I look down at my mobile phone for the time of day, I see the clock, the
date, I don't read them, I don't take in the information. Looking up from
the phone my whereabouts slides like a poster off the wall before my eyes; a
high ceiling, I'm in a room full of dry bamboo shoots, right in the hollow 'o',
in the clunk and thudding wood sounds. There's a girl pushing towards me
through the hardened curtains and she's laughing with that same mischievous 'o'!
She grabs, grabs and it?s wood clacks and owl coos and adrenaline. 'You
got me!' The timber curtains turn into people, hundreds of them,
shuddering with the train, the harsh strip light, engine hum and mp3 tin
frequency; us hugged together tightly. Good
morning rush hour. The sleepys wear
their bodies like overcoats so it's like we're hiding in a wardrobe, me with my
black cowl, she with a velvet material across her eyes, her mouth says 'Who
wears the hoody in this relationship?' Shrieeeeeek! We bash against the zombies like a tickling
outrage, a crash against their dream hangovers, we make their heads bob along
the sea of their shoulders. I look down
at my mobile phone for the time of day, I see the clock, the date, I don't read
them, I don't take in the information. I
look up from the LCD display into night time, her and me on the shores of
Barceloneta, I'm naked. "Go, go go!" The spirit amphetamine surges when she kisses
me away towards the water, the tepid air gone hot in my lungs I scream it out
above the white noise ocean and the thud of my feet in the sand as I'm running. I jump and turn back first, the wall explodes
in spray, shattered concrete, ice grains like electricity charge my shoulders;
I blackout. "How long have we been
here?" Incense smoke detaches in
thick strands and curls up to meet the cornice of our bedroom. "Two days." she says, enveloping my
head in the duvet and following me in, behind her the yellow lantern lights
blur out of focus; now they look like candles.
The tea lights make 50 tiny hemispheres dotted on and around a fallen
tree trunk in the park, they shape an arrow pointing up the verge, a signpost
to the London sky. She catches me remembering and four arms and
two bodies interlock like always, a way of sharing the memories. I look down at my mobile phone for the time
of day, I see the clock, the date, I don't read them, I don't take in the
information. I look up, my eyes hit slap-bang into a train window pane,
the buildings outside leave a trail with the speed we're at. She doesn't know why I'm staring out so intently,
likewise fixing me in place with her quizzical expression, keeping me there
until I satisfy it; "OK, Look now."
The night like punk lashes brush glass, cheeks flat out for curiosity
and I see those eyes go wide, so wide the other shoreline's for a vanishing
point. A series of letters in big, black
print run left to right on the passing office block window; it's a message for
her. We shuttle past and get imprinted
with what's written; does Time really move us away anywhere? In wonder and at
the barrel end of a Starfleet Phaser, frozen for the female officer in tight 60s
cut blue who's set to kill, "Don't shoot..." I say "...I got you a pineapple!" The red-orange rays tingle as she says it; "We're
beaming up." There's a shimmering
sound, some left over sparkles and the Berlin squat is every colour paint, all
angles and none of them; a camera flash burns our picture to the room, more
graffiti scrawl, a fine art tag of the sudden photograph. We let our partied-out feet drain down the
staircase, ourselves river afterwards like a metal spring, our knitted fingers,
nimble as invincible and unaware of modelling for the walls of spray paint. I look down at my mobile phone for the time
of day, I see the clock, the date, I don?t read them, I don?t take in the
information. The phone's screen light
clicks off leaving bruised purple squares across the darkness of the cloak
room, my eyes adjust as each square fades into the pixelating low light, out of
the fuzzing an A4 David Hasselhoff comes grinning celotaped to the fire escape
door, a speech bubble: "Meet Louis here." That's the silhouette, framed in the opened
door she rushes me, tumbling through the fire escape together we race nobody up
the stairs full pelt. The rooftop is
just another floor but with the ceiling missing, the Capital's landscape for
hour long lips, wine red as the last staining rays of Sun. In the sunset of flooded marsh land we watch
this sheet white animal drinking at a pond.
She whispers, "His mother was a unicorn." Walking home through the fields, we know like
we always have, together we are a universe.
I look down at my mobile phone for the time of day, I see the clock, the
date, I don't read them, I don't take in the information.

Posted by louis

We weren't lucky enough to get practical cats, the mentalists and athletes of the feline kingdom. We just got that other kind.

