We brainwash ourselves with alcohol over and over, a refrain Cyruss heard Belinda say once. He referenced this, kept it, or rather held onto it, like prison view mirror, would think about that statement for decades. He had never quite heard that put in such way, a way, or such way, and had never heard it uttered by anyone else ever since. There where a lot of drinkers in this world and it was astonishing and wondrous that no one ever said this.
In mania of stimulated-brain comedown off end of night, while impossible sleep gnashes such over-idiosyncratic imaginary discourse marching the penguin narrative, punching the clown fantasy dialogue, ever just imagining so sickly so, Cyruss would imagine saying, I need you to be with other guys just so that it breaks my heart now, Cyruss saying this in the imagined fantasy setting steeple of unstable revolving carousel of imaginary women ghosts he cultivated, ghosts he just drifts to make to keep churning, all but churning to those he couldn't quite concentrate on, replacing one with another, while bed tossing un-slick sick worm. And what did it say about conditions so dire, that even the ghosts in his fantasy would still need to cheat on him.
Belinda knew coke nose rinsing, Belinda knew that onions tasted like cocaine, or whenever she saw the James Welling silver-gelatin print in storage, she said it always reminded her of white uncrushed angel dust flakes on jagged folded paper mountain, and maybe she must have known, knew too somehow, to tossing off her own beige jagg in the frying brain pan off comedown also—but now the printing studio seemed ever impossible of an enterprise in her still drunk mania while holding on now somehow to just casually interact somewhat normally anyways, and the studio seemed futile like all printing studios seem futile, Belinda so now insane off fresh drunk hangover waiting for the pep pill to just rinse in, Hilma AF Klint, Hilma AF Klint, claimed, or she just claimed spirits, like— haunted her to what, to what create or create 'the first', that's the first as in first, abstract or like abstract works—but if that, that wasn't ever as a modernist myth I ever heard, I must say Darling. Or what never, or what never these, quite frankly, may I say, sweeping frost administrators fail to see or ever so but to mention my Dear, is, is they look just as ghastly, they look just as ghastly, as all those bugger abstract paintings by all the painters who followed her . . . But so, so what does she mean even? So if ghosts created these Klint paintings, does it just prove ghosts are just as generic or pedestrian as anyone else who painted exactly like this following afterwards??
Right like as if dying, or dying, like becoming a ghost automatically turns one into enlightened avant-guardist painter prophet set to haunt to inspire struggling artists? Belinda almost to herself, while Cy was looking for filament cartridges for the tags.
Oh, right of course, Cyrus muttered and Belinda could tell he was just being polite in being preoccupied.
Cyruss accidentally knocked over a soda can on the floor used to freebase, the can clattering and rattling like junk yard car, exposing some notion of supreme unprofessionalism of the entire enterprise in a way that seemed not quite fatal but was still innocuous enough as to be a funny casual kind of farcical nonetheless.
Belinda, salt me lustful, cut my lace, and all winds come from skylock of all the suffocating love spurned. Belinda's insurance was high, but Cyruss' price was cheap. Cyruss usually tried but failed not to stare so intently at her speaking, as if he was failing a lie detector with no one watching the results (except maybe half watched, half noticed by Lin). There was a never ending party inside Belinda's pants, and how so she sat there back against battered green studio fuck couch.
Girl skaters think they're the next Diana Ross, the pro thinks he's a musician, the filmer that thinks he's a movie director, the graphic designer thinks he should be in a museum, the distributor that thinks he's an art director, the rep that thinks he's a . . . what does a rep think he is?
Essential, Belinda, again not knowing the specifics of such machinations of an industry otherwise modeled and molded after the mass production of the yo yo or the boogieboard or the pro am RC cart, full pad gymnastics, but Baelin being yet again, or as usual, somehow still so treacherously on the mark.
Cyrus now breeched in now reaching morning still-drunk too, off Belinda somehow miraculously here on her very own now, No, no, no, totally—well, as cool as we think we are, or as cool as this country thinks it is, we are just living in Tony Hawk's America. In alternate reality, an alternate reality, or in possibly a richer world, everyone in America, anyone in America, would know, would well know who Gonz is—or the Picasso of freestyle like, or like instead of everyone knowing like who the McDonalds of freestyle was.
Is quite pitying right, Love?
Belinda mentions how sails spread on four great breaks in Western Art : Greco/Roman to Christian, Christian to European Renaissance, European to Modern and Modern to now, that which Belinda was practically concurring with Cyruss, Rodney Mullen standing on mini board sideways, heels on wheels, grounded in parent's tool shed, the fourth.
And now Cyruss loomed over the squiggle squaggle logo proofs he got printed out at Xerox 'Pocalypse—"squiggle squaggle" was jargon off Cyruss' own invention (basically, late fried sugar late Matisse like whiggle waggle shapes re-processed to look barfed up by a succession of different machines making Louise Lawler seem about as fauvist as André Derain)—as the vitality (and depth of field) of the co, or any co for that matter (according to Cyruss), is inside the poetry of minutiae of depth of behind the scenes product naming; Heitor Forum, Omen HI X, Wino, Low ADV Millie, Matchbreak SUP, Hommes.
The best freestyler was Carroll, and Carroll was also the most autistic, Xerox 'Pocalypse was the copy shop, printer, small coffee depot on Prince and Mercer Carroll ran now—it was built into an old appropriated lazer tag arcade in an historically preserved building. Some wheezing Sharper Image leftover lazer tag guns were even used reconfigured as cash register product squad scanners, employees dressed like plain clothes police wore lazer tag vests instead of name badges. Even the dark lighting and seizure strobing background generic 80's space pre-techno from the lazer tag Photon danceclub battlefield landings were all kept surprisingly so left over, if not just for tact of thematic atmosphere or it was thematic atmosphere, even though it probably ran counter intuitive to getting one's tax ID forms self serve xeroxed.
The iridescent Takatomi Fox Plaza plastic bag that the proofs came in was strewn on Cyruss' floor in the yawn of day, as if saying they were in such advanced ultra economic phase and district so, that it was even reflected in the thrashed trash, or was reflected especially in the trash. But Belinda kept hangover terror looking back at the incidental indexical traces readymade of the light lines from the window blinds projecting onto the silver bag lying next to the take out Chinese carton, the broken harlequin mask found off the street, all wasting away right on the weathered and scuffed up scabbard old white painted wood floor, stray black rose pedals so stale, incidental broken glass accidentally re-framing it all, in what now became practically Lacanian tableau of screen from Belinda's now dazed gaze.
Lacanian screen, a Lacanian screen could be : you are on a raft in the wilderness of the ocean alone and innocently floating along comes an unharmed can of sardines floating up to you on the surface randomly, and you look at the floating can of random sardines in the middle of nowhere sea from you're pov, but it's you're gaze, the now prime gaze, the center of the universe in the vacuum of nowhere—that's also kind of how Baelinda was Lacanian screen.
When you snorted a line sixty forty, sixty times or whatever tries or whatever, and finally, finally get it, got it, you had a like what, one in sixty chance, which is a pretty damn dishonest lousey representation if you think about it, or dishonest representation of anything really, and then then what—that dishonest representation accelerates, pushes into more or being more like accelerated by new, younger, or no, new, younger, less tethered by the self inflicted, or self reinforced methodological habits of prison of of the seasoned's like learning limits—practitioner's, no evolutionary permutations which may only now next take first try. Cyruss, 'Cyrusssplaining culture moves fast apparently, or how even then so many tableaux vivants just always degenerate, wearing themselves out, or doubling back in a way that contradicts its previous impetus all quite unknowingly.
Most of the times anyways, it's just over exaggerating how much you like something right?, if only just to seek common ground?, Belinda casually quipping, not exactly making sense in direct respect to what Cyruss just said, illuminating by Baelin's own warped poststructuralist logic, which Cyruss felt he had the monopoly on appreciating.
Tony Hawk's New York was built city on collective sin. You officially become a New Yorker when you find a way to contribute to the geohistorical river of sin in your own special way. Maybe it could start innocuously, needlessly lying to your family back home over the phone when you first move, or you getting ahead of yourself by distancing yourself emotionally from your sweet mom and dad out of new misguided petulant and burgeoning self serving hypocrisy and some completely rancid unoriginal sense of you're ascension past humble origins. You may unoriginally become a New Yorker when you develop a superiority complex, but you definitely become a New Yorker when the people with more means and power than you certainly would never know this, because you are all too eagerly quick to bootlicker be too helpful when at all possible, and you sycophantically fall in line in way that could even easily be considered disgrace to your family line even, that is, if anyone was really paying attention, which, by the way, no one is. When you're sense of autonomous interiority that you came with, is hop gobbled up and everything about you internal is publicly interfaced, and when you accept and just actually now don't care about your flaws in public and when New York admonishes you for whatever deficiency you have, which you actually have control over, and you shamelessly don't care and even realish in the needless and avoidable humiliation, is when you officially become a New Yorker. You officially become a New Yorker when you get fucked up, and put yourself in or end up in a humiliating position, and everyone involved or witness to such, who are ostensibly now more responsible and now supposedly so more put together and believe, point to you as the fuck up, the problematic, a wannabe drip to boot, and the people who look down on you, are from higher and more affluent privileged means, but you can still see also they are kind of exaggerating their response to whatever your social faux paux was, and really you can kind of see the self serving hypocrisy of their origins causing considerably more collective damage than you ever could on your very own, and when you see that you being put in place just now kind of serves some function they may operate under, this predictably convenient opportunity for them in self reinforcing their relation to the city yet again, because that's how they get by after all, and they do this with people, all people really, and your probably not the only one, they marking themselves unaware to themselves, but quite too aware of you now, as hypocrites held precious in all the world's esteem, and you can see from direct exposure to their bewildering self unaware corruption, enough to triangulate that to the founding of New York even, and it's a scam, it's all a scam, everything is a scam, women are a scam, is when you officially become a New Yorker.
Cyruss officially became a New Yorker when he fakie pivot Madison Square Garden outrail twenty sequence shot at six in the morning, in a way that makes Keith Harring street bubble figures look like Zoe Kravitz nose ring.
There is no avant-guarde, Belinda relishing in the cruelty, but also sounding like the most realistic person in the boroughs.
Yeah, yeah, but except for, except Last Days of Disco I hope,
No, no totally, Love . . .
All my heroes became kooks, or are, or were pretty much, were just like total kooks the whole entire, entire time, like, and the whole entire time and I couldn't tell, I really couldn't tell—But I'm victim of the lies style tells, or was a victim of misrepresentation, held hostage by media forms, well no more, Cyruss petulantly holding toke in gills.
The history of freestyle is : first Jay Adams competed in his first slalom hip shakin' wiggle waggle cone race in the early seventies and then, now Cyruss futilely holding the translucent proof up towards window in over studied, over self serious determinist contemplation, hitting roach lips like loach, looking from the objective outsider's pov like total flake, like a dilettante now at 10:37am on a Wednesday morning day.
Video Days was radiating off the old screen now, the plash of Rudy Johnson part had Dino Jr.'s cover version of Cure Just Like Heaven—edited street tricks videotaped with consumer camera, by future Academy Award Winning cameraman, was a logical progression from Rock N' Roll teleology move to Hip Hop to then next pastiche montage music video anti-art practice of documented board riding wave substitute, professional home movie informal time capsule and something we could never categorize quite to satisfaction—video part as self portrait, or new song, or new kind of catalog album—a ne plus ultra of exaggerated media progressed forms, and now so far in the future they are, that even Video Days was like listening to an old jazz record that had only a small dedicated subcultural cult of devotees of once accelerationist old head hold outs.
