Wheels are spinning beneath me once again. I haven’t scribed that line in eons. Sitting on a train, feeling the smooth transition from moment to moment away from a stagnant place and towards one of budding life, gives me hope within a future that is entirely static. Whether this universe is the one I have chosen or (surely) not, my elections have landed me here, gliding on these tracks.

In fact, the stagnant place is always behind and the one of fecundity is always beyond. The place I am sitting in now, like very moment, is limbo. And limbo is where I get my work done. Sweet Entropy calls me. She whispers into my unclogged ear canal: Every moment is limbo. Every instant is a transitional phase. Here we go again.

The head of this moment, as opposed to the middle and then the tail, which will both follow, becoming their own particular heads, I shall begin organising the music I shall send to Christián. Three parts exist for him to sing in the now dubbed The Sheriff Lies. Parts one and three will be entirely mp3s created from my midi drafts. I have not recorded live versions of these. Yes, yes - the demo exists in recorded form, but does not contain Christián’s parts, which to me, have become essential to the whole piece.

Part Two has already been sent once to Death To Tuesday, but I’ll email it along with the other hovno so the crusty old man has everything in one place. That includes sheet music. His part is labelled GOAT.

Christián is rather goat-like, if you think about it.

I am unsure if the mp3s entitled goat1.mp3 and goat3.mp3 were attached correctly to the email I sent to that shivering stink of flesh quivering in his flaccid skin. If not, they will be uploaded to thinklikeamink (along with this entry) and the tail of this extended moment becomes the head of the instant that I am sitting drunken on the bed of my hotel room, doing those punishable deeds.

Why are they punishable?

Pure creativity is becoming less of a criminal act, I agree, but it is still frowned upon in most circles I have tread upon the surface of. I see social circles more as spheres, really. Or ellipsoids. Or ovoids. Or whatever three dimensional construct the reader wishes to pummel his / her mind with. These three-dimensional objects have surfaces. Beyond those surfaces is void, or even limbo were I to write optimistically.

I once wrote in a poem later translated to song (the pertinent line is here for illustrative purposes, aunque the whole was also rather poor quality and now decays inked on yellowing parchment in a box in either mine or Tony’s archives, best forgotten): Two clouds meet and drift away. I should have written Two clouds merge and drift apart. I was naïve during the autumn of 1990, naturally. I suffered from unrequited love, as I often did in those scintillating days. The days brightest blind us to the awaiting drift into the reality of limbo, where creation actually does or doesn’t happen. You see, my social skills were putrescent. No, that is not exactly correct. For something to become putrescent, it must initially be ripe - metaphorically attractive and alive. In contrast, my social skills never really grew beyond a tiny, greening bud knocked from a miniature of a bush in a West Texan Desert. Fuck um.

The two clouds were people, of course, and a mingling of minds, or souls, or spirits, or animas, or bodily juices. Most possibly the most latter. But the ellipsoids also match the cloud metaphor. They drift close. Their skins touch, They buckle slightly. Some of these entities bounce entirely from one another, but most of their cell walls tentatively break and their cytoplasm temporarily merges.

This is a fun, but very heavy-handed metaphor.

Where was I?

I usually swim on the surface of ellipsoidal cytoplasm. When I delve deep and even possibly consort with a mitochondrion, it is among social groups small and close-knit in ways not particularly universal for these strangely bulging creatures. Connections are much more complex than the three dimensional space we mere mustelids see in our everyday jaunts from ellipsoid to ellipsoid (all which share cytoplasm at the head and tail of that moment, naturally, as travelling through limbo is a solitary profession).

I recall a conversation with an exacting woman recently about social circles, concerning ideas she wished to explicitly expunge. She wanted to delete my obtuse metaphor, possibly? Bubbles that couple are actually hyper-ellipsoidal constructs, intersecting orthogonally in manners that she would complain would melt her cerebrum into an oily mass best cooked up with leek, coriander seeds and sour apples. But appreciation of her viewpoint is captivating, as visceral interpretations fascinate me until Sweet Entropy calls again to prod me like the GOAT I am into abstraction.

Swimming on a single surface, two dimensional, of myriad hyper-ellipsoids from which I could have chosen, I am satisfied to peer at the limbo. I’ll dive from the watery cytoplasm into it soon enough. My springboard is this train.

