i am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

This site is currently what the true-life time-traveler James Cole would call "mentally divergent." One hundred percent rabbit hole. As a result, sometimes I'm here; sometimes I'm not. Bouncing in and out of the place like a pinball. And no idea who is the wizard with the fingers upon the flippers.

Also, the notion of "I" has become malleable, fungible. Currently "I" am a dancing rabbit. For a while, I was Joe; then, I was Johnny. I expect that when I attempt to post this, I will appear as something like E Pluribus Unum.

Judging from the comments, that are occasionally available for viewing on this now but occasional site, this has become a common experience. No one, here, is, very often, who they generally are; generally, they are, most often, here, somebody else.

I think we have been plunged into a Philip K. Dick novel. Some sort of amalgam of Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. There has been a Calamity of some sort, and as a result we are all in cold-pac, but at the same time we are also moving bodily through non-ordinary space/time. We are also gobbling Chew-Z and testing a new Perky Pat Layout, during the course of which we are passing in and out of one another's minds and bodies. If, as in Ubik, in the morning we check the coins in our pockets, and find Joe's visage emblazoned upon them, we will know we are really There.

This present experience is also somewhat redolent of the trials of the true-life crew of the starship Enterprise, as presented in the documentary film The Tholian Web.

There, the Enterprise, while out and about exploring the final frontier, happens upon a floating, derelict starship, the Defiant, that is both there, and not there. As Spock says, "we see it, but our sensors indicate it is not there."

Naturally Kirk elects to beam onto the there/not-there derelict all the most essential members of the crew, including himself.

The Enterprise people on the semi-Defiant wander around in their spacesuits looking at dead instruments, and dead people, until McCoy excitedly announces: "Jim, this ship is dissolving: my hand just passed through a man and a table."

Dissolving like today dissolves this site.

Kirk orders the landing-crew back immediately to the Enterprise, but of course the transporter has blown some sort of valve, and so one person has to remain behind, and of course Kirk manly orders the left-behind one to be himself. When Scotty then tries to retrieve the left-behind Kirk, more transporter valves blow, and Scotty Fails, and then the Defiant, with Kirk still aboard, completely disappears.

Spock goes to the computer, and determines thereon that they are all caught in a bad place, where "the fabric of space is very weak." Sometimes stuff in this space is Real, sometimes it isn't. Moreover, the space has a bad effect on humans, causing their brains to blow, kinda like the transporter valves, until they start keening wildly, weeping openly, expressing love and affection for Vladmir Putin, things of that sort. Eventually these people become a Menace, and they have to be placed in Restraints. This bad space totally ODed the crew of the Defiant, Spock opines, and it will Get the Enterprise people too. But meanwhile they have to hang around in the bad space in order to retrieve Kirk, when the next "interphase" occurs with that universe that has floated off with him. As Spock explains to Chekov, just before the latter flies into an uncontrollable Putin frenzy: "We exist in a universe which co-exists with a multitude of others in the same physical space. At certain brief periods of time an area of their space overlaps an area of ours. That is the time of interphase during which we can connect with the Defiant's universe."

Sorta like this place, today.

As if the Enterprisers don't have enough problems, some grumpy illegal aliens identifying themselves as Tholians show up and claim the space is theirs. Spock explains the Enterprise is just waiting around for the captain to float on out of another universe. The Tholians are skeptical, but agree to hold fire until the next "interphase" period identified by Spock. When that interphase arrives, and there appears no ghost ship, the Tholians let loose, and the Enterprise lets loose in return. The Tholian ship is crippled. McCoy, who is supposed to be down in his hovel concocting some sort of magic brew to counteract the effects of the bad space, picks this moment to go up to the bridge to rave at Spock (which is, after all, his favorite thing in all the world to do). Spock replies: "Please go at once to your laboratory and search for an antidote to the effects of this space. That is your primary task, since we must remain here." I say the exact same thing to McCoy, almost every time I go into a tube, and there read a news. But McCoy never listens.

More Tholian ships show up and start spinning a web around the Enterprise. Spock identifies it as like Charlotte's web, except Bad. Spock declares that Kirk must be Dead, and there is a big Sad. They have a funeral, and then Spock says it's time to leave, before the Charlotte's web is completed. But then Uhuru sees a Kirk ghost. At first everyone thinks the bad space has gotten to her, and that soon she shall be raving too, so they tie her up down in sick bay. Next the Kirk-ghost appears to Scotty, which flummoxes even Spock, because if Scott starts wailing and gibbering, they will never get away from the bad space. But then everyone starts to see the Kirk ghost—it is like a St. Vitus Dance—and the ghost is determined to be Real. Spock and the computer calculate the next interphase, and when the Kirk-ghost then duly appears, they put a tractor beam on his sometimes-there/sometimes-not form, and drag him through the bad Charlotte's web just before it is to close. Kirk is beamed aboard the Enterprise and the helmet of his suit is ripped off just before all his oxygen is exhausted. All this has meanwhile blown the ship free of the bad space where everyone logs on, when they can log on at all, as someone different than they truly are, and no recs are rightfully recorded.

Despite this sort of havoc, I don't mind traveling on starships, so long as they are incorporeal. But mostly I ride the bus. I no longer drive. For the reasons I set forth, some years ago, and as seen below, in the true-life documentary film Repo Man.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKobmM2OnDc]

Whatever this is, afflicting this site, it is not something I want to trust with the creation of some long and winding word-trail. I have over the decades both witnessed, and myself been the victim of, stories wholly swallowed by aberrant tubes. This is always a deeply unpleasant experience. And I don't at present possess enough Medicine to properly cope with it.

The first time it occurred is still vivid in my mind. Danny, on deadline, had finished up a 5000-word piece, and hit "send." But the story, it was not sent to Publish, but instead straight to Hell. It completely disappeared. It was irretrievable. Some demon had snatched it, and was ebulliently laughing, dancing in the flames, wiping his ass with it. Before Danny even announced what happened, I could read it in his face. I can see that face to this day. Danny then glumly set about recreating what had been lost. But of course it is never the same.

The machine that ate Danny's story was a plague we writers did not want. The beastie was called a VDT, or Video Display Terminal. (No one was calling them computers yet, back in this Dark Age.) When they were suggested to us, we writers went out and found Studies, conducted by fellow luddites, that Proved that VDTs blasted out huge streams of radiation that would transform anyone who got near them into a mutant.

And we were right. For here we are, decades later, and all of us are mutants.

The VDTs were forced upon us by a publisher. We were not even supposed to have a publisher. This paper had until very recently been a collective. But for reasons too long and sturm and drang to relate here and at this time, it was now increasingly controlled by this form of war criminal known as a publisher. When I remonstrated with this criminal being that instead of going out and buying these VDTs—which all we writers called "death-tubes"—he could instead pay us a salary that would not cause a penniless wino to laugh in our faces, the publisher brightly informed me that machines were "positive cash flow," while employees were "negative cash flow," and no publisher in his right mind would fork money over to the latter, rather than invest it in the former. This I remember as vividly as Danny's swallowed story.

When I relayed the publisher's pronouncement to the other writers, Danny reached for a large stick that he kept propped against the wall, ever-ready for him to wield against his desk, or various objects upon it, in times of frustration or rage. He announced that he was going to take the stick to the hands of the publisher, and break some of his fingers. We told him that would most probably mean he would have to go to the jail, and we reminded Danny the publisher did not pay us enough money to go his bail. Danny called upon his heritage, stating his people were Polish steelworkers, who traditionally dealt with Outrages like the publisher with a short length of steel rod; with the big stick, Danny pointed out, the publisher would be getting off easy.

But Danny did not hit the publisher with the stick. Instead, Gary peed in his soup.

Rather than pay the Negative Cash Flows an actual living wage, the publisher endeavored to otherwise prevent them from murdering him by such pathetic gambits as bringing in alleged foodstuffs for the Negative Cash Flows to dine upon on "layout night," which was the 18-hour-day during which we "put the paper to bed."

The publisher was also, of course, the head of the advertisting department, a den of wanton thieves forever arranging "trade-outs" with advertisers in which they personally would partake of various of the advertiser's goods in exchange for a cut in the paper's rates. Many a time Danny had to be restrained from taking his stick to these people. Here, the publisher "generously" shared his thievery with the entire staff. On layout night, at around five o'clock—he always left at five o'clock—the publisher would roll in some steaming garbage and tell us we could eat it. Then he would leave.

On this night the centerpiece of the heaving mound of garbage was a large tureen of some hideous soup. No one could stomach much of it. So instead that night we ate, if memory serves, piroshkis and cocaine.

Layout night generally concluded with those that participated in it also laid-out, in one form or another. But on this night—or rather early morning—it was mania that prevailed. And so Gary decided, once work was done, to heave various objects into the tureen, and then stash the thing in the publisher's desk.

We had searched, without a warrant, this desk, and on many occasions, and these searches confirmed to us that the publisher performed no actual work. Almost all of the desk was empty. There was a large vacant shelf upon which the tureen would easily reside. Gary kept tossing stuff into the soup, storing it in the desk; then some new inspiration would hit, and he would pull the tureen back out, and heave some other object in there. Finally, Gary was seized by the notion to pee in the soup. This he did. Then he reached into the top drawer of the publisher's desk, where the unused pens and paperclips and whatnot were stored, and pulled forth the publisher's toothbrush. It drove Gary mad that the publisher would go into the bathroom and brush his teeth every time an advertiser was expected to arrive. Gary swirled the toothbrush around in the soup, then returned both the toothbrush, and the tureen, to the desk.

When we arrived at work the next day, we expected the tureen to have been discovered—if only because the ptomaine-palace that had sent it over would call and want it back—and that maybe somebody would be Mad. But no. When the publisher left on his endless lunch-break, we popped open the drawer, and found the tureen still fetidly in place. Gary gave the soup a swirl with the publisher's toothbrush, then shut it up again.

This went on for fucking weeks. The publisher never opened his desk and discovered the damn tureen in there. Daily Gary would dutifully stir the soup with the publisher's toothbrush. On those occasions when Gary had to be out on a cocaine binge, Lizanne would do the honors. Occasionally Gary would freshen the soup with a renewed stream of urine.

But all this finally had to cease, because the shut-away tureen began sending out an unbelievable stench. All the way across the large room we were, and we needed freaking gas masks; to actually open the drawer, we figured, would instantly fell whoever did so; their face would commence to melt, like those Nazis who gazed upon the forbidden tablets in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But the publisher, he never noticed a thing.

We were even broadly hinting about the thing in the actual newspaper. Part of our charge was to write about the haplessity and petty crimes of the local board of supervisors, familiary known as "supes." So we would publish headlines like "Is It Supes Yet?" or "Time To Check The Supes." But I don't think the publisher even read the goddam paper.

Finally, the stench faded, and eventually we actually forgot about the soup in the desk. It was only when we came in one day and saw the remains of the tureen sitting on the publisher's desk that it all came back to us. Over the months, the tureen had been transformed into something that looked like it had burned badly while passing from outer space through the earth's atmosphere. "Supes Found" was I think our headline. And it was shortly thereafter that we all walked out.

Danny in those days lived in a large house with several other immigrants from Pittsburgh. These were interested mostly in finding blonde California women—I was given to understand by these men that there were no blonde women in Pittsburgh—who wished to ingest mass quantities of quaaludes and then with the Pittsburgh men writhe on the floor like sluggish snakes. The only other resident of the household was a prince from an island in Micronesia, who was known as "Micro Joe." He had been sent by his father, the king, to college in the US, to there learn how to be Advanced. Instead he served as designated Sane Person in a house full of quaalude-sufferers.

Those were Danny's formative years. He later went on to a long and storied career at the Los Angeles Times.

Gary I remember wrote a long piece for Rolling Stone that was laughably butchered by some stonehead; I wrote about this, humorously I thought, in the pages of our newspaper. But Jann Wenner read it and proceeded to throw people around his office. Although at the time our paper was serving as a sort of farm-team for his publication, he pronounced a permanent blacklist on anybody connected with us and ours. But we didn't care: he had moved the magazine to New York, and therefore it was no longer Real. The only guy who cared was the guy from our paper who was employed there in the office when Wenner threw his tantrum. He was one of the people who got thrown. But this same guy—I remember this well too—sat there and tried to defend to me Elvis Costello calling Ray Charles "a blind, ignorant nigger" on the grounds that Ray Charles really was "a blind, ignorant nigger." What this was really all about, of course, was that Costello was then "cool," and so to be "cool" too, one had to like, or at least overlook, everything Costello might say or do. So this guy had, sadly, spent too much time in New York, and it had permanently seared his soul.

Gary's later career we can pass over, but the really cool chick-flick (I like chick-flicks) part of his life is that when he and Lizanne were then working together, he barely noticed her, while she noticed he was a flying car with both the wings and the wheels coming off. But years later, and in a city hundreds of miles away, they, through serendipidity, reconnected, found a love thang, and are married to this day.

And where all that came from, I have no idea.

Moving right along, this is the holiday season. And so I shall share below one of my favorite images of this time. I think of it as: "Christmas In Many Lands."

Alright. Let's press "send." And see what happens. Remember to check your pockets.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhMHaiSZ26A]