indra?

billy stopped by again last night (static noise occurring) (why not?) (the historic great snows) wanting to spend a little time with the "visualizer" (deep darkness, deep canyons, bolts and shackles, trade winds, etc.) some of you may be confused or unaware of this bizarre digital-speak, but for others it is old hat by now- a veritable old and cherished friend, in some cases.

(yes, it's the itunes visualizer I'm referring to here.)

as mentally suspect as it might sound, (and he knew this) billy wanted nothing other than to hunker down in front of my laptop again and listen to music accompanied by the itunes visualizer effects.

"no problem" I told him.  "that's what the visualizer is there for, old buddy."

(deep down in the silence, deep darkness, deep mercy, deep hiddenness)

some of you have been pestering me to describe billy's appearance and I'll get around to that eventually- it's something I'm deliberately putting off until the appropriate moment.

several years ago I burned him copies of 3 particular motion picture soundtracks that I thought he might enjoy.  I didn't hear anything about them until about maybe 5 or 6 days ago, when he showed up, somewhat bedraggled, to report that he "finally understood what those rascally fellows were up to...the tracks bleed into each other in mystical ways that the composers- completely unknown to one another as far as I'm aware-  could never have explicitly planned for..."

my response was:  "ok, billy- delighted to hear that you're enjoying the music."

I haven't even seen the films for which the music was written, and neither has billy (people in this era are a little convoluted sometimes) but I have, at his gentle insistence, settled down with him a couple of times in front of said visualization apparatus to try and understand what all the fuss is about.

(admittedly, there are some pretty cool effects)

I can hear you wondering to yourself at whatever great distance you happen to be:  "does that rogue billy mix and mingle/scramble the various tracks into a sequence of his own choosing that speaks more personally to his subjective experience of living alone in a small log cabin outside the small town of mt. zion?" 

well, f.y.i- that's what he told the UPS man as he was leaving my house the other morning-

you will obviously want to know which soundtracks he has become so enthusiastic about and I'll get around to that eventually-  I want to be like that sort of generous/anonymous narrator, so beloved in the world's various storytelling-based cultures, who provides his or her patient listeners with the deep and dark satisfactions they hunger for.

billy stopped by again last night (sorry- still no word from siberia) wait- didn't I already go over that?  hmm....well, he just wanted to spend a little time alone with the visualizer!  he doesn't own his own computer and considers that to be a pretty unfortunate thing- always having to barge in on friends and associates at inopportune moments just so he can listen to music or record random musings and observations for strangers.

(you'll also probably want to know what version of itunes I'm referring to here and whether we're using standard or "classic"- well, sort of like billy's physical appearance, these are all sensitive matters that I intend to carefully sort thru in due course) 

(deep snow, deep forests, deep ethers, deep bodies)

(dig in deep snow) (winter echoes) (hidden chambers and ventricles)

the one thing I can share presently is that my poorly groomed friend keeps mumbling something about "indra's meshwork or web."   w.t.f.? I hear you mumbling- yeah, well, I mumbled it too-  we're all mumbling something or other these days!  it's the holiday season!...the holiday season...so whoop-de-doo...and dickory-dock...and don't forget...to hang up your sock...cause just exactly at 12 o'clock he'll be coming down the chimney down...   

so like any responsible citizen of the digital era, I logged onto wikipedia to find out just what this meshwork or web could possibly be, or was it just another strange coinage direct from billy's bizarre private mint-

well, whaddya know!  it exists.

(here's a few excerpts from the wiki entry- the page was last modified on march 11, 2010 but that doesn't mean that someone hasn't swooped in in just the last couple of minutes and rearranged or even sabotaged it completely- in any case, there's no need, no need at all, to physically go to wikipedia yourself so as to confirm that I'm not just making all of this crazy shit up-)

"...also called indra's jewels or indra's pearls) is a metaphor used to illustrate the concepts of emptiness, dependent origination, and interpenetration in mainstream buddhist philosophy...holds that all phenomena are intimately/infinitely repeated mutual relations existent...imagine, if you will, a spider's frail web in the early morning covered with dew- and now imagine niagra falls- well, they have a subtle agreement apparently...far far away in the tin shack of the mid-level god indra there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a weird manner that it stretches out quite far in all conceivable directions- and in accordance with the extravagant taste of all self-respecting tin shack enthusiasts, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" or "ear" or "nose" or even "mouth" of the net, and since the net itself seems to be damn near infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number as well- that's a lot of friggin' jewels, you guys! ..................................................................................................................  ................................................................................................................................................................................                     .................................there they hang, silently.....................hover.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................recede.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................collapse......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................recombine..........................................................................................................................................................................................................multiply.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... sorta like stars or black holes, you might say- a truly disoriented visualizer beholding a truly disorienting visualization!........................................................................sooooo.................................if we decide, just for laughs, to arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look quite closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net!!!!!!- seems crazy but check it out-  indra's got some whacked out visualizations in store for you!  and not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels as well- man, that's alo 

