The Author's Narrative

Introductory Text

Hello Friends
The Author's Narrative Part 01 First Post from the Author Posted 27 April 2016 Link to original

Hello, friends.

Thank you for your interest in my posts. I want to apologize to the community at large for posting them to threads whose relationship to their content is, at best, tangential. I simply had nowhere else to post my "information" where anybody would read it. Previously, I was operating a website wherein my information laid out in a rather straightforward manner. I was quite convinced that the undeniable "truth" of this information would attract attention on its own accord. I was quite sure that somehow this grand truth would shine out as a beacon and resonate with receptive people and quickly become widespread. As I recall, my best month brought about 400 visitors and a total of four non-spam comments. 75% of these recommended psychiatric intervention.

So here we find ourselves. I am attempting to use the techniques of fiction and suspense to hopefully generation interest in this information. Your subreddit furthers this aim, and I sincerely thank you for creating it.

I should clarify that this information is not fiction. Nor is it true. It is a mix of things which happened and things which almost happened. Things which were and things which could have been. You must understand that the present moment in which we exist is simply a nexus from which trillions of possible pasts and possible futures branch out. The important thing to realize is that these unreal pasts and unrealized futures are related to each other. By examining what might have been, we can come to understand what might come to be.

I am writing about what has never been, and what must never be.

Unfortunately, our generation has been given a special burden. We are doomed, as the apocryphal Chinese curse has it, to live in interesting times. Soon, technological advances in the field of information technology and bioengineering will fundamentally reshape human existence. There are a number of possible outcomes, and I believe that most of them will result in the human race entering unending era of absolute slavery.

As a free species, we have seen totalitarianism before, and we have destroyed it. But when it arises again, aided by advanced information and biological technology, it will have a new and unprecedented ability to envelop the entire earth and place humanity in an unalterable state of total mental and physical slavery that will last for uncounted millennia until the earth becomes uninhabitable.

Not only do I believe that this outcome is possible, I believe that it is overwhelmingly likely. Out of all the trillions of possible futures arrayed before us, 99.9999% of them result in this outcome. As Christ said, "Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But narrow is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."

We must find and enter the narrow gate, but it will not be easy. It order to find it, we must sort through the many possible pasts to find the few possible futures which result in a humanity free to live and die as humans, and not as an unholy agglomeration of mindless flesh. Unfortunately, as we fight against the forces of slavery and death, it will be precisely our instincts towards the preservation of freedom and life that will lead us to destruction. In short, we live in precarious times.

I want to make clear that while this post shows clear and appalling signs of megalomania, I am actually aware that I am not a prophet or an expert. I am 30-something American male without the benefit of a college education or a stable job. Sadly, I have spent most of my life drunk. My posts will contain a number of historical errors, both intentional and unintentional, as well as bad spelling, bad grammar, and laughably overwrought prose. Readers with a proper education will easily see through my attempts erudition. In short, I have no proper formal qualifications for the task I have set out for myself.

But I have personally experienced the intellectual mutations of which I write. Through repeated self-experimentation, I have fractured the time-state of my brain, and now it exists in an ever-shifting state between various pasts which didn't happen. As such, I have been given what I believe is special insight into our possible futures. They are dark. The shadows of past atrocities pass and overlap with the shadows of future atrocities.

Time is short. Recently, I have been beset with a persistent creativity that seems to grow stronger as the days go by. I fear this state is unsustainable. Perhaps eventually this productive mania will turn into an unproductive psychosis. And soon, on a larger scale, mankind's productivity will turn into its own sort of psychosis.

Billions of years ago, the so-called primordial soup arranged itself into a self-replicating form which multiplied and flourished and divaricated into countless species. From our vantage point in the present, this singular moment of origin has become lost in the mists of time. Equally obscure to us is the future singularity towards which we are heading: the end point, in which all the countless species are once again reintegrated to a new and singular form, a new abomination.

We are on the verge, all of us.

Times are dire.

We are about to be gathered again into the arms of the Mother, to become one flesh with her.

The Mother who gathers lost children.

The Mother I have seen in dark spaces since I was a little child.

Back when I called her "the mother with horse eyes."

We are about to meet her again.

We are about to be unborn.

Ah, the Simple Nemesis
The Author's Narrative Part 02 Second Post from the Author Posted 26 April 2016 at 17:20:45 EDT Link to original

When novelist Philip K. Dick was 42 years old, his fourth wife left him. Lonely and devastated, he opened his home to whoever wanted to stay there. This being San Francisco in 1971, the house quickly became filled with drug users. Dick himself was heavily abusing amphetamines, eating pills by the literal handful and forgoing sleep for days. The mood in the house quickly became paranoid, and at one point, multiple occupants were sleeping with guns under their pillows. The house was broken into, and Dick suspected government involvement, thinking he had gotten too close to some kind of secret in one of his novels. He moved away shortly after.

But his time at the house hadn't been all paranoia and firearms. There were also many good times. Dick was a mesmerizing conversationalist, with an easy command of facts and theories about art, religion, philosophy, and numerous esoteric subjects. He and his new friends, usually kids in their early twenties, would rap for hours and days about everything under the sun. He grew close to many of them. Many of them were runaways or otherwise clinging to the margins of society. After the break-in, Dick went to rehab and quit speed, but as time went on, many of his friends fell victim to the drugs.

In the epilogue to A Scanner Darkly, a fictionalized account of this time, he wrote:

"This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed -- run over, maimed, destroyed -- but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. We were forced to stop by things dreadful."

In the grip of withdrawal, I read that epilogue many times. Read it and wept. I remember, after a week-long binge, lying in my bed, weeping, nightmares crowding my mind, my hands shaking, the mental suffering unbearable, thinking to myself, "Should I really be punished like this? What have I done that was so horrible? Was it so wrong to drink? To want to feel comfortable? To want to feel OK? To want to forget about things for a while? Was it so horribly wrong? Such a crime, that I should go through this mind-crucifying torment?"

But it wasn't really a matter of right and wrong.

It was simply a matter of cause and effect.

My brain had adapted to the inhibitory effects of alcohol, and once the alcohol had been removed, it had entered a state of hyperactivity. The adaptation had become a maladaptation. That was all. There was nothing out there administering this suffering as a punishment. My only 'crime' had been knowing that this would happen and drinking anyways.

I had been a child playing in the street.

Dick wrote in his epilogue, "In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street."

There was no magical fate causing my suffering. Just the impersonal cruelty of causal law.

That was my only Nemesis. Perhaps one day, they will invent a substance which prevents the neuro-adaptation to alcohol, and we will be able to drink forever, like the Greek God Dionysus. We will drink and dance and laugh, and there will be no nightmares.

We will be made children again, and we will play forever on a street where there are no cars.

Until then, there will be suffering beyond belief.

Coming Back Online
The Author's Narrative Part 03 46th Post Posted 11 May 2016 at 04:12:36 EDT Link to original

I call it "coming back online."

That moment when you first come out of drunken blackout. It's always frightening. Where am I? What is this neighborhood? What happened to my face? Where's my wallet? Some people, when they drink enough to disable their short term memory, immediately collapse into an immobile heap. This is nature's failsafe. But I lack this feature. I can walk and talk and carry a tune, yet have no idea of what's going on.

I have never come back online to find myself up to any good. I have never emerged from a blackout to find that I have built a convenient spice rack or delivered a moving speech about women's rights. It's always been some fucking calamity.

The last time I came back online, I was standing in my front yard having a conversation with my parents. Even in my tottering state, I knew this couldn't be a good thing. I had no idea what we were talking about. Why were we talking about it on the front lawn? At night? What time was it? Hoping for a clue, I waited for something to come out of my mouth. And here it was: "Didn't you notice I never left my room? I've been living with you for 6 months. I think I've seen each of you twice."

This was bad. I knew I shouldn't be saying something like this. It sounded terribly confessional. Ever since I had gotten fired and moved back in with my parents, I had been holed in my childhood bedroom, secretly drinking and basking in an unremitting sense of personal shame. But this was all supposed to be a secret. As far as my parents knew, I was freelancing and "getting back on my feet." This scene, this mad scene, was not part of that narrative.

"We were giving you your privacy. We didn't know you were getting drunk up there," my mother said.

This conversation was out of control. I should just tell them I'm going to bed. I should calmly bid them a good night. So I said, "Of course I was getting drunk! Fuck! I've been drinking every goddamn day for the last ten years! What the fuck else would I be doing?"

This was a poor choice of words. This was not how one calmly bids others a good night. Oh, the look on my poor mother's face...

That look stayed with me. That look, the fallen face of a tired old woman, stayed with me as I lay in bed that night. It stayed with me as the alcohol wore off, as the night turned into queasy morning, as the hands began to shake, the "brain tingle" set in, as the "hell whispers" began, as I waited for them to go to work so I could sneak a bit of relief from the liquor cabinet, as the awful day wore on, as we talked that night, as I packed my stuff up, as I went off to rehab the next day.

My mother is almost 70. She's small and stooped and old. When did she get so old?

I just thought I would be something by now. 33 years old. I thought I would have something to show her, something to give back, something to make her proud. I thought I'd be a man. Not just a drunken failure. All those little soccer practices she took me to, all the swim lessons and therapy and errands and effort and love. What was it for? So I could be a drunken sack of shit? Why was I so fucked up? Why did I require shore-leave levels of liquor to operate properly?

As I lay in bed in the rehab that first night, listening to the occasional moans of the other patients, I asked myself these questions and others. Soon, I found myself returning to the question I had been asking my entire life, the one I always retreated to in moments of self-pity, the one that seemed hold some key to my dysfunction. The one I had always been afraid to ask my mom.

What about that one summer when you were dead?

Tired of these damn anti-Semitic Jews
The Author's Narrative Part 04 53rd Post Posted 14 May 2016 at 02:56:55 EDT Link to original

"Love and tolerance of others is our code." - Page 84, Giant Crock of Shit.

It's not often you meet a black Jew. It's even less often that you meet a black Jew who believes in Jesus. And it's that much rarer to meet an anti-Semitic black Jew who believes in Jesus. That's gotta win you some kind of fucking prize. That's like a unicorn throwing a no-hitter. And to be roommates with an anti-Semitic black Jew who believes in Jesus? What a treat! What an absolute delight. Don't you love it when a disagreement over laundry turns into a 30-minute fact-free lecture about the end of days, FEMA camps and the mark of the beast? lol. Just anti-Semitic black Jew for Jesus things.

I don't think I'm going to make it living in this sober house. I can't live with this nutcase. The house manager says I'm supposed to be open-minded and tolerant. Should I be tolerant of some of the most odious and insane anti-Semitism I've ever encountered outside of a nazi rally? I don't know. I'll concede that it is possible that he could become a cool guy, if he only stopped believing in everything he believes in and believed in entirely different things. That would be a good first step.

The real problem is that I hate AA. I fucking hate it. It has the same old bullshit magical beliefs as any cult, but they pretend to be open-minded. It's just a bait-and-switch to convert you to believing in God. The entire program is nothing but "Let god make you sober." That's it. That's the entire program.

Yeah, they try to distract you with all this pseudo-systemization: 12 steps and 12 traditions and triangles and diagrams and slogans and little self-help exercises, but that's all just a bunch of numbers and jargon to hide the essential emptiness of the program, to hide the fact that it is centered on a god that doesn't exist.

The idea that this is the go-to program for helping alcoholics is fucking appalling. It's a fucking crime. It's like getting cancer and going to the best hospital in the country and the doctor hands you a voodoo doll and tells you to sacrifice a chicken. You'd sue him for malpractice. They should be fucking ashamed of themselves. To prey on people in such a vulnerable state, pretend that they're going to help them and then try to convert them to their stupid fucking magical beliefs. It's a crime.

I mean, everybody thinks the True Jew Hebrew guy is nuts, but it's not like their philosophy is any less bullshit. At least he is upfront about being religious. And he sure as hell isn't trying to convert me. He told me that white people are the children of Esau. We're gentiles, but we can still get into heaven if we aid the children of Israel. I let him borrow the charger to my laptop. So I guess I'm covered.

It eats through everything
The Author's Narrative Part 05 56th Post Posted 16 May 2016 at 17:10:38 EDT Link to original

You cannot quite understand the power of addiction until you have seen it firsthand. Until you have seen it eat like an acid through everything you are. It is astounding to watch. Its slow and total corrosion of your entire life is mesmerizing. As you watch it, you keep thinking, "At some point, the corrosion will stop. There is no way it will be able to eat through this next thing. This next thing is too important to me." But then it does. It eats through everything. And you realize you are dealing with a vast and inhuman power.

The most frightening thing is that consequences do not work against a well-developed addiction. There are ultimately no consequences, none, which can separate you from your drug. As your addiction progresses and your self-control slips away, there is nothing you won't risk to continue doing your drug. Nothing is important enough. Nothing is sacred enough.

Money. Career. Marriage. Home. Family. Goals. Art. Religion. Dignity. Safety. Health. Sanity. Parents. Children. Life Itself. All of it will go into play. All of it will be put on the table. If you play the game shrewdly, you might get to keep some of it. You will not get to keep all of it. You will pay. You will pay in ways that you cannot imagine.

You will look at the people who have lost more than you, and you will pretend you are different than them. You will pretend that you can walk away from the table. But the time will come to walk away, and you won't. You will keep playing. You will be made a liar. If you play long enough, all your pious little promises will be shown to be lies.

"I have a good job. I would never risk my job."

"I love my wife. I would never risk my marriage."

"I love my children more than anything. I would never risk my children's safety. Ever." "I don't want to die."

Whatever specific promises you make will be the ones that you will break, because those are the ones you have made to try to control yourself. But you won't be able to control yourself. Your self-control will be pried from your grasp like a toy being taken away from a child.

And when break these promises, you will not be some mindless "junkie" who doesn't care anymore. You will be in many ways the same person you are now, and you will know how awful and horrifying your actions are, and you will do them anyway. You will not be able to believe what is happening to you. You will tell yourself that you are unlucky or cursed. You will watch in horror. But what you are watching is yourself. The horror is what you are doing.

I realize that this all sounds rather silly and dramatic. From the perspective of somebody dabbling with drugs, this all sounds laughably overwrought. But if you ever go where I have been, if you ever see what I have seen, this will still sound laughable, not because it is overwrought, but because it is insufficient -- because it doesn't even begin to describe it.

some thoughts about addiction. who knows.
The Author's Narrative Part 06 64th Post Posted 22 May 2016 at 04:40:17 EDT Link to original

If you are horribly burned in a fire, you can take drugs to relieve the pain. If you shatter your spine, you can take drugs to relieve the pain. If you are addicted to drugs and your life has turned to utter and total shit, you can take drugs to relieve the pain.

And that's how the trap works.

Imagine if the only cure for burn pain was fire. Imagine if the cure for back pain was whacking yourself in the spine with a hammer. The drug addict is caught in an analogous situation. The only fast, reliable remedy for the psychological pain of drug addiction is drugs. There are other cures (a notable one is not doing drugs), but they are all slower and less reliable.

Somehow, the lure of feeling better now overrides the hope of feeling better later. This is the basic mechanism of addiction. The behavior of an addict is perfectly logical in the short term and perfectly illogical in the long term. Because life exists in the long term, addiction is illogical overall. What is surprising how easily addiction can ensnare people who are perfectly intelligent and self-disciplined.

You can go to certain parts of any sizable city in America and watch drugs addicts totter around. Looking at their blighted faces, their filthy clothes, their total lack of self-regard, you would be forgiven for thinking that they lack self-discipline. How could you think otherwise? When a person can't be bothered to shower, much less get a proper job or just stop smoking crack for more than a few hours, what else could you call it but a lack of self-discipline?

Imagine the Nazi troops at Stalingrad, encircled by the Soviet troops, fighting against total annihilation. Would you look at these troops, these underslept, unshaven men in stinking unwashed clothes, and accuse them of lacking self-discipline? Would you say, "Tut-tut, these Nazis are an undisciplined lot?" Of course not. You would understand that their shabby state is not from a lack of self-discipline, but rather because they are concerned with other things. Dire things.

While there are several notable differences between Nazi soldiers and crack heads, the same principle is in effect for both. For both, there has been a terrible reordering of priorities. The showering, the clean clothes, the job, all of these become secondary to fast access to the drug. If showering and clean clothes got them fast access to the drug, they would walk around looking like a detergent commercial. You would never see whites so white.

But they don't need clean clothes. They don't need showers. They need drugs. The drugs are the solution to everything.

Highly self-disciplined people are actually quite vulnerable to drug addiction. It is because they believe that they need to control their feelings. They often seek to simply eliminate bad feelings, just as they seek to eliminate underperformance from every other area of their lives. The demon of addiction looks at their grand self-discipline and giggles with glee. It knows that it will be precisely this self-discipline that will bring them to heel. They will self-discipline themselves right into total obedience to the drug.

As an example, look at Prince and Michael Jackson. Were they self-disciplined? Definitely. The world has hardly seen such self-discipline. They were obsessive workaholics, devoted to their careers, and they propelled themselves to the very pinnacle of professional success. They both knew the dangers of drug addiction and fastidiously avoided drugs. Keep in mind, avoiding drugs in 1980s Hollywood must have been like avoiding water in a swimming pool at the bottom of the fucking ocean. Yet they managed to do it for a while because they had self-discipline.

Now they are both dead. They were both destroyed by drug addiction. In the end, self-discipline was not enough to save them. Why not? Because self-discipline is just a talent, an accomplishment. And like any other talent or accomplishment, it can be turned and made to serve the dark master.

What then is our defense against this menace? What is the answer?

How much of the real story actually survived?
The Author's Narrative Part 07 72nd Post Posted 29 May 2016 at 03:07:00 EDT Link to original

A friend from rehab invites me to an H.A. meeting. Shooting boy was never among my vices, but I go with him. The meeting is out in the suburbs, and it is packed. Every bit of floor space is filled with folding chairs, and every chair is filled. I want to leave as soon as I sit down. It is like being in a crowded elevator for an entire hour. I can feel the coffee breath on my skin.

It is disturbing to look around at all the kids in the room. How are they all so young and fresh faced? The alcoholics tend to be much more beat up. All those years of excess capillary dilation give our faces a meaty quality. These little heroin addicts, on the other hand, come into the rooms at 19 with the glow of childhood still on their skin.

My friend's arms have no track marks. They are smooth and doll-like, no major veins left. He is 21. I've been roommates with kids like these for the past few months. They don't know who Norm from Cheers is. They don't know how to empty a dryer filter or take care of a teflon pan. But they know how to cook up black tar. They know how to find veins.

It quickly becomes apparent that one of the meeting's regulars died last night. Everybody is upset. People start crying. My desire to not be there grows exponentially. I didn't know the kid. I feel like I've stumbled into the wrong funeral.

The kid's sponsor talks. He's an older man with a gray goatee. He was guiding the kid through the steps. The room looks at him to say something comforting, something with the ring of authority and wisdom. The room is full of children in the grips of a problem that their parents cannot understand. Here is a grownup who can understand.

He talks about meeting the kid's parents at the hospital. His eyes grow damp. He recalls haltingly that the parents were very polite. They thanked him very politely for trying to help their son. He looks down at the floor. There is no more to say.

Later, I relate this story to my roommate Shawn. He says that this has been going on with the blacks for years, but nobody cared until it came to swallow up all the little white children. He says that most problems come to visit black people first because black people are God's chosen people. They must be chastised.

The program tells us to be more open-minded and less judgmental. I am trying to be more open-minded and less judgmental about Shawn's beliefs. At first glance, his beliefs are paranoid, ahistorical, conspiracy theory hogwash. At second glance, they are appallingly anti-Semitic cultural appropriation. But my sponsor says it is not my place to enlighten him with my views. I only need to be a decent roommate to him.

When the Jews were sold into captivity, their narrative survived. This was not so for the slaves of America. At least, nothing like the Torah was passed on. The American system of slavery worked to destroy the history of millions of people. But I wonder, how much of the Jews' history really survived? There are certainly parts of the Torah that don't have the resounding ring of authority and wisdom e.g. the talking snake or the talking bush or the Nephilim or 90% of everything else. How much of the real story actually survived?

It must be tempting to place oneself into the context of a mythical narrative that goes back thousands of years, that extends forward to the end of history. Instead of just being this lost little individual, you become the inheritor of a grand spiritual legacy, part of a grand struggle, one of the chosen people.

A new roommate moved into the house a few days ago. His name is Donnie. He's in his mid-forties, and he's a former Marine. I show him the Iwo Jima segment of my story and ask him what he thinks.

A Lifetime of Spiritual Failure: I used to drop mucho acid and believe in God. Then I became an alcoholic. Now I don't what the fuck is going on.
The Author's Narrative Part 08 73rd Post Posted 30 May 2016 at 03:30:00 EDT Link to original

When I was in high school, I liked dropping acid. One of my favorite books was The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which tells the real-life story of a band of early acid-heads and proto-hippies called the Merry Pranksters, who invented a lot of what would become tropes of the 1960s such as dressing up in weird shit and riding around on a painted bus while stoned on drugs.

I was especially intrigued by an experiment which was carried out by the Pranksters in 1965. One day, a few of the Pranksters put a sign on the front gate of the group's compound that read, "The Merry Pranksters Welcome the Beatles." At the time the Beatles were the biggest band in the world, and the Merry Pranksters were largely unknown. Moreover, none of the Pranksters actually knew the Beatles or had any idea of how to contact the Beatles. Nor did they make any attempt to do so. For the Beatles to show up at their house in California was extremely unlikely. Despite all this, the Pranksters put this crazy banner out on their front gate. And they fully expected the Beatles to show up.

To understand the Prankster's behavior, you must understand the effects of LSD. This is true in a general sense and with specific regard to that banner. You see, sometimes when you take LSD, something strange happens, something beyond all the weird hallucinations and thought distortions. Sometimes you get the eerie feeling that coincidences are happening all around you. You might be listening to music while watching TV and notice that the pictures and the sound seem to synch up. You might open a book and notice that the opening passage has an odd, unmistakable relevance to the current moment you are in. At times, you almost feel like you are conscious of things before they actually happen. You imagine your friend walking through the door, and a moment later she does. You look at your phone, and a moment later it rings.

Sometimes these coincidences pile up so quickly that you get the feeling that there is something behind it all, that all the seemingly disparate and unrelated phenomena of your life are actually part of an underlying order (or pattern or structure) which is normally hidden. This order seems to be a cosmic phenomenon that pervades and controls all of existence, something which has always existed but which you have been blind to until now. The existence of this fundamental order comes as a revelation because it is completely different from the ordinary mechanism of cause and effect that you are used to, that science uses to explain things. This feeling, to me, is the essence of the LSD experience. LSD leads to a sudden awareness of meaningful coincidences which in turn gives rise to an awareness of an underlying cosmic order which is acausal.

The "acausal" part is important. A true coincidence is when two things happen which are clearly related but which cannot possibly be related by cause and effect. For example, let's you are watching a show on TV about zebras, then you walk out your front door and see a zebra trotting down the sidewalk, dropping zebra shit all over the place. The two events have an obvious connection, but it's hard to imagine how that connection could occur through cause and effect. It's not likely that your TV viewing choices caused that zebra to escape from the zoo, nor it is likely that the two events have a common cause, unless somebody is playing an elaborate prank on you. Such a coincidence could be considered meaningful if you believe that it is evidence of the aforementioned underlying order. Otherwise, it's just some weird shit that happened randomly.

During my high school years, because of my little LSD hobby, I became obsessed with meaningful coincidences. I was always looking for little signs from the cosmos and hidden connections between things which weren't causally related. I tried to predict things. I looked for symbols and tried to fit the events of my daily life into cosmic patterns. I got into Nostradamus, the I Ching, stichomancy, all sorts of shit.

Unfortunately, my attempts to ascertain the underlying structure of the cosmos were heavily clouded by my own immature narcissism. You'll notice that people who believe in past lives tend to see themselves as great figures of the past like Caesar and Van Gogh, rather than the anonymous turnip pickers and fishwives who actually populated most of history. Similarly, I was convinced that the cosmos was sending me indications my impending greatness, rather than portending my eventual descent into alcoholic mediocrity. Yes, it was revealed to me that the world would end soon, I would be a Christ-like figure of greatness in the coming apocalypse. I shit you not. I really believed this stuff. Luckily, blogs had not become popular yet.

Then I took my final acid trip. It was a bad trip. I don't want to get into the details, but let's just say that I saw some shit, and I never wanted to take acid again. All my life, I had been hoping to be visited with a grand revelation, and now I just hoped I was never visited by another one. It filled my head with all sorts of crazy shit. Not truth, just madness. I decided that whatever was underlying the cosmos could stay lying under the damn cosmos. I wanted no part of it.

Oh, I guess I should tell you what happened with the Beatles banner. In putting out that banner, the Pranksters had hoped that they could tap into the underlying acausal order of the universe by simply welcoming the Beatles, rather than by reaching out to the Beatles or pursuing them. But the Beatles never showed up. At least, they never showed up in a literal sense. A couple years later, the Beatles released The Magical Mystery Tour film, in which they all dressed up in weird shit and rode around on a painted bus while stoned on drugs, precisely as the Pranksters had done. So, in a sense, they did "come to" the Pranksters. Of course, this can all be explained by ordinary cause and effect. The Pranksters helped popularize a social movement which eventually spread to England. Or you can invoke a mystical explanation, saying the Pranksters somehow sensed that the underlying pattern of the cosmos would bring the Beatles around to their way of doing things.

After I stopped doing LSD, I started leaning away from notions of cosmic patterns, and I became more convinced that any understanding of the universe would have to rely on cause and effect. My earlier attempts at mysticism began to look like embarrassing folly. I came to regard all that meaningful coincidence stuff as bullshit. I figured that LSD just overstimulated whatever sort of coincidence detector might exist in the brain. You could dress it up in a fancy word like "synchronicity" and give it the imprimatur of Carl Jung or whomever, but it was nothing more than magical thinking, as old and stupid as stone age tribes.

I had been perceiving connections between things where none existed. There are no meaningful coincidences. A coincidence is only meaningful if you can find a casual relationship between the two phenomena, and if you can, it is no longer a true coincidence. The universe doesn't send people signs through the I Ching or Nostradamus or any of that silly shit. If there are rainclouds in the sky, it's a sign you should carry an umbrella. That's an actual sign from the universe. The other stuff is just a load of crap.

It was with this mindset that I entered AA years later.

AA is a god-centered program. The main idea is that you can get sober if you live according to god's will instead of your own will. People in AA often talk about watching for signs from god and listening to instructions from god and so forth. As you can imagine, I was less than impressed. I was appalled. I felt like I was being dragged back into this narcissistic mystical bullshit that I had thankfully left behind. I felt like I was being asked to roll back my little personal Age of Enlightenment and go back to the Dark Ages. Fuck that. I wasn't going to do it.

One night at a meeting, after months of listening to this spirituality shit, I made my feelings clear. I told them that spirituality was the hugest load of horse shit ever foisted upon human culture. Spirituality, I opined, was like a thought virus that gets passed on from one person to another. It was basically gonorrhea of the brain. And AA was one of the biggest fucking disease vectors I had ever seen. I told them they should be ashamed of themselves for preying on people who are in a vulnerable state just to convert them to their bullshit spiritual beliefs.

Rather than the stunned silence that is the dream of every r/atheism subscriber, they just told me to "keep coming back" and moved on to the next guy. It turned out that little rants like this are semi-regular occurrence.

Having no other good options, I kept coming back. I asked a lot of people why they believed in god. They almost invariably brought up meaningful coincidences or magical signs. I became more convinced than ever that it was all bullshit. I argued a lot with one guy in particular. In recovery, you meet a lot of people who are like Ned Flanders with tattoos, people who lived dirty and then cleaned up and became extra-square, but they still have their tattoos. This was one of those guys. He told me a story about how he was in prison, at the end of his rope, and he prayed to God to send him a sign. Just then a little bird alighted on prison window and sang him a beautiful little song. God, he knew at that moment, was real. I almost dislocated my eyes they rolled so hard. What a bunch of silly shit. How could a grown adult believe this crap?

I read the AA literature, mainly to bolster my arguments against the program. AA literature is very sneaky. It knows that most atheists follow the tradition of Western secular humanism, which values open-mindedness in contrast the close-mindedness of religionists. So the literature portrays atheism as close-mindedness. Atheists are encouraged to be more open-minded, more flexible, more willing to accept the idea that they don't know everything about the universe. I wondered if it was fucking opposite day. How were these spiritual nutcases going to portray spirituality as open-mindedness and atheism as close-mindedness?

I was simply asserting that in my entire life, I had never seen any convincing evidence of god. That wasn't close-minded. That wasn't presumptuous. It was the opposite. I was willing to accept the evidence presented to me by the world, unlike religionists who turn a blind eye to it. I told heavy-metal Ned Flanders that if the skies ever opened up to show me the majestic glory of god, then I would be happy to fall to my knees, because either god existed or I was in the presence of a technology advanced enough to be god-like. I told him that I was perfectly willing to believe in god, if I was ever presented with a shred of credible evidence for his existence.

Soon after, I was presented with precisely that.

Who knows. Maybe it was a coincidence.

False Revelation
The Author's Narrative Part 09 74th Post Posted 31 May 2016 Link to original

I think it's possible it could be written on the fly. The story gives the appearance of vast scope because the storylines are from different eras and areas, but rather than a broad panorama, it only provides thin slivers of insight into each time and place. Everything in between these slivers is left to the player's imagination. And given the author's hints at branching timelines, he or she is not even necessarily required to link these little slivers together.

People also point to the various stories' interconnectedness and claim that the work has a structure too intricate to be improvisational, but how much interconnectedness is there really? For example, the stone age story has cats in it, and the cat story has cats in it (obviously). This is a point of similarity (obviously). But what is the significance? So what if both stories have cats? Is this meaningful coincidence or a meaningless one?

The same question could be asked about the children of the forest or the various Marines or the demon penises for which the author has such fondness. Yes, these elements recur, but to what end? Perhaps, like somebody on LSD undergoing a false revelation, we are drawing connections where none really exist. Perhaps these are meaningless coincidences.

The story employs a number of "call backs" where it makes reference to something which was not mentioned in quite a while. This gives the appearance of careful preplanning. But call backs are actually a pretty easy to improvise. The author can just look over the story, pick an element, and bring it to the fore again. Like a prime factorization problem, the problem is easier to create than it is to solve. A successful callback is really more of a testament to the reader's intelligence than the author's.

And btw, whatever happened to COMPANION-12? That seemed like it was going to be a thing.

But anyways, all this is speculation on my part. It's an interesting question: how can we know whether the story is improvised or not? The author does occasionally make direct responses to other Reddit comments and make reference to current events, but as you said this could just be a sort of superficial improvisation, where most of the story is actually fixed, but a few of the details are improvised. The author could also be combing through reddit for the right comment to give the appearance of improvisation.

Are we watching real choices in action, or are the events of this universe occurring along some deterministic path? Is there any way to find out? Maybe some sort of test should be devised. But that would require the author to play along.

Oh, tragic haircut!
The Author's Narrative Part 10 80th Post Posted 7 June 2016 at 23:37:34 EDT Link to original

I am 24, and it's a Friday night in early summer. The sun is settling down into a haze beyond the mountains, and the city's concrete is beginning to cool after a baking day. The signs for all the bars are on turning on. The windows of stolid office buildings become a wild collage of reflected neon. Yes, everybody wants to party tonight. Even the Central Insurance Bank is looking festive. Oh, you minx!

I've drunk six beers. I am right in the zone. Active. Playful. Charming. Oh so charming. I am actually charming myself right now with my internal monologue, reeling off clever little observations about the people who pass on the sidewalk. I can see a glowing doorway in my mind. All I have to do is walk through it.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. Who's calling me now? Maybe it's my usual gang of friends. Or the Swedish friends I drank with until 6 A.M. last weekend. Or one of the dozens of girls who are saved in my phone with thoughtful pet names like "brownhair2" and "metinpark." But I'm not going to answer my phone. I don't want to make any plans. I am simply going to walk down this street, and something is going to happen. Because the door is open. The world awaits.

I stand by a food vendor and watch people pass. I smile, nod, make funny comments. Most people smile and pass right by. Others linger for a while. Two girls and guy start talking to me. They're tourists from out of town. What are they looking to do? A nice place or just somewhere cheap? Do they like saké? I know just the place. Sure, no problem.

And we're off. Soon we're sitting in a booth, and the saké is arriving at regular intervals, and I'm telling crazy stories and snapping off jokes, and I'm listening to them, and they're telling me about themselves and one of the girls keeps glancing at me when she thinks I'm not looking and

I am 30, and I am in a darkened apartment, hunched over the glow of my laptop screen, jacking off. I finish and go to the bathroom to wash up, and there is that moment, that same moment, where I have to look at my blotchy face in the mirror and say, "Well, not my proudest moment," in my head, the same joke I make to myself every time. When I'm done, I stand in the doorway of my bathroom and look at the tiny studio apartment: a desk, a laptop, a futon, a small window with the curtains closed against the summer glare, a crowd of empty bottles on the floor by the door. The stink of old sweat and beer.

I whimper. The door is closed. The door is closed forever. I am locked in this apartment, this little box, closed off from the world.

Now that the jerking off is done, the jitteriness starts to creep back in. Oh nightmare. I want to drink, but is only 3 PM. I have only been awake for half an hour. I should wait until at least 8 before drinking. At least 6. But this is torment. I need some now or I will have some kind of fucking seizure. Just two shots, that's it, and then no drinking until

I am 33, and I am sitting in the 24-hour club, listening to a man talk about a mouse that changed his life. He had been living out of his car for a month, and it was so full of a trash that a mouse started living there too. This was this problem that finally broke him, that finally showed him the absurdity of it all, that finally made him get sober: how do you set mouse traps in a car? It's a pretty good story, but I've heard it before.

Stolid Haircut walks into the meeting late again. I call him Stolid Haircut because I don't know his name, but he has a respectable Republican haircut: silver and gray and sculpted into broad curves that recall the body of a pre-gas crisis American sedan. He wears the uniform of a retiree: bright blue dad jeans with running shoes and white socks and a plaid shirt buttoned up to the next-to-top button.

Stolid Haircut walks with the wide, clumsy steps of a hesitant toddler. Years of alcoholism have damaged his cerebellum, resulting in an abnormal gait. This and his reddened, venous nose make his weakness for alcohol plain for anybody to see. At a glance you can know his most painful personal shame. His lips are permanently pursed into an embarrassed smile.

I watch him ease into the chair and go back to listening about the mouse and find myself looking at him again.

Oh, tragic haircut!

The haircut calls to me from some golden past. It is the haircut of a man who once was. In days gone by, it was thick and brown and belonged to a man who walked with a purposeful stride, a husband and father, the kind of guy who hoisted his son onto his shoulders to watch passing parades, who played softball and relaxed with a few beers after work, and a few whiskies after that, but always woke up bright and early the next day, who worked hard, who knew who he was, who knew right from wrong, who know how the world ought to be.

I stare at his soft, shining, embarrassed eyes and feel my own filling with tears. How it has all slipped away from him. The young son is grown. The job is done. The wife doesn't talk. Everything that was once strong and sure is now frail and shaky.

How many nightmares has this ordinary man seen? I saw so many in just ten years. And I am nowhere near the point of an abnormal gait. This man has seen unutterable things. How bewildered was he when it first came for him, the scuttling darkness? Did he think he was going mad? He comes from a generation where this sort thing is not discussed. How he must have suffered.

O haircut! haircut! haircut! O the bleeding drops of red.

I am staring at him openly. The rest of the meeting is not there anymore. A halo of light pours out around his face, and he becomes a vision. Doves and cherubim swirl around him, Escher staircases extend in every direction, mandalas expand and overlap and spin and

The door-- my god. For a moment, the door is open again.

We All Have Skeletons
The Author's Narrative Part 11 82nd Post Posted 11 June 2016 at 04:23:00 EDT Link to original

Before writing this series, I wrote a novel. I worked on it for 6 years. The worst years of my life. As I sank deeper into alcoholism and became a pathetic trembling recluse, I held on to the novel as my one desperate hope. Maybe it would turn out well, maybe it would get published, maybe it would sell well, maybe my life would change, maybe I would escape my stinking little apartment. What dreams I had. What desperate little dreams.

As my life got worse, I told myself I was on a journey of self-discovery, that I was an artist going through a period of struggle before my great breakthrough. Every famous artist has some story of living in a tiny apartment and working a mind-numbing job and eating crap food before their first big success. Surely this was just that part of my story. How much richer would my success be after all this pathetic degradation!

After a night of writing, I would get drunk and imagine myself being interviewed by in front of an auditorium full of my fans, telling self-deprecating but touching anecdotes about my ragged days before I became I literary success. The audience full of bookishly pretty young women would titter and sigh as they related to my struggles and admired my unwavering determination. What fantasies I had!

There were other times when I knew that I was just comforting myself with delusions of grandeur, that I was trying to romanticize my lazy failure of a life by pretending to be a struggling artist on the verge of success. Really, I was just a lazy drunk on the verge of fuck all. I wasn't even some proud rebel drunk like Charles Bukowski. I hated myself. I didn't write enough or read enough or know enough or work hard enough to be a real writer. I had never read Anna Karenina or One Hundred Years of Solitude or anything by Henry James.

I was often bored when reading and bored when writing. Did I even like it? I had half-assed my way through school and work and relationships. I had half-assed everything I had ever done, and I was even half-assing something that was supposed to be important to me. I hadn't even finished one novel after six years.

And then there was the most damning evidence of all: my writing sucked.

Sometimes I felt like I was fraud, sometimes I felt like I was on the right path, sometimes I felt like both of these things were true at once, like I was on two different timelines. My view of the matter changed often. At night, I tended to regard myself as being on the very cusp of fame and fortune. The next morning, I tended to wake up feeling like a untalented dilettante. Meanwhile, this supposedly temporary period of struggle stretched on and on and on. I turned 30. Surely something would happen by 40. But what if it didn't? As I withdrew from friends and coworkers and became more of a recluse, I rationalized it as "concentrating on my writing." Except my busy schedule of drinking and hangovers didn't allow for much writing. The story of the struggling artist was showing itself to be a lie.

Then I got fired from my job and sent to rehab. After I stopped drinking, I used my newfound energy and spare time to finish the novel. I finished it in a few months. You can get a lot done when you're not entering the void every night. For someone like me, the completion a 6 year struggle is an occasion which simply begs to be accompanied by a drink, by many drinks. I had always planned to just go get drunk for an entire week after I finished my novel. Instead, I took a walk down to a nearby bar and stood outside of it for a while.

I didn't go in. In my head, my life seemed to be developing into a new story: a heroic turnaround in which I got sober and everything fell into place. Yes, surely this was how it would go. I sent letters to 30 literary agents with the hopes of getting the book published. None expressed any interest.

It hurt to be rejected. I had stopped drinking, but I still hadn't found a fulfilling job. I was able to talk to people and look cashiers in the eye again, but I was still a recluse. I had still invested a lot of desperate hopes into getting the novel published. I felt so foolish for investing so much hope into something that is just so unlikely, but I couldn't help myself. The lure of feeling some sense of purpose and accomplishment was just too much.

I wanted to be noticed. Honestly, I wanted to be rich and famous. Though they may have been disguised as "achieving artistic success" and "finding my purpose," perhaps my dreams were ultimately as crass and grasping as any Kardashian's.

I had given the literary agents 4 months to respond to me before accepting they were not interested. Soon after that deadline passed, I started writing this web series. As you may know, a few websites wrote articles about the series, and some very lovely people created a very wonderful subreddit about it, and this drew the attention of people in the publishing industry. They contacted me, and just like that, my long-held dream was again revived, and now it seemed more in reach than ever. I had been struggling to contact agents, and now they were contacting me! Oh, what a heady feeling. Again, it felt like everything was falling into place, like my life was shaping into a story with a happy ending.

Speaking of endings, I needed to come up with an ending for the series before I could finally take my rightful place as leading light of the literati (cough). A few people on the subreddit had expressed doubt that I could possibly deliver a satisfying ending, and I was inclined to agree with them. I had already noticed that the story was easier to write when I was opening narrative threads than when I was wrapping them up. What would the overall ending be?

It had to be about Mother. That was the center of the story. But what did I really know about Mother beyond a few vague memories? I had long puzzled over these memories. Back when I was drinking, I was convinced that something had happened to me one summer, something beyond my understanding, something monstrous. But after I got sober, I was encouraged to digest some hard truths about myself, and I decided that it was entirely possible that I had more or less made it all up. Not that I simply lied to myself, but more that I had latched on to some vague memory, perhaps a recurring nightmare, and built it up in my mind over the years, perhaps as an explanation for why I was so emotionally fucked up. It was easier to face life as a victim of some unknown, half-remembered evil. It gave me an excuse to crawl into the bottle.

I needed to provide a satisfying ending to the series and to my quest to get published. Being intertwined, both of these tasks rested on a hazy collection of sinister memories. Then again, couldn't I just make some shit up? Hadn't I been doing that all along?

The solution presented itself to me one night when I was talking with my roommate Shawn. He told me that back when he smoked crack, he used to break into abandoned buildings to see if there was stuff to steal. He said that once he broke into a warehouse downtown and found set of stairs that led to an underground room, which led to many more rooms that went deep underground. Over the course of a few weeks, he went deeper and deeper into the complex, taking various stuff, but always leaving quickly, because it was a spooky place. On the last night he snuck into the complex, he found a room where the walls were covered in human bone.

A Double-Take
The Author's Narrative Part 12 83rd Post Posted 12 June 2016 at 08:52:04 UTC Link to original

So there I was on the front porch with Shawn, both of us sitting in rickety old chairs, slapping away the mosquitoes, when he mentioned quietly that he had once seen a room where the walls were covered with human bone. Right away my heart started thumping in my chest.

He must have seen my reddit posts. This was something I had been worrying about, even dreading. My posts were none too flattering of him, and he was a very private person, very defensive of his boundaries. He would see it as an intrusion and a betrayal. I had taken great pains to obscure the details of his identity, giving him a new name and a different sort of Afrocentric religion. Nobody would recognize him from my posts. But some of the stuff in my writing had been had been taken verbatim from our conversations. If he saw them, he would surely recognize himself.

Shawn was not a guy I wanted to piss off. When he first came to the house, he told us that his main character defect was his temper, and he wasn't kidding. On more than one occasion I had watched anger build up inside of him until he ended up chewing somebody out. It was the sort of scene that left me tip-toeing back into my bedroom, giddily thankful I wasn't taking the brunt of his outrage. All those years as a recluse had left me with no appetite for confrontation.

Shawn had been sincerely working on his temper. He was the only black dude in the house, and he was worried about being seen as the angry black guy. He often said to me, "You get up in somebody's face and they'll be like, 'Say, fellas, let's work this thing out.' But if I cross the line, they'll be like, "Call the police! This nigga gone crazy!'" I assured him that this was not the case, while not being entirely sure that this wasn't the case.

As a result of his fears, he had become very indirect about how he expressed his anger. If he felt somebody was disrespecting him, he would give them the silent treatment for a while, then come down hard on them for something small, all the while being very careful to not raise his voice or make any threatening gestures, which somehow made him more intimidating. As much as he didn't want to play out the angry black guy stereotype, I didn't want to play out the meek, affronted white guy stereotype, but I was sometimes intimidated by him.

So now when he told me about the walls covered with bone, I figured he must have been feeling me out, seeing if I would come clean about what I had written. But it was such a strange way to do it. I didn't know what to say. I looked him in the eye, trying to make my face completely neutral. He gazed back at me, his face half in shadow, half colored by the yellow porch light, his expression dead serious. He went on, speaking softly: "Skulls... teeth... arms and hands... melted together... on the walls... up on the ceiling."

So there I was on the front porch with Shawn, both of us sitting in rickety old chairs, slapping away the mosquitoes, when he mentioned quietly that he had once seen a room where the walls were covered with human bone. Right away my heart started thumping in my chest.

He had seen in real life what I had only seen in my mind. He was about to tell me that the flesh interfaces and Mother and all the other nightmares were true. I had, on some level, known this was coming. It was the culmination of the strange feelings I had had all week.

It started when I was sitting in that AA meeting, looking at the sad face of the old man with the Stolid Haircut. I had entered a strange and sudden reverie, carried away by the sheer damn poignancy of this man's haircut and how it symbolized the sort of strong, upright man he had tried and failed to be. I saw him in a great shifting vision, different versions of him emerging and overlapping. Here he was a young boy learning how to use a comb. Here he was a young man, the wind ruffling his sturdy locks as he experienced that a rush of confidence that comes with drink. Here he was in front of the mirror, running the comb through his wet hair with a shaky hand, dropping it into the sink. Here he was with stitches just below the hairline after another accidental fall. Here he is finally face down at the bottom of his stairs, his hair ever so slightly mussed, just a few strands out of place... almost perfect.

The next day, my roommate Donnie (the ex-Marine) and I went out to the river to swim. It was a perfect sunny day, and there were a lot of people out swimming and floating along in inner tubes. As I lay back in the cool waters, feeling the warm forest air alive on my wet skin, I saw for a moment that vanished primeval world peopled by the forest children. These children lived along the river, not working or toiling, but simply taking what the river offered, living and dying by the good mother's generosity. Sure, they wouldn't know the benefits of writing or agriculture, and they would drop like flies to horrible diseases and predators, but in doing so they would accept their humble place in the universe, rather than striving to overcome it through science or religion. They would know themselves to be fragile things which lived for a brief moment and died, like glimmers on the river's water.

For the second time in as many days, I found myself with tears in my eyes over some trivial moment, and I was forced to turn away from Donnie as he related a story about Marine buddy who had been given a humorous nickname by the platoon due to his uncanny knack for finding and acquiring venereal disease.

In AA, they talk about not struggling or trying to manage everything, but rather letting God manage it. Not believing in an interventionist God, I had to interpret this as simply trying to "accept the things I cannot change." I saw a vision of my life where I was able to accept life's vicissitudes with humility and grace, and where life opened itself to me as a result. With it came a wave of nostalgia. The last time I had felt like this, I had been in college and taking a lot of acid.

How long had I shut myself away from life? In that goddamn apartment with that goddamn bottle! I had been unable to accept any discomfort or unhappiness, so I had avoided everything except liquor. I had tried to control my feelings, and as a result, I had found discomfort and unhappiness like I never imagined. But now I could accept life, embrace life, welcome all the awkwardness and frustration and pain and indignities. How many opportunities were right at my fingertips? I could talk to one of these girls wearing the smart bathing suits and be married in a few months! Or just find a friend. Or be hired as staff writer as some kind of pastry magazine. Anything was possible! I saw now the glowing door open before me! I saw all doors open, all doors open and aligned, one after another, and behind them all there was--

There was what? I couldn't say... The insight slipped away without revealing itself, but the fading reverie left a warm glow, and I dipped my head back into the cool water and looked up into the sky crowded with bright weightless clouds. I could see now that so many things were coming together in my life. I was getting sober. I was learning to talk to people. Even the dream of being a novelist -- the dream -- was coming true!

So now when Shawn told me about the walls covered with bone, it seemed like yet another thing falling into place. But this time it was something sinister, something so awful I thought it couldn't be real. Now it seemed that whatever force was bringing my dreams to life was also acting on my nightmares.

I looked Shawn in the eye, trying to make my face completely neutral. He gazed back at me, his face half in shadow, half colored by the yellow porch light, his expression dead serious. He went on, speaking softly: "Skulls... teeth... arms and hands... melted together... on the walls... up on the ceiling."

I asked him very carefully, "Is this something you read about on the internet?"

He shook his head and said, "No, man," and looked down into his lap.

I needed to find out exactly what was going on, even if it meant giving myself away. I asked him, "Have you been reading my reddit posts?"

He squinted at me and asked, "Reddit? What is that?"

So it was real after all...

If I could just be drunk until the end of time
The Author's Narrative Part 13 86th Post Posted 17 June 2016 at 03:52:00 EDT Link to original

Alcohol goes great with nostalgia and melancholy. It's what gives us misty-eyed barflies, forlorn poetry, midnight phone calls, the last page of The Great Gatsby, Sinatra ballads and 73% of all country music.

That was my favorite part of drinking: the wistful interlude a couple hours after the first flush of drunkenness, when you wander away from a boisterous party and look out into the darkened woods and see for a moment the fragile past floating ghostly before you, colored in sunset oranges, all the bygone things which have slipped away in the gentle flow of time. Your breath catches in the tightness of your throat, and your eyes fill with tears. Then somebody calls your name or you have to piss, and you wander back into the party.

I felt like I was at my finest in these moments. I felt poetic and sensitive and alive. Eventually, though, it all became an awful parody of itself. The gentle wistfulness devolved into me sitting in front of my laptop, drunk on a Wednesday night, watching sad Youtube videos, weeping and slurping down vodka and water. I would watch any sort of weepy video (soldier homecomings, kids with cancer, dogs being put down, etc.) just to get a good cry on, to trigger that dopamine release that came with the tears. It was nothing more than emotional masturbation. Just like with the alcohol itself, I had found something that gave me true pleasure, then used it over and over until my feelings had become rote and dead.

The same sort of thing happened with my memories of Mother. At first they came unbidden, stirring up a sense of wonder so powerful it brought tears to my eyes. But over the course of too many drunks and too many hangovers, I replayed the memories over and over from every angle. Eventually I couldn't be sure if certain parts came from the original or were formed by during later recollections. The whispering magic became a monotonous drone. The vaporous impressions dried and hardened into simple facts.

Mother was a woman sewn together from different things.

Mother would come in late at night with a bag that squirmed.

Inside the bag were children.

We would go down into the basement where she kept the cages.

We would do things to them together.

I thought the memories had no more power. I thought they were just abstractions at this point. Bad data. Who could explain them? And why bother?

Now I found myself walking down the street in the middle of the night, trying to burn off the eerie feeling that Shawn's story had put inside me. At the intersection, a stiff breeze zipped down the empty lanes, making the traffic lights sway. I walked by a bar with a patio and listened to the low rumble of confident male voices. A smell came off the bar -- cigarettes and hot wings and liquor sweat. It was the smell of action. The smell of good times. I could just walk in there, have a couple drinks and hold court. Tell a few jokes. Make a few friends.

The problem with going out sober is you have to make all these little decisions: where to go, where to sit, what to get. When you go out drunk you just make one decision: to keep drinking. Every other decision just falls into place. Life becomes easy. As easy as listening to a story.

It wasn't worth going in the bar. It would be closing time in an hour anyways. So I walked past it... on down the street... by myself...

God, if there was no closing time. No tomorrow morning. Just darkness and magic and mystery forever. If I could just be drunk until the end of time.

CHODE OR CHOAD??? LETS SETTLE THE DEBATE
The Author's Narrative Part 14 90th Post Posted 26 June 2016 at 01:47:45 UTC Link to original

Posted. na na na FUCK REDDIT

I have decided to move out of the sober house. People usually stay here a couple months. I've stayed here over six months. Honestly, I'm finding it hard to live in the same house with Shawn. He's never been easy to live with, and lately we've been getting in arguments about little shit like chores. On top of that, I'm freaked out by his story about the room full of bone. I've come up with a few theories about why he would tell me that story -- and why he would insist it was real. None of these theories are terribly comforting.

I want to put it behind me. For a while, I had actually considered finding the warehouse that he mentioned. Maybe it would give me some answers. But I've decided: fuck that. I'm not going to some goddamn warehouse in crack city. I don't need an ending to my story that badly. I'll just do what I've been doing: make shit up.

Actually, I've been stuck for the past few days. I can't really come up with anything that seems fitting as an ending. I've been considering just leaving it unfinished. Maybe not all stories should have ending. Endings are lies.

I've realized that AA meetings are just a form of storytelling. That's what we do in meetings. We sit in a circle and tell each other stories. Oh, we pretend like it's all real life. But every time somebody shares, they make an attempt to "storify" their life, to make it into some tidy little parable. Sometimes the parables are profound and touching, and sometimes they're absurd or clichéd or just terrible.

A guy in meeting might tell a story about how he got into an argument with his boss, and he might end it with something like, "... and that's how I learned I need to stand up for himself." Except maybe arguing with his boss was a terrible idea. Maybe he's trying to portray stupidity as wisdom. Or maybe it really was wisdom. Either way, he's packaging the truth up as a story with a lesson at the end. And this covers up one of the essential facts of life: that it just keeps going along, not giving a shit about our attempts to explain it.

There are these moments in life when the goal is achieved and the story should end and the credits should roll. But instead, it just keeps going the fuck along. The guy gets the girl, and now they have to live with each other. She farts a lot, and he hogs the shower. Or the underdog teams wins the tournament, and now they have to get ready for the next season. 10 seasons later, they're all retired, sitting around and scratching their balls.

That's the first big problem the recovering alcoholic encounters. We make the inspiring and courageous decision to walk away from our whole way of life to try something new. The story could end there. But it doesn't. Instead, life stretches on, and we have to live day after day with the grinding boredom of sobriety.

So maybe the interface story should be like that. No tidy ending. Just "Here. Take or leave it." Except that's lame. That's a rip off. I'll just wait. Some kind of ending will come to me. But I'm not going to that warehouse, though. Fuck no. I'm not asking Shawn any more about it either. If I have to make up a shitty ending, that's fine. A lot of good books have shitty endings. At this point, I'm just a little burned out.

After I'm done, I'm going to put aside writing and work on my social life for a while. I'm going to try to change my number of friends from zero to a positive integer. I thought maybe I could find a group of friends in recovery, but it hasn't happened. I don't like recovery people. They're corny and boring. I've found a room to rent near downtown in an arty neighborhood. As a soon-to-be acclaimed writer (ha!), don't I belong among the thinkers and the artistes?

[''The end to this chapter doesn't feel believable. After everything that this character has said previously, how could he come to this decision so lightly? Sure, he's a self-deceiving alcoholic. Sure, people make crazy decisions on a whim all the time. This might be realistic, but it is not believable. A novel must have more logic than real life. The events in a novel must operate by a chain of cause and effect that the reader can follow. If you're going to have somebody completely contradict their previously expressed viewpoints, it has to be the result of some event happening in their life which causes them to change. The bigger the change in the character, the bigger the event must be. Before you post this, I would rewrite it, playing up the conflict with Shawn. Make it into a full-blown fight that forces the narrator to move out. Then have the narrator living alone, going to stir-crazy, which leads him to make the fateful choice.'' -- K.]

I'm going to get in touch with some old friends, and I'm going to go out and meet people. I'll just try to get a small circle of friends started. I know how to meet friends. I've always known how. It's easy. I'm going to drink again.

Falling Into The Abyss
The Author's Narrative Part 15 92nd Post Posted 27 June 2016 at 22:26:33 UTC Link to original

The person sitting in the big chair. New mother. A basement full of specimens. Glistening membranes. Blurred faces laughing. Tower witch monster mountain apocalyptic sky infested with winged things. The dream folds in on itself and spills out dozens of new creatures, images intercourse

Panes of light behind everything. Ragged muppet creatures tumbling out and chasing one another, devouring, bloody crunching. Growing panes of light. Galapagos critters howling, ingesting, affixing, lamprey succubus Voltron food chain formation. Panes of light: a persistent locus.

The window panes' persistence triggers reality. Rational bootstrapping. Persistence rapidly infects everything else. The weird Galapagos creatures die off, too weird to live. All the props of ordinary reality are rushed into place just before I open my eyes.

A sunlit window in a bedroom. Where is this? My new place. I rented it online before moving out of the sober house. This is real. I try to remember what I did over the last few days. The memories are a dark, shifting mess, a clinging mud I'm afraid to touch. Face hurts. My tongue finds cuts on the inside of my bottom lip. Brown spots dot the white pillowcase.

Picking my head up and looking around at the room, I recall it from the 20 sober minutes I spent here before going to the bar. Beside the bed, the nightstand has been tipped over and the lamp is a corded pile of shards. Shit. This isn't my stuff. It's just a bedroom in a somebody's house.

I slide out of bed. My stomach tingles, my brain tingles, my limbs are moving stroboscopically. Oh, wow, I am inside the nightmare. Mind-crucifying. Reddish spots make a trail along the hardwood floor. Fuck fuck fuck. I can't handle this. I run to the little bathroom, and a red-faced creature lurches into the mirror's frame. Oh, Jesus. A distorted mass of bruises. I turn this way and that to see my new features. The horrible tingling in my brain feels like it is going to eat through my skull. I check my teeth and my heart sinks. The bonding on my front tooth has been knocked out. The other teeth seem OK though.

I look down at the sink. It seems to have been scrubbed with blood. Swirling trails of reddish brown cover the porcelain. It's on the floor, the toilet, the walls. Oh, it's a lot of blood.

I'm Taking The Vodka
The Author's Narrative Part 16 93rd Post Posted 29 June 2016 at 02:06:31 EDT Link to original

Have you ever noticed that whenever you swallow your throat closes up for a moment and you can't breathe at all? Of course it always opens back up. The process is quite automatic, and you don't need to think about it. But what if you do think about it? What if by thinking about it, you somehow confuse everything, and your throat just stays closed? What if all that gummy flesh just sticks together and you suffocate to death?

This is how I think after a bender. I call it the "Scary Swallows." I swallow and my throat seems to "catch" for a moment, cutting off my windpipe, and panic blooms through my brain, threatening to take over everything. Then I manage to suck in a breath, and the panic subsides until the next swallow. So I try not to swallow at all, but then I'm thinking about it, obsessing over it, and my throat starts to twitch.

Shut up. Shut up. Irrelevant. Stupid. Do something. What do I do? Liquor. Look for liquor. My queasy stomach groans at the thought of it, but every other part of me shrieks with anticipation. Liquor will make everything else possible. Without it, the panic will rattle me apart. With it, I can do anything.

I scan the blood-smeared bathroom for bottles: nothing. Out in the bedroom, there is an empty half gallon of vodka and empty cans everywhere. Drunk to the last drop. Goddamn it. Nothing in here.

Where is the owner? I remember that I checked into the place without meeting him, using a door code. Have I met him since? No idea. That area of memory is corrupt. What will he think when he sees the broken lamp, the blood, my face? He'll kick me out for sure.

What if something even worse is waiting outside the bedroom door? What if I've killed him and his body is lying face down on the floor and my entire life is over? And I was so close -- so fucking close -- to getting out of the misery, of doing something, of accomplishing something, something mom and dad could be proud of, and now it's all over, all destroyed.

Calm yourself. Calmness. This is all imagination. Oh your fanciful imagination. What a delight it is. Just go out into the living room and look. Just go. Just go.

I crack the bedroom door and peek out. It's the ordinary living room and kitchen of a pretty nice apartment. I don't see anybody lying face down in a pool of blood. Nothing is broken.

Liquor. Now.I go to the kitchen. There's nothing on the counters. I open the refrigerator. Pleasepleaseplease. There is nothing. Oh, you teetotaling cunt. Did I get a room with the one sober motherfucker in this whole fucked-up drinkin'-ass city? I open the freezer. A frosty bottle lies on its side. I pull it out.

It is a fifth of Absolute. Full. Unopened. Emitting a ghostly cold mist like an angel. I stare at it in my shaking hands, tears coming to my eyes. I feel flowing through my entire existence the begrudging mercy of a disapproving god.

I scratch at the stupid, slippery plastic around the cap. My trembling hands are almost useless. I imagine myself having a seizure before I can get the bottle open, dying right here on the kitchen floor, like a man in a desert dying of thirst just feet away from an oasis. But finally I manage to tear the cracking plastic off.

The front door of the apartment swings open, letting in a blast of horrible sunlight. A figure stands at the door. I shove the bottle back into the freezer and slam it shut and turn my back to the person. I want to run and hide, to evaporate, but all I can do is just stand there. Fuck. Fuck.

"Oh, hey, man," a friendly voice says. "Nick, right?"

"Yeah. Good," I mumble. I am still standing with my back to the person. This is not valid human behavior. Fuck. Fuck. Why did he have to come home now? I force myself to turn around.

A youngish dude is standing in the doorway with bag slung over his shoulder. Apparently, the owner. "Hey... Are you alright?" he asks, the smile fading from his face.

"Yeah."

"What happened to you?"

"I don't know. Mountain biking."

Another invalid response from me. Now he's worried. He glances around the apartment, checking to see if his stuff is OK.

"I broke your lamp," I say preemptively. "I'm going to go. I'm sorry."

"What happened?" he asks, closing the front door.

"I got drunk and... Mountain biking," I mumble. I head to the bedroom, my heart pounding.

On second inspection, I notice that not only is the nightstand turned over and the lamp broken, but there are broken plates and a hole punched in the dry wall and beef jerky sticks strewn everywhere.

"Jesus, man. What did you do?" the guy asks as he follows me into the room.

"I don't know," I say, already on the verge of sobbing. Maybe I can just cry my way out of this. Nobody likes to see a grown man cry. I've got to get out of here. "I got drunk. Please just take the month's rent. I'll go," I say. This is a really stupid offer. I can't afford to give away a month's rent. But I don't know what else to do. I can't handle going to jail. It would kill me. My heart feels like it's trying to punch its way out of my chest. I need liquor. I just need liquor.

"Dude, hold on. How much stuff did you fuck up?" the guy asks.

"This is it," I say, not really knowing if I'm telling the truth or not. A bunch of my clothes are lying on the floor, and I gather them up and throw them into my suitcase and zip it up, only to realize that there are a lot more of my clothes obviously lying all over the place.

"Well, we need to figure out the damages."

"I can't, OK? I've got to go," I say in a quavering, childish voice. "Just take the month's rent."

The guy starts inspecting the room as I pack my clothes. The awkwardness of it makes me want to claw my eyes out. My suitcase won't close. The clothes won't fit unless they are perfectly folded. God, I want to cry. I am almost crying. Good. Good. It's like a squid blasting out a jet of ink. It will allow me to escape. I throw my least favorite shirts onto the floor and zip the suitcase up.

When I stand up, me and the guy have this moment where we're looking at each other eye to eye. "Dude," he says, "You're all fucked up."

"I'm taking the vodka," I announce.

Fuck, A Five Day Bender! /Or/ I Am The King In The Land Of MIsery
The Author's Narrative Part 17 95th Post Posted 30 June 2016 at 06:57:06 UTC Link to original

Outside, the midday light and the heat are mind-bending, like some kind of goddamn UFO ray zapping me. Sweat rolls down my burning face. Squinting makes my cheeks ache. The wheels of my suitcase rumble over the gritty sidewalk. I have no fucking idea where I am or where I'm going. Some street. Some fucking neighborhood.

I desperately want a drink from the bottle of liquor I'm carrying in a grocery bag, but I'm afraid somebody will see and report me. All the internal alarms in my mind and body are ringing at once. Each passing car seems like it will pull over. Each one seems to slow and veer toward the curb. Each one is surely filled with gang members or undercover cops, ready to beat me down. Each one passes, sending a wave of warm air and panic past me.

I am insane. I do not belong in normal society. I must be isolated. I must keep moving. The sidewalk ends. Shit. Fuck. The road is turning into some kind of freeway. Can I walk along it? Is it allowed? I don't know. I don't know. Why don't I know things? Everybody knows things. Here I am wandering tits-out. No fucking clue. This wet bottle of liquor is showing right through the plastic bag. I've got to get somewhere. I've got to get this liquor inside me.

I trudge through an abandoned lot, trying to get away from the road, dragging the rebellious suitcase over rocks and weeds. There's a bunch of high grass and some kind of sloping concrete drainage thing behind it. I don't even know what the fuck it is or how to describe it. I'm not a novelist. Never was. I plop down on the concrete so that the weeds shield me from the passing cars on the road, and I spin the cap off the bottle.

My stomach cringes when the cold liquor hits it. Relief begins to flow almost immediately into my brain. Merely psychological, I'm sure, but psychological is exactly what I need right now. I breathe deep and shudder and take more sips, shaping my tongue into a sluice to send it right down my throat with no fuss. The panic slackens. Perfect. Perfect. Relief.

All the nightmarish feelings are still inside me, but now there is just a bit of distance between me and them. They are at bay. Pretty soon I've taken down a quarter of the bottle. Wow. Fuck. Look at me. Just a few days out of the sober house and I'm literally lying in the ditch with a bottle of liquor. At least it's a concrete, man-made ditch. No déclassé dirt ditches for me. I snicker at the thought. My panic of just moments ago seems ridiculous. Underneath it, though, the awful horror is still there. I know my snickering is just an empty little show of bravery.

What to do now? Usually, at this point, I would do forensics. We have to find out what happened over the past few days. For example, who beat me up? But it could be anybody. Who even cares. I used to get punched out all the time. Whoever did this really had it in for me, though. I must have unleashed a few of my delightful bon mots on an unamused stranger.

I check my phone. All my cringe-sensors are on full alert, ready to fire when I see what nonsense texts and 3 AM calls I've made. But it's just a few ordinary texts from my new "landlord." He says he won't be back until Monday. That's today. I left the sober house on -- when was it? Wednesday? Fuck, a five day bender. And only a handful of memories from it all. Scary. At least the owner was out of town for most of it. I take a sip to my good fortune.

It occurs to me to check reddit. I have a vague memory of being on there, chortling at some outrageous comment I made. Let's see... It turns out I posted the piece I had been working on. And the title was "CHODE OR CHOAD??? LET'S SETTLE THE DEBATE" Jesus. How stupid. It certainly undermines my claims of possessing otherworldly knowledge. "Hey, some guy possesses the power to see into alternate timelines, and he's using it to make chode jokes on the internet!" Right.

The wave of ethanol relief is fully washing over me, caressing me, easing my worries. I can feel the euphoria of the booze, but I can also feel the dread of the withdrawal at the same time, and I know that both feelings are lies. Soon the euphoria will be gone, and the dread will reign again. It will be like this for 3 days -- or more if I keep getting drunk and this turns into just another day in the bender. I have to try to taper down, but tapering means always drinking less than you want to, always remaining in barely tolerable misery.

I groan and my babyish instincts tell me to take another drink, but I don't. I shouldn't drink for another hour. Then one shot every hour, until it's time for sleep, then 6 shots to speed me through the nightmare realms. God. The math. The fucking math. 17 drinks in a fifth. 9 hours until alcohol sales stop. The body processes a drink an hour. For all those months, I didn't have to do the drinking math. Now I'm back in it.

I groan and lie back against the concrete drainage whatever. I know I look like the very picture of a drunk, but I don't care. I wallow in the feeling. Good. Good, I say!

One of the lies that leads you down the road of addiction is that you are "just visiting." The first time you end up in the drunk tank or the trap house (as the kids call it) or the rehab, you look at all the other guys and shake your head at how sad their lives are, because they are regulars. But you -- you are just visiting. You're here because of a crazy fuck-up, but you'll go back to your normal life. Heck, it'll be a funny story. Even when it happens for the second or third time, you're still just visiting. You're just a tourist in the land of misery, not a resident.

Well, no more lies for me. I am not visiting. I am returning home.

And everything is just where I left it.

I need answers...
The Author's Narrative Part 18 97th Post Posted 8 July 2016 at 01:43:39 EDT Link to original

The back of my neck feels all hot and boggy when I wake up. I hate that. The air conditioner in this motel room makes a lot of noise, but it's just a big show. I close my eyes and hope sleep takes me away somewhere dark and cool, but it doesn't. Reality persists.

I have been tapering off booze for the past few days. It's amazing how timid and jittery I become when the alcohol is oozing its way out of me. I haven't even worked up the nerve to call the motel manager and complain about the air conditioning. To think, I lived for years in this helpless, reclusive state. What a fucking waste. The whole time, I though the alcohol was giving me courage when it was stealing it from me.

I can't drink anymore. I need courage.

I'm down to my last two hundred dollars. I could call good ol' mom and dad and ask them for some help. But what kind of conversation would that be? "Why am I broke? Well, I took some time off work so I could write a book. About what? Oh, you know, tripping acid, Nazis... finger blasting... cats."

No, I'm not going to call ol' mom and dad. I'm not going back to the sober house either. I'm going to get some answers. I'm going to call Shawn.

Shawn shows up at the motel right after he gets off of work. I'm surprised because we had gotten into a lot of little arguments towards the end, and I left on pretty bad terms with him. I'm standing in the parking lot when his black truck pulls up, and my paranoia starts to flare. Maybe he saw the story online and was outraged. Maybe he's been looking for me.

He strides up to me and gives me a quick hug, patting me stiffly on the back. He steps back and squints at the dingy face of the motel. "I know this fucking motel," he says quietly. "Come on, man. Let's get your stuff."

"Get my stuff?"

"You said you're sober, right? I already talked to the house manager. He'll take you back. We got a bed," he says.

"I'm not going back to the house. I asked you to come here because I... I want to know where that warehouse is. The one downtown."

Shawn turns and looks me in the eye. "Why you wanna know about that?

I tell him the story. I tell him about Mother Horse Eyes, the Nazis, the CIA, the LSD, the experiments, most of the stuff that I've told you. I leave out some parts, like the fact that he is in the story. That we are in the story. That all of this in the story right now. He listens to me, but his face darkens. Maybe he thinks I'm crazy or high or full of evil spirits.

"Listen to me," I say, working myself up to deliver my big speech. "I have lived things which are impossible. Which could not have happened. So have you. Those tunnels, those cages, the bones, none of it should exist. But you saw it. I've seen things too. We have to find out what it is. I lived with that monster for a whole summer. I know she's down there. And I want to find her."

Shawn narrows his eyes as he stares at me. "What's down there is the devil, Nick. If you go down there, you won't come back."

"I want to see her. I want to know. Please," I say to him, my voice breaking. "I just want to know why I'm so fucked up."

"You're fucked up because you drink all day. And you got character defects. Like me. And everybody else. That's it."

"Don't you want to know what's going on down there? You're not curious? "

"No."

"It doesn't eat at you? You don't need any answers?"

He shakes his head. "God doesn't promise answers. God gave us all the answers we need in the Bible. That's all we get. I don't ask him what's going to happen in the future. I don't do horoscopes. I don't practice witchcraft. God's not going to come down and give me the answers to everything. All he wants from me is obedience."

"Oh, come on. So we shouldn't try to figure things out? We shouldn't ask questions? That's just some anti-intellectual, anti-science bullshit."

When we were roommates and got into disagreements, he would start quoting the Bible at me, and I would start picking at him with snide intellectual arguments, using as many big words as I could. We're falling back into the same dynamic.

"Anti-science?" he says. "Shit, I'm not saying don't be a scientist. I'm saying don't go into a tunnel with fucking bones on the walls, man."

I find myself laughing at this. He smiles with me.

"For real though, man. It's dangerous," he says, the smile fading

I look out across the crumbling parking lot. Long evening shadows are drawn across the asphalt. "Man, I don't know. I just feel like if I could figure out what happened during that summer, then maybe I wouldn't be so fucked up. I've obsessed about this shit for 25 years or so, and now there's a chance to get some answers.

"Just let it go."

"No. No, there has to be an ending. There has to be some kind of... pay-off."

"Moses and the people wandered the desert for 40 years looking for the promised land. One day the Lord took him up to a mountaintop and showed him all the promised land, and Moses died right there, without ever setting his foot in the land. Do you know what kind of Lord does that?"

"A messed up one," I muttered.

"The Lord knows that we are generations. Man is of few days. Generations might pass before we get any answers. For the last ten years, I've been living like the world might end any day, but I'm not doing that anymore. I have to remember that we know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh. That's why I'm going back to school and all that."

I nod. Through the course of our little debates, I had told him many times that the world wasn't going to end anytime soon. The world was going to go on and on like it always did, in a fucked up and confused state. Maybe some of it rubbed off on him. Maybe some of it should be rubbing off on me now.

"I need answers," I told him. "I've tried just accepting the mystery and whatever, but at this point I just need to know why I'm all fucked up, why I can't stop drinking, why I can't be normal."

"Man, I could tell you where the warehouse is. But what are you going to do when you go down there? What are you going to do when you meet the devil?"

I haven't told him that part of the story. It's a part that I'm not sure I really believe myself.

"I think... I have been given reason to believe... that whatever is down there... I can destroy it."

I am coming. Mother. I am coming.
The Author's Narrative Part 19 99th Post Posted 12 July 2016 at 23:59:09 UTC Link to original

Mother locks me in the cage and sits down at the kitchen table. I scream and cry but she doesn't move. Her horse eyes stare at the wall. The sun sets very slow and the room goes dark. She is just the shape of a black mountain sitting at the table.

When the sun rises her eyes are still on the wall. "You were bad. Your magic was bad. You won't be bad again," she says.

"I hate you!" I shout. I do I hate her hate her hate her.

Mother's birds giggle. She stands up from the table and all her golden flies scramble around. The bars in the cage slide to the side like magic. She reaches in and grabs me with her crab hand. It hurts so bad and I scream and kick at her but she doesn't care.

She lifts me up and carries me into the living room.

It is full of cages! When did they get here? There are naked kids inside the rows of cages. They are not scared like me. They are sitting cross-legs with their hands on their knees, sitting nice and still and straight with their eyes closed.

"I will show you what will happen if you are bad," she says. We go to the back hall. There is the door to the basement. I don't like the basement. I cry and ask her to please let me go please please. She opens the basement door. Usually the basement is dark but not this time. Light shines out of the door. I look inside.

Inside it is not the basement.

It is alive.

Grim stuff of the news lately. Gunshots popping like fireworks. People scrambling through shaky footage. Cops dead in the streets.

It hit 100 degrees today. It's supposed to hit 100 every day this week. What a strange summer it has become.

Nobody can agree on the truth. They say the media is ignoring the problem. They say the media is creating the problem. The protesters are the problem. The cops are the problem. The whole thing is a false flag operation so Obama can take our AR-15s away. It's a false flag operation so they can crack down on Black Lives Matters.

Chemtrails crisscross in the sky. Conspiracy theories clash in the comments section. Single women in your area want to date now. Across the ocean, they're crucifying people again.

I feel so much different than I did in the spring. Less optimistic. I thought maybe I would achieve the dream of publishing a novel and -- gee, wouldn't that be neat? But now I don't feel any excitement about it at all. Whether I publish something or not, I'll still be this friendless little specter, holed up somewhere, sneaking drinks. Money is pointless for a recluse that never does anything. And fame? A bicycle for a fish.

There is nothing in my future. I'm going back to the past. I'm going to kill it.

Mother doesn't care what I do so long as I don't bother her. I make sure not to bother her. When she comes into a room I sneak out quiet as a mouse. I never go into the rooms with cages. I never ever go near the basement. I just stay quiet and make sure not to get in trouble.

I have been practicing my magic. Doing small secret things. I make bread for myself out of stones. I make yummy cookies. My stuffed animals walk around and do fun things. My trucks race around a little track I made. Magic is a lot of fun but I'm afraid of making Mother mad.

How long will Mother stay here? Will it be forever? I think it will be forever. It makes me cry when I think about it. I can't even think about mom and dad for a little second before I start to cry.

I came up with a neat idea. Lately there are a lot of ideas in my head. Like a crowd of people all talking at once. One idea was very strong and clear.

I tried to bring mom and dad to the house but I couldn't do it right. My magic fell apart and they turned into stupid cats. It's because mom and dad are on the outside. I can't make them do things with magic. I'm not strong enough.

But I can make myself do things.

Shawn told me where the warehouse is. I am going down there. I am being called. By the shape of my entire life, I am being called. The story must end this way. Mother will be down there, and so I will try to destroy her. I've thought about bringing some kind of weapon. But what good would a weapon be against her? She who is everything. Who has shaped my live across time and space.

I feel exactly like I do when the evening comes. I have woke up so many mornings, swearing I won't drink that day, but 7 PM comes and I am walking to the store, feeling none too wise, and I don't want to be walking to the store, and I know I'm making the wrong choice, but my feet keep moving me closer and closer. I know what I am doing is wrong but I am doing it anyways.

I am coming. Mother. I am coming.

So long, and thanks for all the chitinous cruciforms!
The Author's Narrative Part 20 100th Post Posted 18 July 2016 at 00:16:24 UTC Link to original

I am being changed. Mother's lessons are teaching me things, transforming me. At night, I lie in my little bed eating cookies and watching the ceiling. Then the seams open up and -- wow -- look at what's behind them! Colors without names. Stars from long ago. Tunnels through the beyond.

My magic is growing stronger. I can make things happen. I pray and wait and they come to me. Every morning little sparrows land on tree branch outside my window. Mother says I can't be too greedy. Press at the curves, she says. Direct the flow. Don't move against it.

I am reading the Bible with the new words I've learned. Christ had blood magic. The magic of suffering. Of desire and limitation. At night, Mother and I watch his soft flesh writhe and struggle on the hard architecture of the cross.

"Mother," he cries. "Behold your son."

"Father," he cries. "Into your hands I commit my spirit."

Soon I will call my own little christ

Unto these yellow sands.

The other passengers on the bus seem unaware that I am headed towards a showdown which will decide the fate of all mankind.

Am I still sane? I feel pretty sane. I'm not drooling at the mouth. I'm not shouting at the pigeons. But what really makes me feel sane is that I can still recognize that my actions are insane. I am going to confront a sinister entity which has been shaping the course of human events since prehistory, which may one day enslave all of humanity. And I am doing it wearing an old Garth Brooks t-shirt.

As I step off the bus and onto the blinding summer sidewalk, I am reminded of the brave Marines piling out of their landing vehicles onto the beaches of Iwo Jima. Yes, brave warriors are we. They say one hallmark of delusional thinking is grandiosity. The delusional man often thinks himself to be a part of some grand struggle, when really there is no struggle but that in his mind.

A pigeon bobs across my path. I mutter, "Fuck off."

Google Maps leads me through the streets. I expect to see a bunch of crack heads milling around but everything is empty. In the sunshine, it looks like a ordinary factory street. The warehouse itself is just a dusty old brick building with scribbles of spray paint and boarded-up windows. It's not even especially shitty.

The front door is chained up, but I check the boarded windows and find a board that bends back easily. A musty smell seeps out of the dark. Fuck. Am I really doing this? Sweat already coats my face. I fish a flashlight out of my backpack and turn it on.

Inside the warehouse, my sweeping flashlight finds dusty shapes littering the floor. Old boxes. Cinder blocks. And a gleam on the floor -- yes, it's our first crack pipe. Or maybe a meth pipe. Is there a difference? Listening to people in the rooms has made me feel rather worldly when it comes to drugs, but it's all been secondhand stories. What do I really know?

Shawn said there was a flight of stairs that led down to a door. The floor of the main room doesn't seem to have any stairs leading down, but there are a few doorways on the far side. I make my way over, stepping carefully through the debris. The middle doorway sits at the top of a short stair case. At the bottom is another empty doorway. The flashlight catches the glint of metal: a pair of torn hinges.

When we were roommates, Shawn always has such a cool demeanor -- cool and poised and confident. But now I see a new picture of him: working the hydraulic spreader, prying the door off its hinges, the metal groaning then shrieking, sweat coating his face, his eyes bright and wide with that terrible craving, that thing beyond hunger.

I shudder and step down the stairs. Sure enough, they lead to a tunnel. I move slowly, forced to press against some basic animal instinct to go back! get the fuck out of there! But the tunnel is strangely plain and featureless, considering that it lies under a crack den and leads to a possible flesh interface. It's just dusty block walls with no light fixtures or anything.

The tunnel leads to more tunnels. More stairs. Empty rooms. The black air teems with bits of dust that shine in the flashlight. My skin tingles all over. Is it the dust clinging to me? Or is it just the low-grade terror that has filled my body? It reminds me of the tingle that filled my limbs on all those mornings before the first drink. How I had begged for that feeling to end. But now I know it will never end. There will always been another awful morning, another fuckup, another withdrawal -- unless I go forward. Not away from the nightmare. But into it.

But it goes on and on. I cannot believe how long the tunnels are, how many rooms there are, how deep the stairs are. I can taste the dust on my lips, and I pull my shirt up over my nose. Occasionally I come across an old metal chair or some rotting boards but nothing else. I'm hoping to find some scrap of paper or maybe a nametag, some clue as to who built this monstrosity, but there is nothing but dust, more and more dust.

I stop and watch the dust float across my flashlight's beam. Holding out my sweating, shaking hand, I let a dark speck settle on my fingertip. Looking at it closely, I see that it's in the shape of a flake. Is it dust? Or is it ash?

A wave of dread moves through me. Could it be from a burned interface? Is it human ash?

The wave of dread is followed by a flurry of nervous wisecracks. Fucking dust. What the fuck do I know about dust or ash? I'm not some dust expert. Maybe it's just flaky dust. Maybe it's dandruff. Maybe I'll find a huge cache of used wigs down here. "Did you find an interdimensional portal?" "No, but these wigs are in pretty good condition. Look, we got a mid 60s Dusty Springfield here."

I wipe my hand on my shirt and keep moving forward. Just a few steps later, my flashlight finds the end of the block tunnel and the beginning of the rock cave. Just like Shawn said. God, can it be real? Maybe it's an ordinary rock tunnel. Maybe it's just part of an unfinished...

Reaching out of from the shadowy wall, with its bony fingers splayed almost elegantly, is the shape of a human hand.

I stare at it for a moment, letting my eyes flood with tears, before I have to kneel down and wipe my face. I am not crazy. I have not been crazy all these years. Something happened. Something happened to me when I was a child, and I'm not just some fuck up. I'm not just some piece of shit loser who can't keep his hands off a bottle. I have seen something. I have been touched by something vast and unimaginable.

I stand and approach the hand. Yes, it is a human hand, as real as my own hand holding the flashlight, except it is little more than bone wrapped in a gray, papery skin. It extends from a wrist that is fused to a distorted mass of gray and black shapes. The flashlight passes over an awful collage of desiccated anatomy: rows of teeth, racks of ribs, pairs of eye sockets and hip sockets, snaking vertebrae and femurs and tibias and clavicles.

For a moment, I feel like I am not standing on the ground but am suspended over a pit full of bodies, like one of the great burning pits of Treblinka, only much vaster. These are not just the bodies from Treblinka but from all the camps, all the prisons, all the pogroms, all the wars, all the plagues, all the indifferent machinery of history, the great unfeeling clock-wheels of the cosmos which roll sublimely along, generation after generation, rending and crushing the human form into pieces, into powder, into dust, into ash.

Vertigo encloses me. I totter and find myself sitting on the ground, sweating and gasping. The jumble of body parts spins around me, and I close my eyes.

What is this vision of death? This dead clockwork universe? Stars and abyss. Atoms and void. This is something beyond Mother. Even more horrible and fundamental. Mother is at least alive -- monstrous and devouring, but alive. Virulently fertile, she writhes and struggles within this vast tomb universe, binding times and worlds to...

...but the dizziness passes, and with it the visions. The ideas slip away like fish in a stream.

Sitting there in the afterglow of this near-revelation, I think of what Shawn said happened to him when he came to this cave. He said he smelled apple sauce coming out of the tunnel, a smell that reminded him of his daughter. He said he could feel the presence of the 'evil one' tempting him with dreams of family and love.

I open my eyes and pick up the flashlight and shine it down the tunnel. Is there anything down there? Anything to tempt me? The flashlight catches awful shapes along the walls extending on and on until the beam of light fails. But I don't see anyone in the tunnel. I don't sense anyone waiting for me. And I don't smell anything but dust and ash and...

Cookies. Little sugar cookies. My god. I remember. They were like the one's my mom used to make for me. But not quite the same as them. These were the ones I used to make for myself. Out of stones.

The memory of it comes flooding up to me so hard that again my eyes are full of tears. Christ. I used to sit in my room with stones and turn them into cookies. I tried to make them like mom's cookies, but they always tasted a little different, and that made me miss her even more. Impossible. Completely impossible. And yet real. Real and floating in the darkness before me.

I stand and brush myself off. There is something at the end of the tunnel waiting for me. Good or evil, it will be an answer. A resolution. An end.

I walk into the dark.

I say my prayer and look out the window.

For a long time, the street is empty.

Then he comes walking down the road, carrying a flashlight, even though it's light out.

I rush downstairs. Mother is sitting at the kitchen table. I think of saying goodbye to her, but the gleam in her eyes tells me there is no need.

I go into the dim little front hall. A beam of daylight is shining through the peephole.

There is a knock on the door. I wait. The knob turns, and the door opens. This is it, the beginning.

I walk into the light.

THE END