They're not layabouts -- don't get me wrong -- but though they work hard and study hard, it's just not likely they'll ever amount to much. I mean, take Hawthorne for instance. Graduated high school by the skin of his teeth and took two tries to get through community college. Now he has an associate degree in Theater Technology, a brief resume that includes getting fired from delivering pizza, and last week he started yowling every night at sundown so we had him neutered.

Heather-Lynn just showed up one night on the living room window ledge, peeking between the blinds to watch American Idol with the wife and daughter (Madeleine and Gerty). She's intent on being a music producer, looking for the more promising cast-offs from the show to "rescue" and sign to her label. I took that as a warning sign and had her spayed immediately and dewormed to boot. Unsurprisingly she's completely tone deaf, but does in fact have a wonderful memory for lyrics. But she does not, in fact, have a label. Or a studio. Or any kind of musical taste.

Also, one of her farts can clear a large room in ten seconds. I don't know if it's what she eats out on the prowl for crazier-than-usual buskers or the steady diet of American Idol or what. But if you hang in there and tough it out, she herself will make an excuse and leave the room, looking for a lost oven mitt or checking to see if we have enough toothpaste or some silly shit like that.

And that one's McGillicutty -- if you'd seen him jump up onto that railing there you'd know he's no athlete NOR mental giant. The only reason he's not still sliding is that the paint is flaking and he's apparently grabbed onto it with his asshole. You'll get no hint of that while we're watching, but be sure he'll be walking funny for hours after we're gone.

He reads comic books and plays video games, so at least he's normal there, but he's WAY into shoujo anime, and you can't tell me that's right. He also tells me he's learning to write like Haruki Murakami. I've seen some of it. Let me tell you. Sometimes at night, when it's quiet, there's a ballpoint pen that lies weeping in a drawer. That's all I'm saying.

T. S. Eliot's been dead for forty years, and I guess it's not really his fault for raising the expectation of the typical cat warden (because, like children, you never really own them)... but if next time you see Andrew Lloyd Webber around, please kick him in the pants for me. He'll know why.

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

They called it a B&B;, but really it was a hostel for the homeless. By
the time he got there, he no longer cared. The woman in the woolly
cardigan showed him around.
"Why is there no toilet seat?" he asked as they passed the bathroom.
"We keep re-ordering them, but people steal them or break them."
"Why would anyone do that?" he thought.
His room was green, like nausea. Someone had covered the wall in
bogeys they'd picked from their nose. Every night he was kept awake
by sirens and strange guttural cries from down the hall. One night
there was a fight and the police were called.

Three weeks later his money came through and he was able to leave. On
his way out, he saw that the new toilet seat had arrived. He looked up
and down the corridor and then kicked it to pieces and left.

Posted by DoghouseReilly

Posted by jc1000000

Fabrics:

For the outer layer of the jacket and trousers consider tanned dura mater cultured from the tissues of an even mix of saints and psychopaths. The linings should, of course, be the finely networked vessels of pia mater grown from the cells of dead innocents, children and the profoundly retarded, kept alive by the warmth of being worn and fed through ports into the wearer's own capillaries. The insulating fill between the layers, the arachnoid, should be another tissue culture, taken from workaday drudges who died alone and unfulfilled, kept alive at first and then allowed to stultify and suffocate through the course of a season's wearing.

It's only fitting, then, that the underclothing, the clothing worn closest to the skin, be on the surface woven myelinated neurons cultured from the wearer's own spinal tissues with an underlayer of gray matter grown from the wearer's amygdala suspended in a matrix of bamboo fibers for breathability and Lycra® for a bit of elasticity.

Cut and Assembly:

Living media should be assembled and draped on a form of textured growth matrix printed from some sturdy and porous material formed from a body scan and painted with agar gelatin nutrient mixture until tissues are established. If done correctly, no stitching will be required except for dermal sealing of edges, though, for the purposes of emulating historical or retro stylings, feel free to grow individual pieces of tissues on sectional forms and stitch the pieces together later in the usual way, taking care to preserve blood flow where necessary for living vascular layers.

For garments that provide support and constriction, take care to mold in elasticizing and boning while material is still developing on the shape-optimized forms. Optimizations may be added surgically during final fitting, but, as most tailors and designers know, the process is more likely to risk the health of the garment if applied post-construction.

