2 July c. Froggy’s Deliciously Snack Waffles [sic.]
Doreen Antlerst sips gracefully on a Bloody Mary (in-tall-perfectly-cylindrical-glass whose rim is topped with lemon and coated in salt) from the balcony overhead some guests’ idle conversations, smoking a short Kamel Viridian, blowing Os of varying near-perfection while Jim Antlerst and Dotty Pride engage in violent coitus on the bed in the room to which the balcony is connected. This is the plan. Things go this way every time they host this party, it seems. She will sip and smoke in silence as the origin-points of conversations of varying intensities reach an echoic terminus somewhere in the convolved middle below. The pool’s body is filled with guests, some topless—Kitti Maud, for instance, topless in F. H. Dreidel’s submerged lap as he makes a real show of trying to fully cup his hands around her boobs, which is impossible. Dempsey and the other two smashed low-brain-wavelength fraternity alumni jump in with a splash, holding two beers each, fully clothed. Wanda Xod is here somewhere, in a bathroom doing who-knows-what with who-knows-whom is the word, wearing a kitten mask. Coke is the big ticket tonight. The extravagantly dressed houseparty’s guests are all webbed up, caught in the in-/outflux of their own kind’s overlapping vectors, in the reception’s motional web, which now it’s apparent the house-party’s locus has shifted to the pool area, at which a fully staffed and attended Pookah bar alcoholizes bloodstreams responsible for the reception’s web’s energy or what-have-you: a fête champêtre of the wildest sort. The white nosecandy gets underhanded in little clear baggies mid-exchange, hands releasing baggy to receive cash between the cumbersome handshakes which doesn’t elude Doreen for a second; she never misses a beat. It had begun to occur to her at the percussive spout of (y = m(x) + Bitchhhh) cum her husband’s scepter’s fountain had erupted that there were also dark birds attending in the trees on the lawn’s great fore. A Rossignol picayune tune swept loosely barbarous over shrouds of people of bodies in the pool’s chlorinated body would crane trees in their eyes with refined snow-white powder such that when the drinking had really begun they were too far gone down the mental ski-slope to realize that the mountain had a cliff. And that tumbling comes in three segments: (a) Dempsey vomits in the pool. This causes somewhat of a commotion. Women are screaming—topless amply-busted-boisterous Kitti sprinting elbows-at-right-angles through water as if she were walking on it. There is a foul moan when Bunfed Cruelgas—clad in the technicolor tie-dye Hawaiian-shirt whose design pattern so thoroughly disturbs the eye to view—rises from the pool, because (b) Demon Whitaker and his little leather-born fiat are leaving without Sherise Flour (a known member of the gang, girlfriend to DW,) who is emotionally distraught and so really downing the tequilas from which little toothpick-umbrellas arise due to something like an argument which took place early on at the party, between Sher and Demon, when Demon accused Sher of being lascivious toward a man she claimed to have accidentally slipped on and someone named Roy T. Zoomout had to break it up and mellow it out because Demon had actually become quite upset, actuating premonitions of adulterous paranoia which subconsciously latched to his inner membranous gooshy burgeoning conscious thought by knocking over a porcelain lamp whose body and bulb shatter visually dark and then blaming the shattered lamp on bystander Cool Breeze, whom it is apparently no fun to look at for too long; there were no more ghouls from which to hide, and so therefore all things prior faded into a kind of milk of light before the eye of the hour in its glass encasement within the silver pocket watch he kept in his black leather-jacket’s pocket at all times suddenly jolts and reopens and fixes its gaze on the rainsoaked clouds darkening above. And Sher would be left on the little in-between point of light: moments to appear publicly with Demon’s boys; moments to be sincere and honest with De; moments to move entirely on one’s own without having to feel—to really feel at all—or be controlled by the joystick of his erect Rectitude (for little-he was so named) whenever it was he wanted to use her as a liquid bag of flesh he could put himself inside without affording her the necessity to consent to anything. She thought: oh, this is love; she thought: oh, what a journey. And