dukeofuke

TELEREVELATIONS

Dear reader- already I sense your gratitude, and rightly so. Truly fortune has been kind to lead you to this tome where so much has already been revealed to you- and were the revelations to halt here this book would already warrant a spot amongst the cannon of history’s greatest philosophical and scientific literature- and yet we have hardly begun!
L’avenir!

Now- rotate the tone knob of your television into the deepest end of the red spectrum, and eliminate all extemporaneous light from the screen by rotating the brightness control to it’s absolute darkest setting.
Only a few sparks should twinkle and shimmer upon your screen- scientist believe these sparks are the last remnants of the Big Bang, ancient photons from cosmic background radiation, which is truer for you and I than most others.
We have peered into the foggy and murky mists of the distant past, and now we shall completely remove the shackles of time and gaze into the future, revealed now with the Key of David within the telepathic static:

Amorphous forms lift from the darkness, glimpses of news flashes- Palestinians hurling bricks at Israeli tanks, Twin Towers collapsing, the subliminal snickers of the serpent-

Now, below us, we see the beach of Patmos Island, 90 A.D..
A bedraggled St. John stumbles and flops across the ivory white sands, chasing scurrying crabs. He trips and topples over his disheveled beard as the crabs scuttle away in tiny gails of chipmunk laughter.
He lifts himself up, eyes tear swollen with weariness, and scans the waterblurred skies.
-Why? Why?
Suddenly a second sun appears- the blinding omniscience of the CBS eye.
Saint John is transfixed, mannequin mesmerized. A baritone voice booms:
-An angel is arriving. Place the tablet he gives you upon your tongue- it will taste as sweet as honey but turn you belly bitter. It is a Television Guide.
Curious crabs watch a blubbery bubble bob and descend, from which a towering chubby Cherubim appears wearing strap on wings. As the angel’s enormous bare feet sink in the sand it hands a confused Saint John a dog-eared April issue of the Television Guide and disappears in a puff of smoke through a trap door.
Saint John places the magazine upon his tongue and it dissolves. Yum. Ouch.
Thermin squeals. The television tubes sputter and blow- waves of color blast through the screen in sudden 3-D- we are experiencing the psychedelic pod ride at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey- our televisions are full of stars-
Our goggled eyes slide into startled juxtaposition over Saint John’s- we shall now see what he sees:

Behold:
Earth lies tied to train tracks, kicking her pantaloons in yarbled yelps, the chugging thunder of a train approaching.
A honky tonk piano disgorges manic melodies.
The heavens lament, crying out:
“Who dares don their Batman boots to undo Pauline’s knots? Where are Homer’s heroes, the great saints and saviors of history? Woe, woe, woe- MLK JFK Lincoln and Lennon, all felled by thunderclaps, gone, to the harpcluttered clouds, all! Oh, woe! None remain to halt the train!”
The train clamors closer, the black fangs of it’s cattle pushers gored with blood. Ebony fumes of sulfur spume from it’s black metal pipes and black oil chugs through it’s pistons. Upon it’s mast the number 666 is etched in gold. It winds like a snake over the rattled tracks.
The sound of the roaring engines dissolve into the sound of a roaring crowd.

St. John now speaks, thusly:

Ladies and gentlemen we’re coming to you live from Megiddo Square Gardens where the tag-team wrestling match of Armageddon is about to begin! It’s a perfect day for it- Jerusalem appears to be completely surrounded by enemies, and there are wars and rumors of wars- a huge crowd has gathered- from here I can see Alf, Lassie, Sigmund and his sea monster, Howdy Doody and Captains Kirk Picard and Kangaroo- angels are hovering above, blasting bullhorns and dumping buckets of pestilence and Gatorade upon the throng- and now, yes- the four horsemen have arrived- ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS- leaping through flaming hoops- and now, I think- yes, yes- Satan, the smack down serpent himself, has entered the ring! He’s just how you picture him, folks: apple red, colored after the most evil of all fruit (Author’s Note: I disagree), he’s horned, sports a jet-black ghoutee- he’s wearing a black plastic Dracula cape and brandishing a plastic pitchfork- he’s autographing Def Lepperd albums and Playboy magazines with a pen dipped in the blood of the damned- the rich are applauding wildly from their front row skull piles, I can see their jewelry wiggle on their chubby clapping hands-
Allow me to quote myself here, folks- “And I looked and beheld a white cloud and upon the cloud one sat like unto the Son of Man, having on his head a golden crown and in his hand a sharp sickle” - Revelations 15: 14. Well it’s happening right now, folks! Here comes the Davidic King, David King! The poor meekly applaud- He’s arrived on a cloud of glory alright- oh, wait- that’s a fog machine- he’s riding a golden Schwinn bicycle, held aloft by two weather balloons- he seems to be having a little difficulty- he’s trying to steer with one hand while chugging a vanilla latte with the other- Wagner music is blasting from the boom box shoved in his bike basket- he’s wearing a cardboard Burger King crown and has a plastic imitation lightsaber sheathed in one of his belt buckles- he lands the bike in the ring and dismounts- he locks his bike to the ring rope and lights a cigarette- the referee enters and motions for them to join him center ring-
Referee: Alright boys- I want a clean fight, Queensbury rules- no Stooge stunts- I see any two-fingered nose wrenching, bilevel body bops or windmill noggin knocks it’s over! Got it? Good!
There’s the bell….
Satan’s bounding about the ring, bellowing blasphemies- David sits in his corner, smoking, doodling in a red notebook- Satan’s bouncing towards him and- OH! He’s whacked Dave on the head with his pitchfork! David appears more miffed than maimed- he stands angrily, hurling his notebook down- he’s unsheathed his saber- dear lord! Satan’s bounding away, shrieking and flailing his arms like a little girl- apparently he has badly bent his pitchfork- he’s- yes, Satan is tagging his partner…
Satan’s partner is entering the ring- dear lord! It’s a four hundred foot tall behemoth- it has enormous chicken legs, the body of a giant squid and two bat wings the size of fighter jets- what appears to be cat laxatives are spewing from the creature’s blow hole- it has nine towering giraffe necks upon which nine human heads bob and hiss, each wearing plastic tiaras inscribed with their names- from left to right they read: Bobby, Peter, Greg, Mike, Alice, Carol, Marcia, Jan and Cindy, the youngest one in curls- yes folks, I believe this is it- the very creature described in the book of Revelations- the Brady Beast!
Talk about your Davids vs. Goliaths- this doesn’t look good- David is outweighed by a good metric ton-
Beast: Advocatus diaboli de frundis, nemine contradicente!
(“The Devil’s advocate from the depths, without opposition!”)
David: Laus lares et penates!
(“Praise be to household gods!”)
Beast: Quem Deus vult perdere prius dementat! Satis verborum!
(“Those whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad. Enough words- no more need be said!”)
David wiggles his light saber at the Beast- the Beast tromps and guffaws, and- OH! David has been blown backwards by a nefarious blast of bubblegum music! ‘Sunshine Day’, I believe… David tumbles, toppled like a leaf- his sword appears to have popped out of it’s handle- a tough break, folks- I can assure you, from personal experience- once that sword part pops out it’s nearly impossible to get it back into the handle- the Beast is stomping towards David- David is digging around in his pants, a bizarre recourse- however, he is a notorious masturbator, folks- wait, wait- he- he has pulled a kazoo, a golden kazoo, from his pants- the cyclopean claw of the Beast is lowering over him- I should mention here that according to the laws of Quantum mechanics there is a remote possibility that the claw will pass directly through him- hold on- a kazoo quack has rented the heavens!
Oh my God! Out of nowhere an enormous flung halibut has struck the heads of Marcia Carol and Alice! The Beast wobbles back, flapping it’s batwings, trying to balance on a single chicken leg- it teeters, it totters- it topples backwards, destroying the cardboard skyline of a mock prop Tokyo- where on Earth did that halibut come from? Wait- can you hear it? No, not the halibut! (Editor’s note: It is a well documented fact that deceased halibuts are incapable of producing any sound, whatsoever.) No- that! What- what is that- thunder? Oh my God! No it isn’t!
Ladies and Gentlemen- an monstrous metallic golem has entered the ring- it’s enormous armored chest bears the crest of a barbwire-tangled heart- above it’s head module a huge neon halo hovers like a hula hoop- Jesus Christ! No- literally! Jesus Christ himself is sitting in the head module, manning the controls- is this- yes it is!
Ladies and gentlemen- the Mech Messiah has entered the ring!
The Beast is struggling to it’s claws, trying not to expose the zipper along it’s back to the camera crews- it’s- yes, it’s regained it’s footing and now it’s bounding towards the center ring….
Jesus seems to be hesitating against the ropes- he’s maneuvering his metallic arms outwards, leaving his chest completely vulnerable- it appears- yes- Jesus is attempting to hug the Beast! What a bold unorthodox move!
The Beast appears confused- it wavers- OHMIGOD! The Beast has headbutted Jesus! With Alice’s head! The Beast is demonstrating a rather cavalier disregard for the Queensbury rules, I’d say-
Jesus stumbles, stunned- sparks spew from his head module- he steadies himself and- holy cow! Jesus has turned the other cheek!
The Beast counters with three swift left jabs and a right undercut- ow!
Jesus seems dazed- fuel is flowing from his ruptured fuel packs- the metallic joints of his mech suit are screeching, apparently knocked out of alignment- why has God forsaken him? He stumbles forward like a wounded bull and- oh holy shit- he’s turning his other cheek again…
OW! The Beast has just landed one of the most ferocious right hooks ever executed in the annuls of boxing-
Jesus is knocked backwards- he’s leaning against the ropes- the weight of his eighteen-ton mech is stretching the ropes to their very limits- the ropes are fraying, snapping like rubberbands- Jesus lifts and steadies himself- oh shit, he’s turning his other cheek again-
The Beast is applying pressure on Christ’s funny bone and pounding the sensitive glands below his ears and solar plexus, magnificently untinged by the promptings of conscience or remorse- folks, this battle is reminiscent of the Kilkenny cat fight, who, as you fans of Irish folklore may recall, fought with such vehemence and viciousness that only their tails remained-
Ladies and Gentlemen- it appears that Jesus Christ has died! A nation mourns!
Oh, what loaves he halved! Those fortunate enough to catch his Mount Olive act were transported with delight as he produced bon bons, bric a brac and tiny toys from borrowed hats- saving his piece de resurrection (a trick unparalleled in the annuls of conjuring) for his final act-
Hold on- wait- it looks like- yes! Jesus has resurrected himself! Jesus is alive again, again! And Caucasian!
The Beast continues to thwap him vehemently- this is looking pretty bad, folks- JC hobbles limps and shambles- he falters, tottering and staggering- if you only see your own footprints in the sand it’s because he’s over here getting his ass kicked- the Beast unleashes a corno breton throw, a judo-like Cornish wrestling maneuver- followed by a rapid series of gen seiryu strikes- a type of karate that stresses tumbling and somersaults- Jesus is being cruelly whacked thwacked thumped smacked stomped and slapped- he writhes and winces- the Mech suit is folding forward, it’s transformers bursting like piñatas- electricity streaks like blue lightning across the screeching metal- sparks cascade and tumble from the Mech Messiah’s badly joggled head module, threatening to ignite the fuel spurting from it’s dented jet packs-
Ominous events are unfolding by the ringside- an attractive woman in a polkadot dress is guiding a bewildered hypnotised Palestinian towards the rope- he's groping for a gun, while a high-level CIA assassin is leveling his sniper rifle at the messiah directly in front and slightly below the Messiah from a sewage drain at the foot of the grassy knoll.
It looks like David’s up again- he appears groggy- a look of horror crosses his face as he surveys the carnage before him- he staggers to the ringside and grabs a bucket of water- he hurls it at the Mech Messiah, whose fuselage has burst into flames- but no, it misses- the water sails right over Jesus and splashes across the Beast’s belly, who is now ferverently stomping Jesus’ groin….
Well, that looks like it, folks. Evil has triumphed.
The Beast turns and fixes it’s eyes upon the Throne of David, which God has sanctified for all eternity. Roaring boasts the Beast tromps up the marble stairs to the holiest of chairs- with a flatulent flop the Beast sits upon the throne, claiming victory.
Beast: Vae victis! Sic transit gloria mundi!
(“Woe to the vanquished! Thus passes away the glory of this world!”)
Do I smell bacon? Wait- what’s happening? The Beast seems perturbed- steam is ring from the Beast’s wetted belly- it leaps up, slapping its smoking scales with its bat wings- Geeze- that must have been holy water! Holy smokes! The Beast appears to be melting!
Beast: Memento mori, parvenu! Non omnis moriar! Resurgam!
(“Remember that you must die, person of low origin that has suddenly risen to great position! I shall not wholly die! I shall rise again!”)
Wow- what a stunning upset- the Beast has dissolved into an angrily muttering puddle!
David places the cardboard crown upon his head and ascends the stairs to his throne, where he plops with a sigh.
As you can hear the crowd has gone bonkers- David yanks the handle on the throne’s side and a foot rest pops out-
David rests his badly battered Beatle boots upon it- in the crowd the wretched world leaders are trying to sneak away- David lights a cigarette-
Ladies and gentlemen- I’m pleased to present the new Messiah- King David!
"The root of David hath prevailed" - Rev. 5:5

