Gopher - Issue 27

WRITINGS FROM THE RODENTS OF THE UNDERGROUND
VOLUME III, ISSUE NUMBER 27
© 2001 by Rewired and the Gopher Society. All rights reserved.
E-mail editor at: rewired@trianglepants.com
web: http://www.trianglepants.com/gopher
"De omnibus dubitandum."

-Editor and High-Order Drone of the Food Service Industry-
rewired

-Spelling, Grammatical Correcting and Assistant Manager of Bimonthly Assasinations-
CIB Man

-HTML Conversion and Needed Death Threats to Editor to Get His Ass in Gear to Release This Issue-
Mister G

-A More Logical Theory Regarding the Nature of Evolution and Seeming Order in the Universe Offered By-
Rupert Sheldrake's Theory of Formative Causation

-Those Who Graciously Admit You to Take an Escapade into Their Unique (and Perhaps Temporary) Belief Systems Through the Medium of Hierarchal Groups of Symbols Maintained by the Morphic Fields of All English-Speaking Homo Sapiens-
Rich Logsdon
Bart Becker
Slavemonkey
Isis
Ruatha
3i
Grace Kelly, the Original
Simpleton
Lame
Bekka
J. Line
Dave
Grant Wolf

Insomiacatorial	by Rewired
God Bless You, Angie McClintock	by Rich Logsdon
A Different Kind of Real	by Rewired
Last Set At The Pressure Drop	by Bart Becker
Futile	by Rewired
On Faith and Thinking	by Rewired
On the Battlefield of Love, or Casualties	by Slavemonkey
Question	by Isis
Just Like Anyone	by Rewired
Giving into the Disease	by Rewired
Tipping Scales	by Ruatha
Why God is Such a Popular Guy	by Rewired
Ashbrook Summer Bible Camp	by 3i
Without	by Grace Kelly, the Original
Polarity	by Rewired
New Wave Love	by the Simpleton
circles and spirals	by Rewired
Tartarus	by Rewired
Disturbing Thoughts	by Lame
Excerpt from my Journal	by Slavemonkey
Crazy	by Rewired
Warped Beyond Believing	by Bekka
Another Story	by J. Line
Answer	by Isis
Letter in a Library	by Dave
A Poem From Basic Training	by Grant Wolf
Standing in the Breeze	by Isis
4.27.95: the Drive Home	by 3i
Oh, Descartes?	by Rewired

It's now precisely 5:21am, okay 5:22 am, on February 12, 2001. I have work in a little under eleven hours, and I'll get up in a little under eight -- but I won't be to bed for another two, in the least. Insomnia has been a way of life for me since 95 when I was in high school, when I chose it over the vulnerability that I felt that came with sleep. Nowadays, I just like the late evening and early morning hours a lot better than the hours when that damned radiant globe is climbing up and then descending slowly in the sky, and all those fellow robots of the human race are walking around, following their little habit patterns. I like the silence here. As soon as people get up and come downstairs here in the household, I usually ascend to my room, lock the door; go through my usual self-hypnosis, and go to sleep. By that time, it's usually relatively easy, because I'm exhausted. Lately, however, I've been staying up later, which just results in me... well, staying up even later. Most would say I've just got to get on a regular sleeping schedule; I think I need to live on a planet with longer nights. I suppose I'd settle, however, for a residence other than the snowbelt where there was considerably more coffee shops, preferably ones that aren't raped by local sports buffs.

I promised myself, however, that I'd write my editorial and send this damned thing to CIB man already, even though I am in need of sleep and have vowed to watch the videotaped episode of the ever-worsening series, X-Files, where I'm constantly waiting for Agent Dogbutt or whatever to melt into the carpet or turn to Scully with a blank face, flash a tiny photo to her and say in a serious and frighteningly polite manner, "have you seen this boy?"

This is an issue I like. We've got a lot of people here, and some material of my own that I've wanted to print for a LONG while, but felt it was best to withhold, save for in abstract expressions and less-than-subtle indications people either didn't catch onto or didn't give a flying donkey pooh about. It definitely beats my issue-long angst fest contained in the last issue, but expressing what I expressed there, as what I expressed here, was a deliberate means to an end. The strategy, as well as the goal it aims at, is all unconscious, of course, but I do think there is deep, unknown meaning behind every aspect of conscious existence -- be it Shadow, Anima/animus, Higher Self, soul, synchronicity, Unnnamed Cosmic Force; whatever. There was even a deep purpose behind me saying the two, blatantly stupid words, `donkey pooh' in the second sentence of this paragraph.

I must, getting back to the original topic, get more sleep. I was utterly incoherent when CIB Man and the DragonTPG woke me up in the back of CIB's car yesterday morning when we got back from Kent. I woke up, not recognizing anything -- not my two friends laughing at me (which I could not comprehend), not the house I was at (even though I used to basically live at DTPG's house), nor did I recognize my car, for what seemed like two full minutes. It was the most massive brain fart I've experienced in my life. Things weren't linking up right -- the symbols were there, but my network of definitions that I attached to them for the purposes of general comprehension had been temporarily lost upon my rude awakening. Driving home, even after overcoming my initial confusion regarding reality, was horrible, and I'm lucky I didn't get in a wreck. Who needs psychotropic drugs when you've got sleep deprivation?

I commented to a friend at work on how upset I was -- I used to get by, during the high school years, with two to three hours, and sometimes no sleep whatsoever, just fine. I was tired, but nothing like I had experienced yesterday morning. She reminded me that I was getting older, and my body probably couldn't handle it any more. So now I feel like a geezer.

I. First, a little background to enable you to understand the behavior of a young woman that I have known since grade school. Please understand that Angie McClintock was never what you would consider a bad girl. Sure, she had her ups and downs-we all do-but the fact that she was raised "strict Pentecostal," as she liked to put it, is a mark in her favor.

To begin: it was Angie's final night as cocktail waitress at Tarantula Lil's, the city's most notorious nude bar. The next day or the day after, she would pack her things into her car and head back to her home in Laramie, Wyoming. Angie's two years of living in Las Vegas had been an exercise in isolation: she had made no friends and had not met any decent men. In this city the men seemed slick, manipulative and evil. She couldn't wait to leave.

Her first year away from home had been dreadful, beyond anything she could have imagined, and twice she had contemplated suicide. After a year of take art classes at the community college in North Las Vegas, having made no friends and sensing that loneliness was pushing her to mild insanity, Angie had agreed with her therapist that she desperately needed a job, anything that would provide a buffer to the dark and bloody thoughts that plagued her at night. Further, she had told her counselor, an overweight and dim-witted man named Dr. Raymond Morley, that she wanted something that paid reasonably well. Thus, the day after she had attended one of her sessions with Dr. Morley and had prayed that God open a door, she had read in the newspaper of the opening at Tarantula Lil's.

One week before she was hired, one of the owners of Tarantula Lil's had been shot and killed as he had stood outside the nightclub, waiting for a ride, but this news had not deterred Angie, who considered the announcement of the opening a "sign." Boldly driving to the nightclub and applying for job, she had been hired on the spot and for a year had managed to pull down between $500 and $1000 per week, most of which she sent back home to her dying mother. (For this, I think she should be applauded.) Now that she had made enough money and gotten onto her feet, she could leave this neon desert wasteland and return to Laramie with her dignity and self-respect intact.

Recognizing Angie as somehow different, the dancers and bouncers working Tarantula Lil's had left her alone. But this was all right to Angie. At least they communicated and joked with her. Yet, while her mood and disposition had brightened considerably since she had begun working as a skimpily clad cocktail waitress, Angie had come to resent some of the more aggressive and disrespectful male customers, one in particular. This one, Brad, had apparently been a regular before she had begun working at the club.

Angie knew Brad would come in around 9:00 and once again ask her if he could tie her up and fuck her in the ass. "You've got the nicest ass I ever seen," Brad had hissed at her again and again in the club's sticky darkness. After work, alone in her car or on her knees in prayer at home, she had resolved how to handle this odious man.

II. Angie's last night at Tarantula Lil's was a typical mid-January night, shrieking Arctic winds reaching high velocity, and conventioneers pouring into Lil's by the hundreds. A tall, gorgeous brunette with hair flowing down her back, Angie had wound her way between the tables and had just asked the two women at the next table what they wanted to drink when she felt someone place his lips on her semi-exposed right butt cheek and give it a kiss. The time, Angie noticed by glancing at her watch, was 9:37.Blood building to a slow boil, she knew Brad had arrived. You fucking worm, Angie thought, her thoughts bloody.

Brad sickened Angie beyond words. A middle-aged, perfectly built man who rarely bathed and allowed his long dirty blonde hair to grow long like a lion's mane, Brad seemed to Angie to be the epitome of the devil. Perversion and filth, she had learned long ago, were not of the Lord.