the casino

Call me K.  I know it’s weird.  Everything is weird nowadays!  Jack and Maria took away my identity and now there doesn’t appear to be any more of this precious thing called “identity.”  I knew some people once who dumped their possessions into the river.  We’re supposed to take care of our possessions.  We’re supposed to like our possessions.  People subtly move towards the exits, and if they’re in motor vehicles, they move toward the off ramps.  They’re not so sure that they want to commence on this journey.  I can’t say that I blame them.  I’ve been through alot recently and it’s taken what might be referred to as a psychological toll.  I won’t go so far as to call it the “road to perdition,” although that’s not necessarily the worst cliche I could apply to the overall damage.  Any other letter of the alphabet would probably do just as well, but for certain obscure reasons, several years back, I arbitrarily settled on K.  This is the gist of what happened:    

It was late in the evening when I arrived.  The village lay deep and silent in fresh-fallen snow.  The casino plaza was hidden, veiled in fog and darkness, nor was there the faintest glimmer of light to show that a casino was even there in the first place.  Some of the people around here must have serious psychological problems, I thought.  Gonna eventually have to do something regarding all these psychological problems.  On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village, I stood for a long time gazing out into what I think could only be called a vast seeming emptiness.

I sighed deeply, and proceeded on to find lodgings for the rest of the night.  Luckily there were still people up and about at the inn, and although the receptionist could not provide a room and was somewhat upset by such a late and unexpected arrival, she was willing to let me sleep on a bag of straw in the lobby.  Strange and unpleasant offer, no doubt, but I was already so dejected and tired that I accepted politely.  Some locals were still enjoying their peanuts and beer in the adjoining restaurant/lounge, but I didn’t feel like being social, and after fetching the bag of straw down from the attic myself, I quietly bedded down next to the fireplace.  It was a warm corner, the locals didn’t appear to be very intrusive, and, after letting my weary eyes stray over them briefly, I soon fell asleep, wondering how many of these people had serious psychological problems.

Well, surprise surprise, it wasn’t long before I was awakened.  A young fellow in a beat up but stylish leather jacket was standing right there along with the receptionist, both of them staring down at me sternly.  Turns out I wasn’t mistaken about the psychological problems!  I noticed that some of the locals had turned turned their chairs in our direction, almost as if in expectation of some kind of amusing performance.  The young fellow apologized for having wakened me, and introduced himself as the son of the casino manager.  “You may not be aware of it, sir, but this village belongs to the casino, and whoever lives here or even passes one single night here does so, effectively, in the casino itself.  Nobody is allowed to do that without the casino manager’s express authorization.  As far as I can tell, sir, you lack such authorization.  Unless I am mistaken, I’m afraid I am going to have to ask you to immediately vacate the premises and proceed on your journey, at least until you are well beyond the village borders.”

I had half-risen in bed at this point, smoothing down my hair and squinting up at these charmers.  “What village is this, anyways?  And what’s all this talk about a casino?”

Several of the locals shook their heads in astonishment.

“Sir, have you never heard of Count Dracula?  Have you never heard of his world-famous casino?”

“And I really need authorization just to sleep here?”  This was almost starting to seem like something straight out of Franz Kafka!

“One must indeed have received authorization” the young fellow replied.  There was a certain sarcastic contempt for my ignorance as he then appealed to the locals with a dramatic wave and tone of voice: “Who knows?  Maybe express authorization is just a thing of the past!  Maybe I, the manager’s son, wasn’t even informed of it!  Maybe I’m just wandering around here totally clueless as to how things are run here!”

Not surprisingly, the locals laughed heartily at this clever sally of his.

“Well then,” I mumbled, pushing the blanket away and getting up- “If it’s so important, I’ll go get authorization.”

“And just where might you get that, sir?”

“From Count Dracula, I suppose- do you have any better suggestions?”

The entire room completely erupted in laughter, and it lasted unabated for about 20 or 25 minutes.  I had never witnessed such a sudden loss of control!  The locals were pounding on the table, themselves, and each other, tears streaming down their faces- the two charmers standing over me were doubled over and heaving, barely able to stand, and leaning on one another and the walls for support.  Turns out I wasn’t mistaken about the psychological problems!  I laid back down, closed my eyes, and waited semi-patiently for these unusual people to “get it out of their systems.”

Finally, after the young fellow had regained a little composure, he cried, tears in his eyes, and a voice hoarse from uncontrollable laughter, “Authorization from Count Dracula at this hour of night!” which, of course, just set the whole group off again.  I continued lying there, wondering for a moment if this wasn’t all just a dream.

I waited until the laughter had almost completely subsided before sitting up again and trying to get a straight answer.  

“If it’s impossible to get authorization at this hour of night, why did you wake me up?  Why did you even let me bed down in the first place?”

The young fellow seemed deeply offended, and started gesticulating and shouting. “You hooligan!  You wandering, anonymous, good-for-nothing, bizarre excuse for a human!  You are vagueness incarnate, sir!  I will not be addressed in that fashion!”  He turned to the receptionist.  “Susan, let’s get this guy hauled away!”

Before Susan could say anything, I cut them short.  “People- chill out, please.  OK?  Take a couple deep breaths.  All of this drama is completely unnecessary.  I am the landscaper K whom the Count is expecting.  I’ve been hired on to reconfigure the grounds of one of his rental properties.  My assistants will be arriving tomorrow in a truck with all our equipment.  I decided to come one night ahead of schedule, to get a better look at the place, but unfortunately lost my way several times because of the snow.  That it was too late to report in to the Count was apparent to me without the benefit of your kind instruction.  That is also why I have accepted this substandard sleeping arrangement which you have had the further discourtesy to interrupt with these trifles about authorization.  That is all I have to say, ladies and gentlemen.  Good night.”

And with that, I pulled the blanket back over me and turned on my side toward the fireplace.

“Landscaper?  What the f?  All of the Count’s rental properties are just dandy the way that they are!  What an idea!  What an outlandish idea!  Why, I was just marvelling yesterday what a good job Groundskeeper Evans was doing!” I heard a number of remarks like this being muttered here and there around the lobby/lounge.  Eventually the young fellow suggested calling the casino main office to check.  It turned out that the phone was situated right next to the fireplace.  I had completely overlooked it in my drowsy condition.  Would I allow this continued disturbance of my much-needed night’s rest?  What other choice did I have?  I sat up in bed again and gazed wearily out into the room.  The receptionist was back behind the desk gazing stonily into her computer.  The telephone call was underway.  It turned out that the casino manager had gone home for the night, but one of the assistant managers, a certain Mr. Fritz, was available.  The young fellow in the leather jacket, identifying himself as Jack Schwartz, went on to report that he had come across a suspicious-looking man in his thirties sleeping calmly on a bag of straw off to the side of the lobby with a shoulder bag for a pillow and a telescoping aluminum walking stick within reach.  He had naturally suspected the fellow of vagrancy or perhaps even worse, and as Susan had obviously failed to properly look into the matter, he, Jack Schwarz, felt duty bound to take on the responsibility himself.  He reported to have roused and questioned the vagrant, asked for authorization, and having received none, ordered him to promptly and speedily continue on his way out of town, all of which the ingrate had rudely rebuffed, offering by way of excuse that he had been hired by the Count to do a “landscaping” job on one of his rental prperties.  Jack went on to ask Mr. Fritz to inquire with human resources if a landscaper was really expected- yes, he would be happy to hold.  There was a brief pause.  The lobby/lounge remained utterly silent.  After a few moments, Mr. Fritz was back on the line- his report was very brief.  Jack hung up the phone, shouting menacingly “Indeed!  Just as I thought!  Not a trace of a landscaper!  Just a clever, lying tramp who thought we would be taken in with such a transparently ridiculous story!”

For a moment I thought the whole assembly was going to tear me to pieces, and not knowing what else to do, I crawled under the blanket and readied myself for the assault.  But the telephone rang again.  Jack answered it hastily.  He stood there for awhile listening to a relatively long statement, his face growing despondent by degrees, until he said in a low, dispirited voice:  “Really?  Are you sure?  He has been officially hired?  The head of the department confirmed it?  Wow.  That’s strange, really strange.  Yes.  OK, yes.  Thanks for checking.  Good-bye.”

I immediately pricked up my ears.  So the casino had recognized me as a hired landscaper after all.  Not that I was surprised, but after all of this bizarre “authorization” rigmarole I have to admit that I was a little concerned.  I’d been through some permit/licensing issues a handful of times in my career, and I knew that sometimes they could take weeks to resolve.  I had been led to believe that this job was shovel-ready!

               

        

the animal kingdom

Godzilla's appearance has changed quite a bit over the years; however, most of his core characteristics have remained fairly consistent.

For example, his terrible roar- changing only slightly in pitch and timbre when he made the transition from film to cartoon.  Godzilla's basic physiology retains the same general properties, which are, of course, instantly recognizable: a giant, lime-green, bipedal, mutant iguana or dinosaur with rough, bumpy scales, a long powerful tail, fierce teeth, and jagged dorsal fins often blue or dark purple in color.

Although the legend of his origins varies somewhat from film to film, it is generally understood that he is a prehistoric reptile-amphibian hybrid who mutated into his present form thru massive radiation exposure, most likely from an atomic weapons test gone awry. Non-canonical sources (such as the Universal Studios version of King Kong vs. Godzilla) suggest that Japan is the home of Godzilla's ancestors.  However, this has never been confirmed by a credible source.