King David: Somebody bring me a martini! Where’s my Savior Squad?
A battalion of metallic monsters holding stun guns march up in clomps and halt before him, saluting.
King David: Bring me the world leaders. We have work to do.

"And they anointed David King over Israel." 2 SAMUEL 5:3.

Now, dear reader, all has been revealed to you- from Alpha to Omega, Flintstone to Jetson, Beginning to End.
All we have to do now is make our way through the muddle in the middle.

BANANAMANIFESTO


April breezes rock the pink streamers dangling from the budding quad trees. All the local freaks have gathered to witness the bananaman wedding.
I had put posters everywhere- "Come see the bananaman wedding! (Bring a toaster!) Then come to see the horrible divorce!(Bring a lawyer!)"

"Achtung! Backroom bards, bughouse Hamlets, tosspots, coxicombs, and raggle-taggle hootchie-kootchie girls- cubist contortionists and ocarina soloists! Lend me your ears!
Are you depressed? Unimpressed by the stress-evoked repression of the souless jet set? Would you like more hop in your hobble, more pep in your step, more POW in your pickle and more pluck in your fiddle? Howzabout more nirvana for your nickle? Then step right up!
Though pumpkin pelted we shall wobble like bobtailed pullets through the vaccitudes of fortune's cantrip to the rickety hen-roost of our most halcyonic of days!

Here is how:

The energy that orchestrates the universe radiates omnidirectionally- the life-giving winds of the eleven Rundras are illuminated upon it's rays, held aloft by Vayu's omniscient transmissions- and we merely need to catch a single one of it's trillion waves to channel surf to immutable bliss! So what is the problem?
The problem is that we mere mortals are warped looms- we are simple receiving antennas. Whereas heaven radiates willy-nilly we are highly directional and, by contrast, profoundly limited. Overwhelmed by the cacophony of clamoring frequencies we muffle the muses with buffers and filters. We suffer from image distortion, improper illumination, bounces and blooming, picture ghosts and barber-polling. Our deflection yokes sizzle upon the gangloin of lightnings bursting from our high voltage anode connectors. The commercialism of death has denied us the x-ray protection circuits and the sand-castle generators we so urgently need!

Woe woe woe!

Boo hoo hoo!

What are we to ever do???

I have risen from briny depths, resurrected as the beatified Bananaman to reveal the burlesque Bishop's egg of the truly true truth to you!

Pythagoras' mathematico-metaphysical musings were correct- the dodecahedron does indeed embody the structure of the universe! But, alas! He could not yet envision the device which could translate that structure into a comprehendible form!
Heraclitus was correct- all is in a state of flux! But he could not forsee the device which would eventually orchestrate the amorphous fluxuations!
Before 1947 philosophy was damned to maddening bafflement, having been denied the crucial puzzle piece to all their queeries. By the cruel vagaries of fate they had been condemned to live in the dark ages before the enlightening glow of God manifest itself upon our television screens.
The cynistic tyranny of Diogenes the dogman has finally been toppled! The pedantry of scolasticism has been eviscerated- not by Occam's razor, but by Gilligan's Island! The war between empiricism and rationalism is over- Schopenhauer and Hegel can cease their bickerings, for Apollo and Dionysius have finally merged! The babel of philosophy, cosmology, psychology, theology, and optometry can finally be reduced to one simple goal:
We must keep our receivers functioning properly to be opened wide to transcendence.
The most practical and most (technically) efficient way for us to achieve this tremendous magnification is to implement the preventative and corrective maintenance procedures (ashtangika-marga) which will lead us to that final condition of perfect perception. It is then, when we amplify and radiate the divine directly, unhindered by interference, that we enter a state of shunyata- the realization that all things, including God and Man, are actually devoid of individual characteristics- and that, although discrete color blocks are indicated, all colors blend into one.
This condition of being is sometimes referred to as the 3.58 MHz color burst.
In order to this you will need the key of David to unlock God from his box. Heaven is upon the earth- it's in your goddmaned living rooms! Listen- for I shall instruct all with ears to hear and tongues to tab! I will show you how to watch TV!"

MY DEATH IN THE BRINY DEEP



“David is back and already I’m wondering if it wasn’t worth 400 dollars a month not to hear his inane attempts at music and his ten-year-old drawings he did last week.”

Clam shells and crabs craunched and cracked beneath the steel toed tromp of my dew damp jungle boots. I stormed across the winter misted beach of Bainbridge Bay huffing my mother’s mentholated Trues, clutching the neck of my sister’s guitar, high off a stolen hit from my stepfather’s bong, mashing mollusks to mincemeat.
A ferry boat’s mournful horn haunts the mist.
Shrooo. Clapshhhh. Hissssss.
A surreal landscape of barnacles revealed in queer clusters with each wave’s hissed retreat.
This was the end, dear reader, time for my last toppled T-Rex bow, but do not weep for me. All must pass away- this moment now now the past. These words and this page will fade away, swallowed by our swollen sun, and even our television transmissions will die when time and space are dragged shrieking into an infinitesimally small point again everything ends, everything.
Who would miss me? No one. I felt weary of the weight.
The silvery dithyramb of my heartbeat faltered, swooning from malaise, slowing to the languid warbling of a funeral drum. I set forth with grim determination to surrender, to give up the ghost and regurgitate the poltergeist. I screwed my courage to the sticking place, testing my mettle against my myrtles, and across the ferryboat banister I leapt and yelping downwards I toppled, tumbling stunned into the tumultuous foam of the Puget Sound, BLOOSH.
For a moment I struggle like a bee stuck in honey, thrashing upon the surface.
What have I done? Oh no no no…
I sputter saltwater, glancing one last time at the unreachable beach, before the waters tug my head down.
By Mother Cary’s chickens what a stormy pickle! Where was I?
In salted dark waters, alone.
You may shake your empty noddles now, jolly toppers, and not believe what I tell you here anymore than a tale told by a tub, but it is no jest. By my troth I was in a sad fright, boo hoo hoo, lost forever- I sink, I am drowned, now I am like your tumblers, my feet standing higher than my head, bellyup to heaven and bottom down to hell, swallowed like a palmfull of pills, eighteen pailfulls of Poseidon’s tart tea down my gullet. I am custom-shrunk, conflabberated, groping for trouts.
Blub.
Blooberoo.
Belay, here make fast below- as bitter as buttermilk for the nonce, far below the flusterblusters of Aeolus.
I have thrown all the venerable Gods and Goddesses into a fit of laughter like any microcosm of flies. Joltheaded loblollies, ballocky devils, despite magics your brush plucked from the ethers, be you king or street sweeper, all dance with the grim reaper. To be plucked out of salt water at birth, snatched out again at two, only to be tossed in again at Nineteen- this triggers a slobbery guffaw- what little air in my lungs that remained is released in a trillion giggled bubbles, rainbow marbles lifting through shimmering light in boggreen mist, shining like snail trails. Down down drowned through starfish, crayfish and catfish.
A twinkling cloud of moondust lifts in slow motion as I hit the bottom. I am surrounded by the bones of pirates and parrots, rusted treasure chests and monstrous mollusks emerging from the murky mists.
Bungled botched balloon boy popped, sopped, I am a peachfleshed teabag turning Earl Gray, dissolved, nothing to read in my leaves but sad misfortune. Oh father, take this tea cup away from me- I have supped on sorrows and drowned in tears. Lugubrious melodies of marine melancholy lift from my organs.
Lo! Mother! Mourn! Your throwaway son is done, sunk in the soup!
The Key of David is lost in Davy Jones’ locker!
There is nothing in this wicked world worth clinging to. For one last moment I linger. I could have stayed, could have fought, but no, cowardly I sunk, the chicken of the sea.
I see her face again- the ghoul gal of the lake. I see now what Dave saw in her. She is seductive, as mysterious and cold as the moon. The tides rise in their longing for her. She recognizes me, from when I was two. She has pined for me for all those years. She almost had me, and now at last I have returned to her. Her tears of joy salt the sea.
I have become a sour wine sponge.
Eli! Eli! Lama sabachthani?
One last word burbled:
EPIHPHATHA!
(“OPEN WIDE!”)
They shall gather at my grave and weep in shame. The heavens too shall weep, drenching the graveyard in tears, lamenting my desecration and destruction, and the skies will rumble angrily about how I died like an untouched child, pale cold and neglected.
Suddenly a fog horn startled me from my dark dream, and a wave of panic hit me: Holy shit- how many days had I spent on the ferry boat, dreaming of death? How long had I hovered between life and death, neither living or dieing, just a ghost haunting my clothes? I suddenly knew I would have to truly choose between life and death- to really leap or really live. To be or not to be…
Why live?
My first impulse was art- there were too many things left for me to create- for a moment I thought I should make a list and send it to somebody else to do- the movie ideas, the song ideas, the concepts for paintings- but who to send it to, and would they execute the ideas well? No, if I toppled the songs and paintings toppled with me. And there were other things to live for as well- things that had been obscured by the gray fog of my dour inner monologues- the smell of rain on summer streets, the sound of cicada song, the taste of strawberries, the touch of cool grass on weary feet-
Stepfather- I shall have my vengeance upon you, meted out with quill scribblings. In prose I shall desecrate thee, thrice for every once thou hast desecrated me. By Jupiter these words shall fly through the air like biscuit baskets! In this loveless desert I shall gird my loins for battle, festooning my black ninja pajamas with x-ray nightvision goggles, bandoleers of silver bullets, and a backpack stuffed with subsonic jellybombs, electro disruptive grenades, passports, fishhooks, shark repellent, and amphetamine salts. I will genuflect in the direction of Venus, scatter a box of chocolates as an offering to Aphrodite, and bury a picture of my mother in the sand. I will cling to hope, and I will strive for excellence- I will no longer just survive, but truly live. No more creeping from paycheck to paycheck in polyester- I will live as though each day were the last, aware of my mortality- I shall live out my absurd dreams and squeeze every drop of juice from the day- I will live live live like so few have lived before- I will return and reclaim my home town, no longer trompled, no longer exiled, but exultant.
And I will rewrite the Bible. It will be called ‘OPEN WIDE’, and it will have more laughs and action then the last one, with scratch-n-sniff pages and pop-up pictures, and it will roll across the moraines of the heartland onto the hearths of every home, and all will don their wielding spex, tongue their tabs and tune in to their tubes. Our race will be saved, reborn.

