Tag Archives: psychedelic

The Fractal Rangers: Princess Pop’s Predicament

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Princess Pop descended from the lights, a flaming nude angel. Halogen green panties, its elastic snapped by an expert military slingshottist, rocketed from the stage to snugly wrap against her pubis and tuck around her hips. Sparks sprayed from stage rear, sending arrows of multi-hued bottle rockets pinwheeling.

Princess Pop favored her fans with a chiclet grin as electronic spiders crawled on her torso, rapidly knitting a horizontally striped purple and black tube top. The spiders, bidding adieu, flung themselves outward, their spinnerets weaving a night black cobweb skirt, and exploded retina-etching flashbangs of poptronica emoticons in a crackling arc to dust.

Princess Pop waved her arms and ghost limbs, phosphorescent blue, slurped along kaliesque trajectories. Riot red fingerless dukes fell from the psychedelic koi trawling heavens of the riven warehouse ceiling and spun onto her punching, twirling fists.

“Hey!”

Pop’s first word resounded, a fell wave, a tsunami of sound flattening the salivating horde and extinguishing the sea of lighters already, before the show even started, clamoring for an encore! Android cherubim wafted like demented bumblebees, their tiny clicking fingers draping upwards her legs sheer purple knee-high leggings.

Princess Pop alighted, finally, onto the polished stainless steel floor, her delicate feet slipping into steel-toed jackboots like a sigh. The audience, prone, rose like grass under a footprint, their moan of anticipation a sexy stench washing over her mohawk.

“Hey!” Princess Pop began again, rising on a blast of thunder, the sweet acoustics sending the first chords of the instant classic Power Pop steamrolling. A transparent bubblegum pink raincoat flanked by the cherubim floated out of the constant pyrotechnics and draped itself onto Pop’s outstretched form. Her boots slapped on cold steel and the multi-billion dollar musics systems took it up a notch.

Pop’s lips as pink as her coat plucked and plicked over whitewash teeth, deepthroating the words that made her a goddess. She sang of punk princesses in kingdoms of garbage and intravenous needles, of the madness of FTL travel outside cold sleep, in the quaintly distilled jargon of the times. She sang: The Ballad of Shandy Peaches the Intergalatic Punk Pirate, Holograms Can’t Love, The Beep Be-bop, Pop and Her Pussy (the clean version), and the honey lava drawl of Tarpit Tangos.

Princess Pop was in the middle of Space War Brutes when she felt a familiar presence crackle through her thoughts. It was Perfesser Prof! He was saying, “…need to be careful, Pop. It’s the big one and as you know, the most likely moment…” Indeed it was, her crescendo was coming up after a couple more songs, that big finale without a fucking denouement, like a body rolling in the midst of an orgasm with the flow abruptly unstoppered. Lights out. Her fans would be pissed, and they would love her for it.

Pop first came to this corner of reality in torn fishnet stockings and a tattered pullover dress. The Prof had outfitted her throat and diaphragm with the abilities of meta-historical she-crooners, and she had charmed her way to the top of the billboard in two years. What her fans  didn’t know, she was deep undercover, and her subsequent disappearance would be as a much a mystery as her appearance.

Pop, as she sang, recounted the cat and mouse game that was her life. A real princess, as real as anything in reality could be, her youth was the smell of hyacinths, the murmurs of wet nurses, and the joyful frolick of her and her twin sister. They lay in the womb, mirror images, and grew up, their violet eyes and peroxide blond hair mirror images. One side of the mirror was Pop and the other was Pip.

Nobody knew what happened. Some said it was the nature of twins, for one to go bad. Pop was no princess (heh heh) but she was a good girl in most respects. Pip broke the mold they both were cast in and escaped north; the kingdom was razed with her pack of slavering wolfmen and the resurrected dead. Princess Pop never had time to mourn. Well versed in the multi-martial-arts of a hundred cultures, she, with a small band of heroes, fought until she was the last one standing.

She owed it all to Perfesser Prof and The Fractal Rangers. He appeared in his fractal foaming craft, like a wild rocket blurring out of nowhere, leaking eddies of  multiverses, his van winkle beard twisting in the entropic currents, his wizened hands waving come on oh, Pop! come on! She got on and never looked back.

Pip, on the other hand, used dark arts and violent technologies that rendered her planet barely habitable to catapault herself into the metaflow of realities. She pursued Pop across dry tales, sent pirates after her in high seas blockbusters, was the dame from hell in noir hardbacks, played the cold-hearted bitch lawyer in massive litigation dramas, was a constant thorn in the meta-metaphoric heel of the Fractal Rangers, all the while laying waste to the worlds within the multitude of multitudes.

So this concert, this artificial narrative was a last ditch effort of the Fractal Rangers to bait and permanently remove Princess Pip from the equation. Quarter through the final song, The Shards of God, Pop spotted a wraith detach itself from a speaker and swoop towards her. Perfesser Prof triggered a curtain of firebrands at stage front, obscuring the twins from the audience. But they didn’t mind, as long as Pop sang. Prof had put on a recording. Pop faced off her sister.

The mirror was broken. The reflected did not reflect the reflectee. They stared at each other and smelled hyacinths from the recesses of memory. Princess Pip was a toothless crone, the horror of her history running through her blood. Her cloak, torn from the furies, moved restlessly upon her decimated frame. There was no room for words.

Princess Pip roared, raising corpse white arms.  She had forgotten why she hated her sister, only that all the pain in the pursuit was not to be for naught. She had subsisted on that rage and pain of others like a crow picks scraps of roadkill from the highway, and a meal of fraternal soul juice would do her right! The hieroglyphics of a tortured language tore through her throat, bringing flecks of blood speckling, and coloured the air with violent violet ideograms. They throbbed and wheeled, spinning into a white hot, flickering artifact, Princess Pop a shrinking black silhouette in the midst of all this light. The audience howled as The Shards of God broke apart in a scintillating mitosis, that would soon inexorably draw together  into a Big Crunch.

The artifact rose, spun on its axis to–hiss and fall apart like a bucket of incandescent water. Pip collapsed! The failed magic ran across the stage, corroding the stainless steel. Princess Pop’s boots sizzled. A couple of concert goers yelped, burnt. Pip lay, a bundle of rags and bones, her neck skewed at a bad angle. Her eyes regarded Princess Pop like an injured puppy’s,  the whites mostly showing.

Diaphanous, bleached of colour and substance, the lines of Pip’s flesh were transparent. She was spread wide and thin, her selves losing objective and straying into lost tales of pain and betrayal, of the disgruntled Catholic mother of twenty children scrubbing pans, of the woman and her smoking gun sent to jail after the murder of a wealthy husband, of the prostitute under the hands of one Jack or another, of the desperate girl and a final candle in snowy streets. Pop was overcome with pity. They had not needed to bait her! All they had to was wait until Pip extinguished herself, her component pieces lost in the megaflow.

In a final agony of movement, Pip moved her mouth into a semblance of words, a creaking vowel falling into a murmur then rising in a sharp intake s trembling into an ohhhrrrweee. Pip faded, a darkroom trick. Pip’s lines, her organic definitions, twinkled into the ether. The stuff of worlds had reclaimed what was left of her. Pop, vital and eternally in the prime of her life, wept as the flames arched above. The song, at its apogee, cut off.

The lights went out.

Nonsense! 1.0

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These are the weird little things that occurred to me during my late night paid binges of fluorescent light, that give me pause mid-task to jot down in my little notebook these squiggles, making me wonder if there is such a bar defining normalcy, whether I would frighten some people I knew if they read this.

The ride was called The Psychedelic Swirl and upon its completion he stepped off and remarked dizzily to his companion, “What a revolution!”

He dressed it up in his mind as something ephermal and transitional in nature, and accorded the respect due to such a state of mind.

“Life’s all about moving up the rung.”
“So what was there before ladders were invented?”

The laws of reality are being rewritten as we breathe, a monotone voice says as green-spectacled leprechauns caper around the fairy circles that blotch the White House lawn like ringworm infestations, Secret Service agents targeting with laser scopes the little green men, laughing to each other and going, “Oh! This is better than target practice in Afghanistan,” where they shot dark-skinned youths in loincloths who sprang from the smoke-bombed cave harems to run across the hot dust, a flurry of red dots converging on body parts.

Her crotch consolidated in the vulpine geometry of a fox’s head, its eyes glittering of fallopian secrets, its pink tongue slightly revealed under sharp teeth. Her toes fluttering like intoxicated moths, wafted in the light. The fox grin yawned and he fell into its pink gnashing kiss.

The CITRUS VIRUS, it soured out its victims until they become unapproachable by most members of society, including close friends and family, and gradually sink into a depression, to culminate in a wasting away disease, often anorexia, or a suicide, in which they take their lives in a befuddled state. What happened to me, how did I get here?

I am being written, she tells him. I don’t understand the language, the vocabulary; I lack the context, but I know I am being told, my purpose spirited from—wait… listen! She cocks her head and searches for the narrative that runs through her mind always. You’re mad, he says. Mad! She looks at him with a sad smile. If I go mad, it is because I am made to go mad.

A nervous state of mind, in which I translate contact with individuals in terms of a reverse temporal current: angry men, vapid women, sallow faces, hard lines and laugh wrinkles, plump tendencies and corpse sentimentality, there are all kinds of people, and gazing upon them, I cannot help but try and see them when they were young, unblemished by the joys and agonies of Experience… their skulls shrink, decalcify under their tautening flesh, wrinkles regressing with small shudders until what remains is a child’s small frame draped with oversized clothing, the weight of the world that grows with each succeeding year bursting from their shoulders in a bitter vapor, leaving behind innocent eyes that glitter with the exultant anticipation of Experience. Their smiles grow, crack to reveal gapped teeth, goofy and true to human nature… then there are these sad, tired eyes that quickly break contact with mine to desultorily stalk the ground. Sour sweat taints their wake as they pass me by.

I failed

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Events in my life have conspired to prevent me from completing the goal of fifty thousand words within a month’s time. I am loathe to set the blame on external circumstances, but it is true enough. This here is an excerpt from the CHESTER section, which concerns a zombie’s odyssey. He will interact with Vogina and Seamus, another character I have not (yet?) shown in this blog, though minutely, despite their convergence being of the utmost importance (to the plot, if I threaded it correctly). Chester remains largely unwritten and exists in the rough chunks of excerpts, so forgive any discontinuity. I just might finish this novel, for the hell of it, having just read it after a couple of weeks dusting. It’s not too bad. A bit weird, yes, but that’s the type of fiction I subscribe to. Well, happy readings, and do share your thoughts of Chester, if you managed to read through the entirety of this unusually long post, hell, even if you didn’t make it through.

Good luck.

Continue reading →

The Aftermath: Map Nomads

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All the pretenses of the old world had fallen away like a whore’s veil. Old belief systems crumbled in a loss of faith, and from its dust thoughts different and new were erected with renewed faith in Mankind. Though civilization congealed in the normalized gravity that was rampant in the zones of moderate psychedelia and synaesthia, many of the people became fiercely nomadic.

Cults of Movement began popping up along the western seaboard, in groups of synchronized dance that pulsed in coastal cities. California was ideal for this because the affected regions there contained peculiar acoustic and physical effects optimal for their purposes. They populated the beaches and rocky crags in sprawling campsites constantly wreathed with smoke and wore bright colored clothing more for display than warmth; they moved with a cadence that was unique to each cult, with swooping movements, frenzied gyrations, or an eloquent elegance. Certain groups just stood still and let the environment move them. Travelers from far and near came to prostrate themselves at the foot of Motion, which was now the law of the world.

Small groups of men and women and their children populated the low gravity zones, and could leap many meters in a single bound. When they passed through zones of heavier gravities, their weakened muscles ached and often, if they could not pull back in time, they crumpled on the ground until they were assisted or died from starvation. More groups chose the color zones and faded into particular hues. On occasion an unfortunate nomad would intersect the path of a fatal zone and flash into a fine dusting of ash in a smell of ozone, or creak slowly into a blue hue until the body stirred into snowflakes. These were not the only horrors to be discovered in these zones; slow deaths were common and sometimes death struck as a silent bursting of the brain’s veins. The fatal zones sometimes obliterated large caravans, lengthy histories, and would be the nomad’s biggest terror for a long time until the Mapmakers pooled their resources.

The slow men, passing time as trees do, stood in their temporal arbor and watched the outside reality unwind like an accelerated film, their leaden gaze reflecting the turning seasons. Forays into faster time—which they called the quickening—would find them catatonic, their nervous systems literally stunned by the change of temporal flow. Nomads from other zones, usually furtively escaping from something, would slip into their slow world and wait shortly before re-emerging into the future where the danger elapsed with time. The slow men were a heavy, ponderous race, and shunned most of the outside zones with the mutual solidarity of distrust.

The gnat people, their lifetimes in the accelerated zones a burst of dust in the wind full of frantic copulations and aimless frenzy, within a few generations had quickly forgotten their history. Because of this, they began to interbreed in the high-speed climate and spawned a multitude of congenital deformities. The nomads who used this zone as a shortcut to other zones regarded the gnats as dumb beasts that were given the same passing caution as the dogs and cattle of the old days. Occasionally a gnat would burst out of the zone’s boundary and stand there stiffly as it tried, uncomprehendingly, to absorb a slowed down world, and grope backwards with increasing panic until it slipped back into the comfort of smooth speed. A gnat who by chance or whim lost their zone wandered the zones in bleak despair, black pupils always moving in the dark circles of their eyes, jerkily, as if still trying to accustom themselves to the inexorable slowness.

One thing in common these people had: map-making. It was a time of exploration, where novelty twisted in the next corner. Centering from the Samuels map,—transcribed during Samuels’ wanderings in the early years of the Event. He was the very first map nomad. The maps he brought plus the techniques he taught greatly reduced the death rate. The original maps, copied time and time over, were retired with honor on display in a moderate zone that held a semblance of constancy—their well-inked maps were filled in with details and references. Friendly travelers meeting on the road through zones took the time to copy, update their maps. They discovered that Samuels’ original hypothesis that the slow drift of the zones circled the planet to return to its point of origin was correct; they named this the Long Year, in addition to the current Solar year, and could calculate the exact position and time of each zone on any latitude and longitude.

Legend sang of a great temple—its location was known, but the area was generally shunned. The nomads that adventured there never returned—that twisted the world into the pulsing and throbbing existence the nomads all knew, and that there was an island in the stream of zones that kept still the qualities of the Old World. In Samuels’ original mapbooks, a torn page haunted historians, and lore suggested this page contained the secret location of the tranquil zone. The bedtime stories of children outlined this eden in much imagination… Utter silence, complete tranquility, absolute motionlessness. Children dreamed of dust collecting on shelves, still grasses, and grey stone animals in the gorse. Their snores bled onto their hempen pillows and smelled of old berries.

Man changed drastically during his time in the Effect, and although the zone residents were of the same species, their appearances became many and varied, to accommodate the environments in which they thrived. But, as always is the nature of Man, they looked up at the twisting and pulsing stars and wondered hungrily what lay ahead.

December 21, 2012

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A wink, a wrinkling, then a flash of geometry.

In the library, the patrons become like frantic insects on the floors of the vast bookish halls, or find themselves towering over the floorplan, petrified like some fleshly tree lest a step incurs mass murder. A small child cowers in a corner, frightened, as the Halloween picture book he was gleefully perusing grows maliciously, its text into giant marauding alphabets, its pictures filled with witches and goblins gaining an evil life of their own.

The palm trees twist and twirl like mad brown bellows pumping out inert green clouds, their drastic capillary motion owing to the xylem undergoing gigantic magnification as the tensorlens of space-time varies its dimensions. Cars on the road shrink and reel into the distance, their perturbed drivers colliding in a frenzy to decipher their senses, and leave in their wake a cartoonish carnage. “It was like driving a toy car through a highway full of semi-trucks!” remarks a survivor. Another account: “… through a prism where there was a million copies of everything, then I woke up inside the Rexall. I had crashed into the entire storefront…” Rent limbs dangle as long as roads and the droplets of blood drip off to infinitesimal smallness. Air bags lend many of the crushed cars the appearance of beached zeppelins. The burning vehicles wedged in houses, storefronts, snarling the freeways and avenues, fill the city with heat and monstrous smoke. Burst fire hydrants shower the oscillating children that play on its warp and weft with droplets the size of watermelons. Acidheads emerge from their stupor and say, “What the fuck? I lost my high.” The writhing city is like this, filled with pain and death and sudden awe. And it is the same, all over the world.

At ground zero where the effect is much stronger, the scientists and equipment are twisted into fantastic configurations, the very topology and their inability to navigate complex knots and surfaces trapping the technicians in the collider’s cool halls. Their cries become sounds in water, or are distant, far off, as if creeping through a labyrinth. They slowly starve to death before they find their way out. “They didn’t have a ball of thread,” later historians would remark sadly, after expeditions were sent into—to use a term coined by a television personality—the LSD atomizer and found old bones in postures of desperate futility.

Let’s take a couple of terms from graphic design: rasters and vectors. Vector images contain no information loss when its dimensions are modified, as opposed to the raster image which is plagued with distorting information loss when its size is changed. Vectors operate like an picture on a rubber surface: stretch and pull the surface to change the dimensions of the picture, and when you let it snap back, and the picture retains its original dimensions. There is no loss in quality in quantity of change. Space-time is a smooth vector and along its breadth there are small fluctuations—ripples, one could say—in the structure. When we are born, our brains learn to normalize this until this is done effortlessly and unconsciously. Perhaps children do notice, before their brains have integrated this completely, and it might shed some light on the ‘flights of imagination’ for which children are notorious. This might also account for the effect psychedelics have on the human nervous system.

What the LHC has done, is twist the normal properties of space-time and gravity. Keep in mind: No natural laws were violated… it is just our perceptions of space-time that has changed.

Earlier today:

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I suddenly experience a pseudo-flashback that is subtly but compellingly of psychedelic persuasion. The scene, stark and startlingly illuminated, is blanketed with the sun’s bright relief. I blink involuntarily down a river of steel and plasticine which radiate sheaves of bright colorful frequencies into the cerulean expanse above; they scurry forward apprehensively into a flood that holds and swells until a generous green smear replaces that baleful red glare. The jangle of glint-light rivulets into thinning color and intensifying brightness.

Constant motion concretely reigns in this verdant vista. The trees wave and sway aggressively as their branches, feathery in the heat-haze that simmers in the distance and coarsely bright at a stone’s throw, surge with some unseen force that frolics about, shifting leafy hues to subtle shade after shade into a faux phosphorescence: a patchwork of life and light, moved by a force that is unseen but not unfelt.

Its sweet smell of cut grass, for once strong enough to mask the stink of exhaust, buffets me through the driver’s side window as I coast down this rolling hill of Kansas. This slope penetrates deep suburb, into a congealing glut of apartment complexes and condos, and as it parabolas upward, know it is one of many that wrinkle east toward the higher wilds of Missouri. My brakes clatter but the bright moment doesn’t shatter; it instead imperceptibly deposits me once more to a halt on a hot street that waits for the green signal.

A thirst finds me and I grip-crackle my empty water bottle.