The most notable of Godzilla's many abilities is his nuclear breath: a powerful heat-ray of atomic fire or lava which shoots out at mach-speed from his terrible mouth. Godzilla is also depicted as being resistant to most kinds of injury thanks to a tough, leathery hide and sophisticated self-healing properties. He is portrayed as being quick, strong, and dexterous, sometimes utilizing arcane martial arts techniques in combat.

The famous “Godzilla roar” is the copyrighted sound that the creature most often uses to communicate his displeasure.  It is a very mechanical sounding roar and does not resemble any other known animal noise one might actually encounter out in the wild.

This terrifying noise, debuted in the original Godzilla film, was created by acclaimed Japanese composer Akira, who produced the sound by rubbing a resin-covered leather glove along the loosened strings of a double bass and then slowed down the playback.  

Over the years the roar has become a trademark feature of the Godzilla franchise and is now instantly recognizable all over the globe. Its fame is on a par with the iconic Tarzan yell.  It is often pirated by other directors for satirical purposes when monsters or animal villains are featured onscreen or when a human character becomes exceedingly angry and wishes for this anger to become generally known.

Godzilla usually lets his mighty roar be heard when he makes his initial appearance in a production, even if there is no discernible reason for doing so. During destruction and fighting sequences he usually roars multiple times. Directors tend to re-use Akira’s original recording, but in more recent years variations of the roar have been crafted to express some of Godzilla’s different emotions.

All of these looped decibels are a kind of “under wraps” flagellation, a lunar entity into which being and sickness both enter, by way of ear lust, pulling a soiled uniform over one’s skeleton, and heading down to the racetrack to personally “weigh in” on the issues.  I need only mention in passing the reappearance of the “catfish” tradition in the popular cycle of zen instructional videos, which proliferated in the wake of japan’s initial encounter with buddhism.

Pioneers drove by instinct; this gave way to steering by instrument; and then to fully automated GPS monitors stretched way beyond the lustre of older stock phrase equivalents, traded freely, off market, to the very end of the crocodile’s snout.

crocodile: member species of the family Croco-dy-la-dae are large aquatic reptiles that live throughout the tropics worldwide. They tend to congregate in freshwater habitats such as rivers, lakes, wetlands, and feed mostly on earthworms, giant pythons, cheetahs, crayfish, and, of course, one another.  They first appeared during the Eocene epoch, about 55 million years ago.

Godzilla's signature weapon is his distinctive nuclear breath. His dorsal fins glow ominously, and then he lets loose with a concentrated blast of radiation direct from his gullet. This power is often mistaken for mere fire or smoke by his enemies, much to their unpleasant surprise and undoing. In Godzilla’s Challenge his breath was depicted as having incendiary properties strong enough to destroy a small belt of black holes, while in Godzilla Grills out with Neighbors it possessed incredible range, power and accuracy, able to hit microscopic targets in deep outer space and pick off invading goblins one by one while Godzilla casually floated on his back thru the Straits of Gibraltar.  

In a memorable (and somewhat infamous) scene in Godzilla Comes to his Senses, he ingeniously uses his breath to fly by aiming it down at our earth and using the properties of inverse gravity to lift off like a rocket. His breath can also power electrodes, melt steel and rock, germinate plants, cook raw meat, and instantly evaporate water.

In donning the data-suit an individual slips into a catastrophically pure information environment, a body suddenly endowed with a muscle-nerve interface that slips over one’s own subcutaneous longing.  Mark Twain’s cave might apply here.  There are several desirable openings.  Lengthening, widening arches.  Cardboard cities, literally woven out of electronic impulses, no longer satisfied merely to synthesize pressure and noises, but planets, office desks, and old-fashioned steam radiators.

Nonetheless, I recall the Vice President of Panasonic’s AV research and development laboratory inquiring if the storm-fiend was planning to kick up another ruckus this evening.  I had better be getting back to the tent now to make sure everything is shipshape, weigh down the canvas with a few extra boulders, bank the fire, and prepare myself a little hardtack and gingersnap tea.  In another reality my avatar lives in a dingy one bedroom apartment, nothing like the brisk desert islands I am always reading about in the newspaper.  “Excuse me, man or woman, may I please have the sugar?”  “Why certainly, man or woman- pardon me for not having it passed it already.”

Crocodiles are very fast over short distances, in and out of the water. Because they hunt by lunging out and holding onto their prey, they have evolved extremely sharp teeth and massive jaws for tearing into and clamping down onto the flesh of their food source.  They have the most powerful bite of any known animal, clocking in at 5,000 pounds per square inch, compared to just 335 for a Rottweiler, 400 for a large great white shark, 900 for a hyena, or 2,000 for a giant sea tortoise.