Final Fitting and Adjustments:

Take note that, unlike many fabrics, living tissue can be stretched -- slowly -- but not too much without tearing and obvious markings developing which may affect long-term wear and detrimentally affect aesthetic impact. Removing material is actually fairly similar to inert fabrics. The extra material removed to provide fresh edges for healing is quite analogous to leaving a seam allowance.

Finishing:

Once the flexible layers have been assembled and established as healthy, spray the outermost layers with a mist of cadherin solution and a peppering of stem cells cultured from the marrow of a loyal dog and keep dusted with raw bone meal and powdered collagen. During this part of the process it's critical that the clothing be worn normally so that the bony plates and scutes develop with joints where needed and do not inhibit flexibility.

If additional coloration or ornamentation is required other than that of the natural material or biological pigmentation that can be doped into the cellular matrices during the tissue construction phase, consider the effects that can be achieved with tattooing and scarification. If the tissue is suitably healthy, it should recover from tattooing and piercings in the usual period of time as long as care is taken to prevent infection.

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

"Beautiful death is not such a long walk from where we choose to spend much of our time, it seems." This was from Lorenzo, to whom I have, on several quite recent occasions, wanted to feed his pith helmet with a generous salting of ground glass.

We'd have to finish the gin first, though. The only glass we were carrying was the bottle. I resented its weight, but not the gin. Gin was the only way to handle the bullet ants, and I truly hoped the forest would run out of ants before we ran out of gin.

Lorenzo captured one of the enormous bastards and forced it down the neck of the bottle as some kind of poorly thought out magic spell against their venom and as a warning to the rest of their kind -- that we were coming with frustrated murderous contempt and well prepared to drink gin at them in our fury. It screamed as he put it in the bottle, and the glass rang with the sound, amplifying it. The memory of that sound I will take to my grave. Or someone's grave.

I am well prepared to drink Lorenzo's gin-and-venom-tainted blood when he finishes off the booze.

To think that just four hours ago we were in the mall parking lot looking for his Wrangler. Two cups of yagé tea apiece at the Teavana on the second floor, a missed interstitial boundary that Lorenzo lead us around counterclockwise in his stupor, and then Costa Rican rainforest. First he thought we stumbled through the back entrance into Trader Vic's Tiki Bar, then took a wrong turn through the enclosed exhibits at the botanical garden, and then... Well, now that he has sobered a little, I can only assume it's likely he's right. But without the yagé I can also assume that it will be a very very long walk home.

I intend to nick every kind of liana I see with my knife and suck at the wound until I discover the one that is yagé -- but now that I think of it, I'm sure the yagé juice will likely only keep me here. What we need to do is keep stumbling around and surviving as well as we can until we find a Starbucks, have a couple of Americanos, and then go the right way around the next interstitial boundary until we end up back at the mall. Or any mall.

I say "we", but if I leave Lorenzo's corpse behind, and his poisoned bottle of gin, I will be happy indeed.

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

It's hard to maintain focus today.

The rainbow spears come with such a feeling of presence, like each line of color is an angel of itself, dancing on a lethal solar gibbet with the abandon of the nominally immortal. I feel I could strum the infrared tethers above and the ultraviolet anchors to the ground below. It's a toss-up whether I'd hear the chord of a celestial harp or be pounced by the weaver who spun the strands, poisoned with a sudden jab and wrapped and hung in the sky for later feasting.

I try to focus. I squint and blink and watch the colors blur. Nearsighted as I am and accustomed to blur, the blurs do not make sense.

When I drive late at night and the taillights of the cars in front of me smear away and float off to the sides of the road, I open my eyes wider and relax them, and the red lights warble and chirp back to pinpoints. This is like that. But the sense of presences does not go away.

Thank God there are other people in the garden today, ignoring the hell out of this. I don't know what I'd do without them as an anchor for the reality I should be responding to. My tuner has been broken for years. I stay on their station by circuit resonance alone. I should follow them when they leave.

The medicines distilled from green blood -- mescaline, cocaine, ahayuasca, datura, psilocybin, lysergin -- are the food and drink of the fey. The red blood drugs that would counteract this -- fermented bloods of various animals, preserved meats and tissues and pastes made from various exudations -- are arts lost to science.

I am tempted to try the bloods of demons and angels - slime from between the legs of a succubus, spunk of a cherub, nymph lymph, cerebrospinal fire from a djinn, cytoplasm of the interstellar krill that are the softshelled spawn of the oldest gods -- but that would be jumping off the cliff at the edge of the world.

But then these strands would be shed, dripping with the various glues of interstitial foam, from my own spinnerets, gleaming with the promise of my own venom.

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

I have only two speeds
- With you, with him, with everyone. It's resting or full speed ahead. No half way house, no reason. It's just 'stop' or 'go'

I have only two speeds
- My default emotion is love. The other’s unthinkable

I have only two speeds
- You react to my love as if stung, act as if I’ve singled you out. The truth's the reverse. You came here for me

I have only two speeds
- You are not my lover, never have been. Understand this; whether in true love or friendship; slowly is not, can not, will never be my way

I have only two speeds
- Honesty. Consideration. I have no choice. I can only hurt those I love if I must do so to survive

I have only two speeds
- Friend or foe, I love you. I strive to understand. I honour or ignore you. I act one way or another, assume empathy or indifference. That's camouflage. Self protection. Not me.

I have only two speeds
- And when he comes, my Lover, when he arrives from the random noise, from the music, from the daubs of colour on the sand,when he comes from the soil, from the Earth itself, maybe then you'll understand

I have only two speeds
- Love freely given can't be undone. It's never lost. It can grow, stay the same or be killed. When he arrives and the pitch and volume of the voices start to swell, when the oohs, and aahs start to rise from the pavement, when the sounds sing from the paper, the colours from the numbers, when the letters shout and speech shines bright on the sidewalk, maybe then you'll understand. For us, for sure, they'll no longer be unintelligible. They'll be a symphony to life, to our senses, to synaesthesia and to love

I have only two speeds
- Don’t cross my wires. I know I'm not normal. Spending time at a friend’s house makes the fact no clearer than when I spend time alone

I have only two speeds
- Don’t tell them I told you. My love means the scream of your scratch on my psychie will scar me forever. The fall-out could scar you as well

I have only two speeds
- You came for me. Now help me. Do what you came for and paint me my future. Make the sounds good. Make the lines deep. Make them clean and - if we were ever friends - make them true

I have only two speeds
- But only ever one direction. It appears that I'm facing away from you


Now go

Posted by Dhamaka

In my early years I thought it was normal. That's no surprise. I mean, anyone old enough to spend the night at a friend's house can tell you about the shock of spending time with that friend's family and learning how bizarre your own upbringing was. Anything you grow up with you think is normal.

When I was in elementary school one of my sometimes-friends asked me why all of the sevens were a pale yellow-orange that was difficult to read on a computer screen or a whiteboard or a piece of paper. I looked at him like he was the idiot I knew him to be. Somewhere on the other side of shoving him off his bench and him leaving a bruise on my inner thigh from an attempted kick to the crotch, we figured it out. I held up two rulers, changed the angles I was holding them at, and when they looked enough like a seven, it changed colors -- for him -- and he burst into tears.

It was synaesthesia. Just a fairly common crosswiring of sensory input. Just about everyone has some of it buried somewhere -- from scratching someplace on the body and feeling a twang elsewhere to a ringing in the ears when you look at bright lights to-- Well, you probably don't even realize it when it happens. You grew up with it and think it's normal.

I see faces. I mean, we all do. We see faces in random noise, in clouds, in treebark, in woodgrain, in complex interplay of light and shadow. But the mechanism is synaesthetic. A certain configuration of light and shadow, something eyesish and nosish and maybe a little mouthish, and *poof* we see a face. There's really no sensory connection, there.

Except for me, that's where the voices come from.

If I see a face, I hear a voice. Sometimes it just hums or goes "oooh" or "aaah", and the pitch and volume kind of depend on the size and the shape of the mouth and ... sometimes I just fill a page with all kinds of simple stick figure heads, move it around in front of me, scan back and forth across it, and listen to the choir in my head. Having fun at the expense of my own crossed wires. Sometimes I hear voices in the voices, though, starting to form words....

The disturbing part is that the more accidental the face, the more likely I am to hear muttering, words just on the edge of comprehension, a message that seems important. I know it's just noise, and accident of random wiring, but that doesn't keep me from trying to listen. The faces I can just barely make out, here one moment, gone the next -- those speak to me loudest and clearest.

And that's why I'm an abstract painter.

Tell me. Does my work speak to you?

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri