The Year Is 1790 ...




"For a tear is an intellectual thing!
And a sigh is the sword of an angel king,
And the bitter groan of a martyr’s woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty’s bow!"
William Blake, from "Jerusalem"

Anyhow, there I was (or William Blake in Cyberspace was) hanging mid-air, a few feet above the stage. This was after a ceiling tile fell down, hitting the podium, but well before the whole trip came crashing down on me. I had taken this Dixie cup, see, and put a bunch of miniature Tarot cards inside. My little Dixie cup of magic. My unholy grail. Then, I looked to each member of the small audience in the eye, then began my take off, the Waterboys’ guitars, bass and drums building up to a fury. One step, two steps, my Frye leather boots leapt from the Haverhill Micro Theatah stage: Lift off. The Dixie cup of Tarot cards pushed up into the air … the strobe light pulsing up platelets of energy ...
The next day, after one night as William Blake in Cyberspace, I arise out of bed, wrestless, as usual, coming up rather quickly, but I’m not strong enough to stand. I pull two blankets over my shoulders, one red, one white. I pick up the Bible and read one of the psalms, about God’s warning of protection to the Israelites. Gives me pause for thought. Makes me believe. A sense of peace comes over. The sun is pulsing light through the window. Then it passes. Access denied.
Then I try a CD in the player. The music is jubilant, loud, totally inappropriate for the morning hour. I dance around. My secret roots rockin Gaelic jig. Moving my feet just so. Rythmn possessed. Free at last. Free at last. Then it slows. Then I slow, try to stretch my back, and return my troubled mind to that day’s up coming court appearance.
What was I going to do. I was fighting for my claim to space, trying to prove my right to the lost lease in the Court of Utopia.
Light now pitches through the transparent jolly roger of a black and white pirate flag, hung in the window to shield myself from the lookliloos, and, to announce my disdain for things of this earth going by my door.
The phone rings. Le Muse is on the line.
"It’s me. You asked me to give you a call last night to wake you up. Can I go now? "
"Dear lady, thank you. I’m feeling a tad funny today. "
"Well, yopu must have a lot on your mind. "
"No fear. Fear nothing and nothing will run, I say. "
"That makes so sense … you really don’t sound so great."
"Just feeling chipper, like the birds outside this window. "
"Oh, fuck yourself. You are the biggest geek …"
"One must take care …"
"… asshole I’ve ever heard. "
"My Muse. Le Muse. You need to listen …"
"You are so weird …"
"But you’ve got to be here at dusk. The light. The way it vibrates in fall-leaf light …"
"Asshole. "
"The gargoyles ... In my window … their shadows vibrate, too."
"You must be here at dusk. In twilight. That’s then the ghosts start rising from the grave."
"You geek! You loser! Don’t ever call …"
"No, you’ve got to listen … the dead, at dusk. "
"Fuck off! "
Click.

~

The year is 1790: One year after the fall of the Bastille. One year before the outbreak of French Revolution. Fourteen years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in America, for William Blake, a heroic unbinding of the New World’s Prometheus. He would write in "America, A Prophecy" in 1793:Silent as despairing love, and strong as jealousy,The hairy shoulders rend the links; free are the wrists of fire.
The year is 1790. Nine years before Napoleon seizes rule, crowning himself, appropriating the king myth, that is, mythappropriatin’ power. Euro-Zeus restored, the chains go back on Prometheus, rebound, when, nine years later, Bonaparte orders a further extension of the Network 1.0, that is, Claude Chappe’s optical telegraph. A system of linked towers with wooden, mechanical arms -- controlled by macro marionettes that worked by pulling levers -- to signal others operators in other towers, like referees signaling touchdowns at a football game; like archons pulling the strings for the new code to come. Architectural renderings look like a child’s stick-figure drawing, or, Don Quixote’s demon windmill, or, the Hopi symbol for a religious leader in Oraibi, Arizona, made permanent signal, since after all, it was etched in stone 1,000 years before. The groundwork for the Web is born with Network 1.0. It’s a military appliance. Britain and Sweden join the race, steal the code, and communications windmills are thread across England and Western Europe, the tenuous membranes of a global communications spider. By 2001, centuries after 1790, the race is still bein’ run, the Web is still bein’ spun. And unspun. An unnatural order, a thing with its very own mythic nature.~
I actually met William Blake, the Romantic Period (later 18th and early 19th-century visionary poet and artist), in cyberspace. If he was walking down the street, going through your neighborhood, from door-to-door, like some Bible-thumping Jehovah’s Witness, you would, like, have more patience. Duh.
But traveling in cyberspace, an experience that left me, after thousands of hours of getting paid to surf, well, something broke, that is, my ability to think in a linear way. And then, as I began to understand the World Wide Web, started to see Blake’s gothic vision unfold before my eyes. Zeus in such archons of control as America Online and Microsoft and Google. Centaurs and robot golems and avatars and other mythic figures as living digital beings in the virtual world. I recognized the public outcry for security against spam and hackers as natural as placing gargoyles on your front lawn to ward off the evil deed doers. After I began to understand the gothic nature of video games, it was all over.
Urizen rhymed with Verizon, which was sewing up phone lines and airwaves but good. The archons of control were trying to control everything, at war with the pioneers and hackers. It was all Prometheus could do, as "a voice crying out in the wilderness," sayeth Blake, to vent his rage by throwing electronic e-mail lightning bolts right back up the hill. Or, at least, play the Tragically Hip at top volume while surfing at high speed.

~

The judge is a perfunctory figure. Going through everything so quickly. Asking all of the defendants, perhaps out of an automatic memory of the Grand Design, if they understand everything they are being told.
I don’t understand anything. Not any of it.
The lost lease of Utopia.
The prosecutors busily shift papers around. They never look once back into the pew of the poor, huddled masses behind them.
The Court of Utopia has a big high ceiling, a round glass eye above, glowering weakened New England sunlight as a punishment from heaven.
The prosecuting attorney team is made up of beautiful young women. Sharply dressed in associate suits and tightened hair pulled back in a bun.
The bailiff shouts. No babies allowed. Children, out!
The loudspeaker gives regular warnings that people’s cars, perhaps everyone’s, eventually, are about to be towed. The defending attorneys are completely befuddled, less efficient in their movements. They react. They sway. They shuffle through papers they should have read. They dodge and weave and, amidst all of this grand architecture, the glass eye window above, there’s a heartless judge, a relentless spewing of information, all of it just outside the fingertip ledge of understanding, a rapid-fire of paper and process.
The lease is lost forever.

~

My information fetish went into hyperdrive with a sweet-as-soda-pop energy drink called Red Bull, a fully patented, fully licensed excuse for an overdose of caffeine in a narrow, pressurized can. It cost seven Horus and went down like an artillery shell loaded for the Big One. Certainly, the FDA had approved the drink as being safe for democracy. But who knows? How much study had really been done? One of its other powerful ingredients is taurine, which we produce when we need adrenaline. And a taurus, in astronomical terminology, is how a black hole appears to an astronomer. What happens to the electromagnetic bursts of taurine, pulsing in our mushy, data-permeated minds, when you add "Gotu Kola Herb" into a product already built for hypertension?
We already know quite a lot about caffeine. Caffeine is an alkaloid that acts as a mild stimulant. In mild doses, that is. What if you get up in the morning -- presuming you have slept at least once in the last 30 days -- and order a triple espresso in a dirty paper cup? It's certainly raw enough to seem dangerous. It's black pit stuff, like tobacco spit or industrial waste, a noxious brew so thick and powerful it makes you sweat at the first sip. Unlike your standard-brand, construction worker's coffee blend. With that big flask, once the thermos is finished, you spend the rest of the morning making trips to the latrine. Espresso has very little liquid to dispose of. There is compression. With very little energy wasted on processing. You get more bang for the buck. Density in totality, like a taurus.
In recent years we've tried, but failed, to find a good reason to squelch caffeine fiends. For caffeine abusers, well, we provide more rooms for that now in the form of coffee houses than all of the opium dens of 17th-century China. The drug increases blood pressure, stimulates the central nervous system, ignites a spark plug in the heart and lungs. But the Victorian elements in our society have found no way to suppress the stimulation. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration keeps caffeine off its "generally recognized as safe" list, but acknowledges no clear evidence of hazard at normal levels or use.
But it’s 3:46 a.m. in America and the fiend in you is wondering if you are normal and, perhaps, a victim of a conspiracy. This is the way we are to become more productive. If we can focus, without sleeping, then maybe we can compete with the whole emerging, coffee-producing Third World. It's 3:47 a.m. in America. Do you know where your muses are? Do they live in the alleyways of inner space, in whatever is bonding the molecules taurine to make us a fast, better, funnier machine?

~

The year is 2,000: The Red Bull tea-of-taurus was advertised at the bar and video game arcade called Bar Code, which is designed to appeal to cyber-geeks with kids in tow. The whole drink was advertised on the menu as a boost to higher cognitive abilities, to clarity, to a more focused, compressed brainstem. Adding value to the potency of Red Bull held the same attraction to me as uploading more RAM or throwing back a vial of some mysterious alchemist’s elixir.
At $2 for a mere medicine dropper of the "Gotu Kola" stuff -- much more expensive than most brands of tequila -- $7 (or Horus) was enough to get an attractive blond bartender gal to put it on ice and give her name. Certainly, such high-end pricing had been targeted for the yuppies and upwardly mobile technophiles sufficiently numbed by their work and off-hours in front of the tube. The barkeep kept her story to herself, but what of technophobes?
Had the hired mass-marketing moguls for Bar Code, a virtual arcade along Times Square, New York, considered what might happen to those oversensitive folks, such as myself, whose absorption rate for the information ran faster than, say, those dogs numbed to anything other than what’s on TV tonight. An informational blitzkrieg that only New York City can provide, for newcomers, even for visitors in normal states of mind, tends to lead on to think in mythic, epic, hideously cosmic contexts.
I was quite clearly suffering from the kind over stimulation that only Times Square, New York City, can incite. Out of place. In awe. To be in the center of Times Square is to know how it feels to finally make it to the moon. So much trouble. So much technology. So many bookstores with tattered but cheap versions of Nietzsche that inspire repeated trips to the notebook to explain why Babe Ruth was America’s first uberman superstar:Walking unlimited miles to whiskeyin the bars near Central Park,Searching for the livingamong the dead: History comesin threes.
It's a very Roman Catholic thingand there are as many anti-christsas the incalculable stars in the sky.Oh great genie, oh Babe, over the fence man,a poor boy, but genes set right,fine-tuned antenna to the natural world--Big boar Roaring Twenty appetitesscorching Victorian-styled city streets,humming New Orleans Dixieland rag.Did he command the universal fluxcavorting with whores along Congo Square?Did he find his Elvis there?Black holes subtract starlightand animal magnetism flirts with flash powder.Walking into the good Cardinal'sgreen cathedralhe ignites the musty atmosphere,slouching toward home plate to be born.Uttering God's inviolate immaculatesense of a woman's softest parts,he penetrates the thin veil masking lawswe believe, tentatively, to exist:He had the heartof an anarchist.
New York is like that big full, not-cost-efficient moon. Just as on the moon, once we arrive, we will become dependent on machines to nourish and sustain us. Wouldn’t want to be there without light, electricity, without the systems that schedule everything from the openings and closings of manic stock markets to commuter vendors to the moment, each day, when hot dog vendors arise from bed and their impossible dreams of fast food franchises. The logic of technology is ubiquitous in New York. There is no trend left to wait for in New York. It’s just one big snowball rolling downhill toward your dream of Eden. To crush it. The big, moonish boot of mankind.

~

This is no court of law. It’s a whirlpool where people get sucked in deeper and deeper.
All of the affluent whites meting out their justice, slinging their code, toward poorer people who don’t fit the mold. Who can’t manage their way around the code. Code is law, indeed!
The judge speaks:
"Do you have any mental or psychological problems today?"
"No I say," wishing I could say: I don’t understand any of it.
In the background, beyond the visible, a drunk black man is crying from behind some door to the right leading to the jail cell. To spare us this vision of hell, an attorney politely closes the door. The closing is a soft, gentle woosh and click.
Urizen

"Lo, a shadow of horror is risen In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific,Self-clos'd, all-repelling: what demonHath form'd this abominable void,This soul-shudd'ring vacuum? Some said"It is Urizen." But unknown, abstracted,Brooding, secret, the dark power hid."
- William Blake, from the "Book of Urizen"

The Master Clock says 3:20 a.m. in Times Square and the juices are flowing a flood of light, an electrochemical lake of fire. John Milton used wake up this early in the morning, full of the rough alchemist’s equivalent of taurine and caffeine, claiming the muse had come to visit. He had no place to else go. Nothing else to blame. He wrote "Paradise Lost" in a fit of insomnia. One might presume an eviscerated synapse, some lose live wire, tapped the sub-current of electromagnetic fuels emanating from the earth, drove him out of his sleep into the transcendental file cabinet of circus animas, a zoetrope zoo found while in R.E.M.-state, when the subconscious is most open to undulating flux of the alien vibe. For primitive folk, such a download was described as the summoning of muses, said to send messages from the North Pole to the willing receiver, and that’s probably better anyway: It’s far easier to believe. But where are these archangels now, when we cannot sleep? It's 3:25 a.m. in New York, the juice is flowing in every direction, toward every pole and polarity, and back again. The muse is no longer necessary.
Which makes the material world somewhat limited in its possibilities. Everywhere but here, that is, where the very life force of the world is sucked up by the big magnet of Metropolis. It’s 3:36 a.m. in New York City. You are not in the suburbs. You can’t choose a night book and you can’t scan the desperate airwaves of the radio. After getting sucked all the way through 3:38 a.m. in America, you can only be still enough to click on the telly to find the phantasm of the Net. It’s all leading to there, anyway. The visions are weird and wild and phantasmagorical. Milton should have had such easy access to Hades, such an easy substitute for dreaming. Just a little light techno music, and a load of espresso, and then perhaps a stroll down the street toward electronic Central Park, at war with the body’s natural command to get some sleep. The sleepless fiends of the Net that points toward all lights on Times Square are the soldiers at war with the very laws of gravity.
You analyze -- processing, processing, processing -- like a computer: God made you in his image, you make the computer in your image, the computer makes … There you are, a wizard, your leg bouncing on frenetic automatic pilot, your permanent maintenance of the universal flux just slightly ajar. Oh my sweeties, all my loves, where are you now? Not one green leafy thing is in your line of sight. Maybe you are finding the Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, the promised glittering city of gold, right there on the World Wide Web. The intermediary is betwixt you and the infinite.
Funny. There’s time for everything when you don't sleep and the weeds no longer irritate you with ceaseless processes that are, apparently, random and chaotic and beyond control. Short of that, strip clubs right around the corner from any GPS-locatable dot on Times Square. The 21st century beckons but your countrymen are mired in counterproductive slumber. It’s almost quiet enough to hear the hum of the hierarchical layers of this botched Void. This messed up architecture we call material things. It's 3:41 a.m. in America. This vibe is running through you, fully sanctioned by the United States government. You are the lone standing chairman of the bored. Two things split open the yearning mind of the last decades of the 20th century: full-scale, foot-to-the-floor self-abuse. Get over it! Everybody is recovering from something. If not, well, get a life! But if you quit crack or cocaine or nicotine or the home shopping network, if you unplug from the Internet for just one day, you still need to fill the anxious Void. That’s what God commanded, after all, when it was reportedly stated, "Be fruitful and multiply." But the message was so long ago debased and degraded and plugged up with hidden code. We wonder if the Creator was joking, washing his hands of this entire cosmos that is, reportedly, so imperfectly rendered from the original cast off sign to Satan: Go ahead! Ruin your lives. Be fruitful and multiply.
There are few sanctioned methods for filling the Void in our society. But everything leads to imposing order, or a senseless desire for it, anyway, this ceaseless craving. If there’s a blank space, a canvas or a page, we fill it up with our image of Paradise Lost. We are of nature, and so, we abhor a vacuum. We fill that vacuum with myth. ~ For the human search engine, Mythville always leads to where it began. To where the master storyteller always begins. Mythville is everyone’s hometown. Any mythos is customizable, sure, just as New York is "Babylon" to some, the "Big Apple" to others. "In New York," Or, splooge all three together, calling it, "Harlot’s Web." Play on all of those old myths of childhood. Where the Wild Things Are. Batman. The Man on the Moon. G.I. Joe. Mythic action figures of the mind. It all depends on your first tender step, your first impression, because that’s the basis for all interior design to follow. The path of myth will lead you right back to where it began. Eternal return is a kind of cosmic reaffirmation of truth. Go ahead. Take a step. Plug the word into your little Google there. Everyone will end up, eventually, at the same door.
See how it works? Moving forward is everything. You are the human search engine.~ On the day we are born, or, introduced to something new, the information overload begins. We process. We file. We search for words, giving words to the many names of everything. They are symbols only. Things don’t change when named. But the power of the word, its distribution, can mean changes are in store.
From Harlem to a halo, the mind is set racing, a slowly growing search engine for superlatives: a desperate need to classify, to find order, hierarchy, ascending and descending. Each moment, asleep or awake, sacred, purgatorial or profane, is an attempt to give an image to the One out of oblivion.
We are born and we yearn, the random access memory of that moment filling in the blanks. The coding of our genetic memory, often mistaken for evidence of reincarnated prior selves, the meta-real thing we are, our essence, our DNA, even the spaces between each code, each word, each image, each impression, is all we have to help us store that stuff. But everything returns, eternally, to where it all began.
Basic needs are we … at birth: an instinctive response to the sudden emptiness of open air, to the cutting of the chord. The desire to reconnect to our root source is a common theme. We awake and we cry. Matter and life and metaphysics blitz us, all of it in flux, all running through us, subatomic particles, bombarding torrents of infotainment, from too many directions. We want to get back to Woodstock. Turn back the clock.
Even in ancient in 10 B.C., Philo propagated a Luddite yearning for Eden, believing bustling Alexandria to be way too distracting for the contemplative life. Oh, cried Philo, to get back to Qumran, to breathe that Dead Sea air and grow vegetables with my Essene brothers and sisters. Or the poet, W.B. Yeats, in "Adam’s Curse," writing of metropolitan man, undone at the turn of the last century: "That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown as weary hearted as that hollow moon." Life is an involuntary download that betrays the animal within that longs for a return to a simpler life; the universal server, information overload. We all get cheated, some more, some less, when first tethered to this big wet mesh of mush and rock, fed our first Big Apple. Then we are handed our space suits of mere flesh, a strange stitch of mostly water, eyes and ears that only reads certain frequencies, all connected to a tiny, tiny processor.
That processor is the problem. The universal server creates man in its image, we create processors with the same programming codes, which returns cyberspace to the image of the Master Server. A dream within a dream within a dream. "I knew that One is animate," sayeth Yeats, "Mankind inanimate phantasy."
He knew we never obtain enough cosmic data, but we still try. That is our nature. To save space on our hard drive, to compress and move on, we map the many streets of Mythville. Compression is a kind of upgrade and archiving the logos is our saving grace. The upgrade allows us to circle the moon without fear, to set a raft down the Colorado River without knowing where it leads, to rest on the mix of words to describe the megalomaniac’s landscape of New York City’s steel towers and glass canyons, all this without going bonkers. We are able, through the profane perfections of art and poetry and mythmaking, to find order in the overload. We frame a myth as an abstract but suitable meme to contain the metaphor.
Ah, the road to Mythville is paved with good intentions. Your mileage, human search engine, may vary.

~
See New York City and see the moon as another layer of "Harlot’s Web." One might say, "It’s big. It seems very big to me," and then file it away, saving the URL, content with a point of reference that you can live with. Depends on vocabulary, upbringing, education, marital status, on the total amount of time and attention – career – that we spend loving or hating, ratting on friends, confessing to strangers or talking to telemarketers on the phone about the weather in their state. New York looks like a tickertape parade of mythinformation. See all that stuff falling down. Who’s going to clean up this mess?
The megalithic icons of New York float in an ill-mannered jumble of images: How Times Square is just like the Web, a jarring eyesore of lights and noise and fully licensed, cross-promotional insanity. The snake swallows its tail right on this street corner. The mob is running in all directions to then return, after too many bites from the Apple, to devour the very bark off the Tree of Life. The feeling must be a common phenomenon for visitors: If this is the pinnacle of civilization, maybe it’s not so bad the lights will eventually go out, as the law of entropy says.
Later on at Times Square, a few hours after a graffiti shower for some massive promotion about a Broadway show had sprinkled the place, a police officer by a barricade is asked how many street-cleaning machines it would take to clean up the mess. He doesn't know. But the Java generator running lights were running behind his sunglass-shielded eyes: … Organize impertinent initiatives …~
Oh, we can improve things. Make them clear. Intensify the frequencies for better service. Reflecting on the strange words we read, enough to search them out in the dictionary, certainly adds to our bandwidth, the intensity of our P.O.V. We watch television, nod off in church, affiliate with other political animals, join new tribes, march to generals and dance to rock bands, commute or telecommute through Metropolis and back, live whole days in the air without looking out the window to see the puny world down below. We do get lazy and forget to ask questions. Life is an investigation with no apparent crime to solve. It’s so easy to give up on the search. Those who do give up fail to move forward. Something to do with evolution.
See how it works? I hope so. You can’t believe the trouble it took me, one of these human search engines, just to get you this far.

~
All of this to create a mélange that’s our private mythos? What’s the point? We might ask the Master Programmer for clues? But eternity rarely returns our e-mail, depending on whether your mythos allows for the belief in e-mail from "insert deity/archangel/spammer here." All we have is this ball speeding through space in a generally dependable direction. The scene of the crime, earth, is being scanned, even as we read, to see if the answer is in the subatomic stuff between the atoms. So help is on the way. Hooray. Hooray.
Although it’s not always apparent, everything seems to be in order. But sometimes we wonder. Sometimes even our myths erode. The energy crisis to keep our icons on the screen is like fuel loss, entropy, starvation, bankruptcy and so on. However, if a myth is close enough to the truth, it will become timeless, outlast even its mightiest temples, intended, as they all are, for self-serving institutional needs, for marketing, for propagation.
Maybe the best mythos at the end of the game wins? Or, the most popular. Then it starts over. Other than a habit on keeping up on mythmakers, it’s hard to keep the collection of angels and devils and deities from completely fragmenting, or going to dust like a mummy exposed to fresh air. Sometimes the angels of Mythville throw the manna from heaven around in our head. It’s a metaphysical food fight.
When it’s peaceful in Mythville: Even if we get it all figured out before our rented space suits are overdue, we eventually get tired, due to entropy, and lose the vision. That’s a daily cycle. The heat of inspired mythapropriation can regenerate, or, form a new party of appropriated myths. Our best mythological archetypes –– that is, those with the best streaming bandwidth -- outlast us, until someone else’s myth outlasts these, gets thrown out of town, or simply morphs into something else. Hopefully, the most illuminating myths are like good deeds, or light, and just keep going on forever. With limitations (and no temple at all), our sense is the whole mystery has something to do with growing the mythos, like a farm for high-minded content, a databasing of positive logos more than negative, stored in the metaphysical and physical realm for unknown reasons. But reasons, nonetheless. Why? Who knows? Run a search on Teilhard de Chardin.
Does the bee know why it makes honey?
Why should we?~
Moving forward is everything. Does the wise man see the same tree the regular guy sees. No real way a regular guy can prove that statement. But a wise man might be able to come up for the technical terms to explain how it’s possible. Maybe Mythville. (The ill effects of too much time in cyberspace? Perhaps.) Look at New York City, thinking of Mythville to see the central nervous system of Harlot’s Web. It’s very important to paint it that way. Easier to conjure it that way. Like a muse spinning up a form from the North Pole. You may disdain any type of trade of abstract terms for descriptions of visceral terrain. Not from anyone, living or dead. "Big" just might be enough. You might find a fashionable convergence of the two –– such as, "Mythville is the central nervous system of Harlot’s Web" –– to be obscure, obvious, inaccurate, incitement to riot, or, pure horseshit.
Hey, after a while, you get used to sensory overload. Eventually, you know longer experience that gush of overexcited language when, suddenly, only "Mythville" will suffice. Mythville gets to be just another humdrum place to live. It’s amazing what we humans can get used to. Same old song of Innocence and Experience: Once the innocence of a first impression morphs into just a daily experience, Mythville will keep doing what Mythville will do -- without much need for meteoric blather.
Which is why we need the challenge of artistic abstraction: It keeps the old ghosts visible. Don’t believe in ghosts? Well then, ask yourself this: Does a ghost, or a God, for that matter, require your trust, your faith, to do what ghosts and gods will do? Even a refusal to believe in such things has an impact, que no? Nature abhors a belief system on vacation.~
At about seven or eight years of age, when my brother and he were still were sleeping in the same room at our tiny home in the subdivision on the fringes of budding Phoenix, we used to talk before they fell asleep. Sometimes, we planned our dreams. We would repeat the words, "I want to dream of Disneyland." Or, we would agree to visit our grandma’s house: casting spells for nocturnal tele-transportation.
A few years later, I started to have nightmares. I would awake, suddenly, whenever the ghost -- a boogey man or, perhaps even an alien being -- arose out from under the bed. The golem would slip out from that nether region beneath the mattress to peer down from the footboard. The dreams recurred for years, and the result was always the same. I would sit up, startled by a terror only a child can know. During these experiments in dreamtime programming years before, I was actually successful. I could transcendental-ize myself to Grandma Julia’s backyard, with its big pecan trees in South Texas and fireflies hovering around the grapefruit grove, or better yet, to ride the Monorail in Disneyland.
I’m a big fan of public transportation.
Anyhow, I set my mind to address the midnight appearance of my private Mephisto. I promised myself that the next time the golem came out from under the bed - he would beat the living crap out of him. He never came back. He knew better. So did I. Fear nothing and nothingness will run: That’s what I used to say.
It’s a good story to tell about conquering our fears. Kids eat it up. But more than that, there’s this: That opaque phantom still lives. See his image whenever you like –– the long figure of the salamander man rising from the edge of the bed. The golem doesn’t need to materialize to have an impact anyone who has heard the story. Welcome to the nightmare. Fear nothing and nothingness will run.~
If a poet says, "New York is like the moon," the image will fill your mind. Even if you want to edit that, and then, stick the word "Big" in there somewhere. You also may not believe America has even been to the moon. You might argue: If we don’t really know all that much about the moon, what good does it do to compare New York to anything so … grandiose? In an epic sense, the description is not viable in any commercial way, shape or form. Not even a good advertisement for New York, and advertising is everything.
Maybe you dismiss magical thinking on this scale as merely a fantasy. Just play. Or maybe it’s just too New York-centric. That it belittles the Babylonian possibilities of Los Angeles, or Las Vegas, and hey, Hong Kong has good potential in the leading role of "Harlot’s Web." Any major glob of civilization, as it streams terabytes of self-serving data, as unique systems of thought and tradition stream tentacles to every other city in the world, offering it’s own uniquely influential central nervous system. Just one big Babylon. Sp
reading like a disease, or, more kind and gently, like a viral marketing campaign. You may be the sort of person to scoff at the notion that civilization marks the official start of each year by synchronizing everyone’s clock with Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve. You may say the real global stopwatch clicks first from Hong Kong, from a tiny village in the Congo, or, Oraibi, the world’s oldest continuously inhabited settlement, on the Hopi Reservation. The pueblo in Northern Arizona is a peaceful citadel perched where, a poet might say, they are holding off the end of the world. To a Hopi, keeping New York out is everything. When and if they fail, well, that’s the end of everything. See how it works? All in all, the whole setup seems pretty frail. When the last line of defense lacks any real technology, such as missiles, well, kinda makes you wonder how the Hopi lasted this long.~ You also may find it ludicrous for a poet to be a credible source for news and information when his poem links the Garden of Eden and the nickname, The Big Apple. But a poet will write words into his little notebook in any order he or she chooses. A human search engine will plug it into Google. The impact will be limited to whoever might be reading: usually, not that many people; unless, of course, the poet is in advertising. If the poet or artists sells out and works on Madison Avenue in New York, then his power as a conjurer all depends on his ability to distribute a clear message as often as possible, as well as the strength of the signal across the broadest possible bandwidth. Another important factor is whether his audience is willing to receive tricky, metaphorical coding. Code is law. Code is everything. For anyone who can’t decipher the code, well Kenneth, some dogs do get the frequency.
Poets and artists and computer programming engineers and wizards and sorcerers do. Human search engines are even more powerful. One such artist was Jean-Michel Basquiat, the graffiti-style painter who frequently hyperlinked his canvas to the technology storms of Babylon. If you haven’t seen the work of Basquiat, he was like a witch doctor with a can of spray paint for his power stick. He was a soul-sick captive in a city that subjected him to information overload. To handle the overload -- and, to add more magic his power stick, as sorcerers will do -- he took heroin until he died. But before that happened, he painted at least one untitled work that seems to be about technology and New York. Scratched in black line, with other diagrams and primitive designs are such phrases as "Sun God/Trickster," a reference to the source and mercurial nature of information, "Global Industrial," and, more to the point, "The Apple of Sodom."
People in Sodom (same thing as Babylon) tend to last longer if they get used to being there, maybe not take themselves so seriously, and get out of town more often. ‘Tis better to "buy in" and "sell out" and then take extended vacations. Take a "breather" from that sort of self-inflicted conflict.
By the way, William Blake was an artist, too. His wound was self-inflicted. Without a persecutor he would have had to invent one. This was due to his insistence that the ethereal world was more important than the material. He was constantly wishing his life away, believing the mystical and the real could be wed. Other than a marriage of heaven and hell in cyberspace, he’s still waiting for an audience that’s in tune with that frequency. Other than the weird way paranoia went pop at the beginning of the New Millennium, and the way wireless technology fuses the Web with the real world, the boundaries melting into fluidity, the very convergence of every known thing on the Web … yep, we are still waiting in Bethlehem for that rough beast to be born.
Fools are born every minute, too. And New York is Harlot’s Web. And so is Mythville. Heaven and Hell are one. Go ahead. Run a search on it.~
Maybe you can entertain this: That the World Devourer is making its move in the 21st century. That this age-old foe of nature is fed by the corporate nation-state: the Urizen (or it is Verizon?) on the horizon. That The Book of Revelations, by John of Patmos, in the standard-issue, open source Bible, is a networked virus that will eventually lead to the crash of human history. What the Hopi call the Fourth World. Oh sure, you may not believe in the Bible or God or that the end is near. But certainly, plenty of people do.
Enough to have an impact on those who do not? We are all secluded, prisoners of the epic information war.
Only a poet would make such claims. A human search engine could find some source to support it. It’s irresponsible, unscientific, certainly not journalistically PC. But then, this extended narrative doesn’t dwell much on why such statements are true or prophetic. The chaotic swirls of observation, metaphor and paranoid theory, mixed in a somewhat linear manner and intensified by hyperlink, myth and caffeine-induced overdrive. It’s supposed to work in a way we don’t completely understand. After a few rounds of remembering and forgetting and re-forging the text, the poet is as surprised as anyone.
Surely, anyone with imagination or vision can discern the purposes and agencies behind the history (the way a Blake historian put it) that the poet’s readers are witnessing. Poetic imagination is everything. And so is this: Whether Mythville is real or imagined is of no consequence. The impact on the poet -- and anyone who can decipher his code -- is everything.~
The moon doesn’t ask permission from anyone to influence the swelling seas, or, women in the peak of their menstrual cycles: what a poet might call "moon goddesses." The orb, the poet or New York City needs no permission to work a special voodoo on you, your dog, the born, the unborn or born again. Global warming can take place without the permission or approval or sure-fire, written-down proof of the world’s best scientists or their highly paid corporate contrarians. Without seeing a subway, you may disbelieve just about anything subterranean. Not seeing is disbelieving. But the subway doesn’t need you to believe to keep moving uptown. The childhood alien golem doesn’t need to show up again in order to go "Boo!" He’s still there. See him. Read him in these words. This code. See him hovering. The archon. The Salamander Man. The ghost in the machine. Keep searching, human search engine. He's here. Between the words.
Zeus Sucks!

Predicting the future is only an act of hubris, and it’s a symptom of spending too much time on the Web to believe you are better at it than, say, throwing darts on the big target of possibilities. Techno-savvy prognostication is standard practice for the highly sought out members of think tanks and leading edge members of the digerati fringe. As one attains greater tools and more power and believes something other than simply being human is happening to him, as he deigns himself to have a greater awareness and insight into things, it’s nonetheless an act of folly. Still, we try. It’s no accident that the spirit of Prometheus, that Greek deity who gave fire and the alphabet to human beings, who then went on to speak and build things, much to the consternation of Zeus, is now recognized among many techno-wizards and members of digerati to be a technology god who is sometimes referred to as 'one who sees far.' The hubris is derived from the resulting megalomania inspired by tools that provide a supposedly superhuman reach across the networked world. Which is what made Zeus angry and perhaps a little jealous, incensed enough, at least, to bound Prometheus to the rocks on the shore: His real concern that humans, believing themselves to be Gods, just might foul up the whole hierarchical system of nature. But Prometheus refused to bow to this higher power just as many of us refuse to recognize that, despite the heady intoxication of so much technology converging on our desktops at lightning speed, we are all still pinned to one big rock in space.
In coming years, the architecture of the Web will continue to evolve by the very same seemingly random patterns, the ebb and flow of living things and forces that dictate events on big rock in space. By known economic and social patterns that repeat throughout history. By natural currents that are all quite mysterious to even the most profound and comprehensive thinkers about what’s going to happen next in cyberspace, which is as equally pinned to the real world as Prometheus. In fact, many of these mighty ones are falling, or about to fall, even as I write this, because they believed they had the secret key to the Emerald City, convincing a lot of others to come along. In the upcoming year, many of the most notable pioneers of e-commerce will lose their grip and slip into the abyss. Only to replaced by the vultures and transformers of their best ideas, usually by corporate nation-states that had long recognized the strength of being tethered to material things. In short: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. If you don’t believe it, look at the revenge of the brick and mortar stores as they restore order at the online shopping mall. It has always been that way. Why should the Web be any different?
In coming years, the Web will seem more human, but only because humans will seem more robotic, that is, they’ll morph into cyborg citizen-servants to the emerging order of the electronic beehive. Space will continue to fuse ubiquitous cyberspace to the collective mind of the earthbound. Reality and unreality will become harder to discern. Especially for those who don’t have a proper grounding in the physical and metaphysical laws at work on both ends of the spectrum. Many might believe, for example, that Martin Sheen really is a good president. Others, seeing this trend, will take advantage by creating all kinds of multimedia assurances that, if propagated to enough people, will enable them to achieve any cynical end they might desire.
The next-generation Web will seem more virtual, and the real world will be more often referred to as 'just like the Internet.' But by the end of the year, closed networks and intranets will be more prevalent. From that point on, the World Wide Web will become fractured, disordered, and many will complain. Hyped all year already by those it might serve, for calling for security and privacy, the Web will become less a tool for communication, more often a function for those who command, those who control. Most will comply and register for the Mark. Greed and self-interest will rule a society dictated by this fact: Bar code is law. Technological man will, after all, have no choice if he wants to feed from the mutual marketplace of e-commerce.
This loss of a sense of an online community, this descending into electro-tribes, set into motion whenever a comprehensive hegemony dissolves, will be reinforced by gated communities created out of the desire to re-establish bonds with our fellow man. The digital divide will widen. The technocrats will only get stronger. As resources become more and more scarce, and global warming moves closer to its inevitable redline say, 50 years from today, those who dictate the architectures of technological space will find themselves to be increasingly able to drive people like cattle to the diminishing safety zones of survivability.
Conflict will arise out of the resistance to this, but the system will only fracture more as a result of this literal cyberwar between the competing hierarchical layers of technocrats, corporate interests, governments and its cyborg servant class trying to just keep up and survive. It will be too bad. We could have all got along. We could have put the automobile to pasture. Finally, a large number of enlightened ones who are scrambling, even now, to discover practical ways to unplug from this insanity we like to call 'civilization,' will find a way to connect in a mutually effective, quite spiritual way. The wisdom of this passion for self-sufficiency will only become apparent when the lights go out, when dwindling resources for fuel and then, cheap electricity fails to feed the system, which collapses from the weight of too many voices, too many demands, too much desire for more civilization, more production, for its own sake. The neo-Luddites, though quite techno-savvy, will be the meek who inherit the eventual earth. After all, small is big, slow is fast, spirit is all that remains, and ever shall be, on terrain both cyber or dirt real.
Of course, since I’m only a mere human casting you this Web of apocalyptic imagery with a gnostic’s mysterious writing machine, quite the opposite is equally likely to happen. What do you think I am, the Wizard of Oz?

~

The opening of the century came and went and it appeared the winds of change had conspired against the entire continent. If you haven't already forgotten and moved on to the consoling video stream of the virtual presidency, where President Martin Sheen says all the things we always wished our presidents would say, there was that drab Wednesday in American history, Dec. 13, 2000, when there was a very real, certainly material, corrosively visceral version of what we like to call convergence: When the Supreme Court cast its votes for Dubya, and all were spared the trouble of deciding for democracy. Then convergent metamedia, now pouring through the anticipated cataclysm of the future like a bad -- but well publicized -- rendered-in-3D dream, amped up the volume and the Twin Towers came tumbling down.
The whole constipated poop shoot of the dog-eared promise of the New World jammed into the screw-tight orifice of the next century and instilled an overwhelming dreadgeist of collective disappointment and paranoia. Every human soul within earshot of any report or anguished groan over what the U.S. Supreme Court had failed to do: that is, be Supreme, and all voters, counted and uncounted, felt that gong of doom from the very bowels of hell. But with uncanny prescience, that act only served as a forshadowing event, for in George W. Bush America had hired its international executioner.
"It Can't Happen Here," apparently, can. That much was obvious. Spreading like a contagion of fire across the networked landscape of the globe via talk shows, television news updates and e-mail flame war preventing even the most modest real estate developer's home page to upload in a slow a sludge ball of bad bandwidth as grief overdosed every pedestrian on Main Street, the deep truth always expected, but never fully understood, pierced the broken heart and fogged the mind's eye of anyone able to read, think, love, hate and vote.
But I was more interested in the solar flares causing freakish storms, suggesting that there might be some relationship between the chaos on earth and the blaze of heaven. Certainly, between the failures of democracy and the maximized 13-year-pulse of solar storm cycles, each new turn took on a new tragi-cosmic character.

Now that the days of pleasantries are over

At the arrival of the storm, the front door to the second-story condo blew in, since it faced the wind. Giant trees somehow avoiding the axe for a century swayed madly, and to the good fortune of my own little endeavor in empirical science, a string of multi-colored toy balloons (perhaps the casualty of a Latino car dealership upwind in downtown Phoenix) swished across my line of sight, speeding by about one-hundred feet up: a perfect weather balloon. I’d say it was doing sixty (even though I can’t detect the red-shift and all). Conclusion: A big storm was zeroing in on the southwest from L.A., across the great desert through Barstow, but who really knew with this paradised-out moonscape, this maxed out marketplace plain, with its golf courses and manmade lakes and teaming foundations and swimming pools? Could have been enough moisture around to evaporate up enough for a couple of lakes of rain ...
Anything to keep my mind off the cautious company I was living with, who, like my girlfriend’s cat, looked at me as if she wanted me to die. Or rather, for me to go away and let her die. She lived by the darkness of the television light, in gloom, in defeat with self-preservation … a satisfaction of being only minimally depressed within the perfection of her sphere, a void onto itself … in a prescription haze….
Regardless, what the trees lack, the wind whispers. Like a suburban monk, I was, making sure to keep a light touch whenever I touched the landlord lady nurse’s refrigerator as her rayo-light-Tv obliterated the room from it’s darkness, a flickering firelight of cop shows, cop dramas, cops in love, in law … a very strong law enforcement vibe and then yer off to bed kinda light and white noise … And, me, talking about the weather: The atmosphere of the southwestern desert struck me as unearthly, as guided by angels. After growing up there, I didn’t recognize it anymore. There was no antidote for this mercurial snakebite. By the great nimbus beasts that took shape in the late afternoons, the clouds taking on characters with each gust.
There’s the dragon. There’s the wolf. The snaky front with its long tail slouching across the desert, only to explode into a microburst at five in the afternoon. The archangels of global warming in full view, perhaps. About as clear as the chemtrails, also over Phoenix, I’d say. But I’m at a disadvantage. It’s hard to tell anymore what the normal weather patterns are when you move around so much. The sense of something supernatural, as in moving by abnormal physical shifts in the sky, is a feeling only enhanced by being pushed around by the winds in life. I had just come down from Oregon, fresh from a record season for rain on the Pacific Coast. Forty straight days of rain, in fact. A record for January and February in the deep misty wood along the shore that drove men like Lewis and Clark into dreamy depressions, in a place where the local natives thought White Man mad to want to live there, a foul stenching woodsy murk on a tsunami terrorized coast. Where the winds shook the house, but nobody ever mentioned anything about a storm the next day. Where the angry seas at the 45th parallel pummeled the seawalls along Highway 101, threatening to break through its lines within the next century, not to mention the next 10 years. We, Jaimie O. and I had arrived back like refugees, yes, and we never quite got our feet back on the hot cement of Phoenix, either. She called out to the sea when the storms moved in, in full fury, to Tiamat, to the lost Gods of the beaches, worn away, keening into the wind …
But this sense of disturbed timing goes back further than that: to the fire in the sky. No doubt I was pushed this far by a very last lick of sun that touched the planet. But the first thing I have to say is I had a hard time getting anybody to believe me. Seven years ago, maybe a decade or more, by the time you read this: Our story. The whole thing was too preposterous and prescient and certainly my description of the event as “a lake of fire in the sky” didn’t help at such things as counseling sessions and divorce proceedings. In fact, I had a hard time getting anybody to believe anything I said in those days. Not about the lightning. The polarities. The dot-com bust looming. The bloodbath to come … the one-click wars to come: Ever since that period in 2000, the weather has become preternaturally strange to me, just as I had become preternaturally strange to other people. Something to ignite a concoction in my head. Something without a compass, without a needle to get a handle on. My best friends then, usually women, said I seemed haunted.
Especially after that concurrent histrionic state of mind, due to the stolen election of 2000. The country had been hijacked by a band of Skull & Crossbones pirates. By 9/11 it was clear. Anyone could see. I lost my job. Got a divorce. Refused to own a driver’s license. Tried to get off the grid. Ran into the Colorado Rockies dreaming of same fabled web site to make it all ring clear, then ran back to Boston in time to find the world at war, a nation pumped up by its delusions, shadowboxing with an idea, an ancient Christian foe as old as the Crusades. When the solar storm hit New England in the fall of the year 2000, in fact, most likely a series of storms, it appeared to me as having biblical portents, but denial in those days of the Y2k craze was strong. The world had just moved on. Any prognostication about the dark days ahead was met with derision by co-workers and family members. It was the holidays, after all. Nobody wanted to think about it. The election had finally done the work of a global stun gun. The wrath of God stuff could be safely removed to points of conjecture in the land of god and cannon, and thus, put off for until now as back story spinning out of control.

Okay, let's set a few ground rules. First of all, this living novel isn't going to be one of my long sad odes to lost love. Nor do I make much of my own apocalyptic furies anymore. They are merely observations now, after all. Looking for something a little more life-affirming despite, as I said before: The forty days of fire, forty day of rain. Perhaps if I explain these places, these hard-weather haunts I keep finding, and how the storms swell in myself, we might end up with some kind of real interesting nature study. Let all of that stuff wash this planet clean, I say. Good riddance. Nor is this series of honest entries going to be overly metaphysical. I know, it can’t be avoided. As the metaphysical blends with the physical, as it always has, we can at least grasp all things as one whole, and leave it at that. All religions are one, Blake said, and that shall be the central core of the moral code here, but I'll add that science can be combined in the Tao of that diagram, too.

That being established, the real meaning behind all this is the essential idea that global warming is a proven reality, and despite the fact science has yet to confirm it, we can rely on our own empirical experience, our subjective sensitivities, to guide us. Any animal has this power. We humans shouldn’t deny it, either. Our instincts are telling us everything we need to know. Feeling shook up? Sure you do. If you don't, well, aren't you lucky. You must live in some high-class castle somewhere, insulated, numb, actuallly, with a bank account growing rich from the pilfering of the globe and its underclass of citizen servants to the machine mind. I know, you smile, in social Darwinist glee, don't you, thinking there’s nothing but money that flows like some kind of river or holy ghost that dictates the true realities of the global engines, and all of the rest of us, with nothing but spirit to hone, are just flapping around in the narcotic gods of our overactive imaginations.

Okay then, you have your reward. Drive your Hummers into the sunset with glee. Carve up the valleys and canyons to your hearts’ content. Vote red. See red. Drain blood. Drill. Drill. Drill! Carry your U.S. Marine guarded pallets of cash up and down the streets of Baghdad like a parade of caskets, for all I care. You have your reward, you fucking vampires! What do you know about the weather? I know that it passes through me, over me and, in some cases, below me. That’s all I know. The only real “touch” I’ve been granted. Science, of course, addresses the evidence differently. In a supposedly objective way. Not so angry. More reserved. Cool. Feeling from the subjective, I can say that what I know about the weather, and what I feel, is all that I need to know.

Though my senses may betray and my emotions may swell, I know my personal track record is better than your best satellite. They say our primordial instincts, though dormant, are intact. The eye in the sky uses science, but even old Horus lacks the local skills to reach the conclusions of verifiable evidence that yes, it’s raining, yes, it’s a hurricane outside, and so on. But these are conclusions we are already able to reach by looking up into the sky, opening our eyes, taking a breath, and catching the ill winds that blow through all of us now, at one time or another, for an unlucky many on a daily basis.

The scientific process, whatever it takes to get theory ratified into human understanding, will not help us now. We must rely on our senses, now, or the situation looks terminal. Sure, life will adapt. For example, you might live in a condo in the future in, say, Carlsbard Caverns. Certainly, Carlsbad Caverns, though I have never seen it, scientifically speaking, I know it must be a beautiful place. Yes, we humans have always done well in caves. Caves are consistently good for being safe from, say, tornados. The attendant rain my eventually reach you, but as far as tornados go, you’re good. They provide excellent cover from the cold, and yes, the heat. It’s nice and cool down there in those caves. You might like that fine.

Scientifically speaking, I don’t know much about the Kyoto Protocols. My knowledge is based on hearsay. Certainly, here in Arizona, as it is for the rest of America, there is no evidence of any kind of Japanese-hosted global protocol, unless you count Toyotas. Otherwise, the air is dirty as sin. In this valley, I choke on the dust, and it really cramps my smoking. My senses tell me the air is dirty as sin and sin is disorderly, to say the least. A protocol implies order. There is no order here, sir.

~

This day in Phoenix began with a large Latino demonstration against some kind of proposed state legislation that, to hear the agents of La Raza describe it, sounds like some kind of Nazi pusch to rid this place of more than half of its population. On a fine March day, 20,000 citizens of real actual America, most of them more than likely so-called “illegals,” showed their faces at 24th and Camelback to create the largest mass demonstration in state history. Throughout the day, all traffic in Phoenix was ground to a halt and consumerism took a heavy blow, as a result. I saw a parade of little Latino guys pushing those musical ice cream carts up and down the street, and thought I caught a whiff of ricin in the air while trying to negotiate it all in a white rented truck, my nerves of heightened alert, but actually it wasn't too bad of a day to find Phoenix: A bundle of nervous polarities. I left it that way. Now it has intensified. Figures. But, O my sweeties, how it made me forget about the beauty of the craggy California and Arizona desert I’d driven through. It made me forget about the little burghs of trailer parks, tire fix outlets, shanty little restaurants, and that whole weird world of citizens who are off the grid in the deserts of America. We can only imagine who they are. Who we are. Good people, mostly, since most people are basically good. But we must be an anti-social bunch. If anti-social means avoiding the streets of Phoenix, though, then I can certainly relate to the gripe.

Anyhow, the transition from the coast of woodsy Oregon sure made the clean-as-a-whistle resort marketplace in Sonora seem more moonish than ever before. And that’s the situation with the magazine business in Phoenix, all expressed oh so confidently by the editor of a local fashion magazine, who was trying to elucidate what kind of fill goes between the ads at his publication.
Print journalism in America is so far removed from the First Amendment it can scarcely raise a mute defense against “surface, wallpaper.” The skin-deep marketplace dictates all. Economic forces shape the printed word in order to appear before the overpopulated media frenzy to promote “surface, wallpaper.” And my career? An attendance at the end of the age of newsprint, a more sophisticated form of wallpaper. Thin pages of paper, papyrus, as rendered originally by Guttenberg, then Hearst ... over. Like wall paper burning off the screen for the opening of “Bonanza.” My first thought, immediately looking at the “wallpaper” round the offices of the magazine, tucked into the rococo renaissance of gilded logos at the Esplanade, where even Donald Trump gets shown the door, was to ponder what kind of lives go on there for those covered in wallpaper. If I cared to take the time to do a study, I would examine what kind of flora adorns the Esplanade: As above, so below, the sages say. The desert has been eradicated for many miles, and so this shiny coated surface is a curtain of death, the death of the printed sheet of paper for the purposes of print media, for all I can ascertain. The “surface” and “wallpaper” represents everything sucking the planet dry, and the planet, sucking back, has decided to claim print journalism, through the untimely appearance of turmoil in the real estate industry, one of it's first victims. If you had read this far, certainly, you need little convincing of this: An electronically charged posting. But it’s worth railing on, all the same. That’s because behind it all, there’s something to live for. There’s something valuable to know behind the notice that you can’t drink from fountains, but hey, bottled water is still freely available. There’s something valuable in casting a review of the song cast by the Vampire, who’s sucking sounds ring loud and clear, only to be filled with endless port thirsts worth of water, all being poured like the waters of Google myths, by vases into cracks in the earth, a mystical sentence then, for endless words disappearing beneath the land ... a sacrifice to the god of information.

The Biltmore shopping mall, across the street, is one big mirror to the surface and the wallpaper. Notice the mall-dressed manikin chicks as they glance at themselves, half secretly, in the window shop reflections. To see my own reflection is to live in a kind of torment myself. I can't even laugh at the shallowness of “surface, wallpaper,” if that’s all I’m looking for. So trying to figure out how to fill in the spaces between the ads is a pretty pointless event, I see. Anyone with a global conscience is going to feel that way, if asked to observe the surface of high-end consumer paradise, and by swimming in these dry environs they will no doubt be likewise lost in the despair, hopelessness and banality cast by the controlling mechanisms of the ruling caste. You the one, the order of the Red, which made a brief goodbye at the nearby Biltmore Hotel with John McCain's capitulation beneath the starless of skies of Phoenix by November, 2008. But still ... the Vampire sings: “Think surface, think wallpaper.” All platform surfaces are even, yes, safe for high-heeled beings, but there is nothing eternal about the surface of concrete. And this is really, really valuable to know. Because the days of such pleasantries are over. Nothing left to do now but see what the most Dangerous Creatures on Earth will leave on the silver plate after they are finished with their feast. Forget about trying to keep up by putting on new Euro-trash clothes (to feel better ... free) Forget about getting a free drink of water. Realize that if you are thirsty, you can always slip into some men’s room and cup your own hands in the sink, like Pilot, I guess, and drink from the basin bowl of “surface,” enjoying the “wallpaper” as you blow your hands dry on the electrified blower (this is the desert, there’s not a free water fountain within 10 square miles; and you would think we could save the juice and let ourselves dry naturally.
Somewhere in the Middle East there's a bunch of crazies dreaming up a way to crash this surface and burn the wallpaper. But they are no better than the guys dialing up dollar digits to make sure the enemy surface, doesn’t gain supremacy so that they, themselves, can cover it with their own name brand style of “wallpaper.” So sip from your tippy cup, sweet babies, and hope you are born with the right pattern and style on your faces. The days of such pleasantries are over. Tip the cup of vampire blood for just one last great sip of the concrete basin. Drink. Drink! Your mangled engines may wine and dine, and the pretty glossy sweet dallied lies may glint for a month on your tabletop surface, but seek no truth there, just empty descriptions of “surface, wallpaper.”

~

If the week began with the planet Mercury going into retrograde, and with my own knowledge this meant trouble for communications and all ars technica, well then, that would have been enough. But to see and feel and interpret this phenomena, powered by the solar winds permeating the earth, so often, well now, this is certainly an item for more research.
If you had told me January 1, 2004, that August 14-15, 2004, would be like a summer day in Boston or San Francisco, well, I would have laughed. I am not laughing now. The solar winds, perhaps the very eye of Ayer beaming in on us, are blowing more holes through this thing called human technology by the hour.
Take, for example (since all journalism is local), by complex swimming pool at Tatum and Bell. As I mentioned before, on Saturday morning it appeared to be losing water at an incredible rate. My assumption had been that the wind and the sun had been the culprit. But now, I have determined, the pool pump has cracked a leak, and despite all of my efforts to rescue it like some fire team on a U.S. Navy destroyer, going so far as to even buy a garden hose (I have no garden) to refill the pool, the whole damn problem is much more associated with something akin to a broken heart.

On Saturday night, the pool was bubbling up oxygen like some foul sulfur pit. This morning, the same, but in the light, it looked and felt more curative and pleasant. Great whooshing bubbles would come up from the bottom of the pool as the pump, with the help of the fresh blood, tried and tried to adjust. At this point, after informing the pool authorities about what is going on here, I think I have mastered control of this nature. For a while, though, I almost could believe that the pool, like Gaia itself, could heal itself. But it cannot. Why?
It is dying of a broken heart. So, take this metaphor, dear readers: You want the planet to heal itself? Then stop breaking its heart.

~

Today the observations are as follows: The planet is melting. As foretold, the humidity comes first as the polar ice caps melt and the polarities of temperature and moisture ... no need to write formulas for you. Outside this morning, despite cloud cover the day before, the pump for a large swimming pool was sucking dry after several days of intense sun. August is always that way in Phoenix, but what was different on Friday, August 13 (Jacque DeMolay, thou art avenged), was this: A dust storm tearing across the Valley at 2 p.m. Weather man was a tad startled. These are his perfect days. Face time with his public to explain strange storms, fires and double-dipper hurricanes with triple-digit winds.
Cannot say I feel too bad about Florida, though, surely, many of those who suffered had votes that went uncounted in 2000. The remaining dimpled chads have blown into the Atlantic by now. Time to forgive. It is not for us to determine punishment. Although, I must say, we don’t need no God to punish us, no Malkuth to fly us away now from the Sun, no: I say, we do a perfectly good job of punishing ourselves. Anyway, this is about metascience. Keep all politics aside. Except for this: Please, before we all burst into flames from the mere humidity and pressure. Heap big storm in the Valley of the Sun on Sunday night. Me see um fire in the sky. Thunderbirds in weird mood swings. Me take Valerian to sleep. Noni for clam. The animals awake, confused. Clocks all set wrong. The large buildings of the Biltmore quad took all the hits. Tall boys doin' us big um favor. The sun rises high and hot and fast today. The morning is a beam ...

Click-Clack-Paddy-Whack Meets Jack Kerouac on the Mer-O-Wac
The scene: In the imagination, but with combat boots on the soil, clearly, lugging the laptap across the land. Just out of lunch after getting my Chinese fortune cookie from this downtown rough spot in Lowell, Massachusetts, too dumb to realize I was doing the historic Jack Kerouac tour in some crude way, since he was born and raised in this half-priced-on-everything, that is, everything turned into a pawn-shop-of-a-New England industrial town. And I certainly don’t remember or have the cookie fortune now. Then when I stumbled upon a commemorative site, a classic red-brick river-walk territory of the National Park Service, or at least this part of town near the Merrimack River seemed to be, I stumbled upon the Jack Kerouac Mational Monument, or perhaps it was just a shrine, who knows? It all seemed very official. Paid for. Looks a lot like Stonehenge. With big horizonal cement slabs in half circles, trees growing old and wise. Worthy of the full respect of everyone. It was the year 2000. Bush had just been elected.
I’d gotten there how? By train out of Boston, I guess. I pulled a folded pouch of black, white, quite stained cloth from my backpack. I set it on a cement bench with various notebooks of poems, a backpack carting the PC, a compass, business cards, collected media, small piles of books for sale, a carved wooden “eagle” and, gotta have it, the Mythville logo, which is the image of a steer skull and the words Mythville.org, my brainchild just coming to being. An adaptation from a Georgia O’Keefe motif (traced it from a drawing myself … a red, white, black deathly image … when a friend saw it he said, “How unfortunate.”) But at that time, for myself, it said it all. Or so I thought. Really, the logo was just a “A premonition of anthrax,” I can now chuckle to myself, in the Mythville of my mind, on how that logo was devised nine months before September 11, 2001, but only a few weeks, if that long, after December 13, 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled all Floridian dimpled chads null and void. That’s the kind of humor you find now. The ironic kind. With saturnine subtext. Oh well, satire never plays fair. All we really knew back then, the witches of Essex and myself, was there was going to be some serious hell to pay. “Some serious action,” this bizarre historian landlord in Ipswich would say, a year later, after the World Trade Center Towers were taken down. And the logo, the dot org, a network of one? What a gag! A serious non-prophet action, yes it is, yes it was.
Oh yeah, the scene, again: the Jack Kerouac shrine in Lowell, Massachusetts. Right by the river. Betwixt the satanic red-brick mills. The site is chosen now, for examination, because just eight years or so ago, as I write this, sometime after the so-called “election” of George W. Bush Jr. as national executioner, and just prior to the dawn of the new century, that is, January 1, 2001, I had accidentally found this place. Or, since there’s no such thing as an accident, it had found me. There I was, in a Chinese food restaurant in downtown Lowell, after coming out of the “T” station (Yes, I can see it, hear it now, the Dr. Sax sound echoing in the Lowell railway terminal, right along with the “On the Road” mementoes … and me regularly lugging it all over to the city center because, hey, it was something Kerouac would do. To see a woman. A witch ... to have her … should have saw it coming …. I didn’t really have that thought, however, until I opened up my fortune cookie and realized, like I say: I was “On the Road” to Mythville, on the way to the so-called Blakean “Palace of Wisdom.”
Yes, yes, certainly, it was a road of excess ... I just loved to wander all over New England, by car, train or, at best, by foot, to let the thickety mysteries of the Hub, for this transplanted Arizonan, find me.
So then, from downtown Lowell, I just got up, and started walking toward the Mer O Wac bridge, toward the home of this earth woman, a graphic designer and co-conspirator who had agreed to create a logo for the self-publishing effort ... the mission ... she had long flaxen hair, long flaxen body, as well … could it be an accident? Finding that place. Along the way, wham! A moment of complete synchronicity. I walk right up to the Kerouac shrine. Ker O Wac by the Mer O Wac. Never even knew there was such a thing. A veritable stonehenge for the New Journalism.
So now, the coffee is ready. Time for the imaginary press conference. The pouch, a pirate flag unfolded and draped over my shoulders, like a cape. An act of bizarre eccentricity worthy of a Lord Byron or Robert Bly. There are imaginary snickers all around, and I stand (the performance artist) on the cement benches there, part of the circuitous shrine, with big stone slabs circling me, each with bits of Kerouac’s writings, his poetry … imaginating a bunch of nobody listeners around me, listening to me, nobody, signifying nothing. I light up a cig, an Indian bidi, blowing out the smoke for effect. To make it worse, I stand on the center stool of the Kerouac shrine, and my voice begins to boom as the sound waves bounce around within this literary circle, standing on this sorcerer’s stump: "Click, clack, paddywhack, I just met Jack Kerou-oooooouuu-wack! Right along the Mer-O-Wack, the mighty Merrickmack," and so on, with nobody around to listen in, nobody to say, “shut up” … or, “I knew Jack Kerouac, and you ain’t no Jack, Jack.” Those not in audience, the members of the nobody press, would’ve just whispered sour nothings and giggled, but with the acoustics, if they really had been there, could hear the other: “What a piece of work! Standing on the shoulders of this giant, Kerouac! Indeed!”

~

Where am I now, or that is, where do we go? Nowhere, so much, because at the end of it all, it exists in each and everyone’s mind. The Road, that is. Think of it like the impossible endless search for the Holy Grail, negotiating the storehouse of each person’s personal mythology, where all of their angels and demons live. It’s the shining city of light. A place the imagination (and therefore the soul) can go into infinite directions. Just on the edge of touch, but certainly not your mind. For some people, it’s a whole barnyard of beings and deities, gods and their avatars. To meet the Ethereans, perhaps, at first. To ask for their guidance … all quite within the literary tradition of summoning the muses … yes, yes ….
There’s a code for this quest. Comes in handy. Comes in studying the land, the symmetries of it all, the way the old Freemasons even lined up the old North Shore lodges, leaving clues in the aging stone bridges crossing the river in Haverhill, Lowell, North Andover … Ah yes, code is law ... just follow the sun east to west, note the charted streets, the compass-like points of civilization. The passwords are being all handed out now, then, to all of the nobodies there. Indeed it is. Just like the Da Vinci code, too, but in this case it’s a real story of that search? Some of it perhaps. But it’s all a lost doggy story, too, really. Of a borderline perp trying to find his own little lost doggy. Yes, yes … explains the pain … the loss, the endless searching .... You do need to be able to work your machine to get to my machine and then download either an e-book or print-on-demand book, or fuck’n’hell, just read my mind. It’s all tipping over now … pouring out.
So the code is the computer, the ghost between the digits one and zero, and all of these digitized geeks, who like to read about wizards, the enviro digeratis, the online sorcerers, all of those not in the audience … except, perhaps, as, well, kind of personal pathway: The road to superinformation. Like Blake said, “The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.”

~

The road could’ve begun, a ticket for a tricked up mule born then bought on the Smolak Farm in Andover, actually, when I had a long discussion about rabbits. Actually, books with “Sully,” as in author William Sullivan, who wrote numerous short, somewhat quirky, oddly sinister children’s books. It was the fall of 2000. Election day was looming. It was a beautiful day. Picking apples, wandering through the trees, picking a pumpkin with my little girl. Talking of wolves and rabbits. Then I met “Sully” and saw what he was trying to do, and is still doing, writing fairy tales about rabbits and a whole barnyard of his own characters. I was the senior editor for Access Internet Magazine, with its 11 million readers, weekly, another kind of content farm, and I suddenly realized the connection between the mythological constructs of William Blake and the hierarchical order of the online, and therefore, real world. And more than that, what it might mean for a self-publisher of numerous, smaller, shorter, more digestible reads. In other words, making e-books, William Blake-style. Some dumb idea, huh?
But, actually, the experiment in experiential literature all started,
also, with a pirate flag. That is really the crux of the whole thing. That was my first logo. The Jolly Roger.
What kind of Peter Pan fantasies are we talking about here? Now? No, that’s right … I remember ... That medium was the message. The pirate flag was the crux of the whole thing, the Skull & Crossbones vibe back then. A kind of upgrade from the X-files journey of the 1990s … the pirate flag … the crux … the whole thing. Oh well, maybe I really should backtrack? Provide even more back story before the Bush era even begins? When moving through a lot of the ephemeral stuff quickly, we are well advised to keep the mind still and the eyes sharp. The truth will fly right past you.
Okay, so there’s the election. I voted for Nader. Who knew? Then, this long period of a couple of weeks, then a month, then six weeks of nobody knowing who the hell is in charge anymore, right?
Then came a solar storm … A solar storm hit New England. I looked it up. Nobody believed me, except for a lady in a gas station pay counter near the freeway in Andover. A lake of fire in the sky, over Lawrence. I thought the whole place was ablaze with lightning. Yes, yes, that was the first day of forty days of fire that I can count, forty days of rain …

~

Look it up yourself, a freak solar storm hit New England, the whole earth, really, from that point, sometime between the election and December 13, 2000. Apparently, it was the end of a 13-year cycle of unusual solar activity. My theory is that it sent vibrations turbulatin’ on into the very core of the earth. I was certainly feeling them: After the Supreme Court had ruled to decide the election, I just broke loose. I wanted nothing to do with this country, or, any other. It was as if a bolt of lightning had briefly lit up every one of our institutions and revealed, for just one brief flash of X-ray, every one of our major institutions as faulty, frail and hopelessly corrupt. For me, looking at it from the dark, wintery, London-esque Mordor of Boston, one big, giant, monstrous … well … one big complete bogus ... Mythville. Not that there was much of an audience for this kind of publishing, expression, through the blogs and so on … a specialized audience, indeed. Audience? At that point, I was just one guy with a blogger … A voice crying out in the wilderness …. Yeah sure, that’s what we all believe, but like the ancient Google myth, it’s really just endless pourings of pitchers of water into a crack in the earth, an attempt to cool off the planet, or heat it up, who knows? … So, as my world was coming apart, and I was determined to tap out of the system, especially creatively, in pursuit of this self-publishing, self-expressive dream, I decided I needed to network with like-minded people.
So, what I did was …. And really, trust me, I’m not this person anymore … I took the pirate flag, which I intended to give to my future-ex-father in law for Christmas, and I hung it out to flap in the breezes on the front porch, right out there to challenge the American flags, innocuous sailing flags, and so on … for whatever reason, people in New England alll have flag mounts on their porches. I wanted to signify to anyone who might get the code: Panic! Panic! It’s time to take action. It’s time to be a pirate.
But action came from unexpected quarters: My wife threatened divorce , then followed through with those threats. My in-laws, Sicilian mob-style, tried to get me kicked out of our place there in North Andover. They called the cops. Stirred up the neighbors. Threatened to send thugs over to kick me out. Took the family car, a kind of wedding gift, away, leaving me wheeless. Once, when I had left the home, they snuck into the basement and pulled out all of the fuses, leaving the place completely dark. I guess they figured I would never be able to get the old place back up and running. In fact, I’m pretty damned good with matters electric. They called the landlord and said I was burning candles in the house and leaving wax all over the place, like some kind of creepy Vincent Price.
O sure, there were candles … Yes, but I only burned them at dusk, as a ritual before more writing and blogging and so on. I was in mourning: Look, I'm not saying I wasn’t getting a pretty weird ... approaching the borderline … yes, well past, already, by the time I … I was just expressing the anxiety and turbulance I was feeling all around me. For God's sake. It was the year 2000!
Since both misery and mystery love company, some pretty cool people got curious about what I was up to, and started to come over to the house. I’m sure this sudden new type of gathering in the neighborhood only served to stir things up even more. By this time, the North Andover police really wanted my ass in a sling. One cop, a long-timer macho kid, who lived as a townie all his life, came over, and asked me, after I smarted off about “search and seizure” and some such lunacy, he asked me if I was a lawyer. I said “Yes, I went to Harvard law school.” It was true. What I didn’t say was it was only for one day to attend an Internet-related conference on MP3s and Napster. Anyway, I was obviously going head-to-head with the Gillette crate-packing mentality around there.
That’s when I really started to meet the witches of Essex county, too. They would come over, hang out. I would play loud music and try to describe what, exactly, was going wrong with me, trying to gert off medication I had been prescribed for my ADD … and they’d get to play the healers …. People from a salon in North Andover. In fact we had designers, Webmasters, entrepeneurs, like-minded folk came over, too … but there was a strong New Age vibe …. This Reiki therapy trainee came over and practiced on us, for myself, something of a hallucinatory experience. Was it Mesmer or was it Memorex, who cares? It was a real salon, Parisian style, and I was that cat Cagliostro. Or, at least one of them: the millenial metrosexual man. It only lasted for a short while, though, a few weeks at the most ... it was short-lived because I had decided to get out of there. The Sicilians around the corner, my former New England family fully militarized against me, were getting to be too much …
The whole plan was to end up in Telluride, Colorado, writing my tales from my heart-home, anyway. So with so many problems for me in the neighborhood, my pending divorce, and all of the lousy bitterness and stupidity that entailed, I decided to leave, going back to my friends in the mountains of southwestern Colorado. From there, at about 9,500 feet in altitude, I launched the first incarnation of my brainchild, my Frankenstein, my personal obsession, this text, my message to you, dear reader … and Bush had just been elected … the dot-com bust just a few months away …
Then, I lived in Telluride for a year, then came back to New England, living in Ipswich this time, in order to clear up legal stuff related to the divorce. But right as I moved back, this time to Ipswich, September 11 changed everything. I was living in Concord, Massachusetts, home of the first “shot heard ‘round the world” on the day of the attack. All I can most clearly recall is the complete silence of the skies to the east, over Boston, where the hijackings and subsequent attacks had begun.
I moved to Haverhill because it was cheaper, times getting tough, setting up a small metamedia bookstore right there on the street. And, of course, I always put my pirate flag out on the window to attract like-minded people and ward away the foul spirits, too. Artists. Writers. Programmers. Scammers. Lunatics wandering that unwalled insane asylum called Haverhill. Perfect town for people with Peter Pan fantasies in their heads. Lot of Captain Hooks floating around up and down the main old downtown quad, home of Arichies’ Comix, Viet Nam war vets, most likely … up and down the street drinking beer and me bashing away on my laptop in the Irish bar downstairs. I loved that place. A writer’s place, that bar, for this message to you, dear reader.
Please keep on, see … I almost starved. Trying to sell e-books and print-on-demand poetry is not, exactly, the stuff of commerce, you’ll no doubt find. You can only go so far with a pirate flag in your shop window, as well. But the public doesn't give a fuck about even the shadows flickering on the wall anymore. So until they do, it’s to thine own self be true, with time still to hope everybody else eventually realizes the only actual political boundary, that of Gaia, is both rock, living and atmospheric in nature and moving, through space, on the moment at perilous speeds ... the road going onward … the little doggies as lost as ever … and the weather spinning madly about … heated by the undulating currents beneath the overheated earth …

Lest we try to remember ...
Here's what I think about organized religion: Right after 9/11, you'll wishfully forget, there were the anthrax attacks, and, after that, a rash of copycat hoax mailings. One day, while I was living in Ipswich, Massachusetts, I went to an interview for a journalism job in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and it just so happened on that day that the whole staff had been freaked out by one of these copycat mailings.
So, as an ever helpful soul, I told them about a theory I had based on my own wacked out mind at the time. If you could take your mail, put it at the bottom of a box, then cover it up with dirty laundry, especially dirty socks, then leave it there for a while, you could neutralize the anthrax with your own defending fungus microbes. Then, you could read your mail without worries.
Well, as you can imagine, I didn't get the job. But as far as the anthrax went, it never got me. And I felt a lot better.
That, in a shoebox, is my metaphor for organized religion. A bunch of dirty laundry, put in a box and hidden for a while, to make everyone feel better. And so they do. Who am I to argue?

~

What has happened to artistic expression since Sept. 11 as it’s transmitted through
any kind of media (or anyone claiming to be a medium), from the political satire of
"The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show" to the mega-bombastic sequel to the classic post-apocalyptic thriller in any theater near you. To the episodes of “Survivor.” To every creative impulse that every tried to be a light in the darkness; to all those media images that are flowing through us now: How do we respond? How do we deal creatively with our own struggle to find the appropriate voice? How do we know the right thing to say, when we see death, so much death? He do we contend with what David Byrne of the Talking Heads once anticipated in “Life During Wartime”:

“Ain’t got no speakers
Ain’t got no headphones,
Ain’t got no music to play.”

After many knee-jerk reactions to Sept. 11, including a slew of benefit performances
by rock stars and actors, there was a shaky sense of assurance. After an alleged victory over the Taliban, followed by their resurgence, Americans crawled out of the foxholes and flooded back into the malls, then the floods and economic crisis of late 2008 flooded right back out. Nevertheless, Sunday’s gladiatorial epic, otherwise known as the NFL, stormed right on through from Super Bowl to Super Bowl. Like a country immune to war, then, not so immune. A country dotted like a push pin map of the Stars and Stripes remains as a menacing reminder of who we have become ... and then the election of 2008 ... as if every now and then the electorate feels guilty for its leadership and responds.
For several years, anything that strays from a patriotic vision was likely to be, with the force of a fully diligent flight crew, wrestled to the ground and whisked away: A terrible beauty was born. But where does it stand now?

~

Seth Butler, out of a concern for air pollution on North Shore of Massachusetts
and a need to burn film for a photo essay for a class at Montserrat College, loaded a
roll of film and fired.
He pointed his weapon, a truth-telling device, at the churned and weathered brown
spires of the Salem Power Plant. Since photos never lie, or, at least, a picture beats a thousand words, he figured in some small way the images might flesh out of the mystery and wonder of the place. He thought the suspected poisons made possible on a daily basis by the plant might be explicated by his pictorial essay, and through this kind of truth we might all be saved from this inconvenience, or, at least, that we might all enjoy some breathtaking pictures of the alleged poisoning taking place.
In fact, such satanic mills have been fodder for artists since William Blake. In fact,
power plants and factories will always be great targets for interesting photos. Especially now. Technological wonders perched on American shores will always make great targets. For artists. And for terrorists.
Which, for Seth Butler, age 22, of Vermont, became part of the problem.
After Sept. 11, as a he snapped on the lens and took in the fall New England air, he
looked at the monumental smokestacks, trying to see what the relationship was between
himself, the lens and the world at war----not so much the brother-against-brother battle, but man-against-nature war.
“I was just struggling with how to deal with it,” he says.

~

If the medium is the message, then the date, Sept. 11, is the portal where we pour all
of our pain, and then, put it on display.
The message is our mantra, our artistic Alamo. Lest we forget, every shark-eyed cub
reporter tooling around the town halls of Salem, Beverly, Gloucester and Marblehead
has felt a nearly subconscious duty to post that date, Sept. 11, at least once or twice, like staples into the newsprint, glossy or cheap, of whatever passes for local media.
One reporter, well after the attacks, typed “Sept. 11” in four times within the text of an article that had absolutely nothing to do with the war or terror, real or imaginary.
(Well, actually, even in some tangential way, it was hard to fail to find some way the war against terror might apply to each and every thing we did in a daily lives, from trips to the mall to articles written under intense deadline.)
Plagued by nightmares before a pilgrimage to Ground Zero in New York City, the
writer provided repeated semi-accidental advertising for our national numeral of
mourning, anger and fear, for all of the shell-shocked sensibilities, destructive or
creative, which launched our nation into a heightened state of awareness (whatever that means) on Sept. 11. To write Sept. 11 in copy, in short, became our patriotic duty as muckrackers and documentarians for our times.
For example, so far this article has used the date five times. The date, Sept. 11 (OK,
that’s six) flows like water, like shorthand, or better yet, a link to the streaming media of shock, horror, and yes, nationalistic fervor, our personal bond to (what it believes to be) justice and (unbelievable) vengeance. By expressing oneself in this way, in times of mass hypnotic states of hysteria, war, famine and scary bad TV, we discover the most constructive choice in terms of reacting to the world around us.
I mean, why send a missile when maybe a simple e-mail note or a Hallmark card
would do? “Hey,” we write, “Remember Sept. 11, and get well soon.”

~

As they say, the medium (Or, the media) is the message. So is writing the date, Sept.
11 (seven). On posters, stamps, newspaper supplements, whatever we can get our hands
on.
But what is the most appropriate way to express oneself on the big blank page of life
during a time of national trauma, and yes, tight security? The Urizen archons of control, the warlords and the convergent media paradigms, are all in sync with the Union at War.
What if you are a dissenter? A pacifist? With dark skin? Maybe even a Canadian.
Or worse, an Islamic art dealer who needs to take a plane to Paris?
A Hub taxi driver?
A Quaker who just woke up one day, and, feeling his or her oats, decided they had
something to say?
A photographer on the North Shore of Massachusetts who pointing and firing near
some power plant smokestacks?
Better think twice. First figure out if it’s naughty, or, nice. Think twice before you
click.
But then the reversal came true, especially after the release of "Fahrenheit 911" before the election of 2004. Slowly and surely, as the war became less popular, a whole new sense of media emerged.

~

Seth Butler, age 22, photography student at Montserrat, isn’t an idiot. As a cub
photojournalist he knew that when firing off snapshots of satanic mills in Salem during wartime, it’s best to let the most immediately available authority in on what you are up to.
“I went up to the police officer out front of the plant, gave them three IDs, and
warned them that I was shooting photos for a project,” he says.
Butler thought he’d received permission, at that point, since he was on public
property, to start firing away with his telephoto lens. The guard at the gate said sure, whatever.
“But then this guy pulls up,” a security guard, he says. “I just wanted to do my work.
They told me I had to leave.”

~

The bombardment of the global media, crashing all day, all night upon the New
England shores, lighting up the giant video screens of Times-Square (still standing) and the pubs of London (last time checked), and yes, your living room, became overwhelming.
Our sense of freedom and free expression, in every aspect of our daily lives, from
Paris to Portsmouth, became critically impacted. Especially so for those of us in the
curious position of being at the seacoast front of a new kind of war when the media
buzzword, as in “terror,” is the message, and the enemy could be just about anyone.
“Since Sept. 11, as a photographer,” says Ron DiRito, a teacher at Montserrat whose
specialty is art and media and its context and meaning in society, “I don’t think they
understand what it’s like for us. I think the rest of the country doesn’t have the same kind of …,” he pauses, looking for ways to explain how it feels to be at the front of this new war, then, completing the thought: “ Everybody in New York understands it better than other people in the country. The physical distance changes our perception of something. There is this overwhelming sensibility.
“We have learned to tolerate each other better, but on the other hand, there is that
thing going on, you don’t know who to suspect. This is still relatively trying to be
understood. I don’t think we have processed it culturally and socially.”
But, once it did, America's appetite for violence in the media soared ...

~

“They watched me leave and get back into my car,” says Seth Butler, spurned
photojournalist after being unable to capture very much of any possible dangers,
through photographic realism, of the alleged poisoning of the sky at the Salem power
plant.
As he moved on into an intersection, at a speed of 15 miles per hour, the legal limit,
a white pickup truck sped in front of Butler’s vehicle and slammed on the brakes. “He
must of have going thirty five when he went by me and stopped,” he says.
“This cop says, ‘Some people want to talk to you.’ ”
Another police car pulled up, and then another. The local arm of the security state
was coming down on Seth Butler, age 22, of Vermont, like something out of a
Raymond Chandler novel.
“A large black SUV with tinted windows pulled up next. I kept my hands in clear
view,” he said. “I had the film …,” he laughed nervously, visibly shaken, as he spread
photos of American flag imagery upon a table in the media lab basement at Montserrat.
“I was in possession,” he admits, “of concealed film.”

~

For all practical intents, seemingly, the latest CD by Madonna was for several years rendered not so much obscene but most certainly oblique. On the surface level (which really the only level you can really make money in the entertainment business) it’s a commercial question. What were audiences looking for?
Perhaps everyone had seen enough. That was at least the sentiment immediately
after the attacks exploded so cinematically onto the real world’s stage. But things have changed. While it was hard to know what to feel, at first, the natural inclination toward unity, even for writers, artists and performers, who are often malcontents and social renegades, even they seemed to join up and salute to the brave new paradigm: grieve now, kick ass later.
Oh sure, there was that initial sense that pyrotechnic violence on theater and
television screens was a thing of the past. But that was naive, it has been proven.
“A lot of people had the same impression, that it seemed like Hollywood, not the
real thing,” said David Goss, director of fine arts at Gordon College, of the terrorizing video of the Sept. 11 attacks. Prior to the terrible events of that day, and the subsequent season of terror that followed and continues to this day, the main concern for the planners of fall concerts, for example, might be quality, recognition, publicity, recognition, ticket sales, recognition, who might get top billing, and oh yeah, recognition. But now, everything has changed.
“People are feeling uneasy about what they once considered to be so exciting,”
Goss said.
But that's all different now. You can rate films in terms of tonnage of TNT now.

~

My first night in Ipswich was Sept. 18, 2001, and it revealed something … at least in
terms of the ripple effects (tidal wave, actually, in hardy Ipswich sea-shanty talk) of the post-Sept. 11 realization. I was feeling world weary. So much moving from town to town. I just wanted to be an old tree, not a burned out leaf in the crosswind of global or civil war. All the same, on that day, Sept. 18, I was feeling thankful for having found some shelter in the storm.
More out of accident than a sense of patriotism, I wore my blue Ralph Lauren, “Polo
Jeans Company, RL,” baseball cap, which features stripes, but no stars, because Mr.
Lauren is the only star to be allowed on this particular head-based insignia. I was a
human billboard for Ralph Lauren, patriot … even if most people only recognized my
tribal signifier: red, white and blue.
I had a beat up used copy of Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man” in my back pocket, as well as a childlike curiosity about this strange town called Ipswich. Down the street I went, toward the town center, a babe in the woods beneath a dusky sky of implied imaginary terror.

~

Was the media really ready to fess up, since Osama-style violence is only the copycat
caricature of three, hmmm, maybe four late ’80s get-the-terrorist films, two of those
starring Bruce Willis, who can walk on the White House lawn, most likely, any day of
the week without an invitation. Are post-Sept. 11 tastes no longer able to stomach the
video violence?
Yeah, right.
You only need to consider the many years conditioning, that is, what’s required to
stomach a totalitarian storm of Christmas-season escapes into Star Wars, hobbits and
pre-teenage detective wizards, Monsters, Inc., The Sopranos and on into the phantasm we go ... The Christmas of 2008 it became another of a long line of films with furies frames of evermore destruction.
In the global mythic village, the plastic monsters and war toys are as real, within the own scale, as anything you can find in the jumbled up world. Just another mask for our national fascination with violence, which is still, quite surely, anything but satiated.
While the purpose of art has not changed, the art of re-purposing myth towards the
designs of the machine are more than ever apparent. But money machines, still, easy to
come by, for some, are less easy for others. Starving artists included. So then, the big money still wins. The purpose of mass entertainment (as opposed to art), taking its Dec. 7 queue from the way the film industry rallied to the cause in the 1940s, now becomes a mouthpiece for that very same machine.
And it’s only beginning: Coming to a theater near you – a lock-step, achy breaky
heart sort of thing, with a plastic Bill Murray doll for the marketing tie-in. It’s a pull-upyour-bootstraps at the boot-camp sorta flick. With real napalm, and, real renegades to storm the unsafe gates of the Republic.

~

Just then, it happened: a spontaneous moment of humanity. A grizzled old man
walked toward me. Small towns such as Ipswich, especially those that have made peace
with nature, require us to say hello. It’s the decent thing to do. But a week after Sept. 11 everyone was being decent to one another. A crying of our lot in each and every eye.
But this time my fellow pedestrian and I appeared to be on a collision course. The
man just came right up to me, took my hand and shook it, saying, “God bless you,
brother.”
I was taken aback. Maybe giggled out of a sense of surprise. I figured he saw my
cap and was thanking me for my heroism. Yes, Ipswich is a friendly little place, but
connections like these, random acts of humanity, were taking place all over the country.
For the first time in a long time we noticed each other, realizing we all had something – loss – to share.

~

As Boston political satirist Jimmy Tingle put it, in a post-Sept. 11 performance at
the Wingate Street Micro Theatre in Haverhill, Massachusetss, “everything has
changed.”
As part of the performance, serious even for a satirist in less apocalyptic climes, he
read from a poem he had written in reaction to Sept. 11, “911: Prayer for America.”

There’s a hole in the tip of Manhattan
A hole in the soul of America
A hole in the center of our psyche
A hole in the foundation of our confidence
There’s a hole in the faith of our country
That fills churches in search of our God
There’s a crack in the national mirror
empty chairs around the family table
9
dark houses of our missing neighbors
Vacant desks of our absent workers
On our streets,
There's a wail from the widows with candles
sobs from the orphaned with pictures
the face breaks on the lawyer of the dead women’s husband
flags and flowers for the public servants
There’s a hole in the soul of America
Afraid with the televised pictures
Numb with the morning papers
Grieving for the land they loved
Grieving for the land they lost
Grieving for the innocent victims
Grieving for the broken families
Grieving for the friends still weeping
Grieving for the ones who fight fire
Grieving for the ones who fight crime
Grieving for the volunteers by the thousands
Grieving for the City that never Sleeps
Grieving for the City on a Hill
There’s a hole in the soul of Humanity
And I pray for all of our leaders
Good people and well intentioned
Condemned to retaliation,
Doomed to retribution
Sentenced to seek revenge

~

It happened again in the local café. Strangers meeting eye to eye, recognizing the
shock and the grief and pain. We all had good radar for it, at least until Thanksgiving.
We were awakened out of our complacency, if for just a few weeks, months or years,
10 depending on your sensitivity to such things as alcohol, Duncan Donuts coffee or
intensive psychotherapy.
Times such as these bring out the best, and also the worst. It has always been that
way. In 1916, a small contingent of Irish patriots (today we might call them terrorists), took over a post office and ended up dying in a martyrdom of British bullets and fire.
The poet, W.B. Yeats, reflecting on the shock waves the event created in Irish
society, wrote the following: “All is changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born.”
America became terrible beauty, then the bloom came off the thorny rose bush ...

~

After his 45-minute roust, Seth Butler, spurned photojournalist, put his Greenpeace
passions aside over the Salem power plant, and started taking photographs of American
flags. But rather than puffing up his frames with a patriotic fervor, his eye seemed to be finding something else. An irony. A horror. A beauty. A terror. And more than anything else, a sense of alienation.
“For the first time in my life, I was feeling like a stranger in my own country,” he
said. “They basically insulted me. They asked me why I wasn’t in Vermont (which is
where his family lives). I was being very open about the whole thing. I was being very
civil about the whole thing.
“I’m trying to deal with an event, a problem, over air quality, carcinogens, a serious
matter. I ended up being shut down. I tried to work from farther away, and ended up
trying to look at it in different contexts.
“But never did I think that I was going to run into the FBI as a college student.
“This was history. I didn’t want to give up. Somebody needs to be working,
recording. It doesn’t stop, and I’m not going to either.”
Of the flag photo project, a follow up to his season of hope, terror, frustration,
whatever, Butler has decided to call the series “Tattered.”
A terrible beauty was born.

~

During those fall nights and days in Ipswich, I worked the late-night copy desk at
The Salem Evening News. More than anything else, I remember the horrible anxiety I
felt each time the 10 p.m. news came on in the newsroom. It got to the point where I
was afraid to look over my shoulder and at the television. But still, I got all of the
sound. Each night, the local anchorpersons would gleefully report the day’s horrors, the new death count for the Sept. 11 attacks, and, of course, handy health tips for the best way to deal with the anthrax threat.
One night I decided to ask another copy editor, who also lived in Ipswich, about the
“God bless you” guy. He told me a story that I did not expect.
He said the man was a kind of local loony. Somewhere along the line the man, who
had been a boxer but decent civil servant, lost his marbles. Something to do with a
divorce. Figures.
In fact, he had been coming up to people in Ipswich and blessing them for years.
This stunned me. My impression, as first impressions often are, was incorrect. The
“God bless you” guy’s greeting to me was just another day in the life of Ipswich. It had nothing to do at all with the sudden wash of compassion and kindness in American life.
He was always like that.
It was then that I realized this: While everything has indeed since Sept. 11 has
changed, the biggest change of all, the one that I couldn’t detect, was within me.
So, let me just say this: God bless you all, brothers. A terrible beauty, reborn, faded and then became, what?

~

Word on the street got ugly, especially when it comes to baseline of public discourse we reached after the little Town of Telluride raised its pirate flag over the Bush/Cheney impeachment debate.

The street lingo, as it exists online, became particularly ugly, coarse, beyond just polarized. Terms such as "rabid," "vociferous lunatic-extremist fringe group" and "liberal-minded yellow cowards" were thrown at the Telluride Town Council during the summer of 2007 and supporters of the citizen-driven initiative, and that really hurt. Made one want to take up terms like "Bushite," indicating someone with unconditional love for a Texan with millennial zeal in the pursuit of oil-driven global warfare, in order to respond, and honestly, the whole thing could make you feel queasy.
Most thought the town should back off, turn its back on the issue and start waxing up those ol' snowboards again. Everyone should smile and spend a lot more time thinking about improving customer service. That's all. Town Council should change its vote – in fact tear up the "impeach" document, and keep its mouths shut. Forget sending it to a vote of the people, because in this secluded, insulated coven of pinko fringe groupies, we all know how that vote would turn out. We'd only get more nasty treatment, and then they'd all feel more poorly about the war than they already did.
How can anyone, sitting way high up on this mountain perch, ascertain whether the war was bad or good? They seemed to be immune from war up there, too, and a long, long way from the truthiness of our times. Who knew if there were any weapons of mass destruction from way up there. Heck, nobody could even be sure if there was actually any oil in Iraq, either. Local prices for gas indicate there was a shortage, then prices dropped, then went back up, so who knew?
In calling for an impeachment, the town endorsed a long and brutal and quite frankly embarrassing process that, like it did for President Bill Clinton, would simply add an asterisk to the presidential legacy of President Bush, but wouldn't stop the really ambiguous – if yes, unpleasant – things going on out there. At least not right away. In addition, a lot of winter visitors who were at least partially involved preferred to relax from conducting oil-driven global warfare with millennial zeal while they recreated at 10,000 feet. They spent good money for their vampire time, and when a stressful war is going on, finding quality vampire time is worth its weight in Amex gold.
Since Telluride's economy, as it serves the top tier of our society, is often the beneficiary of trickle-down war proceeds obtained with millennial zeal, there was no backing off. Vampire time was sweet (while it lasted).

~

The interesting phenomenon about suicide cults is their leadership, how it reacts to any challenges to their belief system. Due to the blindness induced from being indoors with too much high-octane religious fervor in the room, a demigod millenarian prophet tends to refute all outside input when backed into a corner. Absolutism is the toxin, here, after all. As suicide cults are confronted with more and more contrary information, they become more and more convinced the evil-doing they are railing against exists, and it's the information bringers gathered outside who become bogeymen, or, in this case, "traitors."
This is why the "Bushites," in terms of their lingo, slammed so much bacon from the "traitor" tray during the election. The contrary information became incredibly intense, and so did the counter response. Their reactions became equally intense. At the White House, they were surrounded on all fronts, just like Waco, by Congress, by a whole competing field of Hillarys and Obamas, by a majority of the electorate, by lurking terrorists, by a United Nations worth of nations, too, as well as mad-bloggers, gay bongers and fake news talk-show hosts ...
In the 1960s the radicals all got together and circled the Pentagon by joining hands in order to, supposedly, exorcize the demons within (Hah! Nice try). However, that seemed to be a dangerous move in this case. The Bush Administration, as well as the Bushites, entered into such a strong state of denial, based on the below-the-belt, guttural tone of their "just drink the Kool-aide" arguments,if the White House were circled in that way, the man would press the button, Jim Jones style, just to prove his talking points on the need for global warfare with millennial zeal.