Or right there, Jason Lee or Jason Lee ironically Operation Ivy singing into video camera at the middle part or first part of Video Days, really seemed or was, was at the time, or at the same time was, was like a mocking, this mocking of Bush era politics, a post Elvis LA uber slacker archetype, skeptical of TV media televised war, no, but, now, then plying and advancing in just this, this, this, alternative cult underground video. But now the line when he sings about 'environments' just seems like a portending of a future libertarian Jason Lee impulse he would succomb to, a mocking of anti-science reactionary attitude or enlightened normie stance he would segue into into middle age, Cyruss after waiting to exhale.
Belinda, her blind square empty eyes, was wearing her prescription eyeglasses, the disjunction of almost never seeing her wearing them, looking like, giving off sociopath in porno now wearing eyeglasses look—as if Belinda looked like Robert De Niro towards the end of Goodfellas, bug eyed magnified when he looks over legal documents at the diner as a distraction from making advances to rub his protégé out. Perhaps Belinda would make advances to rub such other's out in only the way she can, not intentionally, or no, maybe half intentionally, or ruthlessly, or maybe just as collateral damage or some ever shifting combination of the four, in a way that's impossible to deconstruct and identify within the few seconds you even have her waining attention.
Belinda was a different kind of murderer though, but much worse—surely, for any hint of paradise she would break faith and troth. Since Cyruss had never seen her with her eyeglasses on before though, it also kind of, if viewed from another angle gave off an intimate, Sunday Morning damp towel on the bed pantys on the floor crossword puzzle practicality, of taxes and ledger balancing checkbook at the dinner table ambience quaint charm, that falsely alluded to maybe perhaps, more immediate future form exposure of Belinda now set to turn towards his direction perhaps now maybe.
Carroll and Howard, Carroll and Howard are simply, just, just out to lunch, in a way that inflating the price of decks by thirty percent can never save Girl,—Belinda miming in, even though really, there's no way she would have known this on her own, Belinda surprisingly or maybe, not so surprisingly, parroting what Cyruss had said recentlyish, she remembered, or she just had an incredible phonographic pornographic photographic vanalog memory, all but in her now show of emotional and spiritual support and close peer like rapport with Cyruss now. An adaptive freestyled idealism with which she so projected back onto Cyruss without really trying, she could and would do little things like that.
Cyruss thought too much unhealthily about it all, or about one night she, wearing his old t-shirt when he helped dye her hair at the studio from black to Vantablack®—
Oh, no totally, exactly! That's what I'm saying or what I was saying! Cyrus over agreeing with Belinda, quick to give Baelin too much credit, as if what she had said came from her very own autonomous observation and not what Cyruss said days ago.
Which brings Cyruss into feedback loop that only can exist in a studio, there's a point to all this, and he's just getting to it . . .
Someone tell Carroll, yeah, well, ya know, you can't run your team like Menudo, something the freestyle industry has not been able to ever quite move past.
Or no, someone tell Jim Thiebaud no matter, no matter how much of a working generosity you abide by dude, punk like died in the summer of '95, in a way that no late in life adopted East Bay rockabilly parochialist affiliation will ever excuse that you killed off the culmination Hitchcockian Stereo neo-noir beat poet San Francisco legacy that bubbled into the sheer cool and dark in day shadows of the financial district building splendora majesty . . .
But Last Days of Disco, well Last Days of Disco isa is or, gaps, gaps, redoubt! Style surely will give us some cause to climb into merriness! The co is porous, the co is more nothing than something, and the something, that something, which is being projected, is the, or this overt nuke sugar superficiality beyond kitsch, or maybe it's beyond kitsch, or a new kitsch, or exacerbated kitsch. Make no bones, there is absolutely nothing contained whatsoever in the gaps in the co, and to make matters more complicated, in this accelerated late economic phase we find ourselves in, even the substance the board co has to ply in a mode of the late stage xerox of a xerox flea market aesthetics capitalism spectacle, through which to try to wring out some kind of illusion of false utopia, or new kind of false meaning with only now only a tiny sliver of authentic optimism allowed to now even be but projected for which the ultra economic currently deems appropriate and so fashionable . . .
So your aspirations are utopian? Can that be quite hazardous don'tcha think, non?
Oh, my little heart!—Belinda, You—are Utopia, Cyruss stifled himself, Belinda, a metonym for the juice of the day that resides somewhere hiding beneath the stoned orange sun of a god evidently worth fearing, or at very least, being a little wary of.
I feel so reified that I fear I may be inert, Belinda stated with zero irony, as if locating some previously undetected rash on her body.
Like loosing your religion, Belinda?
A Robert Gober sculpture having an abortion is my religion, Dear,
Cyruss stared out the rusted 1930's window into the one o' clock pm godless day, it filling him with dread. He segued back into conversation towards where he was going, to try to ambiently brighten corners with shop talk to offset the flooding of light mid day terror.
Well, anyways, but all cos, all cos, if you think about it, promise utopia, or utopia, but to different degrees. Pro Frisbee Freestyle is about directly facing your limitations, or your limitations, confronting them or like it head on—saying, you know what? Like, surf's up dude!—like, let's party! You know that line from Fast Times. But anyways, we ply in superficiality, Frisbee ply in tricks, turning tricks. Just the word trick reeks of a reedy superficiality, too though. The Frisbee as architectural appendage. Not just for riding architecture, but a trick is about building a structure for one to stand on for about a millisecond in the blind of air. Pro Frisbee is providing a provisional place to stand, either hovering in the air, or a provisional place to stand from climbing onto surface in 4D. When you hardflip to fakie on a bank, when you catch a cracked hardflip, you made a perfect pedestal to stand onto, onto which to support yourself in air. In doing so, something absent or lacking in you can be fulfilled or maybe even redeemed in going through some trick. Learning a trick you think you cannot do, or commit to, but then riding through it, a form of baptism, of being reborn.
No, totally. You should write a manifesto! Freestylers, the ghost of the machine cyborgs now, in a way Hugo Ball dressed up as tin man, 'Magical Bishop' at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, never could have imagined. What other product can promise to deliver to you a better version of yourself if you use it right?
Cyruss agreeing with Belinda again all too quickly, not being able to breathe and look at her at the same time.
No, no, tricks are slippery propositions, their just slippery propositions, really— that require something elusive in order to catch, and that elusive, slippery thing resides in the trick like a slipping ghost slapping so for trick to land.
Cyruss now overbearing onto a deceivingly innocent Belinda on the couch reeking of Eau Triple Cedre Du Liban cologne. Cyruss' only experience with this meant, if you liked their scent it did not mean they were compatible with you, it actually meant they were better than you. Only with someone on your level, you would have to burden their scent, that burden being the work one would have to soldier through the compromise of what's rightfully meant for you.
Ok, Belinda, Belinda look, will ya look over here, Gezzus look!—ok, ok, should I, should I, no, make the squiggle squaggle patches small and like or like small and sporty, or, OR, should I just take total risk and make them—the, like patches deliberately too big, which could be a new thing, but at the risk of being totally unsellable?? So I just go full blown unsellable like, like New School??
Belinda ever addled the nightbird was she, didn't respond, 'Tis sweating labor, she thought to herself, as since resigning her post, even work not her own seemed so exhausting now.
Lin sat on the couch in her white wowcrotch jeans. It was incredible that even unemployed, Belinda still looked so well put together though—a silk scarf around her neck gingerly above her implausibly starch pressed cotton white down blouse, the blazer she had worn was now occupying a chair as if holding the entire room for ransom.
Belinda are you even listening now??
Talking to Belinda was like playing snooker, the cue lines up balls, but also causes chaos. The fact that Cyruss could speak to Bae-Lin in casual self pandering scorn, really did mean Lin held Cyruss in such socius high regard, when otherwise, if anyone spoke to her to such degree, surely Lin would have unleashed upon full poison dragged dagger of her face stabbing mind.
No, no I'm listening, Hon. What didya say.
Belinda! Oh, my god, I can't believe this. The patches! The patches. Should I, should I do them small, or like done over, over big?
Small, go small, but then hand cut the endz of the pantz.
Right, right, yeah— I—will—hand cut the ends then, Cyruss reinforcing and confirming the plan, repeating himself to cut the end of the pant legs, saying this practically rehearsed, as if this had not exhaustively been well over-gone over already.
Cyruss shaking his head cutting the denim with heavy rusty scissors, almost saying to himself, I almost don't want to get footage now, because ten years from now, ten yearrrs, it will look dated—what kind of way is that to run things?
Cy had put Pefume V Belinda on sewing machine duty, even though at that surely he had more skill than her. Lin seemed un-aware of herself, but for once, so for once contented, lost and preoccupied in peasant's handy work. It was just so heroic how Belinda could lower herself to such lower life form labor, so inspiring for Cyruss to see her there now.
Cyruss did not so much smoke chi-chi, than as he used it to punctate within his working process, like a mad hatter, some swift courtier, kept like needle between lips.
The value of tricks gets lower, the more practitioners there are in the field. Pluralism. Riven in pluralism are we. And who be so ignorant not to foresee the immediate consequence of such, such donkey stilting cock toggle? Once masterclass tricks get kooked out by kooks, and more kooks who don't deserve the trick and then this, this, this just confuses everybody into vehenerating kook class monopoly. Your dateing yourself when you skate. How do you hypnotize yourself to get ride tricks, in a field where you are just starting to hate more and more tricks. Tricks produce more tricks, like language multiplies itself, Belinda. And the tricks you like, the tricks you select, you grow tired of, or you stop doing them, though, they are the best thing, the only thing you have of yourself. But you can only pander to you're own bag of tricks—a certain death to one's practice.
Cyruss stopped tagging the the tops, stops in pause, filament needler gun in hand.
I don't even know if i should stay in New York, I have a feeling I should be in LA, but I don't want Last Days to become all LAified, if that makes sense, or no I want it to in a later dead phase sealed in amber in LA when the co dies—there's no industry out here, and, but, there's too much in Cali, too much in LA. . .
But Last Days of Disco is New York, Cyruss—it is!
Cyruss in vow fellow like embrace, Thanks, but no, no, no, I needed to hear, or I just needed to hear that or like that—or, oh, it just means a lot, is what I'm saying, that's what I'm saying.
If you were to ask Cyruss, if the conversations between he and Lin were the best conversations he had ever had, he would have probably said nothing out of paranoia of Belinda maybe overhearing you, Cyruss pulled automatically to feel about as bashful as a child.
Belinda moved and sat on the mattress on the studio floor with her legs crossed at her red MoMA gift shop imperial fascist modernist trooper boots, her back casually hunched in on itself in some operative way, as if her body expressing itself, was saying it was involved now in only the espionage of scenario only open to bear the potential for only her own immediate devlish enterprising entertainment here so soon. There was a false circumstantial innocence about her just existing there, and it was easy to forget if there was not something of possibility of ever so holding her interest, she would by no means ever be there. But if she left and then left something from her purse though, say a book of matches, a hair band, an empty coke can, even stubbed cigarette, Cyruss probably would do that thing where he wouldn't immediately clear it away right after she left. Cyruss might even let it sit and simmer in place before putting it up away somewhere secure. Or she could mention having left something behind apologetically to Cyruss even, as if such could ever be of inconvenience to him.
And Belinda's skin existing there in air, translucent like the ghost of jellyfish or the wrapping of rubber spring roll or the color of a white lubricated condom. Belinda's skin was the same color of dead stars that's light still touched the concrete—meaning her skin was the same color of god. But god was always bored, meaning Belinda was always bored, and having her color of skin was the very hardest to have indeed, but still Belinda was brave enough for us, Belinda was brave enough for all of us, now she could be brave enough for all humanity practically, and handled such hardship such burden, any such difficulty that could occur with a courageous grace and an impossibly dignified aplomb. And it was that attitude of courage that Cyruss thought went right with her everywhere she went, which quality seemed so essential about Belinda to Cyruss now, making him even wondering just how could he have possibly up to now ever not lived without that thing about her.
