HOLLYHOCK KISS to Ramrod's Head Hills, Kiss Me and You'll Kiss the Lapses, Death Prepares Us for Sleep At Least for Once An Eternity

This threat is expressed, among other disturbing effects, by the spreading before our eyes of a mediocre civilization which is the absurd counterpart of what I was just calling elementary culture. Everywhere throughout the world, one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminum atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda, etc. It seems as if mankind, by approaching en masse a basic consumer culture, were also stopped en masse at a subcultural level. 

                                                                       —Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth

Walking into the suite, I saw Sylvie was now visiting Cason also, and I winced in brace. Sylvie was like a client weary commune gay psychic, always incorrectly corrected you when you were just asking a helpful question you already pretty much obviously well knew the answer to, in just politely trying to engage in basic conversation with her. She was so stuck into her dash point of view, that she hardly seemed to ever be listening, in her just automatically assuming you were saying the wrong thing even though you actually weren't, or she may have instinctually just always wanted to undercut you and give you credit for nothing—it was hard to say exactly which. Sylvie lacked some massive amount of self awareness though, where she surely must have needed some kind of professional attention. For instance, Sylvie could be talking about proletarian lapse, and you say supportively, 'Right, like because the commune already has to contend against a nationalism roused by territorial losses right after the war?', and then Sylvie would flatly just go 'No', without further explanation, even though clearly rising nationalism and it's effects on prole's contemporary attitudes were obviously undeniably linked and discussed ad nauseum within this point of frame. And she always did this in a way, she was constantly saying 'No', 'No' to your softball pitching innocent facilitating polite questions of obvious answers, that you would just have to stop engaging altogether and you had to just then plum sit back and listen to her then go on and on, Sylvie with a natural desire to talk about herself, then visibly content in now not having to share any attention you took up from your de facto polite engagement, and you could now tell she then just luxuriated in now yammering on and on uninterrupted. Or Sylvie could be giving you directions to a new evening arcade, and she could be like, 'Cross Tramway Bridge, and then three streets over on Ambrinka Street take a left.' and then you go, 'Yeah, Ambrika Street, across from the écriture mural . . .", and then she would automatically just say 'No', even though it was well known the big crusting écriture mural was across from Ambrika. But it was clear Sylvie took some sort of issue with me for no logical, empirical reason right off the bat, even though my initial demeanor of interaction I had when I originally met her, was otherwise pretty the usual chill and innocent, because when at Cason's, I was usually pretty mellow and up for whatever—I was always usually in hang out mode.

When I arrived at Cason's arrondissement, it was so humid you could float a guinea on the air. Along the gravel track, I passed a Tractus blue cacti, something was born in bloom, and the desert honeysuckle corpsing gave the walking trail a whiff wail like some gigantic dead baby. 

Across the street from Cason's building was a programmable LED sign, some smashed screen bleating in some glitched abstraction of disfunction, which I couldn't discern if the light sign's hardware was broken or some kind of techno situationist-like intervention, which would actually be pretty cool, and it was more alluring than any user generated work I usually saw on the callow networks. Such proximity of rear-vanguarde ingenuity, I associated with Cason and his district, such quality about Cason that I found comforting and reassuring.

When Cason finally opened the door, my initial bored regret of coming over was slightly satiated, now that he was finally letting me in. The fact is bad people take forever to answer the door when they hear it—I've never once in my life left someone lingering the ever rare time I had guests over—if anything, I was too swift in answering their hungry knocks—maybe that was part of my problem.

Cason answers the host door like there's a party going on inside, Jake, my dear, how are you . . .

When I saw Sylvie at the bar, I immediately regretted coming over, but I certainly couldn't turn around and just leave, and besides Cason still had the goods. 

They were talking about Gang Cage with some almost classicist reverence, when really the band was just punchy squealing bed of thicket behind uninspired monotone chanting, that's trendy economy only confirmed and affirmed the listener's misguided predilection to some idea of some kind of vague new musical formalism which was tethered mostly in placing some premium on just some prized 'physicality beat' of what is otherwise just kunst post-commune post-post-punk bleating. Sure, Gang Cage was good for a friday night pre-game, but otherwise, they revealed nothing to me about my life, and people gassed them up way too much in a way that spoke to the limitations of the judgement capacity of some supposed commune avante-guarde advanced culturati.

 

A Year of Tuesday is good—that's good, so is Eat Shadow, Sylvie going on, self satisfied in her conventional smugness, as if confirming something at the ground level that reflects some not-as-hip-as-they-think-they-are young college professor's somewhat but not quite on the level, perception of some brave new Apollonian contemporaniety—like going into a boutique architect's office and they are playing Kid A in the background.

The glint I see of Sylvie's self perceived robo-eye smartness in line with some general pervasive consensus of myopia from an infuriatingly now-prospering intelligentsia was a bit much to take now, I casually mumbled back, They only popular because they bit the Lightning Bolt Paper Rad scrawl cover design motif, but like twenty years later enough for normie-fluencers to now appreciate.

Cason and Sylvie both looked at me and said nothing, resumed talking as if I was not in the conversation.

I managed to keep the rest of my disdain at bay behind arcadian barbed wire practically, until Sylvie finally left—and she took forever to leave. Otherwise, I had hardly uttered one whole note word the whole entire time since I commented on Cage Gang, practically. Now that she was returning to whatever mordant mushroom ville cottage under a rock she came from, my brain was still in some state of stale stagnation in not being able to swiftly shift return into the normal engagement setting I usually puttered around the commune cluster with.

That Sylvie—she certainly makes it hard to hide a smile on one's face, I should say . . .

What,

I says, that Sylvie, oh, nevermind . . . 

Oh, no, yeah right—Cason, the dangerous supplement, everso distracted, uselessly tracking the sector dash out of habit, as if his attention holding on by one thin thread of shaved twinning marrow that couldn't be replaced because spools were on back order, or on never-ordered in our commune district.

The sector dash that Cason compulsively eyed and fingered, especially when you were talking—was Cason enrolled in this like consumer rewards program of his energy provider, where if you clocked and tracked people who passed and came and went in the vicinity of where you received energy, and provided hour by hour updates into the aggregator, he would get more points reduced from his quarterly energy record. Even if the tabulations are inaccurate—they are accurate in their real fictions of the commune, by virtue of them being automatized into the feral network. 

You don't particularly take to her. Cason stating flatly while pressing and confirming useless info into his device ad infinitum. Cason also starting with the knowingness of a somewhat sympathetic sectional voucher school administrator. 

Your saying that like it's a choice I made . . . I gripe back in an already familiar, well over-treaded exasperation.

She is, yeah, she's a bit of a push and pull, otherwise she's usually rather pleasant, or towards me at least. Cason stating innocently, despite knowing the obvious otherwise, but inferring with speculatory air unfairly, that she only may act in accordance with his inaccurate take of what he perceives as however truculent he projects what my general attitude and disposition towards her may or may not be. 

Yeah, well, that's because she's you're friend, you're friend, chap.

Case and point taken my friend. Hey and on a brighter note coach, hey coach, how about a bit of that 'ol Irish that's finally arrived. How's about that, coach.

I impatiently looked out of Cason's cantilever window while he got the coupon drinks in his small economic eco kitchen, I could see a commune spotted cow across the track in a field from the windowsill, the stupid oblivious cow frozen like giant plastic rail set toy pedestrian, all in the window frame and all the way in front of the ash color snowball mountain not too far tucked behind the pittsville.

As youngster, I was always seduced by the banality of superficial simulacral gravel landscape styling around the wait up line up to the waterslide, almost as much as the waterslide itself, though it was something I was barely even aware of back then, though it lay dormant in me, lodged stuck back somewhere in the water shoots of my mind. Once, years ago, Cason's district reactivated this memory, this formerly lost impression from the past—and just like how everything in the commune alludes to some abstract collective optimism of some abstraction of general chill—permanent residents, people who came and left, people from the outside, everyone all looking out on the topology of the parkland so charmed—the drummed up refurbished buildings, oil and steel site layout, the dyed my hair punk new builds—that you could easily conceive all their echos, echoes of some imaginary proverbial tourist's immediate, automatic praise. 

The small building entry hall of Cason's apartment complex when I came in had been playing some stylishly un-stylish grating vapid Wework crystal methl DJ post dubstep that seemed to signal maybe to an outsider or immigrant, that the universe must have well ran out of songs, but the real scensters, the real heads like Cason and the people who took up residence there, knew you can't exactly play Stereo Bloods, BFA Genevieve like twenty four seven background, that is, if immigrants even knew of these bands, which, by the way, they didn't.

Above the entry table to Cason's flat was a mid sized Wilhelm Sansal oil on canvas of close up of a crotch of smelly dirty black panties. Cason had lit candles going in his apartment in the daytime, his space was pleasantly over aromasized smelling like saturday afternoon lollipop detergent—it was like when you were young and would play at a friend's house and their house scent scented extra because you had a small nose back then.

The politics of the orgy unsaid said, and not really ever written about was how ofcourse your partner noticed who you practiced with, and yeah, there where a couple of cool wives I may have exercised with, but mostly those times I really just felt just circumstantially lucky really even then, as if they corpse posed with me just because others they were waiting for were with someone else and they didn't want to particularly be seen in the orgy just sitting there waiting, or not fully engaged or mooned marooned out on the periphery of the mat—it was kind of like the mating selection outside the orgy in the commune section—sometimes you just got lucky to be some femme lord's place holder, and oh, beware a lifeboat of the heedless. 

I'm afraid, can feel the diplomatic course bearing down on us—Cason returning with mouthwash sized paper cuts in both hands, miming the cultivated paranoid air of frugal concern.

Well, there are in fact some real amusing diplomats, at least . . . Friendy back, I bounce back into composure from my fresh peel of indignant frustration.

 

On the way up there, I saw a fire hydrant had been opened up by district works, and has been probably water wasting away on the logged lane for days—despite water being somewhat scarce. It was kind of easy to be paranoid now about those in charge just torching the whole entire forest, in some kind of consolidation move against the general population of the hamlet in order to somehow accelerate some hatched and willfully catastrophic deregulatory plan of all their worst cynical misguided instincts. It had been almost a year since we could get whiskey.

Cason delivers the usual dire assessment with an optimism edged by it's supposed knowingness, I fear it's much worse than we think—in that, or what would be seen as cynical diplomacy, is actually nihilistic diplomacy—

Cason halting in the area on the side of the bar outside the kitchen, holding both cups to finish his next thought. I couldn't tell whether he may or may not be conscious he's teasing and withholding the drinks in his self-enabling and now pointless aside of thought. It was preposterous enough we had to wait for Sylvie to leave before we could drink.

So much, that in it's restless impatience, wants to, wants to, like, like address, just like their perceived eschatological end head on, ya know, exacerbating problems to get them well, well, well-over with frankly, or, or and while they consolidate what's vestigial left to build anew for select few, or a select few of course, bub. 

Cason absent mindedly continues, Nevermind, I mean nevermind, that none can admit or even acknowledge to themselves they are not in the least qualified or even able to architect some supposed sorry better society even just for themselves, from scratch than this one. 

I countered quickly, reaching againsts Cason's wandering train, The problem is is, de facto false equivalence fallacy you know or on, on about both sides being just as bad or just as bad,—but one side bizarrely, fatally, catastrophically satanically worse or whatever, that's driven, driven by lazy pervasive cynicism or and the now really tired, the, the like, this like Fred Durst crypto anarchist crusting gen X boomer notion of 'like the bureaucracy, man', when it's the same bureaucracy that's the only barrier now really keeping any order holding on at all now, but in such the fatal way, or in such fatal way anyways, that the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy is also too feeble to really efficaciously articulate over the opposition's catastrophically populist braying and ceaseless rules breaking, their revisionist account seeking to undermine any, or like any, any now tragedy of commons warped status quo of what's still efficient, ya know . . .  