She remembered, at that moment, standing in the gooey darkness of the club, a conversation she'd had with her father.

"If y'ever meet Satan," her Pentecostal father had told her two years, five months, and six days ago when she had left Wyoming for Las Vegas, "then you must slay the son-of-a-bitch or he won't leave you be." She remembered that he'd wrapped his big strong arm around her waist.

"How the hell do I slay the devil, daddy?" the twenty-one year old Angie had asked her father, the only man she had ever truly respected.
"Any goddamned way you can, honey," the old man had replied.

"An ax is good," the old man had replied, giving Angie a salacious wink and blowing her a kiss.

Thus, as Angie now turned in the bar and looked at Brad, who grinned sheepishly up at her, she knew that time had run out for this man. This fucker's hour of judgment, she thought to herself, has just arrived. Shuddering, she could still feel the imprint of Brad's lips on her ass; yet, smiling, she knelt, looked at Brad, put her hand on his hairy arm, and asked in her sweetest voice, "Is that offer still on, Brad? You know. About doing me in the you-know-what?" When she spoke around strangers, Angie was always careful to avoid foul language, a tendency she told other girls at the night club she had learned from her devout, Bible-believing parents.

"If the offer's still good," Angie added, drawing closer to Brad, "we can do it at my place after work."

Invited out to Angie's place, a little green shack five miles out in the desert, Brad jumped at the chance. "You can drive," Angie said coyly as they left the club hand-in-hand at 2:27 am through grim Arctic wind. To the bouncer, they looked like love-birds.

Eager to the point of incoherence, Brad was speechless as he raced his '84 Ford pick-up hell-bent-for-leather through the windy, moon-lit night and in a cloud of dust pulled into the dirt driveway in front of Angie's house at 2:57.

A very clever young woman, Angie had worked out a simple agreement: both would get undressed, but before she let Brad have his way with her, she got to tie him up on her bed. Brad had stupidly nodded consent, and when the two entered the house and slammed the door on the icy wind, Angie said "Get naked, big boy, and head for the bedroom over there" and began removing her own clothes. When he saw this, Brad quickly stripped, ran into the dimly lit bedroom of the living room, and flopped down on the double bed. This asshole thinks he's in paradise, Angie thought to herself, slowly walking into her bedroom and looking at Brad.

"Tie me up, babe," he panted. She observed that Brad was already quite hard. Then she looked at Brad's body: it was tanned from head to foot, with arms, legs, stomach and chest perfectly developed. Wouldn't be so bad if he didn't smell and wasn't a fucking pervert, Angie thought to herself. Smiling, sensing an angelic presence, Angie used leather straps to tightly bind Brad's hands and feet to wooden bedposts.

"Oooh, baby, that hurts," said Brad, laughing. His arms and legs stretching nearly out of their sockets, he could not remember ever having been tied so tightly.

"Ooooh, yeah, but pain is good, right?" said Angie, now standing over and looking down upon Brad. Excited, Angie noticed with some amusement that her nipples were hard and erect. It had been three years since she'd been naked in front of a man.

"Oh, yeah, baby, pain is good," Brad gasped, lust oozing from him in sweat droplets. "Let's get it on." If possible, Angie mused, Brad's member has grown in the past minute. Briefly, she considered touching Brad but thought better of it.

"Yes," Angie agreed, "let's. But first, I gotta go to the next room." Always a strong-willed person, she was not to be distracted from what she considered to be her present calling.

"OK, baby," Brad said, trying to pull on the straps to induce pain, "but hurry." Brad could barely move. "I wanna do my thing."

"I'll be a sec," Angie laughed, running out of the room. He hasn't a fucking chance, she silently sang to herself as she headed to the closet next to the kitchen.

III. Now we come to the crux of the story, that point at which Angie demonstrates behavior that seems, in the words of the prison chaplain, "quite unbefitting a young Christian woman at any time and in any place."

Brad could hear Angie opening the closet door, banging around some boxes, and taking something off a top shelf. Glancing for a moment to his left, he noticed with alarm an old worn and floppy brown leather Bible on the nightstand.

When Angie re-appeared in the doorway, still nude, her body bathed in the soft glow of the room's corner lamp, she held a bright red chain saw in her right hand. The muscles of her right arm rippled in the moonlight streaming through the latticed window. (It surely must have occurred to Brad, at that moment, that he was dealing with a woman of extraordinary strength.)

"This is my fixer-upper," she said, smiling, as Brad's eyes grew big as saucers. Angie had never imagined that a man could shrink so quickly.
"Oh, God," Brad whimpered. "You're not serious?"

"Oh, God," said Angie, slowly nodding her head, "but I am. I am, after all, quite the obedient servant."

"Oh, God, God, God, no, " Brad squeaked as Angie approached him, suddenly looking very severe.

"Oh, God, God, God, yes," said Angie, lowering her head so that she could just see out of the tops of her eyes. She approached Brad.

This was not the Angie that Brad had thought he knew. It was as if day had turned to blackest night.

"Shame, shame, on you, you wicked man!" Angie suddenly exclaimed, her voice low and subterranean. She now stood next to the bed and held the red chain saw over her head with both hands. A small yellow cross had been painted onto the red, the sentence "Praise the Lord" inscribed beneath it. Temporarily, she felt like a preacher proclaiming damnation to the sinners and felt certain that she was on the verge of performing a just and necessary act. Then, slowly, she lowered the instrument.

Trembling uncontrollably, sweating profusely, weeping, Brad opened his mouth but could only say "Bah, bah, bah."

Angie suppressed a laugh. When she had gone over this scene in her head, several nights before, she had never imagined that she could frighten anyone so easily.

"And 'bah, bah, bah' to you, too, my ass-fucking friend," said Angie, instantly regretting her obscenity. A foul mouth, her father had always told her, meant a foul heart. Angie smiled at Brad, winked and blew him a kiss, and then, lowering the saw to the floor just next to the bed and placing her bare left foot on the engine, jerked the starting chord with her right hand. After three tries, the engine roared to life. With both hands, Angie picked up the snarling thing.

The saw purring eagerly, she approached the bed and looked into Brad's desperate blue eyes. "This chain saw, Mr. Satan, belonged to Daddy, who warned me you'd be coming."

Brad smacked his dry lips, struggled to find his voice, and faintly asked, weeping, "What're you gonna do? You're not gonna use that thing on me?" Strain as he might he could not move his arms or legs.

The smile left Angie's face, replaced by a pouting frown. Angie didn't like men who cried; they weren't men.

"You believe in and love God?" Angie asked in a melodic voice. She had to make sure. Satan, she knew, couldn't profess a love for his arch-enemy God Almighty. She had worked out this part of the ritual in her head just last night.

"God, Brad. God! God!" yelled Angie, who concluded that Brad's inability to answer correctly and instantly indicated disbelief bordering on demonic depravity, a topic her father used to talk about endlessly. Accustomed to living alone for the past two years, Angie had come to know all about demons and hell. She had seen them in her dreams.

"Brad." Angie said, triumphantly revving the chain saw, "I'm doing you and this planet a favor. Sawing you up sending you to the Pit of Hell will be like saving the damned world!"

Angie had hated stupid questions since grade school, and so now she leaned over the bed, and put her face an inch from Brad's. "What is this thing I'm holding, Brad? Is it a gun? No. Is it a knife? No. Is it a rope? No again. No, no, no. What you do with chain saws is saw things up. So of course, I'm gonna saw you up, you ass-fucking idiot!"

Again, without thinking, Angie regretted her unfortunate choice of words. Guilt temporarily burned her soul. She did not want to spend an eternity in Hell.

For an instant, Brad simply stared at Angie, wondering (Angie imagined) if he were dreaming. Then, the whole evening clicked, and looking at the Bible, considering the girl's strange words, and thinking of the cross on the chain saw, Brad realized that he was approaching his own Armageddon.

As Brad began screaming and thrashing his head from side to side, Angie revved the saw, held it a good foot from her body as her father had taught her, and lowered it to an inch above Brad's shriveled manhood.

Looking down at Brad, she asked, mockingly and loudly, "Now, where shall we begin? Any requests? Speak now or forever hold your peace!"
As Brad's screams intensified and mixed with the wind raging outside, Angie considered her options, forcing her mind to think of the aesthetics of the situation (7), and then slowly lowered the machine to a point between the legs, just below the scrotum, and finally moved it toward the left knee. She looked at the clock over her bed. It was 3:43.

