable enough that he avoids being stabbed to death by an irate employee, but beneath this almost likable façade lurks a cynical scum bag who would sell his mother to the first one eyed, Australian nomad off the boat for a dollar fifty in loose change and a used piece of chewing gum (spearmint). For all his idiosyncrasies, his shady past as coke dealer, his trailer park upbringing, his Elvis style shooting of his television, his penchant for eating bugs for money during the tedious nightmare of inventory, he was merely a type; the platonic form of Power records management. Beaten down and cowardly, an advocate of the trickle down theory of stupidity, a grown man who had made a tragic error in his youth and who was now forced to cater to the whims of an eternally young and unfortunately deaf audience of frenzied teenagers in perpetuity. I couldn't blame him, there were more where he came from and they were probably worse. It was the job that did it to you…You could struggle against the tide of mismanagement, but like some world weary politician, sooner or later you'd go on the take. There were worse jobs out there but who really wants to find them. Besides, the employees aren't really much better. Record stores attract three kinds of people; the clinically insane, professional slackers in search of a CD collections or junkies who steal the CD’s to support their habits. A distorted play on urban drift theory yields a perfectly feasible sociological law…the unemployable will either be found in fast food restaurants or record stores…Power in a rather cynical play on apparent tolerance attempts to keep itself young and hip by dragging from the dregs of society. unlike the fast food restaurant, they don't care what you look like…in fact the more deviant your appearance the better. For five dollars an hour they lease your rebellious carcass and put you on parade as the latest in avant garde performance artist, while you complain about the customer's derisive laughter concerning your green hair and septum ring. Who cares (so the cold clinical corporate rationale goes) the old farts expire by the truck load at your appearance making more room for that theoretical thirteen year old girl who really buys all the prepackaged rebellion they're hawking. I go in the back to avoid any future work that might be thrust upon me by circumstance. Instead I'm intercepted by Power's resident Oscar Wilde, Boodles…He assails me with his latest romantic failures; the weekly crush on the latest irrefutably straight male who refuses to renounce his hetero orientation in favor of more manly pleasures. This weeks special has gone so far as to desert Power for the Irish Republican Army. I wipe away his weak tears as he launches into his latest manic tirade; his life long dream of realizing Das Boot as a Broadway musical. I suggest Fitzcaraldo as an alternative, but alas Klaus Kinski is unavailable for the engagement. He insists I behave more responsibly with the time clock…According to his latest calculations I have worked fifteen minutes in the last year. He giggles maniacally and escapes into the men's room singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". I contemplate asphyxiating myself with a shopping bag but change my mind, at least for the moment. I can't tell you the feeling (maybe I don't have to tell you …maybe you would gleefully toss your entire life in the garbage to work for $5.05 an hour, maybe you already have ) of arriving in that parking lot day in and day out. Like the post office, Power is open regardless if the snow drifts in front necessitate the use of flame-throwers and steam shovels in order to gain entrance. On Christmas day, New Years, Thanksgiving, All hallows eve, the spring solstice, President's day, Judgement day…If the earth swallowed New York, if the Archangel Gabriel was blowing a baroque trumpet concerto up the boss's anus as Yahweh spewed volcanic ejaculations of molten lava down aisle thirteen, there would still be some ass hole at the front desk asking for the latest Spice Girls single; a trail of drool defining a path down his slackened jaw, staring vacantly as the hounds of hell clamp their jaws around his empty bulbous head. All CDs 9.99 for an extremely limited time…Please pardon our appearance were remodeling for Armageddon. Legend has it that our illustrious head honcho once attempted to purchase a CD (a CD? Why would a guy who owns a record store shop somewhere else for a CD? Perhaps it wasn't a CD ,it could be anything ,a new hairpiece a lollipop for a hooker girlfriend..) on New Years day, and he was outraged…OUTRAGED … there was nothing open. From that moment on he vowed that his store would be open 368 days a year till midnight (it actually says this on the stationary).Of course…he gives himself the day off whenever he damn well feels like it, an option the lowly proletariat scum who work for him do not have, dragging their sorry selves to work while their friends or family gather (actually now that I think about it, maybe we're better off) I really shouldn't complain…In fact I'm not really complaining about a record store…My theory is that Power is a microcosm of the larger universe ,a miniature of a misruled creation. I imagine the god of the Hebrews, the Christians, the Manicheans, the Zorastorians, the dead god of Nietzche, the opiate god of Marx; not so much as thundering titan or bearded patriarch, but as bureaucrat…as administrator of the department of metaphysical affairs. The blind idiot god of the Gnostics, crouching behind the scarred plastic of some otherworldly equivalent of the DMV counter…telling you've been waiting on the wrong line, that your karmic punch card hasn't been initialed by the right seraphic authorities, the lines running in a double helix stair well winding through millions of miles other dimensional space, resembling nothing so much as a traffic jam of the human spirit as filmed by Jean Luc Godard. Heretics burning their persecutors in the Spanish Inquisition, the roving bands of predatory lambs pouncing on the stray lion, Russian czars criticizing their Bolshevik murderers haircuts, Protestants and Catholics flipping coins to see which one's going to hell , on off days flinging pork chops at their Muslim line mate, all carrying on their disputes beyond the grave in some magnificent orgy of destruction and chaos that makes their earthly travails seem as a minor warm up for the chaos that follows. It's no wonder the universe doesn't spontaneously collapse into non being …who knows it might any minute. I'm called to the front by one of the clerks. A shirtless man in his mid twenties discordantly strumming a battered acoustic guitar in a deranged fashion has been inquiring where to get the best acid. The clerk (I can't remember his name, in fact I don't ever remember seeing him before…turn over is so frequent the applicants sometimes leave before the customers do, if their smart)