Godzilla has displayed an uncanny ability to resist long term injury. Not even the pressure and cold of deep sea trenches can phase him. Starting in the first Godzilla film, he displayed an immunity to all conventional weaponry, impervious to even full-on military assault.  It was also implied that he might be resistant to technology still to come in the future!!! On several occasions he has demonstrated the ability to survive complete submersion in boiling hot magma for periods of time up to 5 or 6 centuries. He has even survived being at ground zero of asteroid impacts and being buried under tons of ice for decades at a time, seemingly cut off from all oxygen sources.

As noted earlier, Godzilla possesses an extremely advanced and highly efficient regenerative ability. This power was a crucial plot point in Godzilla vs. the Bio-Mass and Godzilla’s Progeny. In Godzilla’s Progeny it was implied that Godzilla's regenerative abilities may have something to do with his radioactive substratum. Organizer G1 is the name given to a rare oil in his DNA interface that is responsible for his swift, efficient healing. Even complex neural tissue can be completely regenerated!!!  At the very end of Godzilla Reconsiders his Overall Strategy, after he has been completely obliterated (or so they all think), his heart is shown beating quietly on the dark ocean floor,  suggesting Godzilla's Organizer G1 would allow him to completely regenerate himself from just this one single organ!!! (Admittedly, his healing abilities have not been entirely consistent from one film to another.)

The jade goddess has taken metropolitan logic to its natural conclusion by proposing to replace the old interstate system with an underground railway that will run at approximately 1500 kilometers an hour linking central-southern Wisconsin’s 9 or 10 biggest cities.  To get out of these dust-buggies once and for all has been the dream of humankind since approximately the mid 1920’s.

Chuang-tzu, on the other hand, not only has no metaphysics, he actually condemns and derides that particular science.  The supernatural and the material are equally laughable.  His only cosmogonic principle appears to be “stillness.”  Oddly enough, the only philosophical tool he uses is logic, but with one minor qualification- it’s the logic of dreams.  He makes no mention of divinity, or the purpose of being, or the indestructibility of the self, or the abuses of conceptual language.  This a terrible thing to say out loud, but he even makes fun of yoga.

Inside the deep cavern avoiding the dusk-charged abandonment:  “Excuse me, man or woman, may I please have the sugar?”  “Why certainly, man or woman- pardon me for not having it passed it already.”  A lot of bunk, none of them really care if you get any sugar or not.  Just try asking for something more complicated and see how far that gets you.

Bear in mind once again improvements in data-capture or “keyboarding” in the airline meta-pilot’s graded perceptual system.  This branch of ergonomic research has recently led to new dromo-matrixes for replacing the entire instrument panel with a digi-linked helmet and full-body data-suit, a sort of “virtual cockpit” whose semi or selectively transparent visor would display flight parameters at the precise moment they become indispensable.  

Ophthalmology thus no longer restricts itself to practices necessitated by disease or deficiency; it has broadened its range to include an intensive exploitation of the actual gaze in which the depth of field of human vision is being progressively confiscated by opto-electronic programming that has the modest aim of organizing the most subconscious visual reflexes in order to simultaneously improve the witnesses’ reception of signals, response times, and stereo-grapha-nomic relationships.  

A kind of mirror image, more or less, based on the open marriage concept one often reads about in upper-paleolithic societies.

Crocodile embryos do not have sex chromosomes, and unlike humans, sex is not determined genetically. Sex is determined by temperature, with males produced at around 89 °F, and females produced at slightly lower and higher temperatures. The average incubation period is around 80 days, and also is dependent on temperature.  Crocodiles are protected in many parts of the world, but they also are farmed commercially. Their hides are tanned and used to make leather goods such as shoes, wallets, belts, handbags, bracelets, headbands, and briefcases; crocodile meat is also considered a delicacy. The saltwater crocodile and Nile crocodile are by far the most dangerous, killing between 5 and 7 hundred people each year.

Godzilla's body constantly emits its own radiation, similar to the process of nuclear fission. It has been shown to contaminate water sources, raise ocean temperatures, destroy crops, and create mutations, such as the giant sea louse in Godzilla Loses All Will to Live.  His massive footprints as well as objects and people he has been in close contact with hold traces that register on a geiger counter, while Godzilla himself will register at a distance of approximately 300 miles.  

His radiation, however, doesn't appear to be destructive at all times and places.  For example, In Godzilla Goes to Hawaii, in a panoramic underwater scene, a smiling Godzilla swims in close proximity with several schools of colorful fish and not only are the fish not visibly harmed, but they even appear to increase in strength and over-all confidence at having such a powerful ally and neighbor.

“Chaos never died,” the films seem to be telling us.  The avant-garde eats its own shit and apparently likes it!  If the artist has in fact perished, and if the audience has in fact withered away, then we find ourselves free of even more useless freight, and may commence slapping high-fives in the traditional manner.  Provided we can escape from the museums floating around in our skulls; provided we can stop selling raffle tickets to the guillotines inside our computers; we can begin to contemplate an exchange which re-creates the dynamic of the old taoist masters, who were often described as not rushing into anything, ever, as if fording icy streams in early winter; retiring and hesitant, as if shy or even afraid of other people; reverent in demeanor to total strangers, as if encountering visiting royalty;  

how do I know that the love of life is not just a massive delusion?  or that the fear of death is not like an adolescent running away from a difficult home and refusing to ever go back?  Come the morning, those who dream of drunken orgies and feasts may weep and moan terribly- those who dream of weeping and moaning may go fuck-crazy, pig out, and get hammered out of their gourds!  When they dream, they don’t know it’s a dream!  Indeed, in their dreams they may think they’re interpreting dreams- only when they wake up do they realize it was all just a dream!

Despite his incredible power, Godzilla has displayed a few weaknesses over the years. In King Kong vs. Godzilla and Godzilla Contemplates Suicide he is shown to be vulnerable to strong voltages of coal powered electricity. And yet, as the series progressed, natural lightning has been shown to have the opposite property, serving to revitalize him from his paralyzing guilt-trips and depressions.

In Godzilla Interrogates God it was revealed that he had a back-up, miniature brain in his spine, which came in handy when Aquaman ordered a small brood of poisonous eels to suck out his original brain thru his nostrils while he was collapsed in a drunken stupor on one of the island chain’s crystalline beaches.   

This is my thirteenth year as president of the united states of america.  I was little more than a lad when I first came to this village.  my ideas were all very simple then; there’s no use going into them.  my hobbies were stickball, writing articles for the neighborhood newsletter, fishing, rooting for the Yankees, and woodworking.  Now I am an old man but scarcely any smarter, I fear.  So little are white hair and a wrinkled forehead an indication of wisdom!

The screen door bangs in the wind, one of the hinges is loose.  together, hand in hand, we look back at the rickety house.  It sure could use a coat of paint! Except that I am too lazy to do it myself and too poor to hire professionals!  Just keeping body and soul together takes up 99% of my energy!  And soon, even that relatively simple task may prove to be far beyond my meager powers.

(by the way, that was a good joke you played on your co-worker Martin last week.  That should teach him to shoot video of he and his girlfriend having sexual intercourse with expensive company property.)

still, it is rather fun to linger outside in the rain, letting one’s clothes get soaked and one’s electronic devices be compromised by the moisture.  what difference does it make?  They’ll all dry out eventually. No one will scold us for dying, or look askance at our  principles.  Supposing I catch cold?  Or ruin my devices completely?  There are no doctors or tech advisors around here to make a fool of me.  I’ve already been essentially laughed out of polite or proper society!  A really serious case of pneumonia would suit me right down to the ground.  Ker-choo!   Gesundheit!  

Aw, what’s the use of being president anyways?  I’m going back to the wilderness.  Good-bye, people.  Good-bye, storm fiend.  Good-bye, all you ravenous vultures.

anonymous

the following remarks were delivered to a small group of anonymous bystanders- the speaker was also anonymous and afterward successfully disappeared into the crowd-

the group quietly cited disappointment as the majority sentiment among the most committed and energetic of the so-called natural or intuitive comics-

these are the types that usually talk about “intuition”. . .they talk about the restorative and yet almost entirely unstudied powers of natural “habitus”- code, of course, for living out in the middle of nowhere- and by that I don’t mean small town but primeval, primordial nature!

if this is still ever alluded to as quote, mother or maternal type nature, outside the obvious context of some crude and rancidly inappropriate sexual joke- terrible terrible jokes are being told about sexuality these days!  jokes that are crafted and delivered at the sole expense of sexuality- sexuality itself being almost entirely destroyed and humiliated-  people vowing right and left to never have sex again in their lives!  the image that always comes first to mind for the general public is the one of quote raw animal or quote raw meat gratification- mainstream news organization appropriate these terms very quickly and proudly, and for that we in the entertainment industry are sometimes very richly rewarded indeed.  there hovers still in the eyes of the latest panel of judges- the essence of an orgy followed by an awards-style banquet- the long tradition of ever-decreasing intimate or sexual thresholds between the players and the semi-engaged audience meagerly watching on from a comfortable distance-  I suppose he means you?

one thinks parenthetically sometimes about the team vs. the workforce the same way one might accidentally or discreetly dismiss one of the so-called artificials, or synthetic comedians. . .those among us who are almost entirely dependent on and as a result of that hyper-addicted to all manner and level of mind-altering chemicals.  a group of individuals who probably should not even be allowed to go into comedy!

