Episode 6: "Wool of a Black Sheep"

The Cornucopia: Notes & Errata

Episode 6: “Wool of a Black Sheep”

SCRIPTUM

Intro:

            Welcome to The Cornucopia. I am Billy Kirby. Your legs get restless from sitting for too long. You know this sensation well. If you were to joggle the foot resting cross-legged on your left kneecap, it would serve as a fidget-function: an idle relief from deep internal pressure, from the anxiety associated with the restlessness of sitting or having sat for too long. If I were to touch your hand, as one presumably conscious organism to another, to make eye-contact and speak positive communications and such, whatnot, it would serve as a means for connection: a conscious relief from deep internal pressure, from the sensation that we are both, if even presumably conscious, possibly lost for all necessary time in the skull prisons within which our minds’ brains serve a life sentence. If you were to acknowledge this, then… well… what then? Hello. And welcome.

Episodic Germ:

            They’ve just called my name; would you hold my dog for me? It’s a small dog, a pup really. As you can see it’s an innocuous pug. This is how I feel comfortable asking you to hold my dog. Go on. Give it a pet. She likes you, I can tell. They’ve called my name so I have to go. Thank you so much for holding my dog: although you haven’t had time to accept or deny my request, I’ll just place her here on your lap. Thanks again. I’ll be back.

Meat Hammer:

            I am sitting in a coffee shop. I read somewhere that being in a different environment changes your natural urge toward preformed habits. Maybe this is true. Maybe this is why I come here so much, to write. This is my favorite coffee shop. It is called Caveat. Its logo is an asterisk, and the logo is featured in black on the carboard sleeves of all their to-go cups: a large dark asterisk whose bottommost prong, extension, w/h/y, is drawn to resemble a droplet. A drip. A drooping liquid blip, probably of coffee. I think it’s especially clever, marketing-wise. I enjoy the logo and the shop and the atmosphere the shop creates. It is raining out. It is raining and there are people in here around me on their laptops, likewise, seemingly working on things. If I were an extreme paranoiac, the kind reserved for my own imaginary formation, I’d maybe be paranoid that the people around me—the ones being seemingly productive, doing things, the things, working on stuff I’m not nauseous enough to pry into the validity of (to sit down beside them individually and ask with an inquisitive glare what they’re working on, w/h/y)—I’d maybe think that one or a few or all of them were actually watching me, or, if I were at the extremus of this line-of-thinking, that they were working on dictating my actions to a correspondent Somewhere Else. I obviously don’t think any of this, but it’s interesting enough to imagine what it would be like to be a paranoiac who entertains this line of thinking. I imagine this sort of paranoia goes hand-in-hand with the kind of Hollywoodesque deficient mental-health stereotypes we as a culture have cultivated. Just wondering gives me chills. The coffee-grinder grinds grounds. It is significantly audible. I say “significantly audible” because “loud” is not specific enough for my communicative intent. I’m not sure any of this is really getting across, but oh well, I might as well just spill it out. The truth is that this podcast you’re here listening to and/or reading (depending on the source from which you’re consuming this media), is a means by which I can absolve myself of the loneliness and anxiety I undergo on a daily basis. Maybe that means an awful lot of negative things about me, but maybe I don’t care. I just want to communicate with you. I’ll relay communication signals with you right over the table, look you in the eyes, substantiate the sort of responses that would signify Sincere Attention, etc. Alas, the structure of my podcast is, as of yet, monological. It’s therefore difficult to engage in the traditional types of communication you’d see, for example, between two people sitting together, drinking coffee. Nevertheless, I’d like to entertain the idea that it’s a substantive enough effort I’m taking here—to communicate with someone, a stranger, outside of my immediate time and space—to justify the act of putting down into words on word-processor and recording and developing and ultimately producing this audio file, this communication file.

Meat Shredder:

            The red thread of fate I walk along, as seen from the gods of Mt. Olympus, would seem meandering, indirect, ultimately directionless, perhaps. I have dreams in which I ride passengerside in a red sportscar while my brother zooms through the intricate parking system of a mega-apartmentage, which is also a vast library, which is also a series of interconnected strip malls. I feel intense Anxiety interdream as he veers about, accelerates through pedestrian crosswalks and dodges other vehicles. I recall that we’re looking for our parents. I recall that my brother’s library card was forged in the name of a Demon. I do not recall the name. “Mishna”? “Mylna”? I recall that he registered his library card’s acct. under the name of this demon, and that it was a jocular sort of trick he had played. I recall very little in all, as is often the case. There is a secret to this dream the subconscious data-processing part of my mind will not communicate to the conscious part of my mind I freely associate with my Identity, with my Self. I wonder about the energy required on behalf of my mind to conjure store-names of the mega-condo/-library/-mall’s strip we zoom-zoom-zoom past in this complicated multileveled parking lot, the letter-number-conjunct coordinates of which are interspliced with the streets of an obscure city, nearly impossible to traverse. But this episode is not about dreams, I don’t think. This episode is about the significance of our eminent attachment of meaning to arbitrary external stimuli which are themselves already conjoined with meaning-attachments. I wonder about what this episode will be. Part of the podcast’s previous episode was about applying a Subject to the structure of each episode, a changed form, and so on, but now I feel as if it in some ways interferes with the purposes of YrsTrly whenever it is he (I) begins working on these episodes: I am trying to converse as organically as possible, to communicate ideas which occur continuously and then shift modalities as they evolve through bastardized mentally-affected iterations. It’s as if the eye of the brain’s mind changes the very thought merely by observing it. There’s some scientific experiment I can’t fully recall which relates to this observation-changing-observer-changing-observation-type concept. I can’t adequately elucidate the thought at hand, but there it is: an acknowledgement. Probably more than I ought to, I think about the validity of the thoughts I’m having as I’m having them, a process which includes my thoughts’ flows’ vying for consistency, calm, over the analogical rocks of self-analysis, blocking the as-it-were stream. There’s a quote I’d like to here employ:

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”

-          Alan Watts

I think Watts was really onto something in this quote, and furthermore I’d like to explore his bibliography. I honestly don’t know much of his stuff apart from the motivational collages people have included him in on YouTube. Self-definition seems to be the plague of the many side-effects of consciousness. I look in the mirror and see a version of myself which is external to my own perception, viewpoint, P.O.V., w/h/y. I look and see the reflection and wonder about how to ameliorate my brain’s ghost’s understanding of the man’s visage as it relates to the world. It feels like an utterly futile thing to do, especially taking into account the fact or idea that I’m, as an internal viewer looking out at the external shell of my self’s viewpoint, unable to assess the quality or nature or Objective State of that shell without factoring in the biases of that very viewpoint, paradoxically, like some ouroboros: snake eating tail.