STRANDED ON THE LUNAR NIPPLE

Strange dreams- Dave and I are sitting on thrones in Carle Park- the trees are full of flowers- suddenly John appears and declares Dave the Antichrist and me the New Messiah- he wraps Dave in black streamers, I in white…
“I miss you John.” I say, a wave of sadness choking me.
A fly was tickling my nose.
I swatted at it, slapping my own face, then curled up again, huddling from the ice cold air beneath a small blanket of blue fur.
Had I skinned the cookie monster for his pelt? Dreams flooded back in; multicolored bears dancing in a junk yard. Deadhead imagery- why? What were these moronic hippy visions doing, dancing in my head of all heads?
Nrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrryyyyyyrrrrrrrr-
High buzzing sound. Maybe bats or distant jets.
Tiny legs tickle my nose again; DAMMIT!
I bolt up- the fly buzzes away.
Where was I? A small dark room, sleeping on a cold floor. Nothing in the room except my boombox and a small plastic bag, bulging.
Through a small window I could see the sky outside radiating a strange orange glow. Had the war already happened?
Where was I and what on Earth had happened to the sky?
Then it dawned on me, the sickening revelation-
Oh fuck. Oh no. I’d done it.
I’d run off to join the Hare Krsnas.
How the fuck had I ended up here?
A mad scramble for information- acid was still flowing through me, the tail end of some monstrous trip- it had transformed my veins into electrical circuitry but most of the main tubes had blown- sparks, smoke, bzzzzts and zzzzzzts, blue lightning leaping from wrecked transistors, eviscerated wires twitching and writhing like agonized snakes vomiting sparks- flipping through channels, trying to find pertinent information- vague images lifting through static, like God TV: me on a bike, riding through fog, a cardboard crown upon my head, flinging hamburgers like grenades. Had that happened? No. Impossible. Retards and moon monsters spilling from atop a golden divan, giggling and howling. Fuzzy clips of bad madness interspersed with blasts of static where entire legions of brain cells had been vaporized. Towering squids. A minion of orange oompah loompahs running around some Hindu Oz. Gopi girls seducing me on an enormous lotus leaf. Static. Useless garbage.
Clues, clues. Search the room.
There- beneath the windowsill- graffiti.

I crawled on all fours to the orange glowing window and inspected the graffiti beneath it. Someone had scrawled the words ‘MOON BASE ONE’ upon the wall in purple marker. Beneath it, in pink marker, was what appeared to be either a breast or a crude representation of the moon, with an arrow pointing to a nipple lifting from a crater, the words ‘YOU ARE HERE’ scribbled beside it.
Who the fuck had written THAT? What the hell did it mean? Apparently I was stranded on some lunar moon nipple. Oh, how perfectly reasonable.
Then I glanced out at the strangely orange sky- panic flashes- what if it’s true. No. This is not the moon. This is the Krishna temple on Lunt Avenue in Evanston Illinois. How did I know that? Who said that?
That didn’t explain why I was in Evanston or the moon- I needed clues, clues-
Aha! Clues! There- poking up like a turtle head from the Toys ‘R Us bag- my red notebook!

I pulled the notebook out of the slippy bag- it’s wire spiral made a comic sound as I pulled it out: BBLLLBBLLLOOOOP.
A cluster of marijuana buds toppled out of the notebook’s spiral and toppled onto the floor.
“Oh”, I thought in a little old lady’s voice, “I’ll definitely have to write a thank-you letter to the Meade people. They’ve finally made a notebook that produces it’s own marijuana.”
I peered into the dark bag- purple and pink markers buried in marijuana buds, like Keith Richard’s Easter basket.
I certainly knew how to pack.

I flipped open the notebook, leafing through page after page of sloppy doodles: Water towers, smiling squids, strange combinations of both.
What the hell was this all about? Had it happened- had I finally snipped the slim string that held me to the ground? No- these drawings would make sense to me then. Or I wouldn’t worry if they didn’t. No. I assured myself: You’re stark-raving sane.
Then I wondered if the truly sane would have ever uttered that sentence to themselves. Bad place to go. Flip.
I flipped further back into the notebook-
Oh, this is reassuring. Words, scrawled in purple marker in what appeared to be relatively coherent English.

THURSDAY MARCH 12
Just dosed on dancing bear. Nothing else available.
Oh holy shit. No no no. Why the fuck had I dosed on fucking BEAR? Bad dumb shit happens on Bear! Like my current situation, for example. With great apprehension I read on:
KRSNAS = FREE ROOM AND BORED
MEDITATE YOUR MIND CLEAN
SO GOD CAN SHINE THROUGH THE SCREEN
BECOME TV!!!

Here, then, was the horrific Genesis of my predicament: The perfectly rational desire to transform myself into a human television. And as sparks and sulfur lifted from my charred hippocampus I realized I’d at least succeeded in transforming myself into a rather shitty used one.
I read on:
THE KRSNAS DON’T SEEM TO KNOW WHO I AM. ASSUMED THEY’D BE EXPECTING ME, THE FUTURE KING- WHAT A SPIRITUAL JACKPOT FOR THEM! THINK! OF ALL THE TEMPLES THEIRS WAS SELECTED FOR THE WORLD REDEEMER’S TRAINING CAMP! THAT SHOULD SELL A FEW BEGONIAS!
STEP ONE: LEARN HINDU KUNG-FU, LEVITATION, THE ONE-HAND CLAP, ETC.
STEP TWO: ARRIVE IN JERUSALEM ON CLOUD OF GLORY.
WILL NEED: MOPED, FOG MACHINE, CROWN.
Q: DO I HAVE TO SUPPLY MY OWN CROWN? I’LL GET ONE FROM THE BURGER KING. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA OH MAN I’M DROOLING OH SHIT I BROKE MY BRAIN IT’S COMPLETELY FUCKED I’M RETARDED! RETARDED! I’VE MADE MYSELF A RETARD DRUGS ARE BAD CAN A RETARD BE A WORLD REDEEMER? SURE AND WHYNOT FACILITATES MEDITATION, NO THOUGHTS INTRUDE. AN EMPTY VESSEL OF THE DIVINE GOD WILL DANGLE ME FROM CELESTIAL STRINGS, JABBING THE NERVE CLUSTER OF MY JAW WHEN HE WANTS MY DROOLING BONG HOLE TO FLAP, HIS BARITONE VOICE BOOMING THROUGH ME VIA VENTRILOQUISM.

Suddenly the writing became slurred and jumpy:

LIKE AN ADVENTURER LEAVING A PORT I AM NOW IN THEIR VAN. NOW THE ADVENTURE BEGINS. URBANA SLIPS AWAY TO THE SOUTH, THE SAFETY OF HOME RECEDES, I AM IN UNCHARTED TERRITORY LIKE A FISHERMAN WHO HAS SNAGGED A WHALE, DRAGGED FAR AWAY THROUGH DARK WATERS. THEY SING ‘HARE KRISHNA’ OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AHHH, MY OBEDIENT LITTLE ORANGE ROBED OOMPAH LOOMPAHS, DO YOU REALIZE YOU ARE CARRYING THE MESSIAH UPON A METAL DIVAN TOWARDS HIS DESTINY? TAKE ME TO YOUR TEMPLE WHERE I WILL LAY ON SILK PILLOWS WHILE YOUR LOVELY GOPI GIRLS FEED ME GRAPES AS I GIRD MY LOINS FOR THE APOCALYPTIC BATTLE AHEAD. OUTSIDE FLAT BLUE FIELDS ROLL BY IN NIGHT’S BLUE LIGHT- LIKE ROLLING ACROSS THE SURFACE OF THE MOON. A WATER TOWER DRIFTS PAST. IT LOOKS UGLY. MUST PAINT THEM PLAYFULLY, MY FIRST DECREE AS KING:

This sentence was followed by thirteen pages of strange pink and purple doodles: water towers, squids, naked gopi girls, breasts, moons, and every combination of these elements possible.



THE BLUE PEARL

Superman glides with crocodile stealth through the sumping bog of monkey piss and rotting leaves that lap the guano-caked roots of my primordial brainstems. It creeps and leaps from bush to kiosk across the bovine-cluttered quad of my hippocampus, it’s once dewy eyes now cobra cold.
I proudly tromped over pedal-confettied cobble in my Superhero boots. Helicopter wings fluttered through baby bugs and buds. The setting sun painted the sky a majestic magenta. Yet something strange was occurring- the words “ARE YOU READY?” flashed when I shut my eyes- arrows appeared, pointing back home like compass needles drawn towards the northstar of my mattress. I became aware that my next mission objective from the cosmos would arrive not in the donnybrook fair of this transient world’s fleeting shadows but rather from the eternity within. I turned around and began my tromp back home. A vague trepidation filled me- I was frightened. Why?
Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.
I enter the house and thump up the stairs to my dark room, shutting the door behind me. Here, in the blue gloom of my room- here is where I had to go. I placed my record needle on the last track of Revolver-“Tomorrow Never Knows” Lennon’s voice lifted from the speakers like a ghost howling into a tin cup.
“Turn off your mind relax and float downstream…”
I flopped down on the mattress and closed my eyes. The Hindu Dead Man Position.
YABBA DABBA DOO… YABBA DABBA DOO….
Staring into pure darkness. The Hanna Barbara heavens were blocked by a beast- I could not defeat it. Twas then that my television guide broke through the broody gloom, bellowing “I am within you- I am the man of steel! I can leap over this ethereal ghost with a single dose. Behold- the lollipop of life- you’re hanging on it’s edge, dazed and dizzied by it’s spins! Focus on the center! The fun’s inside! Open wide! The truth is within!“
A luminescent lollipop emerges from the darkness, spinning candy white and candy red, spinning high into bliss, spinning low into horror. I am pulled from the good bad muddle to the manna of the middle. I am fixed on the center.
And it begins- light cracks the darkness. Like Escher’s black and white frogs, interlocked, viewed from satellite. This is the universe, this interplay, scattered when I observe it, like breath- in revealed, out scattered, struggling to surrender to it, to let go of babbling thought-The light before me is tearing through the darkness. I am hesitating like a man standing on a diving board a trillion miles above the world. Let go.
UP UP AND AWAY!
Surrender.
All life is the silence between the tick and tock of God's heavenheavy clockhand.
Tick.
Drift and dissolve. Twosday to weddinsday's quick silver, turning lead to gold. Fall's golden glory bowing to winter's white slumber. All gold is formed in supernovas, we wear dead stars as trinkets. One day our sun too will swallow the sky and die, reborn as some blasé Martian’s pocketwatch. All this to ash. The heavens too will crash, grand screaming galaxies colliding, collapsing, dragging shrieking space and time with them to the vanishing point.
Tock.
Silence.
Upfloating.
Up up floating up from the worldpull. Through thickets and branches in ecliptical orbits about the midnight chimes. The day's weight drops off with goldendust taps of the phoenix deathbone lifewand at the periously hoho night height towards lunarlight sunbright. Mrs. Bloom's yes yes. The illusion of the flesh mirage dissolves like a goodbad dream. Oh heavens. Calling all downs. All water evolving into light. So helplessly heavenly. There- see the tree: rooted in abyssal waters, rising to the polestar around which all revolves. Eat the sweet tree treats. No more of Eve's sourgreens, ripe red. Taste these instead. Ambrosia, sunbright juice, an ocean of light. Home. Ohm. Then...
Rumbling. Smoke lifts from the launch rockets. Now the mantra itself dissolves, swallowed by the darkness. It sounds like a T-rex moan, echoing away, and time slows like grinding bone. The blubbery clamor of mammoth moss-caked chains clanging together underwater.
It is not dying it is not dying…
Cables and support beams topple away into nothing nothing nothing and now light unfolds again, like the pedals of a neon magnolia, unfolding brighter and brighter now brighter than sunlight …
That you may see the meaning of within…
my God like staring at the sun without going blind and brighter yet still static erupts through the speakers as they blow berserk forgetting music toppling back to their primal electric roots waves of roaring feedback…
It is shining it is shining…
and this is it the projector bulb before which the celluloid frames of static reality flutter
this is the real reality unmoving unchanging the light seen by the dying
the light from which we have all sprung and to which we all return
ourselves as the original one before our temporary parade through this passing play , this sweetly sad symphony strummed on superstrings…
bright bright bright holy shit it’s building
my eyelids flutter holy shit shit shit
and suddenly: Houston we have liftoff!
ZAAAAAAAAMMMMMMM!
A shock of shimmering blue jolts me BLAM the world falls away in rolling wreckage, burning and toppling through the stratosphere- ZAP!- a diamond bullet shatters me, like shoving an electrical cable into my frontal lobe holy FUCK! HOLY FUCK!
ZERANALLABUDDHAHABRAHMAKERANAHURAMAZDAHRIMANODINJJORTHOVAH-
Electric blue light unfolds, Shiva’s lotus flower blooms, shimmering like heaven like heaven heaven heaven- holy holy sparkling blue flooding me with waves of love, joy, a monsoon of mirth-all life is a question, here is the answer.

I shot up, shaking. What the hell was THAT?
Had I stared directly into the eye of God?
I closed my eyes to see it again but it was too late- the light was obstructed by the silhouettes of frantic thoughts surrounding the scene like policemen and reporters.

I lit a cigarette. I felt like I’d just fucked the universe.

Open Wide
Pt. 3

GHOST RADIO


John left and I was alone in the house.
I decided to see what was on t.v.
The television spummered and flashed to life.
The Daily News- US hunger reaches epidemic proportions according to Harvard research. Reagan cuts food stamps welfare job training and social services, allocates $14 billion for new Air Force fighter planes, increases military spending 13%- up to 29 cents for each Federal dollar spent- blasts Syrian targets, exceeding War Power acts, alters justifications for shootings. US ambassador says Reagan ‘created’ rightist Salvadorian leader Roberto D’Aubuisson by concealing evidence linking him to ‘Death Squads’.
The acid was really kicking in now- the news was coming off like the book of Revelations-
Very rarely does God reveal his absurd humor to humans- he doesn't want to give the game away too easily, to reveal how farciful this whole charade actually is. You may occasionally catch a glimpse- some three-legged dog wobbling by, some doofus sporting an absurd mullet, maybe a couple of your crunch berries fusing into one bizarre super-berry- but the most extraordinary thing was that his cosmic shinnanigans were on display every night, to millions of viewers, revealed for all with eyes to see:
Open on: Hawaiian shore line. Kettle drums thunder, horns erupt.
A fish-eye lense is swallowed by a jet engine. Hula dancers spasm. And then the camera does an impossible zoom- seemingly from miles away, directly into the stern face of Jack Lord, eyes wincing with cool rage. And there it is- dear lord! LOOK AT THAT HAIR! It defies gravity- absorbs light- an ebony crown of anti-matter, an aquanetted black hole- God's defiant spit at the limits of our perception. And, just in case we walking monkeys were too dim to catch it, he named the motherfucker LORD.
Suddenly thunderous knocks shook the door.
BOOM BOOM.
No one was answering. I recalled that the hippies were gone, following the Dead in their wretched van for the weekend.
BOOM BOOM.
I noticed with a bit of alarm that the banging was so forceful that it was causing the windowsill to rattle. It occurred to me that if all were one it was another manifestation of myself knocking. I lifted myself from the couch and went to the front door to let myself in.
Outside, in the frozen darkness, was an enormous black man, fully a foot taller than me, wearing a torn yellow shirt, blue jeans with a large wet stain around the crotch, and a battered orange football helmet.
The chin guard of the helmet appeared broken, wagging like a dog’s tongue by a thin shred of plastic. The man’s eyes wobbling their sockets independently of one another like red marbles. His lower lip was bleeding profusely.
“Uhm, can… can I help you?” I asked.
He swayed in the freezing wind for a moment and then suddenly exploded.
“MORBADILLY! GOOBADILLY!”
My eyes winced from a sudden wave of rum fumes.
I stood stunned for a moment. Was this actually happening?
“I’m sorry… what?”
He snorted and shook his head like a bull. Drops of blood sprinkled the frozen porch.
“MORBADILLY! GOOBADILLY!” he reiterated.
I didn’t know if he was drunk, retarded, or an exciting combination of both.
“ I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE SAYING!” I said very loudly and slowly.
Suddenly he began bouncing back and forth as if dodging quarterbacks that I could not see. He shook his head and snorted.
“IWANNAFINE RAY! RAY!” he bellowed.
“Ohhhh! Raaaaaaaay! Ray!” I repeated, relieved to make out a word.
“RAY IS NOT HOME! HE SHOULD BE BACK TOMORROW!”
This did not seem to register with him. He swayed in the cold, slowly shaking his head. I decided to clarify what I had said.
“RAY IS NOT HERE. NOOOOOOOOT HERE! HE WILL BE HERE TOMORROW BUT HE IS NOT HERE NOW. I’M SORRY! GOOD EVENING!”
As I smiled politely and began shutting the door he suddenly leapt at me, then leapt back again. My lungs forgot how to function, probably because my tentacles were trying to hide in them, and I nearly created a stain across my pants to match his.
“MOBBANNY POT!” he roared.
“I DO NOT HAVE ANY POT. I AM SORRY. ALL I HAVE IS A HOTDOG.”
He snorted and shook. He had splattered so much blood across the porch that it began to resemble a Jackson Pollock painting.
There was an awkward pause.
“WOULD YOU LIKE A HOTDOG?”
He made no reply.
“I WILL GO AND GET YOU A HOTDOG” I announced, lightly shutting the screen door. I turned and made my way towards the kitchen.
A thousand thoughts raced through my mind: Why the hell had I offered this monster my last hotdog? Maybe it’s a good deed. He’s probably some retard wandering around in the night scaring people out of their hotdogs, like a stray dog. But what the hell was the deal with that helmet?! Maybe… maybe he had suffered a head injury during a game and wandered off the field in a daze. But they don’t play football in January, do they? I had no idea. Christ- that means he’s been wandering around in a delirium since October! No- that can’t be- they’d never let him play in those piss-covered pants… no.
He knew Ray’s name- he said “pot”- maybe he was one of Ray’s customers…
I reached the fridge and opened it. With a twinge of sadness I realized this was as far away from that guy as I was going to get before I had to make my return journey. I pulled my hotdog pouch from the fridge and looked mournfully at my last wiener.
It was curled over, resting in a brown puddle of juice. I slipped it out but decided to put the pouch back in the fridge. Maybe I could survive on wiener juice.
I made my way back towards the door holding my cold flaccid hotdog. I felt like Theseus returning to the minotaur. I thought maybe this guy is a nark. The most clever nark in the history of law enforcement. No one would ever EVER suspect him of being a cop. Then I thought, maybe he’s a jock ghost, some awful athletic apparition, maybe that wasn’t his own blood, maybe he wanders through the night devouring all who detest sports. I hated sports. He and everyone else on Earth could tell that. My very existence drove jocks into a frenzy.
As I drew closer towards the front of the house I became aware of the fact that I might very well be living the last moments of my life.
What had I done with my time on Earth? What had I contributed? Dear Lord, if I survive this I vow to commit myself to making a positive change in the world. I will use the talents you have given me. Just please please don’t let this monster trample me to death.
When I rounded the corner my heart stopped. He was inside the house, bobbing around inside the small foyer. Underneath the harsh lightbulb hanging above him he looked even more grizzly.
Oh holy shit. There was no doubt about it now. I was going to die. Thanks a lot, God.
I wished that I had time to throw out my Playboy magazines. After I died my family and friends were going to loot through all my stuff and think I was a pervert. I realized that the fact that I was about to die waving a wiener at an enormous man in a football helmet wasn’t going to help defuse that notion.
“I guess he was really into porn and football players.”
I knew I’d be thrown out now, thrown out for letting this wild animal into the house. I had to subdue him with my hotdog before he went on a berserker rampage, jeopardizing the structural integrity of the house with his Herculean thrusts against the support beams.
“I HAVE BROUGHT YOU A HOTDOG” I announced, wiggling it at him. He looked perplexed, then grabbed it. I noticed his knuckles were bloody as well. He studied the hotdog for a moment, then popped the entire thing into his mouth.
“I HOPE YOU HAVE ENJOYED YOUR HOTDOG. NOW I MUST ASK YOU TO LEAVE. I HAVE TO GO TO BED.”
His red marbles fixed me in their sight as I opened the door for him to leave. I felt like a small mouse gazing into the eyes of a cobra. Suddenly he lunged at me. I yelped. He bounced back. I noticed he only had one shoe on.
He snorted blood and erupted with a gargled chuckle.
“Yes, his twisted football fetish is what did him in, mam. Sorry your son had to die but after all he was a sick pervert.”
And then he walked past me, stepping out into the frozen night.
I locked the door quickly, then ran through the house to lock the back door. My heart was pounding, BOOM BOOM BOOM, an echo of his thundering knocks. I nervously passed the curtainless windows, expecting the monster to be staring at me through them with his red eyeballs. When I finally reached the cozy cove of the living room something amazing was happening on television.
Jack Lord was apprehending a criminal on a rooftop, and although the world was full of wind his hair did not move.
I watched television until the preacher appeared and the porno for patriots announced sign off.
The screen erupted with static. Had I known what I know now I would have watched it. I didn’t know the static was the best thing on TV.
I switched the power off and watched the universe collapse into a single glowing dot.
It must have been around 1 am. The radiators hissed but in mechanical blangs and shudders they halted, plunging the dark house into silence. Through the windows the blue world was frozen still, like a photograph.
I picked up my guitar and began strumming, but quickly tired of the same old chords. I stopped and sighed, now as silent as the world around me.
It was there, in the silence, that strange things began happening.
Suddenly my muse struck like a sniper - from a point in the air roughly seven feet above the ground in the dining room a song crept, already completed. I merely had to grab my notebook and scribble it down.
It was a weird song- sung in the nasal scratchiness of an old Victrola recording, the singer seemed to know the song would be heard posthumously, ages after his death. He was tearing a hole through the fabric of time.

You’re tuned to Ghost Radio
Where time is tricked by songs
That linger like cicada shells
After their singers are long gone

Dial tones drone on ghost toll phones
Just dust bones in the end
When we die we die alone
And all are one again

The suit I mistook for myself
Has now been cast aside
Welcome to W. R. I. P.
Where the singers have all died

When I’m gone your mourning tears
Can soak my graveclothes wet
But I’m the actor that left the play
While you’re left crying on the set

You’re tuned to Ghost Radio
Home of the dead top ten
Where in the end all singers go
To sing their songs again

One last song from long gone John
One last song from long gone John

I sat, focused on empty air. Other than a faint tinny high hum all was silent. The transmission had ended.
I looked down at my red notebook. The song was unlike anything I’d ever written. No- I hadn’t written it. It came through a hole in the air. The words, scrawled in blue marker, were not my own. They dangled and shuffled across the blue lines like skeletons dancing in a ghoulyard to the creepy beats of a ribcage xylophone. Wind whispered and moaned through the window cracks and I shivered like a child haunted with campfire tales.
The living room was still empty, yet somehow emptier than it had been minutes before.
Now it was empty because something had entered and left it.
My imagination played havoc in the emptiness. Death seemed to fill the air. What I didn’t know then was that it wasn’t my imagination: death really was in the air. That was the last evening of my old life. In 24 hours my childhood would end and I would be painfully yanked from that womb of sleepy idleness and reborn as the Davidic King.

I awoke in the cadaver gray of a February morning, dreams evaporating like vampires in sunlight. As I reach for my boots I notice my notebook staring upwards, blue words hung upon ruled lines. Oh yes, that. I was both repelled and compelled by it- it gave me the creeps.
Through my bedroom door I could hear the hippies thumping around. I wanted to hide from them until the coast was clear. I decided to record the song before the echoes of Ghost Radio faded completely. I plugged in the boombox and popped in a tape.
Because the words didn’t feel like my own it forced me to rethink my approach to it. My sugar sweet chords wouldn’t work with it- this song seemed to snarl- it had pepper in it, seemed to growl for funky 7th chords and bent strings, a voodoo dirge barked in hot swamp twangs.
I hit the record button and played the song, stomping the rhythm and growling the words. It was good, one of the best I’d ever written. Too bad more songs didn’t arrive that way- thieved from the ethers.
I stopped and hit the ‘Pause’ button. Suddenly the phone in the hallway wrung.
A muffled voice through the doorway yelled: ”DAVID- IT’S FOR YOU!”
I opened my door and entered the hallway as Steve hippy drunkenly stumbled away downstairs. Apparently the hippies had returned during my slumber. I picked up the phone.
“Hullo?”
“Dave?”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, this is Craig. Didja hear the news?
“What news?”
“Oh shit man. Listen- uhhhh... John's dead- ”
"WHAT?"
"John killed himself."
No words came- it was like the world halted, on pause.
And then I suddenly got a sinking sensation, one that chilled my neck-
I think I knew where that song had come from-

OPEN WIDE!
Pt.2
TELEGENESIS

Before the beginning the universe was what you behold before you: a small white glowing dot, a trillion-ton peach pit trembling on a pin tip. You are there and I am there and everything that ever was or will ever be is there.

My warped reflection appears, genuflecting, upon the glassy bulge of the abyss.
Fiat lux.
Let there be light.
I pull the power knob out: POP.

The following events transpire within one tenth of a nanosecond:
10,000 Roentgens of electricity surge through deflection coils and circuitry, engorging twin drooping antennae erect, which immediately snag phantasmographical frequencies from the immutable ethers via astromagnetic lures.
Startled ghosts and bugaboos are sucked, glubberly moaning, into the airless chamber of the cathode-ray tube trap where their two-dimensional elements are abstracted with diachronic mirrors and transmogrified into metallic manna to be hammered upon a matrix of microscopic anvils into ammunition.
The ammunition is inserted into magazine clips and fed through the water-cooled rotating barrels of three electron gattling guns (one for each primary color, arranged in delta formation along an equilateral triangle).
The spectral lamp sputters into eerie luminescence.
The phantoms are shot at a rate of 24 rounds per second into the trillion multicolored phosphorescent stones embedded within the picture screen’s shadow mask.

In an orgasmic flash the universe comes into being, spurting sparticals milky ways and shooting stars, the first chord of our bittersweet symphony, strummed on superstrings.
This halcyonic sunbright soup shimmers for a long time- until the sun rises, at which point it forms morning farm reports and Captain Kangaroo.
Here, then, is the origin of our species, as revealed by TV:

Open on: Earth, four billion years ago, spurting lava like a cosmic carbuncle. The surface cools and congeals.
Fade.

Fade to: Earth, a few billion years later. The surface shimmers with water, from which jagged outcrops of volcanic rock jut.
Dolly shot towards a specific rock; a small bespectacled creature emerges, desperately evading the cruel taunts and bullying of the monstrous behemoths and leviathans below. The meek inherit the Earth.
Dissolve.

Dissolve to: The same spot, a billion years later. Clumsily claymated thunder lizards tromp and stomp, bellowing backward lion roars, scattering the slithery Sleestak into their glittering paper mache pylons.
Fade to black.

Fade in on a barren plain, upon which a playcard reading ‘THE DAWN OF MAN’ is superimposed.

Narrator (voice over): After ruling the roost for a billion Brontosaurus afternoons the dinosaurs had been demoted into the disgruntled servants of Earth’s first human beings, Fred and Wilma.

Camera pans left, revealing a small patch of garden in the barren wastes; the Garden of Eden.

Cut to: Garden, exterior. Wilma Flintstone is hanging laundry, poorly animated. Her breasts and genitalia are covered by impossibly huge fig leaves, festooned to her body via some mysterious medium. She hums gaily as she lifts enormous dripping fig leaves from a wooden bucket and hangs them on a clothes line strung between coconut trees. Beside her is a goliath pink porcupine. She plucks a quill from the porcupine’s back- DOING- and secures a leaf to the line with it.

Porcupine (wearily, to camera): Boy- this job’s a pain in the back…
The artificial audience explodes with tin laughter.
anguis in herba
Cut to: The mischievous snake, Wormwood, slithers into the frame. He has a curled pencil moustache and two evil eyebrows which hover, midair, an inch above his googly eyes. He wears a black bowtie and top hat, a smog farting cigar dangling from his lip.

Wormwood: Psst! Hey! You! Lady!
Wilma: Who- me?
Wormwood: Ya see any other ladies around here?

A robotic wave of chuckles lifts from the mechanically contrived crowd.

Wormwood: Ya see that tree over there?
Wilma: Where?
Wormwood: Over there.
Wilma: Point it out.
Wormwood: Look at me lady- do you see any arms? Do you see any hands? Do you see any appendages whatsoever which could support the digits I would require to physically point something out to you? Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick- I can’t believe you fucking baboons are going to rule the goddamned Earth. Just look at the fucking tree behind me, okay? Can you handle that, monkey girl? Huh? Can your primitive mind grasp that one basic instruction?

Cut to: An apple tree surrounded by barbed wire and rabid snapping pit bull dogs. A neon sign is hung before it, flashing the words ‘DO NOT EAT’.

Wilma: What about it?
Wormwood: Fred told me he wannid an apple from it.
Wilma: Oh no- I don’t think we’re supposed to eat from that tree….
Wormwood: Why the fuck not?!
Wilma: It’s evil.
Wormwood: Oh bullshit! That there’s an apple tree! What’s more American than apple pie? That tree invented gravity! What are you- some commie gravity hater?

Cut to: Fred Flinstone lying on a hammock made of saber-toothed tiger hide, reading an enormous blank slate of stone. He grumbles, flipping it over. He grouses and grumbles again.

Fred: Dammit.

Wilma enters from frame left, holding an apple. The apple has the image of a skull and crossbones etched into it.

Wilma: What’s wrong, Fred?
Fred: This newspaper!
Wilma: Bad news?
Fred: NO news! Nothing’s happening! Everything’s in harmony- lions are lying down with sheep- there isn’t even a food chain! There’s no drama, no conflict- nothing! Nil! Zilch!

Fred hurls the tablet to the ground- it crashes on his toe.

Fred: YEEE- OWWWW!

Fred yanks his foot out from beneath the tablet- his big toe has swollen to eight times it’s normal size, throbbing crimson red. Fred clutches his foot, hopping and yelping. With each hop we hear a mouth harp twang: BOING BOING BOING.

Fred: Ya know what this world could use?
Wilma: What?
Fred: A little duality.
Wilma: I know what you could use.
Fred: What?
Wilma: A little lunch.

A tape loop of explosive guffaws erupts and abruptly halts.
Wilma hands Fred the apple. Dramatic music plays.

Fred (oblivious to the music): Gee- thanks Wilma!

Fred takes a bite out of the apple: CRUNCH.

Suddenly all the foliage in the garden bursts into flame- the sky turns a bloody magenta, through which a trillion stars and groaning moons topple into the suddenly poisoned limegreen seas. The green soft earth beneath Fred’s feet is abruptly transformed into cadaver gray clay, cracks streaking across it in crumbled thunderclaps. An angel on burnt wings flutters above like a moth, mournfully advertising wheat at exorbitant prices.

Fred: Say- Wilma… what kinda apple is this?
Wilma: Uhm- I think it’s called ‘forbidden’…

Fred leaps into the air- the sound of train whistles howl as bellows of steam shoot from his ears.

Fred: Wiiiiil- ma! Don’cha see what you’ve done? Now were YABBA DABBA DOOMED!

Cut to: The serpent slithering in sinister snickers through thorn and thistle as Eden topples.
This mammoth monstrous abomination prowls the cemeteries and graves at night, when no hand is raised to stay it’s awful depredations, and with ghoulish glee gobbles all that remain of the dinosaurs, growing longer and darker with each cycle of the horrified moon.
The serpent gobbles and gobbles until it is as long as a pipe line and it’s tail is a telegraph away from it’s head.
Having outgrown the land , belly bursting with Godzillas and Ghidras, it slowly drags it’s bulk to the banks of the river Nile and, with a weary moan, topples in, poisoning the waters of the world.

Great madnesses ensue.

Mummies topple from their tombs dragging toilet paper through sand, murmuring evil curses. UFOs swarm like locust, anally probing cows. Bushes burst into flame, yammering strange decrees.
Mankind, drunk on the serpent’s evil elixirs, begins to hallucinate Gods everywhere- in the stars sun moon and sea- and begins to fill phonebooks with pantheons.
God clubs abruptly sprout wherever man and water meet: The Allah All-stars, the Buddhist Broncos, the Brahma Bulls, the Taoist Cowboys, the Zen Zeroes- all convinced that they alone possess the only truly true truths, all waging holy war upon one another. Deity dazed and Jihad delirious mankind begins hurling even the simplest truths into the bubbling broth of confusion’s cauldron.

A mile-long grin creeps across the black snake’s face- now the stage was set- now it would exact mankind’s demise upon the very sands where mankind began.
With a contented sigh it sinks beneath the sea bed into the muffled mum of Nul where the flickering flames of Hades dissolve it’s hydracarbons into a sinister soup of partially digested organic globules bobbing in a brook of black crude oil.

Witness now history’s greatest irony: That mankind would seek the beast, and not he us.

Here, for the first time, all is revealed:

In 1854 we began drilling the Beast’s black tea, immediately finding it useful as gasoline, kerosene, Vaseline, an effective remedy for church-yard coughs and galloping vapors, delicious on phosphates, sensational at shining boots and generally indispensable in every conceivable way.
By 1917 we’d sucked up a billion barrels of the malicious muck, and that amount doubled in just six years. Suddenly cars were everywhere and our species became a race of snake blood junkies, poisoning our very air with the foul fumes of the serpent’s evil spirit, farted from the tailpipes of a trillion SUVs (Satan’s Ultimate Vengeance).
America is now ruled by Snake Oil Tycoons, poisoned asp black to the marrow, willing to kill all to keep their tanks and banks full, dumping soldiers like toys anywhere and everywhere the serpent slumbers.
Woe to you, hypocrite rulers!
If only you were here, with us, watching television static through goggles high on LSD- perhaps then, and only then, the snake scales would finally flutter from your eyes and you would finally see the truth revealed:
God is not oil!

GOD IS TV!

THE MIRACULOUS NATURE OF MY BIRTH

Dissolve to: My Dad’s balls, interior. It is the evening of September 18th, 1964. In the span of a single lifetime mankind had gone from horses and buggies to supersonic jets and atomic explosives. Just two years before my birth the world had teetered on the brink of nuclear annihilation during the Cuban missile crises. When I was born white people were lynching black people and napalming yellow people. It was the most precarious time in human history.

Jesus’ conception was relatively simple: an illuminated sperm merely manifest itself in Mary’s womb one evening and promptly impregnated her. My conception, by contrast, was a far more formidable battle against circumstance and odds. In order for the Biblical prophesies to be fulfilled I would have to be the son of David, born of a virgin, in the latter half of the twentieth century. This meant that out of four billion people my parents would have to meet, that my mother would have to consent to loosing her virginity to my father, and that out of the three trillion sperm my father has produced in his lifetime I would have to be the one to successfully reach an egg. This, of course, is statistically impossible- and yet it happened.
My memory of the moment is vague- I recall being blasted out of a cannon into a rose blushed cavern filled with salt water along with 200 million other albino tadpoles, all almost exactly identical to me. A great commotion ensued- they all tore off into the shadows at amazing speeds, their tiny sonic booms rattling the cervix walls. I found myself swerving out of control in their bubbled wake.
Dark mutterings lifted from those passing me:
“I’m gonna be a fireman!”
“Bullshit! We’re all gonna end up on some bathroom floor, sizzling like salt-covered slugs!”
“I heard we’re gonna end up in some giant rubber sack!”
Suddenly explosions rang out around me- guided white blood cell torpedoes shrieked out of the darkness, macrophages and granulocytes- thousands of sperm exploded all around me in horrific shrieks, their shattered bodies lifting like ghastly egg whites, torn and tattered.
I puttered to a halt with hummingbird wing flutters of my tadpole tail, hiding amongst the forests of cilia along the cervix wall.
If death awaited us at the end of this abyss they all seemed to be in a mighty rush to reach it. At that point I pretty much gave up- it was pointless to think I could win this mad marathon and, with the exception of some aimless stragglers half blind from acidity behind me, I was almost in last place anyway.
Suddenly something strange caught my attention: horrific sounds bellowed from the black depths ahead- mad yarbles and yelps- what was going on? With nothing to lose I flapped my tail and rocketed forward- through the twists and turns of the fallopian tube, rounding a corner to see the most bizarre spectacle I had ever witnessed in my two-second life:
Imagine a washing machine filled with a million perturbed ping-pong balls all ricocheting off one another in nauseating backward spins, careening and colliding into one another in bubbled slams, a bouncing bedlam with no chance of halting- this mayhem had overtaken the entire sperm swarm and it’s madness was increasing exponentially-
I had swerved around the bend too quickly to halt- I swooped and dived through the yelping snowglobe storm with my eyes clenched, miraculously clearing the chaos- as I slowed the roars receded behind me in black echoes of blue murder.
Where was I?
In salted dark waters, alone.
And here is where I first tasted real fear.
Was I too far out? Should I retreat, return to the others?
The walls around me looked like a midnight coral reef overcome with spiderwebs.
Yet some strange magnetism drew me forward- the ethereal hand of fate perhaps, and my tail gently propelled me forwards, twitching like a wary cat’s.
I began to detect a strange glow within the ink black waters ahead of me, gently blue.
Suddenly it rose before me like a planet suspended in space, haloed by the luminous corona radiata- the ovum cell.
Out of the billions before me I had reached it.
I drove my head into it and rotated counterclockwise, seeking rest in it’s soft folds, and swelled like a mushroom in June rain.
As I grew the world outside came to me in belly muffled sounds, but I was unable to distinguish the sounds of reality from the sounds of television- the two became intermingled, and I fully expected to meet Mr. Ed and the Lone Ranger upon my arrival, which happened abruptly one day in late May, as the Sun, moon, Venus, Jupiter, and ascendant all crept into the house of Gemini- suddenly I was being squeezed like toothpaste through a tube- I entered into this world on May 31, 1965 at 5:30 am.-a rubber hand yanked me out into the fluorescent light of St. Mary’s hospital in Redwood city California, dangling me upside down like a trophy trout. A swift slap across my delicate butt caused me to barf up a cupful of salt water in a startled scream.

Tap tap tap.
And a fluteswirl of larksong burbles back:
Twidleriddlrooo.
I am shivering and wet, quivering in a huge blue towel, sitting on the back pourch of my grandmother's cottage in the redwood forrests of LaHonda, California. Gargantuan trees tower around me, blackening the sky with their canopy. A ray of sunlight shines upon me through the mists and leaves, slowly warming me- and far below me I hear the glubbery hiss of the black mountain stream winding through the rotting bark like an ebony python.
I had just fallen into the stream- I had wondered off on my own, my dew slick shoes slipped on moss moist bark and I had toppled into the frozen black waters, bellowing and gurgling- horror, the black waters tug me down, darker than octopus ink, colder than the grave- time halts, sound dissapears in muffled bubbles, sound explodes again when I thrash upon the surface- blooooderooob, crash, screams and the forrest hiss, crash, blooooberoo- soon the silence will win- and then I see the pale face of death in the waters, ghostwhite in the darkness- it is a woman's face, angelic, sad and hungry- she radiates cold lonliness and unfathomable grief-I will be her child, she needs me, her cold hands reach out to embrace me, to keep me there forever- suddenly hands grabbed my sides, tight, and I am yanked out into the cold air- my grandmother happened to hear me and plucked me out- if she hadn't happened by I would have drowned to death at two.
I now sat, slowly warming in the sunlight- my grandfather sits above me in a dusty robe of sky blue, tapping a hard-boiled egg with a small silver spoon.
Tap tap tap.
And the larks echo back:
Twidddleriddleroo.
He conducts forrest song with egg and spoon, devouring baby birds in birdsong.
He is tall and thin and regal. Eggcrumbs shimmer upon his white ghoutee like dandelions in snow. He is an Englishman, a descendant of William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift. He looks like a king, like God himself. He sits upright, an ornate napkin upon his lap.
Particles dance in the misted sunbeams like fairies. But the sun seems too distant to warm me.
My grandmother clomps out onto the porch holding a folded change of clothes. Her voice is buttery and soft. She holds my small pink hand in her fat pale hand. It feels like cold chicken.
I am led into the cottage. It smells of ancient books and is filled with my grandmother's dream paintings- gardens of flower people, skies filled with enormous fruit- and my freezing clothes are pulled off and new soft warm ones are put on- I am set before the fireplace, warmed by the glow of it's spummering light, it hisses spits and crackles- and I am hypnotized and saved by the golden light radiating out of a box.

I LEARN HOW TO TELETRANSCEND

Like all great heroes my youth was tangled in turmoil:
My father was a police officer with a short fuse. If you ever see footage of protesters being tear gassed and clubbed bear this in mind: My father was one of the ones doing the clubbing. When I was three my father broke my arm. He was convinced I cracked his helmet, even though it was hung on a peg beyond my reach.
-WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO TO MY HELMET?
Wrenchsnap.
My crimson baby boy doll arm dangles, copcrushed plumb purple.
I am sitting on the front stairs of my childhood home, staring blankly out into the street.
Suddenly the screen door bangs open behind me. My mother rushes out.
-Ohmigod are you okay?
She stops and freezes. Her lungs lock. I do not respond. My eyes are as lifeless as the black boxes retrieved from wrecked airplanes. I am a fortified territory, impervious to harm.
The black box is armored, flanked with German Fliegerabwehrkanones- heavy guns designed to shoot down enemy aircraft. Kidney busters litter the iron orchard around it, brain bags blown by similar devices. Whisky rashes scar wrecked Tin Lizzies, sputes vomit cometed into junque.
The key to unlock the box is in an egg in a nest in a tree on an Island farther West than West at the end of the uncharted realms of the undiscovered world.
I am not crying. She has found her boy transformed into a tiny zombie, sitting in a trance.
-Ohmigod! Talk to me!
But she does not know that I am not there. I am up here, with you, watching this happen far below. She gently shakes me like a stuffed toy, black buttons for eyes.
She weeps, but her tears can’t reach me- they cannot climb this high.
Dad taught me how to teletranscend that day. My slaphappy pappy’s rage was Bruce Banner’s gamma bomb, transforming me into a superhero, able to leap away in a single bound. In a snap I suddenly learned how to fly, transmogrophied and transmitted across the airwaves, a balloon boy lifting high and free into a sky of chromokeyed blue. When my father broke my arm he made me the greatest escape artist of all time, a punk rock prestidigitator, no longer subject to the laws of society or physics- in a single raged yank he snapped the chains of gravity- I could transcend time, rewind to better times, fast forward through pain, escape sorrow via swipes and fade outs, freeze frames of fleeting joy, leaving snipped tears cluttered across the cutting room floor, superimposing dreams upon reality with matte shots and trick photography.
I was born again.
-Talk to me!
I do not have to be here. I can cut to commercial or simply dissolve.
Dissolve.


Dissolve.

OPEN WIDE!

A TRUE
STORY












BEING THE QUIXOTIC MISADVENTURES
OF THE BOOB TUBE BUDDHA

BY
DAVID KING





























“AND THEN THOSE WHO WENT BEFORE
AND THOSE WHO FOLLOWED CRIED
OUT, SAYING ‘HOSANNA! BLESSED
IS HE WHO COMES IN THE NAME OF THE LORD!
BLESSED IS THE KINGDOM OF OUR FATHER,
DAVID, THAT IS COMING!’”
-MARK 11: 9-10





“AND THEY SHALL SERVE THE
LORD THEIR GOD AND DAVID,
THEIR KING, WHOM I WILL
RAISE UP UNTO THEM.”
- JEREMIAH 30:9



“AND DAVID MY SERVANT SHALL
BE KING OVER THEM.”
-EZEKIEL 37:24










THE DAVIDIC KING

I’m not quite sure when I first realized I was the New Messiah- the fact was revealed to me gradually, in literary riddles and televised clues, which unraveled before me as I waxed and waned between conviction and confusion.

I suppose now, in retrospect, that it was obvious from the very beginning- from the miraculous nature of my conception to my auspicious mastery of teletranscendic techniques at the age of merely three- but I myself was utterly oblivious to my calling until the autumn of my eighteenth year, whereupon I stumbled across a trampled religious tract shuffled in amongst the fallen leaves beneath me. Snatching it up for a sacrilegious snicker I flipped it open to a random page, across which a heading read:

WHEN WILL THE DAVIDIC KING ARRIVE?

According to the pamphlet a sequel to the savior is slated to arrive during mankind’s final days, as the world wobbles wearily, wracked with war. However, this new and improved redeemer wouldn’t be some wimpy hippy we could slap around like the last one- no, this would be a two-fisted action Messiah, hurling Ninja stars and whooping ass, the hardest boiled of all dicks, a wise-cracking knight of the .45, well acquainted with the song of a slug and the slithery hiss of a swiftly thrown knife.
The wretched rulers of this world will be slouched in the leather chairs of their palatial parlors, buttered scone crumbs gathering in the greasy folds of their double chins, lazily surveying the rodential rabble rioting far below.
“Excuse me- there’s someone here to see you” the meek voice of their manservant, Moe Middlemanagement, will squeak over the intercom.
“Tell ‘em to fuck off!” the leaders will bark as they adjust the 14-year-old Guatemalan sex slaves on their laps.
“They seem quite adamant to see you sir!’
The towering oak doors suddenly thunder, exploding in an eruption of splinters, and the bloated bureaucrats and portly Plutocrats abruptly find themselves confronted by the horrific Hurlothrumbos of the Savior Squad.
Promptly subjugated into submission with cattle prods and stun guns, they will be dragged before the Throne of David, where the Anointed Anarchist of God sits, visiting judgment upon them.
“Please, we beseech thee!” the world leaders will plead, “Is it not enough that you have seduced our wives and devastated us with your witty bon mots? Show us pity!”
“So… it’s pity you crave now, is it?” The Davidic King will respond, abruptly producing a pair of Thompson submachine guns from the satin folds of his King cape.
The azure sky is rattled by the thunder of gunfire.
The world leaders noisily expel their bellyfuls of caviar and pate, collapsing into a heaving heap of blubbery naught.
The savior’s guns spummer and click.
“It’s a pity I’m out of ammo.”
The Davidic King slumps back into his throne, adjusting the bowtie on his tux and slugging back a martini, ruling Earth for a thousand years.

I pressed a fingertip across the heading’s ‘ic’.

WHEN WILL DAVID KING ARRIVE?

My head was haloed by autumnal light, shimmering through goldenyellowed leaves behind me, as I lifted my face in a goofy grin, cigarette dangling from my lip.

Ironically I found discovering my name in a random religious tract little more than an amusing coincidence at the time.
I would soon learn, however, that nothing is random, there are no coincidences, and that I was the Davidic King.
I was at the right place at the end times.


One would assume that I would have been graced with the holy hocus pocus powers of my Messianic predecessor-
but, alas, I possess neither the digital dexterity or thaumaturgical skill required to execute his miraculous fish tricks or water walk stunts. My supernatural skills are limited to a few clumsy card tricks (performed with the aid of a shaved deck) and the rather dubious ability to transform water into urine.
I was, however, born during a much more critical time, the tail end of the atomic age- and this was the advantage I held over all the superheroes and saints of the past who, as venerable as they may be, had all scattered off the stage during the most crucial act of the play.
Perhaps that is why I have been compensated with such an overwhelming arsenal of holy high-tech gadgetry, the very least of which would make Moses’ burning bush seem little more than flamboyant topiary.
I have, at my disposal, such amusements as hurdy gurdeys, chronoscopes, and dizzascopes- a bewildering ‘Boom Box’ (which can capture sounds from the air and, via mysterious manipulations of electromagnetism, imprison them forever upon delicate strips of brown ribbon), a phenomenal ‘Phonograph’ (which can evoke the ghost of John Lennon by running a golden needle across the fingerprint thin grooves of a rotating discus), and titillating ‘Pornographs’ (dimly evoking erotic pleasures with mammararily manipulated airbrushed airheads), all capable of lifting even the most jaded individual into unprecedented realms of delight upon the wings of Elysian waggish whimsicality.
But even the greatest of these was a mere bauble compared to the most astonishing automation in my arsenal- a Mephistophelean mechanism which could pluck phantoms from the immutable ethers, digest them in a belly of airless space, and project them across a mystic lookingglass. Within it’s torrid mists I could discern mystic divinations and madcap epiphanies perpetrated through the medium of a phantasmagoric lantern emitting a flame of spectral blue, and actually recreate grand cosmological events with startling scientific accuracy, all by merely manipulating it’s knobs.
I had access to the greatest gift ever bestowed to man by God, and this cabalistic apparatus was so essential to my Messianic mission that my success or failure in this endeavor hinged solely on my ability to master it’s medium.

In short, I had access to a 27-inch color screen television set.

Now, I humbly concede that history will show that I was not the only human being with access to a color television set in the latter half of the twentieth century.
However, history will also show that Sir Isaac Newton was not the only one with access to an apple tree in the 17th century, nor that Albert Einstein was the only human with knowledge of the letters ‘E’ ‘M’ ‘C’ or the numeral ‘2’ in the year 1903.
I do believe, however, that history will verify the fact that I was the first person to utilize the device correctly, for it’s original intent, as a direct conduit between God and Man. That I was the first to discover this is astounding- God and television are so similar that the two have been mistaken for each other for decades- even as you read this millions sit prostrate at it’s alter, bathed in it’s ethereal blue light, bidding it’s decrees. Many cynics attribute this rampant deification to the spiritual and intellectual ennui of the latter half of the twentieth century, but this conclusion is fundamentally flawed. Although it is true that the world government has manipulated the Promethean flame of television’s transcendent technology to hypnotize an eerily receptive population into complacency, the sole reason for their success in this endeavor is due to the device’s inherent divinity. It is, in fact, an avatar- Dues ex machina- the material manifestation of the divine here on Earth to perform various sacred functions.
My father, David Harold King, was born in 1945- the year the hydrogen bomb was invented.
My mother, Regina Anne Seckbach, was born a year later- just as televisions were being introduced to the American public.
That the advent of the Atomic age and the Television age corresponded was no mere coincidence- God unleashed the Pandora’s box of both technologies simultaneously, one with the capability of ultimate destruction, the other with the capability of ultimate redemption, as the penultimate test of mankind’s merit.
Nor was it a coincidence that my dad, father of my destruction, was born with the bomb and that my mother, muse of my salvation, was born with TV., for, just as gold is formed in the furnace of supernovas, so was it that the key to unlocking the holy powers housed within the Cathode-ray (“He who has the key of David- he who opens and no one shuts”- Rev. 3: 7-8) was forged in their cataclysmic combination and collision.
If I succeeded in using the Key of David to unlock God from his box a great age of absurd enlightenment awaited-this wretched age of architorture fading like a bad dream. No more metallic monstrosities will collide on ugly paved gray- just bumper cars bouncing comically on dream streets, painted like fallen pressed rainbows. The blind will see, the mimes will speak. We will discard our business suits and power ties for pirate costumes superhero capes and giant chicken suits. No more football and monster trucks- just Baba Yaga witch huts strutting through enchanted suburbs of enormous Mother Goose boots upon their jaunting rubbery claws. We will free the go-go dancers from their cages and fill pyramids with philosophers who will contemplate the mysteries of the cosmos and Jack Lord’s hair. Corndog stands and a billion budding begonias will bloom on every corner, ice-cream truck melodies loopily intermingling with our contented sighs into a misquitoless sky cluttered with Chinese box kites, our every need attended to by aproned rotund robotic maids.
“For I recon that the sufferings of this present age are nothing compared to the glories to be revealed” Romans 8: 18.
However, if I failed, great horrors awaited:
H-bombs will bloom like sunbright carnations, scattering skyscrapers like confetti- rose trees will burst into flame, their amber embers dancing like demonic fireflies- the flippered freak descendants of our race will crawl through the gnarled rubble barking for brains, their flesh melting from their bones like ice cream from cones. Monstrous moths will fill the scorched skies, farting photons and birthing grotesque grubs the size of dump trucks. Zombies will trudge from house to house like Jehovah’s witnesses, banging on doors, the abysmal night dimly lit by the orange glow of their jackolantern eyes. Cadaver dogs will feast upon our flesh and take craps on discarded Picasso paintings. Then God shall swipe the slate clean of us, and begin anew with clairvoyant cockroaches and paranoid meat-eating plants.
Fortunately the Davidic Key (the teletranscendic technique) can be easily taught, and I shall now share with you the method of unlocking the full potential of your own RCA oracle.

HOW TO WATCH TV.

Safety precautions.
Television is the greatest tool bestowed upon mankind since fire but, like fire, it has as many destructive potentialities as constructive ones. It is therefore essential that the potential television viewer observe the following safety precautions:
The mysterious and magical medium which fuels the device ( the ‘electro-current’) can jolt feeble flesh into spasmodic soot in mere seconds, and the looking glass upon which images are projected houses a vacuum tube which, if punctured, can trigger an explosion, causing a reactive implosion which can shower a 12-foot radius with glass shred shrapnel. It is therefore imperative that the potential television viewer is covered completely in black electrical tape, leaving absolutely no flesh exposed, and that the television viewer resists the urge to hurl objects at the screen, no matter how overwhelming this impulse may seem at times.
One should note that the intellectual and spiritual damages the device may inflict are far more formidable than it’s physical hazards. Television, like the world, is superficially crass and banal, obsessed with materialism and celebrity gossip, poisoned with pap prattle and propaganda. Television has the tendency to lull it’s more passive viewers into highly susceptible trance, manipulated into believing that hugging can stop drug abuse, the covert crimes of the CIA are conducted in the name of Liberty, and that America is still a democracy. This effect, caused by the lullibying rhythms of Cathode-rays, was originally intended to facilitate mankind’s commune with the divine, unhindered by the cynical snickers of our frontal lobes. In order to glean the device’s loftier spiritual dimensions it is therefore imperative that the television viewer possess the following three things:
SAINTGRACE

‘Saintgrace’ refers to the supernatural gifts bestowed upon the pious few who have renounced the pleasures of this world, both material and sensual, in order to facilitate their spiritual pursuits. Although I have never formally taken the vows of poverty or chastity they have, nevertheless, been thrust upon me, by default, therefore entitling me to all the supernatural benefits of those who have.
It is essential that one transcends the world’s pull if one wishes to ascend into the lofty realms of God TV. A bursting belly bars passage through the flesh mirage barrage and nothing celestial can creep through the bird-dope daze of a tryptaphine trance. It would be easier for a sperm whale to squeeze through a syringe than for a rich man to partake in the sublime decrees of Deity TV.
Why is this?
Let us examine the apple.
In the entire pantheon of fruit there exists none nobler than the humble apple. Each apple is a saint, laying down it’s life in crabgrass and ragweed to sew the seeds for future generations. Each apple keeps a doctor away. And yet, historically, no fruit has been as maligned or vilified than the apple -pounded into pies, stomped into sauce- having been blamed for mankind’s fall from grace, a single bad one having spoiled the whole bunch.
Therefore it is of no small significance that God elected that humble fruit to reveal the elusive truths of his cosmic crazy glue through.
Look now, below:
It is 1652.
A pastoral pasture lies before us, misted with Monet lilies.
Sir Isaac Newton naps beside an apple tree, his powdered wig nested against the syrup drippy tree bark,
cartoon letter ‘Z’s lazily lifting into the fruit-fragranced breeze.
Above him, hidden within the green shade of the leaf canopy, an apple sways.
For a brief moment all the energies of the universe are focused upon the apple, exerting pressure upon it’s stem.
Abruptly the stem snaps- to the nearby aphids this sounds like a thunderclap, and the apple topples at 32.11 feet per second per second, knocking Newton on the noggin.
Newton is startled awake, his head haloed by twittering birds and his powdered wig lifted by his swelling fruit-induced bruise.
“Aha!” Newton thinks, “ I’ll bet that two bodies are attracted to each other with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them!”
Again, I must emphasize that it was not the pompous pomegranate, the vain-glorious fig, nor the pride puffed papaya, but the homely apple that invented gravity, thus saving all life on Earth from toppling to our deaths in the cold vacuum of space. This is because God adores the poor and humble, and holds little but disdain for the proud and powerful. Time and time again he reiterates this point:
As the Earth shook from the goose stomped tromp of Nazi jackboots God selected lovable little Albert Einstein to whisper secrets to. Einstein would lie on Freud’s dream-soaked therapy couch, imagining he was a beam of light rocketing through space towards a wind-up alarm clock. One afternoon he was suddenly jolted with the realization that you, me, and everything we see are atrophied energy masquerading as mass.
The gift of flight he gave to a pair of bicycle repairmen and he stole Mohammed Ali’s bike to make him the greatest boxer of all time.
As pompous professors of Princeton struggled to create a uniquely American form of music in the cobwebs of their academic halls that very sound was being born a thousand miles away in the gin-drenched bars and brothels of New Orleans, heralded by the patron angel of winds, saint Louie Armstrong.
In short- a dentist’s daughter in her daddy’s sports car will not be the next Billie Holliday, nor does the next Van Gogh reside in the 90210 zip code.
The bungled and botched are forced to forge the wings the quarterbacks and prom queens cannot.
Therefore, if you are rich, I must implore you to give all you own to the poor, immediately- or to me, via the publisher.
Done? Good.
Let us proceed.

THE WELDING GOGGLES OF THE ANTICHRIST

Television’s divinational nature is evident in it’s very name, which comes from ‘TELE’ (Greek for: ‘FAR’) and ‘VISION’ ( from the Latin ‘Videre’: ‘I SEE’).
Television uses two primary divinational techniques: Theomancy (prophesy revealed through oracle) and Psychomancy ( prophesy revealed by ghosts).
In order for television to be used properly a holy trinity of divinational techniques must be employed, the third being Cristallomantia- divination revealed within a mystic lens. Here is the reason why:
The bright light of God revealed can leave merely mortal eyes blind, toppling from divinity’s canopy like Icarus on melted wings. To the naked eye television static appears to be little more than a neon snow storm. It is therefore essential that the overwhelming Yin of television is counterbalanced with the negatively charged Yang of the Antichrist’s welding goggles.
The lenses of these goggles are an extremely dark green, creating the illusion that it’s wearer is trudging along the bottom of a moss-choked bog ( thus my frequent reference to them as ‘Bog Goggles’ or ‘Fish Spex’),
and tend to block out extemporaneous information, allowing only the most pertinent images to lift through the static.
Procuring these goggles can be an arduous task, in that it requires the potential television viewer to meet the self-proclaimed Antichrist at an Anti-Valentine’s day party, and for the Antichrist to bequeath ownership of the goggles to the viewer.
Fortunately I have fulfilled these obligations and now wear goggles so dark that my shins are bruised plumb purple from walking into fire hydrants. Such is the trickster nature of the Devil.
Now that you are hungry, horny, and wearing the appropriate eye gear we can proceed to the most essential tool for television watching:
A TELEVISION GUIDE

The Television Guide, of course, refers to the image printed upon the tab of acid you must ingest before watching TV. These images are visual representations of the spirit hosts within each tab, and these will serve as your transdimensional tour guides through your television watching experience.
NOTE: IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO GLEAN ANYTHING EDIFYING, WHATSOEVER, ON TELEVISION WITHOUT FIRST INGESTING COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF HALLUCINOGENS.

RECOMMENDED TELEVISION GUIDES

Jiminy Cricket (aka ‘Beginner’s Acid’, ‘Baby Buffered Acid’)
This is an excellent guide for the viewer’s first trip out. Although lacking some of the epiphanal intensity of many more advanced forms of LSD, this guide will stroll beside you, merrily whistling, gently warning you when unscrupulous wolves are near.
Betty Boop (aka ‘Wonder Woman’)
Although the fairly innocuous image of Betty Boop has often been misconstrued as merely ‘cute’ the tabs of acid which bear her image are packed with the estrogen-laden punch of the Earth-Mother Gia. Many male users have been known to lactate spontaneously on the drug.
Superman
Printed in vivid red whites and blues this is by far the most intrinsically American form of LSD, instilling it’s users a feeling of Manifest Destiny and insatiable bouts of materialism. Communists are incapable of ingesting this drug; their bodies instantly reject it. There are only two known adverse side effects to this drug: The drug has often created the illusion in it’s users that they have the ability to fly, and users have been known to exhibit an extreme vulnerability to anything even vaguely resembling ‘Kryptonite’(i.e.: green glowing objects). Fortunately these side effects have a tendency to cancel one another out, and most users have been felled by traffic lights before tragically testing their abilities to fly.

INEFFECTIVE TELEVISION GUIDES

Cookie Monster
Is this even a drug at all? Drinking two lattes in rapid succession has been known to provoke more profound revelations. Rumored by many to be nothing more than paper dipped in Nyquil, this drug occasionally evokes the strange sensation that Jim Henson’s hand is up your ass, manipulating your every word, free will the dim memory of a preacher’s fading dream.
2) Pillsbury Doughboy
The patron saint of bland trips. Subtle sensations of ‘rising’ and having one’s belly poked by God, followed by fits of moronic giggling and the conviction one’s mind is being ‘baked’.
3) Danny Partridge (aka ‘Bubble Gum Blotter’)
This teenybopper drug, made popular in the early 1970’s, is a milder variation of the nearly neurotoxic ‘Happy Face’ ( see: DISCOURAGED TELEVISION GUIDES) and primarily effects the user’s aesthetic sensibilities. Within three hours of taking the drug it’s users suddenly find ‘Laugh-In’ reruns hilarious, Neil Diamond music ‘groovy’, and lava lamps ‘trippy’. The devastating after effects of this drug are responsible for 84% of the fashion abominations of the early-to-mid 70’s ( bell bottoms, pastel leisure suits, feathered hair, etc.).
4) Thor
The least effective of all the super-hero drugs; the impotent demigod of an antiquated Norse pantheon of Gods.

DISCOURAGED TELEVISION GUIDES

Dancing Bear
This dangerous form of LSD was actually created by the newly-formed DEA in the year 1968 and introduced into the counter-culture as a way of ferreting out the potentially politically subversive by inspiring it’s victims to wear filthy tie-die shirts, slather themselves with nearly toxic levels of petuli, and, ironically, actually purchasing ferrets. The drug, however, was far more damaging than even the DEA had anticipated- frontal lobes were seared to cinders and somehow it’s users were lulled into the fatal misconception that the bland country music produced by CIA-backed rock ensemble The Grateful Dead was actually mind-expanding psychedlia ( which it is, of course, not). Great scores of brilliant spirits were effectively wiped out from the political equation, opting instead to follow the Grateful Dead in filthy VW micro busses, each one painted to resemble technicolor vomit.

2) Skull and Crossbones ( aka ‘Brown Acid’, ‘Altamont Acid’)
This form of LSD was popularized by the Californian branch of the Hell’s Angels in the mid-to-late 1960’s, and later revitalized by Heavy Metal heads in the 1970’s and Goth Rock fans of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.
Although many of the users of this drug purport to be Satanists Satan himself cannot stand this drug nor it’s advocates. By far one of the most lethal substances available to the public, this drug has been documented to vaporize nearly 80% of it’s user’s mental faculties in a single eight-hour trip, oddly inspiring it’s victims to wear leather and to decorate their dark and gloomy lairs with pseudo-‘spooky’ objects such as glow-in-the-dark skulls and posters of Satan devouring businessmen ( the latter being spectacularly ironic, as Satan himself simply ADORES businessmen).
Happy Face (aka ‘Disco Drug’, ‘Dick Clark’)
Concerned with the growing radicalism of pop music and it’s influence over the nation’s youth the government created this drug in the year 1977 to effectively destroy rock music, usurping it with the opiate-like diversion of mechanically-produced discothèque music. The government nearly succeeded; for two years the air waves were inundated with the chipmunk yelpings of the Bee Gees and the corporate-controlled committee-composed cacophony of soul-sapping muzak. Exacting nearly inestimable damage upon the American public, this demonic drug transformed an entire generation into ‘Jive Talking’ zombies. If ingested administer Bowie music immediately.
Ronald Reagan
Although intended as ironic, this form of LSD has been known to have alarmingly Republican side-effects.

Right now I am on Mighty Mouse- a rather effective hybrid of Superman and Jiminy Cricket. The Superman has inspired a feeling of invulnerability and omnipotency, but this is tempered with the playful cartoonishness of Jiminy Cricket, and thus I am not prone to take my super human abilities too seriously.

Mighty Mouse will enable me to negotiate the labyrinth of reality’s illusion towards the evasive golden cheese of epiphany within. I have ingested it with all the due reverence of the Eucharist, dissolving it upon my tongue and becoming as one with the cosmichrist. Revelations will be revealed, their pedals parting willingly- we will not need to pry them, the truth longs to clamor through the clutter.

Don your spex and tongue your tabs, boys and girls!
Prepare to be opened wide!

Oh no.
Even as I pop the knob I can hear it coming.
The gates of Heaven are guarded by the fires of Hell tonight.
At ten minutes to midnight a priest appears on TV, dressed in stiff car salesmen clothes, blue plaids, and he comments on some current event, extrapolating some vague unrelated moral from it, and then his mouth smiles while his paranoiac eyes lean over his cheeks and stare in terror into the camera lens, trying to imagine all the decadent atrocities being committed on the receiving end of his transmission. Orgies, heroin injections, glue sniffing, lord only knew what; and his smile seems to say: go to bed, you sick monkey molesters. Everyone else is asleep, all the good normal people. Why aren’t you? Why in God’s name are you awake at this unholy hour?
-God bless you, and good night.
His image fades. Now hell is unleashed.
After a long day of pimping colas and cars the television stumbles wearily into the early hours of morning, deliriously climaxing in a bombastic propogasm.
Jet planes are ejaculated, sputtering and spewed in metallic ‘V’ goose formation, spurting stars and stripes over amber fields of grain. Endless rows of expendable soldiers salute. Tinny tubas and trombones flatulate the national anthem as the fierce-eyed visage of an endangered bald eagle appears, superimposed upon a fluttering flag.
This is porno for patriots.
But this is obviously not intended for them; they have gone to bed hours ago, at a decent hour.
The only people still glued to their tubes are the sardonically subversive and the snickering stoned.
This particular piece of propagandic pap was actually created by the CIA (Cathode-ray Interference Association) to scatter anyone with an IQ over 80 away from their television tubes, lest they tune into the anarchistic decrees of Deity TV.
It is nearly 100 percent effective- anyone with a functioning frontal lobe is nearly driven mad by it, clenching their ears and screeching like mad monkeys jabbed with sharpened pencils- anything to drown out the obedient oboes and republican rhythms of this celluloid abomination.
But this bed of burning coals is a cake walk to me- Mighty Mouse is in the house! I can endure this, but must shield my ear drums against its siren song, lest I be seduced by it’s shallow symbolism and suddenly find myself inducted into the United States armed forces, any lingering traces of my individuality irrefragably erased.
The screen abruptly explodes with static, like a splash of cold water.
Suddenly the first wave of acid hits, toppling you, undertows threatening to tug you down to the wretched depths.
Wait- what are you doing? A grim image flashes: how others would see you now, the static reflected upon your goggles creating the bizarre illusion that your eyeballs have been transformed into madly swirling snowglobes. You now see your own pupils, dilated and reflected within your goggles, staring back at you in startled horror.
Fear flabbergasts you.
This is where most be people staring at television static through welding goggles at 3 am on LSD simply give up: DON’T.
This is all a very good sign: something which is about to be revealed to you is snarling for secrecy, slapping snow in your eyes. Verily I say unto thee: if that which is about to be revealed to you were revealed to all mankind all our turmoil and tribulations would cease.
If you have chosen your guide unwisely, against my advice, I wish you well, but fear the riptides now engulfing you will tear you from stem to stern- get thee hence to the sanctuary of an all-night Denny’s where you can sit in drooling awe over your moronic psuedo-epiphanies and retarded revelations which all somehow necessitate sculpting PlayDo Yin Yangs.
If, however, you have chosen wisely your Television Guide can now be evoked, thusly:
“Lo- great rodent of grand frommage masticulations- I beseech thee- substitute my fainting strength with your furry fearlessness!”
Suddenly you will sense the girding of your wind-whipped loins, strength surging through you in golden waves of cheese-colored courage.
Now- come, all you faithful, and enter:
Vague images lift through the static storm, forming letter ‘O’s and ‘V’s, before scattering like albino bees. The bacon hiss is haunted by the melancholy echoes of canned laughter, the residual memories of television’s broadcasting day.
The television is broadcasting nervous beta waves, warily dozing off in public, but soon it relaxes and alpha waves flow through the tube like a lilac-sweetened June breeze. The room around you dissolves into a peripheral fog and the static hiss, which moments ago clamored like the menacing tongues of a trillion snakes, now sighs and fades like the distant burble of a daydreaming brook, merrily, merrily.
Now I must implore you to turn your television off.
With a knob pop we are plunged into darkness, save for a fluttering white dot in the center of the screen.
Dear reader- for centuries mankind has suffered beneath the bungled cosmology of the Bible, with it’s evil apples and talking snakes, all metaphors taken literally by generations who have mistaken a menu for the meal.
Tonight we shall rend the veil and witness what has been obscured from mortal eyes since the time immortal: tonight we shall witness the beginnings of the universe and our kind, live and in living color, with the mere flip of a switch.