it is cruel to put certain types of people out on display like that!  

they won’t enjoy it and the audience probably will not enjoy it much either.  there is no talk here of enjoyment.  there is no movement whatsoever in the direction of an appreciable or accretive sense of enjoyment: as in, the person sensed enjoyment, the person was overcome with enjoyment, the person sought out enjoyment, the person achieved deep enjoyment, also, of course, sometimes referred to as

a sense of deep and all-pevasive enjoyment,

a deep enjoyment of the body, in all of its physical layers, beginning of course with the clothing and the web of stories intricately stitched into the clothing-

after this, of course, comes the pure and unadulterated enjoyment-

that old New York/New Berlin line oftentimes comes to mind in this context-

“I look out at the seaboard, I feel a quiet shift in the atmosphere, there is a shit ton of sand and seaweed but I still derive tremendous amounts of enjoyment- enjoyment perhaps by this point attaining something along the lines of human rights or universally articulated standards or principles.  quietly looking up into the night and feeling evoked and arrested, and then demolished at one’s core by a hypo-static but ongoing sense of enjoyment.  never underestimate enjoyment.  never take your eye off the enjoyment.”

It is cruel to put a person like that out on display where his or her fellow citizens will not hesitate for one instant before ridiculing, satirizing, eviscerating, and finally outright insulting him in the most ecologically substantial of ways.

I read that and was disappointed- I felt an immediate and distinctive sense of disappointment.  circumstances were disappointing, disapproving, a sense of palpable, immediate, and core-of-the-earth-deep dis-engagement, disavowal, disillusion, often culminating in an amplified and well-rehearsed detestation.

this final term is the signature one-

detestation of any and everything that has ever been set forth as traditionally sacred.  as in a person who swears solemn vows on her laptop or radio.  any man, woman, or child who invokes the halo of the natural godhead in regards to his or her own digitized backfile-

someone or something, somewhere along the historical line, had set this pre-fabricated network in motion as newsworthy or special- beyond time, beyond parallel, beyond itemized understandings, tunnelling into the earth, tunnelling into the swamp, tunnelling out to the dutch mill park and ride and beyond, unless there is strong enough incentive to come quietly tunnelling back-

a means of people together, as in gathering, as in a single, predetermined location, as opposed to mobs which form more naturally, and usually have as their baseline desire the taking over resuming implicit control over the universe.

you hear something like that, it’s hard to believe it’s coming from a credible source.  you look a little bit closer and ask- now wait here!  what’s the actual source?

the quote goes on as follows:

 “I was a theater major- I’m sorry.  My life had never been very successful, and I continued to go to incredible lengths to avoid science, math, and technology classes- but Puck’s Pizza and Penelope’s Sidewalk Internet Cafeteria occupied a strategic location on campus, midway between my residence and one of the premier entertainment districts in the region, and on weekend evenings I’d often spend an hour or two at a terminal while waiting for the keg parties to get underway.  I had always been a keenly staunch supporter of alcohol.  I frequented gatherings where it was sometimes available in essentially unlimited fashion.  55 gallon barrels and half barrels stacked 15 feet high, on any piece of property that was at that time available to Ron’s Public House.  Unbelievable numbers of books, unbelievable amounts of high quality alcohol- typically, I’d fritter away the time playing Super Mario Brothers. But I did manage to eventually teach myself how to use the system’s cumbersome “trip-to-Mars”  program and even managed a few sophisticated inter-network marriage ties and symposia.  There were, of course, quiet negotiations going off on the side- but I still was able to order the computer around pretty effectively.  I guess it’s fair to say that I made it grovel on a pretty regular basis.   I delivered orders, instructions, negotiations, and judgments.  I wanted to make it my slave.  I wanted to be able to go on issuing this quality and number of threats and commands for the long term.  And that was just the beginning of what might be called a digital dalliance.  It was a foregone clusion that I would be ending my life prematurely.  For every hour I passed in Puck and Penelopes, I must have spent two dozen next door in Ron’s lending library and public house. I crammed for exams up in the shop’s cavernous reading room, looked up facts in the weighty volumes on the reference shelves, and worked part-time checking books in and out at the circulation desk. Most of my library time, though, went to wandering the long, narrow corridors of the stacks.  Despite being surrounded by tens of thousands of books, I don’t remember feeling the anxiety that’s symptomatic of what we today call “information overload.”  Mostly I just thought about hurling myself into the path of oncoming traffic.  There was something calming in the reticence of all those books, their willingness to wait years, decades even, for the right reader to come along and pull them from their appointed slots. Take your time, the books whispered to me in their dusty voices. We’re not going anywhere.