the truth was the journey hadn’t even begun. It was the state of the lurid protasis in which her first real lover would leave her downing tequilas in entire gulps at the Antlersts’ pool, to… (c) vomit onto Bunfed’s shoulder as of having tasted the scent and seen the splurge of Dempsey’s projectile sick. So the hourglass is turned over once more on the little glass table on the balcony on which she sat, looking through branches to dark Rossignol[i] ¶ The thoroughly upbraided and hollowed-out Dempsey is sent elsewhere, into the house’s heart. No one is swimming anymore. Relations have, for the most part, died down. Surfboard Vinny is carrying a surfboard over his head; there is no apparent putative explanation for this other than the obvious moniker’s relation. Everyone high-fives him as prompted whenever he walks past. Sélan De La Alal sips a lime daiquiri down below through some lionesque topiary recession in the garden’s unlit path beside the home’s eaves’ descending foliage, watching Doreen watch the people below, making a real private show of her shimmering blue dress, which would morph furiously into avian-form, blue-bird sent into flight at the moon’s sharp spellcraft, should she feel the urge to suddenly arch backward and drop daiquiri glass in shadowed weeds and shrink suddenly and fly upward through dense tree(s) into the pod of some blessed personal-spatial-bubble the transparency of which makes everything viewed from within somehow more purplish in tincture. There would be massive ridges of glasses’ lenses’ bright sphericoyellow light rays reflecting an Extended Field of View to which the viewer is exposed via some river-Styx-type random phenomenon you hear about and experience every once in a great while, where it’s like you’re dead for a moment, effectively, to the world: dead: no luminous passage: on the journey with Death itself, in-boat, listening to the wrinkling water as consequence of Death’s long oar now treading, treading water. There are no more Edens. Her correspondent, one large watermelon-bellied Rossignol named Elyth Spool (with whom she has established a firm network of avian relations spanning the entire North-American West Coast), is beaking a smaller less cognitively present Rossignol on the noggin, overaudible clunk echoing each peck, such that by the time the less significant bird actually comes-to from its virulent nightmarish paralysis—the type for which all sensation are densely numbed—it squawks, preens, looks over to Elyth wide-eyed open-beaked staring, and flies off to another tree at which some more congenially skull-to-body-proportioned Rossignols take turns projectile-shitting into the drinks of the attendees below. Little deforming plips of smoke-ring exit her mouth, enframing Doreen’s own plosive smoke-rings above, in clear view of unclear view, obstructed by smoke. Skeletons within closets of the home’s bedrooms crawl inbed with the fervent lovers sanctifying the space odorously salt-infused and sink into the mattress beside them, four skeletons in total, in four bedrooms of two-to-three-to-four lovers each per bedroom. It is at the exact moment of the first strike of lightning some hundred meters off the trees shudder birdless and flocks of Rossignol ascend blurrily through sudden rainfall and cloudcovered-moon-darkness the whole contingent below becomes suddenly shifty about. A few errant dateless partygoers take shelter beneath Surfboard’s surfboard—something like seven, though some of them scatter to various other islands of cover: beneath the bar’s eaves’ imbricated palm fronds; in the rubber bouncyhouse left over from Gutrimond Antlerst’s ninth birthday-party; through the small wooden door in the larger of the Antlersts’ lawn’s trees’ trunks, which houses a exercised squirrel family mid-scruffle, at the zenith of the bout of its sociofamilial prollems, etc. Dern and Cynthia Blowhole raise Sher’s discarded leather jacket above their heads, shivering beneath it, trying to get into their car. Really good party, he is saying. Really nice to see the Deckles again. Cynthia finally enters the car with a shrug. The two part ways when they step inside together and close their respective doors: a departure from the conversational medium: Cynthia examines her mobile phone and Dern speaks via Bluetooth headset with Owen Hodston of Eco Press about the “market recession” occurring on every level of the real-estate-tangent paper business. Cynthia is communication with Fabio: How are you? / I’m