For all of our daily transactions we will use a new form of currency. In this currency the traditional engraved presidential portrait will be replaced by a paper-thin, hyperreflective mylar mirror. When we wish to make a purchase we will stare fixedly into this mirror, waiting for it to capture the image of our face and transmit it to a nano-scale supercomputer woven into the fabric of each bill. This computer will then analyze our features with sophisticated psychometric software, parsing each flicker of an eyelid, each dilation or constriction of our pupils, each micron-scale muscular twitch, into an n-dimensional data-matrix which will constitute a detailed portrait of our mental, emotional and spiritual state at the point of purchase. From this data the denomination will be calculated according to user-defined parameters, its value displayed on a pair of tiny digital counters set into the corners of the bill.
Thus the coin of the realm will no longer be founded upon the stern rigor of the gold standard; nor upon the broader base of Populist bi-metalism; nor even upon the solemn weight and authority of the Federal Reserve. Any prospect of monetary stability will be abandoned. Our currency will instead derive the whole of its value from the giddy, chaotic flux of our individual moods and emotions.
The first six months following the introduction of the new monetary system will be a period of fiscal chaos. Wall Street will oscillate wildly between boom and bust. The yield on 20 year treasury bonds will plummet to an all time low. Inflation will escalate to Weimar-era proportions. We will all liquidate our savings, reprogram our money to match our mood of the moment, then race through the malls on manic spending sprees, laughing hysterically, howling with rage, trembling with luxuriant terror; we will burn with erotic passion or even be seized by a luminous transcendence akin to religious ecstasy. The economy will burst in an unrestrained flood-tide of pure feeling that will leave economists reeling at the exponential growth of the money supply, and have bankers clutching their heads, aghast at what technology hath wrought.
Finally the federal government will be forced to take emergency measures. The treasury department will order that the new currency be recalled for reprogramming. In the interim period all emotion will be severely rationed. Federal marshals will patrol the malls, empowered to make an arrest at any overly generous display of feeling. Even so little as a wan smile, a tender glance, a peevish gesture, will be likely to get one called in for questioning.
After long study the Council of Economic Advisers will issue a report on the near-catastrophe. The report will affirm the viability of an emotion-backed currency, but insist that user-programmability is inherently incompatible with fiscal restraint, and that a sound dollar must be backed by a single, stable, long-term predictable emotion. In accordance with the Council's recommendations the Treasury will reissue the currency with user-programmability disabled. Each bill's emotional parameters will be permanently defined to yield maximum value in response to a display of any combination of vague bitterness, undifferentiated anger and barren, bleak despair.
"The Nixon Dollar," it will be called; nobody will know why.
Not all of the old currency will vanish. There will still be a few of the old, flexible bills floating around the back alleys of the economy. Loopy, irrational joy will still purchase a trinket or two from wandering nomadic bands rumored to be descended from the Deadheads; ironic detachment will buy a cup of espresso in the odd grungy urban coffeehouse. But these will be for the few, the marginal, the outcast. We of the silent majority will have no truck with such unsavory commerce. We will be found each evening crowding the lines at the supermarket, glowering into our wallets, staring our faces into stone as we try to conjure up enough bile and spleen to cover this week's supply of groceries.
We will all be dead presidents.
scott hawkins
svrdPalm@interramp.com
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In the future the rich will have compassion for the poor.
This will cause them no small measure of distress. They will be convinced that this abundance of kindheartedness lying dormant in their souls is a vital resource that has yet to be properly exploited. A study commissioned by the Heritage Foundation will prove this assessment to be justified. It will estimate the total value of uncirculated compassion within the hearts of the rich to be $2.7 billion. In addition it will discover that this vast, stagnant pool of sympathy, by acting as a drag on their acquisitive instincts, lowers the productivity of the vital entrepreneurial class by a whopping 23.6%.
These figures will be regarded with alarm. The Wall Street Journal will demand that immediate action be taken, preferably by the private sector, to relieve the rich of this "crushing burden of concern." This will be attempted. A company will be formed to market "Compassion Certificates." These will be offered for sale in bus stations, liquor stores, soup kitchens and other places where the impoverished are known to congregate. For a mere $10 a poor person can purchase a certificate entitling him or her to the "heartfelt condolences" of a billionaire. This company will go bankrupt within two months.
Then the federal government will get into the act, establishing a series of "Sympathy Banks" where the rich can deposit their excess feelings of pity and tenderness to be loaned out to the deserving poor at a moderate, government-subsidized rate of interest, repayable over a 25-year period. This scheme, too, will meet with less than universal success.
The rich will feel betrayed. What is wrong with the poor?, they will cry. We have an overabundance of sympathy for them, yet they absolutely refuse to purchase it at anything approaching its market value. They must be stupid. Or lazy. Or drunk.
Finally, in desperation, the rich will appeal to Congress for relief. This will result in the passage of the landmark "Pity and Compassion Dispersal and Enhancement Act." This act will provide federal funds to purchase, at full market value, any declared surplus of sympathy from any American citizen residing in the upper 5% of the population in terms of net income after taxes, this sympathy to be redistributed by the government to those deemed worthy of its blessings. This program will be funded by a $30/yr surtax imposed on those Americans residing in the lowest quintile (20%) of the population in terms of income.
Following the passage of the act, the rich will weep warm and copious tears, tears that will continue to flow, month after prosperous month, every time their check from the government arrives offering solid, financial proof that the rich do indeed have compassion for the poor.
You can bank on it.
scott hawkins
svrdPalm@interramp.com
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In the future we will all rush out to buy Windows 2025.
We will have no choice in the matter, for Windows 2025 will be the first operating system to govern not only world of computers, but the whole of human society. If we wish to interface with the world, to converse with our neighbors, to advance in our careers, to raise up our children, to appreciate the wonders of nature, art, music and literature, to get out of life everything it has to offer, we must have Windows 2025 installed.