I enjoy listening to music while writing at the coffee shop. I don’t do it when silence is an option, but (alas!) silence is not an option. My Logitech G Pro Headphones do well to combat the amazing music tastes of the shop’s playlist-commencing staff. I do this because my music—as in, the music I’m playing through these noise-cancelling headphones—is instrumental, and thus more conducive to a suitable audio-atmosphere for my writing, which writing’s process is arduous the same way looking in the mirror, trying to define myself, is arduous. So today I put on some God Speed You! Black Emperor. I bought a used CD of theirs: Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven. I love their music with the casual love of those who firmly appreciate the art it is they consume. I sure as hell need to explore their discography. It’s bound to be rich in orchestral post-rock vibes. It’s perfect for my purposes here, with my headphones, at Caveat.

Meat Processor:

You are hoping I give some digestible conclusion here, probably, is the thing. The thing about the thing is that I don’t think I can. I just wanted to say hello. I just wanted to say that you are always welcome here, dear listener. I just wanted to say that, though communication on our parts is difficult enough as it is, we might as well attempt to trek into that fray for the sake of a semblance of something like connection. Whether or not it is immediate, this semblance, it is in my opinion worth the effort and anxiety and Fear required to say Hello, to converse about dreams and thoughts and music, to introduce yourself to the situation you have gotten your Self’s selves into: that the conscious mind is only a part of the as-it-were problem: that there are multiple little versions of your Self which vie all the time with the Fear to be heard, or to be substantial in that their existence has at least a recognizable (if minimal) effect on the You you consider to be the only one. So I’m here to introduce myself to you, to this situation of the act of attempted communication I’ve gotten myself and my Self’s selves into. I’m here to possibly form a semblance of connection with you, the dear listener/reader, to whom I owe a great deal of gratitude. Let it be said that I am thankful. Let it be said that I am in here, in this communication file, hoping you have an excellent day—hoping you’re maybe willing to as-it-were pass it on, this attempt. It seems to me like the world becomes a bit more colorized the more and more we emit positive communications, however effectively, to one another. Maybe I’m totally off here. Maybe only partially. Maybe you’ll have a terrific day, one which reaffirms your faith in the possibility of good days. To quote David Foster Wallace—albeit way out of context—“it may not be likely, but it’s also not impossible.” So with that I’d like to sincerely thank you once more. Thanks for stopping by. Thanks for attending. Thanks for occupying the space you reside in. It has been my pleasure to talk with you.

Episode 5: "Wings That Cannot Lift You"

The Cornucopia: Notes & Errata

Ep. 5: “Wings That Cannot Lift You”

SCRIPTUM

Intro:

            Welcome to The Cornucopia. I am Billy Kirby. I have this QWERTY keyboard I saved up for. I typed on it for the introduction of my last episode. Its keycaps glow white through black plastic, shine through and down onto metallic base of keyboard itself. There’s this dark aspect to the light that shines through the keyboard’s keys. If I remove a keycap, lean in over the board, and stare into the light, a tunnel forms. It is a black tunnel at the center of which a deep white light emanates as if from a great downward distance. It is bone-chilling. It is soft in some ways. If I remove a keycap and lean in and over and stare into the light, it blinds me somewhere elsewhere in my head’s brain such that dustlike floaters form in my eyes which take time to disappear, to give way to the opacity of the time it takes. The springs of the individual keys rubber-band each key’s position on the board after each depress, after each actional input, each key rising from the typing fingers now so adept at their business it is no longer necessary to look at the fingers on the board, that it became this way possibly a long long time ago, as of typing lessons in elementary school which took place on box monitors and black or silvery keyboards with membrane switches: a mushy typing-texture. Nothing like the dinosaur which teaches you how to place your digits along the Main Row, left and right indexes on F and J respectively. Nothing like the tunnel of light which emanates now from my modest gear. No RGB lighting; just a void-white tunnel your mind has trouble measuring the distance of. Hello. And welcome.

Episodic Germ: Tiny Note:

            Suddenly a verb comes to my head: “metaforming”: the noun-form a “metaformation.” What does it mean? Unpacking: n.: Something forming which is aware either of the way it’s forming or of the “nature” of its formation.

Meat Hammer:

            So then what’s this episode about, really? What’s the Point of Interest? There are infinite addictions out there, I’m sure, given the state of the human mind and its capacity for language. Let’s specify the variable’s context a little. In the culture of the US of A, one of the least sexy addictions I can think of is Videogame Addiction. Often in the US, and especially in reference to the “US Perception” as is disseminated by various endemic Media, videogaming is viewed as a non-salutary kind of hobby, and rarely vocational. Not to mention the WHO (World Health Organization) recently accepted gaming as a classification for a bona fide capital-A Addiction, right up there with gambling, substance-abuse, and the like. Some addictions are obviously more socially acceptable than others. That being said, what makes video games so stigmatized by modern US culture apart from the way our media outlets view them? Maybe that’s not a significantly interesting question. Maybe a more interesting question would be, What makes such an un-sexy addiction so… enticing… to so many people? I should preface this Q with the sentiment I share toward the concept of addictions as per limned to in the previous paragraph. There are infinite addictions. Anything you could do, in my vantage point, per this perception-mode, yes? Thus I’m not looking at it from the perspective of a health professional, it should be noted. I’m looking at it from the perspective of a person trying to make manifest the necessity of thought, of a person who engages in excessive thought about an excessive number of arbitrary things. So then what’s this sensation, again, that keeps our subject-types enthralled with their addiction? What, to make this analogous with cigarette-smoking, for instance, is the nicotine-element here? Well, maybe it’s something to do with a dichotomy of self. There’s this game I enjoy called League of Legends. It takes place in the form of a 5v5 multiplayer matchup with a roster of over a hundred characters or “champions” with whom you use the abilities and skillsets of to advance beyond and out-strategize your opponents. It’s the line-walking here involved in the game’s mechanics as they relate to the self involved in the game which most triggers the contemplation at hand….

            There are points of goosebumps (-pebbles, -flesh, etc.) which appear broadly on expanses of your skin as Ultimate Contemplation kicks in, sets off, inflates the eye sockets. And then of course there’s the Q. of the What of the nature of the contemplation point at hand, here. The Q. being something along the lines of, How can anyone be in two places at once? The tentatively proposed answer is: art. In the case of computer-gaming, as is ours—our case, here—the screen: the monitor’s screen: the window opened up unto an isometric portal or vision: the world behind the screen: the limited P.O.V. so much like our own in natural circumstance. We become voyeurs of a space occupied by our own understanding of its compliance with our limited capacity for interactions with it. The concept of the interaction like a pair of wings that cannot lift you or take you anywhere or, as far as this analogy goes, even flap: an impossible use: utility: a purely aesthetic function. This so and such that, when you press and de-press R on your keyboard to initiate the champion Kindred’s ultimate ability in order to survive mid-fight, you know and feel it is not only your action or only her action onscreen, but a melding of the two: thus the “inter-” prefix: it’s become an interaction: between the onscreen champion’s mechanics and your own, your own biology’s nervous system’s hairpin-triggerish coordination and the sub-interactions of the game’s coding working in unison, together, much the same way you can be in two places at once: as with your eyes’ immersion in the screen and the space you occupy around about the screen.

