"Get out the clams!" Uncle Jan said. Of course, no one was around. He started his little hurdy-gurdy dance, and then six minutes passed so he lowered his head in prayer.
The Lord was silent that day: no answer, and no granting of his solemn wish. Of course it was Tuesday, the ugliest day on the calendar line: what would ye expect, you foolish fratricide?
"Now comes the time to rise from the grass, to elevate oneself above his stinking bootstraps... I cannot believe the lies of the world, no more than I can prove the truths. If I have to stack, I will stack up, thank you very much. My hair upon my brow, my sweat upon my jowls, my nomenclature and my pressed palate all brimming with ideas that can never be translated into anything coherent. That is my stake. I gamble the world against a shiny nickel. I hide the franchise that could provide restitution for the sorrows I have suffered. This world is not enough: no world is. If I am trying, than that is a small preface to dying. And I accept that like I accept the armed children who plot my demise every single Easter. Yup, I have denoted a few of these things on paper and put the paper where no casual eye will give it scrutiny. I mean a bank vault, a safe room, a locked up venture that cannot exactly be impregnated. And now, as I continue to walk down this escalator, I am reminded of the assistance which technology gives to a human directive. The black rubber band beside me, a hickory-cured safety stick welling up from the sea of possibilities, and I do not doubt that if anyone's future can float on it, yours and mine are both candidates."
Uncle Jan stopped for a second after he got off the escalator. He gazed into the mall and saw the names that were offered in every cubby: Dollop Centre, Heliotrope Tarragon Isle, Mystery Mystic Envelope Tabernacle, Hatred of Space Lunch Court, The Stuffed Back, Alonzo's Shirthouse, Pachinko Gravitas... these names were all harbingers of something larger. You can find every letter that is in your sight and make a prophetic message with it. Even these terrible lies are some simple source of valid prediction. If you continue to breathe and you are indifferent to specificity, your predictions will always ring true.
Now, Uncle Jan was strutting and his stride was very flamboyant. The purple pants and the white suede jacket told people lies about his ethnic origin, which was Puerto Rican; but he did not care about the honesty of his clothes. It was more important that he get his hands on seeds, so he could change the future and put all these terrible things in the present to death.
"I have to change the present into the future. I have to unlock the box of smoke that will flood this moment and suffocate it. If nothing changes then it at least has to be a new set of identical factors which are assembled in place of the current ones. I hold up against whatever storm of certainty is going to make me think I am successful in this objective. I know there is no discernable success, ever. Only milestones toward a goal one sets, which should be so high that it cannot be accomplished in less than twenty generations. That is why I am going to buy seeds today, and laugh in the face of everyone in this goddamn town. I will take my harbingers and my scented omens out to a field and ingest them like powerful drugs: swooning, careening toward the neon notion of a flighty existence; hidden from the barren traces of reality one finds in supercilious decisions; bursting with flagrant omniscience; helped from the floor of History and irrigated with the ideas of potent acquaintances. Admirers and stewards flock the lobbies of Heaven, and they pay dearly to keep the living away from the bliss of dead genius. It is electric spark preserved in shrink wrap. Petrified elemental noise inside of glass cauldrons, and sparkly native people facing the other way during their entire lives in a field disappearing in the distance speckled with lean-tos and long corridor shelters."
The white sunlight brought warmth to the horrendous mall with its cervical wisdom, operating in a line system like railroad tracks with upraised poles and pinchers which were attached to the genitals of the visitor so he or she was forced to visit every store. Captives of pleasure, warm hot rubber pinchers vibrating along. Music overhead made it impossible to talk, and the face of every child was sprayed with an analgesic solution which smelled delightful but caused total numbness, preventing speech or facial expression and leaving the child disoriented but docile. The child would even obey strangers or voices overhead which came through the music unintelligibly.
A brief hiatus ensued while Uncle Jan fumbled in his pocket, trying to extract a cigarette. Someone was shot in the Lunch Court, a common indecency prompted by a minute frustration for the shooter, a very small inconvenience which was added to every other slight ever suffered by the disagreeable man... so he fired, killing a poor employee who was several hours into a shift, dressed in an ill-fitting uniform at the moment of death and representing nothing more than a sub-par Chinese food counter. The shooter unhooked his genitals and a spray of runway foam shot all around him. He was engulfed by peppered smoke, which caused debilitating coughing fits and made such a nuisance out of the sufferer that agents in the vicinity had no trouble locating the culprit as distinguished by the automatic system of the mall.
Uncle Jan began smoking in the mall, which was wrong of him. Of course he was still walking, being pulled to another store which he had interest in visiting. Tarragon Isle, or time to think about how he would spend his evening... it didn't really matter that he was smoking.