Everything seemed to take on an exaggerated automatic immediacy, to where Belinda would herself also relish in a certain charm in formally making plans to do banal things in such way that was always so quaint. Let's go to the store, let's start a book club, let's plan a day travel then. Such the fatal downside is this could only be maintained and cultivated with no one else around. If someone else came around, all would be immediately jostled or jeopardized or lopside to vanish completely, where time then becomes maddenly so liminal, where, say if Cyruss had to go into another room to find something while she was there talking with whoever someone else, his brain so overstimulated now alone, would now make things or objects that before Belinda were notable or previously important to him now seem so trivial and banal, and maybe now they were even nagging and stupid or so painfully unimportant in its (and Cyruss') new veneer of impotency. The fatal downside also, was how she would so easy so succumb to other's unremarkable charms and it so seemed to cheapen even his best self that he always so hastened himself to give to her.
It made sense that Cyruss would have to leerily uproot himself and move to NYC to find, or to penetrate into such coupe de foudre nature morte richness of the world exemplified through the flackering flake-ering fluckering flanking and unstable gird of synaptic flashes runneling now through Belinda's recent sharp imperial Emily Mortimer/ Jane Margolis sparrow dome cut, her head the size of tip of match pitched to salt meth. But it also made perfect sense that once he found what the surrealists referred to as the 'marvelous' (Cyruss knew about the notion of an historical avant-guardist 'marvelous' because of some brilliant hungover riot of signs musings of Belinda)—but the sea has no edges, and that beholding the marvelous, being in the presence of Belinda a fever in his blood she stirred, the privilege of being in the presence of the marvelous, quite cruelty in no way ever so guaranteed getting remaining forever keeping grasp of desir'd wreathed arms. And if but anything, being in presence of the marvelous most certainly, most simply, was just some very cheap coupon's guarantee of a future trauma looming in all its vapourization.
Worse, when Belinda regalled to Cyruss about meeting Sir Thomas Harewood, Linda talking about the Chancellor's son working with Denma off all people on the Balenciaga ska-program, Denma, fucking Denma??, it may have been quite deflating for Cyruss to even hear, as he gnashed his teeth to bleed as if scrubbed scoured with pad full of sour anthrax—Belinda being the most advanced person Cyruss had come across or ever known of quite frankly, or would ever know, and naturally, and maddeningly so, so should she be in tune with and project against him a richer, more advanced, better-than-Cyruss-reality, her reality, Belinda's immediate reality, that was never to ever really include Cyruss as permanent fixture anyways (and actually, years later Cyruss would marry a more tenable but more well suited woman who complimented him in a more sustainable, more reliable, less stressfull, less catastrophic, but maybe, perhaps, somewhat significantly less romantic, more workable way than if with Belinda, which with Belinda, Cyruss had to keep a working denial in just maintaining, because that's how life really goes down—and oh, our slippery people, who's love is never linked to the deserver).
But that it was so fatal and such an unsurpassed existential threat and everso risk to Cyruss' own interior autonomy to ever but be in Belinda's presence, especially when, considering when, she would innocently talk up a guy, or she talks up another guy, or any guy in that way, in that specific way, that she could be casually low key bragging up some without even trying—a confoundingly lionizing relay to Cyruss of the other's otherwise so banal or unremarkable things about them, stupid but demoralizing normie details, that made Cyruss just now go so completely madd by such over labored futility of all his efforts. Think about it : Cyruss fakie crookx'd the fucking Madison Square Garden Suski rail at six in the morning with the enthusiastic help of pedestrians clearing his landing way for Jesuchristsakes, great—Belinda casually mentions like murder as it fell, her riding on the back of Costard's stupid and insipid motor bike on the speedway. Cyruss nollie flip backtailed down a tiny pvc handrail off a thirty five inch fun box in a contest as youngster (And think about it: a total Mullen meets Gonz move!), and you know what?—hey, at least Belinda got to travel with her cheesewhiz chump change ordinary norm normy university professor kinda boyfriend to Boston where she let him 'get some', as she put it, in the hotel room paid for by the conference, the contents of such conference's programming probably never really to be remembered, except barely by those organizing it. Just men's names passing through Belinda's lips so casual ominous was to Cyruss more obscene than gypie's lust—Cyruss thought about it, he thought about it, he thought about it a lot, actually—tooo much, by which to that was now the ultimate endorsement, Bealin's endorsement of a guy, any guy, stinging like life size furry poison asp, and tears mean nothing, and tears will always mean nothing, all to which, that it maybe even made Cyruss meditate and harp on all but the futility of all his greatest and dear accomplishments now and again, the futility of life, the futility of the unrequited that one is only rewarded by what, becoming bullied by being accused of being love addict by advice idiots who really know sorry nothing or anything for that matter, and if you think about it, who have probably never really ever brushed up against the tepid danger of sublime.
The mind shall starve and the body will pine after spending friendzone zone afternoon with Belinda anyways. But after hearing about Denma though that one one day, Cyruss, alone and madd with energy that needed to be emptied like blue balled fire hose, after hearing about Denma that one one time, Cyruss concocted graphic in fevered frenzy, an everslick graphic, where he counterfeited hundred dollar bills at Xerox 'Pocalypse, surreptitiously at a color printer station (which according to the sticker on the machine, was apparently a federal offense), threw the counterfeited bills into the washing machine at the Panic in Needle Park laundromat to make to look weathered, took photo reproductions of them in battered melted rows (and also added small obscure detail collage of stickers along the edges to give a little life of variation in the graphic), and then sent it off to PS Stix to get heat transferred embossed. Belinda never seemed as much impressed as she shoulda, or could have been, or as much as Cyruss had maybe wanted—or never really seeming like ever enough props from Belinda that he even had prod even with the impossible purist geeks who ran Pro Sports on Upper Eastside.
The clear plastic Swatch telephone bleaped in a way that signaled some future Godardian Alphaville Modernity, and Cyruss may have played up his micro situational petty frustration in front of Belinda answering it.
Vyvanse Distro, this Cyruss.
Judith. No fine. Good. No real good. No, I don't care. Well he's a little liar. No, no, no. That's just fine. Come over. Yeah, totally. Okay, okay well that's quite fine, fine I should say, alright?! No, no no worries. Great. Oh, you wish! Okay, bye Buster.
Cyruss put the phone in its cradle with over emphasis on the clicking clacking sound indicating some finality that laying it down like so into the base it made. This was definitely not a healthy self awareness of performative exaggeration to function with, because eventually a comedown so hard ends up for one from pine to die, and surely comes with such actions, such unhealthy, unhealing thinking. He paused with practiced, casual, over dignified airs, knowing Belinda may or may not be noticing. He lamely whispers something to himself despite never wanting to do so in front of anyone, as if thinking or overthinking out loud, rubbing the tip of his nose with his thumb and pointer with a gale of decisive responsibility self assurance, now segueing immediate trying to project a veil of self possession and finality of command over his immediate environment.
Judith, Judith Lighthill was supposed to come over today, or did I tell you? I—I wanted you to meet her, she was or is going to model Diet Coke Maintenance Pant.
No, I haven't known, or heard of her . . .
Your serious?
I,
Your serious! You never seen, seen—
No, I said, I haven't seen—
Well that's the Lunts, it was like ZKX, or on, or a, or the state municipal channel—the one where they don't put vowels in its call letter. . .
Or no, no, they don't put vowels in any, or in any of the, like radio stations. Cyruss correcting himself in a way that reveals he was relishing in conversation.
Lin stretched her arms out with an unlit cigarette between her fingers, stretching innocently and the pill was surely kicking in.
You know what I always wondered, I wonder, does ice cream, does ice cream have to get cooked before it is actually made into ice cream?
Your crazy, Belinda. Cyruss gunning the top, a band of filament tags in his mouth, giving him a not quite accurate seriousness from executing the labor of vocation.
Oh, spat, see what you made me do, Cyruss examining the tag incorrectly going through the garment panel.
Belinda standing, went over and looked at it innocently, but looking at it also like it was her fault, over appraising it curiously in the fresh peel attention the speed gave her.
Cyruss quickly located the small sewing picker hook, rushing to fish the tag out carefully,
Well anyways, anyways listen, will you listen? The Lunts, it just was this, just was this, about this like troubled nineteen and three quarters of a year old like homeless total babe you see, okay?, that this kinda Robert Mapplethorpey modeled after wanna-be like New Yorker, New York photographer loser guy, but who's straight, innocently lets her crash, or permanently lets her crash or whatever, at his ropy small room apartment crash pad. There was a big age difference, or like archetypally, you know, like it seems he's naturally like suited to be her father or like tawny father figure. But the thing is is, or so what happens is was this dropout girl Post Punky, or she kinda becomes his muse is all, or like his subject, or what have you, whatever, and she even kinda becomes his agent or like rep, and, and, or just vivifies his art photography even, even also gaining him access into the crusty but hip downtown gallery, that before he met Post Punky, wouldn't even look at his portfolio or even spit in his direction for time of day. But also Post Punky, Post Punky was always getting him, or always getting him into all kind of needless but like predictable predicaments and shenanigans. There was one episode where she shoplifted dominatrix gear for a Robert Morris inspired shoot for him and she gets caught, and then she had to go on probation and somehow quit going out, which was an impossible thing to demand of now on poor Post Punky. That's wack, that's wack Post Punky would always say. You can't buy beer with food stamps—that's wack. It looks like the pet store at the Bowery is about to go out of business—that's wack. There's no sliding scale at the abortion clinic—that's totally wack. Another time she stole rolls of film and a new camera bag from a kiosk at the mall for the photographer, and he gets in trouble for unknowingly being out in public with the serial numbered bag. Serial numbers are dumb wack Post Punky says. There was another episode where Post Punky was at a party and as a dare ended up locking herself in a tiny safe and almost accidentally killed herself. But the thing is, the thing is, is, there might have been, or there was an undercurrent between them, ya know, that also was this, or was totally this like subtext engine-ing the entire show. You see, the photographer had this misguided conventional sense from his upbringing in the Midwest, only reinforced by everyone in New York surprisingly or maybe not so surprisingly, even the supposed avant-gardists who ran the gallery who really were actually when it came down to it, traditional in their attitude about Post Punky and the photographer together, more traditional than they'd want to believe about themselves. Because he photographed Post Punky but maintained restraint though, his photos of Post Punky had a, had a like charge to them, this dreamy and luminous subconscious quality thing going on, that no one could quite put their finger on, but they were intriguing, they were actually real intriguing, the photos of Post Punky were actually real good, even poignant, and I don't know who the production designer of the show was who they got to fabricate these photos, but they were actually good, they were actually real good photos, but anyways, they are enough to finally getting him shows and like high profile gigs. But the last episode, the last episode was an hour and a half long, and Post Punky disappears and we don't know why, but it seems like the photographer kinda knows, and then she comes back, and then she disappears again, and it may be a cry for help or something else, but out of a misguided sense of some stupid duty only constantly reinforced by everyone normie else in the show, he let's her go, even though you get the feeling she may or may not have really wanted to bounce. Sure Post Punky was a total ditz and kinda an idiot, but you had the feeling, or you know there was something essential, or just this thing about her, something timelessly indispensable about her presence there, her cracked warped idiot wind wisdom, but really, by then, you could kind of tell the photography project between her and the photographer, you knew was now getting exhausted, and their relationship, their working relationship, or their, or the like situation between them desperately needed to shift somehow. But how should it have shoulda shifted?? But the photographer was also unoriginally allured and lamely seduced also by the intrigue of advancing in his career too, and it became real off putting to Post Punky, and Post Punky was now finally recognized as the superstar she always was, more popular than ever and people were always giving Post Punky unsolicited wildly uninformed and out of line and inappropriate outsider's perspectival advice—leave him he's just exploiting you, Post Punky. She holds hands with another guy at some stupid opening, and is angry the photographer just lets it ride because he's involved in talking to someone who could advance him opportunity, which Post Punky naturally thinks is incredulously lame because she already well got him notoriety and shouldn't that be well enough?, but she feels guilty holding hands with someone else, and hates that she feels guilty, and she's angry too. So at the end of the, or in the last episode, he has a real perfect chance, a real chance to finally kiss Post Punky and you can tell he totally wants to by then, but then he flubs it by his characteristic overthinking, and then it's not his fault now because he even then actually tries, he actually makes body movement to actually go for it, and then they get interrupted by his new age appropriate clueless brassy loudmouth opinionated chunky girlfriend who comes barging in—a super annoying new character from the last two seasons—who now comes waddling in, completely unaware of what's going on, yammering about something trivial that only has a bearing in relation to her cornfed haymaker self. Punky ends up leaving, going with some kid who just started working at the gallery even younger than her, and who you totally can tell Punky now can be smarter than and now boss around and that's an alluring change for her and it seems to work for her. The photographer's career you can tell, at the very end of the episode, is probably or really is about to come to a screeching hault without Post Punky, and he's left with this totally lame and catastrophically boring and super conventional girlfriend who's actually his age, who didn't even want him to take photos anymore—the unbearable old head girlfriend exactly his age he was now with, that he was brainwashed by himself and reinforced by the pedestrian attitudes of Lower Eastside supposed avant-guarde community, into thinking was the right thing to do. The very last scene of the series, he lets Post Punky leave as predicated by, pulled away by the cruel banal pull of incidental circumstantial everyday activity of real life around them, real life like say in a Brecht play, like leaves swept away by the unstoppable wind, and now the stage scene reflects not just the sadness of the sitcom, but it emanates the sadness in everything in this loose and hard to explain way, and Punky exits and it's harsh, but it's in that invisible last silent moment between them, and then the age appropriate fat mouth girlfriend is totally oblivious to it and as usual, interrupts them unwittingly insensitively rudely, and then she and the photographer are now sitting alone on the same old couch that the photographer and Post Punky spent hours watching late night TV together on, and his new girlfriend is prattling on and rattling on, just talking to him now like she made some decision for them now, that she's been nagging him about, that they are going to move to New Hampshire of all places, in a new germ of subtle hillbilly bullying antagonistic way on her part that you can tell is only going to probably ramp up and envelop and advance into the fresh prision of the photographer's new situation with his best friend Post Punky now long gone.