Meat Shredder:

            Then we kind of somehow get to the as-it-were crux of the parsed thought at hand, of the understanding of the necessitation for something as substantial as an addiction like Videogame Addiction: the interaction or ability to interact with the media you’re consuming as you’re consuming it. In some ways it’s as if there are simultaneously two Yous: there is the you outside the screen, looking in, and the you inside the screen, reincarnated as the champion you control. It almost makes you wonder about (like) the unnatural quality of the level to which entertainment and/or art has advanced. I open the Riot Games client and the League of Legends logo blips onto the screen of my Hewlett Packard monitor, whose green light-strip ebbs and glows below HP logo. I drink Sprite-Zero from a plastic bottle (advertising my dentist’s officious practice) whose pull-top lets out a burst of carbonated air. I chug; I chug and log into my League account. I queue for a match. I put slowed-down hip-hop on via Firefox’s YouTube opened on my second monitor. Part of the addiction’s appeal seems to be this dichotomy of Self—of the self—of experience(s). There are Forces Unknown which threaten to shift the course of the whole parsed thought here and now into absurdist tension, that the idea (w/h/y) of the thought itself is one that does not have a stake in daily life. May I proffer a Rich Camel Crush? May I invite you to sit and stay and talk awhile? We do not have the sort of time for this here, in the podcast, but that doesn’t foreshorten the idea of the proposition I’m making. While the Whole Parsed Thought may seem, by some standards, antiquated or misnomerish, it’s still itself a thought which deserves at least enough attention as would be required to ensure its notional value.

Meat Processor:

            So then where do we go, dear listener, with our new thoughts? Where do the new thoughts themselves go, in the end, when we’re done with them? Is it all some paranoid recycling process? Do the words sustain or somehow (like) reinforce the arrival of other words? Are we at all like the thoughts we have? I want to leave you with an image I have in my head. Of course, when I tell it to you, it will not for you be my image, but your own. That is not a problem. That is the way it always goes. Consider blackness, or the oncoming idea of blackness, of the dark, of the fear you might’ve had as a child of what for you constituted the dark. This the whole premise for the domestic night light—this Fear of the dark. As a child, lying in bed beside my older brother, I’d roll onto my side, open my eyes, and face the window. Through the glass pane, far off and constant, the local church’s lights would serve as my reassurance of vision in the night. It’d be that, with minimal effort, the room about would seem to dematerialize, focally, such that all I could see were the large metal beams of the church’s parking lot’s light fixtures. See the lights. Watch as they shine reassuringly. Not an overpowering sense you get, but warm on some internal level it is clear can keep your Fear at bay until, at last, your eyes daze shut and dreams kick in, forever.

[AUDIO CREDITS]

Episode 4: "Dying Tulip: Dreams"

The Cornucopia: Notes & Errata

Ep. 4: “Dying Tulip: Dreams”

 SCRIPTUM

Intro:

            Welcome to The Cornucopia. I am Billy Kirby. I am a persona as voice. I am paranoia and self-aware construction. I am paranoid by my own anxiety, by the endless self-analyses which go on and on in some less-artful Joycean stream on like a seemingly endless scroll, like the original manuscript for Kerouac’s On the Road. I am an amateur stoic, “wannabe”-stoic, a chunk of driftwood you as the listener cling onto in order to get to a shore which serves as the analog for something like coherence. I am grossly an exaggeration of myself. The me that peers into the distorted fractals of closed eyelids is the me here presenting myself as an imitation of myself, thinking (as always) probably too much about the sentence at hand. Hello. And welcome.

Episodic Germ: Inspiration from a Stoical Visualization: A THOUGHT-TRAIN:

            That all this worry, subconscious fear of some vague thought, of simple spectrums, the heart’s rising BPM, is but less than a miniscule fraction of a pixel of the screen reflected in the mind’s eye.

            That Doubt could be a positive aspect of your Being when considering the narrow traversals of blind Dogmatism, all this bleak sureness, etc…. That emotional pain to the synaptic firewall of the brain of a learned, practiced stoic is like a venom which depletes itself, in time, in accordance with and relation to the awareness of the stoic: long fingers, taut young skin picking a dying tulip from its withering roots.

            That the war of the “call-to-arms for a sojourn into the breach of a battle for the posterity of the English language” (its own little gratuitous verbal stack) will be fought most earnestly by the anti-Dogmatists, who’ve adapted themselves to the world—as opposed to vice-versa. That these anti-Dogmatists are the most valiant because they are the least sure of what they’re fighting for, and they’re sure they’re not sure.

            That there are infinite possibilities Out There, and that such a banal truism or cliché (w/h/y) is only reinforced by our understanding of time insofar as it is a concept whose abstractness lends itself to the sort of attention required to maintain a stoic mindset. That, to be truly attending with the mind and metaphorical heart or soul or w/h/y—that these sorts of focus and forms of presentness enhance our capacity to make manifest the relative beauty of human consciousness. That, by choosing to be awake, by intentionally paying (and learning to pay) attention to our immediate surroundings, we become that much closer to our own personhood and the personhood of mankind.

Meat Hammer:

            I’ll sometimes ask myself about the nature of reality, of what we perceive as solid, as finite, as the door which holds space behind it. Never so bluntly, but it does come up subconsciously through objective vehicles: the photograph I so cherish of a woman in a white gown on whose outstretched arm a bald eagle perches; the words and play of words of Ginsberg’s landmark poem HOWL; The haunting scenes of Lynch’s film Blue Velvet; and, most frequently, dreams: these exploratory movies with multiple vantage points only I can see. They’re almost like these tiny purgatories outside of time—for (during the experience, as memory states) they feel long, involved, and intricately carried out, whereas (post-waking) they are or become vague semblances of memories highlighted by salient images or moving-images like Gifs of the scene of the experience on like a mental rolodex of the collected thumbnails your capacity for recalling the dreams allows you to hold onto. Sometimes the memories of the dream are so vivid and realistic—as vivid as the dream (during the dream) itself—that it can take me a moment to distinguish the dream’s relationship to this perceived reality.