The Lord was silent that day: no answer, and no granting of his solemn wish. Of course it was Tuesday, the ugliest day on the calendar line: what would ye expect, you foolish fratricide?
"Now comes the time to rise from the grass, to elevate oneself above his stinking bootstraps... I cannot believe the lies of the world, no more than I can prove the truths. If I have to stack, I will stack up, thank you very much. My hair upon my brow, my sweat upon my jowls, my nomenclature and my pressed palate all brimming with ideas that can never be translated into anything coherent. That is my stake. I gamble the world against a shiny nickel. I hide the franchise that could provide restitution for the sorrows I have suffered. This world is not enough: no world is. If I am trying, than that is a small preface to dying. And I accept that like I accept the armed children who plot my demise every single Easter. Yup, I have denoted a few of these things on paper and put the paper where no casual eye will give it scrutiny. I mean a bank vault, a safe room, a locked up venture that cannot exactly be impregnated. And now, as I continue to walk down this escalator, I am reminded of the assistance which technology gives to a human directive. The black rubber band beside me, a hickory-cured safety stick welling up from the sea of possibilities, and I do not doubt that if anyone's future can float on it, yours and mine are both candidates."
Uncle Jan stopped for a second after he got off the escalator. He gazed into the mall and saw the names that were offered in every cubby: Dollop Centre, Heliotrope Tarragon Isle, Mystery Mystic Envelope Tabernacle, Hatred of Space Lunch Court, The Stuffed Back, Alonzo's Shirthouse, Pachinko Gravitas... these names were all harbingers of something larger. You can find every letter that is in your sight and make a prophetic message with it. Even these terrible lies are some simple source of valid prediction. If you continue to breathe and you are indifferent to specificity, your predictions will always ring true.
Now, Uncle Jan was strutting and his stride was very flamboyant. The purple pants and the white suede jacket told people lies about his ethnic origin, which was Puerto Rican; but he did not care about the honesty of his clothes. It was more important that he get his hands on seeds, so he could change the future and put all these terrible things in the present to death.
"I have to change the present into the future. I have to unlock the box of smoke that will flood this moment and suffocate it. If nothing changes then it at least has to be a new set of identical factors which are assembled in place of the current ones. I hold up against whatever storm of certainty is going to make me think I am successful in this objective. I know there is no discernable success, ever. Only milestones toward a goal one sets, which should be so high that it cannot be accomplished in less than twenty generations. That is why I am going to buy seeds today, and laugh in the face of everyone in this goddamn town. I will take my harbingers and my scented omens out to a field and ingest them like powerful drugs: swooning, careening toward the neon notion of a flighty existence; hidden from the barren traces of reality one finds in supercilious decisions; bursting with flagrant omniscience; helped from the floor of History and irrigated with the ideas of potent acquaintances. Admirers and stewards flock the lobbies of Heaven, and they pay dearly to keep the living away from the bliss of dead genius. It is electric spark preserved in shrink wrap. Petrified elemental noise inside of glass cauldrons, and sparkly native people facing the other way during their entire lives in a field disappearing in the distance speckled with lean-tos and long corridor shelters."
The white sunlight brought warmth to the horrendous mall with its cervical wisdom, operating in a line system like railroad tracks with upraised poles and pinchers which were attached to the genitals of the visitor so he or she was forced to visit every store. Captives of pleasure, warm hot rubber pinchers vibrating along. Music overhead made it impossible to talk, and the face of every child was sprayed with an analgesic solution which smelled delightful but caused total numbness, preventing speech or facial expression and leaving the child disoriented but docile. The child would even obey strangers or voices overhead which came through the music unintelligibly.
A brief hiatus ensued while Uncle Jan fumbled in his pocket, trying to extract a cigarette. Someone was shot in the Lunch Court, a common indecency prompted by a minute frustration for the shooter, a very small inconvenience which was added to every other slight ever suffered by the disagreeable man... so he fired, killing a poor employee who was several hours into a shift, dressed in an ill-fitting uniform at the moment of death and representing nothing more than a sub-par Chinese food counter. The shooter unhooked his genitals and a spray of runway foam shot all around him. He was engulfed by peppered smoke, which caused debilitating coughing fits and made such a nuisance out of the sufferer that agents in the vicinity had no trouble locating the culprit as distinguished by the automatic system of the mall.
Uncle Jan began smoking in the mall, which was wrong of him. Of course he was still walking, being pulled to another store which he had interest in visiting. Tarragon Isle, or time to think about how he would spend his evening... it didn't really matter that he was smoking.