It was in 1986, five years after I was released from prison, that computers entered my life in earnest. To my wife’s dismay, I spent nearly our entire savings, some $ 2,000, on one of Apple’s earliest Macintoshes— a Mac Plus decked out with a single megabyte of RAM, a 20-megabyte hard drive, and a tiny black-and-white screen. I still recall the excitement I felt as I unpacked the little beige machine. I set it on my desk, plugged in the keyboard and mouse, and flipped the power switch. It lit up, sounded a welcoming chime, and smiled at me as it went through the mysterious routines that brought it to life. I was smitten. The Plus did double duty as both a home and a business computer. Every day, I lugged it into the offices of the management consulting firm where I worked as an editor. I used Microsoft Word to revise proposals, reports, and presentations, and sometimes I’d launch Excel to key in revisions to a consultant’s spreadsheet. Every evening, I carted it back home, where I used it to keep track of the family finances, write letters, play games (still goofy, but less primitive), and— most diverting of all— cobble together simple databases using the ingenious HyperCard application that back then came with every Mac. Created by Bill Atkinson, one of Apple’s most inventive programmers, HyperCard incorporated a hypertext system that anticipated the look and feel of the World Wide Web. Where on the Web you click links on pages, on HyperCard you clicked buttons on cards— but the idea, and its seductiveness, was the same. The computer, I began to sense, was more than just a simple tool that did what you told it to do. It was a machine that, in subtle but unmistakable ways, exerted an influence over you. The more I used it, the more it altered the way I worked. At first I had found it impossible to edit anything on-screen. I’d print out a document, mark it up with a pencil, and type the revisions back into the digital version. Then I’d print it out again and take another pass with the pencil. Sometimes I’d go through the cycle a dozen times a day. But at some point— and abruptly— my editing routine changed. I found I could no longer write or revise anything on paper. I felt lost without the Delete key, the scrollbar, the cut and paste functions, the Undo command. I had to do all my editing on-screen. In using the word processor, I had become something of a word processor myself. Bigger changes came after I bought a modem, sometime around 1990. Up to then, the Plus had been a self-contained machine, its functions limited to whatever software I installed on its hard drive. When hooked up to other computers through the modem, it took on a new identity and a new role. It was no longer just a high-tech Swiss Army knife. It was a communications medium, a device for finding, organizing, and sharing information. I tried all the online services— CompuServe, Prodigy, even Apple’s short-lived eWorld— but the one I stuck with was America Online. My original AOL subscription limited me to five hours online a week, and I would painstakingly parcel out the precious minutes to exchange e-mails with a small group of friends who also had AOL accounts, to follow the conversations on a few bulletin boards, and to read articles reprinted from newspapers and magazines. I actually grew fond of the sound of my modem connecting through the phone lines to the AOL servers. Listening to the bleeps and clangs was like overhearing a friendly argument between a couple of robots. By the mid-nineties, I had become trapped, not unhappily, in the “upgrade cycle.” I retired the aging Plus in 1994, replacing it with a Macintosh Performa 550 with a color screen, a CD-ROM drive, a 500-megabyte hard drive, and what seemed at the time a miraculously fast 33-megahertz processor. The new computer required updated versions of most of the programs I used, and it let me run all sorts of new applications with the latest multimedia features. By the time I had installed all the new software, my hard drive was full. I had to go out and buy an external drive as a supplement. I added a Zip drive too— and then a CD burner. Within a couple of years, I’d bought another new desktop, with a much larger monitor and a much faster chip, as well as a portable model that I could use while traveling. My employer had, in the meantime, banished Macs in favor of Windows PCs, so I was using two different systems, one at work and one at home. It was around this same time that I started hearing talk of something called the Internet, a mysterious “network of networks” that promised, according to people in the know, to “change everything.” A 1994 article in Wired declared my beloved AOL “suddenly obsolete.” A new invention, the “graphical browser,” promised a far more exciting digital experience: “By following the links— click, and the linked document appears— you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition.” 13 I was intrigued, and then I was hooked. By the end of 1995 I had installed the new Netscape browser on my work computer and was using it to explore the seemingly infinite pages of the World Wide Web. Soon I had an ISP account at home as well— and a much faster modem to go with it. I canceled my AOL service.

You know the rest.

you know the rest of the story-

you know the rest of the story because it’s probably youre story too

Ever-faster chips. Ever-quicker modems. DVDs and DVD burners. Gigabyte-sized hard drives. Yahoo and Amazon and eBay. MP3s. Streaming video. Broadband. Napster and you know all the rest- you all know the rest of the story- you probably all know the rest of the story because it’s your story also.  we share stories- there is a sense of overwhelming enjoyment- we wake up in the morning and expereince an immdeiate, overpowering sense of enjoyment.  We have tunneled deep into the abyss of a pure and unfettered state of near-constant enjoyment- even to the point where you sometimes hear the cheer raised in a crowd- hip hip hooray- 3 cheers for lasting enjoyment!