Meat Shredder:

So what do I think of the concept of the dream, of dreaming? I seem to think very much and very little at the same time. Whereas the intricacies of what feels to me like a complex convolution of details of data manifested as the subconscious mind elude me, the lazy slow-learner, slow-reader, etc., I get these sensations in my gut which tell me what I might think, which my mind then probably registers and molds into a uniquely gut-affected thought-pattern which probably then integrates itself into my own hierarchical-system of thought, some loose chemical action of the initial gut-type reaction still there in the order and structure of things similar to how I possess my mother’s hair or my father’s creased smile. So I don’t personally, according to the current iteration of the evolution of my mental state’s inherent system, believe there is any necessary correlation between dreams and a “greater meaning” or any type of “spiritual significance.” While supernatural phenomena are no stranger to my family, I do not believe that a nightmare of some forthcoming apocalypse is a justifiable cause for concern. I, nearly wholly unread in the deep fields of cognitive neuroscience, do somehow believe that dreams are almost like a kind of mental exercise, the way our stomachs digest food after we have eaten the food, or perhaps the way astronauts work-out their legs when in outer-space, away from the gravity-analog of Earth. I believe it’s part of what’s so special about our capacity for consciousness and sub-: the presence of a subreality we can sense and interact with, our ability to play out imaginary scenarios with the utility of a brain-capacity which can stretch our very perceptions of time. Maybe this is part of the melancholy I feel upon waking: the understanding of the existence of a relative world as it stands w/r/t our objective selves. One of my most prominent coping mechanisms is sleep; as is probably apparent, it generates a kind of emotional feedback-loop for me—sleep for sandess of waking from sleep for sadness of waking from… etc.—one even my waking mind has some trouble escaping.

Meat Processor:

            Your original question. The “Q,” as-it-were. What was it? I have you here with me, in your respective setting, listening to my voice. You are to Audio as fly is to hypnotic Dionaea muscipila (Venus Fly Trap). Though this prospect of an idea—hypnotism—somewhat justifies enough substance to warrant an entire episode in its own right, I think perhaps I’ll settle with a set of broad statements: you are being hypnotized. I am being hypnotized. We are all being hypnotized all the time. The obvious question, “by whom?,” is more futile than a question like “for what purpose?,” which I find far more interesting. If I am myself subconsciously or intentionally hypnotizing you by what effects other media have had on me, through hypnosis, then let me ask you a question: who is the hypnotist? Is it one person? Is it multiple? Are you the hypnotist? I think the harder you begin to think about it, the more paradoxical the problem becomes: you may find a few Strange Loops in there, in that thought. The aspect by which we are inclined to smile in any given circumstance is the same as the one which makes us cry during sad movies. Having high suggestibility, being so prone to compassion for fictional persons, may have a lot more to do with this post-dream contempt for reality than a lot of us realize. Perhaps that’s the connection I’m trying to reconcile: connection: dreams to hypnosis. Vuala. Andy Shauf once said, in the lyrics of one of his songs, “Old news, the magician bends the rules.” And how appropriate is that? I hope you can deal with the awareness of all the dark shit better than I. Enhancement of our appreciation for light: all that good stuff.

[SONG CREDITS]

Episode 3: "Wonderfluid"

The Cornucopia: Notes & Errata

Ep. 3: “Wonderfluid”

SCRIPTUM

Intro:

            Welcome to The Cornucopia. I am Billy Kirby. Play a song. Let it be MGMT’s “Alien Days.” Let the Sundog Books coffee mug be christened with, first, two cubes of ice from the plastic tray. Then creamer (a splash). Then the refrigerated cold-brew caramel Gevalia. It is not the coveted Chameleon, but it works. Stir in the creamer with your index finger. The music starts with what sounds like a backwards violin that is itself synthesized. Watch as the white blends with the black into brown, hidden tinctures brought merrily to the fore of the surface’s undulant color-brightness as you tune in to the first sip which brings you, the mind, the “terrible master,” to alertness. Hello. And welcome.

Episodic Germ:

            FOOSH (“foosh”): idiomatic Colorado term: “Falling On Outstretched Hands—as informed by the older lady with fractured wrists.

Meat Hammer:

            I haven’t really done any significant preliminary reading, so fair warning: this episode will also be shit. There is this sense I get that whenever I read some good fiction or non-, really get a taste for the prose, that it positively affects my own writing rhythm, gets me “in the mood” so-to-speak. I have this sort of subconscious aversion to the “Fear,” to the deeply inward sense of falling discussed in Episode 2. The truth is that I have many fears. Not many all capital-F or w/h/y, but—all the same—fears nonetheless. This is the episode in which the protagonist is unveiled as the antagonist. This is the episode in which your bright eyes dim in sequence to the circadian rhythm of the body-clock’s waking widget, the episode of burned longing, of some garish overpoignant slip-speech of the speaker, of some maleficent spirit at the wake of the dream we all have, never the same dream, never exactly, not on the most crucial levels. This is the episode in which the labyrinth is illuminated, just slightly, just enough to show you it is what it is: an endless seamless convolution of corridors and stems.

            I bring you seemingly good things: I bring you lemon-seasoned tilapia; I bring you the visual strength as a sensation of a protovisual thing as the womblike shut-eyed wandering inward as the sensation of the strength of a piledriver; I bring you nostalgic smells in  a box of baroque silver filigree; I bring you whirling discs orbiting me on which instrumental jazz as a token of gratitude for your time as a series of playlists lie inscribed by lasers on their radial databanks; I bring you to the cell door to peer in at the You that has been in there for a small eternity, the entirety of your life, all it has known. Let loose judgements and fears of the Fear like a chameleon lets loose its tongue to catch a fly. This is what is required to gain access to the labyrinth.

            Taking a second to note that I could probably go on in unpacking the various possible identities of “the labyrinth” as it stands in this context but yet to note within the note that I will not, that I’m just too damn lazy, etc., to go into it. That was all.

            I am going to as-it-were kick off the episode by breaking one of my preset rules, which rule is: I will not read my fiction. Yes, indeed, I am going to read it here. I’m not particularly sure about what compulsion it is that’s driving me toward the impetus for what’s making me want to read the fiction at all, but I feel it will somehow elevate the podcast’s scope. So here I go, beginning to read, wondering what to read. I look down at my typewritten stack. There are things in there, things like germs of story, narration and blood-sweat-tears-type effort I’m not exactly proud to call my own. Nevertheless it is my own. I look down and see on the stack’s top a Tentative Author’s Foreword. I remember, looking into it, that it was written by the inspiration of my own anxiety in having anyone read anything of mine that is fiction. It is difficult to describe sometimes. I think part of it has to do with the fact that my prose is so… strange(?). I dislike thinking about what other people must feel, reading and adjudging the value of any of my shit. It’s been things they say like “I don’t know what this is.” Like, I’m like, Why the hell does it have to be anything? Why are you limiting writing to a list of prescribed genres? I’d understand if you were maybe a marketer of some sort. Otherwise it doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t know. I’m partially playing a role here as some part of myself caricaturized, I’m sure. But anyway. I won’t tell you what the book is called, but here’s the page:

TENTATIVE AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

When digesting the glyphic spree of these otherwise pale pages, I implore you to be open-minded. As in very. This sort of defensive rigmarole I’m here calling a “foreword” is really just a concerted means by which to describe my limited understanding of the context in which the painter must justify his brushstrokes. This is a bit difficult for me. I think at once the “Wall of Self” is also a barrier through which the author must reach him or her (being the reader, here). I.e. that the Wall of Self is like a double-edged sword insofar as the author must him-/herself communicate what’s going on inside him-/herself in a way that is actually… digestible. What I maybe mean to say here is that The red dog is in the green bush as opposed to like “the hound red in thicket swollen snot-viridian abides thusly” or like “the dog having padded in from the chilly lees, insulated in its red coat, shrouds itself in the ramose green of bushel leaves so prickly and interconnected and sensitive to movement the space about them shifts with idle adjustment as it (the dog) rests and breathes.” etc., etc. The urge or w/h/y being to let the words dance themselves into an impromptu choreography the mind itself hasn’t pre-planned on a conscious level. The urge being to splatter the brush’s paint and burn the canvas with cigarette embers. Little pock marks residing, ashen penetrations their own little gradients into blackness. The urge is a difficult one to deny. The question of the context is Why not to let the mind float? Why not just let the words dance? The reservation for the necessity of the question is a declaration: The reader must be able to chew the meat. I want to somehow bow my head in resignation as if to acknowledge that I am walking the line between these two conceptual forces, letting the words dance in a choreography rehearsed only in post. That the sub-thoughts of the subconscious wander-skating that is Unedited Fiction is attempted with the communicant in mind and that the editing is done to please nothing and everything, to allow the line-walking to be a possibility; to communicate not only accurately but effectively; to talk with you; to dance. I hope you’ll forgive whatever buoyancy this foreword’s writer’s brain’s mind may be capable of. It is only and always has been a way of simultaneously telling you and showing you what I perceive as THE STORY. I hope you dream well and wake well and understand where I’m coming from. My head is bowed. My hands are tied. My mouth is sore from thinking.

GOOD tidings, MUCH love,

Billy M. Kirby

            And that’s sort of it. I find I’m better at ending than I am at starting, which is probably why I’ve made so little progress and so many short chunklets. What follows the page that is the page on which is the Tentative Author’s Foreword is a page on which there is a pseudo-poem. It goes like this:

The Jibber-Walker: A Pome

Forward, must the epics go?

We in scenes of rain all cut by

streams of teardrop-dew and cloud which

fall and strike and form so well to

stroke the foot against the grain so

Forward, must the epics go?

All surfeit movement silly,

bonkers as the maddest bats who

place the blade on either shoulder,

readying our baths of blood, where

one bright leering eyeball seems to

see what no one sees in murk: that

Forward, must the epics go?

Ill forgotten shadow-creatures

creeping through a slipping stream of

smoke there spewing from pipe carb,

preying on the minds of bohemian amateurs,

instilling viscous paranoid molasses of thoughts too long to

fit onpaper. They, in wide gaits, quick as felines or

striking lightning thunder follows,

sleek and sable in their own right,

sink and slink into their shoes into the streets so far beyond us

they are invisible now… to the question… as

we, a rising thread, like unified silkworms dive through the

hoops of eyes of needles to

sew a recurring question: so,

Forward, must the epics go?

(.x.)

I don’t exactly remember what inspired the poem. Maybe it has a lot to do with laziness; the poem itself has to do with action. Maybe it has a lot to do with the book’s themes, which include use of various drugs, not the least-prominent of which is marijuana, ergo the “smoke there spewing from pipe carb,” etc., which deals itself with themes of inaction, and etc. Perhaps what really inspired the play with form was the laziness I exhibited in writing it, the same sort of common-ancestor to the laziness of the marijuana smoke from which the “shadow creatures” manifest, on which line the poem kind of goes a little more haywire. I don’t want to talk about this particular aspect of it for too long, so I’ll stop talking about the poem altogether. It’s an admittedly shitty poem, and in saying this I put up a guard against all criticism. So ha!, goes the writer. Good ol’ daisies and whatnot. I’m happy to oblige a tongue-in-cheek response to my own very genuine nakedly laying-out of unpackable-type stuff here. This previous sentence ill-constructed, another passé defense mechanism. An ouroboratic acknowledgement within the Matryoshka dolls of yet more acknowledgements. All this in a parallel universe in which I actually continue playing this little rhetorical game, onanistic placation, w/h/y.

Meat Shredder:

            The other day I was out getting coffee. It was one of those occasions on which I attempted being especially social, and failed, as usual. I got the cold-brew, sat down outside alone, and then promptly left with my coffee. But this moment I’m telling of is before the coffee. I’d exited my car. There is this place beside the Mexican restaurant beside the gym beside the O’Henry’s Coffee shop where there is a tree. The tree shades two stone benches which face each other on a pit of recycled glass mulch that shines in the parts of the shade through which sunlight breaks. The glass mulch is recycled from bottles the Mexican restaurant leaves out for the recycling plant. This all noted on a small wooden sign beside the benches. Anyway, here I’m sitting, observing the light through the shade on the glass mulch, when I notice—on a stone slab on which my feet rest—a greenish cicada dying in the sunlight. It twitches its legs. It barely moves otherwise. I am smoking a cigarette. I am still. I bend over and snap a photo of the beautiful creature. I have saved this photo for you, beneath the podcast’s play button, within the SCRIPTUM, on my website. I hope you scroll down and see it so you can maybe get a sense of what it is I saw for that split second.

            Moving on:

n  What books are you reading, Billy?

n  I’m glad you asked, Billy. As you know, I’m not all that well-read. I have hundreds of books in my room, forming canyons, taking up space in the form of topographical features I can’t elucidate as I’m illiterate as I’m not well-read. But yeah, I have a few books I currently plan on reading.

n  What books?

n  I recently picked up Plato’s The Republic and Other Works, translated by B. Jowett and published by Anchor Books.

n  Ah, neat.

n  And I’m especially excited because my newest book came in the mail. It’s called The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe and it’s the second volume of transcribed episodes of my favorite fictional podcast.

n  What podcast is that?

n  It’s called Welcome to Night Vale.

n  Ah, that’s a popular one.

n  Yes, and for good reason. As you know.

n  Ah, don’t I ever.

n  Yes. You do.

n  Ah. Yes.

