sound: Sisters of Mercy – This Corrosion

Hey now hey now. Nothing begins like that, no song no nothing. Not a poem that is *known* or a book or a play or a movie but hey now now. The cities grow smaller with each and every passing day as they grow larger and more people come to the city, it’s always the same people that will settle for what everyone else is so as its form expands, its spirit diminishes. Where did we leave off when we forgot how to sing and dance, what happened to the diary we used to have but have no more, where did it disappear into nothingness, this us. When did you stop listening to what you did before you were 23 and what did you listen to, what do you listen to now? Can you watch inside your mind an argument with your parent and can you understand the parent?

It was apparent that we shouldn’t turn out like them but it makes sense now, what they did. What they’ll do but there is more clarity there, connected, as I am in your eyes, there where you sit and twinkles flow through you, generated by your eyes and your story is being told with a backdrop from the dark eighties. We hear unwashed kids sing about their souls as we caress each others and time is there with us, there is no suspension but rather a sensation of living through this moment with you, china skin and short hair, pudgy but thin and smart but stupid. You could have gone places kid and there are better places to go than here but we’re here now and we feel the wine and the weed wrapped through it, permeating from every pore of creation.

When we grow old, our sons and daughters are beyond our command. I don’t know about discordianism as a religion but I see it as a proper guide to help children evolve. Lightly teached with no zealotry in hand, like what it is, a dumb joke inside the funniest set of the dullest comedian. A white elephant watching itself in the mirror, amazed. Chaos never really goes away and order only has certain places where it works. I wish I knew that. I wish I knew more about the mechanics and functions of this world than what I learned of our utopia, our history, religion and politic. I saw then where we wanted to go while I would have loved to just see it the way it is, the way the beast works, mechanical machinations functioning steadily to this tug of war system.

When we die we will not be able to intellectually explain the experiences or the experience of dying, knowingly but we will smile or frown and we will know. Before we let anyone else do it, we’ll judge it ourselves. With the perspective of death, we will see it clearly and we will know everything, every black and white rock of this dualistic world, this fallen void where we walk and preach and as we die we will know how we performed, we will know if we were an asset to the company and we will know who we were and who we are and we will see the ending and none will ever know before they do. Paranoia breeds science and we are in a world of science now, everything is being analyzed, perhaps latest of all, the very food we eat. There’s a movie called eat drink man woman and it’s worth watching. It’s a film basically made for chefs but chefs are usually too stupid to understand or have any interest in anything that requires you to think, at least when it’s spoken in an asian language.

But if you made an english movie about it and slapped some hot young models in it you’d have everyone wanting to see it and there would be lines like grains of sand in the desert because that’s where we are as we drink cactus and bathe in mother earth. We’re here, where the basics of the movie are. There’s food, drink, men, women. The necessities of life are all gathered here and when you think about it it would make a nice new type of reality, that wanted the positive and not the negative. They say that sex sells and they’re right but that’s because it’s become a need, a perfect face gazing towards the abyss of us human waste, something radiating through the night, a piercing light as we grab for the gossips when we’re at the dentist and the doctor and every waiting room we spend our miserable time in, trying to find the light

The eighties did so much right in its own wrong but it takes time to find it, it takes weeks or years to delve into this, here a heart of an era, here it is but it is there, we can still grasp it and understand a decade of decisions if we ever wanted but the pentagon is a pentagon so it can hold cthulhu because the pentagon is built on the sunken city of r’lyeh and it used to be an old indian pentagon there before they arrived and some of those who knew thought about releasing it when it was possible but it didn’t work, there were no dodos and no guy fawkeseseses because they were all dead, all extinct, we were in a newer, braver world and we cast our idols as we bled for it, watching conspiracy theories with jesse ventura.

REMEMBER LEST WE FORGET AND REPEAT OUR MISTAKES is written in the elevator towards hell while in the one ascending there is SAVE YOUR BRIGHTEST SMILE FOR HELL and these are our choices. These are the dreams we correspond with, the choices we make every day as we build or burn karma shopping for groceries, preparing ourselves for hell as we buy the store brand for everything even a quarter of foie gras. This is actually condemnable to hell and we know it as we open a store brand beer before we glide out of there, thirsty and hungry, sweaty but sobering up. We did all the drugs and now we resort to what we can get at nine in the morning and we praise jesus it’s not sunday as we sit in the park like people freshly out of a cave or vault 13.

It flows and it ebbs, the river. We’ve been watching it for days now and we sit here, each and everyone with us collecting inspiration from the environment and everyone else, an acid dream coming through over two weeks as something new is born, a concept that encompasses all parts and thoughts of life, a package for everything for you in your life as we sat there and watched the river flow and ebb and we dreamt it at our stations and we saw it from within, it was only us there and the river, nothing caught in a twilight darkness, we were gray tainted men, tainted by civilization we appreciated nature in a professional sense, each with our profession and we changed.

You know what it begins with? Choir. A violent airy choir before technology kicks in and takes us on further like ken kesey wanted us to but to places not even he could have seen. We sing with them, the children in the streets as it rains on a hot summer day and we’re out dancing with umbrellas and it feels like 1959 and we sing with the choir and we know we’re just the buildup, that is our only true purpose in life before it ends and we sing, we repeat it so many times that you’d have to be on drugs or a little bit stupid to listen to it but we do because we are. Hey hey now now NOW, like a practicing ballet troupe we rehearse and go through each motion, each emotion and as we do so we sing with the choir and we build a world from words, an universe superimposed on the original and we create something new again, a black swan in ascent. But hey now hey now now, sing it and bleed it.

We have a lizard, an early mammal, and a rational human inside each of us, wrestling for control.

It took millions of years for us to develop this great brain. For most of our evolutionary history, we were stuck in the lower brains, our actions predestined by the laws of survival, territory, aggression, sexual reproduction. Now we have a cerebral cortex, and we can ignore or sublimate our reptilian urges. We’re just not very good at it.

People like Tim Leary and Carl Sagan thought that there was a lot of hope contained in this machinery. We spent millions of years living like savages, killing each other with sticks and rocks, and then suddenly we have cities, writing, and the average person is not spending all day struggling for survival. The individual can be taught to orient himself on something bigger and cooler than the immediate tribe. The individual can learn to examine his own intelligence and refine it. If there is hope for our race, it comes with the idea that we can stop acting like lizards.

Is it possible (or desirable) to totally turn off the lower brains? fuck no! But you can learn to recognize when the lizard and monkey are sitting in the driver’s seat and toss them out if they’re driving recklessly.

Maybe if we can get the economy and government to stop sending DANGER messages, people will be able to shake themselves out of lizard mode.

ah, wishful thinking

Wise Book of Baloney

A Salutation to New Discordians – Marcelo Pirani (AKA True Hare)

Principia Entropius

Omitterre Libellus

As is evidenced by this image WORDS are my good point.

I’ve spent some time exploring the Principia Discordia forums recently looking through the GASM discussions. It’s very interesting looking though the formative discussions that were the beginning of what are probably some of the most exciting projects in Discordia at present.

One of these is Intermittens (of which I’ve recently churned out a copy). Number 11 is presently in development, possibly more than that.

During these formative discussions, there was a bit of a debate going on about who Intermittens was for. Was it simply a PD project? Or was it bigger than that? Should it be made easier for people to participate in Intermittens without being part of PD, or should they just get into gear, get with the program and get an account?

I’m very passionate about Intermittens, mostly because I think it’s probably the most engaging, community centered project in Discordia at present. My view is that it belongs to Discordia in all its forms, to every Discordian in every nation, over every ocean, hiding in every cupboard!

Intermittens has hit double figures. Just by reading through a few copies you can watch it evolve and mutate into an interesting and bizarre creature, with each edition expanding and modding what has come before.

I would like to take this moment to invite EVERYONE to participate in Intermittens. You can participate by submitting writing or images, by electing to edit an edition, or just by submitting your ideas. This is a call to arms and hairy legs, for all Discordians to rise up and become a part of this very interesting and engaging project.

Where do you start? Well, while I have just emphasized that I don’t think PD.com should BE Intermittens it IS a fantastic starting point, not least because that will put you in contact with the people who have already done this. Bang out an account and post your honorable intentions in the appropriate area.

If you don’t want to collaborate through forums, I can suggest you check out Discordian groups on Facebook, Livejournal or elsewhere. There’s a good many communities about who can be in on this.

Finally, I monitor the Intermittens email at present; Intermittens at gmail.com.  Send articles, artwork, requests for info, or provide advice for IM readers/writers (I’ll be using these to compile an ‘info pack’ to send out.)

(Edit: The best place to submit on the IM site is the FORUM.)

by concentrating on goals
without playing ego games,
much can be accomplished.

Chao Te Ching, Cp 60.

The Book of Chaos and It’s Virtue

The Book of Eris is one of the more popular pieces of New Discordian Literature. It was written by the brilliant and irreverent St. Vincent Verthaine of New Orleans.

If you’ve ever wondered where Discordians go when they want to go to church, you might try asking Vincent. As I understand it, he operates a for-real Discordian church, the Non-United Church of Eris of Latterday Gothic Industrial Saints.

Book of Eris

Intermittens 10, edited by Placid Dingo

Also, introducing the Intermittens ‘Letters to the Editor’ email address:  Intermittens@gmail.com.

Inter Mittens 10