science fiction

Star Arcade

One year on Christmas Eve, Hieronymus Schitzolini was changing the curtains in his studio apartment. That year the space heater was on the fritz and either overheated the room or barely warmed a leg. So he had it cranked up and moved about in the buff. While putting up the blackout curtains, Hieronymus lost his balance and fell off the ladder. Unfortunately, earlier that evening, he was skinning potatoes. Unbeknownst to him, one of those skinned potatoes had rolled onto the floor and waited for him silently. So when he fell, it so happened that upon hitting the floor with his naked flesh, the potato went right up his rump. At the hospital, nobody believed the miracle had happened in the way he told it. Nonetheless, while waiting in the ER with a tater up the clacker, Schitzolini penned this vision on some paper scrounged together by the helpful staff.
Klein fiasco

‘Twas the Christmas of ’92 and out on the Playa in Death Valley I stood alone on that white plane. Like a racer on the Bonneville Salt Flats, a silver craft raced toward me. As it got closer I saw that it had no wheels. It was hovering fifteen feet above the ground when it stopped before me and lowered its docking bridge. Mesmerized, I failed to notice how anything exited and got behind me but before I knew it, I had my arms held behind my back and a bag over my head. Inside, I was put on my hands and knees in some kind of harness. They spoke a language that sounded precise and intricate. When one of them spoke English, I was shocked at hearing something I could understand. “We’re going to give you back your soul.” I didn’t know that my soul had gone missing. Did the word “soul” mean something else to them? A searing pain in my rear end went well beyond the proctologist’s thumb, let me tell you. While enduring the pain, I was trying to figure out what the word “soul” meant to them and if it were the same meaning then how could it be possible to give it back and through my ass? As they inserted it into my butt, the one informed me that the first person they gave a soul back to was the one we call Jesus Christ. With this much rear pain, I bet Jesus didn’t ask for this gift either.

Whatever they did inside me, at some point they hit a spot that caused me to gush into a fever dream. I saw sand crabs flopping asunder the playa millions of years ago. Soft paws strolling along the shallows of the lake that is no longer there. Then I was in a hut somewhere listening to the murmur of boiling eggs while I picked up a piece of fudge and without realizing what a hard brick it was, rent my tooth and tongued it as it dangled. The smell of sour piss emanated from a corner so I went outside to find myself on a frozen lake with fisherman tending to holes in the ice and pulling out fish already battered and fried from the water. A wild horde of fiddlers fingered psalms as their beards crawled with eels. Somebody scratched the odd phrase “blob warp spew fracture” into the ice. A mint sprig fell from the sky and I caught it and chewed on it and it released a sort of truth meal that’s too difficult to explain but to make a long story short I turned into a river skulking it’s way back into the hills.

When I came to, clearly the one speaking with me was assigned to help me with the transition between my ignorant life without a soul to my new life with one. And so I limped as my star being helped me deboard and as I needed to sit down on my side, my Star Being helped make sense of the inner realizations I was already automatically having from receiving my lost soul. Here is what I understood with the help from its guidance.

Star Beings seek planets that have evolved enough for them to enter the vessels of consciousness and adorn a body in which the weary space traveler can sleep. They use the planet as a womb hive until it must be abandoned due to overpopulation and its damaging effects on any planet’s environment as the technology inevitably progresses. In the adornment process, the vessel prevents the Star Being from bringing their knowledge directly into it. Everything they know is refracted by the fleshy gravity bound medium they call a meat frame box. Their dream state is what we call our waking life. And when we sleep they run their simulations – the decaying sense manipulations – to experiment with consciousness through dream logic.

Star Beings are obviously far ahead of us. The infrastructure of our corporeal form is far more primitive than theirs, which can withstand space travel without the need for ships or suits or any of that limited container mind-frame engineering. Eons ago did they learn how to harness the nested curves of the Sun-Father’s penis. They only presented me with a spacecraft so that I could make sense of their appearance. Some of us dream of other planets where our Star Beings (the ones who took on our flesh) were before.

Once my Star Being entered the vegetative consciousness of a planet and showed it to me through a dream where I had these beautiful white flowers blooming from each of my organs. The sensation of organs blooming was like an ecstasy of endless unfolding. All the spaces under my skin filled with these tender petals. Then I awoke into another dream where I stroked my chest hair and found one I had to pluck. With a tug, the sensation of fibrous rope squeezed pleasure through my pore. Like I had plenty more where that came from. And I pulled and pulled and discovered that it wasn’t hair at all but lettuce. I pulled out a bed of lettuce and still there was more. And on that bed of lettuce, my Star Being revealed himself to me as an ancient Sumerian replete with glorious regal curly hair and beard. So much hair in fact that I had to look closer to realize that he had my face. The only difference was a more pronounced mole or beauty mark on his left cheek. And he told me that he had to appear as a harbinger of justice reincarnated to make an impact on my dull consciousness with a gift known to some on this planet as a vajra or a diamond-thunderbolt by which reality can be peeled open.

Mirroring or doubling is a favorite tactic of Star Beings in our dreams. They tend to stay hidden even when they reveal themselves to us. Like when mine doubled as Shamash, he told me, like some genie, that I could ask him any question I wanted, but when I did, it was like I immediately knew the answer from within myself to the point that I could not discern if I was having an honest conversation with myself or if I was actually receiving his infinite wisdom through the refraction of my vessel. I asked him about the white flowers blooming from my organs and he told me, or I told myself, that it was a plant that he had discovered on that planet where flowers bloom into consciousness in a meadow tended by a lady as light as a gossamer with filaments of light for hair and skin as tender as petals. She would pluck one of his petals as she would with the others and wrap it in a single hair so that it would float across a bay to sentient life on the other shore whereupon receiving it, they recognized it as what they called an epiphany.

The lady of the white flower meadow was the model on our planet upon which the Virgin Mary would be derived along with the ultimate epiphany as an immaculate conception or the impregnation of the greatest idea like the soul inserted into my bum. She would recite a meditation for hyper-active minds bearing the burden of an overactive consciousness while plucking her epiphanies that went something like this:

“Don’t worry about what won’t work out, accept what will. Rather than wasting precious life on worrying, start loving as a way of living instead. Don’t worry about your partner, love your partner. Nothing positive or unifying goes without acknowledgement. It is a mistake to assume so. The mind cannot be directly controlled. The mind can only block thought or direct it. Take care and attention to how you think. Be as good a witness to yourself above all else. Gather the infinite petals of truth and receive the fruit of health and shield of shelter and ultimately the emblem of unity. Follow its warmth. Its gentle unfolding into the void. Its truth is its love.

Love is only an illusion if apprehended by deception. You get what you give. The light of the flower only reflects your light. Such sentient beings forget what love is and that is why they need epiphanies. To remember that deception only gets nothing in the end. It destroys its own purpose. Let go of the objects of your attention. Open your hands and they will be full of everything you need. Step back and relax into the widest frame of your mind. Stop fighting yourself through others by worrying about the shallow terrain of evaluations that accrue into a wasteland of clutter if they are not seen for what they are. Do not live by such superficial restraints set at some other time in some other place. Do not listen to the lies of comfort and safety and efficiency and any other mask that hydra-headed fear can assume. Know that you desire what you fear and fear what you desire and neither is a cause for panic or desperation but rather contemplation.

Sit like these flowers in the meadow on the banks of the ancient river. Observe what floats by. Force nothing. Know that any action is merely a bolder reaction. Let the reactions float down river. Let them assimilate with the rest of the reactions. Relax. Nothing is new under any sun. Everything issues forth from the same place. Have courage in unfolding your tenderness and watch worry crumble away. Abandon enforcement and choose to radiate like the white flower. Nothing will ever be the same again. All the pointless battles and pyrrhic victories will dissipate. And the emptiness of the void will reveal itself as the positive force it also is. That of full potentiality. This is what it means to possess the diamond thunderbolt.”

In that meadow, my Star Being met his soulmate. She sprouted and blossomed right beside him. He could not believe how remarkably easy it was. They knew it right away. And the mother of that garden knew love at first sight (the randomness of destiny) when it appeared in her garden. And when their time had come to leave that corporeal form, she plucked them at the same time so that they could journey across space together. They traveled across the void but their form of traveling is something the Star Being referred to as “growing” across the void and they came to this planet and adorned the forms of myself and my love.

At this point, I realized what he meant by saying I needed to have my soul reinserted. My Star Being was in fact already me without me knowing it. Seeing it as another body was the only way my dim consciousness could make sense of the impossibility. Since my mind became too cluttered with what I mistook as me, they intervened to make me whole again. The flesh had to be bent back to serve its true host and fulfill the rejoining of these star-crossed lovers by lodging the diamond-thunderbolt right up my keister.

We were born into bodies on separate continents but still found each other and repeated the first sight of love we had experienced on that other planet as flowers but had forgotten in this life, though buried somewhere deep in our refracted consciousness.

Stranger still, we sometimes have the same dream. I mean I’m in hers and she’s in mine. In one dream, my tooth fell out or was kicked out by a spider who dangled from its thread so my partner took a pair of scissors and cut it and removed the spider from my mouth. That is love.

We were sitting at a park where a chartreuse haze clung to the grass as people sunbathed and used tombstones for backrests. The sky flashed silver and stayed that way like a sustained camera flash as the clouds rotted purple. We ran to an abandoned houseboat with an indoor pool where a fluffy white Persian cat floated on a satin pillow. The cat picked up a miniature guitar and strummed a few chords that compromised the hull and the house boat began to sink. We escaped through the indoor pool.

Whenever I’m unkind to my partner now, when I harp on things that cannot be, my Star Being reminds me of what a ridiculous man I am. He calls me a real clinger since I persist in his consciousness when on other planets usually his host subsides and accepts his rule. Once I had a real fit about family matters and a flaccid dong flopped out of my mouth. My mustache turned into a pubic bush. I scrambled to stuff the floppy thing back in to hide it but it flopped out all the more. As soon as I figured out how to stop being a dickhead, the swollen sponge disappeared and I could talk and eat normally again.

I asked my Star Being why I keep forgetting myself and turn unkind. He explained:

“Human flesh is governed by its source, the same source we grow across. We call it the void of emptiness and full potential. Sentient beings are all run by the ouroboros of the will. A unity of desire and fear. One and the same. Thus, remembering is made of forgetting and vice versa. It is as natural to forget as it is to remember. And good too. But also not. It’s an eternal flipping and flopping full of contradiction to anyone who only tries to hold on to desire and deny fear. To hold on to memory and forget forgetting. Such is the way of error. There is another place where I have been and you have too, even though you cannot remember it. A place where a crescent silver moon touches the zenith of a mountain. We would cross that bridge and traverse the terrain as particles of reflected light and touch everything with our indirect worship of that sun.”

“But why come here and play this game on Earth?” I asked. And my Star Being moved my mouth to answer my own question:

“The shapeshifter inside plays at the center-less ghost arcade. We impersonate ourselves and pretend they are the people we meet. Intentions are the assumptions of ghosts. Our principles are the desires of these apparitions. We mash the buttons to escape the disappearing scroll. The dead renderings pit us against bosses from our own forgotten scripts. The forms assumed are remembered not as assumed but as strange finalities to be erased. Play the lucid dream game with its soft joystick breaking intentions on every counter gesture. Listen to the disembodied voice impersonating you. Dead soul marionettes dance the death jig for empty points. Ghosts run errands in this looping sand box. They simulate text messages about how many friends they’ve lost. Whoever plays the game forgets the years trapped in this ghostly architecture. Even Star Beings are entranced by the flickering finalities of a captive yet dying light before they can grow across space to enter another game.”

Blind Tongue

Blind Tongue Podcast

Herein Hieronymus Schitzolini bushwhacks his way towards the construct of a movement like those made to sell works of art by simulating scenes the sleepy public could be a part of now by purchasing it in the gift store. The hilarity of posthumously grouping together individuals. They never really worked towards any sort of actual unity nor saw themselves that way, like in Greenwich Village in the 80’s, but they’re packaged together anyways. Or think of the art party as an exhibit like the ones Jason Rhodes used to throw in Los Angeles. The simulated happening. The spark of vicarious ecstasies. The phantom scene every consumer wishes to be a part of and is willing to pay for but misses entirely.
Klein fiasco

Randomness contains order. Change is neutral. Becoming is happening everywhere all the time. Memory is slow. Ownership is a bad fantasy. Guilt only a tool of control. Fate is the inability to find another option that is out there. Gratitude keeps the head buried in the sand. Responsibility is a contract nobody was old enough to sign. Debt is only ink, pixels. Salvation is for fools. Righteousness for idiots. Sacrifice is the ultimate self-deception. Discipline punishes the disciplined who punish who they deem undisciplined.

These are the thoughts that pass through my head when I’m sitting around and doing nothing.

Nobody says these things out loud, so neither do I. I know that everybody else must think them too. I’m not special. Not a conduit of a higher power. Not a visionary. Thoughts like these are left unsaid because the paths they would spawn would be too many. We stick to what we know and try to work from there. Acclimating and tweaking. Change from within. These thoughts would cause us to go in directions we’ve never known or worse end up in some nightmare reproduced from a bygone era that we had seen before and thought how could anyone be so stupid.

So we’re stuck on the line because at least we think we know where we are. What would be worse than actual freedom? Better to stick with known enemies. To rant about the same wedge issues. Watch others freak out who cannot hold the line like the rest of us. It makes sense. The only people who get punished by the rest of us are those who couldn’t hide it well enough. Discretion. That’s the name of the game.

Here we are. Keeping our thoughts to ourselves. Only the foolish express themselves. That’s the fastest and surest way toward persecution. Burning at the stake hardly proves anything. Only a fool thinks it does. In almost every case, it serves you well to not step forward. It’s divisive to do so but not for the reason the fool thinks it is. It’s divisive because the rest of us know that nobody is that special. Sure everybody has their idiosyncracies but none of us are so different that it warrants a cult of personality.

Of course, there are plenty of fools to go around. Those who wear their affiliations on their sleeves. Announce to the world who they’re associated with. Like the dunce at a dinner party who cannot hold back the name dropping. Immediately letting everyone know that he is more special because he knows people who are more special than anyone here. What that person doesn’t know is that the rest of us know fame doesn’t rub off. This is just a sad example of someone who didn’t get the memo. Some lonely sack that sat near Andy Warhol once.

Are you in the know or not? This is really the main dividing line between people. Did you get the memo? Are you competent? Do you have the same sand lines? Can you ignore how arbitrary those sand lines are in the same manner? Can you pretend as we do? Will you demonstrate discretion that reads as trust? Can you wink without getting caught? Do you know how to let the right thing go? Or will you squeal inappropriately at the first sign of discomfort?

The room for error is decided by the threshold of randomness. By honest mistake or by the ignorance of bad intentions, whoever magnifies the randomness gets got. Some simulation of a sacrifice or the real thing will occur. It’s the primal tripwire. A public display to match the unwanted public display. A last ditch effort to ward off the devil. The sight of too much randomness sends us regressing into our caves. Cowering from how ineffective and incapable any order is when it comes to ridding us of the big bad random cookie monster once and for all.

People like to get together. It’s simple like that. Whatever the band is, the trophy, the scoreboard, the special menu items…it doesn’t really matter. It’s only about getting together with others in the know. That’s all it’s about. Only the socially inept focus on those other things. Precisely because they’re not in the know. The connection is never there. It’s sad for those people. And we let them go on with their obsessions. Even compliment them on knowing so much about every player or a band’s history. It’s all they got. And they cling to it as anyone so lost would. It’s like that stuffed animal you carried around everywhere you went but never reached the point of embarrassment that made you grow up and go without it.

All of us cling to something that we hope gives us an edge even though our gut tells us differently. But when it’s all you got, you cling to it. And make sure everybody knows it, too. Maybe it’s just because we’re always feeling under the threat of getting absorbed by mediocrity. The billions of others out there who individually believe in how special they are.

And if you’re unlucky enough to have an exceptional talent, the system processes you until you become a prisoner of that talent. A dead end realized way down the road. Like a child actor who finds out four decades too late that the vacuous society he thought needed him was his own vacuousness all along. What else is there to do but become like the rest and submit the talent to sales. Push a car. Or a new form of refinancing. A medicine. At least he had some talent. Unlike the rest who only hope to reach the vacuousness by way of flirt-acting.

If a scene is simulated by our minds then we can possibly get others to simulate our simulation on another line that might bring money into our pockets. In a trance induced by moving certain thresholds as a group, we simulate a paying audience of members who were never a part of something so cool or so smart. The “in” they were always denied can be purchased now. We simulate the need that simulates our movement. We sell it right back to those in whose image we have simulated a vacuum for the products of our simulation to fill.

To heighten the seeming crucial relevance of our simulation, we also simulate the Other to transgress against. They were never going to buy into our work anyways. And this means we have carte blanche in how we simulate them for our audience. We pull from the worst images in history and morph them together with the Other. The bolder the contrast, the more defined our simulation becomes. The common enemy simulates some loose commonality between our simulations. Our image materializes out of theirs first and foremost. Despite the differences between our simulations, at least we’re not those completely on the other side of our illusion.

We point to the mediums and their media as the simulation from which any sense of reality (another simulation) is realized. Before the photograph it was the painting. Before the podcast it was the radio. Before the TV, the serial narrative. Before email, the letter. Before the internet, it was the library. We play the video game to get a sense of what is real. It used to be film. Every medium is bouncing back and forth into weird loops of simulations upon simulations defining themselves and trapping constructed realities by comparison. The most extreme definition coming when the simulation displaces its simulator and treats it as outside itself and not another product of consciousness.

Employ double speak to enhance the simulation. We say that the word simulacra, our bread and butter, is actually passé. We pretend it isn’t a product of consciousness itself. Now we can save the oomf for exposing the hypocrisy of the Other while overlooking the contradictions of our simulations and the ways in which we ripped terms from the thoughtful to serve more immediate purposes, chiefly selling. Purchasing the simulation of wholeness must seem as if the buyer is actually becoming whole. We perform this illusion by selling them to themselves. That is why it’s quite true to say that there is no audience. There never was. The audience is a construct in anyone’s head. How that construction performs is a matter of how well the simulation is hidden from the buyer. To make this easier, it can be determined who is easiest to hide a particular simulation from and then simulate that person which in turn produces the simulation that person wants to make real through consuming it. Youth centric targeting is the key demographic.

Make no mistake, though, the simulator isn’t the one in control. The simulator simulates without knowing how it simulates. The simulator moves the start and changes thresholds to produce new simulations that its recipient takes as the truth. A loony sort of math involving non-values ensues as the recipient is lost in derivative formats taken as sources and agents. It cannot play self-witness. Something only slightly true in one particular context is stated as an axiom for all contexts. And the products that follow fall into the hands of those who worship Being since that is the only simulation upon which things can be bought and sold. How else could we move the damn souvenirs?

Let’s simulate a party if not a movement. Transmute the eclectic whimsy of our dead culture into the blurry moments of irresolvable shredding. Clutch a piece of it if you must. Pocket that shit. Rub the thingy as a reminder that you too were there. You were part of the idea of the party. Its simulation gave you some new ways to play when you were bored on your plane. Or maybe it gave you something real. Like ripping off those jeans. Or ripping off that merchant in the bazaar behind the temple. Horny dreams of plenty spewed money cum all over their faces. Neon and shiny, glitzy drippings. Kitschy ceramic vessels queefing incense. Dildo chandeliers tickling the nape of your neck with their dick shadows. How else could the rich meet the poor in such fun circumstances? How else can we forget who drops the mother load on the load bearing backs?

Now is the moment of the evening where we watch a circle of corporate douchebags dig for a golden nugget buried deep in one of their asses. Look at them go! The winner looks like he’s got a grill. The authentic gangster performance has been cancelled due to the simulated toaster oven. Splatter everyone with paintball farts. A party is not a party unless it’s a messy party. Otherwise it’s called a function of nothingness pre-consumed and post-marked from another make-believe century. As dead on arrival as the curator at your local museum.

Our butts are too salted for that. Rub my scranus and watch the naughty genie come out to grant you one and only one nightcap. You better choose something totally unnecessary if you know what’s good for you. Who will talk about it tomorrow if it goes without something to blow into a scandal. “Did you hear what so-and-so did last night” never started a story nobody wanted to hear. Jason Rhoades is dead. Mike Kelley is dead. The only art worth its salt is incurable.

Look at those two lucky party-simulators sneaking upstairs to the bedroom. She’s the queen of flirty memes and he’s the lucky follower. She takes it all off for him but he misplaced his goggles and all he can see is a blurry image of her stripping and crawling on the floor and into the bed where her flirt-program writhes around. He squints in desperation but it all looks like the code of fata morgana.

He complains about his glasses and she gives him her pair of VR goggles.

He puts them on and only sees himself from her perspective.

“What’s the matter,” she asks because his face looks pinched with confusion, “I’m not waiting all night. Let’s get on with it!”

He cannot begin to explain and slowly enters the bed while watching himself approach from her perspective.

His body is nothing to write home about. What kind of bad simulation is this? Why is it so cruel in its realism? In fact what the hell she’s doing with him he’ll never know. He sees his sad tummy sagging down over his boxers. He’s got no shoulders. Just two bumps that go to sticks for arms. And the scruffy body hair is enough to make him lose all desire. Just face it, he says to himself, you’re a sad specimen of the male sex. And how in the hell are you going to have sex now with yourself? He had been having sex with himself his whole life. An avid masturbator. But not while seeing himself.

He takes the VR glasses off and sticks his tongue out into the blur with the hope that it lands in the right place while trying to ignore the image of himself lodged in his system.

“Do you mind if I put my VR on?” She asks. He shakes his head, and flaps his ears, as he vigorously licks at the blur. And she cums in a hot minute while watching herself from his perspective eat her beautiful va-jay-jay like a little dirty mangy mut stealing his din din.

There’s nothing like a party with micro-parties spiraling inside it. Simulating grief and suffering to accentuate the opulent joy of tonguing the jewel encrusted bungus of a chocolate camel. If that’s uncouth, go screw a fire hydrant. Play any tune except grandpa’s jazz. Unscrew the dead eye in message art and screw it backwards in someone else’s mind-hole. Wink as they ass-clap up to the ceiling of that stiff exhibit and hang upside down to watch the shit spray down onto the artsy-fartsy crowd below. Otherwise it isn’t a party. Nothing new will ever come without a necessary amount of destruction.

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.

Rubber Dream Trampoline

Rubber Dream Trampoline Podcast

Many have speculated that the origin of the title Rubber Dream Trampoline comes from a passage in Philip K. Dick’s novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said about accessing parallel realities with the experimental drug KR-3: “After that he gave up; hopeless, he said to himself. Like living in a world made of rubber. Everything bounced. Changed shape as soon as it was touched or even looked at.” While this could easily express an angle of Schitzolini’s work, he reveals the actual origin of the title in the following passage that traverses a parallel portal of police state paranoia. This passage also explores two aspects of American life: the inability to apprehend the peculiar phenomena of haecceity by rampant voyeurism made commonplace and acceptable by fame machines, while also looking at the horrid strangeness of violators who think of themselves as victims.
Klein fiasco

“Do you realize what this means? The action itself has definite causes to pick from. None good. It means you’re defective at best. We’ll have to carefully review your records to figure it out. This means a whole investigation. A pre-trial to determine how serious it is. It’s going to be a lot of work wasted on something you never should’ve done in the first place. It’s a shame that nobody taught you better. But that’s life. Everyone gets a steep learning curve about one thing or another. For your sake, I wish this could be forgotten. But the potential consequences are too serious.”

Could I believe my ears? This is what I heard upon entering the brutal heft of a prefab concrete apartment block.

“What did the KID do if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Not that it’s any of your business but he took an unnecessary risk and had an original thought.”

I share a glance with the kid and flare my eyes to tell him to endure whatever this adult has worked himself up over. I say something banal like “kids will be kids.” The adult looks at me as if I were mad.

Once when I was nine, a librarian told me I couldn’t take a book home. She insisted my only choice was to read it there and take notes. But I had a better idea. I slipped into the back office and copied the book on the copy machine. Near a hundred pages deep into that hot sweet stink of fresh copies, the librarian caught me red-handed. What angered her was not the wastefulness but that I thought of my own solution.

“Do you live here?”

The question isn’t really a question but a reminder. You don’t belong here. It’ll be easier if I answer straight.

“I’m visiting a friend.”

“Does this friend happen to live on the third floor?”

Again I feel put on the spot. Maybe I should’ve kept my mouth shut.

“Fifth.”

“Then maybe you should get to it rather than interjecting yourself here.”

The crisp, sharp tone in the adult’s voice sends me off. I’ve been caught and repurposed too many times to not recognize that tone.

My friend on the fifth floor is more acquaintance than friend. Someone who I was told could help me with my situation. Someone who knows somebody. A matter of discretion. And I’ve already told a stranger what I’m doing here. The stain of my own ineptitude sticks until I forget it with the first sip of tea.

“Look. The point is whether you have a pass or not. That’s all they care about. If a certain somebody is stopped and even let’s say forgets their pass at home. This is no innocent thing. More often than not such a person has things on their mind. Possibly dangerous things. Original thoughts. A full inquiry then is made. It’s all very time consuming and resource heavy, you see? The pass system allows a process of selection.”

Why is he talking to me as if I don’t know?

“Go to apartment 313. Tell him I sent you.”

The ominous third floor. That adult in the hallway sure had me pegged. A pang shoots across my back. The vague pain of being about to do something obviously wrong.

I take the stairs down to the third floor. There’s this sickening feeling that I might run into that crank again. And that would make me an instant liar on the third floor. Crack the door. A woman steps out of a room. She walks toward the elevator. Her outfit overcomes her. It’s an orange puffy jumpsuit. There is something in the way she looks that says it’s a costume, not a perfect fit. It makes me wonder about how many other costumes she has. It is as if I can see them all laid out on her bed, in the room I’ve never been.

As she waits for the elevator, her appearance shifts toward a universal form. I recognize her face. It’s the famous actress, Stella Steeplechase. From interviews, I’ve found her process fascinating. Stella Steeplechase claims to have access to a deep catatonic state wherein she finds the smallest and closest place that allows a possession to take hold of her. Then, the behavior pulses itself through her. Sometimes, the pulses near convulsions when the intensity of a possession reaches its limit. Then it becomes a game of holding on to that threshold. On the brink of utter randomness, as she puts it. As loosely patterned as it can be while still sticking together enough to make sense to the audience.

The hall is clear. Another headache strikes and I press my face against the cold wall. I never used to get these migraines until they started deploying the anti-thought machines. At first, we dismissed the crackpot conspiracy theories. But then came the months of what is called “the blankness.” You go blank before you know it. After a few months, the thoughts creep back in punished and more tame. The pounding headache recedes so I swiftly go to room 313 with Stella Steeplechase’s face emblazoned on my mind and knock.

“Who told you to come here?”

“Rolan. From the fifth.”

The door opens. I glance quickly at the empty hall as I slip in. It’s the crank from earlier.

“Aha. I knew it was you. Look, I have to keep up appearances. You never know who’s listening. So what’s on your mind?”

“I’ve misplaced my key.”

“Of course. Not sure what good it’ll do you though.”

“Why?”

“You haven’t heard the news? The Reenactors have finally taken over the city. Did you not notice the pandemonium outside?”

“Of course. It was my best chance to get over here without a pass.”

“Well, you’re lucky a Reenactor didn’t stop you in the street. They’re not interested in seeing anyone’s pass. In fact, if you ever do get caught by one of them, it would be wise to lose the pass. I mean toss it, swallow it, shove it where the sun don’t shine, if you know what’s good for you.”

He sits at a government module, clearly stolen. It’s a toss up when the administration will take back control, but it’s only a matter of time. Order will be restored until the next outburst. At the strike of a key, the dumbwaiter delivers my pass and Felix hands it over. I pocket it.

“You’re not going to check it?”

“What’s it matter? It’s fake isn’t it?”

“What’s your real name by the way?”

“Leon. Short for Leonardus. Leonardus Schitzolini.”

“Not the same Schitzolini as in Hieronymus Schitzolini?”
“Yes. That’s my father.”

“You should’ve told me this from the get go.”

Felix digs into a shelf and pulls out a copy of my father’s book.

“Rubber Dream Trampoline. Granted it was written in a different time. But this book got me through many tight spots. He really harpooned several areas that were foggy until I read it. I’m sure you’ve heard all this before.”

“You know in his time people didn’t appreciate it. It was only later when he was already near death when Rubber Dream Trampoline became a thing.”

This was true but not nearly the whole story. My dad was a conflicted man. His tragedy was to a large degree self-produced like everyone else, in his view. He’d have been the first to admit that. But everybody read something else into Rubber Dream Trampoline until it was banned.

“It had to be so. Something that original cannot be tolerated. Anything too idiosyncratic arouses suspicion.”

“Do you know the origin of the title? Not many do. I don’t believe it was ever in print. But on his death bed, he handed me this note.”

I pull it out from my pocket. It’s been something of a lucky charm for me that I prefer to keep with me whenever I leave my apartment. “Would you care for me to read it?”

“Please.”

Mom wants to get me out of the house so that she can cheat on dad. Whenever she saw someone, there was this sensation I’d get that I didn’t understand at the time. That vague feeling – the queasiness of betrayal. She tells me to go outside and clean up the backyard the day after I had friends over and to make sure to put the tent away from the sleepover.

Grumpy about chores, an idea comes to me I find so hilarious that I cannot resist doing it. It sure would be funny to roll myself up in the tent and roll around the yard. I shake the tent out until it’s flat and I get on one side and roll myself into the tent like a human Tootsie Roll. There I am rolling back and forth across the yard in hysterical laughter. With every roll the tent gets tighter and tighter. Then I fell into the pool. The deep end. As I sink to the bottom I realize what’s happening to me. Lucky for me there is an air tight bubble around my head. But I don’t know how long that will last.

I feel my feet touch the floor of the pool. I bend my legs as best I can but the tent is tight and constricting any full bend. With all my might I push off. The human tootsie roll shoots up and breaks the surface. I scream for my life as I get sucked back down. I feel like I’m going to hyperventilate. I push off again. Scream. Sink. Push. Scream. The hysteria turned terror had me in its grip for minutes that lasted hours.

And it was my dog, Schnipsy, who saved my life. The faithful dog barked from inside the house until my mom’s lover had to dismount and pull me from near doom.

My memory elongates this experience of sinking, pushing, and screaming and presses me into some eternal rubbery capsule. The trickster’s dream bounces me on his trampoline. A trickster who could get me killed, playfully. From then on, I never know when I might next find something so hilarious that it might be worth my doom.

“Would you mind if I make a copy of that?”

If this is traced back to me, I’d have to go through this all over again or worse. I’m already here to change my name to evade the 24 hour surveillance and routine harassment stemming from having my father’s name.

“Go ahead.”

He goes into another room. I raise my voice.

“What are the Reenactors reenacting?”

“Nobody knows. It’s a weird coagulation of half-beliefs and near fantasies about a war that never really happened. But don’t tell them that because they absolutely believe it did.”

“And the Debtors are reacting to the Reenactors?”

“The Debtors believe in rewarding reactionary behavior. They thrive on it.”

“Then what do the Reenactors want exactly?”

“To waver. They yearn for that constant state of wavering between what could be experienced as reenactment right at the edge before it becomes an enactment itself.”

More yelling echoes in the hallway.

“You should probably get going to wherever you need to be before they deploy the anti-thought machines.”

I head out and go to the stairwell and take it down until I hear a struggle coming from below so I quietly step down to peek from the railing. What must be some Reenactors have a woman pinned on the floor. One takes off her pants. Another rips her shirt off. It’s a frenzy of disrobing. They play at roughing her clothes up. Try to tear them. Stomp on them. They giggle and grab at her. Pull at her hair. Her crying excites them. One of them yanks at her panties. And it’s none other than Stella Steeplechase. She belts out a scream whose frequencies cross the wires between agony and threat. Shocked at hearing their mothers and sisters cry within her scream, the others stop what they’re doing. It has become too real. Their plaything too dangerous. The impact of her scream sends the Reenactors running.

I pick up her clothes and hold them as a kind offering. She looks at me with crazed eyes.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

She stands up. Stares right through me.

“I don’t need your fucking help.”

I’m paralyzed by her look. The look that has taken me with her to other terrain. Indescribable and unmapped. That face that has taken me through the dark to come out the other side. Countless times, she returned my spirit back to myself, changed. More brilliant than I thought possible. What kind of a person is capable of guiding others in such a way? Who learns to hold such fragile rhizomes so loosely? She’s delivered countless psyches to their desires. To be free of themselves. Accessing the impossible dreams coiled up inside those in need of her bravery. And she’s been that way since she was a teenager. Existing in a loophole.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think, I just saw you and…”

“Fine. But think again before you look at me with pity.”

“Oh no. I’ve been repurposed. My face never snapped back.”

“That’s a dangerous problem to have.” Her demeanor switches slightly. “Show me your pass.”

“But we’re not on the street.”

“We’re checking everyone who is outside their domicile.”

I hand her the newly made pass.

“Lee Shaw. I’m placing you under arrest. Turn around.”

She ties my hands with a plastic zip tie.

“I’m not Lee Shaw. Please listen to me. I had that pass made here in this building.”

She whispers the info behind me. I assume into a microphone.

“Alright. Let’s go see if you’re telling the truth.”

She marches me back to Room 313. She unlocks the door with her own key. Felix is squatting in the dumbwaiter as it goes down.

“Alright now that I’ve got you alone, you will need to do as I say if you want to get through this alive.”

I’m speechless. Limpid bolts of hot energy dart around my back and into my groin. I nod like an automaton.

Stella fucking Steeplechase leads me into the bedroom. She throws a full head-to-toe, kisser-to-keister body suit at me and tells me to put it on. It’s a tight fit and I can’t see a thing. I feel her hand grab mine as she takes me over to a box. I go in. I don’t ask why. The box creaks closed. The lock clicks.

In the darkness, I think of the minutes that felt like hours for my father and wonder if I haven’t to some extent put myself in a similar Tootsie Roll situation. Bouncing up and down in my own pool of absurd rapture. Was it blind courage or ecstatic stupidity that got me here? I cannot tell.

I hear the door. The box opens. I nearly pass out from standing up. I feel her hand remove my nose patch. I hear Stella Steeplechase’s soothing voice ask me if I want to sniff it. I nod and feel it right under my nose without touching it. It smells of citrus but also quite sour. Probably a grapefruit. But maybe something else. There’s another scent I can’t quite make out.

She asks me if I’d like to taste it. I nod. She opens up the mouth patch. I immediately ask if this is really necessary for my safety. In fact, I plead for her to take the suit off.

“Look I’m happy you’re here,” she says, “but I’m a bit disappointed in your level of gratitude. So just think on that. Hopefully we can reset. Get to tasting that fruit tomorrow if you’re a good little boy.”

Stella Steeplechase puts the mouth patch back on without me getting a taste. When I’m back in my box, I hear her leave the room. There’s some sounds like a scuffle going on. And a gunshot rings out. Somebody unlocks the box and as the person helps me take the suit off, I see it’s Nolan from the fifth floor. I also spot Stella Steeplechase’s body half-in the dumbwaiter. Shot in the back of the head. A mess so bloody it looks like a bad prank.

“Sorry about that my friend. My name isn’t Nolan. It’s Lee Shaw.”

“Is she really dead?”

“Let’s just say it’s her final performance. Look we had to use you. Felix is a Debtor. The story about how he obtained the government module didn’t pan out. Besides, aren’t you tired of being treated like an imposter by the Debtor administration?”
“Well, yes.”

“Of course you do. It violates your sense of reenactment.”

“Is that what this is? A reenactment?”

“It takes action to set reenactments in motion. Our hypocrisy is minor compared to how the Debtors misread the energy of becoming as lack. You are supposed to always lack something according to their system of guilt and resentment. That’s how the Debtors want you to feel so you need them. Stella Steeplechase was a shell for that system. She was a hardcore nightmare. A vending machine dispensing tailor-made poisonous treats of paralysis. The queen of indentured servitude. Pretending as if she were the only one who gets to be free while blocking her fans from engaging in meaningful reenactments. Besides, it was the facial implants that made her a star.”

“Why me? What do I have to do with any of this?”

“Your father’s book changed my life. It showed me the way. He wrote it in code. He had to mask it in a way that the worshippers of Being could accept. Preempting their reading of it as schitzo. When in fact, the cohesion comes about by the end for those who hear its brave call. What a delicate soul your father must’ve been.”

“That’s what Felix said.”

“Because he was copying me rather than reenacting it for himself.”

“Well, just for the record, my dad was also capable of great asshole-ness.”

Lee Shaw pulls out a Tootsie Roll from his pocket and pops it in his mouth.

“Of course he was. I’m sure. But what hope would a child have of understanding such a father when most adults couldn’t get it? The container mindset is where we all begin. Really, though, it was a love letter to someone like me. It liberated me from the worship of Being. Now all that needs to be done is to realize its vision. Then the book will be useless. And that’s what Schitzolini would’ve wanted.”

“You know what he said about that book? He said he believed every word of it and none of it at the same time.”

An anti-thought machine appears in the window.