Windows 2025 will ship packaged in a 500cc hypodermic syringe. The only documentation will be a simple one page installation guide--
TO INSTALL WINDOWS 2025....As we drift off to sleep our inner organs will begin to itch as the hoards of nanotech molecular robots of the Microsoft Installer Program swarm through our system, rewiring neurons, rewriting genetic code, rerouting established intellectual and emotional data flows to assure maximum compatibility with the new Operating System. In our dreams we will ascend effortlessly to a mountain summit from which vantage we will gaze down upon the sprawling, clogged, polluted city of our former selves as it is mercifully and unceremoniously bulldozed flat. We will then see a new city miraculously appear around us-- the City of Windows, the City on a Hill, aglow with the luminous library of beauty to be found in Microsoft Art Gallery. We will feel our bodies begin to change, our features alter, see the pigment of our skin modulate to blend in with the new graphical interface. From our lips will spill a torrent of words as our old, chaotic language is is purged, to be replaced by the concise vocabulary of Microsoft Dictionary. Our minds, our spirits, will be set ablaze, so overwhelmed by the downloading of Encarta's ordered universe of data that, come the dawn, we'll hardly know whether we have awakened or are still dreaming, so transcendent and dreamlike will seem the world of Windows 2025.1) Immediately before bedtime, inject Windows into any major artery.
2) Pleasant dreams!
3) Wake up to the world of Windows 2025!!!
Not all of us will be so fortunate, however. A significant proportion of consumers (38% of all users, according to one estimate) will, as they drift off to sleep with Microsoft fresh in their veins, be confronted by the "hardware incompatibility" screen nowhere mentioned in the advertising.
"There exists a serious compatibility problem with current hardware," it will say. "Dismantle obsolete hardware?" The user will click the "cancel" button and get no response, then click it again and, frantically, several times more. Finally the "ok" button will hilite of its own accord.
"Dismantling current hardware may prove to be quite painful," the System will respond. "Are you sure you wish to continue?" This time there will be no "cancel" button. The user will pause for a moment, then click "yes."
The night will be filled with the howlings of Microsoft customers suffering the tortures of the damned as their bodies are, molecule by molecule, dismantled by the methodical molecular robots of Microsoft, broken down into tidy packages of basic chemicals to be later collected and recycled. Finally towards dawn, a hush will fall over the land. The preterite, the passed-over, the deleted masses, thrashed by the Operating System, stripped of flesh, blood and bone, with nothing left but brain and shredded nerves, will be granted a final vision. Against a sky of pale blue dotted with fluffy white clouds will appear the words "Welcome to Death. Would you like to enter Microsoft Heaven? (Have your credit card ready.)"
It will never be known which button they choose to click.
Meanwhile we the living will step forward into the dawn of Windows 2025, so grateful to be granted a partition by the Operating System that we will not deign to notice the far from minor glitches and bugs in the program. We will not complain when sectors of our memory momentarily disappear. We will not betray alarm when we suddenly find ourselves standing on the edge of a vast chasm that has opened in reality. We will not speak to our neighbors of the lost mornings we spend sitting on the edges of our beds, staring at a simple chair, wondering what it might be called and what it is to be used for. In fact, we will even come to look forward to these inevitable breakdowns in the System. They will give us an excuse to visit our Microsoft dealer, credit card in hand, to pick up patches of code, bug fixes, system upgrades, anything to stick in our veins that will give us the rush of being recompiled. Eventually we will be found there seven days a week, sprawled in the alleys behind Microcenter and CompUSA. Shooting up like junkies, we might once have said, but no more. "Junkie" is a word that will not be found in Microsoft Dictionary.
scott hawkins
svrdPalm@interramp.com
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In the future kissing will become dangerous.
Our lips will lose their sensitivity, their ability to cling. They will grow stiff, clumsy, frozen.
We will smile all the time.
Our evenings will be spent gazing long hours out our windows. We will play soft, romantic music on the stereo. We will sip cups of tea, or fluted glasses of fine wine. We will experience moments of ineffable tenderness, and at these moments we will perhaps silently hold hands. Our windows will be hung with thick, doubled panes of shatterproof glass.
We will not look with longing into each other's eyes. We will sit in the flickering light and gaze straight ahead out our windows, our lips set in an unyielding, merciless smile, transfixed by the billowing flames. In the chill cocoon of our air-conditioning we will not feel their fierce heat. Beneath the tender music we will not hear the victims' screams, their frantic pleas for mercy, the crackling of their flesh as they are pitched onto the pyre. We will not feel the dull ache of our lips stretched unbearably taut.
We will not feel the heat, but drops of sweat will dot our brow. Our lips will be baked dry--stretched thin, glazed over and seared as in a kiln. They will be as fragile as fine china.
An eternal, brittle, enigmatic and terrified Mona Lisa smile.
At evening's end we will turn away from the dying embers to go to bed. Cautiously we will kiss each other good night. Our lips will make a dry, formal clicking sound as we delicately brush them together like teacups. If ever we should forget ourselves, in a flicker of passion attempt to cleave to each other, mouth against mouth, sensuous and yielding, our lips will shatter beyond repair. Dessicated crystals of our blood will spill from our broken mouths, scattering across the carpet.
In the morning the maid will come to sweep up the mess. At the door she will take care to wipe the ashes from her shoes before she enters the house.
scott hawkins
svrdPalm@interramp.com
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In the future the borderline separating the living from the dead will begin to blur, perhaps even eventually it will be effaced.
The Irvine Company will buy out financially troubled Forest Lawn Mortuaries and restore them to solvency by developing a trio of upscale shopping malls, carefully integrated with Forest Lawn's three Memorial Parks. In addition, they will begin offering luxury internment sites at Fashion Island. These will prove to be such efficient generators of profit that Disney, in a meticulously orchestrated six-month orgy of accumulation, will buy out not only the Irvine Company but over a hundred other development firms and funeral establishments throughout the North American Free Trade area, and begin a massive redevelopment project unprecedented in human history.