well. / You ready for the bomb tonight? / Give it to me baby. / Oh I’ll give it to you. / Give it give it. / Oh I’ll give it to you. / O yea I wan it. / Oh… I’ll give it to you. ¶ When suddenly the incoherence had reached its climax and Rachel and Numskull and Lamron and Phillip were finished toking their private communal spliff in the screened-in deck’s fuzzy yellowlight, there is the dispersant call to home which dear falling rain invokes in the hearer of drops of accelerating water in the night. There is the totally pancaked buzz-countenanced facial expression Rachel takes on such that her orange braided hair looks like yarn on the zygomatically limited effigy of a facially overblown hand puppet. Numskull repeatedly says “Ya yaa” in response to every immediate question, including those not directed at him. “You all leaving?” / “Yeah.” / “Ya yaa.” / “Oh alright. We’re prolly gonna hit the hay soon anyways, maybe lay out Settlers of Catan or…” / “Ya yaa.” / “… something like that.” / “Heard.” / “Ya yaa.” / “Have a good night, guys.” / “Ya yaa.” / “You too, Lam. Bye, Phil.” / “Bye.” / “Ya yaa.” / “Bye.” ¶ When everyone has for the most part left as of Kitti’s sing-song exclamation that everyone is going to choke on their own vomit and die, the real party begins: Dotty Pride assumes the position as Doreen ashes her cigarette and enters unwet beneath-umbrella from the rain into the pungent bodily-fluid miasma of the pink room that is her and Jim’s laboratory of human-capacity-for-sexual-zenith. It is her turn. Far away, her self’s true soul is bathing in a vast lake on the moon, whose lunar face lights bathingmilk from below such that like ensnared insect she rises graceful- nakedly from its depthless still body. All covered in milk, dark hair radiant sticking wetly to her nape as hands cover face which peeks out boldly and stares through the lens of the page. Far away, through double-helix spirals, Lamron’s spiritual plot is widening and sprouting a small sweat lodge of red Indian fabric as his body undergoes static night terrors and the earth of its limited horizon crinkles up at the far bourn. ¶ ⸙ I can remember very little; I can remember being very little: swirls of ice flakes falling lit from all sides at Anduey Park, with Cinderblock, who would run and fetch things at relative-high speed, through the miniscule frosted mirrors of light dancing rhythmically down and through piles of (dry) snow so high she would be wading through the slush with large skyward white ears serving the same essential function as a shark’s emergent dorsal fin in blackening water. I remember now a very still moment in some arbitrary high school classroom of looking out through the wire-plated window to see the snow once more, except that apparently this was some time after Cindy had died, and but yet to see the snow once more and reconfigure mentally the whole puzzle of which I was a part: through footsteps: the astral eye looking over its sleeping self: nightmares. I can remember very clearly the evening I lay out on the beach in the rain with whomever—someone, a girl—and sank slowly into the sand. I can remember the shush of the tide’s plumed white rush as it crashed over massive rocks some fifty yards out, and the eerie birdcall of no known origin as the shush and the rain and the wind carrying the rain Eastward in great diagonal vectors faded out into some parasite’s composite stomach outside of time, and all that was left was the murmur of her words and the birdcall far off as if over some static thrush in the ear’s bass drum, constant, white-noise. I remember the cool water’s lisping tendrils reaching out via seawater’s ebb and flow to chill my toes there and swim up the backs of my legs and liniment-like soak the motorcycle wound on my right calf before receding again back into the flow. I remember hot-‘n’-heavy intercourse and beach-related privacy problems and running nude from an irate patrolman and the susurrant rustlecoo of the wind and great whorls of Spanish-gray cumulonimbi and farther-off paled rinds of stratocumulus forming sin-waves moving rapidly through the tears in the façade of rainbearing-blurred underbelly-dark. And these patches of nondark I say to myself intermittently which unveil windowlike the moving canyon of gray farther above, up with the quarreling angels, almost seem even to serve the critical function of… [miss?... Miss?...] somehow affording candid lovers that one purest holy moment of Vitamin-D spotlight and salivary masticatory “face-chewing,” whatnot. We did that. We were picking apples in Anduey park, naked as newborns, Adam-and-Evelike sharing fragile moments of deep corneal superintrospection, vicariously, through the eyes of another person whose reflections are you, your own eyes, whose reflections are the eyes of the eyes who are… ¶ I remember they couldn’t find us because we were excellent hiders and we knew every prominent trail of Anduey Park’s backlot, wherein the dark recesses of which Moondog and Slive Flung-Mason would share queer anecdotes while sitting atop stoops and accompanying a warm green-candent trashbarrel fire, and the eminent summoner ghosts joining in too then, as we ran past youthfully, into the conch-versation being had pre-discursus—concerning the nature of plants’ will to “live” before said pre-disc. was brutally usurped by a shitfest of the politicodogmatic mode when one of the stone busts, serving to actuate in-surrogate in surrogate form (palpable: rough: substantial) the communicative presence of the summoner ghosts themselves, breaks in very quickly on Moondog’s plant-perspective musigngs to mention that Right-Wing Spiritual Politician Kwon Leen, Jr. hates plant and the environment in general, which sure-enough sends tapering off the recurring deluge of counter-comments and reverse-counter-comments all the while snarling increasingly (only audibly, of course; the seated stone busts just sit there, molded expressionless, as their enraged exhortations toward the Salvation Perspective[ii] emanate loudly.) and causing the two corporeal bums to retreat back into their Matryoshka-doll-selves’ inner spaces, silent-broad and dried of all moisture, before finally Slive nods off and falls face-first against the flaming barrel’s rim and but then the Shadows sort of move in, unnoticeable at first, always silent, causing alarm: silence, slow and then slower into view: old women in black dresses whose necks are permanently craned downward such that their long locks of black hair sway and obscure their faces as they inch up to the junk shed in which everyone is convened., emerging in dark spots through the windowlight—before a knock is heard at the junk shed’s plywood door and the single bulb illuminating flickers and the busts go silent. Knock knock, a river of wind whistling, and the match Moondog strikes a light a broken lantern. Knock, knock. The six some-odd iterations of what occurred next fell on distracted ears, and so now there are only two: that in which (1) Moondog opens the door and the shadow knocking eats his face, and that in which (2) Slive reanimates drunkenly and casts Dancing Lights with a duct-taped wand and the Shadows disperse. The first iteration is obviously less popular, though most scholars of the context would say it was truest, self-affording contextual factor being of course that Moondog is still a missing person fourteen years hence. I said goodbye to the girl whose name escapes me and walked up cement steps to an overhead subway platform. I rode in a silver tube through cityscapes submerged in bright fog, and when the voice over the intercom said, “There is a storm coming for all of us—for all of us,” I could not then remember where my stop was. “Like a nightmare you cannot awake from.” And the silver tube moved cleanly as all outside visual stimuli swirled past indistinguishable. I remember I sat there for a very long time. When the tube finally slowed to a halt at an isolated platform somewhere overhead, at the instant of the rail’s sharp screech, I would wake up in bed alone, covered in sweat, clutching a blanket whose material wrapping my person was now soaked. The ghastine memories filed subconsciously under synaptic-ordinance headings seem to creep up in codified patterns, seem to afford themselves textually semantic interactions with other files and sub- written in binary on the frontal lobe’s mesh screen. The resulting effect being something like that of cameos appearing between dreams: the creeping tornado spinning closer like a godly top set loose upon the earth; the faceless sentient feeding me a bottle my tiny phalanges can’t seem to posture themselves to hold properly; the patches of drywall behind my childhood bedroom’s peeling green wallpaper revealing insect-life observable through a magnifying-glass. Sometimes the moon would peek out through percolating clouds and say “Hi” in a low baritone. And I remember walking the street home from the platform in dungaree ‘ralls I can’t seem to remember how I obtained. I remember the crunch of snow in every step and the way the cool air tasted against my lips. Flecks of ice slowly forming snowflake through increments of ascending intricacy, fragile hexasymmetric patterns. There would be men taking individual bullions of goldbrick out of Ft. Knox in leather-padded-interior briefcases which were handcuffed to their person. This was the vision Johnny Trumaine gave us at his parking garage later that night. We could not properly confer with our associates on the matter of Johnny’s soothsaying legitimacy or whatever value any of his portentous white-eyed murmurs might have, and so we believed him. The truth was put into a white envelope and the envelope was burned; all we have left now are facsimiles of his notes. Johnny killed himself two winters later and, according to the lipstick note he left on his tummy—which lipstick note was photographed by blue bats on-scene at various angles—there was no real way of finding out the answer to his puzzle now, since he was dead. These facsimiles were not easy to come by; I only ever got to read one. It said: Fall back through the rabbit hole: initiation word: coconut. I haven’t really thought about it since. According to the Inner Voice, it probably has something to do with identifying who gave Johnny the ampule of noxious liquid cyanide he used to kill himself. The dust made eminent in the light of the setting saw floats on either side of a segment of a stone buttress along the West façade of the Art Wing such that all things floating suspend and distance themselves choreographically there in the mixing wanlight, and at the behest of who-knows-whom, because apparently, as the narrative foretells the goings-on of what numerous steps were taken in order to get a message to me in the first place, three goons scheduled an appointment with me, at which they arrived brandishing mace and short-sword and apparently yes it has been confirmed one of them did indeed ready shurikens; Goon 1 told me that if I ever needed to, I could call on Papa Smurf at any time. Then he gave me a little envelope with a slickly laminated business card inside which glinted sunbeamyellow-white when I lifted it out and exposed it to the mesosphere of that wonderful coordinate now lost. One of the three goons—the one speaking—gave me a hug as some kind of otherworldly gesture. The other two played rock-paper-scissors. “You are friend, now.” Goon 1 says. Goon 2 symbolically snips at Goon 3’s hand of paper with a pair of phalangeal scissors, to which some overblown physical acts incur negative invisible spiritual vibes which float around gaseously. Not Anduey: not anywhere anymore. And awake wetly into your carapace of sweat. The dark tremulous night-terror effects begin to kick in. At first, it’s a gentle paralysis. Listen. Listen briefly. There is a voice somewhere out there in the darkness of the room. Look up: china-doll staring at you with blue porcelain eyes. On the shelf. Unmoving. Unmoving. You are matched alone against your opponent’s King, on the board, stranded eternally in this moment in the darkness. And even as the eyes begin to move and seemingly corneageographically adjust, how you are still unmoving: still. Thus as your eyes well up and mouth creases wide a grimace which strains zygomatic operation in proportion to however long the grimace is held, taking note that your face is now a mask of sweat of an expression acupunctural in its stillness, the sweat carapace itself begins to emulsify white-pellucid, glowing dimly from inside. This is you as you as me. Take my hand. In the dark space we as gods shucked thunder from its lightning, soundless, striking down at various points on Earth such that from the false camera’s box-lens the sphere is shrouded by inspirited fireflies. Somewhere beyond the white gelatinous cocoon there is my face in that death-mask of horror. When you wake up, it’s like being watched. Something lurking around the corners of your apartment, quiet, casting covert gazes as the lightning storm goes off through the blinds’ drawn panels. This is true, you think: something like the aesthetic of the world. There are dogs howling wretchedly outside, in the soundless storm, which, just as a precaution, you have flipped the tube on and clicked the whirring mechanical vortex button which initiates the MonCentral Viewing Deck, and so but they both turn on: Channel Variety Select: News: NBC. Two female anchors in near-glowing attire, with hair sprayed—texturized—it