            What’s so compelling about being a writer is… and then he realizes he’s gone on this tangent before. Anyway, I enjoy my own enjoyment of the appreciation I have been blessed with having—the appreciation for all media’s various artforms, etc.: the ability to tune-in and enjoy all sorts of creative works. It’s fun. It’s good times, as they say. As I say. It’s good ol’ daisies! I’ve also recently picked up a book by a favorite author of my favorite author. It’s called 60 Stories by Donald Barthelme. It’s amazing to me the way this guy wrote short stories. The way he breaks my heart in the best way, in denying prescribed forms, in making his own structure of the things, of the many things. My favorite author David Foster Wallace once said in an interview that he was inspired to write after reading Barthelme’s story The Balloon. This collection of sixty stories by the guy features that very one. I read it. It was incredible. Four pages long and I’m still scratching my head, thinking up analyses, getting lost in the beauty and simplicity and complexity of its prose at various points, thinking to myself: Damn, how is it he does this? How is it he works his magic? The whole thing is like a reversal Uno card. It makes your mind work backward. I was inspired to write the majority of this episode after reading this story, and I’m proud to say that I’m probably a better person on a simple like soul-level for having done it (for having read the story). My heart has been pricked and there’s a New Valve in there, dripping wonderfluid. I have no idea what goes on inside someone’s head when they’re making work this substantive and beautiful and radiant, but I wish I did. Maybe knowing spoils the trick. Maybe I’m meant to be ignorant and blissful, to simply enjoy it as it is. Maybe meaning is pointless. Maybe the pointlessness of meaning has meaning. I don’t know. I just write this shit.

Meat Processor:

            These are my words. This is my eye looking into yours. This is my heart’s most proximal valve dripping wonderfluid. This is a last call-to-arms for a sojourn into the breach of a battle for the posterity of the English Language. This is a Prescriptive grammarian whose typos abound. This is the man who backspaces with the onomatopoeia of skrrt!, whose head is always floating away from him. This is the shit-luck doper of purple prose. This is many efforts for a single thing that is a bunch of words written and subsequently spoken into a red Yeti Blue microphone which features a pop filter the mic’s gain is too high to necessitate pressing my lips into the soft material of. This is your eye looking into mine. This is failing vision. This is an addendum to the more lucid part of my life in which I am so lonely I wish I were dead. This is me trying to cope. This is the mouse playing “jip” with the lion. This is a poor quote from a poor text. I am hoping you are still with me.

            If you can hear me, out there, wherever you are, please know I am here. Please know I am not the same as I was when I started this episode, that I’m always respiring, that I’m as capable of change as I am of stagnation. This is my love for you for the love of words. This is the end, and these are my words.

[SONG CREDITS]

Episode 2: "The Puppeteer's Puppeteer"

The Cornucopia: Notes & Errata

Ep. 2: “The Puppeteer’s Puppeteer”

 SCRIPTUM

Intro:

            Welcome to the Cornucopia. I am Billy Kirby. This is a call to the Ajna, to the pineal gland, to the third eye, to the heart of the brain: to the heart of the heart of the brain. You feel good and bad at the same time, somewhere along a spectrum, some vague always-shifting gradient. Whole pools of mitochondria swimming in their plasmic cells. Hello. And welcome.

Meat Hammer:

            The clutch squeaks as gear-change initiates. Pedals floored, pulse accelerated, we cut through the night’s yellow-lined road with bright headlights, at a dizzying speed, so fast the broken line seems solid. This is my trying to put into words the opening sequence of the David Lynch film “Lost Highway.” I have a soft spot in my heart for Lynch’s works: the way he creates, his ability to eschew rules and pre-assigned structures, etc. I feel as if this opening sequence of a car’s headlights cutting through the night, speeding down the highway, will always stay with me in some way. It is no mere cruise, at least not in a traditional sense. It is an assault. There is in fact a kind of subtle violence to this opening. It is a high-speed assault on darkness, perhaps on the calm of darkness, perhaps—and I’m probably over-unpacking here, but what the hell—on the unknown, the safety of slowness, the comfort of the safety inherent in a limited speed, etc., etc. It makes my heart clutch itself. High speed, credit-sequence names rushing toward the screen in yellow, blaring saxophonic jazz…. It’s so unique and perfectly vague enough and yet blatant and vivid enough that a part of you just about dies inside, watching it. It reminds me of that sensation you get going suddenly down the incline of a rollercoaster that’s just slowed to its apex: that wind rushing against your face and internal falling beyond the falling itself so real and potent it’s as if your brain is momentarily blinded.

Episodic Germ:

            “Trees are the original prophets.”

Meat Shredder:

            My can of cool Pepsi is perspiring, here, on the porch. When I open it, the tab snaps and for a brief moment some of the can’s dewy perspiration flies outward from the lid and lands like a mist god-knows-where, somewhere, and I bring it up to my seer lips and sip and taste carbonated sugar-water so nice and only partially saccharin I cannot help but feel good on a personal level at least a little bit.

The taste is inviting through a whole other sphere of me I can’t even put into words adequately, and so won’t, here. I used to be a Coca-Cola -type-man. I used to praise the stuff. Nowadays, with the 20-cent difference in price of a single 12 Fl. Oz. aluminum can, and what with some vague perception of sugar-to-water disparities, I’m inclined to choose Pepsi over Coke. I think maybe it has something to do with an unconscious shift, though a more naïve part of me wants to believe it’s somehow a sign of a new chapter in my life. Whether or not any of this is true doesn’t really matter much, but I think it’s interesting to at least give the ideas a nod of sorts, to acknowledge their probable depth and possible branches. All things seem to distend way out the more you look at them, in this sense.

I light a Camel Crush (RICH) cigarette with a small Bic lighter depicting minimalist constellations. I inhale and swallow post-inhale and taste in the smoke the sweet aftertaste of Pepsi from the cold can. Sometimes I pinch the filter until its menthol capsule snaps, and then I inhale the menthol and am overpowered taste-wise by its lung-purging chill. Most of the time I wait until after the cigarette is halfway ashen, getting the better of both worlds of whatever it is this so-called “cancer stick” has to offer. Most of the time I enjoy both. This is a journal of my mind’s own shameless dribbling. I like to write in the header of all my shit the phrase “VESCERE BRACIS MEIS,” which is Latin for “eat my shorts.” I consider it a sort of tagline. It’s almost really more a signature than a tagline. It’s almost more a kind of a calling-card. It’s almost something, is what it is. I like how irreverent it is despite the repute of the language from which it derives.

            So this book I’m working on. Let’s not talk about it. Let’s talk about the supplementary material I’m reading: Anything I can get my hands on, for the most part. What’s so inspiring about being a writer is that just about anything your eyes’ brain’s mind’s own inner eye encounters becomes a part of you in some way. It harkens back to this little theory I have about the notion of the words we use and their sentience above our own, about how maybe our own vocabulary controls us more than we control it, in a sense, on perhaps like another level. I’m not entirely sure. Some of my theories are like this: inchoate: not fully formed: half-baked, perhaps, is what a lot of people might describe them as. Since these theoretical people concerning my theory don’t have the same images as me for the words I use, I don’t consider it too important to dwell on. There’s supposed to be a “however” somewhere in that sentence. I was too lazy or too befuddled or too sidetracked to actually put it in anywhere. That’s how the sentence will stay. I’m reading this language-arts book with a really good title: John Dufresne’s Is Life Like This?, A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months. He has a lot of really neat ideas in here, some of which include a single image or notion or action that connects to a character or place—thing, you know—which effectively serves as a jumping-off point for what might occur in the story. It’s sort of a jumping-off-point-type idea, if you will. It could be a gesture a character makes toward their pocket while closing a door behind them: What’s in the pocket? Why are they acknowledging it? Who are they gesturing to? Etc. It goes on from there. And that’s just a single example. It could be an amalgamation of these things: a duck in a pond by which two lovers sit at a picnic table during a thunder storm. Type thing. You hopefully get what I’m trying to describe. I don’t often do the best job at actually putting into words whatever it is I actually mean.

            Well, good ol’ daisies!, folks. I’ve just here kind of invented my own personal exclamation: “Good ol’ daisies!” I want to just dissolve sometimes. The idea of writing this episode has become such a point of exasperation that I can hardly even get my proverbial foot in the threshold of the proverbial door before I’m all but totally winded, mentally. So what do you say to that? I say “Good ol’ daisies!” It’s because of this exasperation I’ll begin what I call [FADE IN: RAINSOUND] an audio-soak. It’s pretty self-explanatory. Meditative, even. What you do is you just let the audible rain beneath the significance of the images of the words of my voice fall over you. Really let it soak. Let the droplets of condensing cloudbellies fall at their uniquely-theirs velocity, in tone, such that (here) you let the trees be the forest they are, so to speak, to let the droplets’ audible drips melt together, to hear and feel on some inside-level the audio-soak’s effects… [FADE OUT (POST-DELAY): RAINSOUND]

Meat Processor:

My mother bought me a red notebook. There was no precedence; I hadn’t asked her to. She just bought it for me, probably—insightful and receptive as she is—having intuited my figurative drought w/r/t creative work. But so anyway: the notebook is manufactured by a company named EXCEED. It features an elastic band for holding it closed, a red ribbon for page-marking, and a folder in its back cover. I’ve decided to use the notebook for my novel, that its utility will serve my purposes well, in all honest hope. Though I won’t be reading from my novel here, I don’t mind reading you the opening page of the red EXCEED notebook, which serves more than anything as a kind of a primer for the content within the notebook itself. It goes as follows:

            The opening page on which…

-          the torture begins: senses’ Self’s own inner narrator begins to plot away all the details of details of the Event of Wording, of the immaculate Always just far enough out of reach to reserve “possibility” for a mythological state, status, the mode of an abstract transcendental term.

-          the self-torture (torture) begins: an overly self-aware writer assesses his own ability or in- to write fiction consistent enough to substantiate a novel, to dredge from Utter Murk some semblance of a compelling story that is as “fun” to write as it is to read or parse or meta-read, w/h/y.

-          the real torture continues: This “thing” which is the thing he’s wrought over what feels like a great time (some six-od yrs., now…) comes sort of at him all “full-focus” and blatant like a crow’s cawing rictus featured head-on, close-up, as if to vie for existence among possible other unformative inartistic pastimes that often occupy him for all too long.

-          the reception of the pain of the torture becomes a reality: the variable abstractions of settings, people and things therein, etc., assemble like pieces on a chessboard only to be reassembled and ultimately moved by some like cosmic poker.

-          the sound of the echo of the audible emissions of the rictus of the abstract birdform thing (analogy) of the thing that is this thing he’s wrought, coming at him, begins to empower itself via feedback loop…: the fiction like the character-rich Oliver Twist begs for more—more content—with all the urgency and genuine hunger of a starving child… to begin to plant especially formative seeds of doubt in the figurative headspace of the creator (its creator) concerning why he doesn’t give this thing that he’s wrought enough time and/or attention as well as a number of seeds of doubt concerning the purpose of life which (in retracing the steps apace all along their trail of red-painted footprints ) brings him back to some idea of a substantive answer, being “art” (the answer), being the only real means by which he sees an opening to bridge the gaps and restore his own lonely soul.

-          “torture” is alluded to as a metaphor for the act of writing: genius interlocuters engage in conversations which go static for brief moments, devise contexts optimal for their arguments’ legs (respective) to stand on (as-it-were), rebut rebuttals to their own in so Socratic and fair a format it can at times be difficult to tell they’re actually arguing and not engaging in a kind of lingual dance of sorts, all unheard by this writer, who’s (even exterior to the text) merely only able to view the locutions as hypothetical, substantiating the “genius” adjective for which the conversationalists’ ethos is modified.

And so, for much of what follows, there will be the (nearly) tacit recognition that—for all intents and purposes—none of this raw unedited shit will really be seen by anyone other than me. This engendering some solace in the “act of” without which the “act of” would be nearly unbearable, just about impossible….

So that’s it: a bullet-list of sorts as an introduction to what is effectively my own great secret text. Hopefully it’s not overly nauseating to be talking about this sort of thing. Hopefully I don’t care. There’s so much to really experience and yet so little time to actually do so, it’s a Fear of mine. It sometimes feels like I just don’t have the energy or brain cells to soak it all in. I wish for absurd things like frozen time, the opportunity to see things from every angle at once. I wish I didn’t wish these types of impossible things. I wish I knew how to end this episode. A sudden thought makes itself apparent. I have this journal I keep for plot points and ideas and such. It’s a small green thing, with numbered pages. The following is a note-to-self from this journal.

To some degree, I’m compelled to both scrap and ignite the failed type-written manuscript, that it might somehow miraculously rise from its own ashes as a reformed/refined version of itself. The characters within have become strangers it seems to feel like I never knew to begin with. The places and events feel stilted [I may have meant “staged,” there.] in a most vacuous way, held up by wires too interconnected and knotted-up for the puppeteer to detangle. For me it’s to a level of such dissociation that I don’t even feel like the puppeteer, but rather like the puppeteer’s puppeteer, trying to somehow control the lack of control. It all feels very amateur, botched in a lurid way like chicken-scratch that is trying to say too much. At this point it seems like I should either endure it and change a lot or simply throw it all into a trunk somewhere until it “turns blue” and dies altogether. Regardless I cannot fully understand why I’m so in love with this failed manuscript or how it’s transmogrified into such a convoluted sleetheart. “Sleetheart” being a neologistic term crafted for the purpose of describing a type of love-relationship that is either one-sided or totally corrosive to the soul or both.

So here we are, listeners: totally out of gas, stranded on the edge of a cool desert. I am like you a mortal thing, made of blood and flesh, but not here. Here I am a voice gone to the Aether. I am slot machines wound to burst at JACKPOT. I am fully empty, devoid of both flesh and blood, white as bone as a noise: white-noise, let loose and dying. A poor-man’s halo floats too high above the head. Goodbye and rest well. May all your dreams be Lynchian and calm.

Episode 1: "PILOT"

The Cornucopia: Notes & Errata

Ep. 1: “PILOT”

SCRIPTUM

            Intro:

Welcome to The Cornucopia. I am Billy Kirby. You have found my voice by some subjectively random string of events which have led you here, to this moment, listening. If you’d like to up the volume, tune in, think along, then (by all means) feel free. My hope in doing all this is to gather and unpack the various Notes and Errata that fill the details of my daily life. Most of what I’ve discovered to be “mundane” is here perverted into the soulful, the interesting, the alien. I think that maybe if you just try to view the things the parts of you able to sense can sense through this sortuv lens of perverse mundanity, there is hope in living. This hope is what substantiates my authorial actions within The Cornucopia: to tread the tired roads, bring oil to a thirsty engine, and once and for all analogize myself as the scarab of all data. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Yrstrly

            Episode-Specific Intro (ESI):

The barren streetlights breed yellow angels, fogging up to crystal iterations of their own least detailed selves through the rose-tinted glasses of a young visually challenged person or persons, inhabiting the apartments through the windows of which the angels’ distal shining makes a jam of halation.

            Meat Hammer:

So then the already prevalent idea of what is to come has come and dissolved like a Tums in a glass of Schweppes such that the upward-dying capsule can be seen clearly through water’s amplification one Whole Clear Thing. So but here we are, all of us, listening to my voice come through computed distortion, through the nether of a long reach that is itself a timeless augmented operation. Blah blah blah. You didn’t come to listen to a pseudo-poem. You came for information and entertainment. You came to read with your ears. So then let us allow the reading to begin, to be begun, to make way for the words’ images’ cerebral digestion. I cordially invite you to sit, relax—recline, even: set your feet at a spatial point above your head, even.—to allow your self’s imagined soul to float out of your periphery, out of your body, to some adjacenting place just far enough to be considered safe, to not agonize over the state of the schedule, of the state of the posterity of the original schedule, to glaze eyes and engage in the sort of idle gesticulations you make when you’re actually genuinely thinking, really reading with your ears. I invite you to watch with your brain. The episode has begun. We are officially nearing The Terminus.

            Meat Shredder:

We will begin at a point between lost and very (or totally) lost. We will sojourn into the mouth of a hungry cave and watch through the illumination of glow worms as it digests us minute by minute. We will try and keep the dilation simple, not give into the temptation of the Darkness Fix. There will of course be the temptation. We will finally grab the proverbial bull by the horns and wrestle it into submission.

[Quick Mathematical Tabulation: Bull = Problem = Restitution for idle time. (A = B = C….)]

There is for the author a cheeky note to the sentence in which nothing is said. This, ostensibly, a huge leap-and-bound difference between the sentence in which nothing is Really said. The horror of the necessary syntax for substantiation of the latter being one of difficult description. You hardly cannot describe the idea of working through the delicacies of a sentence only to discover that nothing valuable enough to justify communication is really actually definitively being communicated… at all. So then what’s the purpose of the former, in which simply nothing is said? I’ll show you: “….” This is just a politety. I really do wish I could more accurately describe what I mean. That thing for the horror (for the writer) of the blank page. Maybe the real horror is the full page that might as well be blank. Maybe the real real horror is the idea that communication period is futile. This solipsistic reflex in which the only solution is to recoil deeply inward: the problem to begin with. The idea that, no matter how effortfully we communicate or attempt to communicate, no matter how accurately we word our prose or syntactic sprees, there is no real way of making OUR image for the words of the sentence the same as the CORRESPONDENT’s image for the words of the sentence. You hope and pray to Nothing that perhaps they know what you mean; you H-and-P that they get whatever it is you’re laying down. So then it goes in stages, this futile attempt at communicating, toward a terminus that is the conversation’s eminent death, foreshadowed. That it is always somehow foreshadowed because it was always going to happen, and either way people read too much into everything anyway. So let’s here lay it down. Let us wipe clean the slate: Tabula Rasa. You cannot escape it. It does not blink. One massive scroll forever in its inky crypt.

            Meat Processor:

I’m writing this novel. Here, in the podcast, I won’t be discussing its plot or characters or structure, etc. I am, however, open to discussing my difficulties with the actual process of trying to create something that has just about willed itself into the morphism of a monster. When I was in high school, I became obsessed with an author. I fell in love with his prose, both fictional and non-, and immediately researched and bought almost his entire bibliography. With each word of each book I fell deeper and deeper in love with this writer whom I’d never known and never would know on a personal basis; he’d killed himself in 2008, four-or-so years before I’d discovered him. His works allowed me to reimagine what language was capable of, how I could possibly use it as a means by which not only to communicate a thought, but an emotion or tone or abstracted idea as well: to bear my soul on the page: to fuse the two somehow into a creation all its own incarnate. That was about seven years ago. I remember vividly  the moment I was in business class in the eleventh grade—a class I would spend all my time writing in, typing out thoughts on the pre-installed canvas of a Microsoft Word Text Document. I remember when I came up with the premiere setting of the book. I remember typing out a conversation between characters at a meeting in this setting and how each character’s principle qualities became visible to me on a level deeply connected to my mind’s heart. Surely I had tapped into something. Now here I am, with around two-hundred-and-fifty pages and hundreds of characters and tens of settings and sub-settings I have very little knowledge of how to arrange or mold in order to elucidate. I am lost on the sinking ship of a novel I can’t abandon, whose stories and people and experimental forms I cannot abandon for the life of me. I am plumbing the depths (so to speak) of void and abysmal waters. With the aide of some excellent language-arts books, the free time I have away from work, and the blueprints of these clastic type-written pages I’ve kept in a brown sheathe all this time, I am assaying toward a palpable Thing, something I can really as-it-were sink my teeth into—something I can know is formed.

            Part of the innate difficulty in writing it is the knowledge that my ability as a writer—my rhetoric, lexicon, w/h/y—has depreciated a good amount, as has my knowledge of much of the plot’s strands. Where the latter is strictly OK because I’m willing to see where the unknown parts take me, the former is a shot to the heart. I look on at these unedited pages I wrote on my Olympia SM9 and wonder how the hell I was able to make the words flow that way. This is a huge part of the despair involved in creating and re-creating art, especially textual art. This part of my life I’m in, exploring, is for me about mastering the craft I have decided to dedicate myself to. Part of that mastery’s initial sacrifice is the realization that the mind is a kind of a muscle. If you don’t regularly “work it out,” it will weaken. I, amid my multiple hiatuses from the artform, have come to confront this newfound weakness. To shirk of the albatross of sloth. To make new things. That is, in part, why I’m doing this podcast. Not only is it a reimagining of the notes I’ve taken, it’s also a storage for the germs of ideas those notes contain. It’s a means rather than an end. I hope you’re willing to listen on, because I have a lot on my mind, and my mind never sleeps.