"Well, do you know where to get good acid?" The clerk looks at me and I can almost here the gears grinding in his head. He's about nineteen and hasn't bathed in as many years. To make matters worse, he's wearing as sweater in the middle of summer, and it smells like week old road kill in a microwave oven. I repeat the question and he eventually shakes his head.

"Sorry man…No acid here. Try the guys in the video section…Any particular variety of acid?" The guys expression brightens. "Blotter or window pane…" I point across the store and he wanders off. He stops before one of the classical employees wandering back from break, a defrocked Russian orthodox monk and part time pedophile by the name of Reger. He's wearing a Viking helmet to commemorate Wagner's birthday though it's still three months away. He stares at the bare-chested man with a perplexed expression, after a moment, directing him again toward the video department. He strolls past me giving me the full nazi salute singing the Liebestod from Tristan & Isolde in a choking raspy tenor. I hear the boss's droll expressionless voice summon me to the back room just in time for me to miss the food truck as it pulls into the front parking lot. I pause before the front door, watching the ebb and flow of traffic on route 80 clotting in chunks of glistening metal ,whirling purposefully across the twisted arterial knots of the overpass at the next exit. The whole world progressing towards some distant goal as if it knew where it was going with unflinching certainty. It's not too late…the doors only twenty feet away. I wouldn't even have to punch out. I could just walk away, after all It's a free country. There are more fundamental rules in operation here I realize heading back to the office…inertia for instance. He's reclining in his leather chair amidst a fractured pile of CD case's and junk mail .I recognize the smile on his face, the I know you fucked up look; the I know your not going to get a raise this year look; the why don't you quit and get a job in telemarketing look.

"What's up?" He gestures toward Kathy the A.A, and she escapes out the door, flashing a sympathetic look my way. A pregnant pause. I glance at the cartoon tacked on the wall behind him, a caricature of Jimi Hendrix at a job interview with the caption "So are you experienced" below.

"Well you've been bugging me to give you your review…so here it is."

He hands me a peace of paper. On the top of the page is a legend with which to interpret the score. A forty designates the rarified heights of unattainable employee perfection. For a moment I mistake the circled number at the bottom for that very number before I realize my mistake.

"A four …a lousy four…"

Images flow through my mind in effusive violent torrents. Slasher movie scenarios, describing with erotic precision the removal of my oppressors epidermis with surgical instruments designed by mad men, unfamiliar with the contours of the human body. Glistening steel, heated white hot by acetylene fires. The boiling gelatinous fluid of the exploding eye ball pouring in thin rivulets of pure pain down the veined crevices of freshly inflicted brands on his scarred drooping cheeks. The numbers of my salary screaming forth from the steaming stench of incinerating flesh. The anguished screams supported on the comforting arpeggiated gurgle of urine trailing down his leg. The light from the office neon refracting in the growing pool at his feet, surrounding the desk as if it were a freshly created island. The varnished mahogany streaked with the bright oxygen rich scarlet of his life's blood liberated from the diverted track of a streaming jugular.