"I think I'll work clockwise," she said. A young woman who had long been fascinated by the advance of time, Angie generally did things in logical patterns. Putting the chain's grinding teeth against Brad's leg, she pulled the trigger and began cutting just below the knee. Blood weakly spurted on her small breasts, but she had to ignore that if she were to complete her task effectively. As she worked, a church hymn filling her mind, Angie could no longer hear Brad's screams.

IV. When she finished with Brad, fatigued and drenched in blood, Angie turned off the saw, placed it in the corner of her bedroom nearest the door, and headed to the living room. Again, she found herself very alone and thought of her father. Several hours of darkness remained, and after praying she would sleep under her grandmother's quilt on the couch.

Then, after waking, she would clean up the mess in the bedroom, wash herself up, put her belongings in Brad's pick-up, and head for Wyoming. She wondered if her father would still be the same.

V. As most of you probably know, Angie McClintock was apprehended six months after she returned to Laramie and butchered her father, and was transported back to Las Vegas where she was tried and sentenced to seven life sentences, three of them to run concurrently. When I last talked to her, she seemed content to be living out her life in a penal facility in central Nevada. "It's like living in a fucking convent," she confided in me; grinning hugely, "and I like it."

To while away her hours prefatory to her eternal rendezvous with the Lord of Hosts, Angie spends a lot of her time participating in Christian Women's Prison Ministry, an activity she claims has turned her life around. Her participation in this ministry is extraordinary thing, particularly considering that (given a propensity for extreme violence) she has been isolated from the other inmates for the past three years.

"I talk to Jesus every night, Pastor," she told me from the solitary four-by-six cell in which she must spend the rest of her natural life. Her eyes blazing, her hair wild and disheveled, she resembled a beast. "And then, y' know what?" she added.

"No, what, Angie?" I asked, looking into the beautiful brown eyes peering at me through the bars of her permanent home. Though I knew she couldn't touch me, I was sweating profusely in a room whose temperature, according to the prison guards, rarely rose above sixty-two.

"Praise the Lord, indeed," I responded. "And what does he say?" I asked. My heart was racing and I rose from my seat and moving away form the cell. Whenever conversations with Angie took turns like this, I got up and left. I had never heard her hiss before.

Angie looked hard at me and then gave me one of those penetrating smiles that always makes my blood run cold. "Why," she began slowly, "he says whatever I fucking want him to say."

N. B. Please allow me to say in closing that I quite agree with some of you: this is a vile tale, one not to be spoken among people raised in good Christian homes. However, I like to think that, even within the larger context of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, there is a point to this bloody story, one that I have pondered in my own darkest hours. I'm just not sure what that point would be.

If reality, from the human standpoint, is greatly flawed at both levels - the species-specific sensory perception level and the individual `mindset' or `reality tunnel' level - then the closest we can get to `objective reality' is through extreme attention in the Now, which is so highly diluted that it can be reduced to a fiction anyway, although a fiction written by many in which few take the time to actually read into. This cup of coffee before me, for instance, isn't just what it seems - to the contrary, it's much more and much less, depending on your species, state of consciousness, your point of view, your beliefs and experiences.

That would seem to indicate that the past, then - memory - and the artifacts left behind by the past which trigger such memories, which symbolize a bond between you and the events which have passed - are fictitious to an even higher degree. Since only the mind can hold the past - if your lucky, a mind that was actually there when those events actually transpired - it is more easily, and in fact inescapably, clouded by the thoughts and emotions, fantasies and point of view of he or she who bears that memory. Our lives are just a journey through which we acquire fiction. A fiction that differs from person to person, even if they were present and played a part in the events that transpired in the now-passed land of `way back when.'

And what of those moments - for some, aplenty - where we get to see beyond the veil; where we sneak a peak at other ways of perceiving this reality, or perhaps seeing other parallel or abstract realities as well? The moments that one is likely to experience when `zoning out', `defocalizing', `phase-shifting', `astral projecting', `dissociating', falling into an `altered' or `trance' state - is what the person sees, when set free from the normal mode of perception that displays to us the normal, mundane reality, a higher truth?

He certainly believes that when set free, the truth is what he sees. So used to the darkness of the cave, one who marches on into the other reality experiences much pain, fear and confusion and must go through adjustment. What the hell is true anymore? When the man comes back from his journey in the other reality, to his friends in the cave, in the world of chains and shadows, he tries to explain to them what is really out there - but his tales are taken as fiction cooked up in a brain stew of a diseased mind, and they fear that perhaps he's gone mad. He wants to walk back to the other reality, what he often mistakenly calls the true reality, and learn how to successfully live in it, but he sees no teacher, and it would be a long, fearful, treacherous path without some guidance. So he goes back to the shadows, back to the chains. Is this reality he experiences, then, the true reality?

No. Not in the least. Another state of consciousness offers new symbols, perhaps a deeper connection to those symbols and, through that connection, perhaps a higher rate of ability to manipulate those symbols at either a conscious or unconscious level - but it's still subjective. It still perceives reality through the organizing, selecting, and interpretations brought to our conscious awareness through our senses and biological brain. Our reality is a sensory reality; we see, in our heads, a symbolic representation of it rather than experiencing it directly. And we cannot experience it directly - we are left with just unlimited different ways, methods, perspectives, reality-tunnels, mindsets, maps, models, and definitions, at the disposal of each individual mind in existence.

This fact - that we do not perceive reality As It Is - seems to pose a problem for the arena of the paranormal and mystical. Those that find themselves out of body during experiences commonly labeled as Near Death Experiences and Astral Projection report seeing a reality in many ways much like the reality of the everyday, even though they proclaim to be outside of the physical body. The seeming problem with these claims is, of course, the fact that the reality we perceive in the everyday has distinctive qualities that originate in the brain. Color doesn't exist outside your head, physical matter doesn't either, and neither does sound - and yet those out of body experience it outside of the physical body, and away from the senses. Does this provide evidence that they (and I) are delusional; lying? Yes, because evidence, too, is entirely subjective construct - but to look at it a different way, take into the account the claims of Spiritualists and many other! Eastern Religions and philosophies and Occult and New Age perspectives: we have more than one body. We have many bodies that are much subtler than the physical body, in which we all coexist. Some say seven, others say five, others claim more - but that's not the point. The point is that if there are other bodies, and the Chakras that are supposedly present in those bodies also exist, this could very well explain why we still experience a very Human Reality when out of the physical body. Some, of course, have accounts of experiencing other realities - though in the same basic way we experience this reality, but perhaps of a much better quality - and there are those who experience `merging with the light' or achieving godlike states of bliss. This could be attributed to a higher subtle body that experiences reality in the most direct way possible - experiencing it as what it all is, energy.

Many systems have been searching for reality. So have I. Many systems, in allowing their systems to become belief systems, systems of faith, have actually blinded themselves to reality and reinforced their own petty delusions. So have I. Perhaps what we have to learn here is that it's not important so much what's real - everything's real. The question is: what kind of real?

This all started right around Easter with a song I couldn't get out of my head - "Casanova" by LeVert. I was sitting on a green park bench singing it when he sat down next to me and struck up a conversation so familiar you would have thought we knew each other from kindergarten. It couldn't have been even five minutes before he turned and said, "Hey, Sweet, knock me a kiss." After that we just kept on going. I can't help it if I'm lucky.

At Tiny's Fruit Stand, a disintegrating tin-and-plank juke joint, it is after hours, which means only that we stop drinking B&B or Blue Ribbon--what we call "legal''--and start on the homemade white shine-"corn'' or "jar.'' This is Tiny's idea of protocol; she won't serve the lightning during business hours. She is huge, beautiful, and counting cash at the bar with her stoic boyfriend Dimples; "cute'' is the word women use about him. A couple of half-drunks with bleached bouffant hairdos start singing pretty harmony on "Try A Little Tenderness,'' Tiny makes that delicate little movement with her mouth, and pulls Dimples in close.

"It was on a Sunday afternoon at the Pressure Drop. Band was playing 'Messin' With the Kid,' fight break out. Everybody was running, I ran, too. Guy shot at him, got me right there.''
"Jesus Christ!''
"Bust that big leg bone. Laid me up for about six months, then on crutches. I ain't doing too bad now. Leg give out now and then.''

Every time I think I've got a grip on my life, I find you there
Every time I feel I begin to understand, you come back to me
Dreams of memories, bursts of enlightenment and flights of confusion
Have I been chasing my shadows? Or is truth the illusion?
Where do you come from?
What do you want from me?
What are you here for?
Why do you come to me?
Do I turn to Carl Jung for this
Or do I turn to Budd Hopkins
Are you a manifestation of my rising consciousness
Or are you a sign of my madness?
Every time I think I've got myself figured out, you reveal the lie
Every time I think I've reached the core, you expose the Chinese box
The images, so powerful, bring fears of morality, you watch it
The images, so horrible, you make me break my moral heart, and you listen
What is it you're looking for?
What do I have inside of me?
You show me the mirror
Is it the reason I always dissect me?
Is that my face now, or are you fooling me?
Why do you do this? Why are you using me?
You keep on feeding the frenzy that dances it's way through my mind
If I chance to dive into my shadow I'm scared of what things I will find
I once dwelled but then there was no point so I ran the other road
You show me the secrets I try and bury away, leave me feeling scared, drained, cold.
Why are you doing this?
Does it have to be this way?
Why are you taking us?
The last thread of sanity begins to fray
Just fucking leave me alone
I need to wake up
I want to go home
Because I don't know the real
But I'm not seeing this
I don't know the truth
And I'm not believing this.
Every time I wake up with that dark atmosphere in my head
Every time I wake up, not having slept, far from my bed
I wonder what happened, I wonder what it was this time
I wonder, am I beginning to see? I wonder, am I growing blind?
Every time I stand there in that place, waiting for whatever
Unable to leave or move, heavy and broken (or am I more together?)
I see the looks on all of their frightened faces
Will they recall this when they awake the next day
Go through their days like dazed zombies
Thinking, it was so real, but it was a dream anyways
Every time I wake up, and at the foot of the bed, you're there
I wonder, do you know how it feels? Do you even have the capacity to care?

Faith is stagnation; death.
Thinking is it's polar opposite:
Thinking is a verb, an action;
it implies motion.
One can believe in one set of thoughts
over another
for a time,
though eventually those
contradictory thoughts might destroy
the ones in which we hold belief --
but that is good and healthy.
The birth and death of thoughts and
the systems of belief that interconnect them
are cycles that exercises the intellect
and keeps one truly alive and aware.
It is imbalance, but a constructive imbalance --
stretching the soul
to dual extremes
so it builds endurance and strength.
These things are needed,
for if a truth exists and this soul ever meets with it,
it will need that endurance, that strength,
to see it for what it really is
and fully realize it's nature and implications.
Take a path of exploration,
riding the questions,
your way lit by a torch of doubt.
It's best to think much,
doubt everything,
and believe nothing.

I feel much better now that I've lost all hope. No, that isn't true. I feel like shit. My mind wanders far too much. Something that I've lost all control over, but I couldn't give a shit about that. I used to have goals and dreams. I used to have a desire, a drive to go another day. Not anymore. I lost it all. The road of my life used to be laid out for me, but now I cannot even see it, and when I do, it forks in directions that both lead to darkness. That is how I've come to give up all hope. Take life like a leaf, flow wherever the wind takes me, and float on the river that leads out into the ocean.
I don't even know where my life is going now. I turned and fled so many times up is west and north is east. I could try and find myself again, instead of run, but the desire to has left me. And what does it matter. All I'm sure of is that this is not where my future lies, and if I have to move every few months until I find something, then that is what I'll do.

"Huh?" I looked up startled. The sun seemed to set her dark red hair on fire; her big green eyes engulfing all light. Pale white skin smoothed over a lean frame; thick, parted lips colored black. Her hair hung down her face as if she spent hours preparing how they fell. She wore a tight tee-shirt that clung to every curve. Tight jeans that were wider at the feet than at the waist showed off the rest of her curves. Beautiful, perfect, but the last person I wanted to see right now.

"Oh hi. I didn't expect to see you here. Didn't expect to see anyone really. How are you?"

She ruffles my hair and offers a hand to help me stand up. "I'm fine," she said, although I doubt she meant it. "What are you doing here sitting on the cold cement in the middle of winter? Have you no sense? And I thought you didn't smoke."

The nerve of her. I look at the clove cigarette in my hand burning away unused. "Uhm, I don't, really. It's a clove, I smoke them every once in a while more for the smell than for the tobacco." I tossed what was left down and ground it out with my boot. "I uh, I was thinking, about nothing really." I looked into her eyes and I was trapped, she had that effect. Large gems, emeralds looked into my soul, bore a hole through my head.

"You heard too?" How many more will know before the sun sets? "I'm okay, I guess, for now." She still bore into me with her eyes, those eyes that I cannot lie to. "You know me. I have a hard time doing anything without thinking about how I will look to someone, alcohol takes away those inhibitions."

"I'm sure there are better ways to get over some inhibitions than drinking that much, that fast. Are you trying to kill yourself?" Damn those eyes!
"Yeah, I guess. I was stupid. It's over with, lets put it behind us and forget it." One more thing behind me that I run from. Has she even blinked yet? "My head is full of holes, what's one more night?" I don't think she took that as a joke. True, a blacked out night or a forgotten memory really isn't that far apart.

Her hand went to my cheek, her caressing touch. "Your head should be full of holes," she laughed. "You really need help Roman, you can't keep running from your past forever."

"No buts," she interrupted. "Anyway, I came to see if you have made up your mind. You said that you would give me an answer by today." Ah, the reason she came. One more thing I'm trying to put behind me.

Sighing heavily, she moved her gaze to look at the sky. "A bad storm is coming, I can see it." She did seem to have a knack for weather watching. "You know that I cannot make you do anything you didn't want to do in your heart. But I can't wait forever." It was true she couldn't wait forever. When I first met her, she was like a sister to me. Best friends maybe. But I wanted to get to know her, everything about her, and in turn, I had to tell her everything about me. She told me about her family, about her friends, her boring job as a secretary and I told her about the war with my mind, and that the war with my mind was destroying my sanity and that hope had already been a casualty. And I told her how much I wanted someone to snuggle up to at night. That I almost regret. Almost.

Nothing really bad happened, I enjoy every minute I spend with her. Her smile could make me forget everything. But it brought back one of the many things I tried to run away from: love. I'm more afraid of love than I am of death, though sometimes I think that they are one in the same. The one thing I looked so hard for as a teenager had me more scared than anything else. Why do I run from love? Why do I run from commitment? I suppose I could settle down with her, she is beautiful. But that means that the search is over, and I certainly don't want to take second best, never knowing who the best was.

"I could love you the rest of my life, always looking for some way to make you smile," her eyes gleamed. This is going to be harder than I thought. "But you deserve someone better," I said as a near about bolted to get away from her. I could not look at her face; mine was already covered in tears.

She called out to me, "You run away from me, and I will hunt you down across every inch of this country!" I stopped dead in my tracks. She never did accept 'no' as an answer, I should have known better. "But you don't run from me, I see that now. You run from yourself. You run so fast you wouldn't be able to see that you past your goal years ago and you've ran yourself to the edge of the world and beyond." I would give anything to avoid looking at her, but I turned around and caught a hand across my face. She slapped me!

"At least on the edge of the world," I started before her gaze made me stop. "You deserve better than me. I'm about ready to snap again, and I don't want to take you with me. I love you too much to see you hurt. Besides, I don't think I remember how to stop running." She laughed at least.

"It is my fault, I never should have pushed you for an answer." Her eyes never left mine. "But if the answer was 'no,' then it won't mean the end of us. You don't have to run." She wrapped her arms around me. "And I don't deserve anyone better than you, trust me," she said with a wry smile.

In her arms, hope seemed to rush into me, flooding my body, my soul, and my head. For the first time since as far back as I can remember, I was truly happy. So happy that I never saw the knife.

This world of mine crumbles
Falling day after day
My legs start to tremble
There is no other way
Hope and pray for the best
This happy little world
My will put to the test
It's ashes, white and curled
With my wrists to the sky
And arms out stretched, I scream
And plead the question, "WHY?"
Nothing is what it seems.

I can't spend another minute thinking
Drinking the putrid juice of my own complexities
I want another moment of wonder
I want to remember what I love and feel it
So I can tear it apart, dissect it, find out why I fear it
I choose to live such a lonely life
Comfortable in my wall of manipulations
That keep me safe and secure from the change I'm afraid of
I won't spend another day on this mental high-horse
Maybe they know something I don't,
But haven't I thought I've known that all along?
She's such a wonderful girl, they all are
They all have such wonderful relationships, too
Why can't I bring myself to pursue a harmony
Why am I so afraid of giving up myself
Sacrificing what time I have, when I fill it with what amounts to nothing
I deny my desire for their bliss and dedication
To pursue my obsession without running in circles,
Chasing my own tail like a dog on a dumb day
Splitting thoughts down to the atom
And trying to capture emotions in writing,
Like a man desperately trying to grip water with his hand
It's such a sick thing
And I'm such a sick thing
And he said that I'm `just like all of us',
just like anyone, like the rest of them
But are they all that bad, that sad?

Come closer, lean closer, my dear
Tell me, explain what it is you
Expect me to do
scared, heavy, listless and lonely here
in the middle of nowhere?
Must I march,
soaked to the bone in gasoline,
right on into the flames?
Drown here in polluted waters
Roll around here in the tar
Waiting patiently
For some
Godlike being to point a direction
Or lift me with Its hands?
Can you
Reach it there -
What's held deep within this iris?
Can you
Defeat it, dear,
Can you murder
And maim this
Virus?
No?
Than what better
Way is there
But this
When you're so
far from
voicing a more
effective option?
Why insult my ways
When you've got no better idea
No better solution?
No cure, you say,
so give in to the disease?

In his never ending attempts at self gratification and the need to justify how he is, we hear from Rewired once again. For some reason he expects everyone to read between the lines and come to some elevated level of thinking -- or at least how he thinks.

There are many things he has yet to understand, obviously -- and before I leave that wide open, let me emphasize what I mean. He sees just about everything that does not suit him as conforming to society. He makes fun of the people with the drone-like jobs and the whole idiocy, which he sees in the things that so many people do. Whether it is right or wrong I am not to judge, but I do know that many of these people are happy with their lives. So they are morons now, right? Conforming to this big government conspiracy wrapped up by the media to make them think that way, right? Sorry to break it to you -- happiness is more of a perception then a feeling.

No doubt you are right that to be an adult you have to know what you want, what you believe in, ect... but that isn't all there is to it. Ever heard, "You're old enough now, your wants won't hurt you."? A large part of becoming an adult is learning to settle for what you can't change, and move on. Not to sit and muddle through it time and time again, until there is nothing left of what it originally was.

It really is a moot point though, whether you are comfortable or not-bottom line it's been 7 years of the same old cycle -- if you could change, I do believe you would have.

Once again though, I do see that you were not reading. You spout no one is getting your point -- but you haven't read well enough to get mine. I did not say your writing sucked -- I said the stuff you massed produced thru e-mail to your friends mostly sucked and you knew it -- because you would put disclaimers right on the message. This is also moot, because I am the one who has been saying all along that you need to choose one thing and pursue it at a time. You can't get anywhere dividing your talents 50 ways from Sunday.

Which brings me back to something -- becoming an adult is learning to stand up for who you are -- I am sorry to break the news to you -- but you know how your friends tell you how easy you are; go where ever they want even if you don't want to, etc.? Then there are so many issues in your own life that you are confused on -- can you really say you know all of who you are and stand up for that?

I have never brought myself into this -- never worried if you found me interesting or not. I am not the issue, though I could be, if you choose to go that route. But you have made a sad attempt at trying to elicit - what, feelings of guilt from me? Sorry to disappoint you. I agree that conversations can have depth and there is no reason why people cannot have them - and there is nothing wrong with trying to know a persons' views and what not -- but you let this encompass your whole life, and once again you assume that since someone has decided they need more than the abstract to satisfy themselves that society's blatant stupidity has caught yet another victim.

I am sorry once again -- you equate adulthood in such a manner you always have --conforming, subservience. These are chains you have placed on society from your perceptions of it -- is it wrong? No, you have the right to your own opinions -- everyone does. But one must learn where to draw the line and call it a night so to speak. You seem to still be lacking that.

What irritates me most about religious belief systems and the people that follow them is the empty network of
beliefs they have that they blindly accept and follow without ever questioning. They are vague in what they believe
and how they explain it and why it has to be that way, and without something resembling a concrete definition one
can't comprehend what something is and is therefore not wise in arguing on it's behalf -- it's an argument over
semantics, pure and simple. I have not met one Christian who will talk about their religion and who is not like
this.

From experience -- and yes, I have to go from that standpoint, for to start from any other would be dishonest and would make me far more hypocritical than I'm going to seem anyway -- I can tell you that in going through experiences one might term `mystical' or `paranormal', one finds it very hard, almost impossible, to explain exactly what one is experiencing. The experiences are not of this world, and cannot be fully expressed through the expressive mediums of this world. One can only hint what one is experiencing or `seeing' and cannot define it in exact detail. If concrete definition is touching the center of something -- as one would explain what their car looked like -- explaining things on the other side is like poking it with a stick. It is, as the Zen Buddhists have often explained, much like pointing at the moon. Plato said that man is chained so he faces the wall of a cave with the light of the truth behind him, and that he mistakes the flickering shadows on the wall as reality. (Plato's Analogy has its place here, as well as the parable of the three blind men and the elephant.)

So, yes, I see how terms to describe the experiences or beliefs cannot be so concrete and direct. One is left to use abstractions and analogies to explain even the simplest aspects of such experiences, if one dares to call anything in the Other Worlds simple. Yet even abstractions - words, pictures, gestures, analogies, and so on - don't explain it all. What one needs to do, since one naturally does not, as a human with limited language, have the ability be direct, is to be thorough - use multiple ways of explaining something in order to communicate the message to others. Use more than one analogy to explain one your experiencing, so people can tune in on the aspects of your experience. Light can be explained as a particle and a wave; explain it as one and ignore the other and you cut yourself off from its various aspects and qualities. Once people see that you are trying to point out the likeness this familiar thing has to this mystical thing, they may assume other likenesses that aren't really there. To stop the mundane minds to which you speak from jumping to conclusions and basing assumptions atop assumptions and losing what you're saying completely, use a simple analogy and then use another simple analogy. If the individual truly hopes to understand, than this is as close as one can get to comprehending such an experience without actually experiencing it themselves.

Most people are far too abstract when it comes to god, and they treat an honest questioner as an ignorant heretic who is bent on breaking their fragile, circular logic. I've met and known people who've had intense paranormal experiences - astral projection, odd visions via meditation, and so on - and it is hard to explain, and abstractions are used. Yet they have the knowledge in their heads to begin with, and then they search for words and other ways to communicate this knowledge. Believers in god, however, seem to explain their `divine experiences' and the jump into the fixed and ultimately vague interpretation of the church. They take no time to process the information by themselves. They had an experience that they could not comprehend, and that is understandable, for it can shake ones world - but then they found a religion to define it for them. That doesn't help one to understand one's experiences. That helps one to bottle it, place a lid on it and put it in someone else's cupboard for them to
label.

In example, I ask the usual question to a believer: "Why do you believe in god?"

"Maybe it was just universal love," I tell him, "maybe we're all interconnected at some spiritual level of existence - why does it have to be god? Why couldn't it have just been a sudden realization of your love for all of existence?"

"I can't define god," they say, as if I'd asked them to spread peanut-butter all over their body and dance around in a tutu clucking like a chicken, "he is incomprehensible. Inconceivable."

"Than how can I have faith in god?" I ask, quite honestly. "How can I have faith in something I don't understand?"

The answer is, if they could understand him, they wouldn't need faith. Faith - beliefs of all kinds, as a matter of fact - is a replacement for knowledge. How can they have such blind faith when they haven't even got a clue as to what they're laying all this faith in? That question gnawed at me for a long time. It stayed under my skin for some time until working it's way into my brain, where it was processed and researched.

Over time, I began to catch onto how, and more importantly why, people came to hold faith in an apparently inconceivable god. How people come to hold faith in god, or more specifically the god of a particular religion, is usually quite simple: they were raised by parents who believed in the particular religion. Already brought up with a particular network of beliefs - which I and many others refer to as a mindset - individuals are conditioned from the beginning to see things through the eyes of that religion. Through that religion's eyes, they come to interpret any
bizarre experience in the context of that religious mindset, which in effect reinforces their beliefs in that religion. Religion is like that sometimes - it's like a complete circuit or a perpetual motion machine. With the head up the ass, the religious mindset eats it's own excrement, chews on it for awhile, swallows it, only to shit it out and start the process all over again. (Please excuse the explicit visuals).

Others, however, have more interesting reasons for believing what they believe; stories that repeat themselves over and over through the mouths of individuals I've come across. Often, it all begins as I explained above: they're raised within a particular religion. The difference is an eventual cut-off from that religion, be it abrupt or a slow sort of drifting from the church and the beliefs with which they were raised. Following this, the life of the everyday becomes their new religion. Perhaps they've pondered the big questions - life after death, how the universe began, whether there is some grand purpose in the cosmos or in their own individual lives, or whether there really is a spiritual side of existence - but those questions aren't really of concern anymore. They've come to see the questions and the religion they once believed held the answers as fairly irrelevant to their day-to-day needs. Their daily lives revolved around academics, the work force, family and friends - the mundane and superficial. They built
their minds around dealing strictly with these things, or their brains adapted to the mundane lifestyle; their minds having been programmed by the culture they live in to survive within the culture, period.

Then, suddenly, for whatever reason, they experience something very unlike that which they've ever experienced - something that doesn't fit into their preexisting mundane mindset. To recount some stories I've been told: in the pits of despair, people have fallen to their knees and `received feelings of universal love'; a mother sees her infant under a heavy objects and suddenly is `granted the superhuman power to lift it off the child'; people 'should've died in an accident' and the unlikelihood such people had for survival in the accident left everyone baffled; cancer goes into remission; healings seemingly occur due to prayer; the virgin Mary appears in a leper-like manifestation on the side of a blueberry muffin.

From the undeniably extraordinary to the blatantly and inconceivably stupid, these things are taken by many to be 'evidence of god.' They are evidences, indeed, but these incidents can be used to support other such `theories': psychokinetic powers, a web that interlinks all of existence, synchronicity, neuro-feedback, biofeedback, and malformed pastries.

What I want to get across is that most of the time I know that the experiences mentioned above are actual occurrences (except for the muffin thing - that's just dumb). Again, I know this because I have had strange experiences myself and I can see the honesty and emotions swirl in their eyes as they recount them. Some even begin to cry at the memories of the experiences, either out of happiness or dread. So the fact that `something' happened to them is not a question in my mind, and I'm always sure to get that across - the question always is what it was that happened. The `meaning' they attached to their experiences and lay faith in.

Which is where I come to what I disagree with: the interpretations they've attached to their experiences. Most don't even try to explain what it is they've experienced, even to themselves. If you are not one of them and are curious, I offer a suggestion: try questioning them. Pay close attention, and note how many times they dodge questions with empty, unsupported proclamations. Note how many times their retorts begin with the words, `but the bible says... ' The reason they do this is that they cannot put into their own words what they cannot themselves understand. They
seek preexisting symbols to cover up their fear of self-analyzation. The interpretations they so helplessly hold undying faith in are usually forged explanations, borrowed symbols, and quoted passages or concepts drawn from religions with which they quickly came to belong to - or returned to, to be `born again' - in order to find security in their experiences. Half the time they speak echoing explanations, words, and symbols, which they do not understand - which they can guise strategically, almost innocently, until you really begin to probe them and ask them to really draw out and define what they mean. They can't. The reason is simple: they haven't the foggiest clue themselves.

After they've slowed down on their echoing of the words of priests and quoting biblical passages, then demand a real answer. Then they say something to the affect that they don't understand what it's all about, and all they know is - and the bomb drops - "you just have to have faith."

The reason they take their `leap to faith' is that they cannot, for the life of them, stretch their mind to attempt to really understand. To step back from religion and delve into themselves, and not look for beliefs to explain but ways to understand. The difference is in one's source - the very soul who experienced it, and perhaps created it - and also through the true sign of strength - the strength of doubt, which, unlike faith and belief systems, are always open to new information. The reason that these Followers can't explain their experiences is because one obviously can't adequately explain what one doesn't fully understand. And if one believes or lays faith in what one doesn't fully understand, one is deceiving oneself. The reason they take the path of belief and faith is obvious: it offers the comfort of others who follow the same ideology and blabber the same brand of bullshit. It's a simple path, the path of ignorance - and that's why god is such a popular guy.

I was so young and ignorant
I ran the mile with my extreme feelings of ambivalence
and kept right on running until I hit that wall.
It seemed so easy for you.
They way you fell into.
I saw you as so strong and willing in the beginning
but you were weak because you'd been tortured
you believed because he'd beat it into you
and I stood on the outside, looking in
and now I look in, to see back then
and I wonder when all of this will make any sense.
I had a thirst, so I followed you there
I had the dreams, and I couldn't share
does the man on the podium hold all the answers
does the book before him mean anything?
It was never a question to you
but it was the doubt that I delved into
fighting the belief, fighting the faith
I tried to understand and strip it naked
but you took my hand and said don't rape the sacred
you seek to stand by this man, with his bald head and belligerence
because you fear your maker, the man with the belt and nonsense
I followed you here, but I want to go home
He drills me in here, just leave me alone.
I can't do this, I can't let them in and they won't let me out.
and if I let them in then I fall in
I'd run this far with you, until I hit this wall
it woke me up, and you're still asleep
falling deeper into their trance.
It seemed so easy for you.
But I draw the line.
I can't fall in, too.

I came into a world so full of hatred
A world with a lack of love and sense
A sense of humanity a society without a damn face
Crowds full of faces but not individuality
They are bodies without a soul or consciences
They think of themselves without once of true feeling for others
They're senseless, hopeless, and inhumane
Yes this society is not a true society
But they're cold heartless beings
without individuality
All they are is a large faceless crowd
without a true thought.

So there I was, putting cheese on a greasy slab of meat
in a fast-food restaurant where I work to the bone
not twenty minutes from home,
and this bitch
she turns to me
and with deep sincerity
says: "I hate them."
I ask who, and why, and then, chin up,
with no tact (the cunt) she motions to a girl up front
and says the word, and it rips through me
I feel her arrogance and unjustified negativity.
I say: "The world to you has no true color, it's only black and white.
Black isn't equivalent to dirt and shit
and white isn't all about purity, strength, and health bathed in light.
I can't stand the unempathetic glare of hate
I see gleaming in your eye," and then I
turn and say, "discrimination's bullshit.
Some time ago I took the time to realize
it's people like you - thoughtless, mindless fools - that ensure that
the Human Race,
with all it's colors,
inevitably meets it's demise."
So there she was,
looking at me
as I put ketchup on the cheese
in a clearly frustrated state of mind,
and the stupid bitch, she turns to me
and fulfilling my prophecy,
she says: "But you discriminate, man,
against me, my boy, our Klan
there's no difference between me and you,
don't you understand?"
Then, with my eyes fixed up on her, I say:
"There is, in fact, a difference.
I don't judge by skin or cloths
or looks or sexual preference
or height or weight or length of hair
or education or build.
I take the time to respect
and open my mind and analyze, question, to
meld together inside my mind who someone is.
To define takes months and years, not two fucking minutes.
You, your boy, your klan
you prejudge out of disrespect and profound ignorance.
Now get up off your white-supremacy high-horse and
go make me some fucking fries."

Why am I forced to believe in a love that's so cruel?
An with a flip of a coin into a well I make a wise for a love that's true.
But nothings changed my relationships are still all the same.
All brains and no heart as my world starts to fall apart.
I just don't know.
I don't have an answer to your question or else I'd have the answer to my own.
Should we build a wall and keep others out?
You know as well as I they will always find a way to get in.
So I guess all we can do is follow our feelings from deep down in our bubbling guts.

Sore feet on murky earth
and I don't have the will to pick the blisters
something's raining on me.
There's someone standing there, in the shadows,
just a silhouette, no details, not even a face to see.
I feel so cluttered, so layered in grime
I've wandered about and found no way out
just a spiral leading forever deeper down that I'm too weak to follow
and circles that I ride in, until I feel this hollow.
I've stretched my mind
but I can't stretch my feelings.
And I can't lose this.

Tartarus
by Rewired
12/9/00
3:20am

I'm in.
The knowledge is lost
it dissipates into the haze
a loss of insight is what it cost
to wander asleep within the maze
forever looking for our Selves
looking for the eye that seeks
always looking for a reflection
always afraid to take a peek
within.
I try to hold on, but the ignorance washes over me
I fight the nova cane of will, the dreaded conditioning
I've got remember this, I've got to conquer this
don't loose sight of your spirit, focus on this, focus.
No, you repress the knowledge gained, suffer all of life's infections
you repress all your fear of you, and disdain where you project this
you build upon this mask, and forget just who you are
this is the source of you, don't think that's what you are.
Don't let the desires manifest and own you again
don't fall for the illusion, don't fall for that again
remember this and break free, don't dismember and fall into
bring it up from the murky waters and integrate the you.
I leave this world today
and I come back again another way
I fall out of this wasted form
and I come back again to be reborn
I keep what I've gained
and feel the return of what was lost again
I need another way to push the threshold
master the experience, and walk on again
to add to the river of knowledge
that flows beneath all of us
find it in the light without
so it goes on in the dark within.
I thought that this was over
I had known that this was over
but I go back over it again:
I'm in.
The knowledge is lost
it dissipates into the haze
a loss of insight is what it cost
to wander asleep within the maze
forever looking for our Selves
looking for the eye that seeks
always looking for a reflection
always afraid to take a peek
within.

what is going on?
control is no longer mine.
once I thought I knew.
but just like a bomb.
my mind it blew up too.
I have lost it.
hell yeah I've gone insane.
all because of too much thinking.
I've over loaded my brain.
from here where do I go?
just like a simpleton I do not know.
what is going on?
are we no longer in control?
the government ,the police, the TV. companies, and the movie industries.
they think they have the winning hand.
but they can't succeed until we forget we are the common man.
intoxicate us with the pretty lights
make us all good children and remind us not to forget to tell our
parents good night.
mommy daddy are you part of the conspiracy?
if your truly the good guys then why am I haunted by these horrible
dreams?
that show me only half of what may have happened to me.
you pay the doctors lots of money to pretend to listen.
I wonder if I'll ever get better or if I'm really even sick?
don't lock me up that's not good therapy and just who the hell do you
think you are to poke and prod me.
what is going on I'm beginning to think control is no longer mine.
I was forced to go to group so that's why you see less of me.
they teach me to be a good citizen and to stay within the lines.
they do this by letting me watch tons and tons of TV. at a time.
now I'm a goner.
I've fallen victim to their wrath.
but if that were true then this would just be a bunch of my crazy ass
bull.
so now we've come full circle.
so if you'd excuse me I have the urge to watch Steve Urkle.

It's been a long time since I last wrote in here, for I really had nothing to put in here worth remembering. I have
lost the drive to all my tasks and have yet to find a new task as has always happened in the past. But I know my
path still leads on and although bumpy, it is a long road that seems to have no end. Everything has always seemed to
work out for me, as I know it will again. I patiently await what lies next on this path, but all I can see is the
black night. But the dawn is soon rising, and with it a new hope, and a new journey. Where it will take me, let the
warm sun or rather the cold light of the moon (as it always has before) light my way.

He smiled
And she took it to be a compliment
He kissed her
And she thought it was so sweet
He held her
And she thought it was the closest she could get to heaven
He fucked her
And she thought it was love
He proposed to her
And she thought he would protect her
They had children
And she thought he'd be a great father
He beat her
She thought that he loved her
He beat them
She thought that he still loved him.
Her son's friend watched
And still thinks they're all fucking crazy.

wistfully i have lied and stared at the darkening sky
playing out my crazy games in my crazy mind
i have wasted miles and miles of precious air
in and out my burned up lungs without a care
sit and twiddle these broken thumbs
cant help to hum along to the same old song
i just dont seem to be getting anywhere

things wherent susposed to get like they did
we where just friends,really
but it all got blown the wrong way
and now i feel as if ive lost somthing

oh dont you hate how life can take those crazy turns
just when it all seems to be going so smoothly
one minute your flying along so close to happy
the next you wake up and your lyin in a ditch
like me

now whos the fool
your lookin at it
it wasnt cool yeah
and i regret it

cause it all got blown the wrong way
and now i know..
ive lost something

I don't reason how the youngsters of America relate to one another. It seems that one middle-finger is exchanged for another in our story of piety and indolence.

I care not for the finely tuned woman who spends an hour getting herself ready for nachos and beer.

This is no story in particular, just another rebuttal to life's ever-tragic fairy tale. We want that which we cannot have and settle into situations that we do not want. I speak, not soundly, on the state of affairs as no intentional lighthouse, warning the ships of troubled waters. I'm just another bitcher, just another voice, on this earth. I am not special. I gave up on all of this long ago.. Be it drugs or alcohol, I see no reason on carrying on this long mission. To where, I do not know. If this be the mission of the longing gaze, and sullen malaise, then so be it. But, I shall repent upon our indolence and fight the merry fight. And be this a reminder to oneself, that there is no world outside that which you have made. Tis horror-show, and frightening faces, the idiocy of youth and the candor of the living dead. I do not understand these humans, and, perhaps, I never shall. They sicken themselves on beer and fatty acids. Maalox and love-struck neurosis. I do not understand present human. Strange paradox: "Come work w/ me, you irresponsible fool." I take not lightly to such words, these fools, these supposed friends of mine. Bastards in drunk's clothing. I shall have no need for your wine, beer or general tendency. I shall take no need of your longing gaze or your loving auto de fate. You strike my fancy, this life, not knowing when and where you shall blindside my love and life. Cuz' I love you life, you intrigue me, you send me flowers on the days when I feel bluest, and send me daggers on day in which I feel the comfort of your warm gaze. But you deceive me, oh Life, you make me feel cushy in my present state. You make me feel that everything is going to be alright tomorrow, when I know that everything must come to an end. You foul harlot, this life, you took my innocence and drank it away. You roll of the dice took my independence away. Be it as it may that single hood today is not what is dreamt, but I wish upon you a slow fatal death in which I see the executioner flick the gallow-switch, in which I see you writhing and grasping for breath. I care not. I want not. I need not. I want a fast death, to remove me of the excesses, the want, the 'need' of humanity. I do not want my neighbor's needs, but I hear about it. I hear the need, the want. Oh, whoa, is the world. Am I this pessimistic?

The sun has set on another day
The life I lead has gone astray
I stand up from the ground
With my hands back at my sides
I smile up towards the sky
The beauty I've seen
And the hatred I've felt
Is pressed back into itself
I am alone again
And to the falls I walk
kneeling beside the water
I look at my paled reflection
Smiling back at myself as the ripples fade away into the night
The moon shines with a fake daylight
One star shines brighter than the rest
And I feel it shines with me.

If you want to play dumb ass games, then do it with someone who doesn't care. Because, you were rude enough to not take the two freakin minutes to sit with me while I ate my dinner. And to throw in my face how you wanted to be here by four, then why did you get on top of me and fuck me? I guess it's alright for you to do what ever you please, but when I ask for a few minutes you're too damn important. Well I hope this stupid argument takes up your precious time and I hope you fail. Because until you take the minute to realize how fucking important I am to you and show me then I'll take back a lot I said. Of course you don't need to do a damn thing, but if not I see what kind of person you really are and I am not going to deal with an uncompassionate prick who only values herself and her time to care about you, show them you care too. Otherwise, please don't waste our time. All I asked was for a lousy stupid minute while I ate - but that was too much for you.

Now all I want is an apology and some respect. I will help you if you need it. Good luck.

Just sign here on the dotted line
Yes, I think you'll do just fine
Some more fuel for the military machine
Every recruiter wants you, when you're eighteen
Promise anything if you'll sign
If you listen, it's the same old line
Get money for college, or a brand new car
Get away from home, travel near and far
Society tells you you'll be a man
It's the first step to a twelve step plan
A twelve step plan to make you insane
It ends in heart wrenching pain
To them it's just a game
In the machine you're all the same
You're just another mindless clone
Memories of your past life are unknown

Standing in the breeze,
I'm watching her move.
Walking through the trees,
and down to the cove.

I'm watching her, silent;
through the darkness I glare.
She moves as if hell-bent;
sensing my loathing stare.

She looks, walks quickly,
destiny unknown;
knows not the sickly
mind she has just blown.

Smiling, still sick of her,
I walk through the shadows.
This time I will be sure
of which path she follows.

She cannot fathom
this hatred I feel.
Her knowledge will come,
she will know it's real.

Following in silence,
I wait to make my move.
I "hate" her ignorance,
she has nothing to prove.

Syringe is loaded,
ether rag is wet.
My body coated
in an anxious sweat.

Opportunity knocks!
She has stopped in her place!
Out from among the rocks,
I feel my heartbeat race.

Needle sinks with ease.
She tries to fight back...
Now, she's on her knees,
Her mind has gone black...

...The excitement I felt,
the release of tension...
Watching plastic nails melt;
fire's my only confirmation...

...Body and bones gone,
screams left in my head.
Watch the break of dawn,
knowing she is dead.

I tell you, this is true.
My friend, I do not lie.
Now I can start anew.
No evidence to try!!

Gladly, the credit
is shared with my friend.
But, I won't let it
happen yet again.

We've had fun, now it's time.
My friend, let me tell you,
it's a hell of a ride!
Have fun! Enjoy it too!

After all, "Life sucks!"
just like she had said.
Rid the earth of those fucks
who'd be better off dead.

After drying my face, I stuck the cassette tape deep in my pocket. There was no way in hell that my parents were getting a hold of this. I managed to calm myself down a bit before going out to see my parents. I didn't say much of anything to them, and they didn't seem all that concerned anyway. I paid my fifty some bucks to the lady and left the place, feeling not at all that well. I realized on the way outside to the van that I didn't remember all too much of what had gone on during the session, or even what I had said. It hadn't aided in recalling lost events from my childhood, either, so far as I could tell - just a few odd images that were neither lucid nor definitive. No matter, I had the cassette tape in my pockets and I could find that all out later, when I played it at home. I wouldn't play it all the way through to the end, though, until about five years later, when I was writing this story.

My parents on the way to the car questioned me a little, and I told them I'd seen next to nothing. Quite frankly, as far as I was concerned I hadn't seen anything, not to say I'd tell them if I had - they were still under the belief that I had gone there to learn about past lives, and I still thought that to be a much more pleasing tale to their ears than the true one. Although I hadn't intended that to be the case, in a way it ended up revealing a bit more about my `past lives' than I had known. It also may have revealed a bit more about the things I'd gone there to learn about, and my history with Them. I had, though, not seen all that much - just fed my past questions further elaboration, as was usual. I'd been so preoccupied with listening to my parents chat in the next room that I couldn't focus on the session itself, or her hypnotic suggestions.

On the drive home, as I usually did in the evening, I checked the skies. I found them all clear. There were also a good number of cars on the freeway and that was a good thing in my book. The last thing I wanted was a lonely stretch of highway where I could be picked up - the irony such an evening would have would be unbearable. I felt like this attempt at recalling buried memories was dangerous on my part, and that, if I was under some sort of surveillance by the creatures, I might be in trouble.

In those days I was terrified, because no significant event had ever occurred that would cause me to believe that I wasn't losing my mind. Nothing contradicted the belief that I was going totally insane - to the contrary, every time I had a memory, vivid flashback, or suddenly felt that I was reaching a greater understanding than anyone around me, it merely reinforced my initial beliefs. I had believed that I believed that I was enlightened because I was insane; that's the best way to put it. I often wondered just what I'd consider evidence of my sanity in this forever-expanding matter. I thought that perhaps part of the reason I thought I was nuts was because I had nothing to hold on to - there was no artifact, as Carl Sagan had put it, that I could bring home with me. I didn't have a shirt splattered with alien blood, I didn't have an instrument from their craft. All I had were memories, and memories were fallible - but they were all I had, and I had to go with that until I could find something better.

Even along the lines of memories, though, I didn't have much. They were severely fragmented. They brought me to a point, but chopped off before I saw too much of that which would blow me away - it was as if my brain had a safety mechanism. I never recalled an implant that a little gray guy sticking in my eye, I only remembered my eye being puffed up and pussing for no good reason my freshmen year of high school, and the doctor saying that it could only be caused by a cut `behind my eye'. I didn't have any other eyewitnesses to the events, at least no one that had consciously recalled anything and with whom I was still in contact. I didn't even have any pictures of UFOs, as others have had. I had nothing but my fragmented memories and myself, and I was uncertain as to the nature of both.

Through all the doubts in my sanity and the authenticity of my recollections, however, I always held a strong belief in the fact that, whatever the nature of it was, something fucked up had happened to me, and that couldn't be refuted. It was something that modern science, modern psychology, modern neurology, could not explain within the rigid confines of their current philosophical frameworks; they would have to greatly alter or expand their mindsets to provide what I felt, what I knew, had to be a logical explanation for all that had happened to me over the last three to four months. I did believe that it was something they could explain. The question I was left with was what exactly that `something' was - and every experience left me not with answers, as I have said, but rather more elaborate questions.

I closed my eyes and concentrated while my parents continued to drive me home. I let my mind wander. In my head, I caught a foggy picture of an almost cartoon like creature. The creature was wrapped up like a mummy, had round green glasses and a derby hat and stood in a long, trench coat. Drawing it on my sketchpad quickly, I then threw both the pen and the paper down on the seat beside me and rubbed my eyes. I was tired and thought that perhaps I should actually try sleeping tonight - but I knew I'd just stay up, drink coffee and draw.

The hypnotist's words echoed in my head: "At one time, were you one of them?" What the fuck had that been all about?

Give it a rest, Tim, I thought to myself, after all this insanity and fifty bucks, you've seen nothing and have learned nothing new about yourself except that every person in the therapist field is even more loopy than you are.

I looked out the window again, my eyes dodging the lights from the cars in the other lane. The sky had grown ever more dark. I tried to take a deep breath and relax. Then I turned and looked in the rearview mirror of my parent's black minivan.

That's about when my reality broke, yet again. I looked away quickly for a moment, feeling my heart jump in my throat and start throbbing like a motherfucker. I had not, and could not, have seen what I knew I had just most certainly seen.

Then I stopped again. What I saw in the rearview mirror was unprecedented. Instead of seeing the reflection of my father's face in the car's rearview mirror, I saw something else - something that should most certainly not be there. The image I saw in the rearview mirror had the overall shape and appearance of what was the traditional Gray alien, with the egg-shaped head and large, slanted, wrap-around eyes. Yet this alien was blue, and it's eyes were purple, and it was a shimmering neon type of color that I had never seen before, or never recalled seeing before.
More importantly, this was no drawing or movie or computer-created image - this was in the rearview mirror, in the exact place were the top half of my father's face should be visible. I couldn't see my father's real face, just the reflection. I didn't even look in the direction of my mother in the front seat. The inside of the car was dark and the seats covered that particular angle.

I looked away. Perhaps if I looked around long enough, it would disappear and I could push it away and out of my mind and deal with it later. It could be that I'd merely thought I'd saw it. Maybe it was a trick of light and shadow. If NASA can use the excuse to account for the face on Mars, dammit, I could use the excuse in this instance as well. Perhaps it was a hallucination.

I looked back again, and to my absolute horror it was still there. My father went on talking with my mother, listening to the music. The picture remained there, in the mirror, instead of my father's face, and my father never looked at me. I still couldn't see my mother's face, either, but perhaps if I had it would've been the same. Later, I would reflect on this moment: why was it always like this? Was there some cosmic law that made things happen just at the wrong times, and made you forget things that would be crucial in order to validate the occurrence? For instance, a camera would've been great at that time, in the minivan - or while at the session, with the woman there. If I'd tapped on my father's shoulder, would I have seen the true face of an alien turn back and glance at me? Would my mother look the same as my father? Did my mother look at my father while they were talking? If she would have, would she have seen the face of an alien creature, or was this all an illusion in my own mind?

Things like this would've never crossed my mind while in the moment. If they had, it's not as if the courage to act on them wouldn't have came, as has been the problem for others as well. That's what makes these type of stories so hard for people who haven't experienced this type of thing to believe: they don't understand the odd state of mind you're in while you have them.

For the remainder of the ride home, I remained silent, looking out the window, time and time again promising myself that I wouldn't turn and look. I always would, eventually, and when I would chance that look back at the rearview mirror, I would see the image still present, moving as my father would move. I did what I referred to as `reality checks.' I didn't seem to be in any bizarre state, nothing seemed to be wavy across my visual field, and I didn't feel any different physically, or seem to perceive anything else any differently as I usually did - until I glanced back at that damned rearview mirror. The face remained there the whole way home. Then I got out of the car without looking at either of my parents and quickly made my way to my room - and I made certain that I locked the goddamned door.

Why do I believe this?
Is there a truth and how
do you distinguish it from illusion?
Is it a collective hallucination
reinforced by our
unquestionable faith in `real';
our subjective delusions?
Is there a purpose to the
madness we live,
and the mad motive
behind the plane of
madness we surf
our lives upon?
Day after day, I wonder
how the truth
would not drive me insane,
I wondered, I queried:
now, where are the answers?
What can be proved?
Nothing, indisputably
Nothing but by ability
to ask, to question,
and to feed the madness
I can't understand.
I think, therefore I am
I doubt the rest, therefore
it might be.
You made sense there,
Descartes,
but how do I get
to the core of me?
And how do I get
beyond me?
Or is there a
beyond?

This e-zine is copywritten (c) 2001 by Rewired and the Gopher Society. All contents are credited and owned by their respective authors, and any misprints, spelling errors, misuse of correct grammar, incessant cursing, or subliminal suggestion in this zine is to be blamed wholly and unconditionally on pathetic school systems, job-related stress, malfunctioning alien implants, traumatic childhood memories, bad gas, material bondage, curses, hexes, invisible monkeys with nuclear bananas, evil (in)convenience store owners plotting to dominate the globe, the food service industry, lack of sex, black magik, mad cow disease, and the absence of a global catastrophe of extreme measures as was predicted by Nostrodamous, the goddamned bible, and countless other whackos who let me down.

Mr. G's commentary (see man, I even set it up for you): um, yeah. I'm set up and everything... heh... What Rewired forgot to tell you is that we're published sporadically, but we've been tending towards monthly/bimontly publication, as time permits. It depends on which phase of the moon that affects the monkey in Rewired's head. (you know, the one that plays with the tint knob for his nose... There's a direct correlation between the green hue of Rewired's nose and publication of an issue of Gopher...)

The Gopher can be found on Mister G's site: http://www.trianglepants.com/gopher

Submissions, so long as they are reasonably coherent, are gleefully accepted (as should be evident by RuAtha's response to To Hell With the Scales and, in a way, Death at the Door as well, this issue). Submissions of all kinds in all forms regarding mostly anything can be sent directly to the editor-in-chief at: rewired@trianglepants.com

Live long, doubt strong, think for yourself and fuck everyone else.