Soon, throughout the USA and Canada, as well as in the more prosperous enclaves of Mexico, the ritual of mourning will be utterly transformed. No longer will it be cut off from daily life, a bounded ceremony of closure, a tear-stained farewell to what is past; it will instead be an intimate part of everybody's daily existence, a never ending, utterly cheerful celebration of the eternal Present and radiant Future embodied in the fervent, mass-produced icons that gaze out from a thousand display-windows upon us as, with credit cards in hand, we stroll through the malls in the company of our domesticated dead.
For the dead shall walk among us. Their computer-generated holographic ghosts will tug at our sleeves. We will hear the ceaseless murmur of their voices deep within the muzak. They'll beg us for presents, which we will gladly buy, just to see them smile. We'll take them to movies to hear them laugh. They will become a major participant in the booming global economy. Market research will show that the dead account for over 30% of all retail sales, and Madison Avenue will react accordingly. We will see the more famous among the departed on television, selling beer and shampoo. Young and attractive corpses will find gainful employment modeling the latest fashions in the windows of I. Magnin, J. C. Penney's.
We will awaken in the middle of the night, gasping, clutching our bodies, pinching ourselves, unsure of the reality of our existence.
The issue featuring the first dead Playmate of the Month will sell out so quickly that Disney's Playboy subsidiary will rush into production with a new magazine targeting this ravenous new market. We will become subscribers and, surrounded by our ghosts, engage in fierce bouts of masturbation.
Madonna will be brutally murdered by a crazed fan, and no one will find it strange when images of her mangled flesh are posted, not to alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless, but to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.
Richard Nixon will be reelected President.
The children of our grandchildren will have hollowed out, darkened eyes. They will wander listlessly through the malls, past our graves. They will trail greasy fingerprints across the glittering showcases. They will spit on the marble floors. They will elbow aside our imploring hologramic ghosts. They will not make any purchases. Security will throw them out.
They will sneak back in at night, under cover of darkness. They'll break open our graves, disinter our bones, fill up pillowcases with our earthly remains. They will take us home with them, decorate their rooms with us, fashion us into bracelets, necklaces, earrings. They will wear us to their parties, where we will rattle dryly as they dance. We will be a party to their desperate embraces. Pressed between their nude bodies, we will scream into their cavernous orgasms. They will fall away from each other unfulfilled, chilled by the hoarse echoes of our voices.
They will wear us to their concerts, where they will crowd around the mosh pit. When the music reaches its frenzied climax they will fling themselves into the pit, impaling their bodies on the iron spikes set in the bottom. When the music is over they will pry themselves off of the spikes and stagger home. The roadies will hose away their blood with ease, in time for the next show. It will have grown pale and thin, the color of white Zinfandel, so as not to leave a stain upon the future.
scott hawkins
svrdPalm@interramp.com
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I tremble with fear.
I watch television, all the time. Scenes of war, crime, madness, idiocy, heartbreak, violence and decay fill my every waking moment. I am filled with terror. My pulse races. I gasp in horror. I can't stop my hands from shaking. My every muscle is knotted, constantly twitching.
I am connected to the grid. Engineers from SCE have installed miniscule turbines in my veins and arteries, and in my lungs and windpipe. They have inserted microscopic generators throughout my musculature. My every heartbeat, gasp and spastic twitch is instantly translated into power for the Company.
I don't know what becomes of the power I produce, once it's out on the grid. Who buys it? What do they use it for? It sometimes occurs to me that somebody might be using some of my power to commit one of the acts of madness I see on television. This thought makes me tremble with fear.
(This is a very efficient system.)
My neighbors all watch television too. I can hear the murmur of their sets drift through my window. I wonder if they tremble with fear too? I don't know. I never talk with my neighbors. But I think they too must be connected with the grid. I don't know why. My neighbors and I are utter strangers. When we pass each other on the street, each of us looks the other way.
I think maybe we're all ashamed of what we do for a living.
scott hawkins
svrdPalm@interramp.com
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Every so often a lost pair of ducks plops down in the Marketplace, far from any welcoming body of water--a sight both haunting and comic. I imagine a security guard approaching them with caution, asking to see their green cards, threatening to deport them, finally insisting that either they make a purchase or move on, move on.....
Here in Irvine we have a pair of artificial lakes--Woodbridge Lake North and Woodbridge Lake South. In the afternoon, seagulls trekking back to the ocean from their daily visit to an inland landfill like to stop off here--paddle in the waters--pass the time of day. I had a friend once who worked as a life-guard for the Woodbridge Village Association. One of her duties when she worked the lakes was, when the gulls clustered too thickly upon the waters, to go out in a motorboat and chase them away. ("Ma vaillante chasseuse de mouettes," I called her.) They would soon stubbornly resettle, unperturbed, on the other lake, only to be chased away again by her Comrade in Arms out on the other side of Alton Blvd. Back and forth they would go every afternoon, ping-pong, ping-pong.....
My friend also told me darker stories about the coots--goofy black birds with yapping white beaks who, according to the Powers that Be in the Woodbridge Village Association, were a Plague upon the Landscaping that must be dealt with. She told me of doses of poison left for the coots to devour.... of midnight teams sent out to gather up the bodies.... to purge suburban paradise of the dark stain of Death......
Meanwhile, further south in Orange County, where median income is greater, property values are higher, the police state more entrenched, at equally-artificial Lake Mission Viejo (the site of Dan Quayle's virgin campaign speech as Vice-Presidential candidate), the coots are slaughtered without shame by teams of sharpshooters in broad daylight--with alarming support from the sub-burghers whose property-values are being thus defended. I participated once in a demonstration against the "coot-shoot," and was amazed at the fervid opposition we faced from drivers-by. "They're killing the lake," howled one property-owner in anguished defense of this bulldozed, profit-generating construct of the Mission Viejo Co. against the relentless onslaught of what we flimsily-placarded few persist in regarding as nature--which is not some fuzzy fantasy of terminally stoned tree-huggers--not at all. Even simplified to the nth degree, it confounds crude calculation. Who dare chart a spreadsheat 'gainst the balance of nature? Who would match a 28k modem 'gainst the bandwidth ofthe optic nerve???
Back closer to home--every so often in passing by Lake Woodbridge, North or South, one percieves a slowly diffusing dull turquoise blob in its center--one wonders what is going on...a deadly micro-organism spawning?? call the center for disease control????..... No, not to worry.... Never forget, you live in Fantasyland where, to ensure domestic tranquility, they (the ubiquitous They) dye the stagnant waters blue....
scott hawkins
svrdPalm@interramp.com
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But in the early days of the war, before the bombardments had become a part of the weekly routine, when they still seemed something strange and dangerous, not everybody submitted so easily to the whimsy of the State. A few brave souls would still raise their small voices in protest, like Robin Stull, a short, stout woman, crotchety beyond her middle-years, a veteran of innumerable civic wars who lived alone with a lazy dachshund named Meyer in a small two-bedroom house down at the dead end of Vista del Mar where it butted up against the freeway, who wrote an open letter to the Governor in which she cited reams of medical evidence about the gas's extreme toxicity, pointed out the close similarity of its molecular structure to that of Zyklon B, and raised unsettling questions about what exactly Rudolph Immergleich (the legendary, ancient founder of Immergleich A & E and a major campaign contributor of the Governor's) had been up to in his native Germany during the thirties and forties. She received her response the next Monday at midnight as the dark hordes of helicopters swarmed out of the night and, instead of making their usual sorties across the length and breadth of the Southland, swooped down upon her house and hovered over it all night long, at least twenty of them executing intricate weaving maneuvers worthy of the Blue Angels of the rotary-wing set, shuffling everybody in and out of the crowded airspace over the theater of operations so that nobody would go home feeling cheated out of quality time at ground zero. The police had cordoned off the area and diverted late night freeway traffic into a detour so convoluted that several unfortunate drivers were never seen again. The choppers were slung with sets of enormous speakers beneath their underbellies that blared an especially shrill and martial rendition of the Andy Griffith Show theme, and the cops on the ground high-fived each other and whistled merrily along inside their gas masks as they watched cloud after cloud of languid, coniferous nerve gas drift slowly to earth, aglow with the searing angelic fire of their searchlights.
All through the neighborhood people hunkered down for the night. They made their bedrooms into sealed chambers, covering the cracks of doors and windows with masking tape or dampened towels, and huddled beneath the covers with pillows wrapped around their heads or, despairing of sleep, sat before their TV sets, sound turned down in mute submission to the sonic superiority of the choppers, watching a late-show horror film (The Creeping Meatball, 1969, colorized), scanning the parade of mutant commodities on Home Shopping, or sharing a silent prayer with the gaunt and sallow graveyard-shift preacher on the Resurrection Channel. In her house Robin raced frantically from room to room followed by a confused and yelping Meyer as paint flaked off her walls, crumbs of asbestos tex-cote ceiling fell like snow, the carpet buckled, and her best china shivered itself to pieces in its cupboards. Finally she seized a phone in one hand and Meyer in the other and barricaded herself inside a closet where, buried beneath a thick pile of winter coats to muffle the roar of the choppers, she spent the rest of the night trying to call the media. But no matter what number she dialed the phone company rerouted her call to 1-900-AY, CHICA!, a Spanish-language party-line where she ran up an unpayable phone bill sobbing out her story to Palomita, a seventeen-year-old Salvadoreña whose child's voice was rich with the authority of terror and hardship as she murmured through the night spare, simple words of comfort in a seductive, broken English that saw Robin through to daybreak when the helicopters peeled away one by one, speakers playing the MisterRogers theme song, and the police pulled up their barricades, allowing traffic flow to return to what passed for normal in the Southland of late. Robin murmured a last "adios" to Palomita and she and Meyer crawled out of the closet. They went into the kitchen where she sifted through the wreckage of her cupboards until she found a heavy clay mug that had withstood the assault and made herself a cup of tea to calm her nerves. Meyer grabbed a milk-bone, waddled after her into the living room and curled up at her feet while she sat sipping her tea and trembling. Her palms were clammy. She felt like she had pine tar clinging to her skin, and her eyes watered and nose ran from the fierce synthetic stink of forest that poured in through her broken windows. She heard a low rumbling and felt the earth tremble. For an instant she was afraid the helicopters were coming back, but then she saw the floor begin to pitch and roll like a storm-tossed sea and heard the splintering of wood as a wide crack split it in two. "Meyer, run for it!" she shouted as she raced out into the front yard just ahead of a mighty Ponderosa pine that swiftly thrust its way up through her floor and ceiling, shivering her house into a mortal agony of scattered shingles, screeching nails and crumbled plaster and didn't stop growing until it reached a good twenty stories into the air where it shuddered violently, shaking off the last dirt and debris left clinging to its branches, and flung its daybreak shadow far to the west, a dark scar reaching out for the unimaginable sea, while haughtily it towered over the subdued neighborhood.
All of Robin's neighbors were already up and about. They had broken out their rakes and shovels and the odd whining leaf blower and were trying to find their cars buried beneath the mountains of pine needles. "Morning," they said when she approached them. "Beautiful day, isn't it. Like a breath of April freshness." They went about their business with their eyes cast down, avoiding the raw pleading of her gaze, trying to ignore the stern monolith that did not, like any sensible tree, whisper or rustle in the wind, but instead growled menacingly. She reached out to touch them, to shake them by the lapels, to clasp a once-friendly hand, but only felt a strange chill shoot down her softening spine as they slipped through her fingers as through an early morning mist that the sun will swiftly burn away. From high above she heard a faint, frantic yelping.
"Meyer," she shouted. It was the poor little wiener dog, caught up in the tree's top branches and transported aloft, terrified, holding on for dear life, slippery dog paws less than useless in this new, heavenward environment. "Don't move, Meyer," she called up to him. "I'm coming." She clambered over the wreckage of her house until she reached the tree's broad trunk where she was brought up cold by its impassive surface. Not a foothold to be found. She reached out her hands to try to get a grip on its rough bark, but she couldn't feel its surface, just a slippery gossamer boundary through which she could have thrust her hands in an instant had not her heartbeat fluttered feeling the chill wind of nothingness howling beyond. "Hold on Meyer," she shouted. "I'll get help."
"Help," she murmured softly, her voice a dry husk, as she turned away from the tree trunk. "Help," she cried out to her neighbors as they didn't even avert their eyes as she approached them, but simply gazed right through her. "Help," she shrieked, fists clenched and eyes squeezed shut against the sun. "Help," she bellowed at the top of her aching lungs, her voice by now just a faint backwards eddy in the morning's onrushing stream of ambient sound, and ran off never to be seen again save as a frail, haggard figure glimpsed flickering in the shadow cast by the nightmare tree, tugging at the sleeves of anybody who rested too long in its chill darkness, appearing as an evening sig-alert when the setting sun flung it across the 605 and she came up to cars stalled in traffic and pressed her face against their windshields, spooking weary drivers with the hollow darkness of her eyes. And sometimes, late at night, when the whimpering from on high became too mournful to be born, when the atmospherics were right, when the air was clear and dry, scoured by Santa Ana winds and crackling with static electricity, her voice could be heard comforting her lonesome canine companion with a mournful rendition of his favorite lullaby:
I wish I were an Oscar Meyer wienerAs for the tree, it did not fade away after a few days as the nerve gas was slowly scattered by the wind. Unlike the more usual needles and cones, unlike the sand dunes or pools of brackish water that briefly lodged in the dark hollows of the suburban environment when Desert Oasis or Ocean Breeze was the fragrance of the week, it endured, standing watch over the community, belligerent and unbowed, for a full month and a half, groaning and creaking more ominously every day, until on the morning of the sixth week when the wind began to blow, tearing off clouds of withered brown needles and flinty chips of bark, razor-sharp and deadly, thunderous pinecones the size of footballs started plummeting from its heights and entire branches began crashing to earth at all hours, blocking lanes of traffic on the freeway, causing havoc on the Grid when they got tangled in the power lines that flowed down the Secuana creekbed. Then finally in the early hours of Tuesday morning, following a particularly heavy night of spraying with a new experimental fragrance, Chocolate Delight, the tree gave a last violent shudder, there was an anguished shriek of twisted metal and the last fragile vestiges of wood, needles, cones and pitch crumbled into a fine ash that drifted to earth and blended into the gooey disaster of Hershey Bars, Baby Ruths, Three Musketeers and Milk Duds as they melted in the morning sun, and in place of the tree stood a huge tower of mangled, rusting steel, a jungle-gym with a severe case of attitude that filled children with terror, put flocks of birds to flight, made strange, mocking ghosts appear on the TV screen of any poor soul not yet hooked in to the cable, occasionally filled the AM band with piercing sine waves that brought to mind tests of the Emergency Broadcast System, clanked loudly when the wind blew, teetered over people's houses and seemed always to be on the verge of collapse but never quite succeeded in doing so.
That is what I'd truly like to be
'Cos if I were an Oscar Meyer wiener
Ev'ry one would be in love with me.
Eventually people got used to the thing, the way people seemed able to get used to just about anything in the Southland, where all manner of strangeness and horror could be routinely and seamlessly absorbed into the ever-changing landscape. They no longer averted their eyes from its jagged silhouette, left bedroom windows open on hot summer nights, no longer afraid that the sound of Meyer's toenails clattering against the steel girders or his ghostly whimperings at three AM would wreak havoc on their dreams. Attendance at the Halleluha Chapel stopped shooting up during apocalyptic weeks when the shrieks of anguished metal were particularly intense. Property values slowly crept back upwards in areas touched by the tower's shadow. Workers stopped calling in sick when flakes of rust powdered the area with a hellish fairy dust. Indeed, before too long the tower became a source of civic pride, particularly after it acquired a certain cachet among the international arts community and shabby, haunted-looking intellectuals began to be spotted in its vicinity, circling about its base, peering intently at its rickety yet eternal superstructure, scribbling feverish notes over a cup of tea in Mr. Eggroll and then scurrying back to their universities to write labyrinthine and futile deconstructions of its metaphor and syntax. One poor soul (whose paper, combining a rigorous semiological analysis of the fiendish gargoyles she discerned in its twisted girders with an hallucinatory description of the torrents of decaying, poisoned dreams gushing from their mouths to fill the Secuana creekbed with their turmoil, was a key factor in her being denied tenure) spent three entire nights in its shadow, mute and trembling, heedless of the freezing rain, until finally the cops came and dragged her away. She went quietly, merely murmuring to herself over and over "Ceci tuera cela." The seminal study, however, was one by Fredric Jameson that appeared in the New Left Review under the title "Reconstructing Rodia: The State of Primitivism/The Primitivism of the State" which conceptualized the State as an immigrant newly arrived in the new world of the postmodern, vainly trying to orient itself in its vertiginous, omni-decontextualised, hypertropic space through the shoddy manufacturing of dream images hauled up from the forgotten depths of its industrial origins. None of this made much sense to the bureaucrats of the Community Redevelopment Agency, not even in the garbled version that made it into the popular press as a result of the fistfights that broke out at the Socialist Scholars Conference when the paper was presented. But when the CRA heard that their tower was being compared to the Eiffel Tower ("a meta-ironic rendering of a subject that was at the very least an irony of the second degree to begin with") they used the occasion to slip past a well-bribed city council the plans for the redevelopment of the Vista del Mar corridor that evangelical emissaries from the Brain Development Group had been whispering in their ears for the past several years, plans that would bulldoze their way through the heart of the community in order to widen the narrow, potholed street into a broad, imposing avenue flanked by monumental facades that would be, according to the planning commission's interim report, "the Southland's version of Paris's Champs Elysée." An army of of earthmovers, bulldozers and steamrollers began to be assembled in a vacant lot at the west end of Vista del Mar in preparation for the assault on the newly-proclaimed redevelopment zone, and residents began to make grim calculations of how many of their belongings they could afford to take with them in the coming diaspora.
Fortunately for them the project soon collapsed into an orgy of bankruptcies, charges of corruption, suits and countersuits, all leading to immense profits to certain well-connected law firms, and of course to infinitely greater amounts flooding the balance sheets of Brain Development, which always structured its ventures so that the cash flow moved inexorably in their direction, whether the project was a resounding success or a dismal failure. In fact, a study by a cutting-edge firm of consultants having showed that the profit margin on failed projects was significantly greater than on those that by more conventional, outmoded standards succeeded, a special division was created, which soon became the cash cow that powered the entire corporation, devoted to the development of unrealizable projects. There teams of young architects and city planners, personally chosen by Douglas Brain himself for their zeal and brilliance and utter lack of common sense (they could have been called Imagineers had not the name already been taken by Disney), sowed the seeds of chaos throughout the Southland with their impossible development schemes, based more on the whims, crotchets and delusions of grandeur of local politicians than upon any realistic assessment of the needs, desires or economic base of the community, whose dismal chances of success were expressed in the more romantic and swashbuckling language of risk-taking and entrepreneurship to gullible city fathers who were swiftly booted out of office (as indeed happened to the long-forgotten city council that approved the Vista del Mar project) when the tide of bankruptcy and municipal austerity began to rise.
But the army of destruction equipment remained, the steamshovels, cranes and bulldozers, massed in serried ranks, staring down the street and dreaming surly dreams of progress which occasionally became so intense that their engines spontaneously roared to life, maintaining the balance of dread in the neighborhood, and bureaucrats from the Redevelopment Agency had to be sent out to calm them down, to assure them that they would be seeing action soon, that plans were in the works to level an elementary school in order to add on a few more acres to the Auto Square, that they were working out a deal to lease them out to the LAPD for a few raids on crack houses in South Central. They responded with a fierce roar of their engines that for a moment had the bureaucrats wondering if this was it, the fabled nut-cutting time of which grim rumors had been circulating through the development community in eyes-only interoffice memos for as long as anyone could remember. But finally they settled for spitting a few sharp, poisonous belches of diesel fuel in the faces of their putative masters, just a friendly reminder that, while they were content to bide their time for the moment they could make no guarantees for the future, that the forces of progress and destruction had an agenda and a timetable of their own, carved upon secret tables of the law, encoded in the first forged ingot of tempered steel, the first barely contained explosion of internal combustion, the first graven image broadcast through the lumiferous ether, the first binary bit of whimsy set on its whirling way through electronic memory, and certainly heedless of the small spaces of privacy and repose that people would from time to time try to hollow out for themselves in this best of all possible neighborhoods, caught between the rumble of the steamroller and the gaunt, naked outline of the tower whose warm glow of dread was so intense that no birds dared to roost there, not even the odd displaced vulture, but which, strangely enough considering the avowed aims of the war that lay at its origins, acted as a beacon, drawing about itself from all across the Southland, from the desert to the sea, a thick, black, buzzing shroud of flies.
scott hawkins
svrdPalm@interramp.com
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cordially--
Lewis Bonnell
Director of Public Relations
General Electric, Inc.
Dear Sir--
This is to inform you that the tears currently gathering in your eyes have been determined to have been caused by a latent memory of the Disney film classic "Bambi." As such, these tears remain the intellectual property of The Disney Corporation. Should you allow them to fall you will owe Disney a royalty payment in the amount of $0.13.
cordially--
Pete Prodhen
Billing Department
Disney Corporation
to: The Earth First! Journal
attention Craig Beneville
from: D. Michael Bakunin
Executive Vice President
Anarchist Development Division
The Irvine Company
550 Newport Center Drive
Newport Beach, Ca. 92660
Thu, Oct 14, 1993
Dear Mr. Beneville--
The Irvine Company believes, with Marx, that History proceeds by dialectical means. The forces of Order, if they are ever fully to realize their vision, must first extract that vision from the muck and slime of Chaos. If the clear and radiant voice of Man¹s Reason is to sing out in all its purity, it will only be because it has first been torn from the midnight howlings of the mad. And if the planet is ever to be fully developed in accordance with that Reason, it will only be after it has been, through long and fateful struggle, rescued from the malignant grasp of those who would fling it back into the primordial ooze of Bestiality.
But alas, nowhere is such a pitched battle to be found. Across the globe Progress proceeds with long, unfettered strides. The reign of Capital, Man's purest expression of Enlightenment, stands everywhere unopposed. In no corner of creation need the prophets of Order fear the dark Anarchy of their dreams. This intolerable situation cannot long endure.
Therefore, in accordance with its belief in the immutable, dialectical laws of History, the Irvine Company proposes entering into a joint venture with Earth First! Movement, Inc. We will provide $1.25 million in seed money, which you will be free to spend at your discretion on all those acts of senseless destruction, mindless obstructionism, Luddite foolishness and reactionary veneration of the Pleistocene for which you have grown so famous, but which, due to lack of sufficient capital formation, you have as yet failed to bring to full fruition.
Naturally the details of this agreement will have to be worked out between our respective legal staffs. However all of us here feel confident that you will wish to be a part of this project. After all, the achievement of our goal, World Domination by the Irvine Company, will, thanks to the dialectics of History, inevitably lead to a result that I know is near and dear to all your hearts: Global Industrial Collapse.
Wishing you a creative and destructive future....
sincerely--
D. Michael Bakunin
P.S: On a more personal note, I was having lunch with Don the other day on his yacht (a succulent broiled spotted owl!) and he asked me to express to you his personal enthusiasm for this project. Also, he wanted to know if you had any spare Bren masks and Bren Bucks you could send him. He¹s remaining coy about what he wants them for, but I suspect he wants to get into the spirit of the project at the next TCA board meeting.
scott hawkins
svrdPalm@interramp.com
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.....off Fashion Island, off the Tollroad overpass, off the Matterhorn, through the Golden Arches, off the Nixon Library, off John Wayne's head....... nothing but net!
My hair gets tangled in the webbing; my head swings to and fro beneath the basket, to and fro......
From outside my window I watch myself at my desk. I see my hands tremble against the keyboard as I write of the illegal aliens summoned by the Association to earn a sub-minimum wage mopping up my last drops of blood from the court.
scott hawkins
svrdPalm@interramp.com
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One fine day in spring Bill Gates, having for a moment grown weary of the cruel and relentless struggle for Corporate Domination, went for a walk in the countryside. Confronted of a sudden with the joy and charm of Nature, his step grew uncommonly brisk. His lungs tingled with the rush of crisp, clear air. His ears greeted with delight the rustle of the wind in the trees, the busy thrum of insects. Coming upon an open field, overwhelmed by this sudden onrush of untoward exaltation, filled with mystic fear upon being faced with the Beauty and Wonder of it all, Bill Gates flung himself down amid the tall grass, cast aside his glasses, squinted upwards into bright sun and blue sky and soon allowed himself to drift off into his habitual nervous, twitchy slumber.
Soon, from all throughout the forest, birds began to gather about the prone body of Bill Gates. Gaily they cavorted in the air above him, counterposing their simple grace against the cramped and awkward twist of his limbs. They chattered and warbled to each other, easily drowning out the relentless grinding of his teeth, his clenched, pathetic whimpers of dreamtime rage, in an ageless ocean of melody. They playfully spattered his sleeping form with their shit. Then a happy sparrow spotted a loose strand of yarn dangling from the sleeve of Bill Gates' sweater, swooped down and snatched it free. A sly finch spirited away a strand of his left sock. A pair mockingbirds pecked out tufts of his hair, and soon the general unravelment was under way. The birds of the forest flocked over his body, coming away with scraps of shredded flesh, splinters of soft bone, clumps of knotted nerves and long, tangled strings of code which they swiftly carried off to the furthest reaches of the forest and assembled into warm and spacious nests in which to cradle their offspring.
When Bill Gates awakened from his nap, when he put his glasses back on and again squinted into bright sun and blue sky he felt himself possessed by a Vision--a Vision of Corporate Domination more ruthless and all-encompassing than anything he had ever dared previously to conceive. So awe-struck was he by this new Vision, so eager was he to put this new Plan into action that, as he strode vigorously back to his office, Bill Gates didn't even notice the fact that he no longer existed.
scott hawkins
svrdPalm@interramp.com
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A less resolute creature than Wittgenstein would surely have found the prospects daunting. After all, the classic paradigm for lower-primate text production postulates an infinite number of monkeys slaving away at an infinite number of typewriters, and here was Wittgenstein, a poor, solitary beast armed with nought but a single, battered Underwood. However, Wittgenstein reasoned that since he did not wish to reproduce the Works of Shakespeare, but merely concoct a brief treatment for a television series by the sale of which he hoped to rescue us from the state of poverty into which we were then just beginning to descend, a satisfactory text might very well be produced by aleatoric means within a period of time substantially shorter than the proverbial Infinity. Thus fortified with hope Wittgenstein went to work.
He was relentless in the pursuit of his goal. He sat before the keyboard day and night, tapping out letter after random letter in an unyielding, monotonous rhythm that I soon feared would drive me mad. "Give it up," I shouted at him in despair. "Can't you see it's hopeless?" Wittgenstein barely acknowledged my existence, granting me only a brief scowl before he continued on in the dogged furtherance of his task. Finally, miraculously, after seven weeks Wittgenstein emerged from his office bearing ten neatly stacked double-spaced pages that he had culled from the vast chaos of typescript that had inundated the room. These he placed in an envelope which he dispatched to Hollywood without delay, confident that our fortunes would soon see a turn for the better.
Alas, it was not to be. The flood-tide of residuals was never to come pouring in. The chauffeur-driven gods of the entertainment industry were never to bestow their blessings upon Wittgenstein. His follow-up letters and phone calls to studio and network executives were never returned. It was as if the fruits of his hard labor had been swallowed up without a trace. Wittgenstein bore the burden of this rejection with his customary grim stoicism. But imagine the dark despair he must have felt a little over a year later when, tuning in to the premiere episode of "Beverly Hills 90210," he immediately recognized characters, situations and indeed entire storylines that he himself had in grim struggle wrestled from the jaws of chaos. And it required a Herculean effort to contain his savage rage when he saw the credit-line--"Based upon characters created by Immanuel Kant," an Orangutan who was at that time employed by Aaron Spelling Productions.
Naturally I urged Wittgenstein to sue, but he would have none of it. Was he who had once braved the storm-tossed seas of randomness now to finish his days sucked down into the fetid swamp of the legal system? Since then Wittgenstein has chosen to affect a haughty disdain for the entire incident. He would have it be as if it had never happened. But I can see how it's changed him. He no longer seems to have any ambition. His typewriter sits gathering dust. He spends endless hours watching television and drinking beer, trying to drown his bleak fury--successfully, for the most part. But every so often I catch a glimpse of the depths of anger that lurk beneath the surface. The ghostly image of Shannen Doherty flickers across the TV screen and for an instant his eyes turn steely and cold. "Darüber muss man schweigen," Wittgenstein mutters grimly under his breath as he changes the channel.
Kant, in the meantime, has just signed a multi-program development deal with Fox. He sits on the patio of his Malibu beach house, sipping strawberry daiquiris and watching an endless parade of would-be starlets pass by. They bare their breasts for him, hoping to be discovered.
scott hawkins
svrdPalm@interramp.com
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For a time I strove mightily to curb the swelling of my Ontology's girth. I restricted his diet to a lean, rigorous Logical Positivism. I strained his food through the fine mesh of the Propositional Calculus. I purged his dark bowells with caustic enemas of Enlightenment. At one point, to prevent his gorging on dubious, undecidable doctrines from the Orient, I went so far as to have his jaws wired shut. All to no avail. My Ontology, in his frenzy for wild and irresponsible speculation, seemed able to absorb the whole of the world through the very pores of his skin, transmuting the most evanescent manifestations of the Real into jiggling, sebaceous blobs of Metaphysic that would settle in apalling, shameless prodigality about his hips, thighs and buttocks.
Finally, in desperation, I checked my Ontology into Ockham's Fat Farm, where the learned Doctor, shocked at how far I had allowed the situation to deteriorate, recomended radical surgery without delay. He ordered my Ontology to be strapped to a gurney and wheeled into the operating room where he would soon have him sliced down to a more elegant proportion. "No anesthetic, of course," he explained. "For the fiercely honed Blade of Logic to slice cleanly, the subject must feel its pain." He unsheathed his instrument, no mere scalpel but rather a gleaming and irrefutable scimitar, and strode into the operating theater. He stood over the bloated mass of my Ontology's flesh and raised his sword high over his head. My Ontology gazed up at him through curious, placid eyes. Then swiftly he brought the blade down, dealing blow after savage blow until I feared I would faint dead away, so sickening was the sound of Reason tearing into Flesh. But my Ontology just giggled, like he was being tickled instead of hacked to pieces. His eyes twinkled as he watched his flesh jiggle, his blood merrily spurt--waiting for Dr. Ockham to feel his arms grow weary and let the blade drop. When he did, my Ontology flicked out a dexterous tendril of flab which snatched up the fallen sword and sucked it into his body, absorbed it into the primordial ooze of his all-embracing chaos of a system whose wounds were already starting to heal. It remains there to this day, I'm sure--Logic gone to seed: its sharp edge quite rounded away, all firmness turned floppy. At peace.....
Since then, I have grown to accept my bloated Ontology. I have learned to live in his shadow--literally. For by now he has grown so huge that when we go out together he blots out the very sun. People see his shadow coming from blocks away. Adults, having attained the "age of reason," generally do what they can to avoid him; children, however, flock to him as to a bowl of Jello pudding. They're delighted by the absurdity of his planetary proportions, made giddy by the tidal undulations of flesh that ensue when they use his belly for a trampoline while he sleeps in the park.
What I find most strange is that no matter how bloated my Ontology gets, he never seems to put on any weight. Indeed, if anything he seems to get lighter and lighter as the years go by. A while back I noticed that his feet were barely brushing the ground as he walked, and I thought it prudent to load his pockets with a ballast of stones. But now it's springtime. Warm weather is coming on and my Ontology has taken to going about in a state of complete nudity, so that I feel I must cling to his hand at all times if I am to keep him tethered to the earth. I know that one day it will be too much for me to handle--his swelling evanescence will overwhelm my feeble gravity. He will one day silently lift off into the air, and before I know it I will find myself dangling beneath him, high above the ground. Caught up in the jet stream together we will race across the sky. I will laugh at the sight of our shadow bouncing across the landscape far below. My arms will grow weary. I will let myself fall. I will turn and squint into the sun to see my Ontology, Time and Eternity, Being and Nothingness, fatter than ever, zooming upwards into the stratosphere as I plummet to earth.
scott hawkins
svrdPalm@interramp.com
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My skin is posessed by an unquenchable erotic thirst. It is a veritable sex-machine. To hear it talk (and who am I to doubt it?) it gets laid several times a night. When it comes home it invariably tries to regale me, as I shiver in the chill air of morning, with lurid, topological tales of its amatory exploits--"She literally turned me inside out!!!" I stare into its eyes, the frayed lids, the absent sockets, then turn away.
During my waking hours my skin won't let me alone. Its uncanny restlessness makes me itch. I scratch myself and scratch myself until I bleed. At odd, embarrassing moments I twitch uncontrollably as it suddenly tries to flee my body. I clench my fists, my toes and my buttocks to hold it in place. Sometimes by bedtime I've grown so weary of my skin that, as I drift off to sleep, I'm almost happy to feel the agonizing tickle of the dermis as it slowly rips down the spine, to hear the soft gurgle and plop as it tears itself away from my flesh in order to slip out my window for another night on the town.
I feel happy, that is, until the trembling starts. Each and every night as I reach deepest, most dreamless sleep, at the moment when the distant carousings of my skin are at their high point, I start to shiver like an eskimo. It doesn't matter the season; even in most torrid summer I am seized by a chill so fierce that my stripped body begins to shudder uncontrollably, with such violence that I must clutch my arms about my torso to try and hold my exposed organs in place. An always vain attempt, alas! Invariably by early morning, when my skin comes staggering in, I'm an ungodly mess, my innards scattered all over the mattress. My skin casts me a look of reproach before it stumbles off to the bathroom to relieve itself in the sink.
I gave up drink ages ago, but my skin is an habitual lush. Every morning it comes home with a skinful (ha ha!). It consumes truly astonishing quantities of liquor. You should see it trying to hoist itself in through my window at the end of a night of revelry, bloated and ungainly, filled to the gills. I don't know how much longer my skin can go on like this. Its endless debauches have left it tattered and torn. As it sloshes down the hall to the bathroom whiskey, beer and gin leak from open sores. When it comes back to my bed to rejoin me, tries to fold me in its embrace, I cast it aside in disgust. It collapses on the bed beside me, limp and useless as a spent condom.
Every morning, before my alarm goes off, I have to gather together my organs to pack them back into my skin. Time was when I would spend my evenings poring over Gray's Anatomy (the assembly instructions!), to be sure that, come morning, I'd be able to put myself back together just right. But I fear I've grown slovenly in my middle ages. Now I just toss them into the ragged old sack helter-skelter--heart, stomach, liver, kidneys, gonads, spleen: they're all the same to me. I just toss them in at random and when they're all in (well, most of them anyway!) I crawl in after them and zip my skin up tight. Then I lie back and wait for my alarm to go off, wakening me to another day. While I wait I feel my organs slosh and creep within me, settling themselves into what I hope will be a usable configuration--one that will get me through another day, showing the world I feel at home within my skin.
scott hawkins
svrdPalm@interramp.com
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Douglas Bashford - bashford@psnw.com
We ghosts at Severed Palm Inc....
Doug Bashford's Home Page....