"Frankly…your not cut out to work in retail…Why should we kid ourselves about this…? Strictly between me and you…I don't like you…I never liked you…If I had been manager when they hired you, you wouldn't have lasted a week…As it stands, I'm just waiting for you to fuck up enough so I can justify getting rid of you…"

"You'll never fire me…then you'll have to pay me unemployment and Power doesn't like to pay.." And I'll never quit because that will mean I let you win, I finish …to myself.

"And I suppose you were born to work in retail?"

"If your born to work in retail, you might as well put a gun in your mouth." Ah the momentary resurfacing of the corpse of his idealistic youth.. nothing worse then a lapsed hippie. I start toward the door and he let's out a chuckle.

"I'm glad my poverty amuses you."

"I didn't say I was done." Fortunately the god's intervene. The distorted, fear filled voice of the aforementioned clerk requesting a supervisor. Thankfully .I am the only example of that particular sub species present in the building.

"They’re playing my song." He grunts, dialing the phone, muttering something about finishing his tap dance on my already bruised ego at a later date.

"And what did you say to him." Jimmy lights a Marlboro, his hand alighting on the moist crotch of his adolescent girlfriend. His usual cronies are slumped in his couch watching jeopardy, obscured by a translucent blanket of stale pot smoke, oblivious to our conversation.

"What do you think I said? What can I say?"

"I'll tell you what I would have said. I would have said listen you sperm burping ass faced excuse for an aborted fetus, your face looks like somebody dragged it across 90 miles of asphalt ,poured gasoline on it, lit a match and put the fire out with an ax."

"Well that's you…I'm not you…" He climbs to his feet, disappearing up the stairs for a fresh libation. I'm left to stare at the carpeting. His girlfriend asks me for a cigarette, which I provide. She's a cute red head, who despite performing an ever lengthening list of menial tasks for her less than attentive boyfriend, was smarter than the scene would suggest. She yells at rat boy for blocking her view of the TV, a smiling auto lobotomized wretch who was two or three grades behind us in high school, ready as a kamikaze pilot to immolate himself in the service of jimmy's latest whim. He falls over scratching at a submerged black head on his neck, his unwashed curly black hair clinging to the gray shag carpeting like Velcro.

"Give me your keys …" Jim fumbles down the last three steps cursing ,spilling the precious drops of his freshly concocted mystery elixir along the floor behind him as if leaving a trail to follow back later on in the evening.

"No fucking way man, it cost me four bills last time I let you drive. "

He replies speaking more to the floor then anyone else. "Rat…you know how I am when I don't get my way." There's a long pregnant pause, punctuated by the rhythmic click of the jeopardy theme in the backdrop. Silently Rat boy's hand climbs into the air swaying in the stoned breeze of his muttered protests like a broken flagpole, the keys dangling between the upraised thumb and forefinger..

The beige 83' Nova harrumphs, lets loose a few hesitant, sputtering farts before spilling over the cub into the path of oncoming traffic. I bite my tongue and close my eye's waiting for the impact that never comes, instead I feel the soft spurt of beer foam soak through my coat sleeve as he cracks open a pint can of lukewarm Guinness. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"I'm glad you asked…I've come to the conclusion…" He pauses for a second weaving momentarily into the other lane in pursuit of a stray house cat that only narrowly evades certain death. "Where was I…? Oh yeah…I've come to the conclusion that It's impossible to go insane and that I am the only one to have managed it so far…"

"Managed what…"

"To go insane."

"But you just said…?"

"I know what I said …what I mean is an entirely different matter."

"Well what the hell do you mean?"

"I mean that it's impossible to go insane in the traditional sense since the world is insane.. therefore it follows that to be sane in an insane world is to be insane in the eyes of the insane so I mean that in the eye's of the world I'm insane but I'm really