I wanna see that show! We should watch it!
No, no networks show it anymore, or no, it's shelved from syndication.
Can you get at one at Video Vortex, anywhere you can rent a taped.
Belinda—they don't like make no video tapes of television, television shows, or only movies, just movies . . .
Oh, okay but what, what happened to her?
Well, that's that's Judith Lighthill—I mean she's still —around, that's what I'm saying, that's all I'm saying, she was, or atleast was supposed to come by earlier . . .
Cyruss brained his fingers against the back of his head, putting pelt finger to nose thinking out loud, reveling in the scent of his own carcass, accidentally grossly exposing himself, sometimes Cyruss would also enjoy blow back of his bad breath exhaust into his hand to waft against his face into his nose and all goddamn day, I seen Judith in a 411 a while back, it looked like like she was working as receptionist at the ZOO YORK loft, in, or in the, at the meatpacking district, or was . . .
She sounds terribly intriguing . . .
No, no but that's like what I'm saying. Just listen or what I was saying was, that, that you'd probably like her, or you would, like her—I mean we really could start working with her Kools . . .
Kools, Kools! Cyruss said Kools to Belinda whenever he got excited. It always just blurped out unintentionally, and oh, so pains of losing control of his tongue, as if Cyruss' body, trying to self castrate itself into perma friend zone box car canyoning it down, even though he was already there. Such an idiot, Cyruss thought to himself in awkward pause he gave, a very slight pause that Belinda may have noticed.
But what can be true love in which it is falsely, or rather in this case, so surreptitiously attempted from friendzone furrowing, like this here or like this now. Cyruss felt it utterly so shameful to feel this way. How so could he not stand being so re-wired like this.
Cyruss got a quick stare at the Elysian field golden peach fuzz micro strands adorning Belinda's arms, forcing Cyruss to look away as if shielding himself, Lady, I command you, thought he.
You are something somewhere in the space of difference between the definitions of idiom and metonymy and synecdoche and then whatever that is divided by three . . .
You, the skittering awkward discontinuity jump cut that fucks up the flow of sequence continuity in a film, you, the film crew reflected and revealed in the actor in the movie's sunglasses . . .
You, an incompetent foley artist, relying on the same two or three cheap tricks that hypnotize over and over . . .
Belinda, the pleasurable squeaking of fresh rubber of new shoes squelching against buffed sealed concrete floor . . .
A Greenwich Village chryon the size of drive in movie screen scrolled news on the narrow street only visible to those walking down the too close blocks, the moon was never more than a month old, Alf bleached all his fur and dyed all his fur blue, was now to be referred to as 'Blue Alf', the sick little girl from It's A Wonderful Life was a new pornographer, there was a massive nationwide shortage of glass and gravel, Jamie Thomas was in his late period Juggalo phase, synth farming might be able to avert some famine somewhere, a dystopian physically obese pop star who was chosen as a function to manage the self conscious dwindling standards of consumers was now taking on a defiantly decadently sexy revamp persona in a misguided misplaced way that couldn't work because of her physical archetype, in a move that the pop star was trying to misguidedly travail past her own professional and personal expectations that went against the concept, the very point of even having a popstar as normative as her in the first place.
The society of spectacle is thus filled by a society of extras—at least Cyruss was blade running team on his own back, promoting notable extras of a now fried sugar au courant freestyle street squad, where everyone finds the illusion of an interactive democracy of the freestyle dance tradition (or what remains of it at least) in more or less now vastly strained truncated channels of communication, which were becoming more and more worn down on a daily basis by biblical flood of totally clueless new practitioners and user generated content anti-aesthetic riven everywhere, and anyone who said skateboarding is better than ever now, but and yet they just weren't ever there when it mattered, and if you weren't around in the early nineties your'e opinion means quite nothing.
The upper Lower Eastside was full of possibility nonetheless, the idealized illusion of the Metropol realized itself out to Cyruss and Lin now, now in center of universe, but a mostly null universe created not from big bang necessarily, but from a colossal ceaseless eternal cosmic nausea contracting itself from its insides projecting out it's pesticide insides and perpetuating un-darkened matter into lighting infinity field of ordered chaos in spiraling out into vertigo fractal—where in certain clusters, a refined collective idealism was for some reason still allowed to exist, but even by then, the best possible outcome of conditions was or could be still so skewd or warped, so krooked like a smushed crocodile's drawbridge head.
On the dim lit streets, no moon and no stars, Cyruss felt a looming uncertainty, personal sensitivity was constantly under threat, Paris and New York were failures. Cyruss and Belinda walked past Madison Square Park dark now, to the sound of the surrounding scrolling tapedeck soundspill that was like customized, user generated junk mail programming, and they passed yet another graffiti wall that dumbly alluded to a future apocalypse of death of artist end of romance end of days. The song sang out Love the One Your With, in a heartily empty Karen Carpenter anemia grasp expressing itself like some juke box desperately needing some unplugging—one quickly gets the idea how media forms were quicker to expire here than anywhere else though, even such heartening empty advice message, love the one your with, did not particularly seem to take on any special social relevance anywhere near or around now, filler sentiment for filler people. And what form do you suppose a life would take that was determined in decisive moment precisely by the cheap street song last on everyone's lips?
The moon was driven up. It started misting rain, making the streets slimy and so expediently hopeless, marking a sense of squalor futility—we were wet in our insides but it was manageable enough for now, the clothes could only seem to barely protect, but the moisture will always move on in, not just in on our bodies, but moisture will advance into our apartments. The subway platform floors looked like the floors of a water park bathroom with soggy bits of orgy sandwich bread, but the grisling smell of burnt train track oil wind tunnel somehow tempered it. If Cyruss had his mind wiped and someone told him this was the most desirable city in the world, there would be absolutely no way of him ever believing so, it would be quite a prosperous proposition to think from just looking at the immediate, and the buildings looked like ruins now and everyone looked ugly and even good looking attractive people looked real ugly, especially the attractive were ugly.
Belinda had catholic severe no nonsense crisp jeans on, some thick heather zip up hoodie underneath stiff dark blue wool Jessica Lange long coat and an outdoor Waldorf scarf to Flâneur it all together. She was talking about her sister in a way it was quite hard for Cyruss to imagine Belinda could ever love anybody, least not herself, a topic he thought best not to lean on too much. Belinda almost anorexically thin now looking astonishing, avec quasi Betty Page haircut now since getting dismissed by David Ross, Belinda by this point just had something like permanent permanent-vacation pain brain drain (well, actually, this was nothing quite new for her, but certainly worth noting yet again), she also had gotten herself all caught up taking some tyroid medicine that worked like speed, or was speed—in which she ingested otherwise steady diet of too consistent amounts of Cordol Medoc, Kratom stems, chronic and blaze. Unpredictable in public, maybe all too predictable in private, though flightlier than JFK airport, and since she was always coked to ears on feds, she had a voracious vibrating insect like sexual appetite, she loved women, hated them even more.
The bar breathed odor of sour milk, and sprayed like kitty litter shit box near the bathrooms, and it smelt good actually, real good in a perverse way, so much, that Cyruss would look forward to the smell with slight regret of missing out, when he thought about the bar.
When people stated punk was the first phenomena where the distinction between performer and audience was ameliorated, they got even that wrong. Altamont was seamonkey sea of hippies that self multiplied from cues from the band they were there to see, the band that was once way ahead of them, but now the long hair pre-twee bubble blowing Manson freak out crowds were quickly gaining in on, not only where the crowds advancing footing, but they had severely misguided idiosyncratic ideas of their very own—the Hells Angels embodied the very extreme and worst of this misguided shift of consumer cum producer, the Hells Angels were a model more punk than the Stones now—they, beyond physically playing music, they were an advancing progression past the Rolling Stones, so much that they as motorcycle dropouts and motorhead thugs were even more Stones than Stones.
New York was the worst because now even the help (bartenders) looked like artists (or tried to at least) and Cyruss could tell this bartender, who clearly wasn't a real artist (otherwise, why ever would he even be there working?) had not only somehow some misguided sense of his actually not not being a real artist status, but that he was a bartender visibly operating under the quite rich attitude, outwardly projecting a social molester's presupposition of bartenders somehow holding more social cachet by virtue of them just working as service industry indentured servant stooges. For sophisticated women to even be complicit in this, is even more apocalyptic than Woodstock, and proof that women were most likely more driven by lazy led have it both ways sorry situation than any notion for regard of any semblance of any firmly held standards.
When they arrived, he and Belinda approached the bar, but then Cyruss saw 'Nanandez, Stephan from the Pierside, Trevor Golden, and Gary Smith (Gary Smith from SF, not Media Gary Smith) at a table and Cy broke away.
Heads is heads and you aint a head unless your head—Cyruss walked into their pub smattering convo going on . . .
The task was infra dig . . .
Or quick . . .
Well, complete non-sec at least
Beneath one's dignity surely
An exaltation of violent sweetness, no no doubt,
Warlock was all, I mean, all bagged up Son, all chased away, crazy lanes too . . .
Cy walked up to the real New York avant-guarde coterie heads of state—that no normie sneaker collector bumkin or idiot mid-take youtuber dweeb could ever quite penetrate or understand.
Cyruss, what that deal Niggah, Trevor slapping Cy.
Nothing Cutty,
Who's that you come in with, that your girl . . .
Nah, Man,
Cyruss casually looks back at the bar, his smile slunk off his face seeing himself now reflected behind the mirror traffic behind the bartender—Cyruss stared at himself, his image behind Baelin and service worker visibly meteing in talking her up now—the servant, who wantonly wasted precious little time doing that little thing where he served himself and Belinda both free shots with an outlay of RC Cola coke back chasers, and then you know they just totally take their shots shot together, like in some bad midrange cocktail movie, in his all out in open way of inadvertently not so inadvertently advancing, carpet-bombing, wretching of the mark, or trying to claim wrought social footing over Cyruss now. The indentured serf, with vicious determination, like male penguin making pebble proposal to female penguin all in ghastly plain sight.
'Nandez usually icey, though but now since Cyruss was preoccupied, you know now 'Nandez completely unrelatedly, of all times decides to now offer Cyruss his attention in generosity of spirit.
I saw a kid with the calling card slick earlier . . .
Oh, dead leather, sick,
Like sex with a nympho, you gonna keep it in rotation?
Most untypical, I mean, I'm tryin,
'Nandez looked at, took notice of Cyruss preoccupied with a vague anxiety.
Hey yo, you okay Sun—
Just look at this little dime bag over there . . . , A sick glint in Cy's eye.
Who?
Who?? The bartender over there, Man! Cy, as if spurring a horse too hard.
Aw, no, it's all good, that's the homie—
Oh, that's the homie, that's the homie. Marvelous!
Cy, don't worry man, Jim's a good guy. 'Nandez putting his hand of Cyruss' shoulder judiciously.
Oh, I'm not worried!
Easy Dunn. He's actually, hey so—
Cyruss walked away from 'Nandez mid sentence, approached reproach coursing himself the bar drunk off freshly peeled anger, feeling especially buoyed by the edge of its own self repression in his sway. There were plastic filament wisteria like palm fronds growing from the ceiling that radiated gradient fluctuations of color light inside them, and the bar looked real cool now in a way that projected an idealism antithetical visually to Cyruss totally trippin' now.
If Chris Miller was dope, if Chirs Miller was so fuckin' dope, then why did he not move to the WORKSHOP when GnS folded?? Cyruss' tweeting inside head approaching them.
Yo, what time you get off Coach? Cyruss pluckily gap pressure flipping the gauntlet and the waiter and Belinda were still talking, or must not have heard Cyruss' provocation. Cyruss now the lone rail, pauses in the obscurity of his non-acknowledgement.
Yo, Homie, I say, what time, what time you get off now Kousin!
Nothing Cyruss just flexed apparently had not at all registered with him—a New York moment where it's impossible to gain one's attention in a world goes on without you activity.
Hey, what can I get you?, the bartender finally registers Cyruss, totally clueless, oblivious distracted from macking Baelin, the barback working a default and repugnant good service standard innocently and in full display of his de facto public facing niceness, what a guy.
Hey, I said, I says what time you get off now Gangstar?? Cyruss swimming in it all now, as if porky swilling his own private above ground circular backyard pool, but also kinda knowing right well he's making a plum fool of himself in front of Belinda now.
Belated in flipping to reproach, tender draws swords back the bartender, Why, what—what you want to know, Brother . . .
No, no reason Money Grip, it's just before you do—go, uhmm, don't forget, or don't forget to hose down the floor mats behind the bar right before you leave, Mate. Cyruss as if wielding the full extent of what's left of his withering socio-sexual-political spleen.
Cyruss! Belinda yapping back like angry penguin.
What. Don't worry, it's all, all good.
Apparently not. Your being rude, don't be like that. Belinda taking in misguided moral stance very unaware of the situation; and what the invalidity, so the pomposity of her own response,
Don't be like what—whatever Man, Cyruss' eyes coursing at readymade rival, as Cy the sweet clown, the sweet fool, now to so dare and try to and fail to plume for sweet lady.
Don't mind my friend, Belinda, for once taking a stranger's feelings into consideration, saying of Cyruss 'friend' to some symbolic and actual mortal enemy to Cyruss, in the soft castrative way that girls so softly and devilishly so can craft, which actually, Cyruss naturally, sort of thought Belinda was well beyond, but really, who knows?, and to be fair, maybe in this case with Belinda, it could have just been linguistically incidental, but no, no women do so know how to use, wield around the F word.
Cyruss turning to the bartender, segueing with more than just a shade of some soley self prescribed tactical manual operations of condescension—the music in the background played a variety beat melody that expressed an economical reified sentiment of self possession applicable to social setting in any occidental city in American, but seeming not particularly to apply to Cyruss right now.
Cy trying to give the impression of pulling back, but still not pulling back,
Okay, okay, sorry, sorry Dick! I'm sorry Dick! I was just kidding, kidding but no, no get me, get me, what you just had or, and then I'll get all three shots, chasers, how about that, let me buy you're drink Pimpstar.
Cyruss, surely no detached signifier to be manipulated now, and as such, such is in the simplicity of man to harken after flesh, one naturally automatically imagines battle of sexes being just between man and lady, though lady could very well conspire or incidentally allow to pit man against man. Belinda definitely, probably, maybe who knows, was doing this deliberately?, probably not though, though her less thought out actions were to surely blanch much more than what this single night allows.
Surely such show of resolve in defending his interests, is something indeed women pay attention to and well do seek out, but considerably less so in New York, or not necessarily how so one would think. The ultra economic had advanced so, all ecosystems would be accelerated to exacerbation, the unworkable godlessness of contradiction was a condition one had to so wearily contend against always. In New York, it was reversed upside down opposite day everyday, but standardized—you had to be man enough to get clucked into soft serve humiliation and not say anything and just play dumb or such would be perceived as you displaying your own weakness and insecurity, and to even but show resolve to defend one's own self and one's own self interests in immediate jeopardy would seem immature and childish and reactionary and insecure the same—and guess who would get to be final judge jury executioner say of all that?
As how Belinda so will scorn, how she spends her wit.
Cyruss the way your being your bound to get you're ass kicked . . .
Curious, Cyruss was quite sure that's precisely what was happening when she was shooting up at the bar with Izzy Stradlin' right over there,
In manner and form following, never you mind, like never mind Belinda, whatever shall follow in my correction and god defend that right . . .
I mean, really. My stomach has been hurting, I—I just needed a shot—to quell the pain from walking here, Belinda now as if as innocent as spare button hidden in blazer sport coat, but from Cy's pov, she really was so with a suspect liar's justification.
Cyruss coming off histrionic, Belinda your so quick to produce acquaintances, I mean, I mean no offense to you, but for myself it is in such ways I must conduct myself and that for which I won't, cannot, will not apologize . . .
The heart is not a metaphor, Belinda dashed back quite unsympathetically, the most unromantic thing said in New York this nigh unto night.
Belinda softened up, but watching the world react to Belinda for Cyruss was like asphyxiation by chemo flumes from aqualung, and as such was ramping up in becoming increasingly so burdensome, it was no wonder that time and time again a behind the scenes whipsawed photographer let Post Punky just leave with someone else, Cyruss thought now. That Cyruss was comparing his life with a made up scenario by an incompetent TV writer was certainly never lost on him either. Still, there was something about Belinda that Cyruss thought was his, his alone, and or seeing such immediate and automatic disregard by a freeway's worth of integer-rando interrupters made him possibly stir quite crazier, or no, stir quite fatally crazier, driven even more madd, compounded by what the city already drudged forth in him, and all the disruptor beserkers coming off the conveyor belt of sidewalk—Cyruss carried that vague sense he would never last.
Belinda was visibly spracked in a way she may not have been aware, You think there's anyone around with whom I could cop an insta gram? I don't think I see anybody . . .
How's your stomach now, Cyruss reaching, needlessly asking by this point.
It's fine now, I suppose, Baelinda saying slightly removed, with an only at face value objective innocence.
Last night I had a dream, and I won't bore you with . . .
Cyruss, not, not now, Lin wiping her mouth.
What not now—
Don't willya?
Don't what?
Just don't, not now,
Okay, okay, okay,
Somehow having rational mind, or like standards and all, gets you nowhere fast apparently here. Cyruss tempering the awkwardness with the notion of some other superficial frustration far off somewhere else, holding his burning cigarette right on blanching the top of the table, right near the coaster placed in the name of candle's beard.
Of course it does not. Your just learning that? And how, why would it ever not? Belinda, with a cruelty associated with an awareness of some kind of categorical imperative wisdom that she as woman only has access to in factoring into the conversation, but she's so off base.
How, they exert themselves against you, the entire world your saying . . .
Entire world what—I mean really Cyruss, after having to resign I'm just so—
So, so what Belinda,
Linda relaxed a sigh in extremis, looked behind her back, looking to see if onlookers were checking,
Recently, I don't know . . . I just don't, simply don't know what to do with myself, I've, I'm becoming or it's like, as if, I'm becoming, or I've become . . . stranger to myself, Belinda with the usual pithy thing white girls like to unoriginally invent to observe about themselves that doesn't quite make sense but, sounds half or a third poetic, like saying such as if they woke up this very morning and looked in the mirror to find they have transmogrified overnight into a three hundred pound black woman and now simply don't recognize themself. Surely it makes one wonder how one would not 'recognize themself' if you've lived in your same body, same mindfield practically everyday continuously with only just sleep breaks the last thirty seven years—'I just don't know who I am . . . ' Belinda, as if a not so original victim to all her not so original instincts.
Oh, ok. Sure, sure you have Belinda. As, or as if you, you haven't been otherwise like living the, this full Belinda Mulgrave show this whole entire, this whole entire time. You resigned you're post basically because you what, sabotaged you're own exhibition on what was like, like what, paid vacation, and whatever, or whatever else, god knows went down in Berlin??
Well, no, no. You just don't understand I—I was just so close. Nevermind how I even got there, no, but I, I was there! There's a reason machines don't work in dreams and I, and, or the source materials, those source materials, for these historical avant-garde experimental abstract works, these source materials I encountered. Well, these Léopold Survage experimental filmic abstraction watercolors in particular, these naked sheets I saw, that I saw outside the Nationalgalerie, well, these Survage drawings from an unmade abstract post-Wagerian absolute film, but seeing, seeing these individual watercolor drawing's marks for a projected animated film never made, still posits direct connections of, of, like the projected . . . subconscious in dream state, or dream state. Dreams end where machines stop working or where they cannot work? Or no, dreams begin when machines stop working. And where exactly does a grid of synaptic flash and a dream differentiate? Just as looking at each frame of drawing is the absolute limit of seeing the film, the brain can only power so much detail in a dream, just like these individual frames of sufficient abstraction ending somewhere else deep on the page. As the limit of abstraction, is an abstraction, the limit, the border of a dream is an abstraction? How close is abstraction to nothingness, or antimatter even? Where does exactly, does abstraction end and oblivion like begin?
Belinda paused, cracking the menthol crush filter ruthlessly like it was bug egg, lighting up in a purposefull expertise punctuation.
Besides, if I never took, never smoked black, I would have never stumbled onto this in the first place. Art has its own sorry conditions, away, regardless of any other normie sanctioned imperatives asserted by all those not on the level surrounding us everywhere and everywhere. That's, that's like, or no, no, those are the conditions solving the paradox, any paradox required, that no normie curators can ever on their own understand.
Cyruss sat unmoved, unconvinced, trying to untangle Belinda's latest art speak pull of chink in chain jingle jangle ballyhoo.
Guns never work in my dreams, but the dream I was telling you about, when I called the Palace girl, the phone worked there that time. So what about that?, Cyruss uncharitable to Belinda now for the first time.
Yes, yes but, but you're dream comes from, it comes from anxieties you have to which were or are the like, like the, driver, driver of that dream, probably or probably because you're dream was so pointedly driven, the phone had enough wind allowing it, permitting it to symbolically and actually function to play out that anxiety. If the phone did not work, then the premise, your dream anxiety could probably not have played itself out by you're subconcious.
But I think, but I think machines don't work in dreams, when, or when, think about it, them not working helps play out the anxiety that is powering the dream anyways. I try to shoot a gun when I need to and it doesn't work, I try to telephone someone desperately, the phone doesn't work. I wasn't calling the Palace girl desperately, but my dream about her was playing out my issues of rejection. Cyruss pragmatically playing Belinda's logic to it's conclusive fault.
Cyruss finding aporia in Belinda's logic, which she was convinced was somehow a major philosophical epistemological leap, her very discovery, by the triangulation of the Chancellor's drawings to be used as models, like a working historical rebus for expressing the very end of cinematic perception, which in turn could be coordinated with whatever the exact ends of subconscious perception is, and then that concept further taken to even being applied to break open what we know about existence tout court maybe even? She knew she had it, or at least really thought she had it, that, that up until now she told no one (besides her failed pitch blatherings to a very unsympathetic director, Heinrich in Berlin, and also the Chancellor), because that's how serious and very real it got to her, like discovering Knowledge on level with some Holy Grail like in Indiana Jones 3. But Belinda sure must have, sure did a number on herself—because when she finally told someone—Cyruss, and that he could so immediately debunk it with even his dumb freestyler street smart logic, and he not at all even trying to be vindictive in disproving Belinda's secret thesis when he, think about it, otherwise wanted her, maybe even needed her to be the enigma she sometimes or most of the time could seem to be.
Actually, that's not true, Cyruss gave it to her straight in a way that tasted of the cheap flavor broth of it's own junk drawer of lost top ramen spice packet flavor vindication, still hot off the bar, even thinking, maybe even, though probably really not, such knocking her off her cloud, would make, could make Belinda, maybe perhaps, who knows, take notice in the annoyed older brother dominant no nonsense treat-you-like-an-annoying-little-sister-dynamic some girls very well do take to, but nevermind that, because it would have probably been real naive of Cryruss to think such way anyways, and a bit futile now too late, as it was all set in the mold of it's own logic of advancing—that no no limit soldier could not exactly retreat back on and start again fresh with a woman, as if somehow un-tattoing themselves from the lady's brain.
But, but you can't read in your dreams, surely that's a machine, writing is a machine—your brain doesn't have enough power to write itself text, for itself, to read back at itself as a prop in a dream. Belinda grasping for reach, demonstrating her quick on the floor administrator thinking, that was the very last line of defense that curators developed to protect their own credibility at street, gallery levs.
Cyruss' brown brow furrowed down, eyes turned to leech squiggles in suspicious pragmatic ordinary consumer level concentration, But I thought, I though like the part of your brain dreaming is separated from the other side of your brain that is in charge of cognitive functions such as reading text, thus you can't read even a stop sign in your dream. Surely your brain has enough power to project the word 'Stop' back at yourself?
I—don't know, Belinda pensively scattershot, baffled for once in her life.
Belinda shrugging off in a sort of adjusting, segueing to a somewhat willful working denial, going from fifth gear down to first, changing lanes, trying to escape the pitfall of her very own devising.
Well, anyways, anyways, well that, that one one, that pedant who's now in my past position, I was telling you about earlier or earlier—that chav wench, she was a jade, a wanton, she didn't, she didn't even use Chicago style for her citations.
Cyruss nodded gulp agreement, as if knowing the difference between MLA and Chicago.
Belinda addressed some recently naturalized citizens of the commune at the orientation for the section orgy. She was a piercing, frightfully striking enigma, short feathered haircut in commune issued one piece workout uniform made out of thick premium constructed stretchy material as if for fascist futurist evil network super hero—Belinda was a figure evoking that of tour guide, guidance counselor, acting coach, trainer, nurse, fellow participant and maybe priestess.
Cyruss, with whom she was hosting the school of flesh orientation, stood in admiring deferral, slightly behind and to the right side of Belinda, his arms casually folded listening intently, as if learning in real time also, alien workshopping what she was saying as if in clinic—as if he as fellow citizen of the commune (though really he was its prime administrator), Cyruss was naturally perpetually discursively open to still learning from the depths of words dynamism in which she so passionately spoke, even though you know he had well heard her spiel already—Cyruss casually demonstrating how he himself, at the end of the day, was also an exemplary administrator citizen, ceaselessly open and now demoing himself as learning model of the commune's section, despite wearing John Lennon glasses and a funk hat.
Belinda's seemingly automatic attitude of refuting all categories full on display, casting not so seemingly hidden twittering depths.
Our message is is that you can spend your whole time.
Keep on breaking through.
But you can't just break on through once and then think, 'Well, I've made it'.
I broke onto.
There's a zillion membranes to penetrate.
Four hundred quadrillion places to go you know, you move to another direction, another dimension.
Big deal.
We went, we went to the moon?
Big deal.
We went to Venus?
Big deal.
We keep moving and moving and moving.
You know, Muhammad went through seven heavens.
Big deal.
I want to see the ninth heaven, eleventh, a thousand heavens.
You know, it's like, broken through the other side.
It's just like going through one door.
One door isn't enough.
A xillion doors aren't enough.
You have to go beyond.
Beyond one reflection.
Beyond the mirror.
Beyond, beyond,
As the sun sets behind the mountains in the sublime dimness of forever unoccupied topology of the hard ice tea beer can mountain that one could stare at so intently every day, at end of commune victory every-day. But like the last woman with whom Cyruss lived, who been a mystery the entire time, who had been living with him in his Buckminsterfullerene Haute Bohemian adobe mudd yurt for about a very quick zippy eight or so sectional months, had also left Cyruss with an invisible though noticeable silent sop besotted ennui kinda just always slow dripping down like mountain snow so and off from him now—Cyruss was a simple guy though—he liked black panties, white panties, red panties and that's about as weird as it got with him in regards to fetishistic preferences towards the women of the communes.
But in Belinda giving her charismatic monologue though, it functioned in some vague promise of saying she could naturally be had by virtually anyone in attendance, though one got the feeling she could never truly ever be possessed. Though one got the impression also, that if she compromised her independent funky lavender-water wanderer spirit of autonomy and let herself become colonized by some trotting codpiece wearing Larry, because after all, even any toddy fool well knows the one you watched in the commune so intently, always landed with the bewildering so random of the section. And if anything, more now than ever, Cyruss and Belinda just now seemed like collegial colleagues, brother and sister comrades now—though a brother and sister who were well experienced enough to lead the new comer's orientation for the section commune orgy.
Not everyone in the commune was allowed, or rather invited to participate in the section orgy, the orgy was a toy machine composed of many separate well lubed and luded working parts, which worked in unicen to form the swarming swathing swinging collective movement that fat weight, old age, too much dark people, and all total bores could only otherwise such impede. Although all inducted into the section commune were all considered equals as neighbors and citizens—being invited to participate in the section orgy was just real special, it let you know where in the commune you really do stand, and there was certainly nothing wrong with that.
Belinda was at the end of her somewhat or mostly or pretty much rehearsed monologue and in closing with a certain lightness, she ended in giving general practical advice—it helps to stretch before and after, do some mediations before hand and after hand, rinse and rub down with the suggested colognes and creams that one could easily obtain at the supply side trading depot, drink plenty of water prior and during, and it certainly never hurts to get checked out for crotch spiders and eggs even if you are sure you are not a carrier.
Belinda ended with a solemn and aspirational cri du cœur—that losing yourself to the collective of the swarm hive, and in losing yourself, only in truly losing yourself, by shedding your ego, shedding your pride and shedding all notion of earthly possessions, was when one could transcend themselves into the Pulse.
Namaste, Satori, Banchee, Belinda closed with, to which the new recruits refrained in a call and response accompanied Namaste, Satori, Banchee, to then everybody, including Belinda and Cyruss ended the orientation with self serving clapping.
As the attendees filtered out the twee flared doja, now going back into the commons or back to their own artist studios, Belinda and Cyruss now finally had respite, left with just themselves remaining on the sprawling pro forma pro foam doja mat that carpeted most of the rooms in the commune's chapel complex.
No matter how many orientations Cyruss led, they still were always so draining and always gave him the condition that was generally identified in the colony as section administrational fatigue.
They were alone in the doja now, except for the single tuffed salon-style sofa, and the things that piece of furniture has seen. Belinda ever the most resilient and fit and ever so striving, of course needlessly (and maybe smuggly) collected the left over orientation info sheets, even though the help were on their maid's way to eventually custodian the doja. Cyruss could not help thinking Belinda's cheerful and silent picking up the stray leaflets might be her way of in casual incidence avoiding interacting with Cyruss now alone.
Recently at the springtime dance bizarre bazaar, sure Belinda boogaloo'd with Cyruss on the dance floor when he casually incited her to dance with him when they were all discoing in the Dancing for Peace cluster—it's just that the way she lukewarm boogaloo'd with him, and then the short duration of her boogalooing with him, certainly made its small statement that Cyruss had been mulling over too much ever since. Certainly Belinda did not boogaloo with him with the same fiendish enthusiasm which you totally know she would have when she first arrived to the colony, all bushy tailed, wide eyed, eager for anything.
Then again, not so surprising and quite predictably, the shock of the new of the commune had worn off, and Belinda was no longer plebe—not only was she no longer plebe, but she was popular with a certain set in the commune, a set that Cyruss never particularly liked or previously even ever thought much about, but who were now becoming more and more precarious and worrisome and conversationally casual hostile towards him when say, he came across them at the section's cafeteria foyer, or while crossing strolling paths walking along the cool breeze of the opium fields before night fall.
Cy, still Belinda's better, still felt a need to break the silence of Belinda, a woman who was like a German clock, still a-repairing, ever out of frame, Belinda dutifully collecting the communist print outs.
That silly dodo. Who does she think she's fooling, Cy balking to himself.
The way he spoke to her in a cloying frankness in a way he could not really help though—he always did that with her, disrupting the automatic authoritarian aura that Cyruss otherwise so easily and efficaciously wielded against all the other members of the commune so well, that now, that whenever he tried to talk to Belinda with an automatic letting guard down familiarity and accessibility that now seemed to undermine himself completely—the exact opposite of what a fast and fetching, unstable girl like Belinda so required.
Everyday Cyruss thought about when Belinda first arrived to the commune, how she over audaciously invited Cyruss for foray of going out by the river for a knocking of moonhorns with red hair Piper, and how he didn't take the trap house poison—because although this general type of general behaviour is standard in the communes, it was way out of line for Belinda to go straight into propositioning the tribe clan leader. But what Cy still never figured out, or quite couldn't know exactly, was why did Belinda invite Piper? Was the minx Piper just to serve an occasion for intimacy because she actually liked him, or did she invite Piper because Belinda didn't really like him? It all being probably up in the air and undecided was Belinda's working approach, until it would play into Belinda deciding which way to veer. But instinctually, by giving in to such temptation, Cyruss would have been giving away his autonomy by mixing with a new member of the commune his very lesser. The good news is is that to land a whitely wanton velvet brow woman like Belinda, it helps to carry an intuitive sense of superiority to her, the bad news is, is although Cyruss found himself in such position, it would certainly do little help for him as witnessed through the perpetual scrutiny of the collective bee hive eyes of the commune with he as leader. Though Cyruss rebuffed her advance, he still played it off in the very hope of thinking with Belinda he was playing the long game and on his terms now. But the thing about girls like Belinda is, is the long game does not, will not, and never ever ever works out for whoever plys in such that the fool's errand.
What didya say, Hon?—an indeed worthless Hon, as Belinda called everyone in the commune Hon.
I said quite a lively motley crew of new recruits, I might say, Cyruss' statement, like mere coke stoke of empty peasantry meaningless statement echoing exactly nothing inside him, and as he uttered such empty sentiment, he knew it was empty, as well he knew Belinda knew it was empty.
Oh, no, totally, Belinda coolly, not missing a beat, playing along playing dumb.
When Belinda first arrived to the section, saying such spare statement, or anything for that matter, surely would have been enough to entice some unhaulted flurry of over enthusiastic response from the happy to do anything Sir! attitude she suspectly displayed right upon arrival, but it was not, or really ever too productive to measure the way a girl acted at first and then compare it to how they are much later in the future, and actually, anyways it was all but just too predictable, it was the same old story. Thinking about it too much was so quite self defeatingly tedious anyways.
Cy parsed his steps reluctantly to director of security office to check the doja logs to confirm what he pretty much suspected all along—Belinda was black rendezvous badging it into the studios non-stop for sessions with, well, with everybody, apparently, anybody practically, and this all through the long past winter months.
It was bracing and gave him instant vertigo confirming what he already knew of Belinda's activities going on all this time—he knew it was bad, but he did not know it was actually that bad, but it was bad in that way that sounded instantly true when he heard Sidney say.
Cyruss always had good rapport with the director of security, Sidney, and the tumbling screen reflecting off Sidney's spectacles gave him an air of clinical expertise, which he well had in aces. Sidney analyzed the lines of red spelling, of motorcycle red punch card numbers and punches, and although what they expressed, or rather revealed, to which, with him, they didn't seem too particularly novel in his experienced professional appraisal, or as novel at least as much as Cy thought it was.
Oh, she's been in there all right—well, more than anyone else, I can see that immediately right—here, you see that?
Cyruss could not bring himself to repeat Belinda's doja metrics out loud, as if such utterance would seem to be contaminating simply from reverberating as echo from his mouth. The whole thing gave Cyruss an uneasiness looming like poison caterpillars crawling all around and upside down and lining the walls of his stomach in festering synchronous pasta noodles writhing.
Cyruss keeping up his impartial administrator's remove, actually he could have won a Tony award with which he concealed a vague feeling of death gulling his interiors, Yeah, well, this isn't the first, or like the first time I have seen this . . .
It's baked into the nature of every commune—you get a real nutcase who is able to skirt through admissions . . .
Cyruss felt offended by Sidney referring to Belinda as a nut, not because Sidney wasn't correct—it just seemed an inaccurate reduction. Actually it was pretty spot on—Belinda was crazier than an out house mouse drunk off a puddle of stale moonshine during penumbral lunar eclipse.
A woman such as Belinda trying to smash her way through a commune is certainly, well it's certainly nothing new, I'm afraid . . . Sidney taking off his spectacles and rubbing his eyes in an expert's general resignation.
Yeah, right, right nothing, it's nothing new, Cyruss holding himself steady, becoming unvarnished and unpeeled from just hearing the word smashed that Sidney chose so to characterize.
I'd imagine a great deal of the populace you govern to be pretty happy village campers right now . . .
I mean, well—Cyruss at a loss, straining.
Hey, hey Cyruss, are you okay, you look like you just—
Resolve fledging flutter, like cadaver falling down the basement stairs, any resolve of certainty, seemed to be ricocheting off the walls in the security office, and Cy may have accidentally exposed something about himself as commune chief. The office though, was such a pristine and lovely International Style of construction, it's ambient idyll made Cyruss seem or look preposterous in a way making his worry appear to onlooker just so perfunctory now. A seared flash of the first orgy scene Cyruss had ever seen did its usual fast dance on the table of his memory screen, activating like crushed emulsion, bodies clanking like warm machinery, a closet of neck nibbling, eyes wide stuffed with skin.
No, no, I'm cool, I'm, I'm good, no, no, I'm just—, any vitality, any resolve in Cy's body memory diminishing like row of empty hearts off an obsolete hand held video game screen.
Cyruss noticed Sidney looking at him, the way Sidney looking back at him, Sidney seeing obvious to Cyruss' administrator's public facing fatigue from the never ending treadmill of the commune he tried to conceal.
No, it's just the tricks, or the tricks she does. I can see it, I mean, I can call it out, I do call it out, or whatever, but then I'm shocked way later, or I'm just shocked, just later, or no, in a, a deferred way that makes no sense.
I seen all the tricks Bennett, but what you talking about, or you're late response reminds me of, you know what it kind of reminds me of, it reminds me of . . . surrealism, Sidney demonstrating his pedestrian cursory read on surrealism and it's quick application (the reason we even have art), illustrating how the Commune in this section, in its cultural fluency at least, was one of the most advanced—something Cyruss sometimes got no credit for.
Cyruss gaining his composure,
Yeah, totally like some displacement. Displacement, from the shock of trauma, a rational irrational response. Like when Breton worked in a hospital during the war, a wounded shell shocked patient in the ward he came across was convinced the war was fake and everyone fighting the war were, like phony, or like props. His sense of reality was displaced in a way that was also a critique of the war altogether . . .
And oh, the earth sins the moon has witnessed far off from it's distant glare, an acoustic guitar filled with blood, everyone with sunglasses looks like a monster, and because insect flies twitch move faster, time is experienced slower for them, making it even seem to them that they live longer than us. And oh, but what consequence ever so but happens when one needlessly kills an insect?
And what does the moon think of an insect? The commune had been, or was always wearing Cyruss down though, the complete child like insatiability of the commune's citizens when everything otherwise is going basically, perfectly swimmingly, but, and, oh, there's still a clanging chattering will still always needing to be so satiated for all the gluttons and everyone—even if something went down perfect, like say the Festival of Grace was a success and all, you know Cy would still be fielding complaints by the semiotic illiterate—Cyruss could see this more now than ever, he could see it in the tossed foils of condoms left on the carpet on the empty doja, he could see it in the misguided antagonistic and reactionary attitudes of those with whom Belinda has now associated and taken up residence with, he could see it in the tableau of this universe where god's messiah is contrived to look like some faded Ringo Starship.
Cyruss knew the felder open range of the orgy mat is but just another chessboard after all—Cyruss, ashamed of himself that he even thought he could even ever gain satisfaction in such way, and that the fascism of beauty is immutable and absolute and treacherous and fickle, that no commune on earth could ever quite temper. No one ever talked about the female gaze—but the intrigue that drives and attracts the female gaze is power (as well as a casual, but solid indifference to the woman beholder)—that's precisely why Cyruss knew he could never have what he always desperately so wanted, even as, or knowing now especially because he was head of state. Women were like money, the more you have, the less you pine for it, and so it only magnetizes more money. Afterall, the guys in the Allegiance Panel Commission all with the most desirable playmates, all seemed to just accept their pulled Wool as no big deal happenstance, or even, or especially now seen to them as burden. Still, Cyruss held out that there were real and potential exceptions to these observations, there could be still a chance (hopefully) for him to be surprised, maybe even granted some unexpected/expected miracle type miracle from the universe.
Belinda was the end of reason. But with Belinda, and also in general, what's confusing to all, but also most fatal, is fascism is driven by rigorous cement dialectic binary logic that yet still but allows, that so brazenly, so incidentally allows for the vicissitudes of contradiction of its own vocally self determined very vocally self predicated conditions, that any blind circumstance always so surely conspicuously compromises, in a way that no collective post-twee pre orgy speech on doja foam mat could ever quite communicate. It seemed like Cyruss was one of an ever dwindling few who knew this.
Cryruss stood out on a hill from his jog, feeling a calm now wending in its way, definitely now not so stressed from leading the orientation earlier or going to the torture chamber of the security office. He looked out now at the scraped and scratched and smeared sky, peaceful and calm casual night of the commune lamped with shadow planes, the single's building modern brutalist brill box with grid of yellow light from expensive light bulbs monochroming windows cold squash soup yellow, and then the smug couple's dome huts off bubbling with their own occupant's own immediate concerns and self interests, conversation of the hum of warm facilities' machinery in the closed night. Behind the post Supreme color way colony reification, beyond the cool red meadow running into thick shawl of pine forrest, the black woods was cosseted from behind by frozen in time margarita mountains.
Cyruss as prime minister, was still running with the hunted. Thursday the moon is most the moon. Belinda, Artemis the Greeks called her, Diana the Romans called her, and others gave her their own name. This is the goddess who wanted to keep herself pure and just plainly, quite frankly, just wanted to plum avoid mortal men altogether. The ultra economic had advanced so far now, Belinda's way of avoiding men was at this point only logically possible by her booking the dojas so prolifically—as if to say to avoid men at such this late phase, the population explosion must be addressed head on, only by satiating the flesh of some few men so in order so to in the future to perhaps achieve her eventual emancipation from them completely (by basically her game in efforts in advancing taking footing towards, maybe perhaps Belinda's attempt at total authoritarian control take over of the commune). Diana wanted to live far from the city with her two virginal nymph assistants. Belinda wanted to live in only major international commune villages in remove from hoi polloi as well as elites. Diana, like Belinda was known as her skill as a huntress, especially prone to expressing herself in concert with moon phase. The marking turn in Belinda's demeanor, when she, just comfortable enough and feeling at home that one time recently to just so slightly rebuff an otherwise good faith Cy at the closing reception for the Matthew Barney exhibition that toured to the small commune arts and crafts gallery. Cyruss thought about Molly Nesbit's account in the publication Matthew Barney Redoubt, coinciding with that same exhibition which was organized by Yale Gallery, that to see Diana unbidden is very dangerous, (as well as one imagines, very quite the same with commune knave Belinda Mulgrave), as 'she is known to mete out the most severe punishment to those who transgress'.
And so long ago, so long ago in history, when one hundred thousand had not existed yet, it had yet to be counted out yet. . .
And you used to be able to smoke indoors everywhere,
And why haven't better drugs been invented yet?
And Harmony Korine can't 3D print himself out his own relevant board co now.
The blunt alcohol so unsatisfying, the required ceaseless administering.
Perhaps besides marijuana, exercise is the only good drug, the body gives you what you need.
And everyday we all fall inanimate in sleep, like dolls on a floor, and time returns to when we didn't exist.
I feel or maybe I seen, the generally happiest people are the ones who can be content virtually anywhere.
The cynical are right about somethings, though applied in a misleading, misdirected way that cancels it all out in a way they will never be able to see or grasp. How much evidence does one actually need to change their beliefs when faced with an avalanche of unassailable empirical evidence on the contrary? Some people, a lot of people are oblivious to such obvious looming disaster and catastrophe.
Meditation needs to work better, meditation has forfeited itself by not connecting, not activating itself to pleasure centers in our brain and such disconnect, such lack, has caused immense violence and destruction here . . .
They should train children by teaching poker in school, not just one year, but every year, and when they graduate mastered, they will be out in a world already adjusted and self regulated and held firmly in order by everyone else living in sharper exact awareness and practice of negotiating all their own limits . . .
We can save each other by creating expression for others to consume, but it rarely works because expression is never labored enough or developed enough or sophisticated enough for expression to transmit with any efficacy, and the art that does work doesn't really work but is lionized by all the easily manipulated and a world drowning in tin peso foil eye. For art to work, for it to really work, it mostly must be found at the level of most impersonal, for a personal connection to develop.
Belinda was in fact surreptitiously and also in plain sight (like fascism does) making advances to unseat him and take control of the communes with the small radical group who possessed an unearned and severely displaced indignant attitude towards Cyruss, through their catastrophically faux enlightened normie-pilled illiterate cynicism (not to mention two decades late in the game awareness that has already proven itself facile, first adopted by the first postmodern generation, genXer's when GenXer's were teeneagers, that which they moved past from to maturity). They with whom she took up with, were of a woefully predictable psychological profile. and they who never really liked Cyruss anyways. Fascism has its advantages because it breaks the rules that the operating in good faith establishment must abide by. Cyruss suspected this was happening, but as leader, he still had to be some good faith operator, and besides no one on his side could see it yet, or understand, or take seriously his very valid and these quite rational concerns—something, a dynamic every ruler knew all too well. Not much to show for Old Boy, he had an exgirlfriend who smoked too much, her looks destroyed by pills, Belinda is turning into a giant moth now, Cyruss has four bald tires.
Now Belinda was now talking to some giant looking giraffe grand theft auto Za Za weathercock speedo underwear wearing larry who carried a catastrophically misperceived political economy of sign smugness about him—a seven foot tall artificial myth, wearing some preposterous Tom Ford aviator prescription glasses, those pants rich normies wear tapered to hug ankles that embody a zeitgiest conventionally misguided sense of what constitutes in the now 'fashion' for Steve Aoki listening avant-pedestrian-guarde chuds. One questions even but why did they ever want to come to New York? A Taylor Mead obsessive to make a pilgrimage to where Max's Kansas City used to stand? To go to a used bookstore to bid a hand signed edition by Kathy Aker? Record shopping to hopefully find that rare Gandalf 7" he's been pinning for? To look for the porch where Sabel Starr would pass out when she was homeless? Early dinner at Elaine's? What even attracts someone like him to macarena himself on over here? Surely it was to see the Anne Truitt exhibition at the Lisson. As if every delusion predicated so by every aggressively uninformed Maserati yacht Jamiroquai placket cologne decision ever made, was his smugness so easily validated, illustrated in now noticeably successfully talking Belinda up, having this open water opportunity to get into her pussy pants—
And the accidentally preyful princess pierced Cyruss so when she picked a worth pitying peak prick partying, and to think Cyruss barely registered him, or didn't even think much about him earlier (well, he was still reeling from the bartender from earlier), though clearly Cyruss now noticed. Oh, what a great marvel it was for those wimpled jerks of invention, cocky gymgoombah brahs in NY just like this, must really be thinking they were practically zenith peak humanity practically, yet though when every big and small decision within their power or their control went well out of it's way only just to show exactly how totally wack they all really were—he probably had a poster of Michelangelo's David on his wall—he gets up on the dance floor the very second the Ricky Martin comes on.
Cyruss now felt as awkwardly formed as the first generation Garfield comic, he felt like an abused gadget, some shattered signifier now, He doesn't know who tf Lowtosh Magillacutty is, Cyruss thought to himself in a razzy audacious non-charitablity, in a bleating defensive indignant yet appropriate reactionary pragmatic self pandering to smugness, and it was precisely this guy's myopically tired horse face future style of attraction, a very specific, predicated on incident, brazen very real anti-Kunstwollen sensibility in what is otherwise the art capital of the solar system, well this is just who I happen to be talking to acting out logic by Baelin, that the otherwise fascism of criteria selection of women so unfairly succumbed to and cheated a river's worth of decent dudes out of, selling them all out. Something a pick up artist manual could never have written down, with women, it's more lazy selection than just natural selection as one would actually think, like how women will listen to music, any music, and have no serious musical judgement standards of integrity they abide by, and did you think they wouldn't do such the same lazy way with the men they choose now also. And yes, it really was that easy.
But it all seemed to be getting more exaggerated coming out of Cyruss' head, it all now unfolding in actuality, and, not only did magical thinking never work, but if he knew he could abate and stave off such negative thoughts, or if he had the power for some naturalistic optimistic thought, this scene would still happen and fall the way it anyways falls. And there is absolutely no power of positive thinking when it came to women.
Belinda went up now, so swept up in the cabaret nihilism, very uncharacteristically, indicating she must have been veering inchoately drunk by now. Surely this walking talking Arno Breker statue could never out jazz Cyruss though—Cyruss had moved to San Fran fucking cis co at one time afterall, had had one of the progenitors of Stereo miraculously at his apartment for heaven sakes, but to which the fascism of the immediate moment driven by the lady gaze never lets something so salient even ever so factor in, and why ever would it?
The bar bill arrived, it had a line that pointed to communism, as Cyruss was red card carrying sympathizer, member, and even his co was registered to a local chamber of commerce, but he'd not be loath to communism some over now to the very well out of line help—get fucked, thought Cyruss.
Do you smoke, Cyruss overheard the duller than death guy talking up Belinda.
No, just cigarettes, chronic, crack, black, blaze, sometimes red methedrine, or just whatever's laying around . . .
I don't like women who smoke cigarettes, he in a lame proclaiming self assurance.
And yet . . . I can feel a collective gasp of disappointment of all women below 42nd Street. Belinda then skulking dry cocky sigh.
Piful, wondrous pitiful, Cy thinking a loud.
The guy's attention directed towards Cyruss smugly purling, the guy turns his attention to Cy.
What did you say,
Ah, nothing, not quite nothing, Old Chum.
And you . . . , the vulgar, vulgar meaning common, reggaeton playboy asking Cyruss with an automatic, unearned skepticism, and you could tell that he interacts in an effective way with people in just his over confident way, as if by asking one such question in such way, it gives the person asked the precious opportunity to prove themselves to all his overconfident myopic scrutiny.
Cyruss gives him a leering look, And me? Hey! What's up Cutty, What's up, Money Loc?
Belinda says you skateboarder. My cousin Felipe, Felipe run a skateboarding company too, in the Ajman . . .
Tell that bullshit to the tourists—surely, he's just some another millennial with Basquiat Samo crown tattoo on their hand I suspect, but I'd imagine running a co is as good thing to get into there, seeing that post punk just broke over there maybe, about what, five minutes ago?, Cy jeering.
Belinda tickled fleer'd, gave a silent racker's repressed smiling smirk.
In New York today there is no avant-guarde, no counter culture, no movies, no writers, no bands. There was just a handful of new and interesting freestylers down downtown though, a few of which freestyled Cyruss' street team. The museums, long became colonized by background network actor pedestrians, those only with a talent of languishing at the vacation resort of the academe. They carved up the entire museological field of cultural production in a way that no PHD candidate writing about the exhausted yet banal subject of late 1960's conceptual practice in a journal that even academics barely read, could never quite save. Video en toto was exhausted by everyone in the phone book producing video, skateboarding subsisting on a dominant but dead hip hop like plodding through the pasture of muddy graveyard barely hanging on.
Cyruss, I'm going to the bar, would you like a drink, Brother?
Belinda never called Cyruss Brother before, and oh, so how convenient now, he thinks.
Baelinda was just so rad, that Cyruss really could never do that to her—he could never really ever want to be flat out hostile to her and he would mostly retreat back distanced and then the couple of times when Baelinda would sense something, ask him just between them so tenderly what's wrong?, to which Cyruss would retreat back and play normal and respond nothing, even though they both knew he was lying.
Though maybe such never exactly exempted Cyruss from being a micron rude and passively antagonistic or just superficially on the surface a little cad antagonistic towards Bae, though he still hated it, and it may have still slightly hurt him to do so.
And Baelinda was aware of this runoff of fallout too, but she'd feign ignorance and let him get away with what no one ever else was noticeably ever so afforded, because she really liked and still admired 'Russ very much.
And besides, Lin seemed the everso even too ripe and prime for touch the edge of infinity meshing of outer skin with internal membrane anyways, and quite frankly, Cyruss maybe really never could have have, or no, maybe he missed some short window perhaps out of the misguided self administered imperative over-thinking that he had to in fact hold back, in that, or some, or some other exact, some other misguided moment. But besides, he was probably all too frozen bewildered anyways, all too shook to even but try, or try anything for that matter with Lin, biggest regret he would ever have in his life and that is surely no fabrication—but there, there inside, inside white bluejean, panty waste so sacred, was garden of Eden, beginning of the universe, but was also its all very apocalyptic end—inevitably, essentially, inside muffy muff mink silk lied The Fall.
Belinda let this jagg playboy swain his arm around her waist. Surely he wasn't even her type, was just some Chad-ed rich foreigner taking up space as some placeholder for her, someone handy enough from by virtue of just being there for her to consume right at that moment. Everything that was uttered to Cyruss by others his entire life about what actually attracts women, proven tearfully wrong now and now right in his face.
I'm gonna ride you all the way to hell and back, Belinda extra raspy in gimlet throat she said to him, and the world becomes guilty by what so swiftly passes her tongue.
It has gone far enough, too far and the moronic inferno recess of old grade school wins again, as not necessarily so should winners in spirit prosper as how, how frequently it falls so losers so frequently to triumph. Somehow this behaviour, this dynamic, such impossibility, even somehow seems related to the illogic schozophrenia of late capitalist ultra economic, but yet also related to something so significantly timeless, pastoral, primordial.
I'm sorry Belinda, I'm sorry, but I must go now . . .
What? You going now? Well, okay, Love. Belinda sitting next to the romancier de grimace, Belinda soft blinkered, in a surprised innocent mild disappointment, sweetly with invocation of the innocent now, so that Cyruss could even succumb to guilt about leaving now.
Drunk, alack with woe, he still mooned over the briar patch of all the unsaid with her recently in the past, even after all this tonight, even after all that, even now, still affording himself an ill grace optimism, it was like looking through the wrong end of telescope, like he being the punchline of a reasonably good sick joke. And nothing rings so final as to see her in other's embrace. Or maybe it can or will change after tonite? There was smoke and dank steam coming from the wet claustrophobic section off impossible street, hearkening never resting decay, pointing of something towards prohibition wet tenement squalor. It was catastrophically fatal to reexamine, over analyze very recent hangouts, but what could one be left to do? It would certainly be impossible to change such compulsion of the sifting for pesos of details relaying she actually really likes you, but she is playing the long game, and women do never ever play the long game. Her casual flirting with you means nothing, really means nothing, and mulling over it, replaying it only but diminishes its weight pushed further into the illusions you use to get by in this world—it becomes absolutely textual by a certain point, the more you look at something, the more it is very loath to change hermeneutically from over examination. As God is too busy Goding to make cause to hold the faithful ever so forsworn, and as surely there will always be somebody to take your gaze.
And if there was only one law Cyruss knew, is that surely fiending desperately for one never once in this world ever even but once ever brought them to bear. He thought back of good times spent, but how this very night so wrenches, absolutely contaminates everything within his view and vantage now, which he shall carry around tout à fait a so forth so forevermore.
As Cyruss was to pine on more promising times with her of recent past, and it is but the worst self torture one inflicts on themselves of ventricle of memory to endure—lingering on the promising conditions before it all goes South, and it always goes South. Cyruss always thought : to get the one one wants, one must carpetbag from one one could immediately be with, and use them to springboard trampoline over onto one's heart's desire whenever they do become available (they attract the one they want by already being with someone else), but such heartless actions so contaminate the heart, and Cyruss was never the type to deliberately do that to anyone. (But if anything, and in these times especially, being so heartless attracts and sustains most or pretty much all beautiful women.) Universal defeat was always there, in the looking too long examining her handwriting futility of it all, which that and ten dollars is barely enough to get you one celibate beer in New York.
No, no—yeah!
Beyond anything? Or destructive, or not destructive, just, just, well unpredictable . . . or unpredictable, really.
Printed flyer sephilitis, practically I know . . .
Namely, well, that is to say, to follow, just follow the viz. Or, but no, no they plainly can't.
Love is trichinosis, or no, love is, love is—biliary calculus, there is no evil carcinoma but Love.
The short door buzzed, a shipment of soft goods may have arrived downstairs at the building, and Cyruss was distracted from Belinda for just once. He went down downstairs, a now alone Belinda walked around the rusted design studio with the working Bladerunner blinking Japanese neon advertising sign still on, outside the window—the studio not only reflected Cy's mind, but also represented a Wunderkammer of the subconscious of the city seemingly not articulated so eclectically as anywhere else. Such not factoring in with her, Belinda picked up stray page on trashed unorganized desk, she came across it really, she read half the billets-doux or half read it, but it affected her nothing and she put it down carefully. The poem was futile like all poems were futile, like when one tried to play a song with short lived pride for the pine'd and it never lands.
In Trouble With The World
I don't want to get in trouble with the world.
I don't want to get in trouble with any of the girls I like.
I was on probation
For public intoxication.
The judge intervened because I was just hurting myself he said,
Which was also the thesis of my defense.
And I don't want to get in trouble with the world.
I don't want to get in trouble with the world.
I don't want to get in trouble with myself,
But I don't mind gyping God.
I pray to a god who invented Duane Peters.
And God will but score DP's body with tattoo'd period styles.
Think about, Duane Peters in '91, somewhere, after street skateboarding took over,
but before gangster rap happened.
And I never want to get in trouble with the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment