Acid Round the Clock
by
HC
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY
HC on Smashwords
Acid Round the Clock
Copyright © 2010 by HC
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for Acid Mothers Temple and Cindy
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Contents
Motorhypomania Nightmare Blues
The Purposelessness Driven Life
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Nuke Butt
I grew up often, but never stayed.
Slumped in a chair in the room with the nuclear button and its 3 anxious wannabe pushers, I'd look up out of my permanent funk every few hours and say casually, but with authority, to the others, "OK, my turn!"
But my turn at the nuclear button never came. It rightfully went to someone else, someone who had it in his blood and had spent his entire childhood doing whatever a child could do to prepare for growing up to be the kind of person who's either pushing or not pushing the nuclear button every second he's on the job.
I, on the other hand, had spent my childhood assuming that, when the time came, I'd just develop a whole new breakthrough product that would either be a drug or a cell phone.
The basic idea was that if the world had "talking in tongues" then why shouldn't it also have "talking in toes" or -- more to the point -- "talking in genitalia"?
And once there was talking in genitalia (say), in the world, then immediately there'd have to be a drug that allowed the average man to do it, and/or a specialized cell phone he could do it over in order to reach the greatest number with his unique incomprehensible message of deep divine mystical revelation and everyday ejaculatory horse sense.
By the time I was a full-blown adult I was part of a large commercial effort (Grupo de whatever) working on this product. And though we still didn't have the least fucking idea what it was, we figured we'd better hold a big meeting of investors to finalize its design anyway.
Everybody who came was genuinely excited about its prospects -- talking ceaselessly about the string of opportunities and doors and spaces that would readily and gladly open themselves up to our crack team of developers.
"I think we've got a winner here," smiling executives said to each other and to underlings with conviction, following or preceding or simultaneous with the obligatory bear hug, or back or shoulder pat.
For the first time, someone at the meeting was taking notes. He had a brand new yellow notepad and had left the first page blank and folded it over so the 2nd clean page was now up and ready to record design specs.
He wrote down the number "1" followed by a period to indicate its status as the first item in a list.
Then somebody said something and he wrote down a word after the 1.
Quickly people gathered around to see what he'd written.
Then they returned slowly painfully to their seats, making sounds most often associated with advancing age and declining health.
In a fast and rare mutual moment, it had become clear to everyone that this fucking product, whatever the fuck it was, would easily rival the most stupid product in all human history.
So, with the first third of my life wasted on a dream that turned out to just be a dream, I vowed to not be fooled again during the next third of my life and so chose to waste it on the absolute most real aspect of reality.
And since there is nothing more real than someone setting off a nuclear bomb in your face, and since I'd rather be the someone setting it off than the someone whose face it's set off in, I applied for and landed this job, whose many subtle and delicate checks and balances should assuage all your possible fears that one day one of my many psychotic episodes will end with me lunging for the nuclear button and depressing it firmly with both hands so the hold cannot be broken -- in much the same way that the hold of the nuclear family and society in general cannot be broken and depresses the living fuck out of you and me.¹
And that's really all I ask of a career path. Cold, hard, immutable substance -- laced with power and yet hardcore protected from the possibility of irrationally taking revenge against high-level, abstract social forces that have been hard-wired in all social species since the early brain completely without regard to how uncool they'd be when I got here and now must fucking live both against and with them, from the same body at the same time.
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Notes
1. Though, sometimes, I'm not so sure about you.
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Zero-Zero Vision
This happens every year about this time. And every year about this time, when it happens, you say to yourself, "yeah, but this happens every year about this time, and obviously it never goes anywhere 'cause here we are a year later and we're still where we were then."
But somehow you know that this year it'll be different and this year it'll happen just the way you're envisioning it now. But then of course, you realize that every year you think, "yeah but this year is gonna be different, this year it's really gonna fly, really gonna just play out the way I'm seeing it now." But it never does, so why should you expect it to now. Which is also what you think each year at just this exact same point in the train of logic.
But, given that, why not just not think it this time, and break the pattern? Why not not think that it's not gonna play out as expected this time because it never has before?
Well, for one thing, you can't just not think it this time because you already have thought it this time. But, for another thing, you can't just not think it this time because, if you don't think that things are not gonna happen and then they do because you didn't, then next year at this time you're gonna be like all, "I'm not gonna think things aren't gonna happen just like I didn't think it last year and then it's gonna happen because I'm not thinking it isn't," at which point you're just trying soooo hard not to think it's not gonna happen that the amount of thinking about how it's not gonna happen that you are doing will probably guarantee it really really can never ever happen ever again.
Ever.
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Dance Song '07
I pretty much knew how my novel, when I sat down to write it, would start. It would start like this:
Like everybody else, I think I'm better than everybody else. However, unlike everybody else, I'M FUCKING RIGHT!! Yah buncha losers!!
After that, who'd fucking care what the story and characters were. Because, in a few simple words, I'd have essentially said it all. The rest of the book, therefore, would have to be just bland comfort words, to help calm the reader down.
The problem is, of course, that when the book comes out, people are gonna draw conclusions. And some of them will come to see me, all pissed off.
"You hate culture!" they'll scream. And: "So, if you're so damn smart, then why don't you tell us how to make culture stop being the ugly stupid worthless boring piece of shit it currently is. -- Or, at least, tell us beautiful, powerful, intelligent, caring, creative, spiritual, humane, highly-valued, vastly entertaining people out here how to stop lapping it up like we're all starved out inside."
I'll, of course, have my answer ready (in fact, I'm figuring it out, as we speak), but first I'll make them listen to a few hours of Acid Mothers Temple and Jack 'O Nuts, while I knock off a quick Vanity Fair piece in the corner. Then, maybe I'll tell them how, if they wanna get rid of their ugly stupid worthless boring piece of shit culture, the first thing they oughta do is replace their fucking candy-ass so-called Olympic Games.
They'll no doubt gasp and say, "Yeah -- but with what?"
At which point I'll casually interject, almost as an afterthought, "With itself blindfolded, of course.
"Take all the current Olympic sports," I'll explain in language even an infant could understand, "and do them all blindfolded. Blindfolded pole vault. Blindfolded swimming. Blindfolded boxing. The blindfolded mile.
"Then, when doing the Olympics blindfolded starts getting boring again, start blindfolding the athletes in the dressing room using non-removable blindfolds and don't help them find their event when it's show time -- so they have to desperately stagger around the whole Olympics stadium for hours not knowing where they're going, occasionally getting into vicious brawls with fans, and ultimately missing their event entirely, disgracing their whole nation and sports in general.
"Then, a few years later, when that gets boring too, blindfold them in their hotel room before they leave, so most of them don't even find the stadium where the Olympics are being held and, instead, wind up in the wrong place without knowing it, so suddenly Olympic-class athletes are doing broad jumps off the tops of buildings and pole vaulting into outdoor billboards on strip mall highways, or running the mile through a series of unexpected plate glass windows."
"OK," they'll say, "but the Olympics are only every 4 years. What's everybody supposed to do for the 3 years in between?"
At which point I'll get all massively self-righteous and unload.
"See!!!" I'll say, showing something between repulsion and contempt. "That's why you're all such a buncha losers. You're just sooo pissed off about how I'm always right! and how you're always wrong, that whenever I put forward some simple honest solution to help you save your pathetic miserable asses, you always have to find some dumb little nit-picky way to try to totally denigrate my unselfish act of pure creative love."
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Apologia
J,
Sorry it took me so long to respond to your email, but I am unable to use a keyboard due to the keys always all breaking off whenever I try to type on them. This is related, I am told, to a lack of subtlety or finesse on my part.
Similarly, pencil points and pen tips always seem to snap off and shoot across the room whenever I try to write even a word or two with them, on paper.
Apparently, only by deeply gouging my words into a block of wood with a strong pin or fork prong can my anger at their meaning be sufficiently absorbed to allow for me to write down anything at all.
Therefore, each email takes me many weeks and months to write, as the only way to correct a spelling error is to slam the fucking block of wood against a concrete wall many times till it's just a mass of tiny, bloody splinters, and then start again.
Once complete, my emails are then typed into an email client by an assistant and sent.
I hope this adequately explains my circumstance, so that, when I finally do get around to answering that worthless, ignorant, piece of shit email you sent me many many months ago, you will not be so angry at the lengthy delay in my response that you slam your fist through your monitor screen (dying instantly of massive blood loss and electrocution), at the sight of its (my much belated response's) sudden appearance in your inbox.
-- Z
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High Think
I walked in.
It was all fun and games.
It was the New DMV.
In the New DMV, when the shit hits the fan, it is, more often than not, real shit hitting real fans.
Today it was most likely the guy at the photo/fingerprint window who'd brought it in and then tossed it up when no one was looking and finally flipped the fan switch to "ON".
For the most part, the Hit(Fan, Shit) proposition behaved according to statistical models worked out at MIT over the course of the last few decades by Professor Dean Moriarity, and the post fan-blade shit splattered harmlessly on walls and windows, rarely hitting faces and therefore even more rarely going directly into mouths and, rarer still, down throats and through digestive systems to be reverse-engineered and ultimately excreted as food.
I walked to the information window as people were rising up from their duck-and-cover crouches and applauding themselves and feeling all elated over having avoided all that airborne fecal matter, unaware that the hated "statistics" had really done all the heavy lifting of saving them from being just another shit-faced statistic.
I flashed my MetroPass.
"What's that?" the information window person said, cheerily, like it was a dead canary and we were children.
"It's my MetroPass," I said, just a touch of incredulity in my voice.
According to Schrodinger's equation, Freedom = Entertainment = Emotion and, according to the Constitution, Schrodinger's Equation is everybody's absolute natural born inalienable right, with or completely without regard to circumstance.
"What's a MetroPass?" she said. "There's no such thing. I'm afraid the DMV does not issue or honor MetroPasses."
I started getting impatient. "It's something you flash," I said. "Characters in science fiction stories have them all the time. They walk up to people or windows or whatever and flash their MetroCard or MetroPass or OmniTicket. It goes by a lot of different names depending on the story. But they're all the same."
"This isn't a story, sir. This is the DMV. Are you here for a driving test?"
"The DMV is a story!" I corrected her. "The DMV is a story in Meatspace! -- Uhh, what's a driving test?"
"So you can get or renew a drivers' license."
"What's a drivers' license? Is that like a MetroPass?" I asked.
"So you can legally drive a car in the state of California," she said, not getting impatient at all -- but that's because everybody was so fucking hang loose at the New DMV.
"Why the fuck," I said, really beyond all reconciliation with time at this point, "why the fuck would I want to drive a fucking car in the state of California!!? -- and even if I did (want to drive a fucking car in the state of California) -- why the double fuck would I want to do it legally??!!"
The New DMV was designed on the theory that there is something higher than thought, and we just need to get our brains to do it.
So the New DMV workers were invited to let it all hang out. Be all pranksterish and fun-loving one minute and then all desperate and despairing the next, and then all calm and mellow, the next.
(Meanwhile, the patrons of the New DMV, unbeknownst to themselves, had been secretly invited to be all melodramatic and self-righteous one minute, then all gracious and obsequious the next.)
Eventually, though, the workers would have to confront the theory that rivaled the theory that the new DMV was based on.
This rival theory, contrary to claiming that there is something higher than thought and we just need to get our brains to do it -- instead claimed that, really, there is something lower than life and we just need to get our bodies and spirits to endure it.
Fortunately, however, neither theory impinged enough on the final product to obliterate its fundamental feature (not a bug!) -- and so everyone with business at the New DMV had to go through the lines with their clothes 100% off -- in the interest of everybody else's safety.
Unfortunately, since they weren't responding appropriately to my MetroPass, I would have to (go through the lines with my fucking clothes off) too.
"Do you know who I am!!!" I screamed as the armed matron started removing my clothes so I could be processed.
"I'm Professor Buck Hardrod, Ph.D.," I screamed as I took my place at the back of the line for window 17 and started filling out my form. "I'm the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award winning discoverer of the idea that there is something more central than emotion, and we just need to get our limbic system¹ to shut the fuck up, and start acting like it!"
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Notes
1. Or our insula and/or cingulate cortex.
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Power Dying
When you/I die, you/I don't want to do it lying in bed or in a coma. You/I want to be conscious and sitting in a chair -- so you/I can stamp your/my feet rhythmically as you/I chant your/my dying words: "RE-FUND! RE-FUND! RE-FUND."
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Dance Story '06
Two men sat at a centrally-situated table surrounded on all sides by full tables of politely talking men and women, mostly young, aggressive, and on the way up.
The first of the two men was likewise young, aggressive and on his way up, but the other man was in his mid 30's, lazy, irresponsible, and already at the top and looking for an easy way back down.
"It's either music and marijuana," said the second man, "or manhood and manual labor. Nature, in short, has conned a whole fucking species into not hanging it up -- for this!"
He held his arm out palm up and motioned it 280 degrees around the restaurant and then around a picture of the cosmos on the cover of a book he'd brought with him to read when dinner with the young founder of the world's currently hottest, fastest growing, and most outrageously off-the-wall business ever, just got too fucking boring.
"As far as that dickbrain Nature's concerned," he continued, arms now drawn back into his body, "we're just another fucking coin-flip experiment. A whole species created solely for a test run -- like a handful of pill-sized capsules created just to be flushed down a toilet to see what small statistical percentage comes back up -- and meanwhile we think we're here to be some kinda super-elevated locus of creation and will."
The waiter came over.
"Tonight we have, uh, you know, some kinda meat thing, or whatever, with, like some sauce or gravy or something on it, and, like some kinda potato or pasta or rice thingy. Or you could have some kinda totally veggie thingy with some kinda, you know, dressing, or whatever. And there's, of course, some fish kinda thing or other in there, somewhere, if you're desperate."
"That sounds excellent," the first guy said, "I'll have everything."
"Nothing, for me," the second man said, reaching into his backpack and pulling out a can of Franco-American Spaghetti. "But what kind of can openers do you have?"
The waiter ran through the kinds of can openers they had.
"Bring whichever one you'd personally use," the second man said.
"To open a can of Franco-American Spaghetti with?" the waiter asked.
"That too," the man replied. "But I mainly wanna use it as a prop to help me describe my recent surgery to my friend here. All kinds of tubes and scopes and lasers and baskets were shoved up the tiny hole in my dick, so they could fish around and yank out a couplea big bloody kidney stones through my ureter."
People at nearby tables politely choked on their food or spit out their coffee. The sound of stifled, unrequited vomit could be heard.
"And it went on for hours," the man called out as the waiter was walking away to get their food and props.
Several tables finished quickly and got up to leave, holding their stomachs and/or mouths.
As soon as a table was completely deserted by its former diners, the second man got up and moved over to it and sat down and started scarfing up big handfuls from the wide assortment and vast amounts of unfinished food left on its plates. The first man followed, sitting down across from him, semi-frantic.
"What are you doing??! Are you crazy?!! This is the most expensive restaurant in LA. The most important and powerful people in modern world civilization eat here all the time!"
"Well, they're sure bein' fed shitty leftovers," the second man said, downing something red from between his forefingers.
"You're just doing this to test us, right?" the first man said.
"Doing what?" the second man said, draining the only previously undrained wine glass. Then, looking quickly around and seeing the current table pretty much scarfed out, he moved to another table where the pickings were far better.
"Whoa!! Look at all this shit!!" he said genuinely elated to the first guy, who'd followed and sat down across from him again.
"Isn't the money enough for you?" the first guy said. "Do we have to indulge your fucking persona too?"
The second guy did a total 180 demeanor change and grabbed the first guy by the shirt neck. "This isn't my fucking persona," he said.
He grabbed the table full of dishes and leftovers and wine and with great difficulty lifted it all a few feet off the ground and threw it against the wall, but missed and it smashed into another table instead.
"This isn't my fucking persona," he said, louder, more forcefully, turning over more tables as he headed for the door.
But instead of using the door when he got there, he jumped through the plate glass front window beside it, and, while he was still in midair, continued intoning, even louder, "And this isn't my fucking persona, either!"
And, fully-coated in glass shards by the time he hit the ground, he continued rolling sideways down the middle of the road, cars swerving through more plate glass windows and storefronts and each other to avoid hitting him, and in between the screeches of their horns and brakes and the sound of metal wrenched apart, he continued saying forcefully, at the top of his voice, but without much other affect, to the many passersby who lined the streets to gawk as he rolled past, "And This is not my fucking persona, either, yah buncha sick fucking losers!"
* * * * *
Why Google Maps Sucks
Why is the title of this piece "Why Google Maps Sucks"?
The title of this piece is "Why Google Maps Sucks" because when you go to Google Maps and click on "Satellite", you get a satellite photo from months ago!
But I wanna go outside and wave my arms around and click on Google Maps and type in my address and click "satellite" and zoom in and see the top of my tiny head and my two tiny upturned palms.¹
And I wanna do this at the same moment everyone else on earth is doing it too -- zooming in from the sky's eye-view of 7 continents till they see themselves (and the rest of man) standing on their own personal specks of earth all over the world, yearning to be free.
There's never been a world moment like this one will be. Never been anything so way far beyond the regular meaning of culture. Never been a time before in history when everyone on earth could so easily share the same stark highly personal, heavily communal realization simultaneously.
Because, in the history of technology-sociology, it's one thing to see a live picture of Walter Cronkite saying "Hello dere from Rome!" live, from Rome.
But it's totally something else altogether to see yourself and every other living human on earth, standing on the surface of the planet, all together, giving the heavens, the cosmos, and each other a playful, ironic, 2-finger V-sign, near-live from the Google Maps page.