Living in such a state          taTestaTesTaTe           etats a hcus ni gniviL
of mind in which time         sTATEsTAtEsTaTeStA          emit hcihw ni dnim of
does not pass, space         STateSTaTeSTaTeStAtE          ecaps ,ssap ton seod
does not exist, and         sTATeSt        oFOfOfo          dna ,tsixe ton seod
idea is not there.         STatEst          ofoFOFo          .ereht ton si aedi
Stuck in a place          staTEsT            OfOFofo           ecalp a ni kcutS
where movements           TATeSTa            foFofoF            stnemevom erehw
are impossible                              fOFoFOf              elbissopmi era
in all forms,                             UfOFofO                 ,smrof lla ni
physical and                            nbEifof                    dna lacisyhp
or mental -                           uNBeInO                       - latnem ro
your mind is                         UNbeinG                       si dnim rouy
focusing on a                       unBEING                       a no gnisucof
lone thing, or                      NBeINgu                      ro ,gniht enol
a lone nothing.                     bEinGUn                     .gnihton enol a
You are numb and                    EiNguNB                    dna bmun era ouY
unaware to events                                             stneve ot erawanu
taking place - not                   iSSUE                   ton - ecalp gnikat
knowing how or what                 2/28/98                 tahw ro who gniwonk
to think. You are in              FORTY-THREE              ni era uoY .kniht ot
a state of unbeing....                                   ....gniebnu fo etats a

--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--

                            CONTENTS OF THiS iSSUE
                           =----------------------=

EDiTORiAL                                                         Kilgore Trout

LETTERS TO THE EDiTOR

STAFF LiSTiNGS


                               [=- ARTiCLES -=]


THE WRONG MiNDSET FOR DRUG USE                                        Clockwork

SERiOUSLY, JUST DO WHAT YOU WANT                     I Wish My Name Were Nathan

SEVENTEEN SiDES OF A CONVERSATiON                                     Clockwork


                              [=- POETASTRiE -=]


UNTiTLED                                                          Kilgore Trout

GNOSTiC LOVE GONE AWRY                                            Kilgore Trout


                               [=- FiCTiON -=]


BANGKOK ANNIE                                                      Rich Logsdon

NO REGRETS                                                             Morrigan

THE STARS BETWEEN THE STARS  Dark Crystal Sphere Floating Between Two Universes

WHERE'S MY DOG?
An Apocalyptic Paranoid Movement in
Five Sections Searching For Stability                             Kilgore Trout

--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--

     EDiTORiAL
     by Kilgore Trout

     So, it's February, the shortest month of the year.  I have an affinity
for short things, like my attention span, which I don't blame on ADD or MTV
but my burning desire to know everything before I die.

     Some might say I have a fear of failure, but that's another conversation
all together.

     I've got a week left before spring break, and I've got two research
papers due, two tests, and a bunch of other miscellaneous homework, and I
spend tonight putting together the zine.  If I fail anything in the next week,
it's all YOUR fault.

     Hah.  Now you're a scapegoat.  Feels good, doesn't it?

     What was that about a fear of failure?

     Blame is something I don't like to place on myself.  I prefer to see
things as the result of everybody else's actions, thereby removing myself from
the chain of command and making me less responsible and more praeterhuman.
For example, if I spend all of my weekly allotment of cash and have nothing to
eat or drink until next Friday, the cause lies in the fact that I was not
given enough money to meet my needs.  Or, say I shoot someone in the head.
It's not that I wanted them to die; rather, they just got in front of a bullet
that I happened to be shooting at a blank wall.

     Okay, so I'm not really that big of an asshole.  I was lying to you.
Well, except for the part about not having anything to eat until next Friday.
That's true.  Donations would be greatly accepted.

     Jeez, so that's not entirely true either.  I do have stuff to eat, it's
just dorm food, and that's really bad, and it's only served at certain times,
and right now I'm really hungry and I've only eaten a tuna sandwich that
IWMNWN kindly bought me this afternoon before I left town and I'm starting to
feel those hunger pangs.  And it's going to be this way every night until
Friday.

     I believe the word is 'failure,' good sir.

     Anyway, unlike my own self-psychoanalysis that I don't really believe in
because I'm always wrong about those types of things, this issue of the zine
is not a failure.  In fact, I really, really like it.  We'd like to welcome
Rich Logsdon to the zine, and I think you'll enjoy his story "Bangkok Annie."
I know I did.  Always nice to find good writers.  Morrigan and DCSFBTU turn in
excellent fictional works as well, and Clockwork and Nathan talk about their
own heads and try to figure things out.  For some reason, I've written some
poetastrie and something else that you might like or might not.

    So, with that, I'm off to try to scam some change for some food from
people who I don't know and hope that I don't have to eat my pet sea monkeys.
They're reproducing right now, and in a few days, maybe I'll have enough to
make a soup.  Until March....

--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--

     LETTERS TO THE EDiTOR

From: Rally
To: Kilgore Trout
Subject: Re: SoB #42 -- don't eat your own heart.

Gigathanx! Kilgore, does this ego need more polishing?... BrrRRReeeliant!
Aha... no chance for me eating my heart. Someone experienced told me it's
bitter.

Cheerz~

Rally

[this month we don't need our egos polished.  they're bright and shiny, and we
 need to wait a bit to let them go down so people don't always think we're a
 bunch of stuck-up bastards.  even though it can be quite fun. ;)]


                                   --SoB--


From: "Plastic Machine"
To: kilgore@sage.net
Subject: Minesweeper

Simple games amuse simple poeple?

What is this I here about interns?  I am up for the challenge.

pM

[well, as much as we'd like to be able to hire interns and show them all the
 secrets of a well-run and fully operational e-zine, we just don't have the
 budget.  however, if people would like to go drop the name of our zine and
 our website all around the net (politely, of course... we aren't spammers)
 then i think that would be like an internship.  sort of.  except we don't
 meet you.  and you don't move here.  which is probably a good thing,
 considering the renovations being done in the ACP offices.  i found a bucket
 of pee in one of the storage rooms.  talk about lazy workers.  jeez.]


                                   --SoB--

From: "Kay Os"
To: kilgore@sage.net
Subject: discordian???

illuminati online.... discordian???? pro, or con???

i have a mailing list subscription to an old e-mail account, 
xxxxxxx@hotmail.com... may i please change it to:
xxxxxxx_x@xxxxxxxxx.com...

most thankfull...

keep up the zine, great work going ....

[io.com has been really swell to all of us over the past four years, giving us
 great ftp service and what not.  we appreciate them.  and being discordian
 isn't a bad thing, as long as you eat hot dogs on fridays.]

--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--

                                 STAFF LiSTiNG
                                
                                    EDiTOR
                                 Kilgore Trout

                                 CONTRiBUTORS
                                  Clockwork
              Dark Crystal Sphere Floating Between Two Universes
                          I Wish My Name Were Nathan
                                   Morrigan
                                 Rich Logsdon

                                GUESSED STARS
                                    Kay Os
                               Plastic Machine
                                    Rally
                                
                             SoB OFFiCiAL GROUPiE
                                 crackmonkey


--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--


                               [=- ARTiCLES -=]


--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--

     THE WRONG MiNDSET FOR DRUG USE
     by Clockwork
     
     So what exactly is going on?  I know exactly what is going on.  It kind
of pisses me off.  Really very badly.  Sometimes you wonder why people do the
things they do.  So.  So.  What shall I do?  Just kind of sit around.  Wait
for things to happen.  Wait.  And rest.  That is easier said than done. Really
is.  Crazily is.  This is all just senseless kind of babble ya know. Very
senseless crap.  Has sense but no emotion/explanation.  So.  What do you do?
It's fairly amusing actually.  There's no point in me writing actually. I'm
just trying to look like I'm doing something.  While I sit and wait and
things.  They better show up again.  If they don't than whatever.  Doesn't
really matter actually.  Not at all.  Who really cares.  I'm not too certain.
What's funny is that I cannot go home and sleep anything off because it is my
parent's house.  Which again is damn, damn funny.  Very silly actually.  Very,
very damn silly.  People are so fake.

     One day I shall meet this beautiful, crazylike chick who will know all
the shit I'm talking about, and won't be this everlasting hypocrite.

     Or maybe I won't.  ----->  I would have to say that anywhere from 80%
-----> 110% of this is in my head.  Now I'm doing what I see other people
doing.  That pisses me off.

     Hmmm.  It's alright.  Yo.  Just not at this moment.  Right.

     Have I mentioned how fake people are?  Funny watching people who may seem
like the coolest most laidback people in the universe....

     Blech.  Let's just have some fun.  Or something.

     God do people piss me off.

     Operators are people too.

     So lessee what have we been doing -- I wish that person would shutup.  So
should I go out and eat or no.  No.  But I should.  I'm hungry.  People are
way too cool for their own good.  But maybe that is just a rut, not too, to,
two sure.  If you want to look at it like that I guess.  Who the hell knows?
Sometimes I believe I'm so full of shit.  So completely fooling myself.  Most
of the time I don't really give a fuck.  But there are times when I think too
much about stuff.

     I do know it's too late for my self.  ----> Not normal definition of
self.  Ha.  Yes.  So ______ was tripping off of me??  So do I fuck everybody's
head up?

--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--


     "If one attempts to govern either himself or another, he is sure to
      become frustrated.  For it will seem that whatever he tries to grasp,
      slips away.  The Sage makes no such attempts, makes no failures, has
      nothing to lose -- is therefore at peace with himself."
                                                                 --Lao-Tzu

                                                                 
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--

     SERiOUSLY, JUST DO WHAT YOU WANT
     by I Wish My Name Were Nathan

     Before I go back to work, an explosion of words from my reeling brain. 
     
     Boy, this is trippy.  I look like a suicide victim in the mirror (once I
can concentrate on the glass).  All the blood dripping from under my jaws,
running down my neck.  Shaving accidents.  [Yes, accidents.]

     No, shaving was an experiment.  No action is good or bad, but an
experiment that yields its fruit in knowledge.

     I've learned not to shave on DXM.  But really, how much worse was this
than any other shaving experience?  For example, when I have been quite sober,
I've accidentally slashed open my nose trying to shave out the nose hairs. 
Ludicrous.  Utterly ludicrous.

     So I took off two days from work because I was sick.  I really was sick,
it wasn't a pretense, but I was wondering otherwise as I drove into Austin the
first time to buy a Pentium-166 and the second time to buy some fake cache
RAM.  (Fake or not, let's just say Quake is fun now.)

     Sick.  I said in my e-mail:  "strep throat."  In other words, as I
interpreted it, an irritation in my throat causing much mucous spitting-up and
much moaning and swallowing in the night.  (An odd punchline to an
infantosexual's bulimic fellatio fantasy.)  Still, I didn't want to work. 
Didn't want to "merge code."  Didn't want to "fix bugs."  Didn't want to "make
it pretty."

     I never realized before that THAT's the gunk in the garbage cans.  All
this time, that black tar just disgusted me, but now I know it's the mucous
I've spat up on sick nights.  Funny.  (Some part of me wants to scrape it out
and pat it together into a homunculus.)

     It was fun, again, to drive home during the day those two times.  Usually
I get home from work around seven or eight.  I never realized that one could
see so far....

     Oh yes, and being sick.  So I spread what might have been streptococcus
to several innocent employees.  At one particular chain store, where they
didn't have any cache for many days, probably three distinct employees were
infected by me, and many others by them.  I don't hate them, honestly.  It's
just that they seemed so unserious about their jobs.  The girl who took my
check was so slow about the whole matter, blathering on to another employee
about yet another employee who'd gotten liquored up and shot a hole through
the wall.  (Bravo!  Tear down the wall!  Tear down the wall!)  She seemed sad. 
Props to her.

