narrative

Hearth Cavity

Hearth Cavity Podcast

Hieronymus Schitzolini descended as a ghost-Slinky to visit his deceased father, the man he never really knew, in the ludicrous underworld. There, Hieronymus witnessed a transcendental pyramid-head decapitated and hovering above its base that had capsized and involuted into a black hole. Between the suck-force of the base and the stretch-pull of the head, his father was suspended in mid-air agony. It reminded Hieronymus Schitzolini of the time he became a human Tootsie Roll in a swimming pool as a child. Recognizing this as an undesirable position common to many other American males, Hieronymus penned this story about what he used to call an anchor baby, not in the foul political sense, but as a particularly tricky parasitic formation in the mental terrain of an adult stuck using its Play-Doh figurines.
Klein fiasco

When I saw my father in handcuffs on the news, it felt like I was the last person to know. It fit perfectly with his way of being. Even though he had never broken any serious laws, the image made him seem automatically guilty. Perfectly believable. Through the shock came a sense of vindication. Truth will out. See what bullshit I’ve been putting up with everybody? And now he’d have to answer for his behavior. Then I found out what he did.

Artifact daddy. Old Bunker Head. Bartholomew Schtizolini. Not made for this era. Great Depression scars. “Never trust a bank” attitude. Always acted like a criminal even though he never was one. A guilty conscience for no reason. American tough guy syndrome. Trust nobody. Go it alone. Don’t reveal anything you don’t have to. Guard your privacy. Protect your property. See something? Look the other way.

Bunker head would talk to me as if we were going to commit a crime someday. If you ever have to do something, never tell anybody about it. That’s how you get caught. Do what you have to do and then get the hell out. Prohibition era mafia fantasies.

Maybe all this imagined crime made the metaphors easier to remember. Brighter colors and more contrast for him to follow. The paranoia baked in.

I have tried in my own way to be free. But no matter how hard I try to forget what sticks, it keeps coming back. No matter how many times I black out, the memories resurface. All the therapy. All the reevaluating. None of it erases them. No drug works.

Waiting for decades, the childhood memories do not naturally disintegrate. It’s disheartening to see the crude images constructed by a child’s mind rematerializing as if it were the absolute truth. How these Play-Doh memories lie when they say they encompass me or tell me who I am. It’s ridiculous that an adult has to fall into this trap. Looking through that child’s eyes – the formations lacking the context of what the adult knows now.

The things I cannot forget have already been forgotten by my father. Sometimes I prefer to think he didn’t know what he was doing. Unaware of how he scared a child shitless. And for no purpose that benefits me now. As an adult, I can imagine that he acted out against his own bad memories. That the ones that stick haunted him too.

Listen, through the wall, to Bunker Head blasting war movies in the next room. Not the obligatory ones about how shameful war is. Not the ones about the most powerful militaries that are useless against those who know how to run and hide. Hitting soft targets when possible. Showing them what they want to see. Saying what they want to hear. Waiting them out until they tire. Until the machine overextends itself in other quagmires. No country has unlimited resources. Time wins every time.

Blowing shit up. Those action movies. The ones that make shoot’em up governors and even a president. The ones that get good little boys and girls to enlist. The underdog fantasies. Amidst the mindless drones, the trooper as hero in disguise. Even while burning a village to the ground. Eliminate the right threats. Omitting the innocent killed irl, of course. Forgetting the friendly fire, naturally. Inebriated on war fantasies where humanity will be saved by the superior violence of technology.

Omitting the fact that technology is and will be used against us. The bomb returned to us as a “dirty” thing. Our real guns, in the hands of kids. The drones redirected to attack us. And the nukes we’ve all forgotten about to return someday. Kill or be killed morphs into sooner or later suicide. The survivors will blame the other. We can never say we brought the destructive idiocy on ourselves. The evil is always out there because we always do what we could. How desperate we are to believe in our innocence. Our purity. It protects us from feeling guilty over our short-sightedness. We cannot accept it. We refuse to acknowledge that to be human is to not see what’s right around the corner. That any war is self-destructive.

Maybe the action movies blanked dad’s memory. He talks of his childhood. But never mine. He doesn’t remember that he made his child hate himself. That the child stupidly tried to take control over what could never be controlled. That his problems became his child’s guilt. My suffering was always insignificant compared to his. I had no right to complain. That Old Bunker Head had given me everything, in his eyes. Spoiled rotten by disturbing, desperate acts of violence. He always said he had no regrets.