Cason wasn't listening, my point didn't seem to register with him as he handed me a paper cup, I impatiently received it and took an aggressive nip in him not listening—the immediate spell of alcohol was like a small immediately intriguing room that one was able to inhabit for a few minutes at least. Alcohol was the only drug on the market, where under its pre-chorus feeling of exultation, one could still feel optimistic talking about one's own wife weaving them with another man—something that the AA big book failed to mention or include in its footnotes (that is, if it even had footnotes).

But off the machine gun gray panties edge of commune hill mountainside, we were so far into the future even Jenny Holzer truisms now read dated—we now refugees into the reductive au courant post poststructuralist meme engine sun circling skull. The commune off the mountain lay as if slipping down the sideways plain of snow, where really now unless everyone was put at risk, it would be impossible to secure aggregate desire, even though that was still quite impossible.

And we're so far into the future that the idea of a talking car seemed as outmoded and clunkily inconvenient as chastity belt—and besides, the new chastity belt of the communes was the superhero villain panty spandex worn to be stripped off at the potlatch of orgy scene spree, anyways. 

After the river caught fire, after warehouses of thick paged telephone books of anonymous names turned into mega stadiums filled of individual video producers, where all the videos where simultaneously over edited and under edited, everything in the communes was harder—no more now quaint seeming TeeVee eye radio girl film strip analogs—houses were harder, women were harder, concert tickets were harder, even mexican food was harder.

The geometry of the commune orgy was almost Beaux-Arts axial, an architecture of motion. And don't think they're really weren't enough lust hours to be repaid in the promise off the cheek to jowl orgy sessions, but there was that immediate futility just from seeing those loose rows of moist Vejas Esplar's, Golden Geese, Becket Simonon, Morgan trainers, just all crudely lined up, junking up the entry before the doja, the sour stink of heterogeneous sweat would later mix so humid, all the superficial interaction before, the mash of bodies of a pancaking of flesh piles flattening—but there's a moment, or an opening of potential for a very vertigo moment there on the crest of orgy, where it hits you like beginning of bad ecstasy trip, a puckish disorientation where you can almost no longer discern foreground from background.

Someone from a hundred years ago was reading about the future now, they assumed the whence and wither commune orgies would probably most likely be some exploitive cultural practice enacted by like men, where women, women where just automatically assumed as some supposed passive collateral—but that kind of wasn't the full deal. And now during peacetime, or now especially during peacetime, libidinal impulses would need a domain to play themselves out, and what better place than the chessboard of the doja pente mat, and who but could have but better encouraged it more so than the warring women commune heads of state off the decadent cluster.

There's less even blood. There's the Barbara Kruger slogan, YOUR COMFORT IS MY SILENCE, which if you think about it, could be read in reverse now practically, as if say, flipped around and decreed by guy to commune girl lord. But with Franny, or with Franny now, I mostly endured to kind of just keep my mouth shut for the most part, or whenever we went out now. And besides, it's not like she didn't not intuit me enough to know I was holding back, or would have not not registered this accordingly, whenever it came across her mind, which recently has seemed significantly less and less.

I think about how Francisca methodically braided her hair before the sessions though, the Darryl Hannah Zinka'd eye make up rectangles she painted so ruthlessly unaware, or she so unaware of such ruthlessness she make upped up with—colonizing swatches over sockets of her eyes, calculated to look like some savage arts and crafts festival native American indian renegade anhedonia. This must be how a crawfish feels once the vile zydeco sounds. But all I'm saying is, let's see how many of those picture paintings Barbs Krugs would wanna paint now though, if she had been witness to bear the wheezing, or the rambling pit ostentatious off the dummy moon of the section orgy harvest. 

But it was like opening your shirt out of courtesy, or before sneezing and you just blow yourself inside with your gale of bad breath, and people just looked at you like a fool most of the time, or most of the time now anyways, even though you were actually shielding them, and, if you think about it, it was that same kind of nervous over-alertness that was pretty much exactly how people where in the minutes, or the minutes leading up to, or like right when any section orgy was 'a brewing—you had to practically be a complete psychopath not to be at least a little nervous before the scene commenced.

Earlier I was looking at Birdie's interview behind Fran's back. Birdie's pose was kind of lame, but mostly you could tell the van-normie-guarde photographer didn't edit his photos correctly. Still though, how her image signed my skin—there was something about her that went out of its way in expressing the innate sensibility ideal of my interiority again, how her crush picture seemed almost lurid even without nudity, the existence of such image itself so hectoring, in how it was dispatched in the in your face of Birdies's now violent phatic image hauntology. Birdie's photo was like the Barthe's photo punctum quote in Carmera Lucida—'It is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out like an arrow, and pierces me.'

Surely, if Franny saw me paying pawing more than three seconds to Birdie though, I would have been bullied for this practically forever before being eventually divorced and exile. I wasn't exactly deluded enough not to feel my time expiring with Franny now anyways, though. 

Fran wasn't in the room now, and I was bored—the kind of bored that gets you into trouble.

I could hear Franny girl-lording hard in her little call in her Office—she wasn't paying attention to me now.

No, no, no—that's what I'm saying. No, I'm saying no—Well, it was almost untranslatable, that's all, Hon. That's all? Well, it was quite despairing. Yes, yes, I did, I did ask him to contribute . . . on the strength of what, well enthusiastic recommendations, frankly. Well, yes, I'm glad too—or that you like it, or that, atleast. No, no, no no no . . .

The society of the communes was a society of extras and the good thing about the communes, well one good thing was was, everyone was allocated the same amount of scrim space and now it was clearly Birdie Farrell's turn—she was some kind of tech selection ingenue apparently, going into the conservatory next quarter or something. It was vague as hell though, or vague about what her discipline was for her little interview feature though, but even that kind of seemed intriguing enough that she would have no outlier soft skill to apply, but then again, if you think about it, it is probably becoming just like more rule now than exception, lately—where otherwise, or otherwise other girls her age, were like, one way screen talkies, or they clubbed makeup tollies, took up to be soldiered mirror drafters, or fused shoe surgeon cobbler, designed ink alcohol, or whatever, or you know, wrote some sort of speculative non-fiction—but it was as if Birdie was intriguing enough just doing practically nothing, nothing if you would cast her in a picture or movie you would tell her specifically not to act and just exist there. You'd probably direct the picture just letting Birdie do whatever.

Under Birde Farrell's pet peeves it said: back tre front foot glued 2 deck, simp-possibles, drop down ledge manuals, little men.

Favorite band, Nature Morte,

                                                                                                   

Hard as fingernails Franny was occupied in the job never ends of it all of her enterprising, she materializes in the room looking down at her palm pilot suppressing a grin of pride to herself. She was practically addicted to the commanding resolve that went with her position—that although she seemed like she was being over competent and with incredibly high working standards, you could kind of tell she was mostly self satisfied kind of codling herself.

I switched off Birdie back to skate magazine containing only photo punctums, now humming to myself.

Franny Windcheater, was a Madonna Cappadonna now practically, all done with her productive femme lord call, walking into our or her bright Victorian room, bringing the residue of atmosphere left over from her call with her. She was like that though. Whatever was going on with Franny Fran, or what she had just been involved with, she brought everywhere with her. The only way to engage with her most of the time now, was to practically drop whatever was going on with you, and then give what was on her mind your full de facto attention and curiosity, which was also what was still appealing about her.

When you take up with someone as antagonistic as Franny though, all is well when you are on the right side—Franny's good side. You could revel in her charisma, comfortable in having won her over—you, right beside her and the conspiratorial vantage you have when witnessing who she positions herself next against in the section cluster. Franny was the kind of person who immediately talked shit about people when you first met her, in a way you could convince yourself she would not eventually do the same with you, even though she does it with everyone. Once she decided a line was crossed, there was no ever winning her back.

Franny off her call as if making a cameo in her own apartment, Larchmont, Mulvaney, Magnusson . . . Larchmont . . . Mulvaney . . . Tully . . .

That was a quick call. You off already?

Franny was wearing her oversized black DRI tee shirt. I gave her shirt a subtle knowing glance as if by accident, but she well knew I was in middle school when I first listened to DRI (their album, Four of a Kind) and not too long after I well moved on to like, Cherry Bomb. That now she as an adult now repping it so late, so deferred finally, was something I immediately baulked at or may have hectored her about once, and it was precisely this attitude towards Franny's DRI shirt that was almost the last bit of cultural sophistication of leverage I had now over her, probably the only thing seemingly keeping our marriage barely in tact for now. 

What. Franny, looked back down, continuing being occupied in her de facto at home paranoid style.

I said you're call ended early Babe, are you off for the resta the day?

Oh, no yeah . . . Kind of, not really, maybe . . . Franny not paying attention, but still giving too much self involved utterance automatic in her own distraction.

They say of sculpture, is that which you bump into when you step back to look at a painting—the same could apply to me the same at the orgy session scene in the forecourt off the commune section block.

And the proliferation of the orgy into the communes was probably like what Beckett had said about dust, Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, an impossible heap.

I read somewhere history begins with the invention, or rather invasion of the written word. The thing is was though, the very decade's edges brazenly frayed flayed with international centers imploding and all, or it was just so into the pervasive unraveling of states into this new like normie DIY exuberant commune-building activity, normie DIY commune pods pop popping up like mushrooms from a moldy floorboard, as if No Wave never existed practically, and now dozens of new little sovereignties claiming independence from Japan, Southern Europe, whatever, even, or not to mention, as was the West same in developing, or descending into the proliferation of constellations of regional commune hamlet blocks pretty much all exactly like ours now. 

And the wonkers tinkered commune orgies further multiplied like how language multiplies itself. The engine room of any orgy at its transcendental worst only seemed to spell we were all alone in our own way—well alone, for most of us (Some people were never alone.) While the others maybe seemed not so much so burdened—or just maybe even perfectly contended, as if at some idiotic baseball gobbling game belly beer stuffing hot dog dongs into their mouths. I though, was pretty blind myself, and just really stumbling juddered the whole time now at this current phase anyways—and worse, or even worst, I myself was even implicated in my very own private panopticon into the, I don't know, the immutability of the absolute grinding gears loss of innocence, sins of the orgy mat, that I really, if you think about it, I hardly have any room to talk at all now. There may have been other things too, or actually there were other things, that I really don't want to get into here, or just things on my end, whatever, or whatever those things I did did, or whatever may have contributed to kind of fucking up my marriage on my own end, or like on my own bad.

But the fresh fruit for rotting vegetables of the section orgy was just some cudgelling direct assault of one's interiority, or that's how I felt at least, or maybe it could have even played itself out even more violently, more ruthlessly than anything in the actual born blind arctic wasteland of real outside life and all, but then if you think about it, or if you thought about it, it was also kind of all the same. But remember what breathtakingly began as free love, free love practically, then became this, this too wild radar love, then eventually or eventually this heartbreaking wrenching head-on-spike rough love, circumstantially brutal in it's egalitarian always open to circumstance way, fascistic in all the democracy of the anyone can take your woman away from you knowingness that we all silently operated against. But old couples need to cheat, and cheating is actually the very best you are capable of ever feeling after being together rolled old and cloistered in the same old stale-ing commune crypt of yurt for so long. But I was first astonished, quite surprised, or like real surprised who I'd see Fran getting it on with though, not really what I would have expected at all, but also not exactly surprised when I got used to it. (Though I never got used to thinking she was always fucking whoever in the orgy way too hard.)

The org gallery guide proclaimed, or tried to say at least, there was no such thing as like earthly possessions in this plane, or on this plane of existence, or like the engine of reality was just this constant chthonic fluxing flux, some relentless reality never pausing for christsakes. But the thing I remember most, or the thing I think about, was something they said about reality, or it said reality was never stuck frozen running, or like how it never got frozen stuck, like saying the universe never glitched in all its elegant existential design and you could always really just count on it, which is true, I suppose—but then it goes on to state or talk about, about possessions, or possessions—the notion of earthly possessions, possessions was like trying to pathetically hold onto some freakish paused cadaver moment of time alive.

But I always got the feeling with the men Fran usually got it on with now, that in some silent, or some unspoken way, they really in some sense kind of possessed her. Or, what I'm saying is, they pretty much did, they did possess her. Even off the pro foam doja mat, or when, or also, when we would come across Fran's past orgy org partners off the village promenade or outside the arcade—it was like just this in your face minutia of it all, how she so slightly signaled this conspicuous slight subservience to him right there in public infront of me, which was subtle enough, but it was there, and yet only I seemed to notice, and which maybe, Franny didn't even really seem completely aware of now even then—like how sometimes she seems not exactly too terribly aware of herself. I mean she may kind of had known what she was doing, while also maybe not knowing what she was doing.

Buy Franny, Franny was just, it was just how she was always trying to solve everyone's problems, make anyone her immediate priority. It certainly didn't matter who they were—as if the least deserving of her un-asked for help they were, the more so Franny was willing to give. And she always did that, she was always doing that—putting practically anyone's unctuous needs just spot before herself at peril of jeopardizing her very own interests, and she did it like all the time—it was simultaneously the best and worst thing about her.

But she just ended up getting good, or she got good quick, made herself a fixture practically at the mordant commune ville arts and crafts center strip like in in the early zero zeroes, kinda also when I was on the way down. It was cool though, or real cool to see—I mean, I got my deal out of my system anyways, and it was a self perceived mark of growth to like move forward, like giving up skateboarding to ride bikes. But it's not like I ever really quit anyways—even though I was out of the game, I never was really out the game, anyways. I had been skating well longer than Franny started with art, and for a while, or most of the time I was ahead of her anyways—not like I even cared about that, it was well known I was her biggest fan anyways and left nobody with doubt certainly. But I used to always vibe her hard when she tried or I would crack myself up at her expense sometimes, but really, it was just how she changed the scott second she stepped even but a toe into a gallery, or any gallery for that matter, it practically didn't matter what gallery it was. If it was an incoherent junk space that also had furniture and resale items, she would be even more perplexed by it, just hypnotized by all it's unlikely hood.

I always just wanted to say, Franny just relax, it's like okay . . . ,You know?— but she wouldn't have listened.

It did not take a lot to stop Fran's blood, but small things became so unbearable with Franny now, I mean the time at the miner's depot, when I overfilled my quarry canteen and the water cooler blubber bubbled, kept continually bubbling for what felt like a minute after, and I could feel the impatience and frustration just from that radiating off Fran right there.

But it was Lester, Lester, Lester there, practically pawing Franny open with eye contact, and how would a husband not notice. Or I'm just saying, I'm just having to go with it all all regardless like some cool swiner gameshow host husband now quickly fading meta celebrity, because the world well does what it's going to do without you in it or with you in it, or with you damn in it anyways. It was that, or it was only that, or it was that as if my very last shred of dignity was just evaporating from an open air plein air laisse a faire, that made decisions affecting me with so much no-say, like the adult world flung ruthlessly onto innocent child, or rather in my case, not so innocent ex pro am pile.

Not to mention how humiliatingly rude the lord boss femmes, corporate girlies where in the moments leading up to the orgy ceremony—how they shock and awe wielded their power immediately, going out of their way to remind you in subtle, not so subtle ways—one woman had these elaborate custom designed high heels that had rubber vulc foxing and rubber toe cap like Converse, some polyglot have it both ways pump sneaker, have it all ways design, and she was going on and on showing them off, and how she still kept them on, even though shoes where prohibited in the chapel doja, her high heels spiking the pro foam there—she was regaling in the hand sewn beads, hand sewn beads with these insipid faux indigenous floral designs sewn in with more expensive color beads and Swavorsky crystals, silver conchae with oyster shell cabochon spinies.

Me and Franny, Franny and I, would never be able to experience the comune section of the cluster equally. Whereas I got cool guyed by the women in the communes before the orgy, Franny got quite the exact opposite treatment with the men there so early on—beautiful women where indeed a kook magnet for hang-dog Rogerhounds and Roger-Stans, and it was always bewildering to see how far with their attention gone out to sea, so she let men with wrists like cankles bluster and belly laugh so on and on about, because women don't really care about looks.

That certain punisher's poetry to the beginning of every orgy, which the org gallery guide always kind of seemed to go well out of it's way to evade, but that which its writers certainly well knew about. Sure, there was the expected awkwardness and how some people maybe seemed to couple up happenstance almost, but for the most part, the politics of the commune could not be painted any better anywhere else when seeing who people immediately actually clung to once the session coach's electronic whistle beep blew out so ruthlessly—it was a purity, some demented poetic truth, not really beautiful at all, or not at all like how the org gallery guide ever made it out to be—and it could actually be fucked up, or real fucked up, it was fucked up. And you could probably never even really say anything about it publicly, because to criticize any mating selection of the section orgy, would be to criticize the orgy in toto, and one could immediately find themself cast off.

The orgy of the commune section block was critical for maintaining some kind of public and private power balance somehow, some vague impression of authority somewhere in there though, continually catapulting the private into public and further into streaking bomber's jeopardy. Franny Windcheater was smart enough to know that, but then she also just well went along with it anyways, or she especially well went along with it anyways now, like how so she went along with so many other things.

But the thing is was though, now that women were in charge, they increasingly seemed even more so like men than when men were in charge. And anyways, the real superstars now, were the superstars of the orgy who archetypally were for sure not superstars—the spons'd orgy artists, and they, not so surprisingly got most of prime wool, while the rest of us ran with whatever runoff was left. But other than that noble exception, it was some administrator's monopoly, a developer's land jagg, carried into their own possession to flesh, and how so over-credentialed analysts staked next their fingered prey against the mat, that went up against, contradicting everything that in good faith up until then I had assumed to expect from women. 

And you would think a sponsored orgy artist would be athletic, but a bewildering amount, most certainly where not—and many of the org artists popular in the commune were popular for wildly practical and utilitarian pedestrian reasons anyways—just about any of the zillion little yet to be unoccupied subject territory you could imagine that had not been colonized user generated, and all but added up to fill the cultural space otherwise once occupied by say the movie Chinatown or Guns n' Roses Chinese Democracy. And now they used that populist figure-it-out-do-it-yourself yourself clout to brazenly advertise themselves on the hour, and situate themselves well into the sleeping hammock of popular convention of sociability, and then of course because of this, they landed all the most trim trimiest wool in the doj—a further disconnect of schizophrenia that reflected the original schizophrenia of these self imposed conditions of the current of self reinforcing hyper accelerated late cultural modes of means of production.

But I would get it on with whoever I could, so Fran wouldn't get self conscious seeing me with no one (this to the hive fly eyes of the commune would reflect poorly on her—though she was pretty popular, more popular than me now, that's for sure). I would find myself conceding compromise, bank my eyes, and even then, or especially then, did it kind of backfire—as if I would have been better off sometimes not getting it on with anybody, which suffice to say, even that wouldn't work. And to add insult to injury, I know, I know Franny looked down on me, from the commune K-listers I got it on with, me so late in age, loomed doomed, scuttling around just for somebody to fuck.

Poetry sense doja without shadow, sneaks into the clunky machinery of administrational bureaucracy, it always seemed to give a false sense of operational competency to those from its use—like in parlance, or the phrase, without a shadow of a doubt is bandied about in the legal system by incompetents waft sounding swift—and the tweee flared orge doja was kind of like that also too, right before it turned out your shit like the devil.

                                                                       

I refuse to even say Lester's name now here, okay? Lester, Wicked Lester—Wicked Lester was of course also the name they were trendoiding around before they named the band Kiss remember, Franny?? I pulled that out of her—Kiss Lester wicked was some telecommunications teletubby dover hangdog stan really though—also in the same field as my Fran. As if his no body standards was some silent rebuke from my athletic, or at least formerly athletic frame. And now I can see Franny succumbing to not so original white girl allure to pizza pie papa baby bear now. And we used to look just so great together, the fascism of Franny's girl-lording logic now though, and now Franny, you can now be the only pretty one.

The mediated dynamic of the orgy made it hard to untangle between actual and simulacral—neither a referent or object—or to be more precise, the orgy was a giant gable-ing performance stage in which real external conditions are obliterated to create a hyperspace for some kind of new super reality, in which once the gate was opened, there was no way of exactly returning to humble origins exactly, and this is kind of an understatement.

Though as my final resting face was sharp dulled now. I, lost all working method of my skate practice-way years ago, and my musings to Franny now seem to be just taking on a more theoretical dimension now, rather than the implied immediate obvious assumed prevalence she so used to listen with in captivation and to which she used to contribute her opinion towards very thoughtfully. I mean it's not hard, not too terribly hard to see exactly—I can tell Franny thinking now, Franny sitting there saying nothing when I pontificate, halting herself, as if protecting something by not saying what she really now thinks—her associates now towards me have grown to feel more fair weather friend-enemies or just even enemies, these new people seem to occupy space in her head formerly reserved for me, and her best friend Joanna still hates me, but I guess that may be rightly so, and I still refuse to say they when talking about her behind her back.

 

But to be in the big tent of orgy behind the view of galleria courts was to be witness to our vanishing. To orgy was to be made aware that we shall all eventually disappear like a mirror in the dessert, and what the orgy must have made even more abundantly clear in expressing, we will all be eventually dashed and replaced by other network clack actors clicks before we die also, as the society of commune is a society of randos, and if some afterlife after life ever at all existed, surely it would also be filled with extras like blades of yellowing crabgrass the same.

 

And problems problems all around. Problems back and forth as more problems cloud abound. Problems money cannot fix. Problems caused by cycles of seemingly innocuous bad habits. And how any little old thing can cause something catastrophic or deadly. Problems too late to temper with discipline. Problems caused by all the people always getting in the way. Problems caused by bad players around, bad players always so unavoidable, bad players one must grimly accept. Problems caused by having to acquiesce to abusers, problems by who's ransom hold onto better judgement they play against with the ill actions they consistently pass in dispatching. Problems caused from still feeling guilty when rightfully confronting legitimate grievance.

The last quarter century has seen the Megapolis no longer really be able to maintain an increasingly splintering heterogenous and infructuous social order, and it began to bare little relation to the processual realities of modern social development, thus the commune clusters multiplying themselves like shingles or herpes sores. The hangover of the rush of commune new seemed to give us an insatiable and unceasing craving for the no limit records promise of the perpetual self reinforcing compulsion of just incessantly needing always something to look forward to, off a now increasingly homogenizing and feeding on itself populace. In some misguided Rousseauian rappel à l'ordre  of co-option of the pagan like pastime of the snow flesh marks of teeth orgy rising up to populist fore, not to mention with a whole industry and media landscape scrambling around it all, the commune orgy phantasmagoria embodied in the thirst trap single mom with full sleeves on the network holding her young child hostage in the pose of it all, and everyone was just hypnotized, just constantly dreaming of getting it on with their neighbor or neighbor's wife. 

I heard a woman reduced me as just some rinsed professional skateboarder (actually, I was formerly paid am, with a pro-mo), but even now, and even then, and to give Franny credit, Franny overhearing this actually really knew, understood the score. 

Franny was tooling Herbert Marcuse' Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, she parroted something like, how men don't live their own lives but perform pre-established functions within a citizenry left to its manipulated interests and passions, and you know it certainly must be so dire when that we are somewhere accelerated way passed this by now practically, that in the bold in hull of orgie commune cluster, such quote un-quote seems almost quaint now. 

I just wanted to tell her though, 'Yeah, we do everything for women—we pick up your garbage once a week, fight your wars for you, fix your cars and build your houses.', but I restrained myself, fearing Franny-cancellation. Or in my case, I write about Powell Peralta logos on the messageboard everyday for the women in this world, your welcome.

But here I am now, Jake Codwill, thirty five years old and not exactly thrilled about it, but it's not too bad. If you had a subscription to Babysitter in mid early early mids, you definitely would have seen my hot lobbed action shots of my a priori never yet executed, engineering operations on soon to be ruins of architectural components and vestiges of a decaying neoliberal order. This was practically at the height of the clean era, and I didn't never have to skate no handrails (which I couldn't do, even if I wanted to)—but I had a move, a real sweet move, which in the mag they referred to as the Codwill Shimmyshae, and thus that became my mark onto this world, when otherwise now, but now, now I'm becoming just like some long footnote at the bottom of the book no one in the garter belt of the commune really wants to read, 

It's not that I just fell off and had lost my superpowers (which I did), but at least you could say and to give Franny a little credit, she knew, was well aware of, that even the room for, even the possibility for innovation prime in the time for when I came up, where I had the once in lifetime opportunity to apply my incidental skill set of meager competence in making then yet to be made contributions to the field, were now just all no longer available. Epistemological discoveries where siphoned up, there was no room for major discursive authors, only room for teeny tiny network actors, but the field today is now completely unapproachable because of the bewilderingly freakish extremes the practice has been driven past by mom-manager gymnastics kids and all straight up dweebs.

Franny knew all this, and surely sympathized, was well versed about the collapse of my field, but her fascists' girl-lord logic was increasingly slouching towards, Yeah, well that's just too bad, anyways, babe—and that I had a better cultivated pant selection than Lester's ankle socks and smug khaki shorts selection and his Santa Claws bod to boot, is more proof that Franny is not as committed as me in the aesthetic life and game, and she knows this, so she revolts by taking up with someone exactly like this in some notion of regression is progress. And as smart as Fran is, I honestly doubt Franny was really fully aware of this, and if she was, well then you certainly could have fooled me even on my best day. My wife is leaving me because I'm a better artist than her—I mean, how could I even make this up??

Though I had become calcified solidified within the subcultural milieu—and it certainly doesn't hurt that it's a subculture that is very much of drunk sentimental skate homies, ceaselessly exuding in the nostalgia of past. The ruins of the trashed cities was once where I could maybe situate my practice, in developing and expressing my own proprietary and self invented body style of performance and interior operation (There's really not too terribly many skate spots in our small commune hamlet.) Coming up, I took from Carroll's cues, added a lethal dose of kill to blaze and puff for street bump air billow, and with the help of then sublime hip hop, that I was convinced was directly tethered to cosmos. Gloriously more stoned than Patricia Highsmith, not yet de-throned, and seemingly riding disembodied from the otherwise accidentally over-executed seemingly impossible fluid trick clips I was able to on my best days take down to record, all as if lifted in luminous Codwill Shimmyshae haze. And to tell you the truth, my secret was, I would film something maybe about a dozen times, or however many it would take, until I got one trick that came out accidentally over-automated and crazy and over puffy puffed as if blasted out from sacto indo kill cloud, and then this edited against other vibing ambient clips of these like Rube Godlberg Peter Fischli and David Weiss household products destruction experiments to give a pomo pictures gen general vibe, where the end result was a video part that was like an unsolvable puzzle for the video krell watcher, and a video part which to this very day, still not replicated by anyone, really.

Skate videos now are not so much filmed as they are streamed now—the ultimate Marxist take, as the distribution system inevitably effects the aesthetic content—as tricks themselves are streamed as the most bloodless progression of most efficient fresh baby brained tabula rasa operations that satisfies the normies with pyrotechnics and flattened vertiginous stunts, that frankly, I never ever really signed up for in the first place. To confound matters, the centers did not hold and all my heroes became kooks the same (Randy Linchpin, Baxter Donovan, Howard Nichols) and they all just well went along with whatever now in the notion of some spirit of open mindedness, or winners guilt probably, or a convenient way of fake balking at pretension out of winner's guilt in their interviews, when otherwise, they at their height were all otherwise the most judgemental bastards on the coast in a way that now seems quaint and more essential now than ever.

But, the tech formalism I was know for, for being a network actor practitioner in, at one time really seemed to promise Nautica laced future now. We didn't so much make full skate porn, as we made short, tightly edited montage analog video tape teasers to announce a new self-realized, impossible for anybody to decipher or replicate street skating methodology—so advanced, that not even anyone on my team could even reproduce their own goddam parts.

Even when Franny was a teenager, she was an amazingly contemporary Head, a head's Head. She made up the archetypal Betty—a model that no longer exists with this new generation. The skate Betty functioned as tastemaker, aggregator—model, muse. That she was featured for about two seconds in my AM fast track promo, it would seem to the uninitiated as her being an accoutrement to me functioning as then pro am, when she had in fact been the one to in fact finally pick me! Falling fashion forward, never not au courant, born avante-guarde bon vivant, well appointed in appropriated lip service club and rave gear, and me, me, Jake Codwill, all but colonized now then by Franny Windcheater.

I didn't live in New York anymore, or even still ride for Trukfit no more. But back then we would film and film and film and film, but unlike all the other companies, who would just pick out the best clips 2 include in the edits—our co vid was just the most methodologically disparate clips edited click clack against each other, to where they made no working sense and where enigmatically incomprehensible in the then exciting unrecognizability of their newness. Usually by the time a video part is done, you can pretty much figure out what the skater's strength is—he's good at wind jamming jumping down, or doing maneuvers where the obstacle is in front of him as opposed to behind him—so by the end, you can tell most of his clips are variations of which by then are the obvious strengths he possesses. What we—the Trukfit battalion that is, didn't show was more important—that was the difference—where all the other companies beatle brained focused on what they did show, and because of that, that made mimicking our motifs and styles impenetrable, and the industry could still never catch up or ever replicate those seductive image pictures postmodern edits off the Trukfit trill ballyhoo. But the bad news was was not even Trukfit could catch up to itself, and indeed we all, the entire team practically, reverted into a self obsolescence by bad new habits, the fatality of too much emotional freedom, new unqualified administrators insurrection of Trukfit, and a winnowing watering down a now center that could not hold from descending into the sick condition schizophrenic zombie brand bathos—which zombie brand is so now the great period style of our time.  

But there's a moment when you can kind of tell the filmer wasn't as interested as you are used to, or you don't get invited on a trip and you have to tell yourself it's no big deal, a moment when you kind of half realize your stunted stunt practice is actually caving in on itself and can only grow in only freakish odd ball variations that can no longer contend with the ever advancing march of new network actors taking it into stale-fresh and not so yet exhausted direction all having all nothing to do with you, and you could see it, you could see it in the negative space between rehearsed phrase you say that doesn't quite land, or in the new kids who are so dumb and you can tell that gives them the upper footing advantage now, you can certainly see it in the new young ams who's girlfriends now don't seem to notice you anymore, in humpty tumpy stance girl skaters set to colonize skateboarding with supplemental bikini photos and show off wow-ass yoga pants who the same afford themselves to perpetually decree women as victim sex objects in representation despite their ceaseless leaning on their own exacerbated autobrand sexual cachet, dizzied by new half pipes as big as rollercoasters, blue balled by the smug virgins wearing sunglasses, dusted like the mirror shine off the drained cocaine glass near the weeping hour.

And to the hanger on filmers and ES Barco spergs, idiot TMs, dilettante graphic designers, asleep at drawbridge owners, normie-fluencers, Olympian super normie super pros, all go thou now and fill another room in hell.

But alas, skaters can get, skaters tend to get sentimental, or at least vulgarly sentimental, and unfortunately this is something I cannot exactly divorce myself from.

There's the touted clip of Franny, teenage Franny, teen Fran in my clip, when I took her along to the page demos in Bamf that summer—Franny had the right Fresh Jive sweater, the Fresh Jive sweater was tan colored with the white red and blue stripes from the shoulders running all the way down the sleeves, as the au courant sour strip that Francis was. Franny had the right straight brown hair, the right color skin, the right back pack (with the right illegal drugs hidden inside stray cassette tape case), and later the clip, the clip where Franny was seen off riding well-heeled in the right Honda Civic hatchback taken right at the intersection on Sunset and Doheny (the Civic, mine, when we lived in Hollywood, before I graduated to Acura in the bay).

Franny was DNA's narrowing, a cute little stoner girl and I won't forget our color was blue (it's always blue)—and as was, I was the one, I was the one who shopped her, I was indeed the one who shopped Franny Windcheater the most, more than anybody. Back then just thinking of her inspired me to want to do everything more. Once when she went on a trip and came back to LA, I picked her up from the airport, we then went to Cafe Emulsion (the motif of the cafe was polaroid photos taken by employees of the customers and arranged in serial grids covering the walls) and while waiting in line, Franny just pulled out a giant bag of beelzebub's cabbage bake she had traveled with so brazenly past TSA in her purse, which I found normatively captivating in the economy of her guilelessness, which I then desperately wanted now only to be ceaselessly around, in proximity to all that which she afforded herself and by seemingly the world writ large just in her being Franny Windcheater.

This may seem inchoately sad, but I think of exact tiny things, or what Franny said as teenager, interesting or banal things that were like kind of interesting because of her now, things about the city that would filter through her as screen projected back on to me—mundane things, and these things have stayed with me even through our marriage, surprisingly. Once early on, we went to some rave at the Ensemble, and just the word she said, Ensemble still sticks with me, and how I pine over just the word Ensemble trapping from her mouth scores ago.

I miss that old version of myself, I dearly miss the old version of myself and Franny—smoking the silk cut road cigs I brought back from summer circuit in Amsterdam, back then we were so unblanched, our bored bodies so much less used up then, and so unused, that cigarettes in the car didn't even seem to stink then or bother us yet. And smoking kill back then we would get way too high for me to operate machinery—in the car we were both so illegally high we played a game where we tried to telepathically communicate thoughts to each other and then we would guess the answers back like witnesses against our own vanishing, and maybe we lied to each other about getting the messages correct. Usually, (meaning always) Franny was way too high to even be seen in public, a high that is no longer available to either of us, and what was once like being cartoon in underwater with background music hallucinated hearing in the background, a Smurf village high that has now after all these years just turned to an immediate bracing paranoia that one must somehow get through the kick in. Once when Franny got way gobstoppingly too high to be in public—once when going to the movies at an underground mall court, she was laughing uncontrollably and Franny fell to the ground laughing uncontrollably high on the ground lying on her back like a looney hornbill plover gussing off a whirring merry go round, Franny lying on her back on the galleria marble floor, right outside the subterranean independent movie theatre, Franny now not even concerned making a spectacle of herself or getting into trouble, she turns her head on floor, looking at me with a charmed, naively blissed whimsy smile, which I will never forget or probably ever get over.

We were both just always total superficial trendoids though. There was something wildly unoriginal about us not wanting to be unoriginal. It seemed unsaid we both exuded in each our own vague overtly self stylized unemployable costume stylishness of being so young and so naïve (she still though, smarter than me)—and I don't think that can ever be overstated, because it was an expression of how we oriented ourselves in and against the gate crashing world otherwise filled all with wrecking ball total bores, and such was the attitude, such with which we then collided and met each other with in full esteem. 

I still think of Franny saying at the plex arcade, I don't like when people say literally, the unearned confidence that goes with like everyone's, like small, like small little vocabulary, and how I understood her general disgust—how to Franny it just sounded so in the cheap of smug economy of it all, and I always still think about that.

When I first met Franny at the graffitti'd-on post historical deco school, she wasn't available to me yet, not to mention I didn't have enough requisite freedom at home to be perpetually out and about just to try to keep up with her, or keeping speed with her and her wild group of friends who lived in the same neighborhood, and her bang gang who even seemed to make remarkable grades despite dropping acid during school hours. One night I tagged along with Franny, but I for some reason rode in another car not with her, and we followed her to the bonfire of party colonized by other teenagers, who with the upperhand of unlimited freedom, as I was just some new comer coomer, some tourist new to her world that I was vaguely invited to inhabit.

Franny had a lot of school nite and weekend freedom, too much freedom, but she was certainly advanced because she could well handle the responsibility—and her three story Tom & Jerry house porch was a meeting place for the other free to loam and roam Jane's Addiction wanna-be junky punky Brewster laden teenagers living in her hip gay center neighborhood to post up all the time, practically seeming like some loose neighborhood micro community I would have to penetrate just to get five minutes in alone with her—if at the time that was even possible. I, a mute witness in such situation made me keenly too aware of what no experience I had in being in the direct presence of what I  beyond anything else ever so wanted—and anything I could muster to say in front of Franny and her neighborhood gang would be thrown in the quaside of the rotted harbor of all their collective non-response. And what started as making plans with her, morphed in her switching them plans around, including, including other people or who ever ended up being around (she never wanted anybody left out and there was always someone around), and when you thought you were going to be alone with her, was actually you following her in a separate car to some party.

Cason, in his characteristic erudite and soft spoken parlour, contrasted starkly to my brazenness, my brazenness, which seemed to intensify more around him, my always asking him if I could smoke in his apartment, my always wanting to have an extra beer before we left the bar.

Cason and I spoke of the usual rehashed topics we discussed when I came to his apartment. To hang out with Cason, I had to come over to his place—and he never wanted to go out to a bar now, he preferred rather to just chink drinks at his kitchen counter, but he rarely even drank now. Cason was able to do real well for himself in the business of smuggling when our commune cluster was burgeoning, he was successful with smuggling banned items in, when doing such was risky though quite lucrative. Now since our cluster has long been established, this kind of activity has become deferred adopted by too many new wanna be full time self stylized network user smugglers on the channel of significantly lower stakes, and besides, there was less demand for contraband, as anything now could be easily found.

The womble of the dash fire in the living room sweep caused the shadows on our faces to weakly flicker, still providing adequate, though unstable light. We were nestled safe in the apartment of communism's borderland sweet spot of the petit Barraganian interior of Cason's pad tonite. Any song we wanted to listen to was always easily available somehow. Our communist shoes, were considerably better designed with an integrity of materials and simplicity, than 'high fashion' brands that the hamster wheels running third and fourth world's capitalist system still couldn't quite touch. 

I don't like going along with shit I don't like, Cason—it's a cote, it's just a cote, man. I trailed off, as if somehow having the final say, standing in front of and over examining Cason's framed Walter Gropius poster, that I always look at.

A Coke.

No cote, a cote, going along with what I don't like is, isa cote, or at one protracted interval, almost, almost becomes sort of like a cote at least.

Oh, yeah, right, right, I think I see, Cason's over-analytic sensability refusing to go along with what I'm tossing off, which I kind of don't need at this very second.

Momentarily lost again in the over-contemplation of my psychological state, unsaid it was every dealer was a hairdresser therapist, but even stodgy Cason couldn't be relied upon for even that. I should insist on  inflicting my will upon him by talking about myself more.

I'm still water, Cason, I'm a back channel billabong now, the skateboard is a slippery proposition quite, yes, but even my own fashion of method has indeed descended away from me. Even if, even, or no, even if I wanted to skate, which, well, quite frankly, I don't really wanna either, or either would, no—I couldn't, couldn't know what to even do now so. . . .

But you're comeback, what about you're comeback! Cason uttering in a rare show of support if only because he knows it's not quite possible, his sentiment is useless to me right now, like a lot of other things about him.

What comeback, the conditions just aren't, or like—just aren't available my friend. My decaying, decaying arsenal bag, like my own bag of rotting carrion strapped to my back—bag of tricks, my bag of tricks is is just so like so boomer now, but it's like I honestly don't, or I don't know, I don't want to even adapt a new . . .

Cason lip servicing too much false sense of optimism this time, which the way he says condescending, Well, not available yet, old boy . . .

No, no, not, no not available yet—I just don't wanna, that's like what I'm saying . . . I, straightening up, snapping at Cason so inconsequentially in his own dwelling.

People just want to see you're Vogt grind choreography, you need a stag song, a miracle stag . . .

I was so kind of buzzed now, I apishly wipe my mouth saying the thing I always say, Everybody wants to rule the world baby, but even when they past prime, they don't even want to let go—and when we say that we just think we are talking about someone else, but really, but really, but really you know what it is, it is where, it is, is actually, or one finds is more directly applicable to—oneself . . .

A Vogt grind without a song, a Vogt choreography with Franny emotionally absent or just abscent, a trick selection to wield that is becoming obsolete from being worn down by great lakes of normie user stans trick reducers—I couldn't see how I could now possibly engineer any sort of comeback promo at this point. Whatever I am, I'm a nineteen nineties goofy boy Carroll wanna-be network actor clone, a Cypress Hill skate-rock relic, a video skate porno extra am from bygone days, a head of state to a place that no longer exists.  And to think, a Vogt grind without a real downtown commons to launch it in now no less, oh, and certainly try not to forget even no dope co to act as venue or frame . . . The idea of even a dope co now, if one was ever possible, which it is not—the very concept itself, so pityingly antiquated anyways.

But all the blithering idiots, meaning some in the commune ska scene of the section cluster, as well as all the other user stan generators in the other 'munes all had their insipid one-note one way talkie channels—the zeitgeist of insipid consensus now was—a skater doesn't like need a brand bro because the brand and the skater are both equals and not to mention reliant on the same network channel. Even seasoned professionals in the industry had their rec room talk channel to reveal how preposterously inane their expertise and base instincts actually all really where, without the, sup-rise sup-rise, help of an advanced and organized co now to restrain all their stupidity. You needed an advanced ultra economic city, you needed a troubled and self sabotaging horny muse, you really needed a punishing photographer, a snide graphic designer who hates the other team riders more than you, you needed a TM ready to sell you out for Coddie-few-minutes-ago from Wichita Falls, you needed a filmer who wasn't sentimental at all as you are about your clips—this is an org, a co, a confluence of potent forces that expresses a rare time in place, that is unreplicatable, and reflects something abstractly poetic towards the sublime. They chose their team very wisely, the edits are cold as hell, as opposed to over lingering and self serving sentimental like everything on the INSTA-STAN—which is indeed what every video in the last quarter century has become.

Cason and I reverted to talking about the usual Nature versus Culture dialectic, and then inevitably descending into chatting the orgy scene—he always agreed about the orgy though, by succumbing to our base instincts, was a synthetic insertion of the barbaric pagan confused as essentialist by Culture itself, under the new verisimilitude of some holistic natural governing celestial impulse, that's now normie norm normie chadded tradded tweeified in the everybody wants to rule the sex on beach communes.

Franny, Franny—Franny's panties, did you know, did ya know the panties she wears to the block now are uzi grey, uzi-rey now . . .

Machine gun grey?

No, no uzi grey, uzi grey—worse!

She still at the Sentinel?

God it's all she does now. She's into, into, her thing, or it's, it's how can I say it's. Psychic text, no, no, concrete words, or somehow the notion of some kind of ink, ink, ink screen words that can be arranged into an order, some new order, that can somehow like, articulate the inherent, like abstraction behind all of reality, ya know? But get this, so, or but get this, and then when this order, like some mystical order of words is transmitted, transmitting, filling, or like suffusing an infected soak of abstraction radiation upon the world, the idea, or so the idyllic state of the cosmos supernatural abstraction becomes like, like physical materializing here just from reading it, or realized into physical being just by these very real words upon tha page, concretized, now blasted back from being read, read direct back onto the physical, or the real. Theoretically, or if this articulated abstraction gets read out in the world, it could possibly somehow get glitched in the fabric of like space, or space time continuum. If read the right way, or under right circumstances, blobs of abstraction from somewhere else hover and float in the air . . .  

She still with Les?

What do you mean she still with Les? She's me . . .

Cason took out his cell phone resignedly from his chain purse, and turned on the projector, a hologram of Franny and Les walking together and talking conspiratorially in a living in each other's pants moment, the frozen 3-D image hovering peacefully in the blind of air in the suite, in a way that went slightly beyond my immediate personal bias of my girl gone now, because I've always simply loathed hologram prints.

I mean, I mean, we well, she . . . 

The opium pellets were connected to each other in grid of rows. I nervously pulled the pellet connected to the other pellets connected on the self contained grid, like snapping off casted plastics of parts for a model air bomber. This was the good cheap old opium from back in the day supposedly, that was becoming increasingly hard to get, which I suspect old Cason somehow got from his northern states jagged connect.

Trying to choke what's left out the pyrex, Cason smoke traced no more, but he stands supportively, playfully hectoring while watching.

I heard they call you Sparkplug for a reason, buddy, eye of the tiger on this last one. . . 

There it is, c'mon, c'mon—hold that shit in, seriously, hold it in, hold it in, don't, don't blow out yet . . .

I blow out no smoke, in meaningful way that has visibly come at some immediate cost,

Ghost hit . . .

Recovering myself from coughing, I randomly think how sometimes I think Chico Brenes kind of reminds me of dash Pappalardo in a vague but very certain way in some clips, which I've never told anyone or said out loud.

Ya know, maybe I should seek AA, I bleap not really meaning it, trying to buckle the bottle top off with lighter, chipping the chirping lighter's withering edge.

What Alcoholics Anonymous never says is, is when you are broken hearted, lovesick, the only thing you can do is drink, or just drink, Cason states heroically, and I like that, that sounds pretty good—and that's basically why I hang out with him.

Amen to that, I toasted with a strained tenuousness, saluting in a sluttering, crushed, lost expression in the remnants of fit of coughing.

I take an immediate baleful gulp in victory beer to viv up opium's trapping, in a way that clearly makes apparent that my mind, my emotions, despite the guarantee of such prescribed substances, the water warped formica counter of my consciousness can still veer off the highway and still very well go all over the place from one thought to the next even under such substance influence, or especially under such influence—I frequently wonder is there a drug somewhere that has an even firmer hold on the containment of one's rovering mindfield? Yes, alcohol was such a dud high, but it was the most reliable (and available), that is most reliable, at least for the first twenty minutes or so—but it was reliable, reliable precisely because of its primordial link to decay in a way that can only be bio replicated like virus or mold, and not invented synthesized like meth or cubism, A dime's worth of advice, you've heard me say it, or you've heard me say is before, no, no—it's death, the death in ferment that makes us sentimental, as alcohol's daggers drag against us in hangover, but even a hangover is better that the naked cauterizing dread amputation of love lost or no, maybe not better, but at least a faithful companion,

Cason leaned back with innocent jaded on looker's visage, wisedly watching me self corrupt tooling his wares, as if the plug wasn't at all his . . .

Well, besides, I have never met anyone in Alcoholic's Anonymous that had anything, or anything they had earned from those timed me me me meetings I ever wanted. AA was the first selfie, I surmised stingily, leaning on the bar, in a way that if I was in a movie and if this was the very first shot of the film, the impartial audience would automatically fail to sympathize with me.

Cason moved a luke weak blinking candle that was desperately trying to stay alive, so he could uselessly wipe down the already clean counter yet again, To relinquish drinking, is to forfeit romance altogether—foreclosed by some, some unoriginal need for control of one's life. Besides, I've been most successful with women in chaos of blind chance, Cason stating wryly.

Cason, you do think, or doya, doya think the orgie is the end of all romance all together, though, right? I mean it is. I point towards Cason in a yearning desperation, wallowing in all the trouble I am currently in. 

Cason hesitates in good measure, I think it was Adorno or no, Marcuse, who said, what was it he says, culture, culture by the mere fact of its existence prohibits the sociopolitical change that it promises . . .

Yeah, but the orgy, A tiny jaunty lady bug tattoo on some young woman, like everything in the section cluster of the clunky commune has it's own agenda and perpetuates its own advances into morphing into covering entire swaths of her body and limbs with giant medallion like pieces and large trashy coat of arms like shapes in its own logic illogic of over-production making her look absolutely whiplashed trash evil from a distance, and I press the question further onto Cason, too hard needling for his answer this very instant.

And, but the orgy. The orgy circumvents that altogether, romance needs uncertainty to flourish and we need romance. The Platonic idea of affirmative culture, i.e. the prison panopticon of marriage is ostensibly firebombed by some supposed idea of some real life Aristotelian cheat mud to jumper cable the burbling taxi cab of sacred form.

Yeah, but that's, that's all theoretical—it certainly doesn't play that way . . .

Cason looked out at the dead end wall of his kitchen impatiently, as if on standby for news of whether something illicit was to play out in his favor in the outside world, No, no, old chum, suffice to say, yes, it certainly doesn't play, I'm afraid I should say . . .

There was no more brown left, so we resorted to the easy to get white tequilas. An ant must have materialized out of a cartoon, because I had never seen it before, and it was purposely heading to one of the stray specs of salt from the line lick off the shots, because it must have thought it was sugar. I envied the ant and the existence it was otherwise zapped into from outta nowhere—oh, the life of an ant, the life of an ant is to find a giant grain of sugar and have to pay nothing for it except to just find and have. Though when the crazy ant arrived at the salt grain, it realized it was not in fact sugar, and then it just resumed scampering its path to the city limits of the counter—but then the ant turned around and went back steadily soldiering back to the salt grain again, as if it was second guessing itself. When the ant realized it was not sugar again, or there was no sugar anywhere in the grain, it continued back on it's path, but then it would stop, turn around and check the grain again, and repeated this cycle for about fifteen minutes, until it finally learned its lesson and then disappeared somewhere underneath the bar counter and I never saw him again.

In nineties, nineties, we couldn't, look—listen to this Cason, even afford ink, afford ink for the promos we filmed for—I mean, imagine. Stating stoically from the tequila-ias, as if I had never said this before to unfaithful Cason.

What, like—

You know nineties, nineties! In nineties, ink was so scarce at the time, so scarce, you know that, you know the decks we skated and filmed the promos on were blanks or just blanks—we shaved the ink from the wheels, decks, the t-shirts for the prod we shipped out, the whole like. We couldn't afford to use, even have graphics we were promoting in the video shots promoting the graphics we were trying to sell—think about that! Then after that, then after, people just wanted, or just wanted to buy blank everything from us after the promo dropped . . . Blank jeans, blank wheels, all that. We saved a lot on ink after that, but it was the beginning of Trukfit getting wiped away by our own self liquid papering, it's own self erasure. Soon all cos went blank, something furthering all our own demise . . .

I paced Cason's bog with unfocused misdirected purpose, like a stand up comic in an empty club,

I became discursive author to finally attract Fran to me—I mean I had to! If your not otherwise, you are a network actor into the orientation to the ecosystem of women. I mean, I wasn't exactly a discursive author, but back then a network actor could just go a long way, it just went a long way is that's what I'm saying. Back then, being a network actor was a thing—even that was rare—now everyone wants attention, now everyone is an skater, an artist—now people film themselves response listening to classic songs for the first time ever and posting it and now they are bigger now than the artists they are listening to.

Women, women, women, women go, go, go to captain of industry, Profered Cason reluctantly in a way Cason could be relied upon to always serve bad updates of state of affairs, while everything outside of his apartment was advancing itself into it's own over-productive self erasure. The one in quadrillion coup de chance where a random photo could be combined with text in an application that illustrated it's own point in the most efficacious way, degenerated in just typing over and over and over onto stockpile photo images willy nilly again and again and again and everyday forever, where one wouldn't even have to wait for correlatives now, and you could just type your minute by minute bored and frustrated un-mused low grade enterprising porridge cold takes.

Well, they are or they do, they use menace and prayer,

Art and sex . . .

Completely, no totally, no now, but now though, or now she's, Franny's just become just this critical cul-de-sac.

Picking up Cason's guitar, and immediately putting it back into the stand as if to interrupt myself to make my sorry little point.

And I have no way, simply no way of coming back now I'm afraid. Everyone is skater now. Back in the day, you know the thing about back in the day was? You know back in the day there was only one type of skater, only fifteen people on earth who could probably engineer kickflip backtail. Skating has become Chadded, communist state gymnastic coach trainee, instead of skate Betty's, we have girl skaters try to steal spot light instead also, who can survive a decade filming two half tricks on flat on the network, I, trying to pass off slightly rehearsed point I was reaching to make, but it didn't land quite right on beat of moment, Cason was distracted for again a sec.

And then what, Cason pushes in a challenging way, in a slightly offensive, condescending way.

And then what what is is, then all the bewilderingly freakishly good skaters have been subsumed in an anti-aesthetic, where how they look, what they embody, are all but just secular price points that goes against what skateboarding embodied in a way they are not unaware they are failures and lost opportunity insufficient, or just insufficient, and well unaware of, unaware of—with their outsized fan base now just encouraging more of decimating, self cannibalizing operations . . .  

But I thought it too much, let it go, now like a blubbering goldfish in the glass cradle of the evening bowl, and after a few Irish knocks back in, the opium, I can relax and breathe.

There's only a couple—there's only a couple of everything there, but it wasn't that bad it really wasn't, that's what I'm saying,

So your saying . . . 

What I'm saying is is it wasn't that bad, is all, it was, I mean, it was pretty great actually, and I don't care, you know, I really don't care, maybe for good reason though, no one else seems to know . . .

Rasher? Cason interrupts to offer, when he should well know by now, when I drink, I don't like to eat—I want to keep steady focus on my empty cave of acid lagoon liquid sucking stomach.

No no, I'm fine. What was, is? Ok, well, yes, or actually, but besides the point—I had such an immature consciousness, was so immature, that I can't believe she, well, she went along with . . .

You can't believe what . . . 

I mean, I know, I know, I'm never gonna learn how to live . . . I can never be contained, never comfortable resting in my skeleton . . . 

Well, that's—I mean, I mean, that says something. This, worst so long, surely it can be the worst.

Wait, what's, who said that,

Who said that, I don't know—Bernadette Mayer? Althusser? Cason with unjustified indignancy.

She used to ask. Or she always used to ask, 'What are you thinking'—'What are you thinking'—'What are you thinking' . . . 

Right, and now she never, never does,

No, no—she never asks is what I'm saying.

Cason didn't reply as if what I said was of little consequence, but him not saying something was also maybe him exercising some tenuously thoughtful patience, which sometimes could be his redeeming trait, that is, when he wasn't reporting his neighbors for more coins for the energy meter.

It seemed like everyone in the orgy scene had either three names or one. Despite being one of the most economically robust hamlets in the cluster, everyone here was so bewilderingly cheap. Supply side commune landed gentry were simultaneously the most frivolous and the stingiest people I ever knew. Not just cheap in spirit, not just cheap in emotional flexibility for when little things didn't go into the prison of everything always going exactly their way—but they were petty, and real petty, and of cheapness reflecting itself in the panneaux and curlique of over decorated dome hut, the ostentatious orgy costumes, mutant pimp lip surgery, not tipping their children an inheritance. 

Because there was a massive world wide obesity epidemic, even though not acceptable to say out loud, the epidemic rarefied beauty to very extreme now. Girls by virtue of just being not fat, assailed in their cachet, and their commune value spiked and surged into their own little power, and now we watched movies pinning over mids.

The beautiful now became some overvalued ne plus ultra beautiful, when I remember kind of taking them for granted in high school, but oh, how in which conditions have so direly descended. Shatteringly beautiful girls that at one time made a decent and approachable demographic, had now become unapproachable the very rare times you even came across them now—like seeing a Delorean out in the wild.

Franny was no Delorean though, now she was like an inherited Victorian house, that I was no longer really that welcome to inhabit now—her work, what she did, sneered itself out at me through her, the way she acted in public went against all that resides Lacanian inside. Lester was bigger than me, but surely not as handsome, but he was extremely charming and a perfect normie sociable socialist, possessed a formidable range of physical intellectual talents, winning every pie eating contest in the commune practically, seemingly knowing more than anyone on a range of normie interests and chud dud subjects, he didn't know what the fuck about the second FTC video, Penal Code.

But ne plus ultra beautiful of course had created this like, new ruthless eat the sky economy of scarcity, and this even had it's deleterious effects on my Franny now. Causing Franny, her, along with everyone else, now hypnotized by cultural conditions to come to only expect more from their own surplus power. As their new desires became satiated, their desires become never satiated and would feed on themselves and morph and become more and more and more outrageously cheek piercings grotesque—hence my Franny now with Les now.

You know what part it was, or you know what part it was that I knew, really knew, or right when I knew Franny was seeing Lester outside the doja—was when, or it was when, when she was talking about Lester or casually brought him up—announcing not only that she knew more about him, but also possibly you got the feeling she had just recently spent time with him. She went or she said, how Lester could give an impression of being arrogant, but his success in the cluster was all, was like, painful for him, that's what she said, painful, and right then I knew. I knew, but allowed myself to half gaslight myself in the moment of keeping it together, not quite knowing how to respond—Franny said sympathetically, his guilt caused him to suffer guilt, that's what she actually said, and boo hoo his feelings of overexposure. Yeah, some overexposure, I'll say.

In the ultra economic of the commune, where ceaselessly accelerating signs and signifiers shifted and skirted, sped up like watching fast forwarding video tape while the TV was still playing on, or how people stupidly time lapsed sped their video on social media, signs and signifiers became promiscuously traded, mashed together, xeroxed and re-xeroxed re-appropriated—epileptic flashing promiscuous symbols to become soon if not immediately minted obsolete. Our art dated quickest, not because of the art itself (well, actually, most of our art was totally insipid DOA), but because of the accelerated conditions around it, into perpetual purgatory where everything meant nothing. A woman singing Motown, a siren song singing to some phantom man, begging into the song 'Please be my baby, baby', was not only preposterous now, but naive and obsolete, as a beautiful woman pinning over a man bad enough to have to desperately sing a song for her supper was about as realistic as watching a giant gorilla climb the Empire State Building.

And when I reply guy'd back to Franny right there in plane air that time in our argument, I'd give a thousand dollars to run as fast as you—I admit it sounded, it felt pretty good to say. But let's just say, that poetry faded pretty quick.

The poetry also faded pretty quick when the shoe deal went south, but that wasn't entirely my fault. But just in case your wondering, there's nothing exactly dope in losing a shoe deal—other than the resignation it was dope you even had one, but then that fades pretty quickly also. I found out I was getting fleeced by Cons Toliver though—when forced to tour, I had shop owners practically congratulating me on my one star design-by, one owner even told me he was able to get a second autobike practically bc he had sold so much, then I started noticing a lot of people were making considerably more cream than me, and by a lot of people, I mean everybody. Tolliver never fed me the numbers, and, or when I finally started looking, nothing added up—first checks where high, then a steady, then they took a dip, and stayed there and then I like doomed freighter ship cursed by Osiris, was cut. Also Harrison, the rep, was saying something about Tolliver shipping a container, or a container to Europe filled including Jake Codwill design by's and Tolliver may have requested to establish some kind of offshore account somewhere?

But I wish they would have taught in school, I really wish though, I would have been taught the poetry line back way then, Never seek to tell thy love—I mean, it really could have saved me trouble as a yungster, but then also maybe probably not. But, I mean why am I complaining? I got to be with Franny Windcheater during prime years. But I still think about that line, because what the line means is is, by doing so—seeking to tell thy love, although you may truly love someone, you are also emotionally hijacking them and placing little or no faith in the power of the unsaid. Surely with Lester now, none of these rules would seem but to apply at all or apply rather with Franny now of course—no rules could apply because of a myriad of sets of reasons which aphorisms can never seem to take into account enough to make a succinct slogan out of in factoring in how Fran's fascist now wide open heart works now.

And now everyone is network actor leg. Normies with white exposed New Balance Stance socks stans beneath their late in the game Quasi high waters Dickies, normie sleeves that go against skateboarding aesthetic tout court—that concept which nobody seems to comprehend, all but have taken some already inherently once tenuously counter culture and over the counter culture'd and homo-jean-genized it, couldn't never get their too many options denim correct—infuriatingly enough, they just ripped sick so hard at skating in a way they didn't even deserve, new pedestrian's out performing seasoned magazined skater of the year of last decade. The fascism of something ostensibly democratic, is those who have a fostered working standard or an historical awareness or accumulated experience, semiotic literacy or measured proficiency for that matter, or even sensibly disciplined working methods and ethics, all but gets bulldozed and rushed beat by someone, anyone, who just equal opportunity showed up just yesterday. Incompetent administrators fail at gate keeping, aren't even aware that a practical gate keeping is actually part of their job, and even if they are, they still always let the wrong ones in, in a wildy misinformed and naive sense of egalitarian everybody of the right to take up space producers. And that's kind of part of the reason I am pro am no more. Dead men, surrogates, auto cadavers, all over-ripping—space all taken up in the diminishing prime wave line up, just like, or exactly like of what Les takes now.

The orgy moon would inhale its own dope, they had no room for me in the boxing ring of the doja, my weary wife walking away and I was simply just witness to this now, like watching the movie of my life from a detached seat in empty dollar movie plex. But to watch Birdie china nollie the queue, to watch Birdie now coup the org, and her unfettered associates like Diana's foresters dispatch a new order of dynamic on assault onto all the top shelf scenester wives, interrupting the deep breathing, the deep cleaving, all the futile over-moaning. Birdie and her fetish goddess gang of little friends descended like parachuting platoon into the post twee orgy doja scene, the doja that looked like startup shared space, but was actually gentry gentrification abattoir. Birdie Farwell straight from her profile feature though, but with other yung babes with her definitely parading in for cuts, interrupting the doja session after the blue boy whistle blew. With little experience providing, but with seemingly all the right answers to the difficult questions posed by the demands of politics of the twee flared doja orgy mise en scene they so skirted and unskirted—mutability of circumstance now lambasting any once otherwise significant standards otherwise left unquestioned, and now, even more so in Birdie and friends in insurrection. 

But Birdie, and Birdie now, had moves that surely would cut the smile off your face, making the master of ceremonies, the commune head Laura Dern looking madam wearing her disgusting porpoise teeth headdress now seemingly rendered practically ostentatious, rendered obsolete.

Franny wasn't balling Lester, but someone else at that moment, as if to now say to even with Lester she was in charge. There was so much going on, Franny probably didn't register Birdie and crew barge the orgie, but I felt some misplaced sorrow and regret towards Franny even now. Even though Birdie was half Fran's age, I still thought to myself she could by no means even compare to Fran in league or archetype. When Franny was a teenager, she at least tried to tackle Mortimer's Catastrophe all on her own, whereas Birdie would march into adulthood still playing cartoon video games hologrammed into the frozen dumb commune air as default. That thought made me grateful.

But not for you or I or the rest of the world, they jumped in, sailed right in practically, seeming very much the so teflon don impenetrable, like silent night offices are never meant to be occupied—Birdie and the girls with her, one wearing a stupid cape, one of them had a lame pedestrian zeitgeist Cyrano mask, their costumes and props like some residue from their not too long ago adolescence. Birdie and her gang still so wrathfully crashing the orgy, shifting the imperial power dynamic possessed by the thirtysomething top shelf post-hipster hipster though not really hipster Curious George's handler's park ranger hat wearing Larry wives now. Some boil on virgin's lips, an outright youth insurrection, as if this has never happened before in any commune ever, though quite seeming just somehow familiar in all it's naked live immediacy.

One of the men tried to grab one of Birdie's soldiers in a skimpy black silicone jerkin, and the way she plucked back, I don't think so dude, filled me with hopelessness, just in the way she disrespectfully said dude to this comrade in his forties. It struck me so how I was more upalled how she called him dude, than anything else in the vivisection table of the orgy spree—which is considerable, seeing I have an utmost automatic animosity and loathing for exactly monied fuddy teletubby men like this.

So sure, under Cason's theory, the chaos of the orgy, was a cleansing from the bloodless Platonic idea of severe architecture and strict laws and strict reason—the cause behind marriage descending, of marriage institution advancing into it's late economic phase logic folding against itself into illogic (an end of reason), which must evidently be further countered by the illogic of the orgy. But I seriously doubt, I mean seriously doubt, married couple's lives ever really improved by swapping partners and cheating. And if it did, what did that say? Bridie and her gang's disruptors to the orgy scene even seemed slightly perfunctory of performative vainitas in its immediacy, with no clear directive, apart from if only to parade and establish their youthful insouciance, and maybe some eventual transfer of wealth away from some of the old Lamborghini eyebrow wives they may be erasing gunning out. Perhaps that fall out, as if just to say, farthing's worth of advice now: you don't have to cry over spilled warming lotion, it's just politics after all, babe.

But the ocean wants to cast me, the tide wants to sweep me, and the knife only wants to scar, I'm shelled in the played to very end of realized aspirations of my youth, concluding in my expired once marriage à la mode. A set of disembodied hands hovers in the darkness with nothing to grab now, a ghost plane of a wedding ring sliming off onto the floor and knocked kicked under the celibate bed, as now I am the double pillows in the dumpster encased in sex and sweat of orgy scene. 

 

And Birdie and her cohorts funk lust demons fecklessly strutting fucked naked across the pente mat like throwing darts out at a board of balloons in their coup de maître cut in, in their insistence of still wearing their post twee anime otaku costumes, vaunt couriers to all those oak cleaving thunderbolts. But as alluring as they looked so scantily costumed, nude balling, hanging out with them also seems like total bore, total chore. 

 

But Franny, Franny with selective mind like colander, gave me half eye blink notice. She was like a train of too many connecting cars so long that it breaks all traffic laws and clogs the slimy Rocky Balboa running commune block streets—and Franny you are just so futile, so futile now now, like pole vaulting into a kiddie pool.

We were so far into the future that even the idea of post-history was no longer pondered or really even ever at all considered anymore—but we were living in a sealed container of post time, but maybe it has always been that way. War even had been rendered obsolete now, event hough wars still went on in the periphery of the red line zone.

Lester, Lester, Lester doesn't even know the difference, the differance between Sherrie Levine and Louise Lawler—not, not that you evencare . . . My one liner not landing, because Franny was paying half attention.

Franny, you know, you know what Franny—sometimes I feel like sometimes I just don't get you.

But like it went, it started off, or started me off—

And also kinda, it was Franny saying nothing as if she was taking some preemptive pre-thought out higher road, her slightly tan white girl arms, the Indy streaks in her hair that normie girls never seemingly increasingly ever got right even now, despite all the tutorials they had available—things I once admired about her, now very well coming to conspire all against me, all seeming now not for me in boundless unease. but a boundless unease of my favorite style being not just not with me, but now against me.

Lester the molester, or rather Lester the Franny molester, maybe I should say, huh Franny? What about that, Franny? What do you think? Tell me what what you think about that . . .

Oh, stop. Sighed Franny, unimpressed.

Oh, stop? Your telling me to stop. You actually want me to stop, yeah that's pretty rich, pretty rich even for you.

Something broke inside Franny, and I was satisfied to get a first response out of her, though knowing I would be haunted by what would soon come summoned out the door of her cruel face I now insisted on forging open.

Lately  ya know you've become such a whinger, do you know that? You sit around 'ere, all you say, all you says, 'Tommy Guerrero . . . Nicky Guerrero . . . Tommy Guerrero . . . Nicky Guerrero . . . Tommy Guerrero,'  Franny flippintly miming.

Shut up!

Ok Mister, 'Julio de la Cruz was a total vibe to meeee like twenty years agooo' boo hoo—get over yourself . . .

Franny!

I could still spell the alcohol rot breath from where she was standing, the final detail sending me bonkers—she had been out day drinking at Picnic of Valor.

Even day-wasted Franny held her own, her mind sharp as a windmill blade, Well, you don't want kids, you don't wanna that— kids, that certainly seems like one, or one thing at least your actually sure of lately, pal. You go around 'ere—wearing the same jumpers the last three years, okay—watching the same old videos over and over—I find it despairing, quite.

I'm doing what I can!

You barely even skate, your always, messageboards.

Inactivity is a certain kind of of movement—and Hey, I read that one in your pissant journal, how bout that. I over-counter flippantly, kind of weakening any oratorial efficacy any of my statements now strive for, but also not really because I'm always saying outlandish things to Fran, it was the, or used to be a way I handled her in all my conscious irrationality.

Franny looked at me in her giving me no credit face, no smile of the space in the unsayable.

Yeah, yeah, messageboards, right Franny, messageboards—that's where we are right now, I mean the messageboard is—I try to retreat back to an unearned pragmatic pronouncement of some of my usual ad hoc windbag wisdoming.

Right, right, I know, I know, the messageboard, the messageboard is the new skateboard, okay I got it . . . Franny worn down by now by my tired, too predictable propriety, but also kind of dashed with the air that I can see is some commune zeitgeist presumption of her veering towards a wildly populist authoritarian and autocratic pervasive attitude, which she could wield in an in the now smug knowing flippancy and brazen teenage-like going along with it all, in the all misguided and corrosive sentiment of the power of charisma of discounting reduction—now to me, obvious she has been hanging out with Lester more than she's been letting on.

Well!

But that's all you do now, Franny, Franny now the everso patient kerner, Franny sounding a bit reasonable for about once in her life. 

I halted myself burning drenched now, almost rehashing to Franny that thing I always say, that I'm only responding to the ska teleology advancing from death of tech formalism death of Barthe's author—embodied by, a) Keenan Milton drowning in a pool in LA on the 4th of July, b) Paul Rodriguez, Jeremy Rogers, Sean Malto and Mike Mo taking tech gnar to it's logical anti aesthetic end only to drop Girl into obsolescence under Mike and Rick's non-watchful eye, c) Guy Mariano's comeback from crack cocaine, returning with thick forearms and a grotesque feeding on itself working method of trying to maintain the notion of his primacy of invention by an arsenal of freakishly weird new tricks, d) Anthony Pappalardo's disavowal of tech formalism and taking it into a sane and workable minimalist stripped down practice, that although revitalizing in its elegance, it just ended up concluding in it's very own self erasure, and thus my practice, by taking such cues incinerated itself in my own version of inactivity—I decided not to bring up Pappalardo right now.

What can I say, Carroll really dropped the—

Carroll, you cannot blame Mike Carroll for every single . . . 

Our eyes met and locked in pitch of intensity of what was been repressed right below the surface all along.

In rare instance Franny seemed to back away, giving me space down.

Yeah Fran, well guess what, guess what—I can blame, I can—can blame everything on Carroll! And you know this!!

As I remained still standing. Franny resignedly sat down on the replica public bench modeled on one from the grounds of Glass House in New Canaan, but with Jenny Holzer black out prose etched to its seat.

You forget, I originally, I originally, wanted to be a singer—I wanted to be a singer, okay?? But guess what—Oh, no!—the cultural conditions were, were no longer available, not available, but I took it in stride, I never complained, feel sorry for myself, and did, or I did the best with what little was given, like, what was, what was available! Okay. So I took skateboarding—given, something unlike singing, I had, have no real talent for. But I made a name for myself anyways, I made a name for myself anyways— in what little, little way, or that I could. Spent years, years alone on the streets perfecting my craft—blood sweat tears bile and cum—more than you even ever spent being editor of your little journal that about exactly ten people a year read. I mean big fuckin' deal, big deal, you publish people, late twentieth century sound artist graduate student teachers close to some post-Cagean lineage from like Pennsylvania or somewhere that some other academic hasn't recently crotch houndedly staked claim on already—and you just puff it up so you make yourself look smarter, and no one, and I do mean no one cares about hookless experimental-only-just-for-the-last-damn-fifty-years music. That's, that's like, like no better, no better, than me writing letters to Justin Girard during the day. Nobody listens to John Cage!

Franny knew I was right, and just didn't plum say anything, her non-response was drawn and quarter painful, because it signaled she had well already made her mind, no matter how many insulting things I could say to get her to stay.

The public domain becoming liquidated, all four quarters of downtown blocks of adjacent dance studio street spots becoming consolidated by the same security group, so that you got kicked out of everywhere all at once, and then the communes not having any proper place to street skate proper, or proper enough for me to bar down on or somehow draw to reinvent revivify myself and practice against a daily rapidly grotesquely advancing field, or not to mention, nowhere to assimilate myself with an increasingly un-interested and preoccupied by everything else larger public landscape—and with what little attention the public still had with skateboarding, they all in their tin-eye waste on these stupid normie glorified gymnastics champs and trad tween girls who skated corny pad bowl, who didn't know UGK from JFA. Yeah, Dill didn't wanna FW me, but Fat Dill's a kook anyways, I don't care—and besides, Ternasky was worse than Jerry Krause. But I kinda went too far attacking her journal, either that or I waited too late in time to attack the journal, or maybe it just didn't matter, and actually it didn't matter. Franny, she, buoyed by academia and that was her sole professional advantage over me now, and I had nothing now, was no longer really even useful to the commune. 

Yeah, its funny, it's real funny how into me you where when things were actually like going well—

Things have not been exactly going so hot for a long time . . . Franny musters consolingly, then immediately self servingly swiping hair out of her face when a group passed us on the annex sidewalk, vainly swiping left her hair in a way that was exactly half unnecessary.

The finality of her resignation trigger tripped, fed the insatiability of all my immediate doom, Your so unbelievable, your so unbelievable Franny, do you know that,

I resignedly sat down right next to Franny, all my silent skin screaming. Franny's so good insult to injury tearing open of old wounds without trying, Franny's so good insult to injury tearing open of old wounds even trying going out of her way not to. People shrinking around the communes always said, always says, 'It's not personal. It's not personal. It's never personal. It's not about you. It's not personal. Quit making it about yourself. It's not personal. Get over yourself, it's not personal. It's not personal. It's not personal. It's not personal', when someone only wanted to live on a rock, a third world running around the sun, insisting upon where the grand narrative of existence en toto does not include you because they don't like you, one very much has the right to take it personally. The logic of the communes is, things are bad, and they don't like bad things, so since they think you are bad, they weren't going to like you anyways—so don't take it personal stupid, it's only because you are bad. But then you see the one she choses, what preposterously comical flaws she allows about him to invade colonize her commune cargos and cargo pantys—that's the insult to injury. Every single book in the history of earth ever written by the literary industry tackles this very phenomenon. And all the worst men on the planet all had some woman slunking smugly proud by their side. Women even straight up married homosexual men, so don't take it personal. As besides, as a husband I did nothing but be supportive and the exact opposite of abusive as Franny's lost hubcap hubby cheerleader—but the communes, no, no, culture itself was stealing her away from me.

Also though, the aesthetic life we chose to live, aspired to and tried to embody as grasping gasping horny teenager then wanna-be scenesters, each on our own ends forked on to different paths here now—mine, half a decade of five very fine fertile years which the visual culture around skateboarding video editing advertising conceptualization print layout adoption of streeted dance motion injected straight into the juice of life, which very much surpassed and trumped the transhistorical Beaux Arts itself, but then had descended into a heterogenous pluralist riven over populated over automated user generated self reinforcing bastardization that contradicted and undid its former visual innovations and solidified its opposite into tattooed on everything populist status quo now—and weather I liked it or not, to some degree, I was its actual physical remnants too, I was the fall out vessel of this great subcultural catastrophe, despite being a rigid holdout that tried to maintain a working ethics of operation. Franny's own fork, her modest, at the time playing it safe direction of becoming a wanna-be contemporary art linguist and semiologist, remained slow and steady past skateboarding's unraveling, and her world now was just this like deconstructed post (post)minimalist sleekness office terrarium world now, all deceptively spare, all cruelty spare, but very exacting to the few eyes that really knew—hundred dollar magazine issues of mostly blank pages with oblique photography and end notes even experts couldn't penetrate—and it was in these international style offices where nothing happened, Monika Sprüth Andrea Zittel future imperial thick cloth glumming administrators work girl boss clothes, and publishing unreadable theories not applicable to anything other than the arcane artists it would take twenty years of gradschool to discover let alone really understand or ever get, if getting was even at all possible or worth it—Franny Windcheater really was cooler than me now, and that's why she was divorcing me. But it was precisely in her not so surprising adoption of secular convention of unoriginality, that makes me feel further away from her now—something about her, not quite right all these years, hidden away or probably growing little by little invisible in the dark inside her body. At the end of the day, she did watch too much TV, went along with a lot of things and stupid cultural phenomenon, and that's why she could never be a real artist. But I wanted to emotionally hurt Franny now, and I was hurting myself trying to hurt her, in feedback loop like I'm a toddler throwing brown Cosby pudding at the kitchen nook wall, and it marks a new low even for me now, which I probably can never undo or unlive. My interior purged out with mellon baller and lye by her, any and all resolve once tenuously keeping itself at bay, compromised now in its own forcing out by the external conditions of all of Franny's own incessant now counter-signaling at me everywhere we go out now. Of all the defeats I faced in the realm of my blind walk through sleeped life of failings, waterfalls loop of lagoon of disappointment ceaselessly pounding conveyered disappointments in my vocation that I just have to sit back and watch and just take in mindless industry stoke, compounded now with Franny turning on me, as if she now living on a long significantly more robust Euro of where she lies now, and all the accompanying little notches and notches of public humiliations that I had been accruing, otherwise soldiering through in good faith, the whole time—that, in this dumb slum of commune, where I had just been taking it all along so stupidly, as ostensible good faith goofy sport all along. The fact that I was taking such humiliations of the section block in good faith this whole time, only to end up where I was now, was the worst degree cosmic kick in crotch of hemorrhaging a real undeniable insult that I could not deny or never really shrug off quite convincingly in lying to myself no matter what my attitude, no matter how much sorry secular optimism I could feign in trying in the mustering of it all away now. And that's what I was throwing the custard at—not necessarily directed at Franny, but also directed right at Franny because it was also kind of all her fault. Not that I'm exactly surprised. And why should I be surprised? Franny wins again, but has she ever lost? No, she has never lost.

The final nail in the torched bunker was exemplified by me actually like trying to segue in squeeze some cloying aside in the same old familiarity with Franny now, in a way that was half inappropriate in the moment, that I could tell kind of made her shudder. I all went trying to change the subject, Franny, so you said your going to the barbeque tonite?

I didn't even think she was going to answer me, she's ghosted me before in person, but Franny answered finally, actually knowing the answer yes, definitely, but not really wanting to indulge nothing now. I don't know, I don't know, maybe, maybe, as if sparing me so cheaply but kind of humanely, seeming in the absolute least way that she could now at least.

My windscreen swoons through Time's rear view mirror. Franny said nothing again, back, back in her self servingly characteristic thoughtful way, a now dry future wet wet nurse who lived in far superior conditions than cursed ward abandoned resident surely now, kind of like that time a long long time ago, when she went out her way to say Lester liked my Spitfire classics promo or he wanted me to know, at least—like, as if they were both just trying to be just so cool as shit now, all in the trying-to-be ethics of freshly minted couple's unintended condescending coupling solicitude them against the world of it and all, and, or, I was that world now too, I am that world. 

Really, I don't know, there's not much to say. When Franny left and before she left the section, I actually saw her out once, which was like, I don't know, thirteen fourteen years ago. I saw her at a party with Wicked Lester, vulcanized Les wearing a Zildjian cymbal t-shirt. I know it's a facile comparison to make in writing, but fat knuckles Les Paul gentrified my Franny, he really did, and how my view of them together just seemed so so wrong, and I have no where else to say it except here—the fat kid gets all the toys, I still liked Franny.

Oh, and also, I'm pretty sure Franny wearing the DRI shirt was because, remember that guy Lester, or there was this guy, Lester, who she left me for like forty some odd years ago?, well, I really think, he really must have just discovered D.R.I. at that time or something, and she was probably wearing it probably in some inside secret solidarity with him, like he just got psyched on them now and so late in the game or something and it got Franny into D.R.I. lamely—I totally could have seen that happening, it was just one of those peculiar details that you notice in the end and then think about forever. I mean, I'm pretty sure that was why she was wearing that shirt that one day, that's gotta be the only explanation.

And I'm the one alone looking now too long at the backgrounds in old photos, lie down, never be counted again—retreat back just in the grand narrative of your life so first person spurned, or just never reach out or never reach back or she would never reach back out, but Franny gave, but gave no line, never sought me out again when she knew exactly where to find me this whole entire time. But it just was how, how she used to, she would do this thing where she would say she needed to bring something up later, 'Oh, and I have something to tell you, remind me to tell you  . . .' and you would just tread and pine on it, and then finally get to ask her, and then Fran would sit dazed, forgetting what it was altogether, and your waiting to breathe until she finally remembers what she thought she had to tell you, because you thought she may be wanting to tell you something important.