I feel the wheels spinning beneath me once again.

I miss you, Hela.

The basic premise of this entry is simply that I am able to appreciate a piece of art, especially music, much more if it can be taken out of all social and historical context and still be intrinsically moving / intriguing to me.

Get it?

I have had many conversations that have touched on this topic in my lifetime. Most happened after the age of twelve or so. I don’t exactly recall the first one, but I can recall one of the first. I believe I was around fourteen and unhappily making the transition from one moment to the next in the acrid atmosphere of Fort Stockton. My cousin introduced me to Rush. I had been already getting into more interesting music, that is, different from the run of the mill pop, metal or country that pervaded the community. Rush isn’t all that freakish or wholly different, but their music contained a hidden (for me, at the time) layer of complexity. Of course, I focused more on the lyrics, but I’ll approach that angle later.

Amy, which was the acrid name of this acrid female in the acrid atmosphere of Fort Stockton, introduced me to the album Hemispheres. We listened to side one together. It resonated with me, especially the ending section (The Sphere). I’d already been listening to Pink Floyd for over a year (and not just the post Dark Side of the Moon stuff), so Hemispheres was not a leap across a ravine. So, cool, I possibly said to myself, here is another group I can explore.

Then Amy began to explain the context of the recording as it stood with their other recordings and furthermore in her life and how it affected her. Even back then, I found this distasteful. That distaste was very undeveloped at the time, but grew steadily hover the years, and I am writing especially with respect with music here. I’d even say that it grew exponentially. I don’t want to initially know any historical or emotional connection or context. I want to enjoy the music on its own merits. zo

CADA LOCA A SU CABRA.

zo She then attempted to explain to me the transition in sound the band had made through the course of six or seven years, then played Power Windows for me. Years passed before I came back to this album and appreciated it fully for what it was intrinsically.

Later, I was happy to find out about the transitions bands go through and historical connections between early and later music. Yes. Firstly, however, I want to hear a piece out of context.

A point that has come up much too often during my existence and especially dealing with humans is how a piece of music (in this case, usually a song or band or especially singer) is tied to a part of a particular human’s life. A particular song can even be attached directly to an event.

I openly admit that I do this, as well. The first album by North Atlantic Oscillation will always remind me, at least for a moment, of either walking through the streets of Tuzla or most likely sitting in the café with my laptop overlooking the first story of what Bosnia passes off as a Shopping Center (Bah!). I let that impression light up in my mind. It soon drifts past. I let it remain neutral. I don’t want to attach any emotional significance to it. The album will always remind me of a period of my life, but effort is made to push that to a portion of my brain that associates raw memories, usually images and scents with sounds (in this case, an album by North Atlantic Oscillation). The music itself needs to stand intrinsically apart for me. It is as it is.

Bob Drake once said, paraphrasingly, A piece of music should express what it is and nothing more. That is a portion of what I am getting at. I am aware, however, that removing all vestiges of context is impossible.

Concerning the post-previous paragraph, I shall always be reminded specifically of walking up the hill here when I listen to the second movement of Shostakovich’s 12th String Quartet. The image and perhaps the scent of pollen will scuttle through my mind, but the music itself sustains intrinsic value to me. I don’t have to attach anything to it for its importance to remain relevant. Shostakovich has much music (I’d say most, actually) tied to historical contexts. I know snatches behind these, but don’t really need or even wish to know them completely and certainly do not wish to tie them to certain compositions. Again, they stand on their own, intrinsically, for me.

(here)

Another anecdote (a shorter one featuring my buboe of an ex-wife):

Everyone reading the Martenblog knows who my putrescent ex-wife was, so I don’t have to provide context. She has contacted me several times since our rupture. The duration of contact each time has varied and usually ended suddenly ostensibly because of something I stated more directly and honestly than she may have liked. Fuck um. One afternoon, evening or night (I don’t recall which), we were discussing (or, more realistcally, having a distracting chat session) a band called the Magnetic Fields. Ok! I told her. I’ll give um a listen. Why not? I gave them a listen. The music did nothing for me. I’d promised that I’d do my best to listen attentively, as well. After informing her of this unfortunate turn of events, she then informed me that my opinion’d’ve been different had I spent hours, days, weeks, months, or some other extended period of time listening to the Magnetic Fields with another person. By other person, I assumed she meant lover or at least drinking compatriot, though I am not sure I ever asked for details. My reply to her clarification was along the lines of what I have been talking about the whole of this entry: I listen to music for the music is itself, not for a nostalgic bang. At least that is what I intend to do, though being a small furry animal, I am not perfect in all of my endevours.

Finally we reach music that has historical folk origins. And again, initially, I don’t want to know those origins. I want the music completely out of context when I first approach it. I know this is an impossibility in the majority of cases, especially in a live setting. At times, the cultural context is forced upon the audient (I stole that word from Robert Fripp, for anyone who does not know).

Knowing the cultural significance of a piece of music can benefit my appreciation later, perhaps, but that particular piece of music is never going to be as powerful to me as an another that can be completely divorced from historical, cultural and emotional context and appeal to me on its own merits as a raw piece of art.

Lyrics are a different matter and at the moment I tire of typing (knowing I shouldn’t, as I haven’t filled these black rectangles for seemingly ages) or I would attempt to go into great detail. A fascinating appeal of Magma’s music for me is the presence of words simply used as an emotional thrust. The sonorities are much more important than the meaning. I suppose as I have aged, I grow tired of lyrics that dwell of specificities. I still dig existential angst when in the mood (usually an intoxicated one), but time and again, absurdist ramblings are more enjoyable.

Christián displayed to me a photo from a book containing Flamenco Quatrains. Or at least I believe that is what they were. I still have not decided whether they are emotionally abstract enough for me to fully appreciate without yawning profusely. I do enjoy that I can read them out of any cultural or historical context. I am sure I can be presented with performances of several via YouTube that do not bother me with any cultural or historical context, as well.

I’ll return to the beginning.

A piece of music (and, to abstract out, art itself) will appeal to me in a more fulfilling manner, and always has, if it is presented without context. Any importance outside of the container that is the music itself IS NOT RELEVANT. My enjoyment of said piece of music (or art) will be diminished by anything outside the container initially. For me, pieces of art (and, yeah, once again, especially music) are discrete forms. Every connection, even between other related discrete forms do not assist my appreciation, although they may modify it later.

So die.

Today’s Special Consternation (toted by my current girlfriend) is indicative of the striking downfall of large, cohesive families. Yes, as i have mentioned previously, Marisa’s family is monolithic. Only the most distant edges crumble slightly. If her family were a circle, I’d be a point on a plane parallel to it and growing increasingly distant. The line passing through me and Marisa, however, remains.

One of her nephews, Alberto, is moving out of the flat that she owns near to this flat that she also owns. In another lifetime, Marisa, her ex-husband and their spawn lived in the flat from which Alberto is moving. Why she did not rid herself of it after she moved on, I am not sure. But back to that nephew who is also abandoning the place: Some wench named Kristina (or something similar - I forget) has claimed his bumpy soul and they’ll begin to add infant cretins to the family in a new flat in a distant corner of the city come September. She’s also torn Alberto away from any hope of a creative future as a programmer by convincing him he should teach high school computer science instead. It’s just so much more stable. I shall not include that story.

Alberto has a brother named Jesús, who, accordingly, is also Marisa’s nephew. They are currently living together in the flat that Marisa owns that is close to this flat that Marisa also owns. Jesús will be living alone in that flat once Alberto moves out. Will he be able to afford the flat himself? Of course he will because his parents, Marisa’s sister-in-law and brother, are the ones that actually pay. However, Jesús may not want to live alone. Someone once informed me that being alone is not wholly amusing, and though I ignored the booming, disembodied voice, Jesús obviously also heard it and chose not to ignore it.

The logical course of action would be for Jesús to find another family member to move in with him. The situation is grand for Marisa because she is paid under the table by her sister-in-law and brother, gaining her some sort of tax benefit. This wouldn’t be the case were she to put the flat up for rent to regular townsfolk. Miguel, Marisa’s son, has noted that he’d like to live there with his scabrous whore of a girlfriend, Andrea. They’d share Alberto’s ex-room. Jesús would stay put. Everyone would rejoice the arrival of hilarious complications regarding splitting rent and utilities three ways, or two ways, or maybe three ways, or possibly two and a half ways since Andrea and Miguel would only occupy a single room, and so on. Did I mention that Andrea is a scabrous whore?

All of this tomfoolery has caused Marisa a topping of stress to accompany her already maniacally stressful lifestyle. It occurs to me, as it surely does to you, that including the family first in every facet of one’s life is NOT beneficial. It’s a fucking anchor. They spend a chunk of every day commiserating in family business, in family gossip and family platitudes. Why platitudes? I use that word because they tend to touch on the same topics and pontificate using the same or similar phrases time and again. All of this family time, in my bulging opinion, could more positively be consumed by creativity, meditation, exercise or even reading a fucking book.

I’m not part of that circle. I reside in a parallel plane that drifts further each elastic second.

Marisa has a trait that I find in part very amusing but in part extremely worrying. It is simple, but indicates a blight in my eyes fundamentally. We were just talking, as we released dry and practically dry clothing from their castigation hanging from a flimsy drying apparatus, about the english word pugnacious. Admittedly, it is not a word I use very often. The word describes a certain feature of creatures that I do not desire to be around often.

A parallel word exists in Spanish, and therefore I expect they both come from a Latin or Lakife root. Pugnaz. The parallel seemed obvious to me but Marisa insisted that the term does not exist in Spanish. Probablamente es usado de Panchitos. She does not consider Spanish spoken in the Americas to be real Spanish, you see. I fetched her grand and more or less (according to her) unabridged (more or less unabridged is a phrase I should utilize more or less more often) dictionary and quickly discovered that pugnaz does indeed exist.

I used to enjoy a song during my desperate high school years entitled In My Ways. In fact, I am downloading the album at this moment because I have not heard it in years. Marisa is stuck in her ways. Her accumulation of knowledge up to a certain point is now immovable. She claims to be a erudite Spanish speaker. I believe her, for the most part, but any evidence that goes against her ostensibly total command of the language is immediately rejected.

This inner mechanism of hers behaves like a reflex. Like a vomit reflex, to an extent. Her sphere of knowledge has no intention of growing, let alone evolving. I come to understand her fear of travelling outside of her known world (Spain, Italy and parts of France) as an extension of this mechanism.

It’s all a bit disconcerting, eh?

Whilst Marisa continued to shop in unnamed clothing shop in an unnamed shopping center a few hours ago, I checked Facebook. The top post on my feed was by Acy. He referenced an article that had to do with the Many Minds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. I was sitting on a squat stool at the base of a number of shelves containing articles of ostensibly new clothing. Humans milled and browsed around me as I sat there, a pile of ostensibly new clothing we were about to purchase in my lap and my phone clutched in my hand.

(Many Minds Interpretation)

I opened trusty Jotter Pad and instead of tapping into Google Keyboard wobbily on my perch, I activated trusty Google Drink In My Mellifluous Speech and began dictating.

Be the observer a protozoan or a mouse, theoretically, we all collapse indeterminate wave states with our minds. Whether our bodies are in superposition with themselves before the mind unequivocally chooses a state is not something I equivocally claim to be an expert on. The thought that collapsed another infinite number of waves states whilst I sat on that bench in the unnamed clothing shop in the unnamed shopping center was that our true conscious path through the universe is unique.

Every collapse of a wave state into a choice is a fork, as they say, in the road of existenece, but only our existence. Our consciousness only traverses this singular path. Eidolons of other consciousnesses are around for the ride, be they mice or paramecia. Their conscious path split from our own in time out of mind.

We see others snuff it all the time, sure, but they are only snuffing it in our unique quantum universe - the one that careens off in our sensationally precise direction upon every observation we make. The dimension in which your pet mouse or friend Christián Newman exists in a purely conscious fashion is unreachable.

Therefore, you are the capiain of this boat.

Everything I write here is for me only. The eidolons that surround me can partake and criticise as they might, but ultimately, they are actors. I may not write the script actively, but the multitudinous realities distill to the only one where my life is center stage. For that is what consciousness is, after all. Sit for a minute and then get yourself up off your own personal bench in an unnamed clothing store in an unnamed shopping center. I am not necessarily advocating the ultimate state of selfishness, but instead, the ultimate state of responsibility.

Everything I write here is just for me. The eidolons may benefit from these words. These words may prey on them. They may rot in a ditch in Berlin with laser printed pages of these words clutched to their naked, scabbed chest.

I’m collapsing wave states as I type. I observe each pixel. They are chosen to be real by my consciousness and my personal quantum universe branches once again. And again. And again. Fuck um.

What of the zombie universes?

There are an infinite quantum universes, according to the paramecium that just awoke in its hovel nestled within the goo underneath my left thumbnail. I posit there are only a limited number of consciousnesses, however. The paramecium’s cilia figit. It’s not clear if he is still in superposition or not. Perhaps this eidolon has been with me all along. Perhaps this is our true consciousnesses’ initial time to split. Paramecium goes his way. I go mine. Fuck um.

Accordingly, there are an infinite number of zombie universes. No true consciousness exists in them. They are filled with eidolons of a finite number of consciousnesses playing out programmed roles. Do they learn and evolve as do true consciousnesses? I posit yes, and therefore that they are interacting shadow consciousnesses that can and sometimes do birth their own spawn of the original.

Then why are you not actually just one of the more evolved zombie consciousnesses, Bobbus?

Well, I guess I am, or could be, or if Buddhism has anything to say about it, we all are. The Buddha consciounsess has been in the true quantum universe for eternity and remains so. It doesn’t perish. It persists! Child consciousnesses are one step away from Mr Buddha. But, according to quantum mechanics, can never return. Good for them. They are eidolons once removed from the Buddha. I’m probably a great great great * 2^65536 grandchild of this original consciousness. I, too, am not allowed to return. Fuck um. I never wanted to, anyhow. I’m fine with the eidolons of my unique path. My zombie consciousness continues to evolve into new and exciting states of being. Hades, belovéd: I’m birthing new zombies with every letter I type, backspace over, re-type and even reread.

May those eidolons prosper in universes of their own.

My posit of finite consciousnesses reduced itself to one. Damn you, Buddha.

The switch that was eventually implanted just above the double fold of fat at the base of Shambal’s neckline had been planned for ages. It was his own design, in fact, for he had foreseen his future condition. He was never pleased with what he foresaw, but, always the pragmatist, he took steps to perpetuate his soul.

Shambal’s concept of soul was shaky, sure, but basically, he meant the sphere of personality that engorged itself slowly (and sometimes even quickly) since the dawn of consciousness. A computer could drink its entirety in and regurgitate sequences at any time.

Thus, the switch.

I call it a switch because i prefer the word switch to the flat and uninventive button. Those insipid writers who dare to use the latter are, in each of my tales, tall or not, boiled in their own faeces. Fuck um.

The switch learns because it can gage the delight or despair of each creature that puts it to use. Therefore, it selects from the acumen of Shambal’s life-knowledge to produce phrases. Initially, it might resemble a random fortune generator such as the olden fortune shell command in old UNIX systems from the father planet. Not so, however! The switch learns from the delight or despair of its carers, their neighbours, visitors from zones abroad, and so forth.

Yes, Shambal’s land was finally repopulated. I’ll get around to that story another time.

One could say that the switch generated platitudes. Of course, the expressions were not platitudes when they were first vomited forth from the corpse-lips of Shambal’s mouth, but became platitudes over time. Eventually, they came to be part of the shibboleth that defined the new culture of Shambal’s old land. Generation after generation, and even after the corpse-thing that was Shambal stopped functioning, these platitudes solidified. Eventually, some were even seen as something like commandments.

One must remember that Shambal Brambel was born both deaf and sessile. I was only when the first tenebrous tentacle plunged from the night sky and uprooted him that he began to become a renowned gigolo, vagrant, gourmet and visionary. Centuries have passed and the apex of his life journey is long behind him. He has enjoyed the ease of descent for ages and like the multicellular forms who shed their complexity and become paramecia once again, Shambal has regressed.

His bed is his sessile base now. As described in other tomes, marvellous machines of his own making collect and create energy from his waste. Naught but rhythmic drones feed his brain. As Natascha used to say, the complexity of one age’s music is finally levelled to pulses. The thump of your crawling blood is the last sound that your living corpse will perceive.

Shambal was well known for his obsession with religion not only in his own land but in empires abroad both fallen and in the throes of power. He was brought up by a despotic mother stewing eternally (well, eternally until her demise) in catholic ideology. To finally flee his childhood oppression and its monkey clawing like his later cocaine demon at the back of his neck for decades and then for centures, he decided to reform the old ways and scribed the following:

The Ten Goat Commandments

• Thou shalt not have other goats before me
• Thou shalt carve my visage into every stone and tree
• Thou shalt smite human females in my sacred name
• Remember the Copulation Day and penetrate me with thy penis
• Honour my goat ancestors and goatlings by penetrating them
• Thou shalt kill only the females of thy own kind
• Thou shalt save the juices from our copulation for thy otherwise pitiful cocktail parties
• Thou shalt steal ovaries from thy human females, implant them within me so that I may gestate and birth a hybrid goat-being
• Thou shalt expose my reeking genitals to thy neighbours
• Thou shalt teach their own progeny to worship and penetrate my kind

Long ago, when the wind still whipped the edges off of sharp stones, Rabbit was a great trapper. He lived with his grandmother on the fringe of the Pellucid Desert. She was an ancient and emaciated creature, as well as the only other of his kind he could recall. Perhaps she was his great-grandmother, or even great-great-grandmother. Time was funny in the borderlands. In any case, all the rest of his kind had disappeared.

His grandmother was very weak, but at times still spoke. She never looked directly at Rabbit when she recounted what sputtered and strobed behind her eyes. Her head bobbed and swung. Her face was lined and the colour of long soiled and dried skins. It occurred to Rabbit now and again that she was completely unaware of him. He did feed and water her, sure, but those demands could have as easily been met by the brook flowing out of the hilly lands he never visited. Fish even occasionally suffocated themselves on the banks, sacrificing themselves as food before an inevitable, wasted death as the stream narrowed and dried in the desert.

During those times, she spoke in fragments. He caught as many as he could with the cup of his mind and sewed them together when curled and about to rest, or when wandering the perimeters and setting traps.

She talked of faces in the moon and a sickness in the sun. The stars were invisibly stitched together to form animals. In his mind, the shapes resembled animals caught in his pits. There was the Wolverine, the Bear and the Fox. Sometimes a coyote took the place of the fox. That other animal - the kind that lived in the village nearby - was always absent. He’d never had the occasion or luck to trap, snare or pit one of them. So they somehow were outside of the textured mythology he wove from his grandmother’s mutterings.

He often remembered his grandmother as a younger creature, speaking at length and with great coherence about the moon and the sun. The moon made faces that predestined the humour of the coming day. The sun’s sickness grew and waned, casting and dispelling shadows. He could remember snatches of stories about creatures wandering in the inky ocean between the points of light in the skies at night. The creatures could set the course of lives in the Pellucid Desert. He often had dreams of them, but in the dreams, their identity was confused. His mind’s eye told him that they were one and the inky ocean was actually a singular mass. He liked to call it the oracle. Rabbit often wondered what the oracle’s prophecy for him would be, or if it was already fixed like a carving into a stone.

Rabbit’s trapping was limited to the area within his burrow’s sightline. His speciality was stone traps. He’d been crafting them since the dim past. Some were quite formidable. He’d hew them from stone with tools as ancient as his grandmother, or more so. Were he to measure time like the strange creatures in the village did, a single trap would occupy dawn to dusk every day for months. He cleverly wired the traps to snap their serrated teeth shut. His hinges were made of the taut guts of wolverines and bears.

These creatures, not anywhere as smart as Rabbit once thought, fell time and again into another type of trap he created. Every few sunups, he found one dead or dying, impaled on spikes at the bottom of one of his pits. Some of the spikes were even fashioned from the bones of the animals’ own kind. As a wolverine panted blood bubbles from his final breaths, Rabbit liked to think that the very bone piercing the animal’s stomach and chest came from that very animal’s own brother, mother or father.

He distributed the stone jaws, small, medium and large, over his range. Each morning, his haul consisted of anything from rats to coyotes. He stewed them all in the burrow inside a great cauldron also hewn of stone. He supposed his grandmother had hewn the giant bowl herself, for who else could have? There was no-one else. There never was, not that he could remember.

Rabbit awoke before the sun gouged the black oracle from the sky every day, before even the few remaining birds began to fill the air with their nonsense. One morning, however, he discovered some of his traps were different. They had been moved ever so slightly. None of his catch was disturbed at first, but as morning after morning passed, crushed animals habitually lying limp within the jaws were missing. The traps were splattered with gore. There was too much gore, as if an animal had been violently ripped from its grave. He began to discover more and more of his traps devoid of prey. He had been robbed. He was being robbed every night.

He could not see the traps at night. Before he slept, he interpreted the face in the moon the best he could and what it could mean for the following day. He imagined the blackness between pricks of light oozing and perhaps loosing tentacles of ink time and again to caress anyone who dared to wander the Pellucid Desert at night. During the failing twlights after his discoveries, he wondered if those imaginary tentacles were the culprits.

Time passed and his food supply dwindled to almost nothing. He was strong, and still persisted, but his grandmother was reduced to nothing more than a bag of bones. She became sessile and crepuscular. She summoned her remaining strength at dawn and at twilight. She still muttered then.

At first, Rabbit thought the thief could be a cunning wolverine, evolved beyond the stupidity that landed its bretheren into the pits. The traps were not so easily opened, though, and he finally dismissed the idea as nonsense. He pondered as his own hunger grew. He reached a decision to snare the thief himself. It was a risk. It was always a risk. What if the culprit was one of those from the village?

He fashioned a loop of the strongest beargut and set out in a waning dusk. By luck, he’d caught a fox in one of his stone jaws early in the evening. It hung like two rags draping a stained, red fossil. He stealthily placed the coiled intestines, hid, and waited.

Rabbit faced the thing struggling within his snare. The looping beargut left weal after weal as it flailed. The thing’s eyes shone with a combination of surprise, rage and a strange resignation. It was as tall as a villager, but wider. It’s bulk displayed protrusions that could have been stunted extra limbs. The weals poured rivulets of dark juice through thick, matted fur.

Finally, the thing calmed, or weakened, or both - Rabbit could not tell - and half collapsed to the hardpan. Without looking directly at Rabbit, it began to speak. Rabbit listened and began to despair.

I was stealing a fox. It had been nearly severed in two parts, but I had to pry the teeth of your trap slightly to remove the tendon that resisted. I brushed against one of your marvellous hinges. I was stung, as if by an insect, and the mark has remained to this day. Surely it was concocted from the same material as these restraints that leave weal after weal on my flesh. The part of my arm that touched the hinge will never heal, nor will these wounds from your rope. It could be that what you call the oracle - the being the flows like sooty fluid between the pricks of light in the sky - wrote that sting in the earth with its black tentacles at my birth. I stared at my demise when I was scarred by your hinge. And my demise is now, as I cannot escape from your ropes of meat.

Unlike the creatures of the village, you nor I have archives or mentors to teach us how to persist in this world. Our only teacher is experience. Though I always pushed it from my mind, I knew that one experience would end me. I also knew that the end of me was not the end of my task. It had to be carried forward.

We also do not come into this world knowing exactly what we are or what we will become. We discover these things as we traipse our violent path through our lives. Better is to not have expectations of oneself, for great changes do not happen gradually. They are sprung upon us like your stone jaws upon your next meal or like the snare now binding me.

Before I slaughtered him, one older one from the village told me at length about what he called spirits and how they, unlike us, were undying. They simply passed from fleshy creature to fleshy creature at their own whim. He was only trying to entertain me with his mind in hopes I would not consume him, of course. His ruse did not play out the way he wanted, but, true or not, his story left an impression.

The villagers once got the better of me. I was foolish that day. They had me tied to a stack of timber and were set to burn me. Maybe they’d have smoked out my spirit and set it adrift. And maybe it would have found you then instead of now, as I die before you. I let them have their fun and I pretended to struggle and even moan, all the more to see their shock when I at last exploded the bonds. The strands were fashioned from fibre, not the once living meat that now sears my flesh. I killed eight and dragged two of those dead with me back into the desert. They served as food for a few days before the real rot set in.

I know you know the ones in the village. They are not like you. They stand erect and prance like owners of the desert. I know you’ve hidden in the scrub on the outskirts and watched their masses swell and wane, pulse like the maggots that will soon infest my wounds. I believe their rationale for tying me was to stop my stealing their pigs and sheep. They roast these animals. I, like you, prefer them raw.

They roast the animals they catch outside of the village, as well. Animals like you and the ancient one you live with. Before I stood in your place, I was in danger of becoming impaled on a spit and turned slowly over a fire, my life juices dripping and sputtering in the flames. The sable night sky took me, as it is taking you, and changed me. Instead of being the pursued, I became the pursuer.

I had a dream that I knew was prophesy. I am one of the replicated. I was an iteration. You are the next iteration. Don’t look away. Just by being here, you have already accepted your own iteration. The dream was cruel. It showed me this night and my demise. I viewed your loops of meat and my wounds seeping beneath them. The dream told me I’d forget when I awoke, but remember once again when prophecy became reality. You’ll have a similar dream.

I fade. The desert will swallow me as it swallows your tiny river further on towards its uninhabited centre. Go back to your burrow. Bury the thing you live with. She is dead. Go. Now.

I am always frightened when I am invited to go to a authentic concert of some ethnic music. Let’s take flamenco, for example. Besides the fact that is pretty much howling mierda, the vomit of cultural emotions, why strain to enjoy a virtuoso guitarist through that haze? Through that filter?

What is the point?

Learning to divine presentiments from some arcana doesn’t make you interesting, you cunt! Why do people flock to see authentic music? What are they hearing? Are they there for some sort of ancient realism or for the chic feeling of nowness. Oh, Carlos, (licking the undulating abdomen), I was there during your performance.

There is not art to performance any longer. The contrast I see in videos Dave Willey shows me of a dance troupe gyrating to avant-garde tunes makes me smile, for sure, but it is so distance from the leprous theatres of today that I want to actually kill a goat and feed it to the dancers who strive to dance to the same music that was made to dance to in pasts they could not even fathom.

WHY DON’T THEY DIE?

I think quite a bit of this bile erupts from contrasts I have made between attempting to enjoy flamenco and then listening to an artistically relevant group of musicians like Present.

Follow your folk music, you junkies. Do it! What else have you? You’ll die a slow death. Neil Young said that it’s better to BURN out than to fade away. See the contrast?

Listen to something challenging. Stop staying within your fucking borders, you passive-agressive cretins.

I sit in a bar in Bilbao. The barman wears a beard and casually goes about his duty. This is in contrast to the previous bar, very close to the bus station, filled with backpacked women with demands for pintxos. Their drooling eyes almost matched the saliva that pooled on their thighs as they sat on metal barstools. They only wanted to get to the aeroport. It is a pity they are dead now.

But, anyway, I wrote these things to Christián, of which I shall elaborate on in turn:

I appreçiate that the Spanish in the north is more pure and delineated.

It is much easier to understand people who speak clearly. Heh. Crudity has its cruel pleasures, however, and those exposed to redneck life during formative years are victims. I find the south crude. Their gypsy and moorish blood birthed abominations. These died and fertilised the land. Music arises from the ashes (or asses) of humans who do not know anything else to do with themselves. Circumcised with drink, I am sure their filth crept into stringed instruments.

I can understand your love of the south and the rawness of Andalucia and Murcia and Extremadura. They slur their words and their brains fire on hormones dying without completion.

At times, I figure the heat is what drives people to vagrancy. Vagrancy of the mind, I tell ya. Texas held the same for me. I wanna sit here and press my ICED TEA to my forehead until the ache the LIQUOR I swigged to forget about YOU gave me wanes into oblivion. Yeah. That was Fort Stockton. There were two choices: the DRINK or the CHURCH. I suspected at times both. Fuck um.

Linguistic culture disgusts me, as it it deepens the stupidity of a land. I’d kill them all if I could, but I am a simple drunk at a bar in Bilbao at the moment.

Fleeing from cultural oppression is very similar to fleeing from heat oppression. Cold stimulates the ability to think rationally, to create sublime portents of the future. Heat lets hormones boil and excrete folk music - the music that, simply mourns loss.

Combining these things is genius. I’ve never heard Flamenco that did it. Other, much more angry forms of music do it better for me (the arbiter of ALL quality, errr). I want to put my throbbing, severed member into a goat right now.

I’m about to listen to a piece of music that will thwart everything I am thinking about at the moment. I’ll let it pause for a moment. Fuck um.

Actually, I’m done. Perhaps more later on the FLIGHT.