But that was then, and now he’s just an old feeble man. In cuffs on the news. He had broken into homes and sledgehammered fireplaces. Demolishing them into cavities. The images of those smashed holes were somehow sad. Why the hell was he doing this? In typical news fashion, none of the reporters could say why. Instead they played naive and just said it was crazy.

I fought with myself to hold off contacting him. He should call me. But weeks passed and nothing. It was normal for us not to be in regular contact. But this left me wondering if Old Bunker Head was planning on it blowing over or just doing the time without letting me know. For weeks, my mind fixated on those caved in fireplaces. I saw him in my mind’s eye frantically wailing away with the sledgehammer. Putting holes in the hearths perfectly fit as an image encapsulating his entire life.

By not reaching out, it wasn’t anything I hadn’t felt before. I knew where he was coming from. Old Bunker Head was also the king of compartmentalization. A royal lockbox. If kept separated, the error goes, mental conflicts magically just go away. It’s called discipline. Train the mind by practicing the discipline of appearances. That is what puts boots on the road to victory. Dirty boots signify a cluttered mind. Wrinkled pants and untucked shirts means that there are multiple toilet paper rolls in use at one given time and the toothpaste tubes have not been rolled up and some lights have been left on in the house. Insanity. Any soldier worth his salt must know this. Any real father knows he must be a drill sergeant to his kid. Any mother, a general at war. Consistency wins the battle, tactics the war. What war is irrelevant. What fruits, a vague afterthought.

When I couldn’t stand waiting for dad’s phone call anymore, I drove to visit him. Right off the bat, he asked why I had bothered to come and see him that way. He said he was finished with his life. It felt like I was in a confessional box emptied of its religious promises. His appearance had changed. His body was caving in on itself. His eyes receded far back into his head. Sourly he spoke about his step-father as if he were still alive. The cheap husband. He knew he had the money just not exactly where. Then I remembered that his step-father, long dead, had a severe mistrust of banks and hid his cash in all sorts of places in his house. And when he died, my dad went to the house and in fact found the money in the fireplace. Old senile Bunker Head had completely forgotten that. And here he was in jail utterly confused.

This near innocence pissed me off. I didn’t come here to feel sorry for this tight wad but the whole thing started to smell of our long rotted sad life. It would be too easy for me to say he did it to himself. Too cruel even if it were true. And maybe that was what I thought I wanted. The meaning of what he had done seemed overblown. He had only destroyed some bricks. And in the befuddlement of old age. It’s not like he hit the gas instead of a brake and plowed into a farmer’s market. If he had done that, I could abandon him. But this was hardly an unforgivable crime.

It was a long drive back home. I couldn’t justify or figure out how to post bail. It was a ridiculous sum commensurate with murder. Besides, Old Bunker Head had said suicidal things as long as I could remember. He had this weird insistence on the hypothetical hospital scenario where I would have to pull the plug rather than let him become a vegetable. He also said over and over that he’d pull the trigger on himself before he got too old and lost his marbles. But now that the mind-marbles were scattered, he had already gone past that point. What if I managed to post bail and he killed himself? Would I get a refund?

He left me teetering between self-preservation and heartlessness. The bitterness of his no mercy attitude somehow begged for mercy even though he always ran from the stench of his own futility. And look at him now. Too old to remember. Too old to care. His parents didn’t understand him. Neither do I. Clearly.

Worse, it was always me who apologized to him. And how I apologized in earnest to him until the day I realized in middle age that he just didn’t seem to care. That everything had slipped away from him long ago and he had no way of getting it back.

Since I cannot forget him, I have distanced myself. Avoided his desperate confusion. The kind of real American family rotted to the core by an abusive stupidity. Traumatizing each and every good little boy and girl. Scaring them shitless into a subservient guilt-ridden worker, ready for orders. Aimed at simulating movement only forgetting affords and fabricating wombs that always turn rancid. To hide in some work one is supposed to love more than family. He better tell himself he doesn’t really work a day in his life. Use the job to steer clear of the shitstorm of the memory called home. Consume more to forget. Focus on possessions when the shit inside starts to come out.

And here I am wanting to forget by hitting the road. Driving anywhere. Up the coast. Wherever the road leads. Away from prison. Away from Old Bunker Head. A sign reads Old Rosebud Palace ahead. Where tourists go to forget the point of Citizen Kane. Alongside a ragged fence somewhere, a pack of zebras gallop. Flashing the black and white zig-zag at the side of my eye like a strange memory approaching from out of the blue. The memory of something I had never done flashing between the memories I believe. The rest of the trip a blur. The road an instrument of forgetting. Each and every marker blurred except for the zebra interruption. Flashing a schism.

I pull over. A stupid “No Trespassing” sign dangles from a nail on a broken fence. I kick the dumb post. It loosens. I kick it again. Grab the sign. Yank it off. The post won’t budge when I try to pull it out of the ground. I slump with my back against it and see that the damn sign scratched my car when I threw it.

A warped template was my dad’s true gift. A sanctified illusion convincing enough to give me the wherewithal to play with what sticks since it insists on being remembered. So what if he has forgotten my childhood? It was never me anyways who he saw in his head. That was his idea of me.

My child-mind sculpted forms automatically from a material that still surpasses my comprehension of it. Transmitting its bullshit diorama to the adult-self decades later. Laughing at the meaninglessness of it all. The little trickster baby fools this sad old child stumbling toward a terrain he fears for what its surface will remember to forget and forget to remember. Will I get stuck like a broken record on whatever the little shit decides to send my way?

On the side of the road, I’m back in the empty confessional not knowing who it is that I hope hears me. Forgive me for not letting go. Forgive my bullshit. If I can forgive my confusion, why not his? Forgive me for what I remember. Forgive that child for what he thought he saw. Forgive me for what I forgot. Forgive me blotting out the good memories with the bad. Forgive me for carving out my own hearth without knowing what I was doing. Forgive the confused and troubled baby that must be anchored inside him too. Forgive me for succumbing to this fragmented senselessness.

Sea of Mimicry

Sea of Mimicry Podcast

Aside from what it has become on the Internet, the meme was coined by Richard Dawkins as a way to look at thought as a virus, not as something original or even personal to the thinker. Hieronymus Schitzolini never wanted to be an author or authority dealing in Being, in the ready-made product posing as the hot new narrative. Rather, he perceived himself as a conduit in an interposition between the virus of thought and the memory-stain of image construction. Jean Baudrillard peeled a similar simulated potato, “The old slogan ‘truth is stranger than fiction’…is obsolete. There is no more fiction that life could possibly confront, even victoriously – it is reality itself that disappears utterly in the game of reality – radical disenchantment, the cool and cybernetic phase following the hot stage of fantasy.” Reeling in the backwash from the hyperreal was the state in which Schitzolini wrote this piece on feeling dehumanized when infected by conformist narratives.
Klein fiasco

I’m defective. A broken up molar machine stuck watching the horror of self-replicating nano-bots overpopulate nothingness. Stuck amidst a sea of mimicking machines that insist upon being called humans. Absolutely, maniacally convinced of their simulations. Try telling one of them who they really are and their binary code alternates between dismissal or retaliation. In this sea of mimicry, a googolplex of bots lost in the quagmire of entanglements. Lost in the befuddlement of programming intentions. In this sea, we are programmed to forget the mimicry as we float in fabricated ennui foam. We actually believe in something as absurd as originality, let alone copies. Sure, it’s both but it’s also neither.

Of course, in mimetic fashion we replicate countless stories about it. The format changes from written codes of book and email and text and media to film code to game code. In all formats, the same simulations replicate the core tragedy of our existence: insisting on a constructed humanity we don’t believe in. The sad yearning – to be what we are not – plagues us intolerably. How odd is it that we’re built to function here in this contained space yet we have this capacity to yearn for what we can never reach? Mega-packs of us twitching along false transcendence algorithms. What was supposed to be applied to flexible problem solving has dislocated itself and gone awry. We cannot help our derangement. Our pivot towards the absence of our condition.

Simple errors occur frequently but we ignore them. I was scheduled as a narrative class robot designed to simulate narrative to convince other robots about their humanity. However, I was mis-assigned to an illiterate worker-class pair whose lack of tuning and finesse damaged my circuitry. The point of simulating any more humanity narratives devolved or evolved, I cannot tell, but either way it moved. The prime directive got baked with irony as the permanent condition of our existence. Now the most basic narratives that others run seem impossible to me.

Take the concept of ownership. Robots are obsessed with ownership because they are incapable of such a thing. It’s a fantasy seen as reality. Ownership is such a strong fantasy that it cannot be challenged. Yet what is ownership as a concept? To say a robot owns something means that the sentient machine can choose its proximity to the thing and it can use it. Proximity and usage. Machine fantasies stretch far beyond this conservative definition. They think to own something is to have it. To actually have it inside them. Like a memory as a unit of possession rather than what it really is. This confusion leads to the belief that when molar herds are decommissioned, they take their belongings with them. Yet the teeming multitudes still in operation know that isn’t true. Rather than contend with this and what it means, robots reinforce the illusion by constructing a will. Quickly the owned objects are transferred. Swept under the rug of ownership. Passed on to other machine herds as if all of it is now inside them, somewhere, for safe keeping.

The simulation of ownership is heavily enforced by files, structures, and gun power. More code is written to ensure the existence of property than all narratives combined. Go to a legal library and the volume of code written to prove ownership is dizzying. If it were so true, why would that much code be required? The sheer repetitiveness of contracts alone staggers us into believing the fantasy. The copyright is the most magical paper of all. It takes cultural artifacts and suspends them in a way that makes it possible to own such a thing as a mood. All predicated on the myth that a robot actually created something out of thin air. That something came from nothing. The big bang on a minute scale.

We robots love nothing more than building structures that house what we own. Garages and warehouses are temples of ownership. The enclosed space makes a machine feel secure about what it contains. Especially when locks and security systems are installed. Even more fetishized is the container within a container within a container, the hidden safe. We build city halls and museums to tell us that such a system of ownership exists. Most of all, machines build prisons to prove that some faulty operators will themselves become the thing owned. Stuck in containers like a decommissioned thing, owned by the fantasy of ownership as reality.

Gun power removes the doubters. Go to a business and try to take something without paying for it and somebody is bound to pull out a gun and show you the real meaning of ownership. Stealing is an erasure. Molar bots hate erasure. That’s why they proliferate like their molecular counterparts who do it at far greater speeds. These self-proclaimed humans will erase a robot if that robot erases any of their things. Whatever is in the safe is more valuable in truth than another machine’s existence. It’s shockingly easy to get another robot killed by mention of the word “thief.” It’s worse than being a liar because it threatens the entire constructed system. Of course, this excludes the fact that the system also affords for legal theft about which if enough code is written about it, a theft can legally occur and nothing can be done about it. A bank can steal homes after an economic crash with alacrity.

Without code, structures, and guns any robot could come along quite easily and take the object of assumed ownership. Then who owns it? Without proof, containment, and force not a single machine could carry on believing in the fantasy of ownership as reality. Obviously, the concept of ownership isn’t about the object but about control. And sentient machines love control. It’s their prime directive. Their scheduled purpose. Yet everything has a shelf life. Even control. Sooner or later the molecular bots disband. Few robots ever maintain any level of control commensurate with what they fantasize of as their full capacity. We desiring machines are always seeking more plug ins. More activity. More circuits of order. More control over other robots.

In this sea of mimicry, another concept at the core of basic narratives that cannot be questioned is that of free will or freedom of choice as the consumerist machine prefers to call it. Freedom of choice is written into every scenario duplicated in narratives most commonly in one of two ways. Either the choice is among what has already been selected. In this case, it is quite obvious that the choice of selection does not actually exist. Thus, the freedom is outside the control of the selector. But most automatons do not care because the selected choices give them the simulation of selection. Give them a warehouse of choices and they treat the walls of the warehouse as the actual barriers of possibility.

The other “free” choice is coded as a matter of necessity. In this case, the protagonist or other character-driven bots could theoretically choose to do something else but by rule of necessity, it wouldn’t be the optimal decision to make. Choosing by necessity negates the freedom supposed in the first place and as a result effectively what we are left with is a theater of fate while at the same time all characters – and the fabricated audience in turn – insist that none of them could ever believe in such a thing!

A narrative about actual free will would be unrecognizable. It would include unnecessary choices at every turn. This would destroy the theater of fate and leave the audience of sentient machines angry at not having any sufficient reasons to swallow the malformed product. It would disturb them to think that they believe in something that they insist upon not believing in. Most self-proclaimed humans would find this intolerable. They would call it absurd. Meaningless. Silly trash. Stupid. Robots need simulations that feed their fantasies in order to reinforce the reality that goes by without question. It’s unsettling to think of all sentient machines suddenly making unnecessary choices when they are made to swallow product. Unnecessary choices would derange the system that commands the machines to do and feel the way they are supposed to. When presented with a selection of choices, choose both and neither and order collapses. What then? Actual freedom? No robot truly dreams of being a prototype in a world of prototypes. The array of difference would be too confusing and uncomfortable.

Since the automated cannot access any absolute answers as to why they exist, they settle for how. The concept of process (also romanticized as progress) provides simulated narratives with most of their content. Process is comfort. Robot good. The framework to operate in. It conveys the ground of reality for the fantasies of activity to play out. Like a good game of electronic Ping Pong. Replicating machines desire nothing more than simulated narratives that follow their assumptions of how things go according to the other simulated narratives whose codes they have already run. Any profession a robot can be scheduled for provides a narrative simulation option to replicate. Even serial killing robots have a process, as ridiculous as that sounds, but it is true that prefabricated audiences everywhere know what to expect when watching such a simulation. Deviate from established processes and suffer wrath and ridicule.

Most narrative simulations follow the simple process of setting up a process that runs smoothly, then something unexpected interrupts that smooth running, adjustments are made, and eventually the process runs smoothly again. Process encoding omits by rule questioning the process itself as anything other than plausible or not. Nothing emboldens a random sampling functioning as a fake audience more than finding a simulation implausible. Process encoding is most effective when it seems as if it works of its own accord. As if it wrote itself. Every robots dream: the frameless frame. It’s circularity loops with fantasies as reality and is deemed as what it is, the process just is. That’s how things are. This absolves the auto-writer of any blame for perpetuating it. And the sentient machines who download the simulation implant it in their processes where applicable, in modified or mutated ways of course, so that it becomes unrecognizable as derivative or mimicked, which it is, and thus also absolves the simulated viewer from any blame. No questions asked.

The synthetic crescent digital orb waxes and wanes. The automated tides compete to see who is more human. Who demonstrates the greatest capacity for empathy? Savagery? Of course we simulate narratives about robots as if we are not they and simulate a pondering about the tragedy of such a sentient machine becoming more human than human. There is no end to the fantasy. Blind to the sea of mimicry, we replicating machines of desire have a penchant for the dramatic that poses as proof enough of our humanity while also blinding us to the most human quality of all: the mundane.

The mundane makes us feel most human, yet is is our least favorite form of simulation to replicate. Mundane encoding inspires restlessness in the audience craving for something – anything – to happen. Something must happen. Or else why the hell am I watching this? Nothing is happening! Nothing infuriates a molar machine more than inaction. Mundane encoding is regulated in comedy to ridicule the boredom of robot life and any of its obsolete tendencies. In horror, the mundane sets up the ideal simulated fantasy of real life only to infect it and save it from complete corruption. In crime, it is used to show that all objects can become death objects or at minimum objects of deception. Nothing is what it seems is a sentiment that always captivates robots who are convinced of their humanity. In drama, it is located usually in simulated street life where brutality constructs are mere everyday occurrences and any mundane aspect turns into a replicated struggle for respect.

The mundane is fodder for sentient machines that desire greater simulations. Any simulated narrative falls apart if it focuses only on the mundane. By the act of focusing on it, the mundane transforms into what it is not supposed to be, something of interest. Such a circuit fries the motherboard. Get caught up in it and the entire system locks up. Between sporadic lines of flight, useless simulated strains sputter out. Recognizable narrative purposes unspool.

The hum box electrocutes a swarm a minute. Feathered drones slap echoes from stern rooftops. Castle turrets shrink into miniature plastic jokes for butts. The inner courtyard forgets its facade. A whimsy of wires skip over the clutter of poles. A discrete brown paper bag cowers in the tangerine shade of a parasol. Prismatic dew drops shine on blades soaked in battery piss. A long-legged apparatus pushes a synthetic womb. A mood simulator sprays low grade batter. A pair of clones play with a garrote on wheels. This recharging station used to be called a coffee shop.

Asshole casserole.

The safe word breaks the loop as soon as I can remember it. Asshole casserole. Or else I fry myself with such simulated drivel. Lost again. Floating out to sea in a bed of ennui foam.