     I think I would make a good criminal at times, because although I went
into Austin twice that day, my mother still thought I had just come home once,
and assumed it was because I was sick (and not fired or something).  God bless
her.  I *was* sick, of course.  Various cold 'n' flu remedies helped a bit
that day, plus a dose of codeine I hadn't finished off from last summer when I
had a wisdom tooth out.  (I do feel less wise, come to think of it.)  I had to
remind myself while I was barreling down the highway at seventy miles an hour
that (at any moment) I could cough and have a seizure once the comforting
illusion of wellness the medicine gave me wore off.  Then I would laugh.

     My mom didn't come into my house when I was sick, which was good.  It
might have been disillusioning for her to come into my room when I was sick
expecting to see me lying in bed but instead finding my computer splayed out
on my bed with the two sound cards removed so I could figure out just what was
preventing the cache RAM from being used.  (It was helpful, after I put the
machine together again, to search the Internet for "cache" and "boot" and
"bios" and "pentium", because I came across a page that had this beautiful
program that proved beyond a doubt that the cache was completely fake.  ">>>
If you think you do have L2 cache, it might be FAKE! <<<")

     Still, it's quite damn fast now, yes it is, and I forget why this was
important.  Like I've always said, "Yep, now that it's faster, it crashes
faster too."  (Important advice for young drivers.)  (Make that non-smoking
young drivers, BTW, because the wonderous caring biology police are about to
broadcast messages of despair and decrepitude towards kids telling them that
smoking can cost them their driver's licenses as well as their lives.  Call me
a spoilsport, but I always take it in the gut when something that was illegal
to buy but not to use becomes illegal to buy *and* to use.  And especially
when the punishment really has absolutely nothing to do with the crime.  Oh
wait, I forgot about the punishment for dropping out.)

     And again I've forgotten the whole point of this.  Oh wait, it came to me
in the middle of that sentence, but it was such a nicely typed sentence.  I
was all prepared to go to work today, woke up at seven o'clock to some
classical fantasy music on 89.5 FM, and everything was tinted sky blue... 
Beautiful, really, or some sort of problem in my brain, and I realized I still
had a cough.  *cough* I knew I didn't like bothering my office-mate with
nose-blowings or grunts or cursing, and I figured it would be twice as bad to
come in after two sick days (advertised as "strep throat," which by the way is
eating our children alive) and cough a lot.  Not a good social maneouvre.

     So, I went into the kitchen and started up the coffee, and tossed my
wrinkly shirt into the dryer for a while to make it warm and cozy and smooth,
and meandered into the bathroom to take three shots of cough syrup.  The
coffee was made especially to conquer the taste of the cough syrup (by me, not
by "them"), which is advertised on the label as being "pleasant."  Pleasant,
my prolapsed left testicle.  It's a damn conspiracy to keep all of us mortals
on the robot plane.  There's a reason why no one sells pure DXM cough capsules
anymore.  Maybe it has become physically impossible to put it in cough
capsules now.  Either that, or all varieties of cough known to science
nowadays only come with headaches and mucous, thereby *requiring* poisonous
doses of guaifenesin and acetiminophen to be added.  (Poisonous for overdosing
people like me, of course.)  ("Kidney failure in fourteen hours!")

     The first time I tripped off DXM, I swore I had taken like half a bottle,
plus.  This time I took much less.  I'm learning bit-by-bit the beauty of
weights and balances, corollaries to which include:  if someone has been sick
for a while and all their defenses are down, they will trip *hard*.

     Of course, this isn't really tripping.  It's just a physiological circus. 
I'm amused at how hard I swing my arm to do simple things like pressing
buttons.  It helps me empathize, you see, with other blind and ignorant
forces.

     It's now ten o'clock and I'm not at work for the third day in a row.  I
planned to go in today, but certainly not once I realized I was tripping.  I
don't trust my driving skills.  I'll wait a few hours.

     Part of me feels guilty, because yesterday I was working studiously on
the computer as much as I would have been at work (provided I enjoyed what I
was doing).  Another part of me knows that the internal picture of myself is
way different from the infinite external pictures of myself (which is
different again from the other infinite internal pictures of myself of which I
am not speaking at the moment), and if I did show up at work in a few hours
while tripping, almost everyone who knew I was sick would agree that I had
deserved the two days I took off.  ("He *still* looks dazed.  Poor guy.") 
Then they'd give me more grunt work to do.

     I think this computer will make me do obsessive and compulsive things
again.  Now that it's so much faster, I can scroll through my writing in much
less time, which makes me think I've written less.  So then I'll write more to
compensate.  Ha ha.  Ha ha.

     I'm still not sure who my audience is here.  I set out to write this for
SoB, but since "I was drugged!" I am being as conversational as if I were
writing in my diary.  Here's a real excerpt from my diary, which would be
interesting to comment on:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

     2/8/98
     2134
     
     This ain't much of a goddamn diary.     
     
     [[ The previous entry was January 24.  The next is from the 16th.]]
     
     Well, after weeks and weeks (I think) of being in a terrible mood and
afraid of going insane, I'm feeling a little better.  Have I explained the
insanity thing yet?  I did, in the next-to-last entry before this one.  But it
happened again.  I woke up in the middle of the night, around three in the
morning, had to shit, and knew "something" was going to happen.  Once again, I
averted "death" while quaking in self-reassuring fear on the toilet. 
Something like that.  This time I didn't offer up my soul to magick like I did
the previous time (after which I scarely considered the matter again, of
course).  I don't remember much of it anymore.  But I know my heart was about
to beat veryvery fast but it didn't happen that way.

     Me writing this now knows the insanity gambit is my ego's strongest line
of defense at the moment.  Especially insanity combined with ghoulish
apparitions and stuff like that, because that's what I fear most.  The loss of
control is one thing, the ghoulish apparitions are a kick in the ass.

     So, P-- and B---- and I were at Metro on Saturday night, while P-- was
writing and I was bitching about being a loser and hating life and all the
rest -- a really tired act, you know, I almost abdicated the whole game --
when finally after hours and hours of being awake (although I had been seized
by an inappropriate napping spell that afternoon after planning some
mischevious masturbation ideas) I calmed down and started listening to others.

     B---- started talking about his conception of reality and he pulled out
the it's-all-meaningless gambit, and the fact that I referred to it as a
"gambit" shows *my* self-confidence.  Because I assumed he was handling his
promotion to glory poorly, that he shouldn't downplay reality and insult the
illusion, etc.  Until he pointed out that those were my interpretations, which
was true.  I listened to him talk, and he said some beautiful things about
enjoying the illusion -- "I love listening to the music" -- and I remembered
the advice to assume that everyone else but you is enlightened already.  I'm
not sure if I was meant to learn anything (for that implies meaning) but I'm
glad he said that.  I think I'd been playing the blind leading the blind role
a little too strongly lately.

     I told him about the definition of meaning being the relation of the
finite to the infinite, which he seemed to muse over respectfully.  It really
is the definition of faith as told by Tolstoy, but I didn't want to bring such
an ugly word into the conversation.

     Before I realized all this, I knew I was in a better mood because I only
sank a little bit when I said things about reality being a pointless ignorant
game, or void politics, or whatever.  Of course, today, having read some
Illuminatus! trilogy some more, I should have seen that Eris has been
beckoning me for quite a while, but being a male, I'm just so darned blind to
such flirting.

     I love the Illuminatus! triology.  It's so damned deep and well-written,
and I've got to stop thinking "that's acid for you."  Because, as I've been
experiencing myself, it can be done on a sober shoestring budget, if I just
stop avoiding it so much.

     They were shocked to find out that I was an aggressive driver.  My dirty
secret.  Once out in the open, I saw how foolish I had been acting while alone
in my metal speedybox thinking that everyone else was out to piss me off. 
Projection of a quite absorbing magnitude.  I drove slowly home that morning
and did the same today.  I think it will save gas.

     I don't know.  I was feeling kinda spacey today while reading, and went
outside to enjoy the February-typical 75 degree weather with the kitties.  I
destroyed the moment, or the potential for tripping, by having fallen asleep
again.  I did only get five hours of sleep last night but I think it's a
sacrifice I'm going to have to make, to get anything done.

     For most of the days last week, my stomach became warm and heavy during
the end of the night.  I know it's a chakra dealie but I haven't bothered to
study up on it.  I have been accepting the symptom well, but more than
occasionally when I get in my car to go home, the cold air has made me shiver
and I have become a little frightened that another "episode" would happen.  I
know I have to face it eventually.  Indeed I want to face it.  But every time
it's happened, I've been too frightened to live up to my agreement.

     I was analyzing myself and decided that, before yesterday, any sort of
tripping or effective meditation would be likely to make me go insane. 
Because, psychically, I'd been dancing on the feet of a barstool, just wishing
to fall and rupture my ass.  I was driving angrily and working angrily and
being an absolute self-obsessed whiny bitch about the whole change in my life
situation.  Several times I notice people have given me clear-cut obvious
answers to my troubles, the most significant being when Br--- S---- said, in
talking about a nasty e-mail from *** suggesting that we don't test our
compilers, that you just have to fix the bugs and go on with things.  Don't
take them personally.  Et cetera.  But I still welcomed the chance to dig up
and expose my previous errors, as examples of things I do take personally. 
The other numerous examples I have completely forgotten.

     In general, though, P-- has been good to me recently.  Whether linked
psychically or not, his life has sucked since I started work too.  Not in
exactly the same way or at the same timbre, of course, but he's definitely not
been distant from my sympathy.  Yesterday he was heading back toward the
happy-go-lucky personality he'd been exhibiting for months, and it made me
happy too.  It really did.  Last night I had a strange dream with him in which
we are exploring some strange house out along a lonely road in a rural area
and I was telling myself that he was "my earth son."  Or is it "sun?"  I
shan't inquire too much into this right now, but it makes me happy, whatever
it means.

     K----!  Well, K----'s back, but he's not the same.  Which is more of an
obvious eternal truth than anything.  He's still single, and he's writing a
bit.  Et cetera.  He told me that in his British poetry class, he liked John
Donne's poetry the best.  Today while reading Illuminatus! I saw a reference
to it, in which the authors believe that Donne wrote best about how to raise
people from the dead.  It all revolves around the Tao or the sign of Cancer
apparently.  Does one perform 69 with the dead?  Hmm.  No, it seems more like
one must switch places with the dead.  Or is that also incorrect?  I'm not
sure I'm much interested in doing this myself, except for possible psychic
analogues.

     I don't like being tired, but I like even less drinking a lot of coffee. 
I don't like the idea that if I don't get enough sleep tonight I'll be fucked
at work.  I don't like the idea that I won't be able to work calmly enough not
to need caffeine while I work.  "Whatever you believe, that is precisely the
truth, for you" -- good words to live by.  I should stop believing in the
imaginary demons of seriousness and failure and anger.

     2305
     
     Wow, I got distracted.  What just happened?  Oh well.  I went and helped
Dad with the computer, returned Mom's tape, etc.

     I'm cold.  My defenses are down.  But I'm a little happy nonetheless.
     
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

     Commentary?  I think not.  Just figured it'd be nice to say or
something.

     Did I mention that in addition to the new processor and fake cache RAM
that I had bought on Saturday a new hard drive and a lot of memory?  You see,
the whole time I was doing this, I was chastising myself for spending all my
money, which is supposed to go to such noble and worthy causes as... uh...
rent or something.  Or overpaying my bills, or something else idiotic like
that.  I was reminding myself, "This is all an illusion, you know," and
countering that with, "Well, so's the money."  Only now do I get far enough to
counter again, "Even the little discussion and the idea that the act of
exchanging fantasmic currency for little silicon-and-metal machines is somehow
bad or wrong or unpleasant is also an illusion."  But of course, me writing
this right now, this is real.

     But now it's not.
     
     So I had this dreamlet (def:  "even more disconnected and confused a
dream than a normal dream, and only a snapshot thereof") about this guy who
obsessively videotapes everything he does, somehow from a third-person
perspective.  (I guess it's metaphorical.)  And he looks over the tapes
studiously every night to pick out instances of when "they" are helping him
out, leading him, directing him to do things.  "Look!" he's laughing
ecstatically, "they helped me through the whole thing!  It all makes sense
now!"

     As I awoke from the dream, my natural thought was, "oh, the aliens
motif," but then I recollected, or grokked, a smidgen of a feeling of a
mystical experience wherein *of course* "they" guide everything, but "they"
are I.  And briefly afterwards (this was before chugging cough syrup) I felt
as confused about what I had just thought as you, dear reader, are about what
I have just written.  And now, too.

     I must have fucked up my computer because the clock keeps falling back in
time.  It's not nine-thirty, it's eleven.  Shit.  (Oh, and of course, jump to
the shell, run "date", and see:

     yin-yang:~/words# date
     Thu Feb 26 09:30:00 CST 1998

     93, 93, 93, ....
     
     Yes, yes.... I definitely think this will be one of those days in which I
say, "of course!" and "obviously!" and giggle a lot, for no good reason.

     I had planned to go to work about thirty minutes ago, but I remembered
that my mom thought I was to leave at noon, and left me with the chore of
moving the wash into the dryer.  But I'm still wearing my glasses and my smart
cap, and when I lay down on the rug (because it feels so good) and the cat
came by to sniff me, I was reminded that he was alive because his breath
fogged up my glasses.

     It's odd, and kind of sad, how rarely I remember that I am alive. 
Because I am, you know.  Nowadays I've taken up the vice of physical fitness,
or a simulacrum thereof, and after fifty pushups and thirty situps done much
too quickly when I am wont to collapse, I smile and laugh because I've
reminded myself that I'm alive.  Alive, and aware.  Aware of being alive. 
What a precious gift!  How much infinite compassion flows from the
prakti-heart unto those who know not what riches they possess!  How many
Oriental phrases flow from my fingers that I'm sure I've heard elsewhere!  How
much laughter flows from my heart when I reflect on what I've said!

     Because it's only true if it makes you laugh.  The world isn't a prison. 
It isn't run by some ruthless or absent God.  It's just a big practical joke
in which everyone is the butt and the prankster, and one by one each person
figures it out -- but being educated by Eris, s/he quickly and mischeviously
resumes an act of ignorance, of idiocy, of sobriety, to prevent anyone else
from catching on.  Because if everyone catches on, the joke dies.  And who
wants to reminisce about some tired old punchline?  ("I couldn't find the
head!")

     I'm not claiming to know much more than the *existence* of the practical
joke.  I'm still trying to figure it out, and I'll work for the rest of my
life to do so -- after which I will promptly clam up and forget it.  Again. 
Like I always do.  But I'll be sure to attempt to reconstruct the joke for
everyone else, giving a characteristically bad telling, which is only funny in
its delivery.

     (Obstetrician to mother:  "Sure, it's a stillborn, but, good Lord, what a
*delivery*!")



--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--


     "So good to see you once again
      I thought that you were hiding from me
      And you thought that I had run away
      Chasing a trail of smoke and reason"
                                --Tool, "Third Eye"


--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--

     SEVENTEEN SiDES OF A CONVERSATiON
     by Clockwork

     Careen into doubts willed about you.  What once was told in slow, steady
rhyming rhythms is now slapped and stamped forcefully into your head, leaving
wonder and question up to none.  Double, triple, one pierce too many.

     "So, why are you here?"

     "Oh, you know, sometimes I wish I wasn't."

     "Right, but then why are you here?"

     "I'm only here because you wish me to be."

     "Right.  What are you on?"

     "Nothing, just in my head.  Or maybe I'm in my head because I am on
something.  Maybe I'm on my head, or my feet, but who says there is a
difference?  East is west and east and north and up and down.  Those who 
believe otherwise are only sad clowns who have forgotten how to laugh, 
or sadder still, never learned."

     "So, do you come here a lot?"

     "All the time, every minute, every day, every moment before time was
created, and every moment since.  It's a nice place, just as nice and nicer as
any.  Heft, jesty people lucid with their words and thoughts and werds.
Simple thinking ones and craft leather strapped ones and red wine primed elder
ones sometime wishing they were you."

     "OK.  You're going to school, right?  Of course you are, you're in one of
my classes, what a dumb question.  So, what's your major?"

     "Declared official as theatre, or even theater, sometimes with the arts,
sometimes without.  Nonetheless I am in no theatre, theater classes, and tend
to think of myself majoring in ego-destruction, self-fulfilling realization
and the like.  Yet it is somewhat difficult to choose classes from the
designated catalog to suit one's wishes.  Perhaps if more would acknowledge
their own wishes, or rediscover, or first-discover their wishes, even have
their wishes, have some wishes."

     "Yeah.  I know what you mean."

     "I'm sure you do, even if you do or don't know such a thing of this or
that.  Just let it go, and don't pretend.  Masks and pretend-tion is what
drives this into the ground.  At times, anyway.  Obviously there is nothing
wrong with imaginary friends or playing make-believe.  Not the pretending I
speak of, but you know that."

     "Sure.  Yeah, I did.  Well, I've gotta go, I'll talk to you later."

     "You always will."

     "OK.  Bye."

     "La dee da."

--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--


                              [=- POETASTRiE -=]

"The poets?  They stink.  They write badly.  They're idiots you see, because
 the strong people don't write poetry....  They become hitmen for the Mafia.
 The good people do the serious jobs."
                                                             --Charles Bukowski


--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--

     UNTiTLED (composed of three haikus)
     by Kilgore Trout

     Track lighting swirls
     Ephedrine, cigarette buzz--
     "She lied, she lied."

     Innocent vision, as
     Black as her nail polish.
     Brushed on, wiped off.

     Smooth walk, glimpse of red,
     Shattered deification.
     Smoke slowly stirs.

--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--


     "OM MANI PADME BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!"
                                    --Robert Rankin, _Armageddon:  The Musical_
                               

--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--

     GNOSTiC LOVE GONE AWRY
     by Kilgore Trout

     /Yaldaboath, Yaldaboath/ she accused, crushing
     my desire.  Her profile backlit by the flickering
     neon, she would not move again until I restored
     her.  The acrid rain tore through my flesh, and I
     raced under a nearby awning, smelling of rotten
     bananas and grapefruit.  I turned to see her
     standing still like a pillar of salt, but I was
     the one who had seen and withheld.
 
--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--


                                [=- FiCTiON -=]


--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--

     BANGKOK ANNIE
     by Rich Logsdon

                                      I.

     The accident still lives in my memory.  Traveling at sunrise in a red '57
Ford Fairlane from Winnemuca, Nevada, to Los Angeles in early June of 1962, we
had just turned on to the interstate when we collided head-on with a semi.
Both in the front seat, Father was crushed to death and Mother was
decapitated.

     I was sitting in the back seat, reading _Treasure iSLAND._  Using crow
bars and blow torches, the rescue crew found me buried alive within the car's
compressed tangle of metal, which had formed a kind of box around my body.
Gradually revived, I had lost considerable blood, and my heart apparently
stopped beating once on the way to the hospital.  Now, a disfiguring scar runs
down the right side of my face, from the outer corner of my eye to just below
my mouth.  Too, I limp badly and am forced to drag my left leg behind me.
  
     After the accident, I spent eight years on a farm in Sunnydale, raised by
an uncle and aunt, both deaf as stones.  It was the nearest thing to hell.
They abused me mercilessly, the old man rarely missing an opportunity to
remind me that my limp was an act of a loving Creator.  However, blessed since
birth with extraordinary intelligence, and unable to take part in athletics
with others my age, I excelled in my classes, graduated at the top of my high
school class and attended a university in Southern California, where I earned
my Ph.D.  My dissertation on _Moby Dick_ was a lengthy examination of
archetypal symbolism culminating in the characterization of Ahab.
 
     Since then, I have published four articles, the most noteworthy of which
is a  fascinating study of celestial imagery in Anne Radcliffe's _The
Mysteries of Udolpho (See Fall 1983, _Bangkok Quarterly_).  While my
publications were not as extensive as I would have liked, they enabled me to
land a teaching position in a small university in the Pacific Northwest, just
east of Portland, where it rains almost continuously.  There I met Professor
John Peterson, who had moved up to the Northwest after teaching for
twenty-five years at a college in central Nevada.
   
     John received his Ph.D. in English from a Southern university.  His
dissertation was an abstruse application of an obscure derivation of formalist
literary theory to six relatively unknown works from Eighteenth Century
English literature.  It won him critical acclaim in the academic community of
Eighteenth century scholars, who often confuse obfuscation with clear
explication.  In the five years following the completion of his dissertation,
he published all but two of its twelve chapters.

     After he was granted his Ph.D., he moved to the barren landscape of
central Nevada where he accrued several teaching honors for outstanding work
in the classroom, wrote three college textbooks (all published by very small
presses) and edited a small literary magazine, _Phantom Streams,_ which
quickly put him and his college in the academic spotlight.  He continued to
write and publish essays on eighteenth century English literature and the
modern novel with considerable ease.

     His students adored him (the females referred to him as "Long John"), my
wife and three beautiful but adopted daughters loved him, and I tolerated him.
At the insistence of my wife Annette and my daughters, I invited him on
several occasions to dine with us at our great stone mansion on the hill
overlooking the university, and John liked nothing more than a hearty meal and
an occasion to smoke his pipe, which he used as a pointer while discussing
with me and other colleagues --  I generally invited several people from the
department over -- the writings of Eco, Pynchon, and Nabokov.  He considered
Nabakov's _Pale Fire_ the greatest novel of the twentieth century.

     There was never an occasion when this great man did not dominate
conversation.  Whenever anyone questioned his observations, the obnoxious old
fart would respond with the fury of a hurricane and quickly sweep away any
objections.  Once, as the logs crackled in the fireplace on a blustery,
hellishly cold night, he humiliated me in front of my own guests, remarking on
my own glaring weaknesses in contemporary literature.  More than once,
however, I so under-cooked and over-seasoned his steak that he suffered
diarrhea for days after.

     He would unthinkingly belittle me in front of my own family and
colleagues.  It was when I began shouting in my own front room at my
colleagues, with whom I argued incessantly, that this great and wonderful man
would loudly clear his throat, spit into the fire, lean toward me, gesture
condescendingly with his pipe in the manner of an elementary school teacher
reprimanding a student, and remark, "Now, now, my dear William, my good boy,
do you really quite believe the statement that you have just made?" or "Tut,
tut, my dear boy.  Try to understand that there may be more than one side to
this argument. Tut,  tut."

                                  * * * * *

     I saw John for the last time several weeks ago.  He was lying in a
hospital bed, gasping for oxygen, a breathing apparatus hooked up to him.  His
face was gray, drained of its life blood.  A veritable bag of bones, he had
lost considerable weight, and veins bulged invitingly in his hands and
forehead.  His eyes, however, blazed gloriously, indicating he was still quite
alive.
  
     "Well, well, it's my old friend 'Bloody' Bill," he gasped and wheezed,
the glow in his eyes temporarily gone.  He used a nick name several colleagues
had given me years before.  The allusion was to a two hundred year-old
vampire, William the Bloody, who apparently killed his victims by driving
spikes into their brains.

     "I'm here, old fiend," was all I said.  My eyes blazed back at him, I am
sure.

     It was then that he asked me, between gasps and wheezes, to publish his
"opus," which he apparently kept in the bottom right hand drawer of his desk
at home.  At one point, as he held my arm and drew me close and hacked the
phlegm out of his throat, I was sure he was going to spit on me.

     With this request, John relaxed his iron grip -- even as he approached
death, his strength was greater than mine -- and sank back into his pillows,
exhausted, his eyes again dancing (I think he was mocking me), and told me to
please go away.  "Anything you say, sweet prince," I mumbled.  A minute later,
he was asleep.  With great effort, I refrained from putting a pillow over his
face.  Instead, I substituted the white tablets I had bought on the street for
the pills his doctor had prescribed to help keep him alive.

     I arrived at the Peterson household shortly before 7:30 the next morning.
(I was on my way to my 8:00 class.)   His mistress Cordelia, surely one of his
"honors" students, led me to his study.  In the corner was John Peterson's
great oak desk.  I dragged myself over to it, a crippled monk approaching a
holy shrine, bent down, and pulled open the bottom right-hand drawer, where I
found a manuscript entitled "Opus #6:  Vampire Lust:  An Allegory for Our
Times," which I have summarized in full.


                                     II.

     "A screaming of vampires comes across the sky.  It has happened before,
but there is nothing to compare it to now.  It is too late.  Vampires are
everywhere, having taken over the city.  The Evacuation of Los Angeles
proceeds.  There are no lights anywhere.  The stench of vampires, like the
smog, is unbearable.  Rain comes down.  All is darkness."

     So begins Peterson's "Opus," the opening  an insultingly plagiaristic
parody of Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow._  It is an outrageous story -- the
label "allegory" eludes me completely -- about teenage lesbian vampires from
Las Vegas, who roamed the American Southwest in their parents' mini-buses,
masquerading as an under-nineteen girls soccer team, winning tournament after
tournament and terrorizing innocent men, women, and children who assumed that
these girls must have been good, ordinary folk.

     Newcomers to the team were routinely given two weeks of freedom before
initiation:  at that point, the new girl had to either become a vampire (see
Anne Rice or ask John Peterson about this one), and participate in the team's
frequent bloodfests, which often concluded with a trip to Lake Mead, or risk
a "surprise" execution.  One reluctant member, Angela (moonlighting as a
stripper), had been stabbed to death over one hundred times, her eyes gouged
out, her corpse left to rot in the desert.  The parents of another hold-out,
Buffy, had been electrocuted while they swam in their pool in Henderson, the
odor of burnt flesh lingering for days over the community.

     The girls' coach was a good though occasionally stupid man, a junior
high school history teacher named Vincent Peter, who had played soccer
professionally for one year in Rumania.  On a bet, he had agreed to take on
this team, abandoned by its previous coach, "a hairy animal of a man, with a
missing left eye and a shriveled right leg, who had mysteriously disappeared
after leading the girls to their only losing season, his disemboweled body
later found floating face up in a swamp near Lake Mead."

     It was when the coach fully recognized that his sick little darlings were
"blood-sucking fiends with fangs, who had a taste for raw unbridled lesbian
sex, who ate raw meat, and whose proper place of eternal residence was the
pit of Hell" that the real fun began.  During a tournament trip to Southern
California, late one night at a motel in Sunnydale, the coach and his wife
caught the girls in the captain' rooms, dabbling in drugs and voodoo,
chanting and dancing, engaging in unspeakable sexual acts, and sucking the
blood from the neck of one of the team's newest members (prostrate and
unconscious), a young high school honors student named Celeste, who had
decided to give up the ghost and join the ranks of the vampires.  The coach
ordered them all to bed, forbade them to watch television, and threatened to
take them home the next day, a very bad move on his part.

     In swift and frightening retribution, they responded as one.  That very
night in the motel parking lot the nasty girls took the lives of his wife, his
daughter, his two sons, his dog Giles -- all of whom had gone on the
tournament trip, viewing the event as something tantamount to a visit to
Disney Land.  All suffered bloody, violent deaths, his poor dog burned to
death in a fury of flames.  Finally, the girls turned on coach Vincent, who
found himself in the middle of the parking lot, surrounded by "growling,
snarling, howling adolescent hussies, who wanted a bite to eat".

     Sensing the presence of the Grim Reaper himself, knees trembling, Vincent
bolted over the weakest girl on the team (a girl named Willow), jumped into
his blue rebuilt Dodge Charger, locked the doors, rolled up the windows, and
laid rubber out of the parking lot.  He drove like hell on the I-15 to Vegas,
his vehicle reaching speeds up to 130 mph, the girls trailing far behind in
the vans they had borrowed from their parents, none of whom had bothered to go
on the tournament.  As coach Vincent approached the city limits, the glowing
blaze of Las Vegas, spreading out on the desert floor like a lake of fire, had
never looked so friendly, and Peter took an off-ramp to the darkened maze of
side streets in hopes of eluding his pursuers.  It proved to be a descent into
the Inferno.

     The girls caught up with him about one half hour after he arrived home,
parking their vehicles in the road in front of his house. "Howling and
growling like a pack of blood-thirsty wolves," the teenage vampires surrounded
his house, allowing no way out, it seemed.  They now stood at the windows,
glaring at him with bright red devilish eyes, awaiting the right moment to
come crashing through glass in bloody cinematic fury.  Vincent, however,
proved  resourceful once again, this time rushing into his garage, jumping
into his car, and driving it through the garage's wooden door, running over,
but not permanently injuring, one of the vampires.

     At this late hour, sweaty hands gripping the steering wheel of his
Charger, this good man prayed for an angel, a flood or lightening. "Sweet
Jesus, help me now!" he tearfully whimpered and sang, vaguely recalling that
he had heard the same words from a black Pentecostal minister at a revival one
night years ago.  On the same night, he had been baptized through
full-immersion in the minister's bathtub.  After what seemed to be hours of
driving the pitch-black back streets of West Las Vegas, he found refuge in a
nude bar on Industrial Road -- a dangerous part of town, famous for drug
deals, gang fights, prostitution, and adult book stores -- reputedly run by
the Asian mob.  Standing out front of the building, a huge, pink fluorescent
sign with a pair of ruby-red lips illuminated this part of town.  He had been
there many times before.  "The girls knew him well and admired him greatly."

     It was in the bar Phantom Moon that he met a beautiful young Asian woman
with long flowing raven hair, with pierced nipples and belly button and red
lipstick, "an Oriental chick surrounded by an unearthly blue glow."  She was
short, somewhat frail, her blue eyes radiant.  Her most noticeable feature,
however, was the tattoo of a small gold cross over her left breast.

     When she asked him if he wanted her to dance, his throat went hard and
dry and he couldn't resist.  Her stage name was Bangkok Annie, and over drinks
and between lap dances she claimed to be an angel sent by heaven above to
redeem him from legions of darkness.  Peter thought her insane.  Quickly, he
drained his drink, stood, and ran for the door. The sun was just coming over
the mountains to the east when he got to his car.  He knew he would be safe
for a time.

     According to Annie, it was only when Vincent could acknowledge that she
was an angel that he would find deliverance.  In the meantime, the coach would
have lots of trouble.  Indeed, Peter did have to spend nights running from the
lusty predators, staying one night in a seedy hotel outside of town, the next
night shivering on a bench in a park located on the west side, a third night
on the beach of a local lake, one night sleeping on the couch of one of the
strippers, and yet another in the back of a pickup truck.  Several times, he
barely escaped, the vampires often finding him an hour or two before sunrise.
During this time, he returned to the nightclub three times, in each instance
refusing to confess that Annie was an angel.

     The fourth visit was the turning point.  Alone with him in a dark corner
of the VIP lounge, sharing with him a bottle of Tequila, Annie stood and,
between song breaks, sang the most beautiful melody that the coach had ever
heard.  The song was an answer to his prayer.  All the other dancers stopped
what they were doing, many moved to tears, breathless, stunned by the sound,
the words of an angel.  Peter believed that no vampire could ever hope to sing
so well.

     Struggling to maintain his reason, buzzed on Tequila, Peter realized he
had seen this singing dancer before.  Certainly, he had not seen her in the
Moon.  He thought he might have seen her in a smut flick.  And then he
remembered:  He had seen Annie several nights ago in a dream he had had while
sleeping on the beach.  In the dream, surrounded by a soft blue flame, she had
walked across the lake to where he stood on the beach, stopping just short of
the sand.  She had held out her arms to him, singing like a siren, beckoning
him to come with her.  He had run away.  He remembered that, in the dream, she
had great blue wings.

     The time had come for Vincent Peter to take his leap of faith.  Though
his thinking was clouded by drink and the sound of the Blue Oyster Cult's
classic "See the Reaper," he closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and slurred in
a barely audible voice, "I believe you, you gorgeous little gook.  I believe
you're an angel with pretty wings."  He felt a finger make some kind of sign
on his forehead and a blinding flash explode in his befuddled brain.
 

                                     III.

     We may count it a stroke of good fortune that the now deceased Peterson
did not finish or attempt to publish his "Opus," an exercise in very poor
taste, indeed.  The very writing of such a narrative, depending for its
effectiveness upon cheap sensationalism attached to vampire literature, seems
totally incongruous with the professor's scholarly persona.

     However, to pander for a brief instant to the audience created by this
work, one could consider a number of endings, all equally plausible given the
total improbability of the story:

1.  It turns out that Annie is not an angel after all.  In fact, she is
drunkenly babbling when she claims to be an angel and her reference to
delivering coach Vincent from legions of darkness is merely coincidental to
the prayer uttered by the coach as he was fleeing his group of "bloodthirsty
bitches."  Thus, left to his own devices, Vincent eventually outwits his
pursuers or, better yet, Peter meets a horrible death involving dismemberment
and cannibalism as soon as he walks into the parking lot of the Palace.  End
of story.  Take your pick.

2.  Conversely, Annie is exactly who she says she is:  an angel of the Lord.
In this case, Peter is redeemed.  When he ventures out into the parking lot,
the vampires are gone and, brimming with the blessed assurance that the Good
Lord has everything under control, returns home to find his wife, his kids,
and his pets awaiting him at the door.

3.  Annie herself turns out to be a vampire.  What else could she be? A true
angel would never work in a nude bar and make money by performing lap dances
for lonely middle-aged men who come to the joint to experience the thrill of a
sexy female sitting on their laps.  Thus, the whole thing has been a gigantic
trap, set by the Prince of Darkness himself, and poor coach Peter has been
caught.

4.   The whole thing has been a terrible nightmare, Kafka's description
of his famous short story about the man who turns into a bug, a result
of one of coach Vincent's bouts of extreme drunkenness or, more likely,
a phantasmagorical dream resulting from indigestion.  Peter loved the
Las Vegas buffets. 

     We could come up with an infinite number of possibilities.  Yet, given
the fact that vampire literature must meet certain expectations, I think we
can safely and logically settle for one.

         
                                     IV.

     To Peter, it felt as if someone had driven a spike through his brain, and
he wondered if he had had a stroke.  When Peter opened his eyes, he looked for
Bangkok Annie.  The d.j., he noted, had chosen one of his all-time favorites:
Nazareth's "Love Hurts," a perfect piece to lap-dance to, he thought; the
mournful wail of the song filled the darkened atmosphere of the club.  The
Oriental babe was gone.  He sat alone on the couch, arms crossed, thinking to
himself, wondering if he should wait for Annie to return or get up.  Somewhat
inebriated, he stood, asked the one other dancer in the room and her customer
-- a beefy fellow in a red AC/DC T-shirt with a huge belly, long black hair
greased back, and sunglasses -- if they had seen Annie.  "Get lost," said the
gorgeous redhead named Victory, who had danced with Peter before.  The fat man
blew smoke at him from his enormous cigar.

     Peter suspected he was in a shit-load of trouble.  Annie -- or whoever
she was -- had disappeared like a puff of smoke either because she was an
angel of God and had done her work, or because she had just made a fool of
him, gotten him drunk, and taken his money.  He stumbled out of the VIP lounge
and through the main dance room, looking at the beautiful, tanned girls
dancing on the stages, looking at the girls seated with customers, to try to
find Bangkok Annie.  He asked one of the muscled bouncers if Annie had gone to
the dressing room.  The bouncer, a huge brute of a man whose arms were covered
with very attractive animal tattoos, said that he didn't know.

     Peter breathed deeply, feeling light-headed and queasy.  The pain made it
difficult to think, but he knew he should have been home grading papers and
preparing for class the next day.  He was sweating profusely, his hands cold,
his heart banging uncontrollably in his pickled brain.  Whether Annie was
still in the building or not, he knew he had to go outside and get into his
car eventually.

     He looked at his watch, a fluorescent Timex.  2:07pm.  The Moon was still
full of people, the drunken laughter of the men and the dancers blending with
the loud rock that the d.j. in the back played constantly.  Some of the girls
and their customers were high as kites.  Putting his glass of Tequila on the
stage nearest the door -- "Thank you, baby," said the young black dancer on
the stage, assuming the drink was for her -- he walked to the exit.  Another
bouncer, positioned like a guard at the entrance to Solomon's temple, bade him
good night, thanked him for coming, and opened the black glass door.  Peter
stepped into the cold night air.

     In the parking lot immediately in front of the Moon, he could see three
shiny blue motorcycles parked by the front door, parked cars filling every
visible space, and a yellow cab whose driver was motioning frantically to him.
The pain in his head began to subside, and Peter figured he would live.  A
cold March wind blew and chilled him to the bone.  He pulled his jacket more
tightly around him.  The sky was crystal clear.  The moon shone full and
brightly overhead.

     Terrified, he crept to the side of the building, turned the corner, and
headed for his car parked near the back.  As he walked into the darkest and
dirtiest part of the parking lot, he heard a horrible blood-curdling screaming
come across the night sky, the sound of some enormous beast prowling the back
streets, and he imagined for a moment that he was trudging through abandoned
marshlands in England.  His mind still reeled from the Tequila, and he
stumbled and nearly fell as he pushed his chest forward and began his slow
walk to his Charger.

     As he approached his car, its front bumper facing the building, he heard
a scraping and hissing behind him.  He turned around quickly, nearly losing
his balance, and there they were, the blood-sucking darlings that he had
coached to the state championship, standing three feet from him, all of them
grinning hugely, fangs bared in grisly anticipation of their next meal.

     Peter turned and started to run towards the back entrance of the parking
lot, but he no longer had the speed of a young man.  With the air-rending howl
of an enormous hungry beast, the largest of the girls sprinted after him and
jumped onto his back, sinking her fangs into his neck, bringing Peter crashing
to the dirtied pavement.  The pain was unbearable, blood gushed from his neck,
and Peter screamed as he felt life slowly ebbing from him.  Then all was
darkness.


                                     V.

     I hope my ending has done justice to Professor Peterson, who went into
fatal convulsions two nights after my visit and who therefore remains as much
of an enigma in death as he was in life.  Certainly, though we may find this
narrative as darkly fascinating as, say, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream I and
Scream II, Halloween I, II, and III, The Shining, Friday the 13th (parts 1
through 9), Interview with the Vampire, Fright Night, American Werewolf in
London, American Werewolf in Paris, Wolf, The Lost Boys, and Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (movie and television series), ad infinitum, labels like "delusional"
and "paranoid schizophrenic" seem more appropriate for this dark piece, quite
clearly the outpourings of a disturbed mind.
      
     As far as craftsmanship is concerned, we are left wondering what ever
happened to that cross-bearing tramp Bangkok Annie.  Since one ending is as
good as another, let us assume that Annie was taking a pee and that she was an
angel who was on the verge of blowing yet another assignment (thus, her
confinement to the nude bar).  When she returned to the VIP lounge and saw
that Peter was gone, she took off after him but arrived too late, finding her
latest client lying face down in a pool of blood at the back of the bar's
parking lot, barely breathing but alive.

--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--


     "If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of
      yourself.  What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us."
                                                                 --Herman Hesse


--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--

     NO REGRETS
     by Morrigan

     The ghost she couldn't know haunted her.  That he was a ghost was her
making, but that he stayed a ghost was his choosing.  She had forgotten
enough to forget him.

                                  * * * * *

     Jeremy loved Aly.  He knew it the first time he saw her or at least so
he'd later say (perhaps even realizing the overwhelming tackiness of the false
sentiment).  In a more accurate sampling of reality, he didn't notice her the
first time he saw her, or even the eighteenth.  The nineteenth time, he
spotted her t-shirt.  It was purple and from a tour by his favorite band.  He
made a mental note to try to get one of the shirts, but paid no mind to the
body sporting it.
  
     That morning, she had looked at her body and decided that bodies can only
be perfected so much without plastic surgery.  She needed a new obsession,
something new to refine.  So she put on a shirt and jeans, brushed her long
chestnut hair, and subtly outlined her hazel eyes.  Satisfied, she walked to
her car and drove two blocks over and got out of her car and began walking,
which was how he saw her.

     She noted that he spotted her shirt, but made no sign of it.  She
determined that this was the object of her next fixation by the simple virtue
that he was the first person who noticed her.  A primitive method perhaps, but
effective.  He was fairly tall and his build was that of a scarecrow.  His
white blond hair was perched on the top of his head in a basic crew cut.  The
overall effect was pretty awful, but his dark blue eyes and distracted smile
redeemed the otherwise hopeless situation.  He would do.

                                  * * * * *

     Time passed, and she figured out his patterns.  He became used to seeing
her walking along the street at all times of day.  He was distracted enough to
not think it odd that someone had so much time to devote to walking two blocks
over and over and over again.  One morning his mind was even further from
reality than usual, coinciding perfectly with the state of numbed mind she was
usually in during her now monotonous walks.  Both oblivious, neither saw the
other and therefore the best thing for the two of them happened.  They passed
each other by.

                                  * * * * *

     It wasn't until the next week, when he was having a period of unusual
alertness, that he noticed her for the second time.  He was looking out the
window of his house at her form passing by and experienced distinct deja vu,
convinced he had seen that exact scene many times before.  He had, of course,
but he didn't know that, being, like most people, not necessarily smart.  For
the first time, he realized that she wasn't that bad looking, even if she was
short.  She wasn't drop dead gorgeous, but she had a certain air to her that
was really rather attractive.  To him, at least.

     She was more surprised than he when at long last he came out of his
closed house to greet her and introduce himself.

                                  * * * * *

     "Hello.  My name's Jeremy."  (cringing at the awkwardness of it all)

     "Oh?  Oh.  Um, sorry, I was a little spaced out, I guess.  Hello."

     "What's your name?"  (gentle prompting)

     "Oh, sorry.  I'm Aly."  (light laughter and a hint of a smile)

     "Um, this might sound terrible, but you look incredibly familiar...  Do I
know you, and I've just forgotten?"  (sheepishly)

     "I don't think so.  If so, I've done the same thing, so no insult can be
taken, either way."  (friendly, but somewhat shy grin)

                                  * * * * *

     They became friends, then lovers.  He noticed that she seemed unusually
devoted to him, but then again, he didn't really know what usually was, so he
didn't really know.  Besides, he loved her, and therefore she could do no
wrong.
  
     Then she began asking things of him.  Little things, at first.  To change
some of his clothes, some of his music.  For the most part, it was little
things that he didn't really care about, so he was content to comply with any
and all requests.  Besides, even though she forbade him to listen to one of
his favorite CDs, he could just listen to it when she wasn't around.

     It took him a while to notice the other change in their relationship.  At
first, they had just seemed to come together.  They'd both want coffee at the
same time, she'd be walking down his street on one of her several daily walks,
and she'd pass his house just as he was thinking of going on a walk himself.
Due to the fact that he was never particularly observant, it never really
occurred to him that she just happened to be around an awful lot.  It was one
of those things that was much harder to detect since it developed gradually.
He only realized that he was having less and less time that wasn't with her.
It didn't bother him.  After all, he was in love, remember?

     His acceptance was his downfall.

                                  * * * * *

     As soon as she realized that he wouldn't resist her influence, she began
to fix him in earnest.  She had a clear mental image of him as an
intellectual, a man ruled by cynicism and pessimism, a man who believed in the
supremacy of the second law of thermodynamics:  entropy always increases,
everything tends towards chaos.

     * body -- work out properly
     * hair -- grow to slightly below the shoulders - ponytail
     * smile -- more confident -- lose hint of uncertainty
     * clothes -- black, stylish.
     * music -- break completely from old music; foster interest in Wagnerian
       opera and industrial genre, such as KMFDM
     * books -- nothing optimistic -- esp. recommended:  _Chaos:  A New
       Science_ by James Gleick, _Johnny the Homicidal Maniac_ by Jhonen
       Vasquez, _Steppenwolf_ by Herman Hesse

     His love for her became more devotion than care.  Since she gradually
insinuated changes, rather than forcing them, he thought all of her changes
were as much his idea as hers.  He was lost.

                                  * * * * *

     Several months later, he ran into a long discarded friend.  At Aly's nod
of approval, he settled himself two tables away for a conversation. Initial
pleasantries were exchanged, though he could see that he was just dragging out
the agony for his companion, who was dying to know exactly what had happened
to the Jeremy he knew.

     "You look like one of them stupid gothic people, man.  What's up with all
of the black?"

     "I thought it appropriate, since this universe is nothing more than an
immense never ending funeral."

     "Uh, sure, man.  Right.  Hey, have you been to any Pearl Jam concerts
recently?  I saw them a few weeks ago and they were great... got a couple new
songs that really rock."

     "I don't listen to such ridiculous music anymore.  I prefer things more
along the lines of _Gotterdamerung_ now."

     "What's that?"

     "It's an Opera.  By Richard Wagner, who is one of the greatest composers
that this world has known.  It's title means "The Twilight of the Gods."
Essentially, it is a metaphor for the way that our entire world functions.  It
is the last in a series of operas that describe the heroic and magnificent
lives of gods and men.  In _Gotterdamerung,_ though, everything they've worked
for is undone and they all die, while the world falls down around them.  Like
I said, it's a metaphor for our universe."

     "Right.... Well, whatever, Jeremy.... See you around, man."

     As she eavesdropped on their conversation, Aly smiled.  Her work was
complete; he was now a perfect man.  As such, she had no need or desire for
him anymore.  She slipped out the door while he exercised his new personality
and began to look for a new project.

                                  * * * * *

     Aly decided that she had now had her fill of human projects and resolved
to exercise her creative urges in a more traditional area: painting.

     Her search for a subject ended when she read the story of Salome and the
Dance of the 7 Veils that was danced for the prize of John the Baptist's head.
Something in the tale caught her fancy and her energy was now focused on the
perfect painting that she envisioned.

     She bought more paints, canvases and paintbrushes than she could possibly
need.  She also found as many books as she could that mentioned the object of
her obsession.  She intended to paint the scene with as much historical
accuracy as humanly feasible while still capturing all of the emotion that she
imagined in the scene.

     She got completely caught up in her new project and promptly forgot
everything she had ever known that didn't pertain specifically to her
painting.

                                  * * * * *

     Jeremy was bewildered by Aly's absence.  Now that she no longer found
him, he didn't see her at all.  He realized with surprise that he'd never
found out where she lived and so he couldn't seek her out.

     He continued to live by the habits that he had grown accustomed to with
her.  His denial couldn't sustain him for long, though.  After a few weeks
without her nurturing, his carefully crafted personality began to fall apart.
He had believed in himself only because she told him to, so as soon as she
left he was forced to question who he was.  The greatest tragedy was that she
had actually done a very good job with her masterpiece.  No traces of his
former self remained.

     His ultimate ruin was inevitable as soon as his personality began to
crumble.  All that his poor befuddled mind could really hold onto was the
image of his creator.  Wasting away without a will to live he haunted the
cafes, the parks where he and Aly had spent many a pleasant afternoon, hoping
for a glimpse of her face.

                                  * * * * *

     As she became increasingly involved with her painting of Salome, Aly
became less conscious of the little things in her life, like where she bought
her coffee.  This day her choice coincided with Jeremy's.  Since he was the
only person in the cafe when she entered, she noticed that he was there.  Her
head was full of her painting, though, and she didn't mark him as anyone
special.  Jeremy, on the other hand, had gone into shock when she entered.
The object of his own obsession stood in front of him and he could do nothing
but stare at her.

     While she was waiting for her tall double mocha, she glanced at him
again.  This time she noticed his t-shirt and she made a mental note to try to
find one like it, because she really liked it.

     She paid for her coffee and walked out of the cafe.

--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--


     "But he recognized that the illusions of the child only differed from
      those of the man in that they were more  picturesque; belief in fairies
      and belief in the Stock Exchange as bestowers of happiness were equally
      vain, but the latter form of faith was ugly as well as inept."
                                         -- Arthur Machen, _The Hill of Dreams_


--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--

     THE STARS BETWEEN THE STARS
     by Dark Crystal Sphere Floating Between Two Universes

     A gentle breeze picks up and rustles the leaves, and his heels tap
together quietly.  Soon the children who play baseball in the field nearby
will find his body hanging there amid the crumbling vine-covered tombstones,
but for now it is merely a peaceful addition to the landscape, so unlike the
tormented soul which had strayed into that cemetery a few hours before.  As
the first rays of the new day wash over the hanged man, a flock of
black-winged birds break from the trees and fly up to the heavens.

                                  * * * * *

     "If you look real hard you can see the stars between the stars," Dirk had
said at one of their philosophy meets, and, straining his eyes, Jon had seen
what he meant.  "It's kinda like people:  There are some people who shine
beautifully and brightly and others who shine on in obscurity with a sickly
light."  It was only now that he realized the full truth of that second
sentence, sitting among the vines on the branch of the old yew just before
dawn, holding the picture of her in her beautiful red and pink dress, and a
flood of memories overwhelmed him.

     He remembered that day, so recent yet seemingly so long ago, the they met
after school, when they stood together beneath the overhang as the rain poured
down and talked.   He had been too scared say anything to her besides "yes"
and "no," and hated himself for his timidity.  He had admired the beautiful
creature from a distance for a month now, sneaking peeks over at her during
band class, admiring the way her hair spilled down over her shoulders with her
cute little ears peeking out from beneath the honey-colored locks, the pretty
way she smiled, the way her firm body filled her jeans and tee-shirt.  They
had seen each other occasionally, but they never had really talked until that
day -- he never would have had the courage to talk to her, and he had always
seen it as inconceivable that she would introduce herself to him as she was
doing now.  That was the beginning of it, the beginning of the friendship
which they shared, the love he had for her.  He thought of the ridiculous
figure of the lanky, white-faced boy with his hands thrust deep into the
pockets of the black trench coat he wore, talking to the beautiful young lady,
the comparison of whom most people only see in storybooks or in dreams of
purple-hued lands far away, and he still didn't understand why she had even
bothered talking to the goblin which stood before her that day.  That was so
long ago, and he wished that things after that had followed the happy
progression he had so hoped they would as he lay awake thinking about the
incident the night after.

     Like a cascade, the more painful memories followed.  As the sky began to
turn red a cock crowed and he remembered when he finally told her without
telling her how he felt about her, after merely being her friend for months.
Finally, after so long, he sat at his desk and the seven page letter gradually
took shape.  After several drafts burnt he finally had a letter which he felt
he could give her -- not the beautiful epic he had planned, but one of an
inferior grade with an occasional tear-stain, written in his horrible little
scribble -- and sealed the pages in the envelope, giving it to her at lunch
the next day.

     The day after he had delivered the letter -- Friday the thirteenth,
coincidentally -- he stood in that silent room holding the neatly typed poem
and appended note and realized just how desolate his life had become in the
few seconds it had taken him to read the page.  In those few seconds the one
timber of hope that had supported his crystal house of dream was yanked out of
place and all that he had built his life around for the past few months was
suddenly gone, and his feeble construct of fantasy had come crashing down
about his ears.  A void had suddenly opened in his life, and he could do
nothing to fill it -- all it did was suck away all happiness he had in life in
a vain attempt to fill the vacuum.  He felt as though she had kicked out his
innards and, not realizing what she had done, left him standing there, with a
shocked look on his face, to pick up the pieces.  Refolding the paper and
placing it back into his pocket, yet another relic of his cult to that which
he could never have, he turned and crossed to the sink and, having washed his
hands of the sweat which had sprung up on them while he anticipated what the
paper she had handed him said, he did what he could to compose himself and
replace the mask which he wore every day but had been broken by the shock, and
he left the public toilet a desolate man.  He went through the rest of the day
in a daze and, as soon as school was over, scurried off to the cemetery, which
had always been to him a symbol of pain.

     He kneeled among the ivy, silently weeping by the neglected graves of
long ago, and put the dagger's stern blade to his neck, preparing to make the
scarlet-summoning slice.  Then he remembered -- remembered other poems she had
written which had touched him happily, of nights spent together though thirty
miles away, consoling each other in the face of mournful things and crying at
the divine joke, connected by fiber optic coils and telephone wires across the
intervening distance.  And suddenly his despair lifted somewhat and he
realized that all was not lost -- there was still some hope that she might
love him.  Finally he sheathed the glittering, thirsty dagger -- let it drink
another day -- let the demons wait a while longer for what they have been
waiting for for years.

     He thought then of everything -- of a life continuing down its spiral
into the dark realms of the Grey Lands, of a life spent with the one goal of
attaining her hand, until *he* came along.  At first Jon thought that John
would be simply another friend, until he found out just how she felt about
him.  Ironic, he thought, how this person had the same name as him with the
addition of just one little letter, but that one element meant so much.  He
decided that moment that all Jons who spell their names with an 'H' must be
bastards -- all the ones he had met were. But, sinking back into misery, he
realized he couldn't blame either of them for their choices.

     He had been walking alone that day at the carnival, watching the fun of
others and glancing into booths when he saw them sitting on the bench together
eating the Coney Island hot dogs which seemed to always be the necessity at
such events.  Their backs were to him and, as he walked towards them he saw
the smiles on their faces as they turned to talk to each other and then he saw
the sight which finally broke his strained heart in two.  The two turned to
face each other and embraced in a long kiss before they broke away, she
putting her head on his shoulder and he put his arm around her as only those
in love do.  He realized then as he had never realized before that being loved
was something for others, not for men such as he, goblins and specters who
lived between the lives of others.  He trudged down the street away from the
jollity with his coat billowing behind him, looking very much like a great
black winged bird who, realizing it has flown its last flight, slinks away
from the flock to die alone.

     He arrived home and, opening the drawer in which he held his most prized
possessions, he lifted the heavy rope from among the all the pictures of her
and all the keepsakes he had of things they had done together.  He held it
reverently, this tool of salvation and of destruction, and remembered the day
he made it when, intending to take his own life after being in a depression
for so long, he went to the nearby university and dug up the dusty volume
which the hangman Charles Duff had written back in 1929 for others of his
trade and discovered the art of hanging.  She had helped him out of that
depression, but not until after he had made the noose, with plenty of tail for
both the nine and a half foot drop necessary for his weight and for tying the
rope to the bough and, having said good night to his family, climbed out of
his window and went to that place of pain.  This was the only way to fix the
problem, to eliminate the pain of those who, as he was, were stuck between
life, sentenced to only watch as others lives passed by -- and the pain of
those forced to deal with them.

     He watched as the sun finally rose on the eastern horizon, and realized
what a pity it was that the whole day wasn't as beautiful as the dusk and the
dawn.  It seemed the beginning and the ending were the most beautiful -- and
the most deceiving -- times of just about everything. Finally he slipped the
noose around his neck and, slipping the picture into his breast pocket over
his heart, he let himself drop from the tree. If anyone had seen him fall that
morning in the pale sunlight, with his coat flying behind him on that short
nine and a half foot drop, they would have sworn how much he looked like a
great black bird with his wings clipped falling to a fate he knew he could do
nothing to avoid.

--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--


     "Did you hear the one about the man who fell off of a skyscraper?  As he
     passed each floor, he said to himself, 'So far, so good.'"
                                                    --from the movie _Le Haine_


--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--

     WHERE'S MY DOG?
     An Apocalyptic Paranoid Movement in Five Sections Searching For Stability
     by Kilgore Trout

 ::: SECTiON A:  MULTiMEDiA MiLLENiAL MADNESS

     television hysteria borderline on the brink of emasculation
     call letters KiSS:  kings in satan's service
     urban legend or dire straits video gone awry?

                                  * * * * *

     feeling pituitary glands rocket forth hormones laden with the love drug,
     an anaesthetic   controlled by men without desire or compassion, without
     any sanctimonious foreplay:  a gel of symbiotic nightmares, tasty enough
     to be spread as icing, deadly enough to be poured into bombs.

                                  * * * * *

 BROADCASTER DAN:  This just in, ladies and gentlemen of the
                   You-Knighted-States of Amerika.  A situation has developed
                   that is of the utmost magnitude.  Stay tuned for more
                   details.

 BROADCASTER TOM:  Incendiary devices!  Incendiary devices!  Blow 'em all to
                   hell, you pinko dupes!

BROADCASTER PETE:  Where's my dog?

                                  * * * * *

     THiNGS TO ACCOMPLiSH FOR TODAY (xx/xx/1998)

     1.  buy dogfood
     2.  shoot dog for insurance money
     3.  buy tampons
     4.  recite the Lord's prayer twice
     5.  burn this list

                                  * * * * *

     /...and there can no other,/ she thought, watching him drench himself in
Reichian terminology and Buddhist meditational techniques while wearing that
tight T-shirt and cute beret.   /You'll be mine soon, once you get your head
out of those books and look my way./

                                  * * * * *

     Lazlo played Othello with the devil every second Thursday.  He was always
black, and he always lost, but he was getting better.  He wondered when the
practice rounds would end and if they'd start playing for keeps. Then it would
be a board game for heaven, winner take all.  Lazlo asked the devil if he
could go first this time.

                                  * * * * *

     Conservatives hate forests because all of the radical rebels go there to
hide.  Logging isn't just a job -- it's a national security issue.

                                  * * * * *

     a heroin dreamland filled with waif model types who have clean arms
     because they shoot inbetween their fingers and toes, under their tongues,
     under the guns of the DEA piece-wielding peace-officers who raid the
     shack to prevent them from sharing needles in a devout and pious effort
     to keep AiDS in government labs where it belongs.

                                  * * * * *

     A brief description of historical criticism:  Who cares about the text?
     A brief description of form criticism:  Who cares about the author?
     A brief description of authors:  Who cares about the critic? (we do, we do)

                                  * * * * *

     Jonestown.  Mount Carmel.  A Luby's in Killeen, Texas.  Post offices
across America.  The government is either already there or they always show up
afterwards.  Coincidence?  Today on [insert tabloid talk show/local news
station/cable access program here.]

                                  * * * * *

     The birth of a revolutionary leader in a Radio Shack mall outlet, circa
     1985:

     10 PRINT "Fuck the world!  Anarchy Rulez!"
     20 GOTO 10

                                  * * * * *

 BROADCASTER DAN:  Tonight, new information from the American Medical
                   Association.  In the new JAMA being released tomorrow, it
                   is revealed that genital herpes is not -- I repeat -- is
                   not a walk on the beach with a symphony playing lazily in
                   the background.

 BROADCASTER TOM:  Flaming cocks!  Flaming cunts!  Be monogomous, kids.

BROADCASTER PETE:  Where's my dog?

                                  * * * * *

     saltine crackers and firehouse gardeners pave the way for the emissary
     from regions unknown to our terrestrial senses who has come to put our
     fears in a small, mahogany box and sell it to the highest bidder.

                                  * * * * *

     defective o-ring g-spot crash consumes the oxygen in his lungs as flames
     lodge themsleves on his tongue, creating quotations in cartoon bubbles
     from third-rate Louisiana erotica writers as she sits on the maitre d's
     reservation book, unsatiated.

                                  * * * * *

     The dichotomy between pleasure and pastoral love:

     Salome and Herod Antipas playing foosball with John the Baptist's head
while Jesus feeds hungry followers on the side of a hill.

                                  * * * * *

     The advanced state of organisms is based on the institutions of prisons.
Biology textbooks define complex organisms as having more cells, which means
that humans in America are the most advanced species this side of Jupiter.

                                  * * * * *

     Revisionism isn't only in the hands of neo-Nazis who want the Holocaust
to go away.  Before the religious right came into power, groups like the
Baptists were the primary supporters of the separation between church and
state.  In fact, Baptists were the only ones in the colonies who allowed
others to worship as they pleased.  The oppressed always become the
oppressors.

                                  * * * * *

     A brief conversation overheard in a downtown bistro in Austin, Texas:

     "So, my mom promised to buy me an inflatible doll for my birthday."
     "Did she?"
     "No, she lied.  She got me a pair of Doc Martens instead.  They're too
big."
     "Well, I guess you could.... Oh, I suppose you want to trade those in,
huh?"

                                  * * * * *

     posthumous awards ceremonies entice would-be believesinto selling all of
     their possesions (washers, dryers, recliners, asbestos firesuits, lawn
     mower repair kits, small children) in a futile attempt to whitewash the
     cash cow and exalt the dead who cannot record another annoying pop song
     that everbody hated at the time.

                                  * * * * *

     She said that she was a siamese twin, but it looked like she really only
had an extra left hand.  When I questioned her about this, she lifted up her
shirt, revealing her grinning sister's head in the place of her left breast.
I wondered if her sister ever wore hats and whether or not they fit her based
on a hat size or cup measurement.

                                  * * * * *

     If I were President of the United States, my cabinet would be just that:
a cabinet.  I'd fill it with useful books from Loompanics and Amok Press,
thereby insuring a library any leader would be proud to own in a bid to rule
the world.

                                  * * * * *

     Parables edited out of the Bible:

     1.  The parable to beat all other parables.
     2.  The parable of the Roman centurion and the vestal virgin.
     3.  The parable of Josiah and his attempt to milk a male cow.
     4.  The parable of the man who knew too much and wasn't afraid to tell.
     5.  The parable of Silas, the altruistic dungherder.

                                  * * * * *

 BROADCASTER DAN:  News is a privilege, and if you're going to treat me like a
                   puppet with a hand up my ass, then I won't rotely read
                   stuff off the teleprompter every night.  Whaddya think
                   about that, boys and girls?  Uncle Dan still has some
                   cajones!

 BROADCASTER TOM:  Watch my broadcast!  I'm better looking!

BROADCASTER PETE:  Where's my dog?


 ::: SECTiON B:  EN ROUTE FROM ALBUQUERQUE

     The stench of her unleashed bladder woke Ramses from his slumber in the
tiny compartment on the 1:26am night train to New Dealy Plaza.  He shook his
head, washing away lingering memories of a dream about Talmud exegesis, and
garnered a peek into the bunk below.  The old hag he had managed to ride with
was in the throes of some grotesque erotic dream, her hands pawing her
withered breasts and freshly damp crotch.  Her dentureless mouth gaped and
contracted, trying to form sounds that her body would respond to.  Ramses
jumped out of his bunk, hastily fumbled into some clothes and exited the
compartment.

     The ticket  had been hard to come by, but Ramses had given up caring
about the price to pay in order to get out of the state.  He'd met the old
woman, whose name he thought was Moira, in line at the grocery store where he
was trying to buy beer with foodstamps so he could make molotov cocktails.
The invading forces were getting closer every day, and he was going to put up
as much of a fight as he could.  Moira had talked him out of it, explaining
that she had friends in Dallas who could protect her, and if he could get a
ticket, she'd be more than happy to take him along when she left in three
days.  Ramses told her he was broke, but Moira made him a deal he couldn't
refuse, even though he wanted to.

     For the next three days, they fucked.  Moira was 61, but she had the
libido of a drunk college party girl.  She also had a problem:  instead of
orgasming, Moira would piss.  Ramses never asked for an explanation, and she
never offered one.  Sinking his head between her legs on that first night, he
recalled the news reports of what the enemy did to their prisoners, making
this look like a Sunday afternoon picnic.  The only part Ramses partially
enjoyed were Moira's toothless blowjobs.

     On the second night, Moira asked him if he thought she was beautiful.
Ramses finished toweling off his face and spat on the ground.  Moira rolled
over onto her side, facing away, and sobbed.  He told her that the only reason
he was here was because she had something he wanted.  Once they were in Dallas
their relationship would end.

     And now he was on this godforsaken train, unable to sleep in his own
compartment.  He made his way to the dinner car.  It was deserted, so he slid
into a booth and tried to get some sleep.  He woke up about two hours later to
the sound of talking.  Ramses lifted his head up and noticed two young women
seated across the aisle.  The brunette saw that he was awake and motioned with
her head in his direction to the redhead, who turned to look.

     "Stowaway?" the brunette asked.

     "Can't sleep in my room," Ramses replied.  "My traveling companion can't
control her bodily functions."

     The redhead made a disgusted look at Ramses.  "Doesn't she have those
adult diaper things?"

     Ramses sat up.  "Nope.  I think she gets off on it.  But what do I know?
She's old enough to be my grandmother, but she was my only way to Dallas."

     "I bet you're headed to New Dealy Plaza, aren't you?" the brunnete
queried.

     "Yeah, I am.  How'd you know?"

     "We are, too," the blonde said.  "Or were, rather.  Latest news I could
pick up off my walkman said that Dallas was already hit.  With nukes. The US
has already retaliated with everything its got, so I expect that this train is
going nowhere real fast."

     "Christ, why is this happening?" Ramses swore.  "What do these people
want?"

     "Not people, sir," said the brunette, grimacing.  "They aren't people."

     "So what are you going to do now?"

     "We're getting off at the next stop and are going to hole up in the first
church we can find."

     Ramses folded his arms across his chest.  "This isn't the time to get
half-baked and religious.  If we don't figure out something soon, we're gonna
be toast."

     "I know," the blond responded, pulling out a bible and a pistol from her
jacket.  "That's why this is the best time to get religious.  Pray with us."

     Ramses thought about Albuquerque and his molotav cocktails, of Moira and
her chance of freedom exchanged for his own debasement.  He clasped his hands
together, closed his eyes, and prayed to a god he didn't believe in, hoping
that they weren't sent by him.




 ::: SECTiON C:  THE PiLLAR OF FiRE BURNS, BURNS, BURNS

     Sign seen outside a Catholic church in Dallas, Texas:

     "God's will is given out on a need to know basis."

     Lucky for us that the Pope has his holy decoder ring.

                                  * * * * *

     Jules stood in the back of the porno store, scratching her head as she
tried to decide between purchasing _Splatterfuck_ or _Booties:  A Book of Baby
Erotica._  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the clerk approaching her,
licking his pierced lip and dancing to an imaginary salsa beat.  He asked if
he could be of any serive, so Jules punched him in the gut, muttering that he
should have better manners.

                                  * * * * *

     A definition of bad musical influences:

     "This song makes me think of mommy squirrels filing down acorns to stab
baby squirrels.  Get me out of this subterranean hell!"

                                  * * * * *

 BROADCASTER DAN:  We interrupt this excuse for quality programming with an
                   even more useless special report.  Our confidential yet
                   highly paid sources in Washington, DC have informed us that
                   your government has lied to you not once but many times.
                   The President has issued a statement saying that we, your
                   trustworthy news broadcasters who come into your living
                   rooms every night, are the liars.

 BROADCASTER TOM:  It's good to know that those bastards are just like us.
                   Well, except for me.

BROADCASTER PETE:  Where's my dog?

                                  * * * * *

     ancient heiroglyphs inscribed in limestone blocks reveal eternal truths
     that have been repeated and repackaged thoughout the centuries in various
     cultures and religions, most recently appearing on late night self-help
     informercials and PBS specials with the latest hip gurus.

                                  * * * * *

     Nakedness is both the curse and cure for innocence.

                                  * * * * *

     The burning bush told Graham that it needed a man to lead its people out
of the bondage of this sick and cruel world.  "Dude, man," Graham said,
stroking his goatee, "I'd believe you if I hadn't done so much acid and didn't
think this was just a flashback."  And so the people continued to suffer.

                                  * * * * *

     "*Ateh malkuth vegeburah vegedulah liolahm amen.*"  The words spilled
forth from the robed man and cut through the darkness of the small room, both
a calling a a proclamation to a pwer that was greater than him and yet
originated in him as well.

                                  * * * * *

     alien membranes erupt under laser scalpel slices, destroying themselves
     to prevent their secrets from being discovered by muttering surgeons and
     Air Force officers who want to be omniscient because they are not
     omnipotent.

                                  * * * * *

     Shattered windows.  Green carpet.  Yellow wallpaper.  A still fan.  No
light.  Miranda.  Fresh vomit.  Two gas station lighters.  A bra from Sears.
The smell of waiting.

                                  * * * * *

     He habitually chewed the skin off os his lower, chapped lip as he sat
looking out the window, nervously preparing for takeoff.  His purpose for the
flight had never been ascertained, and even he didn't know exactly where he
wanted to go.  All he understood was that he needed to go up.  A voice
crackled over the loudspeaker:  "T-minus 10...."

                                  * * * * *

     Advertisement on a bulletin board at a local community college:

     "Babe magnet!  For sale:  18 month old iguana, comes with shelves, toys,
heat lamp, and all the women that he can muster."

                                  * * * * *

     Men can never look macho while sipping out of a straw.  If you think you
can, chances are that you look like a total fool.

                                  * * * * *

     All mystics have trouble relating their experiences because of the
difficulties of language.  If they devised a language that would be concise
and exact, not only would their accounts be dry and drawn out, but they would
soon be viewed like lawyers and probably led by *hasatan,* the eternal
prosecuter.

                                  * * * * *

     Lunacy strives foran exalted seat next to materialism and vanity.  Put
the three together, and you have a triumverate that can make you buy unwanted
goods and feel great doing it.

                                  * * * * *

     Religion is the opiate of the masses.  Opium is the opiate of the French
Decadent.  Decadence is the opiate of apathetic youth.  Apathy is the opiate
of stagnation.  Stagnation is the opiate of religion.

                                  * * * * *

     I thought I read the saddest words in the bible yesterday.  I was
translating Amos 3:2, thinking that God said, "Only you have I known from all
of the families of man; therefore I will be empty unto you with all of your
guilt."  What a horrible thing that would be, for your own God to tell you
that he feels empty because of what you've done.  Then I realized I misread
the verb stem and that the last section should have read, "Therefore, I will
hunt you down because of your sins."  I liked my mistranslation better.

                                  * * * * *

 BROADCASTER DAN:  Flumoxed.  That's how I feel.  If you think the news we
                   give you every night is depressing, even after we throw in
                   bad puns during the lead-in, you should take a look at the
                   stuff we don't broadcast.

 BROADCASTER TOM:  And now for some real news.  Oh, wait.  It's only Nascar.
                   Damn!

BROADCASTER PETE:  Where's my dog?


 ::: SECTiON D:  HOLiNESS iS NEXT TO GODLiNESS

[An undecorated stage with two metal folding chairs in the middle, facing each
 other.  An elderly woman with a cane and a small boy enter from both sides of
 the stage and take their seats.]

   ELAiNE:  Do you believe in the existence of the soul?

   NORMAN:  I know or I doubt.  Belief is only a tool.

   ELAiNE:  Do you know that the soul exists?

   NORMAN:  No.

   ELAiNE:  Do you doubt that souls are real?

   NORMAN:  No.

   ELAiNE:  Then what do you think about souls?

   NORMAN:  Does it matter now?

   ELAiNE:  It may make a difference on the type of afterlife you experience.

[Enter stage right a cop and a folk guitarist.  They stand behind the two
 chairs.]

      COP:  (lighting a cigarette)  Do you know some Pink Floyd?

GUiTARiST:  Sure do.  (begins playing "Comfortably Numb.")

   NORMAN:  The afterlife doesn't concern me.  I'm already enlightened.

   ELAiNE:  You?  Enlightened?  But you can't be more than eight.

   NORMAN:  Precisely.  I have yet to become an actor in the game of life.

   ELAiNE:  Bullshit.  (crosses her arms)  How can you know what it's like to
            be enlightened unless you have been unenlightened?

   NORMAN:  Because I see you right now.

   ELAiNE:  Don't get smart with me, kid.  I've been on this earth for eighty
            years, and I've got more wisdom than you could ever hope for!

      COP:  Ma'am, play nice now.

   NORMAN:  Wisdom consists of cliched sayings and is tripe for mutts.  It
            does not concern me.

   ELAiNE:  Then tell me what I should do.

   NORMAN:  Open your third eye and see.

   ELAiNE:  That's just a bunch of new age -- rhymes with sewage --
            mumbojumbo.  Next you'll be telling me I need to go buy crystals
            for my well-being.

   NORMAN:  I'm not speaking of a metaphysical third eye.  I'm talking about
            trepenation.

GUiTARiST:  (plays "The Great Brain Robbery and sings.)
            All your prayers won't save your soul,
            Adult, you need a hole.

   NORMAN:  In 1962 a Dutch doctor named Bart Hughes proposed a theory about
            permanent enlightenment.  His theory of evolution states that
            man's upright stance, while providing many benefits, prevented
            blood from going to the brain because of gravity, thus restricting
            the levels of consciousness previously maintained.  This lack of
            "brainblood" volume, along with the fusing of the cranium at the
            adult stage, led Dr. Hughes to introduce trepenation as a cure for
            human ills.

   ELAiNE:  You want me to drill a hole in my noggin?

   NORMAN:  To put it simply, yes.

      COP:  I would like to interject that what you propose borders on
            insanity.  I hope it's illegal.

   NORMAN:  Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, give to God what is God's, and
            give to me what is mine.

   ELAiNE:  Were you dropped on your head as a child?

[The guitar player cuts in the Dead Kennedy's version of "I Fought the Law,"
 causing the cop to put his hand on his holstered service revolver.]

   NORMAN:  Really, you must try it.  Perhaps you could live out your
            remaining years without being so stodgy.

   ELAiNE:  Why, I've never--

   NORMAN:  In fact, I've got a doctor here all suited up and ready to perform
            the operation, if you'd like.  (cupping his hands to his mouth and
            yelling.)  Dr. Smithereens!

[Dr. Smithereens enters stage right, dressed in bloody scrubs and a clown wig.
 he carries a large electric power drill and an air horn.]

   ELAiNE:  You're a doctor?

[Dr. Smithereens blows his horn once.]

   ELAiNE:  Ow.

      COP:  Do you have a permit for that monstrosity?

[Dr. Smithereens blows his horn again.]

      COP:  Ow.

[The clown approaches Elaine, turning on the power drill.  Elaine jumps up and
 wields her cane like a bat.  The cop pulls out his gun and aims it at the
 clown.]

      COP:  Don't move any closer or I'll shoot.

[Dr. Smithereens honks his horn twice.]

GUiTARiST:  I smell a rumble.

[Dr. Smithereens lunges at Elaine.  Before the cop fires, the guitarist hits
 him with his guitar, causing the cop to shoot Elaine in the back of the
 head.]

   ELAiNE:  (on floor, gasping)  It really does work....

   NORMAN:  Not exactly the desired method, but isn't a moment of illumination
            in your lifetime worth the price fo death?

   ELAiNE:  Gurgle, gurgle.

      COP:  What have I done?  I've got a family.

   NORMAN:  (standing up)  What about you, policeman?  Do you want to be like
            a child again?

[Dr. Smithereens turns towards the cop, grinning and increasing the power of
 the drill.]

     COP:  Fuck you, clown!

[The cop raises his pistol and shoots the clown in the gut, who slumps to the
 floor.  Dr. Smithereens holds down the horn for a few seconds and then dies.]

     COP:  Jesus, what is the world turning into?

[The cop begins to cry and exits stage right.  A gunshot is heard.]

GUiTARiST:  What do we do now?

   NORMAN:  (picking up the drill and putting on the clown wig) We spread the
            word.

[The guitarist drops his guitar and exits stage left.  Norman turns to the
 crowd and smiles.]


 ::: SECTiON E:  LAST CHANCE FOR A SLOW DANCE

     My girlfriend always makes us wear gas masks whenever we fuck.  She says
it heightens her arousal with the implied sense of impending death, like we're
making a last ditch effort to feel pleasure before the biological weapons eat
our flesh.  I think it's weird, but at least I get some.

                                  * * * * *

     "You look like a poet, but you really aren't one," a guy said to me on
the bus.  I took off my sunglasses, displaying my blind eyes.  "My mistake,"
he said.  "You see more than any of us possibly could."

                                  * * * * *

     concrete enemas and autoerotic asphyxiations enhance the despair of a new
     generation sworn to defy the norm and accumulate gratification at any
     cost.

                                  * * * * *

     I met a time traveler once from the future and asked him if we actually
did a good job.  He put a hand on my shoulder, shook his head, and told me
that the future waits for no one.  He wouldn't answer my questions about
specific details, but he did say people would die.  Ooooh.

                                  * * * * *

 BROADCASTER DAN:  It has recently been proven that cellular phones and
                   computer monitors do not cause brain tumors.  However,
                   usage of these and other similar devices can still be
                   construed as tools to be used against the proletariat, so
                   rise up agaisnt huge electronics corporations and go back
                   to using rotary phones and typewriters.  Besides, the sound
                   of a pulse line and a key hitting a page is more
                   aesthetically pleasing.

 BROADCASTER TOM:  It's cause he's from Texas.  They're all backwards down
                   there.

BROADCASTER PETE:  Where's my dog?

                                  * * * * *

     A teenager to her father after a poor explanation on how his msucle car
engine works:

     "Dad, why do you have to be so obscure?  Even Eliot used footnotes."

                                  * * * * *

     I lost faith in professional wrestling when I was ten and got ringside
tickets to a match.  I was so close that I could see through everything. I
think lots of things are like that:  governement, religion, writers, etc.
It's better to stay at a safe distance and believe the lie, unless you want to
think or something.

                                  * * * * *

     Band names generated on a computer with two word lists:

     Cheesy Discharge.  Papal Pajamas.  Rockin' Enema.  Naval Lobotomy.  Glass
     Dildo.  Freaky Youth.  Sober Sawdusters.  Diabolical Discourse.  Masoleum
     Lexographers.  Synthetic Dustbunnies.  Flagrant Monkeys.  Episcopalian
     Attitude.  Siamese Robotics.  Angelic Intercourse.  Nazi Neighborhood.
     Latent Lycanthropy.  Bouncing Bolsheviks.  Superluminous Reaganites.
     Pleasant Nimrods.

                                  * * * * *

     A conversation overheard during the final minutes of Hebrew 2312:

     "That sounds like a fun UiL activity, arguing theories and all that
jazz."
     "No, I was in computer science.  We dealt with programming."
     "Oh, I thought you said 'pure science.'"
     "That sounds like some strange Aryan superiority contest.  'Uh, hi.  I'm
here for the pure science competition.  Why are you guys dressed like that?"
     "Yeah, costuming would be a major drawback."

                                  * * * * *

     talented bipeds struggle en masse to a perfunctory evening of wining and
     dining, of dancing and drinking, of spending and squalloring, all in a
     thaumaturgical evocation to show that they should spend the rest of their
     lives with you.

                                  * * * * *

     Things I need to pick up at the grocery store:

     1.  Dog food
     2.  Tampons
     3.  Healthy cereal
     4.  Three green lightbulbs (25 watts)
     5.  Frozen chicken
     6.  A woman

                                  * * * * *

     Sometimes I hang outside clubs by the band's van.  It makes me look
important in a way, since people think I've got something to do with what's
going on inside.  In reality, I just smoke a lot of cigarettes and hope for my
big break.

                                  * * * * *

     At the seance, Jan noticed a peculiar smell in the air.  "Who farted?"
she asked, breaking the silence.  The clarivoyant looked around nervously and
said, "It was your dead uncle Charles.  He always had gastrointestinal
problems."  /Wow.../ Jan thought.  /She knows things about Uncle Charlie that
no one else ever did./

                                  * * * * *

     "So this is what it feels like to be a harbinger of death," Private
Murphy said to Major Willis as they loaded the nuclear warheads onto the B-2.
"Don't be so poetic," Major Willis replied, wiping the drool from his chin
with a handkerchief.  "We're just sending them a message."

                                  * * * * *

     Popping pills and taking an occasional swig from the Jack Daniels hidden
in a Sonic styrofoam cup, the teenager tried to walk a straight line through
the partying throngs of people who littered the sidewalks that recorded every
anonymous step with minute depressions.  The ground was dissolving as time
sped up, and he knew that he had to get his body in sync with the earth or he,
too, would disappear.

                                  * * * * *

 BROADCASTER DAN:  And now, as our broadcast comes to a close, I'd like to
                   take this opportunity to speak in tongues.  It's a talent
                   I've long kept hidden, but I think it's time to show that
                   once again, our news corporation is more divine than any of
                   the others, _The 700 Club_ included.  It's almost musical,
                   in a way, and I hope you like it.

 BROADCASTER TOM:  Last chance for a slow dance, people.

BROADCASTER PETE:  Where's my dog?

--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--

State  of  unBeing  is  copyrighted (c) 1998 by Kilgore  Trout  and Apocalypse
Culture Publications.   All rights are reserved to cover,  format, editorials,
and all incidental material.   All individual items are copyrighted (c) 1998
by the individual author, unless  otherwise stated.  This file may be
disseminated without restriction for  nonprofit purposes so long as it is
preserved complete and  unmodified.   Quotes and  ideas not  already in  the
public domain may be freely used  so  long  as  due recognition is provided.
State  of  unBeing is available at the following places:

             ftp to ftp.io.com   /pub/SoB
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Submissions may also be sent to Kilgore Trout at <kilgoret@geocities.com>.
The SoB distribution list may also be joined by sending email to Kilgore
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