218
Abyssal gigantism is not a general trend of those of us who float in and out of this two-tier experience of life in the light and shadows of flickering lamps. It is more simply the ingestion of protein that allows cysteine to enter the body. A man sometimes wants to take care of something growing inside him. Warren tells her to give it a rest; he’s just sick and tired of the dark is all, he just wants to bring it out into the light lets all have a good look at it, chew it over, and sing to it as if we were going to war against the bad weather! But he knew that if he ever started up the old behaviour, if he tried to cut it off and missed, he would surely die this time. A shadow crept onto the school’s, old red brick wall.
217
Did you know that I sometimes look at my art with the same satisfaction that an author might view his or her writing, or a musician might appreciate the music. If I were to describe the feeling of that evening in one word, it would be… home. Never before have I made such consistent gains. The community recognized the need for my work and its reaction as twin effects of the eternal Universe. One gentleman spoke to me at the silent auction table of strange items, one of which was an avocado green leather armless chair. He said he smelled embalming fluid. At that moment, to know that the only other real person in the world was in the same room, in the same dollhouse as I was, and that we were both crazy just made me laugh so hard. So when he asked why I was laughing, I did what any good friend would do – told him the truth. “Look at you! You’re grey! Then he told me that my work is “rubbish” and referred me to the usual change of co-ordinates (e.g. Kruskal-Szekeres). I can’t tell you how heartbroken I am about the whole thing. I know what you must suffer. I recognize the importance of what I’m doing here, and utilize well the opportunity to share. The funny thing is that he was just tipsy, I saw him at the cash register taking my work and placing it in a zipper bag.
216
“I figured you were an old guy who only used Old-fashioned artifacts that need attendance, such as a wood-burning stove. You just look old. Old and used. My uncle used to wear a Michael Jackson jacket. He was like sixty years old, and fat, and he didn’t even shave well! He was with the Times- though. Not that you can’t dress like the Flintstones every day of the year, but it may not be considered quite as fashionable the other 364. Im just saying that you look like an asshat. Whatever bro..You’re the you’re the published novelist and Professional Lawn Mower.”
“Don’t call me bro’… ever.”
215
Cockpit: [Unintelligible]
Public Address: “Put out your cigarette. This is an emergency descent.”
Captain: “Is it power compression?”
Flight Engineer: “Is that right?”
Public Address: “Put out your cigarette, this is an emergency descent.”
Flight Engineer: “All of both.”
Osipovich: “Fuel remainder 1,600”
Captain: “Is that right?”
Public Address: “Put the mask over your nose and mouth and adjust the headband.”
Co-Pilot: “Tokyo radio Korean Air 007.”
Lt. Col Novoseltski: “Well, what is happening, what is the matter, who guided him in, he locked on, why didn’t he shoot it down?”[14]
Public Address: “Put the mask over your nose and mouth and adjust the headband.”
Osipovich: “I am executing. What is the distance to the airfield?”
Tokyo radio: “Korean Air 007, Tokyo.”
Accentuated breathing during the transmission indicated that an oxygen mask was being worn
Co-Pilot: “Roger, Korean Air 007…ah, we are experiencing…”
Osipovich: “Roger”
Public Address: “Put the mask over your nose and mouth and adjust the headband.”
Flight Engineer: “All compression.”
Captain: “Rapid decompression. Descend to one zero thousand.”
Public Address: “Attention emergency descent.”
Flight Engineer: “Now…we have to set this.”
Tokyo radio: “Korean Air 007, radio check on one zero zero four eight.”
Public Address: “Attention emergency descent.”
Flight Engineer: “Speed.”
Flight Engineer: “Stand by. Stand by. Stand by. Stand by. Set.”
Public Address: “Put out your cigarette. This is an emergency descent.”
MiG-23: “I’m executing left to a heading of 180. (Altitude) 7,500 metres (24,600 ft)”
Public Address: “Put out your cigarette. This is an emergency descent.”
Public Address: “Put out your cigarette this is an emergency descent.”
Public Address: “Put the mask over your nose and mouth and adjust the headband.”
Public Address: “Put the mask over your nose and mouth and adjust…”
MiG-23: “Heading 150, Roger.”
Kornukov: “Did Osipovich see the missiles explode? Hello?”
Gerasimenko: “He fired two missiles.”
Kornukov: “Ask him, ask him yourself, get on channel three and ask Osipovich did he or did he not see the explosions?”
Gerasimenko: “Right away”
Gerasimenko” “805, did you launch one missile or both?”
Osipovich: “I launched both”
214
Do you have a wake? You might check the rearview mirror in your car, or even the news for information about accidents, if you were afraid you’d caused one without realizing it. If the cuffs of your pants get wet, well that is the price you have to pay if you want to live in a world with consequences, you make choices and you live with them. That person laying under a logging truck or laying under a skidder, getting bit up by a mosquito, they are on their own path learning the lessons in life that are theirs to learn. Dave Mustaine learned all about that after the release of the phenomenal Rust in Peace. What else are you going to do? Work?
213
Did you hear what came from a lady in the darkness of the alley, seemingly swallowing so sickly since some silkscreen pair sank songs, and poor-lonely-immigrant songs up into brackish bliss. Did you think she would end up killing Mitch? Did you think she would have better control over her bloodlust? I for one always believed the possibly apocryphal claim that it was possible to be consumed and wrought up by shadows cast with no other frame of reference, such as a long-handled shoehorn form peeking out of the separate branches of alleys opening to pocket spaces. Greenery. I dreamed of a tree that handed down a tray of food to me whenever I was hungry and lifted me up into itself when I was in danger. It could smell and taste you, sense the beating of your heart or the electrical impulses generated by your moving muscles. It could speak in a way that closely resembles morphine’s waves. That night in the green room when It murmured to me, helped me think as I dreamed. I was wide awake before dawn, and as first light streaked the starry sky I heard the sound of ponies whose hoofsteps just erased all the walls and did the miraculous sifting of her form out in the middle of what once had been a garden. And she stood there as a teapot, which I thought was rather fantastic, and redeeming.
212
Kitty was walking with her mother and the Moscovite English Club, — she felt herself at home in a refuge of quiet. Emboldened by the wine, she started on her favorite theme, about hypocrisy and the way people act under times of hardship and pressure. Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church or robbing a bank, but never to being bores. They might not even admit to themselves that They had met you several times in the past and always gotten the impression you thought you were better than They. Yet it was They who unwittingly helped to lay the foundation for the brutal classless utopia of the Soviet Union. Such displays of aristocratic radicalism were the most trifling and irrelevant. Instead of crying and blaming the little black fish (for that is what she called them), Kitty wheeled and glared speechlessly at her mother, who was back down the road talking, laughing, and conspiring with a certain Mary Stouffer, known to be a radical scavenger agent and publisher of pamphlets.
211
On the first aerial toll-house, the cast body is questioned about the sins of the tongue. Say the word “Tarrasque” – now where did you put your tongue to make the “t” sound? The second is the toll-house of lies. You told him you would pay it back if he would just let you go. You know that the judge cannot allow you to go unpunished. The judge would be unjust. The third is the toll-house of slander. Jackie was not actually diagnosed with the disease. The fourth is the toll-house of gluttony. How much hair did you eat. The fifth is the toll-house of laziness. And still You lay there Jobless Masterring sloth Blind eyes Face thickening. The sixth toll-house is the toll-house of theft. Take nothing you won’t use. Consider any electrical goods. Will they work in the new country? The seventh is the toll-house of covetousness. You only wanted to be rid of the burdens of those bent beneath their loads. The eight is the toll-house of usury. That wizened man is lame and dry, His life now less than bliss, But what about that truth so wry: “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs?” The ninth is the toll-house of injustice. You are an island, man, in your bones and you will have to beat it. The tenth is the toll-house of envy. Did you dream that you were wearing someone else’s clothes? Your dream may mean that you admire that person or want to adopt some of their qualities. The eleventh is the toll-house of pride. I’m not proud of what youve done but you cant change the past.. I want you to be able to tell me everything! you are my twin and I cant go a day w/out you. The twelve is the toll-house of anger. Raw emotion embarasses us, makes us turn away, and for heaven’s sake let it not touch our household. And why can’t there be “something else” besides the voice of machines speaking to us in the darkness.The thirteenth is the toll-house of remembering evil. He was in the shadow under the canopy he had set up to shield himself from the unusually hot April day, but a ray of sun caught his eyes, enough to let me see that they had committed grievous blunders. But there is no evil incarnate; no entity, no devil. The fourteenth is the toll-house of murder. You really just left town to get away from “someone”. You came back…you came through the door and said no you are dead. The fifteenth is the toll-house of magic. Do you feel like right now you are leaving leaving your body. You may sometimes hear sounds. I sometimes hear a “buzzing” or “vibration” sound. I have heard of others hearing a “whooshing.” You pay no toll if you are traveling to The Island; you pay toll only when going to New Brunswick. The sixteenth is the toll-house of lust. You have lusted for the new rain rather than humbling yourself by treating your brothers as vessels of the new wine. But you have rejected them instead. This time you may pass in silence. The seventeenth is the toll-house of adultery. You are fortunate to have died died a child. The eighteenth is the toll-house of sodomy. The goatse.cx lawyer has informed us that we need a warning! The nineteenth is the toll-house of heresy. Then be silent again for a little while. Silence is anything but empty! When you put yourself and your thoughts aside, you let God come into your awareness. No? ok lets continue… The twentieth toll-house is the toll-house of unmercifulness. That’s where I come in.
210
Did they call before the collapse? Are they really ok? Why don’t they call again? Did they hear the sighs and lamentations which rose up from the debris? Did they hear the three sections of the poem? Could you have said those things and pretended that the sand wouldn’t fill it also, it would never work the other way around, with your mouth singing so so freely THE SONGS OF SCOTLAND BEFORE BURNS as sung by the beautiful, and highly tuneful, the endless roll of the dunes. Did those songs call out for me? When I knelt to the ground, to listen for breathing, to watch the chest to see if it rises and falls, I discovered that it was entirely salt. I picked up a nice little hunk of it to bring home as an ideal free replacement for your spit and tears, unchanged, alike.
209
The Black Clouds Rolling Under The Parapet Of The Sky were taken by John Tyndall in 1859. He had a glass jar, he called Ponyo, he discovered that when light passes through a smoky gel called the vitreous humor it creates an inverted image of the leadpoint of a pencil in the upper eyelid part pointing downward. To help him stay sober he sat in coffeehouses and worked on a novel that contained a lot of sex and a protagonist who was an urban planner. Everyone hung from the rafters. If he sobered up and got a little money, he could go to an inn and the cook would just ignore him. Some days he did not want to do it because he would forget his lunch but he still went and took her in his arms. For a long time they just held each other. He was holding her on the ground so that there would not be any offspring who could have been born with risk of of this inversion. The pencil he wrote with was becoming more like a needle on a lie detector, making Ponyo sweat. That sweat is what is creating the images he was reproducing.