988

Did you know they came up with a standardized suicide hotline for the USA and Canada?  I don’t know about other countries, but here and across the moosey border you can dial 988 to reach somebody to talk to when you feel like giving up on life, somebody whose job is to help you not do that.  This is pretty new, think it just rolled out last year.

It’s tough that some feelings need to find verbal expression -like, you need to be able to say what you’re feeling to somebody- but that the expression of those feelings in mixed company can do harm to others by reinforcing their own bad feelings.  You often see “group therapy” spaces on the internet turn into death spirals of ruin and misery, rivaling the pro-ana blogs of tumblr and incel chatrooms.

If your thoughts are frequently catastrophic or apocalyptic, that’s understandable of course, but it’s better not to turn all your online conversations into that.  Get more hobbies, get mental help if you can, and if you’re earnestly thinking about suicide, call 988.  I’m sure there are a lot of barriers, a lot of unideal circumstances for getting help when you need it, but something can be better than nothing.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m the last person you wanna talk to when you feel suicidal.  I have a dark perspective and a pathological aversion to gentle untruths.  I think the world is in bad shape and can get worse (although we can live through it – we really can), and I also think death is perfect relief from all of what ails one in life – you will not exist to feel bad because there’s no afterlife.  However I kinda fucken hate that about myself, especially lately.

At the end of the day I hate death and love life, and I think that often the people who want to live the least are the people who deserve to live the most.  I just don’t think I can really get that across.  It never comes out of my mouth right.  Be alive, people.  That is all, because anything more elaborate I try to say about it is always undercut by asides and caveats and philosophical horseshit.

Good luck out there.

–

Stop Freaking Out

Does freaking out help you to engage in political action that improves the world?  Get you to rally to the defense of the oppressed?  Make you vote when you have to?  Does it paradoxically cultivate in you an ability to lucidly prepare for disastrous circumstances through communal organization and grass roots activism?  Then get your freak on, I guess.  If it doesn’t, maybe shut the fuck up before you spread more hurt and pain than necessary to people around you.

This may seem ironic from person who has engaged in no small amount of public political and climate despair, but I’m coming around the bend on that.  Been talking again with somebody who is harmed by amped-up fear in comment sections, like, even when he doesn’t believe it on a rational level, the tension immediately gets him in the nervous system and ruins his day.  And as he’s trying to calm his nerves, he’s complaining about the level of fear people are promoting on the internet, how useless it all is, and I can’t help but concur.

It’s very easy for me to imagine a trans person who in fear of a trans holocaust just offs themself on election night.  (My erstwhile despair commenter wontbehereforlong is no longer in the comments, and that might be why, afaik.)  I don’t care if the fuckheel wins and ameriKKKa goes full nazi.  Don’t kill yourself, please.  What if we reach temperatures like the Eocene Thermal Maximum and the icecaps melt and all the beautiful megafauna of the world go extinct, replaced with ugly ratty little things squabbling over bones in the wasteland?  Don’t kill yourself, please.  What if somebody is finally enough of a creep to use nukes and a small exchange renders some of the urban centers of the global north uninhabitable for a while?  Stick around, babe.  What if plastic pollution reaches a kind of critical mass disrupting reproductive cycles and cellular activity, causing populations of all organisms to crater until natural selection works out the kinks over a thousand barren, burning years?  We have each other, kid.

We have things to do, and you’re invited to the party, mon frere.  Life can go on, if you try to live.  There are so many places in the world right now that have to live with ten times the ugliness the USA is bringing on itself, but people there live on, as best as they can.  Trans and gay people exist in the most oppressive countries in the world.  Women have abortions where that would get them life in prison.  People read banned books wherever they’re banned.

This isn’t Grand Theft Auto, where you accumulate stars from doing illegal shit, and when you have five, every cop psychically intuits your exact location and showers you with machineguns from helicopters and APCs, and suicide bombs you with crown victorias.  The illegality of being trans or jewish or cetera doesn’t instantly mean complete extinction of your kind or even you personally.  You have friends and most of you are going to live.  Hell, even truly universally reviled people like convicted pedophiles have somebody in their lives who would try to help them survive when the whole world says “die.”

It ain’t over til it’s over, and when this election is done, even if the nazis win?  It still ain’t over.  People are hurt by panic and fear.  Also, you’re giving bullies exactly what they want, and what are conservatives if not bullies in their purest form?  When that islamophobic mass shooter in New Zealand filmed himself killing people, some progressives on the internet (looking at you, wehuntedthemammoth comment section) said they felt obligated to watch the video, “to be informed,” or because bearing witness to the senseless deaths would grant those lives a meaning in their heart, or whatever.  OK, sure, whatever.  But you know what the killer wanted?  He wanted you to watch the video (and pewdiepie).  So score one for nazis, again.

This is a significant part of why I unfollowed James Stephanie Sterling on youtube.  They’d beat that drum, day in day out, about how trans people have no political allies, nobody cares about them, they’re all gonna die.  It’s nonsense, even on Terf Island.  Trans people have some amount of allies everywhere they exist.  Jewish people in WWII had some small number of nazis and imperial japanese people smuggling them out of the line of genocide, besides resistance people of every other stripe.  The USA isn’t going to instantly transform into The Man in the High Castle because a little strip of land in Washington DC got taken over by nazis.  The idea that regressive states are the only ones that can rebel is kinda silly.  New York and California have the numbers by population as well as economy, and they aren’t just going to say, “cool, we’ll kill all our gay people for you now.”  Don’t be fucking absurd.

I know you can’t control your fear, much like my bud can’t control his limbic system’s response to panicky people.  But maybe you can just think twice about hitting the keyboard and making some innocent third party feel as bad as or worse than you do, when it achieves fucking nothing.

Am I wrong?  Is publicly shidding your fucking pants every ten seconds helping us win the next election?  Fuck me then, keep dropping those deuces.  If not, maybe step away from the computer and take it down a notch.  Touch grass, smoke grass, whatever.  Deal.

This is directed at me in 2016.

–

May Flowers – Another Bouquet

Have some more flowers, my peoples.

Acid Drops

The buttermilk basement lights feebly pushed the murk around but did nothing to dispel it.  The walls were wood veneer on sheetrock, the ceiling more sheetrock with thin enough primer to reveal branding, the floor concrete with fuzzy green skin like a pool table.  The little window that occasionally revealed passing voles and rats in the daytime was pure void black in the night.  Nobody stirred, nobody lived among the dusty milk crates of junk and stiff little furnishings, except silverfish, wolf spiders, and two teenage girls, tripping on lysergic acid.

Linda and Caroline waited with patience and near-perfect stillness, looking through each other with dilated pupils.  Caroline had told Linda it would be safe.  She had experience, and her own sense of inner peace and control could be extended to the less experienced girl if the trip turned dark.  Linda didn’t know if she believed it.  She’d heard that it’s good to have a sober friend to keep an eye on you, but she let herself be talked into it.  Didn’t seem like Caroline would be willing to pony up a tab unless she was flying as well.

Linda could see every part of Caroline.  She was smaller, with darker hair and eyes, pale skin, and tiny pink hands. Her peasant blouse of ivory pleated linen was cinched with silky green ribbons that shone like iridescent beetles.  There was something romantic about her in a way that was seldom trendy.  A Louise Brooks fifty years out of time.  Boys fell hard for Caroline, and Linda could see why, but that body was a doll shell around something less beautiful.  Her outline wavered like a 3-D movie, in tension with the world around it.  Her enlarged pupils blended with the dark color of her irises to become as void black as the little window—a portal to that disturbing interior.

Caroline’s fingers twitched—the first movement in what seemed like an hour—and Linda startled. For a second she imagined all her hair had fallen out with the surprise, sliding down the back of her head and neck, but she realized that was foolish, and didn’t believe it.  Still, the moment sent her reeling.  The room was still spinning after that, subtly but without end.

“What did you do?,” Linda asked.

“Huh?  Same as you.  A tab of acid.”

“I mean just now.  You did something to me.”

“Don’t believe your paranoia.  You’re better than that, baby.  This will be a good trip.  You’ll see.”  Caroline held out her hands, then let them fall to her lap, palms up.

In stillness the vision of Caroline had been centering, so every movement from the first twitch of the finger had disoriented Linda.  That’s the body high, right?  Whether you have a good trip or not, that’s in the head.  In what you do with your thoughts.  Linda tried to keep it together but it kept falling apart.

She became aware of her stomach and it seemed awareness of anything shot a thousand holes in it.  No structural integrity there.  She tried in vain to stanch the herniation, but there were not enough fingers to plug all the openings.  She was losing it, somehow on the floor, on her knees, looking at the green felt with unfocused eyes.

“Linda.  Linda, what are you seeing?”

“My guts.  My guts all over.  Oh god.”

“Your high is what you make it, honeybee.  It doesn’t have to be scary.”

“What if I can never get them back inside?  I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“Don’t!  Listen.  Even a morbid experience can be beautiful.  Don’t look away.”

“I can’t look away.  I can’t, what if–”

“Good!  What does it look like?”

“Bratwurst.  Blood, big … drops like softballs.”

“Focus on the blood.  Look at the drops, Linda.  Where they soak into the carpet, like watching a flower bloom with the patience of the sun.”

Caroline’s voice was so far away, but so rich and clear.  An angel from the Fifth Dimension.  Linda tried to look at her, but lost nerve again.  If she didn’t look at where her guts fell, she might lose them.  What if the doctors needed all the guts they could find?  But she found herself obeying Caroline’s voice of experience, watching the blood instead of the guts.

The blood soaked into the green felt where it hit, turning darker than it otherwise would be, rich red deepened into near black but oscillated with its own furious identity.  The blurry edge of the pools, it really was like the delicate leading edge of rose petals.  Flowers.  She was bleeding great beautiful flowers.

Linda smiled sadly.  “I’m going to die.”

Caroline said, “No, you can take your blood back.  You can keep it.  Just pluck these flowers and eat them.”

“Really?”  She let out a creaking half-laugh.

“Sure you can.  Here.  Before it’s too late.  Take one.”

Caroline’s perfect little hands came into view, plucking one of Linda’s blood flowers out of the green and holding it up to her face.

“Put it in my mouth!  Hurry!”  She raised her eyes to meet Caroline’s.  Red pooled in the bottom of her black irises like twin cough drops.  Caroline fed her the flower.

Linda felt the petals lap at the sides of her mouth, brush along cheek and tongue, clog the back of her throat like getting a bad bloody nose as a small child.  Caroline’s fingers slipped into her mouth sometimes as she worked, a strangely erotic teasing in the slight penetration.

Linda couldn’t speak, but she didn’t choke, gulping down flower after flower, body still paralyzed with the need to hold in what was left of her intestines.  Caroline was smiling.  “Tastes good, doesn’t it?  Like salty cherry chocolates.”

It did.  But also like blood.  Linda felt the cherry taste in her cheeks, chocolate taste over her tongue and palate, the blood taste in her throat, and the salt taste throughout.  She couldn’t breathe but somehow she was still alive, eating or drinking, it was hard to tell.

Caroline’s smile crooked to a side.  “…And one for the doctor.”  She took one of the flowers for herself, inhaling the bloom like cotton candy and slurping the stem like a red-black noodle.  She licked her lips, but they remained darker than before.  Or had she been wearing red lipstick the whole time?  No, definitely not.

“Not yours,” Linda croaked wetly.

“You’ll never miss it.  Trust me.”  The inside of her mouth was much darker than before.

“I don-” Linda lost the words in the swallowing, the desperate consumption.

Caroline took one for herself, then another.  As the blood came into Linda it kept coming out, and with the dark-haired girl harvesting a tax on the flower supply, well, Linda had to be sustaining some net loss, hadn’t she?  She didn’t notice when Caroline rocked her back onto the floor, laid her down gently as possible on that cold concrete.  Holding in the guts was much easier in that position, but everything else a sticky mess.

The master had said Caroline could no longer imbibe of human vices, but he was wrong.  It just took a little more effort for a dead girl.  In the end, the high was all hers.

–

Rose Gold

Lasers from the laser boys.
The cold city ate the young and vomited heat that pierced the sky,
crested, and then drowned the people in boiling rain.
How had any of the rats survived?
Maybe they hadn’t. Maybe a city is the flower of humanity,
drawing its populace through rural roots and blossoming
into a fleshy display of perfect beauty and perfect cruelty,
before eating itself, dying, and starting again.
That’s what happened in the laser boy incident,
the city immolating itself in a savage beauty,
a pink light that settled in simmering pools that slowly drained
and disappeared into the sewers where diaphanous mutants writhe,
and deeper still until the memory of it all just ceased to be.
Laser water.

That’s what Brycine Cybernetics used to fuel Project: Rose Gold,
a nondescript corporate complex in the warehouse district,
a shell around hydroponic gardens of perfect pink roses.
They would allow human photosynthesis,
be the Seal of Famine, an end to the rolling food crises
that had rocked the world since time immemorial –
for a price, of course, and Brycine’s shareholders would be as gods.
Suck up that pink laser water, little flowers, and do your thing.

But to make use of this miracle, humanity would need to change as well.
Brycine had to find the perfect human to receive the machines,
one who could survive the initial implementation
because she was already dead.
They required a woman whose cellular processes persisted
after the arrest of the heart, just long enough and in just the right way
to allow the Rose Gold Interface™ to take root in her flesh.
Cyber ambulances prowled the city like hungry lions
cleaning up after police riots and other scenes of gang violence
for the bodies that would not be missed.
The EMTs would test the dead to see if they met the criteria,
and part them out in the usual way if they did not.
At last, at the scene of a battle between The Machete Mans
and the Garrotte Girls, they found the Chosen One.
Isadora Kors lay across her girlfriend Stuck Steppy like a lead apron,
back chopped into chunks of bone and meat,
blood sloshing in place with the rise and fall of Steppy’s breath.

They came and took her. Stuck Steppy was too concussed
to stop them, sloppy grabs at their ankles and shins,
the thick canvas of their uniforms slipping her feeble grasp.
Isadora darling dear, she thought through clotting fluids,
come back to me.
In the aftermath of the incident, struggling through sutures and gauze,
through police and punks, through the loss of it all
she thought as hard as she could.
Some people are better off not trying in the first place,
she mixed cause and effect, and blamed Isadora’s demise on the medics.
This broken reasoning by broken clock principle set her on the right path.

It was just like when the laser boys had to get their man,
a band of ragged youths against the world of money and power.
Stuck Steppy rallied the gang to raid Brycine Cybernetics
with a promise of valuable things to steal, but all that can be earned
with switchblades and pistols is a wage of chaos and death.
Death to the gang, chaos to the city,
as the monster of Avarice’s making escapes the vaults of power.

Isadora was part plant and part machine and part the lady that Steppy loved,
the one who always took a knife for her in street fights,
the one who knew how to kiss her lovin’ parts just right,
but oily black pistons drove viciously thorned vines
through everything in sight, pink roses bloomed in them
and cried out to the night sky, we have drunk deeply of the well of laser water,
and the season of rain has returned.

–

Baba Safia

She comes out of the tumbleweeds,
when you see a great roiling mass of the things
coming down the trail like a pale golden wave.
She flies like that, a little old lady,
skin the color of bone, etched with so many lines
like twine stretched over a marionette.

Baba Safia is of a people lost to history,
earnt the name of Safia in a Turkish harem,
earnt the name of Baba from living a few centuries.
Her nose is a beak, discolored eyes bulge and sink
into her skull with the vagaries of expression –
an expression deranged like a bull with an estoc in the neck,
murder in the eyes, and a beaming rictus on golden teeth.

Ask her how she lives forever; won’t do you much good.
It takes so long to learn that youth is a distant memory
by the time you know how.  For Baba Safia it was roots
that run through her native soil.
They have a little trick whereby the plant dies, dries, and tumbles away,
but the roots revive like bones in Ezekiel’s hands.
Elsewhere the tumbling corpse carries the weed’s life into time yet unborn.

Baba Safia was burned at the stake and spent a dark eon in dreaming,
woke in a field of flax up the way of the Montana Territory,
and lived in these lands ever since.

You thought we always had tumbleweeds here?
You don’t remember the time before she came?
Doesn’t much matter, can’t bottle a genie.
Can’t stop the wind, and can’t outlive a ghost.

–

On our writing discord, these entries are rewarded with a flower graphic in a big collage.  June 30th is the last day to get such a reward, so pens down for me here.  I got all of them except orange.  Not too shabby.

IANAG Dreampost

I am not a Gamer™ but video games can be an excellent source of fuckery for frustration dreams.  Last night I had a dream about being in some kind of MMO where the game had been designed to punish people for small failures.  There was an urban area that normally had mud splashed up from the road by rushing vehicles that knocked your character down if you didn’t hop just right.  During a patch, maybe an event thing, the rushing vehicles were gone – no more mud.  Cool.

But then I found out trespassing on the streets at night causes some unbeatable giant robots to show up and annihilate your character.  Alternately, if you’re in a corner a robot can’t reach, you’ll get a freaky murder fetish lady like Orin from Baldur’s Gate 3 to do the deed.  I knew the game wouldn’t let me kill her, but thought maybe I could get a ring-out victory by throwing her off the side of a building.  It just teleported her right back to the spot.  On one play-through I was with these orphan NPCs and I figured she’d kill them while I was watching the “you died” graphic.  Instead she recruited them to be murder kids.

You return to a hub in the game when you die, like Agartha from The Secret World.  To keep your death from feeling meaningless, they motivate you to go after your body.  In Everquest and Ultima Online originally, it was to pick up your equipment, which stayed with your corpse.  In FromSoft games, it’s to pick up the currency of the realm, souls or blood echoes or whatever.  I don’t remember what it was in my dream, except it was important, and walled off by instant death.

Worse, there was some kind of a stat penalty, like all my stats were reset to a sad base level.  There was a machine at the hub that was supposed to give you a little boost that you could customize before heading back out into the game world, but instead it drained all my stats to zero.  I thought it was a glitch, but no, just an evil design element.  The machine also split me into three versions of myself with straight zero stats, and I had to get all their stats up again individually before I could re-merge them into one, which I had to do before I could even go try in vain to get my equipment from behind the murder squad.

Sweet dreams are made of these.

–

Low Key Mentally Illin’

Some digestive issues reminding me of having a cancer diagnosis and getting surgery for that stuff a few years ago, got me feeling morbid and hopeless, like, I’m never gonna make my mark as big as I want it to be before I die.  Might not even live long enough to make sure my dude is set up for after I cark it.  This is just a feeling, mind you.  I’m probably going to be fine, but still.  Don’t wanna be doing what I gotta do but can’t make myself do what I wanna do.  Low key.

I wanna rock, I wanna make ecstatic music, wanna write stories for the people that make ’em say, that weirdo over there was world class.  I wanna win.  At the very least, I’d like to pay off this mortgage.  I’m tired and sad, and that’s how it’s gotta be for a lil’ while at least.  I’m sure my neurotypical sauce will regen eventually.  Probably help to stop doing all this overtime at the “bail out the ocean of human need with a thimble” factory.

–

Kids These Days

So I’m out and about today, manmoded testosterone-maxxing in hoodie and hoary facial roughage.  This morning we went to a garden market in semi-rural suburbia, my mans to shop and me to stagger around looking at wildlife while doing my weekly call to busted old paternal unit.  I beheld a swarm of tadpoles in a planty tub (idk from garden people lingo), cliff swallows, killdeer, white-crowned sparrows, anna’s hummingbird, goldfinch (i know, u see them all the time, but I don’t, so it was cool), less positively IDed barn swallows, and very remote big-ass birds at high altitude, I think two herons and a bald eagle, but hellifino.

As we get to the counter I was reminded of the differences between the generations.  Mild-mannered elders were the main run of customers, well-off and engaged in potentially expensive hobbies.  People my age had a bit more aggressive energy.  I feel like we’re the ones to blame for this edgy bullshit marketing like “big cock farms” products, and “hot shit” sauce.  And then the youngest people were, of course, working all the service jobs.

At the counter, as at all the salvage yards and thrift stores from Ballard to Olympia, the staff had colorful hair and pronouns.  Mind you that in this more rural locale they lacked the boldness of a pronoun name tag, but you got the vibe.  The gentle and conventionally attractive youth that rang us up had a gender-neutral name, u kno how it be.  We also visited one of those thrift stores today.

Later I had to return some junk at the mall, and it’s hard to go out there without wanting some kind of treat for my efforts – a frozen coke, mozzarella sticks, tiny hotdogs wrapped in buttery pretzel dough, u kno, pigs in a blanket.  But I felt full and had already had treats to spare today, so what could I do?

I settled on visual treats.  The American mall is a dying institution, they say, but the lower rent businesses that are better able to afford devalued storefronts are fascinating.  Catholic art and gifts, a barber shop, a nail salon, gluten-free fried foods, a shop that sells freaky homemade fan art products…  I used the smartphone to find out that saint with the unicorn horn and Flava-Flav medallion was St. Jude.

As I finished my few minutes of foolery, a child of ten or eleven approached me, and asked “English or Spanish?”  I said Ingles and he issued the challenge.  “First one to move is gay.”

I was in a bit of a hurry and was like, “It’s cool, I’m gay.”  He was like “whoaa” and either him or one of his homies said, “it’s cool” as I walked away.  Nice to get the nod of approval u little weirdos.

Kids these days.

–

May Flowers – Indigo and Grey

I can still get credit for this shit until the end of June, as befits the month of rainbows, I suppose…

–

A Deep Darkness

Look into his eyes and you will see
The vast abyss of his sexual majesty
A place to be lost for eternity
Condemned to this eldritch ecstasy

I met him walking a railroad tie
Made a million locusts and cattle skulls sigh
Said this’ll be a secret between you and I
Said it won’t hurt but that was a lie

Tied to a willow with cottonmouth hide
Made love out of hate and ash out of pride
Wish I was you now, the demons all cried
Can’t much complain with that man inside

Condemned to this eldritch ecstasy
A place to be lost for eternity
The vast abyss of his sexual majesty
Look into his eyes and you will see

–

Cinereous Mourner

The shape of fire is a triangle trailing away to a stream of sparks
The shape of ashes is a triangle mounded hill of cremnant carbon
She watched the fire steal away all that made their lives complete
She walked away left something behind maybe she coughed it out
Part of it blew away in the stream of sparks part fell to the cremains
There she flattened the triangle to make her bed
The wind blew ash across her body and tucked her in for the night

–

It’s a Me

On my most recent May Flowers post, I commented with AI-assisted illustrations for the entries.  The last m’flower was a poem written in first person, that included a section wherein I blast on some creepy bugs with guns.  So my illustration was chosen from a set of midj images like these…

And how did I make these greatamericansatanesque clowns emerge from an AI mo’ chine?  By feeding it this terrible screen capture from my rap debut video (at right).  Like many artists, I find the image of myself – or the idea of the image – to be intellectually interesting.  It makes me feel some kinda way, like who is this creature that is I?

The way it works is called “image prompting.”  Your prompt in an AI art program is the words you use to tell the AI what you want.  When it is just words, it’s referencing the tagging system of the program.  When it’s an image, well, I don’t really know what it’s doing.  AI art is the work of a “denoising algorithm” that uses statistical probability to place pixels, with those odds altered by the prompt.  There’s an explanation out there for how image prompting works that I ain’t bothered to dig up because I don’t care that much.  I figure it’s one of two things:  Genuinely using the image to nudge probabilities, or just reverse engineering the image into a verbal prompt and using the undisplayed verbal prompt to control the AI.

So welcome to my jungle.  I gots fun and games.  Wherein the fun is masturbatory omphaloskepsis and the games is art that nobody asked for.  I’d lead in with the cliche of “you asked for it” but you very much did not.  I hope you get a chuckle or divertingly creepy vibe from the display.  Proceeding thus,

This first set was just putting my image as the prompt and running my “pretty girl” style filter over it.  I’ve posted these girls in comments somewhere, I kinda love ’em.  But are they mees from another mother?  Would this love be a thought crime against nature?

Another time I mashed my selfie up with the “glitchcore” AI art from that one post, and again, I did note them in the comments.  It’s like dollar-store replicant daryl hannahs.  Getting a little less transgenda lookin’, which is a shame, from my point of view.  I think passing is a scam meant to drive trans suicide rates, like dieting is for… everybody at this point.  Whatever.

This one was mixing my selfie with an image derived from a crappy old version of stable diffusion, 2022-style.  You can see that image on my bloge in a Spooktober post.  Closed eyes are the sensuousness, when equipped with horse eyelashes.  Gothique.

The next set is the least passing trans gals in human history, courtesy of mashing myself up with a random pretty-ass 19th century painting lady.  Think she was a nymph or something, don’t care enough to dig up the original pic.  Again, I love ’em.

What’s the most obvious lady pic in human history to mash oneself up with?  The Mona Lisa.  This produced a character that looks very much like NaNoWriMo dot org’s most imperious mod of yore, so I viking hatted her ass, and it was a wild success.

Remember that part in Blue Velvet where Dean Stockwell lipsyncs to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams?  Fucking epic.  This was mashing my selfie up with him.  Kinda reminds me of Phil Hartman, aww.

Here is where things got really interesting for me.  I used a strange painting of Salome in a Babylonian throne room.  The style might be called expressionist or symbolist, I think, and had a fuzzy and drippy effect almost like you were seeing the scene through rain – despite the golden glow.  Cool piece, again, I forget whodunit, but I was very intrigued to see the AI interpret that as motion-blurred degraded VHS!  This is me as tour guide at a desanctified cathedral or castle…

I took that set and mashed it up with an image of a demon from a funky grimoire, and a cool pic of the dudes from The Damned, resulting in these fucked up Marilyn Manson hillbillies.  Very amusing.

Leaving out the cathedral set to only have my selfie mixed with the demon, we get… wigbeard!  Amazing.  I love it.  This is also a good example of the strange things that happen when you mix a photo and a drawing in AI art.

The first image below on the left is actually from artbreeder, which is kind of a fun website.  I added some human “DNA” to an image of a cute puppy, creating an abominable bog mummy standup comedian.  On the right you can see what comes of that mixed with my selfie – some kind of queer grunge bassist who wasn’t cool enough to OD.

Mixing my selfie with a beautiful AI pic yielded these VC Andrews -styled queer cuties, who I mixed with some other stuff to get the characters from this other one.  Anyway, by my affectionate words you may be starting to get an idea of which ones I find genuinely appealing.  Ignoring the fingers, of course.

The one on the left below was mashing myself up with the edgy angel from the cover of the Kult TTPRG, and to my great amusement, it became some kind of hair metal groupie from the late eighties.  Mashing her up with another image full of homunculi yielded this bumper crop of selfcestuous cultist little people.

Those lil’ gals became bigger and gayer and sleepier in subsequent iterations.

it’s a good time, but has this narcotic quality about it… soporific… think im gonna fall asleep now… gnite.

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May Flowers – a Bouquet

Have some more flowers, my peoples.

Make it Snappy

I sat in a haze of a half dozen cigarettes when she walked in, Violeta Magenta, six foot two in stiletto heels.  I could tell she was packing heat, but nothing could rouse me from the toxic torpor of that hangover.  Why did I live like that?  The only thing that could animate my sorry carcass was danger, and she wasn’t it.  Not yet at least.

She said, “Clive Cleaver,” through violet-smeared lips, “I thought I was coming to see a private dick, but all I see is a puddle of swamp water.  Should I take these hundred dollar bills across the alley to Navy Davey?  I hear he’s got a lot of pep in his step.”  No, I said.  I’ll take your money.  She said, “Find out where the thieves fenced my amethyst and diamond piece, and get it back.  Make it snappy.”  For a few lousy sawbucks? I asked.  “I’ll make it worth your while.  If you make it snappy.”

As it happened I did have a line on her jewels, and I could turn this around in no time.  I said yes ma’am and pulled on my shoulder holster to make it look like serious business.  But the only danger I was in came from that kooky dame.  Ya see, I was the one who snatched her necklace, with the help of Dissolute Capriccio.  We’d been working Violeta’s scene for months, and grabbed the goods during one of her famous trysts in the Donkey Room.

Me and Dissolute, we knew there was nowhere in town to offload rocks that hot, so selling back to Miss Magenta was always the plan.  Could I talk her up to six hundred?  She always loved purple.  I’d call her from my partner’s spot with some cock and bull about complications and extenuating circumstances.  Not a problem.

It was a whopping six blocks I had to walk.  Just to make it look like I was going through some stress, I killed a bit of time at Louie’s.  The Funny Girls were playing darts for dope.  Got so clumsy they sunk one in the meat of my right hand.  I resolved to get a tetanus shot with the payoff from Violeta, and kept on.

At Dissolute’s nobody was answering the door.  Had that rat found a fence with deep pockets somewhere in our petty little burg?  Not a chance, but maybe he was at the bus station for Chi-town.  I took the fire escape up to his broken window, peeled back the tarpaulin, and went in.  It was a bright day and the light through his curtains was this intense purple, bright like something alive but dull like something dead.  I couldn’t see jack until she turned on the lamp, already pointing a pearl-handled derringer at my grill-piece.

“Took your sweet time, Clive.  I specifically asked you to make it snappy.”  Where’s Dissolute? I asked.  “Pass me the roscoe, buddy.  No false moves now.”  Where’s Dissolute? I reiterated through clenched teeth.  “Clive, the roscoe, or this conversation is over now.”  I gave up my heater, but what did I really have to lose?  I just didn’t have to vim to put up a fight.  You were wearing them when you came to my office this morning, I said.  She opened her jacket with one hand, the necklace sparkled in the lamplight.

Violeta had asked me to make it quick, but I knew she was about to take her sweet time with me.  Better luck in the next life.

–

Horseness

Horse girls are the wildest.  Get a girl interested in horses and you never know where it’s gonna stop.  Drawings in the margins of all her homework?  Posters?  Insisting the parents get one, rent a stable, take her riding all the time?  Get with other horse girls and discuss the horse tea?  Look up in silence at the approach of human boys, unwilling to let slip their horse secrets?

Horse girls, I’ve seen ’em in school, in the fields behind the school.  I’ve seen ’em strap on the feedbag, or gather around a salt lick, or take an apple from a stranger.  I’ve seen their nostrils flare to the size of silver dollars, their manes growing down the backs of their necks.  I’ve seen the hooved legs come down out of their dresses when they don’t think anybody’s looking.

One time I fell in love with a horse girl.  Goddamn that was foolish.  But there she was, long brown hair and big brown eyes, always made me think of that Van Morrison tune.  By degrees I got her used to my presence, you know, standing around and not doin’ nothin’ when she horsed out.  No eye contact, but gradually gettin’ closer and closer, where I sat on lunch break.

We were out on the football field.  Nobody went there on lunch ‘cept to get away from anybody else.  Some kids were smoking, some were making time.  I was getting as close to Clarabel as she would allow.  The legs came down, but she didn’t pay me no mind, and I thought Yes, she knows that I know, and she isn’t afraid of me anymore.  I approached her with an apple in hand and a hopeful expression on my face, still careful to look more at the nape of her beautiful neck than through the portal of those long thick eyelashes.

But it was all for naught.  She caught wind of my intentions and was havin’ none of it.  Sprouted a dozen horse legs right down the middle, top to bottom of her body, radial formation like the bauplan of a sand dollar or a sea urchin.  One of the damn things came right out of her mouth and stretched her face out to so many rubber bands around the base of it.  I about lost my lunch and my heart.  She just cartwheeled away like that, down the fifty yard line, up the bleachers, and out into the farmland beyond.

Horse girls are wild, but don’t you dare fall in love with one.  Far as I know, she’s still rolling to this day.

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Silverfish

What is that shining in the claws of a bird?
A six-pack of beer?  No, don’t be absurd.
Ah, I see now – a struggling fish,
Shimmering, glittering, must be delish.
Or maybe it tastes like some salty chunk meat,
Bloody and raw, not exactly a treat,
Which tells us not all that shines is a prize.
What more silver creatures bedevil the eyes?
Tentaculate beasts and chitinous ghouls,
Translucent fangs exude strings of drool.
Scaly and flaky but covered with snot,
Metallic in sheen more often than not.
Flashes of light like a shiny new dime,
A veneer for creeps suffused with the brine.
I once saw a silverfish the size of my thumb,
Jumped out of my skin and then went for my gun.
Nickel-plated semi-auto nines I did blast,
In hopes to annihilate the creepy-assed.
I didn’t quite hit the mark, not off by a mile,
But boy did I fuck up my poor bathroom tile.
So heed the warning that I now try to give,
Allow the gleaming and slimy to live.
Go ahead, judge all these books by their covers,
But don’t leave them bait in your basins and cupboards.
Keep a clean ship to sway detritivores,
And you won’t be tempted to destroy your floors.
Quoth the earwig, Nevermore.

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