can be told, argue respectively about the young pop model Vulva Rumford’s impressive foray from Barney the Dinosaur’s educational crew into a career path more congenial to her quote enlightened state of mind unquote, including erotic voice-acting and some prurient hypersecular inter-music-video dancing and even supposedly a bit part in La Rosa Blanca Productions’ Slutventures IV: Anal Pirates Want Booty, which was said to have been disseminated all throughout the Americas on some subnetwork within MonCentral VD’s Adult Entertainment genre web, connected and accessible through some esoteric porno-viewing permutation subweb one must correctly reorder and –arrange to view. They (the anchors) are arguing with specific hand gesticulations which, for the most part, gives the general impression that a kind of invisible swordfight may actually be occurring on some level between the two: that Mandyy Mitherslaw is not going to take any of Konny Zezgold’s inarticulate shit any longer. That that is what is probably generally being discussed among viewers: what is possibly being said beneath their voices. They argue smilingly, mid-gesticulation, as they construct counterpoints to their counterpart’s theses, palam, while the monitor’s own monitor in-studio behind the women plays a roll of patriotic Norman-Rockwellian pictures slightly out of focus: a golden retriever mid-jump for airborne frisby; a young child giving another child a hug, both of the children wearing blue miniature dungarees with red-and-white striped undershirts; a wind-rippling US-of-A flag spangled gladly almost so clear you could tell it had a face; a young soldier holding the severed head of a deer, antlers and all, empirically an 11-pt. buck; a young whipper-snapper tuning the various intricacies of a rusted bike in a large wholesome garage beside a shiny red Ford Sedan; isolated rosin candent floating in light. Mandyy gesticulates disapprovingly to a full-service shot-to-ego when Konny brings up her recent divorce, which now as the receding gesticulations play out and out and out into the void it is apparent that finally the mango’s ripe flesh may be bitten into. This will become the zone, as you pack another hit, reach for the remote and turn up the volume; it will actually become apparent to you that it has begun: the whole vicious cycle. Like a mummy you will rise ensapped in sweat and mucosa of all kinds. It will riddle your head: a dim green Projection-Dismantled symbol onscreen where sunlight’s lost and blank rays shine through faulty white curtains to obscure the purity of the Sony© UHDHF[iii] 60” plasma screen TV.
[i] Rossignol: nightingales: African-Eurasian birds donning reddish-brown plumes of inlaid feathers they unfurl and stretch and tend to the flexure of in brief flight from limb to limb, having been transferred to the Americas in c. 933. To the thorough viewer the bird’s real personality begins to manifest in its movement: they even speak, these Rossignol, although it is of course Romanian: a real hoot, and mostly in whispers. Rossignol: emissaries at the behest of the moon, soft blur-winged darkangels sent shushing past into the trees. This is what we all think we see, no? I have you in my grip now. You cannot get out when you have seen the inside of the labyrinth. The famille habitué have all gathered into a tender moment around you: bunny rabbit, plastic flyswatter, Ulysses: paperback. There is a tune playing somewhere in the background, and an actress’s exacerbated diminuendo from some high-strung final note, too high to hear, too soft and gentle there in that minute the rat walked into its guillotine. And we all expected it. No one could surmise that by the time her voice had gone completely there would be no more light in the maze: no more space around you: just black, absorbed by the dark, sent into union with the minotaur and your eminent death. Have you seen my wand? I left it somewhere. I’m too high now, I think. All these recollections; they come to me like butterflies that die where they land: symmetrically beautiful, encased in glass frames and set on display in an office no one enters.
[ii] The Salavation Perspective being a PoV endemic to the ideological brainstem of the Political Dogmatic which posits its own personal beliefs/preferences as those of the superior mode, in essence saying: the Salvation Perspective is every political dogmatic’s own beliefs, as opposed to any one belief in particular.
[iii] Ultra-High-Definition-High-Fidelity.